Comment by sgt101 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sgt101 | Hacker News Reader

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Here's a test; find a six year old, get the six year old to look for stuff on the web. See how confused they are when the search box jumps to the url bar. See how they react to the clickbait and ads that get in the way of every interaction that they have. See how they struggle with dozens of peoples ideas about page layouts and responsiveness.

Now, you will say : kids are good at using tech, look they are on x,y & z. They know how to do things I don't! But the thing is that they are using services learned one at a time - not access to the library of babel that we all hoped for !

I agree with your post up to the end. The Very happy to stay uninformed too is like "the soviet people love communism". User don't know what is out there that they could get. Especially users don't know what it is that could be made and put out there. This is because tech people don't actually give a toss about HCI and information retrieval, just selling ads and raising rounds of funding.

Don't be evil.

I believe that "kids these days are good with technology" is a phrase uttered by older people who are actually seeing the kids' willingness to experiment without fear, and assume that it must mean proficiency.

Not quite the same thing in the end, though.

One leads to the other; if said older people would be less afraid to experiment, they'd learn things as quickly and they'd too become proficient.

While this is basically true, there is also the difficulty to teach less tech-savvy where it's save to experiment and where not. (And this is where things like "The Line of Death" come into play.)

Anectdotal example: On one hand I sometimes get almost mad when I try to help my parents with computer problems (especially via phone) because they didn't even bothered with randomly trying somewhat problem-related buttons or options.[0] They just get paralyzed (by the fear they could break something) because something happens what isn't routine, even if the solution could be found within minutes even by non tech people.

On the other hand I'm glad about the same behaviour when they call me to ask if some mail or website is legitimate or not. About half of the calls are false positive scam suspicions, but I'm happy looking into them, as long it helps them not getting scammed.

[0] https://xkcd.com/627/

> Not quite the same thing in the end, though.

For all intents and purposes, it is. I do not know a single person who I would term "proficient with technology" who is afraid of experimenting or overly concerned about making mistakes when using something new.

In my experience, people who are "good with technology" are always curious hackers and tinkerers who are unafraid of breaking things, and are never satisfied with simply using the tool: they must look under the hood and they must understand how it works.

I would say the same principle applies far beyond computer technology: math, engineering, physics, music, etc...

> For all intents and purposes, it is.

The vast majority of them max out their skillset with being a consumer (e.g. social media apps) and install a bit of malware along the way.

My sister gave me my favorite definition of "computer literate": Someone that isn't afraid of the computer.

The worse thing that's every happened to me because of my lack of fear was that I fried the motherboard on a friend's Mac back in the 90's by plugging a parallel printer into a SCSI port. Oops! Fortunately it was under warranty.

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