Comment by danaris | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danaris | Hacker News Reader

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Except that there is.

Maybe not from korija in particular; you're probably right about their specific intentions writing that post.

But I've seen posts—hell, I've met people in person—that clearly put forward the opinion that computers are a mistake, they're overly complex, and we need to go back to the time before they existed.

Most of the time, this is at least couched in the form of "Aw, man, these computers are just so dang complicated, y'know? I can never get 'em to work right! You know how it is, right?" But there have been multiple occasions where it was much less playful and much more seriously "computers don't help, they only make things worse, I hate them and we should just all go back to pencil and paper."

Poe's Law[0] is around for a reason.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law for those who aren't familiar

I do think computers are a huge net positive.

And for what we need computers to do, there is a necessary, irreducible complexity involved, so there is a limit to how simple things could be even in theory.

But the problem isn't with that necessary complexity per se. It is the lack of knowledge in the responsible upper layers of any organisation about how to deal with that. Computers are complex, as essential as pen and paper (or more) and exhibit highly correlated failure modes (i.e. one faulty update or one trojan takes down all of them, just like a fire burns all your papers). This means that a large amount of resources should be expended to prevent problems from occuring in the first place, because they are usually large-scale and severe. Instead, IT gets the minimum amount of resources to keep up with constant firefighting. Also, risk-prevention is frowned upon, the new shiny or the crap everyone uses always has priority, even if it increases risk. Because nobody ever got fired for buying HAL or something.

Right; exactly. This is the kind of sensible analysis of the situations you described that is needed to actually solve them, rather than just decide that computers were a mistake and throw them out (or, as is much more common, throw up your hands and claim that this is unsolvable).

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