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Comment by dajohnson89 | Hacker News Reader

I think we underestimate how much time is required to be really good with computers. I'm very knowledgeable about computers, but I've been using them heavily for 22 years.

We have this innate comfort and familiarity with using computers, but as hackers it's a huge part of our lives. People have other ways of life than us, and have other expertise. We shouldn't dismiss their computer illiteracy as stupidity; it's just as bad as them writing us off as "computer nerds".

There's also this tendency for non-computer-literate people to be overly self-deprecating. I noticed this with mathematics, when I tutored people @ uni, but with computers it's the same shit. I constantly hear "yeah, I'm awful with computers, it's all black magic to me". But the person saying that is often not even trying, which is frustrating. It's like a helpless excuse to be lazy and let someone else do the work, which is often not that complicated.

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I don't know about that. There seems to be something innate about one's ability to use computers.

My father is 85 and is quite good with computers; he uses email constantly, writes documents and books using word processors and understands the concept of files, reads on a Kindle, etc. But he had never touched a computer before he was maybe 70 (let alone own one), and before that he wasn't technical at all. He was trained as a Latin teacher (!) and spent his professional life in politics, never having to type anything by himself.

My father-in-law is very good at many manual tasks including woodworking, electricity, electronics, and was an officer in the French army for many years, where he was responsible for maintaining highly technical weapons. He too is 85 and he can't seem to understand computers, although I have known him for 15 years and have been trying to help him for that long. He seems to want to learn but isn't really interested in what one would call "the big picture", he just wants to know a list of actions that will get them to where he wants to go. Of course that approach fails miserably whenever something happens that's not on the list.

I have two friends who have been to top engineering schools who, I discovered recently, type whole urls not in the browsers' bar but in Google's search form. My eldest son is 11 and doesn't confuse the two. My younger son is 7 and doesn't seem much interested.

I agree with this assessment. It has a lot to do with whether the person has the basic ability to understand computers and engineering-like things. If it's not taught at an early age it's tough to pick up this skill later. My parents are perfect examples of this.

My mother is a graphic designer, old enough to have done page layout with a knife and glue. She learned Quark, then Freehand, then In-Design and still uses the stuff to this day. She was not raised with a computer, but her father was an engineer and she has that engineering mind, where she can follow something back to its root and figure it out.

My father, on the other hand, is a Dale Carnegie teacher. He's a people person. He's had a computer since we got an Atari ST in 1985. He's been on Macs since 1987. He STILL cannot use the thing properly. Sending an email is hard for him. Using his iPad is tough. Facebook enrages him because "I don't know any of these people, how do I get rid of them, I didn't ask to see their pictures!" My dad was raised by a photographer and a nurse. He never learned how to troubleshoot. He cannot find a root cause.

But he can hold a room full of people captivated and make them laugh, something my mother would NEVER want to do. So, it's those people skills versus those tech skills, as ever it was.

Aptitude, yes. Some of it is what you learn first, and therefore what you must unlearn. Ditto terrible mental models. Ditto tools poorly designed for the work. Etc, etc.

All this has been exhaustively hashed and rehashed by the UI/UX, cognitive psychologist, designers, SIGCHI, etc groups for decades.

We just don't listen to them.

Typing URLs into the search bar of Google is very common. I see it all the time. If google is your default new tab page there's really nothing wrong with it. One extra click maybe.

It does imply that the user is not (sufficiently) aware of the difference between a browser and a for-profit search engine. It's a type of behaviour that makes people dependent on a service where no dependency is needed. Also, how many of these users are both aware that they are sharing large parts of their browsing behaviour with Google and are okay with that?

Well, most browsers are for-profit too. Typing an address into Chrome's address bar will still send it to Google so they can give suggestions back, I think. (E.g., if I type "http://www.abc" into the bar, it suggests an autocomplete to "www.abcnews.com", which I have never visited. Doing the same in a 'Private Browsing' window turns off this autocomplete.) I'm not convinced that distinguishing between address bar and search field is either a necessary of a sufficient condition for understanding Internet privacy.

You get a search result page instead of going directly to the site (that's how I noticed they were doing it).

