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by chrisseaton 1729 days ago
I guess I don't know what the author thinks they mean about 'hurt your brain'.
4 comments

Yeah, I don't think they're literally meaning "hurt" here.

Maybe a better analogy is where you're having a conversation with someone, and they throw in a double-negative. It's not like you're literally unable to work it out, but you need to engage with it consciously for a second. In a high-stakes conversation, that's just something that's good to avoid.

A memorable example of this for me (if a bit of a tangent) was when Felix Baumgartner was doing his mega parachute jump, and they kept screwing up the comms for which direction the wind was coming from / going in: https://youtu.be/rNhmYaWiPEk?t=4200 (by convention, people talk about wind in terms of the direction they come from).

I think the whole thing here is that driving involves a lot of modelling other drivers and their intentions, so our tolerance for bad UX that requires conscious thought should be really low.

The phrase is very common in the US. You've never heard someone say "this code hurts my brain" ?
Sure, go ahead and play stupid.
Cognitive Dissonance.