People are not really stupid, it is just that you know a lot more. Don’t let knowledge blind you.
The points made in this piece are very good ones but it is not primarily an issue of intelligence - rather, it is mostly about one's point of reference.
Early in my legal career, I worked at a firm that represented a group of Nob Hill condo owners who had had a series of problems with contractors and who had suffered a variety of damages relating to roof leaks, etc. This might sound mundane but these "condos" were (even in that day back in the early 1980s) worth well into 7 figures and the problems had been persistent and severe. Yet, when it came time to settle the case, we had to prepare a set of instructions explaining the settlement documents and where they needed to be signed. We were dealing with perhaps 30 people and they were all ultra-sophisticated types (former board of supervisors members in SF, top-flight lawyers, very wealthy business owners, etc.) and nearly every one of them messed up the execution of the documents in one way or another. When this happened to me, I learned one very important lesson: maybe I had been so immersed in this process that the detailed explanations made perfect sense to me, logically and otherwise, and even appeared to be simple, but, for those who have busy lives and who don't want to have to analyze in detail a set of potentially intricate legal instructions, such instructions were not simple at all. Why? Not because of lack of intelligence (these were very smart and successful people). Rather, because they were not familiar with the legal mumbo-jumbo and they didn't want to bother to go down the rabbit-hole of trying to figure them out. In effect, they simply wanted a "just tell me where to sign" sort of instruction (which suggested the obvious answer as well, because the matter did need explanations for them to be able to sign in an informed way - that answer was to just set up an in-person meeting with them as a group, give the explanations, and then have them sign).
This same principle operated with the big name partners in this large firm (some of the best lawyers in the nation), who couldn't be bothered with computers because "typing is secretary's work" (this was around 1980). These were exceedingly smart people but it did not fit their point of reference to bother themselves with trying to learn about some newfangled technology that seemed like a lot of bother to learn when their life-long habits had taught them that there is no advantage to investing time in that process.
Of course, with engineering design, one needs to anticipate what a very broad range of potential users might do with an interface that is developed by software engineers who may or may not share the point of reference of a great many such users. Concerning such issues, it is not "dumb" for an older generation to eschew text messages when they are used simply to picking up the phone to talk something over and, when they are forced to actually do a text message, to become frustrated with having to learn something that is not intuitive to them and that may lie well outside of their point of reference. Nor is this an issue merely of age and habits. Non-engineers have nowhere near the breadth of knowledge about such items as engineers do (the main point of this piece) and there are legendary examples of the boneheaded instructions that have sometimes been given because of the blind spot that this can create ("how do I sign on with my ISP when I have never had access to the Internet before [this was in the early 1990s]? simple, just log on to the web at xxxxx and follow the instructions").
Moreover, this issue can be generalized as well. If I have specialized knowledge about a given area (such as law), things that seem obvious and even intuitive to me may very easily not be at all comprehensible to one who does not share that point of reference. I realized this fundamental truth early on in my career in dealing with clients: that is, that learning to communicate effectively and simply about a complex subject matter is an art form.
There is no mechanical answer to it except that one must put oneself as best as one can in the place of the recipient of that knowledge and try to anticipate what the person does not know about the assumptions you will be making in giving the explanation.
None of this means that you are of superior intelligence to those with whom you seek to communicate. It only means that you have a specialized expertise that they lack and you have a tall order before you in being able to guide them by the hand, as it were, to make your explanation or instructions (or interface design) understandable. This is not at all easy to do. Indeed, it is one of the toughest challenges extant in the design world, and that is precisely why superb and elegant interface design (among other things) is so hard to come by.
I would therefore amend the main point of this fine article to say, "People are not really stupid, it is just that you know a lot more [about your area of expertise]. Don’t let knowledge blind you."
"The points made in this piece are very good ones but it is not primarily an issue of intelligence - rather, it is mostly about one's point of reference."
I don't disagree, but is that not the same sentiment of the article and the closing sentence? "People are not really stupid" suggests it's not an issue of intelligence, and I think "it is just that you know a lot more" argues your point of reference. I absolutely agree with your correction, but I assumed it was implicit.
It seems, that when you slow down learning (especially outside your area of expertise and with age), you become more relatively stupid, because the world around you learn faster.
The points made in this piece are very good ones but it is not primarily an issue of intelligence - rather, it is mostly about one's point of reference.
Exactly. More simply put: people aren't stupid; they just don't think the way you do. Deal with it.
A good friend of mine recently commented that I always brought up role models that he had no idea who were, and I quoted as known and famous. The people in question were names such as Niels Bohr, Steve Jobs, Larry and Sergey, Richard Dawkins and Einstein.
My first thought was to dismiss him as not very knowledgeable, but then I thought to ask him who he thought were good famous role models. He rambled off a number of names that I'd never heard before, primarily from motoring and sports. A quick google search showed me that these people were just as known as my role models.
It's not so much about being dumb, it's more about simply having different interests and perspectives on life. This is a good thing.
I would be a bit worried by anyone who has not heard of Einstein.
But you make a great point, and I think the article missed it. It is not that we know more, we know more about our particular areas of expertise, just as others know more about their areas of expertise. My Dad knows a lot more about airplanes than I do, because he worked on them for a number of years.
Does Einstein really hold an important relevance to 'everyman USA'? To nearly every citizen - and, I would argue, even with those a basic (HS) level of physics - he's not so different than Heisenberg, Bohr, Bethe, Shrodinger, etc. Sure, they made great advances for the world of physics, but how relevant is that to an individual who does not interact with that theory at all? More specifically, relevant enough to cause worry?
Now, I note that you could argue the Manhattan product is a reason for Einstein's relevance, but was he really significantly more relevant in that than any other of the scientists?
People know politicians because they affect taxes, healthcare, laws, etc. They know sports stars because it's a subject they enjoy following - featuring impressive feats of human ability. And they probably know a few individuals closer to their field of work.
Is Einstein really an example of something that 'everyman' should know about, or could your argument partially be a confirmation of the article's argument?
It's not about whether Einstein should be known or not. The point is that he is an icon, one that the vast majority of people do know about. Not knowing about Einstein means you're really uninformed.
No, Really Uninformed is a whole nother level of ignorance. When pictures of Jupiter from Pioneer 10 were on the front page <\dated myself>, a graduate student in my Engineering school asked me "Jupiter is a planet, right"? Astonished, I answered politely "Yes, its the 5th planet". Then, and this is the good part, she asked "So, is Earth a planet?"
