> Customer delight isn’t something we add to our projects. It’s what’s left if we don’t ruin it.
my anecdotal experience in this is that getting back X (customer delight / curiosity etc) once you’ve ruined it will usually take longer / be more costly than having just not ruined it in the first place.
also, at some point you will ruin it. at that point it’s a question of by how much and if you choose to un-ruin it.
sometimes doing nothing is a more useful skill than doing something.
> Trust isn’t something a brand builds with an ad campaign. It’s what’s left if the marketers don’t ruin it.
So much this. Are ads still a measurably good investment for businesses? I'm assuming they wouldn't run them anymore if not, but they feel so out of touch these days that it's really hard to imagine them really working on anybody.
Sorry for the side-tangent, just felt like that last bit of the post really drove home the point best - at least for me.
Its always been hard to know. "about one-half the money I spend for advertising is wasted, but I have never been able to decide which half." dates back more than a century
Some spend is just in case. Some spend is for prestige (we are on TV!). Some is for vague reasons that cannot be measured.
As someone who works in marketing, this is extremely true. Right now, LLMs are causing a lot of one-time cashing in of trust.
I've seen this pattern a bunch:
1. Person builds trust on X/LinkedIn or via an insightful blog/newsletter (substitute your channel of choice here) for a few years because they have unique opinions, interesting stories from personal experience, are entertaining/charismatic, or share data/insights nobody else has.
2. They realize "AI can do this now" and use AI trained on past content to generate the content.
3. They post the content
4. People initially keep engaging because their AI-generated content inherits some of the trust they built up
5. People realize their posts are AI slop and feel tricked or simply no longer enjoy the posts.
6. Engagement falls off a cliff because the assumption has changed from "If I see this person/company in a feed, it's got a good chance to be interesting" to "If I see this person/company in a feed, it's guaranteed to be AI slop.
There's a temporary "Have your cake and eat it too" phase where you get the results without doing the work. But once that ends, you have to build the brand all over again because it's been tarnished.
(Fyi my take isn't that everything needs to be hand-written and no AI can ever be used in writing. Just that this cycle keeps repeating because people don't do the work anymore. You can use AI and still be doing the work of generating genuinely good writing)
I agree completely, but this is part of a larger pattern in society lately around short-term thinking. It seems like everyone is trying to cash ASAP and fewer people are investing or building long-term.
Between crumbling social institutions, climate change, governmental chaos, and increasing economic inequality, I think people just don't believe in the future as much as they used to. If you stop believing in the future, then making choices with short-term positives but long-term negatives becomes rational. You won't be around when the chickens come home to roost. Or, at least, you believe you'll have much bigger problems to worry about then anyway. Better to get yours now while you can.
I agree with what you’re talking about but I don’t agree this is analogous.
I’m talking about a one-time cashing in of trust one already has built up, not saying whatever the algorithm demands to go viral.
These people already have the thing others are expecting from content creation!
I think this is different from the short-term phenomenon you describe where people want to get rich quick via crypto/prediction markets/wallstreetbets/etc.
It’s much more like you already have enough to retire on, but cash it all out because your cousin’s tattoo artist’s stepson recently got a bachelor’s in finance and they won’t charge any management fees.
X is itself a massive cash-in of trust by the new owner.
But yes, a lot of the tech industry these days resembles people looking at a rainforest and thinking how much value could be derived from clear-cutting it. Massive one-time extraction of value, long term destruction of an ecosystem, resulting in harms distributed all over the world in ways that aren't obviously linked.
This reminds me of trying to use File Explorer in Windows 11.
I wish I could turn all their electron-app "improvements" off, to make it useful again, like it once was..
Case in point:
Explorer now has tabs. I don't need tabs, I need a single tab, and a window title bar so I can drag the damn thing around.
And.. my single tab, now tries to show the folder name, truncated to a few useless characters, so I now have tabs called "C:\folder\sub1\...", while the rest of the row is EMPTY SPACE (which I, admittedly can still use to drag the window around; thank you for that, but it will probably be filled with ADS come next month.)
"Oh, but you can just see the folder name in the address bar in the next row instead then!"
NO I CAN'T. Because they electron-css-screwed that up too..
It now shows a bunch of toolbar buttons <- -> ^ , then a computer screen??, then >, then [...]
Then they truncate the file path to only show parts of it, starting the rest with ...
Is it because we are out of space? I don't know,
every part of the folder path has been separated with [ > ]
(because / or \ was obviously the worst idea ever.)
