> Besides just gaining weight, the movie also claimed that Spurlock got major liver damage and started suffering from a range of mental health issues, all as a result of eating fast food. Notably, none of the people who replicated the experiment suffered from these problems.
> Years after the movie’s release Spurlock admitted to being a lifelong alcoholic, despite claiming otherwise in the documentary. Alcohol abuse can easily explain the liver damage, and alcohol withdrawal during the filming of the documentary also explains the sudden mental health problems he was experiencing.
Hmm, I'm not sure what to think with this new information.
I really enjoyed the documentary when I watched it as a kid. But I did remember thinking it was weird he puked so early in the film. I brushed it off as "everyone is different", and forgot about it.
> But I did remember thinking it was weird he puked so early in the film. I brushed it off as "everyone is different", and forgot about it.
That's one of the few things I still remember from it, and the takeaway I had was "well, he's eating past the point of nausea, of course he's going to puke." And the fact that he accepted any time they offered to "supersize", just pointing out how hard fast food pushes excess calories. Kind of the point of the documentary, really, that fast food is out of control in this country and needs to be regulated.
The fact that he force fed himself kinda weakens the point though, doesn't it? Force feeding yourself 5,000 calories a day even when you feel sick is obviously going to make you sick.
I don’t get the ‘eating 5000 calories of anything would make you ill’ argument against the movie. That was sort of the whole point. At the time, fast food chains, and McDonald’s in particular, were pushing large (and the defunct supersize) meals all the time. That this was dangerous, especially for people who didn’t really think about it and trusted the companies, was the entire point of the movie.
Note that things have changed since then - arguably as a result of, or at least accelerated by, the movie. Supersize meals disappeared soon after it, salads were introduced (yes, you can argue they’re still high calorie), and on the whole fast food places are much less aggressively pushing the larger meals than they were in the early 2000s. I would say there’s more awareness of the importance of eating healthily among the general population too (not that that seems to be having ideal results…)
I'm confused about why you're confused. The point of the movie was definitely not to give the audience the shocking realism that if you're force feeding yourself to the point of vomiting, you're probably doing something wrong. This aspect of the movie only lessens the actual argument of the movie (except that it makes good headlines and thus probably drove the majority of the media coverage and general interest in the documentary).
At the time, fast food chains, and McDonald’s
in particular, were pushing large (and the
defunct supersize) meals all the time. That
this was dangerous [...]
It's still a little bit ridiculous.
A human being should be eating 90 meals per month, give or take. If more than 1 or 2 of those are fast food, that's the problem.
To what standard should we be holding a restaurant meal? "Is it healthy for a person to eat 90 of these meals per month?" doesn't seem like a useful or realistic thing to do.
> A human being should be eating 90 meals per month, give or take. If more than 1 or 2 of those are fast food, that's the problem.
3 meals a day has nothing to do with health and everything to do with marketing. If the way we eat had any ties to common sense we wouldn't be eating our largest meal at the end of the day when we have nothing left to do except sleep.
"Food deserts" (areas with no access to fresh food) are a huge problem, yeah.
Also, economically struggling people often can't prepare their own food, even if given groceries for free: they may be physically disabled, they may be unhoused, they may be unable to afford utilities or appliances, etc.
However, I think that altering the offerings of fast-food restaurants is not even remotely a suitable way to address that.
> I don’t get the ‘eating 5000 calories of anything would make you ill’ argument against the movie.
Good thing that's not the argument I'm making in my comment. The argument I'm making is about forcing yourself to eat more than you want to while the very act of eating is making you feel sick. That's what Spurlock did in the movie; it's not representative of any significant population of people.
I was curious, looks like the equivalent (calorie-wise) of fries & a double cheeseburger is 1KG of salad.*
So yes, quite hard to overeat salad. Plus, eating that much salad would give a lot of nutrition, and throwing some beans & hemp hearts in would give you a lot of protein too.
Further to consider, it's not uncommon for people to eat the extra large fries and have two double cheeseburgers. The comparison to trying to overeat salad is only more favorable. We can also go furthe rand think of"fancy" burger places like Red Robin, there are several burgers on their menu that are over 2k calories.
* For the back of the napkin math - according to google, there's 815 calories in a fries and a double cheeseburger. For salad, I used this house salad recipe [1] as reference with 148 calories in a 170g serving
And yeah, the vegetables aren't the problem here - the problem is everything has to be sugar-coated (yes, even "savory" things like ranch dressing) for people to eat it, and then they drench everything from wings to burgers in it.
The argument is that they’re ‘misleading’ because the _dressings_ that are provided with them are surprisingly high in calories. Like, a standard size salad with all the provided dressing is not lower calorie than one of the more traditional menu options - and people may not realize that.
I’d say the salads are pretty good BTW - better than you might think a fast food place would do.
Think the point is that it's real easy to force feed yourself 5000 calories if it's 2500 calorie meals that don't fill you up for the day.
honestly the burger itself isn't too bad. Double quarter pounder is 750 calories, really filling. But tripling that from fries and drink is the real killer. You can probably lose weight from McDonald's simply by only getting water or unsweetened tea for a drink, and limiting yourself to small sides.
