GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism - <AUTHOR> http://jonoscript.wordpress.com/2012/04/26/gmail-designer-arrogance-and-the-cult-of-minimalism/ <comment><USER3> It's funny, a couple of years ago I was reading articles about how Google's design teams were supposedly hamstrung by their culture of incessant testing. I remember anecdotes about a/b testing 41 different shades of blue and designers being made to provide data for their choice of border width.

Now a whole bunch of people who haven't seen Google's test data are adamant that their redesigns are a usability disaster.

Unless something has radically changed within Google, I'd be _very_ reluctant to question any of their design decisions. I'd be doubly reluctant to call them arrogant whilst panning their design based on nothing but instinct and supposition.

<comment><USER4> Redesigns of a heavily-used UI are always "usability disasters". People spend many hours perfecting their workflow in one environment and FLIP THEIR LIDS when someone changes it. It's not a rational thing (nor, frankly, an unjustified one). What surprises me is that we haven't figured this out yet and rehash the same flame war every time.

The desktop environments show this best: c.f. Gnome 3. Also Gnome 2. And Gnome 1 for that matter (vs. KDE2). And KDE4. And KDE3. And Windows Vista. And OS X Lion.

<comment><USER5> You're begging the question.

If we take what you say is true every redesign is good, which is patently false.

A perfect example is the Office Ribbon UI, an unmitigated disaster. Also putting Vista in your list there, mmmmmm. Wasn't exactly a great redesign was it.

The Google redesign is also pretty much a disaster.

<comment><USER6> Am I the only one that actually likes the ribbon? I can actually find the options I want to use in Office 10 instead of trying to dig through dozens of drop down menus.

<comment><USER7> "Am I the only one ..."

The answer to this is always "no."

Except this time.

<comment><USER8> Amusing, but untrue. I took a (long) while to like the ribbon, but I have to say that I find it a large improvement in usability, and it makes it vastly more likely that I will accept "other than the basic/defaults".

It actively encourages exploration. That's good for some use cases, and it's certainly good for Microsoft.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There's something deeper going on here:

The: Gmail, Unity, Gnome, etc.. redesigns that we've been seeing recently all seem to have a pattern. A lot of these designs are benefiting and emphisizing the designers desperate attempt at garnering attention and acclaim rather than helping the users. You can tell by the constant tweaking of things that were never broken (the Start button), critical and heavily used elements being hidden or tucked away behind several clicks for the sake of "minimalism", incorrectly correlating a sterile white page with "simplicity". And they won't stop until the whole page is white and empty with one button and a line of text.

These designers are doing whatever makes them look off the wall bat-shit- creative (of the Lady Gaga variety). Many of these designers have stopped caring about a/b tests and the users and are focusing their designs solely on how it makes them look to the community. They want to be the next Steve Jobs, now that he has passed. And they are going to mimic his arrogance, take his risks, and think it will get them to his level. It will not, it's just pissing us off.

On a shallow level, and to the untrained eye, these redesigns are pretty and minimalistic but on a deeper level they are deeply flawed. Explaining to the average person why the new gmail UI is abnoxious is like explaining to the average person what's wrong with Michael Bay's films.

<comment><USER10> _> These designers are doing whatever makes them look_

I doubt Google would let a group of self interested ego fueled creative's override rational principal and analysis. Especially considering this is a flagship Google product with 350M users.

 _> On a shallow level, and to the untrained eye, these redesigns are pretty and minimalistic but on a deeper level they are deeply flawed._

I'm a designer. I've never properly critically analysed the new Gmail design. But I haven't felt the need to. For me it just functions really well.

<comment><USER11> Haven't you faced any problem with the toolbar buttons ? they are all lumps of coal with minor variations!

<comment><USER10> Took me literally a few minutes to adjust. Like a lot of UI elements the association of function is formed over time. Everything I do in Gmail is second nature to me now and the UI doesn't impede much if anything. I do wish email attachments would appear on the right of the email thread.

<comment><USER12> Yup plus you don't need the precursor of knowing the English language.

<comment><USER13> That's a poor excuse, Google knows how to do internationalization.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> When I was handed my first challenge of doing design for a web site (being up until that point a pure coder) I encountered a striking tendency in myself to want to neutralise colors. If I didn't know what color to make something, my default choice would be to desaturate it until it no longer offended my eye. On a fine level it works and you can solve a lot of individual UI "problems" this way. The problem is that as you accumulate these decisions you end up with a design that says nothing, has no motivation, fails to speak anything to the user. This is one way I know that I'm a mediocre designer. Great designers make bold decisions that challenge and energise the user and still they do it well.

I feel like Google has suffered from a similar problem - the solution to every UI problem these days is minimalism. Remove borders, accents, highlights, colors. On the surface it looks clean and simple but scratch beneath that and it seems to have no soul and no reason to exist.

I think the same issue goes directly to functional aspects as well - <USER2> functions and features on the page should feel alive as if they are speaking to me. I should be attracted to them, immersed in them, like they've been incorporated as parts of myself - but I'm not - I can barely differentiate them from the inactive, static parts of the page. Most of Google these days feels like I am filling out an IRS tax form. At best it is boring, at worst it is aggravating.

I'm looking forward to when we get through this new style of design from Google.

<comment><USER15> >> I encountered a striking tendency in myself to want to neutralise colors. If I didn't know what color to make something, my default choice would be to desaturate it until it no longer offended my eye. On a fine level it works and you can solve a lot of individual UI "problems" this way. The problem is that as you accumulate these decisions you end up with a design that says nothing, has no motivation, fails to speak anything to the user.

Interesting observation... this is something I struggled with as well coming from a coding background and trying to do design -- at the individual element level the colors seemed great, but pulling back to the larger picture everything looked washed out. Did you ever come up with a solution for this?

<comment><USER16> The solution is to learn color and how it works. Start with something like color theory:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_theory>

<comment><USER17> Kuler is a great tool for this sort of thing.

<http://kuler.adobe.com/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I can't fault Google for experimenting, but the 'all or nothing' approach they took to the rollout was an example of false choice. The classic coloring could have been offered as a theme to lessen the impact of the UX changes.

In case you miss the old color scheme, try this Stylish theme:

[http://userstyles.org/styles/64637/gmail-google-mail- classic...](http://userstyles.org/styles/64637/gmail-google-mail-classic-blue- theme)

Follow Jason's post to fix icons and spacing:

[http://jasoncrawford.org/2012/04/how-to-cope-with-the- gmail-...](http://jasoncrawford.org/2012/04/how-to-cope-with-the-gmail- redesign/)

<comment><USER19> This user style puts the text back on the buttons: [http://userstyles.org/styles/57677/gmail-change-button- icons...](http://userstyles.org/styles/57677/gmail-change-button-icons-to- text)

<comment><USER20> There's an option in general settings to add text button labels.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> One of the main problems why the 'clean design' has not actually benefitted users is because of gmails feature creep. Where once I could just write and recieve mail, now, by default, I have 'stars', 'circles', 'importance markers', '+ share', 'notifications', 'gadgets'... etc. all confusing my view of my mail. Most users don't want any of these things, and they certainly don't want to have to spend mental energy realising they dont want them, then hunting around in settings menus to see if you can actually turn them off...

