Dan Luu on bug blindness

Here is the incomparable Dan Luu, arguing that (i) there are way more bugs than most people think and (ii) most of us systematically fail to notice them. It's a great article; I read its spiritual predecessor, John Regehr's "Operant Conditioning by Software Bugs," over a decade ago, and have thought about it regularly ever since. Why are people systematically bug-blind? Here are a few of the reasons that come up in Dan's essay (but really, consider just reading it yourself): We're very good at adjusting to problems and then forgetting the adjustments. Dan has a wonderful anecdote about how he'd stopped noticing the many physical adjustments he'd learned for his dusty old trackball mouse, which a friend tried and found completely unusable. Many things are like this. We are emotionally invested in things we use, and especially in things we make. That causes us to systematically overstate their quality. The previous point holds both on a personal level and on an organizational level.…