[HN Gopher] The Brown M&M's Principle
___________________________________________________________________
The Brown M&M's Principle
Author : EndXA
Score : 71 points
Date : 2021-03-04 11:17 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (effectiviology.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (effectiviology.com)
| croes wrote:
| Is "to avoid websites that have an outdated design, by treating
| the design as an indicator of unreliable content." a good example
| for the M&M principle? Seems more like an example for
| superficiality, where appearance counts more than content. Many
| people have been deceived this way.
| bluesnowmonkey wrote:
| I do this in code occasionally. Leave in a mistake and see if the
| reviewer catches it. Now I know who pays attention and who rubber
| stamps my diffs. Sometimes you want one kind of review or the
| other.
| mmmBacon wrote:
| This seems like a strange thing to do.
| greenshackle2 wrote:
| Laying down traps for your co-workers sounds strange to me as
| well, we must be working in different kinds work environments
| than the parent commenter.
| freeqaz wrote:
| You have to A/B test this though because who knows when
| somebody is in crunch and doesn't have time!
|
| Also, from a teammate perspective, it might be worth pointing
| it out to the person. "I noticed a bug in the PR that I found
| later... want to show you why it could be a problem so we don't
| let it slip next time"
|
| Imo I usually just fire the PR off and message on Slack saying,
| "this one needs to ship ASAP, anything truly bjork'd here?"
|
| Or if it's going to be critical code, "The blast radius on this
| one is high. Give it a thorough scan please!"
|
| Communication is key :)
| thebean11 wrote:
| > I noticed a bug in the PR that I found later... want to
| show you why it could be a problem so we don't let it slip
| next time
|
| I don't know, that seems kind of confrontational. If I got
| called out for missing a bug in a review I'd be annoyed
| freeqaz wrote:
| That's true, and it definitely can be!
|
| In my opinion, the best way to approach this situation is
| with "non-violent communication"[0] in mind.
|
| Don't make the conversation about "this is your fault, do
| better", instead make it about "I noticed a bug in my code
| that could have broken production and I think we can do
| better".
|
| It takes trust to pull off conversations like these without
| coming across as a prick. This type of empathy is
| particularly important when mentoring others because...
| People are always going to make mistakes. They create great
| opportunities to help somebody learn though.
|
| When I am being taught something, I learn much more quickly
| when somebody points to somewhere I failed versus
| explaining an "abstract" bad pattern. Maybe having the
| "abstract" idea first helps. It might make the "failure"
| easier to stomach later. For me though, those moments of
| stumbling always stuck as lessons I reflect back on the
| most.
|
| My attention to detail with code became a lot higher when I
| was on-call and prod broke at 4am because of a bug I let
| slip!
|
| 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication#F
| our_...
| paxys wrote:
| Code reviews aren't there to catch mistakes. That's the job of
| unit and other tests.
| edflsafoiewq wrote:
| Then what are they for?
| yourself92 wrote:
| Design considerations
| worik wrote:
| Right.
|
| So ignore mistakes in code reviews?
|
| Unit tests are useful, invariant testing in code more useful,
| but code reviews and user testing are important too, for
| catching mistakes.
| roter wrote:
| Kind of a corollary: Place something fixable in your PhD thesis
| so the examiners can find something to write about. Something
| that doesn't make you look stupid but will make them feel like
| they'd done a thorough review and won't focus on your more
| subtle but perhaps more disastrous errors. Perhaps just a thing
| PhDs tell other PhDs to do but never actually do themselves.
| r00fus wrote:
| Isn't this more of a corollary "remove the duck" principle
| [1]? The idea being, you expect the reviewer to force some
| change, so put in a trivial & obvious stylistic difference so
| their need to make changes are assuaged.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9137736
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| I maintain a small fleet of vehicles. I keep a set of worn
| pads, rotors and tires that I put on every vehicle before it
| goes for state inspection. Steering/suspension parts
| replacement fell off a cliff once I started doing this. I
| would say this approach taught me something but it just
| confirmed things I already knew.
| nullserver wrote:
| So needed to something to correct? So you made obvious
| small issues?
|
| Used to do this on mock-ups of apps I was building. They
| wouldn't fuss at the core functionality if they changed
| something obvious and not important.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >So needed to something to correct? So you made obvious
| small issues?
|
| Exactly.
|
| The tall nail gets the hammer. The shop that passes all
| the shitboxes gets the audit.
