from Hacker News

Be curious, not judgmental

by shbhrsaha on 12/23/21, 3:59 PM with 133 comments

by photochemsyn on 12/24/21, 1:23 AM
It's a good title... My instinct is to ridicule the entire concept of the smart home with its dozens of internet-attached devices from TVs to refrigerators to light bulbs accessible from one's smart phone. I suppose I should instead be curious as to why anyone would be comfortable with such a system?
I can see the attraction of using a Raspberry Pi on a closed local network instead of timers and so on, for example if one has a lot of houseplants and so on, but I don't really understand the desire for having that network be internet-accessible.
by mwattsun on 12/24/21, 1:32 PM
There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all argument and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance. This principle is contempt prior to examination -- Herbert Spencer, 19th century English philosopher, scientist, and theologian
I've been attempting to train myself to be more open minded. For example, I have been skeptical of functional programming because my assumption was that it was an academic thing for those that didn't have to live in the real world of state and mutability. I thought it had to be less efficient.
Some investigation proved me wrong. Russ Olsen set me straight:
Functional Programming in 40 Minutes • Russ Olsen • GOTO 2018
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0if71HOyVjY
We don't have to copy a million element immutable array to change one element. We copy a section of it and keep the rest in a tree structure of changes (this happens under the covers). Secondly, manipulating the stateful world is easier to understand if we isolate those actions in Atoms and Actors.
Now I see the beauty of it so I'm glad I investigated.
by ricardobeat on 12/24/21, 2:46 AM
This is good advice, but that design is still terrible.
Take for example, IKEA Tradfri: if you use their dimmers, you don't ever need to reset the lamps. You just hold the dimmer and it's reset button close to the lamp.
And if you use another system, you reset them by quickly switching them on and off six times. Takes under ten seconds. "It's complicated" is not a very good excuse for shitty design reaching end users.
by r3n on 12/24/21, 9:13 AM
Dose anyone has good advices to change this kind of mindset ?
It is hard for me to not be judgmental about stuff I disagree, and I can tell this attitude is causing more trouble than I would like in many different area of my life.
by lejohnq on 12/24/21, 1:30 AM
This reminded me of a clip from Ted Lasso with the same quote: https://youtu.be/5x0PzUoJS-U
Nice to see this pop up here
by sgallant on 12/24/21, 1:07 AM
There is so much wisdom in the title of this post (a quote by Walt Whitman) and it applies to so many situations in life. Happy to see it used as the title to this post (and on the homepage of HN :)
by mooreds on 12/24/21, 1:11 AM
Always good advice. When I see something I don't understand that seems off or weird, one way I avoid judgement is to ask the five whys to myself.
It is also good to recognize that most everyone is doing the best they can, and if you ship a light with a weird way to reset it, there were probably (as the author suggests) constraints that you don't know about.
What if you're wrong and they wanted to inflict anguish on their users? Well, the market is pretty good about fixing those problems, at least with commodities like lights.
by chrismckleroy on 12/24/21, 1:27 AM
Also, PMs and engineers that don’t actively use and love their product can be subject to laziness - finding the most simple passable direct solution and implementing that - just to go home at 4:20.
Sure, yes, empathize don’t judge, but also, let’s acknowledge the human tendencies as non-owners to DGAF - especially in this current age of the worker questioning everything.
by Jensson on 12/24/21, 11:42 AM
> Be curious, not judgmental
Those two are not opposites. The opposite of curious is that you don't care. Most people don't care about things like the factory reset procedure for lamps. A judgemental person cares or they wouldn't spend energy judging, and in fact one of the best way to sate your curiosity is to be very judgemental online since people will write comments, blogs or articles like this and explain things to you when you do.
by rgasiorek on 12/24/21, 11:30 AM
I think it's naive to think that we can stop being judgemental. It's like saying we can stop going to the loo or needing love. It is out nature and this is the nature of our neural-nets. Our neural-nets were trained, and then they 'classify' and 'trigger', the classification is the trigger which is the judgement. What we can do do is to be aware of the nature of our neural system, of the fact that as any other AI solution needs training data and is only as good as the data. As any other AI solution it can over-optimise or end up in a local optimum which makes us think so strongly about some subjects. Part of the video is spot - it's its title - yes being curious helps 'cleaning' the training data and helps having the trained data better balanced which in turn kicks your locally-optimised NN out of it's dip and allow to explore further. The most important part is to distinguish between being judgmental and acting upon judgment rather than reflecting on it first.
This part is not naive -> we can and should control our actions, we do not control our thoughts as much as we like to think but we can choose how we react to them.
by borski on 12/24/21, 6:22 AM
Sure, but this isn’t such a unique problem. Hue handles all of these reset scenarios with much more grace, as an example: https://www.trustedreviews.com/how-to/how-to-reset-philips-h...
by chaostheory on 12/24/21, 5:25 AM
> “we can’t put it on the glass”