Then, to the right of it all, we get a big [Search log ] edit field, followed by
a spyglass.
So, I get two broken displays of the actual folder path, and a lot of 'candy' I did not ask for.
Why does the search tool need so much space, before I am using it at all? What does it need,
apart from maybe the single spyglass icon?
Instead, the actual path that my object by necessity ALWAYS will have,
has been chopped up to unrecognisability.
It reeks of KPI and bonus performance reviews, "we must improve the round shape of the wheel, to get our bonus and not be downsized".
Hey now! The `nautilus' file browser on linux got me hooked on tabs and for years it's been a glaring deficiency of File Explorer. Many tasks involve a collection of directories, and tabs can be ideal for reducing demand for screen space.
I concede the the current Windows implementation is poor but I hope they improve it, rather than dumping tabs entirely.
People's workflows will vary but I never find myself using tabs in Dolphin. (ie, the KDE file manager) If I'm dragging and dropping, I want to see both the source and the destination, so I usually just open two windows and tile one on the left an one on the right. This always works great and is a lot like Norton Commander, which seems relevant.
You can pull the File Explorer tabs from my cold, dead hands!
Also, I'm pretty sure the tabs were WinUI/XAML based, not WebView2 based. There are some "Electron" (i.e. web tech stack) components in File Explorer these days but I don't think most of the things you're complaining about are part of that.
The window handles, on the other hand .. this was correct in Windows 3.0 and there's basically no good reason to have changed it. There should be a title bar. Active window should have visibly contrasting title bar. There should be sufficient grab space all round a window to get hold of it.
Bonus points: move your mouse pointer very slowly around a bottom curved corner window handle on Windows 11. Ask yourself: how well does "place I am pointing at" line up with "where the curve is"?
Every time I was forced to use Windows 7, file browser tabs are something I missed dearly from Linux. But now that I'm forced to use Windows for work almost every day, I find that I almost never use file browser tabs on Windows. No idea why. The tabs show only the dirname, which is what I would want the tabs to do. The UX is mostly okay.
Not being able to grab the top left of the window and drag feels really strange. Plenty of apps encroach on the top bar, but they almost never encroach on the top left. That's where the icon lives, that's the sacred "move the window" space.
Slack has the same problem (hamburger menu in the top left captures clicks, plus a giant search bar in the center) and it's bothersome. But with Slack I don't notice it because I don't really move Slack around. It's permanently maximized on a secondary display. I move Explorer windows around constantly, so I notice it.
A little while ago I ran Windows XP in a VM, inside Windows 10.
I noted that when I pressed the start key, the start menu opened.
I noted that when I pressed Win+E, an explorer window opened.
Fully rendered. After a single video frame.
On Windows 10, the same thing happens, only several hundred milliseconds later, and then you get to enjoy watching the UI elements get painted in one at a time.
I'm forced to use the Microsoft ecosystem at work and the sluggishness of it is a major source of procrastination. I find myself putting off small tasks forever, because waiting for word files to open, browsing folder structures in Teams, etc. are all mildly painful experiences. I suspect a lot of people do this, and maybe all of them don't even realize why they are doing this. The effect of sluggish user interfaces on overall productivity is probably well underestimated.
The same goes to some extent to anything with a web interface, for example Databricks.
I was really excited when I saw tabs were coming to the file explorer, but I can't tell now if I don't like tabs in file explorer or if I don't like all the other things that made file explorer worse when tabs got added
This is the most idiotic thing I've heard today, who UAT'd this? Does Windows even bother having a UAT team? If they have a QA / UAT phase in their process for Windows they need to fire everyone and build a new UAT team for Windows, this is getting so ridiculous it hurts.
The problem with Windows is the users aren't the buyers, so they don't matter.
I hate Windows 11 immensely. At home I use Mac, Linux and... Windows 7. But at my current client I have to use Windows 11. I have no choice; I can either accept that or leave.
So at this point Windows could send small electrical shocks with every keystroke, it would not make a difference whatsoever.
I can understand companies other than Microsoft using Electron because of the byzantine APIs required to make a native GUI app in Windows. But why would Microsoft do this? Have they forgotten how to use their own software??
It is in the nature of capital to ruin it - if users feel great about a product it implies that there is more to wring out of them. The ideal product leaves the user with nothing but the utility the product provides with no extra pleasure. If your employee loves to work for you, you're paying them too much. They can't hate to work for you (unless they have no other choice) but if they feel really good about it, that is a sign of a problem.
