Rerun: Right-Handed Bias - A Sinister Problem

Being left-handed in a world primarily shaped by and for right-handed people can be a challenge, particularly with technology. In this episode, we look at how a right-handed bias can create frustrations for left handers, and how bias in tech can take on more sinister aspects. That was a pun.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tex Stuff, a production from my Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jovian Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio.
And how the tech are you? I am still on
vacation and so we are having a rerun episode. This

(00:25):
episode originally published on July twenty nine. It is called
right handed bias a sinister problem, and as a left hander,
I often get real grouchy about having to fumble my
way through using a lot of common tools that just
weren't made from my dominant hand. I managed to funnel
that frustration into an entire episode, and that's what you

(00:47):
get here. Enjoy. It is a story time you guys. Now,
those of you who follow my personal account over on Twitter,
which is at John Strickland j O N. Strickland, if
you're morbidly curious, those of you who do follow me,

(01:08):
you might know that I was eagerly anticipating the delivery
of a Squire Classic Sixties Vibe Stratocaster, an electric guitar.
And you know, I've done episodes about electric guitars, I've
talked about them a lot, and I thought, I really
want one of these it would be really nice to
have one. This would have been my first six string

(01:31):
electric guitar, and I figured, since you know, I'm working
from home now, it would be good to pick up
a new skill to keep my mind sharp and occupied,
and you know, to help me get into a sort
of meditative state to help manage anxiety. By the way, um,
anxiety is a real pain in the butt, and I
recommend anyone who has anxiety to look into ways to

(01:54):
manage it in a really healthy manner, because that stuff
is no joke and it's obviously getting more challenging to
deal with that. Anyway, back to my story, I had
been thinking about getting a guitar, and I wanted it
to be a decent guitar, you know, something I would
actually want to pick up and play. I didn't want
to buy something super cheap and then find out I

(02:17):
didn't like the feel of it or how it sounded,
because that would discourage me from playing it. I would
just set it down and never pick it up again.
But on the other hand, I also didn't want to
go crazy and buy some sort of you know, super
expensive guitar, because guitars can get real expensive, y'all. I
mean What if I didn't like playing guitar just because

(02:37):
I didn't like it? Right, what if I decided that
I didn't enjoy playing. I am forty five years old
this year, and skills just don't come to me as
quickly as they used to. So it's entirely possible that
I could become frustrated, or I could become bored even
with a really nice guitar, and then just set it
down and let it collect dust. So I would have

(03:01):
wasted a lot of money on a really expensive decoration
at that point, and that would be really irresponsible, even
in a good economic climate, let alone one is uncertain
as the one we find ourselves in today. So I
did what I do. I did a lot of research,
like a lot of research. My wife was getting amused

(03:24):
by how frequently I was watching videos about different guitars
and different price ranges, weighing them, saying, well, yeah, this
is gonna be a slightly less expensive guitar, which means
it's going to have these sort of things that I'll
have to consider. But but on the other hand, it's
better than this other guitar, you know. I went through
all of that. Ultimately I decided I wanted a strato caster,

(03:48):
a classic electric guitar. The strato caster is made by Fender,
and I really like the sound of strato casters now.
I love stuff like surf rock, and Dick Dave, one
of the most famous surf rock guitarists, played a strat.
But I also wanted to be financially responsible because there
are a lot of different strato casters out there, and

(04:11):
generally they mostly share a couple of common traits. Most
strato casters have three single coil pickups, and the pickups
are the components that pick up the vibration of the
strings and then convert that into electric signals that can
then feed out to an amplifier and speakers. Strats have
three of these, typically one near the base of the

(04:34):
neck of the guitar the neck pickup, one in the
middle of the body of the guitar, and one towards
the bridge of the guitar. A switch on the strat
lets you select which pickup or which pair of pickups
are active at any given time, and that changes the
sound you get out of the guitar when it plays
through an amplifier. But beyond these general similarities, there are

(04:58):
a ton of different options. You can buy a starter
entry level Strat for less than two hundred dollars, or
you could go bonkers and buy a mod shop guitar
for around eight hundred dollars. So yeah, there is a range,
and of course if you went full custom shop it
could be way more expensive. So I looked into the

(05:20):
Squire line of guitars. Now, this is Fenders budget line,
but they tend to measure up pretty well to guitars
from the more prestigious official Fender line, particularly in the
Squire Classic Vibe series, which are guitars they are designed
to be closer to the style of the classic electric
guitars of the fifties and sixties. Now, I'm left handed,

