5 ms·

I couldn't agree with you more. On a personal note, I must admit that the level of arrogance seen in IT is sometimes quite overwhelming. Just because someone c

I couldn't agree with you more. On a personal note, I must admit that the level of arrogance seen in IT is sometimes quite overwhelming. Just because someone can use a computer does not automatically make them smart; other people have other skills, amazing! ;)

LiveTheDream 17y ago
"She's not troubled, she's a dancer" - Sir. Ken Robinson on a child whose parents feared she might be learning-disabled, thus demonstrating that different types of intelligence exist. Look up the speech on TED Talks; it is incredible.
- adammichaelc 17y ago
  I know the video you're referring to. It is really cool, and opens up the idea that intellectual intelligence is only 1 type of intelligence. From my personal life, my wife couldn't care less about computers and probably would never watch a TED video, but her "people intelligence" is very high -- she can relate to many different kinds of people and wherever she goes she makes good friends and people around her hold her in high esteem. Her dad is something of a bookworm who knows a little bit about everything and quite a bit about a couple of things. If he were younger (he's in his 70's) he'd probably get his news from HN. I've often wondered if his "intellectual intelligence" was transferred to her but in a different form... like she used it in a different way, in interacting with and reading people, instead of books.
  - Retric 17y ago
    I suspect at the biological level there are vary few differences in "types of intelligence" but people can get vary good at solving the types of problems they have already solved. I think the real trick is not to measure people based on what you are good at but what they are good at. Coders can often walk though large logic problems instantly, but IMO that's the same basic thing as an artist knowing which 12 lines capture the basic idea of a picture. Think of it like the brain missing the correct API's, you can fake it but it's slow and buggy. But, if you start to spend 10,000+ hours solving the same types of problems and you are going to create that foundation. EX: Cab drivers develop much better spatial reasoning skills over time. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/677048.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/677048.stm
    - phaedrus 17y ago
      @Coders can often walk through large logic problems instantly: I work in an IT shop where we write in house systems to support the business processes of nontechnical people. When we try to hammer out business requirements for systems we'll often have discussions with customer where we carefully question "OK, so it is ALWAYS the case that P and Q implies R", and "It's NEVER the case that P or R implies S" and so forth. The customer will say yes, yes, yes, throughout this, then she'll mention some other case can happen that logically invalidates the rest of everything she said. Only, she doesn't realize this because she doesn't have a coder's hard-edged sense of logic. But when this happens I, my boss, and my boss's boss (the CIO) will all three exchange a quick incredulous look with each other at the same time because we all ran through the logic and found the contradiction nearly instantly. Or, that is to say, as she was talking we were all three building up the same structure in our minds, and the last thing she says brings it crashing down in all three of our heads at the same time. Trying to explain that to a non-coder is not easy to do without appearing arrogant, and I think that is why people in IT can appear rude. How do you politely say, "Your mental representations are so messy and imprecise I'm having trouble categorizing what you need?"
      - michael_dorfman 17y ago
        How do you politely say, "Your mental representations are so messy and imprecise I'm having trouble categorizing what you need?" You say: "OK, now that we've covered the standard flow, let's talk about the strange cases. What are the weird situations that come up once in a while?" For many users, "ALWAYS" translates to "always, except for the oddball case", and "NEVER" translates to "not usually, but you never know." That's why Requirements Analysis is as much about psychology and anthropology as it is about logic.
      - jimbokun 17y ago
        '"OK, so it is ALWAYS the case that P and Q implies R", and "It's NEVER the case that P or R implies S"' The number of real world problems where ALWAYS applies is vanishingly small. This is the reason that rule based artificial intelligence floundered. The answer to almost every interesting question is some variation of "sometimes", "often", "almost always", "except when", etc. This is why statistical techniques and machine learning have led to solutions to many problems where rule based AI was an abject failure.
  - iacvlvs 17y ago
    I attended a talk on multiple intelligences a few years ago. The speaker, a research psychologist, said that there are indeed several types of intelligence. They all covary with each other and the property with which their covariance is greatest is called the g factor: general intelligence. The best (but not perfect) measure of g factor is IQ.
    - sesqu 17y ago
      I saw this link here on HN a short while ago from a person more passionate than me when it comes to IQ: Spearman's g, a statistical myth http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/523.html http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/523.html
- chriskelley 17y ago
  I was interested and looked it up - here it is if others haven't seen it: http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_crea...
ErrantX 17y ago
It's a problem definitely, one that always aggravates me. It's about perception of the job too. I struck up a conversation with a guy on the train the other day; he was a journalist - a field I've always been fascinated by. As soon as I told him what my job he barely spoke about his own - it was just constant banal anecdotes about what I did, how bad he was with computers and how I must be amazing and... On one level it attests to how important computers have become in our daily lives. Mostly it just makes me sad because, really, I'm just an IT guy!
- trafficlight 17y ago
  I rarely tell people what I do because I hate those stories. I don't care that you broke your printer and your 4 year old niece fixed it by putting more paper in. Yes, she is super smart for actually reading the error message that said "Out of Paper". I also can't stand it when somebody tells me they are just completely computer stupid. And that's before we've even said hello.
  - potatolicious 17y ago
    I find that it's not so much inability so much as fear. A lot of people (especially the older generation) seem to think that if they futz with a computer they'll irreparably break it - so they stop and call an expert as soon as something deviates from normal workflow. You think you're creating a UI that encourages learning by exploration, but a lot of your users are too terrified of their machine to dare click that button. This is something we need to work with and educate users about - they're not stupid, they're overly cautious.
    - ajj 17y ago
      Couldn't agree more. My mom can get stuff done (email attachments, etc.) if she is sitting alone and absolutely has to do it. If at all I am available, she will ask help for the smallest stuff fearing she would break something. Sometimes I think its not even about breaking anything, but more about not fancying herself to recover from "even more damage."
    - 17y ago