> it's real easy to force feed yourself 5000 calories
No it's not. If you have to force it, it's by definition not "easy". Overindulging in something is different from forcing yourself to do it. My problem with the movie is that it takes a very strange scenario (man forces himself to eat to the point of puking) and acts like that's teaching us lessons about the broader population, none of whom are doing that. It might be bad for you to eat unhealthy things that feel pleasurable, but it's obviously worse to do it so much that it's become an ordeal.
"ease" is relative here. And if you really care about that debate you can find some social media challenge posts fantasizing about how you'd consume 10000+ calories for 1b dollars. I wouldn't drone much more on that point past calorie density being an undertalked about issue with these "calories in, calories out" crowd.
Main point: consuming 3000 excess calories a day roughly equates to an average person gaining 5 points a week, 20 pounds a month (which tracks with the documentary). That is extreme. But think of 1000 excess calories (2 pounds a week) and do it over a year. We know which one is worse, and we know which one is more common. And we know it doesn't just stop after a year.
I think there's merit in demonstrating an extreme experiment (especially in this day of social media) and using it to demonstrate what happens from less extreme, but longer term bad habits.
"that fast food is out of control in this country and needs to be regulated."
Eh, I would rather see change in the area of education and alternatives than just food type/portion/etc regulation. The education can apply to multiple foods and not just the pariah of the day. Ingredient studies and approvals/disapproval would be an area of regulation that I would support though.
Having the declarative knowledge then being able to practice it. I am sure most people know that they are supposed to eat 'healthy'. It can only be one part of a larger program to combat obesity.
Many people don't know just how unhealthy it really is. Many also don't know how to make or choose their own healthy food. It's mostly about habits. It's fine to eat a super-sized meal rarely if you were hungry enough and extremely active, but it's more of an exception.
If we extend this to alcohol, then we should ban all alcohol. Alcohol is generally fine in moderation or occasional use. But if we need to ban things because a minority of the population misuses it, then we will have an extremely long list (butter, sausage, steak, etc).
Tho person you replied to didn't say 'ban' they said 'regulate' and 'a larger plan to combat obesity', and your counter of alcohol is heavily regulated across the world. Some have government run shops, others have advertising bans, or mandatory health warnings, alcohol content labelling and so on. And probably in general should be more regulated.
It read like a ban to me. Other than age restrictions, which vary wildy, it doesn't seem like alcohol regulations have done anything to prevent unhealthy use.
Then you need to increase your reading comprehension. I nowhere said or implied "ban".
Or you need to examine your biases; are you perchance a libertarian? Or really right-leaning in any way. If you're American, chances are very good the answer is 'yes'.
He was also gaining more weight than the laws of thermodynamics allow based on how many calories he was supposedly eating. Alcohol has a lot of calories.
sure but from google, he gained 25 pounds in a month. a pound of fat is about 3500 calories. 3500 calories/pound * 25 pounds / 30 days = 2916 calorie surplus. Morgan Spurlock is a 188cm tall man, which let's say he's 30 years old and 100kg (wikipedia says he gained 24.5 pounds/13% body mass), doing no to little exercise (he did walk 2km a day) that gives a Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE) of 2406 calories per day (used this calculator : https://www.calculator.net/tdee-calculator.html?cage=25&csex...).
So basically, he had to be eating at the very bare minimum 5400 calories per day to get that much weight. To be fair, the wiki page says he did average 5k calories per day so he would have been lying only about 400 calories (minimum) per day.
Checking online, supersize me fried are ~600 calories and a big mac ~600. So let's say you eat that 3 times a day, that's 1200*3 = "only" 3600 calories. I find it hard to believe he drank 1800 calories worth of drinks per day to fill the gap, especially since he was allowed to drink water. Looking at canadian mcdonald's website, a large pepsi is 290 cals/77 grams of sugar, were supersize me really double that? If so, I guess the conclusion is don't drink 462g (literally over a pound) of sugar.
Your math is off because you're forgetting the beverage:
~600 kcal for a Big Mac
~600 kcal for Super Size fries (7 oz)
~500 kcal for a Super Size Coca Cola (42 oz)
1700 kcal/meal or ~5000 kcal/day if breakfast is the same as lunch and dinner
The calorie count for breakfast will likely vary. Note that orange juice contains more calories than Coca Cola per volume, but I don't remember a Super Size fountain orange juice existing.
Egg McMuffin and coffee for breakfast and then a Big Mac, medium fries and iced tea (or diet Coke or water) for both lunch and dinner is... 2130 calories. Not the pinnacle of the healthiest diet for sure. Over 30 days for a mid-sized dude, you might gain... one pound.
Absolutely, drinking diet coke or water is cutting out an enormous number of calories, as-is medium fries.
Heck, I only weight 185lbs and back when I ate mcDonald's a single Egg McMuffin wasn't nearly enough food to make me feel full. I'd get two and a hash brown, and still be hungry and hour later.
