15 ms·

Be curious, not judgmental

257 points by shbhrsaha 5y ago

lysecret 5y ago
I like this way of putting it. For me I have seen it more as being understanding compared to judgmental. But I understand how you would put it as curious ;)
alfor 5y ago
That has to be the funniest serious video The absurdity of our modern high tech lives in 2min It’s not anyone's fault, it’s an emergent property.
- dqv 5y ago
  By the third time I was saying IT’S ENOUGH SLICES [0]. In all seriousness, it’s fine if that is the reset procedure, but I think they should provide some kind of reset socket tool where you can screw in the bulb and it will run the procedure for you. This way, it’s always possible to do it manually, but also can be done more easily with the reset socket. It should be an inexpensive tool of course. [0]: https://www.tiktok.com/@theneedletok/video/6956034610174151941 https://www.tiktok.com/@theneedletok/video/69560346101741519...
CraftingLinks 5y ago
Excuses...
grover35 5y ago
nthngtshr 5y ago
Yeah, but how are you going to get likes on those tweets?
mmaunder 5y ago
“…unless you’re me.”
- jmath 5y ago
  y’all got it twisted
sgallant 5y ago
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 :)
- nuclearnice1 5y ago
  I believe it's misattributed. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/be-curious-not-judgmental-walt-whitman/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/be-curious-not-judgmental-... https://ace.nd.edu/news/be-curious-not-judgmental-not-walt-whitman https://ace.nd.edu/news/be-curious-not-judgmental-not-walt-w...
mooreds 5y ago
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.
- Jiro 5y ago
  >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.)
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  > 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. 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/outside-lies-magic/ https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/john-r-stilgoe/ou...
photochemsyn 5y ago
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.
- nine_k 5y ago
  Smart home is a useful thing. 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.
- gerdesj 5y ago
  "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.
  - oriolid 5y ago
    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.
    - jkepler 5y ago
      We're totally happy with a Christmas tree timer, and see no need to let the world know when our tree lights are on or off.
chrismckleroy 5y ago
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.
- omosubi 5y ago
  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.
lejohnq 5y ago
This reminded me of a clip from Ted Lasso with the same quote: https://youtu.be/5x0PzUoJS-U https://youtu.be/5x0PzUoJS-U Nice to see this pop up here
aaron695 5y ago
> Why not add a factory reset button? If you don't say dumb things in life out loud, you won't move forward. You'll just continue to think dumb things. > I’m saying that we don’t know enough about the constraints to say there’s a better solution. This is pride in ignorance. There's no reason why you can't. Light bulb engineers, rocket scientists and doctors are just human beings. OK I'm curious. Why was it like that? If you don't judge it how can you understand it? What framework should be used? Don't be judgemental without being curious, I think is a better line.
dvt 5y ago
This article, the Twitter critics, and the overall lesson learned reminds me of this quote, one of my favorites: "It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." - Theodore Roosevelt
- trabant00 5y ago
  I like this quote and have used myself several times. The devil is in the details though. "who spends himself in a worthy cause". IoT is far from a worthy cause, it's a desperate attempt to sell more stuff. Or let me go to the internet's favorite argument: Hitler also did deeds and could have certainly done them better. Are we not allowed to be judgemental?
  - zachlatta 5y ago
    I love how I can have lots of floor lighting that’s easily controlled with IoT bulbs and power switches. It solves a real problem for me, and I think many others too!
  - BoysenberryPi 5y ago
    > Are we not allowed to be judgemental? I am far from innocent here but I'm gonna say no. You are saying IoT is far from a worthy cause. Really? Is it not worthy that my aging grandparents can open the door from their bed and not have to go downstairs, turn on their lights in the dead of night from their phone so they don't have to risk stumbling and falling when reaching for the light switch, or even just more accurate track their health? I think those are all pretty worthy causes.
ricardobeat 5y ago
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.
- omosubi 5y ago
  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.
DantesKite 5y ago
I liked how they picked the worst possible example to illustrate their point lol.
ketzo 5y ago
I'm taking a little of my holiday break to try and apply this to cryptocurrencies and blockchain stuff. Horrible, terrible, tragic, I know. But if I feel like I'm going to be ridiculing this stuff on a fairly regular basis, then I should at least know what the fuck I'm talking about, right? I mean, what number of HN commenters who dismiss crypto out of hand have literally never made an effort to be curious about the guts of it all? Probably a pretty sizeable majority, if I had to guess – myself included.
- psyc 5y ago
  I think I have a general policy of withholding judgement until I've researched a thing, with as little prejudice as I can manage. But if I spend a lot of time researching a thing, and still reach the conclusion that it's stupid, and everybody buying it is stupid, then woe unto that thing (in internet comment threads).
  - ketzo 5y ago
    Yeah, I'm with you. I just feel like a lot of my "research" so far – crypto-wise – has mostly just been people talking about it, instead of me making an actual effort to understand any of it myself. So now I gotta go do that.
