I can sympathize with the author's lack of understanding of people's fear of breaking things, especially of those that are tech-related. Take computers for instance. It seems that to the average Joe, they're magical black boxes; they put in passwords, discs, and mouse clicks, and out come YouTube videos and tax returns. To this person, if they don't click on the right series of "OK" buttons, they can put the computer in a permanent state of hopelessness from which it can never recover. It's like they're in some finite state machine with no idea what states the state transitions take them to. To someone in the know, they can be sure that any state in the FSM they go to was intended to be visited in that manner, and they can surely get back to the state they came from by simply exploring. But to Average Joe, the next state could lead him off a cliff or set his pants on fire. This "fear" of exploring could simply be the manifestation of a deep-seated misunderstanding of the concept of software in general. It's really no different than the kettle corn, despite its apparent complexity; it just looks prettier and makes different noises.
I can really see this in myself. I have a deal with my father: I fix his computers and he fixes my car. He's scared that he could break his computer, and lose his data. I'm scared that I'll fuck up something on my car, and need to have it fixed by a proper mechanic, costing me time and money.
I think most people are scared of breaking something, if they're sensible. I know a couple of people who aren't scared to 'try' anything and the result has been a semi-burned down apartment (I can do my own wiring!) and a new set of dining furniture (I can sand it down myself!).
I think that the fear that people tend to have is from ignorance though. I'm trying to learn about being my own atuo-mechanic; I'm teaching my father more about the computer. What people maybe don't realise is just how hard it is to break a computer permanently. This is one of the biggest factors in people being poor with computers; I think that another is that there is often no clear indication of partial success, which is pretty discouraging for an adult who is starting to learn.
There is a sense in which there's justified fear of "trying things" on a computer. While it's fairly hard to permanently break one, it's fairly easy to lose the document you've been writing for the past hour. I remember this being a major issue for my mom back in the early 1980s.
It's not all that difficult to screw things up enough to require a reformat, either, or at least to make a reformat the easiest solution. I think of myself as pretty tech-savvy, and I've had to reinstall Windows before because I somehow borked my registry.
Your example disproves your point. Most people don't even know what a registry is. In general, people don't realize what you can do with a computer aside from the basics, which is what keeps them (relatively) safe.
True; nobody can be an expert in every field. Our job in that case is to make the tools/resources necessary to be proficient easier to access (done, thanks internet!) and to spread the knowledge that computers are really hard to break permanently. Hopefully the next generation grows up without this particular fear!
> To someone in the know, they can be sure that any state in the FSM they go to was intended to be visited in that manner, and they can surely get back to the state they came from by simply exploring.
Sadly this is not always the case; I once broke the xfce version of Ubuntu within 10 minutes of installing it by playing around with the configuration options.
Most people never reinstall their OS at all, so this is analogous to saying that you shouldn't be worried about what can go wrong with doing your own wiring (to use someone else's example) because, after all, you could just rebuild the house.
I expect going into Gnome or KDE and resetting the settings for xfce would have also worked. Though frankly I didn't bother -- if an experienced Unix user can break it in 10 minutes without trying, it clearly isn't stable enough to use.
Y'know, the more I think about this article, the more I think it's a complete load.
My dad hopped on a steamer ship and found his way to England from India with one bag and 14 pounds in his pocket. He found a job, made a living, bought a car -- all without instant communication to some helicopter parents. A few years later he found his way back to find a wife.
A few years later, they wound their way to Canada, with the only difference being that they got to fly.
That is risk-taking, experimenting and hacking your way through a new culture. Screwing up at making kettle corn? Please.
ps. In case you think that this is one of those stories of a previous generation, in 1999 a cousin of mine arrived at the Toronto airport, in January, without even a coat to survive the drive home. He's employed and living in a nice place; no handouts, just damn hard work.
I feel as if you've missed the point of the article.
Yes, the kettle corn example doesn't compare in scale, but he's simply trying to show the difference in philosophy. No one's saying that screwing up kettle corn is the pinnacle of innovation and experimentation. I don't see how father's story discredits the article.
Your perception
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V
Making toast[-----------------------------------------]Brain Surgery
^
Your fathers perception |
Working with computers is more like making toast than doing brain surgery, but many people think the opposite and popular culture tends to reinforce this notion. Many people are understandably afraid. The key to helping people learn to use their own computers is to reverse this perception and give them the courage to try. Once they realize that its possible, they will quickly warm to the idea.
Edit: I chose brain surgery and toast because of their qualitative difference, not quantitative. Its easy to learn to make toast and the cost of error is cheap and easy to undo, its very hard to learn to operate on brains and the cost of mistakes are mortal. Most people can learn to make toast, most people can't learn to do brain surgery. Most people erroneously believe that they just can't learn to use their computers and so don't try.
