10 ms·

I think we underestimate how much time is required to be really good with computers. I'm very knowledgeable about computers, but I've been using them heavily fo

I think we underestimate how much time is required to be really good with computers. I'm very knowledgeable about computers, but I've been using them heavily for 22 years. We have this innate comfort and familiarity with using computers, but as hackers it's a huge part of our lives. People have other ways of life than us, and have other expertise. We shouldn't dismiss their computer illiteracy as stupidity; it's just as bad as them writing us off as "computer nerds". There's also this tendency for non-computer-literate people to be overly self-deprecating. I noticed this with mathematics, when I tutored people @ uni, but with computers it's the same shit. I constantly hear "yeah, I'm awful with computers, it's all black magic to me". But the person saying that is often not even trying, which is frustrating. It's like a helpless excuse to be lazy and let someone else do the work, which is often not that complicated.

crooked-v 10y ago
> But the person saying that is often not even trying, which is frustrating. This reminds me of all the anecdotes I've heard about people who immediately click through all alert boxes, to the point of being nigh-incapable of passing on an error message unless someone is standing over their shoulder forcing them to read it.
- Noseshine 10y ago
  Oh god my mother. What she needed to do was written in plain language right in front of her, and it was nothing technical but something simple like "you should fill out that text field". I had to install an antivirus software that would not nag her about installing the for-pay version, because no matter what I said, she would inevitably end up with the for-pay version and its useless features installed (but only the trial version, she's smart enough not to actually pay). My mother is pretty intelligent and far from senile, just around 65, it wasn't that long ago that she was a busy executive in a major corporation who had to manage not only people but also her Excel sheets and MS Office at the very least. I still remember many many years ago when she first got a computer with a mouse. She moved the mouse carefully between the tips of only two fingers, and taking her hand off of it between movements to stop and look...
  - mjevans 10y ago
    It doesn't help that 'the Windows trick', for the UI that is, became popups. Popups after popups that were almost all useless things or worse annoying ads that got popped up on some page you were on. There is a LOT of noise to that signal. Contrasted to more traditional (teletype inspired) interfaces that only reported actual warnings (if asked for) and failures unless you were extremely specific.
    - Bartweiss 10y ago
      This UI hostility also burns people who aren't experienced with hotkeys. An awful lot of malware-serving webpages pop up duplicate header bars as part of an image, in hopes of catching people who click on the wrong X (much like ads that consist of fake download links). That's a non-event for a an experienced user, who (if ad block didn't disable the page) probably resorts to the close-tab hotkey by sheer habit. But it's an appreciable threat to someone who's trying to rely on predictable screen UI for their browsing.
      - digi_owl 10y ago
        Weirdest thing i have seen was some ad delivered malware that would pop up a full screen image of an XP desktop, complete with some popup claiming to be some error or other. The whole thing was clickable and it fooled me the first time (i really should have picked up on the pointer being a hand rather than an arrow), never mind my less knowledgeable relatives.
        Bartweiss 10y ago
        That's a new one on me, too. I'm not sure I would have caught it. One useful trick is right-clicking first, which shouldn't trigger the link and will be very different on an outbound link than a blank webpage or desktop. Of course, mobile is where I get the most trouble from this - I don't have any hotkeys, and real page-loading is so bouncy and unpredictable that it's particularly easy to get caught by a fake top bar. It's made even worse by things that scroll away the top bar as you move down page, and then bring back a fake one.
- Qantourisc 10y ago
  In deep pain, I have to regret I even know some IT people that don't read error messages. (I suspect partial problem is here the effort he has to read.)
  - tremon 10y ago
    Not reading error popups is the norm around me, and I work in IT support. It has nothing to do with the message, but the medium: a message popup disrupt the user's workflow, and more often than not for no good reason. All people who work with computers very quickly get in the habit of dismissing flow-breaking popups. I'd say the problem is not with the people.
    - Bartweiss 10y ago
      It's like the ER doctors who miss crucial "Patient is dying!" alarms. They're not just lazy or careless, they work in an environment where every device is screaming "I am here!" every minute of the day. It's both an important work skill and an unavoidable physiological response to tune out obnoxious and unimportant stimuli, to the point where the people abusing those signals ought to be accountable.
      - digi_owl 10y ago
        You had something similar that resulted in a mid-Atlantic plane crash some years ago. The crew got so blanketed by automated warnings, and didn't have any visual cues thanks to being a night flight, that they basically flew the plane into the ocean.
      - ckib16 10y ago