(05:43):
and that's really what I'm going to get into in
this episode, because being left handed means there are a
lot of little struggles in your life. Most of the time,
they aren't particularly meaningful or noteworthy. They tend to mostly
be slightly frustrating worst, and that's about it most of
the time. So I want to stress from the beginning

(06:05):
of this episode that the stuff I'm going to talk
about is really not that big a deal in the
grand scheme of things most of the time. But being
left handed often means that when it comes to purchasing
stuff where handedness is a factor, like guitars, you're faced
with fewer options than you're right handed counterparts. For example,

(06:27):
if you were to go to Fender's website the morning
that I wrote this, and you were to look at
the different options for electric guitars that they had in stock,
you would see at that time that the company had
one hundred eleven guitars for right handers in stock, for
left handers eight eight versus one hundred eleven. Now, typically

(06:51):
a left hander has fewer options, and then fewer choices
within those options, choices like the color of the guitar,
for example, So while I could have loved a Candy
Apple red left handed Squire Classic Sixties Vibes stratocaster, that
was not an option, Nor could I get the lovely

(07:12):
Lake Placid blue option that right handers could get. Those
right handed versions had Candy Apple red and Lake Placid blue,
but for left handers you didn't have a choice. There
was only one color option, Sunburst, which sadly was my
least favorite of the three colors. But hey, them's the brakes.
And while I wasn't in love with the color. I

(07:35):
could live with it, and I did love all the
things I read about the line of guitars, so I
didn't really let that bother me so much. And before
anyone pipes up about re stringing a guitar so that
you can convert a right handed guitar into a left
handed guitar, yeah, I could technically have purchased a right
handed Candy Apple red model, taking the strings off, taking

(07:59):
the nut off the top of the neck, flip the
nut around, reinserted it, then restrung the guitar so that
it was a left handed guitar. But that would also
mean that all the controls for the guitar, like the
volume and tone knobs and the tremolo or whammy bar
would have been on the wrong side, and I would
have to figure out how to deal with that in

(08:19):
order to play it properly. So I wasn't really keen
on trying to make a product that had been made
for a right hander work for a left hander. I
had a few gift cards for Amazon, not a sponsor,
and that sealed the deal for me. I said, I'm
gonna use these gift cards toward buying a guitar. I
would buy a Squire stratocaster for four hundred dollars, which

(08:41):
is not an insignificant sum of money, particularly if you're
trying to stay economically responsible during a time of uncertainty.
But with the gift cards that would bring the price
down to about half price, and I figured I would
splurge on myself as sort of a late birthday present.
I figured, if nothing else, I could consider it an

(09:01):
investment in my mental health. I placed my order on
a Saturday, and I was predicted to receive the guitar
on the following Friday, so a week later. Now, over
the course of that week, I grew a bit anxious
because when I would check on the order status, it
hadn't changed. It had registered order, but it never moved
to shipping, let alone out for delivery. And then on

(09:25):
that Friday that I was to receive it, July twenty,
that was the morning that I wrote this, I finally
got an email that said my order had been canceled
due to quote lack of availability end quote. Now, Amazon's
system had said that there was only one of these
guitars and stock, but apparently they just couldn't locate it,

(09:49):
and so I did not get my guitar, though I
did receive the accessories I had ordered, so now I've
got a guitar stand and a guitar strap, but no
guitar to go with it. Sad trombone. Now, I don't
tell this story just because I'm bummed out and I
want to grouse about it, though I admit that's definitely

(10:12):
part of it. I want to talk about the problems
that left handers face when it comes to certain technologies,
and how those relatively minor problems can open the door
to the realization and acknowledgement that other people face much
more serious challenges when it comes to tech and bias
and accessibility. And before I get into it too much,

(10:34):
let's talk about why I'm not upset at Fender Guitars
for this in general, I'm not even really upset at Amazon.
I mean, when it comes down to one unit in
all of Amazon, I imagine it's not that uncommon for
something to appear in an online inventory, and yet you
can't actually track down the physical thing when someone places

(10:57):
in order. You just can't figure out where it is
and aware how somewhere that's got to happen. You know,
fairly frequently the prevailing wisdom is that left handers make
up about ten of the total population. Now that number
is sometimes disputed. Some argue there are way more lefties
than that, but the general consensus is that nine out

(11:19):
of ten people are right handed. So if you are
making products where handedness matters, it makes far more sense
to dedicate your focus on the right handers. They make
up the bulk of the population, they represent your primary customers,
and that will guide many of your other decisions. For example,

(11:40):
if what you're making requires mass production, you have to
create an assembly process, and that assembly process needs to
be as efficient as possible. Efficiency relates to cost, so
the more efficient you are able to make the production process,
the less it costs to make the thing you're making,
and that means you can be competitive in your pricing.