There is something called "general culture". Not knowing that Einstein is a physicist, that Jupiter and the Earth are planets, that Christopher Columbus landed the Americas in 1492, is lacking general culture, i. e. being dumb. When you're so specialized you can't be bothered to know the bare "common sense" stuff, you can't even be a responsible citizen.
Knowing that Jupiter is the 5th planet from the sun is practical knowledge for how many people?
edit: (HN wont let me reply again)
I understood your point. I think in the context of the article the only irony is you think the technical fact that astronomers label Earth as a "planet" is necessary knowledge for every field of engineering or anyone with an advanced education.
Yes, I learned about the solar system in elementary school too but I wouldn't judge someone who didn't. It's not much more useful than trivia to most people.
Discussion around another recent article on HN comparing C programming to a carpenter using a hammer demonstrated that even people with computer science degrees and years of experience writing software might no nothing about HTML or SQL.
> This highly educated Engineering graduate student
> didn't know that they lived on a planet. Its ironic.
And assuming you're reasonably well educated, and reasonably well informed, and reasonably intelligent, you didn't know, or care, that "its" as you've used it should've had an apostrophe. When you write "Its ironic" the "Its" is an abbreviation of "It is".
There are things that just don't matter in people's lives. For many, increasingly, traditionally "correct" usage of the apostrophe is one of them. For others, it is irrelevant that the word "planet" has a technical definition, that Jupiter and the Earth are examples, and Pluto no longer is.
Most people don't know that a sizeable proportion of the mass in wood comes from the air, or that the Earth goes round the Sun (in the simplest model of the Solar System) or that Google is not a web browser. These are things removed from people's concerns, irrelevant to them.
Before a few years ago I didn't know that Bach pre-dated Beethoven, even though I listened to their music all the time. Why should I care? No doubt I'd be laughed at by the self-declared "cultural" people, and then I'll ask them to quote the second law of thermodynamics.
Ok, I am a holdout on the "its vs it's" issue. One is not superior to the other; they are a compromise due to 'battling syntax rules', posessive vs contraction. Following convention would be useful for the reader, yes, but I bet you weren't confused by my text.
And not knowing you live on a planet is not a "technical definition" problem - its a fundamental ignorance. I didn't go into it, but I'm thinking another sentence from me may have sorted out the flat-vs-round issue in their mind as well.
I'm afraid I disagree with much of what you've just said:
> I bet you weren't confused by my text.
Actually, I was. It took a number of tries (where the number in question is strictly greater than one) to work out what you meant, and finally I had to read it aloud. I was trying to work out who or what it was that owned the "ironic", and what the ironic was that was owned.
I've just read that capitalization matters, because there's a bug difference between helping Uncle Jack off a horse, and helping Uncle jack off a horse.
> not knowing you live on a planet is ...
> a fundamental ignorance.
I disagree with what I think you're trying to say. For that person it's irrelevant knowledge. Consider - do you know the atomic number of strontium, or the proof of the Banach-Tarski theorem? Not knowing such things is also fundamental ignorance, but you don't care about that because you don't think it's important or relevant. Why should someone else be forced to know that the Earth is a planet, or that the Sun travels around the galaxy at about a million miles a day? Why should they know that as you travel 8km the Earth drops away by 5 meters, or that the distance to the Moon is about 284 megameters? Why should they know that light travels about 1ft/ns, or that sound travels about 1ft/ms? These are things that I consider people ignorant for not knowing, but I accept that they don't need to know them.
I also accept that others will think I'm ignorant. I'll get laughed at for not knowing the characters in a Shakespeare play, or for not know who the latest contestants are in X-Factor, or America's Top Model, or Dancing With the Stars.
I'll help people learn, and I'll explain why I think it's important, but I won't laugh at their lack of knowledge. I'll appreciate that they know things I don't, and while I might not care about those things, I won't condemn them for doing so.
And finally, there are perfectly usable physical models in which the Earth is flat. To say otherwise is to display ignorance of the context in which they are useful, more useful than the more complex spherical model, which in turn is less accurate than the oblate spheroidal model, which in turn is not as accurate as the one I use in other parts of my work.
I'm veering slightly off topic here but something in this post fascinated me...
Are you sincere in your claim that you were genuinely confused because of the its vs it's mix up in the original post? I had always assumed people pointing it out were doing so just to be pedantic or to make the person who made the mistake look foolish, it never occurred to me that genuine confusion could result.
I'm honestly curious, not trying to anything subversive here. I always read the word "loose" correctly, even when by context it is clear that the author meant "lose" and end up having to pause or re-read the section, so I can certainly understand the experience, it had just never occurred to me that its or it's would really cause confusion.
For what it's worth, very personal point of view ...
I'm serious and sincere. I learned to read very young, and I don't (as a rule) vocalize. Net result is that ungrammatical constructions or phonetic spellings slow me way down and cause serious cognitive dissonance. Likewise the latest idiomatic mutation - "I could care less" - makes absolutely no sense, and forces me explicitly to guess what the author may have meant. Then I need to carry forward the possibility that my guess is wrong and I'll have to backtrack. Sort of a Garden Path sentence on steroids.
Your code will be read and modified far more often than theone time it was written, and hence you should take time to make it clear. Similarly anything you write will (most likely) be read far more often than the one time it was written. It is simple politeness to take time to make sure it's as correct as you can sensibly make it.
Yes, there are people who struggle, either because English is not their first language (although many of them put native speakers to shame) or because they are dyslexic, or whatever, but remember that the comparatively small amount of time it takes to get it right is paid back many-fold in the readers' time by not having to backtrack, second guess, or even, worse still, give up and ignore you completely.
Einstein is basically consider to be the stereotypical genius in pop-culture; it's not so much the details of his work that's important to the weirdness here, but that he is widely known for having been brilliant. (Consider common phrases like, "I'm no Einstein, but ...") The fact that he is unfamiliar with Einstein is like being unfamiliar with King Tut or Mozart or George Washington; at least in the US, you'd expect most people to recognize the names, even if they might not remember all the precise details about them.
The underlying issue is that people are afraid to try and explore. They form a mental model of how to do something, look for something that fits into that model, and then are happy. If they guess the wrong model, though, then they are stuck forever.
