> here’s the weird thing: if you have two dishwashers, you never need to unload the dishwasher, and you don’t actually lose any storage space.
They do this at some places of work that I'm aware of. It's not "barking insane". However, some thought shows that it won't work for a lot of people.
Firstly, dishwashers have to live at ground level whereas crockery can be stored in a cupboard at any level. You are contraining yourself to store crockery at the ground level where most people also have their under-sink unit, laundry machine, and heavy pans cupboard.
Secondly, plates and utensils are way more spread out in a dishwasher. You have to expose every surface for them to be cleaned properly. Plus, there is the space needed for the dishwasher itself, which can be pretty chunky.
So no, Rory Sutherland, in our 2-bedroom urban UK house we definitely cannot afford the space to have a second dishwasher. And if your job is to go around blithely trying to convince everyone that they'd be better off with one, all you're doing is re-affirming my contempt towards behavioural scientists and salespeople.
It also assumes that you have exactly as much stuff as will fit into a single dishwasher, and that you go through it all at the same rate, such that when the "dirty" dishwasher is full, the "clean" one becomes empty enough that it can switch roles.
Right now, our dishwasher's top rack is full of top rack stuff, whereas the bottom rack has two dishes and a coffee cup. I guess we go ahead and run it, and then... move everything from the second dishwasher to that one? This is definitively more work.
You just declare the other dishwasher dirty and that’s that. If you want you can unload it to your cabinets like you would with only a single dishwasher. In that case you’re still at worst the same amount of work you would if you didn’t have two dishwashers. But ordinarily it will be far less.
And yeah I thought about this years ago and ruminated on these issues.
> But isn't the other dishwasher that we just declared "dirty" still full of clean dishes?
No, it's probably about three-quarters empty, because you probably use roughly the same crockery every day, unless you do something particularly bizarre like having three soup-based meals one day and three plate-based meals the next. Sometimes you wash a couple of plates that were already clean, sure. Or you move them into the "clean" dishwasher before declaring the other one "dirty", which is no more effort than putting them into cabinets (often less). And sure maybe a couple of days a year you have a big party, or really do eat soup every meal, or something, and you have to do something different. But the vast majority of the time it makes life easier.
Something beautiful about the Internet is that you can say "Hey, here's a thing you could do" and some guy will come and say "Well, actually, I am in a situation where I can't do that". No matter what you do, someone will have that.
"You could buy one variety of socks and you'll never have to worry about sorting them!" -> "Well, I have two jobs and they both require I wear uniform socks in different colours so this won't work for me, Mr. Smarty Socks Pants"
"If you place a dishwasher pod in the slot as soon as you empty the dishwasher you'll know if it's dirty or clean when you open it" -> "Well, I can only afford a single dishwasher pod at a time and I put my dishes away in the morning, go to work and use the day's wages to buy the one I'll use that night, so that won't work for me Mr. Richy Two Pod Pants"
"If you put your weighing scale in the bathroom it'll make it easy for you to measure your weight every day" -> "Well, my bathroom is too small and doesn't have level flooring anyway because it's wide enough for one man and is located on the San Andreas fault with a crack going through it. So that won't work for me Mr. Flat Floor Pants"
"If you use shellcheck, you can catch a bunch of errors in your shell scripts" -> "Well, I use my custom shell CrazySH and shellcheck won't work on that. So that won't work for me Mr. Normal Shell Pants"
I wonder if it is possible to construct a suggested thing that no human could respond to in this way. I think it's impossible. But what do I know. I'm just Mr. Can't Comment Pants.
I was advised that if I get one variety of pants I wouldn’t have to sort them but that didn’t work for various reasons that I was compelled to inform the advisor of.
Like everything in this piece, this example seems to overlook major aspects of human experience and preference in its rush to draw smug “one little trick” conclusions.
Independently of cost and space considerations, why would you want such a ”system” as this dual-dishwasher setup?
I take aesthetic pleasure in unloading the machine in the morning and restoring my cabinets to a condition of full, orderly, clean stock. My relationship with the machine is as a tool that transitions items from dirty to clean, and it’s aesthetically displeasing to mix those purposes with the ordered, dry, clean cabinets. Those are places where you know you’ll always grab a clean item without having to check a post-it note first.
I take pleasure in owning the right cutlery and servingware for a wide variety of food and situations, and in using the correct subset for the correct occasion. The idea that I would use everything from the Clean Washer every time I fill the Dirty Washer utterly confuses and repulses me.
This, like essentially all of this person’s examples, reminds me of this Chesterton’s Fence kind of thing the rationalist types get on about: if a bunch of people are doing a thing, take the time to ask why before you assume your One Bright Trick is something new under the sun.
I totally agree. Generally if there is some inefficiency or imbalance on paper because of human perception according to Rory, the actual reality is that there are other costs that humans from other perspectives consider which cause the imbalance in aggregate (e.g. the dual dishwasher space usage or the "south london is cheaper because it is not on the tube map despite their being overground trains into central london").
I tried to apply some of Rory's advice to a real product - basically, some combination of "give a longer wait time than the actual time for better experience / improve the experience of the euro tunnel by putting Wifi on it for $1m rather than spending $100m making it faster" (I know the real sums were much bigger).. and the idea of "live in the South of London because it's not on the Tube map so the prices are much cheaper yet the travel distance is the same!"
The result?
Sales dropped when we gave a longer wait time, which was not compensated by repeat business.
I lived in a place in South London. Without night transport options, I couldn't stay out on a night out without forking over crazy money for Taxis. And the other major thing I noticed? Not a single woman I met in that time had any interest in coming back to my place, in the part of London she didn't know, without many options to Uber back to her place if she wanted etc. The only person I met in this time when I was single yet on paper successful took me back to their place. I couldn't figure it out but I felt dissatisfied. I moved then to a much more central place (yet the same cost) and started a casual relationship within a couple of months of being there. Trust me when I say, everybody generally preferred parties and hanging out at a place on the Tube.
I suppose I love Rorys ideas and they captivate me, the comparisons with nature are great. But the content is as much advertising as it is about the psychology of advertising and human tricks. The problem is Rory doesn't consider that for a young man you might want to be able to get night transport or that a young woman you meet might prioritize safety and familiarity, wanting to know the area better, be closer to their home and have transport options. A place away from Tube Stations also by virtue of it's costs is more of an honest signal that you don't have the money to live in central/"tube" London if you wanted to. As a young man, if I had realized that, I obviously should have lived like my peers a few tube stops away or in a nice house several towns away. So basically deviating from the social peer norm generally has costs. It's easy to point out one trick benefits but you miss out on what you don't observe.
I find it even more bonkers than that, even. Let's "frictionless vacuum" the problem: I live in a home in which all we eat is breakfast cereal. We need one spoon and one bowl per meal per person. But we own 25 bowls and 40 spoons. When we run out of bowls (that is, when the "dirty" dishwasher is running with a complement of 25 bowls), the "clean" dishwasher still contains 15 spoons. At the next mealtime, we each get a spoon and a bowl. When we're done eating, we put the dirty dishes in… Well, not either of the "clean" dishwashers!
It becomes absurd faster when you consider what a realistic household would own and eat and use. "There's no unloading necessary," he says. Absolutely ridiculous.
> But we own 25 bowls and 40 spoons. When we run out of bowls (that is, when the "dirty" dishwasher is running with a complement of 25 bowls), the "clean" dishwasher still contains 15 spoons. At the next mealtime, we each get a spoon and a bowl. When we're done eating, we put the dirty dishes in… Well, not either of the "clean" dishwashers!
So you end up washing those 15 spoons again. Big deal. Or you notice that you consistently have leftover spoons in the clean dishwasher and put some into storage, or get rid of them.
On average you use more or less the same dishes each day, so you reach equilibrium pretty quickly. You wash a bit of stuff that was already clean. It's no big.
So you're running your dishwashers inefficiently. It really does feel like a "big deal". You use more water, more salt/dishwasher cleaning chemicals, and more electricity on empty runs. The clean dishes and utensils getting extra wash degrade faster, the machine itself wears off faster too.
Maybe one day someone makes a dishwasher that can do continuous washing efficiently, dynamically adjusting for the number, type and locations of the dirty kitchenware. Until then, it feels super wasteful.
It does, but our feelings are likely miscalibrated here. Dishwashers are insanely efficient.
> You use more water, more salt/dishwasher cleaning chemicals, and more electricity on empty runs.
