It’s still important to recognize that a variant might “win” because of factors completely unrelated to its “fitness,” like an organization using its market power in an unrelated sector to promote its variant, or even just good old fashioned dumb luck.

That's a good point. I'd have to give it more thought on how much predictive power we're supposed to ascribe to multiple-dimensions.

Maybe multiple dimensions is a better thinking tool for experimentation than prediction. This frees one from being paralyzed by the status quo. For example, a 1990s entrepreneur sees that the internet is becoming popular and maybe he thinks he can sell books on it. But then he goes to Barnes & Noble and sees that people are pulling real books off the shelves, taking them to the lounge chairs, and then leisurely sitting down and flipping through the pages before buying. If the dimension of "in-store experience" constrains the worldview, it will not occur to the entrepreneur that other dimensions like near-infinite selection in a "virtual bookshelf" and convenient delivery to the home will be prioritized over the store's lounge chairs. One doesn't know if those other dimensions for "book buying" matter more to buyers until he tries it.

Another well-known example of constrained single-dimensional thinking is analyzing the Blackberry vs the iPhone in 2007. Both the CEO of Research In Motion and Steve Ballmer of Microsoft were focused on the physical tactile keyboard. They saw that the iPhone obviously lacked real QWERTY buttons, so they both predicted it would flop in the marketplace. Steve Jobs' Apple team ignored the dimension that RIM & Microsoft used for criticism. Instead, they looked at the dimension of "screen size" and made it larger. The also bet on the dimension of "capacitive touch screen" which enables finger gestures. These were the dimensions that a billion smartphone buyers ultimately preferred. The Blackberry was cheaper and buyers still preferred the iPhone touchscreens.

And then you conclude abstract fitness is irrelevant anyway because everyone uses qwerty and there are:

- Advantages in everyone using more or less the same thing

- No way you're going to make everyone incur huge costs and switch

Ideally, stay out of it and let others decide for themselves.

We don't need to decide that bikes are better than cars. We ought to just support both (paved roads, traffic laws, places to keep your vehicle while you shop, etc.).

We don't need to decide that SSDs are better than disc drives. We just need to support the latest SATA standard.

So, for qwerty vs dvorak, we just need to support appropriate USB standards. And at the software level, we need to let the user customize their keys from time to time (remap hjkl in vim, remap wasd in video games, etc.).

it's pretty rare to get dedicated cyclist lanes which were created separately to the rest of the road.

it's generally created simultaneously.

This is so daunting that it feels nearly impossible, and indeed, I suspect any rigorous cost/benefit analysis would show that the benefits of any new layout (even the technically best layout) is not worth the costs of switching away from any single ubiquitous standard (even the technically worst layout imaginable), at least not in any reasonable time frame.

My guess is that the best approach is to maintain one ubiquitous standard, and change it very gradually, and to gradually reduce the costs, e.g. by implementing easy layout-switching software in major operating systems, or even bolder approaches like supporting virtualization/containerization of personal software settings and development environments in major operating systems.

What if I could just sit down at any modern networked PC, type in a URL and some authentication, and immediately be running my own exact customized computing/development environment, complete with my keyboard layout, text editor, development dependencies, etc.? That would be awesome. As long as the hardware keyboard layout is roughly compatible with my software settings (and I don’t rely on printed labels on the physical keyboard), most of the costs of choosing a keyboard layout (other than the fixed costs of learning it) go away.

Either the benefit per unit time eventually surpasses the cost per unit time (since some costs are fixed, namely the initial learning), or it doesn’t. Only switch if benefit surpasses cost in a time window you’re comfortable with.

It really bothers me actually.

I'd be curious about your statement the most people who use phones didn't learn to type. Is that for a particular age group? Alternatively, for the developing world, where phones are more common than computers? I'm having difficulty seeing the justification for the statement.

Do you believe that most people who use phones know how to type?

I would describe today's society as one in which typing is necessary for any basic tasks, and is universal, and so I don't see why smartphone users would be different from the norm in terms of typing ability. Are you using "typing" to refer only to "touch typing"?

What benefit is there to having everyone hunt and peck on a phone to keep with a convention that only really makes sense to typists?

Game theory literature should have this problem?

Most of the early users and developers were (and continue to be) LTBTQ+ people, and the project leader (Eugen) was 100% welcoming. In a world where we don't get much that's for us, it's nice to have a thing where we're well-represented.

