29 ms·

The Brown M&M's Principle

81 points by EndXA 6y ago

nimbius 6y ago
fun anecdote: when I first apprenticed for heavy diesel repair there was a safety practice at the shop that was weird but never ignored: Always return swivel jacks to storage with the jack pin in hole 4. no exceptions. even though the stand was unloaded and not used, it seemed weird to be so specific but the rumor was youd get fired on the spot if you didnt do it. Eventually I asked an old timer whos name was on the training SOP. He smiled and told me, "people who cant be bothered to pay attention to the swivel jack pin when its safe, probably wont when its under load."
klodolph 6y ago
This principle is used in traditional auditing as well. Periodically pull up some randomly selected documents and ensure that they match the corresponding records. If you can’t find the documents or if they don’t match the records, you trigger an audit.
- danieldk 6y ago
  At one of my employers, we did this with backups. Every now and then one of the team was asked to claim to have accidentally removed some files, asking the sysadmins to recover them. This was a regular sanity check that to confirm that incremental backups were working.
  - klodolph 6y ago
    I was an engineer working on a storage system for backups. We encouraged our users to do restore tests, like randomly select a mailbox and restore it from backup into a test environment. The aphorism we used was “nobody needs a backup system, but everybody needs a restore system.”
  - goatinaboat 6y ago
    At one of my employers, we did this with backups. Every now and then one of the team was asked to claim to have accidentally removed some files, asking the sysadmins to recover them. This was a regular sanity check that to confirm that incremental backups were working. We have self-service backup restores for user files, so we get to spot check which users can be bothered to read the documentation on the wiki...
    - eschneider 6y ago
      Yeah, when I was an operator back in the 80s (9-track tape, FTW!) this was the policy. Every so often someone would request a file from last month/6 months ago/3 years ago, just to see if we could retrieve it.
- dwpdwpdwpdwpdwp 6y ago
  Also in psychological evaluations. A questionnaire may include items that people pretending to have some condition think they should answer a certain way, but would be untrue in (most) actual incidences of that condition.
  - gruez 6y ago
    This would be easily foiled by reading the wikipedia page of the condition beforehand, right?
    - HelloNurse 6y ago
      Such advanced cheating would require enough intelligence, mindfulness and self control, if not psychology competence, that it can be considered a proxy indicator that the subject is more or less OK.
      - DrewRWx 6y ago
        The real Catch-22.
      - metiscus 6y ago
        The problem would then be catching those cheaters.
  - jimmaswell 6y ago
    What are some examples?
    - derbOac 6y ago
      Depends on the domain but in general it relies on item responses that people in general tend to think are typical of some "condition" (in a broad sense of the term) but actually are not. This requires a lot of data collection usually. So, for example, items that people tend to think would be incorrectly responded to by people with dementia, but are actually easy for people with dementia to respond to. Or items that sound like they'd be endorsed by people with severe mental illness but are not. In more sophisticated implementations, it's not just responses to these types of items, but multivariate patterns of responses that are unusual that are flagged. So, for example, not getting items increasingly incorrect with increasing difficulty (i.e., getting easy items incorrect and hard items correct) might be flagged, just for one example. Specific examples are hard to list because (a) it would violate test copyright and/or other ethical issues, and (b) are sort of idiosyncratic and require actual data on the items. With cognitive testing for example, lots of times certain types of memory are intact in severe brain injury but people who are faking don't realize it.
amelius 6y ago
> The brown M&M’s principle is the idea that small details can sometimes serve as useful indicators of big issues. > This principle is named after a rock band (Van Halen), who had a “brown M&M’s clause” in their contracts with event organizers, stipulating that the organizers must provide M&M’s in the backstage area, but that there must be no brown M&M’s available. This small clause gave the band an easy way to check whether organizers actually paid attention to all the details in the contract, which was important given how complicated and potentially dangerous the band’s production was. Ok, but it also means that somebody touched all your M&Ms.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  > Ok, but it also means that somebody touched all your M&Ms. Did latex gloves not exist in the 80s? Actually, come to think of it, it's possible one could simply order pre-sorted M&Ms directly from the factory if one were buying in enough bulk.
  - janekm 6y ago
    You can now, not sure if that was available at the time (in the volume sensible for a green room): https://www.mms.com/en-us/shop/single-color https://www.mms.com/en-us/shop/single-color Amusingly the UK version does not offer brown ones.
  - MrZongle2 6y ago
    > Did latex gloves not exist in the 80s? Yes. As did plain old (but effective) soap and water!
- please-reread 6y ago
  Those are not for eating. For visual confirmation only.