    - Ensorceled 5y ago
      The technology is actually not that hard to understand, at least at a high level, it's getting through the "people talking about it" down to what is actually being done with the technology and why it needs to be a "distributed ledger". Often it doesn't and understanding that disconnect seems to often be the hard part.
- Ensorceled 5y ago
  > I mean, what number of HN commenters who dismiss crypto out of hand have literally never made an effort to be curious about the guts of it all? I think most people on HN don't dismiss the "guts of it". I don't think blockchain is technically deficient, though proof of work is an ecological disaster, and I don't think most other people do either. But it seems to be a technology in search of a problem; the problems blockchain/crypto answer are often things like enabling Ponzi schemes, money laundering, ransomware and, rarely, currency in despotic regimes. Whenever we ask crypto supporters WHY blockchain?, WHY NFTs?, WHY so many ICOs?, isn't this a ponzi scheme?, the answer is some form of "you don't understand" or "good luck, stay poor".
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
selfhifive 5y ago
But the whole point of curiosity is to find out more about something in order to form a judgement. We just need to be willing to change judgements when shown the constraints. In a way, asking people to be non judgemental kills curiosity. I'd quote Marc Andreessen: "Strong opinions; weakly held."
- trabant00 5y ago
chaostheory 5y ago
> “we can’t put it on the glass” LED lightbulbs are typically housed in plastic. You easily integrate a plastic button into plastic housing.
gigglesupstairs 5y ago
Anecdotal but Yeelight smart bulbs in my home require 5 turn offs and ons to reset with 2 sec pauses after every press. I reckon the GE bulbs don't actually require 8 sec pauses and it's just suggested to ensure users cross a certain threshold at all times when they are really trying to reset.
deft 5y ago
Not directly about a lightbulb, but I've learned that when you see something and think "why is it this way, that's stupid" its usually not. People don't make things "stupid" for no reason.
- dexterdog 5y ago
  Somebody hasn't seen the yoke.
borski 5y ago
Sure, but this isn’t such a unique problem. Hue handles all of these reset scenarios with much more grace, as an example: https://www.trustedreviews.com/how-to/how-to-reset-philips-hue-bulbs-with-and-without-a-bridge-4145209 https://www.trustedreviews.com/how-to/how-to-reset-philips-h...
mfav 5y ago
Plus, the QA team probably felt this a lot more then end users, testing this reset procedure thousands of times. The product team had probably received this feedback long before the Internet spoke. And, ultimately, found a 40-second factory reset procedure is not that big of a deal. Totally agree with this sentiment. It's easy to criticize on the Internet and receive positive feedback for that. But, constructive replies are often the most clever & interesting ones. Great post, Shu!
kstenerud 5y ago
What would be cool, although it would take enormous coordination and negotiation effort to do, would be to develop a universal reset code for lightbulbs. One idea would be to use the morse code encoding for "RRR", or ".-. .-. .-." (has a nice, memorable beat to it) with a minimum and maximum frequency such that it could be input at human or machine speed (say an allowed period between 50-500ms and a tolerance of 20% variation while inputting). Once you have a standardized way to encode "reset" using on-off (which is all we have available given the legacy system we use), the next-gen lamps and light switch panels could just incorporate this into a built-in reset switch that sends the full reset signal to any bulb that happens to be plugged in.
ozy 5y ago
FYI: Little kids unpair ikea lamps with ease if there is still a physical switch.
cupcake-unicorn 5y ago
While I agree with the general sentiment when it comes to individual interactions, I think it's kind of naive to put this much trust into corporations in a capitalist system. Should we have been curious about the development of MCAS at Boeing? Or the Volkswagen emissions scandal? And it's very common that have companies that have actuaries that spend money determining the amount of money they'd have to pay out in lawsuits for lethal design flaws in their products vs recalls. The point is that big companies have such vastly, mindbogglingly different systems behind them, so yes that much is true, that most likely there was a "reason" it was done this way, like there was a "reason" the Volkswagen emission scandal happened and the departments were mixed up in such a way so no one could point to any one person. But that reason sure isn't about the customers, it's about their corporation. By all means though, curiosity is great to cultivate in INDIVIDUAL interactions where it's a human interaction and not motivated by profit/transactional. Why give companies this benefit of the doubt? In my opinion the onus should be on them to prove to consumers that they're not just profit based and that they care about customer service and transparency.
- wintermutestwin 5y ago
  Good question. Should we apply this axiom (and resulting benefit of the doubt) to power structures / organizations? One way to look at it is: which approach is more likely to lead to a better understanding of the problem and thus the solutions? If we are curious, we can ask questions like: what are the root cause incentive structures that led to anti-social actions? and: What systematic adjustments can we make that disincentivize such actions in the future? I think that these questions lead to a more broad perspective on how to address problems. Where a judgemental approach narrows the possible solutions and opens us up to the cure being more deadly than the disease.
