Facebook’s Fatal Flaw

Given the fact that Facebook just filed for a public offering of its shares which will value the company at $100 billion and make thousands of its current investors wealthy beyond imagination, you might be forgiven for thinking that Facebook is a wild success. That, and the fact that some 800 million people currently use Facebook, or more than 10 percent of the total world population.

But despite all that, I think that Facebook is failing.

Do I think that Facebook is going to go bankrupt tomorrow? Far from it. I’m sure that it will continue to print money for years to come, based on sheer momentum alone. (Hey, AOL still exists.) But if you listen to the way that people talk about Facebook you sense – or at least I do – that its cultural moment has passed. This is just based on a very unscientific analysis of my own very small circle of acquaintances, but once upon a time, Facebook was this awesome cool thing that you just had to try. Lately, all everyone seems to say about Facebook is “I don’t get it” or “I find it annoying but I feel like I have to go on once in a while.” Facebook, in other words, is heading the way of MySpace.

Becoming MySpace, of course, is the specter that haunts the nightmares of every Facebook investor. The company has been super aggressive in trying to avoid that fate by trying to metastasize into something grander than an automated blogging site, sending out tentacle everywhere in order to become a ubiquitous presence that binds together every aspect of the internet experience. They have striven for immortality through intrusiveness. And this, I think, will be their undoing. Continue reading Facebook’s Fatal Flaw

Why Your Brain’s Wrong About Danger

The world is full of potential hazards. Unfortunately, the things that we’re afraid of oftentimes aren’t the things that are actually mostly likely to hurt us. Our brains’ admirably lightning-fast danger-detection system evolved in an environment different from the modern world, so it tends to trigger our alarms when the situation isn’t really that grievous. Worse, it can fail to activate when we really are faced with a real-and-present danger, leaving us prone to walk right into potentially harmful situations. That doesn’t mean we’re totally SOL, however. With a little effort we can consciously arm ourselves with rational risk-benefit analysis and try to override our erroneous automatic impulses.

For example? Here are some perceived dangers that get blown out of proportion:

Cell phone radiation. Uncertainty is a powerful trigger of anxiety. When new technologies reach a broad public, they can seem uncomfortably mysterious, and hence ready targets for health-scare furors. Remember Alar, silicone breast implants, electromagnetic fields from power lines? In the case of cell phones, the word “radiation” adds additional emotional baggage. The fact is, numerous studies have failed to turn up any conclusive evidence that cell phone emissions pose health risks, and the physics suggests it’s most likely impossible.

Vaccinations. We tend to be less afraid of things that provide an immediate, palpable benefit. The problem with vaccinations is that we never really know if they’ve helped us or not. What’s more, we’re intuitively suspicious of things we perceive as artificial rather than natural. These biases have helped stoke widespread panic about childhood vaccinations, which in turn expose kids to very real risk. Continue reading Why Your Brain’s Wrong About Danger

What AF447’s Passengers Experienced

One of the more interesting responses to my recent Pop Mech piece on Air France 447 came from the Atlantic Wire, which took my description of the sounds and smells that the pilots experienced as a point of departure to discuss what the flight’s final moments must have felt like for those in the cockpit. Here is a photograph that accompanies the post, showing the electrical phenomenon known as St. Elmo’s fire. I’ve never seen such a thing in real life, but imagine that it must seem both beautiful and worrying.

Thanks to the cockpit voice recorder, we have a pretty good idea of what the pilots heard, and the instrument data gives us a pretty good idea of what they saw. But what about the passengers in the back? Their perspective was very different, so I’d like to offer a few speculations about what the final moments of the flight might have been like for them.

The plane had taken off from Rio de Janeiro at 7.30 in the evening, local time, and had been flying for about four hours when it first encountered the weather system that would precipitate the final crisis. It was nearly midnight, then, by the internal clocks of most of the passengers; a few were probably reading, or watching a video, while the majority were probably sleeping, or lightly dozing. The captain himself had just left the cockpit to go take a nap.

As the flight neared the line of massive thunderstorms straddling the Inter Tropical Convergence, any passenger who happened to be awake would probably have felt some light turbulence. Those looking out window would have watched the plane fly into a bank of clouds, then out into clear sky, and then back into clouds. At six minutes past midnight, one of the co-pilots made a call back to the head flight attendant, alerting her that the plane would shortly be entering an area of turbulence. He made no such announcement to the passengers, however.

