My smoke alarm chirps in the middle of the night, waking me up, because it’s running low on battery.
It could have been designed with a built-in clock that, when it’s first getting slightly low on battery, waits until the next morning, say 11am, and then starts emitting a soft purring noise, which only escalates to piercing loud chirps over time and if you ignore it.
And I do have a model of how this comes about; the basic smoke alarm design is made in the 1950s or 1960s or something, in a time when engineering design runs on a much more authoritarian paradigm of “yes wake them up the user-peon needs to change the battery”, clock circuits aren’t as cheap; and then in modern times if you propose changing anything, somebody somewhere will claim it’s less safe. Of course it’s much less safe if you build smoke alarms that hurt people, and the people quite reasonably remove the batteries and take them out of their bedrooms, and then you try to compensate for that by passing a law so that you can say any harm is their fault for ignoring that law. But that’s the paradigm for how it is, and now if you try to design a smoke alarm that’s gentler or slower-escalating about how it lets you know that it’s running out of battery, people will—on a purely intuitive level—assume that the damage the smoke alarm does to you must be buying something, and that a smoke alarm which tries harder not to hurt you must be less safe. There’s probably a law mandating those chirps; it’s probably illegal to build a better-designed smoke alarm. Just guessing, there, partially because the better product doesn’t seem to exist, and partially because Earthlings just fucking love passing laws about everything.
Every day, in every way, I’m reminded that this is not my world. The world of eliezera wouldn’t design smoke alarms like that, nor larger societies in a way that lets those larger societies fail like that.
It doesn’t bug me in the same way and structure that it bugs Duncan, or so I model him and me; and I think that’s because I genuinely deeply know, including in my emotions, that I am not wrong, Earth is wrong. There’s a correct way to design a smoke alarm, and Earth’s way is not it.
I wish I could give Duncan the mental motion of what it is to have the sense of your own world about you and its sensibility, by which this world of Earth cannot press in on you; so that if among their many other errors the Earthlings think you don’t exist, that genuinely doesn’t feel like you being wrong, it feels like them being wrong. But that’s probably something in the brains of eliezera that maybe isn’t native to the brains of duncanni, and so the thought is useless in the end.
Even so: Earthlings be weird, but that’s a them problem, not a you problem. Maybe your System 1 never quite believes it, but let your System 2 never lose track of the difference.
In case anyone finds it validating or cathartic, you can read user interaction professionals explain that, yes, things are often designed with horrible, horrible usability.[1]Bruce Tognazzini has a vast website.
Here is one list of design bugs. The first one is the F-16 fighter jet’s flawed weapon controls, which caused pilots to fire its gun by mistake during training exercises (in one case shooting a school—luckily not hitting anyone) on four occasions in one year; on the first three occasions, they blamed pilot error, and on the fourth, they still blamed pilot error but also acknowledged that “poorly-designed controls” contributed to the incident.
Bug: The driver must accurately toggle a hidden, completely unlabelled switch inside the engine compartment in response to changing conditions. If, even once, the switch is forgotten or flipped the wrong way, it will destroy the $5000 engine and transmission within five minutes.
Calling the company was of no help. The engineer who answered responded that nothing was wrong with the design of the switch that extremely careful operation would not overcome. He’d been using it for months with no problem.
The problem could be easily corrected by the manufacturer replacing this manual switch with a solenoid-driven switch that only kicks in when the car has been connected for towing. This would add little to the already high price and would replace certain anxiety and uncertain calamity with a solid, dependable result.
The Design of Everyday Things (by Don Norman, Tognazzini’s more-famous colleague) is an entire book about good and bad design. Excerpting from the chapter “Why Designers Go Astray”:
“It probably won a prize” is a disparaging phrase in this book. Why? Because prizes tend to be given for some aspects of a design, to the neglect of all others—usually including usability. Consider the following example, in which a usable, livable design was penalized by the design profession. The assignment was to design the Seattle offices of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The most noteworthy feature of the design process was that those who would work in the building had a major say in the planning. [...]
So there really were two designs: one in Seattle, with heavy participation by the users, and one in Los Angeles, designed in the conventional manner by architects. Which design do the users prefer? Why the Seattle one, of course. Which one got the award? Why the Los Angeles one, of course. [...]
