That was, of course, until they banned psychic violence in the "Goddamn, get out of my brain" amendment in the late 21st century.
I'd like to have an eye tracking study done on my viewing because the brain has a separate center that controls direction of gaze that is not part of the visual cortex that processes sight. With a normal human subject looking at a normal scene, an eye-tracking study will reveal in a few seconds the outlines of everything in the scene, trees, doors, windows, people, etc. because the eye tracks the interesting parts and edges.
Also relevant is the fact that only a tiny section at the center of the field of vision is actually in any kind of focus - you cannot read anything resembling normal sized type with your peripheral vision.
There's also the phenomenon of 'blind sight' where with people who are cortically blind, i.e., their eyes and optic nerves work, but their visual cortex doesn't (e.g., due to head injury to that part of the brain) When shows a panel of vertical or horizontal stripes in a forced choice test (i.e., they can answer "vertical" or "horizontal" but not "I don't know"), they answer correctly at rates much higher than chance (iirc from courses a decades ago, ~70%). It was thought that they might be unconsciously extracting the H/V information from the area that still controlled the gaze direction.
I'm wondering how many of us have 'ad-blindness' that isn't just filtering our visual input, but is actually guiding our gaze away from intrusive content so we literally never see it because the focal area never rests on it.
Anyone more up to date on neuroscience have any info?
I wouldn’t be so sure it’s at no cost, it seems possible that parsing/blocking a lot of that stuff causes some kind of mental/sensory strain or fatigue.
I recently emailed a museum to ask about tours since they didn't have any information on their website. They replied with links to all the information on their website, that was in literal plain sight, but that I totally and completely missed because my brain just straight adblocked them. I almost had to force myself to "see" them. They just so closely matched that ad spam you see at the bottom of news sites and blogs that I'd just keep skimming past them.
Even non-advertising elements such as social-media icons, related articles lists, sidebars, and the like. The more the display is limited to simply the text I intend to read, the less stress and distraction I feel.
Virtually all studies of multitasking show that multitaskers both overestimate their abilities and their performance is negatively affected by the attempt.
Ignoring intrusions is a task.
I don't know how many things go unpurchased because of this.
Usually accompanied by large in-corridor vendor displays which further obstructed already-crowded walkways.
I stopped going to malls.
High-street shopping districts still don't affect me to the same viscerally-negative degree. Even those which seem to be fairly consciously emulating and attempting to create a mall-like atmosphere. There's something about the open-air nature, and the fact that sounds attenuate rather than echoing off hard surfaces from all sides.
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As the struggle for survival had escalated over the past few millennia, the human brain had developed a miraculous defense mechanism: the psychic immune system. Simply said, the psychic immune system regulated the production of thoughts and emotions to a sustainable level. But with the new law came a new synthetic freedom to attack the underlying problem of an economy based on coercive consumption. Marketers and advertisers, wielding their mental weaponry, had been on the offensive, attacking minds of the world's citizens unabated. Psychic immune systems, no matter how strong, were helpless against the onslaught. Now that the psychic immune system had been weakened, everyone was a potential target for propaganda and mind control. In the following chaos, advertising mutated into a new form. The ban on psychic violence was not comprehensive, and included exemptions for images used in the furtherance of scientific, educational and artistic works. To survive, the advertisers had to learn to speak the language of art. They were the only ones left with the knowledge to speak it.
I hope we don't have to wait that long :/
Ironically, worse than the deluge of advertising described in this comment is the attempted redefinition of language for political agendas as exemplified in this comment.
Both are a form of psychic warfare - except that while I have seen non-intrusive and useful forms of advertising (i.e. product discovery, not trying to brainwash me into believing that Coca-Cola isn't unhealthy), I have never seen a non-malicious instance of this kind of hostile language redefinition.
The poster was clearly writing a jocular, one-sentence sci-fi story to express how they felt violated by the constant vieing for their attention. That's why it's _set in the future_ and regarding a _fictional constitutional amendment_. Making up words is a genre trope of sci-fi.
The second is that languages just change and people make up words. This isn't unique to the political arena and isn't necessarily malicious. Every term you have ever used exists because someone needed it, didn't have it, and so they made it up. You'll need to actually argue that introducing a term is harmful or deceptive in the particular instance that it happens.