(12:02):
When you put your product up on the market against
products from other companies. You need to charge more than
it costs to make so that you can make a profit.
You don't want to sell things at a loss typically,
but you can also be competitive against those other companies
that are also making whatever it is you're making. But
this means your assembly process needs to be fine tuned

(12:23):
toward that product. You can imagine that there is an
ideal version of whatever it is you're making. This is
the model you're working off of. This is what you're
trying to replicate every single time. So your goal is
to produce stuff like guitars that match that model as
much as possible. And with guitars made from wood, this

(12:43):
is actually impossible. You're never going to have two guitars
come out exactly the same because there's going to be
variations in the wood. You'll be able to see and
maybe even feel minor differences from guitar to guitar, even
in the same line, even produce just on the same day.
But the goal is to get each guitar as close

(13:04):
to this standard as you possibly can, and that means
that the whole process needs to be precise, consistent, and
easy to replicate. So the process works great as long
as you're producing the same thing over and over. You'll
get small variations, but in general you'll chug along and

(13:24):
you'll build however many guitars as your facility can manage
given the process of materials, as long as all these
guitars require that same process, and that's where the left
handed problem comes in. To make a left handed guitar,
you need to flip everything a d eighty degrees. The
string order is reversed, the headstock has to be flipped,

(13:48):
the tuners will have to be on the opposite side
of a right handed guitar. The controls like volume and tone,
and the tremolo or wamy bar have to be on
the opposite side. The pickguard has to be flipped. You
get the idea. The real problem is you can't just
flip a switch on the assembly line to go from
right handed to left handed and have the whole process

(14:10):
pop out ten left handed guitars for every one right
handed guitars. It doesn't work that way. Instead, you either
need a parallel assembly line just for left handed guitars,
but that doesn't make much sense because you're never going
to need to produce as many left handed guitars, or
you have to retool your normal assembly process in order

(14:33):
to occasionally produce some left handed models. Either way, producing
a left handed guitar isn't as efficient as producing a
right handed one, and that means it costs more to make.
Now you could charge more for a left handed guitar,
and some companies do, or you could resign yourself to
the fact that you just won't make as much money

(14:55):
selling a left handed guitar as you would selling a
right handed guitar. Are either way, you're not likely to
make that many left handed guitars, and it's important that
you know I am not criticizing that decision. It makes
no economic sense to produce left handed anything's in the

(15:16):
same amount as right handed ones. You would never sell
them all because there's just not enough left handers to
make up the market. The same is true for all
the different options you find with products like guitars. Sure,
you could spend the time and effort necessary to provide
the exact same options to lefties as you do to

(15:36):
right ease, but there's a good chance you would end
up with a lot of unsold stock. You might eventually
move that unsold stock by selling products at a huge discount,
but by then you could be looking at maybe breaking
even or perhaps even selling them at a loss. It
makes way more sense to just never make the ding

(15:56):
dang durned things in the first place. So this means
that left handers often have to make some compromises when
it comes to technology. Either we have to make do
with things that were made for right handers and find
a way to make it work, or we are left
with a limited number of options that pales in comparison
to what is available for right handers. When we come back,

(16:19):
we'll talk about how the more sinister among us have
to navigate technology. But first let's take a quick break. Now.
I'm not going to go into the history of how
being left handed is or was a taboo in many cultures.

(16:44):
That gets outside the realm of tech stuff. But it
mostly comes down to how groups of people are pretty
good at identifying individuals who do not fit the norm,
and then they attempt to find ways to explain why
that person is different in those ways often can end
up being negative. Going into left handed technology is interesting

(17:05):
because in some cultures the typical approach to dealing with
left handers was to force them to perform tasks as
a right hander, forcing people to write with their right
hand even if they were left handed. You hear the
story all the time, and this is not always easy
for left handers. I mean, assuming you're not ambidexterous, I

(17:26):
imagine there are things that you would find fairly simple
to do with your dominant hand that become frustratingly difficult
to do with your non dominant hand. I figured we'd
start with a technology that I found quite vexing in
my youth, a very simple technology, scissors. Let's talk about

