6 ms·

Functional Fixedness

34 points by dedalus 11y ago

deutronium 11y ago
This reminds me of J.P. Guilford's Alternative Uses Test, the aim being to find as many uses as possible of every day objects such as a brick etc.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Back when I didn't have a day job and had some free time to spend outside, I took it as a point of honor to always fix everything with duct tape and whatever I could find on the spot. This was a conscious exercise to make sure I don't get that "functional fixedness" (I didn't knew the name back then). Needless to say, my mother wasn't always satisfied with the alternative applications I came up with. By the way, this is how I think a lot of people become functionally fixated - unfortunately the typical parent's reaction to child's creativity is "WTF did you do? Please put it back the way it was before.". By the time they reach maturity, improvisation skills get beaten out of them.
  - srtjstjsj 11y ago
    Engineering flowchart for fixing machines: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/70/b5/11/70b511ecc607f60fc6224917448633fc.jpg https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/70/b5/11/70b511ecc... If you need it to start moving: WD-40 If you need it to stop moving: duct tape
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      I tend to carry both in my backpack everywhere :).
- agumonkey 11y ago
  Brilliant, I just tried the test here http://www.indiana.edu/~bobweb/Handout/d1.uses.htm http://www.indiana.edu/~bobweb/Handout/d1.uses.htm and it was delightfully fun to pick a mundane object and imagine all possible uses.
  - srtjstjsj 11y ago
    > You might have noticed that the higher fluency the higher the originality (if you did "good for you!") This is a contamination problem and can be corrected by using a corrective calculation for originality that misses the point that in real life, "originality/creative" is often derived from fluency. The best ideas come from people who have the most* ideas (the bad ideas are discarded).
spullara 11y ago
These examples appear to be little more than riddles.
- tgb 11y ago
  Yes, and there's good reason why people wouldn't think to tack a tack box to the wall just to hold a candle. The box is holding the tacks already, so you've just replaced one problem with a different one. We don't pull all stops out to solve problems because usually doing so makes more problems. One time I had to take the bottom panel on my fridge off to switch how the door hinged. I couldn't find the last screw that was holding it in place, so I couldn't get it off. If all I cared about was 'solving the problem' I'd have taken out my tools and broken the plastic panel off and switched the door. But then I'd have a broken panel... so I kept looking and eventually found how to actually remove it.
  - jschwartzi 11y ago
    True, but in the case that a small child or animal was trapped under that panel your priorities would change significantly. That's actually a pretty strong argument for many of the "functional fixedness tests" to be invalid, because they don't account for peoples' priorities. For example, with the tack box in the candle problem, I think people don't empty the box because they don't want to scatter the tacks all over everything, so it's not really testing functional fixedness but rather peoples' willingness to break something to accomplish their goals.
  - srtjstjsj 11y ago
    This is a common problem in psychology research: Researches making grand unfounded conclusions by over-generalizing an observation in a very narrow experiment. In school my professors pushed me to make ridiculous generalizations from my tiny experiments.
bbcbasic 11y ago
I thought this was going to be about the "fix" function in Haskell.
- wz1000 11y ago
  Also known as the Y Combinator :P
  - pflanze 11y ago
    The Haskell implementation is not the Y combinator. But it's one way to implement the fixed-point combinator (and it is functionally equivalent): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed-point_combinator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed-point_combinator Edit: The difference is that the Haskell implementation (http://hackage.haskell.org/package/base-4.8.1.0/docs/src/Data.Function.html#fix http://hackage.haskell.org/package/base-4.8.1.0/docs/src/Dat...): fix f = let x = f x in x relies on recursive let. The Y combinator instead works in the lambda calculus which does not have recursion, and it instead relies on recombining the function for each application.
    - agumonkey 11y ago
      I am fascinated by fixed points and quines and their relationships.
      - pflanze 11y ago
        Interesting, I didn't think of quines since I learned about and played with the fixed-point combinators. I never wrote a quine, I guess that's why. I'll try some time.
        agumonkey 11y ago
        Articles about derivation of quines and fixed points often start with their infinite expansion nature, and then imagine a way to build a meta level replicator. The Y combinator is mostly that, duplicates the function to make recursive, with a functional parameter protocol to pass it to its sibling self. Only my newb view.
TeMPOraL 11y ago
Good to know the name for the phenomenon. It's incredibly common among people and it seriously infects thinking, to the point some seem to believe objects have little tags attached to atoms that say "this can be used only for X", and they'll act as if you're breaking the laws of nature if you use the object for something else than its "intended purpose". Current society itself also seems to encourage functional fixedness. Whenever there's a problem, there's always a dedicated tool to solve it, marketed for a particular purpose. Like e.g. various safety razors for different sexes and body parts that are all basically the same, sans color and packaging. Or cleaning tools that are just cheap rolls of tape wound backwards. People learn to solve their problems by mindlessly throwing money at prepackaged solutions instead of realizing they could reuse something they already use to solve a different problem.
- srtjstjsj 11y ago
  Several your examples are examples of specialization and optimization, that increase efficiency in operations. There is a good reason that we have more complex tools than the 6 platonic simple machines.
- zachrose 11y ago
  There are some academics who study functional fixedness in literature under the name "Thing Theory". In particular, Raymond Malewitz has a book of examples of "creative misuse" in recent American lit.[1] Some of his examples (Fight Club, No Country for Old Men) are noted for their anti-capitalist or anti-consumerist slant, while others (Apollo 13, McGuyver) have more of a quasi-military aspect to them. I'm also reminded of British architecture critic Reyner Banham's essay "The Great Gizmo" about examples of American technology that are meant for retrofitting and composition more than entirely new things.[2] The outboard motor, for example, as opposed to designing a new boat. And also Olia Lialina has an essay "Turing-Complete User" about very similar themes in today's software.[3] 1 http://www.amazon.com/The-Practice-Misuse-Consumerism-Contemporary/dp/0804791961 http://www.amazon.com/The-Practice-Misuse-Consumerism-Contem... 2 http://mashupstudio.pbworks.com/f/Banham_The%2BGreat%2BGizmo.pdf http://mashupstudio.pbworks.com/f/Banham_The%2BGreat%2BGizmo... 3 http://contemporary-home-computing.org/turing-complete-user/ http://contemporary-home-computing.org/turing-complete-user/
jfoster 11y ago
Can process overcome this? For example, if the first step in attempting to solve a physical problem like the candle/wall/box problem is to take itinerary of your tools, it might become more apparent to the problem solver that they could use the box. Not sure how well that approach would work if the problem were less physical, but I think there might be an equivalent.
- vm 11y ago
  Process can overcome this. "Systematic Inventive Thinking" is a methodology which does just that. I took a crash course with the company that created it. The repeatability of the process impressed me, especially across different groups and problems. You can boil it down to a checklist, (though it's still a meaningful time commitment). More on the company here: http://www.sitsite.com/ http://www.sitsite.com/ Unfortunately I don't see much on their site about explaining their process, but a lot of "Design Thinking" courses cover similar approaches. Stanford's d.school has an intro here: http://dschool.stanford.edu/dgift/ http://dschool.stanford.edu/dgift/
srtjstjsj 11y ago
This is the obverse of "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." This is "when you have a nail, nothing looks like a hammer."
ggchappell 11y ago
Interesting. I wonder if this phenomenon might at least partially explain the repeated misguided calls we see for encryption software to have back doors for law-enforcement use. Roughly speaking, people might be thinking that such a back door would not be used for nefarious purposes, because that is not what it is for.