There are some good design additions in the revised gmail too, but IMHO the above is really what makes gmail feel much more cluttered and cumbersome than it was before....

</comment><comment><USER22> Personally, I love the new GMail interface and have been using it for months. I like that is less cluttered and that I can more easily configure what is displayed. I've changed the buttons to be text in the settings as I did find the icons hard to pick at a glance. I also love the new themes.

It's interesting to me to see so many people grumble at interface changes whether it's Facebook or Gmail.

<comment><USER23> Same...

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> All of the things that he's complaining about are changeable in settings. And not even buried three levels deep -- they're right on the first settings page!

1\. Pick a different theme. I have one with a blue background, not the default light/white one.

2\. Go into the general settings, and change your star to a different colour, ie. enable the red, or blue one, or the green checkbox. Now they stand out.

3\. Go into the general settings. Change the 'Button Labels' radio from 'Icons' to 'Text'.

If you're going to bag someone's interface, you should at least spend some time figuring out how you can change it...

<comment><USER25> Thanks, changing the labels to text is a big help. I didn't even notice it there in General settings. It still doesn't change the tiny "..." link to a text label (the thing you click on in a message to show previous messages in the conversation). See my other comment here about Fitts' Law.

<comment><USER26> While the button is tiny, is it really highly utilized, with the entire conversation being in the threaded view?

<comment><USER25> I use it all the time. I've found that clicking on the previous messages in the conversation view is much slower (requires hitting their servers, which are usually slow). But clicking on the "..." must not require a server hit, because it's instant.

<comment><USER24> I don't find it that slow - but you can hit 'expand all' in the top right (next to the printer icon) to download the whole thread at once.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I really do buy the "change aversion" theory. I never used Gmail before the current design, and now I use it every day without problems. I click an email and I can read it. Importance and starring work as expected. And, the interface is very smart about not moving things out from under me when I make a change, much like Chrome's tab bar. Except for the slowness, I think this UI is a fine way to handle email.

<comment><USER28> I use it without problems too, and so does the author, but our eyes are not happy and our brains are less relaxed. We never used importance and we don't want it cluttering up our stars. We need visual queues, like lines.

<comment><USER29> You can turn it off. Under Inbox in Settings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I have no problem with the new Gmail. After the initial adjustment period, I find myself enjoying it more than the old version. I have developed a reflex for using the buttons that didn't exist with the text versions. It just happened.

</comment><comment><USER31> Well at least there's a giant red COMPOSE button, because every time I see a giant red button, I think COMPOSE!

I'm hoping that they'll do another revision soon to make it look more like the recently updated G+ design, which actually puts some visual separation between content and navigation (and also doesn't have giant red buttons).

<comment><USER24> There isn't on my GMail, because _I figured out how to change the theme_...

<comment><USER31> As did I, but the defaults shouldn't be awful.

<comment><USER24> Who says they're awful? You just don't like them.

Fair enough that you don't, but putting your opinion forward as fact (like most of the people here and the OP) doesn't really advance the argument. Perhaps a lot of people have trouble finding the compose button on first use?

<comment><USER32> > Who says they're awful? You just don't like them.

Well yes, but he is the guy who wrote Gmail, and that does add a little bit of strength to his argument.

<comment><USER24> It shouldn't be a free pass though ;)

"A big red button is awful." isn't much good compared to "A big red button is awful because ..." or "Instead of a big red button you should do ..."

<comment><USER32> I think the reason was implicit. Red has a meaning in UIs, and it's not "Compose".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I, like the author, abhor the new GMail interface. Thankfully, I found a _workaround_ , explained at bottom.

In fact, I found it difficult to explain to my parents how to navigate the new interface. They were quite upset at the changes and were considering about how to revert to their old providers (thankfully, I set up an email forwarding domain for them years ago so they can change any time they wish). It really is that appalling!

The contrast in usability to almost any other web mail service is shocking. Check Hotmail or Fastmail.fm or even Yahoo mail and "feel" the difference yourself!

Workaround to GMail's new interface:

0\. Make sure you have a browser or plugin that supports site-selective scripting, e.g. NoScript.

1\. Disable scripting for google.com

Then when you login, GMail offers a "basic html" interface. This is amazingly straightforward, fast, everything clearly delineated with strong colors, all new information extremely obvious, and just the basic design that matches closely to the old design.

If Google manage to mess up even this basic interface, then I guess, I and my family will have to find alternatives, e.g. switching to mail clients or for those who travel a lot to Hotmail.

</comment><comment><USER34> Levying "designer arrogance" on Google is laughable. Google has never made decisions based on the principles of design before, so why would one assume the design process is to blame here? I think this is a result of people who _don't_ understand design abusing style and visual trends.

The authors criticisms are legitimate and directly related to the design, but to assume an arrogant designer is at the top pushing these changes is frankly offensive. It's the same old engineers calling the shots at Google. But now, they just seem to be trying to keep up with other well designed products, like a little kid putting on his dad's Italian suit, wondering why he doesn't look great. Pleas, don't blame the tailor.

</comment><comment><USER35> I hate the new themes. My question is: why couldn't they have provided themes that at least look similar to the old ones? I tried most of the available themes and there only one that I find vaguely satisfactory is the high contrast theme. Some of them, like "Wood" are laughable -- is this an old Myspace page I'm seeing? And better yet, you'd think a company with Google's talent pool could make the themes configurable at a more granular level.

Thanks, Google, for making me contemplate abandoning gmail for the first time. (I know, I know... it's free, right? So what right do I have to complain? I guess I'm mostly angry at myself for growing so dependent on it (and recommending it to my friends/family.))

</comment><comment><USER36> Now, personally speaking, I don't like a bunch of the changes (those damn icons being the most annoying - and yes I know you can change them to text and I have :-). I can certainly criticise some stuff that gets in the way of my personal workflow. But hey - I'm not the 'average' GMail user. Expecting Google for optimise for me is daft.

A couple of random thoughts from usability tests I've done over the years:

* People are treating the changes to gmail in isolation. Google has changed and integrated design over all of their products. Some parts of a system can get "worse", but still help the overall system get "better". I've seen this when we culled some specialised hi-density layouts on a particular part of a larger system that pissed off some expert users who spent all their time there - but opened up the functionality to be used by a _much_ larger population who were more familiar with the "normal" look.

* People don't know what Google is optimising for. Usability and usability testing isn't necessarily about "making things nice for the user". It's about meeting the business goal. For example I've seen users _hate_ the fact we took some layout and colour preferences away from them, despite the fact that overall satisfaction went up, and efficiency increased _even for the users who hated the change_.

