Boasting rights or who has the biggest... thing

In case anyone still has doubts about the importance of context let us just look at how often we establish comparisons among things. In fact we could argue that, when faced with the choice between two similar objects it is irrelevant how valuable, how long, how heavy each of them is in absolute terms, but which of the two is the most valuable, the longest or the heaviest, because that is what will determine its suitability to fulfill a purpose. There are probably many other objects that are more valuable, longer, and heavier, but they are not an option at the moment, so the absolute value, length or weight is, in many cases irrelevant.

The situation becomes a little trickier when the number of options grows: with three options you have to make three comparisons; with four, six; with five, ten. This explosive increase requires a more efficient approach, and here is where absolute values become important: by assigning a number to the property of interest of the object it is suddenly much easier to sort them according to that property. So the absolute values ease the comparison but they do not make an object intrinsically good or useful or valuable by themselves.

Photo: Florida Fish and Wildlife

One kind of comparison which is particularly useful is one which allows us to establish the fitness of an object for a purpose: it you measure a hole in the ground and find that it is three feet in diameter you can compare that value with the length of the boards that you have available, and be confident that every board of less than three feet will not be able to cover the hole, while every board of four feet or longer will. The comparison between the needed and the available values will also allow to define a criterion for sufficiency: there is a certain value beyond which an increase does not bring any benefit (or even become a problem, imagine you need to handle 20-feet-long boards).

There is one additional use of values that is not inherent to the objects but link instead to their possession. Things that are valuable or rare could be sold for a big sum of money or traded for other objects, but that would mean parting with them. However there is some level of psychological satisfaction in knowing that we own them (and everybody else does not), as if that awarded us some kind of boasting rights, to stroll around the community flaunting our luck and pointing out our uniqueness. In fact, it is also the other way around. People that do not have anything to show off tend to feel "less" than their peers. In a study that, unfortunately, I cannot cite right now, psychologists found that families who lived in communities with similar income to their own were happier than those who lived in neighborhoods where many people earned more than they did, even if, in absolute terms, the latter were making two or three times as much as the former. That is also why the social networks are filled with beautiful babies, gorgeous gardens, expensive cars, dream vacations, and handsome boyfriends and girlfriends: everybody wants a piece of the admiration (envy) pie, and you can only get it by showing off.

But the main reason why I landed on this subject today is because a friend of mine recently sent me an article about a speed comparison between the newest Samsung phones and a not-so-new iPhone, where the Korean brand did poorly with around 20% worse performance in some well-established benchmark. The question, once again, is that comparisons might be helpful in determining the suitability of an object for a purpose, but if the measurement is not related to the typical use of the object, the value becomes just an excuse for boasting. Keep in mind that I do not consider benchmarks useless, in fact they are an essential tool in the development of high performance computers. All I am saying is that we do not carry phones in our pockets for their raw computing performance, but for their ability to serve us information and to run applications. And very often the performance of the phone is not essential in determining which applications can be used, because there is a whole range of options to allow higher or lower demand of resources. For instance, an endless source of headaches for game developers is the amount of detail that they can put in the graphics: adding fine textures, shadows, reflections, water and hair effects, and other similar complexities can bring any computer to its knees it you push it far enough; on the other hand, tweaking down these effects that are not essential to the game allows it to run in significantly smaller machines. The same applies to productivity tools, like email, text processors, spreadsheets, slideshows, etc. By adjusting the level of detail, the number of buttons on the screen or even removing some functionality it is possible to make the application compatible with a wider range of devices.

In the case of iPhone versus Android there might be a small fraction of users that choose one or the other because a given application is only available in that platform, but for the general public it is just a matter of looking for the adequate version (or finding a clone that would do the same but it is called differently). In the end, if a software manufacturer decides to provide a version for that platform they will make the effort of adapting the software to ensure that it runs well enough, even if that means making substantial modifications to the original program. And my suspicion is that the iPhone's better performance is actually removing the incentives for the software houses to be computationally efficient: since the programs will run well anyway, there is no reason to invest valuable resources in making them run even better. What is your position there? Are you Android or iPhone? As usual, you are welcome to leave your comments below. Have a nice evening.