When I tried the previous attempts at federated social networks, they seemed to match the general demographics of tech. The predominantly white, male, straight, cisgender population wasn't exactly unwelcoming, but I didn't feel comfortable talking about some topics. It wasn't any better than Twitter in that sense.

And then we got content warnings and per-toot privacy levels. The possibly technically superior predecessors didn't stand a chance.

> Baerwald and her colleagues believe that birds do not suffer the same fate as bats – the majority of birds are killed by direct contact with the blades – because their lungs are more rigid than those of bats and therefore more resistant to sudden changes in pressure.

The Whole Product is not just the core product. You have to add on all the things like reliability, service and support (the expected product), its expansion capabilities (the augmented product), and its potential for future development (the potential product) to get "the whole product".

If you just look at the core product, you are very likely to go wrong, because having a technologically superior core product does not mean you have a better Whole Product. (See cassette tape vs DAT, Windows vs OS/2 and many more.)

The Whole Product concept was popularized by Geoffrey Moore in Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado, which were seminal books at places like Netscape. Before that, the key idea was TAM, the Technology Adoption Model, pioneered by Professor Everett Rogers in Diffusion of Innovations in 1962.

I see the value in Geoffrey Moore's framework. There are similar analysis frameworks. One is MCDA (multi-criteria decision framework)[1] and another is SWOT Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities Threats[2]. There must be a dozen others.

But I would still generalize them down to "multiple dimensions" because one can use it for non-commercial products sold for free such as comparing GCC vs Clang/LLVM -- or -- compare non-specific products such as "categories of products". An example of comparing multi-dimensions of categories such as "live theater" vs "movies".

Without GM's book and his framework, if we see someone say that "GCC is superior to Clang because it targets more cpus than Clang and the resultant binaries of LAME MP3 and FFMpeg compiled by GCC have better performance", it means the commenter is leaving out other dimensions to support his conclusion of GCC superiority. By omitting the missing dimensions, the observation that Clang/LLVM is winning over GCC in the "marketplace of ideas" seems totally illogical. But once one adds in additional dimensions such as Clang not forcing a GNU license and/or Clang exposing the AST parse tree, its adoption makes more sense.

Same for categories like "theater vs movies". When movies first came out, some experts believed that films would be a fad because "audiences want to see _real_ actors in person and not some _artificial_ projection on a screen". The experts were only focused on one dimension: the appeal of the audience being in the same physical space as the actors. They ignored all the other positive dimensions that films allow such as closeups on actors faces. (E.g. a live stage play's script can't rely on very subtle facial responses such as an eyebrow raise or a tiny smirk of the lips because anybody beyond the 3rd row won't even see it. Stage dialogue with whispers can't be real whispers, they have to very loud and very fake stage whispers. Films also allow alternating time and location cutting for storytelling. But live Broadway theater is also still around -- because it has quality dimensions some people prefer.)

A lot of arguments on the forums about X being superior to Y are really people favoring different dimensions and then talking past each other. Since people can't agree on all the dimensions/criteria to consider and how to weigh them, the debates remain unresolved.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple-criteria_decision_ana...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWOT_analysis

It is pretty clear now that cars are decidedly not the best solution to transport. It just so happened that they scaled the best, and now everything is designed around them.

It's just macro vs micro and hardly has anything to do with the product.

I have seen that in the computing field. with, say, how Java won over Smalltalk (by engaging IBM's marketing muscle). Or how Windows won over CP/M and QNX (again, IBM's marketing muscles and more). Or how EFI won over Open Firmware (Intel's marketing muscle).

Such "successes" can then lead to establishing monopolies with social networking effects which become self sustaining -- even if the origins may be questionable: http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2004/9/13/lawsuit-threaten... "According to the complaint in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts, ConnectU LLC, formed by Divya K. Narendra ’04, Cameron S. H. Winklevoss ’04 and Tyler O. H. Winklevoss ’04, is seeking damages for Zuckerberg’s alleged theft of their idea — then called Harvard Connection — and his subsequent deception."

See also for Bill Gates' success based on other's source code: https://patch.com/california/losaltos/microsoft-co-founder-p... "That phase of Allen's life involved taking the bus–sports coat, tie, leather briefcase and all—down to the offices of local computer gurus. "I would boost Bill into dumpsters and we'd get these coffee-stained texts (of computer code)" from behind the offices, grinned Allen."

And: "MS-DOS paternity suit settled: Computer pioneer Kildall vindicated, from beyond the grave" http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07/30/msdos_paternity_suit...