        This same topic is taught in flight training. Pilots are repeatedly taught to never "silence" the annoying warning horns that come on for different reasons (slow speed, wrong landing gear configuration). The idea being that mindlessly dismissing alarms will build a bad habit pattern. Especially when you're actually in trouble.
    - digi_owl 10y ago
- Qantourisc 10y ago
  In deep pain, I have to regret I even know some IT people that don't read error messages. (I suspect partial problem is here the effort he has to read.)
qwrusz 10y ago
I was just thinking about this recently while installing something with radio buttoned install options: Standard Install (Recommended) Custom Install (Advanced Users) Yet the custom/"advanced" option was just a couple checkboxes that let you exclude extra bloatware during installation. I wonder how many users upon seeing both options tell themselves they are not "advanced" computer users and just go with option 1 without even looking at option 2. Had they bothered to look many of them would have understood to uncheck the bloatware they know they don't want. If that was too much there was a Back button. But the wording "Advanced Users" scares many ppl away from even looking into that option and so they end up with some Yahoo! search toolbar forever after... Self-deprecating computer users is an issue. The extent some software companies are taking advantage it is another.
- stackptr 10y ago
  Seems to me that you're describing the exact sort of psychological tactic that software vendors favor to get people to install the bloatware in the first place.
  - caseyohara 10y ago
    Sometimes called "Dark Patterns" http://darkpatterns.org http://darkpatterns.org
    - digi_owl 10y ago
      Perhaps one should really call them what they are, scams.
- severine 10y ago
  Hey, that's political!
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  I'm constantly annoyed by "Advanced user" installation options. They're occasionally accurate - I can think of a few programs where the "advanced" option demanded that I go and read a bunch of documentation - but mostly it's either laziness or malice. I don't think they've been a reasonable choice since storage was so limited that 'advanced' meant screwing around with DirectX directories and partial installs. In 90%+ of cases, basic/advanced could be better addressed with a handful of simple-English checkboxes for what to install. One is locked-active, for the core bundle. The others have one-line descriptions of what they do and possibly what other products make them redundant, maybe with a "more info" button. And since evil bloatware isn't going anywhere, we could at least set a norm that real menus give you options, and anyone trying to prevent you from engaging your brain is pushing crapware.
thesimpsons1022 10y ago
not just computers. whenever i visit home and my mom or sister want to watch netflix i have to be the one to plug in the hdmi cord for them from the ps4. i've showed them how to do it dozens of times but they somehow zone it out and would rather bother me and wait then figure it out.
- beachstartup 10y ago
  why should they learn, when you do it every time? sounds like a great bargain for them.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    Reminds me of my cats. One of them learned to open doors by jumping on the door handle. The other didn't, and when he needed some door open, he would wait for the first one to come and help.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Then again, HDMI is laden with HDCP, and i seem to recall more than one story about how you had to turn on devices in just the right order to get something other than a black screen or error because HDCP tripped up. Digital signals are in theory a boon. but digital signals wrapped in DRM is a hot mess best avoided.
- zentiggr 10y ago
  You: "Seriously? It's about 5% more complicated than plugging in the vacuum cleaner. I'm in the middle of something. One last time and that's it." Voila!
agumonkey 10y ago
It's a very large and fuzzy topic. It depends on what computer system you run. Being able to use windows is not a skill, it's extremely unconceptual and ad-hoc, and mostly coll rote learning. I'm sure older systems, with less layers and cruft (think 70s box) taught you more, giving you simpler tools and more ways to solve problems on your own. Nowadays it's mostly fads. You're right about self deprecation. Society lifts computer usage as a value even if it's mostly absurd in reality (because I knew excel, people would look at me doing basic tasks saying they couldn't do it). It affects many people, it's very very hard to reverse. It's indeed very similar to math anxiety. Reminds me of childhood friends who dropped out of school in Junior High, couldn't do the "simplest ratio" but were doing them on the fly with custom units to sell weed, I couldn't follow them. It's all ceremony, sadly. ps: one last thing, I wonder how illiterate people would feel if given a system like NixOS or GuixSD with almost fully rollbackable system; meaning they can mess with it without negative emotions or almost no superstition.
- AstralStorm 10y ago
  Laziness and time efficiency trumps experimentation and curiosity. Now, if you exposed kids to those systems...
  - agumonkey 10y ago
    Even in programming schools I and others felt that we should have old machines to program most of the time. It makes you think differently, or just more.
    - digi_owl 10y ago
      Also, less distractions. With a full screen cli, all you see is what you are trying to do in this moment. With a WIMP interface you have the task bar and whatsnot that may at any time try to grab your attention away. Never mind all those background processes a modern OS runs, for various reasons.
