Paul Buchheit: Brilliantly wrong

http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/12/brilliantly-wrong.html

by brlewis • 19 years ago

33 15 19 years ago

paulbuchheit.blogspot.com

Bravo, man. I always wanted to be able to articulate what you just said.

edw519• 19 years ago

"While an Undo feature could be useful, isn't this just coddling people who should otherwise be paying closer attention to what they are doing?"

While a parachute could be useful, isn't this just coddling skydivers who should otherwise be paying closer attention to where they are falling?

brlewis• 19 years ago

The funny thing is, your skydiver statement could be argued true more effectively than the original quote.

robg3• 19 years ago

What a fantastic post.

One thing I'd like to add: It's extremely difficult to overwrite or unlearn things that have already been learned. You can teach users something new, but if it conflicts with what they already know, they're going to run into trouble and much effort will be expended to overcome the multiple messages.

One silly example from my research: We found developmental traces of pre-school knowledge in biology professors. The professors acted like children even though they've had at least 20 years to overcome their early confusions. The simple, bastardized story: The brain doesn't have a delete button and overwrite appears to be very hard.

Better to conform to users, because they're not likely to conform to you. At most, pick one thing you want them to learn and the more novel, the more likely they'll "get it"..

downer2• 19 years ago

"We found developmental traces of pre-school knowledge in biology professors. The professors acted like children even though they've had at least 20 years to overcome their early confusions."

Details!

robg3• 19 years ago

Sorry, it's still rare for me that folks outside my research area want to hear more. Two people makes a quorum!

The abbreviated background: Young children tend to confuse movement and naturalness with life. So if you ask a typical four-year-old if a cloud is alive, they'll tend to say yes. Same deal for things like a mountain and a truck. They don't know yet that life involves mechanistic things "inside" the organism. Similarly, they'll deny life to plants becuase they don't do anything. There's been a ton of research in this area because it addresses why young children are initially confused and how they can best be brought along toward mature knowledge. Even still, it takes us years to understand basic life processes. You might learn what's alive or not alive, but obviously the knowledge drills much deeper than that.

Results: Any case, the very first study I conducted as a grad student, I found that undergraduates, when tested under speeded conditions, have much more difficulty answering, for example, that a cloud, a mountain, and a truck are not living things than saying the same for a table. Same difficulty for calling plants living things as compared to animals. Just to show how hard it is to see the forest for the trees (pun intended), it took me five years to even think about testing bio profs. And wouldn't you know, they replicated the effects but with one important caveat. They showed improved performance for living things, as compared to the undergrads, but still much worse for plants than for animals and no improvement for the moving and natural non-living things. Even after 20 years of advanced biology training, they are still "thinking" like little kids, on some level.

Of course, I'm interested to hear complaints, concerns, or questions. But my take-away is that if something as simple as living or non-living can't be overwritten once much more advanced knowledge is acquired, and for many years at that, then learning that involves change is really, really hard. Better to rely on common schemes as much as possible, and expect users to learn as little as possible.

I wish I could cite a paper, but this startup stuff has had me happily distracted from the joys of publishing. But the manuscript is in decent shape and once my co-author looks at it, we'll send it out for review.

nootopian• 19 years ago

My Vigor router has a JS alert dialog that reads

If you have a fixed IP address press cancel to continue

uuilly2• 19 years ago

When I was at MegaCorp the smartest guy I knew (photographic memory, ninja puzzle solver) thought that users should be required to pass a test to use OUR software! His rendering engines were amazing and his UI's were a disaster.

downer2• 19 years ago

That's not very smart.

uuilly2• 19 years ago

The title of the post is "brilliantly wrong." I thought this story was apropos.

eru3• 19 years ago

"As for "undo", in general, the more we can lower the costs of making mistakes, the faster we can move."

One of the reasons for version control systems and automated-testing.

as• 19 years ago

Reminds me of an Overcoming Bias post. If your source of stupid is pure enough you can just reverse it to get right.

Paul Buchheit: Brilliantly wrong

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