It does have the nice feature of spell checking for you :-) It's a good bit safer to search for your bank site, for example, since there're large incentives for phishing sites to sit on common misspellings of bank domains.

I actually do this just for financial sites I don't have bookmarked. It's faster if I miss type and vastly safer.

There are conflicting incentives for search engines (Yahoo seems much worse than Google for this) to allow paid results for phishing sites above the real result. I can often tell exactly which phishing site a user is getting directed to instead of the real domain that they want.

Innate, yes: not being stupid helps tremendously.

Not stupid + put in the time = "good" with tech.

I would say innate interest in the field rather than intelligence vs stupidity.

I know intelligent people that spend time on it and fail because of lack of interest.

Innate: inborn, natural

I seem to have an innate talent for computers. Given a "clue" I can usually extrapolate most of what I need to know. I may be "smart", but my memory recall is horrible -- making connections is very difficult to me given too much time displacement. The extrapolation is mostly automatic w/o actually "thinking".

You just described me, my memory recall is horrible and I'm very curious in finding an explanation.

My memory is poor and seems to only get worse and I'm not even in my 30s yet.

I was just thinking about this recently while installing something with radio buttoned install options:

Standard Install (Recommended)

Custom Install (Advanced Users)

Yet the custom/"advanced" option was just a couple checkboxes that let you exclude extra bloatware during installation.

I wonder how many users upon seeing both options tell themselves they are not "advanced" computer users and just go with option 1 without even looking at option 2. Had they bothered to look many of them would have understood to uncheck the bloatware they know they don't want. If that was too much there was a Back button. But the wording "Advanced Users" scares many ppl away from even looking into that option and so they end up with some Yahoo! search toolbar forever after...

Self-deprecating computer users is an issue. The extent some software companies are taking advantage it is another.

I'm constantly annoyed by "Advanced user" installation options.

They're occasionally accurate - I can think of a few programs where the "advanced" option demanded that I go and read a bunch of documentation - but mostly it's either laziness or malice. I don't think they've been a reasonable choice since storage was so limited that 'advanced' meant screwing around with DirectX directories and partial installs.

In 90%+ of cases, basic/advanced could be better addressed with a handful of simple-English checkboxes for what to install. One is locked-active, for the core bundle. The others have one-line descriptions of what they do and possibly what other products make them redundant, maybe with a "more info" button.

And since evil bloatware isn't going anywhere, we could at least set a norm that real menus give you options, and anyone trying to prevent you from engaging your brain is pushing crapware.

After being burned by ATI and Nvidia driver installs gone bad I'm reluctant to use anything but the defaults. Software SDKs too seem especially brittle when installed apart from the recommended options.

So it's not only casual users who prefer the default.

I would probably make an exception for driver installs, which definitely get into that "actually broken" territory. I'm also ok with "detect my device settings automatically".

I was mostly thinking about the program installs where 'advanced' is a list of different things you might want to install. The worst case there is pretty much just "you didn't install the thing you wanted", versus the "good luck buddy" worst case of tools and drivers.

Seems to me that you're describing the exact sort of psychological tactic that software vendors favor to get people to install the bloatware in the first place.

Sometimes called "Dark Patterns" http://darkpatterns.org

Perhaps one should really call them what they are, scams.

Please (re)read Norman's Design of Everyday Things, for starters. TLDR: Blame the designer (of the tool), not the user.

I taught 100s of people how to use CAD. Tough going. Technophile me thought "Of course it's better, easier, more powerful." Most of my student's blamed themselves. But I knew they were smart, knew what they wanted to accomplish, and just couldn't figure out how to do their jobs with CAD.

You could say "square peg, round hole", or "like pushing rope". I preferred "CAD is an angry 800lb gorilla sitting between people and their work".

Being kinda thick, I finally figured out the tools suck, not the people. Specifically with CAD, worse than the terrible UI, they had terrible mental models, completely divorced from how the users see their own work.

In conclusion, blaming the user is not very humanist. I rage at computers all the time, and I supposedly know what I'm doing. I have deep empathy for anyone not chin-deep in this crap.