|
| They don't want that audit and if that audit comes they
| want the paper trail to make them look like they're hard-
| asses about everything just like the auditor wants to see
| so they don't lose their license. The deal is that safety
| inspections are basically guaranteed work for the shops
| and exchange they get an incentive to not fudge emissions
| inspections. I dunno if that's still how they present it
| but that's what the 3rd party that runs the state
| training was telling everyone years back and the rules
| haven't changed since then (other than some more
| increased reporting requirements that are either to
| reduce odometer fraud or lay the groundwork for a mileage
| tax depending on who you ask).
| kerbs wrote:
| Not every reviewer has a "fine-toothed comb" philosophy.
|
| Unless code is algorithmic in nature, I look at architecture
| and approach only.
|
| A good post on the topic:
| https://blog.danlew.net/2021/02/23/stop-nitpicking-in-code-r...
| dang wrote:
| If curious, past threads:
|
| _Brown M &Ms, or Why No One Reads the Manual_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23985817 - July 2020 (150
| comments)
|
| _The Truth About Van Halen and Those Brown M &Ms (2012)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18643258 - Dec 2018 (15
| comments)
|
| _Why Van Halen 's tour contract had a "no brown M&M's" clause_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7754334 - May 2014 (158
| comments)
|
| _Why Van Halen had brown M &Ms contractually removed_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2839581 - Aug 2011 (55
| comments)
|
| _Why Van Halen 's contract calls for the removal of all brown
| M&Ms_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=743860 - Aug 2009
| (79 comments)
| forgingahead wrote:
| I'm hiring for several positions right now (non-engineering). At
| the end of every job ad is a section titled *HOW TO APPLY*, in
| bold and with asterisks like that, with the simple instruction
| that the interested candidate needs to go to a linked Google Form
| to fill out some details. For us, this centralises all
| applications into one box that we can review, and also tests to
| see whether people actually read the job description.
|
| Around 10% of applicants actually fill out the form. It's not a
| tough form at all, but it's striking that so many platforms have
| made it easy to one-click-apply, that shotgunning job
| applications is very common now.
|
| So yes, fully agree that carefully reading a document is a key
| pre-requisite for a knowledge worker job.
| user-the-name wrote:
| > Around 10% of applicants actually fill out the form.
|
| That is a very good sign that it is you who is doing something
| wrong, not the applicants.
| dsr_ wrote:
| The ends of my ads usually include: please send your resume in
| HTML, PDF or plain text, and a short discussion of a time you
| solved a technical problem.
|
| Most people managed the first part.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| I get where you are coming from. It is not a bad indicator. I
| as job seeker would have probably just skipped the job all
| together. Having been through this system recently, one more
| form to fill out that is hand crafted, would have made me nope
| out. You explain why but it does give off an interesting look
| you may want to rethink. Now you may be fine with that. But my
| level of dealing with HR form systems has dropped to a dramatic
| level of low, please end me, levels. A hand crafted one would
| make me think 'that is odd'. The whole fill out this form
| system almost every company has now, plus other tests has worn
| me out. It does not even matter how 'easy' the form is. It is
| just one more hoop to jump through.
|
| I also understand where you are coming from. You have 1
| position and 100 resumes. At least 99 of those have to go.
| Filtering for not reading the instructions is not a bad one.
| Just be careful you can end up with a set of people who do not
| know how to do things that are not in the instructions, and
| will block out until someone corrects the issue.
| electrondood wrote:
| To be fair, most online application processes are fairly
| broken. I'm sure everyone here knows what it's like to
| painstakingly enter your complete personal information and work
| history several times, when everything is clearly on the resume
| you've already uploaded. Or to have it entirely erased and need
| to enter it a fourth time because you accidentally went back to
| a previous page, etc.
|
| Often, if a job has a form that smells like this, I'll bypass
| for other options, as to me it indicates bureaucracy and
| institutional stupidity, which I don't want to deal with on the
| job. It's my brown M&Ms clause.
| Symbiote wrote:
| When I worked for a government agency, this system ensured no
| personal details made it through to the people assessing
| candidates. Name, age, sex, nationality etc were all removed.
|
| Sometimes other information gave the details away anyway.
| ("Westminster School for Boys, 1969")
| forgingahead wrote:
| Yes, but you wouldn't click the "Apply" button on the actual
| job post (ie, LinkedIn or whatever) and NOT follow the
| instructions would you? The point was that if you're going to
| apply, follow the instructions in the job ad.
