It's a good title... My instinct is to ridicule the entire concept of the smart home with its dozens of internet-attached devices from TVs to refrigerators to light bulbs accessible from one's smart phone. I suppose I should instead be curious as to why anyone would be comfortable with such a system?
I can see the attraction of using a Raspberry Pi on a closed local network instead of timers and so on, for example if one has a lot of houseplants and so on, but I don't really understand the desire for having that network be internet-accessible.
> dozens of internet-attached devices from TVs to refrigerators to light bulbs accessible from one's smart phone. I suppose I should instead be curious as to why anyone would be comfortable with such a system?
I get value from such a system for the following reasons:
- my bedroom lights wake me up by fading in over the course of an 20 minutes. Before that, I'd always wake up in a bad mood as I got startled awake by an alarm.
- Thanks to the HomePod in the bedroom, we can adjust the lights by voice, useful in the evening when one is falling asleep and the other's still in the bathroom. Like the 80s "Clapper", but magnitudes more useful.
- My mainroom lights adjust color temperature through the day, which I find inordinately pleasing. They will also switch to an "evening" dimmed and redder lighting at a particular time. This is often a subtle cue to me to stop working, or prepare for bed.
- The HomePod in my bedroom also serves as my alarm, using music from the auto-generated playlist of stuff I like. I no longer am woken up by the same repetitive alarm (I can't listen to some of my favourite tunes due to the association), or awful radio.
- I can transfer the music to different devices as I go through my morning routine. It's never been easier to listen to what I want, where I want.
- If a meeting suddenly comes up, I can just give a vocal order to stop the music
- I can switch watching something on my iPad to my TV, and control the TV from the phone that I always have with me, rather than hunt down the single-purpose remote.
There are some downsides of course, but they don't outweigh the above quality-of-life benefits, and I'm very happy with what I have.
Network connected devices are fine, but this thing where every object in your home is reliant on a persistent network connection to a remote server which it uses to funnel data back to the manufacturer? This needs to die.
The push for evergreen, cloud-connected, as-a-service everything was never about meeting users' needs. It's just a cynical grab for recurring revenue and job security.
> I don't really understand the desire for having that network be internet-accessible.
Some devices are more useful if they're internet accessible:
- Thermostat: can start the AC/heating ahead of time if one comes back at irregular times, in order to come back to a house at the right temperature while saving energy away from home
- Security system: can arm it away from home if someone forgot to arm it, can disarm it remotely if coming back with heavy packages
- Security cameras: can monitor them remotely if needed
- Garage door: can close it remotely if forgotten, can open it remotely so that it's fully open by the time one arrives at the door, can also integrate with Amazon delivery so that they can leave packages in the garage instead of on the porch
- Lights and other devices: no more wondering "did I turn off the lights?"
- Washer/dryer: I don't have one of those, but it would be nice to get phone notifications that the laundry is done and be able to check remotely how much time is left on the current cycle
"My instinct is to ridicule the entire concept of the smart home"
Your choice. I'm an IT consultant and I try to run my home IT to the same standards as at work.
I keep my IoT devices on a separate VLAN or two. I use Home Assistant as a mediator and I absolutely refuse the likes of Alexa. I'm pretty sure that my Kitchen telly is listening and it is surely loving Morecambe and Wise show's audio on an endless loop and quite quiet.
I'm a former IT consultant, and I'd like to run my home network to the same standards as at work. I looked into it and came to the conclusion that dealing with a few timers is much less hassle than trying to do it with computers.
A cloud-connected, vendor-locked smart home is not such a smart move, to my mind, though.
A LAN of things, with a VPN to my phone and laptop is something I'm considering. An always-on third-party listening device, like Echo, I would never consider.
> I suppose I should instead be curious as to why anyone would be comfortable with such a system?
My assumption, informed by a few anecdotes of people I know - people want to feel like they're living with modern amenities, or like they're in the future (Star Trek people talking to their computers, for example), and this is obviously aided by marketing.
Remember when Apple referenced Dick Tracy when introducing the Apple Watch (or a subsequent model?), and how they had always wanted to have the same cool device? I suspect that this is a huge part of what drives the "smart" home.
There are lots of applications for having home devices and appliances on the network. The typical user doesn’t know much about security and tends to assume devices will do what they’re supposed to, so it’s not an obvious problem for those devices to be accessible by a cellphone app.