I think you underestimate both the complexity and possible downsides of dealing with computers. Computers can be learned, but it takes hundreds or thousands of hours to master them. Making toast requires putting pre-sliced pieces of bread in a toaster and pressing one button. If you screw up your 50 page MS word document and it gets corrupted and lost, you're shit out of luck, out potentially weeks of typing. If you burn some toast, it costs a few cents to fix, and maybe 2 extra minutes.
So learn to save before the 50 page doc is on the line. Try a 3 line this is a test and master it. Don't wait to learn to make toast until you're about to serve poached egg to Donald Trump either.
Listen, this is surely true. But that's irrelevant to the countless people who have learned that sometimes their computers do frustrating shit that seems beyond their control ("what the hell do you mean the article I just made sure to save every 5 minutes for the last week is 'corrupted'? Blargh!!") and by consequence think of them as both fickle and difficult-to-trust-or-experiment-with machines.
Just about everyone I know, tech savvy or not, has numerous computer horror stories. I don't know anyone who failed serving Trump some toast. (There are also cooking nightmares, to be sure, which is why I personally am not rushing out to cook a turkey, and will stick with my stir fry, pasta, and fried eggs. Some food preparation seems difficult and fraught with peril from this newbie's perspective.)
I find that metaphors on HN have to have really sharp edges or you have to spend a few follow ups on clarification. I'm not yet particularly good at it but this is a very good place to practice. :)
THANK YOU. I think this feeling of invincibility the kids have these days is a by-product of the cocoon we are now bringing up children in. I bet none of the youngguns reading this have lost a grade school friend and a cousin under the wheels of a school bus. They'd know that sometimes, when one takes risks, there are consequences.
Sometimes I prefer taking care of somebody's computer, precisely because they might break something. Nowadays you can still burn an LCD if you neglect the screensaver and powersave (10'000 hours backlighting MTBF can really fly), or burn a nice annoying image in your display. You can mess up your Windows installation pretty bad if you play in the wrong places. And don't get me started on giving root access to grandpa. I don't see much value for some people in learning to rebuild an OS installation from scratch. Like with kids there are times to encourage experimentation, and there are times to be cautious.
There's a whole school of thinking that value safety first. About 15 years ago there was a bold data entry clerk that wasn't afraid of fixing problems by himself. Faced with 2 waypoints called "R", he decided to encode one point as "ROZO" and the other as "R". As a consequence an aircraft turned into a mountain en route to Cali, Colombia.
Toyota, presumably because of sloppy programming in a cheap microcontroller, is learning that when you take somebody's code without looking, you get all his problems too.
It's fun to take risks sometimes, go into uncharted territory, put yourself in a situation to be exposed to new unfamiliar things.
But please, don't make it a point of being careless.
I don't know why you are downvoted, but this is from experience: people who don't know what they're doing can do pretty much anything they don't want with a pc without realising it. Case in point: My grandma vs. Windows. Windows is a sore, sore loser. And try as I might, all I can do to really fix it is install it again (temporary) or install linux (not going there yet)
More recently than that, there was a time -- pre LCDs, DDC and monitors that would shut themselves down when driven at the wrong frequency -- when rolling your own XF86Config file could fry your monitor if you got the timings wrong.
The author gets frustratingly close to insight, but ultimately retreats to "blame the user". Only now, instead of the usual accusations of stupidity and/or laziness, they're irresponsible for being afraid to take what they perceive as risks.
Why not ask why they're afraid? Why do they see risks that you do not? To what degree are these fears rational? What can be done to assuage these fears so that they can actually learn something positive from the experience?[1] Oh no, too many questions! Quick, blame the user!
Most of the time it seems that the fear of breaking the computer expands into something like: "If I meddle with this thing I don't understand, I might break it.[2] If I break it, I won't know how to fix it. If I don't know how to fix it, I will have to ask or pay for help. If I have to ask or pay for help, I will feel stupid, lose money, and won't understand the thing any better." (Note that none of this is specific to computers.)
Implicit here is the perception both a high probability of failure and the perception that failure will be costly. This is the kind of risk that people respond to with fear instead of curiosity. When it appears cheap to make mistakes, people are much more willing to risk making them.
In light of this, comparing this sense of fear that a computer user may experience to the "risk" of trying to make your own kettle corn is absurd. There was no perception that failure was going to be costly. Even if there was a high probability of doing so, making a mess of your kitchen costs almost nothing, is easily reversible, and involves no hidden mechanisms. You just clean it up.
[1]: Emphasis on learn because much effort has been expended on interfaces that are usable without being learnable. That is, even if you successfully navigate them, you gain no new understanding. The low point historically was probably when Windows XP shipped with a animated talking cartoon dog to help find your files.
[2]: "Broken" can be something technically trivial, but if the user doesn't know how to fix it, it doesn't matter how trivial it is--it's still broken for them. The idea that you can't break software only holds true if you believe that reinitializing/reformatting/reinstalling is just part of normal operation and not a "nuke the site from orbit" solution to real problems.
