Optimizing for Feelings
browsercompany.substack.com
browsercompany.substack.com
The concept that we do things based on our emotions will strike a certain type of individual as wrong, simply because they've become so used to looking at things like a machine.
To that person I say: you are doing it right now. You are doing things based on your emotion, and it doesn't always feel... good, but it is how humans work.
Humans are highly evolved organisms, and our emotions emerge from a vast collection of observations (both conscious and unconscious) made by our nervous system. Especially important is the unconscious aspects of emotion. We can often tell things are rotten before we can describe why.
Trusting our gut is underrated.
If companies and individuals followed their intuition rather than being a slave to a paycheck, we'd likely not have the many of the dark patterns and creep-tech we have now. People ultimately choose to implement their own dystopia, a few individuals cannot do it all with their own hands. People should listen to their conscience and vote with their feet.
However, it isn't solely the responsibility of the individuals involved to put the brakes on bad, unethical software. It is also up to governments to ensure that people feel safe to challenge their employer. It is also up to companies to foster a culture of doing right, then profiting, rather than profit at any cost.
I'll go ahead and give the U.S. government and corporations an F grade on that right now.
unconditional rationalism seem to lead to a meaningless life (i.e. the shitty kind of nihilism)
unconditionally doing something because "rationality" demands it strikes me as mental gymnastics to let some symbolic-computable method dictate what we do... to follow this unconditionally is just as dumb as acting only on one's emotions
we have (are able to do) both; so let's use both.
It's best if we replace "rational" for "what I think makes sense" or "what I think is the best course of action", etc...
Which is, of course, self-evidently what one should do.
"Acting rational" is optimizing one's utility function to the best of their abilities and knowledge. It says nothing about the utility function itself, and using unconscious/emotional/instinctive thinking leads to better results for their appropriate places (including figuring out the utility function/what you care about)
You don't do mathematics to catch a ball thrown at you.
Is there evidence that we can train our intuitions? I'm reminded of the expert art assessor in Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink" who immediately knew a sculpture was a forgery by gut instinct. (I know Gladwell's writing isn't often held in high regard, but it's a good illustration for my question). Surely, we aren't inborn with the ability to assess art validity, implying it's a trainable 'instinct'.
Is the example provided by Gladwell different from the instance of "something is off" that many of us had when we got to our home and something, a plant, a chair, or something barely noticeable like a medal, had been moved elsewhere, and we could not explain why our "off" button went off?
If many among us had spent a lot of time dealing with art and forged art we would have acquired, conditioned on our "talent", similar "gut feelings" with respect to original and forged art.
When you average over the range of users, conveying the right emotions is an important feature on itself, even if it's not a functional requirement; a product that elicits positive feelings will be better that one that engenders negative ones. Developers ignore this tenet at their own risk, often creating functionally correct programs that their users hate to use because of their "death by 100 papercuts" interfaces.
UX people know that emotionally positive interfaces work better than equivalent ugly and cumbersome interfaces. Marketing people live their entire careers on generating those positive feelings artificially. Integrating into product and service design the creation of positive feelings of the kind that benefit users would be something that is beneficial to all of us, rather than the usual approach of maximising profits by capturing and directing customer expectations to profit-maximising environments.
I especially agree with your final statement there about the dangers when in a position of responsibility or "power". It's those times when people really should strive harder than usual to fall back on logic and facts despite any emotional reactions they may be leaning toward, although if the emotion they're feeling is "empathy", they might want to let at least a little of that leak through and "guide" their logical response to some degree.
And one's thoughts, which also affect the feelings
Meditation = a bit practicing being in control over one's thoughts?
Emotions point in a direction. They don't inform the user of what knowledge, time and meaning that may be needed along the way.
Emotional reasoning often directs people to a mediocre end, most commonly seen in failed indie video games or niche tech projects constantly worked on with no end in sight. People end up in nurturing tribes trying to follow an irrational direction without the higher meaning needed to convert a direction into a result. Eventually time catches up to all of them and you don't hear about the nothing that comes of it.
Your gut is like a wet finger in the wind, it indicates a direction of the prevailing winds.
I think the article was talking more about feelings, sensation and desirability than emotions.
But I doubt my stuff would be considered "commercially feasible," and I probably wouldn't get VCs interested.
I don't care. I'm grumpy, battle-scarred, and quite good at what I do. I'm in the enviable position (although I suspect many here would not "envy" me) of not needing to beg others to validate my work (or pay for it), so I'm fairly free to do what I want to do, as opposed to what I have to do. This won't get me fame and riches, but does make me happy.
When optimizing for emotions, we need to be very, very sensitive to our audience. One simple example, is high-key, vs. low-key. High-key stuff is usually against a white background, and low-key stuff is usually against a black background.
White and black trigger all sorts of emotions, and one's culture plays a big part of that (like, black is the sign of mourning, in the US, but white is the sign of mourning, in Japan).
One way that I deal with this, is respecting Dark Mode.
Purple is also another color that can trigger different emotional responses, based on culture (and what it is paired with).
Americans tend to like simple, uncluttered, design-heavy interfaces, while Japanese tend to like busy, colorful interfaces, without as much attention paid to design.
etc., ad nauseam.
Part of it could just be an age thing. As an elder-millennial I came of age during the peak of vintage/thrifting hipster culture. There was a pretty vibrant spirit of mixing and matching and putting things together from myriad influences before it all got blended into a generic paste of flannel and thick-rimmed eyeglasses.
But the more I read stuff like this, the more suspicious I get, and I get hit by manifesto fatigue. I want to see the product, and I would love to see something new in the browser world.
The vision is beautiful, and I'm curious to see how that turns into a usable product. I'm pretty sure I don't want my go-to browser to be an artwork or a build-it-yourself type of thing.
Function often comes before the feeling for a reason. A restaurant can't exist without its functionality. That "beloved dish that never fails" is not a feeling but a good product.
I have a strong feeling this will be a very niche product. I would also love to be proven wrong.
(And if you're on MacOS, you can actually try it. I haven't.)
Orion is WebKit, thebrowsercompany’s Arc browser is Chromium.
I think what really matters is simple and almost tautologically obvious. Just... make your product really good at what it's supposed to be for.
Facebook sucks because it's a social network that isn't designed for people to be social. Chrome was great when it was introduced because it was an internet browser that made browsing the internet extremely fast, easy, and organized (tabs!).
I wonder what that would mean in practice. Optimising for your own feelings is easy, but when you have 100s, let alone millions, of users, what can you possibly know about their feelings? How about conflicting feelings, within the same person, or between different people?
Optimization has crept into our lives too much. Optimization of decision making that sucks the fun out of everything and makes activities inaccessible to anyone but those who want to optimize for it seems to be the predominant way of thinking. "How to optimize your YouTube channel for view, pick this $1000 bicycle wheel in order to optimize your efficiency by 1%.." I could go on forever. I joined the waitlist and I am excited to see what comes out of this project.
That is, optimize for (number of tasks user performs using your software) / (time spent per task)
Actually measurable, too.
When they have too much money and not enough ideas, they end up writing hipster manifestos and end up like Mozilla.