(17:46):
how scissors work. So scissors are a type of compound machine,
and a compound machine is one that makes use of
two or more simple machines. The six simple machines the
class simple machines are the wheel and axle believer, the
inclined plane, the pulley, the screw, and the wedge. Now, interestingly,

(18:10):
the pulley, screw, and wedge are all extensions of the
first three machines, and simple machines are intended to change
the magnitude of a force or the direction of that force.
A pair of scissors consists of two blades, which are
essentially wedges, and that's one of the simple machines. They

(18:32):
are also mounted in a cross shape around a fulcrum,
and that turns the handles of the scissors into levers,
another simple machine. So pushing the levers together brings the
wedge blades together, and that's what allows you to cut stuff. Moreover,
the process of squeezing the handles actually creates pressure that

(18:52):
squeezes the blades together, not just up and down, but
left and right, so there's a sort of pinching action
happening between the blades that allows for a nice clean cut.
That is, they do this if you happen to be
using the scissors in the proper hand. If a left
hander tries to use right handed scissors with their left hand,

(19:15):
they will find that the blades tend to create a
space between them as they close, so they close up
and down, but there's a space left and right that
allows whatever you're cutting to bend between the blades, which
usually means you don't tend to cut anything at all,
or if you do cut, you do so in a
way where you're maulding whatever it is you're trying to cut.

(19:37):
I can't tell you how many times I ended up
with what looked like shredded paper instead of a nice
clean cut. The squeezing action with the left hand just
creates a force along that full crumb that moves the
blades apart rather than squeezing them together. Now, left handers
can attempt to compensate for this by creating a different
force with their fingers, essentially pushing their thumbs and index

(20:00):
fingers in a way to create that pinching force. You're
forcing the blades together. The boy howdy, that is not comfortable.
It hurts. Moreover, the position of the blades means that
the top blade is always on the right side. You
can flip the blades over, but that means the top
blade is still on the right side. This actually makes

(20:20):
it really hard for left handers to see what they
are cutting if they're trying to cut with their left hand,
because the blade is in the way. Left handed scissors
have the top blade on the left side rather than
the right side. That There are so called left handed
scissors that don't do this, but they are left handed
only in the sense that they have handles that have

(20:42):
contours that better fit the left hand. But without changing
that blade orientation, you really haven't solved the problem. You
still can't really see what you're cutting, and you're still
going to be forcing those blades apart from each other. Now.
Fun fact, I never learned to use left handed scissors
because when I was going to school, my school just
didn't have any. I would use right handed scissors, either

(21:05):
trying desperately to get them to work with my left
hand or just giving up and using my right hand,
knowing that whatever I was going to cut was going
to look awful because of my lack of fine motor
skills with my non dominant hand. For another common tool,
one much more advanced than a pair of scissors, let
us consider the computer mouse. Now, your typical computer mouse

(21:27):
tends to have at least two buttons, one on the
left and one on the right. There are ones that don't,
they're the single button mouse types, like the ones that
are used with certain max that kind of thing. But
your typical computer mouse has at least two buttons, a
left click and a right click, and they tend to
be contoured in such a way the mouse is that

(21:50):
they have a nice fit with the right hand. They
don't fit the left hand the same way. They're just
not contoured that way. And most programs tend to incorporate
mouse commands by shifting important functions for the keyboard to
the left side of that keyboard, so that way you've
got the mouse in your right hand and your left

(22:10):
hand remains free on the left side of the keyboard
to do whatever other functions you need to do to
navigate the program. Computer games tend to be a good
example of how this plays out in favor of right ees.
So take a first person shooter game like Doom. The
mouse controls your point of view or your aim in
the game. You use your mouse to direct your line

(22:33):
of sight and thus where you have your big zappy
gun pointed at any given moment so you can shoot
all those little demon critters. Your character's movement maps typically
to the WAZA keys, the W A S D keys,
W being forward, S being backward, and A and D
typically being strafe left and strafe right, respectively. In a

(22:54):
shooting game, you need to have precise aim to compete
at really high levels. If you watch some pro e
sports players and you really pay attention to how fast
and precise they are with their aim, it's incredible, and
it requires a highly developed fine motor skill set with
whatever hand you're using to aim. In contrast, your movement

(23:14):
in these style of games is important, but typically does
not need the same level of precision as aiming, so
offloading movement to the non dominant hand isn't a huge problem.
Left handers have it harder. If they're using a traditional
right handed set up. They're aiming with their non dominant
hand and thus they tend to be less precise and

