While placebo "walk" buttons in New York City are amusing, more malevolent was that NYC had thousands of placebo fire hydrants. The city would ticket people who parked in front of these unused fire hydrants even though they had been disconnected decades earlier.
There was a similar controversy with NYPD issuing parking tickets illegally for parking in front of sidewalk pedestrian ramps that are not at crosswalks. The most ticketed one collected $48,000 in parking tickets over 2.5 years despite actually being a legal spot.
Maybe I'm alone, but I feel like this makes sense. It would be difficult, and take more effort than its worth, to have to decide which hydrants are legal to park in front of, somehow designate them so drivers know they're inactive when looking for parking spots, and instruct police and parking enforcers on which hydrants they're allowed to ticket for.
Or they could do like the do in the UK, and have the hydrants in manholes in the middle of the road or pavement, so they can't be blocked by cars and won't freeze or get damaged. The fire engines carry the above ground hydrant part with them and attach them when they use them. But then that wouldn't generate any revenue.
The Fire Department already has to keep track of which hydrants are operational.
If marking them would generate any revenue it would be done very quickly. As it is not marking them generates tons of parking ticket revenue, so that's what's done.
Only issue with this is probably the city would have to hire somebody to paint it, so they have to decide on a budget, have a bidding process, comply with union requirements, and then finally execute it.
The covering of them mentioned by nommm-nommm might actually work, though.
Maybe remove or fix the non-functional hydrants? It seems to me that firefighters wasting time trying to use one in an emergency could have far more serious consequences than just some parking tickets.
If you don't enforce the parking law for the non-functioning hydrants, people may become complacent or confused and start parking in front of necessary ones.
But removing them isn't worth it either, because it's expensive, and there's no particular need to. (The article says they can afford it, but even so, there are probably better uses for the money.)
Elevator open/close buttons are enabled when you put the elevator in "service elevator" mode. There's usually a key switch for that. This is for freight; it's not a maintenance function. In "service" mode, the doors won't close unless you press the door close button, so you can move things in and out without interference from the door. With some service elevators, pressing a hall call button when the doors are open rings a bell to tell you to stop hogging the elevator.
Other key switches may include "independent operation" (decouples that elevator from the group controller) and "attended" (enables buttons Up, Down, and Non-Stop).
When moving in or out of a multi-elevator building, ask to borrow the service elevator key. That's what it's for.
I love the street art, but believe the article is fundamentally flawed. It picks three examples of placebo controls, crosswalk buttons, elevator door closing, and office thermostats. Let's go through those
Crosswalk buttons - When traffic through an intersection (both pedestrian and vehicle) merits "knowing" when pedestrians want to cross, the buttons are considered. When such information will not change the flow, they are not. At some point in time if the cycle of walk/dont walk red/yellow/green will not differ based on button input, you can stop considering the button input. However, we get into situations in the Bay Area where the button is important and people who don't push it never see a walk sign. So sometimes they work, sometimes they don't.
Elevator buttons have a similar issues. There are regulations about how quickly after the doors open that the doors can close, and there are mechanisms that control the speed of closure (also regulated for safety reasons). Few people feel consider the door open button is a placebo because they can see, "Yup the doors are still open" but they feel that close is a placebo because the doors don't immediately start to close when it is pushed.
And office thermostats. Having been responsible for a company move, and consequently dealing with the landlord of the old and new space. The HVAC system was always divided into "zones". The thermostats were placed based on some previous zone. So when you reconfigure the space, new thermostats get added (if necessary) but old ones don't get removed. The old ones are either useful in the new configuration, or not useful now, but may be at a future date. Since it was $300+ to add a thermostat into the space, the landlord kept all thermostats that exist, so that future tenents might be able to use one that wasn't needed before but is already installed, saving $300+ in tenant improvement costs.
For the thermostats, I had a customer at a previous job who had a bunch of placebo thermostats installed for the "office ladies" would stop fighting. It actually completely solved the problem.
("office ladies" is my translation of what the customer actually said. I'm not trying to be sexist, although the customer had no problem being so.)
I did a similar thing to thwart a roommate who would always turn down the thermostat so it was frigid inside. I changed the calibration so it would show a temperature a few degrees lower than reality. He never touched it after that, and the rest of us didn't have to wear sweaters indoors.
