Hacker News Reader

Comment by jhealy | Hacker News Reader

A similar anecdote from my family.

My uncle (a sheep farmer) and I discovered that:

1. I was afraid to touch anything in a car engine, but happy to muddle through unfamiliar computer issues

2. He was afraid to click unknown buttons on a computer screen, but comfortable pulling apart and rebuilding an unfamiliar car engine.

In both cases, we were confident because we knew whatever mistake we made we'd be able to reverse it. And in both cases, we were afraid of making a mistake that we couldn't reverse.

View on HN

That's basically how I taught my father to use a computer. It came down to two things:

1. He was terrified of breaking it, so I told him that there was nothing he could possibly do to it that I couldn't fix. I made sure to sound overly confident -- almost like I was challenging him to break it. That gave him the confidence to do whatever.

2. Every time there was a problem with it, I would Google the answer in front of him, and he'd watch me figure it out in real time. Eventually, he got the confidence to start Googling things himself. The tech support calls dropped off pretty steeply after that.

Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day.

Teach a man how to google, and he'll never go a day in his life without being obsessed with conspiracy theories.

You're not far off, to be honest. Just replace 'conspiracy theories' with 'extreme political YouTube channels'.

It's not all bad, though. He invites his friends over and shows them how you can find all sorts of cool stuff online. One of them the other day was apparently trying to stump YouTube with increasingly obscure woodworking joints.

I think most people would be surprised how many people are still out there who have no idea what the internet is or what it does. Imagine discovering that there's a machine that can show you how to do anything, or play any song you've ever listened to, and you had no idea something like that even existed.

Yeah it's nice and everything but don't tell that to your boss or bosses in general otherwise most of us will be unemployed in a few years /s

This reminds me of a trick I would do when I was the teenage “computer guy” for my family and neighbors back in the nineties.

When I was doing upgrades, I would make the person in question replace a few parts themselves. Usually I would pull out one SIMM chip or PCI card, explain what it did and how it was retained, and then ask them to pull out and replace a similar part themselves.

I found that getting their elbows dirty went a long way toward perceiving computers as things that could be figured out.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com