This is pearl-clutching to portray people you disagree with as being shrill and ridiculous and not worth listening to. It's a bad faith tactic which you should desist from.
ETA: Because I seem to be earlier in the sort order, I want to point out that there is a much more important third reason is a sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32016181
par for the course, and embedded in all political discourse.
Recently we started calling anyone proposing higher taxes a socialist, which indicates total illiteracy, as it has no bearing on centrally planned economy
Laws that stop business defrauding customers are called 'consumer protection' and 'red tape', but when we protect business from individuals it's called being tought on crime.
When you make an extra copy of a song, you commit intellectual property theft, and the state can prosecute you for free and put you in jail, and you are a criminal.
When a company does not provide warranty you paid for, its called a business dispute and you have to hire your own lawyer.
But ya, "psychic violence" hits the nail on the head nicely.
How many of us software engineers have had this exact experience: Someone runs into an issue with your software that can't be papered over because of inherent complexity, and they report the problem to you. You tell them the solution, and they tell you it should be documented. You tell them it is documented, and you even tell them where. They tell you it should be more prominent.
I've had this happen where the warning was in bright red, bold letters at top in a separate box that said "WARNING!" but even after I sent them the link telling them it was documented, they still didn't see it.
I'm sure this banner could improved. I'm not sure the problem could have ever been avoided or solved entirely.
We're overwhelmed with shit to read. Most of it poorly written. Almost none of it important. Combine with the tendency (in some societies—notably, the US is possibly the most like this) to post rules and notices and disclaimers on everything, and we become blind even to things that look like they might be important—because they almost never are.
We aren't above this or better about it. Knowing what to pay attention to is hard, people develop a huge and complex set of heuristics that sometimes let them down. Failing to account for that adequately may be a problem in our society but I don't think framing it as individuals failing at the virtue of "reading thing thoroughly" will be any kind of solution.
But I think your example still works, because this is something you learn to do through training and experience, not something that you inherently know to do.
But the other 50% of the time.. After a few hours I go back and read the original error message very slowly :-)
Anyway, some times this is unavoidable.
Advertising perverts this. It is by definition the least relevant information on any page, yet is often placed the most prominently. This is why people are conditioned to skip around content trying to find only the relevant bits .
Support gets questions all the time from users which just clicked arbitrarily on the dialogs without reading (we can tell by their questions), leading them into a state they don't want.
At this point I'm seriously considering to replace the dialogs with an interactive text adventure-style thing.
Is this really a "problem in our society or species"? I would say the problem is more that everything around us demands our attention and demands careful consideration, more than we have capacity of attention to give, to the point that we tune out most of it.
There's "fine print" everywhere and if we took the time to really scrutinize most of it, we wouldn't really be getting a lot done.
Especially in a remote context. In the office face to face communication can be often faster - though even then you need to write stuff down or you will suffer long-term - but remote it just sucks. The whole advantage of being able to work asynchronously gets lost because everything needs to be a call.
So either I get totally exhausted from constant calls that kill my productivity or they get pissed at me for "not communicating enough" when they ignored every single email and JIRA comment.
Any way to better cope with this?
So I go ahead and document things anyhow. I sort of naturally fall into documentation-first development, so I almost always have it.
And what I've found is, this doesn't make people read your documentation. What it does is it makes people stop asking for it. Hence my belief about it being a ploy more than anything else, again, perhaps not consciously, but in effect.
When people do read documentation, I find people do a very surface read of it. You can say "This JSON object has these three parameters, 'age' which must be an int, 'name' which must be a string, and 'status' which must either be a string from one of these three values or be entirely missing", provide them a JSON schema or some other standard format that precisely specifies that and can be automatically used to validate and/or generate code, and you'll get things submitted to your API that more or less have an age, a name, and a status, but sometimes the age will be a string with a number in it, the name attribute will experience various capitalizations of the attribute name (not the value), and they'll push status as an empty string and then complain when your API rejects it. I often find myself a bit agog at my fellow programmers with decades of experience who still seem to be struggling with the concept that I can't write code that takes "stuff" any more than they can and are so careless about interacting with an API or something, and then get pissy when the code fails because of unexpected input.
