11 ms·

While not nearly as important, the idea that authors are real makes me immediately relate to my own experience that customers don't seem to understand that soft

by sosuke 15y ago

While not nearly as important, the idea that authors are real makes me immediately relate to my own experience that customers don't seem to understand that software is made by real people too. People with feelings, who are fallible. Several comments on blogs or reviews on the app store show to me that people don't feel they are being insulting or rude if they aren't facing the person they criticize. The more I wrote this comment the more I started to seem the Internet as a whole falling victim to anonymous words that cut deep. We've had to develop unnaturally thick skin.

Spearchucker 15y ago
This is an unfortunate but real human trait. There's a book that describes the effect in war. The basic premise is that it's easier to kill people by dropping a bomb on them from an airplane than it is to shoot them with a rifle on the battlefield. It's because in the latter you see your victim. And immediately relate to that victim [edit: 1]. Which makes shooting him or her exceedingly difficult. It's an interesting parallel. The book is called On Killing, by US Lt. Col. Dave Grossman. [1] Unless the shooter is psychotic.
- DanBC 15y ago
  > Unless the shooter is psychotic. Nitpick: You mean "psychopathic", not "psychotic". People with a psychotic illness are more likely to be victims of violence than the perpetrators of violence, and are much more likely to harm themselves than to harm another person.
  - stan_rogers 15y ago
    "Psychotic" also works here, but for a different reason. While a psychopath may be able to perceive, but unable to empathize with, a person, someone in the depths of psychotic delusion may be unable to perceive a fellow human being. It is perhaps not nearly as common "in the wild", but it does occur (the killing of Tim McLean by Vince Weiguang Li being the example that comes most easily to mind). In fact, generating a sort of "target psychosis" has been the aim of most modern infantry training for some time, since teaching people to see, recognize and react to targets is an awful lot easier than training them to kill humans, even under severe threat. (Human-shaped targets were introduced to training after it was discovered that most infanteers never actually fired an aimed shot at an opponent in either of the World Wars.) Similarly, you can sniff war on the horizon when the machinery used to dehumanize the enemy is started up.
    - patrickk 15y ago
      An article about the reasons infantry fire or not: http://www.historynet.com/men-against-fire-how-many-soldiers-actually-fired-their-weapons-at-the-enemy-during-the-vietnam-war.htm http://www.historynet.com/men-against-fire-how-many-soldiers... I read somewhere (citation needed!) that the percentage of soldiers who deliberately fire their weapon at the enemy has increased from WWI to the Iraq conflict, which some put down to violence in movies and video games. After watching excellent Iraqi conflict documentaries like Restrepo and Armadillo (Danish movie) and seeing how soldiers react to conflict, there could be merit to that argument.
      - Spearchucker 15y ago
        You're right about the percentage increase. This is for two reasons - first, because most of the close-range shooting on the ground was done by special forces who're trainined to overcome that resistance. Second, because many of the deaths are from bombs - either shelling from ships at sea, or from aircraft and UAVs. Those last three remove the personal element, and that makes "pushing the button" really easy and guilt-free. We as humans who pride ourselves on empathy can be pretty savage :-(
        patrickk 15y ago
        I could be mis-remembering the article in question, but I think the percentage increase referred to soldiers who fired their weapon (e.g. assault rifle or sidearm) directly at an enemy they could see - meaning that we've become more desensitised to violence over time. I also recall that snipers are trained by shooting watermelons - the impact of a high velocity round on a watermelon is not too dissimilar to an impact on a human head. Snipers see the carnage in all its gory detail because of their magnified scope so it's necessary to desensitise them in training. Edit: slo-mo watermelon getting shot: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iO3XsZpOiBA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iO3XsZpOiBA
        derleth 15y ago