Yes, the myth of placebo buttons continues unabated. Maybe that's a NYC thing. I know plenty of crosswalks in SF and LA areas where if you don't press the button it will never say walk.
Also, here in Japan nearly all elevator close buttons work instantly
In New Zealand most of the pedestrian crossings don't show any lights until someone pushes the button. Occasionally someone will stand at the lights staring at a completely unilluminated crossing light until someone else pushes the button.
Handily it means if the light is on it will change.
Yeah, the 'don't walk' light doesn't illuminate until you press the button, there are even some pedestrian only lights where you must both press the button and stay standing on a mat, otherwise the light will not change.
I've never seen a traffic light in New Zealand that won't change it cycle in some way during at least some part of the day when that button is pressed. During peak hours there are many traffic lights where the cycle doesn't change at all when you press the button, other than show the walk.
Most other traffic lights modify their cycle slightly, with red turning lights to prevent drivers from turning across the crossing pedestrians.
The button is only truly important outside of peak hours, when the traffic lights operate on sensors. And the cycles for cars are often so short that a pedestrians can't actually cross the road in time. So pressing the button not long makes the cycle change, but lengthens the cycle.
"Myth"? You have certainly not debunked ChuckMcM's detailed hypotheses about the reasons a placebo device exists. San Francisco, Los Angeles and (presumably all of) Japan are not indicative of much of the rest of the planet. There's still Chicago, Berlin, England (encompassing London), Brazil, Beijing...
I don't think the burden of proof goes quite this way around, as every claim I've seen that crosswalk buttons do nothing has always been specifically about NYC. This seems to be a "fun fact" about a particular situation in NYC that everyone just started to repeat as if it was true everywhere.
I have yet to see a 'working' crosswalk button in my nearest (non-NYC) metropolis. This would be because every light-controlled intersection I traverse on foot is on a programmed loop. Reliably, the crosswalk lights go to "walk" a second before the parallel street goes green. This happens five seconds after the perpendicular direction goes all red.
That's not to say that sensor-controlled intersections which take the crosswalk button into consideration do not exist- there are far too many intersections which I haven't the time nor the inclination to tour.
Ultimately, my point is this: simply because all the media on placebo buttons dwells on New York City does not mean similar devices don't exist elsewhere. I bet here, folks just don't care; they press a button and eventually get through a light.
Behavior may be very different during low-traffic periods. During busy periods, it's important to keep synchronization with nearby intersections. During off-peak periods, many traffic lights go to an on-demand mode, skipping directions where no traffic or pedestrians are waiting.
The standard modes are called "pre-timed", "partially actuated", and "fully actuated".[1] In pre-timed mode, the pedestrian buttons don't do anything, but there's a WALK period somewhere in the cycle. In "fully actuated", you never get a WALK without pushing the button.
In the middle of nowhere (Stafford, England) we have a mix of the lot. Here we have standard crossings that will never be anything but green (for traffic) without a button press.
There's also T-junctions here that toggle between multiple roads that insert a pedestrian crossing into the cycle when the button is pressed, otherwise they'll just toggle between the roads as normal.
Then we also have Y-junctions where the pedestrian light is green when the opposite road light is green. The buttons might speed up the cycle there but I've never seen any evidence of it doing so.
I have not suggested that any particular functionality (or lack thereof) exits in any particular place. I have, however, suggested a limited list of places not include in San Francisco, Los Angeles, the City of New York, and Japan.
Yeah, this is the problem. If you know that sometimes the button does have a purpose then it makes sense to always press them, since you don't know when you have to and it's basically no real effort to do so.
After a few hours of Googling, I still can't figure out why these regulations exist. I managed to find a lot of people saying that the ADA requires a door to stay open for a certain amount of time, but nothing about why a Door Close button shouldn't override that.
A common scenario where elevator door close buttons are useful is hospitals. They often have a very long door open time set to accomodate the disabled and people handling gurneys, and the button will shorten it. This has been the case in most every hospital I've been in.
There are few things more infuriating than a placebo button. They talk about illusion of control, but it's actually just a cruel and borderline sadistic demonstration of the control you don't have.
