One of my formative childhood lessons came when I was playing in the garage one day. I went into my mom’s car and put the seatbelt on (probably to pretend I was flying a plane). I realized at one point that I could still lean pretty far forward. Far enough that my head could touch the dashboard. How ridiculous! What’s the point of the seatbelt if i

A while later, I pulled on the seatbelt quickly (a lot happens in imaginary aerial dogfights), and the seatbelt immediately stopped. An overwhelming feeling of stupidity hit me almost as fast. Nine-year-old me was not in fact smarter than Toyota engineers.

Sometimes things really are poorly designed (check out The Design of Everyday Things), but I should give more benefit of the doubt when I don’t know much about the subject. There can be so many competing and nonobvious trade-offs when it comes to designing something. And an aspect of something’s design can be a positive in one context and a negativ

Now whenever I’m tempted to judge something as stupidly designed, I try to check myself and remember my seatbelt experience. My rule of thumb is:

My willingness to judge something should be proportional to how much I know about it.

In the seatbelt case, the ingenuity of engineers has managed to account for multiple situations. I just didn’t realize it at first! And even now that I am aware of it, it makes me think of what else I don’t know about seatbelts. How much complexity do these mechanisms add for manufacturing? How much more expensive do they make a car? Which aspects