Heuristics, or why we hate comic sans ms
In the manifold manners with which we find ourselves talking to familiar people, I tend to slip into a mood of gentle ribbing and snark that can often descend into outright scorn. I’ve long considered it a fallout of boredom and manic energy unbridled by the middling day.
This is hardly a healthy habit if you regularly fret about maintaining propriety, but the best thing that can be said in its defense is that, just through the animating chaos from continually putting people off-kilter, it can be tons of fun—a form of fun often selfishly accrued by one person, but when played as a sort of social game, great at enlivening the mood of the room.
Thus on an unremarkable mid-week work day, as the working momentum of the office staggered about listlessly in the liminal hour post lunch, I found myself on a roll of mockery, that, at the cusp of running out of ideas, picked itself among the lowest hanging fruits for the internet scorn economy: the comic sans ms typeface.
But let me pull back.
As is in the nature of all people professing to do something important, there’s a mild self-consciousness to activities that invoke said important thing — a particular sort of awareness of symbols, habits, and what they mean and how they appear to others. And so, among the team’s many trivial pursuits, we found ourselves in interminable arguments about the company t-shirt. As a totem of our working identities, people had nuanced opinions on sizing, fabric, texture, neck style, talent at sweat absorption, whether it was ecologically produced, if the neckline felt akin to being gently choked by the hands of a really weak strangler, and so on.
Okay, maybe not all of these things, but you get the idea.
After many vocally rejected designs, I found myself holding up the 200th sample shirt. This one, designed by the hands of our super talented designer, Adil, had our tagline “Keep it Simpl” adorned across the chest in a style reminiscent of a usability existential nightmare: comic sans ms. Running out of steam as I was, I was quick to bite, haranguing the shirt for its gauche sensibilities, it’s amnesia for 20 years of UX design, it’s generic texture that in no way implied that we worked with the providence of god, or complexity, product-market fit, or some other popular teleology to lend narrative weight to our mission. I was bored.
Akshay — product manager, engineer, purveyor of opinions, chronic medical patient, and a fan of deep thoughts—immediately found himself goaded into the argument. Beyond 20 minutes of meandering bluster, what ensued was a regressive slide to the basic question of what forms a valid opinion; whether the raucous gale of fashion and social acceptability meant that the veracity of most human thought was rarely inspected; lost instead to the memetic recycling that characterizes a particularly powerful human desire to be in on the joke.
His point was simple: Did most people hate on comic sans only because it was a popular thing to hate on? Why was any fondness or affiliation an open signifier of poor taste and deserving of reproach?
I thought this was interesting. Obviously, comic sans might be a poor cause to martyr your status and intellect on (jk), but he rightly pointed to a strange social behavior we rigorously impose on each other — the reaffirmation of tacit mutual beliefs within groups of people where we trade status or influence rather than anything approaching truth.
Joking about comic sans is just one extremely trivial instantiation of this phenomenon; think through details of your life and everyday pieties start to peep out from the shadows. Our norms about how hard we work, what is healthy, the latest programming framework, some esoteric trivia from TV show long lost to the detritus of tv programming (I’m looking at you The Wire fans.), to the polite deference attached to liberal shibboleths.
During the argument, I found myself defending social reasoning. Analogising it to a form of system 1 reasoning, I proffered an example of how people often learn to detect certain forms of danger through some form of cultural osmosis, For example, inhabitants of urban spaces today often can spend their lifetimes without facing any real physical danger, but are subliminally aware that they should run from a bear or a tiger (although, caveat, if there’s a strong biological fright response, I may be wrong on this instance.). A lot of such learning isn’t inductive — actually experienced by the individual — but is instead a mental model validated over generations of human experience, and thus assumed as gospel truth repeated for for the edification of the neophyte.
In a simpler sort of world — the vast history of human experience — this sort of reasoning is extremely effective. Run away from the tiger; stay away from certain types of wild mushrooms; listen to the expedition leader during the hunt, etc. In such a starkly delineated world, heuristics are adaptive. We first survive, then thrive.
But thriving comes with new agendas. Once the natural world is largely tamed, our attention turns to ourselves — that nebulous thing called culture. Culture is a strange beast; it puts influence and status into sharp relief. We have ideas about the world, and we like to proselytise them. “Join my movement to fix our broken politics”, “You should try this new fitness regime”, or “Let’s go out for Chinese food” — the hallmark of religion and politics, or starting up.
And this is where heuristics — or socially motivated inductive reasoning — gets hijacked. Because what is adaptive for survival gets re-wired for status politics as easily; when it comes from ostensibly important people whose favour grants status and other social advantages, such as when kids pay heed to their teacher’s directives, improving their odds of being made the class monitor, our desire to know the truth or fulfill some ethical stricture is left by the wayside.
Human history is rife with status conflict. It’s basically a dominant feature of society, and in its delicate balancing act of selfishness and altruism, we’ve forged the civilization where we can continually run out of charge in our batteries(sorry, I am truly bad with metaphors).
Let’s be kind to us. Life is incredibly computationally expensive. From regulatory failures to the minutiae of my Macbook’s circuitry, I basically don’t understand most things. I’m enormously grateful that there are tons of super smart people who do, and we have this incredible power of the internet if I someday find myself enthused or anxious enough to find out more. In this world of emergent chaos, socially inductive reasoning can be a blessing.
But as we create more cultural artifacts that find themselves orbiting material reality more loosely than ever, this sort of socially absorbed and transmitted consensus realities risk larger derailments. Watch the self-immolation of the right in Donald Trump’s America, or England voting against the EU, and you see the destructive theater of 21st century social life, abetted by technology; a dyspeptic bull out of it’s pen left to roam downtown during late evening drinking hours.
I suspect that maybe we’re just caught at a bad time. Our technological and informational frontiers mean local cultures are mutating harder than any bullshit-sniffing frameworks can handle. Manipulation for gain is easier, and addictive behaviours are rife. At best, the UXs we traverse the world with are indifferent to our ambitions; at worst, they’re turned fiendishly exploitative.
So we need to build our way out of this morass.