* I 100% guarantee that the people commenting here are not "normal" as far as Google is concerned. Does it matter if the geeks like me hate that they can see less e-mail at a time, if the other 99% of the market is jumping for joy that they're not repeatedly clicking on the wrong e-mail? Sometimes you just can't make everybody happy - so have to make a decision over which audience you want to be happy. You will generally have a more successful product if 60% of your audience goes "yay" rather than 100% going "meh".

* I spend a bunch of my time talking to "normal" users. I've noticed the general reaction to the new GMail be very different from the general reaction here. They either liked it, or just not noticed/expressed an opinion. I suspect Google cares about that user group more than it does me :-)

Also, and this is complete guesswork on my part, this feels like a first stage to me. Currently the various apps are very lightly integrated with a mostly pure visual design makeover. I wouldn't be surprised to see more functional integration appear over the next year or two as more people perceive the various Google apps and systems as an integral "thing".

</comment><comment><USER37> "I find the (algorithmically-applied) importance marker completely useless and would remove it if I could, but I use the stars quite heavily."

You can remove the importance markers: Settings > Inbox tab > Importance Markers.

<comment><USER38> And there is also a setting for having text labels in buttons instead of icons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I'm incredulous that one of the goals of the redesign was to make more powerful themes. New-style themes are much, much _less_ powerful than the old- style themes - cf. the new Terminal theme, which can't even change the text color or font, but is rather a hollow shell of itself with a small gif of a blinking green cursor in the upper left corner the only remnant of its old self. A preview of the old page in my Opera speed dial is all that remains of my old green-on-black monospace friend; I have set it to never update.

Incidentally, the new UI for video calls makes the 'end' button the same color as the background, and it is very difficult to see.

</comment><comment><USER40> Sometimes when I read HN I feel like I must be the only person who really likes most Google products. I think the design is pretty good. I don't analyze it very closely, and... I don't know, it works and it works very well for me.

</comment><comment><USER41> I have been using Yahoo Mail for a number of years. I find the interface to be far superior to that of GMail. More usable and practical. In many ways it mimics Outlook. They have some nice drag-and-drop action, right click menu tools and, my favorite, an Outlook-like reading pane. Last time I touched GMail it felt clunky. Because of this I have never felt compelled to use it.

</comment><comment><USER29> Please, for the love of Loki, can we all stop equating our subjective opinions with objective truth? Your tastes are different than others. That doesn't make them "arrogant" - at least, not necessarily.

</comment><comment><USER42> Does anyone else find it humorous that OP's site is ugly and hard to read? it doesn't diminish he's point (I could take or leave the new Gmail) but maybe his credibility.

<comment><USER43> Don't shoot the messenger - Who cares if his site is not easy to read? It's all about the message. He does not pretend to be a UI designer or something.

<comment><USER44> Because maybe he doesn't know what he's talking about. Personally having used the old Gmail interface and the new Gmail interface extensively, I think the criticisms do mostly boil down to change aversion.

Just to take one point: the icons _are_ confusing at first, but mail is something you daily for years, and Gmail has always been optimized for power users, so even though it might take you a week or two to get used to the icons, it's a benefit because now a greater percentage of the words on the screen are actually your email content.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> brilliant hack to re-enable reverting to the old gmail UI:

<http://qwerjk.com/revert-gmail>

[http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!searchin/gmail/qwerj...](http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!searchin/gmail/qwerjk.com$2Frevert- gmail)

<comment><USER46> It works! I love you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> The thing that drives me crazy with the new design is the separate scrolling areas, when I use the mouse wheel or hit the up/down arrow keys I want the entire thing to scroll, not whatever chunk I happen to my mouse in. This is especially annoying as I have a low res screen (old computers) and thus I can't much of any of the chat list, I used to just be able to scroll down to see it. I wish knew CSS magics to try and fix it with stylish or something (I'm a c programmer all the way)

</comment><comment><USER48> I posted this in the comments of the blog yesterday but it hasn't been approved yet, I imagine there are a lot of comments to get through. Please excuse the second person singular grammar, I'm copying this straight from the notes app on my phone:

Your last two points I agree with, but given they are optional and can be switched off I think those criticisms are not only misplaced but suggest a sense of entitlement similar to the designer's arrogance you bemoan.

On your first point though you are simply wrong. The thing you incorrectly call 'visual texture' is actually clutter.

The borders for individual table rows are superfluous as the baseline of the text draws that line regardless. Additional borders duplicate these baselines and demand that a user reads twice as many visual elements in order to interpret an interface.

The same is true for coloured backgrounds. If a distinction of utility has already been inferred by shape and proximity then to add an additional visual cue adds little more than another layer of complexity. This is unnecessary visual information that a user has to decode. Time that could be better spent performing the tasks they've actually come to the app to do.

I'd suggest having a read of Edward Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and Envisioning Information to get a better grasp on these concepts.

</comment><comment><USER49> I've long solved the Gmail web interface issues by accessing it only via IMAP. On the rare occasions when I have to use the website or Android Gmail clients they seem so unproductive to me. I think it is an information density thing - my desktop client (Thunderbird these days) is able to do a far better job of showing me more information at once. It also has the ability to manage state a lot better than web apps so my different panes can have differing contexts.

</comment><comment><USER50> Forcing users to relearn an interface without providing any added value makes no sense.

I ended up moving to Mail.app (which isn't perfect) because of the hideous in- page scrolling forced on me in the new Gmail interface.

Desktop experience is unbeatable; snappier interface, better performance, wider access to system resources, better integration with the OS, and you don't have to rely on the browser to be open all the time. I find this advantageous especially when composing emails.

</comment><comment><USER51> I overwhelmingly agree as a UX guy w/the comments in this thread about the poor choices from a design perspective.

But since this new design rolled into beta I've found myself slowly depending on Gmail more and more vs. my desktop client.

I don't know why but the "lack" of proper interface design here makes it feel blazing FAST to me, which is really the #1 thing I care about when trying to keep up with a slew of email.

I never had that sense in the previous version.

Anybody else?

<comment><USER52> Nope. The asinine hiding of most of your mail folders makes it way slower to navigate. And there's no indication that they exist. No control with which to reveal them.

This regression in UI standards that evolved and stayed in place for decades reveals that there aren't enough decent designers to do the required work today. And they don't have even a moderate level of experience or common sense, or they wouldn't make such glaring errors.

<comment><USER24> Click on the little arrow next to your folder/label. Under the 'In label list:' part, select 'Show'. Now your folders appear all the time. Also, you can click the "More" at the bottom to expand it.

Why is that so hard?

EDIT: No really - why is it so hard? Better than 90% of the complaining on this page could be solved just by spending a few minutes going through settings, tweaking GMail to your liking. There's even a settings page where you can see all of your labels in one place, and set each folder to show/hide/show if unread. It's _specifically designed_ for the parent's use case, and yet he pretends that it doesn't exist.