Skilled computer users, on the other hand, don't let a failing model bother them. They just try something else.
Most people will do this for anything but computers, though, which is weird. If their favorite road to the CHEZBURGER store is closed, they will find another road. But if it happens online... panic, frozen.
People basically need to be taught that you can't break computers. Programmers need to provide better undo functionality, so that this is not a lie.
I once tried, unsuccessfully, to dissuade someone from putting a floppy disk in a CD-ROM drive and shoving it closed with enough force to permanently break the plastic. This person then blamed me.
The lesson? I need to learn to write some people off as jackasses not worth dealing with. (My grandmother, on the other hand, is pretty cool. If she needs cables plugged in, I'll happily help.)
My grandma declared a few years ago that she would have nothing to do with computers, as she did not want to get sick from those widely rampent computer viruses!
Yes, and it doesn't help that some nitwit put the ethernet port right next to the USB ports on the standard ATX layout. DURR. Probably the same guy who made USB symmetrical, thus forcing me to spend what must be a day or two of my total lifespan trying to jam the things in upside-down.
Exactly. I think the fundamental disconnect is between people who see an unfamiliar user interface and immediately try to figure it out, and people who see an unfamiliar UI and think "Oh no what the hell is this, I don't remember it! Panic, panic, panic!". Obviously it's not as sharp a dichotomy as that, but it definitely exists.
A lot of people learn to use computers by memorizing a sequence of steps which, if followed exactly, will produce the right result. To send an email, first double-click on the "internet", then click "bookmarks", then "send an email", then press "compose", then type the email address of the recipient into the field, and so on. This is a very brittle kind of knowledge, and if the computer goes off-script, people who've been trained to interact with computers this way tend to just fail, hard.
I'm not sure what the answer to this is, because for most of these people, learning how to figure things out on a computer would be a lot of work for not much immediate gain.
Maybe the problem will go away on its own. How many younger people read the manual for their cell phones, or a video game? And yet they figure it out anyway, by exploring.
> Maybe the problem will go away on its own. How many younger people read the manual for their cell phones, or a video game? And yet they figure it out anyway, by exploring.
I agree, this seems to be a problem I notice far more intrinsic to older generations.
I'm going to give another anecdote (I'm full of them today, see my other post in this subject): I once worked a very interesting job where we staffed people who traveled with an extremely sophisticated technology package into a workspace, and literally "embedded" as a super-user of the package, who acted as the user-lead for the package, and got the rest of the users up to speed by solving real world problems. There were literally dozens of components, pieces of software, data sources, etc. The data flow graph of the system covered a wall when printed out on a plotter.
Between cycles acting as a super user, we'd rotate on a cycle of training new hires (about an 8 week training cycle) to do this job. Intrinsically it was a problem solving job. You'd go to a site with the package, and when the users had problems, you'd craft a solution. Over time, you'd more or less build a work book of solutions to most of the common issues that particular user team would see.
From time to time we'd end up with an "older" person filling that position and going through training. I ended up on a couple of the training rotations with these folks, all great guys, but simply unable to put together a solution to very simple problems. To the person, every one of them asked us to build out a procedure manual covering all these various problem solving exercises.
Let me repeat that, they wanted to field novel problem solving questions by looking them up in a procedure manual for the appropriate solution. We're talking about a system with dozens of components, each of which with an operating manual the size of a phone book, and an 8 week training course covering thousands of slides, dozens of exercises, review, scoring, scenarios, private discussion etc. If a procedure manual could have existed for every conceivable problem scenario, it would have been tens upon tens of thousands of pages.
They simply couldn't fathom not having a procedure manual. And to the man, they left shortly after ending up in their field assignments because they "couldn't solve any problems and didn't have a procedure manual". Other than being a terrible waste of everybody's time, it was a repeatable pattern time and time again. Whenever we hired somebody over about 50, they always seemed to fall back in the need for procedures.
And as you've said, that's a terribly brittle kind of knowledge.
people who see an unfamiliar UI and think "Oh no what the hell is this, I don't remember it! Panic, panic, panic!"
Or sometimes people see an unfamiliar UI, think "ugh---yet another drain on my time to figure this out", consider the value of what they are trying to do, and may decide it's not worth it. This is why I largely stopped using MS Office when the "ribbon" debuted. It seemed to me to be an arbitrary change to something that had been long familiar, and I decided "I really don't need Office anyway" and stopped using it.
Most people will do this for anything but computers, though, which is weird.
I'm not so sure about that. A majority of people (no data, sorry) confronted by danger or an accident will panic or freeze. People can have extensive familiarity with physical tools but be blind or even reject nonstandard configurations or uses when first proposed.
There are complex problems I can solve in my head and simple ones that make me go stupid; my wife is way faster at abstracting information from a 2d layout like a videogame or a map, I'm much better with 3d or data with multiple overlapping layers. So she kills me at Tetris, Scrabble and reading transit maps, whereas for me Space Giraffe, wire puzzles and tree scheduling come easy. She likes LISPs, I like assembler, and so on.
Your analogy confuses me. It seems that Lisp, and it's tree structure, would fit better with "multiple overlapping layers", and assembly would fit better with "2d layout", since it is so important to visualize the memory model, like a map in your head.
Oh, it wasn't an analogy - the only programming she liked in college was functional languages, and I enjoy assembler - don't program a lot anymore and not so fast at it, but find it more satisfying in a low level context.
I don't get it either. The only reason I can think of is maybe it's more interesting because it's less natural? She claims not to like geometry much either, which just baffles me.
I think the reason for this is that computers are too easy to stuff up. You see this when you go to fix someones computer, and you have no idea how they got it into that state. They can not describe how they did it.
This is why so many people love the iPad, you can not screw it up (at least, it is a lot harder).
There are also too many inconsistent UI representations for common operations. Do you ever see the "up" and "down" call buttons for an elevator placed side-by-side? Or vertically, but with "up" below "down"? Yet often times it seems that UI designers do stuff like this, maybe for no other reason than to try to put a unique stamp on their designs.
I actually recently had a talk with my parents about just that; how, unlike years ago, computers have gotten better to the point where nothing they can do will 'break' them, so they should feel free to click around and try to figure out what they might be looking for. Software tools like CrossLoop have also made my life a hell of a lot easier in maintaining this promise, since anytime anything goes wrong I just tell them to click on the loop icon on the dock and I can usually solve whatever problem they have in ~5min or less.
