Not everything is behavioral science
behavioralscientist.org
behavioralscientist.org
They do this at some places of work that I'm aware of. It's not "barking insane". However, some thought shows that it won't work for a lot of people.
Firstly, dishwashers have to live at ground level whereas crockery can be stored in a cupboard at any level. You are contraining yourself to store crockery at the ground level where most people also have their under-sink unit, laundry machine, and heavy pans cupboard.
Secondly, plates and utensils are way more spread out in a dishwasher. You have to expose every surface for them to be cleaned properly. Plus, there is the space needed for the dishwasher itself, which can be pretty chunky.
So no, Rory Sutherland, in our 2-bedroom urban UK house we definitely cannot afford the space to have a second dishwasher. And if your job is to go around blithely trying to convince everyone that they'd be better off with one, all you're doing is re-affirming my contempt towards behavioural scientists and salespeople.
And assuming that you have more money than time, which isn't true for everyone.
If you don't spend the $1,000 then your ongoing costs are lower (a dishwasher lasts maybe 10 years, call it $100/yr - ignoring the operating costs since you're probably using a dishwasher the same number of times per year), that could be an income stream of about $50/yr - by FIRE logic you're probably $150/yr closer to not having to work any more and you have a bigger buffer for surprises along the way. Those are some pretty significant swings for most people.
It isn't economically clever to have 2x as much personal capital on hand as you need unless you are fabulously wealthy already.
Right now, our dishwasher's top rack is full of top rack stuff, whereas the bottom rack has two dishes and a coffee cup. I guess we go ahead and run it, and then... move everything from the second dishwasher to that one? This is definitively more work.
And yeah I thought about this years ago and ruminated on these issues.
And furthermore, if I just have two dishwashers, both of which are considered "dirty", I no longer have clean plates.
Unless, of course, I unload it to the cabinets. Which I do now. Without paying $800 for a second dishwasher.
No, it's probably about three-quarters empty, because you probably use roughly the same crockery every day, unless you do something particularly bizarre like having three soup-based meals one day and three plate-based meals the next. Sometimes you wash a couple of plates that were already clean, sure. Or you move them into the "clean" dishwasher before declaring the other one "dirty", which is no more effort than putting them into cabinets (often less). And sure maybe a couple of days a year you have a big party, or really do eat soup every meal, or something, and you have to do something different. But the vast majority of the time it makes life easier.
I clean mine ones in couple weeks, there is some gunk building up by the doors, filter of course, so just wipe it and then run once on highest temp and so far no smelly dishwasher - but still if I would just left dishes after cleaning for 2 days I would have to run some cleaning again because they would not small bad but somewhat "not clean" for sure.
It becomes absurd faster when you consider what a realistic household would own and eat and use. "There's no unloading necessary," he says. Absolutely ridiculous.
But you have to go to something close to 'we only eat cereal' for it to sort of work, which is crazy (and not healthy).
It's a bit like telling people to be like Steve Jobs and have a single outfit, your laundry will be so much easier, your wardrobe so much neater: sure, but it turns out most people actually don't want that... So it's really neither here nor there what problems it might solve.
So you end up washing those 15 spoons again. Big deal. Or you notice that you consistently have leftover spoons in the clean dishwasher and put some into storage, or get rid of them.
On average you use more or less the same dishes each day, so you reach equilibrium pretty quickly. You wash a bit of stuff that was already clean. It's no big.
Maybe one day someone makes a dishwasher that can do continuous washing efficiently, dynamically adjusting for the number, type and locations of the dirty kitchenware. Until then, it feels super wasteful.
It does, but our feelings are likely miscalibrated here. Dishwashers are insanely efficient.
> You use more water, more salt/dishwasher cleaning chemicals, and more electricity on empty runs.
Unlikely. You're still running the same programme at the same frequency (you were always going to run the dishwasher when you ran out of bowls, the only difference is you have some extra clean spoons in the dishwasher when you do).
> The clean dishes and utensils getting extra wash degrade faster
Technically true, but when was the last time you had to replace a spoon because it had worn out? And how much did it cost when you did?