(23:38):
less accurate. Now I know that's the case with me,
and of course I'm also older, so my reaction times
are slowing down too. I guess what I'm saying is
you really don't want me to be on your Overwatch team.
There are left handed versions of the computer mouse out there,
and the fact that we've gone to USB connections rather
than the old PS slash two ports that computers and

(24:02):
stuff like keyboards and mice used to depend on. We
don't use those anymore, which that usually means you actually
have more options of where you can connect stuff to
your computer, so cable management isn't as big a pain
in the neck because you typically have more options of
where that USB cable can plug into. If the game

(24:22):
developers thought it through, you might even be able to
map your computer keys so that your movement stuff can
go to a different set of four keys, such as I, J, K,
L or the number pad. If you can't map keys,
then it means the left hander has to deal with
sitting in an odd way or positioning their keyboard in

(24:43):
an offset way so that the right hand can control
those W A, S, D keys. Now I used video
games as my example. But of course the computer mouse
is a standard input device for all sorts of PC programs.
I'm the only left handed person in my family, so
our computers at home all had a right handed set up,

(25:03):
you know, right handed computer mouse and all that kind
of stuff. Likewise, when I got to high school and
they just started to offer classes using computers, all of
those machines had a right handed mouse as well. Some
of the programs would allow you to switch the mouse
to a left handed mode, but really all that meant
was that the left and right mouse buttons flipped what

(25:24):
they did, so that a right mouse click was the
equivalent to a right hander using a left mouse click.
It didn't magically change the shape of the mouse or
how it connected to the PC, so it might still
not really be convenient. So as a result, I taught
myself to use a mouse right handed early on. It
wasn't that big a deal because most of the stuff

(25:45):
I was doing didn't require lightning, fast reactions or anything,
so I could take my time moving my wobbly little
cursor to the right spot on the screen. A few
times I tried to use a left handed mouse. I
hated it because all the important keyboard functions were on
the wrong side of the keyboard, and the user interface
was clearly biased toward right handers. It was just more convenient,

(26:10):
though less precise, to use my right hand on the mouse.
Sticking with video games, let's talk about consoles for a second.
The standard console controller these days has two thumbsticks, one
for each thumb. The left thumbstick typically control stuff like movement.
The right controls stuff like camera angle or aim, so again,

(26:34):
the task that requires the most precise fine tuning goes
to the right side. Some games do allow you to
change this. That's nice, but it's a bit weird when
you first do it, particularly since a lot of games
also include platforming elements where you need to access controls
that are mapped to the buttons on the controller. The

(26:56):
buttons on most controllers are, you guessed it over, on
the right side, so you have to take your thumb
off the right stick to hit the buttons on the
right side of the controller. If aim is going to
the left thumbstick and movement is going to the right
thumb stick, suddenly you can't jump and move at the
same time because you have to take your thumb off

(27:18):
the thumbstick, and it has to do all the work.
You could conceivably buy a really expensive controller with stuff
like extra paddles and trigger buttons and map things out
to improve matters, but it's really hard to compensate for
this design using just a standard controller, and not all
games allow you to map controls like that. Now, I

(27:39):
don't mean to suggest that being left handed immediately means
a person is going to be bad at stuff like
video games. There are left handed players out there who
are amazing. Many have spent countless hours training their non
dominant hand to do more finely tuned tasks, and they
can compete at a professional level. But for a lot

(27:59):
of us, these basic approaches to design stand as an
extra challenge we face on top of whatever it is
we actually want to do. Now. I mentioned UI or
user interface a moment ago. The user interface of a
technology is exactly what it sounds like. It's the method
by which a user interacts with the technology. It includes

(28:21):
not just the physical interaction, such as the keyboard and
mouse of a PC, or the touch screen of a
smartphone or the controller for a video game console. It
also includes the actual design of the software and how
things are laid out, and sometimes developers will build it
in a system that just favors right handedness in more

(28:42):
subtle ways. For example, I can't tell you how many
on screen smartphone keyboards I've used that become a total
hassle because I would be using my left hand and
I would hit keys a little to the left of center,
and the keys really designed to be hit a little
to the right of center. I've practiced using my right

(29:03):
index finger to try and type things out much more
smoothly then if I were to use my left hand.
But I am left handed. I want to use my
left hand. I'm faster at it, it's more comfortable, at
least it would be, but I have to end up
thinking about aiming a little to the right of where
I think I need to go in order to hit
the key I want. Otherwise I'm just getting typos and

