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> Also don't underestimate learned helplessness. Learned helplessness is so real. My partner works at a help desk, and I constantly hear stories of older folks

by kortex 5y ago

> Also don't underestimate learned helplessness. Learned helplessness is so real. My partner works at a help desk, and I constantly hear stories of older folks just mentally shutting down as soon as she has them open the start menu or a settings menu. I even see it in myself, a super curious neophile software/hardware hacker. Sometimes I'll come across some particularly arcane API docs and it's like my brain just goes "tl;dr" to the whole thing and tries to immediately find a way to avoid interfacing with it. That mental switch of "ah this is overwhelming, eyes glaze over" is all too easy to trip, even if you push through it and it really is not that bad after the fact.

bonoboTP 5y ago
It's also an ego-threatening thing. Often the older folks or otherwise nontechnical people are socially higher status and being lectured about something that they may not understand sounds dangerous to them or they take it as being challenged by them, especially if the person explaining it is lower social status, younger, "just a kid" etc. It's easier for them to just refuse to participate and dismiss the topic as irrelevant, than to take up the game and then perhaps be seen as "dumb". And this state of affairs is actually quite unnatural. The natural course of things over the millennia was that older people are more experienced and can give direction and advice to the young ones. Sure, this is still true in some "soft" topics, but the generational gap in understanding how the modern world works has never been so large.
- loopz 5y ago
  When someone has lived 70+ years and done fine for most of those years. What is the use for them to learn what an "icon" on the "desktop" is, and why should they care about "browsers"? This very much feels like justification for victim blaming.
  - LorenPechtel 5y ago
    Because the world changes. You don't change, you get left behind, sometimes in very important ways. (For example, my wife's licensing board now sends the renewal stuff only by e-mail, not snail mail. There are a few old-school people who have to get someone else to get the form for them.)
    - loopz 5y ago
      So progress is an excuse to be unempathetic towards people who may not had your introductions to technology?

by kortex 5y ago

bonoboTP 5y ago

It's also an ego-threatening thing. Often the older folks or otherwise nontechnical people are socially higher status and being lectured about something that they may not understand sounds dangerous to them or they take it as being challenged by them, especially if the person explaining it is lower social status, younger, "just a kid" etc. It's easier for them to just refuse to participate and dismiss the topic as irrelevant, than to take up the game and then perhaps be seen as "dumb". And this state of affairs is actually quite unnatural. The natural course of things over the millennia was that older people are more experienced and can give direction and advice to the young ones. Sure, this is still true in some "soft" topics, but the generational gap in understanding how the modern world works has never been so large.

loopz 5y ago
When someone has lived 70+ years and done fine for most of those years. What is the use for them to learn what an "icon" on the "desktop" is, and why should they care about "browsers"? This very much feels like justification for victim blaming.
- LorenPechtel 5y ago
  Because the world changes. You don't change, you get left behind, sometimes in very important ways. (For example, my wife's licensing board now sends the renewal stuff only by e-mail, not snail mail. There are a few old-school people who have to get someone else to get the form for them.)
  - loopz 5y ago
    So progress is an excuse to be unempathetic towards people who may not had your introductions to technology?