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Comment by bitboxer | Hacker News Reader

I thought it is proven that dvorak is not superior :

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/18/210216

Is there something wrong with that article/research?

You should be aware the the Dvorak vs Qwerty debate is politically charged. If it turned out that Dvorak were superior, this would be evidence for market failure.

A lot of people want to demonstrate that market failure [edit: does or] does not exist, hence there are many more attempts to show the inferiority [edit: or superiority] of Dvorak than you would expect to see in a politically neutral context.

Also:

You should be aware the the Dvorak vs Qwerty debate is politically charged. If it turned out that Dvorak were superior, this would be evidence for market failure.

A lot of people want to demonstrate that market failure does exist, hence there are many more attempts to show the superiority of Dvorak than you would expect to see in a politically neutral context.

Absolutely right. I edited my original post to take this into account. My aim was to advise people to take Dvorak studies with a pinch of salt and understand the context in which they are published.

Disclaimer: I'm very happy with Dvorak, since it feels more comfortable to me than Qwerty and I have no doubt it helped me recover from repetitive strain injury. Other than that, I have no horse in this race.

Market failures happen all the time and are well known (e.g. "worse is better"). Why would "true believers" focus on Dvorak of all things?

Out of curiosity, what else would you consider a good example of a market failure?

Edit: also, why is tome (grandparent) being downvoted? He makes a good point.

There are lots of cases where the superior product fails completely and something inferior in most every way ends up becoming standard.

I don't understand why anyone would see this as something that can never happened. The market is made up of people and people are often going to be ignorant about the details of what they're buying. Often they choose purchase price above all even though total cost of ownership is a lot more expensive for the "cheap" product. Then you have to add market hype, incorrect perception, on and on.

In that case, I think what's interesting about the Dvorak market failure (or non-failure) is that it doesn't require asymmetric information or irrational consumers.

I've never thought of it as a market failure and certainly never framed the holy war as ultimately signaling economics beliefs. It's just a marginally lower local optima with a gargantuan switching cost. The benefits of having a standard layout far outweigh the costs of using a less optimal layout. On the other hand, it would take an Act of Government to make something else the standard (e.g. the DoD buying millions of Dvorak keyboards) and that is a typical symptom of market failure.

I don't think it's a market failure to punt on a hard problem. The problem being, in this case, finding a satisfactory way to switch people to an intrinsically superior way of doing things. Simply forcing everyone to do it is not satisfactory, because the new way might very well not be superior (and because you'd be trampling on many people's rights, by definition of "forcing"). (Imagine what would happen if the government decided they were going to figure out once and for all which operating system was the best, and make everyone switch to it. And then, halfway through the process, new and drastically improved versions of each of the operating systems come out, and now a different one is superior.) Another alternative would have been "prevent any keyboard layout from becoming widely used before "we" figure out which is best", which is also unsatisfactory.

I don't believe in market failures, and I think Dvorak is superior and have been using it for a few years.

This doesn't contradict what you said, though, because, whether or not it would be a market failure, these people you mention certainly think it would be.

For me the real question is who cares which is "superior"? Seriously, people have so many options today and they can use whatever they prefer.

I tried learning Dvorak, but at the end of the day I've been using QWERTY for over 25 years, and I can type more than fast enough.

Besides, lots of people use other layouts anyway due to language differences requiring extra keys for letters. I do want to kill the person who decided that Shift-7 was a good place for the forward slash in most of those layouts, though!

The article seems to be focused entirely on typing speed, and the studies cited mostly involve typists already proficient in Qwerty.

The article doesn't appear to mention typing distance or effort. Your fingers will move twice the distance in Qwerty than they would in Dvorak or Colemak. The home row is used twice as much in Qwerty, and whilst Dvorak and Colemak favour the right hand, Qwerty favours the left.

I shift between Qwerty and Dvorak keyboards regularly, and Dvorak is noticeably easier on the tendons.

One article (or "research") rarely proves anything. This article in particular has been contested.

I am aware of that. Can somebody please pinpoint the errors or show articles that explain where the writer has done errors? I am curious if it will be worth to switch, but I need some facts first :) .

As a very happy Dvorak-user I'd say "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". I switched because there was a compelling reason (repetitive strain injury). If you don't have a compelling reason, it's highly unlikely to be worth your time.

Have you read the article in question? It does a pretty thorough job of analyzing (and demolishing) the "research" presented, by Dvorak, in favor of the Dvorak keyboard.

If anybody has a strong, data-based counter-argument in favor of Dvorak, I'd like to hear it.

There's a rebuttal here. I don't know if you'd consider it a "strong, data-based counter-argument", but then I don't think the Fables paper does a "pretty thorough job of analyzing (and demolishing) the "research" presented" either, rather it reads like the politically motivated hit piece that it almost certainly is.

http://dvorak.mwbrooks.com/dissent.html

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