I do think that the blue screen of death and similar things of the past have created this idea of the possibility of catastrophic failure on a computer and it is important to make the users feel more confident that their actions will not cause any irreparable damage.
I think that's one of the best things about the iPad that goes relatively unheralded. It's most of a computer, but nearly impossible for a user to accidentally get into an unusable state.
I bought my Dad (74) one this year, as his first "computer", and the first thing I told him was not to worry because he couldn't break it by doing the wrong thing. Now he's sending email and playing Words with Friends. It's been transformative for him, and I believe his acclimation has been made possible mostly by the software's resilience to mistakes.
> It's most of a computer, but nearly impossible for a user to accidentally get into an unusable state.
Thank you for this. It seems so obvious now, but this wonderfully captures something about the iDevices I couldn't quite put my thumb on...I think I need to go and do some deep meditating on this.
I've thought about this "you can't break computers" phrase for a while. I suspect, though, that when people say that they're afraid of "breaking" a computer, what they mean is that they'll get the system to a state they don't know how to get out of.
The issue here is not so much that people need to be taught they can't break computers, but what the map of states is. On the other hand, if they don't even want to learn that... well, then I'm not sure what the (software-side) answer is.
You can't break the computers as such but if you work with enterprise software you sure can run the wrong process at the wrong time, or with the wrong options and make a mess in the database. Sometimes that commits IT people to spending hours or days cleaning up. Lots of people still spend all day on these old school systems.
Because lots of apps are linked up (emails can be filed so Document management, which integrates with CMS....) users don't know where the boundaries are. So it's a small wonder that they get scared of the system. And I think that fear reinforces any uncertainty with computers in general.
>They form a mental model of how to do something, look for something that fits into that model, and then are happy. If they guess the wrong model, though, then they are stuck forever.
>Most people will do this for anything but computers, though, which is weird. If their favorite road to the CHEZBURGER store is closed, they will find another road. But if it happens online... panic, frozen.
I think you overestimate people's ability to find different models for things in their life. Their ingrained model just happens to have a fall-back plan, but outside of that most people simple aren't problem solvers. But I agree that it's particularly bad when dealing with anything electronic.
One thing that I have to keep telling myself is that most of my world, the stuff I do, the people I interact with regularly, etc., is a world composed almost entirely of people, tools, philosophy and mechanisms steeped in the mystique of "problem solving". Whenever I get out of that world, I'm usually mystified at how generally people run into very simple real life problems they can't seem to surmount.
The second is that half the human population gets by with an IQ under 100. (I also use this to motivate myself).
> Skilled computer users, on the other hand, don't let a failing model bother them. They just try something else.
I like this analogy, problem solving then seems to be the ability to quickly craft and test mental models against a situation till one of them provides a good enough estimate to describe with the situation. This is actually a powerful way of thinking about problem solving. Once you think of building models, a whole host of new cognitive tools become available.
Anecdote: I worked with a guy with a background in business, educated at absolutely the top schools, MBA, the works. He spent his formative working years selling a shrink-wrapped product that had no support tail whatsoever. There was no execution part of a client engagement outside of ensuring proper delivery of the product. Later he found himself in a different company, with me as a sales engineer, selling a very high touch product - every sale had to have a support tail (it seems onerous, but is a great opportunity to build a strong relationship with the customer).Yet he kept acting like he was still selling the previous kind of product.
After a couple years of this, and seeing lots of missed opportunity because he simply didn't get the "client relationship building and execution" part of the business (so getting follow on sales, or expanding business with a previous client was very challenging) I finally lamented to our mutual boss...he, an engineer by training, but since then with decades of experience in highly successful businesses, told me, "you simply can't project your problem solving mindset onto him. You see the client engagement issue as a problem to be solved, and it agitates you like a nervous tick that has to be scratched. I've worked with many many people like this, business trained types, and problem solving doesn't run in their blood, they think of the world in terms of how to extract money from it."
I responded, "but I'm interested in making money as well".
He responded, correctly, "wrong, you are interested in solving the problem of making money, money is a secondary motivation."
> The underlying issue is that people are afraid to try and explore.
> Skilled computer users, on the other hand, don't let a failing model bother them. They just try something else.
I don't agree with you.
The fear of new ideas and places is a human quality, not a consequence or a property of a particular group of people.
I, for example, feel very comfortable learning a new programming language. I feel excited and content when I'm picking up some new language or library -- I can easily hunt through pages and pages of information that does not help me without being deterred in my goal. To phrase it objectively -- it's an environment that's completely foreign and largely without immediate payoff, yet I feel comfortable within it.
In stark contrast to that, I've listened to the same ~20 songs for the last 4 months. I know there are plenty of great songs out there, but I'm happy with what I'm listening to right now. I don't want to explore and find new or neat music -- I'm perfectly happy with what I've got. I know there are countless "unknown unknowns" -- wonderful gems of music just waiting to be discovered -- but I don't want to hunt after them. When I feel comfortable with these 3-4 albums, I'll go look for something else.
I don't think advanced computer users are in any way immune to feeling, at least, uneasy or uncomfortable when exploring a particular set of new ideas or places. It's just a question of what type of things they're comfortable exploring.
I happen to be pretty comfortable with programming, but I am hesitant and uneasy when exploring new music. Why? I don't know. I've come to accept myself as I am. :)
When my daughter was two she had a knack for crawling up next to the computer, mashing the keys for three seconds, and causing an unbelievable amount of software carnage.
I think at one point she changed the default language to Swahili. It was impressive.
People basically need to be taught that you can't break computers
This was more or less true until the internet came along. Now computers are full of booby traps and hungry wolves and the things you do on the screen actually affect the real world. It's not so much that you will break the computer, more like the other way around.
Sorry old coots, you had your chance to practice and you wasted it being stubborn. Now the real game is on and there is nothing us nephews can really do for you.
I've found a fairly useful analogy that helps most tech people. If you're into cars and the analogy doesn't work, just think of something you need to know about at some point, but probably don't know much about at all.
Mostly this helps when a customer feels guilty about needing help, or someone in IT thinks "me > all" because they can enter a command line. I think of my role like this:
Your average non-tech person probably feels about their computer the same way I feel about my car. I know nothing about cars. Usually I get my oil changed, but only because I have a repeating 3 month appointment based on 10 years of not getting it changed regularly. Bt even then, I sometimes forget. I now know I need to check tire pressure, but the place I buy my tires does that for me when I check in every two months. I know NOTHING about cars.