Don't let the brevity of this post dissuade you from its value. I believe Seth is getting at a very good psychological insight.
By default, people give a lot of trust and benefit of the doubt. Everyone's account in life starts out a little positive when it comes to trust, welcome, empathy, and believe.
But the flip side of that is that people have a very good memory for past transgressions. When someone has extended you a little trust, or given you some time to learn your product, they will absolutely remember if you turn around and harm them.
It takes only a match to burn a bridge, but a year to rebuild it.
In a similar vein, I've argued in many a corporate meeting that there's no such thing as "empowerment".
People start out wanting to achieve things, change things to be better, do a good job.
The active issue is disempowerment, created by other people (usually but not always senior) within the organisation.
So the question isn't "how to empower people", but rather "how to prevent disempowerment of people".
This isn't always popular, as it shifts the focus and responsibility for different behaviour away from the disempowered rank and file, towards the dysfunctional leadership.
> People start out wanting to achieve things, change things to be better, do a good job.
Like all generalizations, this is only partly true. There are bad actors.
> The active issue is disempowerment, created by other people (usually but not always senior) within the organisation.
Disempowerment (is that a word?) is necessary. So necessary, that entire departments incorporate it as a large part of their mandate. HR, finance, QA...
> So the question isn't "how to empower people", but rather "how to prevent disempowerment of people".
Or more, how to focus the disempowerment on things that matter?
> This isn't always popular, as it shifts the focus and responsibility for different behaviour away from the disempowered rank and file, towards the dysfunctional leadership.
Maybe it's not always popular because some disempowerment is necessary, and framing the entire issue as a necessity for its removal and those who disagree as dysfunctional is needlessly inflammatory and counterproductive?
> Like all generalizations, this is only partly true. There are bad actors.
Of course, but in the organisations I have experience of, I'd estimate that the 'bad actor' rate is very low - certainly a low-single-digit percentage. (I don't work in tech, BTW.)
> Disempowerment (is that a word?) is necessary. So necessary, that entire departments incorporate it as a large part of their mandate. HR, finance, QA...
I think we need to differentiate between different forms of disempowerment. For example, having a set budget to work within (i.e. the disempowerment that a finance department might generate) is structural in nature; and further may either be empowering if an individual or team has freedom to work within those constraints, or disempowering if the budget is too constrained, or changes unpredictably. In contrast, smart committed people having their ideas stamped on irrationally by a bad egotistical leader ultimately leads to disenchanted people who don't want to invest their energy any more.
> Maybe it's not always popular because some disempowerment is necessary, and framing the entire issue as a necessity for its removal and those who disagree as dysfunctional is needlessly inflammatory and counterproductive?
You're maybe not considering the background context of why such a discussion would even be taking place. These discussions spring out of leadership noting somehow (direct observations, discussions, workplace surveys, workplace transformation initiatives, etc.) that people in their organisations are less "empowered" than they (leadership) would wish (with perceived negative impacts) and therefore this is something they want to reverse. They're frustrated and confused: they think they're offering an environment for people to behave as they hope to see, and yet people aren't stepping through the apparently open door.
It's unpopular because asking why people are disempowered shifts the focus from the failings of individuals ("why is this employee not behaving as I expect them to; what stick or lever or additional incentive can I use to improve their behaviour?") to the failings of leadership ("what have I been doing wrong all along to result in this sorry state of affairs? Am I the cause?")
You would hope a light bulb would turn on, but management who needs those sorts of conversations might often not have the wherewithal to do the right thing, never mind respond positively.
I think codebases and optimizations are a lot like this.
A lot of people seem to think the way to make things work better and faster is to add elaborate caching layers and layers and retries and GPUs and multi threading and...
I find the opposite tends to be true. Make things fast and reliable by doing as little as possible. If an API is flakey, make it not flakey, don't cache the result and add a retry loop.
> Or perhaps: Satisfaction in our work isn’t created by the boss. It’s what’s left if they don’t ruin it.
~no boss sets out to ruin employee satisfaction. It's a byproduct of having to integrate more realities into the smaller scope that employees usually care about, and that is just not easy.
Of course, most bosses are also not great at this – on average bosses are, like everything else, just average – but to assume that bosses "ruin" satisfaction and employees would be longterm fulfilled and create working companies if only left alone is polemic.
Sound systems do have an omnipresent "only as good as your weakest link" feeling.
A lossless source (or analog, whatever your preference) and great speakers/amps can't overcome a bad sounding room - or a piece of music that was mixed/mastered poorly.
