TITLE: Empiricism, Bias, and Confidence
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: September 06, 2010 12:45 PM
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This morning,
Mike Feathers tweeted
a link to an old article by Donald Norman,
Simplicity Is Highly Overrated
and mentioned that he disagrees with Norman. Many
software folks disagreed with Norman when he first
wrote the piece, too. We in software, often being
both designers and users, have learned to appreciate
simplicity, both functionally and aesthetically.
And, as
Kent Beck suggested,
products such as the iPod are evidence contrary
to the claim that people prefer the appearance of
complexity. Norman offered examples in support
of his position, too, of course, and claimed that
he has observed them over many years and in many
cultures.
This seems like a really interesting area for
study. Do people really prefer the appearance of
complexity as a proxy for functionality? Is the
iPod an exception, and if so why? Are software
developers different from the more general
population when it comes to matters of function,
simplicity, and use?
When answering these questions, I am leery of
relying on self-inspection and anecdote. Norman
said it nicely in the addendum to his article:
Logic and reason, I have to keep explaining, are
wonderful virtues, but they are irrelevant in
describing human behavior.
He calls this the Engineer's Fallacy. I'm glad
Norman also mentions economists, because much of
the economic theory that drives our world was
creating from deep analytic thought, often
well-intentioned but usually without much
evidence to support it, if any at all. Many
economists themselves recognize this problem,
as in this
familiar quote:
If economists wished to study the horse, they
wouldn't go and look at horses. They'd sit
in their studies and say to themselves, "What
would I do if I were a horse?"
This is a human affliction, not just a weakness
of engineers and economists. Many academics
accepted the
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis,
which conjectures that our language restricts
how we think, despite little empirical support
for a claim so strong. The hypothesis affected
in disciplines such as psychology, anthropology,
and education, as well as linguistics itself.
Fortunately, others subjected the hypothesis to
study and found it lacking.
For a while, it was fashionable to dismiss
Sapir-Whorf. Now, as a
recent New York Times article
reports, researchers have begun to demonstrate
subtler and more interesting ways in which the
language we speaks shapes how we think. The new
theories follow from empirical data. I feel a
lot more confident in believing the new theories,
because we have derived them from more reliable
data than we ever had for the older, stronger
claim.
(If you read the Times article, you will see that
Whorf was an engineer, so maybe the tendency to
develop theories from logical analysis and sparse
data really is more prominent in those of us
trained in the creation of artifacts to solve
problems...)
We see the same tendencies in software design. One
of the things I find attractive about the agile
world is its predisposition toward empiricism.
Just yesterday Jason Gorman posted a great example,
Reused Abstractions Principle.
For me, software abstractions that we discover
empirically have a head-start toward confident
believability on the ones we design aforethought.
We have seen them instantiated in actual code.
Even more, we have seen them twice, so they have
already been reused -- in advance of creating the
abstraction.
Given how frequently even domain experts are wrong
in their forecasts of the future and their theorizing
about the world, how frequently we are all betrayed
by our biases and other subconscious tendencies, I
prefer when we have reliable data to support claims
about human preferences and human behavior. A flip
but too often true way to say "design aforethought"
is "make up".
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