<comment><USER53> This entire discussion is a nice demonstration of the Dunning-Kruger effect -- everyone's suddenly a designer with more skills and common sense than Google staff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> I think I'm the only user who has found the "important" filtering to be remarkably helpful. I don't have a few dozen filters set up, and don't empty my inbox, so the flagging serves as a useful lossy compression of my email stream.

<comment><USER55> The best part of it is having Gmail on Android notify you only about important messages. It's great to get notifications about emails from friends about things going on tonight, but not get bothered by email list messages that can wait.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Contrast this with Yahoo Mail, which hasn't had a major design change in a couple of years. It's also crying out for some basic feature/usability improvements that gmail introduced in the 2000s (for instance, "always display images from xyz").

(I still use Yahoo Mail for online account signups, as well as friends and relatives going way back -- I opened the account in the 90s)

<comment><USER57> Has effing tabs so you can have a "compose" tab open and reach your email for info to copy-paste in your message.

Something as basic as this is missing in gmail's default interface. Having to save and go back to drafts is cumbersome, as are other work-arounds.

<comment><USER26> Pop the compose into a new window and/or tab? The assumption is probably that tabs and windows are built into your browser, why build another layer of tabs?

<comment><USER57> This is not the default behaviour. Popping it out will send you to the main page, having two full email tabs and no good clue about which is which. It's worse than Yahoo's way, or the basic html interface in gmail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> I'm in the same boat, and think the usability of the new interface is terrible. And the pretentiousness of the "form over function" design still makes me gag. But Chrome plugins like "Minimalist for Everything" make it almost bearable.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bmihblnpomgpjkfdde...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bmihblnpomgpjkfddepdpdafhhepdbek)

This and similar tools let hide and modify GMail with custom CSS and Javascript. Instead of trying to convince Google to behave rationally, it's easier to try to warp the new interface into something usable. I think about half the things in the article are already covered.

If only I could figure out a way to get the "stars" on the same side in the message view as on the overview...

</comment><comment><USER59> This one is driving me INSANE for past 2 days: Google Chat Title Bar Colors

They completely REVERSED it!!

Previously:

 _Blue_ \- No new message

 _Orange_ \- New chat message

Now:

 _Blue_ \- New chat message

 _Black_ \- No new message

Orange worked perfect -- it grabbed your attention. Blue doesn't really cut it, even worse that it is opposite to what it meant previously. BAD DESIGN. Period.

<comment><USER60> On the topic of bad colors, I like facebook's old colors of "offline" and "online": A green circle for online. a Gray-green circle for offline. On a screen with bad gamma, they looked almost exactly the same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Designers designed the old look; designers designed the new look. What makes them arrogant now?

</comment><comment><USER62> Design and UX may be a science or "science". But, it heavily involves taste (in the Steve Jobs sense, not "likes" or "preferences". And peoples tastes vary widely from "good" to "doesn't have any". It is ludicrous to believe any design / UX will leave large percentage satisfied. Also, many create valid, correct design / UX and yet are devoid of taste.

To further elaborate on taste; Engineers often refer to this as "elegance". Two bits of code can meet all specifications and requirements. Engineers with taste will feel the one which has elegance to be superior.

<comment><USER63> Great analogy between a designer's idea of "taste", and the engineers equivalent "elegance".

To take it further, just as the shortest code isn't always the best, the most minimal design is also not best by default.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> There's nothing wrong with minimalism. Minimalism is about making things simple, but _knowing when to stop_.

<comment><USER65> Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> I agree with #3. I have a lot of problems deciphering the icons, in the browser client and the ipad client.

<comment><USER67> They added a setting to change the icons to text: [http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2012/03/customize-gmails- bu...](http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2012/03/customize-gmails-buttons- replace-icons.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> The part I find interesting is that whole "minimalism" part. Simply removing stuff or add icons in favor of text buttons have nothing to do with minimalism necessarily.

I don't claim to be a minimalism expert, but more often than not people who talk about minimalism seems to think it's either cleaning up your house or removing stuff that "People don't really need", without figuring about what the basic needs actually are. Removing all door handles from your house doesn't make it a minimalist home.

</comment><comment><USER69>
        > I've certainly encountered this attitude before. Mozilla UX designers
        > like to use the example of tabs-on-top: when we moved the tabs above the
        > navigation bar in Firefox 4, many users balked at the change. But nobody
        > could give a reason why tabs-on-top was worse — they just didn't like it
        > because it was unfamiliar.

It strikes me that the problem was in this case an interchange of mental model. Tabs on top implies that the location bar _belongs to this tab_. People were balking because they had mentally yoked it to the browser as a whole, "this is the part of the browser which tells you where you are," and now it was a part of the tab which mentioned where the tab is presently pointing.

I think that's important to remember. The UI designer is always trying to give you a mental model for how their device works, and how the parts are causally connected. The "designer arrogance" is much more understandable when it applies to people who are merely upset that their mental model is changing. That is _not_ the case with the facelift choices of changing text labels into icons, or removing borders and highlights. Those _cannot_ be a valid occasion for this sort of arrogance.

</comment><comment><USER70> I just don't get this article from the sense that I have used GMail as my primary email client for the past 5 years and I their redesign didn't affect me at all. The things this author talks about seem to be more of personal preferences than actual objective thought. There has only been one thing that has ever really bugged me about GMail and it has nothing to do with the visual design. I don't like how they treat Folders and Tags as sort of the same thing. In my mind, they are two separate things. I want to organize my mail into folders, but I also want to tag them with keywords that have cross- cutting concerns (ex. folders Work or Home, but tags like Expenses that could be on emails in both folders).

Now, I understand that what I am talking about is sort of a personal preferences as well, but I guess my point is that I would care more about changes to functionality in GMail than small, minor visual changes like the ones this author describes. I sort of agree with their mentality that people eventually figure out the new UI and then it is no longer an issue.

</comment><comment><USER71> I always have though GMail is subpar at best when it comes to interface. I feel no desire to justify this opinion, just my personal feelings.

<comment><USER44> Did you ever learn the keyboard shortcuts?

Why I love Gmail is combining 80% of the power of CLI mail clients like mutt with 80% of the visual presentation of native clients.

I process hundreds of emails a day, and that's on top of the coding work I'm expected to do. Being able to work through them with vi-style keyboard shortcuts for everything including rapid labeling is the killer feature that nothing else comes close to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> Pretty horrible list IMO...

1) Try a different theme, it may help if it really affects you that much. But this is the only one I somewhat agree with as being possibly an issue; but nothing I really thought of when first looking at the new UI

2) The marker is more than far enough away to make it easy to scan through IMO. This feels far too subjective to just throw out and be like "yea this is definitely a bad change" without doing some testing first. Either way, you can disable this from settings. (Disable snippets iirc?)