In the sister comment, I did some math and because the guy was 188cm and 220 pounds to start with, he needs 2400 calories per day just to keep his weight. He would have lost at least half a pound per week with the diet you just mentioned.
Not a doctor fwiw, but elevated ALT and AST levels often comes with being overweight and that could be seen as liver damage. I'm willing to give MS the benefit of the doubt on this claim.
Alcohol is definitely a confounding factor here but this documentary is more of a "social experiment" rather than a proper study.
It's patient sample size (n=1) and doctor (n=1). IIRC, the 2 other doctors MS consulted (cardiologist and a gastroenterologist) didn't mention the same opinion as the internal med doctor and the doctor who did voice the skepticism was also saying it shouldn't be a no brainer that eating Mcdonalds would cause health problems. Other doctors on the web have gone on record to say "this makes sense."
Obviously it doesn't absolve MS of unethical filmmaking practices but that doesn't mean the premise is false given the plethora of other medical literature that supports it.
> Remarkable the hand waving people go through to excuse dishonesty because they want to believe it so badly.
What I find remarkable is how badly people want to ignore just how bad fast food is for you. They'll use anything to dismiss completely the whole debate.
I just thought it was a bad reaction to a change of diet. You can feel bad just from a few days of bad food. Can't imagine 3 meals a day for that kind of stuff.And ofc these were large portions for a (by BMI standards) very slight overweight man.
Umm who in America doesn’t know someone personally who has visible liver damage from fast food? I know multiple families where 4/4 people have it. Why would he make that up? He didn’t even go diabetic.
Even during the course of the documentary, at the end his doctors were saying his body was seeming to adapt to his new diet so always found it unsatisfactory that it just ended right there.
It's unfortunate that on the day of his death all I can really think about is how troubled the man was, between dealing with alcoholism, cheating on his past wives / gfs, the sexual assault allegations, and resigning from his company because of just how negative his public image had become. He became something of a household name because of a misleading documentary that was arguably more about the dangers of alcoholism rather than fast food.
Strange processing the death of someone with such a mixed legacy.
The blog post mentioned in the nbcnews link mentions more of his problems in addition to alcoholism, adultery/infidelity - broken family during childhood, sexual abuse, depression, etc.
A society of overweight and obese people giving enormous attention on how the effects of eating McDonalds everyday cannot be replicated. Please let's snapshot everything so the future generations can laugh at how we turned into a parody.
Well the problem is that he stuffed his face with absurd amounts of calories everyday. Of course he got fat. He was eating like 5k calories a day. No one is doing that on accident cause they didnt know how big a supersize fry was.
So yes, its a super disingenious doc that is laughably transparent in its pandering to people just like you who want to make fun of obesity and trivialize it.
There are, or at least at the time there were a lot of people whose meals come entirely from fast food. There wasnt a lot of awareness about how bad that could be and there had been a decades long trend towards replacing meals with microwave dinners and fast food. Supersize Me did play a part in reversing that trend. It was trying to make a very valid point about fast food and dining habits. So its science wasnt exact, but complaining about that is like quibbling with a Michael Moore documentary for being a little loose with facts
I disagree that there wasn't enough awareness. As someone who was alive at the time, there was a pre-existing moral panic about fast food and there were constant discussions before Supersize Me about how unhealthy it was, not to mention pop culture jokes making fun of it. I think that pre-existing anxiety was one of the reasons so many people saw the film.
I was definitely alive at the time and remember no such moral panic. I remember how much more acceptable it was in the 80's and 90's, even in upper middle class families to have 'tv dinners' and I think even for a time in the 70's and earlier (though I wasn't alive) dining out on fast food was a fashionable novelty. I very strongly remember when there was a discernible cultural shift which saw the likes of Whole Foods going mainstream and then the shift after that when even regular grocery stores started to have organic food and in-store bakeries which they didn't have before. And fast food chains started to consciously introduce salads and drop trans-fats and make other changes to seem more healthy. The shift started before Super-size me but I remember how shocking it was and how it helped to define the new zeitgeist that books like Erich Schlosser's Fast Food Nation were also helping to create. I think Super-Size me was even directly responsible for the fast food chains changing their menu part.
Are you referring to 2004 when the movie came out? Just curious what "at the time" means. My personal recollection, the early 2000s was part of a pushback and the movie was part it.
As a trend from the late 80s to 90s, fast food was on the upswing I'd say. Think back to the 1940s when most American's were not getting enough calories, the average American at the time was not getting enough calories. Fast forward to past the 60s when teenage car culture is all the rage, fast food is part of that picture. If there was effectively no fast food before 1950, and by 2000's it was culturally waning, it raises the question of when was peak fast food? Both in terms of cultural "coolness/acceptanced" and per-capita consumption. I don't know if the per-capita consumpion has gone down, but in terms of culture, I'd guess that happened in the early to mid 90s. Probably co-incided with America being mostly under-nourished, to now "over-nourished" (nourished in quotes as there, as soda calories etc are not really nourishment)
>No one is doing that on accident cause they didnt know how big a supersize fry was.
People have definitely become more aware of what they eat since the documentary came out. And I'm not sure how much of that can specifically be credited to the documentary but if we are still talking about than it clearly has done something right in raising awareness.
