It’s helpful to take a few steps back from time to time to reassess where we’re each coming from on our knowledge of tech (or anything) to better communicate.
Many people are very uncomfortable with the degree to which their work and life depend on computer systems they do not understand. They feel vulnerable to computer problems, pressured into depending on more tech than they really want, and do not believe they have the knowledge or resources to remedy problems with it.
So when something goes wrong, they feel helpless. This is not unfounded, but it can often make the problem worse.
Depending on the person, this can lead to blaming or blame-dodging behavior. IT folks — did you ever ask someone what the error message was and they say “It’s not my fault!” or “It’s not my job to fix it, you’re the computer person!” … as if blame ever helped!
The “tech person” differs not so much in knowledge but in having a different emotional response to tech doing a weird/broken thing: when something goes wrong, they jump to curiosity. It’s not “I already know how to fix this” but “We don’t know what happened here yet, but we can find out.” Knowledge comes from exercising this curiosity.
But this is not something that everyone can do, because people who feel unsafe don’t typically go to curiosity to resolve their unsafety.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance begins with a discussion on this very theme, before it gets weird (weird and good)
I don’t remember that very well, I just remember it describing the scientific method. I probably need to reread that.
This describes it perfectly. I am the computer guy in the family and even work in computer repair. I don’t have any official training, all “self taught”. All I did to teach myself was to simply search solutions and apply then myself. Eventually you learn terms and some other knowledge but the biggest difference between IT and “most people” is mindset.
Even my CompTIA teacher said “IT folk are just people that know how to use Google”
Computers do actually turn the world into a place of magic boxes.
To understand the problem, imagine being Joe Miller, space detective, and having to clear one of those party tents from Harry Potter. You’ve got someone with a deathly fear of doors and corners, but unlike normal space where you can eventually say “clear!”, you go into one of those Harry Potter tents and you don’t know how much of it there is. A room you just walked out of could have changed behind you, and now there’s enemies in there.
You can’t clear a space like that.
A lot of our animal sense of safety is based on “clearing” territory. We thoroughly search the cave and once we’ve seen every part of it, we can calm down, think creatively, take our time. But until we can clear it, we need to be on high alert, ready for saber tooth tigers.
Every animal, especially animals with an evolutionary history of being prey, has a need psychological need to have all the territory mapped out, before we can feel safe.
And cyberspace – the set of states and their transition pathways that a person can travel through as they use software – doesn’t work like normal space. It’s not finite. It’s not easily mappable. It’s not consistent. When you’ve cleared a room, it doesn’t necessarily stay clear. The rules you need to memorize to know whether it’s clear change from room to room.
It feels extremely unsafe UNLESS the software world can be constrained to operate in a known manner, consistently, that doesn’t change too much from context to context, that has consistent behaviors throughout. Then we can start to feel safe with it.
This is a problem for all of humanity. Cyberspace doesn’t feel safe to us. It’s exciting, for sure. It’s powerful and useful, but it is an alien world and we do not feel at ease there unless we can inhabit a small part of it that always behaves consistently. That’s the only software we can feel comfortable with. Like a calculator, or a video game. Finite, consistent behavior.
But even the finite, consistent behavior is a facade, an illusion. Depending on our tech culture, we always have some degree of fear that the “space-like” consistency of the software we’re using is actually a thightly-constrained magical illusion. You might think you’re in your own house, for instance, but you’re really in some wizard’s illusion.
Cyberspace, even the extremely well-regulated parts like apps we use every day, are places built and controlled by wizards, and there might be sneaky shit going on behind the scenes. What might appear to be a magic-free zone might actually have magic happening just subtly, in a way meant to mimic consistent reality.
Many people are very uncomfortable with the degree to which their work and life depend on computer systems they do not understand. They feel vulnerable to computer problems, pressured into depending on more tech than they really want, and do not believe they have the knowledge or resources to remedy problems with it.
About 1/3 of my customers. They mess with my electrical drawings because they can’t mess with the software and try to redesign stuff so it doesn’t have software. Or even worse they try to do it themselves and need me to bail them out. Generally I don’t make a big deal about it. I already have designs for morons so I just give them a moron special. But yeah I have lost it a few times. My job is to build systems, not to reassure idiots that I will manage to overcome their mistakes.
