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Anybody have ideas on why the age divide on expectation + exploration vs. memorization seems so stark?

In my experience the top predictor of whether a person can use a computer to do what they intended to do is age. Not IQ, not other mechanical or technical competence, not education, not cultural background, not linguistic aptitude, not reading speed, not creativity, not engineering or product design experience... mainly age.

(with outliers of course)

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My guess is it's about how curious about new things you were when computers got popular. Computers are, compared to a lot of real world devices, a lot more complicated than pretty much any consumer tool that predates them, but also more forgiving. Most consumer appliances before computers had at most a couple of settings, all of which were clearly defined and handed to you. Anything beyond that involved aggressive tinkering that may or may not go well.

Computers, on the other hand, have interfaces that are vastly larger than any human brain could hope to contain. So they require exploration. This comes naturally to children, less so to fully matured adults, and is extremely rare in people middle-aged or beyond. So you get a line based on how old they were when they first got their hands on a computer.

The thing I've noticed about people on the other side of the divide is this irrational fear that doing anything incorrect, even once, is going to completely brick their device and cost a bunch of money. So they develop these weird superstitions and go through the ritualistic rote-learned menu clicks because exploration doesn't feel safe.

I don't know the origin of this attitude.

My elder relatives even went as far as writing down (on paper of course) the exact steps to do some specific thing. Which will of course inevitably fail because some popup or whatever putting them into some (to them) inconsistent state.

It probably has to do with older people being introduced to computers as big, complicated machines with consequences if you mess up, while younger people were first exposed to computer games as kids and knowing it's possible to undo stuff. Until they end up coding a buggy smart contract and losing 6 figures.

>In my experience the top predictor of whether a person can use a computer to do what they intended to do is age.

From what I've seen, it isn't age, even IT people. Sorry.

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