  - jtbayly 6y ago
    It's possible to be in a room with M&Ms in a bowl and not eat them? TIL.
AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
It's strange to see the rehabilitation of the famous Van Halen rider. Until it was finally discovered in 2011[0], the phrase "no brown M&M's" was interpreted as an example of crazy demands from entitled rock stars. [0] http://web.archive.org/web/20200112124637/http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/crime/van-halens-legendary-mms-rider http://web.archive.org/web/20200112124637/http://www.thesmok...
- fullshark 6y ago
  It's unclear to me what is the truth. David Lee Roth's quotes here do little to indicate it was a professional way to ensure rider compliance, given he trashes the green room, and does the show anyway destroying the arena floor. If a venue failed the M&M test then the band did what exactly?
  - __s 6y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IxqdAgNJck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IxqdAgNJck Trashing the green room makes it something to write home about, so future hosts would be more careful about reading over the instructions
    - hef19898 6y ago
      Maybe not in the van Halen example, but such behaviour bears the risk of forcing the supplier to optimize for the "brown M&M" and ignore the rest. Especially if you don't check for all the other stuff as well.
      - abstrakraft 6y ago
        That's why you save the truth about the brown M&Ms for your autobiography.
    - superjan 6y ago
      That’s a useful addition. I was thinking it is kind of pointless to have this indicator that only tells you that something might be wrong when it is too late. The article does not address this aspect if I’m not mistaken.
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
I hate these tropes that exist somewhere in the "rules of thumb and vague proverbial advice that can be twisted to mean anything" space. Known metrics become targets. Unknown metrics destroy morale. At the end of the day there is no stupid proof easy rule of thumb shortcut that replaces the need for people to do their jobs properly.
- protomyth 6y ago
  Its not really a metric. Its a spot check of the known metric. Not much different then pulling some random invoices and deciding if you need to do a full audit.
  - airhead969 6y ago
    I agree. Defense-in-depth in terms of risk management. Use many strategies, in depth and breadth, holistically to manage vendors. There is no single magic action to make vendors do good work and be competent. It's lots of annoying managerial effort, but hopefully it's prevention and effort applied effectively. I think just showing up, having a look around, treating vendors as human, and being curious without annoying curious about what's going on goes a ways to show there's humans and not just nameless a corporation behind a project.
- airhead969 6y ago
  Trust but verify / you don't get what you expect but what you inspect. Random but easy to inspect riders in a contract helps signal if the other parties read the contract in its entirety rather than just set it aside. The basis for it was avoiding injuries from inattentive, incompetent, and/or negligent electricians and riggers in particular. It's merely one technique among many in a holistic strategy of risk management. It's not a Silver Bullet panacea and it doesn't work everywhere.
- vharuck 6y ago
  I've found "brown M&M" tests are good for telling me how much I need to investigate things. For example, let's say your job includes verifying data submitted by hundreds of hospitals. You don't have the time to do deep investigations for all of them, so you use a script to look for red flags (e.g., discharge date preceding admission date). If there are no red flags, you still quickly look over a small sample. If there are red flags, now you're going to spend a lot of time looking for any errors and their causes. And it's not just to save time. You're only human, so trying to be thorough with every submission will likely result in you getting sloppy because all those reviews of good submissions gives you a false sense of security.
bluesnowmonkey 6y ago
I do this in code occasionally. Leave in a mistake and see if the reviewer catches it. Now I know who pays attention and who rubber stamps my diffs. Sometimes you want one kind of review or the other.
- freeqaz 6y ago
  You have to A/B test this though because who knows when somebody is in crunch and doesn't have time! Also, from a teammate perspective, it might be worth pointing it out to the person. "I noticed a bug in the PR that I found later... want to show you why it could be a problem so we don't let it slip next time" Imo I usually just fire the PR off and message on Slack saying, "this one needs to ship ASAP, anything truly bjork'd here?" Or if it's going to be critical code, "The blast radius on this one is high. Give it a thorough scan please!" Communication is key :)
  - thebean11 6y ago
    > I noticed a bug in the PR that I found later... want to show you why it could be a problem so we don't let it slip next time I don't know, that seems kind of confrontational. If I got called out for missing a bug in a review I'd be annoyed
    - freeqaz 6y ago