The reality is, your average person is no more stupid for not knowing "technology" than you are for not knowing automobiles, or how an airplane works, or the nuances of ASEAN trade relations. You've specialized, even if it doesn't feel like a specialization because YOU see technology all around you. Guess what: someone specializing in US/China trade relations sees the impact of RMB undervaluation all around, too. And a nutritionist sees daily health decisions all around. And so on.
So don't laugh because someone clicked a link to a pop-up ad when they thought they were closing the ad. Instead, help them fix their problem and, if appropriate, give them a pointer or two so they don't make the same mistake again. And absolutely have the patience with your customers that you'd want someone else to have with you, in your area of weakness. And if you don't think you have a weakness--if you think you're infinitely adaptable--I hope people around you have god-like patience, because you're probably wrong.
But regardless, don't get superior: our skills are valuable, but so are other ones. The sooner you learn that, the better off you'll be.
I don't think there's anything I own without a working understanding of how it functions, or at the very least the ability and willingness to attain that understanding if required. If I owned a car, I might not learn how to strip and rebuild the engine, but I would learn how to check and replace any sensibly serviceable parts, and how frequently I needed to do things like an oil change - which I would do for myself.
This generalises into other skills - if it's useful to my life, I'd much rather learn to do it to a passable level rather than get somebody else to do it (unless there's a significant risk attached). The only reason I'd be happy to be completely ignorant of something is if it holds absolutely no interest to me at all - which clearly isn't the case for anything I'm actually trying to do.
I'm not claiming that this makes me a better person, and I'm not claiming I'm infinitely adaptable as you put it, but I do feel that there's a very real difference that goes well beyond simply having a different area of specialisation.
I appreciate the disagreement. And I do agree that some knowledge is better than no knowledge. But there are always limits to what we can know and do, if simply because of the number of hours we're alive.
But even the way you phrase your comments indicates you're wearing a large set of winkers. "If it's useful to my life" is so broad as to be unimaginably large. Just thinking through my day: do you know what makes good soap or shampoo, and could you make it on your own? Can you purify dirty water? Can you fix the plumbing in your house? Can you make a toothbrush or toothpaste? Spin yarn or other thread, and use it to make material goods like towels, clothes, or shoelaces? Can you hone a blade's edge to razor sharpness using a leather strap? Can you skin a cow? Can you re-sole shoes? Fell a tree and use the lumber to make a bed, dressers, cabinets, or a door? Can you make elastic? Harvest grain and use it to make food? GROW grain in the first place? Re-wire your house? Fix your fridge/stove/microwave/garbage disposal/dishwasher/vacuum cleaner/etc.? Power your house without relying on the grid? Make and level concrete? Build a house? And on and on...
I have no doubt that you could, should you want to, learn some of those things. But you have to rely on other people at some point -- even if just because "there's significant risk". But just because you can learn things you're actually trying to learn says nothing about the MYRIAD things you aren't learning. And the sooner people realize that OTHER people find those things interesting, and that some of those other things even take immense skill or knowledge, the better off they'll be. Right now, it mostly sounds like you're completely ignorant of how many things you rely on that you have no idea how to do yourself.
I don't know, I do a lot of work on both computers and cars, and I can understand why people want nothing to do with the internals of either.
I was working on changing the oxygen sensor in my car this weekend, and it started raining. It is a major pain in the but when you have the car jacked up and the hood open and parts strewn about with tools and you get a random rain storm (I guess this is why I need a garage). I didn't finish the project and my girlfriend had to drop me off and pick me up at work yesterday. It would have been a lot better if I knew nothing about cars and just had a mechanic do it (hundreds of dollars extra aside).
The same goes for computers. I can reformat a hard drive and go through a Gentoo install - but I haven't done that in years. I don't have time to deal with that stuff anymore so I want it to just work. It is an inconvience to stay up on it.
Likewise, I know almost nothing about accounting or law. I have to do a little bit of both now for my startup, and I want nothing to do with it. I turn to people who know what they're doing and ask for help rather than dive into it. I am perfectly capable of learning it if I wanted to, but I just don't like learning it. Those guys come to me for car help and I go to them for legal advice.
Everyone has different passions, and when you get busy it is easy to just delegate/ignore the stuff you don't like.
I agree. I don't expect people to become experts in cars or computers or anything else they use in their daily life that their job or safety may depend on, but I do have more respect for people that make an effort to learn the basics or try to understand what they're dealing with.
I don't assume someone is stupid for being clueless about technology. I might assume they're at least a little lazy.
When I started using computers in the 1980's I sat down with a 20 minute tutorial and learned the basics about the mouse, keyboard, interface elements, command line and components of the computer. I've met people that have spent years asking others for help with things I took less than half an hour to learn up front.
If you are changing your oil every three months then you are almost certainly wasting money. You should trust the integrity of the oil change shop about as much as you would trust an 'SEO expert.' There might be good ones, but most are looking to maximize profit at your expense.
So, now he knows he's wasting money, but he doesn't know how to exit that state. Essentially, you've told him "You're doing it wrong" (in a helpful tone, to be fair).
Months is not the metric, miles is. There is a maximum amount of time you want to leave the oil in but most people should be changing it sooner than that for mileage reasons.
Follow the manual on your car. In my case that is about every 3 months based on how much I drive. My brother drives a lot more, almost 2,000 miles a month, so he does it every other month.
And if you switch to Mobil-1 oil you can bump that to 6000 miles, and yearly (but only starting from the second usage of it, i.e. the first time you use it stick with 3000 miles). The oil costs more, but you'll save money by doing less changes.
With newer cars you can go as much as 10,000 to 15,000 miles with regular oil.
Going synthetic in an older vehicle isn't always good. a small leak into the piston woudln't be a problem with regular oil, but with synthetics you have an issue.
Read the owner's manual. Are you using the type and grade of oil and filter they recommend? If you're getting your oil changed at Jiffy Lube, I can assure you that you are almost certainly not.
Is that somehow more your own fault than when, after months of ignoring the strange popups that appear when windows starts up, your virus-ridden computer finally grinds to a halt and fails to boot?
However, the relevancy of being an expert in emerging technology isn't really captured by your metaphor.