      - agumonkey 10y ago
bambax 10y ago
I don't know about that. There seems to be something innate about one's ability to use computers. My father is 85 and is quite good with computers; he uses email constantly, writes documents and books using word processors and understands the concept of files, reads on a Kindle, etc. But he had never touched a computer before he was maybe 70 (let alone own one), and before that he wasn't technical at all. He was trained as a Latin teacher (!) and spent his professional life in politics, never having to type anything by himself. My father-in-law is very good at many manual tasks including woodworking, electricity, electronics, and was an officer in the French army for many years, where he was responsible for maintaining highly technical weapons. He too is 85 and he can't seem to understand computers, although I have known him for 15 years and have been trying to help him for that long. He seems to want to learn but isn't really interested in what one would call "the big picture", he just wants to know a list of actions that will get them to where he wants to go. Of course that approach fails miserably whenever something happens that's not on the list. I have two friends who have been to top engineering schools who, I discovered recently, type whole urls not in the browsers' bar but in Google's search form. My eldest son is 11 and doesn't confuse the two. My younger son is 7 and doesn't seem much interested.
- roryisok 10y ago
  Typing URLs into the search bar of Google is very common. I see it all the time. If google is your default new tab page there's really nothing wrong with it. One extra click maybe.
  - bambax 10y ago
    You get a search result page instead of going directly to the site (that's how I noticed they were doing it).
    - ericd 10y ago
      It does have the nice feature of spell checking for you :-) It's a good bit safer to search for your bank site, for example, since there're large incentives for phishing sites to sit on common misspellings of bank domains.
stinos 10y ago
It's like a helpless excuse to be lazy and let someone else do the work In my experience more often then not the 'not even trying' has nothing to do with wanting someone else to do it, but rather with being scared to mess up exactly because they feel they are not knowledgeable. That's pretty instinctive I think (e.g. the first time I used a chainsaw I was also rather hesitant as I basically knew sh*t about it) but sometimes also driven by the abdunance of horror stories heard about 'losing all mail/photos/....' (which is, given the person's skills, usually actually very hard to do for them).
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Yeah i see people happily surf all kinds of sites, but once they need to deal with local files they lock up i fear of making an irrecoverable mistake. The benefit of youth is that one do not have prior memories of failure and punishment that thus allows one to mess up. One of the first things i did after getting a computer was to accidentally blank the hdd. But after a friend helped me reconstruct the environment i learned how to do same and more. And these days i am the ad-hoc support line for family and friends. I wonder if the whole GUI is not really helping here. Sure, it allows things like browsers to exist etc. But at the same time all the locations of files and such are mental rather than physical. back in the day, if i wanted to run a spreadsheet program i had to locate the floppy it was stored on. Now it is stored in one of the many sub-folders that blanket my 1TB+ sized hdd. A whole lot of problems with home computers seems to stem from them doing a number of things in the background without the user being aware. I can't help wonder what would come to be if one were to go back to the C64 or similar where if we wanted it do anything we had to start it ourselves. BTW, there is an old OSNews article[0] from someone teaching basic computer usage to older people. And he claims that he had a fair bit more success with the CLI than the GUI. This because not only was it clear when the computer was doing something (one could not input more commands) but it also gave a history of previous actions, and the ability to set aside tasks for later (with a warning about that on exit). I can't help wonder if the whole desktop metaphor and WIMP, while making things more "friendly" at first glance (vs that blinking prompt) in the end has just added a whole lot of conceptual thicket to cut through when trying to translate goals to actions. All in all i wonder what we would get if we had a cli with some gui niceties, like being able to add file names to a command by clicking them in the history of a recent ls/dir command. [0]http://www.osnews.com/story/6282/The_Command_Line_-_The_Best_Newbie_Interface_/ http://www.osnews.com/story/6282/The_Command_Line_-_The_Best...
kazinator 10y ago
On the other hand, I could redirect to a bright fifth grader most adults who have some computer/mobile/IT problem.
specialist 10y ago
Please (re)read Norman's Design of Everyday Things, for starters. TLDR: Blame the designer (of the tool), not the user. I taught 100s of people how to use CAD. Tough going. Technophile me thought "Of course it's better, easier, more powerful." Most of my student's blamed themselves. But I knew they were smart, knew what they wanted to accomplish, and just couldn't figure out how to do their jobs with CAD. You could say "square peg, round hole", or "like pushing rope". I preferred "CAD is an angry 800lb gorilla sitting between people and their work". Being kinda thick, I finally figured out the tools suck, not the people. Specifically with CAD, worse than the terrible UI, they had terrible mental models, completely divorced from how the users see their own work. In conclusion, blaming the user is not very humanist. I rage at computers all the time, and I supposedly know what I'm doing. I have deep empathy for anyone not chin-deep in this crap.