I imagine our home of the future with a microchip in all outlets, switch, circuit breaker, bulb, etc.
Each breaker would know the current going through it and through all sockets and bulbs. They will be able to detect the bad connection, shut off the current and report the problem, saving a lot of electric fire.
The wiring of the house will be massively reduced as they will be no need to go from switch to light. All lighting will be connected all the time, the switch will be wireless, will be just a faceplate that you stick where you want them. You will assign the switch to the light that you want, they will adjust with the time of day, etc.
Some of the heavy energy use appliances will do peak shaving to reduce the cost of the electricity bill (already in place in some areas)
Sounds great. None of those devices need to be talking to anything outside the home, though.
Even peak shaving can be done by simply checking the AC supply voltage. If it's starting to sag, ease off some of the heavier appliances. If it's higher than expected, now's a good time to burn some extra power.
There are (since several years) "bus" electrical systems, simplified, there are five wires (live+neutral+earth+a two wire "bus" ) going everywhere.
You can decide to mount in "box #1" a switch and (say) a socket, then you configure the switch in "box#1" to command light bulb #23 and the socket to be either always on or commanded by switch #18, etc..
What you are proposing is essentially removing the two wire cable to go wireless.
You need anyway the three mains cables (live+neutral+earth) to get everywhere and passing in the same pipe/tube the additional two wires cable is "no cost".
NO practical advantages, but a whole new possible sets of malfunctioning and/or vulnerabilities.
Apart from the added (and not-so-trivial) added cost of a "bus" system as compared to a traditional electric cabling(not that your dream solutions will be any cheaper), the existing solutions work, and work reliably, because by now they have existed and have been tested for many years, let's introduce a new wireless protocol and brand new microprocessors/terminal devices that offer no advantage...
That would be a dumb home then. A smart home would be properly insulated and a lot more passive, it wouldn't leak as much heat and wouldn't be cold when you get home. All without "smart" tech or burning extra fossil fuel.
Grandma tech: keep rolls of sugar cookie dough in the freezer, and bake 'em when you get home. An excuse to hang out by the oven, and then you have cookies.
Curious if that saves any significant energy, if you visit home regularly. The same with summertime AC. I believe that allowing a properly insulated room to get hot/cold and then reheating/recooling it takes the same work, because half a day is barely enough for it to get equilibrium with the environment. For a week probably yes, but then again you don’t want your home to cross a freezing point too often. Am I right or naive here?
Many years ago I knew someone (an electrical engineer by trade) that modified a standard/ubiquitous Panasonic telephone answering machine connecting it to his home thermostat, he used the code to hear messages to switch the heat on.
You don't need the internet, nowadays the equivalent would most probably be something like :
A smart system would learn your patterns and eventually be able to predict your arrival, setting a temperature that's further away from ambient and towards some target the more confident it is.
We're currently binge watching Ted Lasso, and that scene really stung and stuck with me. I am someone who is often judgmental and contrarian, exacerbated by the Internet and many things in our society being not enjoyable, and it has masked the underlying humanity of curiosity that lies inside. It's hard, but focusing on what I can do to learn more about something and actually do things rather than critiquing some existing thing is a process I'm trying to implement. While being a critic is valid, too much of anything is not a good thing.
There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all argument and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance. This principle is contempt prior to examination -- Herbert Spencer, 19th century English philosopher, scientist, and theologian
I've been attempting to train myself to be more open minded. For example, I have been skeptical of functional programming because my assumption was that it was an academic thing for those that didn't have to live in the real world of state and mutability. I thought it had to be less efficient.
Some investigation proved me wrong. Russ Olsen set me straight:
We don't have to copy a million element immutable array to change one element. We copy a section of it and keep the rest in a tree structure of changes (this happens under the covers). Secondly, manipulating the stateful world is easier to understand if we isolate those actions in Atoms and Actors.
Now I see the beauty of it so I'm glad I investigated.
I was very puzzled by your argument until I skimmed the video. You are associating functional programming with avoiding side effects. That’s a very Haskell-ish view of things but that’s not the heart of it.
The key idea of functional programming is that it’s easier to think of program as a composition of functions rather than as a list of statements and therefore functions should be first class values. That used to be controversial but frankly the idea won. We have seen lambdas go mainstream in most major languages and programming is more and more functional by the day.