  - cupcake-unicorn 5y ago
    It's a tough issue, for sure, because the playing field is just so unequal. To even be able to approach these issues in a more equal way you'd probably have to start a lawsuit and go through a process of discovery because the corporation is bound by all these bizarre legal, financial, and political motives that don't apply when people are interacting with each other. This leads to corporations responding to such requests in a way that's inherently against the interests of the public answering these questions. Without a system in place that further aligns and incentivizes companies interests with their users the only way you can really approach this in a more equal manner is something like a lawsuit. Many times the problem is incredibly complex and while some people, even C level people may be all for providing this transparency it breaks down at scale and the company is at the end of the day beholden to its own interests and perpetuating itself. I recently saw this video on YouTube about some of the shadiness going on with Roblox: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTMF6xEiAaY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTMF6xEiAaY The official answers they are giving is basically meaningless legalese and that's becoming more and more common. As I said before since Roblox isn't entering into this conversation in good faith the only way to force that conversation would be legal actions. Any kinds of laws further aligning the needs of clients/the general populace against the needs of big corporations/political elite have a really hard time passing because the system is self sustaining. We already understand this dynamic and we have been asking these questions for a long time but they keep getting pushed down and torn apart as "unrealistic". This is a good video about how hierarchical systems self select for people who play the game rather than people who stick to their morals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs And here's a video that shows just how undemocratic laws passing in the US is and self serving of corporate/elite interests: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tu32CCA_Ig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tu32CCA_Ig The issue here is a bigger one because it's going to self sustain and to make progress at this point you have to kind of just fight fire with fire (be part of the elite, own a big corp, or throw massive amounts of money at it) and getting involved with those systems can lead you on the path towards getting in a situation where you're betraying your own goals for entering them...
r3n 5y ago
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.
- petargyurov 5y ago
  I can strongly recommend the book "The Scout Mindset" by Julia Galef. It's not only an excellent discussion/lesson on exactly this, it's also an incredibly well written book.
- wccrawford 5y ago
  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.
  - wruza 5y ago
    Another deleter-a-lot is “Why do I need this fight?”.
    - Fnoord 5y ago
      With our toddlers we ask ourselves: 'is this the hill you want to die on?' It makes us less judgemental, more curious, more listening, and more self reflective. I believe that is also what 'please listen to what I have to say' means (tho its too often shortened to shouting 'Listen!' which works less well. But we all lack one important currency these days: time. Spending your time on someone is therefore an invaluable investment. Who other than your children deserve it more?
rgasiorek 5y ago
I think it's naive to think that we can stop being judgemental. It's like saying we can stop going to the loo or needing love. It is out nature and this is the nature of our neural-nets. Our neural-nets were trained, and then they 'classify' and 'trigger', the classification is the trigger which is the judgement. What we can do do is to be aware of the nature of our neural system, of the fact that as any other AI solution needs training data and is only as good as the data. As any other AI solution it can over-optimise or end up in a local optimum which makes us think so strongly about some subjects. Part of the video is spot - it's its title - yes being curious helps 'cleaning' the training data and helps having the trained data better balanced which in turn kicks your locally-optimised NN out of it's dip and allow to explore further. The most important part is to distinguish between being judgmental and acting upon judgment rather than reflecting on it first. This part is not naive -> we can and should control our actions, we do not control our thoughts as much as we like to think but we can choose how we react to them.
Jensson 5y ago
> Be curious, not judgmental Those two are not opposites. The opposite of curious is that you don't care. Most people don't care about things like the factory reset procedure for lamps. A judgemental person cares or they wouldn't spend energy judging, and in fact one of the best way to sate your curiosity is to be very judgemental online since people will write comments, blogs or articles like this and explain things to you when you do.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mwattsun 5y ago
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: Functional Programming in 40 Minutes • Russ Olsen • GOTO 2018 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0if71HOyVjY 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.
- WastingMyTime89 5y ago
  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.
  - mwattsun 5y ago
    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 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
Msw242 5y ago
Why can't the button be on the bulb? It's not vacuumed glass
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