> the machine itself wears off faster too.
Maybe. Not convinced. You're not putting any extra dirt in it, and the sprayers etc. are likely designed to handle a full load (e.g. the shelves will always be balanced, because you'll always have a full set of dishes when you run the dishwasher).
???
For example, 10 bowls, 10 spoons, 10 forks. If the make are fork-using salads and spoon-using soups, the shared resource--bowls--will run out before anything else does.
At least 3 dishwashers are needed.
After all, the universe has only two kinds of problems: those solved by queuing theory, and those solved by category theory. Or so hanging out on HN would have me believe.
Independently of cost and space considerations, why would you want such a ”system” as this dual-dishwasher setup?
I take aesthetic pleasure in unloading the machine in the morning and restoring my cabinets to a condition of full, orderly, clean stock. My relationship with the machine is as a tool that transitions items from dirty to clean, and it’s aesthetically displeasing to mix those purposes with the ordered, dry, clean cabinets. Those are places where you know you’ll always grab a clean item without having to check a post-it note first.
I take pleasure in owning the right cutlery and servingware for a wide variety of food and situations, and in using the correct subset for the correct occasion. The idea that I would use everything from the Clean Washer every time I fill the Dirty Washer utterly confuses and repulses me.
This, like essentially all of this person’s examples, reminds me of this Chesterton’s Fence kind of thing the rationalist types get on about: if a bunch of people are doing a thing, take the time to ask why before you assume your One Bright Trick is something new under the sun.
That plate needs a resting period first.
I tried to apply some of Rory's advice to a real product - basically, some combination of "give a longer wait time than the actual time for better experience / improve the experience of the euro tunnel by putting Wifi on it for $1m rather than spending $100m making it faster" (I know the real sums were much bigger).. and the idea of "live in the South of London because it's not on the Tube map so the prices are much cheaper yet the travel distance is the same!"
The result? Sales dropped when we gave a longer wait time, which was not compensated by repeat business.
I lived in a place in South London. Without night transport options, I couldn't stay out on a night out without forking over crazy money for Taxis. And the other major thing I noticed? Not a single woman I met in that time had any interest in coming back to my place, in the part of London she didn't know, without many options to Uber back to her place if she wanted etc. The only person I met in this time when I was single yet on paper successful took me back to their place. I couldn't figure it out but I felt dissatisfied. I moved then to a much more central place (yet the same cost) and started a casual relationship within a couple of months of being there. Trust me when I say, everybody generally preferred parties and hanging out at a place on the Tube.
I suppose I love Rorys ideas and they captivate me, the comparisons with nature are great. But the content is as much advertising as it is about the psychology of advertising and human tricks. The problem is Rory doesn't consider that for a young man you might want to be able to get night transport or that a young woman you meet might prioritize safety and familiarity, wanting to know the area better, be closer to their home and have transport options. A place away from Tube Stations also by virtue of it's costs is more of an honest signal that you don't have the money to live in central/"tube" London if you wanted to. As a young man, if I had realized that, I obviously should have lived like my peers a few tube stops away or in a nice house several towns away. So basically deviating from the social peer norm generally has costs. It's easy to point out one trick benefits but you miss out on what you don't observe.
"You could buy one variety of socks and you'll never have to worry about sorting them!" -> "Well, I have two jobs and they both require I wear uniform socks in different colours so this won't work for me, Mr. Smarty Socks Pants"
"If you place a dishwasher pod in the slot as soon as you empty the dishwasher you'll know if it's dirty or clean when you open it" -> "Well, I can only afford a single dishwasher pod at a time and I put my dishes away in the morning, go to work and use the day's wages to buy the one I'll use that night, so that won't work for me Mr. Richy Two Pod Pants"
"If you put your weighing scale in the bathroom it'll make it easy for you to measure your weight every day" -> "Well, my bathroom is too small and doesn't have level flooring anyway because it's wide enough for one man and is located on the San Andreas fault with a crack going through it. So that won't work for me Mr. Flat Floor Pants"
"If you use shellcheck, you can catch a bunch of errors in your shell scripts" -> "Well, I use my custom shell CrazySH and shellcheck won't work on that. So that won't work for me Mr. Normal Shell Pants"
I wonder if it is possible to construct a suggested thing that no human could respond to in this way. I think it's impossible. But what do I know. I'm just Mr. Can't Comment Pants.