In this talk Erik Meijer surprised me by saying functional programming is not about immutability (at the end) which is talked about a lot by functional programmers and then refers to his paper, which lays out his thoughts in greater detail:
The Curse of the Excluded Middle: "Mostly functional" programming does not work by Erik Meijer
Right, I understand where I wasn't clear. You're right, that idea has won and gone mainstream so I didn't think it was worth mentioning. I was emphasizing that I thought immutable data structures were inefficient and that it was the luxury of academics to abstract away stateful changes in the name of purity.
I've got a couple of other ideas that I need to do more research on (I'm watching Erik Meijer videos today)
1) Class objects with methods and data are like small programs, so I don't get why people go on and on about having data structures with functions as being superior to class objects, which are essentially data structures with associated functions.
2) Similarly, Joe Armstrong seems to hate object oriented programming but Erlang instances are essentially class objects, albeit running in their own process so they have more isolation
3) From reading Erik Meijer's Confessions of a Used Programming Language Salesman, I'm assuming that Async/Await that he help put in C# and Dart are his attempt to bring Haskell continuation monads to the imperative world
4) I'm assuming Clojure Atoms and Actors are like Haskell monads but don't know that. I watched Brian Beckman: Don't fear the Monad (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhuHCtR3xq8) but couldn't make heads or tails of it. Something about functions calling first order functions and pure first order effects with stateful second order effects, or something... That was a few years ago so I will give it another chance.
I'm probably wrong about these ideas but they're fun to think about and give me something to learn
This is good advice, but that design is still terrible.
Take for example, IKEA Tradfri: if you use their dimmers, you don't ever need to reset the lamps. You just hold the dimmer and it's reset button close to the lamp.
And if you use another system, you reset them by quickly switching them on and off six times. Takes under ten seconds. "It's complicated" is not a very good excuse for shitty design reaching end users.
Not sure why you're getting down voted. People here complain that a website/app doesn't load quickly even if it's a few seconds regardless of the complexity. I'm not going to use the service if it has problems. I don't care about the "engineering challenges" unless it's moving needle dramatically.
Dose anyone has good advices to change this kind of mindset ?
It is hard for me to not be judgmental about stuff I disagree, and I can tell this attitude is causing more trouble than I would like in many different area of my life.
It's really hard, and the author falls into their own trap. They're being "judgmental" about the people who are being judgmental. And here I am doing it, too.
Instead of worrying about "curious" vs "judgmental", I would instead ask: Who am I helping with this statement?
The author is attempting to help people be more helpful to other people. Clearly you heard them, and it has inspired you to be a better person. Unfortunately, they didn't provide you actionable advice. I'm hoping my suggestion above is better for people.
I use it myself sometimes when responding online. When I first started asking it (or things like it, focusing on the wellbeing of others), I deleted a lot of comments. They simply weren't actually helpful overall.
Another way to look at it: "Am I going to ruin someone's mood with this?" If you are, can you provide the information in a way that doesn't, or at least softens the blow, if they really need to hear it?
I don't enjoy making people unhappy, so it wasn't hard to start concentrating on that first instead of last, and improving all the help I was trying to give. I'm sure I have a long way to go, but I feel like I do better than I used to.
What works for me is to assume there is always an explanation, then go look for it.
Could be anything from an actual good reason to do it this way, or some other factors like cost, or maybe even just lack of time, or the best of multiple bad options.
Postpone judgement until you have a good understanding. You could still come to the same conclusion but it will likely be much more nuanced.
Basically empathize with whoever build it or was involved.
Also design/build stuff yourself, do user testing and get feedback; it’s humbling haha.
I get annoyed when other younger/new hires come in and just start bashing and saying how stupid this is that is/was and that the person that did it was dumb or an idiot or incompetent without them first learning the history, context, and environment the decision(s) were made in. And they're typically not wrong. If the decision(s) were made today, I typically agree 100% with them.
Assume you are wrong until proven otherwise. There are really quite a lot of constraints you are at most times not qualified to reason about. Small example: I was working on implementing accessibility for a government website and was rather baffled at the requirement to provide sign language videos providing basic explanations. I had assumed we'd need to provide augmenting accesibility, i.e. text-to-speech for the blind. In my mind, if a person can see, they can also read. Turns out: no, not the case. Sign language is a separate language and you'd be learning your locally dominant language as a first foreign language, so depending on the community you grow up with, you may as well lack basic literacy in that language. Therefore, sign language videos are more akin to offering the website in different languages that assistive technology. After that incident, I've learned to assume there is always something I don't know which explains the things I find weird.