The turbulence grew worse. In the cabin, the flight attendants would have been strapping into their seats. Continue reading What AF447’s Passengers Experienced

Popular Mechanics: How Panic Doomed an Airliner

On the evening of May 31, 2009, 216 passengers and 12 crew members boarded an Air France Airbus 330 at Antonio Carlos Jobim International Airport in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The flight, Air France 447, departed at 7.29pm local time for a scheduled 11-hour flight to Paris. It never arrived. At 7 o’clock the next morning, when the aircraft failed to appear on the radar screens of air traffic controllers in Europe, Air France began to worry, and contacted civil aviation authorities. By 11am, they concluded that their worst fears had been confirmed. AF447 had gone missing somewhere over the vast emptiness of the South Atlantic.

How, in the age of satellite navigation and instantaneous global communication, could a state-of-the art airliner simply vanish? It was a mystery that lasted for two years. Not until earlier this year, when autonomous submersibles located the airliner’s black boxes under more than two miles of water, were the last pieces of the puzzle put together. What doomed the 228 men, women and children aboard Air France 447 was neither weather nor technological failure, but simple human error. Under pressure, human beings can lose their ability to think clearly and to properly execute their training—a well-known failing that has proven all too difficult to eliminate.

Over at Popular Mechanics I’ve got a long piece offering a detailed blow-by-blow account of how one of the co-pilots of the Air France jetliner managed, in the course of just five minutes, to take a perfectly operational airplane from an altitude of nearly seven miles down to impact with the ocean. Here, I’d like to offer a nutshell summary of what happened, and what our understanding implies for the future of air safety. Continue reading Popular Mechanics: How Panic Doomed an Airliner

The Truth About Lies

In the ‘90s, psychologist Paul Ekman leapt to fame with his theory of “microexpressions”—the idea that when we lie brief, subconscious flashes of emotion register on our face to reveal our true feelings. People trained to pick up on these cues, Ekman said, can root out the truth with astonishing accuracy. His idea inspired a $1 billion TSA program and the TV show Lie to Me.

There’s just one problem. There’s no evidence that Ekman’s theory has any basis. “It’s hokum,” says Yale psychologist Charles Morgan III. While something like the microexpressions that Ekman described do exist, truth-tellers exhibit them as well as liars. “There is no clue, no behavior, that always means that someone is lying, and never means something else,” says Bella DePaulo, a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara who studies lying. “All of these behaviors are just hints.”

So can science help us unmask deception? Yes. But the key is not just to observe a suspected liar but to ask them the right kind of questions. Making up a story and keeping the details straight require more mental horsepower than just telling the truth. Researchers have found that if interrogators can place an extra “cognitive load” on a liar’s intellect they’ll likely push it to breaking point and cause the story to fall apart.

Dutch psychologist Aldert Vrij has tested several ways to accomplish this. In one experiment, he asked pairs of subjects to either go eat lunch together in a restaurant or to simply lie and say that they had. Vrij found that when it came to the kinds of questions that they probably expected to face—“what did you do in the restaurant?”—the liars were able to come up with such convincing stories that it was impossible to tell the two groups apart. But when he forced them to respond on the fly to unexpected questions, such as queries about spatial layout (“In relation to where you sat, where were the closest diners?’’), the liars gave up the game 80 percent of the time.

So if you want to get the truth, sit your suspected liar down for a chat and lay some cognitive load on them. Here are four proven techniques based on experiments that Vrij and others have conducted: Continue reading The Truth About Lies

Surviving Fear Under the Ice

I'm still not sure this is a good idea. (Photo by Isabelle Dubois)

You can study the psychology of fear until the cows come home; it’s not going to do much to keep your heebie-jeebies under control when you’re about to jump into a gap in six-foot-thick sea ice.

I shuffle closer to the edge of the five-by-five foot hole that’s been chainsawed into the ice. I have no real reason to be jumping into the frozen-over Hudson Bay. I’ve come up here for a totally different reason—to do a story about igloo building for a men’s magazine. But the trip’s organizers added a couple of extra days onto my itinerary so that I could get a taste for the local Inuit culture—riding on a dogsled, eating raw caribou meat — oh, and going scuba diving under the sea ice. Care to give it a try, Mr. Wise?

I couldn’t say no. Stunts like this are basically what I do for a living. I’m a magazine writer specializing in experiential adventures like skydiving, surfing, and survival training. Along the way, I developed an interest in the psychology of intense pressure and wrote a book on it. So though the idea of scuba diving under ice scares the crap out of me, that’s all the more reason I should do it.

