Tags: crit

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Monday, July 11th, 2022

The Dangerous Populist Science of Yuval Noah Harari ❧ Current Affairs

We have been seduced by Harari because of the power not of his truth or scholarship but of his storytelling. As a scientist, I know how difficult it is to spin complex issues into appealing and accurate storytelling. I also know when science is being sacrificed to sensationalism. Yuval Harari is what I call a “science populist.” (Canadian clinical psychologist and YouTube guru Jordan Peterson is another example.) Science populists are gifted storytellers who weave sensationalist yarns around scientific “facts” in simple, emotionally persuasive language. Their narratives are largely scrubbed clean of nuance or doubt, giving them a false air of authority—and making their message even more convincing. Like their political counterparts, science populists are sources of misinformation. They promote false crises, while presenting themselves as having the answers. They understand the seduction of a story well told—relentlessly seeking to expand their audience—never mind that the underlying science is warped in the pursuit of fame and influence.

This tracks.

Harari has seduced us with his storytelling, but a close look at his record shows that he sacrifices science to sensationalism, often makes grave factual errors, and portrays what should be speculative as certain.

Monday, January 3rd, 2022

Superheroes create cultural acceptance for popular oligarchy (Interconnected)

I sometimes imagine a chair made by someone who sits all twisted. Sitting in that chair yourself, you couldn’t help but to sit in the same way.

When a designer designs an object, their stance will be encoded and transmitted to the user. Imposed.

Is culture really passed on like this, not just with chairs or superheroes, but in a general sense?

Tuesday, August 3rd, 2021

Hacks Are Fine / Matt Hogg FYI

If you employ a hack, don’t be so ashamed. Don’t be too proud, either. Above all, don’t be lazy—be certain and deliberate about why you’re using a hack.

I agree that hacks for prototyping are a-okay:

When it comes to prototypes, A/B tests, and confirming hypotheses about your product the best way to effectively deliver is actually by writing the fastest, shittiest code you can.

I’m not so sure about production code though.

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2021

There’s a voice inside your head that prevents you from sharing ideas—punch it in the face. - Airbag Industries

Violence is never the answer, unless you’re dealing with nazis or your inner critic.

The excuses—or, I’m sorry, reasons—I hear folks say they can’t write include: I’m not very good at writing (you can’t improve if you don’t write often), my website isn’t finished (classic, and also guilty so shut up), and I don’t know what to write about, there’s nothing new for me to add (oh boy).

Sunday, June 7th, 2020

There’s a voice inside your head that prevents you from sharing ideas—punch it in the face. - Airbag Industries

When I challenge the idea of topics—especially when I suggest writing about a design topic—the “I don’t know what to write about” excuse goes to level two: Someone has already written about [design topic]. And that might be true, but by Great Gutenberg’s Ghost, if that was a hard requirement for publishing, we’d have one newspaper, a few magazines, and maybe a thousand books. Hollywood would be a ghost town because we got to the end of all of the movie tropes by 1989. We’d have seventy-five songs with lyrics, but re-recorded in every music style and everyone would still hate Yanni. The point is you can’t let the people who have come before you be the excuse to stop you from writing or, frankly, creating.

Wednesday, January 29th, 2020

Thoughts on Writing: What They Say · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

We all want to create successful work. We want our voices to be heard. We all want to be recognized or, at least, respected. But instead of trying to please everyone, you should deep down inside of you accept the fact that it is not yours to decide if others like your work. This will give you immense freedom. Suddenly, you can start to just write, without worrying whether your readers like what you’re saying or how you are saying it.

Strong agree.

Sunday, October 27th, 2019

Tune Out USUCK FM and Free Yourself to Write – Chip on Your Shoulder

Freewriting—beating your inner critic by lowering your standards:

The trick is to type so fast that the clacking of the keys drowns out that voice.

Sunday, July 21st, 2019

The Simplest Way to Load CSS Asynchronously | Filament Group, Inc.