That's definitely the right approach most of the time. But sometimes people are just beyond any sort of help. When a literate, educated user cannot even read a message presented on the screen (and I don't mean understand or act upon the message, I merely mean read it), or when they don't understand that their electrically operated computer will not function until the building's electricity is turned back on, I think it's fair to blame the user.

Sometimes people really do have the necessary knowledge and skills, they just refuse to apply them to computers. Certainly, many computer are too quick to blame the user when it's really a design problem, but it's not always wrong.

I sometimes wonder if this is the result of people falling into one of two categories of how they learned to see the world, deeply or shallowly. I think of myself as looking at the world deeply. I'm often less interested in the immediate response to my action than I am as to why that was the response. I want to understand the cause of things. I've met plenty of people that don't care about this at all, they care that action X yields response Y, and (for the most part, barring specialties) go through life with that as their model of the world. Sometimes I envy these people, as their heuristic approach often yields better projections than I'm able to come up with in certain areas (such as how a person may respond to a complex situation).

Unfortunately, I think the shallow mental model has problems when presented with large systems of behavior as a whole that are foreign. Similar to the average person when dropped into a foreign culture with a different language, someone with a shallow mental model of the world may find a computer, with it's decades of layered systems and skeuomorphic metaphors, if they are even attempting that in the specific instance, may be initially too daunting to attempt on their own. At least that's my pop-psychology theory of the day.

I think there's a correlation here, but I'm not sure that someone's weltanschauung would be causative of digital literacy.

Rather, I think the divide is "I can" vs. "I can't", and the latter limited thinking leads to the sort of limited world view you describe.

It's something that fascinates me - so many lead lives that are essentially proscribed, view reality through a pre-fabricated toy lens - and when confronted with an individual that has chosen something other than default options in life react vigorously and vociferously. I see the same in computer literacy and literacy in general - the "I can't" stemming from a refusal to accept new information which may conflict with preconceived notions.

If anything, I think it's fear of thought for the potential unhappiness that knowledge brings - adding something to the picture can make the overall scene so large and intimidating that many shy away rather than attempting the daunting task of filling the gaps.

I mean, it is daunting - once one has climbed a mountain of knowledge you can see the whole, the foothills, how it joins in coherence - but at the bottom, all you can see is an almighty sheer face. I have learned to be comfortable with the knowledge that I know nothing, despite knowing far more than my fellow man. Knowledge requires humility, as you swiftly learn that you couldn't be further from the centre of the universe or less significant.

I think there's a point early in life when this bifurcation happens - perhaps it's down to whether parents attempt to answer a child's questions about the world or simply reply with "stop asking stupid questions". Perhaps it's down to egoism - you either have to be humble or unspeakably arrrogant to pursue knowledge, and the middle is intimidated.

That's my pop-psychology theory of the day :)

You should read "Thinking, Fast and Slow", it will change your life. Hint: you're not too far off base

> When a literate, educated user cannot even read a message presented on the screen (and I don't mean understand or act upon the message, I merely mean read it)...

This is usually trained into users by non-existent or awful error handling and messages in the majority of software. How the industry addresses errors is haphazard at best, and I see lots of evidence of what I call "checkbox/boilerplate project management" in lots of software products. The classic symptom is an error throws a message along the lines of "Foo Error: there was a foo type of error"; it is an error message, so I guess it got marked as a successful part of somebody's sprint by its mere existence, and not evaluated on its utility.

The industry should be hiring legions of editors with red markers to up our communications game when it comes to error messages.

To an extent, yes. I can understand why users will ignore error messages when they're in the middle of doing something else. I can even understand why they might ignore them when things are going wrong. But where it crosses the line for me is when an expert is helping them and asks them, "Can you read me the error message?" And they plead computer-ignorance and refuse. (Yes, this really does happen.)

Learned helplessness seems like a perfectly reasonable reaction to the terribly designed products we are all subjected to.

I've seen people that can't understand the interface to an elevator, that the up light means it's going up and the down light means it's going down. That's for a single purpose tool that people use everyday. How do you propose we design intuitive UI's for those people?

And aren't CAD tools power tools? They are designed to be easy to use for the experienced, not easy to pick up. There is a trade off between power and ease of use.