And it does scare the crap out of me. Immersion in 32 degree water sounds bad enough, but to be trapped under six feet of ice as well? There’s a section of my book about how deadly that kind of thing can be. If a diver panics, the instinctive response is to rip away anything that blocks the airway – in this case, the regulator. In an enclosed space far from the surface, there may be no chance to recover from that mistake. Ironically, just knowing that the possibility exists makes it more likely to happen. “Well, let’s see how it goes,” I tell the organizers.

I’m being weasel-y, but with good reason. Continue reading Surviving Fear Under the Ice

Sad News

Stull at the Sun n' Fun airshow this past April.

Sadly, I’ve received news that Mark Stull, a 59-year-old airplane designer and builder who featured prominently in last month’s Popular Mechanics cover story about do-it-yourself aviation, died on Wednesday, November 16, in a crash near his home in Texas. Stull had just taken off on his first test flight of a new design when the accident occurred. According to a witness, he had climbed to about 50 feet when the aircraft stalled, flipped, and fell to the ground. Stull died instantly.

When I interviewed Stull earlier this year for the article, I was astonished by the risks that he described to me. He was constantly tweaking and modifying his aircraft, and would regularly take them apart and start new designs from scratch. This approach was no doubt fascinating to him intellectually, but it meant that he was constantly flying untested designs whose flying characteristics only became clear once he was in the air.

Stull is not the first aviator I’ve interviewed who has subsequently died in a crash. Last year, I wrote about John Graybill, who died while flying with his wife Dolly in Alaska. I’d profiled Graybill a decade before for National Geographic Adventure. Like Stull, Graybill knew that his passion for flying might someday lead to his death; like Stull, he was fatalistic about his chances.

“I have had many near-death experiences in my life. I am a thrill seeker,” Stull told me earlier this year. “I used to be a white-water kayaker, paddling steep, flooded creeks in Oregon. We used to say, if we don’t almost die, we aren’t having fun. I have no fear of death, but I fear being seriously injured.”

Like Stull and Graybill, I love to fly. Like them, I understand that doing so entails a certain amount of risk, but believe that by staying within certain parameters I can reasonably expect to live a long life. When I hear of an accident like Stull’s or Graybill’s, I have to step back and ask myself: am I really being as safe as I think, or am I deluding myself? Am I taking unnecessary risks? The answer may be no, but I have to ask the question again and again and again.

In cases like this, you often hear people say, “He died doing what he loved.” That may be true, but I can guarantee that in the final seconds, he didn’t love it at all.

UPDATE: Go San Angelo, the website of the San Angelo Standard Times newspaper, has put up a nice piece up about Stull by staff writer Laurel L. Scott.

Forging a Soul of Iron

Gerry Duffy, a rangy, chiseled 43-year-old from Ireland, ranks as one of the most remarkable endurance athletes in the world. Last year, he took first place in an insanely grueling event called the UK Deca Ironman Challenge that required its participants to complete, every day for ten days, a full triathlon: a 2.4 mile swim followed by a 112-mile bike ride and a 26.2-mile run. He has also completed a number of other punishing long-distance events, including one perversely torturous undertaking of his own devising in which he raced a marathon in each of Ireland’s 32 counties over the course of 32 consecutive days. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Duffy, though, is that he used to be just like the rest of us.

At the age of 26 he was a chubby, chain-smoking traveling insurance salesman, 60 pounds overweight, unambitious and comfortable with life. Then one day he saw a photograph of himself taken as he met his hero, golf champion Seve Ballasteros. The sight of the chubby man next to the legendary duffer shocked him. “I said, ‘Mother of…!’” he recalls. “I just felt that I was better than that. I said to myself, ‘I have to do something about this.’” And so he did. Starting with small, easy steps, he began a long journey that ultimately shaved off 30 percent of his body weight and transformed every aspect of his life. From an ordinary schlub, he turned himself by force of will into a man of unparalleled resilience.

Duffy’s story offers a perfect example of a profound but often overlooked truth about human toughness: even the most physically punishing feats of endurance are less about the body than they are about the mind. Sure, Duffy is an incomprehensively fit individual. But it’s how he’s trained his mind that’s allowed him to keep going while his competitors are dropping like flies.

It’s a lesson we all can learn. Though we may not need to run multiple triathlons, we all could benefit by being more determined, more resilient, more resolute in achieving the things that really matter to us. Duffy’s journey serves as an example we all can follow, if to a lesser degree. On his own initiative, he launched himself on a course of self-improvement that bolstered the inner quality that positive psychologist Salvatore Maddi calls “hardiness.” Continue reading Forging a Soul of Iron