I found two books so far that had pretty actionable plans to address this.
They first is Difficult Conversations, largely about nonviolent communication, which provides a structured template for “learning conversations”. The relevant advice was: when you feel a strong feeling of disagreement, you tell the other person instead of bottling it up, which lets you ll then transition to a listening state. Like: “When I heard that my first instinct was to disagree because of X. At the same time I know you (insert reason like “have different life perspectives” or “are my friend and care about me”) so I would like to learn more.
The second is The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leaders, which offers a metaphor for the mental state between judgement and curiosity they call “the line”. Being “above the line” is a state of curiosity, “below the line” is judgement and defensiveness. The book goes into physiological reasons, the advice they give is to develop strong awareness of your emotions to detect when you go below the line, then use breathing exercises to quickly resurface. They also have other exercises for developing empathy for other points of view you can do on your own, like isolating narratives from facts and working through all possible narratives for a given situation (like “Tom thinks I am incompetent, I think Tom is incompetent, Tom thinks I am competent, I think Tom is competent”)
I’ve used both to some pretty good success so far, after receiving some feedback that I was not listening well.
I use self-reflection and internal dialog when I notice I'm feeling judgemental, to drill down to what has created the discomfort. Once you understand your own reactions it's much easier to talk with others. I'm not always aware until later but it works then too as a retrospective. Most people are open to walking through their beliefs with you as long as they feel safe from risk of attack. Apply the same kindness to yourself.
there is a logical fallacy (not just in the title). It ignores that curiosity will always result in a judgement, and even it's a "positive judgement". If only we stick around long enough we'll need to tear down our original belief (only way to avoid it is not to grow). Being loud (judgemental) makes us look like we have done the leg work (of curiosity). But curiosity is a lot of work and it's easier to get reward by simply looking competent (judging loudly). Exploiting this is easy because it's hard to tell if a stranger has actually put in the legwork and earned their "right" to judgement. And it's also easy to dismiss judgement as "Don't judge just be curious", when in reality, staying curious is impossible once you have a full grasp over a specific topic. (being curious here would mean move on to new things to be curious about).
I'm probably overthinking it. Last weeks I was working on designing an IIoT device (EV charging point) where the customer insists on using the outdated protocol, and not spend the money or time to bother with security. Hardware constraints will rule out there is a future in which this device will be secure (or maintainable). So when I read this:
> By being curious, not judgmental, we can start to understand these peculiar things around us. Only by understanding, we might even find a way to make them better.
It drives me up the wall. Almost impossible for me not to immediately judge and ridicule them, for sloppy thinking, but also for forgetting that a system/idea will only get better by stressing it. And it would be a shame if somebody destroyed their echo chambers, or took a dump in their "safe-space". Perhaps I'd understand the situation a bit better (have empathy) if the people being attacked and ridiculed were unpaid tinkerers or engineers (e.g. FOSS). But a big company like GE? And especially a topic like IoT - I don't think so.
I’ve been contemplating this topic as well, though more for social issues which I think that I’ve thought deeper on than the other person. The end state is that I believe that I know more than them and therefore my conclusions are “more correct”. It results in a physiological response and I end up in an argumentative state trying to get them to see my position but in the process, failing to query their point of view.
I’m torn because I think there are genuine cases where I do have more information, but I don’t want to become an argumentative person, and logically if offered a 1% choice to possibly learn something new, it would be more beneficial to learn than to not.
I was thinking next time I could try to guess their assumptions and reasoning and they can fill me in on the difference. Then point out and see if they accounted for any extra information I had.
The replies to this are very good. I'd just add that - like anything - it takes practice. You have to train your mind to work this way, and you need to continue to do so. So, don't judge yourself too harshly when it doesn't come easy. Recognize it and continue to practice.
> Dose anyone has good advices to change this kind of mindset ?
The only way you can not be judgmental is by being dead or unconscious. Living is about making judgments about everything, all the time (and most of them become habits at some point).
A person may not be able to suppress spontaneous judgement, but one can observe the process and reflect on the reasoning, incentive, and emotions that go into it afterwards. Then you can decide if you mind _should_ be made up, or if it might be better to put more effort into a higher order of understanding.
I once heard this observation: judgement and curiosity are two distinct states of mind. If you’re curious about something, you cannot simultaneously be judgmental.
I learned about Buddhism and the concept of lovingkindness and that really helped. I read a short book on Buddhism.