Also it's definitely not that you're smarter, rather you are just familiar with the technology. And of course, tech draws a lot of smart people (as it's interesting and has probably the highest potential for financial reward for the most people).
Two things to say here. First, "dumb" is not the right word. My wife is a theoretical physicist - thus pretty much guaranteed to be "not dumb" - but is not fully cognizant of the fact that URLs exist. She, too, has Google as her default home page and types what she wants into it. And she has Google search on the toolbar and types what she wants into that. Even if what she wants is the name of the site, she goes through Google first. Always.
The corollary to the observation that most people don't know what you take for granted in the computer realm, though, is that your customers know all kinds of stuff you have no idea about.
I think the key word in the title is seem. People seem dumb if you don't know anything else about them besides this one fact they don't know that you do. The author is arguing that this is a bad thing.
Oh, I know. When that was news, I laughed at it, and told her about it. That's why she's now partly cognizant that URLs exist. It hasn't changed her habits much, although it did allow me to persuade her that setting bookmarks can have its uses.
The problem is that the speed technology is growing with, made the barrier quite high for people to understand how technology works. The details are tremendous and the story of the web and its' evolution is too long that they should bother and keep up with it.
Same apply for other fields. How much do you know about neurology or physics to explain everyday facts?
My programming language professor once told us the history of when he was assigned in a committee to produce a brochure about the college. At one point a publication specialist came to the committee meeting to talk about possible brochure arrangements. The specialist was using too many jargon words from the publication world so my professor wasn't really able to understand what the specialist was saying. At one point the professor had an epiphany: "My god, this is how we sound to people that work in other areas when we talk about our own area!"
I just mailed this post to my partners. We recently merged.
They sold individual accounts to teacher and students. I sold accounts to schools.
Their users are very web savvy and need no training. My users did not seek out the app online. They are being asked by their schools to use the application.
We are noticing now how things we took for granted in the UI are now being questioned. These new users are struggling with the same exact UI that the others picked up and ran with.
Although it is a much larger sale, we are finding ourselves having to "hide" most of our options behind an "advanced" button. We are giving the school admins control to set all of the options and therefore simplifying the app as much as possible. This will make our new users feel comfortable.
I wish I could wrap my head around the size of the subset in relation to the larger set of users of the internet. I think that those are able to accomplish this have a huge leg up in product design, and this ability is something that is incredibly taken for granted.
One time my non-technical partner was attempting to access something I had been working on for a day or so and he told me that it wasn't working at all (even though I had confirmed it was before I had left) and I started to panic as we were close to a deadline for a client. Turns out that when i was telling him to access dev.somesite.com he was putting in www.dev.somesite.com and it was screwing up the javascript... because he naturally thought everything started with a 'www'.
It blew me away that he didn't understand the concept of subdomains, but also it was a reality check that he sort of knew his way around a computer and websites, and that it meant there was a much much larger set of users that couldn't grasp the concept of a subdomain. It can be difficult sometimes when you have the perception (especially on HN) that so many people out there know more than you about everything. I guess you just have to take a step back and realize you are still in the 99th percentile of the rest of the world when it comes to this stuff.
99th percentile?
I'd say HN audience is in 99.9 percentile of the world when it comes to computer knowledge.
(0.1% of the world is still 6.6 million people).
A few years ago I ran a website for a local community science fair. We'd get about 200 schools participating, and they have to register online before they can send kids projects to the fair.
190 of the 200 go off without a hitch. But I always get five or ten angry emails asking how to register a school, because they see no box to type into. Somehow they can find the "contact" link in tiny print and write out an email with bad spelling and grammar, but the "Click Here to Register" link in 24 point red text is impossible to locate. Also, these people are educating our children.
I learned the hard way why most websites have their signup form right on the front page. Call it A/B testing via angry feedback form.
I find it rather depressing that while we've built up all these layers of abstraction there are still people who don't understand what the address bar is.
Because the address bar has become rapidly irrelevant. Domain name is almost as useless as ip address - its highly coded unrememberable nonsense, often unrelated to the product or company name.
I think (one of) the biggest difficulties is that it's not as simple as
Make your apps, websites and tools as simple as possible
There are two targets that could be aimed for- (a) some kind of inherent intuitiveness/simplicity (as in the calendar example), and (b) something the most similar to past experience (as exemplified by the "Reply" button example).
One of my lab partners in grad school didn't believe there was such a thing as inherent intuitiveness. Back when I had more free time for such things, I remember having lengthy arguments with PC-to-Mac switchers explaining how the implementation of feature X was inherently more intuitive or ergonomic on the mac although it seemed a stupid way to do it to them. Some might argue that even in the calendar example, clicking the date is not more intuitive but similar to the past experience of writing on a physical calendar.
However, I'd argue there is definitely such a thing as an interface that is inherently non-intuitive, so by contrast, there must be things that make an interface inherently more intuitive.
So, I think of (a) and (b) as competing trade-offs that must be compromised. Going too radical towards (a), especially on a product that people already have formed associations with, and you end up an awesome, but fringe, product with a small community of fanatic followers (see NeXT). If you create a radically new something, or the impression thereof, you have a lot more leeway, since people are not psychologically attached to previous experiences.
Go too radically towards (b) and you aren't adding anything different with your product.
If you're making something new to go into battle against existing, well-established products, the best approach is to start with (b) and then slowly "fix" things, one at a time, over time, starting with features that give the biggest bang for the smallest change in user behavior. This applies to user-facing front ends, only of course.
But seriously, every time Facebook changes something we get a reminder of how disruptive it is to change the average users' usage flow. Everyone gets around it eventually, but adjusting isn't pretty.
My dad is a Master Electrician but he still asks me questions about his hotmail account and to resend a link to my Picasa albums. He deals with megawatts of electricity on a daily basis. I would hesitate to call him dumb...
Ditto for my stepdad, electrical engineer, holds more patents than I own books, and has put something on fucking Mars.
Still can't get his webcam to work, and keeps every document on his desktop.
It's just a matter of different knowledge domains. If you tossed me into the woods with experienced naturalists, they'd probably laugh every time I wiped with poison oak, too.
Thank. You. I'm glad you nipped that in the butt. Could have been very embarrassing.