| brundolf wrote:
| I remember seeing something like this on a test in grade school;
| if I recall correctly, there were instructions at the top under
| the "name" field to _not_ write your name there, but write it on
| the back instead. Following those instructions would comprise
| some small portion of the total grade.
|
| In hindsight, I'm not sure what the point was of checking who was
| reading the instructions closely on a test...
| DrewRWx wrote:
| Pretty good way of introducing the idea that the system can be
| capricious and cruel for no discernable benefit.
| jasperry wrote:
| A lot of things in our society just wouldn't work without
| somebody paying attention to details. I'm not saying that's a
| good way to teach it, but it needs to be taught. Even among
| artists, the greatest are those who show not just inspiration
| but also meticulous craftsmanship.
| arduinomancer wrote:
| A common example of this is surveys that have a question that
| reads "Select strongly disagree for this question" to weed out
| people randomly choosing answers.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| That seems like it will also weed out people who decide to have
| some personal fun with the stupid question while answering the
| others accurately.
| amelius wrote:
| > The brown M&M's principle is the idea that small details can
| sometimes serve as useful indicators of big issues.
|
| > This principle is named after a rock band (Van Halen), who had
| a "brown M&M's clause" in their contracts with event organizers,
| stipulating that the organizers must provide M&M's in the
| backstage area, but that there must be no brown M&M's available.
| This small clause gave the band an easy way to check whether
| organizers actually paid attention to all the details in the
| contract, which was important given how complicated and
| potentially dangerous the band's production was.
|
| Ok, but it also means that somebody touched all your M&Ms.
| please-reread wrote:
| Those are not for eating. For visual confirmation only.
| jtbayly wrote:
| It's possible to be in a room with M&Ms in a bowl and not eat
| them? TIL.
| toast0 wrote:
| If they don't have peanuts in them, why would you eat them;
| yuck.
| dsr_ wrote:
| If you see the usual percentage of brown M&Ms in the bowl,
| you can eat them while you wait for a full re-check of
| every power and weight item in a very long checklist,
| confident that somebody poured a bag into a bowl and left
| them unmolested except, maybe they ate a green one.
|
| If the M&Ms are devoid of brown ones, you don't eat them
| because you know some peon was told to go through the bowl
| and take them out, and that sort of person will eat the
| brown ones and then go back in with their bare fingers for
| the next one, and thoroughly stir their fingers into the
| bowl looking for the last brown ones.
|
| Now, if the M&Ms are carefully laid out in a series of
| monochromatic bowls, with no brown bowl in sight, it's
| probably safe to eat them because what sort of maniac would
| do that sorting without aid of a knife or spatula or
| something, right? But you shouldn't eat them because that's
| a work of art.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| Or just don't be a germophobe and eat them regardless.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Ok, but it also means that somebody touched all your M&Ms.
|
| This would be normal for M&Ms that were just dumped into a
| bowl, too -- you can't eat from the bowl without touching the
| other M&Ms.
| jedimastert wrote:
| To be frank, I don't think sanitation and cleanliness were top
| bill for the Van Halen members back then.
| scarecrowbob wrote:
| Having worked with riders, there are a lot of things that folks
| ask for but which get clarified by communication.
|
| When a request is super specific, weird, and hard to fill, it
| usually gets pushed back on, at least in my world.
|
| My understanding of the "check" is that you get a call from the
| person advancing the show to ask about the strange demand, not
| that you verify compliance.
| [deleted]
| kayfox wrote:
| > Ok, but it also means that somebody touched all your M&Ms.
|
| Someone touched all the toppings on the sandwiches as well,
| catering knows how to avoid poisoning the talent and crew.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| > Ok, but it also means that somebody touched all your M&Ms.
|
| Did latex gloves not exist in the 80s?
|
| Actually, come to think of it, it's possible one could simply
| order pre-sorted M&Ms directly from the factory if one were
| buying in enough bulk.
| MrZongle2 wrote:
| > Did latex gloves not exist in the 80s?
|
| Yes. As did plain old (but effective) soap and water!