"Four models. One topology — designed by Darren Myers, engineered by Bob Stadtherr. Driven from a state-of-the-art active power supply that delivers performance benefits no traditional transformer-based passive supply can match. Class A bias of 50 watts means your music spends 99% of its time in the most linear region of the amplifier's operation"
Just recently it occurred to me that the sage parenting advice, "Don't try to make a happy baby happier," applies to so many other things. Once I had this idea, it seemed like everywhere I looked were people trying to make happy babies happier. Improving tools that work fine, optimizing things where the available margin for improvement is small, etc.
Unless Seth gets the ear of some high-up executives, I don't think this article will change anything. The workers "ruining" products have to do their job, and often don't have much input into these decisions.
The bias to action. Buffett and Taleb write about it. People feel like they have to "earn" their time. If something is good, or good enough, they still have to do some sort of "improvement" because they want to feel like they earned their salary.
> Curiosity isn’t simply what’s left after a complete education. It’s still there if the system doesn’t ruin it.
Yes, but also some people are shockingly incurious and approach academia and life through a depressingly hollow transactional lens from the beginning. Though if it was there to begin with, there's a good chance it'll be stripped away through the structuring of courses to be measurable first and intriguing second
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 77.4 ms ] threadmy anecdotal experience in this is that getting back X (customer delight / curiosity etc) once you’ve ruined it will usually take longer / be more costly than having just not ruined it in the first place.
also, at some point you will ruin it. at that point it’s a question of by how much and if you choose to un-ruin it.
sometimes doing nothing is a more useful skill than doing something.
So much this. Are ads still a measurably good investment for businesses? I'm assuming they wouldn't run them anymore if not, but they feel so out of touch these days that it's really hard to imagine them really working on anybody.
Sorry for the side-tangent, just felt like that last bit of the post really drove home the point best - at least for me.
Some spend is just in case. Some spend is for prestige (we are on TV!). Some is for vague reasons that cannot be measured.
Attempting to measure the effectiveness of ads is basically what drove the creation of the surveillance capitalism monster we all know and love today.
I've seen this pattern a bunch:
1. Person builds trust on X/LinkedIn or via an insightful blog/newsletter (substitute your channel of choice here) for a few years because they have unique opinions, interesting stories from personal experience, are entertaining/charismatic, or share data/insights nobody else has.
2. They realize "AI can do this now" and use AI trained on past content to generate the content.
3. They post the content
4. People initially keep engaging because their AI-generated content inherits some of the trust they built up
5. People realize their posts are AI slop and feel tricked or simply no longer enjoy the posts.
6. Engagement falls off a cliff because the assumption has changed from "If I see this person/company in a feed, it's got a good chance to be interesting" to "If I see this person/company in a feed, it's guaranteed to be AI slop.
There's a temporary "Have your cake and eat it too" phase where you get the results without doing the work. But once that ends, you have to build the brand all over again because it's been tarnished.
(Fyi my take isn't that everything needs to be hand-written and no AI can ever be used in writing. Just that this cycle keeps repeating because people don't do the work anymore. You can use AI and still be doing the work of generating genuinely good writing)
I agree completely, but this is part of a larger pattern in society lately around short-term thinking. It seems like everyone is trying to cash ASAP and fewer people are investing or building long-term.
Between crumbling social institutions, climate change, governmental chaos, and increasing economic inequality, I think people just don't believe in the future as much as they used to. If you stop believing in the future, then making choices with short-term positives but long-term negatives becomes rational. You won't be around when the chickens come home to roost. Or, at least, you believe you'll have much bigger problems to worry about then anyway. Better to get yours now while you can.
I’m talking about a one-time cashing in of trust one already has built up, not saying whatever the algorithm demands to go viral.
These people already have the thing others are expecting from content creation!
I think this is different from the short-term phenomenon you describe where people want to get rich quick via crypto/prediction markets/wallstreetbets/etc.
It’s much more like you already have enough to retire on, but cash it all out because your cousin’s tattoo artist’s stepson recently got a bachelor’s in finance and they won’t charge any management fees.
... You don't actually advise them to post on LinkedIn, do you? You know all the engagement on LinkedIn is fake, right?
But yes, a lot of the tech industry these days resembles people looking at a rainforest and thinking how much value could be derived from clear-cutting it. Massive one-time extraction of value, long term destruction of an ecosystem, resulting in harms distributed all over the world in ways that aren't obviously linked.