Obviously if you are doing research in this area you were never going to cite Super Size Me as it was never serious scientific research.
Were still talking about it because the movie very effectively sold a lie.
Ever tried to eat 5k calories in a day. I bet you cant. No one, and I mean no one, was taking fast food to the extremes he was without really really trying.
I bet you can. easily. I used to eat ~6000 calories a day during training while doing competitive rowing in college. not hard with nutrient-dense foods.
your average chipotle burrito is like half way there. throw in a breakfast, snack, and light dinner and easily 5k calories.
In case you didn't read the article linked: Morgan had a history of alcoholism and admitted later on to drinking during the experiment. That would definitely influence things, and explain why he had symptoms in his liver similar to an alcoholic.
The experiment may have been flawed but it was clearly highlighting a real issue. One that isn't just a one month stint but a multi-decade lifestyle.
Yes, indeed. That is the real real issue. People are mean to each other and fight? Just be nice. World hunger? Just share food. Rent too high? Just live together.
If only complex issues had simple solutions. Until then let's look at the layer above and solve that:
- government subsidies high fructose corn syrup, a calorie rich good.
- subsidized syrup used in almost all pre-processed food.
- is sold cheap, so it can target lower income individuals
- lower income individuals have less access to resources on dieting, or even nutrition facts.They also have less time to research such issue as they now need multiple jobs to barely pay rent.
- obesity increases in the US, disproportionately from lower income people
So we have 2-3 ways to tackle this issue past "just eat less".
Except that issue you brought up is NOT what supersize me is about. Its competitor doc, Fathead, is about that though. And absolutely lambastes supersize me.
And im not saying just eat less to fight obesity. Im saying portion sizes at a resteraunt are a moot point. People stop eating when they are no longer hungry. Do you always eat 100% of the food you get at a restaurant? Again, peiple treat obese people like theyre too stupid to figure out how they got fat, or theyre too weak minded and must have dietary decisions made for them. Fuck that. Theyre adults free to make choices like anyone else. Im all for education about nutrition, and supersize me offers 0 in that department.
>Do you always eat 100% of the food you get at a restaurant?
Given how I grew up poor, yes. Yes I do. Restaurants that weren't a McDonald's were a treat (not that I wasted McDonald's). Wasting food was about the worst thing I could do to my grandparents. Any food I didn't eat at the restaurant was tomorrow's dinner. That mentality doesn't just go away even when your lifestyle improves and food is no longer scarce.
>Again, peiple treat obese people like theyre too stupid to figure out how they got fat, or theyre too weak minded and must have dietary decisions made for them. Fuck that.
Call them what you want. You asked for answers and you're rejecting the reality of the situation. The answer for obesity isn't just "make better life choices". It's a mental addiction like alcoholism, we need to treat it like so if we want results, instead of some excuse to degrade people (again, people are are disproportionately lower class income)
>that issue you brought up is NOT what supersize me is about.
Okay. My answer isn't really isn't about supersize me anymore. That ended when I spent my first response giving context to the situation and you decided to diverge the topic with "well what's the answer?". I
I got more subtle answers around 10th-12th grade with other documentaries. The education has to start somewhere. Supersize me is a decently engaging starting point. But I'm not in 5th grade anymore. I have other, more subtle documentaries to reference for that question.
I don't really hold it in regard anymore than I hold my 3rd grade math book. It did it's job, I'm thankful for it. I don't need to go back and tear it apart over how many things it gets wrong. I'm no longer its audience.
If you're for education, stop lambasting 2nd grade math just because it "lies" about negative numbers for a while. Sometimes it's easier to contrive a system and then build on it later by denouncing those simplicities. If you don't understand calories in/out (and yes, some people don't. Gotta start somewhere), you won't understand the issue with corn syrup subsidies, you won't have all the dots to connect, and you may not put them all together in one sitting.
>Theyre adults free to make choices like anyone else.
And child obesity skyrocketed around the same time too (another documentary I watched that I can't recall). I think it's falling over the last decade, but let's not pretend this is an issue relegated to "smart adults".
>People stop eating when they are no longer hungry
I have and sadly do still stress eat. Once more: stop treating this like obesity can just be solved by saying "eat less". It's like telling an alcoholic to stop drinking.
Not only that it has the same issues as lying about Covid in the name of “public safety” - when people find out it’s a lie they’ll trust the next thing you say even if it’s 100% true.
Accessibility is easily overlooked but in my opinion provides a much more direct and widespread impact than the mentioned ESG - and often provide value to more people than originally intended - I'm thinking of subtitles in videos that immensely helped me learn English, and public infrastructure adaptations for wheelchair users which also greatly benefit others - like mothers with strollers.
I wish more things were designed with an accessibility-first mindset - enabling edge cases might seem like overkill at first, but it could bring unforseen advantages.
I think the elephant in the room is that in many cases, the only way to improve accessibility beyond a fairly low point is to lower the utility.
