Chip Morningstar: “People have this tendency, particularly people who have utopian yearnings, to say, “We’re going to build this thing and everybody will behave. Everybody will do X.” Those plans get disrupted when it turns out that everybody doesn’t do X. This was one of the very early lessons from Habitat. You can build experiences predicated on a model of user behavior, but if it’s wrong, those experiences will not work. That seems like a trite thing to say. Well, of course. But the reality was that early on, we designed things that didn’t take into account a realistic model of user behavior. When everybody didn’t do whatever thing it was predicated upon, it would fail. We learned the hard way to pay attention to that. That’s a lesson that people have to learn over and over again…Prototyping, playtesting, and don’t think that you as the developer are representative of your users’ behavior.”
Cedric Chin: “The goal of reading from history, then, is to expand the set of prototypes in your head. Treating history in this manner sidesteps many of the problems we’ve discussed earlier. You don’t have to worry about path dependence, for instance, since you’re not drawing tight lessons from specific scenarios. Nor do you have to care as much about the narrative fallacy — if you have enough samples of the thing in action, your brain will be able to pattern match against the similarities across cases, never you mind that retellings of each case may be inherently flawed. When you’re hunting for concept instantiations, the criticisms of historiography are a wash; they fall to the wayside.”
Isaac Saul: “Misinformation is “incorrect or misleading information.” This is slightly different from “disinformation,” which is “false information deliberately and often covertly spread (by the planting of rumors) in order to influence public opinion or obscure the truth.” The notable difference is that disinformation is always deliberate.”