Scott re-examines the browser support for loading everything-but-the-critical-CSS asynchronously and finds that it might now be as straightforward as this one declaration:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="/path/to/my.css" media="print" onload="this.media='all'">

I love the fact the Filament Group are actively looking at how deprecate their loadCSS polyfill—exactly the right attitude for polyfills in general.

Sunday, June 30th, 2019

Nick Cave - The Red Hand Files - Issue #33 - Did you ever want to simply give up and quit, because of your inner voice? : The Red Hand Files

Nick Cave, like Ana, is blogging about the inner critic:

The truth is that virtually anybody who is trying to do anything worthwhile at all, especially creatively, has seated in his or her brain, a horrible homunculus that blows a dreadful little trumpet, and only knows one song – a song that goes, “You are not good enough. Why bother?” This evil little gnome is full of bad jazz, and is, in the words of author Sam Harris, “an asshole.” The enemy of aspiration, this atrocious inner voice demands you turn away from whatever your higher calling may be and become a second-rate, cut-price version of yourself. As your very own personal detractor it is deeply persuasive in its dark business.

Tuesday, June 18th, 2019

Oh Hello Ana - Six talks later

I really admire Ana’s honesty here in confronting her inner critic (who she calls “side B Ana”).

Tuesday, May 21st, 2019

Going Critical — Melting Asphalt

This is an utterly fascinating interactive description of network effects, complete with Nicky Case style games. Play around with the parameters and suddenly you can see things “going viral”:

We can see similar things taking place in the landscape for ideas and inventions. Often the world isn’t ready for an idea, in which case it may be invented again and again without catching on. At the other extreme, the world may be fully primed for an invention (lots of latent demand), and so as soon as it’s born, it’s adopted by everyone. In-between are ideas that are invented in multiple places and spread locally, but not enough so that any individual version of the idea takes over the whole network all at once. In this latter category we find e.g. agriculture and writing, which were independently invented ~10 and ~3 times respectively.

Play around somewhere and you start to see why cities are where ideas have sex:

What I learned from the simulation above is that there are ideas and cultural practices that can take root and spread in a city that simply can’t spread out in the countryside. (Mathematically can’t.) These are the very same ideas and the very same kinds of people. It’s not that rural folks are e.g. “small-minded”; when exposed to one of these ideas, they’re exactly as likely to adopt it as someone in the city. Rather, it’s that the idea itself can’t go viral in the countryside because there aren’t as many connections along which it can spread.

This really is a wonderful web page! (and it’s licensed under a Creative Commons Zero licence)

We tend to think that if something’s a good idea, it will eventually reach everyone, and if something’s a bad idea, it will fizzle out. And while that’s certainly true at the extremes, in between are a bunch of ideas and practices that can only go viral in certain networks. I find this fascinating.

Wednesday, April 10th, 2019

Improving accessibility with accessibility acceptance criteria — Paul Hayes

Wouldn’t it be great if every component in your design system had accessibility acceptance criteria? Paul has some good advice for putting those together:

  • Start with accessibility needs
  • Don’t be too generic
  • Don’t define the solution
  • Iterate criteria

Saturday, November 10th, 2018

CSS and Network Performance – CSS Wizardry

Harry takes a look at the performance implications of loading CSS. To be clear, this is not about the performance of CSS selectors or ordering (which really doesn’t make any difference at this point), but rather it’s about the different ways of getting rid of as much render-blocking CSS as possible.

…a good rule of thumb to remember is that your page will only render as quickly as your slowest stylesheet.

Sunday, September 2nd, 2018

Sapiens

I finally got around to reading Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. It’s one of those books that I kept hearing about from smart people whose opinions I respect. But I have to say, my reaction to the book reminded me of when I read Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist:

It was an exasperating read.

At first, I found the book to be a rollicking good read. It told the sweep of history in an engaging way, backed up with footnotes and references to prime sources. But then the author transitions from relaying facts to taking flights of fancy without making any distinction between the two (the only “tell” is that the references dry up).

Just as Matt Ridley had personal bugbears that interrupted the flow of The Rational Optimist, Yuval Noah Harari has fixated on some ideas that make a mess of the narrative arc of Sapiens. In particular, he believes that the agricultural revolution was, as he describes it, “history’s biggest fraud.” In the absence of any recorded evidence for this, he instead provides idyllic descriptions of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle that have as much foundation in reality as the paleo diet.