“Doing something is better than doing nothing, so people believe. And when you go to press the button your attention is on the activity at hand. If I’m just standing at the corner I may not even see the light change, or I might only catch the last part of the change, in which case I could put myself in danger.”
Probably the most condescending and patronizing statement I've heard in a long time.
Then there are those who try to find deep meaning in something as innocuous as a joke placed at a crosswalk signal. It's not "sociopathical". There is no "depth" or "satire". It might be "art", but even that is debatable.
It's just citizens putting up something funny. Why is there a need to attribute it to something more deeply rooted in the psyche?
I think a lot of these stickers are a form of graffiti with a political agenda, of thinking for yourself and noticing you're losing your autonomy. Some people scream it and throw things, others use satire to prod us into action.
This is what I mean. You're reading way too much into the situation. If I were not such a lazy are artistically-challenged person, I would absolutely set up such a display at a useless crossing signal. And it would have no meaning whatsoever other than to make fun of the fact that the specific button does nothing. Nearly equatable to being satire, but with less meaning than the term "satire" generally refers to. It would be purely for the purpose of a fun moment in my life, nothing more. No philosophical meaning about how "many actions in life are fruitless", but rather "heh, this one button doesn't do anything, time to have fun with it".
Our brains may be wired with complexities we don't understand, but I know the difference between having a moment of enjoyment for myself, vs. doing something with an ulterior motive of pretending to be a genius making grandiose remarks about civilization as a whole.
More people need to remember what it's like to be an innocent child who, in such a case, would instantly proclaim "a button that doesn't do anything... whyyyy?", instead of going full-on adult with a cynical point of view. For fuck's sake, stop overthinking every single moment in life. It's depressing.
I knew a gameplay programmer years ago who got frustrated with a particular designer constantly requesting minor tweaks that required code changes. He built a fancy control panel with a bunch of sliders and dials to adjust all kinds of gameplay parameters and gave it to the designer who happily spent the rest of the project making endless adjustments without bothering the programmer in question.
Of course he never hooked up the controls to actually do anything and the nicely balanced gameplay was entirely due to the decisions he hard coded.
Makes me wonder what kind of placebo buttons will be put inside self-driving cars. Maybe a "vroom" button to tell your self-driving uber to take the fast route, or maybe even a "NY Cabbie" button to make it super aggressive in the city, along with a few honks. Latest research shows that people think biggest benefit of SD cars will be time to do other things (http://unu.ai/self-driving-cars/), but I bet one of those other things might be to hit the placebo button....
> Maybe a "vroom" button to tell your self-driving uber to take the fast route
I hope uber will have some way of adjusting the route. I can tell the driver that the address is misplaced on google maps, or that a specific one-way is always blocked, but I can't say the same to the car unfortunately.
> No, this will become something you pay for (unfortunately). Higher priority in the traffic routing algorithm will go to those who pay more.
Doesn't this require for there to be only one self-driving car operator? What if there are multiple competitors that all route high priority traffic in a way that ends up making a route congested?
They're probably likely to collude, but it could still be an issue.
Are there placebo buttons in regular cars? Why would self driving cars have this as a feature? Especially whoever is paying for the car which would have to pay money for this useless feature.
As far as placebo effects in cars, a lot of newer cars are putting in "sound enhancing" tubes to pipe sound into the cabin from the engine bay to make the car sound more powerful. VW went so far as to actually play engine noises out of the speakers regardless of if the stereo was on.
Well, there are certainly buttons that do things that have little real-world impact on the car. Like on high-end German cars you get seven different levels of ride stiffness etc. that can be selected.
> Feeling you have control over your world is a desirable state
I wonder when exactly in business the "experience" of something became more important than the actual thing - but this pattern seems to become increasingly more common:
It's more important that customers feel valued than that they are actually valued; it's more important that food looks fresh and tastes nutritious than that it actually is; it's more important that a device has a high-quality exterior than that it has high-quality specs; etc, etc.
I feel this kind of thinking is the source of many frustrations and even health problems. I find it sad if it's now apparently so widespread that papers take the assumption for granted.
