On Tue, May 01, 2018 at 03:02:27PM +0000, Dan Sommers wrote: > >> I happen to be an excellent judge of whether a given block of code is > >> readable to me. > > > In the same way that 93% of people say that they are an above-average > > driver, I'm sure that most people think that they are an excellent > > judge of readability. Including myself in *both* of those. > > Are you claiming that I'm not an excellent judge of whether a given > block of code is readable to me?
Of course not. I don't know you. I wouldn't dream of making *specific* claims about you. I speak only in broad generalities which apply to people in general. I'm reminded that in the 1990s during the UI wars between Apple and Microsoft, people had *really strong* opinions about the useability of the two OSes' GUIs. Macs required the user to use the mouse to navigate menus, while Windows also allowed the use to navigate them using the Alt key and arrow keys. Not surprisingly, *both* Mac users and Windows users were absolutely convinced that they were much more efficient using the method they were familiar with, and could justify their judgement. For example, Windows users typically said that having to move their hand from the keyboard to grab the mouse was slow and inefficient, and using the Alt key and arrows was much faster. But when researchers observed users in action, and timed how long it took them to perform simple tasks requiring navigating the menus, they found that using the mouse was significantly faster for *both* groups of users, both Windows and Mac users. The difference was that when Windows users used the mouse, even though they were *objectively* faster to complete the task compared to using the arrow keys, subjectively they swore that they were slower, and were *very confident* about their subjective experience. This is a good example of the overconfidence effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overconfidence_effect This shouldn't be read as a tale about Mac users being superior. One of the two methods had to be faster, and it happened to be Macs. My point is not about Macs versus Windows, but that people in general are not good at this sort of self-reflection. Another example of this is the way that the best professional athletes no longer rely on their own self-judgement about the best training methods to use, because the training techniques that athletes think are effective, and those which actually are effective, are not strongly correlated. Athletes are not great judges of what training works for themselves. The psychological processes that lead to these cognitive biases apply to us all, to some degree or another. Aside from you and me, of course. -- Steve _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
