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Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

Easy rule-of-thumb: if you think somebody is stupid, ask "Help me to understand"

I've found that once you understand, very, very rarely do you think they are stupid any more.

I couldn't agree with you more.

On a personal note, I must admit that the level of arrogance seen in IT is sometimes quite overwhelming. Just because someone can use a computer does not automatically make them smart; other people have other skills, amazing! ;)

"She's not troubled, she's a dancer" - Sir. Ken Robinson on a child whose parents feared she might be learning-disabled, thus demonstrating that different types of intelligence exist. Look up the speech on TED Talks; it is incredible.

I know the video you're referring to. It is really cool, and opens up the idea that intellectual intelligence is only 1 type of intelligence.

From my personal life, my wife couldn't care less about computers and probably would never watch a TED video, but her "people intelligence" is very high -- she can relate to many different kinds of people and wherever she goes she makes good friends and people around her hold her in high esteem.

Her dad is something of a bookworm who knows a little bit about everything and quite a bit about a couple of things. If he were younger (he's in his 70's) he'd probably get his news from HN. I've often wondered if his "intellectual intelligence" was transferred to her but in a different form... like she used it in a different way, in interacting with and reading people, instead of books.

I suspect at the biological level there are vary few differences in "types of intelligence" but people can get vary good at solving the types of problems they have already solved. I think the real trick is not to measure people based on what you are good at but what they are good at.

Coders can often walk though large logic problems instantly, but IMO that's the same basic thing as an artist knowing which 12 lines capture the basic idea of a picture. Think of it like the brain missing the correct API's, you can fake it but it's slow and buggy. But, if you start to spend 10,000+ hours solving the same types of problems and you are going to create that foundation.

EX: Cab drivers develop much better spatial reasoning skills over time. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/677048.stm

@Coders can often walk through large logic problems instantly: I work in an IT shop where we write in house systems to support the business processes of nontechnical people. When we try to hammer out business requirements for systems we'll often have discussions with customer where we carefully question "OK, so it is ALWAYS the case that P and Q implies R", and "It's NEVER the case that P or R implies S" and so forth. The customer will say yes, yes, yes, throughout this, then she'll mention some other case can happen that logically invalidates the rest of everything she said. Only, she doesn't realize this because she doesn't have a coder's hard-edged sense of logic. But when this happens I, my boss, and my boss's boss (the CIO) will all three exchange a quick incredulous look with each other at the same time because we all ran through the logic and found the contradiction nearly instantly. Or, that is to say, as she was talking we were all three building up the same structure in our minds, and the last thing she says brings it crashing down in all three of our heads at the same time.

Trying to explain that to a non-coder is not easy to do without appearing arrogant, and I think that is why people in IT can appear rude. How do you politely say, "Your mental representations are so messy and imprecise I'm having trouble categorizing what you need?"

How do you politely say, "Your mental representations are so messy and imprecise I'm having trouble categorizing what you need?"

You say: "OK, now that we've covered the standard flow, let's talk about the strange cases. What are the weird situations that come up once in a while?"

For many users, "ALWAYS" translates to "always, except for the oddball case", and "NEVER" translates to "not usually, but you never know."

That's why Requirements Analysis is as much about psychology and anthropology as it is about logic.

'"OK, so it is ALWAYS the case that P and Q implies R", and "It's NEVER the case that P or R implies S"'

The number of real world problems where ALWAYS applies is vanishingly small. This is the reason that rule based artificial intelligence floundered. The answer to almost every interesting question is some variation of "sometimes", "often", "almost always", "except when", etc. This is why statistical techniques and machine learning have led to solutions to many problems where rule based AI was an abject failure.

I attended a talk on multiple intelligences a few years ago. The speaker, a research psychologist, said that there are indeed several types of intelligence. They all covary with each other and the property with which their covariance is greatest is called the g factor: general intelligence. The best (but not perfect) measure of g factor is IQ.

I saw this link here on HN a short while ago from a person more passionate than me when it comes to IQ: Spearman's g, a statistical myth http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/523.html

I was interested and looked it up - here it is if others haven't seen it:

http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_crea...

It's a problem definitely, one that always aggravates me. It's about perception of the job too. I struck up a conversation with a guy on the train the other day; he was a journalist - a field I've always been fascinated by.

As soon as I told him what my job he barely spoke about his own - it was just constant banal anecdotes about what I did, how bad he was with computers and how I must be amazing and...

On one level it attests to how important computers have become in our daily lives. Mostly it just makes me sad because, really, I'm just an IT guy!

I rarely tell people what I do because I hate those stories. I don't care that you broke your printer and your 4 year old niece fixed it by putting more paper in. Yes, she is super smart for actually reading the error message that said "Out of Paper".

I also can't stand it when somebody tells me they are just completely computer stupid. And that's before we've even said hello.

I find that it's not so much inability so much as fear. A lot of people (especially the older generation) seem to think that if they futz with a computer they'll irreparably break it - so they stop and call an expert as soon as something deviates from normal workflow.

You think you're creating a UI that encourages learning by exploration, but a lot of your users are too terrified of their machine to dare click that button.

This is something we need to work with and educate users about - they're not stupid, they're overly cautious.

Perhaps a user interface should have a "fearful user" mode, where a tooltip on each button describes the worst-case scenario that'd happen by clicking it, and how to recover from that to a pristine, unclicked state.

Couldn't agree more. My mom can get stuff done (email attachments, etc.) if she is sitting alone and absolutely has to do it.

If at all I am available, she will ask help for the smallest stuff fearing she would break something.