LED lightbulbs are typically housed in plastic. You easily integrate a plastic button into plastic housing.
by gigglesupstairs on 12/24/21, 5:38 AM
Anecdotal but Yeelight smart bulbs in my home require 5 turn offs and ons to reset with 2 sec pauses after every press. I reckon the GE bulbs don't actually require 8 sec pauses and it's just suggested to ensure users cross a certain threshold at all times when they are really trying to reset.
by kstenerud on 12/24/21, 8:15 AM
What would be cool, although it would take enormous coordination and negotiation effort to do, would be to develop a universal reset code for lightbulbs.
One idea would be to use the morse code encoding for "RRR", or ".-. .-. .-." (has a nice, memorable beat to it) with a minimum and maximum frequency such that it could be input at human or machine speed (say an allowed period between 50-500ms and a tolerance of 20% variation while inputting).
Once you have a standardized way to encode "reset" using on-off (which is all we have available given the legacy system we use), the next-gen lamps and light switch panels could just incorporate this into a built-in reset switch that sends the full reset signal to any bulb that happens to be plugged in.
by nthngtshr on 12/24/21, 12:59 AM
Yeah, but how are you going to get likes on those tweets?
by ketzo on 12/24/21, 3:30 AM
I'm taking a little of my holiday break to try and apply this to cryptocurrencies and blockchain stuff.
Horrible, terrible, tragic, I know. But if I feel like I'm going to be ridiculing this stuff on a fairly regular basis, then I should at least know what the fuck I'm talking about, right?
I mean, what number of HN commenters who dismiss crypto out of hand have literally never made an effort to be curious about the guts of it all? Probably a pretty sizeable majority, if I had to guess – myself included.
by cupcake-unicorn on 12/24/21, 9:10 AM
While I agree with the general sentiment when it comes to individual interactions, I think it's kind of naive to put this much trust into corporations in a capitalist system.
Should we have been curious about the development of MCAS at Boeing? Or the Volkswagen emissions scandal? And it's very common that have companies that have actuaries that spend money determining the amount of money they'd have to pay out in lawsuits for lethal design flaws in their products vs recalls.
The point is that big companies have such vastly, mindbogglingly different systems behind them, so yes that much is true, that most likely there was a "reason" it was done this way, like there was a "reason" the Volkswagen emission scandal happened and the departments were mixed up in such a way so no one could point to any one person. But that reason sure isn't about the customers, it's about their corporation.
By all means though, curiosity is great to cultivate in INDIVIDUAL interactions where it's a human interaction and not motivated by profit/transactional. Why give companies this benefit of the doubt? In my opinion the onus should be on them to prove to consumers that they're not just profit based and that they care about customer service and transparency.
by mmaunder on 12/24/21, 1:02 AM
“…unless you’re me.”
by deft on 12/24/21, 6:04 AM
Not directly about a lightbulb, but I've learned that when you see something and think "why is it this way, that's stupid" its usually not. People don't make things "stupid" for no reason.
by DantesKite on 12/24/21, 2:59 AM
I liked how they picked the worst possible example to illustrate their point lol.
by lysecret on 12/24/21, 12:44 PM
I like this way of putting it. For me I have seen it more as being understanding compared to judgmental. But I understand how you would put it as curious ;)
by dvt on 12/24/21, 2:30 AM
This article, the Twitter critics, and the overall lesson learned reminds me of this quote, one of my favorites:
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." - Theodore Roosevelt
by mfav on 12/24/21, 7:06 AM
Plus, the QA team probably felt this a lot more then end users, testing this reset procedure thousands of times.
The product team had probably received this feedback long before the Internet spoke. And, ultimately, found a 40-second factory reset procedure is not that big of a deal.
Totally agree with this sentiment. It's easy to criticize on the Internet and receive positive feedback for that. But, constructive replies are often the most clever & interesting ones. Great post, Shu!
by alfor on 12/24/21, 3:14 AM
That has to be the funniest serious video
The absurdity of our modern high tech lives in 2min
It’s not anyone's fault, it’s an emergent property.
by ozy on 12/24/21, 8:26 AM
FYI: Little kids unpair ikea lamps with ease if there is still a physical switch.
by Msw242 on 12/24/21, 1:56 PM
Why can't the button be on the bulb? It's not vacuumed glass
by CraftingLinks on 12/24/21, 7:39 AM
Excuses...
by selfhifive on 12/24/21, 4:19 AM
But the whole point of curiosity is to find out more about something in order to form a judgement. We just need to be willing to change judgements when shown the constraints. In a way, asking people to be non judgemental kills curiosity.
I'd quote Marc Andreessen: "Strong opinions; weakly held."
by aaron695 on 12/24/21, 1:52 AM
> Why not add a factory reset button?
If you don't say dumb things in life out loud, you won't move forward. You'll just continue to think dumb things.
> I’m saying that we don’t know enough about the constraints to say there’s a better solution.
This is pride in ignorance. There's no reason why you can't. Light bulb engineers, rocket scientists and doctors are just human beings.
OK I'm curious.
Why was it like that? If you don't judge it how can you understand it? What framework should be used?
Don't be judgemental without being curious, I think is a better line.