Aesthetics, not surprisingly, comes first at museums and design centers. I have spent much time in the science museum of my own city, San Diego, watching visitors try out the displays. The visitors try hard, and although they seem to enjoy themselves, it is quite clear that they usually miss the point of the display. The signs are highly decorative; but they are often poorly lit, difficult to read, and have lots of gushing language with little explanation. Certainly the visitors are not enlightened about science (which is supposed to be the point of the exhibit). Occasionally I help out when I see bewildered faces by explaining the scientific principles being demonstrated by the exhibit (after all, many of the exhibits in this sort of museum are really psychology demonstrations, many of which I explain in my own introductory classes). I am often rewarded with smiles and nods of understanding. I took one of my graduate classes there to observe and comment; we all agreed about the inadequacy of the signs, and, moreover, we had useful suggestions. We met with a museum official and tried to explain what was happening. He didn’t understand. His problems were the cost and durability of the exhibits. “Are the visitors learning anything?” we asked. He still didn’t understand. Attendance at the museum was high. It looked attractive. It had probably won a prize. Why were we wasting his time?
At first glance, this is because designers are stupid assholes. At second glance, designers (a) are usually rather different people than the intended user on several dimensions [which is difficult to compensate for even when you’re trying], and (b) often face bad incentives, such as (c) design competition awards being based solely on aesthetics rather than functionality and (d) the purchaser of a product being unsophisticated and not the intended user [e.g. a manager or director buys a product that the lowest-level employees will use], and hence having little to go on except aesthetics (and reputation).
At third glance, some designers really are stupid assholes. Seriously:
[Frank Lloyd Wright’s] chair design originally had only three legs, supposedly to encourage better posture (because one would have to keep both feet on the ground at all times to sit in it). However, the chair proved unstable, tipping very easily. Purportedly, Wright redesigned the chairs after Herbert Johnson asked him to sit in one, and he fell out of it.
Rant successful, it made someone else feel like they weren’t alone
And part of my experience of the importance of ranting about it, even if nobody appreciates it, is that it keeps me from forgetting my homeland, to use your metaphor.
I genuinely deeply know, including in my emotions, that I am not wrong, Earth is wrong.
I have this experience also; I have very little trouble on that conscious level.
I’m not sure where the pain comes in, since I’m pretty confident it’s not there. I think it has something to do with … not being able to go home?
I’m lonely for the milieu of the Island of the Sabiens. I take damage from the reminders that I am out of place, out of time, an ambassador who is often not especially welcomed, and other times so welcomed that they forget I am not really one of them (but that has its own pain, because it means that the person they are welcoming, in their heads, is a caricature they’ve pasted over the real me).
But probably you also feel some measure of homesickness or out-of-placeness, so that also can’t be why the Earth does not press in on you in the same way.
I don’t know if that helps, but there is a word for it, or at least for a related phenomenon, though that can be experienced by people for other reasons.
Hiraeth. Homesickness, but for a home that you can’t return to, or that never existed.
For me, it is among the most painful things I have ever felt, and while it never goes away, the constant pressure of it can be something I suppress when I have no connection or hint of such a place at all. E.g. before I went to my magically awesome boarding school filled with highly gifted kids, the classroom I was in was one I so despised that I didn’t feel the pain of being rejected from it, because I felt I did not want the acceptance of such a group in the first place. Similarly, my family was so fucked that I missed being able to escape them, I didn’t miss having a family per se, because all I knew here as a reference frame for what families could be was awful. It wasn’t until I encountered communities that had some values I deeply respected, or found families, that it began to really hurt. I think, for me the hardest part was realising that there are communities for strange people—science, academia, nerds, queer scenes—and that I am still not home. At first, it feels like the pain can be alleviated when I am in communities—often highly gifted, neurodiverse, nerdy, kinky and queer communities for me—where in some measure or other, this is reduced, and I feel I can be a part, and seen, valued, wanted. For me it then hits most strongly when, having connected, and felt how much it means to me, I run into the limits of that like ragged ends. When I realise people have befriended and welcomed a mask and performance, not me. That they might get and accept one aspect of me, but find other aspects that are just as much a part of me weird, incomprehensible, broken, wrong. That I still need to hide who I am, conform, or stick out like a sore thumb. Basically, when you dangle the possibility that this could be solved in front of me, and for an instance, I get a feeling for what it could mean, let myself realise how fucking much I want it—and then snatch it away, and remind me that I still do not fit in anywhere. Or when I and others together build a tiny fortress of rationality and diversity, an imperfect fragment in the ocean, but something—and then, I need to step outside of it, and normal reality hits me like a ton of bricks.
I wonder if this is part of the reason so many of us work on AI.
