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Comment by pessimizer | Hacker News Reader

This must be like when in threads about Uber, people describe taxis as a traumatizing hellscape. When I was a child, I figured out how my city was shaped, and figured out how to get around. Knowing how to get around one's own city is a skill worth learning, and is less of a time investment than fishing around for a phone to spend minutes futzing around with for the rest of your life.

> The first times I traveled involved printing a stack of papers including names, addresses, and maps. Getting to a hotel in a country you've never been before and without having a good command of the local language is stressful.

Not a problem most people have often. For the pretty well-traveled, maybe a few times a year.

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> When I was a child, I figured out how my city was shaped, and figured out how to get around.

You either live in a pretty small city, or an exceptionally well-laid one. I have lived in the same city all my life, and while I have a pretty good idea of where major points of interest are, and can probably walk or drive home from anywhere in the city, I definitely don't have any chance of finding a random address someone gave me, or finding a bus&tram route there.

We had maps, bus schedules phone books. It wasn’t that hard.

Sure - with pre-planning. That is simply no longer required, which is a clear improvement with no downsides (though phones do have other downsides, no doubt about that).

There are some of us who will never learn 'how to get around' one's city. We lack a head for sense of direction, for memorising landmarks etc. We can try all our life, and we'll only cope, but never be comfy.

Of course, if I'm just going to commute to the office and come back, I could do it blindfolded, and those days it's easy to be without the phone. It's exactly when you're doing something unusual that the phone is so handy.

Just because you don’t have the problem doesn’t mean you should trivialise someone else’s experience. How rude.

Try listening more, and hold back from telling people how to solve problems they didn’t ask for help solving.

And yet you are trivialising the experience of the person you are replying to.

How rude.

Thing is, there's no symmetry here.

If some people genuinely have problems and some genuinely don't, then only common conclusion is that the problems do exist (for some) and so solutions to them are required, so the experiences of the people who had problems can't be trivialized (because that experience is relevant for solving the problem even if they're in the minority) and the experiences of the people who didn't have a problem should be trivialized unless there's a good argument that those experiences almost universal and the problem actually is not real.

>If some people genuinely have problems and some genuinely don't

You only gather data to reach that conclusion by letting both sides talk about their experiences, not by telling one side "you're rude, shut up and listen more".

No, the conclusion that some people genuinely have problems can be reached without listening to the experiences of those who don't have problems, the testimony of the people with problems is fully sufficient for that conclusion.

As I explained above, even if some people genuinely don't have those problems, that is simply irrelevant if others do have them.

No, that would lead you to conclude that all people have problems

Someone expressed a problem they have which having a map helps them with, the reply was that people who need maps are lazy (despite the existence of maps suggesting that needing them is endemic to human existence).

Whose experience am I trivialising here?

I am not interested in participating in your purity politics.

Not once was laziness mentioned, you are projecting. The post is just someone sharing that their own experience is completely different to that of the parent.

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