(29:24):
nonsense all the time. This sort of bias in design
can be found in a lot of other places too.
For example, the typical student desk tends to have a
shape that caters to right handers. Often there's a place
for the right arm to rest while the student is writing,
whereas on the left side of the desk it's typically open,
so if you're a lefty, you're writing with no support

(29:46):
for your left arm. And when I went to high school,
they had just switched over to these asymmetric desks and
they had more surface area on the right side. So
that's great. If you're a right hander, you're notebook is supported,
you can just right that way. But as a lefty,
it meant that I had to twist a bit in
my seat just to write stuff down. Even note books

(30:09):
are laid out in a way that work better for
right handers than left handers, at least for those of
us in the Western hemisphere who are writing left to right.
The binding of the notebook is on the left side.
Now that's not in the way if you're a right hander,
but if you're a lefty, then you've got that binding
to deal with, which means you're either contorting yourself to
work around it, or you're starting a good deal further

(30:32):
into the page than your right handed counterparts are. Curse
you notebook bindings. For that reason, when I use notebooks,
I typically either flip them upside down or I flip
them over and I start from the back and I
work my way forward that way. The binding is on
the right side. I still right left to right, but

(30:53):
now the spiral of rings is on the right hand
side and they don't get in my way. Now. So far,
most of the off I've mentioned has been frustrating, but
ultimately not really that big a deal. Yeah, it's not
fun to compensate to interact with a world that was
designed for people who aren't like you. But for the
most part, the examples I've used are fairly benign. But

(31:15):
just you wait, we'll be right back after this short break.
Left handers aren't strangers to facing struggles using technology meant
for right handers. And when we're lucky, someone has created

(31:37):
a left handed version for us to use. When we're
really lucky, that left handed version works just as well
as the right handed one does when we're crazy lucky.
Whatever it is we're doing with that left handed tool
doesn't otherwise have handedness entering into the picture. But now

(31:58):
we're gonna talk out chain saws. Yeah, chainsaws. These are
really useful and potentially extremely dangerous, and their design favors
right handers, which means that for people like me, they
become much more potentially dangerous tools. Now chainsaw has two handles.

(32:22):
One is at the very rear of the chainsaw. That's
where the throttle control is, and that's meant for the
dominant hand. Really, it's meant for the right hand. And
then there's a front handle, and typically that's an arc
that goes along the top and side the left side
of the chainsaw. It's meant for the left hand to
be there to help guide the chainsaw. Many chainsaws have

(32:44):
that front handle join with the body of the chainsaw
itself close to the top right side of the device,
which means that even if you wanted to hold it
as a left hander, you would be very limited and
where your right hand could go, they couldn't go all
the way to the edge because that where the are
the handle actually joins the body of the chainsaw. But
if you're holding the chainsaw with your right hand on

(33:07):
the rear handle, there's plenty of space for your left
hand to hold onto the front handle. That gives you
lots of different options for grips when you need to
use the chainsaw on different orientations, But typically you just
don't have that level of versatility on the right side
of the front handle. So if you were to try
and hold it left handed, you would already be facing
some limitations and controls really important when you've got a

(33:29):
whirling chain blade right in front of you. You want
that dominant hand on the back to control the overall
motion of the chainsaw and to deal with any kickback
you might have. The non dominant hand is really meant
to use to to guide the specific angle of attack
of the chainsaw. Chainsaws typically have a guard that's called

(33:50):
a chain break, like a brake, like a kind you
would have in a car, and that's mounted in front
of the front handle. The chain break is essentially a
lever that, if it gets pushed beyond a fail point,
will cut off power to the blade. So let's say
that you're using the chainsaw. The chainsaw bucks back so

(34:11):
that the blade is now arcing up so it would
be coming towards your head. The lever is positioned in
such a way that it will make contact with the
back of your leading hand, your left hand, and it
will trip that lever, cutting off power to the blade.
That's the idea. The problem here is that if you're

(34:32):
using it the other way around, with your left hand
on the rear handle, your right hand might not be
in the right position to really engage with that chain break,
so if something bad happens, there may be no way
to stop it. That's not great. Or you could be
operating it as a right hander, but it means your

(34:52):
non dominant hand is the one that's trying to control
the overall motion of the blade. That's not a great
option either. Now I have as chainsaws a few times,
I've always had to revert to using them as if
I were right handed, which in my mind, is the
least bad of all the different options I had in
front of me. And this is just one example of