Unlikely. You're still running the same programme at the same frequency (you were always going to run the dishwasher when you ran out of bowls, the only difference is you have some extra clean spoons in the dishwasher when you do).
> The clean dishes and utensils getting extra wash degrade faster
Technically true, but when was the last time you had to replace a spoon because it had worn out? And how much did it cost when you did?
> the machine itself wears off faster too.
Maybe. Not convinced. You're not putting any extra dirt in it, and the sprayers etc. are likely designed to handle a full load (e.g. the shelves will always be balanced, because you'll always have a full set of dishes when you run the dishwasher).
Just to emphasize how efficient a dishwasher is with water, I had a clog in my kitchen pipes (turned out to be much deeper than my drain snake could handle and we had two clogs) and the plumber couldn't come in until a few days unless I was willing to pay for an emergency plumber. I would run the sink for 30 seconds and it would clog. But I could run an entire dish load and it would only fill a bit of the sink and everything would drain okay. Now I have a nice modern dishwasher, but it just goes to show that literally handwashing a handful of dishes is probably as efficient as doing an entire load of dishes in the dishwasher.
Well I guess in this weird household you wouldn't have that many, you'd just have the dirty one and the clean/using one each?
But you have to go to something close to 'we only eat cereal' for it to sort of work, which is crazy (and not healthy).
It's a bit like telling people to be like Steve Jobs and have a single outfit, your laundry will be so much easier, your wardrobe so much neater: sure, but it turns out most people actually don't want that... So it's really neither here nor there what problems it might solve.
2 dishwashers idea works more in a single person or 2 people household depending on habits. The dishes in the 2 dishwashers are the ones you use frequently, and for occasional times, you get the extras in the cupboards. It's also a decision you make during construction. The difference in cost between a dishwasher and a full bottom row of drawers is not much different, especially if they are beside each other and you already wired up one dishwasher.
I believe OPs point is that supply imbalances and asymmetries exist even with just one kind of meal, and they would be even more prevalent in a more-realistic scenario where multiple kinds of meals have different demands on your supply of clean stuff.
For example, 10 bowls, 10 spoons, 10 forks. If the make are fork-using salads and spoon-using soups, the shared resource--bowls--will run out before anything else does.
Dishwashers are also somewhat gross, unless you're cleaning and sanitizing the filter very regularly. A dry and clean environment for dish storage is probably less amenable to molds and bacteria developing on surfaces.
Seems like lots of people don't really understand that. They somehow think it cleans itself but then I see on the shelves products for "smelly dishwasher" so there must be some disconnect there.
I clean mine ones in couple weeks, there is some gunk building up by the doors, filter of course, so just wipe it and then run once on highest temp and so far no smelly dishwasher - but still if I would just left dishes after cleaning for 2 days I would have to run some cleaning again because they would not small bad but somewhat "not clean" for sure.
Yes. The claim "you don't lose any storage space" may not be barking insane, but it is drooling idiot stupid. Also, you have to spring for a second dishwasher.
More than that. Replacement costs multiply the price by a few times over the course of your life and there is significant opportunity cost.
If you don't spend the $1,000 then your ongoing costs are lower (a dishwasher lasts maybe 10 years, call it $100/yr - ignoring the operating costs since you're probably using a dishwasher the same number of times per year), that could be an income stream of about $50/yr - by FIRE logic you're probably $150/yr closer to not having to work any more and you have a bigger buffer for surprises along the way. Those are some pretty significant swings for most people.
It isn't economically clever to have 2x as much personal capital on hand as you need unless you are fabulously wealthy already.
I have been advocating for multiple dishwashers for a long time, but the reality is that many times when preparing a meal you dirty more dishes than fit in a single load, and dirty dishes will still pile up in the sink.
Surely this is a queuing problem, and must be solved accordingly.
After all, the universe has only two kinds of problems: those solved by queuing theory, and those solved by category theory. Or so hanging out on HN would have me believe.
> Firstly, dishwashers have to live at ground level
What makes you believe that? In my professional setting (think restaurants for instance) dishwashers are actually at countertop level to improve staff efficiency.
And while I not aware of any dishwasher design that allows to put it higher than countertop level, I don't see any impossibility either: you just need it to be unloadable from below.
There's a typo here, as I wanted to say “many”. (It's more like a lapsus than a mere typo actually since I had the dishwasher of the restaurant I work at as a student in mind when I wrote this comment)
While less common in domestic kitchens, "raised" dishwashers are a thing. A friend of mine designed his dream kitchen and his dishwasher (just a standard domestic dishwasher) is at about hip height, next to the cabinets where dishes are stored and above the drawers that house heavier pots and pans.
That's a common professional setup, steel bench top with dishwasher with two side doors that both lift upwards at the same time.
Washers coarse sluice dishes and stack them in a circular rack on the bench, then use horizontal handle at front of washer to lift both the door on the left and the one on the right, the internal circular rack of freshly cleaned dishes is pulled out along the bench on one side, the just filled rack of dirty dishes is slid in on other side to replace, doors down, washer on, unstack clean dishes and move the empty rack back to the sink to start sluicing and stacking just arrived dirty dishes.
Repeat for three hours, then clean down kitchen and go home.
Well, I've never seen that before but I guess it's possible. But in my kitchen that would mean taking up space that's used by the countertop, boiler, or fridge. Securing it to the wall and connecting it up to the water inlet I can easily imagine running into the several thousands to carry out.
In my kitchen I don’t have space to hang the pots and pans. If I could move a wall or a cupboard then that problem would free up a drawer and one of those fiddly corner cupboards.
Yeah, his advice fails to consider that people aren't all the same as he is. For example I like to cook, and I have a lot more dishes/pots/pans than could fit in two dishwashers. What do I do with the rest, store it on the ground?
I can't really say why, but every paragraph of this article left me annoyed. It's full of under-examined half-truths, told in the smug manner of someone who doesn't have to care if they're right or wrong.
You can, though, reflect on the juggling you observe yourself doing with sufficient precision and accuracy to both distill the essentials for others and further improve your own practice. This also generalizes.
> So much of our brain work is not done by making decisions or critical thinking or even anything we are aware of.
Like for example, forming accurate beliefs about the quality of ideas our minds lack familiarity with!
Perhaps like juggling (and unlike walking, etc), it is a skill that is not innate, so must be learned? And perhaps unlike juggling, it isn't easy to know when you lack the skill (because of the nature of it).
Are these two limitations of rational thought described in the literature:
1. Rational thought takes place in an irrational environment. As much as we try to control for biases, fallacies, heuristics, effects, etc, our evaluation of a scenario is dependent upon our personal history.
2. Rationality is a great tool for breaking things into small parts and describing acting in small steps; but a fundamental error occurs when we 'zoom out' to a system and use those small parts to say something definitive about the whole. In each step 'down', we exclude details not relevant to that scope, but we neglect to add those details back when we consider the system.
AI will certainly not save us from #1 because it will have it's own history.
#2 may benefit from AI, but the people using it will still have great difficulty.
I have no idea about literature, but off the cuff I would say:
> 1. Rational thought takes place in an irrational environment. As much as we try to control for biases, fallacies, heuristics, effects, etc, our evaluation of a scenario is dependent upon our personal history.
a) rational thought (usually) isn't what it seems to be
b) this is sloppy/inappropriate/dangerous language for this topic
> Rationality is a great tool for breaking things into small parts and describing acting in small steps; but a fundamental error occurs when we 'zoom out' to a system and use those small parts to say something definitive about the whole.
Statistically/probabilistically, yes (take this comment section, on a high-IQ platform (see also: /r/SlateStarCodex), as a prime example), but not necessarily. Doing it wrong will produce wrong results, like most anything else. An important distinction though in some domains: it is not possible to realize when you are wrong. And sometimes, it isn't even possible to wonder if you are wrong[1].
Consider the complexity involved (and the historic journey behind) manufacturing modern day top end CPU's - and this is but one of the many feats of genius humanity has pulled off, and we now take much of it for granted. Why can we do that, but not certain classes of other cognitively complicated tasks? What is the distinction between the domains that guarantees (so far) failure? (A hint: consider how we answer such questions.)
> #2 may benefit from AI, but the people using it will still have great difficulty.
What is the meaning of the symbol "great" in this context? Is it related to the probability of us Accomplishing The Goal?