A good example of this is tables. Tables are amazing at conveying large amounts of complex data in a very intuitive way. Not only that, it's great at manipulating data as well. It is not without reason Excel is powering a significant portion of the business world, and try as many startups have, it's very hard to pry Excel out of the hands of people who are using it. Excel is extremely versatile and very good at what it does, owing largely to the table metaphor.
Problem is that tables are also not very accessible. Among other things, they all but require sightedness. They also don't really work on mobile in any practical sense. At the same time, any accessible alternative to large tables are a strict utility downgrade for people who are able to partake in tabular data.
Starting with an accessibility first design principle, it would not be possible to produce something like Excel. We'd be stuck with a hell consisting of a million mobile apps, one for each conceivable workflow and task, rather than having one tool that can be made to perform any data manipulation task.
1. "Accessibility" means more than just "blind people can use it."
2. "Tables" are primarily for static tabular data (but not exclusively). Excel is a "spreadsheet," a grid of interactive cells.
3. While accessibility is best thought of as an aspect of usability, the practical limitations of tables or spreadsheets on phones are usability problems for everyone, not just for people with disabilities. It's more about the touch interface than what you can see on the screen; a modern phone can display a lot more than the monitors used for the first spreadsheet programs.
4. While having vision can make it more efficient to take in and understand a lot of information in a table or spreadsheet, a screen reader user can navigate them in two dimensions if they're made correctly. Excel's core functionality is useable with a screen reader though not every single feature is.
One of the most useful desktop applications uses a metaphor that is among other things, fundamentally incompatible with mobile devices, and also all but useless for blind people.
It's also important to note that Excel's value is not primarily as a presentation format, but a data transformation tool. Its strength is that it permits the user to define ad-hoc tables and then proceed to transform that data in completely arbitrary ways.
Adopting an accessibility first mindset, you can design software that does not use such a metaphor, enabling it to be accessible on mobile and for people who aren't sighted, but such a design would exclude a lot of the utility of Excel, since almost all of its utility comes from the grid metaphor.
> While accessibility is best thought of as an aspect of usability, the practical limitations of tables or spreadsheets on phones are usability problems for everyone, not just for people with disabilities. It's more about the touch interface than what you can see on the screen; a modern phone can display a lot more than the monitors used for the first spreadsheet programs.
This isn't actually correct. Modern phones have very high resolution, but also very high DPI. The amount of (readable) text is very low, even compared to an old 15" CRT on which you could read a 8x4 pixel font without much trouble.
No matter how high the resolution is, the fact of the matter is that a mobile phone is generously half the size of a page in a paperback. Even an old, small computer screen was the size of full two pages, if not more.
Maybe in some cases. I think it's a creativity issue. In an ideal world the utility can be preserved or increased, with the use of an innovation that improves significantly the life of the functionally varied, with secondary effect of reducing for example cognitive strain on the original user. There may challenges in mindset, funding, time, organisation, lack of understanding or empathy, and so on, for this to be reality. But I would argue that there is a flow of unforeseen benefit from the user that requires a feature, to users that don't require a feature but reduces time and energy spent on getting something done just because the path is shorter, easier, friendlier. Personally I have used many accessibility features as part of small productivity hacks. I also think the study of for example UI accessibility doesn't only apply to the functionally varied but also makes life easier for any user.
If you ignore all the cases where a statement is contradicted, any statement appears true.
Ultimately the visual medium permits random access 2D representations of information that just aren't viable in the sequential-access 1D medium of speech / small screens.
Sometimes accessibility improvements are to general benefit, but this isn't universally true.
You claim utility first and accessibility as first principle removes utility.
Removes utility for who? Accessibility is all about utility for the groups who need it the most. You can have normal excel and an excel that uses sound for blind people on the side. It's not one or the other, and the other in this case also puts utility first for the people it applies to. And what you learn from that can make normal excel better too.
> Accessibility is all about utility for the groups who need it the most
Do some groups really need utility more than others? This seems to contradict the idea of accessibility in general.
> You can have normal excel and an excel that uses sound for blind people on the side. It's not one or the other, and the other in this case also puts utility first for the people it applies to.
It really is one or the other. You cannot represent an effectively infinite 2 dimensional grid in speech. This is impossible because speech is one dimensional. This 2d grid is not accidental to excel, it's at the core of its utility.
Some people need help and it's a positive sum game to help.
You have misconstrued me.
>Do some groups need really utility more than others?
Some people have a lot of utility at hand, and some people who have no utility at all, we can do some stuff so they also can use a tool.
>It really is one or the other. You cannot represent..
The 2d grid is stored in computer memory. You don't need speech to store it. Speech is just a communication medium. A lot of accessibility is just altering the communication medium. It has columns, rows, things that are described with words. You can index into the grid. It is true that sight is a good thing, but your total refusal to provide features to those with alternate needs is ableist. It doesn't matter if the visual component is the original source and I agree excel couldn't have been created without sight. Clay tablet accounting couldn't be created without sight. Doesn't mean you can't use other senses when something has been created. Why the refusal to share? It's pointless not to share. An ending note: Leonhard Euler was rather productive while blind.
