psy-ops

Civilization creator Sid Meier's GDC 2010 talk on applying psychology to game design. He discusses player perception, randomness, and win states, and why designers must account for how players experience events.

Jon Ronson, author of The Psychopath Test, gives a TED talk on the blurry line between sane and crazy and on psychopathy as a spectrum, with stories of how the label gets applied.

Jesse Newland describes how GitHub uses Hubot, its chat bot, to run operations such as deployment, monitoring, graphing and provisioning from chat rooms. He explains how this improves shared awareness and remote work culture.

The Grugq's Hack In The Box 2012 talk on operational security for hackers, drawing on hacker indictments and counter-intelligence research. It reviews OPSEC goals and methods for avoiding detection and arrest, with case studies of how hackers got caught.

A DEF CON 30 talk by Sam Bent, a former darknet vendor, on operational security when using Tor and the darknet. He applies the hacker mindset to staying anonymous and avoiding capture.

Journalist Matthew Cole's Black Hat 2013 talk on the CIA's operational security failures in the 2003 Milan kidnapping. Phone and location metadata exposed the team and led to arrest warrants.

Audio of Charlie Munger's 1995 Harvard speech on the psychology of human misjudgment, laying out a framework of cognitive biases and mental models for decision making. It covers factors like incentives, social proof and denial.

Psychologist Melanie Joy's TEDxMunchen talk introduces carnism, the invisible belief system that conditions people to eat some animals but not others, and how it shapes reactions to food choices.

Guy Steele's classic 1998 OOPSLA keynote on how a programming language must grow with its user community. He delivers it in a playful style, starting with only monosyllabic words and defining new terms as he goes.

Alan Kay's 1997 OOPSLA keynote, preserved on YouTube after being lost from Google Video. He discusses what object orientation was meant to be, messaging, system design, and the state of computing practice.

A SXSW talk by W Watson that uses Lacanian psychoanalysis, with nods to Zizek, to critique popular programming languages. It argues that people choose and defend languages for emotional and ideological reasons rather than rational ones.

Alexander Nix of Cambridge Analytica presents at the 2016 Concordia Summit on using big data, psychographic profiling and behavioral microtargeting in elections.

Psychologist Philip Zimbardo explains how ordinary people can be pushed into doing evil by situations and systems. He draws on the Stanford prison experiment and unseen Abu Ghraib photos, then turns to the opposite case: how ordinary people can become heroes.

Alan Kay's 1997 OOPSLA keynote argues that the computer revolution has not really happened yet, reflecting on how computing, objects and the web fall short of their potential.

A four-minute TED talk in which Derek Sivers argues that announcing your goals can make you less likely to achieve them. He cites psychology research going back to the 1920s.

Matthew Cole's Black Hat 2013 talk on operational security failures by CIA operatives. It covers the Abu Omar case and how sloppy tradecraft with cell phones exposed officers through call records and metadata.

John Allspaw and Paul Hammond's Velocity 09 talk on how Flickr achieved ten or more deploys per day through close cooperation between development and operations.

Psychologist Kelly McGonigal argues in this TED talk that stress is harmful mainly if you believe it is, and that reaching out to others is an underrated way to reduce its effects.

Clinical psychologist Dr Michael Yapko draws on forty years of practice and research to explain skills that help people recover from, and even prevent, depression. He emphasizes cognitive and social factors beyond medication.

Chris Domas's DEF CON 23 talk on psychological warfare against reverse engineers. He builds code whose disassembly and control flow graphs mislead, intimidate and demoralize anyone analyzing it.

Sean Parent's GoingNative 2013 talk surveys new and overlooked C++ features and shows how to use them for simple, correct, clear code. It stresses using standard algorithms rather than raw loops.

A long talk by rancher Gabe Brown on turning his North Dakota farm into a regenerative ecosystem using no-till, cover crops and integrated livestock. It covers the five principles of soil health and how they pay off financially.

Guy Steele's 1998 OOPSLA keynote on designing a programming language that its users can grow. He builds the talk using only one-syllable words and terms he has defined, to demonstrate the idea.

Casey Muratori's two-hour talk tracing the history of object-oriented programming back to the 1960s and examining how its ideas, and later entity component systems, came about. It is followed by a Q&A.

Zoz's DEF CON 22 talk on operational security in the age of pervasive surveillance. He shows how hard it is to avoid mistakes even for people who should know better.

Farmer Gabe Brown talks about how he rebuilt the soil on his ranch using no-till farming, cover crops, and grazing animals. The talk was recorded at a sustainable agriculture symposium in Idaho in 2014.

Christopher Alexander's keynote at OOPSLA 1996 on patterns in architecture, addressed to the software community. He moves beyond patterns toward deeper ideas of wholeness and living structure.

Psychologist Barry Schwartz argues in this TED talk that abundant choice makes people more paralyzed and dissatisfied rather than freer and happier.

A short edited excerpt of Terence McKenna arguing that culture acts as an operating system for the mind, set to imagery and music. It touches on psychedelics and how they change thinking.

Daniel Kahneman's Talks at Google lecture on his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, covering System 1 and System 2 thinking and the psychology of judgment and decision making.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt presents his moral foundations research in a TED talk. He argues that liberals and conservatives weigh a different set of moral values, which helps explain political divides.

Psychologist Dan Gilbert argues in this TED talk that our psychological immune system lets us become happy even when things do not go as planned. He challenges the idea that we will be miserable if we do not get what we want.

Joscha Bach's 32C3 talk applies computational theories of mind to questions of meaning, emotion, and love, asking how computation can explain irrational-seeming human experience.

CppCon 2014 talk by Jeff Preshing on how Ubisoft Montreal developed games for multicore hardware, before and after C++11 concurrency support. It goes into atomics and lock-free programming in practice.

Social psychologist Melanie Joy introduces the concept of carnism, the belief system that conditions people to eat some animals but not others.

Steven Pinker presents his book The Stuff of Thought at Google in 2007. He covers language as a window into human nature, including taboo words, swearing and the psychology and game theory of indirect speech like bribery.

Joanna Rutkowska's 32C3 talk asks whether trustworthy client systems can be built on x86 hardware, and what realistically can be done about the challenges, such as Intel ME.

Psychology professor Lisa Feldman Barrett presents her research on what emotions are, arguing that the brain constructs them rather than reading them off faces. She says this means we have more control over our emotions than we think.

Bryan Cantrill's GOTO Chicago 2017 talk on debugging production systems under pressure, centered on the incident where an operator's mistyped command rebooted an entire Joyent datacenter. It covers human factors, automation and architecture.

Tim Urban's TED talk on why people procrastinate, covering YouTube binges and Wikipedia rabbit holes. It ends with the life-calendar idea as a nudge to act before time runs out.