------------------
[1] A classic "extraordinary claim", typically invoking this (and then after that, something else....but discussing those sorts of things isn't something you do in polite company, which HN most certainly is[2]):
This article is perfectly meta and should be read as performative art capping a lifetime of work. i.e., "I am so rich and successful that I can write transparent absurdities that are labeled as such and get lots of nodding agreement." Even the HN response of dissecting the absurdities fits nicely into the author's oeuvre.
I'm pretty sure the two dishwashers thing has occurred to plenty of people. But dishwashers cost more money than a cabinet and they require a dedicated water line. This means you can't simply install a second dishwasher in a pre-existing house without first tearing up the walls to add new pipes from your water main to wherever you're going to put the dishwasher, and if you wanted to do this in a brand new house, you'd be asking whoever you're trying to sell it to to pay for an extra dishwasher.
And what is with this layperson misunderstanding of placebo effect? Why is this so common? Nobody is trying to subtract it or not induce placebo in real patients. It's the same principle you're applying when evaluating predictive models. You can't simply look at raw accuracy. You need to compare it to some naive predictor to see if it does any better. "Always predict no" is extremely accurate for rare conditions, like "does this patient have ebola" or "is this person a terrorist?" That doesn't make it a good predictive model. Same thing with a treatment. If it does no better than placebo, that isn't to say that placebo is useless. It's to say that we don't need the more complicated, expensive treatment and can simply use placebo. If giving some person a sugar pill has the same effectiveness as giving them a patented synthetic drug with harsh side effect, then just give them the sugar pill. Nobody is trying to avoid placebo. We're trying to avoid unnecessary extra steps.
Can someone explain the aside about solar panels to me? The article makes it sound like nobody is buying them despite the advances made, but half the houses in my neighborhood are covered in solar panels, and the only reason we don't have any on our house is because no company will sell to us because our roof is shaped weird!
The engineering solutions absolutely made people willing and interested in installing solar panels.
That was bizarre. I think we're outliers here in Southern California, but the main problem with solar panels here right now is the huge differential in daytime vs nighttime available power, due to the popularity of solar. And power companies trying to totally reinvent billing in order to stay in business.
This. Almost half of my neighborhood has panels, and we're in the midwest, I'd assume sunnier places it approaches close to 100%. I'd probably have them, but all of the companies that are in my neighborhood use annoying door to door sales and I hate to reward companies that do that.
> I'd assume sunnier places it approaches close to 100%
Weirdly, no. I live in an extraordinarily sunny area and solar panels are still slow to roll out in 2024. I've never convinced my parents to get panels on their house, and almost nobody in their neighborhood has them. (I live in an apartment and I don't think I know of a single apartment building in my city that has panels.)
Something is definitely wrong, but I'm not sure what. I'm pretty sure my city even has big rebates for solar installation.
I do know that some companies lease them, which is a bad financial decision for a homeowner - not only do you not own them, which is bad, but the contract stays with the house, which may make it harder to sell. After all, why would I buy a house that's somehow weirdly indebted to some fly-by-might solar installation company I've never heard of ?
I'm sure some of them are leases, but mostly what I see is that you either buy them, often over a long time with a loan, and keep all the 'profits' or you agree to let the company place them on your roof but they keep most of the 'profits'. The profits generally coming from selling the electricity back to the grid. Leasing them may make financial sense in some situations, like places where you can't sell back to the grid but still use a lot of electricity and the lease price is still less than buying from the grid directly.
Wow, yeah. I suppose I can sort of see the motivation, insofar as solar panels have a finite lifespan, the homeowner might think it's better to not be on the hook for handling end-of-life. But in reality, as you say, I would not want to lease them. I would prefer to purchase them outright and trust that either the original installation company or another company could remove the old ones correctly.
The solar rollout in my neighborhood has mostly been recent, but I think part of it also depends on the local contractors and your area might just be underserviced still.
Weird choice to talk about the placebo effect in this context. The placebo effect is definitely used in combination with chemical and biological effects when administering drugs (or, more accurately, it always automatically happens). It's just when trying to test the efficacy of drugs that you need to control for the placebo effect, otherwise the noise of the results would drown the signal of the biological/chemical impact.
This is exactly the framing the author is criticizing. It assumes that the placebo effect is a constant that cannot be improved upon, and thus deserves no consideration, when designing the treatment. However, the placebo effect is malleable, and can be improved [1], In scientific studies, this is typically done through suggestions and conditioning [2]. However, this is not standard clinical practice (AFAIK).
Where the author is wrong, is that people that are designing drugs, aren't thinking about using the placebo effect more optimally. It is fairly well known, that the efficacy of drugs correlates with the severity of off-target side effects: say that you are taking an analgesic that acts by binding receptor A, but which also induces nausea by also binding an unrelated receptor B. During drug development, the structure of the drug is often tweaked to reduce or abolish binding to such off-target receptors, thus limiting side effects. However, these structural changes also often reduce efficacy, even if the affinity of the drug to the intended target isn't altered at all. My colleagues and I (working in pharmacology but in academia) have often wondered to what degree drug companies try to actively keep non-severe side effects as part of the response profile, given that they may be beneficial for the treatment outcome.
What's it called when someone asks you a question with certain parameters, then makes fun of you for trying to keep your answer within certain parameters because you didn't think outside the box?
He misunderstands Harry Truman’s quote, “It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.”
It's actually about politics (Truman's domain): If you insist on being the sole owner of some initiative, then no one else will want to work with you. If you allow other people to take some of the credit, then a lot of things become possible.
It's not that it can't be tortured into applying to his BS/BS thesis, but it doesn't particularly help.
This can be extrapolated to say something a little more like, every field of study can be used to analyze the world. It means that partially, everything is connected to anything else like the Holographic Theory of Learning[1] states. Creating a field of study is creating a framework for tackling problems. Architecture for spatial and material problems, software for logical and procedural problems, history for causal problems, chemistry for material, etc. Any one of those fields gives you a tool for addressing any problem, and some of those tools are extremely useful in some narrow definition of a problem. Everything has a historical, material and spatial dimension, and everything is processed through our logic and behavior. The goal is to know which hammer to use when, I suppose.
Reading the commentary on here reminds me how much Rory rubs techie people (and I count myself as one) the wrong way. You have to realise: he’s not presenting an alternative to rationality/science/economics/whatever; he’s just pointing out where it’s easy to miss out on seemingly silly, but ultimately far wiser, solutions to problems that are usually — ultimately naively — positioned as technical or numerical.
Plus, as a marketing man, he knows that injecting some humour into things is almost never a bad idea. Don’t take it so seriously.
Yes he does rub technie people the wrong way, but I think it's more widely a growing didain of Nudge theory and these guys in other places like UX conferences after a lot of wasted time from these ideas - they just don't pan out in practice in the long term.
I don't have a solely tech background and once believed quite staunchly and with excitement in Rorys ideas. As commented elsewhere, they did not work out for me, it turned out the mimetic nature of humans is useful - to avoid loss, and lost experience (which accumulates greater costs over time).
Things like nudges, these ideas, these one trick examples - they are all individual, one shot.
The problem is, if you trick someone into paying twice as much for their shampoo, they have less money to spend on other things. How is it satisfying to do this? It's dark patterns with a new face.
I think this applies in the positive case too. Great, something like estimating a 10 day waiting time and hitting it in 7 days makes people report on paper they are happier. When most places do this, the effect will disappear. In fact, if I have one place in my life (e.g. the dentist) where they overestimate, and one where they underestimate (doctors), I will get more annoyed at the doctors than I would have been if they both were bad at estimating. It's shifting my discontent but I'm still discontented by the fact it takes 7 days, not the difference with the estimate. This is obvious and evidence in this example from the data in England with the NHS vs the health services and their satisfaction rates in Denmark and Germany etc. It's true individual cases can have individual effects, but it's a bit like how if you provide personal tutoring for one subject, the student often falls behind in the other subjects - you are taking on a debt that is paid somewhere if you don't actually improve the actual thing or product.
In a role like advertising, this is fine. If you want to improve the world, I don't think it is. Likewise if you want to improve your application in terms of retention, lying to the customers about wait time will work for one order, but not multiple. It won't actually improve retention in an AB test after a year to lie unnecessarily.
> these one trick examples - they are all individual, one shot.
He would be the first to admit that this is true; it’s more of a ‘science of exceptions’ (like biology) that it is like physics or (classical) economics.
> if you don't actually improve the actual thing or product
The standard (and importantly, correct) answer is that the marketing/perception is the product. Marketing isn’t an extra bit of magic added at the end of a process designed to get the best out of an existing product — in many cases (and not just the obvious ones) it creates most of the value. If you’re a techie you instinctively hate this kind of thing, but that makes you no less immune to — or more aware of — its effects.