> Some people have a lot of utility at hand, and some people who have no utility at all, we can do some stuff so they also can use a tool.
Right, but the point is that we all need the same utility, right? Some people may presently have less utility available, but surely the goal is for the utility to be the same?
> The 2d grid is stored in computer memory. You don't need speech to store it. Speech is just a communication medium. A lot of accessibility is just altering the communication medium. It has columns, rows, things that are described with words. You can index into the grid. It is true that sight is a good thing, but your total refusal to provide features to those with alternate needs is ableist. It doesn't matter if the visual component is the original source and I agree excel couldn't have been created without sight. Clay tablet accounting couldn't be created without sight. Doesn't mean you can't use other senses when something has been created. Why the refusal to share? It's pointless not to share. An ending note: Leonhard Euler was rather productive while blind.
Enough allusions to a nebulous solution that must surely somehow exist. How would you represent Excel to a user that is not sighted? A spreadsheet is not just a table, it's tables within tables. The data is scattered in tables around the sheet and inconsistently surrounded by areas of empty cells, the data is ad-hoc and user created and can not be assumed to have any standard headings or type annotations as many spreadsheets just don't. Unrelated tables may also be adjacent to each other within the sheet. A row of empty cells may be semantically meaningful, or just the space between two different tables. There may or may not be headings or column labels. Any cell may be represented both as a formula and a value. Formulas may refer to any cell both within the sheet and within other sheets in the workbook. It's as truest digital equivalent of unstructured writing with pencil on a blank sheet of paper.
Many of the things that make this a complete accessibility nightmare are the same things that makes it an extremely versatile and high-utility tool for abled people. The complete lack of structure and freedom to invent completely ad-hoc work flows that may or may not resemble structured data is exactly what makes it so incredibly powerful.
My entire point I've been trying to make is that there is an inherent conflict here. Pretending like it doesn't exist doesn't make it go away.
>Enough allusions to a nebulous solution that must surely somehow exist. How would you represent Excel to a user that is not sighted?
A voice presents the information structurally top-down recursively as needed. That's it. Braille displays may also be used. If the excel is unstructured, an inclusive organization makes sure such files are documented. Soon an LLM may describe the structure. And don't underestimate peoples intelligence if they happen to be alone without documentation, structure can be extrapolated. Let's not pretend things are impossible that aren't. A simple screen reader gets a lot done here.
>surely the goal is for the utility to be the same?
Not for the methods to be the same, the goal is for the output to be the same. To consider the majority's way of doing things the correct way is sort of discriminatory. To cram people with different needs into an existing framework doesn't always work, rather you have to meet their needs so they can provide the same value in alternative ways.
I like your point excellent job you're right of course it's a difficult problem. I won't be able to reply any longer. I hope you may generalize an appreciation of the willpower of people with functional variations and not try and fit them in a mold rather give them alternative interfaces that they need to produce the same results
> I think the elephant in the room is that in many cases, the only way to improve accessibility beyond a fairly low point is to lower the utility.
They did this on Windows and on Android. It didn't work.
Try resizing a window on 4k screen in win 10. Or try to get rid of an error message in Android 10 (hint: there is no Ok or Cancel button and the error message obscures other UI elements).
So look at this as changing the definition of what “minimum viable” means in your organization.
Maybe you can make the case for why every link and image should have aria tags, since it’s a new app and assets are more likely to be missing.
Or maybe you know that keyboard controls need to be implemented, but you didn’t consider focus trapping for assistive users.
Accessibility isn’t a binary, but a sliding scale. At the top of the market you get insanity like WCAG AAA, which straight up invalidates most of the modern web because it’s so restrictive.
It struck me as comforting to actually be able to post it all online without a major worry, I imagine a person of that age living with close supervision of their family can get fully disconnected of this paranoia and just enjoy actual life, sans administration and connectivity.
Even John Carmack - an ultimate prototype for a nerd - has evolved into a CTO (and from the linked Fridman interview he sounds like a really good one). What is it about tinkerers being put into these positions as a natural progression?
It always seemed to me that people with more of a managerial background would be better managers - is software/system development the only field where masters of their craft ultimately become directors?
Tinkerers are basically technology generalist, and have tinkered in probably everything. So they can map out solutions and have good ideas of what will work and won't.
People with managerial backgrounds have....what? Nothing really. They have to guess at any plan presented by technical people, are always suspicious they are being screwed over on estimations and real problem areas, and are unable to correctly identify when people are doing good work -- thus also being unable to set a healthy engineering culture for success. That's why most managers are demoralizing for engineers. They just don't get it.
It's interesting to note that alot of the most successful startups in SV are not from MBA's but engineers with masters or PhDs....it's not a coincidence I think. They have the practical experience to lead a real world venture to success.
Managers are good at managing departments like insurance claim processing or bad debt collections, which any human can learn in a few weeks fundamentally.
This is an overly cynical view of management. Distrust and "screwed by estimations" are signs that the dynamic needs tweaking, not that all dynamics are like this.