257 points by shbhrsaha 5y ago

I like this way of putting it. For me I have seen it more as being understanding compared to judgmental. But I understand how you would put it as curious ;)

alfor 5y ago

That has to be the funniest serious video The absurdity of our modern high tech lives in 2min It’s not anyone's fault, it’s an emergent property.

dqv 5y ago
By the third time I was saying IT’S ENOUGH SLICES [0]. In all seriousness, it’s fine if that is the reset procedure, but I think they should provide some kind of reset socket tool where you can screw in the bulb and it will run the procedure for you. This way, it’s always possible to do it manually, but also can be done more easily with the reset socket. It should be an inexpensive tool of course. [0]: https://www.tiktok.com/@theneedletok/video/6956034610174151941 https://www.tiktok.com/@theneedletok/video/69560346101741519...

CraftingLinks 5y ago

Excuses...

grover35 5y ago

nthngtshr 5y ago

Yeah, but how are you going to get likes on those tweets?

mmaunder 5y ago

“…unless you’re me.”

jmath 5y ago
y’all got it twisted

sgallant 5y ago

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 :)

nuclearnice1 5y ago
I believe it's misattributed. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/be-curious-not-judgmental-walt-whitman/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/be-curious-not-judgmental-... https://ace.nd.edu/news/be-curious-not-judgmental-not-walt-whitman https://ace.nd.edu/news/be-curious-not-judgmental-not-walt-w...

mooreds 5y ago

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.