Sometimes I think its not even about breaking anything, but more about not fancying herself to recover from "even more damage."

This is a big part of it. When I'm helping somebody with their computer, I always tell them that they can't break it and not to worry about it.

I used to be able to tell people that, back in the DOS era. Unfortunately, in the Internet era, I'm afraid the people afraid they'll break it if they do something wrong are perfectly correct. One quick download of Bonzi Buddy and You Have Lost, for one instance from my own personal network.

That still doesn't break it. You just reimage and go.

That's the beautiful thing about software - you can't physically destroy anything, such that it can't be moderately easily recreated.

I can't backup my car, so I'm extremely hesitant about messing about with the transmission or exhaust or what have you.

It's trivial to backup my computer and data, and just go for broke. Worst case, I'm out some time, but no real dollar cost.

It might be trivial for you to backup your computer, but it isn't for most people, and most people don't do it. And, beyond the risk of data loss, people now also have to worry about identity theft and other financial loss if they do the wrong thing on their computer. (Keeping in mind here that for most people, browser == computer.)

That's an advantage of having an old, already-broken car. The potential downside of messing with it is small relative to the potential upside. I've a friend who has a nice BMW he drives every day but he recently bought an old junky Jeep and is rebuilding it in the back yard with his kids. They're a little too young to follow what all the parts do but not too young to learn that cars aren't just sealed black boxes; they're collections of parts that do things which we can take apart and put back together.

my dad used the excuse of breaking the computer to not let me mess around with them when I was a kid. That probably set me back from programming around 7 years or so, now that I think about it.

Try telling people you study mathematics ;)

I was just about to say the same.

Fear of computers is nothing compared to fear of mathematics.

I worked at my college's computer help desk while earning my undergrad. Since the college distributed laptops to every student over half time (or by request if half or less) and every professor, lots of people needed help.

Not to pick on the gender, but girls who came in almost always started the explanation of their problem with some variation "I have no idea what I'm doing with this thing" or "You must think I'm a total idiot, but..."

A lot of the time, problems were simple and I could show them how to fix it in a matter of minutes. All I could ever tell them was that if they played with computers for a living, they'd get the hang of it too.

The girl in my office almost always starts off a request for tech support with the words "tom, you're clever".

Out of the two people she shares an office with she is definitely the most tech literate by far... People do undersell themselves.

      ... always starts off a request for tech support with  
      the words "tom, you're clever".

,,, It's the strangest thing, since none of us are named Tom.

I don't think I know anybody who I would call stupid. I do, however, know people who are intellectually lazy - they don't know, and they don't want to know. Which is not the same thing at all.

[Edit: in case that sounds obnoxious, I was aiming more for "frustrated"]

"they don't know, and they don't want to know" I agree, this is usually my experience, as most of the people I interact with are fairly highly competent in their field.

One thing that bothers me is when I raise an idea, "could we do this...." for example. And they say no, it is not possible.

My latest example was, asking if animated characters in a video could have automated lip-synching, based on a text file (this could massively cut production times for new videos). No, it's not possible, was the answer, and when I disagree, everyone in the room kinda looks at me like I'm the idiot. [Of course it can be done, there are lots of products that do just that...and btw, I am the client in this scenario.]

Another example....we needed some customization in SharePoint, two specific requirements, that aren't provided out of the box. I went back to my desk, implemented demos for both in about 4 hours using jQuery. Did a demo at the next meeting....yes, that's nice, but jQuery isn't a standard here. So we turned to an outside consulting firm, and they implemented the easy feature using.....jQuery. (I don't think they knew how to do the other one, at least it hasn't gotten done).

So where I come from, the idea that you are surrounded by "idiots", which is a bit provocative, is often true. I don't pretend to be an expert in law, engineering, etc, but I constantly encounter experts in their field that behave as if they are experts outside their field.

I will always listen to the opposing side of my arguments and always consider that I may be wrong, but I rarely encounter someone I disagree with who is willing to debate the disagreement with an open mind, and consider that perhaps they may be incorrect.

How else should we consider these people?

My practical definition of stupidity is talking authoritatively about a subject one doesn't understand, and is incapable of explaining. Stupid people are often parroting things they've heard in various places, of which they have only the most superficial of understandings. Not being stupid is often knowing when to shut your mouth.

At a deeper level, it all comes down to being poor at evaluating the relative value of information sources, placing value in the judgment of people for social and political reasons rather than for their actual expertise in the subject matter. This inability to recognize expertise, easily vulnerable to misguiding, is the essence of idiocy.

A more realistic and common definition I think would be talking authoritatively about a subject one knows a bit about (have read some articles, or genuinely has some expertise in), without considering who your audience is.....if you're truly intelligent, and someone disagrees with you, you should change into a different mode, determining whether the person actually knows what they are talking about, and the possibility that they know something you don't.

It's people like this that bother me...I don't know what the proper term for them is.

Sometimes there is nothing to understand. Code produced in my project at work is a good candidate for the daily WTF (http://thedailywtf.com/). I tried to explain the problem to the management but they didn't change anything. Now the project is more than a year late because the thing doesn't quite work. It is quite obvious that there are problems and if nothing is done when told, than the only logical conclusion is that they are stupid. My boss's answer to this now is "that's life". "Help me to understand" is in this case a waste of time and resource. Where is Darwin again ?

Change your job?

What looks like stupidity is almost always ignorance.

What people forget is that, half the time, that ignorance is yours.

Yeah. If one can't explain the thing "on his fingertips" he doesn't understand the thing either.

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