What makes you believe that? In my professional setting (think restaurants for instance) dishwashers are actually at countertop level to improve staff efficiency.
And while I not aware of any dishwasher design that allows to put it higher than countertop level, I don't see any impossibility either: you just need it to be unloadable from below.
There's a typo here, as I wanted to say “many”. (It's more like a lapsus than a mere typo actually since I had the dishwasher of the restaurant I work at as a student in mind when I wrote this comment)
While less common in domestic kitchens, "raised" dishwashers are a thing. A friend of mine designed his dream kitchen and his dishwasher (just a standard domestic dishwasher) is at about hip height, next to the cabinets where dishes are stored and above the drawers that house heavier pots and pans.
Washers coarse sluice dishes and stack them in a circular rack on the bench, then use horizontal handle at front of washer to lift both the door on the left and the one on the right, the internal circular rack of freshly cleaned dishes is pulled out along the bench on one side, the just filled rack of dirty dishes is slid in on other side to replace, doors down, washer on, unstack clean dishes and move the empty rack back to the sink to start sluicing and stacking just arrived dirty dishes.
Repeat for three hours, then clean down kitchen and go home.
Specifically, I can teach someone to learn to juggle, but I can't teach a person to juggle directly.
My thinking brain cannot juggle, but my body can juggle. I can't make decisions fast enough to juggle.
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This is kind of a silly example, but I think the same is true for reading (what happens when you see an unfamiliar word), speaking, etc, etc.
So much of our brain work is not done by making decisions or critical thinking or even anything we are aware of.
Like for example, forming accurate beliefs about the quality of ideas our minds lack familiarity with!
Perhaps like juggling (and unlike walking, etc), it is a skill that is not innate, so must be learned? And perhaps unlike juggling, it isn't easy to know when you lack the skill (because of the nature of it).
1. Rational thought takes place in an irrational environment. As much as we try to control for biases, fallacies, heuristics, effects, etc, our evaluation of a scenario is dependent upon our personal history.
2. Rationality is a great tool for breaking things into small parts and describing acting in small steps; but a fundamental error occurs when we 'zoom out' to a system and use those small parts to say something definitive about the whole. In each step 'down', we exclude details not relevant to that scope, but we neglect to add those details back when we consider the system.
AI will certainly not save us from #1 because it will have it's own history.
#2 may benefit from AI, but the people using it will still have great difficulty.
> 1. Rational thought takes place in an irrational environment. As much as we try to control for biases, fallacies, heuristics, effects, etc, our evaluation of a scenario is dependent upon our personal history.
a) rational thought (usually) isn't what it seems to be
b) this is sloppy/inappropriate/dangerous language for this topic
> Rationality is a great tool for breaking things into small parts and describing acting in small steps; but a fundamental error occurs when we 'zoom out' to a system and use those small parts to say something definitive about the whole.
Statistically/probabilistically, yes (take this comment section, on a high-IQ platform (see also: /r/SlateStarCodex), as a prime example), but not necessarily. Doing it wrong will produce wrong results, like most anything else. An important distinction though in some domains: it is not possible to realize when you are wrong. And sometimes, it isn't even possible to wonder if you are wrong[1].
Consider the complexity involved (and the historic journey behind) manufacturing modern day top end CPU's - and this is but one of the many feats of genius humanity has pulled off, and we now take much of it for granted. Why can we do that, but not certain classes of other cognitively complicated tasks? What is the distinction between the domains that guarantees (so far) failure? (A hint: consider how we answer such questions.)
> #2 may benefit from AI, but the people using it will still have great difficulty.
What is the meaning of the symbol "great" in this context? Is it related to the probability of us Accomplishing The Goal?
