Power of Suggestion
February 12th, 2007 by Kelson. Posted in Web and tagged for browser, perception, placebo, safari, WebSurfin’ Safari posted an interesting remark that highlights the power of suggestion.
There’s a tip floating around to speed up the Safari web browser by changing a hidden setting, “page load delay.” There are testimonials by people who are really impressed with how much faster Safari is after making this change. Only one problem: The setting doesn’t exist anymore in current versions of Safari (1.3 or later), so changing it has no effect.
The author of the shareware tool in question responded, saying that he honestly had no idea that the setting had been removed, and offering a refund to anyone who wanted their money back. And there are a couple of other optimizations it can make.
There are some things that the human mind just isn’t good at measuring objectively, and perception of time depends very much on circumstance. “Time flies when you’re having fun” and “A watched pot never boils” have been known for ages.
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2 Responses to “Power of Suggestion”
By West on Feb 13, 2007
I wouldn’t be TOO surprised if those same folks are STILL convinced of the usefulness of changing that now-nonexistent, hidden setting.
By Kelson on Feb 13, 2007
Heh! Me neither. There’s something in human nature that makes us want to believe our own subjective judgments over someone else’s, whether subjective or objective.