And it helps to start rich, of course: http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/ "William Henry Gates III made his best decision on October 28, 1955, the night he was born. He chose J.W. Maxwell as his great-grandfather. Maxwell founded Seattle's National City Bank in 1906. His son, James Willard Maxwell was also a banker and established a million-dollar trust fund for William (Bill) Henry Gates III. In some of the later lessons, you will be encouraged to take entrepreneurial risks. You may find it comforting to remember that at any time you can fall back on a trust fund worth many millions of 1998 dollars."

Contrast all that with the hypocritical: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists "As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid Is this fair? One thing you don't do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn't make money selling software. The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free?"

So says the millionaire dumpster diver who could afford to write free software his whole life. Hypocritical to anyone who knows more of the story, but brilliant marketing! Including the rhetorical deception about how much time free software developers might have (including ones at universities or government labs or students like, then, Linus Torvalds).

The extension of copyright duration and scope by Disney and others uses the courts to suppress possibly better free alternatives to paid media. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/35811012/why-star-trek...

Even for cars, the purchase and destruction of light rail across the country by companies who stood to benefit from selling more cars was a factor (but not the only one) in the car's ascendance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

Leaded gas was known from the start to be harmful, yet money talked on that too including to misleadingly point the finger at lead paint instead of leaded gas for so much criminal behavior -- leading to a century of suffering and all sorts of external costs to society. http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure...

Further, the infrastructure for bicycling in the USA was never developed in a way like, say, the Netherlands -- and that is a political choice affecting the desirability of product use.

Marijuana and hemp (easily grown almost anywhere) in general became criminalized in part due to profits to be made by selling alternatives for tree-based paper and oil-based pharmaceuticals and remained criminalized because of campaign donations related to profits from maintaining prisons (e.g. why NY's clearly harmful Rockefeller drugs laws were supported for so long by so many legislators with prisons in their districts).

Most heart surgery like stents in most cases is basically a scam at $50K+ a pop compared to dietary changes (where nutritional advice and support offer little profit to hospitals and doctors): https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/02/health/heart-disease-sten... https://www.drfuhrman.com/learn/library/articles/53/for-stab...

The entire medical profession was distorted in many ways by this application of big money a century ago to disrupt a focus on lifestyle and nutrition and shift the focus to drugs prescriptions and procedures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexner_Report

There are quite a few financially successful drugs and procedures which are based on questionable science and ethics -- but tremendously successful marketing operations.

The same goes for food.

The truth is increasingly coming out about refined sugar as poison: https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2017/11/409116/sugar-industry-supp... "If Project 259s findings had been disclosed, sucrose would likely have been scrutinized as a potential carcinogen, the authors said."

But rather than make such findings public, the Sugar industry paid money to shift the blame to fat: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/well/eat/how-the-sugar-in... "The sugar industry paid scientists in the 1960s to play down the link between sugar and heart disease and promote saturated fat as the culprit instead, newly released historical documents show. The internal sugar industry documents, recently discovered by a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, and published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, suggest that five decades of research into the role of nutrition and heart disease, including many of today’s dietary recommendations, may have been largely shaped by the sugar industry. “They were able to derail the discussion about sugar for decades,” said Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at U.C.S.F. and an author of the JAMA Internal Medicine paper."

Or in general: http://www.timescolonist.com/opinion/columnists/monique-keir... "One popular television journalist quipped that the four food groups should be renamed “the four lobby groups.”"

The food lobbyists (especially the dairy industry) were very good at getting propaganda into schools by supplying free "educational" literature.

The schooling industry itself also delivers a monopolistic product with many bad qualities: "The Underground History of American Education: A School Teacher's Intimate Investigation Into the Problem of Modern Schooling" https://archive.org/details/TheUndergroundHistoryOfAmericanE...

An even deeper question regarding foods, games, online, and other products and services is designing them to have an addictive nature as part of how companies get people hooked on stuff that is harmful for them. Examples: https://www.naturalnews.com/021949_tobacco_smoking_health.ht... https://www.npr.org/sections/monkeysee/2012/11/27/165989232/... https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/ethics-everyone/201202/... https://www.polygon.com/2014/7/28/5930685/love-child-intervi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_Stimuli

Unregulated or misregulated businesses (including non-profits and government-run businesses) will privatize gains and socialize costs and risks whenever possible (including costs and risks to consumers and societies of using inferior products). So, while you are 100% right to look at multiple dimensions in saying why some products succeed, some of those dimensions can be pretty ugly.