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I think Charlie makes a good observation: > I've been saying for years that most people relate to computers and information technology as if they're magic, and

I think Charlie makes a good observation: > I've been saying for years that most people relate to computers and information technology as if they're magic, and to get the machine to accomplish a task they have to perform the specific ritual they've memorized with no understanding. It's an act of invocation, in other words. UI designers have helpfully added to the magic by, for example, adding stuff like bluetooth proximity pairing, so that two magical amulets may become mystically entangled and thereafter work together via the magical law of contagion. It's all distressingly bronze age, but we haven't come anywhere close to scraping the bottom of the barrel yet. Is this something that we, the developers and designers and UX specialists, should seek to change?

smoldesu 6y ago
> Is this something that we, the developers and designers and UX specialists, should seek to change? Well, it's something we already have changed. The earliest models of computing were based around manipulating data with different tools that had express purposes. We eventually implemented abstraction over those tools, though, and the real question is how far we want to take that abstraction. As the author suggests, most users treat software like a black box that can either work or fail. The more variables we introduce to the situation, the more likely it is for the end user to screw things up. Somewhere along the line an engineer somewhere said "fuck it", and we decided to abstract the data away from the user to limit their liability. Our penance for that decision is the "magic" conjecture most people come to when they see Bluetooth or ML in action: the user is no longer drunk or high, they're outright dead. Most people (and programs) can't differentiate between a client-side and a server-side error, so how should they be able to tell the difference between a bad question and a bad answer? In direct response to your question, my answer is "I don't know". My greatest hope is that one day our data will be interoperable through a number of user shells that offer a toolkit to the user rather than a toybox. It's very wishful thinking, but I don't know how we're going to progress the status quo of personal computing without that flexibility. The state of social media these days is almost universally considered miserable (see: doomscrolling), so something's gotta give. It's not going to be paid "super follows", and it's not going to be another short-form video sharing app. The next step in empowering the user is giving them the tools to rise up against developers, so I suppose the answer to "should we fix this" is rather personal.
carapace 6y ago
> With speech interfaces and internet of things gadgets, we're moving closer to building ourselves a demon-haunted world. I call it the daemon-haunted world. (The reference is to Sagan's book "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark".) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(computing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(computing)
yourapostasy 6y ago
> Is this something that we, the developers and designers and UX specialists, should seek to change? We must do our part. We can't do it alone, though. I'm already seeing a distressingly high number of IT people fall prey to invocation practicing. Much of it is due to time pressure from management, but even absent that stressor, I'm quite concerned that there is nil curiosity in peeling back the abstractions, and find the wizard behind the curtains. I'm no Fabrice Bellard by any stretch of the imagination. To compensate, I'm willing to rapidly point out my current limits of understanding when working with others, and to seek how to push it further back. I'm confident given sufficient time, information, and practice, I can master a lot more cognitive subject matter material. Definitely not most much less all available (sometimes raw intellectual firepower is required to even access some material, and most days I'm lucky if I crack one standard deviation above average), but enough to keep a lifetime of the joy of learning busy. I used to be absolutely surrounded IRL by like-minded people in the early days of the personal computer. These days, I've yet to run into that crowd at any gathering IRL (certain online communities tend to sort of scratch that itch for me), and I'd really like to find my people again. To the heart of the question however, we must because otherwise we'll forever be limited by the complexity of what we can model and solve with software. And we'll need a lot, lot more complexity management to solve the really interesting problem spaces still hanging out there.
- prewett 6y ago
  > ... fall prey to invocation practicing I am unashamedly that way with git. I don't want to learn the mental model of git, I want to accomplish some task with my files so I can go back to coding. I consult the Oracle at Google, and make the suggested incantation. The fact that there are, if I recall correctly, four different incantations for deleting a file, I consider justification for not spending more time with it than I need. Actually, I've appointed a GUI wizard to do most of the incantations for more. Just once I figured out the solution on my own. I felt like a genius. An artificial genius, because source code control shouldn't require geniosity. In general I happen to like computers, so usually I'm usually willing to learn, but as I get older, I find I don't enjoy the prospect of 1) sit down to a task, 0) discover I have to learn something to do it, -1) read up on it, play around, 0) practice, 1) finally start my task.