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[1] A classic "extraordinary claim", typically invoking this (and then after that, something else....but discussing those sorts of things isn't something you do in polite company, which HN most certainly is[2]):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_claims_require_e...
A knockout punch if I've ever seen one!
Yes, I'm describing Untrue Scotsmen. I'm hoping for a citation or something I can google.
People are farting in my rational cleanroom and I don't like it.
Not entirely sure what you mean, something like this?
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-analysis
And what is with this layperson misunderstanding of placebo effect? Why is this so common? Nobody is trying to subtract it or not induce placebo in real patients. It's the same principle you're applying when evaluating predictive models. You can't simply look at raw accuracy. You need to compare it to some naive predictor to see if it does any better. "Always predict no" is extremely accurate for rare conditions, like "does this patient have ebola" or "is this person a terrorist?" That doesn't make it a good predictive model. Same thing with a treatment. If it does no better than placebo, that isn't to say that placebo is useless. It's to say that we don't need the more complicated, expensive treatment and can simply use placebo. If giving some person a sugar pill has the same effectiveness as giving them a patented synthetic drug with harsh side effect, then just give them the sugar pill. Nobody is trying to avoid placebo. We're trying to avoid unnecessary extra steps.
If having two dishwashers instead of one is the goal, then it can be trivially easy to put a second dishwasher next to the first one.
(It is possible to think in terms that aren't exclusively flippant and extreme.)
The engineering solutions absolutely made people willing and interested in installing solar panels.
Weirdly, no. I live in an extraordinarily sunny area and solar panels are still slow to roll out in 2024. I've never convinced my parents to get panels on their house, and almost nobody in their neighborhood has them. (I live in an apartment and I don't think I know of a single apartment building in my city that has panels.)
Something is definitely wrong, but I'm not sure what. I'm pretty sure my city even has big rebates for solar installation.
This is exactly the framing the author is criticizing. It assumes that the placebo effect is a constant that cannot be improved upon, and thus deserves no consideration, when designing the treatment. However, the placebo effect is malleable, and can be improved [1], In scientific studies, this is typically done through suggestions and conditioning [2]. However, this is not standard clinical practice (AFAIK).
Where the author is wrong, is that people that are designing drugs, aren't thinking about using the placebo effect more optimally. It is fairly well known, that the efficacy of drugs correlates with the severity of off-target side effects: say that you are taking an analgesic that acts by binding receptor A, but which also induces nausea by also binding an unrelated receptor B. During drug development, the structure of the drug is often tweaked to reduce or abolish binding to such off-target receptors, thus limiting side effects. However, these structural changes also often reduce efficacy, even if the affinity of the drug to the intended target isn't altered at all. My colleagues and I (working in pharmacology but in academia) have often wondered to what degree drug companies try to actively keep non-severe side effects as part of the response profile, given that they may be beneficial for the treatment outcome.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/npp201081
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030439590...
It's actually about politics (Truman's domain): If you insist on being the sole owner of some initiative, then no one else will want to work with you. If you allow other people to take some of the credit, then a lot of things become possible.
It's not that it can't be tortured into applying to his BS/BS thesis, but it doesn't particularly help.
[1]. Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40439572#40464765
Plus, as a marketing man, he knows that injecting some humour into things is almost never a bad idea. Don’t take it so seriously.
It'd be hilarious if they were actually useful ideas.
I don't have a solely tech background and once believed quite staunchly and with excitement in Rorys ideas. As commented elsewhere, they did not work out for me, it turned out the mimetic nature of humans is useful - to avoid loss, and lost experience (which accumulates greater costs over time).
Things like nudges, these ideas, these one trick examples - they are all individual, one shot.
The problem is, if you trick someone into paying twice as much for their shampoo, they have less money to spend on other things. How is it satisfying to do this? It's dark patterns with a new face.
