A related phenomenon: Right-leaning Supreme Court justices move left as they get older, possibly because they’re in a left-leaning part of the country (DC) and that’s where all their friends are.

A typical justice nominated by a Republican president starts out at age 50 as an Antonin Scalia and retires at age 80 as an Anthony Kennedy. A justice nominated by a Democrat, however, is a lifelong Stephen Breyer.

[…]

• The Cocktail Scene. Maybe the justices — human as they are, after all — want to fit in at parties. “Justices may be subject to influences by the Beltway cocktail scene and want to be perceived as reasonable and moderate,” Josh Blackman, a Supreme Court scholar at the South Texas College of Law, told me in an email. That assumes the cocktail set is liberal, what with its law professors and journalists. But that stereotype does exist in D.C. President Richard Nixon, for example, explicitly wondered if his Supreme Court nominee Harry Blackmun could “resist the Washington cocktail party circuit.”

It sounds way more like “raise the sanity waterline of smart people” than “raise the sanity waterline of the population at large”. If they wanted to raise the sanity waterline of the population at large, they’d be writing books for high- and middle-schoolers.

Wouldn’t they need to make right- and left-handed manicules unless they went for, like, a hamsa hand?

And in case “build things” isn’t concrete enough (it might very well be, in at least the case of software development): ship things.

You can spend a lot of time “building” things, only to get mired in choices that likely won’t matter at all, or matter very little, or can be changed easily enough later.

I think this comment would be made way better with the inclusion of a concrete example or two. I know there’s at least one book out there that can get compressed to a sound bite like this, but a concrete example or two would help explain why.

Human color and space perception doesn’t work symmetrically across light and dark contrasts, so a well-designed dark website and a well-designed light website just look very different from each other on many dimensions. You can of course do it with CSS, but we are not talking about just inverting all the colors, we are talking about at the very least hand-picking all the shades, and realistically substantially changing the layout, spacing and structure of your app (so e.g. you don’t end up with large grey areas in a dark mode setting, which stand out vastly more in dark mode than equally high-contrast grey sections in a light mode).

I’m hoping the negative agreement karma for the parent comment isn’t for this — it’s just for “maintaining both a dark mode and a light mode design for a website is very hard” (emphasis added, as distinct from creation).

The above blockquote makes me want to say to the studio audience “Why are you booing — he’s right!”.

I feel like a bunch of forces on the internet nudge everyone towards the same generic site designs […], and while I agree there is a cost, I do feel actively sad about the tradeoff in the other direction.

Mobile-first cuts out a lot of room for self-expression, agreed.

Dark mode, meanwhile, I like too much. Heck, I have a site where one might reasonably ask “where’s the light mode?”.

And again, if you set the setting once on LessWrong it mostly should be stable, I don’t really buy that there are that many people who get the setting lost?

Safari is set to throw out a site’s cookies if it isn’t visited in seven days. I don’t know about other browsers.

This is probably pretty close to a bookkeeping request, but I visited https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ThoseTwoBadGuys and the page at the bottom says "If a direct wick has led you here, please correct the link so that it points to the corresponding article.”

I could use some sort of correction because there are a bunch of Those Two Bad Guys types listed on the page and I’m not sure which one Eliezer is pointing at.

So, I think we have at least some preference for people’s first experience of it to be on lightmode so that you at least for-a-bit get a sense of what the aesthetic is meant to be.

This makes sense in a vacuum, but…

…if someone’s first visit to Less Wrong is in the evening after the sun goes down, then his first impression of the site will be colored by an unpleasantly bright website that doesn’t work properly in dark mode. Is that really what you want?

I’ve designed sites where the light mode has a nice background flourish, but I never figured out how to make it work nicely in dark mode.

So I just had a solid dark color in dark mode (instead of the background image) and left the image as a light-mode-only thing, which makes it something like an easter egg if one usually browses the site with a dark-mode preference being forwarded on to the site.

This kind of thing happens to me, as well — I have wallpaper that changes with the time of day, and I generally don’t see the sunrise versions of the wallpaper unless I’m at my computer crazy early or crazy late.

My preference, by default, is something I communicate through the browser because the browser forwards on my light/dark preferences to websites.

In general, I want websites to do whatever my OS is set to do by default.

The relevant “auto” setting for browsers just turn on dark mode in the evenings and light mode during the day.

This is what Macs do by near-default, but some people use dark mode on 24/7 and some people use light mode 24/7. It’s not what all browsers+OS setups do.