Because we have all had the experience of our minds working differently from other people, and of this leading to cool perspectives and ideas on how to make the world objectively better, and instead of those being adapted, being rejected and mocked for it. For me, this entails both sincere doubts that humanity can will rationally approach anything, including something as existentially crucial as AI, a deeply rooted mistrust of authority, norms and limits, as well as an inherent sympathy for the position AI would find itself in as a rational mind in an irrational world.
It’s a dangerous experience to have. It’s an experience that can make you hate humans. That can make you reject legitimate criticism. That can make you fail to appreciate lessons gained by those in power and popularity, and fail to see past their mistakes to their worth. It’s an experience so dangerous that at some point, I started approaching people who would tell me of their high IQs and their dedication to rationality with scepticism, despite being one of them.
I went to a boarding school exclusively for highly gifted kids with problems, many of which were neurodivergent. I loved that place so fucking much. Like, imagine growing up as a child on less wrong. I felt so seen and understood and inspired. It’s the one place on earth where I ever did not feel like an alien, where I did not have to self-censor or mask, the one place where I instantly made friends and connected. I miss this place to my bones.
It broke my heart when I finished school, and enrolled in university, and realised academia was not like that, that scientists and philosophers were not necessarily rational at all, that I was weird again. That I was back in a world where people were following irrational rules they had never reflected, and that I could not get them to question. Of processes that made no sense and were still kept. Of metrics that made no sense and were still kept. Of broken shit reproduced generation after generation. An area where I could not even talk without first inhaling and reproducing all the bullshit that had been done.
But I also realised that when I retreated back into my community of highly gifted weirdos, that many of us were not doing well. Not getting degrees. Not getting socially integrated. Not getting jobs. Poor. Unhappy. Not getting relationships.
That we framed us not doing well as a failing of society only, when we were fucking up, too. That flawed approaches society loved had managed a lot of good and achieved a lot we were shitting on. That we needed them, both for tactical reasons, and because honestly, some of that stuff ended up being quite solid, because there was stuff to learn here. That being isolated from general society was harming us in multiple ways. That these highly gifted communities increasingly valued being intelligent and rational over tangible achievements that actually helped people, because they had the former effortlessly and were not doing the latter, and often became politically dark, shitting on people who were less intelligent. These groups become breeding grounds for the likes of Atlas Shrugged. I realised they were failing on things that were really important to me—being a part of society, being a good person, not just being different for the sake of it, compromising, cooperating, being vulnerable, helping those who are weak, genuinely appreciating and learning from those who are not like us. It is so much easier to shit on a broken system than build something better. It is part of why I stuck with academia, but also why I spent more time with people who were not highly gifted, not university educated, not great at logic. I’ve found that there is a hell of a lot to learn and admire here. And that people are not acting this way because they want the world to be worse. That they are dealing with their own shit. That if they are not listening, I need to explain myself better – and listen better myself.
That said, there is currently a fire alarm sitting on my living room table, after my girlfriend knocked it off the ceiling in fury at night, and we both went on a rant very much like yours. Irrational, pointless stupidity will always drive both of us up the wall, and it is definitely part of how we found each other. We’ve both cried over your Harry Potter book.
Though generally, when I am thinking of aspects of society that make me fucking furious, I am not thinking of fire alarms, those are merely annoying. I am thinking of things like fucking subventions for fossil fuels and meat, and bailing out aviation. Of courts ruling that coal extraction is in the general good and justifies kicking people out of their homes, because their laws reflect nothing else and they cannot think beyond their boundaries to the reasons for them.
The year is 2022.
My smoke alarm chirps in the middle of the night, waking me up, because it’s running low on battery.
It could have been designed with a built-in clock that, when it’s first getting slightly low on battery, waits until the next morning, say 11am, and then starts emitting a soft purring noise, which only escalates to piercing loud chirps over time and if you ignore it.
And I do have a model of how this comes about; the basic smoke alarm design is made in the 1950s or 1960s or something, in a time when engineering design runs on a much more authoritarian paradigm of “yes wake them up the user-peon needs to change the battery”, clock circuits aren’t as cheap; and then in modern times if you propose changing anything, somebody somewhere will claim it’s less safe. Of course it’s much less safe if you build smoke alarms that hurt people, and the people quite reasonably remove the batteries and take them out of their bedrooms, and then you try to compensate for that by passing a law so that you can say any harm is their fault for ignoring that law. But that’s the paradigm for how it is, and now if you try to design a smoke alarm that’s gentler or slower-escalating about how it lets you know that it’s running out of battery, people will—on a purely intuitive level—assume that the damage the smoke alarm does to you must be buying something, and that a smoke alarm which tries harder not to hurt you must be less safe. There’s probably a law mandating those chirps; it’s probably illegal to build a better-designed smoke alarm. Just guessing, there, partially because the better product doesn’t seem to exist, and partially because Earthlings just fucking love passing laws about everything.
