Comment by Waywocket | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Waywocket | Hacker News Reader

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Broadly speaking, I disagree somewhat.

I don't think there's anything I own without a working understanding of how it functions, or at the very least the ability and willingness to attain that understanding if required. If I owned a car, I might not learn how to strip and rebuild the engine, but I would learn how to check and replace any sensibly serviceable parts, and how frequently I needed to do things like an oil change - which I would do for myself.

This generalises into other skills - if it's useful to my life, I'd much rather learn to do it to a passable level rather than get somebody else to do it (unless there's a significant risk attached). The only reason I'd be happy to be completely ignorant of something is if it holds absolutely no interest to me at all - which clearly isn't the case for anything I'm actually trying to do.

I'm not claiming that this makes me a better person, and I'm not claiming I'm infinitely adaptable as you put it, but I do feel that there's a very real difference that goes well beyond simply having a different area of specialisation.

I appreciate the disagreement. And I do agree that some knowledge is better than no knowledge. But there are always limits to what we can know and do, if simply because of the number of hours we're alive.

But even the way you phrase your comments indicates you're wearing a large set of winkers. "If it's useful to my life" is so broad as to be unimaginably large. Just thinking through my day: do you know what makes good soap or shampoo, and could you make it on your own? Can you purify dirty water? Can you fix the plumbing in your house? Can you make a toothbrush or toothpaste? Spin yarn or other thread, and use it to make material goods like towels, clothes, or shoelaces? Can you hone a blade's edge to razor sharpness using a leather strap? Can you skin a cow? Can you re-sole shoes? Fell a tree and use the lumber to make a bed, dressers, cabinets, or a door? Can you make elastic? Harvest grain and use it to make food? GROW grain in the first place? Re-wire your house? Fix your fridge/stove/microwave/garbage disposal/dishwasher/vacuum cleaner/etc.? Power your house without relying on the grid? Make and level concrete? Build a house? And on and on...

I have no doubt that you could, should you want to, learn some of those things. But you have to rely on other people at some point -- even if just because "there's significant risk". But just because you can learn things you're actually trying to learn says nothing about the MYRIAD things you aren't learning. And the sooner people realize that OTHER people find those things interesting, and that some of those other things even take immense skill or knowledge, the better off they'll be. Right now, it mostly sounds like you're completely ignorant of how many things you rely on that you have no idea how to do yourself.

I don't know, I do a lot of work on both computers and cars, and I can understand why people want nothing to do with the internals of either.

I was working on changing the oxygen sensor in my car this weekend, and it started raining. It is a major pain in the but when you have the car jacked up and the hood open and parts strewn about with tools and you get a random rain storm (I guess this is why I need a garage). I didn't finish the project and my girlfriend had to drop me off and pick me up at work yesterday. It would have been a lot better if I knew nothing about cars and just had a mechanic do it (hundreds of dollars extra aside).

The same goes for computers. I can reformat a hard drive and go through a Gentoo install - but I haven't done that in years. I don't have time to deal with that stuff anymore so I want it to just work. It is an inconvience to stay up on it.

Likewise, I know almost nothing about accounting or law. I have to do a little bit of both now for my startup, and I want nothing to do with it. I turn to people who know what they're doing and ask for help rather than dive into it. I am perfectly capable of learning it if I wanted to, but I just don't like learning it. Those guys come to me for car help and I go to them for legal advice.

Everyone has different passions, and when you get busy it is easy to just delegate/ignore the stuff you don't like.

I agree. I don't expect people to become experts in cars or computers or anything else they use in their daily life that their job or safety may depend on, but I do have more respect for people that make an effort to learn the basics or try to understand what they're dealing with.

I don't assume someone is stupid for being clueless about technology. I might assume they're at least a little lazy.

When I started using computers in the 1980's I sat down with a 20 minute tutorial and learned the basics about the mouse, keyboard, interface elements, command line and components of the computer. I've met people that have spent years asking others for help with things I took less than half an hour to learn up front.

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