I just started a new job and I've been exporting Confluence pages to PDF and putting them in a Claude project so I can just ask Claude stuff.
SketchUp makes it where creating these sort of drawings is pretty easy! It's a great tool for ideation.
I live/work in a fairly rural area where there are 7 towns with the biggest having a population of ~10k and the smallest ~2k and they all have varying requirements. I've had conversations with the single code enforcement officer or director in each of them and we all agree how aggravating it is that the requirements vary from town to town. Three of these towns butt right up next to each other so the code requirements can vary from one side of the street to the next!
Contrary to what I would expect, the biggest town, and the county seat, has by far the fewest regulations on homes of them all.
Anyway, of the two which enforce anything about bedroom dimensions it's 9' for smallest allowable dimension. I think only one of them requires closets, but I can't recall for sure.
Your parenthetical requirement reminded me of two things:
Yeah, I flip houses fairly often and it's something I have to be aware of when remodeling stuff.
I'm sure it's different in different areas.
Interestingly, and ridiculously, this bedroom would not pass city code where I live for two reasons:
I'm not exactly claiming that it is or is not useful in improving outcomes, I'm just wondering if any "hard, sterilized" data exists.
Anyway...
Your comment does make me wonder some things. Take the following more as me exploring my state of mind on a lazy Sunday afternoon and less as a retort or rebuttal.
I'm not sure that we actually disagree...it's hard to quantify the amount of skepticism we're both talking about. You can't say "you should be skeptical level 3" and I can't say "no you should be skeptical level 4.3". For all either of us knows from the conversation so far is that I'm less skeptical than you!
Be careful not to cargo-cult skepticism
Yes, I think this is a dangerous failure mode...but I think it's likely that the flipside is a more common failure out there in the real world.
dealing with a set of hundreds of people ... the most reasonable hypothesis is that it was useful.
Maybe? I'd have to think about that more. However, being the most reasonable doesn't mean there are no other reasonable hypotheses. We should work hard to increase the "reasonableness delta" so that we can increase our confidence.
There's millions of otherwise reasonable and successful people (often people I respect) telling me that they talk to ghosts or that loading up on Vitamin Omega Delta Seventeen Power Plus is the key to perfect health.
Combine that with the fact that this intervention seems pretty susceptible to not being able to distinguish between "feels useful" and "is useful" and this is the largest item raising my skepticism level. Whether this is true could be an interesting line of inquiry.
We just have to use other things like "does not conflict with how I think the world works" and "these people are generally (in)correct about subjects in this area" and "how likely is it that they tricked themselves" to weight the evidence of "these people say this is useful" to adjust our skepticism level towards the appropriate amount.
Millions of people tell me lots of things like "statins work" and "drunk driving increases risk of bad things". I'm less skeptical of those things because of the same sort of things mentioned in the previous paragraph.
To me, by far the strongest point in reducing the skepticism level is the studies backing up TAP. In fact, it seems like this point is so strong that I'm a little confused by the proportion of your comment directed towards "believing people" vs "TAP studies".
I'm not interested enough in the subject to dive into the studies, but if I was I'd really be looking into whatever delta existed between CFAR's practices and the literature. (Besides trying to generate the hard, sterilized data, of course)
All that being said, I'm still not sure if I'm more or less skeptical than you on the subject.
I guess I should've also stressed the difference between alumni thinking it's proven useful (which is easy to determine) and it actually being useful in accomplishing stuff (which is the more interesting and harder to determine part).
None of the things you mention seem like fool-proof methods of determining the second case.
has proven useful to the majority of our alumni
Curious as to how this was established. I can see lots of ways for confirmation bias to creep into this.
What about something like text buttons?
When I'm designing a UI, I try to use text if there is not a good iconographic way of representing a concept.
Something like:
AGREE (-12) DISAGREE
I'm not sure how that would look with the current karma widget. Would require some experimentation.
Yeah, I haven't got it automated yet. Someday I'll have the time.
Another place I did this was with the mountain of onboarding docs I got. Now I can just ask Claude stuff like "how early do I have to request time off and who do I contact?" or "What's my dental insurance deductible?"