If I had to go by this article, I would have to conclude that behavioral science is indeed pure bullshit. Example: "Because the boiling point of water depends on altitude, you could take it to a very, very high place and the same calorific value might well boil the water." Or, with much less effort, you could put it on top of a burning stove. Claiming that bringing the water to the edge of space still counts as using only the candles isn't being clever, it's bullshit.
And also, it takes forever to boil water at high altitude, for a variety of reasons. The air is usually colder (which means the candle consumes more of its fuel just warming itself up), the oxygen content of the air makes the candles less efficient, and also less oxygen means the candle burns slow enough that radiative cooling of the water becomes a factor, not to mention that while air is generally a poor thermal conductor, low density air is an even worse conductor. I can boil a quart of water in about 5 minutes on my jetboil at sea level, but it takes about 15 minutes at 10,000 feet.
I feel like a point-by-point takedown of this article would get tedious, but it would be a good illustration of how smugly wrong this guy is.
Reading this article left me more and more annoyed with every paragraph.
To quote from the article:
> Because the boiling point of water depends on altitude, you could take it to a very, very high place and the same calorific value might well boil the water.
I agree that approaching it like this is possible. But, “possible” doesn’t mean that it is sensible.
Philosophically speaking, if such things like above are allowed, then it should also be allowed to simply heat this water to very high temperature (like 99 C) with another apparatus such as a stove and then finally boil it with the candles. That is, use a stove instead of a rocket.
It is also possible to conceive of an apparatus with heating elements and photodiodes. This apparatus will run the heaters and heat the water when its photodiode detect the light from the candle. So, in effect, the candle is responsible for heating the water.
Here’s what I’m trying to say: we need to accept some constraints and reject some possibilities in order to answer anything. If there are no constraints, then anything is possible. But, we know that this is not how the universe works.
Finally, I hope to never read anything from this author again. Ironically for this person, maybe they should consider the possibility that their ”science” is BS, aka bullshit.
It's a silly example but he does give a constraint. The one constraint is that the heat has to come from the candles. The purpose is to illustrate that even if one variable is constrained, there are other variables that may not be constrained, that you had assumed were static (altitude, pressure). It's just an example which illustrates a point of the article: try and think of something you had assumed was fixed and change that instead of working with the parameters you thought you had. Not a bad idea overall.
He absolutely does not. He said "using only the candles and a box of matches". He never says "as a heat source". There's nothing in the problem as given that would indicate moving the water to someplace low pressure is within the rules but moving it to someplace hot is not.
You didn't get the gist of the article: many constraints are artificial or plain mental. And you have to think outside the worn trousers to determine where that is the case.
If the title were "Is Everything Behavioral Science?" I certainly would have answered the question myself with a "no" and then moved on with my day. Instead, I was fooled into clicking on the article with the false hope that this would be an interesting take on the rise of bullshit.
Can someone update the title to be less clickbait?
I've taken a crack at it but I'm not sure it's much better. If anyone can suggest a better title (i.e. accurate and neutral, and preferably using language from the article itself), we can change it again.
> if you have two dishwashers, you never need to unload the dishwasher, and you don’t actually lose any storage space.
I'm too sleep-deprived from a rough night in a hotel, but something about this smacks of "I don't have to wash my towels because I'm clean when I get out of the shower" thinking.
For all the logical arguments both for and against di-dishwashing, I think the main problem is actually aesthetic (at least for me). There's something quaint and appealing to me to know that my dishes are neatly stacked in a cupboard compared to sweating it out on the innards of a dormant appliance.
Behavioral science has lately shown itself susceptible to a great deal of BS! The defensive crouch is reasonable, and entirely earned in my view given the question of how much of the field's basis may well fail to replicate.
The usual advice to "beware the man of one study" may apply also to fields; especially through so totalizing a lens as behaviorism has always sought to apply, it can be hard to see things any other way, and that makes it difficult or impossible to distinguish a representation of reality from a limitation of perspective.
>> If you look at medicine, one of the slightly strange things about it is that they subtract the placebo effect. Now, given that the placebo effect can contribute to a cure, or to the efficacy of a treatment, you’d think people would be trying to actually maximize the placebo effect.
Honestly the article is all over the place and appears to be mostly "bullshit" although I haven't afforded it a complete read yet (and probably won't).
This article is an example of the Shirkey principle: Institutions Try to Preserve the Problem to Which They Are the Solution. Of course behavioralscientist.org wants you to think that everything is behavioral science. If it was, then we would need to keep the behavioral scientists employed.
I think that's definitely very common. Though it's possibly tricky to distinguish from "<domain expert> will see the world through their lens," which is a bit more innocent, I think.
I've never met someone who doesn't behave this way. Especially the ones who think they don't. We are a product of our experiences, and our expertise is our experience.
I hear what you're saying, and I also tend to think this way. But it sounds like a very cynical view of the world. As an outsider to the field (I assume), how can you so quickly dismiss their study? Is there no value in observing human behavior?
I think the article does a pretty good job of dismissing itself.
The Shirkey principle is not necessarily true, but its a convenient catchall for articles like this one, which expends a lot of words being pithy and appearing clever, but not a lot of words on being right, which makes the reader believe that behavioral science important, without doing any of the necessary work of buttressing the claim with facts.
Behavioral science is very important for understanding e.g. why you can't simply model traffic flow as a fluid, or why you can't simply model economics as a system of oscillators or as analogous to chemical systems. But this article only manages to demonstrate that the author is very smugly self-satisfied, and lacks the introspection to actually chase down and verify their claims.
You should generally dismiss anyone who can't consistently predict outcomes over their chosen class of things they study better than others who have no familiarity with their theories. Ask the better predictors if they're intrigued by any of the ideas of the bad predictors if you want to look for reasons to redeem the dismissed.
> Is there no value in observing human behavior?
The current paradigms of behavioral science aren't the only ways to describe the observation of human behavior. You could in a similar way defend astrology by saying "Is there no value in tracing change over the passage of time? Does the origin of a thing say nothing about it? Is there no value in looking up at the sky, in the stars? Is there no wisdom in the legends of the past?"
Not sure if you have seen it already : https://youtu.be/uvU5dmu4sl8?si=cCQ7ZOriFp4rdmQM. As much as I love architecture and design, this take is pretty funny and relatable to many BS architecture.
> here’s the weird thing: if you have two dishwashers, you never need to unload the dishwasher, and you don’t actually lose any storage space.
They do this at some places of work that I'm aware of. It's not "barking insane". However, some thought shows that it won't work for a lot of people.
Firstly, dishwashers have to live at ground level whereas crockery can be stored in a cupboard at any level. You are contraining yourself to store crockery at the ground level where most people also have their under-sink unit, laundry machine, and heavy pans cupboard.
Secondly, plates and utensils are way more spread out in a dishwasher. You have to expose every surface for them to be cleaned properly. Plus, there is the space needed for the dishwasher itself, which can be pretty chunky.
So no, Rory Sutherland, in our 2-bedroom urban UK house we definitely cannot afford the space to have a second dishwasher. And if your job is to go around blithely trying to convince everyone that they'd be better off with one, all you're doing is re-affirming my contempt towards behavioural scientists and salespeople.
It also assumes that you have exactly as much stuff as will fit into a single dishwasher, and that you go through it all at the same rate, such that when the "dirty" dishwasher is full, the "clean" one becomes empty enough that it can switch roles.
Right now, our dishwasher's top rack is full of top rack stuff, whereas the bottom rack has two dishes and a coffee cup. I guess we go ahead and run it, and then... move everything from the second dishwasher to that one? This is definitively more work.
You just declare the other dishwasher dirty and that’s that. If you want you can unload it to your cabinets like you would with only a single dishwasher. In that case you’re still at worst the same amount of work you would if you didn’t have two dishwashers. But ordinarily it will be far less.
And yeah I thought about this years ago and ruminated on these issues.
But isn't the other dishwasher that we just declared "dirty" still full of clean dishes?
And furthermore, if I just have two dishwashers, both of which are considered "dirty", I no longer have clean plates.
Unless, of course, I unload it to the cabinets. Which I do now. Without paying $800 for a second dishwasher.
> But isn't the other dishwasher that we just declared "dirty" still full of clean dishes?