But also finding people who can engage with those they disagree with without resorting to mean behavior and listening to them is probably a good tactic. One person I can think of is Beau of the Fifth Column on YouTube who basically explains a left leaning political position to conservatives and centrists in short videos every day. He’s totally non judgmental and I have found it useful to just listen to the way he describes things. He explains topics that are often divisive without any condescension, which I think is a rare trait in political discussion.
EDIT: Forgot to include the obvious, but therapy. I had all manner of rough edges and I’m still finding tricky situations that my therapist has been helping me with for years. Keep in mind that if you learn to become less judgmental you will have better relationships all around. Better friendships, work relationships and love. My career is much better today because I matured, in a large part through therapy, and can manage complex and difficult discussions with my business partner without upsetting anyone. These changes benefit you and those around you and lead to more harmony and happiness. And you deserve that!
There is so much wisdom in the title of this post (a quote by Walt Whitman) and it applies to so many situations in life. Happy to see it used as the title to this post (and on the homepage of HN :)
Always good advice. When I see something I don't understand that seems off or weird, one way I avoid judgement is to ask the five whys to myself.
It is also good to recognize that most everyone is doing the best they can, and if you ship a light with a weird way to reset it, there were probably (as the author suggests) constraints that you don't know about.
What if you're wrong and they wanted to inflict anguish on their users? Well, the market is pretty good about fixing those problems, at least with commodities like lights.
>What if you're wrong and they wanted to inflict anguish on their users? Well, the market is pretty good about fixing those problems, at least with commodities like lights.
The problem with this idea is that consumer-unfriendly things can make more money for the manufacturers than consumer-friendly things--not because the consumers want to pay for them, but because it lets the companies make money in other ways (typically advertising, monetizing consumer data, or using consumer bandwidth) that are dangerous in ways that are hard for consumers to understand. The consumers will end up worse even by their own standards (they'll understand the dangers after they happen to them, they just won't understand them in advance or connect them to the poor design).
The market assumes perfect consumer knowledge. Most people here know the dangers of the Internet of Things, but the average person doesn't. And just HN geeks are not enough to support a market, so you only get to buy the same things that the average consumer can buy. (Go ahead, try to find a non-smart TV.)
Also, PMs and engineers that don’t actively use and love their product can be subject to laziness - finding the most simple passable direct solution and implementing that - just to go home at 4:20.
Sure, yes, empathize don’t judge, but also, let’s acknowledge the human tendencies as non-owners to DGAF - especially in this current age of the worker questioning everything.
Yeah what a terrible example. We can all strive to more curious but bad product design is bad product design. We shouldn't let people off the hook for that regardless of the engineering challenges that arise.
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I can see the attraction of using a Raspberry Pi on a closed local network instead of timers and so on, for example if one has a lot of houseplants and so on, but I don't really understand the desire for having that network be internet-accessible.
I get value from such a system for the following reasons:
- my bedroom lights wake me up by fading in over the course of an 20 minutes. Before that, I'd always wake up in a bad mood as I got startled awake by an alarm.
- Thanks to the HomePod in the bedroom, we can adjust the lights by voice, useful in the evening when one is falling asleep and the other's still in the bathroom. Like the 80s "Clapper", but magnitudes more useful.
- My mainroom lights adjust color temperature through the day, which I find inordinately pleasing. They will also switch to an "evening" dimmed and redder lighting at a particular time. This is often a subtle cue to me to stop working, or prepare for bed.
- The HomePod in my bedroom also serves as my alarm, using music from the auto-generated playlist of stuff I like. I no longer am woken up by the same repetitive alarm (I can't listen to some of my favourite tunes due to the association), or awful radio.
- I can transfer the music to different devices as I go through my morning routine. It's never been easier to listen to what I want, where I want.
- If a meeting suddenly comes up, I can just give a vocal order to stop the music
- I can switch watching something on my iPad to my TV, and control the TV from the phone that I always have with me, rather than hunt down the single-purpose remote.
There are some downsides of course, but they don't outweigh the above quality-of-life benefits, and I'm very happy with what I have.
Dead Comment
The push for evergreen, cloud-connected, as-a-service everything was never about meeting users' needs. It's just a cynical grab for recurring revenue and job security.