      That's true, and it definitely can be! In my opinion, the best way to approach this situation is with "non-violent communication"[0] in mind. Don't make the conversation about "this is your fault, do better", instead make it about "I noticed a bug in my code that could have broken production and I think we can do better". It takes trust to pull off conversations like these without coming across as a prick. This type of empathy is particularly important when mentoring others because... People are always going to make mistakes. They create great opportunities to help somebody learn though. When I am being taught something, I learn much more quickly when somebody points to somewhere I failed versus explaining an "abstract" bad pattern. Maybe having the "abstract" idea first helps. It might make the "failure" easier to stomach later. For me though, those moments of stumbling always stuck as lessons I reflect back on the most. My attention to detail with code became a lot higher when I was on-call and prod broke at 4am because of a bug I let slip! 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication#Four_components https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication#Four_...
forgingahead 6y ago
I'm hiring for several positions right now (non-engineering). At the end of every job ad is a section titled *HOW TO APPLY*, in bold and with asterisks like that, with the simple instruction that the interested candidate needs to go to a linked Google Form to fill out some details. For us, this centralises all applications into one box that we can review, and also tests to see whether people actually read the job description. Around 10% of applicants actually fill out the form. It's not a tough form at all, but it's striking that so many platforms have made it easy to one-click-apply, that shotgunning job applications is very common now. So yes, fully agree that carefully reading a document is a key pre-requisite for a knowledge worker job.
- electrondood 6y ago
  To be fair, most online application processes are fairly broken. I'm sure everyone here knows what it's like to painstakingly enter your complete personal information and work history several times, when everything is clearly on the resume you've already uploaded. Or to have it entirely erased and need to enter it a fourth time because you accidentally went back to a previous page, etc. Often, if a job has a form that smells like this, I'll bypass for other options, as to me it indicates bureaucracy and institutional stupidity, which I don't want to deal with on the job. It's my brown M&Ms clause.
  - forgingahead 6y ago
    Yes, but you wouldn't click the "Apply" button on the actual job post (ie, LinkedIn or whatever) and NOT follow the instructions would you? The point was that if you're going to apply, follow the instructions in the job ad.
  - Symbiote 6y ago
    When I worked for a government agency, this system ensured no personal details made it through to the people assessing candidates. Name, age, sex, nationality etc were all removed. Sometimes other information gave the details away anyway. ("Westminster School for Boys, 1969")
- sumtechguy 6y ago
brundolf 6y ago
I remember seeing something like this on a test in grade school; if I recall correctly, there were instructions at the top under the "name" field to not write your name there, but write it on the back instead. Following those instructions would comprise some small portion of the total grade. In hindsight, I'm not sure what the point was of checking who was reading the instructions closely on a test...
- DrewRWx 6y ago
  Pretty good way of introducing the idea that the system can be capricious and cruel for no discernable benefit.
- jasperry 6y ago
  A lot of things in our society just wouldn't work without somebody paying attention to details. I'm not saying that's a good way to teach it, but it needs to be taught. Even among artists, the greatest are those who show not just inspiration but also meticulous craftsmanship.
arduinomancer 6y ago
A common example of this is surveys that have a question that reads “Select strongly disagree for this question” to weed out people randomly choosing answers.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  That seems like it will also weed out people who decide to have some personal fun with the stupid question while answering the others accurately.
croes 6y ago
Is "to avoid websites that have an outdated design, by treating the design as an indicator of unreliable content." a good example for the M&M principle? Seems more like an example for superficiality, where appearance counts more than content. Many people have been deceived this way.
dang 6y ago
If curious, past threads: Brown M&Ms, or Why No One Reads the Manual - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23985817 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23985817 - July 2020 (150 comments) The Truth About Van Halen and Those Brown M&Ms (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18643258 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18643258 - Dec 2018 (15 comments) Why Van Halen's tour contract had a "no brown M&M's" clause - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7754334 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7754334 - May 2014 (158 comments) Why Van Halen had brown M&Ms contractually removed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2839581 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2839581 - Aug 2011 (55 comments) Why Van Halen's contract calls for the removal of all brown M&Ms - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=743860 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=743860 - Aug 2009 (79 comments)
XargonEnder 6y ago
This guy's trying to get people to read a 53-page contract and here I am I'm just trying to get people to read a two sentence email

