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WizardMaskOP•

Credit to trot-trot for providing the link. This is popular in r/science, and it's gotten some notice in r/news.

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TheEvilScotsman•

As a creative type person (I'm a historian/literature student who espouses market socialism as the way forward) I already knew this to be the case but it's good to see quality research done on the topic. Upvotes all round.

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incredulitor•

Confirms my experience as well, as a technical guy. I felt like my role as a freshly minted college grad was to make new tools to make peoples' lives better. Turns out the tools can be the best fucking thing in the world but if they're not what people are used to, they'll push back until it's obvious they have no other choice.

I'm a little bitter about it, but I'm learning to accept it. I'm sure knowing the tendency and working with or around it is better than being caught off guard again.

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TheEvilScotsman•

I've heard about this happening. Do you know the QWERTY keyboard was originally made because typewriters would jam up if the keys were hit too quickly so employers put the letters in as difficult places as possible so they would slow down. Even though there could technically be a better keyboard, anytime this has been attempted it has faced widespread rejection from the mass market since people aren't used to it.

So it must be incredibly difficult for you to find something which doesn't make sense, needs changing, then manage to change it in such a superior way that it will then be popular enough to change everything. Quite a challenge in front of you, there. And that's why I respect techs.

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WizardMaskOP•

Based on my observations of political manipulation, the trick is to find a series of intermediate stages that are generally acceptable to people. The stages aren't constant. Once you convince people to adopt a step, the description and arguments you used lose relevance. Once they've lived with the new step long enough for the context to change, you can use a wildly different description to convince people to adopt the next step. You can even use arguments at different stages that contradict each other.

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