        > meaning that we've become more desensitised to violence over time. And yet the rate of violent crime continues to go down, bear-baiting and dogfights have gone from national pass-times to illegal aberrations, and dueling is pretty much extinct.
evincarofautumn 15y ago
It’s not anonymity, exactly, but (for want of a better term) noncorporeality. We all know plenty of people whose online personae are bold and crass, even though they write under their real name. In person, we’re wired to observe certain social niceties to fulfill, I don’t know, some innate sense of tribal duty. It’s a whole lot more difficult to shout at a man than at his words on a page. Bodilessness is dehumanising—for good and ill.
JangoSteve 15y ago
Even as a developer of software, I've at times found myself forgetting that software is written by real people. Just a few months ago, I bought an app from the Mac App Store. I became disenamored with the app due to a glaring fault. I regained consciousness about halfway through writing my negative review on the App Store (that'll be my excuse for getting as far as I did), with the thought, "Why don't I first email this guy and see if he'll fix it before writing this review?" So, I closed the review form and opened an email. Sure enough, he responded within the hour, and a new release came out the next week with my suggestion built in. My next email to him was explaining why he should raise the price of his app. He was a real person.
- gaius 15y ago
  I once had a cow-orker who thought software came from "the internet" - he literally could not fathom writing a program himself.
  - peacemaker 15y ago
    I can't understand this logic. Did he think the internet was some magical place that created all his games and apps and so on? How did he think about manufacturing then? Or artwork? Or movies? How does someone get so far in such a technology based society without knowing that there are people behind all these things?
    - LockeWatts 15y ago
      Has he ever seen anyone make a movie, or a program? Some people really are bad at looking at abstract layers.
    - johngunderman 15y ago
      In my experience there is a large class of people who lack basic curiosity about how things work. They are content to believe that things just "exist". I haven't done much research into this, but I would be interested in seeing if this is considered more an education problem, or if some people simply don't have the capacity for curiosity.
essayist 15y ago
David Foster Wallace's take on this was that my own reality is so overpoweringly real, that it's hard to see you (or anyone else) as real. everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness, because it's so socially repulsive.... Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.... The remedy he proposed: [Instead:] if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her little child in the checkout line - maybe she's not usually like this; maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of her husband who's dying of bone cancer, or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the Motor Vehicles Dept who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a nightmarish red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible - it just depends on what you want to consider. http://m.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/sep/20/fiction?cat=books&type=article http://m.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/sep/20/fiction?cat=books&... What works for me sometimes in dealing with customer-service folk is to ask them what they would do in my position.
- LesZedCB 15y ago
  It is amazing how much that kind of thinking can help. Especially since I have tried to adopt considering the persons situation before getting mad at them, when I see myself or others getting mad at somebody and accusing them of something, when they are in the (car|line) (next to|behind) us.., it makes me ashamed to realize 1) I'm being just as much, if not more of a jerk, and 2) maybe they aren't actually being a jerk at all...
- partisan 15y ago
  While I agree with your suggestion for dealing with Customer Service, I don't agree with Mr. Wallace's proposed remedy. Why should I have to imagine someone in a piteous position in order to be able to empathize with them? Can't we just accept people for who they are and empathize because they are just like us?
danso 15y ago