- mikeash 10y ago
  That's definitely the right approach most of the time. But sometimes people are just beyond any sort of help. When a literate, educated user cannot even read a message presented on the screen (and I don't mean understand or act upon the message, I merely mean read it), or when they don't understand that their electrically operated computer will not function until the building's electricity is turned back on, I think it's fair to blame the user. Sometimes people really do have the necessary knowledge and skills, they just refuse to apply them to computers. Certainly, many computer are too quick to blame the user when it's really a design problem, but it's not always wrong.
  - kbenson 10y ago
    I sometimes wonder if this is the result of people falling into one of two categories of how they learned to see the world, deeply or shallowly. I think of myself as looking at the world deeply. I'm often less interested in the immediate response to my action than I am as to why that was the response. I want to understand the cause of things. I've met plenty of people that don't care about this at all, they care that action X yields response Y, and (for the most part, barring specialties) go through life with that as their model of the world. Sometimes I envy these people, as their heuristic approach often yields better projections than I'm able to come up with in certain areas (such as how a person may respond to a complex situation). Unfortunately, I think the shallow mental model has problems when presented with large systems of behavior as a whole that are foreign. Similar to the average person when dropped into a foreign culture with a different language, someone with a shallow mental model of the world may find a computer, with it's decades of layered systems and skeuomorphic metaphors, if they are even attempting that in the specific instance, may be initially too daunting to attempt on their own. At least that's my pop-psychology theory of the day.
espeed 10y ago
it's the same shit. I constantly hear "yeah, I'm awful with computers, it's all black magic to me". But the person saying that is often not even trying, which is frustrating. It's the difference between a Growth Mindset and a Fixed Mindset: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/dweck http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/dweck "For twenty years, my research has shown that the view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life. It can determine whether you become the person you want to be and whether you accomplish the things you value" (https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/01/29/carol-dweck-mindset/ https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/01/29/carol-dweck-mindset...). Link to Fullsize Image: http://www.gridgit.com/postpic/2013/10/fixed-mindset-vs-growth-mindset_1261542.jpg http://www.gridgit.com/postpic/2013/10/fixed-mindset-vs-grow...
- 0xfeba 10y ago
  Very interesting. Thanks for the info. Now does everyone just tend toward fixed mindsets as they get old? Or is that just a popular misconception or some sort of selection bias?
  - headcanon 10y ago
    I think the incentives to having a growth mindset are diminished. Once people are comfortable with what they have in life - job, spouse, children, what benefit does learning, say, poetry, or programming, have to their daily life? I feel like at a certain point you have to feel like it enhances your life beyond allowing you to acquire the standard metrics of success that we adopt into our cultural consciousness.
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    I feel like I ought to offer this link: http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/08/no-clarity-around-growth-mindset-yet/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/08/no-clarity-around-growt... There are several more pieces in that series, on that site, if you care to look. The reality and strength of the Growth Mindset theory is fairly unclear, despite a lot of books pushing it as gospel. It's also unclear whether it's accurate even if it is effective - there's an open possibility that people who are basically delusional about their own potential practice harder than the realists, and a handful of them who had high starting potential get great results. So... age-related degeneration is real, neuroplasticity drops over time, but I wouldn't want to connect that to growth mindset because I'm not convinced that's even a real effect.
GFischer 10y ago
the person saying that is often not even trying, which is frustrating. It's like a helpless excuse to be lazy I suspect some of that might be due to Learned Helplessness. That is something that has to be worked on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness http://catlintucker.com/2016/01/learned-helplessness/ http://catlintucker.com/2016/01/learned-helplessness/
thirdsun 10y ago
I couldn't agree more with your last paragraph - I see this all the time. If these people approached other skills like driving a car or using a washing machine the same way they approach computers, they'd walk around in dirty clothes. As you mentioned it's easy to dismiss computer wizardry as black magic. This is the lazy approach in my opinion. This is simply a question of attitude towards problem solving.