How silly! I love the tinfoil hat account of office thermostats. When you retrofit a controls system, based on my experience, it's not uncommon to leave existing fixtures and wiring in place...disconnected. It's not a conspiracy, however it is often the case of people being cheap. It costs far more labor to rip everything out in addition to installing new equipment. I've seen things...awful things...that inform my opinion on the subject ;)
> Late for work in Manhattan, you push the crosswalk button and curse silently at the slowness of the signal change.
In other parts of NYC maybe, but in most of Manhattan I can't imagine anyone doing this more than a few times. They'd be more likely to just "jaywalk." Signal phases are very short and "jaywalking" is so accepted and normal that it seems odd here to have a word for it.
The real irony is that (so I was told) "jay walking" comes from an old derogatory term, "jay" meaning someone from the country not familiar with the city. But in Manhattan, it's the other way around -- the tourists are usually the ones that scrupulously _don't_ jaywalk.
> "jay walking" comes from an old derogatory term, "jay"
Really? I always wondered where the term came from, the best explanation I could think of is that the original offense was walking most of the way across the street and then doubling back (so walking in a 'j' shape) which would confuse traffic and lead to more collisions.
To make it better the term really came into its own because the automobile industry ran various PR campaigns using it in order to combat the many campaign groups who were against bringing large numbers of vehicles to the city.
I always press the street crossing and elevator door close buttons, even though I'm well aware that in many cases it won't work. Why? Sometimes it actually does work, and the effort required is minimal. I don't do so because the button has provided the illusory feeling of control.
In addition to that, there are cross roads in my city were if you don't press them, the light will _never_ turn green. Instead the cars going in that direction get a turn right arrow.
We have a placebo button on the last page of our online school interview booking system.
The last page clearly states that their bookings are confirmed and have been emailed to them, but during usability trials we found many people wanted another button to confirm completion. So now we have a "Finished" button that simply takes them back to our home page.
This article seems to suggest that it's all in good fun because "traffic flow is now computer-controlled", the suggestion being that traffic is cars and cars only.
In many many parts of NYC, pedestrian traffic dominates cars, yet signals and streets continue to give preference to cars and other motorized vehicles. If there is an overflowing sidewalk full of people waiting for a signal it's a testament to the 1960s era thinking that permeates DOTs planning and construction.
yet signals and streets continue to give preference to cars and other motorized vehicles
I don't know about NYC, but in SF this is not necessarily the case. Signal timing can be optimized for pedestrian rates of speed, or bicycles. Planners do think about this stuff.
Most of these stories use large cities like NYC or London as an example. I wonder though how common it is that the crosswalk buttons don't do anything in the rest of the world or even other cities in the USA. I often wonder if pressing the crosswalk button does anything when I wait for the crossing light. Of course, if we knew which ones worked and which didn't then they wouldn't be as effective.
Something like 6-7 years back from now, I was working as a guy who distributes free newspapers on the street in Kraków, Poland, and my assigned street corner was next to an intersection with those crosswalk buttons. I decided to check out the story about placebo buttons then, so I took measurements how long it takes for the pedestrian green to turn on depending on whether or not someone pressed the button. It turned out that the button cut down the waiting time by about 20 seconds, which was at most 50% reduction AFAIR.
So sometimes they may work, but the change may be subtle enough to be easy missed.
I think it was Melbourne, Australia where I experienced this, but there were no automatic cycles for the crosswalk lights - they don't go green unless you press the button. Even after learning that, I would still forget sometimes that the buttons weren't just a placebo and would find myself getting frustrated at how long I was having to wait.
Was that at the town end of Starowislna near the old newspaper offices? I may have passed you a few times; didn't accept the paper because I can't read Polish.
From reading the comments here I get the impression that such crossings are only at intersections. In Drammen, Norway, where I work, we have in addition crossings that are not at intersections and the only time the lights change in favour of the pedestrian is when you press the button. In addition there are some at intersections that also require a button press because the one way system means that there is never a conflict between vehicles.
I suspect these are much more common in cities, simply because they're more likely to have the kind of intersections where a fixed cycle makes sense. For example, if you have a crossing over a one way section of road, or if the crossing is busy enough that there will almost always be pedestrians waiting.
Outside of cities, you often have less frequently used crossings over main roads, where a button controlled crossing makes much more sense than a fixed cycle.