3) This too can be disabled: go to settings and change it to text labels instead of graphical labels?

As much as I used to hate the new look too, I think it's improved enough since its first iteration to get out of the way and let me do my thing. Though, I still _REALLY_ hate the fact that you can't click on the "Google" logo at the top left to go back to the main page for whatever application you happen to be at. I have no idea why they would remove that...

</comment><comment><USER73> many of these issues can changed to be more old-gmail-like [http://jasoncrawford.org/2012/04/how-to-cope-with-the- gmail-...](http://jasoncrawford.org/2012/04/how-to-cope-with-the-gmail- redesign/)

1) remove important markers 2) add labels to actions/buttons

<comment><USER74> [http://techie-buzz.com/how-to/revert-old-gmail- interface.htm...](http://techie-buzz.com/how-to/revert-old-gmail- interface.html)

Even closer revert-to-old via the Stylish plugin and CSS hacks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> Look at Apple's e-mail interfaces for a fine counterpoint. Even their iCloud web client, while kludgey in some respects, is a sight for sore eyes after using Gmail. They use different shades and textures to bring my focus squarely to the most important elements - the e-mail list and the e-mail/draft in focus. They even let you hide the inbox/draft/sent menu for an even more focused view. The Calendar is a similar story - focused and crystal clear where Google's product is a jumble.

I hope Apple stays competitive/serious about iCloud - they clearly have a few things to teach Google (and vice versa, of course).

</comment><comment><USER76> Actually they don't have much choices on dropping some specific email features to make UI better. Anyways I think it's just like MS Metro. One cannot say OMG this is cool as we say with Apple properties but people continue to use those (inferior) UIs.

</comment><comment><USER77> As much as a I dislike the new Gmail design, I'm fine with it, why? I almost never use the Gmail site. I'm either getting my mail with Thunderbird or my tablet or phone. I almost never have a reason to do otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER78> What I hate most is that when typing an email it is contained in a fixed size box. I can't fill my screen with my email, I have to scroll inside the box to move up and down.

</comment><comment><USER79> My wife and I think they are optimizing for women. No empirical basis for this, it just seems like every one is aping UI elements and styles from Pinterest these days.

</comment><comment><USER80> It's spelled "Gmail", lowercase 'm'. Source: the Gmail blog, <http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/>

</comment><comment><USER81> I feel completely opposite, if anything I think gmail should go back to being simpler and more minimalist instead of more complicated.

</comment><comment><USER82> So no mention of the font size of this blog's content? The comments are larger than the content

</comment><comment><USER83> The new icons remind me of visual studio's new redesign.

Monochrome icons, no text. Ugh, horrible to use.

</comment><comment><USER84> What I don't like is colour as a premium feature, you pay with your social profile

</comment><comment><USER85> thank gawd - someone needed to say that . we're all helpless with google's arm-twisting us to accept the new email-look, or going back, forcing youtube users to start using a gmail id ..

</comment><comment><USER86> change is good in general. this change to gmail's interface is good in general. all 3 points in the article can be adjusted by changing a user setting.

</comment><comment><USER25> I totally agree with you. Another specific change that is hard to defend is the new "..." three dots to expand hidden parts of the conversation from previous messages. It used to be text that was clear and large enough to click on. Apparently the Gmail team hasn't learned about Fitts' Law, and the new target is pretty hard to hit with a mouse.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law>

<comment><USER87> Fitt's law is useful for two insights: The obvious one is that things you want to be easy to click should be large/close, but the less obvious one is that things you _don't_ want to be easy to click should be small/far.

The "..." dots is probably an example of the latter - I'd guess that Google wants people to view entire conversations by expanding the conversation view, not by clicking "...", so they make one way much easier than the other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER88> On an unrelated note:

I noticed people always complained about GMail having bad service (like me, when I couldn't open particular pieces of mail for a few days at a time).

How do these problems change when we become paying customers of Google? When I get a Google drive, do I get help in fixing problems? Or is that a lie I want to believe in?

<comment><USER89> You get proper email support if you are paying for gapps for domains. I don't know if that's what you mean by paying for gmail.</comment></comment>


My Four-Year-Old Son Plays Grand Theft Auto - <AUTHOR> http://www.bitmob.com/articles/my-four-year-old-son-plays-grand-theft-auto <comment><USER3> As a side note, I was really disappointed that Rockstar omitted the ambulance and firefighter missions in GTA IV. The ambulance missions were one of my favorite parts of the pre-GTA4 games -- challenging and well-rewarded.

(Edit: ...and, as the article shows, these missions are some of the only pieces of the game that could be played entirely ethically -- which may be why they were removed. I'm surprised no one's created a similar driving-and- saving-lives sandbox game outside of GTA, although the taxi minigame is similar to Crazy Taxi, which may be where GTA got the idea in the first place.)

<comment><USER4> GTA is quite an old franchise, GTA 1 & 2 were both top down games. You could drive a taxi/bus and pick up people. The game was really quite fun.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto_2>

Free download from rock* <http://www.rockstargames.com/classics/>

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the link, didn't know they were downloadable for free! (huge props to Rockstar).

I loved GTA2, never played 3 and beyond because I was always behind the tech curve for the moment (and fairly busy with studies).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Much is said about protecting children from video games, but what about other mediums (mainly TV, given its exposure)?

Any station can air some movie at 4pm featuring the good cops shooting the bad guys. Or, for instance, it is easy to be watching some news report at dinner and being exposed to something beating the horror or gore movies by points.

Aren't kids exposed since birth to the notion that violence becomes acceptable if against the bad guys? Where goes the moral of don't to others what you don't want to be done to you?

Even some very successful animated movies like Lion King end up with the bad guy being killed. Either intentionally or not, kids end up satisfied that the bad guy had what he deserved and that all become happily ever after.

I'm not for one side or the other, I just wanted to raise some questions to see what you guys think. I don't think video games are bad for children, but I agree they have to be picked appropriately for their age. But I also think we end up avoiding violence in the obvious places but letting kids completely exposed to it in another ones.

<comment><USER7> I'm not really sure where I stand on this issue but I think the argument is along the lines of: watching violence is different than role-playing violence.

<comment><USER8> Right. In addition, we attempt to socialize young men that violence is supposed to be a technique of last resort and permitted in only a narrow range of situations. (This will not endear me to some teachers of mine, but I'll say it anyhow: in those situations, it is often morally praiseworthy.)

Grand Theft Auto and company, on the other hand, depict violence as _riotously good fun_ which is self-justifying and an appropriate response to, e.g., boredom.

<comment><USER9> Yes. You should be playing Deus Ex instead. You have a choice there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I found this article incredibly disturbing.

 _Instead of plowing into the rear of the car ahead of him, he swerved to the right and popped up onto to sidewalk. In doing so, he accidently ran over a woman walking towards his oncoming car. He was incredibly ashamed of himself and profusely apologized._

I was an extremely sensitive young boy. This would have been _deeply_ affecting to me at the time.