When the book avoids that particular historical conspiracy theory, it fares better. But even then, the author seems to think he’s providing genuinely new insights into matters of religion, economics, and purpose, when in fact, he’s repeating the kind of “college thoughts” that have been voiced by anyone who’s ever smoked a spliff.

I know I’m making it sound terrible, and it’s not terrible. It’s just …generally not that great. And when it is great, it only makes the other parts all the more frustrating. There’s a really good book in Sapiens, but unfortunately it’s interspersed with some pretty bad editorialising. I have to agree with Galen Strawson’s review:

Much of Sapiens is extremely interesting, and it is often well expressed. As one reads on, however, the attractive features of the book are overwhelmed by carelessness, exaggeration and sensationalism.

Towards the end of Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari casts his eye on our present-day world and starts to speculate on the future. This is the point when I almost gave myself an injury with the amount of eye-rolling I was doing. His ideas on technology, computers, and even science fiction are embarrassingly childish and incomplete. And the bad news is that his subsequent books—Home Deus and 21 Lessons For The 21st Century—are entirely speculations about humanity and technology. I won’t be touching those with all the ten foot barge poles in the world.

In short, although there is much to enjoy in Sapiens, particularly in the first few chapters, I can’t recommend it.

If you’re looking for a really good book on the fascinating history of our species, read A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived by Adam Rutherford . That’s one I can recommend without reservation.

Monday, August 20th, 2018

How can designers get better at learning from their mistakes?

Jon has seven answers:

  1. Build a culture to learn from mistakes
  2. Embrace healthy critique
  3. Fail little and often
  4. Listen to users
  5. Design. Learn. Repeat
  6. Create a shared understanding
  7. Always be accountable

It’s gratifying to see how much of this was informed by the culture of critique at Clearleft.

Saturday, June 23rd, 2018

The Critical Request - Speaker Deck

There are some handy performance tips from Ben in this slide deck.

In this talk we’ll study how browsers determine which requests should be made, in what order, and what prevents the browser from rendering content quickly.

Friday, June 1st, 2018

Four short stories and what I learnt writing them (31 May., 2018, at Interconnected)

I’ve been enjoying the stories over on Upsideclown so it’s great to get a peak inside Matt’s writing brain here.

I also happen to really, really like his four stories:

  1. Moving House
  2. The search for another intelligence
  3. The Ursa Major Moving Group
  4. Volume Five

I wouldn’t say I’m great at writing fiction. I find it tough. It is the easiest thing in the world for me to pick holes in what I’ve written. So instead, as an exercise—and as some personal positive reinforcement—I want to remind myself what I learnt writing each one, and also what I like.

Tuesday, April 3rd, 2018

In Defense of Design Thinking, Which Is Terrible + Subtraction.com

Our insular discourse, the way we’ve jealously protected the language and tools of design, the way we’ve focused so much on the “genius designer”… these behaviors have all worked against our own interests.

Khoi on design thinking and the democratisation of design.

Any embrace of design by non-designers is a good thing, and design thinking qualifies here. The reason for this is that when that happens, it means our language, the vocabulary of design, is broadening to the rest of the world.

Saturday, March 10th, 2018

Campaign. — Ethan Marcotte

Ethan is understandably dubious about Google’s recent announcement regarding the relaxation of the AMP’s iron fist.

Because it’s great to hear the AMP team make some overtures toward a more open web—and personally, I’d like to thank them sincerely for doing so. But if we’re swapping one set of Google-owned criteria for another set of slightly more permissive Google-owned criteria, I’m not sure how much will have changed.

Saturday, January 6th, 2018

Why So Many Men Hate the Last Jedi But Can’t Agree on Why | Bitter Gertrude

While not every white man who dislikes The Last Jedi overtly dislikes its gender balance or diversity, many feel a level of discomfort with this film that they can’t name, and that expresses itself through a wide variety of odd, conflicting complaints about its filmmaking.