"Oh, but you can just see the folder name in the address bar in the next row instead then!"
NO I CAN'T. Because they electron-css-screwed that up too.. It now shows a bunch of toolbar buttons <- -> ^ , then a computer screen??, then >, then [...] Then they truncate the file path to only show parts of it, starting the rest with ... Is it because we are out of space? I don't know, every part of the folder path has been separated with [ > ] (because / or \ was obviously the worst idea ever.) Then, to the right of it all, we get a big [Search log ] edit field, followed by a spyglass. So, I get two broken displays of the actual folder path, and a lot of 'candy' I did not ask for. Why does the search tool need so much space, before I am using it at all? What does it need, apart from maybe the single spyglass icon? Instead, the actual path that my object by necessity ALWAYS will have, has been chopped up to unrecognisability.
It reeks of KPI and bonus performance reviews, "we must improve the round shape of the wheel, to get our bonus and not be downsized".
Hey now! The `nautilus' file browser on linux got me hooked on tabs and for years it's been a glaring deficiency of File Explorer. Many tasks involve a collection of directories, and tabs can be ideal for reducing demand for screen space.
I concede the the current Windows implementation is poor but I hope they improve it, rather than dumping tabs entirely.
Speak for yourself. Tabs in file explorer and notepad are my favorite windows feature in decades. I can't believe it took them this long.
Also, I'm pretty sure the tabs were WinUI/XAML based, not WebView2 based. There are some "Electron" (i.e. web tech stack) components in File Explorer these days but I don't think most of the things you're complaining about are part of that.
The window handles, on the other hand .. this was correct in Windows 3.0 and there's basically no good reason to have changed it. There should be a title bar. Active window should have visibly contrasting title bar. There should be sufficient grab space all round a window to get hold of it.
Bonus points: move your mouse pointer very slowly around a bottom curved corner window handle on Windows 11. Ask yourself: how well does "place I am pointing at" line up with "where the curve is"?
Not being able to grab the top left of the window and drag feels really strange. Plenty of apps encroach on the top bar, but they almost never encroach on the top left. That's where the icon lives, that's the sacred "move the window" space.
Slack has the same problem (hamburger menu in the top left captures clicks, plus a giant search bar in the center) and it's bothersome. But with Slack I don't notice it because I don't really move Slack around. It's permanently maximized on a secondary display. I move Explorer windows around constantly, so I notice it.
I noted that when I pressed the start key, the start menu opened.
I noted that when I pressed Win+E, an explorer window opened.
Fully rendered. After a single video frame.
On Windows 10, the same thing happens, only several hundred milliseconds later, and then you get to enjoy watching the UI elements get painted in one at a time.
Twenty years of progress.
The same goes to some extent to anything with a web interface, for example Databricks.
They still work exactly the same, and now even my agents can do it.
Imagine if agents attempted to use explorer, even powershell seems like it is confusing enough.
If people really want tabs in everything then have the windows enable tabbing between multiple contained apps.
This is the most idiotic thing I've heard today, who UAT'd this? Does Windows even bother having a UAT team? If they have a QA / UAT phase in their process for Windows they need to fire everyone and build a new UAT team for Windows, this is getting so ridiculous it hurts.
Meanwhile I'm enjoying both Mac and Linux daily.
It's still fairly early days, but it's SCREAMING fast and I find it very intuitive to use. :)
Lots of customization and power, but the defaults are all quite reasonable.
- the close button in outlook is HIDDEN until you move the window
- in Gdrive they list the selected filename at the bottom. They have the entire page width to show the file name. It truncates at like 70px.
I hate Windows 11 immensely. At home I use Mac, Linux and... Windows 7. But at my current client I have to use Windows 11. I have no choice; I can either accept that or leave.
So at this point Windows could send small electrical shocks with every keystroke, it would not make a difference whatsoever.
Modern Explorer is a WinUI/UWP app, nothing to do with Electron, it could be worse.
I do use tabs in Explorer quiet frequently.
Wait, never mind. Stupid question.
By default, people give a lot of trust and benefit of the doubt. Everyone's account in life starts out a little positive when it comes to trust, welcome, empathy, and believe.
But the flip side of that is that people have a very good memory for past transgressions. When someone has extended you a little trust, or given you some time to learn your product, they will absolutely remember if you turn around and harm them.
It takes only a match to burn a bridge, but a year to rebuild it.
People start out wanting to achieve things, change things to be better, do a good job.
The active issue is disempowerment, created by other people (usually but not always senior) within the organisation.