Some devices are more useful if they're internet accessible:
- Thermostat: can start the AC/heating ahead of time if one comes back at irregular times, in order to come back to a house at the right temperature while saving energy away from home
- Security system: can arm it away from home if someone forgot to arm it, can disarm it remotely if coming back with heavy packages
- Security cameras: can monitor them remotely if needed
- Garage door: can close it remotely if forgotten, can open it remotely so that it's fully open by the time one arrives at the door, can also integrate with Amazon delivery so that they can leave packages in the garage instead of on the porch
- Lights and other devices: no more wondering "did I turn off the lights?"
- Washer/dryer: I don't have one of those, but it would be nice to get phone notifications that the laundry is done and be able to check remotely how much time is left on the current cycle
> Security system: can arm it away from home if someone forgot to arm it, can disarm it remotely if coming back with heavy packages
Someone finding a zero day can turn off my security system
> Security cameras: can monitor them remotely if needed
Someone hacking my system can spy on me and my family members naked or doing other NSFW things
> Garage door
Same as above, someone will hack it to open my garage
> Lights and other devices:
Increases the surface area massively for getting hacked.
> Washer/dryer (same as previous item)
Further, each one is a chance to be monitored by 3rd parties and/or charged a subscription.
Your choice. I'm an IT consultant and I try to run my home IT to the same standards as at work.
I keep my IoT devices on a separate VLAN or two. I use Home Assistant as a mediator and I absolutely refuse the likes of Alexa. I'm pretty sure that my Kitchen telly is listening and it is surely loving Morecambe and Wise show's audio on an endless loop and quite quiet.
A cloud-connected, vendor-locked smart home is not such a smart move, to my mind, though.
A LAN of things, with a VPN to my phone and laptop is something I'm considering. An always-on third-party listening device, like Echo, I would never consider.
My assumption, informed by a few anecdotes of people I know - people want to feel like they're living with modern amenities, or like they're in the future (Star Trek people talking to their computers, for example), and this is obviously aided by marketing.
Remember when Apple referenced Dick Tracy when introducing the Apple Watch (or a subsequent model?), and how they had always wanted to have the same cool device? I suspect that this is a huge part of what drives the "smart" home.
Each breaker would know the current going through it and through all sockets and bulbs. They will be able to detect the bad connection, shut off the current and report the problem, saving a lot of electric fire.
The wiring of the house will be massively reduced as they will be no need to go from switch to light. All lighting will be connected all the time, the switch will be wireless, will be just a faceplate that you stick where you want them. You will assign the switch to the light that you want, they will adjust with the time of day, etc.
Some of the heavy energy use appliances will do peak shaving to reduce the cost of the electricity bill (already in place in some areas)
Even peak shaving can be done by simply checking the AC supply voltage. If it's starting to sag, ease off some of the heavier appliances. If it's higher than expected, now's a good time to burn some extra power.
You can decide to mount in "box #1" a switch and (say) a socket, then you configure the switch in "box#1" to command light bulb #23 and the socket to be either always on or commanded by switch #18, etc..
What you are proposing is essentially removing the two wire cable to go wireless.
You need anyway the three mains cables (live+neutral+earth) to get everywhere and passing in the same pipe/tube the additional two wires cable is "no cost".
NO practical advantages, but a whole new possible sets of malfunctioning and/or vulnerabilities.
Apart from the added (and not-so-trivial) added cost of a "bus" system as compared to a traditional electric cabling(not that your dream solutions will be any cheaper), the existing solutions work, and work reliably, because by now they have existed and have been tested for many years, let's introduce a new wireless protocol and brand new microprocessors/terminal devices that offer no advantage...
You don't need the internet, nowadays the equivalent would most probably be something like :
https://www.ezyswitch.co.nz/
Or a tad bit more risky, you could email it.
We're currently binge watching Ted Lasso, and that scene really stung and stuck with me. I am someone who is often judgmental and contrarian, exacerbated by the Internet and many things in our society being not enjoyable, and it has masked the underlying humanity of curiosity that lies inside. It's hard, but focusing on what I can do to learn more about something and actually do things rather than critiquing some existing thing is a process I'm trying to implement. While being a critic is valid, too much of anything is not a good thing.
Deleted Comment
I've been attempting to train myself to be more open minded. For example, I have been skeptical of functional programming because my assumption was that it was an academic thing for those that didn't have to live in the real world of state and mutability. I thought it had to be less efficient.