Tech people presume that normal people think about how technology works
They don’t even try to conceptualise how something on their phone gets there from the internet or ‘the cloud’ - when things stop working they don’t think about the fact that their an app on their phone is using a network connection to a router, which distributes an internet service that connects them to a server, that is running a program, on which they have an authenticated account…
They wouldn’t even know where to begin with troubleshooting, it’s just ‘broken’ and they get frustrated
Here’s the difference you’re probably not understanding about your self: people don’t need to know everything about everything, and they couldn’t if they tried.
A very small part of my job involves lubricating large industrial fans. Easy enough. What grease should we use? Hang on to your fucking panties
Lube or grease? Lithium-based? Urea? Composite? What was used previously? What should have been used previously? Have you ever done sampling? What’s the vibration frequency?
Did you know there are people with PhD’s in grease composition?
I bet you never even realized that was a thing.
So no, I don’t know what TCP/IP means, or what port and protocols are or what the hell a subnet mask is. I don’t even know what I don’t know. And that’s okay, because YOU know. Doesn’t make you any smarter than me, any more than it makes a grease expert smarter than either of us.
Nothing I said was critical of anyone, any set of skills, any profession. I’m glad that you have specialist skills, everyone does because no-one can know everything
I was responding to a particular question about technology, and how non-techies approach it. I explained in another comment that this complexity in technology is fundamentally different from many other fields of everyday experience
If the industrial fan stops working, they call you, and somewhere between the power point and the air they want to move is the problem you can fix and diagnose
If someone can’t see their cat photos, it could be anywhere from their device to their network, their ISP to the server, the programs on that server, the other server that holds the photos… Like with the fan they know the power is generally ok because the lights didn’t go out, but from that point you actually need some conceptual model of the complexity to even know who to call
part is because the technology tries to hide the inner workings for the user experience and the profit. part is because education systems dont teach any systems concepts, and if they tried to they would be hopelessly outdated. part is because repairability and support are loss centers.
There was a period of time, way back when, in which personal computers were relatively common in households, but repair services basically didn’t exist in most places. Computers were still expensive, and not really useful enough that you’d just go buy a new one when it broke, you’d either fix it or hope someone you know could show you how.
That was a time of “learn or don’t use it” (we had a pc we couldn’t use for 6 months until we figured out how to fix it) and it’s sad that it was so short, because only a very specific age group of people grew up with that pioneering mindset. Since then it’s gotten more “user friendly/foolproof” (locked down and hidden) and the knowledge of how to do stuff with it is becoming more rare on the whole.
I always sort of expected that generations younger than mine would be more tech inclined (inner workings, not just using it) but they really aren’t due to how so much of our modern tech is just… not approachable, locked, or hidden.
This is very well put, I was in this as well. Everything was so much more tinker-able. I miss that. I took felt that people would just be inherently more knowledgeable.
The primary reason is that the technology is designed in such a way that large distributed teams of people can build them without anyone needing to understand the entire structure, because the entire structure is beyond the understanding of a single mind.
A software developer wouldn’t even try to read all the source code of all the libraries their app relies on, nor the machine operations and logic operations and character encodings and chip design and the chemistry and physics of computation.
We’ve consciously decided to abstract things down to reliable interfaces, and as long as the thing behind the interface works, we can understand the interface and build on top of it.
These other reasons are secondary to this one: people don’t understand fully because we’ve gone beyond what a human can fully understand, and deliberately and consciously, decided to adopt this system of abstractions and interface contracts to allow ourselves to operate in the space beyond where the human mind can go.
I had a coworker get livid when an end user didn’t know what “the start menu” was.
Pointing out that the last version version of Windows to actually say “Start” on the start menu is old enough to drink (XP was released over 22 years ago; mainstream support ended 15 years ago) did not quell his anger.
This is why scammers are so efficient, they adapt to people not knowing things because the people they’re targeting don’t. They say start menu or button that looks like 4 windows
Now that you mention it…What are we supposed to call that anymore? The…Windows menu, I guess? This reminds me that the “icon-ification” so to speak, of interfaces has made things frustrating for everyone involved since there’s no name/label for the icons to rely on to communicate what to click/tap.