How a light works can change also. Sometimes it will fall back on a dumb rotation if the sensors are not working.
Also it may make sense to rely on sensors/buttons when there are few people, but once your city gets too big and has constant foot traffic, fixing the sensors may not be worth it.
Can't speak for anywhere else, but here in Baltimore I've never observed them to actually do anything. But we all just jaywalk across roads at whatever point happens to be most convenient for our purposes, so it doesn't matter anyway.
As someone that comes from a smaller town in the UK (I went into detail in another comment) I find it really weird when I go to London and nobody presses the buttons.
In Cincinnati, many of our crosswalk buttons at intersections that trigger automatically, which are most of them, have small signs "push button for audio only."
I'm so used to the NYC crosswalk buttons being useless, that when I visit other cities I'll find myself waiting at a crosswalk for 2 or 3 cycles before remembering that I won't ever get a "walk" sign without pressing that button.
On the other hand I ride the office elevator every day with people who slam on the "close door" button multiple times despite that the door closes automatically very quickly, as if slamming on the button will increase the speed of the already-closing door.
I see this frequently in Edinburgh. I join a group at the pelican crossing and after waiting too long, realise that the button hasn't been pressed.
Many of our crossings do nothing if you don't press the button. And if the light has been green for road traffic for a while, pressing the button /immediately/ sets the traffic sequence towards red. I often let the odd car pass so the traffic looks clear before pressing, rather than force a poor driver to a stop.
I find that the placebo elevator close buttons are a very North American kind of thing. In other countries that I've been to, I've surprisingly seen them working. In Brazil for example the door will close instantly. I'm pretty sure they worked in Germany as well.
Report on Facebook is such a frustrating experience.
For example, reporting a spam post in a neighborhood group.
> Dropdown > Report Post > It's spam > Continue > Mark this post as spam and/or Report to admin > Done
> How was your experience getting help with this issue?
I would pick happy if it were 2 clicks instead of 7...
> Spam post is still displayed...
I've reported hundreds of posts but it doesn't seem to be actually acknowledged by a human.
Now, on the other hand, Instagram very recently (maybe last month) drastically simplified their reporting + blocking flow down to a small number of steps. It's very nice, and you get feedback of the spam comments and follows being hidden immediately.
I read a writeup by someone who tried a year or so ago, creating two almost exactly identical Facebook groups only one was telling how one group of people were just sh*t and the other was just the same only with people in the country right across the border from the first one.
One was taken down almost immediately, the twin was still up when the experiment ended IIRC. Won't name the nations here but it goes to show the influence Facebook actually has.
It seems like relevant context to include the countries at hand, for example, if their government structures, censorship levels, or corruption vary significantly.
At one point about a year ago it was indeed a no-op. I checked and while the thumbs up button sent a request, the thumbs down one did nothing. It was changed a few months ago though, and now both send requests - though that doesn't guarantee anything server-side ;)
Blizzard acts on them, as does Microsoft with Xbox Live feedback. It's usually on a 6-month cycle and they do huge bans all at once, and they usually hit the gaming press along with tons of comments of the form, "you can't close my Xbox Live account, I only cheated 3 dozen times!" etc.
Smaller games like Mechwarrior Online? I'd be very surprised if the complaints are ever checked in any systematic way.
The nice thing about the Xbox Live system is that even if the specific game doesn't act on the reports, Microsoft themselves will sooner or later. With smaller games, it's just placebo, and that jerk who you played with will still be there 3 years from now, still being a jerk. Oh well.
I have gay friends and most of them agree, what about trying telling that to a poor person? elections are -on its current form- a very unrepresentative way of democracy.
There are concrete issues that can be addressed by electing certain persons but generally speaking, change and elections(especially with money involved) it's like the traffic buttons... you think the light changed because you pressed it.
Hi. I think he's right. But that's beside the point. Whether I think he's right or wrong, I can say so, or not say so, for myself. You don't need to worry about it. Thanks for the thought, but I've got it covered.
I assumed as much, but I don't understand how gay marriage was affected by voting for either of the two parties. As far as I could tell from an outside perspective it was a Supreme Court decision that followed a long series of changes in state law in large parts of the US.