It's like a helpless excuse to be lazy and let someone else do the work

In my experience more often then not the 'not even trying' has nothing to do with wanting someone else to do it, but rather with being scared to mess up exactly because they feel they are not knowledgeable. That's pretty instinctive I think (e.g. the first time I used a chainsaw I was also rather hesitant as I basically knew sh*t about it) but sometimes also driven by the abdunance of horror stories heard about 'losing all mail/photos/....' (which is, given the person's skills, usually actually very hard to do for them).

I agree. I felt that with maths many times - it was fear caused by lack of understanding. "I don't know what it is, I don't know how to bite it, I don't feel the problem, help!".

I have that with software too, sometimes - again, due to lack of understanding. For most of my Java experience, Maven POM files for me were "that fucking pile of shitty XML I'm not touching with a ten foot pole, because it doesn't make sense". I didn't know why it looks the way it does, what any change will do, how to make anything work. I eventually bit the bullet and spent a day reading up on the docs and now I'm not afraid anymore. But it took me some years to first stop avoiding the topic altogether.

> 'losing all mail/photos/....' (which is, given the person's skills, usually actually very hard to do for them).

The thing is, they don't know that. They have no intuition for the range of operations and capabilities of a piece of software in front of them. You and I both know that this program they're using probably won't be able to find user's mail or photos by itself, much less delete anything - nor that anything in its operations comes close to deleting anything. But regular people don't know that, and I think the common factor here is not having an intuition about the limits of space you're moving in.

Don't blame yourself.

XML obfuscation layer, semi-declarative runtime that can't be debugged (no breakpoints), weird rules, unpredictable failure modes, arcane config & installation, etc.

Maven is utterly broken and irredeemable. That you rose to the occasion to master it is a testimony to your adaptability and pluck.

I'm not proud of my adaptability; I'm ashamed it took me so long to bite the bullet and read the docs.

I'm actually working on turning it into an instinctual habit - instead of trying to power through the unknown, take a break and read a goddamn book about it. It makes you less productive for few hours or days, but then quickly pays significant dividends. Sharpening the axe, and all that.

I brought up the story to highlight the fact that it was so easy, so natural for me to avoid dealing with Maven altogether for years. If, as a technical person, this is my default reaction to a confusing piece of technology, then how can I expect more from normal people? Conversely, their fears could probably be alleviated with as little as few hours worth of education or at least a good explanation. The trick is to make normal people willing to invest those few hours, when their own curiosity isn't enough.

What's better than Maven to solve the problems Maven is used for?

Yeah i see people happily surf all kinds of sites, but once they need to deal with local files they lock up i fear of making an irrecoverable mistake.

The benefit of youth is that one do not have prior memories of failure and punishment that thus allows one to mess up. One of the first things i did after getting a computer was to accidentally blank the hdd. But after a friend helped me reconstruct the environment i learned how to do same and more. And these days i am the ad-hoc support line for family and friends.

I wonder if the whole GUI is not really helping here. Sure, it allows things like browsers to exist etc. But at the same time all the locations of files and such are mental rather than physical.

back in the day, if i wanted to run a spreadsheet program i had to locate the floppy it was stored on. Now it is stored in one of the many sub-folders that blanket my 1TB+ sized hdd.

A whole lot of problems with home computers seems to stem from them doing a number of things in the background without the user being aware.

I can't help wonder what would come to be if one were to go back to the C64 or similar where if we wanted it do anything we had to start it ourselves.

BTW, there is an old OSNews article[0] from someone teaching basic computer usage to older people. And he claims that he had a fair bit more success with the CLI than the GUI. This because not only was it clear when the computer was doing something (one could not input more commands) but it also gave a history of previous actions, and the ability to set aside tasks for later (with a warning about that on exit).

I can't help wonder if the whole desktop metaphor and WIMP, while making things more "friendly" at first glance (vs that blinking prompt) in the end has just added a whole lot of conceptual thicket to cut through when trying to translate goals to actions.

All in all i wonder what we would get if we had a cli with some gui niceties, like being able to add file names to a command by clicking them in the history of a recent ls/dir command.

[0]http://www.osnews.com/story/6282/The_Command_Line_-_The_Best...