Microsoft themselves still call it the start menu:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/open-the-start-menu-4ed57ad7-ed1f-3cc9-c9e4-f329822f5aeb
I work in an admin role in the construction industry. I regularly encounter seasoned engineers, project managers, and architects who don’t know the difference between a website and an app, or how to scan a QR code.
But then I remember that they know how to build a house from scratch, and I don’t. We’re all good at different things.
Thank you for having such a lovely view on things
What do i get for knowing how to do both?
I think a big part of my career was shaped by hell desk IT at my uni for a semester. I know this guy is smart. He has like a bazillion papers in things I can’t even pronounce and a whole mess of awards and what have you. He can’t figure out why his printer isn’t working.
I am far from perfect but I do make an effort to remember, as you said, that human knowledge and abilities can vary so much.
Having the kind of habits you need to keep yourself safe and private online.
Blows my mind how many people don’t consider or sometimes even reject the idea of things like password managers because “it’s too complicated”.
My wife drives me up the wall with this. She insists on using similar passwords everywhere, like Lemmy1 or Lemmy12, even though I’ve set up BitWarden for her.
To make it worse, she reset her email password recently, refused to use the password manager, then promptly forgot it again 😤
BitWarden ftw! that’s why I started using it, couldn’t remember my overly complex passwords for all the everything In the world needs a password now.
Have you told her that it makes you feel unsafe?
idk man, I know a password manager would make things easier and more secure, but it’s still putting all your eggs in one basket. If the service I gave all my passwords to has a leak or gets hacked - I’m fucked. And I don’t trust them to keep all my passwords locally and not peak in.
I’d rather a couple of my accounts I’ve long since forgotten about be broken into than for my entire digital life to be uprooted.
I have multiple passwords for the levels of security I want, bank is the most difficult, e-mail is close second, then we have mid tier passwords for things I care about personally but wouldn’t really have big consequences if lost, and then the password I personally saw leaked on a russian hacker forum that I use when a webstie insists I need an account to be graced with their service lmao
Just use a password manager that keeps a hash of your database only. They can’t peek since the data is encrypted.
If all it keeps is a hash of your database then you can’t get any information out of it and it’s useless
You could use three password managers I suppose. Then you’d either need a rule for determining which manager a particular set of creds was stored in, or you’d need to just brute force remember it.
But one thing I discovered when I stated using a password manager is that I don’t have five or ten things I need passwords for. I have at least five hundred.
That’s why you take several steps to ensure security. 2FA on everything. A different email address specifically for your password manager. A keyword suffix that you add to the end of every password. So even if someone gets into your password manager, they’re not getting into any of your accounts. Unfortunately proper security takes a lot of effort these days.
2FA is shite, I hate having to keep my phone on me at all times. I’ll just stick to my flawed system, it’s not the most optimal but I have all my unique and important passwords written on a piece of paper hidden between two glued pages in my journal, and the throwaway passwords are simple muscle memory
Everything.
From the difference between WiFi, cellular data, and wired Ethernet to the ports on a computer.
People don’t know shit, and it’s getting worse thanks to the abundance of things like tablets and phones. Nobody knows anything about operating systems, file system structure or types, or even how to turn Bluetooth on.
And I am not what I consider highly tech literate. Plenty of stuff stumps me or I simply don’t know how to do. Yet I’m the family “IT guy” that has to troubleshoot and fix stuff.
Probably the worst part isn’t people not knowing. That’s fine. There’s tons of shit I don’t know. It’s the unwillingness to remember and learn about the system. That’s pretty maddening.
Also not to mention today, your computer hides shit from you. Back in the old days (around 10 years ago) you would get an error message, something you could search and understand but increasingly all you get now is “operation failed”. You get this kind of thing on Mac’s, iPhones, android and increasingly windows.
And of course phones/tablets are much more locked down and you see any of the “nitty gritty” computing, just icons and bubbles.
Windows has always had awful error codes. A BSOD with some (made up) 0x00000231a would get “Kernel gobbledygook” as the search result. Completely useless. It was and still is awful. Only by digging in to logs, event manger, and anything else you can imagine you might be able to correct the issue. However, I will offer that Windows has been stable AF since 7, and I could count the number of times it’s crashed on me in the last decade or so on one hand, and the times it did crash or was because of either a change I made or a bad driver update.
