Item — HN Reader

> users will ignore cryptic error messages, particularly if they occur often

It's not just cryptic error messages. Pretty much anything that requires the attention of people will end up being ignored eventually. For example:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4894506/

I've also read about an anesthesiologist who turned off the alarms because they annoyed him. One day he failed to secure the endotracheal tube during a surgery, it came off and nobody noticed. The result was cardiac arrest, brain damage, multiple organ failure, sepsis and death.

Monitoring hardware is very sensitive so it will fire off alarms if anything changes, no matter how small. The more sensitive a test is, the more false positives you get. This is extremely demanding of a health care professional's attention, which in practice is multiplexed between countless patients.

Up to 99% of these alarms and messages will do nothing but get in the way of people. These represent false positives, disconnected cables, and other minor failures that don't represent a real danger and can be easily fixed. People will get used to the alarms, and will learn to ignore them.

> Pretty much anything that requires the attention of people will end up being ignored eventually.

Perhaps, but your example is not supporting evidence. The PACU alarms were muted, precisely because they were so hard to ignore.

> Monitoring hardware is very sensitive so it will fire off alarms if anything changes, no matter how small. The more sensitive a test is, the more false positives you get.

This is fixable. The problem is the same as the one in the Therac-25 case ... severe and inconsequential alerts are indistinguishable.

Here's an particularly enjoyable piece of literature crafted around an instance of alarm fatigue: https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/smithcordwainer-deadladyofclownt...