Translating to modern technology, Nolan would express surprise that his irrational users that preferred web pages that displayed text before downloading media,

Translating to modern technology, Nolan would express surprise that his irrational users that preferred web pages that displayed text before downloading media, or displayed above-the-fold content before rendering the rest, or liked being able to see welcome message instead of a full-screen loading animation at game startup, because the less-user-friendly version has the optimal "reality" of taking less time to finish an return to idle. The lessons Nolan got tanalizingly close to discovering were that overall user experience matters more than whatever metric is easiest to measure mechanically, and that sometimes empirical data can disprove a theory. (Ironically, this second lesson was part of the message of Tog's article.).