Jiro 5y ago
>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.)
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
> 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. 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/outside-lies-magic/ https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/john-r-stilgoe/ou...

photochemsyn 5y ago

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.

nine_k 5y ago
Smart home is a useful thing. 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.
gerdesj 5y ago
"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.
- oriolid 5y ago
  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.
  - jkepler 5y ago
    We're totally happy with a Christmas tree timer, and see no need to let the world know when our tree lights are on or off.

chrismckleroy 5y ago

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.

omosubi 5y ago
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.

lejohnq 5y ago

This reminded me of a clip from Ted Lasso with the same quote: https://youtu.be/5x0PzUoJS-U https://youtu.be/5x0PzUoJS-U Nice to see this pop up here

aaron695 5y ago

> Why not add a factory reset button? If you don't say dumb things in life out loud, you won't move forward. You'll just continue to think dumb things. > I’m saying that we don’t know enough about the constraints to say there’s a better solution. This is pride in ignorance. There's no reason why you can't. Light bulb engineers, rocket scientists and doctors are just human beings. OK I'm curious. Why was it like that? If you don't judge it how can you understand it? What framework should be used? Don't be judgemental without being curious, I think is a better line.

dvt 5y ago

This article, the Twitter critics, and the overall lesson learned reminds me of this quote, one of my favorites: "It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." - Theodore Roosevelt

trabant00 5y ago
I like this quote and have used myself several times. The devil is in the details though. "who spends himself in a worthy cause". IoT is far from a worthy cause, it's a desperate attempt to sell more stuff. Or let me go to the internet's favorite argument: Hitler also did deeds and could have certainly done them better. Are we not allowed to be judgemental?
- zachlatta 5y ago
  I love how I can have lots of floor lighting that’s easily controlled with IoT bulbs and power switches. It solves a real problem for me, and I think many others too!
- BoysenberryPi 5y ago
  > Are we not allowed to be judgemental? I am far from innocent here but I'm gonna say no. You are saying IoT is far from a worthy cause. Really? Is it not worthy that my aging grandparents can open the door from their bed and not have to go downstairs, turn on their lights in the dead of night from their phone so they don't have to risk stumbling and falling when reaching for the light switch, or even just more accurate track their health? I think those are all pretty worthy causes.

ricardobeat 5y ago

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.

omosubi 5y ago
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.

DantesKite 5y ago

I liked how they picked the worst possible example to illustrate their point lol.

ketzo 5y ago

I'm taking a little of my holiday break to try and apply this to cryptocurrencies and blockchain stuff. Horrible, terrible, tragic, I know. But if I feel like I'm going to be ridiculing this stuff on a fairly regular basis, then I should at least know what the fuck I'm talking about, right? I mean, what number of HN commenters who dismiss crypto out of hand have literally never made an effort to be curious about the guts of it all? Probably a pretty sizeable majority, if I had to guess – myself included.

psyc 5y ago
I think I have a general policy of withholding judgement until I've researched a thing, with as little prejudice as I can manage. But if I spend a lot of time researching a thing, and still reach the conclusion that it's stupid, and everybody buying it is stupid, then woe unto that thing (in internet comment threads).
- ketzo 5y ago
  Yeah, I'm with you. I just feel like a lot of my "research" so far – crypto-wise – has mostly just been people talking about it, instead of me making an actual effort to understand any of it myself. So now I gotta go do that.
  - Ensorceled 5y ago
    The technology is actually not that hard to understand, at least at a high level, it's getting through the "people talking about it" down to what is actually being done with the technology and why it needs to be a "distributed ledger". Often it doesn't and understanding that disconnect seems to often be the hard part.
Ensorceled 5y ago
> I mean, what number of HN commenters who dismiss crypto out of hand have literally never made an effort to be curious about the guts of it all? I think most people on HN don't dismiss the "guts of it". I don't think blockchain is technically deficient, though proof of work is an ecological disaster, and I don't think most other people do either. But it seems to be a technology in search of a problem; the problems blockchain/crypto answer are often things like enabling Ponzi schemes, money laundering, ransomware and, rarely, currency in despotic regimes. Whenever we ask crypto supporters WHY blockchain?, WHY NFTs?, WHY so many ICOs?, isn't this a ponzi scheme?, the answer is some form of "you don't understand" or "good luck, stay poor".

