Thread by @allspaw

I am somehow surprised when I encounter folks with such strong beliefs in the "Humans-Are-Better-At/Machines-Are-Better-At" approach to designing software. At this point I shouldn't be surprised, but still am. 1/n

This "HABA-MABA" philosophy has been so ingrained that it almost flies under the radar as worthy of attention to some.

Who will argue with "make the computers do the easy/tedious stuff so humans can do the difficult/interesting stuff"? (apparently, I will) 2/n

This notion was first described in the late 1940s, and it was known as "Fitts' List" - original is shown here... 3/n

Later, the technical term became known as "functional allocation" and the challenge (it was believed) was: 'which tasks should go to which "side"?'

As with many original Human Factors research, it turned out to be the *wrong question* 4/n

Research in many "automation"-heavy domains revealed that the real world doesn't work in this if/then logical and orderly way, and that these "tasks" or work "types" can't be separated into neat buckets like this. 5/n

Perhaps the strongest "response" to this HABA-MABA myth was that successful work in modern (read: complex) systems required "Joint Cognitive Systems" (JCSs) or colloborative agents (some maybe human, some maybe not) that exhibit some fundamental behaviors. 6/n

For more on a seminal work on this, see @ThaiWoodHere's writeup on the "Common Ground" paper here getrevue.co/profile/resili… as well as perhaps hundreds of my past tweets. :) 7/n

Anyway, this calling-of-bullsh*t on HABA-MABA is part of the core ideas underpinning the field of #ResilienceEngineering, which is that people are THE flexible and adaptive elements in a system. With this view, @ddwoods2 had constructed an "un-Fitts' List" here... 8/n

Which I suspect will ring true for software engineers with any real-world experience with production systems.

More on this: Google search terms "HABA-MABA" or "MABA-MABA" (because it was debunked back when it was referred to as 'Men-Are-Better-At') or "functional allocation" 9/n

Of course, I must mention Lisanne Bainbridge's canonical "Ironies of Automation" paper, which still stands valid many decades after its writing: ise.ncsu.edu/wp-content/upl… 10/n

My point here is to shed light that this simplistic "HABA-MABA" perspective has been debunked, we're just slowpokes in software engineering in understanding this. :) (fin)

(this thread brought to you by inspiration borne from @this_hits_home's talk at #SRECon)