> This because not only was it clear when the computer was doing something (one could not input more commands)

Maybe old GUIs were better. You had N windows on screen, meaning N tasks being done. Now you also have to track minimized windows. And tray icons. And programs that run in the background without showing any window or icon at all. And system services, which are different kind of background programs. And I'm probably forgetting something.

Right now, in Windows, I believe the Task Manager is a fundamental tool to understand the runtime state of your system, and it should be advertised as a "normal-user tool", not "expert tool". And I'm talking here about detailed process view[0], and not the dumbed-down view from Windows 8/10[1]. Users can't really hurt themselves with Task Manager anyway (you don't get to kill a system process that easily), and it's fundamental to getting a feel for what your computer does.

Tangentially, the "dumbed-down view" of Task Manager is an example of what I believe is the biggest sin of modern UIs - lying to people. There's hardly a better way to confuse the shit out of users' minds than presenting a limited and inconsistent view of the internal state.

> the ability to set aside tasks for later (with a warning about that on exit).

I wonder how it is this feature was made - both in GUI and CLI - in such a way almost nobody (except sysadmins) use it? I mean, personally I discovered that Windows can do it only very late in my life, and I don't trust UNIX cron. Most people I know - including programmers - don't know about either. Yet delaying tasks seems like useful feature. How come it's not exposed in OSes (and it seems to not exist on mobile at all, from user's POV)?

[0] - http://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/650x593x...

[1] - http://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/411x406x...

Sorry, i was not talking about cron or similar. But simply ctrl+z. Keep in mind that while on the surface that is similar to having multiple windows open, the process is suspended and out of the way. Now the user can actively tell the process to resume in the background, or just leave it there until later. And if one was to attempt to log out while having such a process waiting, there will be a warning.

All in all, this is perhaps a closer approximation of a physical workflow than the desktop metaphor.

Ah, found the article finally.

http://www.osnews.com/story/6282/The_Command_Line_-_The_Best...

I guess i should have tried harder before hitting reply on my initial comment.

"Task Manager is a fundamental tool to understand the runtime state"

IIRC, the taskbar and tray are meant to communicate that at all times. But trays were easily overrun as people installed more and more background software on a single PC. Modern taskbars too have become so crowded there are groupings and virtual taskbars for the virtual desktops.

One cause is software unnecessarily running at all times. Another is people do more with their PCs than in times past.

i dont have a good response yet, but your comment made me think about this and try to explore this problem, so thanks for that!

No problem. I rewrote the comment some 3-4 times and still it came out long and rambling.

> But the person saying that is often not even trying, which is frustrating.

This reminds me of all the anecdotes I've heard about people who immediately click through all alert boxes, to the point of being nigh-incapable of passing on an error message unless someone is standing over their shoulder forcing them to read it.

Oh god my mother. What she needed to do was written in plain language right in front of her, and it was nothing technical but something simple like "you should fill out that text field". I had to install an antivirus software that would not nag her about installing the for-pay version, because no matter what I said, she would inevitably end up with the for-pay version and its useless features installed (but only the trial version, she's smart enough not to actually pay). My mother is pretty intelligent and far from senile, just around 65, it wasn't that long ago that she was a busy executive in a major corporation who had to manage not only people but also her Excel sheets and MS Office at the very least. I still remember many many years ago when she first got a computer with a mouse. She moved the mouse carefully between the tips of only two fingers, and taking her hand off of it between movements to stop and look...

The first time my mother used a mouse was in 1989. She called me on the phone and said "the mouse is not working".

- What do you mean it's not working, does it move on the screen or not?

- Well, it moves but just a little.

- ??? Tell me more?!?

- When I do big movements it moves a little, but when I do small movements it doesn't move at all. I can't get it to cross the screen, even with momentum.

It took me a while to understand she was moving the mouse in the air; in those times mice had a ball that would indeed register movement if you shook the object hard enough.

This was fun and all, but in the end my mother learned to use computers and is now very good at it.

I was certain you were going to conclude with coaching her on how to remove the ball and clean the oil/dirt/hair off the rollers with a q-tip.

It doesn't help that 'the Windows trick', for the UI that is, became popups. Popups after popups that were almost all useless things or worse annoying ads that got popped up on some page you were on.