It was my understanding that these kind of "contentious" issues are generally only resolved by the Supreme Court when there is already a de facto majority decision in state laws making it a "safe" decision. I'm not sure how much impact the president can even have on these, seeing how the Supreme Court is supposed to be impartial and non-partisan.
Pretty much, although the Court tends to be a bit further ahead of the curve than you suggest.
While I can't speak for 'aaronbrethorst, based on his recent commentary here the theory appears to be that a Republican president will "pack" the Supreme Court with nominees who will then proceed to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges.
Under our system of rule, this is plausible, and Obergefell was decided by a simple majority of the nine-justice panel, with five concurring and four dissenting. A single retirement or death among the five justices concurring in that opinion, therefore, would open an opportunity for a justice of a different opinion to be empaneled, following which a sufficiently savvy court challenge to gay marriage would give the Supreme Court another opportunity to rule on the matter, possibly with a different result.
As I said, this is plausible. It is not, however, likely. Historically speaking, the Court has been extremely conservative in its actions - not "conservative" in the sense of the modern US political faction, but in the proper sense meaning "cautious and hesitant to overturn the status quo without extremely good cause". Gay marriage is now the law of the land. Whether or not that is a good thing, and whether it should've been made so in the fashion it was, are questions worth discussing, but they're also immaterial to the fact of the matter, and there is very little in the history of the Supreme Court to suggest that even a panel which would have ruled differently in Obergefell will act to overrule it after the fact.
Pretty silly, these buttons, especially in areas with combined cycle & pedestrian traffic, at winter or during a wet period. You're supposed to cycle on the right side, but then you swerve to the left to reach for the button. Stick your foot in the snow or dip it in the puddle. If you're carrying a big box, you may also have to drop that before you can reach the button. And now people get confused as to who's going to stay where when they cross, some on the wrong side, others not. All this for a button that you probably didn't need to press in the first place. But if you don't, you'll find another intersection where you'll wait a bit too long and realize the light is not going to turn green and you're almost late for the bus.
There's one reason I just don't care about red lights anymore when I'm on foot or saddle.
Some of the cycling lanes here have inductive coils below the pavement to detect the bike and switch the light, no button needed. This fixes that problem at least.
Maybe five, ten, twenty years ago traffic signal buttons in NYC were an everyday sight, but they are increasingly further and fewer between. Taking the article's 100 functioning + 1000 non-functioning buttons at face value, combined with the fact that there are ~12,000 signalized intersections in NYC [1], means that it is likely that less than 2-5% of the crosswalks in NYC have buttons.
A fully equipped traditional "+" shaped intersection would have 4 crosswalks and 8 buttons, so 1100/(12000 * 2 to 8) = 1% to 5% of crosswalks could have buttons.
NYC gets a lot of grief for decrepit infrastructure, but this is an area where they have actually started to remove the unused stuff.
The fact that building HVAC controls are so often owned and locked down to people outside the building is infuriating.
I worked on a community theater production that rented space from a high school in the summer. It was perfectly cool throughout rehearsals, but sweltering hot when we came in on Saturday because the HVAC system's schedule hadn't been overridden to reflect being occupied over the weekend.
The thermostats around the building (less than 5 years old, with very powerful AC) were, of course, placebos. We called the district-level administrator who had control of HVAC, but she was out of town and couldn't get her VPN client to work. So no AC for us.
In Japan elevator door close buttons are used the majority of the the time, and they really work. If you don't press the door close button, the door can stay open for an uncomfortably long time.
Since returning from Japan, I've noticed that many door close buttons in the US are actually functional which surprised me (I had always believed they were placebos). Also, many elevators in the US will close the door as soon as a floor is selected, which in most cases eliminates any need to press door close. In Japan you can press a floor button right away even if others are entering, and as I have discovered by habit, not polite here :)
From a UX perspective, I wish the signals were retrofitted to reflect that, i.e. maintain the automated traffic flow control but when someone presses the button, start a countdown until it's ok to walk.
It's very possible that one has enough money to add something useful, like a count-down, even if there is no money to use for something cheaper, but plainly useless, like removing the button.