| janekm wrote:
| You can now, not sure if that was available at the time (in
| the volume sensible for a green room):
| https://www.mms.com/en-us/shop/single-color
|
| Amusingly the UK version does not offer brown ones.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| It's strange to see the rehabilitation of the famous Van Halen
| rider. Until it was finally discovered in 2011[0], the phrase "no
| brown M&M's" was interpreted as an example of crazy demands from
| entitled rock stars.
|
| [0]
| http://web.archive.org/web/20200112124637/http://www.thesmok...
| fullshark wrote:
| It's unclear to me what is the truth. David Lee Roth's quotes
| here do little to indicate it was a professional way to ensure
| rider compliance, given he trashes the green room, and does the
| show anyway destroying the arena floor. If a venue failed the
| M&M test then the band did what exactly?
| protomyth wrote:
| His autobiography has more information, but they also did a
| full line check when the rider was not obeyed. I would
| imagine they were able to check everything but the floor's
| stats.
|
| As to trashing the room, they were rockers in the 80's. He
| does mention he thought it was a funny story that he trashed
| the green room and did $85k in damage when it was mostly the
| floor damage. "Why let a good story go to waste?" was the
| quote.
| __s wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IxqdAgNJck
|
| Trashing the green room makes it something to write home
| about, so future hosts would be more careful about reading
| over the instructions
| superjan wrote:
| That's a useful addition. I was thinking it is kind of
| pointless to have this indicator that only tells you that
| something might be wrong when it is too late. The article
| does not address this aspect if I'm not mistaken.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Maybe not in the van Halen example, but such behaviour
| bears the risk of forcing the supplier to optimize for the
| "brown M&M" and ignore the rest. Especially if you don't
| check for all the other stuff as well.
| abstrakraft wrote:
| That's why you save the truth about the brown M&Ms for
| your autobiography.
| ses1984 wrote:
| I was active in guitar forums on the late 90s, early 2000s, and
| the brown M&M thing and its purpose was known then.
| klodolph wrote:
| This principle is used in traditional auditing as well.
|
| Periodically pull up some randomly selected documents and ensure
| that they match the corresponding records. If you can't find the
| documents or if they don't match the records, you trigger an
| audit.
| danieldk wrote:
| At one of my employers, we did this with backups. Every now and
| then one of the team was asked to claim to have accidentally
| removed some files, asking the sysadmins to recover them. This
| was a regular sanity check that to confirm that incremental
| backups were working.
| goatinaboat wrote:
| _At one of my employers, we did this with backups. Every now
| and then one of the team was asked to claim to have
| accidentally removed some files, asking the sysadmins to
| recover them. This was a regular sanity check that to confirm
| that incremental backups were working._
|
| We have self-service backup restores for user files, so we
| get to spot check which users can be bothered to read the
| documentation on the wiki...
| eschneider wrote:
| Yeah, when I was an operator back in the 80s (9-track tape,
| FTW!) this was the policy. Every so often someone would
| request a file from last month/6 months ago/3 years ago,
| just to see if we could retrieve it.
| klodolph wrote:
| I was an engineer working on a storage system for backups. We
| encouraged our users to do restore tests, like randomly
| select a mailbox and restore it from backup into a test
| environment.
|
| The aphorism we used was "nobody needs a backup system, but
| everybody needs a restore system."
| dwpdwpdwpdwpdwp wrote:
| Also in psychological evaluations. A questionnaire may include
| items that people pretending to have some condition think they
| should answer a certain way, but would be untrue in (most)
| actual incidences of that condition.
| gruez wrote:
| This would be easily foiled by reading the wikipedia page of
| the condition beforehand, right?
| HelloNurse wrote:
| Such advanced cheating would require enough intelligence,
| mindfulness and self control, if not psychology competence,
| that it can be considered a proxy indicator that the
| subject is more or less OK.
| DrewRWx wrote:
| The real Catch-22.
| metiscus wrote:
| The problem would then be catching those cheaters.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| What are some examples?
| derbOac wrote:
| Depends on the domain but in general it relies on item
| responses that people in general tend to think are typical
| of some "condition" (in a broad sense of the term) but
| actually are not. This requires a lot of data collection
| usually.
|
| So, for example, items that people tend to think would be
| incorrectly responded to by people with dementia, but are
| actually easy for people with dementia to respond to. Or
| items that sound like they'd be endorsed by people with
| severe mental illness but are not.
|
| In more sophisticated implementations, it's not just
| responses to these types of items, but multivariate
| patterns of responses that are unusual that are flagged.