 _"It's okay. It's only a game. It's not real", I reassured him. After a few minutes of me explaining the difference between a game and real life, he felt comfortable enough to continue playing._

Dear god.

I really hope the scene played out like:

\- Child was disturbed

\- Father was reassuring

\- Child continued playing _entirely of his own volition_

And not like:

\- Child was disturbed

\- Father was reassuring and encouraged child to continue playing, because it's okay to kill people in a game

\- Child continued playing

<comment><USER11> I understand you completely. I was chilled when I read "Its okay. It's only a game." Its true of course, but probably beyond a child's reasoning. Imagine "Its only baseball, cheat all you want". But here, its running over people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This speaks to why people are afraid of Grand Theft Auto: it isn't intrinsically bad; it can sometimes, however, speak a lot about people playing it.

Even more so, though, it also speaks a lot that about our society that it places a lot of value on decisions people make _in a game_.

<comment><USER13> and its a lot easier to express criminal behavior within the game without any repercussion, coupling that with a young mind that hasn't grown the mental aptitude to distinguish could lead to some ugly mishap's. We have a separate child's court for all of the above reasons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> What the ... This is truly unbelievable. If the kid wants to drive cars, there are tons of games available (my three year old loves one such game on iPad). And you can't argue that it isn't "intrinsically bad" either, a lot of stuff that is OK for grownups (alcohol, nudity, coke) may be bad for kids and may cause permanent psychological damage. Do you want to risk it?

<comment><USER3> Granted, drugs can hurt kids, but I'd be surprised to find that nudity has ever been shown to cause permanent psychological damage; otherwise we'd never have made it out of the trees. Do you have any references supporting that view?

<comment><USER15> My understanding --- which I can't in any way back up --- is that exposure to nudity was pretty much the norm for most of human history, in that families lived together in single rooms.

It's the (accidentally or otherwise) killing people part that bothers me about this.

I've studiously avoided exposing my (now 10.5 and 8.5 year old) kids to sexual material because it's unpleasant for _me_ to have to deal with the questions (though the boy's pretty much already gotten the details formally now).

But violence still bothers me.

<comment><USER16> I find it odd that sexuality and nudity are considered to be the worst things you can expose to a child. Violence, up to a point, is tolerated, but any display of sexuality is seen as adults only. Speaking directly of GTA, yes, there was some outcry over the violence contained, but the hot coffee mod received far more attention.

I've met a fair number of people who've had sex, and have had it myself, and I can't say that many have been seriously emotionally damaged because of it [1]. I've also met a few people that have taken the lives of others [2]. The damage done to someone by them killing someone else is miles away from the damage done to someone by having sex (if there even is any).

[1]: Excluding a few people I've met who have been raped. [2]: I used to work for the military.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I always thought it was kind of obvious that the rating for the games meant without adult supervision. When you sit behind your kid and take care of him and stress the difference between real life and game (and do not let him play for 20 hours straight) then almost any game would be ok.

<comment><USER18> _When you sit behind your kid and take care of him [...] then almost any game would be ok_

I agree about your larger point (there is a huge difference between supervised and unsupervised play), but no, almost any game would not be okay for a four year old. Four is a pretty critical age - kids start grasping the concept of death for example - and really, there are a lot of games that are developmentally completely inappropriate for this age.

The sad thing is that it came down to "my kid liked driving the car". If there is one thing the gaming world isn't short of, it's kid-appropriate driving games.

Kids grow up so fast - why rush it? Let them play the kiddie games now, there will be lots of time for GTA later.

<comment><USER19> > If there is one thing the gaming world isn't short of, it's kid-appropriate > driving games.

I think you'd be hard pressed to find a current gen sandbox driving game that is suitable for children. I think the only one I can think of off-hand would be Test Drive: Unlimited (which is a great game, btw, and probably more suitable for the child in this article).

There's probably more Need For Speed games or Mario Kart clones that I can think of, but very few driving games that are not focused on winning a race.

Thinking back a few years, the Crazy Taxi-type games are also good for children, although a good representation from the genre hasn't really been seen.

<comment><USER5> I remember the "Stunts!" game which let you customize your tracks... it was huge fun when I was a child.

Here it is on Wikipedia: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stunts_%28video_game%29>

<comment><USER20> Awesome. It was actually called "4D" on my old 386, and I haven't thought about that game in years. I spent countless hours building tracks and driving on them when I was 11 or 12 years old.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> How is this Hacker News? This belongs on Reddit.

<comment><USER15> I won't cry if this gets flagged but I like any HN discussion that touches on parenthood, because it's another experience besides coding and entrepreneurship that I might share with people here.

<comment><USER22> ..and provides for a classic hackers' sparring session: hands-on experience in one corner vs. those who've read all about it in the other.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> So when he turns 8 and starts wasting innocent bystanders for fun, do you take the game away?

<comment><USER24> I thought the point of the article was that the kid _didn't_ waste innocent bystanders. In fact, he apologized for it when he accidentally did it. I'm sure if he keeps playing it one day he'll do the missions and be exposed to the bad stuff, but by then I'm sure he'd be able to distinguish between game and real life.

<comment><USER25> He didn't waste innocent bystanders during the particular play session(s) the blog post was documenting. True.

But that's irrelevant and distinct from the notion of whether he will be more likely to do it at some future point in life, or do other related actions which result from a lack of empathy for other human beings, or a lack of understanding of negative consequences, or the permanance of harm in the real world.

I hear a lot of black-vs-white arguments in debates around this issue, but the problem is that it's not about black or white states or actions. Yes, having a 4 year old play GTA will not instantly turn him into a monster. And a kid can become a monster without ever playing GTA. Neither of those data points disproves a range of other possible negative effects that have shades of gray impact in the real world.

<comment><USER24> > _He didn't avoid these things because I told him he counldn't try them. It > just never occurred to him to commit these acts._

Does the game cause kids to go bad or is the game simply a litmus test for evil? The little baby kid didn't waste bystanders because the game doesn't tell you to do that. Perhaps your first instinct is to kill innocent bystanders when you think of sandbox style worlds... but for this kid apparently it's not. Even if it was, the game wouldn't be at fault. I'm pretty sure even if he did the missions, and understood the dialogue, he wouldn't be made to do such things because the missions don't usually have you kill innocent people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I posted this here because I think the actual actions of the child, against overwhelming odds, are probably a more credible indicator of its future than any images of filth he may have encountered. If you believe that playing this game and seeing hookers and blow will turn you into a delinquent, then what this kid did should turn him into IronMan.

</comment><comment><USER26> I think about this all the time. 2 boys 3 and 6 yrs old. I cringed a bit when I saw the title because it made me think of the term 'alterna-dad' and of a style of parenting in which children become accessories and 'buddies' to their extended adolescent parents. Sport matching mohawks, etc, etc.