crooked-v 10y ago

> But the person saying that is often not even trying, which is frustrating. This reminds me of all the anecdotes I've heard about people who immediately click through all alert boxes, to the point of being nigh-incapable of passing on an error message unless someone is standing over their shoulder forcing them to read it.

Noseshine 10y ago
Oh god my mother. What she needed to do was written in plain language right in front of her, and it was nothing technical but something simple like "you should fill out that text field". I had to install an antivirus software that would not nag her about installing the for-pay version, because no matter what I said, she would inevitably end up with the for-pay version and its useless features installed (but only the trial version, she's smart enough not to actually pay). My mother is pretty intelligent and far from senile, just around 65, it wasn't that long ago that she was a busy executive in a major corporation who had to manage not only people but also her Excel sheets and MS Office at the very least. I still remember many many years ago when she first got a computer with a mouse. She moved the mouse carefully between the tips of only two fingers, and taking her hand off of it between movements to stop and look...
- mjevans 10y ago
  It doesn't help that 'the Windows trick', for the UI that is, became popups. Popups after popups that were almost all useless things or worse annoying ads that got popped up on some page you were on. There is a LOT of noise to that signal. Contrasted to more traditional (teletype inspired) interfaces that only reported actual warnings (if asked for) and failures unless you were extremely specific.
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    This UI hostility also burns people who aren't experienced with hotkeys. An awful lot of malware-serving webpages pop up duplicate header bars as part of an image, in hopes of catching people who click on the wrong X (much like ads that consist of fake download links). That's a non-event for a an experienced user, who (if ad block didn't disable the page) probably resorts to the close-tab hotkey by sheer habit. But it's an appreciable threat to someone who's trying to rely on predictable screen UI for their browsing.
    - digi_owl 10y ago
      Weirdest thing i have seen was some ad delivered malware that would pop up a full screen image of an XP desktop, complete with some popup claiming to be some error or other. The whole thing was clickable and it fooled me the first time (i really should have picked up on the pointer being a hand rather than an arrow), never mind my less knowledgeable relatives.
      - Bartweiss 10y ago
        That's a new one on me, too. I'm not sure I would have caught it. One useful trick is right-clicking first, which shouldn't trigger the link and will be very different on an outbound link than a blank webpage or desktop. Of course, mobile is where I get the most trouble from this - I don't have any hotkeys, and real page-loading is so bouncy and unpredictable that it's particularly easy to get caught by a fake top bar. It's made even worse by things that scroll away the top bar as you move down page, and then bring back a fake one.
Qantourisc 10y ago
In deep pain, I have to regret I even know some IT people that don't read error messages. (I suspect partial problem is here the effort he has to read.)
- tremon 10y ago
  Not reading error popups is the norm around me, and I work in IT support. It has nothing to do with the message, but the medium: a message popup disrupt the user's workflow, and more often than not for no good reason. All people who work with computers very quickly get in the habit of dismissing flow-breaking popups. I'd say the problem is not with the people.
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    It's like the ER doctors who miss crucial "Patient is dying!" alarms. They're not just lazy or careless, they work in an environment where every device is screaming "I am here!" every minute of the day. It's both an important work skill and an unavoidable physiological response to tune out obnoxious and unimportant stimuli, to the point where the people abusing those signals ought to be accountable.
    - digi_owl 10y ago
      You had something similar that resulted in a mid-Atlantic plane crash some years ago. The crew got so blanketed by automated warnings, and didn't have any visual cues thanks to being a night flight, that they basically flew the plane into the ocean.
    - ckib16 10y ago
      This same topic is taught in flight training. Pilots are repeatedly taught to never "silence" the annoying warning horns that come on for different reasons (slow speed, wrong landing gear configuration). The idea being that mindlessly dismissing alarms will build a bad habit pattern. Especially when you're actually in trouble.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
Qantourisc 10y ago
In deep pain, I have to regret I even know some IT people that don't read error messages. (I suspect partial problem is here the effort he has to read.)