This is an interesting take that I had not expected to read when going to this comments section, but you're absolutely right. But this applies to almost everything. Every time I read a report of a sanctioned (non-criminal) or poorly evaluated public school teacher, I think of my friends who are teachers: how they've had to juggle everything in their personal lives in addition to the emotional and physical drain that comes from being passionate about teaching children, especially if the school's administration is terrible. After that, it's harder to judge the teacher in question, knowing that there could've been any number of strains that led to a troublesome incident or poor performance report.
- SoftwareMaven 15y ago
  It is unfortunate that, given how important teaching is, we still don't have good ways to evaluate which teachers are good and which are not.
  - gaius 15y ago
    It doesn't help that teacher's unions vociferously oppose the development or introduction of such methods.
    - SoftwareMaven 15y ago
      It doesn't, but think about it from their perspective. Do you base performance on number of A's given? On scoring on standardized tests that only show how well you taught students to take tests? Where do you include "opening a student's eyes to the power of reason and science" or "planting a seed of a deep love for literature" or even just "being a person a student wants to be like"? It isn't much different than how've question of how to evaluate coders. Any mechanism that can be easily proscribed can be easily gamed or is meaningless. Any mechanism that truly measures worth is extremely complex, doesn't scale, and may have issues with labor laws. I wouldn't want that crap legislated by state legislatures, either.
      - gaius 15y ago
zackham 15y ago
The best lesson I have learned after dealing with lots of frustrated users is that their initial contact is more like how you'd interact with an inanimate object than a human. If someone yells at me personally, it seems a bit unreasonable... but if someone gets frustrated using my product and "virtually" throws it on the ground and stomps on it, that is a feeling I can understand. Once they have that off their chest, and I respond in a reasonable way, the follow-up conversation is always more respectful and humane. Just need to figure out how to read that initial communication and understand that they aren't mad at you, they are just frustrated with your product. Also, don't take it so personally that you miss out on the valuable bug report (or ux critique) that is so often embedded in these messages.
ThaddeusQuay2 15y ago
The color of the envelope does not change the message it contains. The only difference between what I write to you online and what I would say to you in person is one of detail and quality, as I have more opportunity online to compose. The problem of rudeness and insults is not due to any inherent flaw of the Internet itself, but rather due to the fact that most children aren't taught that anonymity, although a necessity, is not for the purpose of becoming unaccountable. "Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority ... It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights, and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation -- and their ideas from suppression -- at the hand of an intolerant society." http://groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20051007151046741 http://groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20051007151046741 (The First Amendment Right to Anonymous Speech - Delaware Supreme Court Ruling in John Doe No. 1 v. Cahill)(2005-OCT-15)
- lukifer 15y ago
  > The color of the envelope does not change the message it contains. I would consider this half-true. As Marshall McLuhan said: "the medium is the message". What is communicated is defined by the complete sum of the experience of the receiver, which includes subtle nuances of how that message is packaged. That said, I agree with your core point.
InclinedPlane 15y ago
It's more than that though. One problem a lot of people have with regard to software is that they think it is trivial work. As though it requires merely "doing it right", as though it's a matter of just assembling widgets into something else in a straightforward manner. An analogy would be, say, a fast food cashier. All it takes is punching the buttons for the desired options, right? Creating software is the same sort of thing just with slightly more complicated options, right? They don't appreciate that it's a complicated creative endeavor that requires inventiveness and trade-offs and architecting and artistry. I think this might be one reason why Apple's products are perceived differently, because the aesthetics are more apparent and that clues people into some aspect of the complexity behind the software.