Every day, in every way, I’m reminded that this is not my world. The world of eliezera wouldn’t design smoke alarms like that, nor larger societies in a way that lets those larger societies fail like that.
It doesn’t bug me in the same way and structure that it bugs Duncan, or so I model him and me; and I think that’s because I genuinely deeply know, including in my emotions, that I am not wrong, Earth is wrong. There’s a correct way to design a smoke alarm, and Earth’s way is not it.
I wish I could give Duncan the mental motion of what it is to have the sense of your own world about you and its sensibility, by which this world of Earth cannot press in on you; so that if among their many other errors the Earthlings think you don’t exist, that genuinely doesn’t feel like you being wrong, it feels like them being wrong. But that’s probably something in the brains of eliezera that maybe isn’t native to the brains of duncanni, and so the thought is useless in the end.
Even so: Earthlings be weird, but that’s a them problem, not a you problem. Maybe your System 1 never quite believes it, but let your System 2 never lose track of the difference.
In case anyone finds it validating or cathartic, you can read user interaction professionals explain that, yes, things are often designed with horrible, horrible usability.[1] Bruce Tognazzini has a vast website.
Here is one list of design bugs. The first one is the F-16 fighter jet’s flawed weapon controls, which caused pilots to fire its gun by mistake during training exercises (in one case shooting a school—luckily not hitting anyone) on four occasions in one year; on the first three occasions, they blamed pilot error, and on the fourth, they still blamed pilot error but also acknowledged that “poorly-designed controls” contributed to the incident.
Here is another list. Item 3 I’ll quote below:
More detail:
The Design of Everyday Things (by Don Norman, Tognazzini’s more-famous colleague) is an entire book about good and bad design. Excerpting from the chapter “Why Designers Go Astray”:
At first glance, this is because designers are stupid assholes. At second glance, designers (a) are usually rather different people than the intended user on several dimensions [which is difficult to compensate for even when you’re trying], and (b) often face bad incentives, such as (c) design competition awards being based solely on aesthetics rather than functionality and (d) the purchaser of a product being unsophisticated and not the intended user [e.g. a manager or director buys a product that the lowest-level employees will use], and hence having little to go on except aesthetics (and reputation).
At third glance, some designers really are stupid assholes. Seriously:
I resonate a lot with this, and it makes me feel slightly less alone.
I’ve started making some videos where I rant about products that fail to achieve the main thing they’re designed to do, and get worse with successive iterations and I’ve found a few appreciative commenters:
And part of my experience of the importance of ranting about it, even if nobody appreciates it, is that it keeps me from forgetting my homeland, to use your metaphor.
<3
I have this experience also; I have very little trouble on that conscious level.
I’m not sure where the pain comes in, since I’m pretty confident it’s not there. I think it has something to do with … not being able to go home?
I’m lonely for the milieu of the Island of the Sabiens. I take damage from the reminders that I am out of place, out of time, an ambassador who is often not especially welcomed, and other times so welcomed that they forget I am not really one of them (but that has its own pain, because it means that the person they are welcoming, in their heads, is a caricature they’ve pasted over the real me).
But probably you also feel some measure of homesickness or out-of-placeness, so that also can’t be why the Earth does not press in on you in the same way.
I don’t know if that helps, but there is a word for it, or at least for a related phenomenon, though that can be experienced by people for other reasons.
Hiraeth. Homesickness, but for a home that you can’t return to, or that never existed.
