Author Archives: Dave Fernig

A recent press release from NYU celebrates the release of some new video games that “train your brain.” The games were developed by “developmental psychologists, neuroscience researchers, learning scientists, and game designers,” so you can be sure they’re thrilling. There are two issues I want to discuss. The first is their choice of control. The […]

Cliff Stoll Doubleday, 1989 Amazon There was a time before we defaulted to locking our doors. In the 1980s, the nascent internet was mostly used by research scientists and the military. The community was small, and—as tends to be the case in small communities—the level of trust was high. Administrators didn’t invest much effort in […]

I came across an interesting problem on the website of UofT prof David Liu (who I had the privilege of TAing for a few years back). Part of what makes the problem amusing—I think⁠—is how we respond to it.

In physics and chemistry, better instruments and larger sample sizes raise the bar for making accurate predictions. But in psychology, software usability testing, and biomedical science—any discipline that relies heavily on significance testing—they have the opposite effect.

For a while we were all deluded into believing that we can directly optimize for the “correct” objective — be it clickthrough, revenue, or whatever — without any regard for made-up bullshit that can’t be objectively measured. You know, like “happiness,” or “trust.”

“It was as if he had been assigned to take apart a fiendishly complicated alarm clock to see why it wasn’t working, only to discover that an important part of the clock was inside his own mind.”

There are two ways you can help users become proficient with your product. The first is explicit feedback, in which you literally tell them what to do. Documentation/manuals are a common example. The second is implicit feedback, where the user learns by doing. Implicit feedback is great, but a whole bunch of prerequisites have to be in place in order for it work […]