Some investigation proved me wrong. Russ Olsen set me straight:
Functional Programming in 40 Minutes • Russ Olsen • GOTO 2018
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0if71HOyVjY
We don't have to copy a million element immutable array to change one element. We copy a section of it and keep the rest in a tree structure of changes (this happens under the covers). Secondly, manipulating the stateful world is easier to understand if we isolate those actions in Atoms and Actors.
Now I see the beauty of it so I'm glad I investigated.
The key idea of functional programming is that it’s easier to think of program as a composition of functions rather than as a list of statements and therefore functions should be first class values. That used to be controversial but frankly the idea won. We have seen lambdas go mainstream in most major languages and programming is more and more functional by the day.
The Curse of the Excluded Middle: "Mostly functional" programming does not work by Erik Meijer
https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2611829
I've got a couple of other ideas that I need to do more research on (I'm watching Erik Meijer videos today)
1) Class objects with methods and data are like small programs, so I don't get why people go on and on about having data structures with functions as being superior to class objects, which are essentially data structures with associated functions.
2) Similarly, Joe Armstrong seems to hate object oriented programming but Erlang instances are essentially class objects, albeit running in their own process so they have more isolation
3) From reading Erik Meijer's Confessions of a Used Programming Language Salesman, I'm assuming that Async/Await that he help put in C# and Dart are his attempt to bring Haskell continuation monads to the imperative world
4) I'm assuming Clojure Atoms and Actors are like Haskell monads but don't know that. I watched Brian Beckman: Don't fear the Monad (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhuHCtR3xq8) but couldn't make heads or tails of it. Something about functions calling first order functions and pure first order effects with stateful second order effects, or something... That was a few years ago so I will give it another chance.
I'm probably wrong about these ideas but they're fun to think about and give me something to learn
Take for example, IKEA Tradfri: if you use their dimmers, you don't ever need to reset the lamps. You just hold the dimmer and it's reset button close to the lamp.
And if you use another system, you reset them by quickly switching them on and off six times. Takes under ten seconds. "It's complicated" is not a very good excuse for shitty design reaching end users.
It is hard for me to not be judgmental about stuff I disagree, and I can tell this attitude is causing more trouble than I would like in many different area of my life.
Instead of worrying about "curious" vs "judgmental", I would instead ask: Who am I helping with this statement?
The author is attempting to help people be more helpful to other people. Clearly you heard them, and it has inspired you to be a better person. Unfortunately, they didn't provide you actionable advice. I'm hoping my suggestion above is better for people.
I use it myself sometimes when responding online. When I first started asking it (or things like it, focusing on the wellbeing of others), I deleted a lot of comments. They simply weren't actually helpful overall.
Another way to look at it: "Am I going to ruin someone's mood with this?" If you are, can you provide the information in a way that doesn't, or at least softens the blow, if they really need to hear it?
I don't enjoy making people unhappy, so it wasn't hard to start concentrating on that first instead of last, and improving all the help I was trying to give. I'm sure I have a long way to go, but I feel like I do better than I used to.
Could be anything from an actual good reason to do it this way, or some other factors like cost, or maybe even just lack of time, or the best of multiple bad options.
Postpone judgement until you have a good understanding. You could still come to the same conclusion but it will likely be much more nuanced.
Basically empathize with whoever build it or was involved.
Also design/build stuff yourself, do user testing and get feedback; it’s humbling haha.
I get annoyed when other younger/new hires come in and just start bashing and saying how stupid this is that is/was and that the person that did it was dumb or an idiot or incompetent without them first learning the history, context, and environment the decision(s) were made in. And they're typically not wrong. If the decision(s) were made today, I typically agree 100% with them.
[0] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Chesterton%27s_fence#:~:tex....
It's not only an excellent discussion/lesson on exactly this, it's also an incredibly well written book.
They first is Difficult Conversations, largely about nonviolent communication, which provides a structured template for “learning conversations”. The relevant advice was: when you feel a strong feeling of disagreement, you tell the other person instead of bottling it up, which lets you ll then transition to a listening state. Like: “When I heard that my first instinct was to disagree because of X. At the same time I know you (insert reason like “have different life perspectives” or “are my friend and care about me”) so I would like to learn more.