But the article was nothing like that. It is short but the feeling I got was of true exploration and of forging a real relationship. (Another HN post of the past few days talked about how you have +/- 10 yrs to connect with yr kid). It also reminded me (as other posters noted) of that SouthPark where they all play WOW and meet Randy in game. Or the classic 'Chinpokemon'. Two really well done episodes - in both cases parents wade through unfamiliar territory to meet their kids and understand them better. Not simply ban the game.

There is danger in letting your chidren do certain things. The impulse to bubblewrap them is strong. I catch my breath everytime they do things like walk with me out on our balcony (17th floor), ride the scooter in the skatepark, climb on the rocks in the park across from our apartment, etc. But I consciously hold myself back - watching them but not rushing in to stop them. This week end my 3 yr old got punched full in the face by a 5 yr old. I held back for a count of 10 to let him deal with it as he wanted to and then comforted him a bit and broght him back so he could feel safe playing around this kid.

The point is to show them experientially that you trust them - and that you are in the background to help them if things get scary. I felt that vibe from this writer and applaud that.

In truth I have no idea of what I am doing. I use my intuition as a guide and hope I am right. What he says about the ESRB is spot on. If - as a parent - you need a school, govt agency or rating agency to tell you what is safe for your kid - then you are screwed. You need to go through it with your child and see for yourself.

You can get good advice from individuals - teachers, other parents, certain writers - but not from agencies and bureacracies.

As a parent dealing with impact of media in general is a challenge. For the past 2 yrs we went off cable tv and started to rely completely on the internet/ public library/ netflix for movies etc. I have held off on getting Wii/ x-box, etc in favor of PC based games. They have both watched tons of anime and comics (particularly stuff like Miyazaki Hayako (sp?) and the Avatar series). They both love Futurama - which might be too adult at times for them. I will have to explain 'death by snoo-snoo' one of these days.

My older son has learned to really enjoy some of the games that an Ubuntu distribution has to offer - things like Wormux, OpenSonic, BattleTanks. He has looked over my sholder as I have played some of the Doom emulations on the android or the Quake-like games on Ubuntu.

From hacker news I found out about the Wolfire free bundle and he fell in love with the Samorost series. He cried when it was done and drew a big picture of what he thought the next episode should be.

More recently on my wife's computer (WinXP) I downloaded Steam and setup the free version of Portal and bought a Tower Defense game to play.

Every time we take the subway or wait somewhere my wife and/or I whip out the gPhone and let the two of them play android games.

We try to limit this to certain times of the week etc. because of the vague fear that media will completely saturate their lives.

It is not the violence alone that gives me pause. I knwo experientially how absorbing a good game is (thinking of days past playing Half-Life or Diablo, etc).

I want them both to enjoy good media and I am loosely overlapping anime, movies and games because I feel like there is power in the imagery of soemthing like Half-Life or Miyazaki's "Princess Mononoke" which affects you deeply.

What often pisses me off are crappy movies in which the point is simply to sell a lifestyle. I hate movies like "Shark Tales" or "Madagascar" and I cant say exactly why. There are funny bit parts but the whole thing feels like it is in the service of what the philosopher Adorno referred to as the "Culture Industry". I find those movies more disturbing than somethign with more overt violence.

In a very interesting way I think this goes back to Plato and his fear of 'poetry' by which he included dramatic arts. It was the fear of the power of images. We have reached the point where video games and anime have reached a complexity and depth of imagery that they have a life of their own.

I know myself that these things affect me differently. I am trying to see through my sons' eyes to see how they are affected. At times it feels dangerous - like letting them speed ahead on their little bikes on the city sidewalk - but what this guy is doing is right. Watch them in the background, ready to bolt after them - let them know that you trust them and that you are there to help deal with the scary parts - let them experience it and learn from them as they reflect their experience back to you.

Plato on images: <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-rhetoric/>

Culture Industry: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_industry>

<comment><USER27> Parent of a 9yr old boy here.

> In truth I have no idea of what I am doing. I use my intuition as a guide > and hope I am right.

The problem is, for most people, intuition doesn't do very well in raising kids. Experience does. That's what bugs me about humans in our current stage of development. Each generation learns things and most of it is not passed on to the next generation. Every single one of my peers got squat from their parents in terms of "this is how it works, pay attention".

I definitely feel like I know a LOT more now, and much of my intuition was wrong.

I will say that I have a tendency to want my child to grow up too fast. The other day I was eyeing Blade Runner on the shelf and kept asking myself if he was old enough. It's rated R and there's a lot of violence. My son doesn't like violence yet, so that made it a little easier. (This wasn't an intuitive issue, it was about my desire. My intuition was to not let him.)

Overprotection is a real problem with today's kids. I see it everywhere I look, even in my own house. My spouse's intuition is to over-protect. It's nearly impossible to fight against that.

<comment><USER26> Well said: ...Each generation learns things and most of it is not passed on to the next generation. Every single one of my peers got squat from their parents in terms of "this is how it works, pay attention".

Blade Runner is an excellent choice for this discussion. A really good movie, something that remains with you long after. In terms of scary violence - <USER2> early tense scene where the android is being tested might be over the top - but the rest is just Star-Warsy gun battles where no one gets their head blown off...

Is it really that much more violent than prime time TV?

Lots of murky,scary suspenseful scenes.

I guess the counter argument is always - 'there will be time to watch this in the future'. But it is an individual decision not one for the esrb. Depends on the kid, I think.

On overprotection. I ran across a reference within the last year to 'free- range parenting'. Didnt read the book but got a good chuckle out of the amazon review and the idea in general.

I live in a NJ city about 1 mile west of the Empire State Bldg. So I am in the crucible of NYC-metro competitiveness which insinuates itself into everyday life. Kids taking 2 or 3 different language classes, multiple sports, music - all before they are 4 yrs old.

And insane over-protectiveness at times. A neighbor with 2 boys 9 and 7 yrs old, lets them walk 6 blocks to school. Which I somewhat agree with. Not sure I will be able to do that at the time but it has made me think about this issue in general.

The biggest problem with over-protectiveness in general is that I think kids absorb the fact that you dont trust them. In fact you are thinking of the murderers and molesters and drunk drivers but the kid thinks you dont trust him/her.

The movie/ novel "The Road" deals with this on an extreme level

I think this will inevitably happen in adolescence - some kind of "I'm old enough" / "No you're not" discussion. Seems like it is better to develop alot of trust before that happens.

<comment><USER9> > And insane over-protectiveness at times. A neighbor with 2 boys 9 and 7 yrs > old, lets them walk 6 blocks to school. Which I somewhat agree with. Not > sure I will be able to do that at the time but it has made me think about > this issue in general.

Indeed. We've come a long way, when letting your kids walk to school is something out of the ordinary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Does everyone here believe this guy? The guy spins a good tale, but I seriously doubt this happened. It is at the best an elaboration.