I'm feeling snarky because it's 11:29 PM local time, and I'm about to ditch the trial server software I had planned to use and just write the goddamn things I need in Python, and keep it all in memory, so I can actually finish my shit this week. Fuck databases, fuck socket-server middle-ware, fuck best practice dogma (except when they really matter).
Yeah. I'm in the middle of the woods, helpless, surrounded by a bunch of naked men and women. Obviously my first instinct is to laugh at the only people that can keep me alive. :)
A slight exaggeration, but he worked on the mass spectrography unit at UT Dallas, and that was part of the Phoenix mission.
If you'd like to point out that it ended up having some problems due to an electrical short circuit and have a giggle, please do so now. :)
He also ended up clearing out the entire building one day, because I think he left some chemicals on a hot plate. Every time after that, when the fire department would get called for whatever reason, if the fire chief saw him wandering around, he'd bellow, "STEIN, WHAT DID YOU DO THIS TIME!"
I have no reason to believe your dad is dumb, and I'm not someone who thinks you're dumb if you're not computer savvy (such as your Dad).
That said, I've known and employed electricians whom I would call dumb, despite the fact that they can do their jobs. I'm not having a go at electricians, I can't do what they do, and I'm certainly not trying to make any point along the lines of "electricians are dumb except when it comes to their own area". Hell, I've known more intelligent electricians than dumb ones.
What I am saying, though, is that I don't think "dealing with megawatts of electricity" proves that someone is/isn't dumb. (And again, that's not me saying you're wrong in saying your dad isn't dumb.)
I think you could replace the word "electrician" in your quibble there with just about any other profession, with a corresponding change to the "dealing with megawatts" boast, and it could still be true.
I think you could replace the word "electrician" in your quibble there with just about any other profession, with a corresponding change to the "dealing with megawatts" boast, and it could still be true.
I went to a talk given by a high-ranking Mozilla employee. He mentioned it was challenge getting the loyalty of non-techie users, because when asked what "web browser" they used, most responded, "Google."
I have above average intelligence, compared to me most people ARE dumb.
Said in jest, obviously....
In all seriousness, this is a very common issue for "isolated" developers and designers. We all work in our little cubicles building what makes sense to us. We never think that we are our own most knowledgeable users. A feature that is obvious to us is most likely obvious because we put it there.
It's also why in any company, the people making the product (whatever it is) should spend some time on the front line dealing with customers. Even better, they should WATCH people use the product they built.
> Seriously, how the hell would anyone discover this feature on his own?
That's exactly how I expected it to work. Only goes to show I've been working in close mental proximity to the people who made this feature for a long time. Sometimes even physical proximity.
Totally counter-intuitive to me, as many other aspects of the iPhone interface: perhaps this is why I never send text messages from an iPhone, and why I keep making calls when I just want to see the details of a contact.
The iPhone was just made for somebody younger than me I guess.
It seems to me the problem is that there are many more opportunities for people working in computing to feel superior because of the way computers (and the internet, in particular) have become ubiquitous in our society. I mean, supposing you were a marine biologist. Not everyone is an expert in your domain, sure, but equally, people just don't normally ask you that many questions about it. If, on the other hand, a marine biologist gets asked daily whether a common species of seaweed is safe to eat, she might, after a while, start wondering why people are so stupid that she has to keep answering the same question. The problem is that in this hypothetical world, enough people eat seaweed often enough that this knowledge is required of our marine biologist on a regular basis, yet any particular person doesn't eat seaweed often enough that he would remember which species were safe to eat. Of course, it doesn't help that there are so many species of similar-looking seaweed or that there are just enough marine biologists around that she meets a group of them with whom she can feel smug at every party she attends!
Yesterday someone emailed me saying that they downloaded "Like.fm for Firefox" and then proceeded to ask me what the site's address was (it's Like.fm).
However cases like this are still the exception. Bad user experience design usually leads to clueless users. So it's not a matter of intelligence or technical acuity, it's all about how experienced you are with the interfaces and how well it's designed to be familiar to you. Obviously if you are the designer you're going to be more familiar than a new user. But it won't matter if you're using wormholes for your internet backbone if it's well designed even Abraham Lincoln will be able to use it.
That being said not all user interfaces should be dumbed down as much as possible. It just has to be as familiar as possible to your target user base.
This is a pretty condescending article. I mean, it's certainly true that your average Silicon Valley engineer or entrepreneur is of far above average intelligence, but things like knowing what a URL is isn't a good way to measure it. For the literal argument of this article, it's a specialization. I'm sure there are military commanders that are strategic geniuses who wouldn't immediately know how to get to special characters on the iPhone, or highly skilled pilots who can't answer the question, "what's a browser?" accurately.
These are pieces of topic knowledge, orthogonal to the question of "smart".
All of this said, having worked in consumer internet, I totally agree that the vast (read: vast) majority of internet users are absolute retards (or at least play them online).
I think this is a case of "flamboyant headline; reasonable article". He doesn't really argue in the article that people are stupid. It is implied by the headline, but that is clearly just an attempt to get pageviews. The actual content of the article is quite reasonable, and true.
While it would be even more reasonable for him to include a paragraph about how other people probably feel the same way about us with things like "social skills" or what have you, that would be off topic, and overly pedantic.
What frustrates me most is that I keep meeting people who seem to know less about their respective fields than one would expect them to, or they should at least know more about them than I or some other laic does.
Hmm, I have the opposit feeling, that is compared to me many seem to be more intelligent. I stumble into many different fields and know some basics, but whereever I go people can tell me stuff I have never heard of and seem to comprehend stuff quickly when I explain it, which took me weeks to figure out...
So I usually go with the opposit approach and believe most people can explain something to me rather than believing I could figure everything out what they know by myself ...
Let's say I go to the mechanic with a light on in the dashboard, and he'll immediately notice the gas cap isn't tightly secured so it set off a car sensor. He probably went back to his mechanic friends, told them the story, and everyone laughed.
The computer and everything about it is our profession/hobby/passion and that is the main reason we know so much more than everyone else about it.
It's just that everyone knows more about their own trade than others.
My Dad's an automobile engineer and he thinks it's kinda funny that I do not really understand how a 4-wheel drive works...and I find it funny that he doesn't get why his computer hangs much more than mine (I use Linux :P )
This is a really good article when considering use cases for your users. Sometimes classifying it under 'stupid user syndrome' just isn't good enough, you have to understand that they are not unintelligent, they just don't grasp the same domain knowledge as we do.