No, it's probably about three-quarters empty, because you probably use roughly the same crockery every day, unless you do something particularly bizarre like having three soup-based meals one day and three plate-based meals the next. Sometimes you wash a couple of plates that were already clean, sure. Or you move them into the "clean" dishwasher before declaring the other one "dirty", which is no more effort than putting them into cabinets (often less). And sure maybe a couple of days a year you have a big party, or really do eat soup every meal, or something, and you have to do something different. But the vast majority of the time it makes life easier.
clearly, the solution is to have three smaller desktop dishwashers then
Something beautiful about the Internet is that you can say "Hey, here's a thing you could do" and some guy will come and say "Well, actually, I am in a situation where I can't do that". No matter what you do, someone will have that.
"You could buy one variety of socks and you'll never have to worry about sorting them!" -> "Well, I have two jobs and they both require I wear uniform socks in different colours so this won't work for me, Mr. Smarty Socks Pants"
"If you place a dishwasher pod in the slot as soon as you empty the dishwasher you'll know if it's dirty or clean when you open it" -> "Well, I can only afford a single dishwasher pod at a time and I put my dishes away in the morning, go to work and use the day's wages to buy the one I'll use that night, so that won't work for me Mr. Richy Two Pod Pants"
"If you put your weighing scale in the bathroom it'll make it easy for you to measure your weight every day" -> "Well, my bathroom is too small and doesn't have level flooring anyway because it's wide enough for one man and is located on the San Andreas fault with a crack going through it. So that won't work for me Mr. Flat Floor Pants"
"If you use shellcheck, you can catch a bunch of errors in your shell scripts" -> "Well, I use my custom shell CrazySH and shellcheck won't work on that. So that won't work for me Mr. Normal Shell Pants"
I wonder if it is possible to construct a suggested thing that no human could respond to in this way. I think it's impossible. But what do I know. I'm just Mr. Can't Comment Pants.
I don't think my kitchen is very small compared to the average 2-bed London house.
Also technology connections said dishwasher pods are sub-optimal
[flagged]
I was advised that if I get one variety of pants I wouldn’t have to sort them but that didn’t work for various reasons that I was compelled to inform the advisor of.
Like everything in this piece, this example seems to overlook major aspects of human experience and preference in its rush to draw smug “one little trick” conclusions.
Independently of cost and space considerations, why would you want such a ”system” as this dual-dishwasher setup?
I take aesthetic pleasure in unloading the machine in the morning and restoring my cabinets to a condition of full, orderly, clean stock. My relationship with the machine is as a tool that transitions items from dirty to clean, and it’s aesthetically displeasing to mix those purposes with the ordered, dry, clean cabinets. Those are places where you know you’ll always grab a clean item without having to check a post-it note first.
I take pleasure in owning the right cutlery and servingware for a wide variety of food and situations, and in using the correct subset for the correct occasion. The idea that I would use everything from the Clean Washer every time I fill the Dirty Washer utterly confuses and repulses me.
This, like essentially all of this person’s examples, reminds me of this Chesterton’s Fence kind of thing the rationalist types get on about: if a bunch of people are doing a thing, take the time to ask why before you assume your One Bright Trick is something new under the sun.
I totally agree. Generally if there is some inefficiency or imbalance on paper because of human perception according to Rory, the actual reality is that there are other costs that humans from other perspectives consider which cause the imbalance in aggregate (e.g. the dual dishwasher space usage or the "south london is cheaper because it is not on the tube map despite their being overground trains into central london").
I tried to apply some of Rory's advice to a real product - basically, some combination of "give a longer wait time than the actual time for better experience / improve the experience of the euro tunnel by putting Wifi on it for $1m rather than spending $100m making it faster" (I know the real sums were much bigger).. and the idea of "live in the South of London because it's not on the Tube map so the prices are much cheaper yet the travel distance is the same!"
The result? Sales dropped when we gave a longer wait time, which was not compensated by repeat business.
I lived in a place in South London. Without night transport options, I couldn't stay out on a night out without forking over crazy money for Taxis. And the other major thing I noticed? Not a single woman I met in that time had any interest in coming back to my place, in the part of London she didn't know, without many options to Uber back to her place if she wanted etc. The only person I met in this time when I was single yet on paper successful took me back to their place. I couldn't figure it out but I felt dissatisfied. I moved then to a much more central place (yet the same cost) and started a casual relationship within a couple of months of being there. Trust me when I say, everybody generally preferred parties and hanging out at a place on the Tube.
I suppose I love Rorys ideas and they captivate me, the comparisons with nature are great. But the content is as much advertising as it is about the psychology of advertising and human tricks. The problem is Rory doesn't consider that for a young man you might want to be able to get night transport or that a young woman you meet might prioritize safety and familiarity, wanting to know the area better, be closer to their home and have transport options. A place away from Tube Stations also by virtue of it's costs is more of an honest signal that you don't have the money to live in central/"tube" London if you wanted to. As a young man, if I had realized that, I obviously should have lived like my peers a few tube stops away or in a nice house several towns away. So basically deviating from the social peer norm generally has costs. It's easy to point out one trick benefits but you miss out on what you don't observe.
Eating from a plate straight out of the dishwasher is something 19 y.o. me would have done, if I had a dishwasher.
That plate needs a resting period first.
I find it even more bonkers than that, even. Let's "frictionless vacuum" the problem: I live in a home in which all we eat is breakfast cereal. We need one spoon and one bowl per meal per person. But we own 25 bowls and 40 spoons. When we run out of bowls (that is, when the "dirty" dishwasher is running with a complement of 25 bowls), the "clean" dishwasher still contains 15 spoons. At the next mealtime, we each get a spoon and a bowl. When we're done eating, we put the dirty dishes in… Well, not either of the "clean" dishwashers!
It becomes absurd faster when you consider what a realistic household would own and eat and use. "There's no unloading necessary," he says. Absolutely ridiculous.
> But we own 25 bowls and 40 spoons. When we run out of bowls (that is, when the "dirty" dishwasher is running with a complement of 25 bowls), the "clean" dishwasher still contains 15 spoons. At the next mealtime, we each get a spoon and a bowl. When we're done eating, we put the dirty dishes in… Well, not either of the "clean" dishwashers!
So you end up washing those 15 spoons again. Big deal. Or you notice that you consistently have leftover spoons in the clean dishwasher and put some into storage, or get rid of them.
On average you use more or less the same dishes each day, so you reach equilibrium pretty quickly. You wash a bit of stuff that was already clean. It's no big.
So you're running your dishwashers inefficiently. It really does feel like a "big deal". You use more water, more salt/dishwasher cleaning chemicals, and more electricity on empty runs. The clean dishes and utensils getting extra wash degrade faster, the machine itself wears off faster too.
Maybe one day someone makes a dishwasher that can do continuous washing efficiently, dynamically adjusting for the number, type and locations of the dirty kitchenware. Until then, it feels super wasteful.
> It really does feel like a "big deal".
It does, but our feelings are likely miscalibrated here. Dishwashers are insanely efficient.
> You use more water, more salt/dishwasher cleaning chemicals, and more electricity on empty runs.
Unlikely. You're still running the same programme at the same frequency (you were always going to run the dishwasher when you ran out of bowls, the only difference is you have some extra clean spoons in the dishwasher when you do).
> The clean dishes and utensils getting extra wash degrade faster
Technically true, but when was the last time you had to replace a spoon because it had worn out? And how much did it cost when you did?
> the machine itself wears off faster too.
Maybe. Not convinced. You're not putting any extra dirt in it, and the sprayers etc. are likely designed to handle a full load (e.g. the shelves will always be balanced, because you'll always have a full set of dishes when you run the dishwasher).
Just to emphasize how efficient a dishwasher is with water, I had a clog in my kitchen pipes (turned out to be much deeper than my drain snake could handle and we had two clogs) and the plumber couldn't come in until a few days unless I was willing to pay for an emergency plumber. I would run the sink for 30 seconds and it would clog. But I could run an entire dish load and it would only fill a bit of the sink and everything would drain okay. Now I have a nice modern dishwasher, but it just goes to show that literally handwashing a handful of dishes is probably as efficient as doing an entire load of dishes in the dishwasher.
Well I guess in this weird household you wouldn't have that many, you'd just have the dirty one and the clean/using one each?
But you have to go to something close to 'we only eat cereal' for it to sort of work, which is crazy (and not healthy).
It's a bit like telling people to be like Steve Jobs and have a single outfit, your laundry will be so much easier, your wardrobe so much neater: sure, but it turns out most people actually don't want that... So it's really neither here nor there what problems it might solve.