(35:13):
a power tool that is designed to be used by
right handers. Pretty Much every tool is biased toward being
right handed. Either the tools are contoured in a way
where they fit the right hand but not the left,
or they operate in such a way that you really
need to be using them in your right hand, or

(35:33):
the line of sight doesn't really work unless you're using
it with the right hand dominant side. Whether it's a
table saw or a drill press or a power drill,
a lot of these tools just work best if they're
operated by a right hander, and at worst they can
be dangerous if they are operated any other way. The

(35:53):
same thing is true with firearms. Now. I am not
a gun guy. I have not fired any type of
firearm in a really long time, but if I did,
I'd likely be frustrated by the lack of options for me.
Most handguns that have an external safety catch place that

(36:13):
on the left side of the gun, so that your
right thumb can easily disengage the catch whenever you are
ready to actually fire the handgun. But if you're holding
this in your left hand, the catches on the opposite
side of the gun from where your thumb rests, it's
no longer where you can easily disengage it. Many rifles

(36:34):
are designed specifically to use with the butt of the
stock up against your right side. They expend spent casings
out the right side of the firearm, so they're away
from the shooter. If you were to try and fire
left handed, you would be dealing with this, and it
would make the experience less safe for you and as

(36:55):
well as less safe for anyone who happens to be
around you. It's not great. Now there are manufacturers that
make ambidextrous models of firearms, meaning that at least in theory,
they can be fired either by a right hander or
a left hander with no real difference in performance. And
then there are a few that will make left handed

(37:18):
models of certain firearms, but these tend to be more
expensive than the exact same models that were made for
right handers, for much the same reason that it's hard
to find good options for left handed guitars. That being,
the manufacturing process has been streamlined to create a certain
type of product in a very particular way, and that

(37:39):
process works great when that's all you want to do.
But if you want to do anything besides make the
exact same product with the exact same orientation, that assembly
line cannot really accommodate that. So yeah, we left handers
need to make do, or maybe spend more money so
that we don't have to make do. Now, there is
a small, nearly cottage industry business of creating left handed

(38:03):
versions of many common utensils, tools, and gadgets. For left handers,
there are left handed can openers, for example, since using
a right handed can opener is tricky and at best
of pain in the well the hands, I guess. For
left handers, there are rulers that have measurements that go

(38:24):
from right to left, which is useful if you're a
lefty and you want to draw a line that is
a precise length. Otherwise, my mo was to start at
the end result and work back at zero. So if
I needed to draw a three inch line, I would
start on the three inch mark and then draw toward
the zero because then it was just easier for me

(38:45):
to see what I was doing. There are left handed
cork screws because it's easier to use because the twisting
motion ends up being counterclockwise rather than clockwise. There are
left handed measuring cups and left handed playing cards. These
have markings on the opposite side of where you would
find them on the right handed version or the standard version.

(39:06):
The products are otherwise identical to right handed whatever's right right.
A left handed measuring cup is exactly the same as
a right hand measuring cup, except the markings are on
the opposite side of the cup. That's it. For that
wonderful little flip, you're gonna be paying a premium, I mean,
like sometimes a crazy premium. You might see a measuring

(39:26):
cup that would cost five bucks end up being a
twenty dollar cup because it was a left handed one.
So yes, there is a certain selection of common tools
and utensils that you can find in a left handed orientation.
They typically cost more than the right hand version for
the reasons that I've given already, and sometimes they don't
even work as well as the right handed versions because

(39:48):
sometimes they're just made by right handers. But if you look,
you can often find them. So being left handed in
a world that has largely been designed by an for
right handed people isn't always easy or even safe. There
have even been numerous studies that suggest that left handers
may have a lower life expectancy than right handers, not

(40:11):
because we are somehow inherently less healthy, but perhaps because
we might be a little more accident prone than right handers.
You know, maybe we're using those right handed chainsaws in
a way that is most assuredly going to result in catastrophe.
There are a lot of little tasks that just become
a touch harder for the poor lefties of us out there.