As Merlin Mann said, we're all nerds (see http://www.43folders.com/2010/09/10/my-paladin). We're just not all nerds in the same disciplines. E.g. I couldn't care less about lawn mowers but I wouldn't dare say that to a clerk at Home Depot.
It's a matter of specialization, if you will. Technology literacy is not the only talent in the world, but if that's what you choose to define yourself with, then it's easy for you to classify people in a related hierarchy.
Granted, this sort of relativism can only cover so much, since you'll also come across people who don't seem to know anything at all.
"People are not really stupid, it is just that you know a lot more. Don’t let knowledge blind you."
No, you dumb fuck. You're the idiot who knows nothing apart from useless technobabble that nobody will care about in 100 years - sorry, that should probably be 10 years.
Tech people, and especially the circle that is absorbed in the startup/techcrunch/combinator thing, have to be the most incredibly self absorbed, solipsistic bunch of twits in creation.
Most people are busy earning a living or living their lives doing something that actually matters, and the subtle nuance of details that tech startup types endlessly masturbate over is trivial background noise to most of the normal working populace.
To turn it all around, I have had the experience of explaining a legalism such as a specific application of labor or copyright law to a deep hard core techie. It's absolutely outside their universe and their frame of reference... does not compute... smoke starts coming out the ears... "Illogical! Norman, please coordinate..."
'Frame of Reference' is exactly the right concept. This is what allows you to make sense of what you don't understand. Even the smartest people with the wrong frames can come up short when challenged.
Having a frame of reference is a combination of specific knowledge (typically gained through a program of formal study), and experience (typically gained from operating within a frame for some time, and building a private sense of how it works in practice).
The fastest way to infuriate an otherwise smart, capable person is to (a) fail to understand that they simply don't share your frame of reference, then (b) treat them like they're incapable of understanding anything at all while (c) failing to supply the kinds of helpful clues that can get them properly oriented, allowing them to use what they do know to make better sense of what they don't.
Agreed. I tried to eat it a Korean soup kitchen the other day. There I sat clueless with some murky broth and undescipherable dishes of 'stuff' while all around me Korean students scraped and mixed and ate with happy abandon.
I'm glad for the huge disconnect between techies and actual people. It makes it possible for the development of new ideas to connect with mainstream users. If techs understood mainstream people I wouldn't be on this site right now. Why do I feel Palinish? Ugh. . . too bad it's true.
Perspective Time: Being an expert means you are capable of a lot, it's great for sure, but it doesn't mean you're smart or have all the answers. Let's not be mad at each other, it's all good.
Can someone explain to me why I should respond to this person with any respect whatsoever given his complete lack of tact? Isn't this a tech site? Why am I more downvoted than him? Have a little more self-respect, tech community.
The points made in this piece are very good ones but it is not primarily an issue of intelligence - rather, it is mostly about one's point of reference.
Early in my legal career, I worked at a firm that represented a group of Nob Hill condo owners who had had a series of problems with contractors and who had suffered a variety of damages relating to roof leaks, etc. This might sound mundane but these "condos" were (even in that day back in the early 1980s) worth well into 7 figures and the problems had been persistent and severe. Yet, when it came time to settle the case, we had to prepare a set of instructions explaining the settlement documents and where they needed to be signed. We were dealing with perhaps 30 people and they were all ultra-sophisticated types (former board of supervisors members in SF, top-flight lawyers, very wealthy business owners, etc.) and nearly every one of them messed up the execution of the documents in one way or another. When this happened to me, I learned one very important lesson: maybe I had been so immersed in this process that the detailed explanations made perfect sense to me, logically and otherwise, and even appeared to be simple, but, for those who have busy lives and who don't want to have to analyze in detail a set of potentially intricate legal instructions, such instructions were not simple at all. Why? Not because of lack of intelligence (these were very smart and successful people). Rather, because they were not familiar with the legal mumbo-jumbo and they didn't want to bother to go down the rabbit-hole of trying to figure them out. In effect, they simply wanted a "just tell me where to sign" sort of instruction (which suggested the obvious answer as well, because the matter did need explanations for them to be able to sign in an informed way - that answer was to just set up an in-person meeting with them as a group, give the explanations, and then have them sign).
This same principle operated with the big name partners in this large firm (some of the best lawyers in the nation), who couldn't be bothered with computers because "typing is secretary's work" (this was around 1980). These were exceedingly smart people but it did not fit their point of reference to bother themselves with trying to learn about some newfangled technology that seemed like a lot of bother to learn when their life-long habits had taught them that there is no advantage to investing time in that process.
Of course, with engineering design, one needs to anticipate what a very broad range of potential users might do with an interface that is developed by software engineers who may or may not share the point of reference of a great many such users. Concerning such issues, it is not "dumb" for an older generation to eschew text messages when they are used simply to picking up the phone to talk something over and, when they are forced to actually do a text message, to become frustrated with having to learn something that is not intuitive to them and that may lie well outside of their point of reference. Nor is this an issue merely of age and habits. Non-engineers have nowhere near the breadth of knowledge about such items as engineers do (the main point of this piece) and there are legendary examples of the boneheaded instructions that have sometimes been given because of the blind spot that this can create ("how do I sign on with my ISP when I have never had access to the Internet before [this was in the early 1990s]? simple, just log on to the web at xxxxx and follow the instructions").
Moreover, this issue can be generalized as well. If I have specialized knowledge about a given area (such as law), things that seem obvious and even intuitive to me may very easily not be at all comprehensible to one who does not share that point of reference. I realized this fundamental truth early on in my career in dealing with clients: that is, that learning to communicate effectively and simply about a complex subject matter is an art form.
There is no mechanical answer to it except that one must put oneself as best as one can in the place of the recipient of that knowledge and try to anticipate what the person does not know about the assumptions you will be making in giving the explanation.
None of this means that you are of superior intelligence to those with whom you seek to communicate. It only means that you have a specialized expertise that they lack and you have a tall order before you in being able to guide them by the hand, as it were, to make your explanation or instructions (or interface design) understandable. This is not at all easy to do. Indeed, it is one of the toughest challenges extant in the design world, and that is precisely why superb and elegant interface design (among other things) is so hard to come by.
I would therefore amend the main point of this fine article to say, "People are not really stupid, it is just that you know a lot more [about your area of expertise]. Don’t let knowledge blind you."