34 points by dedalus 11y ago

This reminds me of J.P. Guilford's Alternative Uses Test, the aim being to find as many uses as possible of every day objects such as a brick etc.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
Back when I didn't have a day job and had some free time to spend outside, I took it as a point of honor to always fix everything with duct tape and whatever I could find on the spot. This was a conscious exercise to make sure I don't get that "functional fixedness" (I didn't knew the name back then). Needless to say, my mother wasn't always satisfied with the alternative applications I came up with. By the way, this is how I think a lot of people become functionally fixated - unfortunately the typical parent's reaction to child's creativity is "WTF did you do? Please put it back the way it was before.". By the time they reach maturity, improvisation skills get beaten out of them.
- srtjstjsj 11y ago
  Engineering flowchart for fixing machines: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/70/b5/11/70b511ecc607f60fc6224917448633fc.jpg https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/70/b5/11/70b511ecc... If you need it to start moving: WD-40 If you need it to stop moving: duct tape
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    I tend to carry both in my backpack everywhere :).
agumonkey 11y ago
Brilliant, I just tried the test here http://www.indiana.edu/~bobweb/Handout/d1.uses.htm http://www.indiana.edu/~bobweb/Handout/d1.uses.htm and it was delightfully fun to pick a mundane object and imagine all possible uses.
- srtjstjsj 11y ago
  > You might have noticed that the higher fluency the higher the originality (if you did "good for you!") This is a contamination problem and can be corrected by using a corrective calculation for originality that misses the point that in real life, "originality/creative" is often derived from fluency. The best ideas come from people who have the most* ideas (the bad ideas are discarded).

spullara 11y ago

These examples appear to be little more than riddles.

tgb 11y ago
Yes, and there's good reason why people wouldn't think to tack a tack box to the wall just to hold a candle. The box is holding the tacks already, so you've just replaced one problem with a different one. We don't pull all stops out to solve problems because usually doing so makes more problems. One time I had to take the bottom panel on my fridge off to switch how the door hinged. I couldn't find the last screw that was holding it in place, so I couldn't get it off. If all I cared about was 'solving the problem' I'd have taken out my tools and broken the plastic panel off and switched the door. But then I'd have a broken panel... so I kept looking and eventually found how to actually remove it.
- jschwartzi 11y ago
  True, but in the case that a small child or animal was trapped under that panel your priorities would change significantly. That's actually a pretty strong argument for many of the "functional fixedness tests" to be invalid, because they don't account for peoples' priorities. For example, with the tack box in the candle problem, I think people don't empty the box because they don't want to scatter the tacks all over everything, so it's not really testing functional fixedness but rather peoples' willingness to break something to accomplish their goals.
- srtjstjsj 11y ago
  This is a common problem in psychology research: Researches making grand unfounded conclusions by over-generalizing an observation in a very narrow experiment. In school my professors pushed me to make ridiculous generalizations from my tiny experiments.