2 dishwashers idea works more in a single person or 2 people household depending on habits. The dishes in the 2 dishwashers are the ones you use frequently, and for occasional times, you get the extras in the cupboards. It's also a decision you make during construction. The difference in cost between a dishwasher and a full bottom row of drawers is not much different, especially if they are beside each other and you already wired up one dishwasher.
> I live in a home in which all we eat is breakfast cereal
???
I believe OPs point is that supply imbalances and asymmetries exist even with just one kind of meal, and they would be even more prevalent in a more-realistic scenario where multiple kinds of meals have different demands on your supply of clean stuff.
For example, 10 bowls, 10 spoons, 10 forks. If the make are fork-using salads and spoon-using soups, the shared resource--bowls--will run out before anything else does.
Dishwashers are also somewhat gross, unless you're cleaning and sanitizing the filter very regularly. A dry and clean environment for dish storage is probably less amenable to molds and bacteria developing on surfaces.
Seems like lots of people don't really understand that. They somehow think it cleans itself but then I see on the shelves products for "smelly dishwasher" so there must be some disconnect there.
I clean mine ones in couple weeks, there is some gunk building up by the doors, filter of course, so just wipe it and then run once on highest temp and so far no smelly dishwasher - but still if I would just left dishes after cleaning for 2 days I would have to run some cleaning again because they would not small bad but somewhat "not clean" for sure.
Yes. The claim "you don't lose any storage space" may not be barking insane, but it is drooling idiot stupid. Also, you have to spring for a second dishwasher.
A second dishwasher is like a thousand bucks. Well worth the convenience over years of use.
Assuming that the system works exactly as the author describes, which it would not.
And assuming that you have more money than time, which isn't true for everyone.
More than that. Replacement costs multiply the price by a few times over the course of your life and there is significant opportunity cost.
If you don't spend the $1,000 then your ongoing costs are lower (a dishwasher lasts maybe 10 years, call it $100/yr - ignoring the operating costs since you're probably using a dishwasher the same number of times per year), that could be an income stream of about $50/yr - by FIRE logic you're probably $150/yr closer to not having to work any more and you have a bigger buffer for surprises along the way. Those are some pretty significant swings for most people.
It isn't economically clever to have 2x as much personal capital on hand as you need unless you are fabulously wealthy already.
I have been advocating for multiple dishwashers for a long time, but the reality is that many times when preparing a meal you dirty more dishes than fit in a single load, and dirty dishes will still pile up in the sink.
At least 3 dishwashers are needed.
Surely this is a queuing problem, and must be solved accordingly.
After all, the universe has only two kinds of problems: those solved by queuing theory, and those solved by category theory. Or so hanging out on HN would have me believe.
You forgot to scale the infrastructure for a billion dishes and redundancy across multiple regions
The only reasonable thing to do is make every under cabinet a dishwasher.
1 dishwasher, but every cabinet or drawer is waterproof and can be servoed through a track system to be loaded directly into the dishwasher.
> Firstly, dishwashers have to live at ground level
What makes you believe that? In my professional setting (think restaurants for instance) dishwashers are actually at countertop level to improve staff efficiency.
And while I not aware of any dishwasher design that allows to put it higher than countertop level, I don't see any impossibility either: you just need it to be unloadable from below.
> In my professional setting
There's a typo here, as I wanted to say “many”. (It's more like a lapsus than a mere typo actually since I had the dishwasher of the restaurant I work at as a student in mind when I wrote this comment)
> dishwashers have to live at ground level
While less common in domestic kitchens, "raised" dishwashers are a thing. A friend of mine designed his dream kitchen and his dishwasher (just a standard domestic dishwasher) is at about hip height, next to the cabinets where dishes are stored and above the drawers that house heavier pots and pans.
That's a common professional setup, steel bench top with dishwasher with two side doors that both lift upwards at the same time.
Washers coarse sluice dishes and stack them in a circular rack on the bench, then use horizontal handle at front of washer to lift both the door on the left and the one on the right, the internal circular rack of freshly cleaned dishes is pulled out along the bench on one side, the just filled rack of dirty dishes is slid in on other side to replace, doors down, washer on, unstack clean dishes and move the empty rack back to the sink to start sluicing and stacking just arrived dirty dishes.
Repeat for three hours, then clean down kitchen and go home.
It seems a lot of these issues could be solved by just running the dishwasher after every meal.
Why do they need to be at ground level? You could elevate them if you want.
Well, I've never seen that before but I guess it's possible. But in my kitchen that would mean taking up space that's used by the countertop, boiler, or fridge. Securing it to the wall and connecting it up to the water inlet I can easily imagine running into the several thousands to carry out.
You're right. I've personally seen kitchens with dishwashers at counter level. Only in buildings that were once restaurants though.
In my kitchen I don’t have space to hang the pots and pans. If I could move a wall or a cupboard then that problem would free up a drawer and one of those fiddly corner cupboards.
Yeah, his advice fails to consider that people aren't all the same as he is. For example I like to cook, and I have a lot more dishes/pots/pans than could fit in two dishwashers. What do I do with the rest, store it on the ground?
More dishwashers, obviously.
I could hang some dishwashers on the wall!
I can't really say why, but every paragraph of this article left me annoyed. It's full of under-examined half-truths, told in the smug manner of someone who doesn't have to care if they're right or wrong.
Absolutely true. The article is a BS spewing BS.
Since finishing Blindsight, I've been thinking about juggling (real physical juggling, not a metaphor).
Specifically, I can teach someone to learn to juggle, but I can't teach a person to juggle directly.
My thinking brain cannot juggle, but my body can juggle. I can't make decisions fast enough to juggle.
---
This is kind of a silly example, but I think the same is true for reading (what happens when you see an unfamiliar word), speaking, etc, etc.
So much of our brain work is not done by making decisions or critical thinking or even anything we are aware of.
You can, though, reflect on the juggling you observe yourself doing with sufficient precision and accuracy to both distill the essentials for others and further improve your own practice. This also generalizes.
> So much of our brain work is not done by making decisions or critical thinking or even anything we are aware of.
Like for example, forming accurate beliefs about the quality of ideas our minds lack familiarity with!
Perhaps like juggling (and unlike walking, etc), it is a skill that is not innate, so must be learned? And perhaps unlike juggling, it isn't easy to know when you lack the skill (because of the nature of it).
Are these two limitations of rational thought described in the literature:
1. Rational thought takes place in an irrational environment. As much as we try to control for biases, fallacies, heuristics, effects, etc, our evaluation of a scenario is dependent upon our personal history.
2. Rationality is a great tool for breaking things into small parts and describing acting in small steps; but a fundamental error occurs when we 'zoom out' to a system and use those small parts to say something definitive about the whole. In each step 'down', we exclude details not relevant to that scope, but we neglect to add those details back when we consider the system.
AI will certainly not save us from #1 because it will have it's own history.
#2 may benefit from AI, but the people using it will still have great difficulty.
I have no idea about literature, but off the cuff I would say:
> 1. Rational thought takes place in an irrational environment. As much as we try to control for biases, fallacies, heuristics, effects, etc, our evaluation of a scenario is dependent upon our personal history.
a) rational thought (usually) isn't what it seems to be
b) this is sloppy/inappropriate/dangerous language for this topic
> Rationality is a great tool for breaking things into small parts and describing acting in small steps; but a fundamental error occurs when we 'zoom out' to a system and use those small parts to say something definitive about the whole.
Statistically/probabilistically, yes (take this comment section, on a high-IQ platform (see also: /r/SlateStarCodex), as a prime example), but not necessarily. Doing it wrong will produce wrong results, like most anything else. An important distinction though in some domains: it is not possible to realize when you are wrong. And sometimes, it isn't even possible to wonder if you are wrong[1].
Consider the complexity involved (and the historic journey behind) manufacturing modern day top end CPU's - and this is but one of the many feats of genius humanity has pulled off, and we now take much of it for granted. Why can we do that, but not certain classes of other cognitively complicated tasks? What is the distinction between the domains that guarantees (so far) failure? (A hint: consider how we answer such questions.)
> #2 may benefit from AI, but the people using it will still have great difficulty.
What is the meaning of the symbol "great" in this context? Is it related to the probability of us Accomplishing The Goal?
------------------
[1] A classic "extraordinary claim", typically invoking this (and then after that, something else....but discussing those sorts of things isn't something you do in polite company, which HN most certainly is[2]):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_claims_require_e...