There is a LOT of noise to that signal. Contrasted to more traditional (teletype inspired) interfaces that only reported actual warnings (if asked for) and failures unless you were extremely specific.

This UI hostility also burns people who aren't experienced with hotkeys. An awful lot of malware-serving webpages pop up duplicate header bars as part of an image, in hopes of catching people who click on the wrong X (much like ads that consist of fake download links).

That's a non-event for a an experienced user, who (if ad block didn't disable the page) probably resorts to the close-tab hotkey by sheer habit. But it's an appreciable threat to someone who's trying to rely on predictable screen UI for their browsing.

Weirdest thing i have seen was some ad delivered malware that would pop up a full screen image of an XP desktop, complete with some popup claiming to be some error or other.

The whole thing was clickable and it fooled me the first time (i really should have picked up on the pointer being a hand rather than an arrow), never mind my less knowledgeable relatives.

That's a new one on me, too. I'm not sure I would have caught it.

One useful trick is right-clicking first, which shouldn't trigger the link and will be very different on an outbound link than a blank webpage or desktop.

Of course, mobile is where I get the most trouble from this - I don't have any hotkeys, and real page-loading is so bouncy and unpredictable that it's particularly easy to get caught by a fake top bar. It's made even worse by things that scroll away the top bar as you move down page, and then bring back a fake one.

In deep pain, I have to regret I even know some IT people that don't read error messages. (I suspect partial problem is here the effort he has to read.)

Not reading error popups is the norm around me, and I work in IT support. It has nothing to do with the message, but the medium: a message popup disrupt the user's workflow, and more often than not for no good reason. All people who work with computers very quickly get in the habit of dismissing flow-breaking popups. I'd say the problem is not with the people.

It's like the ER doctors who miss crucial "Patient is dying!" alarms. They're not just lazy or careless, they work in an environment where every device is screaming "I am here!" every minute of the day.

It's both an important work skill and an unavoidable physiological response to tune out obnoxious and unimportant stimuli, to the point where the people abusing those signals ought to be accountable.

You had something similar that resulted in a mid-Atlantic plane crash some years ago. The crew got so blanketed by automated warnings, and didn't have any visual cues thanks to being a night flight, that they basically flew the plane into the ocean.

This same topic is taught in flight training.

Pilots are repeatedly taught to never "silence" the annoying warning horns that come on for different reasons (slow speed, wrong landing gear configuration). The idea being that mindlessly dismissing alarms will build a bad habit pattern. Especially when you're actually in trouble.

I suspect this is why Microsoft introduced the notification center, and seems hell bent on redirecting popups there.

I don't read them either it turns out, even though I would assume I'm the kind of person to do so. I particularly notice this when say in a video game you need to hit one button to exit and then it asks you to confirm. I can find myself going through the exit, cancel exit, exit again loop multiple times before my brain catches up to what's happening.

In case of IT, you also have to factor in that sometimes people dismiss error messages because they already know what they're telling. Like in my C++ days, I would often not bother looking at the error output at all, because the moment I saw that compiler is starting to spew out text, I immediately realized where I've made a typo.

Then again, compiler errors can be nigh incomprehensible.

it's the same shit. I constantly hear "yeah, I'm awful with computers, it's all black magic to me". But the person saying that is often not even trying, which is frustrating.

It's the difference between a Growth Mindset and a Fixed Mindset: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/dweck

"For twenty years, my research has shown that the view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life. It can determine whether you become the person you want to be and whether you accomplish the things you value" (https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/01/29/carol-dweck-mindset...).

Link to Fullsize Image: http://www.gridgit.com/postpic/2013/10/fixed-mindset-vs-grow...

Very interesting. Thanks for the info.

Now does everyone just tend toward fixed mindsets as they get old? Or is that just a popular misconception or some sort of selection bias?

I feel like I ought to offer this link: http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/08/no-clarity-around-growt...

There are several more pieces in that series, on that site, if you care to look.

The reality and strength of the Growth Mindset theory is fairly unclear, despite a lot of books pushing it as gospel. It's also unclear whether it's accurate even if it is effective - there's an open possibility that people who are basically delusional about their own potential practice harder than the realists, and a handful of them who had high starting potential get great results.