qwrusz 10y ago

I was just thinking about this recently while installing something with radio buttoned install options: Standard Install (Recommended) Custom Install (Advanced Users) Yet the custom/"advanced" option was just a couple checkboxes that let you exclude extra bloatware during installation. I wonder how many users upon seeing both options tell themselves they are not "advanced" computer users and just go with option 1 without even looking at option 2. Had they bothered to look many of them would have understood to uncheck the bloatware they know they don't want. If that was too much there was a Back button. But the wording "Advanced Users" scares many ppl away from even looking into that option and so they end up with some Yahoo! search toolbar forever after... Self-deprecating computer users is an issue. The extent some software companies are taking advantage it is another.

stackptr 10y ago
Seems to me that you're describing the exact sort of psychological tactic that software vendors favor to get people to install the bloatware in the first place.
- caseyohara 10y ago
  Sometimes called "Dark Patterns" http://darkpatterns.org http://darkpatterns.org
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    Perhaps one should really call them what they are, scams.
severine 10y ago
Hey, that's political!
Bartweiss 10y ago
I'm constantly annoyed by "Advanced user" installation options. They're occasionally accurate - I can think of a few programs where the "advanced" option demanded that I go and read a bunch of documentation - but mostly it's either laziness or malice. I don't think they've been a reasonable choice since storage was so limited that 'advanced' meant screwing around with DirectX directories and partial installs. In 90%+ of cases, basic/advanced could be better addressed with a handful of simple-English checkboxes for what to install. One is locked-active, for the core bundle. The others have one-line descriptions of what they do and possibly what other products make them redundant, maybe with a "more info" button. And since evil bloatware isn't going anywhere, we could at least set a norm that real menus give you options, and anyone trying to prevent you from engaging your brain is pushing crapware.

thesimpsons1022 10y ago

not just computers. whenever i visit home and my mom or sister want to watch netflix i have to be the one to plug in the hdmi cord for them from the ps4. i've showed them how to do it dozens of times but they somehow zone it out and would rather bother me and wait then figure it out.

beachstartup 10y ago
why should they learn, when you do it every time? sounds like a great bargain for them.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  Reminds me of my cats. One of them learned to open doors by jumping on the door handle. The other didn't, and when he needed some door open, he would wait for the first one to come and help.
digi_owl 10y ago
Then again, HDMI is laden with HDCP, and i seem to recall more than one story about how you had to turn on devices in just the right order to get something other than a black screen or error because HDCP tripped up. Digital signals are in theory a boon. but digital signals wrapped in DRM is a hot mess best avoided.
zentiggr 10y ago
You: "Seriously? It's about 5% more complicated than plugging in the vacuum cleaner. I'm in the middle of something. One last time and that's it." Voila!

agumonkey 10y ago

It's a very large and fuzzy topic. It depends on what computer system you run. Being able to use windows is not a skill, it's extremely unconceptual and ad-hoc, and mostly coll rote learning. I'm sure older systems, with less layers and cruft (think 70s box) taught you more, giving you simpler tools and more ways to solve problems on your own. Nowadays it's mostly fads. You're right about self deprecation. Society lifts computer usage as a value even if it's mostly absurd in reality (because I knew excel, people would look at me doing basic tasks saying they couldn't do it). It affects many people, it's very very hard to reverse. It's indeed very similar to math anxiety. Reminds me of childhood friends who dropped out of school in Junior High, couldn't do the "simplest ratio" but were doing them on the fly with custom units to sell weed, I couldn't follow them. It's all ceremony, sadly. ps: one last thing, I wonder how illiterate people would feel if given a system like NixOS or GuixSD with almost fully rollbackable system; meaning they can mess with it without negative emotions or almost no superstition.

