Not understanding how things work can result in very suboptimal decisions, and throttle control is a good example. Even in a good old ICE car the throttle is n

Not understanding how things work can result in very suboptimal decisions, and throttle control is a good example. Even in a good old ICE car the throttle is not as straightforward as “more ‘gas’ equals more acceleration” (depending on many factors, such as road surface conditions, it can also make you go slower or stop completely). An airplane would take it to a whole new level. What throttle does is dependent on fuel mixture, air density at your altitude, the configuration of controls—in fact, it’s probably much easier to enumerate the limited scenarios in which throttle actually makes you go faster as opposed to straight up crash. There can be made an argument that smart systems could/should, with their layers of abstraction, maintain an illusion of ‘gas’ = acceleration, and that human should not have to know anything else; but would you trust your life to such an arrangement? There can be an argument that stakes are high in case of air travel, and low in case of VCS; but that falls apart if you consider source code managed in a VCS can indeed power a life-critical system, and if not knowing well enough how the VCS works can lead to development overhead and eventually bugs in that system, then human cost is real.