LiveTheDream 17y ago

"She's not troubled, she's a dancer" - Sir. Ken Robinson on a child whose parents feared she might be learning-disabled, thus demonstrating that different types of intelligence exist. Look up the speech on TED Talks; it is incredible.

adammichaelc 17y ago
I know the video you're referring to. It is really cool, and opens up the idea that intellectual intelligence is only 1 type of intelligence. From my personal life, my wife couldn't care less about computers and probably would never watch a TED video, but her "people intelligence" is very high -- she can relate to many different kinds of people and wherever she goes she makes good friends and people around her hold her in high esteem. Her dad is something of a bookworm who knows a little bit about everything and quite a bit about a couple of things. If he were younger (he's in his 70's) he'd probably get his news from HN. I've often wondered if his "intellectual intelligence" was transferred to her but in a different form... like she used it in a different way, in interacting with and reading people, instead of books.
- Retric 17y ago
  I suspect at the biological level there are vary few differences in "types of intelligence" but people can get vary good at solving the types of problems they have already solved. I think the real trick is not to measure people based on what you are good at but what they are good at. Coders can often walk though large logic problems instantly, but IMO that's the same basic thing as an artist knowing which 12 lines capture the basic idea of a picture. Think of it like the brain missing the correct API's, you can fake it but it's slow and buggy. But, if you start to spend 10,000+ hours solving the same types of problems and you are going to create that foundation. EX: Cab drivers develop much better spatial reasoning skills over time. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/677048.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/677048.stm
  - phaedrus 17y ago
    @Coders can often walk through large logic problems instantly: I work in an IT shop where we write in house systems to support the business processes of nontechnical people. When we try to hammer out business requirements for systems we'll often have discussions with customer where we carefully question "OK, so it is ALWAYS the case that P and Q implies R", and "It's NEVER the case that P or R implies S" and so forth. The customer will say yes, yes, yes, throughout this, then she'll mention some other case can happen that logically invalidates the rest of everything she said. Only, she doesn't realize this because she doesn't have a coder's hard-edged sense of logic. But when this happens I, my boss, and my boss's boss (the CIO) will all three exchange a quick incredulous look with each other at the same time because we all ran through the logic and found the contradiction nearly instantly. Or, that is to say, as she was talking we were all three building up the same structure in our minds, and the last thing she says brings it crashing down in all three of our heads at the same time. Trying to explain that to a non-coder is not easy to do without appearing arrogant, and I think that is why people in IT can appear rude. How do you politely say, "Your mental representations are so messy and imprecise I'm having trouble categorizing what you need?"
    - michael_dorfman 17y ago
      How do you politely say, "Your mental representations are so messy and imprecise I'm having trouble categorizing what you need?" You say: "OK, now that we've covered the standard flow, let's talk about the strange cases. What are the weird situations that come up once in a while?" For many users, "ALWAYS" translates to "always, except for the oddball case", and "NEVER" translates to "not usually, but you never know." That's why Requirements Analysis is as much about psychology and anthropology as it is about logic.
    - jimbokun 17y ago
      '"OK, so it is ALWAYS the case that P and Q implies R", and "It's NEVER the case that P or R implies S"' The number of real world problems where ALWAYS applies is vanishingly small. This is the reason that rule based artificial intelligence floundered. The answer to almost every interesting question is some variation of "sometimes", "often", "almost always", "except when", etc. This is why statistical techniques and machine learning have led to solutions to many problems where rule based AI was an abject failure.
- iacvlvs 17y ago
  I attended a talk on multiple intelligences a few years ago. The speaker, a research psychologist, said that there are indeed several types of intelligence. They all covary with each other and the property with which their covariance is greatest is called the g factor: general intelligence. The best (but not perfect) measure of g factor is IQ.
  - sesqu 17y ago
    I saw this link here on HN a short while ago from a person more passionate than me when it comes to IQ: Spearman's g, a statistical myth http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/523.html http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/523.html
chriskelley 17y ago
I was interested and looked it up - here it is if others haven't seen it: http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_crea...

ErrantX 17y ago

It's a problem definitely, one that always aggravates me. It's about perception of the job too. I struck up a conversation with a guy on the train the other day; he was a journalist - a field I've always been fascinated by. As soon as I told him what my job he barely spoke about his own - it was just constant banal anecdotes about what I did, how bad he was with computers and how I must be amazing and... On one level it attests to how important computers have become in our daily lives. Mostly it just makes me sad because, really, I'm just an IT guy!

trafficlight 17y ago
I rarely tell people what I do because I hate those stories. I don't care that you broke your printer and your 4 year old niece fixed it by putting more paper in. Yes, she is super smart for actually reading the error message that said "Out of Paper". I also can't stand it when somebody tells me they are just completely computer stupid. And that's before we've even said hello.
- potatolicious 17y ago
  I find that it's not so much inability so much as fear. A lot of people (especially the older generation) seem to think that if they futz with a computer they'll irreparably break it - so they stop and call an expert as soon as something deviates from normal workflow. You think you're creating a UI that encourages learning by exploration, but a lot of your users are too terrified of their machine to dare click that button. This is something we need to work with and educate users about - they're not stupid, they're overly cautious.
  - ajj 17y ago
    Couldn't agree more. My mom can get stuff done (email attachments, etc.) if she is sitting alone and absolutely has to do it. If at all I am available, she will ask help for the smallest stuff fearing she would break something. Sometimes I think its not even about breaking anything, but more about not fancying herself to recover from "even more damage."
  - 17y ago