AstralStorm 10y ago
Laziness and time efficiency trumps experimentation and curiosity. Now, if you exposed kids to those systems...
- agumonkey 10y ago
  Even in programming schools I and others felt that we should have old machines to program most of the time. It makes you think differently, or just more.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    Also, less distractions. With a full screen cli, all you see is what you are trying to do in this moment. With a WIMP interface you have the task bar and whatsnot that may at any time try to grab your attention away. Never mind all those background processes a modern OS runs, for various reasons.
    - agumonkey 10y ago

bambax 10y ago

I don't know about that. There seems to be something innate about one's ability to use computers. My father is 85 and is quite good with computers; he uses email constantly, writes documents and books using word processors and understands the concept of files, reads on a Kindle, etc. But he had never touched a computer before he was maybe 70 (let alone own one), and before that he wasn't technical at all. He was trained as a Latin teacher (!) and spent his professional life in politics, never having to type anything by himself. My father-in-law is very good at many manual tasks including woodworking, electricity, electronics, and was an officer in the French army for many years, where he was responsible for maintaining highly technical weapons. He too is 85 and he can't seem to understand computers, although I have known him for 15 years and have been trying to help him for that long. He seems to want to learn but isn't really interested in what one would call "the big picture", he just wants to know a list of actions that will get them to where he wants to go. Of course that approach fails miserably whenever something happens that's not on the list. I have two friends who have been to top engineering schools who, I discovered recently, type whole urls not in the browsers' bar but in Google's search form. My eldest son is 11 and doesn't confuse the two. My younger son is 7 and doesn't seem much interested.

roryisok 10y ago
Typing URLs into the search bar of Google is very common. I see it all the time. If google is your default new tab page there's really nothing wrong with it. One extra click maybe.
- bambax 10y ago
  You get a search result page instead of going directly to the site (that's how I noticed they were doing it).
  - ericd 10y ago
    It does have the nice feature of spell checking for you :-) It's a good bit safer to search for your bank site, for example, since there're large incentives for phishing sites to sit on common misspellings of bank domains.

stinos 10y ago

It's like a helpless excuse to be lazy and let someone else do the work In my experience more often then not the 'not even trying' has nothing to do with wanting someone else to do it, but rather with being scared to mess up exactly because they feel they are not knowledgeable. That's pretty instinctive I think (e.g. the first time I used a chainsaw I was also rather hesitant as I basically knew sh*t about it) but sometimes also driven by the abdunance of horror stories heard about 'losing all mail/photos/....' (which is, given the person's skills, usually actually very hard to do for them).

digi_owl 10y ago
Yeah i see people happily surf all kinds of sites, but once they need to deal with local files they lock up i fear of making an irrecoverable mistake. The benefit of youth is that one do not have prior memories of failure and punishment that thus allows one to mess up. One of the first things i did after getting a computer was to accidentally blank the hdd. But after a friend helped me reconstruct the environment i learned how to do same and more. And these days i am the ad-hoc support line for family and friends. I wonder if the whole GUI is not really helping here. Sure, it allows things like browsers to exist etc. But at the same time all the locations of files and such are mental rather than physical. back in the day, if i wanted to run a spreadsheet program i had to locate the floppy it was stored on. Now it is stored in one of the many sub-folders that blanket my 1TB+ sized hdd. A whole lot of problems with home computers seems to stem from them doing a number of things in the background without the user being aware. I can't help wonder what would come to be if one were to go back to the C64 or similar where if we wanted it do anything we had to start it ourselves. BTW, there is an old OSNews article[0] from someone teaching basic computer usage to older people. And he claims that he had a fair bit more success with the CLI than the GUI. This because not only was it clear when the computer was doing something (one could not input more commands) but it also gave a history of previous actions, and the ability to set aside tasks for later (with a warning about that on exit). I can't help wonder if the whole desktop metaphor and WIMP, while making things more "friendly" at first glance (vs that blinking prompt) in the end has just added a whole lot of conceptual thicket to cut through when trying to translate goals to actions. All in all i wonder what we would get if we had a cli with some gui niceties, like being able to add file names to a command by clicking them in the history of a recent ls/dir command. [0]http://www.osnews.com/story/6282/The_Command_Line_-_The_Best_Newbie_Interface_/ http://www.osnews.com/story/6282/The_Command_Line_-_The_Best...

kazinator 10y ago

On the other hand, I could redirect to a bright fifth grader most adults who have some computer/mobile/IT problem.

