I found a very odd Google search bug/misfeature on android: I've somehow gotten stuck in Brown Mode.
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It is way too "I have been awake for 20 hours" for me to attempt logging back into my Google account without accidentally deleting everything and forgetting all my passwords and my mother's maiden name*.
* hey what if I have two dads, neither of which changed their name? It's the 90s, it's possible! These poor kids can never have a quite-shitty password-reminder!
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@lritter you forgot:
Brown -
It's also possible there is nothing at all I can do that affects this, and it's just some A/B testing that one of my accounts got in the segment for and the other didn't.
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@foone Silly suggestion: have you tried rebooting? Maybe some of the color inheritance gets set at boot? Or a new launch of the app?
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In 1948, B. F. Skinner's "Superstition in the Pigeon" showed that if you fed pigeons at completely random times, they would still try to predict when they'd be fed. Absent any information or pattern for when they'll be fed, they become "superstitious".
The repeat specific behaviors, turning in place, waving, pecking at a specific spot on the floor... -
They do this, he asserts, because they're trying to repeat the meaningless actions that happened the last time they "won", and got fed.
It's like a lucky pair of pants you always wear when your team wins. -
In both cases, there's no action that leads to the win condition, and no information to accurately predict the outcome.
But both our brains and the pigeon's brain don't work like that. They assume there are patterns and tries to find them. They assume it's not just all random and unpredictable.
That's usually a good thing! It clearly is very useful, for both us and pigeons, to figure out the patterns... because usually there are!
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Many things are related and predictable. Basic physics for example: if a thing is in the air, it will fall down. Get out of the way.
Definitely a pattern there!
(Although you may need to adjust for the "flying" loophole) -
That's why we evolved a "pattern finding" brain. Because there's patterns in the world, and recognizing them is useful.
Anyway, I think of those pigeons, spinning in place, perhaps praying to some God of Food Pellets they invented, and how they don't know there's no pattern and all there actions are meaningless. The cruel scientist man built this game so you can't win, and worse: you don't know you can't win, so you have to keep trying.
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I thing about them and how I've been doing professional "computer stuff" for like two and a half decades now and BOY does it feel like we're spinning pigeons a frightening amount of the time.
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Anyways, A/B testing: because gaslighting is cool if you do it in parallel at scale!
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@foone Have you read "House of Stairs"? It made a bit of an impression on me as a kid. The author's other stuff was similarly intense if I recall.
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@hattifattener yeah, one of my favorite books as kid. I've owned three distinct copies.
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@SnyperWolf yeah! Switched out of dark mode, set a different wallpaper, rebooted to the same brown.
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Still brown at 3:20pm. So it's not time based.