smoldesu 6y ago

> Is this something that we, the developers and designers and UX specialists, should seek to change? Well, it's something we already have changed. The earliest models of computing were based around manipulating data with different tools that had express purposes. We eventually implemented abstraction over those tools, though, and the real question is how far we want to take that abstraction. As the author suggests, most users treat software like a black box that can either work or fail. The more variables we introduce to the situation, the more likely it is for the end user to screw things up. Somewhere along the line an engineer somewhere said "fuck it", and we decided to abstract the data away from the user to limit their liability. Our penance for that decision is the "magic" conjecture most people come to when they see Bluetooth or ML in action: the user is no longer drunk or high, they're outright dead. Most people (and programs) can't differentiate between a client-side and a server-side error, so how should they be able to tell the difference between a bad question and a bad answer? In direct response to your question, my answer is "I don't know". My greatest hope is that one day our data will be interoperable through a number of user shells that offer a toolkit to the user rather than a toybox. It's very wishful thinking, but I don't know how we're going to progress the status quo of personal computing without that flexibility. The state of social media these days is almost universally considered miserable (see: doomscrolling), so something's gotta give. It's not going to be paid "super follows", and it's not going to be another short-form video sharing app. The next step in empowering the user is giving them the tools to rise up against developers, so I suppose the answer to "should we fix this" is rather personal.

carapace 6y ago

> With speech interfaces and internet of things gadgets, we're moving closer to building ourselves a demon-haunted world. I call it the daemon-haunted world. (The reference is to Sagan's book "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark".) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(computing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(computing)

yourapostasy 6y ago

> Is this something that we, the developers and designers and UX specialists, should seek to change? We must do our part. We can't do it alone, though. I'm already seeing a distressingly high number of IT people fall prey to invocation practicing. Much of it is due to time pressure from management, but even absent that stressor, I'm quite concerned that there is nil curiosity in peeling back the abstractions, and find the wizard behind the curtains. I'm no Fabrice Bellard by any stretch of the imagination. To compensate, I'm willing to rapidly point out my current limits of understanding when working with others, and to seek how to push it further back. I'm confident given sufficient time, information, and practice, I can master a lot more cognitive subject matter material. Definitely not most much less all available (sometimes raw intellectual firepower is required to even access some material, and most days I'm lucky if I crack one standard deviation above average), but enough to keep a lifetime of the joy of learning busy. I used to be absolutely surrounded IRL by like-minded people in the early days of the personal computer. These days, I've yet to run into that crowd at any gathering IRL (certain online communities tend to sort of scratch that itch for me), and I'd really like to find my people again. To the heart of the question however, we must because otherwise we'll forever be limited by the complexity of what we can model and solve with software. And we'll need a lot, lot more complexity management to solve the really interesting problem spaces still hanging out there.

prewett 6y ago
> ... fall prey to invocation practicing I am unashamedly that way with git. I don't want to learn the mental model of git, I want to accomplish some task with my files so I can go back to coding. I consult the Oracle at Google, and make the suggested incantation. The fact that there are, if I recall correctly, four different incantations for deleting a file, I consider justification for not spending more time with it than I need. Actually, I've appointed a GUI wizard to do most of the incantations for more. Just once I figured out the solution on my own. I felt like a genius. An artificial genius, because source code control shouldn't require geniosity. In general I happen to like computers, so usually I'm usually willing to learn, but as I get older, I find I don't enjoy the prospect of 1) sit down to a task, 0) discover I have to learn something to do it, -1) read up on it, play around, 0) practice, 1) finally start my task.