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selfhifive 5y ago

But the whole point of curiosity is to find out more about something in order to form a judgement. We just need to be willing to change judgements when shown the constraints. In a way, asking people to be non judgemental kills curiosity. I'd quote Marc Andreessen: "Strong opinions; weakly held."

trabant00 5y ago

chaostheory 5y ago

> “we can’t put it on the glass” LED lightbulbs are typically housed in plastic. You easily integrate a plastic button into plastic housing.

gigglesupstairs 5y ago

Anecdotal but Yeelight smart bulbs in my home require 5 turn offs and ons to reset with 2 sec pauses after every press. I reckon the GE bulbs don't actually require 8 sec pauses and it's just suggested to ensure users cross a certain threshold at all times when they are really trying to reset.

deft 5y ago

Not directly about a lightbulb, but I've learned that when you see something and think "why is it this way, that's stupid" its usually not. People don't make things "stupid" for no reason.

dexterdog 5y ago
Somebody hasn't seen the yoke.

borski 5y ago

Sure, but this isn’t such a unique problem. Hue handles all of these reset scenarios with much more grace, as an example: https://www.trustedreviews.com/how-to/how-to-reset-philips-hue-bulbs-with-and-without-a-bridge-4145209 https://www.trustedreviews.com/how-to/how-to-reset-philips-h...

mfav 5y ago

Plus, the QA team probably felt this a lot more then end users, testing this reset procedure thousands of times. The product team had probably received this feedback long before the Internet spoke. And, ultimately, found a 40-second factory reset procedure is not that big of a deal. Totally agree with this sentiment. It's easy to criticize on the Internet and receive positive feedback for that. But, constructive replies are often the most clever & interesting ones. Great post, Shu!

kstenerud 5y ago

What would be cool, although it would take enormous coordination and negotiation effort to do, would be to develop a universal reset code for lightbulbs. One idea would be to use the morse code encoding for "RRR", or ".-. .-. .-." (has a nice, memorable beat to it) with a minimum and maximum frequency such that it could be input at human or machine speed (say an allowed period between 50-500ms and a tolerance of 20% variation while inputting). Once you have a standardized way to encode "reset" using on-off (which is all we have available given the legacy system we use), the next-gen lamps and light switch panels could just incorporate this into a built-in reset switch that sends the full reset signal to any bulb that happens to be plugged in.

ozy 5y ago

FYI: Little kids unpair ikea lamps with ease if there is still a physical switch.

cupcake-unicorn 5y ago

While I agree with the general sentiment when it comes to individual interactions, I think it's kind of naive to put this much trust into corporations in a capitalist system. Should we have been curious about the development of MCAS at Boeing? Or the Volkswagen emissions scandal? And it's very common that have companies that have actuaries that spend money determining the amount of money they'd have to pay out in lawsuits for lethal design flaws in their products vs recalls. The point is that big companies have such vastly, mindbogglingly different systems behind them, so yes that much is true, that most likely there was a "reason" it was done this way, like there was a "reason" the Volkswagen emission scandal happened and the departments were mixed up in such a way so no one could point to any one person. But that reason sure isn't about the customers, it's about their corporation. By all means though, curiosity is great to cultivate in INDIVIDUAL interactions where it's a human interaction and not motivated by profit/transactional. Why give companies this benefit of the doubt? In my opinion the onus should be on them to prove to consumers that they're not just profit based and that they care about customer service and transparency.