by sosuke 15y ago

Spearchucker 15y ago

This is an unfortunate but real human trait. There's a book that describes the effect in war. The basic premise is that it's easier to kill people by dropping a bomb on them from an airplane than it is to shoot them with a rifle on the battlefield. It's because in the latter you see your victim. And immediately relate to that victim [edit: 1]. Which makes shooting him or her exceedingly difficult. It's an interesting parallel. The book is called On Killing, by US Lt. Col. Dave Grossman. [1] Unless the shooter is psychotic.

DanBC 15y ago
> Unless the shooter is psychotic. Nitpick: You mean "psychopathic", not "psychotic". People with a psychotic illness are more likely to be victims of violence than the perpetrators of violence, and are much more likely to harm themselves than to harm another person.
- stan_rogers 15y ago
  "Psychotic" also works here, but for a different reason. While a psychopath may be able to perceive, but unable to empathize with, a person, someone in the depths of psychotic delusion may be unable to perceive a fellow human being. It is perhaps not nearly as common "in the wild", but it does occur (the killing of Tim McLean by Vince Weiguang Li being the example that comes most easily to mind). In fact, generating a sort of "target psychosis" has been the aim of most modern infantry training for some time, since teaching people to see, recognize and react to targets is an awful lot easier than training them to kill humans, even under severe threat. (Human-shaped targets were introduced to training after it was discovered that most infanteers never actually fired an aimed shot at an opponent in either of the World Wars.) Similarly, you can sniff war on the horizon when the machinery used to dehumanize the enemy is started up.
  - patrickk 15y ago
    An article about the reasons infantry fire or not: http://www.historynet.com/men-against-fire-how-many-soldiers-actually-fired-their-weapons-at-the-enemy-during-the-vietnam-war.htm http://www.historynet.com/men-against-fire-how-many-soldiers... I read somewhere (citation needed!) that the percentage of soldiers who deliberately fire their weapon at the enemy has increased from WWI to the Iraq conflict, which some put down to violence in movies and video games. After watching excellent Iraqi conflict documentaries like Restrepo and Armadillo (Danish movie) and seeing how soldiers react to conflict, there could be merit to that argument.
    - Spearchucker 15y ago
      You're right about the percentage increase. This is for two reasons - first, because most of the close-range shooting on the ground was done by special forces who're trainined to overcome that resistance. Second, because many of the deaths are from bombs - either shelling from ships at sea, or from aircraft and UAVs. Those last three remove the personal element, and that makes "pushing the button" really easy and guilt-free. We as humans who pride ourselves on empathy can be pretty savage :-(
      - patrickk 15y ago
        I could be mis-remembering the article in question, but I think the percentage increase referred to soldiers who fired their weapon (e.g. assault rifle or sidearm) directly at an enemy they could see - meaning that we've become more desensitised to violence over time. I also recall that snipers are trained by shooting watermelons - the impact of a high velocity round on a watermelon is not too dissimilar to an impact on a human head. Snipers see the carnage in all its gory detail because of their magnified scope so it's necessary to desensitise them in training. Edit: slo-mo watermelon getting shot: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iO3XsZpOiBA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iO3XsZpOiBA
        derleth 15y ago
        > meaning that we've become more desensitised to violence over time. And yet the rate of violent crime continues to go down, bear-baiting and dogfights have gone from national pass-times to illegal aberrations, and dueling is pretty much extinct.

evincarofautumn 15y ago

It’s not anonymity, exactly, but (for want of a better term) noncorporeality. We all know plenty of people whose online personae are bold and crass, even though they write under their real name. In person, we’re wired to observe certain social niceties to fulfill, I don’t know, some innate sense of tribal duty. It’s a whole lot more difficult to shout at a man than at his words on a page. Bodilessness is dehumanising—for good and ill.

JangoSteve 15y ago

Even as a developer of software, I've at times found myself forgetting that software is written by real people. Just a few months ago, I bought an app from the Mac App Store. I became disenamored with the app due to a glaring fault. I regained consciousness about halfway through writing my negative review on the App Store (that'll be my excuse for getting as far as I did), with the thought, "Why don't I first email this guy and see if he'll fix it before writing this review?" So, I closed the review form and opened an email. Sure enough, he responded within the hour, and a new release came out the next week with my suggestion built in. My next email to him was explaining why he should raise the price of his app. He was a real person.

gaius 15y ago
I once had a cow-orker who thought software came from "the internet" - he literally could not fathom writing a program himself.
- peacemaker 15y ago
  I can't understand this logic. Did he think the internet was some magical place that created all his games and apps and so on? How did he think about manufacturing then? Or artwork? Or movies? How does someone get so far in such a technology based society without knowing that there are people behind all these things?
  - LockeWatts 15y ago
    Has he ever seen anyone make a movie, or a program? Some people really are bad at looking at abstract layers.
  - johngunderman 15y ago
    In my experience there is a large class of people who lack basic curiosity about how things work. They are content to believe that things just "exist". I haven't done much research into this, but I would be interested in seeing if this is considered more an education problem, or if some people simply don't have the capacity for curiosity.

essayist 15y ago

David Foster Wallace's take on this was that my own reality is so overpoweringly real, that it's hard to see you (or anyone else) as real. everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness, because it's so socially repulsive.... Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.... The remedy he proposed: [Instead:] if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her little child in the checkout line - maybe she's not usually like this; maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of her husband who's dying of bone cancer, or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the Motor Vehicles Dept who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a nightmarish red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible - it just depends on what you want to consider. http://m.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/sep/20/fiction?cat=books&type=article http://m.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/sep/20/fiction?cat=books&... What works for me sometimes in dealing with customer-service folk is to ask them what they would do in my position.