I'm not angry about this, either... because I've learned to just budget the time for it and 100% expect it as part of the process. I fully expect to be asked for documentation, for them to do a surface read of it, and for us to have to work through the process of actually conforming to the documentation. I will send them references to the docs as we go but I scrupulously avoid even a hint of the idea that they should have already known this because I documented; it is only references to convenient examples I happen to have on hand, or whatever other softening I can apply. And of course, I am not perfect either, and when I do edit the documentation because of something I hadn't considered, I always make a point of calling out that the documentation wasn't quite correct and I've fixed it, so it doesn't look like an accusation. It's just part of the process.
I can't say it always stops people for asking them. Even when they've commented on the documentation when it was shared, even when the conversation started around a link to the documentation, I've found people one month in when it's time for them to do something ask for documentation with the implication there is none, and if you provide it in the meeting where they're trying to prolong the process they just insist they need time to review it despite having had at some stages a month to do so (or having left comments that at least indicate they already did)
There are many, many problems with our species, but we can’t change that. We can only adapt to it.
—From “The Purloined Letter” (1845) by Edgar Allen Poe
So, what happened? I was focused on other things. I was trying to not be hit by vehicles while crossing the street. I was trying to aim my body at the doors. I was trying to avoid bumping into other pedestrians. I was trying to prepare my mobile pickup order in the app.
What could have been done differently? You need to get these things right the first time. Once the user is in a mindset where they know where to go, signs to the contrary won't be noticed. The store's app told me to go to the counter, so I went. If the app had initially showed me a message like "Oh, at this location we do things differently, pickup is always outside" I think that would have worked.
The design principle is: You need to get in front of the user's eyes somehow. A brightly-colored banner isn't going to stop a user who's used to tuning out banners. Banners are where websites put ads and beg for donations. If you want a user to see pertinent information, you need to put it EXACTLY where the user will look. Make the page show half of the D&D role playing info, and make them click a button to expand the rest (coincidentally the button says "This is homebrew content, hidden so you notice this, this feature can be disabled with a checkbox at the top of the page")
Finally I went in, and got "oh, we don't do curbside pickup".
I was already paranoid about it, and now I'll be forever.
The page is chock full of distracting elements that have nothing to do with the content the user is looking for. The only way to read it is to mentally progressively block out the useless stuff. That banner fades easily and is probably one of the first things to go.
Also, they think of the banner as a clear contrasting color, but it's mostly a background image with a graphical, stylized text overlay that blends on to it. It's camouflage really, not prominent at all.
But I don't think graphical design should be a core competency of a good D&D resource center. There's almost some cred in their bafflement about why this doesn't work.
I say put an [Unofficial] badge, with a distinct style and color next to each link and title. It will be on the content the users see.
Beyond banner blindness and also the general page design as you say I think there is another, more subtle problem as well: the user doesn't care about the distinction. "Official" vs "homebrew"? What does that even mean in the context of D&D gaming? Although I'm sure it's possible to fully appreciate the distinction by reading whatever legalese is provided I'm equally sure no one will.
It's hard to make people notice things they don't want to notice. It's even harder when your callout looks like an ad festooning a clutter.
You can see the wiki’s admins talk about it here: https://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/User_talk:Admin/Archive_3#Home...
It ends with “Aye aye, I certainly won't be implementing anything before passing it by here first.”
In my personal experience all the somewhat successful non-hierarchical communities I’ve been part of, had some principles which make it easy to get stuff done without waiting for an explicit agreement from everybody else. For example the consent-based government system Sociocracy encourages people to ask for objections instead of asking for agreement from the the others.
I read the banner and thought "of course this is user created content; that's typical of a wiki. I wonder what separates their 'official' wiki pages."
The color scheme doesn't seem to match the rest of the website, so it's easier to write off as an ad or to just ignore it out of disgust.
The main text on the left, "Homebrew Page", doesn't necessarily register as synonymous with "Unofficial" to me, so even if someone gives it a passing glance they might just assume it's a specific version of D&D and therefore official. I'm not deep in the community though, so most players may already understand what it means.
