> Houdini’s fondness for reading extended to magazines, too: after his famous escape from inside a locked safe behind a screen, which took mere seconds, he spen

> Houdini’s fondness for reading extended to magazines, too: after his famous escape from inside a locked safe behind a screen, which took mere seconds, he spent the next fifteen minutes back stage, idly reading a magazine, after which he dotted himself with water and burst forth, looking properly sweaty and exhausted TurboTax famously does this. It has a few loading screens where it slowly ‘calculates your best return’. It happens instantly, of course, but they spend about 10 seconds showing you loading bars so you think that whatever it’s doing is difficult. I’m a big fan of magic, and the main thing to take away from magic is this — none of us perceive ‘reality’. Our minds create a simulation of the world based on very limited and error prone input. And if you can carefully control the sensory input if your spectators, you can control their reality. The moment of the magic trick is often when the false reality you’ve created collapses — you’ve made them believe that you put a card in the middle of the deck, or that you’ve shuffled it, or that they had a free choice — and then you present them with incontrovertible evidence that they had not. That moment of inconsistency is what causes the perception of magic to happen — their mind moves the card from the center of the deck to the top in an instant in their internal reality, which is the only reality they’ve ever existed in. So I guess when you’re designing software, don’t just think about how your software works, but also think carefully about the model of reality that your users are building. If you manipulate it carefully, you can seem to perform miracles. Game designers, btw, I think already understand this — games are full of hacks and cheats that make you think there’s a whole world or a mind behind what’s happening to your character, when it’s often quite simple behind the scenes — magician’s choices in particular are quite popular in games — where you’re presented with seemingly several options which all produce the same outcome.