Nobody Believes It, Everybody Does It

Speaking of things we know individually, but let slide collectively, here’s Jeremy Keith talking about how we all used Flash:

Remember when almost every website had a Flash intro? Everyone knew they were annoying and uneccessary, but everyone else was doing it.

And here’s John Gruber writing about his experience with those marketing schemes that trade your personal information for a discount:

The marketing shitbirds who press for these schemes  […]  do so by pointing to data that shows that they do convert some number of users. “It works” they claim, pointing to data. What doesn’t show up in their data are interactions like mine. They don’t have analytics that measure that I now consider their website an antagonist to avoid at all costs.

There’s a funny thing about us humans: we place trust in systems that our own individual experience tells us are flawed. For example:

• KPIs: we know metrics get optimized at the expense of reality, but leadership treats dashboards as a reflection of truth.
• Performance reviews: we know they’re political and subjective, yet companies leverage them for promotions, compensation, even firings.
• Standardized testing: we know tests don’t measure real ability, but institutions rely on them for admissions, funding, and rankings.
• Terms of Service: nobody reads them, but the legal system acts like informed consent is given.
• Privacy notices / cookie banners: everybody clicks through them mindlessly while companies claim transparency and compliance.

This behavior is best summed up by Scott Berkun in Confessions of a Public Speaker:

I know I avoid most surveys I’m asked to fill out, as do many of you, which begs the question why we place so much faith in survey-based research.

What’s convenient at scale becomes a substitute for the reality we experience as individuals (because scale excludes the parts of reality it cannot conveniently capture).