</comment><comment><USER29> To those of you who are all for this kid playing GTA-

Would you feel differently if this was Manhunt 2? Or would that be totally cool as well.

</comment><comment><USER30> I think he is an idiot. What a way to ruin a child.

</comment><comment><USER25> I think the author is dangerously naive because young children, much more so than adults, have a hard time distinguishing between the real world and one's imagination. For them, the border is much more fluid and harder to see.

And it's not like we're talking about a 14 year old playing D&D here with heroes and castles and dragons, oh my, but rather a 4 year old with cops, hookers, pimps, drugs, car chases, mugging and vandalism.

<comment><USER31> How do you know you aren't just a child with an overactive imagination who think's he's an adult? Since you say a child couldn't reliably tell the difference...

It's really dehumanizing to take a very large group of people and basically say they are incapable of decent thought like you and need to be controlled.

[edit: added the word "reliably"]

<comment><USER32> Joking? I'll bite anyways...

There has been myriad research detailing the adverse effects of children (aka developing humans) viewing violence, sex, drugs, etc. I think four year-olds safely qualify as developing. If stuff like this isn't alarming enough, consider a more extreme example like the two year old in Indonesia who smokes a couple packs of cigarettes per day [http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/05/31/indonesia.smokin...](http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/05/31/indonesia.smoking.baby/index.html) . You're hurting these kids' chances (of living a healthy life/of relating to their peers/of being successful/ etc)

For those hounding me for citations, here's something I quickly rustled up:

From an economist: <http://www.scribd.com/doc/22743802/Learning-Violence- Young>

From a social psychologist: <http://www.scribd.com/doc/2038214/Video-Game- Violence>

From a the Institution of Youth Development in Washington DC: <http://www.scribd.com/doc/33292276/Violence>

<comment><USER31> I don't think it's fair to compare playing a video game in which one does bad things with _actually smoking in real life_.

As to the studies, I've read some such studies and deemed them invalid or unscientific. Can you cite one that you would stand behind as rigorous and accurate?

[Edit: Can you site ONE study that you will STAND BEHIND? One you've read in full. Not three studies you just googled. I can google studies too...]

<comment><USER15> You are on very shaky ground with this line of argument, which attempts to cast aspersions at basically all of psychology because of controversies unrelated to the the issue we're actually talking about.

Yes, there are questions about whether playing "Mature"-themed games actually causes problems _for teenagers_.

Yes, there is an effort, probably ill-conceived, to restrict access to "Mature"-themed games _for teenagers_.

We are not talking about teenagers; we're talking about a 4 year old.

One simple axis of argument to observe here is the Harvard (Kutner & Olson) vs. Iowa (Anderson) debate; Kutner's book points out that much of the psych research is methodologically flawed. But _both_ Kutner _and_ Anderson agree that exposure to very violent games is associated with increased aggression. Kutner just doesn't want to see all games demonized for all pre-adult age groups.

<comment><USER31> You've used the weasel words "associated with" which are common in psych studies.

One thing "associated with" does NOT mean is "caused by". It's consistent with, say, people first becoming aggressive and then taking up violent games afterwards. And it's consistent with taking their violent games away from them making them more, not less, aggressive.

Anyway, just because two people from a debate agree doesn't make something true. And just because psychological studies are flawed for irrelevant reasons doesn't mean they aren't also flawed for relevant reasons. Feel free to cite a study you'd like to stand behind...

<comment><USER15> Something's gone pear shaped in this discussion if I have to weasel my way through it. Sorry. I'd just like to point out again that it's not like we're arguing about anthropogenical global warming here. Developmental psychology, along with (I hope) common sense, suggests very strongly that 4 years olds are not 14 year olds.

I've cited researchers (both with litanies of studies) downthread.

<comment><USER33> _Developmental psychology, along with (I hope) common sense, suggests very strongly that 4 years olds are not 14 year olds._

Which cleverly dodges the question at hand. Cartoon violence and/or sex: harmful to kids or not?

The big problem with most of the psych studies indicating "harm," for some definition of harm, is in the controls. Typically they'll sit some kids down in front of an Xbox for a measured period of time, and monitor them for signs of aggression and aberrations in empathy. The control group consists of another group of kids sitting in the next room playing with crossword puzzles.

The control groups in these studies _should_ consist of kids running around outdoors playing Cowboys and Indians, but that never, _ever_ seems to occur to the psych majors. It's almost as if they initiated their studies to demonstrate a preordained conclusion, or something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'd sure like to see some peer-reviewed scientific literature, where the peers in question aren't all members of evangelical Christian pressure groups, that documents the 'harm' done to young children by media.

If children are that easily traumatized, how can _any_ child grow up to become a healthy adult in a real war zone?

<comment><USER15> See upthread. The Department of Psychology at Iowa State and Harvard Medical School Center for Mental Health aren't evangelical Christian pressure groups. Let's not bring culture war into this.

Oh, the answer to your second question might be _sometimes they can't._</comment></comment>


Predictive brains, situated agents and future of cognitive science (2013) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/280585369/2013-clark.pdf

<comment><USER2> I find this an amusingly cognitive view. I think the commentators do a pretty good job of dealing with the main issues. Yes, you could frame everything as 'prediction' but basically all you are doing is conflating 'prediction' with 'agency with a time delay.' This really doesn't solve any problems. At what timescale you want to draw the line between prediction and agency for closed loop systems is an open question. I think one of the key concepts that the author fails to address is that the fundamental problem the nervous system addresses is coordination of otherwise isolated muscles, organs etc. While we may remain mystified about the function of the mind, we do know that at some level the nervous system is really about control and synchronization. There are astoundingly good models (now with biological correlates!) of motor control loops that are just classic PID controllers. While the predictive perspective can be useful in some cases it is just a perspective and an interpretation. If you want to get to the heart of the matter you need math, and this paper is lacking on the math. To paraphrase: words are wind, math is truth.

<comment><USER3> Your comment lacks of math though.

<comment><USER4> Exactly. Why intentionally obscure stuff with math if you don't have to? What a silly bias.

<comment><USER5> Doesn't it work the other way... Math provides clarity where as words can be ambiguous.

<comment><USER4> I've never had that experience. It usually takes a lot more effort effort to work out what the math is actually describing and why the operations done on it make sense. That's if I even understand the symbols and functions they use. If not then it's totally inaccessible.

To be fair you can easily obscure natural language in similar ways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Perhaps the brain just provides a place for the patterns to live? Perhaps it is not so much searching for patterns of activity which allow it to predict the future, but allowing the patterns of activity induced by the world to grow and evolve together. Then all it has to do is modulate this evolution when the organism gets something it likes. Reward modulated hebbian learning I believe it is called. I've not read the whole paper, but it seems overly complicated and unnecessary when you consider the above conception...</comment>