wintermutestwin 5y ago
Good question. Should we apply this axiom (and resulting benefit of the doubt) to power structures / organizations? One way to look at it is: which approach is more likely to lead to a better understanding of the problem and thus the solutions? If we are curious, we can ask questions like: what are the root cause incentive structures that led to anti-social actions? and: What systematic adjustments can we make that disincentivize such actions in the future? I think that these questions lead to a more broad perspective on how to address problems. Where a judgemental approach narrows the possible solutions and opens us up to the cure being more deadly than the disease.
- cupcake-unicorn 5y ago
  It's a tough issue, for sure, because the playing field is just so unequal. To even be able to approach these issues in a more equal way you'd probably have to start a lawsuit and go through a process of discovery because the corporation is bound by all these bizarre legal, financial, and political motives that don't apply when people are interacting with each other. This leads to corporations responding to such requests in a way that's inherently against the interests of the public answering these questions. Without a system in place that further aligns and incentivizes companies interests with their users the only way you can really approach this in a more equal manner is something like a lawsuit. Many times the problem is incredibly complex and while some people, even C level people may be all for providing this transparency it breaks down at scale and the company is at the end of the day beholden to its own interests and perpetuating itself. I recently saw this video on YouTube about some of the shadiness going on with Roblox: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTMF6xEiAaY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTMF6xEiAaY The official answers they are giving is basically meaningless legalese and that's becoming more and more common. As I said before since Roblox isn't entering into this conversation in good faith the only way to force that conversation would be legal actions. Any kinds of laws further aligning the needs of clients/the general populace against the needs of big corporations/political elite have a really hard time passing because the system is self sustaining. We already understand this dynamic and we have been asking these questions for a long time but they keep getting pushed down and torn apart as "unrealistic". This is a good video about how hierarchical systems self select for people who play the game rather than people who stick to their morals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs And here's a video that shows just how undemocratic laws passing in the US is and self serving of corporate/elite interests: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tu32CCA_Ig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tu32CCA_Ig The issue here is a bigger one because it's going to self sustain and to make progress at this point you have to kind of just fight fire with fire (be part of the elite, own a big corp, or throw massive amounts of money at it) and getting involved with those systems can lead you on the path towards getting in a situation where you're betraying your own goals for entering them...

r3n 5y ago

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.

petargyurov 5y ago
I can strongly recommend the book "The Scout Mindset" by Julia Galef. It's not only an excellent discussion/lesson on exactly this, it's also an incredibly well written book.
wccrawford 5y ago
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.
- wruza 5y ago
  Another deleter-a-lot is “Why do I need this fight?”.
  - Fnoord 5y ago
    With our toddlers we ask ourselves: 'is this the hill you want to die on?' It makes us less judgemental, more curious, more listening, and more self reflective. I believe that is also what 'please listen to what I have to say' means (tho its too often shortened to shouting 'Listen!' which works less well. But we all lack one important currency these days: time. Spending your time on someone is therefore an invaluable investment. Who other than your children deserve it more?

rgasiorek 5y ago

I think it's naive to think that we can stop being judgemental. It's like saying we can stop going to the loo or needing love. It is out nature and this is the nature of our neural-nets. Our neural-nets were trained, and then they 'classify' and 'trigger', the classification is the trigger which is the judgement. What we can do do is to be aware of the nature of our neural system, of the fact that as any other AI solution needs training data and is only as good as the data. As any other AI solution it can over-optimise or end up in a local optimum which makes us think so strongly about some subjects. Part of the video is spot - it's its title - yes being curious helps 'cleaning' the training data and helps having the trained data better balanced which in turn kicks your locally-optimised NN out of it's dip and allow to explore further. The most important part is to distinguish between being judgmental and acting upon judgment rather than reflecting on it first. This part is not naive -> we can and should control our actions, we do not control our thoughts as much as we like to think but we can choose how we react to them.

Jensson 5y ago

> Be curious, not judgmental Those two are not opposites. The opposite of curious is that you don't care. Most people don't care about things like the factory reset procedure for lamps. A judgemental person cares or they wouldn't spend energy judging, and in fact one of the best way to sate your curiosity is to be very judgemental online since people will write comments, blogs or articles like this and explain things to you when you do.

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mwattsun 5y ago

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: Functional Programming in 40 Minutes • Russ Olsen • GOTO 2018 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0if71HOyVjY 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.

WastingMyTime89 5y ago
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.
- mwattsun 5y ago
  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 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

Msw242 5y ago

Why can't the button be on the bulb? It's not vacuumed glass

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