bbcbasic 11y ago

I thought this was going to be about the "fix" function in Haskell.

wz1000 11y ago
Also known as the Y Combinator :P
- pflanze 11y ago
  The Haskell implementation is not the Y combinator. But it's one way to implement the fixed-point combinator (and it is functionally equivalent): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed-point_combinator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed-point_combinator Edit: The difference is that the Haskell implementation (http://hackage.haskell.org/package/base-4.8.1.0/docs/src/Data.Function.html#fix http://hackage.haskell.org/package/base-4.8.1.0/docs/src/Dat...): fix f = let x = f x in x relies on recursive let. The Y combinator instead works in the lambda calculus which does not have recursion, and it instead relies on recombining the function for each application.
  - agumonkey 11y ago
    I am fascinated by fixed points and quines and their relationships.
    - pflanze 11y ago
      Interesting, I didn't think of quines since I learned about and played with the fixed-point combinators. I never wrote a quine, I guess that's why. I'll try some time.
      - agumonkey 11y ago
        Articles about derivation of quines and fixed points often start with their infinite expansion nature, and then imagine a way to build a meta level replicator. The Y combinator is mostly that, duplicates the function to make recursive, with a functional parameter protocol to pass it to its sibling self. Only my newb view.

TeMPOraL 11y ago

Good to know the name for the phenomenon. It's incredibly common among people and it seriously infects thinking, to the point some seem to believe objects have little tags attached to atoms that say "this can be used only for X", and they'll act as if you're breaking the laws of nature if you use the object for something else than its "intended purpose". Current society itself also seems to encourage functional fixedness. Whenever there's a problem, there's always a dedicated tool to solve it, marketed for a particular purpose. Like e.g. various safety razors for different sexes and body parts that are all basically the same, sans color and packaging. Or cleaning tools that are just cheap rolls of tape wound backwards. People learn to solve their problems by mindlessly throwing money at prepackaged solutions instead of realizing they could reuse something they already use to solve a different problem.

srtjstjsj 11y ago
Several your examples are examples of specialization and optimization, that increase efficiency in operations. There is a good reason that we have more complex tools than the 6 platonic simple machines.
zachrose 11y ago
There are some academics who study functional fixedness in literature under the name "Thing Theory". In particular, Raymond Malewitz has a book of examples of "creative misuse" in recent American lit.[1] Some of his examples (Fight Club, No Country for Old Men) are noted for their anti-capitalist or anti-consumerist slant, while others (Apollo 13, McGuyver) have more of a quasi-military aspect to them. I'm also reminded of British architecture critic Reyner Banham's essay "The Great Gizmo" about examples of American technology that are meant for retrofitting and composition more than entirely new things.[2] The outboard motor, for example, as opposed to designing a new boat. And also Olia Lialina has an essay "Turing-Complete User" about very similar themes in today's software.[3] 1 http://www.amazon.com/The-Practice-Misuse-Consumerism-Contemporary/dp/0804791961 http://www.amazon.com/The-Practice-Misuse-Consumerism-Contem... 2 http://mashupstudio.pbworks.com/f/Banham_The%2BGreat%2BGizmo.pdf http://mashupstudio.pbworks.com/f/Banham_The%2BGreat%2BGizmo... 3 http://contemporary-home-computing.org/turing-complete-user/ http://contemporary-home-computing.org/turing-complete-user/

jfoster 11y ago

Can process overcome this? For example, if the first step in attempting to solve a physical problem like the candle/wall/box problem is to take itinerary of your tools, it might become more apparent to the problem solver that they could use the box. Not sure how well that approach would work if the problem were less physical, but I think there might be an equivalent.

vm 11y ago
Process can overcome this. "Systematic Inventive Thinking" is a methodology which does just that. I took a crash course with the company that created it. The repeatability of the process impressed me, especially across different groups and problems. You can boil it down to a checklist, (though it's still a meaningful time commitment). More on the company here: http://www.sitsite.com/ http://www.sitsite.com/ Unfortunately I don't see much on their site about explaining their process, but a lot of "Design Thinking" courses cover similar approaches. Stanford's d.school has an intro here: http://dschool.stanford.edu/dgift/ http://dschool.stanford.edu/dgift/

srtjstjsj 11y ago

This is the obverse of "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." This is "when you have a nail, nothing looks like a hammer."

ggchappell 11y ago

Interesting. I wonder if this phenomenon might at least partially explain the repeated misguided calls we see for encryption software to have back doors for law-enforcement use. Roughly speaking, people might be thinking that such a back door would not be used for nefarious purposes, because that is not what it is for.