The second is The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leaders, which offers a metaphor for the mental state between judgement and curiosity they call “the line”. Being “above the line” is a state of curiosity, “below the line” is judgement and defensiveness. The book goes into physiological reasons, the advice they give is to develop strong awareness of your emotions to detect when you go below the line, then use breathing exercises to quickly resurface. They also have other exercises for developing empathy for other points of view you can do on your own, like isolating narratives from facts and working through all possible narratives for a given situation (like “Tom thinks I am incompetent, I think Tom is incompetent, Tom thinks I am competent, I think Tom is competent”)
I’ve used both to some pretty good success so far, after receiving some feedback that I was not listening well.
I'm probably overthinking it. Last weeks I was working on designing an IIoT device (EV charging point) where the customer insists on using the outdated protocol, and not spend the money or time to bother with security. Hardware constraints will rule out there is a future in which this device will be secure (or maintainable). So when I read this:
> By being curious, not judgmental, we can start to understand these peculiar things around us. Only by understanding, we might even find a way to make them better.
It drives me up the wall. Almost impossible for me not to immediately judge and ridicule them, for sloppy thinking, but also for forgetting that a system/idea will only get better by stressing it. And it would be a shame if somebody destroyed their echo chambers, or took a dump in their "safe-space". Perhaps I'd understand the situation a bit better (have empathy) if the people being attacked and ridiculed were unpaid tinkerers or engineers (e.g. FOSS). But a big company like GE? And especially a topic like IoT - I don't think so.
I’m torn because I think there are genuine cases where I do have more information, but I don’t want to become an argumentative person, and logically if offered a 1% choice to possibly learn something new, it would be more beneficial to learn than to not.
I was thinking next time I could try to guess their assumptions and reasoning and they can fill me in on the difference. Then point out and see if they accounted for any extra information I had.
My heuristic is:
Is the subject matter important?
If yes, is the cost of being wrong high?
If yes, am I displaying any signs of cognitive bias? (Consult the cognitive bias codex)
If yes, how do I mitigate the bias?
Once done, has my outlook changed?
What action should I take?
Then follow up with a question.
And repeat this without offering any opinions.
Just practice that.
The only way you can not be judgmental is by being dead or unconscious. Living is about making judgments about everything, all the time (and most of them become habits at some point).
(Because in improv, if you object to something, you can just stop the show.)
It works really well in a professional setting, too. Try it!
But also finding people who can engage with those they disagree with without resorting to mean behavior and listening to them is probably a good tactic. One person I can think of is Beau of the Fifth Column on YouTube who basically explains a left leaning political position to conservatives and centrists in short videos every day. He’s totally non judgmental and I have found it useful to just listen to the way he describes things. He explains topics that are often divisive without any condescension, which I think is a rare trait in political discussion.
EDIT: Forgot to include the obvious, but therapy. I had all manner of rough edges and I’m still finding tricky situations that my therapist has been helping me with for years. Keep in mind that if you learn to become less judgmental you will have better relationships all around. Better friendships, work relationships and love. My career is much better today because I matured, in a large part through therapy, and can manage complex and difficult discussions with my business partner without upsetting anyone. These changes benefit you and those around you and lead to more harmony and happiness. And you deserve that!
https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3124-give-it-five-minutes
Nice to see this pop up here
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/be-curious-not-judgmental-...https://ace.nd.edu/news/be-curious-not-judgmental-not-walt-w...
It is also good to recognize that most everyone is doing the best they can, and if you ship a light with a weird way to reset it, there were probably (as the author suggests) constraints that you don't know about.
What if you're wrong and they wanted to inflict anguish on their users? Well, the market is pretty good about fixing those problems, at least with commodities like lights.
The problem with this idea is that consumer-unfriendly things can make more money for the manufacturers than consumer-friendly things--not because the consumers want to pay for them, but because it lets the companies make money in other ways (typically advertising, monetizing consumer data, or using consumer bandwidth) that are dangerous in ways that are hard for consumers to understand. The consumers will end up worse even by their own standards (they'll understand the dangers after they happen to them, they just won't understand them in advance or connect them to the poor design).
The market assumes perfect consumer knowledge. Most people here know the dangers of the Internet of Things, but the average person doesn't. And just HN geeks are not enough to support a market, so you only get to buy the same things that the average consumer can buy. (Go ahead, try to find a non-smart TV.)
There's an awesome (and odd) book, called "Outside Lies Magic,"[0] that explores many of these types of things in everyday life.
[0] https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/john-r-stilgoe/ou...
Sure, yes, empathize don’t judge, but also, let’s acknowledge the human tendencies as non-owners to DGAF - especially in this current age of the worker questioning everything.