If you want to understand humans, start by looking at clip-on ties.

[david_chisnall@infosec.exchange]

If you want to understand humans, start by looking at clip-on ties. These are the result of a surprising amount of design work to look like normal ties, but they have the benefit that you can wear them around heavy machinery and, if they get caught, your head doesn’t get pulled in and squashed between cogs. Most humans prefer to avoid painful death, so this has clear benefits.

Now, those of you more familiar with rational species may ask ‘wouldn’t it be simpler to just change the dress code so that people operating the machinery didn’t have to wear ties?’ And, of course, the answer is yes. And, it turns out, factory managers are not complete idiots and realise that having skilled workers killed by machinery (and then having to take the machines out of service to clean the blood and bones out) was not beneficial to profits.

But ties were worn by professionals. People would rather ignore a rule that would literally save their life than violate the social norm that people in their in group wore ties. Being perceived as not being a member of the professional class was a bigger risk than possibly dying.

Eventually, these things shifted and (almost a hundred years after the clip-on tie was invented), more people are happy to not wear a tie as an in-group signifier (they have other ones, don’t worry, humans didn’t suddenly become sensible).

Sometimes they shift because a respected person ignores them. For example, the Department of Computer Science and Technology in Cambridge is informally known as the Computer Laboratory. This used to be its official name and before that it was the Mathematical Laboratory. At the time it was founded, all faculty were required to wear gowns most of the time (in lectures and so on), but there was one exception. For entirely sensible not-being-on-fire-related reasons, you didn’t have to wear gowns in laboratories. Maurice Wilkes really hated gowns, so designated the entire department as a lab: no gowns permitted.

He was willing to violate the norms, and gradually the norms changed.

Note also that he could do this because there was a loophole in the rules (as there always is). Give humans a set of rules that they disagree with and they will search for loopholes. Give them a set of ludicrous cultural norms and they will defend them with religious fervour.

Rules don’t change how people behave. Rules that actually work encode things everyone agrees with and provide you with a mechanism to deal with the outliers who refuse to follow them. Most people refrain from murder because they think living in a society where people aren’t randomly killed is a good idea. Laws against murder don’t prevent it, they give you a process to deal with the tiny minority who think killing people is a good solution to problems.

With very few exceptions, successful laws follow changes in broad consensus on acceptable behaviour. They don’t cause these changes.