A knockout punch if I've ever seen one!
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> b) this is sloppy/inappropriate/dangerous language for this topic
Yes, I'm describing Untrue Scotsmen. I'm hoping for a citation or something I can google.
People are farting in my rational cleanroom and I don't like it.
> I'm hoping for a citation or something I can google.
Not entirely sure what you mean, something like this?
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-analysis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_and_indirect_realism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautology_(logic)
This article is perfectly meta and should be read as performative art capping a lifetime of work. i.e., "I am so rich and successful that I can write transparent absurdities that are labeled as such and get lots of nodding agreement." Even the HN response of dissecting the absurdities fits nicely into the author's oeuvre.
I'm pretty sure the two dishwashers thing has occurred to plenty of people. But dishwashers cost more money than a cabinet and they require a dedicated water line. This means you can't simply install a second dishwasher in a pre-existing house without first tearing up the walls to add new pipes from your water main to wherever you're going to put the dishwasher, and if you wanted to do this in a brand new house, you'd be asking whoever you're trying to sell it to to pay for an extra dishwasher.
And what is with this layperson misunderstanding of placebo effect? Why is this so common? Nobody is trying to subtract it or not induce placebo in real patients. It's the same principle you're applying when evaluating predictive models. You can't simply look at raw accuracy. You need to compare it to some naive predictor to see if it does any better. "Always predict no" is extremely accurate for rare conditions, like "does this patient have ebola" or "is this person a terrorist?" That doesn't make it a good predictive model. Same thing with a treatment. If it does no better than placebo, that isn't to say that placebo is useless. It's to say that we don't need the more complicated, expensive treatment and can simply use placebo. If giving some person a sugar pill has the same effectiveness as giving them a patented synthetic drug with harsh side effect, then just give them the sugar pill. Nobody is trying to avoid placebo. We're trying to avoid unnecessary extra steps.
Plumbing isn't always challenging.
If having two dishwashers instead of one is the goal, then it can be trivially easy to put a second dishwasher next to the first one.
(It is possible to think in terms that aren't exclusively flippant and extreme.)
Sure. Get rid of the fridge or the sink.
Can someone explain the aside about solar panels to me? The article makes it sound like nobody is buying them despite the advances made, but half the houses in my neighborhood are covered in solar panels, and the only reason we don't have any on our house is because no company will sell to us because our roof is shaped weird!
The engineering solutions absolutely made people willing and interested in installing solar panels.
That was bizarre. I think we're outliers here in Southern California, but the main problem with solar panels here right now is the huge differential in daytime vs nighttime available power, due to the popularity of solar. And power companies trying to totally reinvent billing in order to stay in business.
This. Almost half of my neighborhood has panels, and we're in the midwest, I'd assume sunnier places it approaches close to 100%. I'd probably have them, but all of the companies that are in my neighborhood use annoying door to door sales and I hate to reward companies that do that.
> I'd assume sunnier places it approaches close to 100%
Weirdly, no. I live in an extraordinarily sunny area and solar panels are still slow to roll out in 2024. I've never convinced my parents to get panels on their house, and almost nobody in their neighborhood has them. (I live in an apartment and I don't think I know of a single apartment building in my city that has panels.)
Something is definitely wrong, but I'm not sure what. I'm pretty sure my city even has big rebates for solar installation.
I do know that some companies lease them, which is a bad financial decision for a homeowner - not only do you not own them, which is bad, but the contract stays with the house, which may make it harder to sell. After all, why would I buy a house that's somehow weirdly indebted to some fly-by-might solar installation company I've never heard of ?
I'm sure some of them are leases, but mostly what I see is that you either buy them, often over a long time with a loan, and keep all the 'profits' or you agree to let the company place them on your roof but they keep most of the 'profits'. The profits generally coming from selling the electricity back to the grid. Leasing them may make financial sense in some situations, like places where you can't sell back to the grid but still use a lot of electricity and the lease price is still less than buying from the grid directly.
Wow, yeah. I suppose I can sort of see the motivation, insofar as solar panels have a finite lifespan, the homeowner might think it's better to not be on the hook for handling end-of-life. But in reality, as you say, I would not want to lease them. I would prefer to purchase them outright and trust that either the original installation company or another company could remove the old ones correctly.
The solar rollout in my neighborhood has mostly been recent, but I think part of it also depends on the local contractors and your area might just be underserviced still.
Weird choice to talk about the placebo effect in this context. The placebo effect is definitely used in combination with chemical and biological effects when administering drugs (or, more accurately, it always automatically happens). It's just when trying to test the efficacy of drugs that you need to control for the placebo effect, otherwise the noise of the results would drown the signal of the biological/chemical impact.
> it always automatically happens
This is exactly the framing the author is criticizing. It assumes that the placebo effect is a constant that cannot be improved upon, and thus deserves no consideration, when designing the treatment. However, the placebo effect is malleable, and can be improved [1], In scientific studies, this is typically done through suggestions and conditioning [2]. However, this is not standard clinical practice (AFAIK).
Where the author is wrong, is that people that are designing drugs, aren't thinking about using the placebo effect more optimally. It is fairly well known, that the efficacy of drugs correlates with the severity of off-target side effects: say that you are taking an analgesic that acts by binding receptor A, but which also induces nausea by also binding an unrelated receptor B. During drug development, the structure of the drug is often tweaked to reduce or abolish binding to such off-target receptors, thus limiting side effects. However, these structural changes also often reduce efficacy, even if the affinity of the drug to the intended target isn't altered at all. My colleagues and I (working in pharmacology but in academia) have often wondered to what degree drug companies try to actively keep non-severe side effects as part of the response profile, given that they may be beneficial for the treatment outcome.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/npp201081
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030439590...
What's it called when someone asks you a question with certain parameters, then makes fun of you for trying to keep your answer within certain parameters because you didn't think outside the box?
Being a father?
Being a prick.
He misunderstands Harry Truman’s quote, “It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.”
It's actually about politics (Truman's domain): If you insist on being the sole owner of some initiative, then no one else will want to work with you. If you allow other people to take some of the credit, then a lot of things become possible.
It's not that it can't be tortured into applying to his BS/BS thesis, but it doesn't particularly help.
This can be extrapolated to say something a little more like, every field of study can be used to analyze the world. It means that partially, everything is connected to anything else like the Holographic Theory of Learning[1] states. Creating a field of study is creating a framework for tackling problems. Architecture for spatial and material problems, software for logical and procedural problems, history for causal problems, chemistry for material, etc. Any one of those fields gives you a tool for addressing any problem, and some of those tools are extremely useful in some narrow definition of a problem. Everything has a historical, material and spatial dimension, and everything is processed through our logic and behavior. The goal is to know which hammer to use when, I suppose.
[1]. Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40439572#40464765
Or, thinking out of the box (sic), you could have zero dish washers, a decent sink and a draining rack.
Much more flexible.
ie the way to fix the problems with dishwashers is not to get another one, but to get rid of the one you have :-)
Reading the commentary on here reminds me how much Rory rubs techie people (and I count myself as one) the wrong way. You have to realise: he’s not presenting an alternative to rationality/science/economics/whatever; he’s just pointing out where it’s easy to miss out on seemingly silly, but ultimately far wiser, solutions to problems that are usually — ultimately naively — positioned as technical or numerical.
Plus, as a marketing man, he knows that injecting some humour into things is almost never a bad idea. Don’t take it so seriously.
Yes he does rub technie people the wrong way, but I think it's more widely a growing didain of Nudge theory and these guys in other places like UX conferences after a lot of wasted time from these ideas - they just don't pan out in practice in the long term.
I don't have a solely tech background and once believed quite staunchly and with excitement in Rorys ideas. As commented elsewhere, they did not work out for me, it turned out the mimetic nature of humans is useful - to avoid loss, and lost experience (which accumulates greater costs over time).
Things like nudges, these ideas, these one trick examples - they are all individual, one shot.
The problem is, if you trick someone into paying twice as much for their shampoo, they have less money to spend on other things. How is it satisfying to do this? It's dark patterns with a new face.
I think this applies in the positive case too. Great, something like estimating a 10 day waiting time and hitting it in 7 days makes people report on paper they are happier. When most places do this, the effect will disappear. In fact, if I have one place in my life (e.g. the dentist) where they overestimate, and one where they underestimate (doctors), I will get more annoyed at the doctors than I would have been if they both were bad at estimating. It's shifting my discontent but I'm still discontented by the fact it takes 7 days, not the difference with the estimate. This is obvious and evidence in this example from the data in England with the NHS vs the health services and their satisfaction rates in Denmark and Germany etc. It's true individual cases can have individual effects, but it's a bit like how if you provide personal tutoring for one subject, the student often falls behind in the other subjects - you are taking on a debt that is paid somewhere if you don't actually improve the actual thing or product.
