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According to a piece in the New York Times:<\/p>\nArchaeologists know that a “Roncofact” is an artifact that you find, and realize (or speculate) that it had multiple functions.”It slices, it dices, it makes Julian Fries….”A recent study claims that humans, in fact, shun Roncofacts. But wait, there’s more..According to a piece in the New York Times:<\/p>\n
In a clever experiment … psychologists had students fill out a survey using a ballpoint pen that could also serve as a laser pointer. They then had half the students evaluate the pen’s laser-pointer function, thus making this group more aware of the pen’s dual purpose. Later,… all the participants [went to] another room [to] complete a short form, next to which sat two pens: a laser-pointer pen and an ordinary office pen. Of the participants who had not been primed about the dual purpose, a little more than half used the laser-pointer pen. But among people who had been primed, fewer than 17 percent picked it….being mindful of an object’s dual purpose made the students reluctant to use it. “Once you associate the pen with another function, that same pen doesn’t come to mind as easily when it comes to writing,” Fishbach explains.What happens, the researchers showed through other studies, is that connecting one tool or method to multiple goals weakens the mental association between that means and any one goal. …You should prefer a stone that kills an extra bird you didn’t have in mind. “But you won’t,” Fishbach says.[source]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I’m not sure how to interpret this. It may well be that specialization is a feature that we recognize as related to effectiveness of a tool. Some have suggested that this is a Neanderthal-Modern Human difference. Neanderthals seemed to have used their tools for a single purpose, while modern humans (contemporary with those Neanderthals) seem to have used a given tool for many purposes. Perhaps the students in this study were Neanderthals. I don’t know.In any event, this is very dangerous talk, and I’ll tell you why. When was the last time you needed a bottle opener to open your beer, and looked around a while before you actually found one? OK, think of that time, and now think: Did it happen to be the case that as you looked around you located one or more items that could<\/em> have had a bottle opener, but didn’t?For example, a can opener often has a bottle opener built into it. Well, have you noticed that these days fewer and fewer can openers have that bottle opener built into it?In fact, there was a time, corresponding I think to the rise of Ron Popiel of Ronco, but perhaps predating this phenomenon, that everything that could<\/em> have a bottle opener had<\/em> a bottle opener. I have (at the cabin) a spatula, you know, like for flipping hamburgers, with a bottle opener built into it. But this approach to design has been lost, and I personally think it is the fault of those faux European designers that Target gets to pretty up the stuff they sell in their housewares department. Those are the guys who are ruining it.Anyway, it seems to me that this research can be used to justify this practice, possibly saving the manufacturers of spatulas and can openers alike millions (in the aggregate, over the years) while causing the rest of us to live in a regressive, devolutionary, world in which we can’t find a bottle opener when we need one.This is the sort of thing that clearly indicates the coming end of our very civilization.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Archaeologists know that a “Roncofact” is an artifact that you find, and realize (or speculate) that it had multiple functions.”It slices, it dices, it makes Julian Fries….”A recent study claims that humans, in fact, shun Roncofacts. But wait, there’s more..<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[112],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5fhV1-9l","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=579"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}