Never trust a system that seems to be working

As much as I love academia, I really wish there were more instructors with real experience that could say things like, "for math purposes assume a zero-loss conductor" while still emphasizing that real life is not so simple.

Generally, the biggest problem with math, physics and chemistry is that if you miss just one lesson (no matter if you physically miss it, or in worst case miss out understanding a concept for a couple minutes), you can easily end up "left behind" for years. With history, arts, languages, a number of computer science topics or most of biology you can either skip out on a certain subject or catch up easily on your own, but not getting a specific part in math/physics/chemistry and lacking the resources to follow up is setting oneself up for exponential learning gap later on.

The societal problem is that we've not set up schools or universities to deal with this "failure mode". Privileged kids can have after-school teaching or siblings helping out, but most will sooner or later resign and hate these subjects for the rest of their lives - and that is incredibly sad.

For example, cars have "fail open" brakes but have independent cylinders so that it is relatively hard to have all four wheels fail at the same time (older cars had single master cylinders) - and one of the tradeoffs is that people want cars to get going immediately and not wait for brake cylinders to "charge up".

As more and more things get computerized, you have more options for "intelligent failover" - anyone who used to drive an old manual car knew you could slow down using the engine - but now the computer could detect brake failure and do things for you to help recover.

And as seen from other comments, the modern US military prioritizes "on-road safety" over "under ongoing attack ability" - partially because of changing strategies I suspect, but also from the realization that the US military kills more members of the US military each year via accidents, etc, than anything else.

At the time it was an acceptable trade-off; later military vehicles have more in common with trucks than tanks, I suspect.

I remember a house at the bottom of a steep mountain grade that got plowed into on a regular basis especially during that time.

EDIT: hmm... seems freezing might still be a way to cause failure?

I'll take that bet and offer up a break key from my active keyboard if I'm wrong.

For example, on most modern Thinkpads, Pause is Fn+P, and thus Break is Ctrl+Fn+P.

You're using a program. A thingy pops up or unexpectedly shows up that interrupts you.

80% chance it's some stupid ad or newsletter thing. Dismiss with prejudice.

19% chance it's a "oopsie poopsie we did and whoopsie, the server monkeys are working VERY HARD to fix this, sowwy!!" and then the app still works apparently just fine, or if it doesn't you just force close and re-open the app.

1% of the time it's an ad again.

In the remaining floating point error's worth of %, it's an actual actionable thing a user could action to fix the issue.

I don't really blame people for just predicting that a pop up will be useless because it probably will be.

Like, the WALK / DONT WALK crossing signals that were around in my youth were slowly replaced with the HAND / WALKING PERSON ones, I'm sure because they're better for people who don't read English.

But also there is a cost to change, and it's often not worth doing if the benefit from the new system or standard isn't a lot better than the old.

In fact, a theoretically better standard could actually be worse in some situations if people are accustomed to a different standard. Imagine if America had settled on red for go and green for stop, and then tried to change the standard to match the rest of the world. It would be a calamity as some drivers continued to adhere to the old standard that they knew.

Stop signs were originally yellow, so such a change isn't unprecedented, but in that case they also contained the word STOP so the colour wasn't critical to understanding the sign. Standards can more easily change when there is backwards compatibility available. More recently, some jurisdictions have started adopting traffic light shapes (square = stop, diamond = caution, circle = go) but retain coloured lights for backwards compatibility.

Why doesn't the rest of the world (outside the US) have a 3rd middle brake light (CHMSL), as was mandated in the US in 1986?

My guess is because, despite measurements of ~22% crash avoidance at the time, that number turned out to be between 0% and 4% in practice. Maybe the rest of the world didn't care about 4%, or maybe they thought it was as stupid then as it turned out to be.

But the CHMSL standard in the US has refused to die.

This resulted in premature conclusion errors. They went to the ATM to get money. They got their money so they left... forgetting their card.

When ATMs were updated they fixed the design error. Now the card popped out and had to be removed before money would dispense. This resulted in a spike of people leaving with money hanging out of the ATM because they had been trained that removing their card was the end of the task. (Which is why money now gets sucked back into the machine if it hasn't been removed fast enough).

The point of the anecdote (other than that you hire HCI experts before implementing an interface) is that implementing a new and objectively better system doesn't necessarily result in an objectively better outcome when replacing an incumbent worse system.

Back in 1649, when Descartes formulated the concept of a reflex, it was used to describe lower animals, to support his notion that they were automata without a mind on their own. The word reflex originated from the "reflection" of the sensory input into a response. The physiological backgrounds were not yet known.

In the early 19th century, Hall narrowed the definition of a reflex to be a "involuntary action of a muscle or gland in response to the stimulation of a receptor neurone which does not depend on the existence of consciousness".

Sherrington, in 1904, narrowed the definition further, introducing the concept of the "reflex arc", a hardwired pathway between receptors and effector muscles.

Pavlov later did a strange thing and widened the definition, which is the source of some confusion. Nowadays, Pavlov's Conditioned Reflexes are mostly called Conditioned Responses, to avoid this exact confusion. NB: there are people arguing that conditioned is a mistranslation, and that it should mean conditional, which makes more sense in the context.

Pretty much every current publication uses the term "reflex" for involuntary, inborn responses, detected by receptors, transported to the spinal cord by afferent nerve fibers, processed there, and the motor signal sent through the efferent nerve fibers to the effector muscles. I only found the term "conditioned reflex" in papers discussing Pavlov's experiment.

But as you say, people can do what they like.