(40:35):
All that being said, I chose this topic not just
a grouse about how irritating it is to be left
handed sometimes, though again that was a big part of it,
but to show how this is just one way that
bias can have an impact on a population. In this case,
I'm talking about handedness, and it's pretty obvious that most

(40:56):
of the time the bias against left handers isn't malicious.
It's not intentional. It's not like right handers are trying
to wipe out the left handers by creating stuff like
can openers or pencil sharpeners or chainsaws that really only
operate properly if they're used as a right handed way.
They're just making stuff that works for them. And that's

(41:17):
one of the really insidious things about bias. It doesn't
have to be an intentional, malicious thing. When engineers are
building something, they want to make something that works, and
you have to consider what the problem is and how
you intend to solve that problem, and then you design
that solution. And many times engineers are looking at problems

(41:38):
from their own perspectives, but not from the perspective of
someone who is not like them, And for that reason,
we sometimes get technologies that work really great if you
happen to match the same general demographic and perspective as
the engineer who made it, but not so great if
you don't. This becomes an enormous issue with stuff like accessibility,

(42:01):
where people who might be differently abled are trying to
use technology, Those who have challenges with hearing or vision
or what have you might find it extra difficult to
make use of certain technologies because those technologies depend rather
heavily upon faculties that the differently abled may not possess,
or at least may not possess to the same degree.

(42:24):
And so a gadget that an able bodied person might
think is life changing could be completely useless in the
hands of someone else. And it doesn't always have to
be that way. Designing things with accessibility in mind presents
new challenges, no doubt about that. But that's what engineering
is all about. It's about overcoming challenges. Moreover, it means

(42:47):
more people can directly benefit from the solutions that engineers create,
and bias can emerge in lots of other ways. I've
recently had shows where I've mentioned bias in the design
of systems that you use artificial intelligence and machine learning.
If you train a system using a data set that
is biased, the end result will reflect that bias. For example,

(43:10):
if you train an image recognition system to identify a
face and you only train the system using a data
set that includes photos of white people, that system could
have problems working when you feed in pictures of people
who aren't white. We've seen this happen with some pretty
awful results. More than a few facial recognition systems have

(43:30):
shown to work well when they're identifying white people, but
not well whenever trying to identify people of color. That
bias leads us to a technological kind of racism that
has real world effects and consequences, much worse effects than
the little frustrations I've encountered as a left handed person.
I can't even begin to understand how that all plays

(43:53):
out in a day to day life, except to know
that it's just worse than what I have to cope with.
So that's really the message of this episode. It's not
that we need more left handed strato caster guitars, though
that is also true. We do need them, more specifically,
I need them even more specifically. I just need one, really,

(44:16):
and it's gonna be a while before I can justify
buying a silver burst left handed strato caster, So get
on that fender. No, the real message of this episode
is that the purpose of technology, when you really get
down to it, is to make our lives better. But
that's only true if we're designing technology that addresses the

(44:39):
needs of people in general, not subsets of people or
through excluding groups of people. Whether you are designing a
physical gadget or an app or whatever, it is important
to step outside of yourself and to think about how
people who are different from you will be accessing and
experiencing the use of that technology. It could be that

(45:02):
with just a few tweaks, you could turn what was
a decent idea into a world changing one. I plan
on doing more episodes like this one, and I hope
to get some women on this show to talk about
how the tech world has tried to cater to women
in various ways, sometimes successfully and perhaps way too frequently,

(45:25):
sometimes in colossal failures. Just look at all the pink stuff.
But I think that that is really a related issue,
particularly in an industry that is still dominated by male
designers and engineers and executives. It's a problem that we
have to confront and fix in order to make stuff

(45:47):
that really works for everybody, or at least works for
the intended audience, because otherwise you just get a bunch
of you know, knuckle headed guys saying, you know, I
think women like pink things. Let's make it pink. That's
so not cool. Anyway. This is an issue that obviously

(46:10):
goes beyond technology, but we see it really with laser
focus in the tech world over and over again. That's
why I wanted to bring it up, and I brought
up the left handed perspective because it's one I can
speak to directly. It's one that I have experience, and
I can acknowledge that while it can be frustrating, it's
nothing like what other people go through all the time

(46:33):
in their day to day lives. So that's it for
this episode. More of a kind of abstract approach to technology,
but one I think is important and our goal, I
think should always be to create technologies that work for
as many people as possible, to improve things as much
as possible, and not just to you know, throw in

(46:55):
a feature because you think it's cool, or to throw
in a feature and call it accessibility in order to
have a little box checked off of your to do list.
That's not good enough. If you guys have suggestions for
future topics of tech stuff, whether it's a specific technology,
maybe it's a company, maybe it's a person in tech,
maybe it's a theme, let me know. Reach out on Twitter.

(47:16):
The handle is tech Stuff H s W and I'll
talk to you again really soon. Tex Stuff is an
I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio,
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.