81 points by EndXA 6y ago

fun anecdote: when I first apprenticed for heavy diesel repair there was a safety practice at the shop that was weird but never ignored: Always return swivel jacks to storage with the jack pin in hole 4. no exceptions. even though the stand was unloaded and not used, it seemed weird to be so specific but the rumor was youd get fired on the spot if you didnt do it. Eventually I asked an old timer whos name was on the training SOP. He smiled and told me, "people who cant be bothered to pay attention to the swivel jack pin when its safe, probably wont when its under load."

klodolph 6y ago

This principle is used in traditional auditing as well. Periodically pull up some randomly selected documents and ensure that they match the corresponding records. If you can’t find the documents or if they don’t match the records, you trigger an audit.

danieldk 6y ago
At one of my employers, we did this with backups. Every now and then one of the team was asked to claim to have accidentally removed some files, asking the sysadmins to recover them. This was a regular sanity check that to confirm that incremental backups were working.
- klodolph 6y ago
  I was an engineer working on a storage system for backups. We encouraged our users to do restore tests, like randomly select a mailbox and restore it from backup into a test environment. The aphorism we used was “nobody needs a backup system, but everybody needs a restore system.”
- goatinaboat 6y ago
  At one of my employers, we did this with backups. Every now and then one of the team was asked to claim to have accidentally removed some files, asking the sysadmins to recover them. This was a regular sanity check that to confirm that incremental backups were working. We have self-service backup restores for user files, so we get to spot check which users can be bothered to read the documentation on the wiki...
  - eschneider 6y ago
    Yeah, when I was an operator back in the 80s (9-track tape, FTW!) this was the policy. Every so often someone would request a file from last month/6 months ago/3 years ago, just to see if we could retrieve it.
dwpdwpdwpdwpdwp 6y ago
Also in psychological evaluations. A questionnaire may include items that people pretending to have some condition think they should answer a certain way, but would be untrue in (most) actual incidences of that condition.
- gruez 6y ago
  This would be easily foiled by reading the wikipedia page of the condition beforehand, right?
  - HelloNurse 6y ago
    Such advanced cheating would require enough intelligence, mindfulness and self control, if not psychology competence, that it can be considered a proxy indicator that the subject is more or less OK.
    - DrewRWx 6y ago
      The real Catch-22.
    - metiscus 6y ago
      The problem would then be catching those cheaters.
- jimmaswell 6y ago
  What are some examples?
  - derbOac 6y ago
    Depends on the domain but in general it relies on item responses that people in general tend to think are typical of some "condition" (in a broad sense of the term) but actually are not. This requires a lot of data collection usually. So, for example, items that people tend to think would be incorrectly responded to by people with dementia, but are actually easy for people with dementia to respond to. Or items that sound like they'd be endorsed by people with severe mental illness but are not. In more sophisticated implementations, it's not just responses to these types of items, but multivariate patterns of responses that are unusual that are flagged. So, for example, not getting items increasingly incorrect with increasing difficulty (i.e., getting easy items incorrect and hard items correct) might be flagged, just for one example. Specific examples are hard to list because (a) it would violate test copyright and/or other ethical issues, and (b) are sort of idiosyncratic and require actual data on the items. With cognitive testing for example, lots of times certain types of memory are intact in severe brain injury but people who are faking don't realize it.

amelius 6y ago

> The brown M&M’s principle is the idea that small details can sometimes serve as useful indicators of big issues. > This principle is named after a rock band (Van Halen), who had a “brown M&M’s clause” in their contracts with event organizers, stipulating that the organizers must provide M&M’s in the backstage area, but that there must be no brown M&M’s available. This small clause gave the band an easy way to check whether organizers actually paid attention to all the details in the contract, which was important given how complicated and potentially dangerous the band’s production was. Ok, but it also means that somebody touched all your M&Ms.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
> Ok, but it also means that somebody touched all your M&Ms. Did latex gloves not exist in the 80s? Actually, come to think of it, it's possible one could simply order pre-sorted M&Ms directly from the factory if one were buying in enough bulk.
- janekm 6y ago
  You can now, not sure if that was available at the time (in the volume sensible for a green room): https://www.mms.com/en-us/shop/single-color https://www.mms.com/en-us/shop/single-color Amusingly the UK version does not offer brown ones.
- MrZongle2 6y ago
  > Did latex gloves not exist in the 80s? Yes. As did plain old (but effective) soap and water!
please-reread 6y ago
Those are not for eating. For visual confirmation only.
- jtbayly 6y ago
  It's possible to be in a room with M&Ms in a bowl and not eat them? TIL.