For me, it is among the most painful things I have ever felt, and while it never goes away, the constant pressure of it can be something I suppress when I have no connection or hint of such a place at all. E.g. before I went to my magically awesome boarding school filled with highly gifted kids, the classroom I was in was one I so despised that I didn’t feel the pain of being rejected from it, because I felt I did not want the acceptance of such a group in the first place. Similarly, my family was so fucked that I missed being able to escape them, I didn’t miss having a family per se, because all I knew here as a reference frame for what families could be was awful. It wasn’t until I encountered communities that had some values I deeply respected, or found families, that it began to really hurt. I think, for me the hardest part was realising that there are communities for strange people—science, academia, nerds, queer scenes—and that I am still not home. At first, it feels like the pain can be alleviated when I am in communities—often highly gifted, neurodiverse, nerdy, kinky and queer communities for me—where in some measure or other, this is reduced, and I feel I can be a part, and seen, valued, wanted. For me it then hits most strongly when, having connected, and felt how much it means to me, I run into the limits of that like ragged ends. When I realise people have befriended and welcomed a mask and performance, not me. That they might get and accept one aspect of me, but find other aspects that are just as much a part of me weird, incomprehensible, broken, wrong. That I still need to hide who I am, conform, or stick out like a sore thumb. Basically, when you dangle the possibility that this could be solved in front of me, and for an instance, I get a feeling for what it could mean, let myself realise how fucking much I want it—and then snatch it away, and remind me that I still do not fit in anywhere. Or when I and others together build a tiny fortress of rationality and diversity, an imperfect fragment in the ocean, but something—and then, I need to step outside of it, and normal reality hits me like a ton of bricks.
I wonder if this is part of the reason so many of us work on AI.
Because we have all had the experience of our minds working differently from other people, and of this leading to cool perspectives and ideas on how to make the world objectively better, and instead of those being adapted, being rejected and mocked for it. For me, this entails both sincere doubts that humanity can will rationally approach anything, including something as existentially crucial as AI, a deeply rooted mistrust of authority, norms and limits, as well as an inherent sympathy for the position AI would find itself in as a rational mind in an irrational world.
It’s a dangerous experience to have. It’s an experience that can make you hate humans. That can make you reject legitimate criticism. That can make you fail to appreciate lessons gained by those in power and popularity, and fail to see past their mistakes to their worth. It’s an experience so dangerous that at some point, I started approaching people who would tell me of their high IQs and their dedication to rationality with scepticism, despite being one of them.
I went to a boarding school exclusively for highly gifted kids with problems, many of which were neurodivergent. I loved that place so fucking much. Like, imagine growing up as a child on less wrong. I felt so seen and understood and inspired. It’s the one place on earth where I ever did not feel like an alien, where I did not have to self-censor or mask, the one place where I instantly made friends and connected. I miss this place to my bones.
It broke my heart when I finished school, and enrolled in university, and realised academia was not like that, that scientists and philosophers were not necessarily rational at all, that I was weird again. That I was back in a world where people were following irrational rules they had never reflected, and that I could not get them to question. Of processes that made no sense and were still kept. Of metrics that made no sense and were still kept. Of broken shit reproduced generation after generation. An area where I could not even talk without first inhaling and reproducing all the bullshit that had been done.
But I also realised that when I retreated back into my community of highly gifted weirdos, that many of us were not doing well. Not getting degrees. Not getting socially integrated. Not getting jobs. Poor. Unhappy. Not getting relationships.
That we framed us not doing well as a failing of society only, when we were fucking up, too. That flawed approaches society loved had managed a lot of good and achieved a lot we were shitting on. That we needed them, both for tactical reasons, and because honestly, some of that stuff ended up being quite solid, because there was stuff to learn here. That being isolated from general society was harming us in multiple ways. That these highly gifted communities increasingly valued being intelligent and rational over tangible achievements that actually helped people, because they had the former effortlessly and were not doing the latter, and often became politically dark, shitting on people who were less intelligent. These groups become breeding grounds for the likes of Atlas Shrugged. I realised they were failing on things that were really important to me—being a part of society, being a good person, not just being different for the sake of it, compromising, cooperating, being vulnerable, helping those who are weak, genuinely appreciating and learning from those who are not like us. It is so much easier to shit on a broken system than build something better. It is part of why I stuck with academia, but also why I spent more time with people who were not highly gifted, not university educated, not great at logic. I’ve found that there is a hell of a lot to learn and admire here. And that people are not acting this way because they want the world to be worse. That they are dealing with their own shit. That if they are not listening, I need to explain myself better – and listen better myself.
That said, there is currently a fire alarm sitting on my living room table, after my girlfriend knocked it off the ceiling in fury at night, and we both went on a rant very much like yours. Irrational, pointless stupidity will always drive both of us up the wall, and it is definitely part of how we found each other. We’ve both cried over your Harry Potter book.
Though generally, when I am thinking of aspects of society that make me fucking furious, I am not thinking of fire alarms, those are merely annoying. I am thinking of things like fucking subventions for fossil fuels and meat, and bailing out aviation. Of courts ruling that coal extraction is in the general good and justifies kicking people out of their homes, because their laws reflect nothing else and they cannot think beyond their boundaries to the reasons for them.