| So, for example, not getting items increasingly incorrect
| with increasing difficulty (i.e., getting easy items
| incorrect and hard items correct) might be flagged, just
| for one example.
|
| Specific examples are hard to list because (a) it would
| violate test copyright and/or other ethical issues, and (b)
| are sort of idiosyncratic and require actual data on the
| items.
|
| With cognitive testing for example, lots of times certain
| types of memory are intact in severe brain injury but
| people who are faking don't realize it.
| derbOac wrote:
| Actually this is kind of telling with regard to the "brown
| M&M principle."
|
| The the items in an effort/response validity measure reflect
| some kind of systematic schema on the part of respondents.
| It's very non-arbitrary.
|
| The brown M&Ms in contrast are sort of trivial and arbitrary.
| That is, there's nothing about M&Ms that has anything to do
| with actual stage safety or management, and the assumption
| that attention to M&Ms and stage safety are the same is kind
| of odd.
|
| In fact, one might argue that the brown M&M clause pulls for
| a sort of cargo cult phenomenon, where people are following
| something to the letter without regard to deeper principles
| or understanding of what's important or not.
|
| Sometimes psychological tests do have items that test for
| random responding, which is maybe more comparable. But even
| then I don't think it's the same, because it's still item
| responses that are critical. To me the brown M&M test is like
| looking at the response time to an initial consent page, and
| arguing that if that is unusually long the person probably
| isn't responding to the items per se.
|
| I think there's maybe something to the brown M&M test but to
| me it pulls for the wrong things. Why not just actually, you
| know, make sure they abide by the long list of supposedly
| safety-critical items that you specified? If you as the
| performer are so sure that they're safety critical, but can't
| be bothered to check those, and instead rely on brown M&Ms,
| because it's easy to check in your dressing room, who's the
| one being lax about the stage?
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| I hate these tropes that exist somewhere in the "rules of thumb
| and vague proverbial advice that can be twisted to mean anything"
| space.
|
| Known metrics become targets. Unknown metrics destroy morale. At
| the end of the day there is no stupid proof easy rule of thumb
| shortcut that replaces the need for people to do their jobs
| properly.
| protomyth wrote:
| Its not really a metric. Its a spot check of the known metric.
| Not much different then pulling some random invoices and
| deciding if you need to do a full audit.
| airhead969 wrote:
| I agree. Defense-in-depth in terms of risk management. Use
| many strategies, in depth and breadth, holistically to manage
| vendors. There is no single magic action to make vendors do
| good work and be competent. It's lots of annoying managerial
| effort, but hopefully it's prevention and effort applied
| effectively. I think just showing up, having a look around,
| treating vendors as human, and being curious without annoying
| curious about what's going on goes a ways to show there's
| humans and not just nameless a corporation behind a project.
| airhead969 wrote:
| Trust but verify / you don't get what you expect but what you
| inspect. Random but easy to inspect riders in a contract helps
| signal if the other parties read the contract in its entirety
| rather than just set it aside. The basis for it was avoiding
| injuries from inattentive, incompetent, and/or negligent
| electricians and riggers in particular. It's merely one
| technique among many in a holistic strategy of risk management.
| It's not a Silver Bullet panacea and it doesn't work
| everywhere.
| vharuck wrote:
| I've found "brown M&M" tests are good for telling me how much I
| need to investigate things. For example, let's say your job
| includes verifying data submitted by hundreds of hospitals. You
| don't have the time to do deep investigations for all of them,
| so you use a script to look for red flags (e.g., discharge date
| preceding admission date). If there are no red flags, you still
| quickly look over a small sample. If there are red flags, now
| you're going to spend a lot of time looking for any errors and
| their causes.
|
| And it's not just to save time. You're only human, so trying to
| be thorough with every submission will likely result in you
| getting sloppy because all those reviews of good submissions
| gives you a false sense of security.
| nimbius wrote:
| fun anecdote: when I first apprenticed for heavy diesel repair
| there was a safety practice at the shop that was weird but never
| ignored: Always return swivel jacks to storage with the jack pin
| in hole 4. no exceptions. even though the stand was unloaded and
| not used, it seemed weird to be so specific but the rumor was
| youd get fired on the spot if you didnt do it.
|
| Eventually I asked an old timer whos name was on the training
| SOP. He smiled and told me, "people who cant be bothered to pay
| attention to the swivel jack pin when its safe, probably wont
| when its under load."
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