Maybe I'm odd, but I am actually rather afraid of breaking software, at least at the system-level. I'm not at all afraid of writing software, or breaking apps, but I really don't like my entire OS being borked, and I try to avoid poking at it for fear that it will become so.
This is mostly from experience of things actually breaking in hard to fix ways if you poke them the wrong way. Back when I used Windows mainly, I probably reinstalled 4 or 5 times because of something somehow being screwed up and there being no apparent way to fix it that was easier than just reformatting.
Linux tends to give you more diagnostic information (you can google for error messages), and I've never had to outright reformat/reinstall, but it can still be a real hassle if you screw up your system. Early in my Linux-using days (circa 2002), my Debian installation somehow managed to get apt into an inconsistent state that required a lot of manual fixing to repair. And I'm still somewhat afraid of upgrading anything in the kernel/modules/X.org/videodrivers bundle, because I've more than once ended up with hours of debugging after an upgrade resulted in stuff not working together (this was worse before Debian improved its process for handling binary video drivers within the apt framework).
It's not as bad as it used to be. I borked my X just last night when I switched graphics cards and fixed it in 10 minutes of googling on my phone. I used to do hours of booting into windows (back in the days when I still dual-booted), searching for stuff, writing it down, rebooting into linux, trying said stuff, rinse and repeat. Either there's a lot more good advice out there or my googling skills got better.
Add the ability to do research - most of my computer troubleshooting is just search engine use. His kettle corn could've been made right the first time if he'd googled around a bit before embarking on the project.
Edit, after thinking about it. I glass-bedded one of my rifles recently. This is a procedure involving epoxy and a disassembled rifle. If you do it very wrong, you will wind up with the barrel stuck permanently to the stock; I suppose you could mess up the inner workings, but that would take more than willful ignorance. But the internet provides all the information necessary to do it right the first time.
I've heard one argument that posits one of the causes for this rift is the prohibitive costs of legacy computer hardware/software. The old 286 in my father's office growing up probably ran him $4,000 - $5,000. If you can imagine paying a much larger chunk of your income for a home PC that was not designed with modularity or expandability in mind you can begin to see why the boomer generation is so careful around electronics.
I think this article is on the right track, but rather than it being a generation thing it is what a person is made of. I see two types of people - those that want to do things themselves vs those that would rather pay for someone to do it. The trend is more people of the later and it is scary if you think about it. As the quality of workmanship goes down, those skills don't get passed on (like framing a house, or working on a car) and then in the end you are stuff with inferior work. A good example would be changing the oil in your car - most of the time it is cheaper and of course faster to have it done, yet by losing that skill (maybe desire is the better word) you are now relying on some old kid who doesn't care one bit about your car. It isn't just the "handyman" though, it can apply to everything from cooking to writing software.
I'm like this, basically frustrating to someone who is standing next to me when I'm trying to fix a problem or just being the one at the keyboard at work or something. Have a tenancy to dive in and click through skimming dialogs, most of the time it works just fine.
Brilliantly put. This is exactly the mindset of an engineer/hacker.
(Incidentally; talking about the market - I'm very jealous. Im still on the look out for a traditional style, fresh produce market that I could feasibly live very near too)
Strangely I've started off computer usage by having a fear of breaking hardware and no fear of breaking software.
I assume this is because I've always though I can "undo" software changes, but hardware was expensive and you couldn't "undo" much there. This might also explain why I've never made my own PC from scratch.
Of course, now with OSX on the laptop and virtual servers in the cloud I've almost abstracted away hardware :-)
Yeah, I remember being afraid of breaking computer parts putting them together or taking them apart. Then, after I accidentally dropped the screwdriver, pointy end down, on a few important looking circuits on the motherboard and it kept working, I realized that things weren't that fragile.
I'm often a bit afraid of running some games for a long time when I hear the video card fan going ten-to-the-dozen and feel the computer case warming up. I'm frightened some part I can't afford to replace, like the graphics card, might wear out and overheat. It's not particularly rational, I suppose...
You can install software to check on the temperature of your CPU and video card to ease your paranoia :) Most of these programs can even start beeping loudly if you are getting close to overheating the hardware.
That said, high-power modern video cards work at ridiculous temperatures, around 95C. That's almost enough to boil water, and yet is considered acceptable. Any modern CPU will shut off if overheated.
Anyway, you will probably have to replace your video card due to obsolescence rather than thermal damage.
Despite doing a lot of computer programming, after finishing university I knew little about how the modern PC went together. It was only after building together a few PCs (at work) that I understood just how easy it was.
I think it comes from the 1960's depiction of computers, when if you hit the wrong key the keyboard would shoot sparks out and throw the operator across the room.
