Unoriginality

A recent tweet from vjack (author of the most excellent http://www.atheistrev.com/) asked, "Why is it that nearly every Christian who comments on an atheist blog acts as if he/she is the first to ever do so?" I suspect this was in reaction to his latest Christian troll, a 14 year old with all the arrogance and enthusiasm of his tribe, along with the lack of answers or experience also common to his tribe.

In part I think that old arguments get brought up to provoke a reaction (rather than taking the time to see where they've been answered again and again and again), but part of it lies in the basics of the human ego, particularly among the incompetent. (Incompetent people, of course, have no idea they are incompetent, and tend to rate themselves more competent than people who are competent.)

Before I retired, the products whose user interfaces I and my team designed consistently made profits, took market share in expanding markets, and spurred supplies profits. Yes, these products were in a niche market where ease of use was an excellent selling point, but the point is that much, much money was made by these devices, and our work was the public face of these flagship devices.

As our success became obvious, market forces and trends happened to erode the profitability of other divisions in this Fortune 500 corporation. And here's the counterintuitive part, the one that I think ties in with vjack's question: the more money our products made, the more awards we won, the more rave reviews from customers, the harder it was for us to do our jobs.

Designing a user interface requires scientific creativity. You make several things up, you test them, you iterate, and so on and so on until, out of all your hypotheses about how different aspects may work, you end up with a theory of a usable interface that matches your customers' needs. This process involves seemingly endless research and thought and experimentation.

When you outperform others in a multi-billion dollar a year company, one where corporate "restructuring" is CONSTANT as a method for placating financial analysts, people want to be associated with that stellar performance. As our devices performed better and better across the years, more and more people tried to interfere in the development process: you should do this, our customers are going to hate that, I think this should go here and be called this, well how many people did you test, on and on and on.

And the most frustrating part of all of that almost universally worthless advice and questioning is that the majority of these incompetent hangers-on were impossible to shut up. "Yes, thank you, no one on MY team is a moron, your points have already been considered and rejected."

"But blah blah."

"Blah blah doesn't matter, it has already been considered, tested, and rejected by the exact same process that has resulted in profit making, market share taking devices for the last 9 years."

"Well, the old one did bleh, and I think that is the way to go, our customers really like bleh."

"I am the one that personally INVENTED bleh, I hold a patent on it. The same methodology that said BLEH was a good idea says that our current ideas are even better!"

And this continues for days. Weeks. Months. Years even. (We had a normal 2 year development cycle, and the same stupid suggestions would get reborn as new people, with no training in our field, no experience and little intelligence would come in and duplicate the time wasting of their equally idiotic predecessors.) I once tried sending out form letters of, "I read and understood your points. Your opinion now resides as a data point in the thousands of users and experiments whose actions and opinions and results I have absorbed. Nothing that you have said is new, and there is no reason for I or my team to spend any more time on this issue. Thanks for your input, The Pompotous."

Needless to say, I was ordered to stop using that -- too insulting, as if an untrained novice with no evidence attempting to dictate to a seasoned, educated and proven successful professional wasn't insulting! But that is corporate life. People really don't seem to understand that some ideas are correct, many more ideas are incorrect, and there are indeed instances where this can be demonstrated. Being wrong, as a scientist, is just part of life. It is part and parcel of the scientific method. Most people can't seem to internalize that, and end up wasting a lot of time with what is, quite frankly, crap.

And I don't want to give the idea that all input from untrained novices with no evidence is useless. Sometimes questions from the non-idiots can provoke a chain of thought, when answering, that opens up new doors to be explored. That's the basis of collaboration, at least the way it worked for my team: someone lays down a set of hypotheses and you start asking questions until you're down to things with all the obvious logical or technical flaws removed, something that needs to be explored through experimentation.

Too much ego is bad for the scientific method. So when scientists come along and say, "You're not only wrong, you're not worth arguing with because YOU HAVE NOTHING NEW AND THE PROCESS HAS ALREADY HAPPENED," they just go nuts with outrage. If the basis for, say, evolution was as completely worthless as the basis for, say, creationism, then speaking out would be warranted. But it's not.

I wonder if there is an atheist FAQ (or FAA, Frequently Answered Answers) that we could point to: you think Biblical Creationism is a scientific theory, you have provided no new evidence to support your ridiculous position, see tinyurl.bleh#3.