For example SSDs became much more common and affordable over the past 15 years and their parameters also improved. Are there similar improvements in household appliances like irons? Where would one look for an industry overview?
I’d instead look more at commercial cleaners (e.g. how shirts are cleaned/pressed for shipment to stores) if you want to see the bleeding edge of cleaning technology.
(It’s sort of like home consoles vs. arcade machines in the 80s/90s. Home consoles had to optimize for affordability, while arcade machines could essentially be expensive operationalized prototypes as long as they paid for themselves.)
tongue in cheek, but WHYY
On the other hand, my mom has sent me things like machines that fold and do other stuff whenever she finds something… or refinds something. So I doubt she likes doing it and maybe passed that down to me.
• People (all animals?) seem to have a quirk about learning hygiene practices in particular, where the criteria they have for what is hygenic/unhygenic gets formed when they're children, and then becomes unalterable. People generally seem to intuitively believe that whatever hygiene practices they were taught as children, are exactly the set of things they need to do feel clean. No more, no less. And so they don't go out actively looking for new hygiene practices (or for hygiene technologies that would suggest new hygiene practices.)
If you slow down and have a conversation you can sometimes figure out what the specific emotional problem is, often involving shame or fear, and what triggers it has. The problem is seldom if ever “so-and-so is incapable of learning anything new”.
Well, yes, but coercion, extrinsic motivation, and general spite are all edge-cases, and outside the scope of what the core fact about "learning" that I'm trying to talk about here.
Let's look at a specific non-edge-case case: learning under self-directed intrinsically-motivated reward + time pressure — for example, learning to hunt/gather when stranded in the wilderness and hungry.
In situations like this, children do better than adults at deciding to begin experimenting in an attempt to learn how to survive. Adults will try to apply any skills they already have (however rusty), but will have a much harder time than children do in deciding to try to do things they haven't already ever been taught to do. And even when they do make that decision, they will repeatedly revoke it—i.e. give up much more quickly when a solution does not come easily to them. Even though, in education-theoretic terms, all the stars should be aligned in terms of motivating their learning process.
> The problem is seldom if ever “so-and-so is incapable of learning anything new”.
Of course not. That's the observed abstract pattern, not the reason. The reason for adults, AFAICT, is almost always pride/hubris — that is, the idea that they don't need to learn anything new, that there's no advantage in it to outweigh the learning cost, because they've got by just fine up to now without having learned it. (And also because learning is just plain harder for adults, since they have so many existing schemas that need to be broken+reshaped in the process of fully absorbing new ideas that don't fit the existing schema.)
This resistance comes almost always from adults who see themselves as having higher social status than whoever's trying to teach them the thing. They have no mental schema for learning from someone younger or more junior (or of a lower social class/caste) than themselves, since it's not something they've ever experienced earlier in their lives.
Instead, when someone in an inferior social positions knows a thing, and offers to teach it to this social-superior adult, the adult will instead try to manipulate their social inferior into doing the task for them any time they need it to be done — often under the pretext of demonstration for purpose of learning. But with no intention of actually learning, and a complete rejection on being tested for knowledge acquisition (because that would be a violation of the social dynamic!)
Note also that learning is separate from doing. I know many adults that are willing to do novel things (without really understanding what they're doing), and to memorize that specific series of actions by rote — but who have no desire to understand the more general skill behind the rote actions they're taking, such that they could perform related actions in any context other than the exactly memorized thing. In general, memorizing is easy, while learning a new skill is much, much harder. (And yet memorization without learning almost never "sticks", since there's no backing mental schema to encode the memorized steps in terms of.)
Anecdotally, kids often also give up easily when faced with trivial setbacks. I think your speculative generalization is far too broad. I’d be interested to see some concrete research, but my impression is that there is very wide variability, and I’m not sure how meaningful the statistical averages are.
The people I know who are best at diving into a new never-seen thing and experimenting systematically to figure out quickly and accurately how it works are all adults. They easily run circles around kids at this: the kids get tired, get distracted, get confused and give up, get stuck into an obviously sub-optimal pattern but don’t try to fix it, etc. (The kind of adults who have decades of practice at trying / learning new things. Many relevant metacognitive skills have broad applicability across disciplines.)
One big advantage kids have is that their basic needs are met by someone else, and they generally don’t have lots of other worries and responsibilities. This allows them to focus on something they are interested in far longer and deeper than most people who aren’t doing that thing professionally.
The best for learning (for either an adult or a child) is a combination of personal interest + pleasant no-pressure environment + face-to-face guidance from a trusted expert tutor/coach, who can probe weak points, notice and correct mistakes and misconceptions, suggest methods of practice, ....
> pride/hubris
What you call pride/hubris, I call shame and fear of embarrassment. People really don’t want other people (or themselves) to see them as failures.
> when someone in an inferior social positions knows a thing
This kind of social situation is completely different than the “self-directed intrinsically-motivated reward” situation you were talking about before.