AdmiralAsshat 6y ago

It's strange to see the rehabilitation of the famous Van Halen rider. Until it was finally discovered in 2011[0], the phrase "no brown M&M's" was interpreted as an example of crazy demands from entitled rock stars. [0] http://web.archive.org/web/20200112124637/http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/crime/van-halens-legendary-mms-rider http://web.archive.org/web/20200112124637/http://www.thesmok...

fullshark 6y ago
It's unclear to me what is the truth. David Lee Roth's quotes here do little to indicate it was a professional way to ensure rider compliance, given he trashes the green room, and does the show anyway destroying the arena floor. If a venue failed the M&M test then the band did what exactly?
- __s 6y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IxqdAgNJck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IxqdAgNJck Trashing the green room makes it something to write home about, so future hosts would be more careful about reading over the instructions
  - hef19898 6y ago
    Maybe not in the van Halen example, but such behaviour bears the risk of forcing the supplier to optimize for the "brown M&M" and ignore the rest. Especially if you don't check for all the other stuff as well.
    - abstrakraft 6y ago
      That's why you save the truth about the brown M&Ms for your autobiography.
  - superjan 6y ago
    That’s a useful addition. I was thinking it is kind of pointless to have this indicator that only tells you that something might be wrong when it is too late. The article does not address this aspect if I’m not mistaken.

throwaway0a5e 6y ago

I hate these tropes that exist somewhere in the "rules of thumb and vague proverbial advice that can be twisted to mean anything" space. Known metrics become targets. Unknown metrics destroy morale. At the end of the day there is no stupid proof easy rule of thumb shortcut that replaces the need for people to do their jobs properly.

protomyth 6y ago
Its not really a metric. Its a spot check of the known metric. Not much different then pulling some random invoices and deciding if you need to do a full audit.
- airhead969 6y ago
  I agree. Defense-in-depth in terms of risk management. Use many strategies, in depth and breadth, holistically to manage vendors. There is no single magic action to make vendors do good work and be competent. It's lots of annoying managerial effort, but hopefully it's prevention and effort applied effectively. I think just showing up, having a look around, treating vendors as human, and being curious without annoying curious about what's going on goes a ways to show there's humans and not just nameless a corporation behind a project.
airhead969 6y ago
Trust but verify / you don't get what you expect but what you inspect. Random but easy to inspect riders in a contract helps signal if the other parties read the contract in its entirety rather than just set it aside. The basis for it was avoiding injuries from inattentive, incompetent, and/or negligent electricians and riggers in particular. It's merely one technique among many in a holistic strategy of risk management. It's not a Silver Bullet panacea and it doesn't work everywhere.
vharuck 6y ago
I've found "brown M&M" tests are good for telling me how much I need to investigate things. For example, let's say your job includes verifying data submitted by hundreds of hospitals. You don't have the time to do deep investigations for all of them, so you use a script to look for red flags (e.g., discharge date preceding admission date). If there are no red flags, you still quickly look over a small sample. If there are red flags, now you're going to spend a lot of time looking for any errors and their causes. And it's not just to save time. You're only human, so trying to be thorough with every submission will likely result in you getting sloppy because all those reviews of good submissions gives you a false sense of security.

bluesnowmonkey 6y ago

I do this in code occasionally. Leave in a mistake and see if the reviewer catches it. Now I know who pays attention and who rubber stamps my diffs. Sometimes you want one kind of review or the other.