Regarding the crosswalk buttons: The article mentions that in NYC the purpose of the buttons were obsoleted by "careful automation". That leaves me a bit stumped. Whatever sophisticated machine learning algorithm you have running behind the scenes, wouldn't you want at least some input on the state of pedestrians to tune it?
That is, unless the "careful automation" is actually just a fixed sequence of traffic light changes or a rigorous "cars first" policy.
The illusion of control is not limited to the placebo effect. When you consider that our Universe is causal and that all actions (including that of a human) result from a set of conditions determined by previous actions, it is quite easy to discount the existence of free will.
Without getting existential, I would like to raise that not only does pushing a placebo button give you no control, but the choice even to press that button was not one you took but one which was predefined. This means that even if that button wasn't a placebo, you would still ultimately have no control over what happens as the choice to push the button is not yours.
This extends further questions as to who you are as you are defined by your actions which were not your choice to make. This obviously has serious implications with our legal system where by a person could not be held accountable for commiting a crime however it is also worth noting that the notion of awards would be invalidated as a person had no choice in doing good thing X.
Intelligent agents do make choices and it's a useful abstraction to think of the world that way. A chess playing program may be deterministic and make the same move Everytime. But it still picks the move it thinks is best, out of all the possibilities. If it thought another move was better, if would have chosen that. And so it does have control, it does make choices , in some sense.
> At the end of the day, placebo buttons do little harm and may well do a bit of good.
Except for the fact that all of those buttons are contaminated with germs. If one person contaminates a walk button at a busy intersection with the flu virus, how many hundreds of other people will be exposed to that over the next few hours? How many people will they expose?
Do you think everyone diligently follows those practices though, or depending on their background, even knows about them? Even conscientious people have lapses where they touch their eyes or mouth after touching something like that.
Crosswalk buttons do work in some cases, where the lights are usually open for cars but if a pedestrian comes, presses the button then it goes red
Now, to expect that a 4-way intersection will have any way of obeying the buttons (of that crossing and of all the other pedestrians in all the other crossings) is just laughable
I have run in to a lot of 4-way intersections where the button doesn't change the timing, but if the button was never pressed, once the traffic lights change the walk sign will not come on.
It needs to have been pressed before the light change to show the walk sign. It's either dumb, or it really did increase the delay until the next light change, to allow a pedestrian to cross. It just didn't speed up the initial light change.
This sounds like a reasonable compromise if you optimize for vehicles.
Also it means you can possibly have shorter intervals between pedestrian crossing openings because they won't affect anyone as long as nobody pushes the button.
On 3rd street in SF (effectively 6 lane road with 2 lane roads intersecting) they have this setup at most intersections. It makes sense for crossing the 6 lane road, especially since it makes the crossing light extra long to allow for crossing the wide road in time. There's not too much cross traffic, so no point in slowing the 6 lane traffic down unless there's someone crossing.
But they also have the no cross light until the button is pressed for the 2 lane crossing and I think it actually makes things more dangerous. If you don't hit the button early in the cycle, you of course have to wait until next cycle.. Which can be a while! Not that many drivers are turning.. So most people in the neighborhood jaywalk. Which means that drivers looking to turn see a red hand and probably think it's okay to turn even if it's not.
Except it trains drivers turning left through the intersection that pedestrians do not have the right of way until they suddenly do. The intersection at my apartment does this and I nearly get hit about once a week by some idiot turning left who assumes I don't have the right-of-way.
It means that if a pedestrian arrives just as the light is changing, they have to wait through an entire cycle for a walk signal. I just dealt with this a few minutes ago. Annoying.
Kurt Vonnegut predicted this in Sirens Of Titan. His spaceships have two buttons: on and off. The on button starts the auto pilot. The off button doesn't do anything at all, but gives its human passengers a sense of control.
One of my first supervisors formerly worked a Motorola and explained that the retractable antenna on late 90's cellphones eventually morphed into a placebo.
In the course of phasing out external antennas, the initial design had a fake antenna. However, by extending the fake antenna to its maximum, it turned on an high-gain amplifier. So while deceptive, it did improve reception.
But later the retractable antenna served no function other than a placebo that reduced complaints about poor reception.