specialist 10y ago

Please (re)read Norman's Design of Everyday Things, for starters. TLDR: Blame the designer (of the tool), not the user. I taught 100s of people how to use CAD. Tough going. Technophile me thought "Of course it's better, easier, more powerful." Most of my student's blamed themselves. But I knew they were smart, knew what they wanted to accomplish, and just couldn't figure out how to do their jobs with CAD. You could say "square peg, round hole", or "like pushing rope". I preferred "CAD is an angry 800lb gorilla sitting between people and their work". Being kinda thick, I finally figured out the tools suck, not the people. Specifically with CAD, worse than the terrible UI, they had terrible mental models, completely divorced from how the users see their own work. In conclusion, blaming the user is not very humanist. I rage at computers all the time, and I supposedly know what I'm doing. I have deep empathy for anyone not chin-deep in this crap.

mikeash 10y ago
That's definitely the right approach most of the time. But sometimes people are just beyond any sort of help. When a literate, educated user cannot even read a message presented on the screen (and I don't mean understand or act upon the message, I merely mean read it), or when they don't understand that their electrically operated computer will not function until the building's electricity is turned back on, I think it's fair to blame the user. Sometimes people really do have the necessary knowledge and skills, they just refuse to apply them to computers. Certainly, many computer are too quick to blame the user when it's really a design problem, but it's not always wrong.
- kbenson 10y ago
  I sometimes wonder if this is the result of people falling into one of two categories of how they learned to see the world, deeply or shallowly. I think of myself as looking at the world deeply. I'm often less interested in the immediate response to my action than I am as to why that was the response. I want to understand the cause of things. I've met plenty of people that don't care about this at all, they care that action X yields response Y, and (for the most part, barring specialties) go through life with that as their model of the world. Sometimes I envy these people, as their heuristic approach often yields better projections than I'm able to come up with in certain areas (such as how a person may respond to a complex situation). Unfortunately, I think the shallow mental model has problems when presented with large systems of behavior as a whole that are foreign. Similar to the average person when dropped into a foreign culture with a different language, someone with a shallow mental model of the world may find a computer, with it's decades of layered systems and skeuomorphic metaphors, if they are even attempting that in the specific instance, may be initially too daunting to attempt on their own. At least that's my pop-psychology theory of the day.

espeed 10y ago

it's the same shit. I constantly hear "yeah, I'm awful with computers, it's all black magic to me". But the person saying that is often not even trying, which is frustrating. It's the difference between a Growth Mindset and a Fixed Mindset: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/dweck http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/dweck "For twenty years, my research has shown that the view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life. It can determine whether you become the person you want to be and whether you accomplish the things you value" (https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/01/29/carol-dweck-mindset/ https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/01/29/carol-dweck-mindset...). Link to Fullsize Image: http://www.gridgit.com/postpic/2013/10/fixed-mindset-vs-growth-mindset_1261542.jpg http://www.gridgit.com/postpic/2013/10/fixed-mindset-vs-grow...

0xfeba 10y ago
Very interesting. Thanks for the info. Now does everyone just tend toward fixed mindsets as they get old? Or is that just a popular misconception or some sort of selection bias?
- headcanon 10y ago
  I think the incentives to having a growth mindset are diminished. Once people are comfortable with what they have in life - job, spouse, children, what benefit does learning, say, poetry, or programming, have to their daily life? I feel like at a certain point you have to feel like it enhances your life beyond allowing you to acquire the standard metrics of success that we adopt into our cultural consciousness.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  I feel like I ought to offer this link: http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/08/no-clarity-around-growth-mindset-yet/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/08/no-clarity-around-growt... There are several more pieces in that series, on that site, if you care to look. The reality and strength of the Growth Mindset theory is fairly unclear, despite a lot of books pushing it as gospel. It's also unclear whether it's accurate even if it is effective - there's an open possibility that people who are basically delusional about their own potential practice harder than the realists, and a handful of them who had high starting potential get great results. So... age-related degeneration is real, neuroplasticity drops over time, but I wouldn't want to connect that to growth mindset because I'm not convinced that's even a real effect.

GFischer 10y ago

the person saying that is often not even trying, which is frustrating. It's like a helpless excuse to be lazy I suspect some of that might be due to Learned Helplessness. That is something that has to be worked on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness http://catlintucker.com/2016/01/learned-helplessness/ http://catlintucker.com/2016/01/learned-helplessness/

thirdsun 10y ago

I couldn't agree more with your last paragraph - I see this all the time. If these people approached other skills like driving a car or using a washing machine the same way they approach computers, they'd walk around in dirty clothes. As you mentioned it's easy to dismiss computer wizardry as black magic. This is the lazy approach in my opinion. This is simply a question of attitude towards problem solving.