freeqaz 6y ago
You have to A/B test this though because who knows when somebody is in crunch and doesn't have time! Also, from a teammate perspective, it might be worth pointing it out to the person. "I noticed a bug in the PR that I found later... want to show you why it could be a problem so we don't let it slip next time" Imo I usually just fire the PR off and message on Slack saying, "this one needs to ship ASAP, anything truly bjork'd here?" Or if it's going to be critical code, "The blast radius on this one is high. Give it a thorough scan please!" Communication is key :)
- thebean11 6y ago
  > I noticed a bug in the PR that I found later... want to show you why it could be a problem so we don't let it slip next time I don't know, that seems kind of confrontational. If I got called out for missing a bug in a review I'd be annoyed
  - freeqaz 6y ago
    That's true, and it definitely can be! In my opinion, the best way to approach this situation is with "non-violent communication"[0] in mind. Don't make the conversation about "this is your fault, do better", instead make it about "I noticed a bug in my code that could have broken production and I think we can do better". It takes trust to pull off conversations like these without coming across as a prick. This type of empathy is particularly important when mentoring others because... People are always going to make mistakes. They create great opportunities to help somebody learn though. When I am being taught something, I learn much more quickly when somebody points to somewhere I failed versus explaining an "abstract" bad pattern. Maybe having the "abstract" idea first helps. It might make the "failure" easier to stomach later. For me though, those moments of stumbling always stuck as lessons I reflect back on the most. My attention to detail with code became a lot higher when I was on-call and prod broke at 4am because of a bug I let slip! 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication#Four_components https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication#Four_...

forgingahead 6y ago

I'm hiring for several positions right now (non-engineering). At the end of every job ad is a section titled *HOW TO APPLY*, in bold and with asterisks like that, with the simple instruction that the interested candidate needs to go to a linked Google Form to fill out some details. For us, this centralises all applications into one box that we can review, and also tests to see whether people actually read the job description. Around 10% of applicants actually fill out the form. It's not a tough form at all, but it's striking that so many platforms have made it easy to one-click-apply, that shotgunning job applications is very common now. So yes, fully agree that carefully reading a document is a key pre-requisite for a knowledge worker job.

electrondood 6y ago
To be fair, most online application processes are fairly broken. I'm sure everyone here knows what it's like to painstakingly enter your complete personal information and work history several times, when everything is clearly on the resume you've already uploaded. Or to have it entirely erased and need to enter it a fourth time because you accidentally went back to a previous page, etc. Often, if a job has a form that smells like this, I'll bypass for other options, as to me it indicates bureaucracy and institutional stupidity, which I don't want to deal with on the job. It's my brown M&Ms clause.
- forgingahead 6y ago
  Yes, but you wouldn't click the "Apply" button on the actual job post (ie, LinkedIn or whatever) and NOT follow the instructions would you? The point was that if you're going to apply, follow the instructions in the job ad.
- Symbiote 6y ago
  When I worked for a government agency, this system ensured no personal details made it through to the people assessing candidates. Name, age, sex, nationality etc were all removed. Sometimes other information gave the details away anyway. ("Westminster School for Boys, 1969")
sumtechguy 6y ago

brundolf 6y ago

I remember seeing something like this on a test in grade school; if I recall correctly, there were instructions at the top under the "name" field to not write your name there, but write it on the back instead. Following those instructions would comprise some small portion of the total grade. In hindsight, I'm not sure what the point was of checking who was reading the instructions closely on a test...

DrewRWx 6y ago
Pretty good way of introducing the idea that the system can be capricious and cruel for no discernable benefit.
jasperry 6y ago
A lot of things in our society just wouldn't work without somebody paying attention to details. I'm not saying that's a good way to teach it, but it needs to be taught. Even among artists, the greatest are those who show not just inspiration but also meticulous craftsmanship.

arduinomancer 6y ago

A common example of this is surveys that have a question that reads “Select strongly disagree for this question” to weed out people randomly choosing answers.

thaumasiotes 6y ago
That seems like it will also weed out people who decide to have some personal fun with the stupid question while answering the others accurately.

croes 6y ago

Is "to avoid websites that have an outdated design, by treating the design as an indicator of unreliable content." a good example for the M&M principle? Seems more like an example for superficiality, where appearance counts more than content. Many people have been deceived this way.

dang 6y ago

If curious, past threads: Brown M&Ms, or Why No One Reads the Manual - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23985817 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23985817 - July 2020 (150 comments) The Truth About Van Halen and Those Brown M&Ms (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18643258 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18643258 - Dec 2018 (15 comments) Why Van Halen's tour contract had a "no brown M&M's" clause - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7754334 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7754334 - May 2014 (158 comments) Why Van Halen had brown M&Ms contractually removed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2839581 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2839581 - Aug 2011 (55 comments) Why Van Halen's contract calls for the removal of all brown M&Ms - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=743860 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=743860 - Aug 2009 (79 comments)

XargonEnder 6y ago

This guy's trying to get people to read a 53-page contract and here I am I'm just trying to get people to read a two sentence email