LesZedCB 15y ago
It is amazing how much that kind of thinking can help. Especially since I have tried to adopt considering the persons situation before getting mad at them, when I see myself or others getting mad at somebody and accusing them of something, when they are in the (car|line) (next to|behind) us.., it makes me ashamed to realize 1) I'm being just as much, if not more of a jerk, and 2) maybe they aren't actually being a jerk at all...
partisan 15y ago
While I agree with your suggestion for dealing with Customer Service, I don't agree with Mr. Wallace's proposed remedy. Why should I have to imagine someone in a piteous position in order to be able to empathize with them? Can't we just accept people for who they are and empathize because they are just like us?

danso 15y ago

This is an interesting take that I had not expected to read when going to this comments section, but you're absolutely right. But this applies to almost everything. Every time I read a report of a sanctioned (non-criminal) or poorly evaluated public school teacher, I think of my friends who are teachers: how they've had to juggle everything in their personal lives in addition to the emotional and physical drain that comes from being passionate about teaching children, especially if the school's administration is terrible. After that, it's harder to judge the teacher in question, knowing that there could've been any number of strains that led to a troublesome incident or poor performance report.

SoftwareMaven 15y ago
It is unfortunate that, given how important teaching is, we still don't have good ways to evaluate which teachers are good and which are not.
- gaius 15y ago
  It doesn't help that teacher's unions vociferously oppose the development or introduction of such methods.
  - SoftwareMaven 15y ago
    It doesn't, but think about it from their perspective. Do you base performance on number of A's given? On scoring on standardized tests that only show how well you taught students to take tests? Where do you include "opening a student's eyes to the power of reason and science" or "planting a seed of a deep love for literature" or even just "being a person a student wants to be like"? It isn't much different than how've question of how to evaluate coders. Any mechanism that can be easily proscribed can be easily gamed or is meaningless. Any mechanism that truly measures worth is extremely complex, doesn't scale, and may have issues with labor laws. I wouldn't want that crap legislated by state legislatures, either.
    - gaius 15y ago

zackham 15y ago

The best lesson I have learned after dealing with lots of frustrated users is that their initial contact is more like how you'd interact with an inanimate object than a human. If someone yells at me personally, it seems a bit unreasonable... but if someone gets frustrated using my product and "virtually" throws it on the ground and stomps on it, that is a feeling I can understand. Once they have that off their chest, and I respond in a reasonable way, the follow-up conversation is always more respectful and humane. Just need to figure out how to read that initial communication and understand that they aren't mad at you, they are just frustrated with your product. Also, don't take it so personally that you miss out on the valuable bug report (or ux critique) that is so often embedded in these messages.

ThaddeusQuay2 15y ago

The color of the envelope does not change the message it contains. The only difference between what I write to you online and what I would say to you in person is one of detail and quality, as I have more opportunity online to compose. The problem of rudeness and insults is not due to any inherent flaw of the Internet itself, but rather due to the fact that most children aren't taught that anonymity, although a necessity, is not for the purpose of becoming unaccountable. "Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority ... It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights, and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation -- and their ideas from suppression -- at the hand of an intolerant society." http://groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20051007151046741 http://groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20051007151046741 (The First Amendment Right to Anonymous Speech - Delaware Supreme Court Ruling in John Doe No. 1 v. Cahill)(2005-OCT-15)

lukifer 15y ago
> The color of the envelope does not change the message it contains. I would consider this half-true. As Marshall McLuhan said: "the medium is the message". What is communicated is defined by the complete sum of the experience of the receiver, which includes subtle nuances of how that message is packaged. That said, I agree with your core point.

InclinedPlane 15y ago

It's more than that though. One problem a lot of people have with regard to software is that they think it is trivial work. As though it requires merely "doing it right", as though it's a matter of just assembling widgets into something else in a straightforward manner. An analogy would be, say, a fast food cashier. All it takes is punching the buttons for the desired options, right? Creating software is the same sort of thing just with slightly more complicated options, right? They don't appreciate that it's a complicated creative endeavor that requires inventiveness and trade-offs and architecting and artistry. I think this might be one reason why Apple's products are perceived differently, because the aesthetics are more apparent and that clues people into some aspect of the complexity behind the software.