I have a love/hate relationship with Apple. I despise how everything is locked down and they spare no effort to make sure you stay in their walled garden and play with their toys under their supervision. OTOH, shit almost never breaks. Regular PC? You’re free to wreck it, and I love that.
You bring up a good point about the stability of Windows. I’ve been using Linux Mint for the past few months and am quite happy with it. However I’ve experienced at least four different times when the OS has become completely locked; I couldn’t do anything and had to hard reset. Not a deal breaker for me but it made me think about how that never happens to me in Windows any more.
It’s the unwillingness to remember and learn about the system
You hit the nail on the head. People assume that entry level software or hardware stuff gives way to calculus before they can actually solve their problem, so they don’t even try.
We assume that people know what an OS is, what OS they’re running, and how to install an OS.
I’ve seen it dozens of times, especially on here, where someone describes Linux, convinces the person that they’ll like it, and then gets the equivalent of a blank stare when they say ‘You just need to download the ISO and install the OS’
My mother is in her 70s, and if you set up her computer to run Linux in the same way that it comes ready to run Windows, she’d be fine after a short readjustment. If you gave her a USB stick with Linux on it, she wouldn’t get anywhere because she has no clue what she’s supposed to do with it.
She doesn’t care about the OS, as long as her browser opens and loads Facebook, letting her keep in touch with her friends.
Even as someone relatively comfortable with computers, Linux intimidates me. I want to use it but there’re so many variations and it’s a massive rabbit hole to go down; I just don’t have the time or energy to spend several days getting it set up how I want it and fixing any errors that I cause
that’s why I recommend ubuntu. It’s got big market share. It’s orange. It’s linux.
How to change the input source of a tv.
This blows my mind, we’ve had tvs for a very long time. How do people not know how to do this, I get the 90yo Grandma, but, the 50yo guy living in his bachelor pad I just don’t get.
The 50 year old guy living in his bachelor pad does know how to do it
People don’t even know what a browser is… Yet if anybody expresses the slightest frustration with Netflix or anything else, the immediate responses hey you just need to set up a Plex server.
It’s two things wrapped into one.
First, the assumption is that people know the names of the software that they use.
The second is that other people who are not techy consider it just fine to spend hours and hours creating a stopgap solution that shouldn’t have to exist in the first place. They don’t.
I think this also exists within tech. There are some people with humongous working memory, who have no concept of thought being hard, and for them setting up a plex server is 5 minutes of effort: read the instructions once, do it all perfectly without time delay. Then there are others who are barely getting through the day. Accomplishing a Plex setup means trial and error, multiple attempts. Eventually, a deep understanding, but one built through sweat and folly.
Personally, when I’m looking around for different software, as someone that’s in-between unfamiliar and familiar with tech: if it doesn’t have an installer/executable/apk and only describes a way to build/compile from source, I have to imagine it wasn’t intended for non-devs to start with.
Yet somehow I seem to find my way to software like that occasionally. 🤷♀️
Turning it off and on again fixes so many things.
Not if you’re shutting down Windows, you have to do the restart option to really be effective. Thanks for that Microsoft, totally worth the support headache to be able to boot up in 32 seconds instead of 38.
I complained enough at my business that we turned off fast boot. I haven’t had to have a conversation about restart vs shutdown in like a year now which is sweet, but my own computer takes significantly longer to start up so jokes on me I guess.
The government created the Internet, not Elon Musk
I’m old enough to remember when Al Gore created the internet
Go to a website. If I say “go to support.ourwebsite.com” I expect you to do that. It blows my mind how often people manage to do a search for the URL and then ask me which result to click on.
Tech people overestimate people’s ability to distinguish harmful versus harmless actions. To us it seems obvious that there’s read operations, write operarios, and execute operations, and that the read is basically safe, write can lay traps for you, and execute can kill your computer or the control you have over it.
But that’s not obvious to everyone. We just tell them “Don’t run any code or give it permission to overwrite anything” but most people don’t know what the significance of that is or how to notice when a button is going to cause a write or execute.
All the lingo and acronyms.
