Comment by hopelite

If I had to guess, I think he may be trying to describe the behavior when you try to interact with the virtual knobs in a way that is based on assumption of how it would work due to other experiences in digital UIs, rather than the “level of detail” that Apple puts into UI and UX that is at first contrary to experience, but then actually amazes people when they realize it actually works with their human expectations rather than the human having to have to adjust themselves and their expectations to the poor UI and UX interactions of other experiences.

To be more concrete, if I had to guess, the author tried using the knob like a slider, trying to drag the visual slider down to decrease and up to increase the knob rotation, but that conflicted and caused movements in “random directions”.