I think this applies in the positive case too. Great, something like estimating a 10 day waiting time and hitting it in 7 days makes people report on paper they are happier. When most places do this, the effect will disappear. In fact, if I have one place in my life (e.g. the dentist) where they overestimate, and one where they underestimate (doctors), I will get more annoyed at the doctors than I would have been if they both were bad at estimating. It's shifting my discontent but I'm still discontented by the fact it takes 7 days, not the difference with the estimate. This is obvious and evidence in this example from the data in England with the NHS vs the health services and their satisfaction rates in Denmark and Germany etc. It's true individual cases can have individual effects, but it's a bit like how if you provide personal tutoring for one subject, the student often falls behind in the other subjects - you are taking on a debt that is paid somewhere if you don't actually improve the actual thing or product.
In a role like advertising, this is fine. If you want to improve the world, I don't think it is. Likewise if you want to improve your application in terms of retention, lying to the customers about wait time will work for one order, but not multiple. It won't actually improve retention in an AB test after a year to lie unnecessarily.
He would be the first to admit that this is true; it’s more of a ‘science of exceptions’ (like biology) that it is like physics or (classical) economics.
> if you don't actually improve the actual thing or product
The standard (and importantly, correct) answer is that the marketing/perception is the product. Marketing isn’t an extra bit of magic added at the end of a process designed to get the best out of an existing product — in many cases (and not just the obvious ones) it creates most of the value. If you’re a techie you instinctively hate this kind of thing, but that makes you no less immune to — or more aware of — its effects.
I feel like a point-by-point takedown of this article would get tedious, but it would be a good illustration of how smugly wrong this guy is.
To quote from the article:
> Because the boiling point of water depends on altitude, you could take it to a very, very high place and the same calorific value might well boil the water.
I agree that approaching it like this is possible. But, “possible” doesn’t mean that it is sensible. Philosophically speaking, if such things like above are allowed, then it should also be allowed to simply heat this water to very high temperature (like 99 C) with another apparatus such as a stove and then finally boil it with the candles. That is, use a stove instead of a rocket. It is also possible to conceive of an apparatus with heating elements and photodiodes. This apparatus will run the heaters and heat the water when its photodiode detect the light from the candle. So, in effect, the candle is responsible for heating the water.
Here’s what I’m trying to say: we need to accept some constraints and reject some possibilities in order to answer anything. If there are no constraints, then anything is possible. But, we know that this is not how the universe works.
Finally, I hope to never read anything from this author again. Ironically for this person, maybe they should consider the possibility that their ”science” is BS, aka bullshit.
Can someone update the title to be less clickbait?
Much more flexible.
ie the way to fix the problems with dishwashers is not to get another one, but to get rid of the one you have :-)
I'm too sleep-deprived from a rough night in a hotel, but something about this smacks of "I don't have to wash my towels because I'm clean when I get out of the shower" thinking.
Love it. Let's just call it didishwashing
The usual advice to "beware the man of one study" may apply also to fields; especially through so totalizing a lens as behaviorism has always sought to apply, it can be hard to see things any other way, and that makes it difficult or impossible to distinguish a representation of reality from a limitation of perspective.
Is this a joke?
And we wonder why there's such a reproducibility crisis in behavioral science....
Revisiting it…maybe the terms are interchangeable.
I've never met someone who doesn't behave this way. Especially the ones who think they don't. We are a product of our experiences, and our expertise is our experience.
> Is there no value in observing human behavior?
The current paradigms of behavioral science aren't the only ways to describe the observation of human behavior. You could in a similar way defend astrology by saying "Is there no value in tracing change over the passage of time? Does the origin of a thing say nothing about it? Is there no value in looking up at the sky, in the stars? Is there no wisdom in the legends of the past?"
The Shirkey principle is not necessarily true, but its a convenient catchall for articles like this one, which expends a lot of words being pithy and appearing clever, but not a lot of words on being right, which makes the reader believe that behavioral science important, without doing any of the necessary work of buttressing the claim with facts.
Behavioral science is very important for understanding e.g. why you can't simply model traffic flow as a fluid, or why you can't simply model economics as a system of oscillators or as analogous to chemical systems. But this article only manages to demonstrate that the author is very smugly self-satisfied, and lacks the introspection to actually chase down and verify their claims.