Science or Fiction News Segment

You're listening to the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Your esc ape to real ity . Hello and welcome to the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Thursday, May 7th, 202 6, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella, Peter Moddy, Kara Santa Maria. Howdy. Jay Novella. Hey guys, and Evan Bernstein. Good afternoon, everyone. So this is the first episode after May fifth, so this is technically our twenty first anniversary. We've completed twenty one years. Completed twenty one years of the SGU. Wow. Wow, twenty one. Lucky number for some I joined you guys in what twenty eighteen fifteen years ago. Eleven years later. My gosh, Kara. That's more than half then. More than half. Yeah. Wow. I love it. It must mean something. That's right. Let me ask my numerolog ist. Kara, you know what I've been you know what I'm noticing, Kara? You have become I think as integrated as you can because you reject like so much of what I've reached my limit of of nerddom with the show. But I mean that in a very positive way because like you you're doing things now I never thought you would do. Like you get most of our our things now. You get it. I do. And even the ones where I don't know the provenance are still funny to me. Correct. You have been absorbed into the collective. You have discovered that resistance is futile. Part of the hive mind. Part of the hive mind. That's right . One of five. We have added your distinctiveness to our own. Oh . Oh, we're all the better for that. Oh, what an honor. So guys, the other day I had I got a new printer, right? Like I have to print something like once or twice a year. But you know, like when you need to print something, you need to print something. Of course. Conventional black and white. Staples go to staples. My twenty-year-old printer crept out was like, I'll just get a new laser printer. So I got like the basic, basic s printer only , no three in one, whatever, just black and white, the simple just if I whenever I need to print and sign something or whatever. Plug and play, right? Twenty one years. I mean, was that a dot matrix printer? No, no. Wow. It was a good printer, just it was low. It was old. So no, Evan, the opposite of plug and play. It took me an hour to install this printer. No, we can't know something . An hour. That's a that's a total failure. Steve with your hourly with your hourly But here's the thing. I it it was n uh seriously, it had nothing to do with me. That was just the process. That was whatever the process was to install this printer. It's not like I was fumbling or making mistakes or couldn't figure out how to do anything. It's just that's how long the whole thing was. It went smoothly, but it was just torturously long. At first it's like, oh, it install this app and I thought oh that's great because usually when you have an app it walks you through I don't you know I don't I try not to have an app for every single piece of technology in my life but I'm what the hell? I install the app and then the but that wasn't that was just the beginning of this torturous process. And part of it was that like they you would have to enter the same information like five different times. Like there's a code. Oh there's a code on the printer, which I by the end of the process I memorized the freaking thing. But it's like why am I entering this like every time I went to the next step it's like enter the code that's here on the printer. It's like why don't you remember from the last step? Why do I have to go you know look down and read that stupid number again. It was just maddening. Is this some kind of trade-off for the price or something? Like you could have paid five hundred dollars more and avoided this? No. No, I think it's it's all part of the new way. This is just how things work. So that's I finished I get I complete that process like great now you can print from your po your phone. If you want to print from your computer, you have to install a separate app on your computer. So then I basically had to go through the whole thing again on my computer. That's terrible. But here you know, and again, I try and I had this conversation with my wife. It's like, are we just getting old? 'Cause I don't want to be that old crotchety guy who's like these new Fangel technology. I don't think that's what it is. I really honestly I'm trying to be humble and you know unbiased here. I don't think that's what it is. Because it's not like I didn't understand anything. And you know, we're we're pretty much all above average computer users. I don't think that's it. I was actually the quote unquote super user in my department, you know, for computers. So it's not like I'm not tech-savvy or I don't know how to be a head to install freaking printer. But I I honestly feel like there's so many different applications that are just not user-friendly. And I think that a lot of tech companies are just no longer hiring user uh interface experts. They're just you know what I mean? They're just having engineers do it. And it's interesting. You know, like all of the principles and again, I actually read a book on user interface principles like in the 1990s. And you know, I used a lot of this working as um the liaison to the EMR you know people in my department, et cetera. So again, I've been at doing this at a very high end at some point. And it just seems like everything I do, every piece of software I'm interfacing with, um, especially new ones, they like violate every law of a good user interface. Like no one is thinking what is the experience of the end user here. It must be it must have to do with cost. Yeah. They don't care. And they just didn't care. They just did not care that it it they did it and they Aaron Powell Or that they don't have to like you said, Steve, I think hire the people maybe that they used to have to hire to make these products more user-friendly. Well that's it. I know for a fact, you know, that the EMR that was installed at my hospital, that they would have had to spend two million dollars to have user interface um exper ts you know remake the user interface, and they just chose not to. And it's the user interface is horrible. The back end is great. It works. The user interface is terrible. And at my hospital they they did do that and we actually have a whole team of people on our EIS who are exper ts in the actual technology. Yeah. It's like we we're willing to train and pay our own people to run basically the EMR and update it all the time Yeah, because it's its own specialty. Yeah, it's its own specialty. And so it I do think that maybe the non-experts don't realize how bad they are. And companies are like, well, why do we need to spend all this money for something that seems superficial when in fact it's often critical? It's it is the actual experience of the end user. Is there a role for AI here to plug this hole? I don't know. Maybe. Maybe if it 's trained properly, I I would say yeah, but it could, but there's isn't there like a big pushback by programmers against AI sort of doing their jobs for them? Which I understand. jobs, these people don't exist in the first place. Well they exist. They're just not being used properly. There's a whole there's a whole subspecialty among programmers that are their expertise is the user interface. They're just not being utilized consistently. You know, it it's hard to uh when you think of all the apps that we use and all the different interfaces and everything. I mean it it's not easy making good user interfaces, even though you know there's a lot of examples of really good interfaces. Also there was a book I, think it came out in the late nineties, maybe early aughts. It was called Don't Make Me Think and it's That's the book I'm talking about, Jay. Yeah, it was a late nineties. Don't make me think. Absolutely we probably when we read the same book, probably gave it to each other. But yeah, that's one that's one of the rules of a good user interface. Don't make me think. Get out of my way. Do what I need to do. Don't make me think and cater to the ninety nine percent, not the one percent. Like the ninety-nine percent Kate use case, you should make that as easy as possible. There was something when we were programming our EMR, the old one, not the one that's currently used by my my department, that w those were all principles, including there was a there was a uh a specific analysis called click minimization. How many clicks does it take to get from A to B? And how can we minimize the number of clicks it takes you to complete a task? That is pure user interface. Like how difficult is it to accomplish your task? And then in the next MM R, it went backwards . There was like really hard to accomplish basic things you do 30, 40 times a day. But completely unnecessarily. Steve, I wonder if I wonder if the printer you got was more one one of their lower end brands and they just like you Okay. But no frills. But no frills, because I didn't want I didn't scanner, I didn't whatever. But no, they pretty much all come with Wi-Fi now. So they are more complicated than the printers we had previously, but that's it's not a frill now. It's basically a core functionality. Oh yeah, but it doesn't have Wi-Fi. Who the hell would even buy that? Guys, there are network and you gotta give it whatever, you gotta stack . You know, we have billion-dollar industries like you know, the healthcare industry, whose websites are arguably some of the worst I've ever seen. That is that is just utter neglect. They have plenty