It’s hardly surprising that someone who is supposed to be an expert doesn’t want to be shown up by their subordinate or their junior colleague. It makes them look incompetent and is a direct threat to their social position and livelihood.
It sounds like you're assuming these conversations/learning events occur in public. Why would people feel shame/embarrassment about something nobody can see them doing?
This was the point of my example: if someone is alone in the wilderness, what does it matter to anyone but them—to anything but their survival—if they were to try and fail at building a shelter or a trap?
> It’s hardly surprising that someone who is supposed to be an expert
Who said anything about being an expert?
The example that comes first to my mind is a grandchild trying to teach their grantparent to post photos to Facebook on their iPad. The grandmother explicitly—even "infamously"—has no experience with computers or anything to do with them. If their friends/family/etc. were to observe the situation, they'd have a preconception that the child would know more about "posting photos to Facebook" than the adult would.
And yet, despite nominally having no real way to be "shown up"–no presumed domain expertise to lose; and despite nominally wanting the grandchild to teach them how to post photos to Facebook; and despite the grandparent being intrinsically motivated to learn how to post photos to Facebook (because they enjoy the social interaction that comes when friends see their photos); the grandparent still won't bother to focus at all on paying attention to / understanding / remembering what the grandchild is saying.
I would describe this as a kind of learned helplessness, except it's more like contextual helplessness. It's not that they can't learn how to do this–they seem to be able to learn it from a peer their own age just fine. But when it comes to those they think of as people they are supposed to be teaching, their mind just turns into a brick wall.
I would compare it to the prevalence of people who get their romantic partner to open jars for them, instead of buying one of those gripper gadgets that allow them to open the jar. If their partner offers to buy them one of those, they'll often actively refuse the gadget! They think of this job as something someone is supposed to do for them — something they shouldn't have to do – rather than something they want to get done by whatever means, as efficiently as possible. Despite it not being a hard/complex job, or a matter of comparative advantage.
That’s real progress!
These typically have an offboard water tank and boiler that doubles as a stand for the hot iron. This also lets the iron itself be lighter in weight.
A key feature for this market is the absence of the automatic shutoff that's commonly found in consumer irons.
I bought a new washer/dryer recently. A bunch of bells and whistles, but... the "autosense the water level" feature is awesome, and likely saves water in the long run.
It seems like washers use so much less water these days, its not like the old agitator models from 2000s which filled up a tank. Instead, modern washers thoroughly wet the clothes, add a bit of extra water at the bottom, and then mix vigorously (be it a front-load or top load, the HE washers all do this technique).
This leads to lower water usage. I also ended up using much less soap per load (the first few times, I noticed the soap wasn't fully getting rinsed out, but the significantly less water usage means I also should use significantly less soap).
> Where would one look for an industry overview?
At least for generic household appliances, Consumer Reports is a non-profit survey / reviewer group. I dunno if they have much on irons themselves, but I haven't seen anything wrong with their reviews yet.
I think there's a problem when the price goes too low. For something like $20, $50, or even $200 or $1000 appliances even... its not really worthwhile to review. Instead, you often have to just buy the thing and hope for the best.
Maybe there's a specific professional group who is thinking about these tools and how to use them (chefs and cooking tools, or woodworkers + woodworking tools). But for things like irons or washers, or other household appliances... I don't think any such group exists outside of things like Consumer Reports.
Still, I get my reviews on "Tide vs Persil", and other household items. I think "Wirecutter" is a competitor and some people say they've got good reviews too.
In any case, Consumer Report's page on steam irons is here: https://www.consumerreports.org/products/steam-irons-28981/s...
A agitator "tub washer" uses 40-gallons of water to wash clothes. A modern front-loading HE washer uses 10-gallons.
If you use the same amount of soap on both washers, you'll naturally be either... adding too much soap to the HE washer, or too little soap to the agitator washer.
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Same thing with "Tide Pods". The idea of those things is "one pod per load", which removes the mental need to think of how much soap to add per load. But... once again, there's many different washers that all use different amounts of water. There's no way we really have a one-side fits all situation.
It is definitely easier not having to worry about the cord tangling or pulling at your clothes.
Some examples that I know of:
- modern robot vacuums, that can mop, use LIDAR etc. We have a pretty decent one, it works OK, but we still have to vacuum by ourselves every 2 weeks or so.
- battery operated vacuums, irons, hair dryers etc.
- smart homes -- automaticcally setting heat, window blinds
- tons of gimmicky stuff like smart fridges, or water taps with touch screens.
But I'd consider these just some quality of life improvements, not major time savers like washing things by hand vs a washing machine. IMO the next big thing will be household 3D printers when someone finds out how to make them safe and reliable for everyday use by non-technical people.
If anyone here has one, I'm curious how well it works.
Never used it myself but i have been curious if it actually works.
They weren’t always electric.
well that, and the electric toothbrush