In a role like advertising, this is fine. If you want to improve the world, I don't think it is. Likewise if you want to improve your application in terms of retention, lying to the customers about wait time will work for one order, but not multiple. It won't actually improve retention in an AB test after a year to lie unnecessarily.
> these one trick examples - they are all individual, one shot.
He would be the first to admit that this is true; it’s more of a ‘science of exceptions’ (like biology) that it is like physics or (classical) economics.
> if you don't actually improve the actual thing or product
The standard (and importantly, correct) answer is that the marketing/perception is the product. Marketing isn’t an extra bit of magic added at the end of a process designed to get the best out of an existing product — in many cases (and not just the obvious ones) it creates most of the value. If you’re a techie you instinctively hate this kind of thing, but that makes you no less immune to — or more aware of — its effects.
He reads like smug sandpaper.
I'd say, certain ideas (his are some of them) seem to be intolerable even as a supplement.
It'd be hilarious if they were actually useful ideas.
If I had to go by this article, I would have to conclude that behavioral science is indeed pure bullshit. Example: "Because the boiling point of water depends on altitude, you could take it to a very, very high place and the same calorific value might well boil the water." Or, with much less effort, you could put it on top of a burning stove. Claiming that bringing the water to the edge of space still counts as using only the candles isn't being clever, it's bullshit.
And also, it takes forever to boil water at high altitude, for a variety of reasons. The air is usually colder (which means the candle consumes more of its fuel just warming itself up), the oxygen content of the air makes the candles less efficient, and also less oxygen means the candle burns slow enough that radiative cooling of the water becomes a factor, not to mention that while air is generally a poor thermal conductor, low density air is an even worse conductor. I can boil a quart of water in about 5 minutes on my jetboil at sea level, but it takes about 15 minutes at 10,000 feet.
I feel like a point-by-point takedown of this article would get tedious, but it would be a good illustration of how smugly wrong this guy is.
Reading this article left me more and more annoyed with every paragraph.
To quote from the article:
> Because the boiling point of water depends on altitude, you could take it to a very, very high place and the same calorific value might well boil the water.
I agree that approaching it like this is possible. But, “possible” doesn’t mean that it is sensible. Philosophically speaking, if such things like above are allowed, then it should also be allowed to simply heat this water to very high temperature (like 99 C) with another apparatus such as a stove and then finally boil it with the candles. That is, use a stove instead of a rocket. It is also possible to conceive of an apparatus with heating elements and photodiodes. This apparatus will run the heaters and heat the water when its photodiode detect the light from the candle. So, in effect, the candle is responsible for heating the water.
Here’s what I’m trying to say: we need to accept some constraints and reject some possibilities in order to answer anything. If there are no constraints, then anything is possible. But, we know that this is not how the universe works.
Finally, I hope to never read anything from this author again. Ironically for this person, maybe they should consider the possibility that their ”science” is BS, aka bullshit.
It's a silly example but he does give a constraint. The one constraint is that the heat has to come from the candles. The purpose is to illustrate that even if one variable is constrained, there are other variables that may not be constrained, that you had assumed were static (altitude, pressure). It's just an example which illustrates a point of the article: try and think of something you had assumed was fixed and change that instead of working with the parameters you thought you had. Not a bad idea overall.
He absolutely does not. He said "using only the candles and a box of matches". He never says "as a heat source". There's nothing in the problem as given that would indicate moving the water to someplace low pressure is within the rules but moving it to someplace hot is not.
You didn't get the gist of the article: many constraints are artificial or plain mental. And you have to think outside the worn trousers to determine where that is the case.
If the title were "Is Everything Behavioral Science?" I certainly would have answered the question myself with a "no" and then moved on with my day. Instead, I was fooled into clicking on the article with the false hope that this would be an interesting take on the rise of bullshit.
Can someone update the title to be less clickbait?
I've taken a crack at it but I'm not sure it's much better. If anyone can suggest a better title (i.e. accurate and neutral, and preferably using language from the article itself), we can change it again.
> if you have two dishwashers, you never need to unload the dishwasher, and you don’t actually lose any storage space.
I'm too sleep-deprived from a rough night in a hotel, but something about this smacks of "I don't have to wash my towels because I'm clean when I get out of the shower" thinking.
For all the logical arguments both for and against di-dishwashing, I think the main problem is actually aesthetic (at least for me). There's something quaint and appealing to me to know that my dishes are neatly stacked in a cupboard compared to sweating it out on the innards of a dormant appliance.
> Di-dishwashing
Love it. Let's just call it didishwashing
Behavioral science has lately shown itself susceptible to a great deal of BS! The defensive crouch is reasonable, and entirely earned in my view given the question of how much of the field's basis may well fail to replicate.
The usual advice to "beware the man of one study" may apply also to fields; especially through so totalizing a lens as behaviorism has always sought to apply, it can be hard to see things any other way, and that makes it difficult or impossible to distinguish a representation of reality from a limitation of perspective.
>> If you look at medicine, one of the slightly strange things about it is that they subtract the placebo effect. Now, given that the placebo effect can contribute to a cure, or to the efficacy of a treatment, you’d think people would be trying to actually maximize the placebo effect.
Is this a joke?
It's only a joke because doctors will prescribe placebos. He's unable to distinguish between testing medicine and treating diseases.
// I’d add that BS (behavioral science) without creativity—indeed BS without a tiny little whiff of BS (meaning bullshit)—may be actually suboptimal.
And we wonder why there's such a reproducibility crisis in behavioral science....
BS in the case of this article stands for “behavioral science”
Does it though?
I felt like I got click-baited and closed the article after the first sentence without reading it.
Revisiting it…maybe the terms are interchangeable.
Honestly the article is all over the place and appears to be mostly "bullshit" although I haven't afforded it a complete read yet (and probably won't).
I was so confused by the initial part of article. BS here, BS there…
I really wanted this to be an essay about “is everything Bullshit?”
This article is an example of the Shirkey principle: Institutions Try to Preserve the Problem to Which They Are the Solution. Of course behavioralscientist.org wants you to think that everything is behavioral science. If it was, then we would need to keep the behavioral scientists employed.
I think that's definitely very common. Though it's possibly tricky to distinguish from "<domain expert> will see the world through their lens," which is a bit more innocent, I think.
I've never met someone who doesn't behave this way. Especially the ones who think they don't. We are a product of our experiences, and our expertise is our experience.
I hear what you're saying, and I also tend to think this way. But it sounds like a very cynical view of the world. As an outsider to the field (I assume), how can you so quickly dismiss their study? Is there no value in observing human behavior?
I think the article does a pretty good job of dismissing itself.
The Shirkey principle is not necessarily true, but its a convenient catchall for articles like this one, which expends a lot of words being pithy and appearing clever, but not a lot of words on being right, which makes the reader believe that behavioral science important, without doing any of the necessary work of buttressing the claim with facts.
Behavioral science is very important for understanding e.g. why you can't simply model traffic flow as a fluid, or why you can't simply model economics as a system of oscillators or as analogous to chemical systems. But this article only manages to demonstrate that the author is very smugly self-satisfied, and lacks the introspection to actually chase down and verify their claims.
You should generally dismiss anyone who can't consistently predict outcomes over their chosen class of things they study better than others who have no familiarity with their theories. Ask the better predictors if they're intrigued by any of the ideas of the bad predictors if you want to look for reasons to redeem the dismissed.
> Is there no value in observing human behavior?
The current paradigms of behavioral science aren't the only ways to describe the observation of human behavior. You could in a similar way defend astrology by saying "Is there no value in tracing change over the passage of time? Does the origin of a thing say nothing about it? Is there no value in looking up at the sky, in the stars? Is there no wisdom in the legends of the past?"
Wait...I just read on HN that everything is architecture... so, is BS architecture, or is architecture BS? Or are they both the same thing?
Not sure if you have seen it already : https://youtu.be/uvU5dmu4sl8?si=cCQ7ZOriFp4rdmQM. As much as I love architecture and design, this take is pretty funny and relatable to many BS architecture.
hail satan
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Behavioural Science is contradiction in terms much like Military Intelligence.