So... age-related degeneration is real, neuroplasticity drops over time, but I wouldn't want to connect that to growth mindset because I'm not convinced that's even a real effect.

I think the incentives to having a growth mindset are diminished. Once people are comfortable with what they have in life - job, spouse, children, what benefit does learning, say, poetry, or programming, have to their daily life? I feel like at a certain point you have to feel like it enhances your life beyond allowing you to acquire the standard metrics of success that we adopt into our cultural consciousness.

It's a very large and fuzzy topic. It depends on what computer system you run. Being able to use windows is not a skill, it's extremely unconceptual and ad-hoc, and mostly coll rote learning. I'm sure older systems, with less layers and cruft (think 70s box) taught you more, giving you simpler tools and more ways to solve problems on your own. Nowadays it's mostly fads.

You're right about self deprecation. Society lifts computer usage as a value even if it's mostly absurd in reality (because I knew excel, people would look at me doing basic tasks saying they couldn't do it). It affects many people, it's very very hard to reverse. It's indeed very similar to math anxiety. Reminds me of childhood friends who dropped out of school in Junior High, couldn't do the "simplest ratio" but were doing them on the fly with custom units to sell weed, I couldn't follow them. It's all ceremony, sadly.

ps: one last thing, I wonder how illiterate people would feel if given a system like NixOS or GuixSD with almost fully rollbackable system; meaning they can mess with it without negative emotions or almost no superstition.

Laziness and time efficiency trumps experimentation and curiosity. Now, if you exposed kids to those systems...

Even in programming schools I and others felt that we should have old machines to program most of the time. It makes you think differently, or just more.

Also, less distractions.

With a full screen cli, all you see is what you are trying to do in this moment.

With a WIMP interface you have the task bar and whatsnot that may at any time try to grab your attention away.

Never mind all those background processes a modern OS runs, for various reasons.

When I push this trail of thought I sometimes believe mainframe programming style slow turnaround: plan, reflect, write, wait for test, correct; was great for this.

Sure exploratory programming, which I used to love, has value, but lots of the development in past days I think came from the technological wonder of "can we do it this way ? cool".

In the post-mainframe golden age, before UNIX and C came to screw everything up, people were using highly interactive programming environments with REPLs, system-wide debuggers, ability to work directly on running processes, etc. I think having access to such tools does not diminish your ability to think (I'm judging by my experience with those tools which somewhat survived in the Lisp world). But the issue with distracting OS seems more real. Back in the 70s, they didn't have a task bar with IM, music player and web browser waiting for you there. It was you and your dev environment.

the person saying that is often not even trying, which is frustrating. It's like a helpless excuse to be lazy

I suspect some of that might be due to Learned Helplessness. That is something that has to be worked on:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness

http://catlintucker.com/2016/01/learned-helplessness/

not just computers. whenever i visit home and my mom or sister want to watch netflix i have to be the one to plug in the hdmi cord for them from the ps4. i've showed them how to do it dozens of times but they somehow zone it out and would rather bother me and wait then figure it out.

Then again, HDMI is laden with HDCP, and i seem to recall more than one story about how you had to turn on devices in just the right order to get something other than a black screen or error because HDCP tripped up.

Digital signals are in theory a boon. but digital signals wrapped in DRM is a hot mess best avoided.

why should they learn, when you do it every time?

sounds like a great bargain for them.

Reminds me of my cats. One of them learned to open doors by jumping on the door handle. The other didn't, and when he needed some door open, he would wait for the first one to come and help.

You: "Seriously? It's about 5% more complicated than plugging in the vacuum cleaner. I'm in the middle of something. One last time and that's it." Voila!

I couldn't agree more with your last paragraph - I see this all the time. If these people approached other skills like driving a car or using a washing machine the same way they approach computers, they'd walk around in dirty clothes. As you mentioned it's easy to dismiss computer wizardry as black magic. This is the lazy approach in my opinion. This is simply a question of attitude towards problem solving.

On the other hand, I could redirect to a bright fifth grader most adults who have some computer/mobile/IT problem.

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