The Role of Doubt in Design | Hacker News Reader

The Role of Doubt in Design

matthewstrom.com

45 pointsimartin2k8 comments

“Disclaimer: Richard Feynman was a colossal misogynist. I have a hard time separating this fact from his contributions to science.”

I have heard that Socrates was fond of the young boys whom he taught. Why mention an irrelevant bias of one and not another? Is the point to condone behaviour that isn’t yet fully condoned by present society?

In a similar vein, I was reading a parenting book by Mr Rogers in 1983 and he starts it off by asking mother's to stay home with their children if possible with their circumstances and that children require good mothering in their first years. I couldn't but help wondering if this book had been written today if those same thoughts would have been expressed in a gender neutral way.

This is something I seem to be coming across a lot more often lately. People can't accept a viewpoint from someone that is mean towards a subset of people, or refuses to accept public opinion on a specific topic, while having done something amazing to progress human forwards in a specific area. If you can't appreciate the amazing work they did without compartmentalising their character, I consider that a fault.

Taking sound advice from someone who you disagree with on a philosophical/religious/etc level is vital to strengthen your character. In my opinion :)

Note: this started as a super brief comment and then expanded into a missive because I was interrupted by a call with an artist friend and two glasses of wine, and then didn't want to throw it away.

TLDR: can we really trust the work product of untrustworthy ("bad") people?

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I know it sounds rational to enjoy the works of "geniuses" even if they were horrible people. I just have trouble with it.

Like, even using JavaScript which was invented by a homophobe, rubs me the wrong way, as it were :) Even though I kinda like the language itself for fun/easy hacking.

Or take Schopenhauer whose stuff about music is inspiring to me. Dude was a gross incel though. Or take Wagner's anti-semitism.

Encountering facts like that just makes me wonder what other kinds of defects or oversights could be hiding in their works. Belief in the virtue of punching down just doesn't feel the same qualitatively as other vices like addictions or whatever. It seems worse, "evil"?

I would trust the average drunken poet or painter or junkie musician more than any iconoclast or figure who seems to be inspired by the muses of unfair living for other people only. Excepting of course legitimate satire or criticism. If you have to rely on extremist or violent ideas in order to create something useful or beautiful, it actually comes off as pitiful.

I guess it's not that art needs to be harmonious or symmetrical or pure or "good", but that to be trustworthy and useful for insight, I feel more comfortable knowing that its creator was somehow loving and inclusive.

On top of it, I think if you are considered a genius that the bar must be higher not to fail at basic respect for others. Geniuses are ostensibly smart after all, so defects like discrimination, opposition to equal opportunity, or any form of hatred (except maybe self-hatred) just feels disqualifying from a user experience standpoint.

For every Feynman or Schopenhauer or Wagner there are tons of equal or better geniuses who might not be in the right place at the right time, or don't make a lot of noise, mainly because of inequality.

One of my favourite commentators, Stephen Fry, a gay man of Jewish descent, even defended Wagner's art, which I find extremely conflicted. I wish I could achieve that level of liberty in criticism.

All of that said, I think also that just creating anything at all comes with some amount of good built-in. Nature is brutal too and it makes all kinds of beautiful and useful things quite by accident. The difference in critique and judgement only seems to arise if the creator is sentient.

> Encountering facts like that just makes me wonder what other kinds of defects or oversights could be hiding in their works.

To me this sounds as if you now need to search for issues on a piece was already deemed good; in a way this is a fallacy. Wagner was a great artist, is his music antisemitic? Doesn’t sound logical. You could perhaps argue that there might be some latent risk in his music expanding values that can create a basis for antisemitism; to me all that sounds just like justification.

In the extreme: is a math theorem less true when done by awful people? There must be some truth and some value on their works.

Casting such a broad net with the word "doubt" suggests that all questions are argumentative. But in fact, almost none of the questions listed here are necessarily expressions of doubt or the basis for an argument. They are expressions of seeking understanding, which is a designer's job.

A designer who is not a question machine can only ever put lipstick on your product, not really make it better.

Ditto - these are exactly the questions that must be asked, frequently:

> he asked “one of the good ones, or one of the bad ones?” A designer on his team — a “bad one” — asked too many questions. Questions like “Why are we building this now?” “Are we sure this is the right problem to solve?” “Why don’t we approach the problem in a different way?”

Calling those questions 'doubts' just doesn't seem quite correct.

In the best teams I've worked with/on, designers [1] aren't afraid to frequently ask these questions. I have yet to see a case where that's been a problem. Quite the opposite - far too often, there aren't enough deep / 'stupid' questions asked, especially at the outset & middle of projects.

[1] and everyone else on the team

Measure twice; cut once.

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