Interestingly, DandDWiki is somewhat notorious for being less than accurate in many articles, I wonder how much of that reputation is potentially attributable to this phenomenon of mixing up homebrew and official content.
I think more than ignoring banners, we've become really good at just focusing at the content div. A bit like the Reader Mode in your browser.
At first I didn't think there was any good reason not to notice their banner, but the more I look at it, it does look a lot like a banner ad. Especially since it goes wider than the text of the page itself.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Template_index/Clean...
Normally I'd just skip straight past the sponsor message (and YouTube's new 'most replayed' feature enables this pretty effectively, as these videos all have a massive spike where the sponsored message ends), but if I'm doing chores I can't and am actually forced to listen to the ad. I have found that I've tuned in to the subtle changes in tone of voice between "content" and "ad", to the point where I don't even hear the messages any more; they're just a void in my short-term memory.
Unicorn colored Galaxies could work if you are the NASA, probably not so great in other cases.
And, anyway what is the real distinction between official and homebrew? Is that like Organic and Homemade in a supermarket? A distinction that is often without a meaningful difference.
Well, official is the material written by the creator of the game (here WotC), which is supposed to be tested, properly edited and more or less balanced; homebrew is written by anyone: that doesn't mean it's lower quality or unbalanced, but there's less of a guarantee; so most GM will usually allow official content and forbid homebrew
One of the comments on an answer complete with a nice redesigned mock goes: This is really good, but I'd drop the word "PAGE" that isn't adding anything and have it just say "HOMEBREW" to focus on the detail that matters.
Reminded me of Just remove the duck (2013), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9137736
An example of a notification style that's more likely to be noticed: https://carbondesignsystem.com/components/notification/usage...
His banner has stylized fonts, a photo as a background, and as such looks like an ad or something decorative.
My own wiki puts the "this is homebrew" information in said infobox, and has never received a single complaint about people mixing up homebrew and official content.
A while ago I sent a friend a link to something I found online, not realizing it was full of porn ads and scam ads. I had to convince him to get off the phone with "Microsoft".
It feels that your attempt to make the banner "pop" had an opposite effect. You need to completely rethink the design of the banner in terms of color, placement, and text.
They were human, it happens.
But that was beyond the ability of one manager to understand.
His response was to put in a request to have the procedure… blink with a blink tag…(he knew some html).
The procedures were sometimes multiple pages, and he wanted them to blink…
The guy who managed the CRM told him the blink tag was deprecated and would “crash the CRM”.
He later told me that of course a little JavaScript could do it but “I couldn’t do that to other humans.”
My daily driver is a big noisy old Range Rover. Okay, dark blue is maybe not the most in-yer-face colour, but it's quite loud and it's easy to tell when you're near it. People walk out in front of me, all the time, or pull out in front of me or hop their bike off the kerb in front of me, all the time.
My occasional work Landrover Defender - I don't often drive it, I've already got a tremendously capable off-roader, but sometimes I need to use the big roof rack or we need two 4x4s for a job - is literally Fire Engine Red, covered in red and yellow high-vis, and has big blue strobes on it (that we normally don't use). People walk out in front of it, pull out in front of it, hop their bikes off the kerb in front of it... did you guess "all the time"? Right, I knew you would!
The more visible you are the harder you are to see. I don't know why.
(Incidentally, I have the same issue in real life when I go to a restaurant with a TV, so I intentially sit with my back to the TV.)
I never have found any answer to any question in that particiular area. The colors also make me pay even less attention, and if you really wanted me to notice it, it would have been red text :D
On topic, most people just don’t read on web pages and emails! They expect to be spoon fed in tweet increments through short messages.
It's surprising and interesting that he didn't understand it himself, after reading his own post, it should have clicked.
Make the text red, or put NOTE/Important! in bright, bold text etc and it'll get noticed.
Maybe I've been conditioned by poorly designed webpages.
I like the suggestions that recommend slightly modifying the rest of the pages theme and adding text to the page title.
I went to the site linked in the post, and that banner is still like that o_0
I don't play the game, and until today I have never visited the site. But I doubt that the solution being discussed will have any material effect on the original problem.