In Kentucky, I've encountered crosswalk buttons that don't actually change the traffic-light cycle at all, but the walk light doesn't come on during parallel green-light traffic unless the button was pushed. I have no idea what that's supposed to accomplish, unless it's just another level of placebo.
I admit I feel a tiny sense of superiority when I don't press the crosswalk buttons in SF. There are some that actually need to be pressed but they're different: instead of a button they have a little touch sensor and make a very pleasing chirp.
Placebo or not, what makes no sense to me is when people continuously slap at the Walk button as if toggling it more than once will somehow make the signal change over faster.
it's not a toggle button. when you press one it doesn't necessarily feel as though you've depressed it enough, so you press it a few times. you don't want to miss your signal and have to wait for the lights to go around again.
Also, an unsophisticated mind will think that maybe "the system" will understand multiple presses as multiple people and prioritize the change somehow.
A more sophisticated mind would consider that maybe they interpret short bursts at the button as one (impatient) signal.
Anyway, I find myself hitting those buttons multiple times just because... I'm not really thinking about it, I just press and then press few more times to be sure. It's probably driven more by the knowledge that doing so will not do anything negative, than from expecting a positive outcome.
You shouldn't be guilty about that. You're doing the button a favor. Its only reason to exist is to be pressed, to be useful. It was good at that once. And now it isn't, because it's no longer connected to anything meaningful. The world has moved on, and its purpose is gone, and it is unaccountably still there.
And it's durable, of course, being made for outdoor use, and so it stays pretty much the same even though no one really cares about it or looks after it any more, day upon day and year upon year, and it stoically refuses to show much sign of its advancing age and the existential uncertainty which now pervades it, and every day puts it one day further away from its memories of brighter days long gone. Days when it was useful. Days when it mattered.
And then someone comes along who's bored. Hey, there's nothing better to do, so you push the button. Maybe you push it a few times, maybe a bunch of times. Maybe just once. Doesn't matter. You're not as bored now. And the button gets to be useful again. Not in the same way as it used to be. Doesn't matter. Useful again. Making someone's day a little bit better again. Worthwhile again. Even if only for a minute. Don't be ashamed of that. Never feel guilty about that. Small kindnesses matter, too.
> You're doing the button a favor. Its only reason to exist is to be pressed, to be useful. It was good at that once. And now it isn't, because it's no longer connected to anything meaningful. The world has moved on, and its purpose is gone, and it is unaccountably still there.
Now I want a story about a button who wants to be pressed.
It doesn't do anything, it serves no function, it flags no signal... it's just there to be pressed. For petty Human psychology, so the Human can feel more comfortable in a robotic landscape.
"Please, press me. Put your fingertip on me and push me inward. You'll feel better. I will be fulfilled. My purpose will be actualized. You will feel such a subtle pleasure you won't even notice, but you will fall asleep happier tonight. Just by pressing me. Please. Press me."
Maybe they believe repeatedly hitting the button tells the machine they're angry and hurries it up? Like how yelling at the automated phone system can sometimes get you passed over to an actual person, or yelling at the social media staff on Twitter seems to be a quicker way of getting your support prioritised...
Live in a world that doesn't give a damn about you for long enough, and it gets hard to sustain that contempt for people who can successfully convince themselves that it does. Something you might want to watch out for.
My (rather pithy) comment also alludes to a larger scope of activities which people go through (various forms of ritual, cargo-culting, false beliefs, etc.), which give an illusion of control or agency.
As your comment seems to suggest, these may simply be psychological self-inflicted tricks to retain sanity in an uncaring universe. That thought has occurred to me.
It's also possible to engage in self-aware self-trickery. Though that's somewhat more complicated.
I'm also of the view that all models are false. Some models are useful.
A lot of what we today consider fallacies are in fact very reasonable heuristics if you live in the conditions of our ancestors from before civilization. Though with illusion of control, people are pretty good if inventing it for themselves if no external placebo is provided. Consider rain dances, or various folk beliefs around curing diseases...
Oh the folk cures are the best! The ancient Greek ones were literally and figuratively, batshit. IIRC To treat epilepsy it was recommend that you eat the heart of a black donkey beneath the light of the moon on some specific night.
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/1994/01/23/nyregion/soapbox-a-little-...