People with managerial backgrounds can become quite adept at helping you:
- Identify blindspots in your biases and behavior that keep you from peak performance
- Avoid working on stuff that's not valuable to your team
- Settle disputes within a group
- Motivate you and keep you engaged/fulfilled with your work
- Get unstuck with personal problems
This is not an exhaustive list and you don't have to have a 'managerial background' to master stuff like this. I am an engineer who has had to learn management as a startup founder. I used to distrust the whole management thing but that kept me from growing as a teammate. Management is not only useful in 'non technical' jobs, it's useful in all human endeavors it's why we study it so much and why it has so much leverage.
A cynical or experienced view? I'm in management and have seen good managers and bad, but the bad ones are quite a few. To address your points, managers with a non technical background:
- Cannot identify blind spots that keep you at peak performance, only another engineer with more experience (tech lead or senior) can do so. They can only identify behaviors that make them look bad or are inconvenient when viewed from the point of view of their peers -- other managers.
- A non technical manager has literally no idea what is valuable to delivering complex technical work. They can only guess, and often guess badly. Again only a senior or tech lead with experience could do this.
- How could a non technical manager motivate any engineer, without an understanding of their difficulties, problems and ways to solve these problems practically? I just don't buy it. "Let's do overtime on the weekend guys..."
- Managers should not be involved with people's personal problems. I've met so many managers that are extroverted and managing sensitive introverted teams, that all they ultimately do is the equivalent of hammer on the aquarium glass. Remember that sign in the pet store: "Don't tap on the glass"? It's true of technical teams that are of a totally different temperament than managers.
> A cynical or experienced view? I'm in management and have seen good managers and bad, but the bad ones are quite a few. To address your points, managers with a non technical background:
Thanks for the detailed breakdown and no name calling :D
> Cannot identify blind spots that keep you at peak performance, only another engineer with more experience (tech lead or senior) can do so. They can only identify behaviors that make them look bad or are inconvenient when viewed from the point of view of their peers -- other managers.
Given you have different levels of skill in the team, a good manager would convince you and the other teammate to help each other out with the learning. Lubricating these interactions given everyone has responsibilities is not always trivial. I'm less experienced on the politics but I believe what you're saying about politics distorting incentives. I'm conveniently side-stepping this issue bc it applies to all positions in a corporate structure.
> A non technical manager has literally no idea what is valuable to delivering complex technical work. They can only guess, and often guess badly. Again only a senior or tech lead with experience could do this.
A non technical manager can know very well what's valuable to the product/company. That they don't believe their team on the value of a specific piece of technical work to enable that seems like something else is at play here (lack of trust).
> How could a non technical manager motivate any engineer, without an understanding of their difficulties, problems and ways to solve these problems practically? I just don't buy it. "Let's do overtime on the weekend guys..."
By reminding/reframing/convincing re:impact their work has on their team, personal growth, customers, society or personal preferences. Doesn't have to be only technical; they can help you deal with any self-inflicted discomfort regardless of the subject matter.
> Managers should not be involved with people's personal problems. I've met so many managers that are extroverted and managing sensitive introverted teams, that all they ultimately do is the equivalent of hammer on the aquarium glass. Remember that sign in the pet store: "Don't tap on the glass"? It's true of technical teams that are of a totally different temperament than managers.
Agree to disagree. I've had great conversations with peers when/if we're open to talking about non-work stuff - both ways not just me 'giving advice'. It's not binary and depends on the relationship. A skilled manager can care for reports beyond work, create genuine bonds and be respectful when they have not been given an opening to engage in these subjects.
> A non technical manager can know very well what's valuable to the product/company. That they don't believe their team on the value of a specific piece of technical work to enable that seems like something else is at play here (lack of trust).
Trust is a difficult commodity to build, a lot of company culture issues stem from lack of trust. It's particularly key to the manager/team relationship.
When you have a non-technical manager directly over technical teams it's particularly difficult to build trust. People, emotionally, want to have someone really understand them. Someone who doesn't, at a fundamental level, understand the actual work you're doing is going to be at a disadvantage as the work is crux of the purpose of the interaction.
Not to say that it is impossible, someone with well above average people reading and listening skills can still build that trust and get it. But it's definitely going to be more difficult than someone who really knows the turf.
As a startup founder you are automatically at the top of the company food-chain.
Managers in the middle of the food-chain are all about power-struggle and social games they play to out-compete each other.
That is especially the case for non-technical managers who don’t have a sense for the underlying technical challenges. They have all their bandwidth available for political positioning and social games.
It would be great if all managers where “serving the team” in the sense of your bullet points. But alas many don’t see it that way.
IMHO many startups are successful because they have a technical person at the top. Who is capable to understand, evaluate and positively reward technical work within their organization.
Part of the reason for that - especially in tech - is we keep hiring people utterly unsuited to manage others. Pretty much every manager I've had is a software engineer in the past. But, only one manager was a true manager who helped me with the technical stuff, career and personal growth. The rest were all great people but totally inadequate as a manager.
In tech and pretty much every company I've worked at, you need to get into a managerial position to be able to have a say in what get built and how much you get paid. Programming fatigue and frustration with being told what to do also sets in after a while. The two together convinces people who are terrible with their people management skills to chase a manager-path career.
