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.

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

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.

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.

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.

This reminded me of a clip from Ted Lasso with the same quote: https://youtu.be/5x0PzUoJS-U

Nice to see this pop up here

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 :)

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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-h...

> “we can’t put it on the glass”

LED lightbulbs are typically housed in plastic. You easily integrate a plastic button into plastic housing.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

“…unless you’re me.”

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.

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

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 ;)

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

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!

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.

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.

What works for me is to assume there is always an explanation, then go look for it.

Could be anything from an actual good reason to do it this way, or some other factors like cost, or maybe even just lack of time, or the best of multiple bad options.

Postpone judgement until you have a good understanding. You could still come to the same conclusion but it will likely be much more nuanced.

Basically empathize with whoever build it or was involved.

Also design/build stuff yourself, do user testing and get feedback; it’s humbling haha.

Assume you are wrong until proven otherwise. There are really quite a lot of constraints you are at most times not qualified to reason about. Small example: I was working on implementing accessibility for a government website and was rather baffled at the requirement to provide sign language videos providing basic explanations. I had assumed we'd need to provide augmenting accesibility, i.e. text-to-speech for the blind. In my mind, if a person can see, they can also read. Turns out: no, not the case. Sign language is a separate language and you'd be learning your locally dominant language as a first foreign language, so depending on the community you grow up with, you may as well lack basic literacy in that language. Therefore, sign language videos are more akin to offering the website in different languages that assistive technology. After that incident, I've learned to assume there is always something I don't know which explains the things I find weird.

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.

I found two books so far that had pretty actionable plans to address this.

They first is Difficult Conversations, largely about nonviolent communication, which provides a structured template for “learning conversations”. The relevant advice was: when you feel a strong feeling of disagreement, you tell the other person instead of bottling it up, which lets you ll then transition to a listening state. Like: “When I heard that my first instinct was to disagree because of X. At the same time I know you (insert reason like “have different life perspectives” or “are my friend and care about me”) so I would like to learn more.

The second is The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leaders, which offers a metaphor for the mental state between judgement and curiosity they call “the line”. Being “above the line” is a state of curiosity, “below the line” is judgement and defensiveness. The book goes into physiological reasons, the advice they give is to develop strong awareness of your emotions to detect when you go below the line, then use breathing exercises to quickly resurface. They also have other exercises for developing empathy for other points of view you can do on your own, like isolating narratives from facts and working through all possible narratives for a given situation (like “Tom thinks I am incompetent, I think Tom is incompetent, Tom thinks I am competent, I think Tom is competent”)

I’ve used both to some pretty good success so far, after receiving some feedback that I was not listening well.

I use self-reflection and internal dialog when I notice I'm feeling judgemental, to drill down to what has created the discomfort. Once you understand your own reactions it's much easier to talk with others. I'm not always aware until later but it works then too as a retrospective. Most people are open to walking through their beliefs with you as long as they feel safe from risk of attack. Apply the same kindness to yourself.

Remembering when I was wrong about something I felt strongly about in the past can be a good reminder to suspend harsh judgment.

there is a logical fallacy (not just in the title). It ignores that curiosity will always result in a judgement, and even it's a "positive judgement". If only we stick around long enough we'll need to tear down our original belief (only way to avoid it is not to grow). Being loud (judgemental) makes us look like we have done the leg work (of curiosity). But curiosity is a lot of work and it's easier to get reward by simply looking competent (judging loudly). Exploiting this is easy because it's hard to tell if a stranger has actually put in the legwork and earned their "right" to judgement. And it's also easy to dismiss judgement as "Don't judge just be curious", when in reality, staying curious is impossible once you have a full grasp over a specific topic. (being curious here would mean move on to new things to be curious about).

I'm probably overthinking it. Last weeks I was working on designing an IIoT device (EV charging point) where the customer insists on using the outdated protocol, and not spend the money or time to bother with security. Hardware constraints will rule out there is a future in which this device will be secure (or maintainable). So when I read this:

> By being curious, not judgmental, we can start to understand these peculiar things around us. Only by understanding, we might even find a way to make them better.

It drives me up the wall. Almost impossible for me not to immediately judge and ridicule them, for sloppy thinking, but also for forgetting that a system/idea will only get better by stressing it. And it would be a shame if somebody destroyed their echo chambers, or took a dump in their "safe-space". Perhaps I'd understand the situation a bit better (have empathy) if the people being attacked and ridiculed were unpaid tinkerers or engineers (e.g. FOSS). But a big company like GE? And especially a topic like IoT - I don't think so.

Besides living long enough to witness mistakes that took a decade or longer to play out, what I do is use the cognitive bias codex by designhacks.co.

My heuristic is:

Is the subject matter important?

If yes, is the cost of being wrong high?

If yes, am I displaying any signs of cognitive bias? (Consult the cognitive bias codex)

If yes, how do I mitigate the bias?

Once done, has my outlook changed?

What action should I take?

The replies to this are very good. I'd just add that - like anything - it takes practice. You have to train your mind to work this way, and you need to continue to do so. So, don't judge yourself too harshly when it doesn't come easy. Recognize it and continue to practice.

Start with questions, even when you know the answer, and listen.

Then follow up with a question.

And repeat this without offering any opinions.

Just practice that.

> Dose anyone has good advices to change this kind of mindset ?

The only way you can not be judgmental is by being dead or unconscious. Living is about making judgments about everything, all the time (and most of them become habits at some point).

In improv, there’s an exercise where you say “yes and”. This language construct helps you build on what someone else is saying.

(Because in improv, if you object to something, you can just stop the show.)

It works really well in a professional setting, too. Try it!

I learned about Buddhism and the concept of lovingkindness and that really helped. I read a short book on Buddhism.

But also finding people who can engage with those they disagree with without resorting to mean behavior and listening to them is probably a good tactic. One person I can think of is Beau of the Fifth Column on YouTube who basically explains a left leaning political position to conservatives and centrists in short videos every day. He’s totally non judgmental and I have found it useful to just listen to the way he describes things. He explains topics that are often divisive without any condescension, which I think is a rare trait in political discussion.

EDIT: Forgot to include the obvious, but therapy. I had all manner of rough edges and I’m still finding tricky situations that my therapist has been helping me with for years. Keep in mind that if you learn to become less judgmental you will have better relationships all around. Better friendships, work relationships and love. My career is much better today because I matured, in a large part through therapy, and can manage complex and difficult discussions with my business partner without upsetting anyone. These changes benefit you and those around you and lead to more harmony and happiness. And you deserve that!

Try looking up “Beginners Mind”. It’s a concept from Zen Buddhism.

Give it five minutes. My all time favorite advice on exactly how to do that.

https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3124-give-it-five-minutes

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).

> 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".

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.