So the question isn't "how to empower people", but rather "how to prevent disempowerment of people".
This isn't always popular, as it shifts the focus and responsibility for different behaviour away from the disempowered rank and file, towards the dysfunctional leadership.
Like all generalizations, this is only partly true. There are bad actors.
> The active issue is disempowerment, created by other people (usually but not always senior) within the organisation.
Disempowerment (is that a word?) is necessary. So necessary, that entire departments incorporate it as a large part of their mandate. HR, finance, QA...
> So the question isn't "how to empower people", but rather "how to prevent disempowerment of people".
Or more, how to focus the disempowerment on things that matter?
> This isn't always popular, as it shifts the focus and responsibility for different behaviour away from the disempowered rank and file, towards the dysfunctional leadership.
Maybe it's not always popular because some disempowerment is necessary, and framing the entire issue as a necessity for its removal and those who disagree as dysfunctional is needlessly inflammatory and counterproductive?
Of course, but in the organisations I have experience of, I'd estimate that the 'bad actor' rate is very low - certainly a low-single-digit percentage. (I don't work in tech, BTW.)
> Disempowerment (is that a word?) is necessary. So necessary, that entire departments incorporate it as a large part of their mandate. HR, finance, QA...
I think we need to differentiate between different forms of disempowerment. For example, having a set budget to work within (i.e. the disempowerment that a finance department might generate) is structural in nature; and further may either be empowering if an individual or team has freedom to work within those constraints, or disempowering if the budget is too constrained, or changes unpredictably. In contrast, smart committed people having their ideas stamped on irrationally by a bad egotistical leader ultimately leads to disenchanted people who don't want to invest their energy any more.
> Maybe it's not always popular because some disempowerment is necessary, and framing the entire issue as a necessity for its removal and those who disagree as dysfunctional is needlessly inflammatory and counterproductive?
You're maybe not considering the background context of why such a discussion would even be taking place. These discussions spring out of leadership noting somehow (direct observations, discussions, workplace surveys, workplace transformation initiatives, etc.) that people in their organisations are less "empowered" than they (leadership) would wish (with perceived negative impacts) and therefore this is something they want to reverse. They're frustrated and confused: they think they're offering an environment for people to behave as they hope to see, and yet people aren't stepping through the apparently open door.
It's unpopular because asking why people are disempowered shifts the focus from the failings of individuals ("why is this employee not behaving as I expect them to; what stick or lever or additional incentive can I use to improve their behaviour?") to the failings of leadership ("what have I been doing wrong all along to result in this sorry state of affairs? Am I the cause?")
You would hope a light bulb would turn on, but management who needs those sorts of conversations might often not have the wherewithal to do the right thing, never mind respond positively.
A lot of people seem to think the way to make things work better and faster is to add elaborate caching layers and layers and retries and GPUs and multi threading and...
I find the opposite tends to be true. Make things fast and reliable by doing as little as possible. If an API is flakey, make it not flakey, don't cache the result and add a retry loop.
> Or perhaps: Satisfaction in our work isn’t created by the boss. It’s what’s left if they don’t ruin it.
~no boss sets out to ruin employee satisfaction. It's a byproduct of having to integrate more realities into the smaller scope that employees usually care about, and that is just not easy.
Of course, most bosses are also not great at this – on average bosses are, like everything else, just average – but to assume that bosses "ruin" satisfaction and employees would be longterm fulfilled and create working companies if only left alone is polemic.
Don't make a bad situation worse.
A lossless source (or analog, whatever your preference) and great speakers/amps can't overcome a bad sounding room - or a piece of music that was mixed/mastered poorly.
[0] https://www.wealest.com/articles/via-negativa (or Antifragile)
"Four models. One topology — designed by Darren Myers, engineered by Bob Stadtherr. Driven from a state-of-the-art active power supply that delivers performance benefits no traditional transformer-based passive supply can match. Class A bias of 50 watts means your music spends 99% of its time in the most linear region of the amplifier's operation"
Yikes; run the other way ...
On the other hand, you never adopt alternatives.
Yes, but also some people are shockingly incurious and approach academia and life through a depressingly hollow transactional lens from the beginning. Though if it was there to begin with, there's a good chance it'll be stripped away through the structuring of courses to be measurable first and intriguing second
I feel like that's a result of prior bad experience. Noone goes into university, or even primary school a blank slate.
It's very easy to fall into a trap where education is transactional if that's what was modelled to you or that's how previous teachers treated you