Essentially, you're diagnosing the symptom to be the cause.
Just figuring out what is important / not important to the company alone is enormously important.
I’ve seen multiple times my careers were dozens of people no will work for months on something that just isn’t important.
Being able to put things in terms like this feature will cost us $1 million in developer time. We can expect a return of $50,000 over the life of the product. Or vice versa.
I feel that turning to leadership (tech leadership, but also pure engineering management) can be a natural "tinkerer" progression. If you want bigger impact, you turn to more "abstraction", and use tooling and patterns to fill out the details. In this case, you can consider that your role is to give broad directions. They are very important directions, because they shape the "design space" of the problem you are trying to solve.
After that, you have a set of "programming tools" (I don't want it to sound mechanistic, because it is the opposite of that), which are your team and reports, and they will be able to fill in the details (and the details here can be significant pieces of design and architecture by themselves). And your role is to choose the right tools, and allow them to work to their full potential. This means clearing obstacles, clear communication, technical help at times, mentorship, aligning expectations and giving them clear paths for growth.
All these things can be considered engineering at a larger scale. You want to get a really big system shipped and productive? This is the work, these are the skills you need.
> What is it about tinkerers being put into these positions as a natural progression?
Because those tinkerers get to a point where they want to be the ones making the decisions, controlling the culture, technology, and direction of the company. Without position you have no power and without power you can't affect change.
Software isn't the only field where practitioners get promoted to management, but it is one of the fields where technically incompetent managers and executives will kill a company with unsound decisions.
> What is it about tinkerers being put into these positions as a natural progression?
I don't know enough to say whether this is a common pattern or not, but if it is, it could perhaps be that tinkerers tend to gather a vast breadth of knowledge that can be very useful when making strategic decisions. They reach the point where they know enough to understand what questions to ask on many topics, even if they are an expert in only a few (or none) of them.
I'm not the worlds greatest manager - but after you've worked with hundreds or thousands of people and seen seen hundreds of projects come and go you start to develop some insight about how things go and how they can go bad.
I don't know how else you pick up the skills to be an effective technical manager
> It always seemed to me that people with more of a managerial background would be better managers
The distinction dates back to the industrial revolution, where you had manufacturing line workers and line managers. A manager would usually be an owner's relative or someone they trusted – more loyal to the company than the unions.
This distinction perpetuated well into current age, just notice how much implicit bias there is about "programmers don't have people skills" to keep workers accepting a career ceiling. Most managers aren't skilled either, and not respected by the workers due to it, but companies won't keep them from managing because they need someone to be responsible for plans, estimates, OKRs, etc.
I guess in software it's "more" common due to survivorship bias – the business of software is so messed up and people have so little idea how to manage it, that companies without experienced leaders have a smaller chance. Strong companies and teams in the field have leaders with enough hands-on experience to have natural authority.
> Even John Carmack - an ultimate prototype for a nerd - has evolved into a CTO
I didn't get the impression that he's your typical CTO and completely hands off with code and development. If anything, it sounded like he's still very much in the trenches but has learned how to delegate work well and pick which problems are worth the time investment.
When it came to his work on Oculus and the work he's about to do in the field of AGI it sounded like he'll definitely be making direct contributions. It's entirely possible that I misunderstood his stance throughout the interview though and he's a more hands off guy now.
In my case my impact plummeted. Sometimes going in to management means having your hands tied -- you are the ones allowing higher ups to scale their impact. It was awful.
I'd love to be able to find folks that can do what I do -- it's probably our #1 issue holding us back -- and direct them to meet some business and technical goals, but I've yet to work at an organization that supports that mode of management.
And here your organization has failed you. In our org we split engineering career at a certain point into three careers: engineering, people and architects. Up to the VP level their grading run in parallel. The architects are optimized for tech and business impact while the people managers are good in managing people. and yes engineering tracks and architecture track optimize certain skills but are not necessarily a hard separation
Who's programming 12 hours a day. He never ever said in that interview, that he's going away from programming. He's been "CTO" in the early days too. You misunderstood the whole conversation if you think he's turning into an "architect" only.
Carmack did end up moving from Meta VR (although he still works there one day a week). I presume it is because he was not doing enough engineering work. I used to read all of his posts internally and he really did seem to be an amazing CTO.
It's not they are tinkerers necessarily - it's that they want their impact to scale larger than what they themselves can create. Solo coder -> tech lead -> CTO is like going from single CPU -> multiple CPU -> distributed systems.
That page is way more beautiful and unique with it's use of vibrant color and gradients in dark mode. Also it doesn't share the most obvious thing between the others (Built for speed... section).
I think almost straight copying landing page designs and layouts is basically fine and common practice. Using the same or very similar copy... not quite.
The driver is most likely on multiple apps, and is doing rides there while the Uber one stays open so he can accept the cancellation fee when somebody less devoted than the parent commenter gets frustrated enough
This is very consistent with customer service in The Netherlands - nothing is ever the fault of service providers, and you manage to convince them otherwise - you'll get nothing more than "unfortunately (...) not possible"
