Comment by AndrewPGameDev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AndrewPGameDev | Hacker News Reader

Slight tangent from the original post:

I wish "normal" people were more tech-literate. I don't think they realize just how much of their autonomy they've given up by choosing to use Microsoft Products/Reddit/Twitter/Spotify/Facebook/TikTok/Apple Products/ etc.

We're at a point where now the average person depends on several layers of technology that they can't even conceive of, and often the companies building that technology don't share their political interests. But then the average person expresses frustration at having to use open-source alternatives (which is completely understandable when the open-source alternative is definitively worse!).

Basically, for me not understanding how technology works when it's so central to our everyday lives just seems baffling. I suppose someone could say the exact same thing to me about not understanding how my car works, or how to grow my own food. Maybe technology seems easier to learn than agriculture? But then of course it's easier for me, I'm a professional programmer. So I try to have a lot of empathy for everyone who doesn't understand technology, especially my mom when she doesn't know how to convert a PDF.

The reason is we only have so little time and yet so much to do.

For the vast majority of people, understanding technology is simply not worth their time. They have other, more important things to worry about.

You don't know nor care to understand how telephones and cars and electricity work. Nor how and where the food in the supermarket comes from. Water comes out of the faucet because faucets dispense water. You have more important things to worry about, like computer technology.

Much like those aforementioned things are merely a means to an end for you, so too is technology merely a means to an end for most people; their ends lie elsewhere.

Or to TL;DR: Life's short, ain't nobody got time for computer.

There's a (few) meta-level(s) for this. They should recognize the value of, and accordingly advocate for, having more "hackable/discoverable/understandable tech environments/contexts". And not necessarily for themselves.

The post opens with the classic just brew install blah, and immediately runs into the problem of people not having brew (or some other package manager) preinstalled and ready on their computers. It's the walled garden problem.

And it's not a trivial problem. And even this meta-level argument is not necessarily straightforward, because it comes with serious trade-offs.

And .... unfortunately even one level up, where it should be straightforward to see how a walled garden monopoly is bad (as the consensus on rent-seeking being bad is pretty strong in economics) people mostly don't care about this issue, because they don't connect it to the value of "more power user freedom".

People start to see the value of right to repair tractors, people see the value of the first sale doctrine, people see themselves as temporarily embarrased rich gentlefolk, but they are afraid to see themselves as just a few commands away from a power user.

>People start to see the value of right to repair tractors, people see the value of the first sale doctrine, people see themselves as temporarily embarrased rich gentlefolk, but they are afraid to see themselves as just a few commands away from a power user.

The dissonance stems from the fact that most people don't care about power using.

Users (most people) don't care for messing with their computers because that's not what they're at the computer for. They want to do something on the computer, and the only thing they care about is whether they can get it done.

It's like how most people drive cars to get from Point A to Point B, without giving a damn how a car works or how they could tune the car. If it gets them to Point B then nothing else matters, and tuning their car is a roadblock to getting to Point B because they aren't getting any closer to Point B while tuning their car.

Power users use computers as the end to a means, users on the other hand use computers as a means to an end. More dials and knobs on their computer is irrelevant and even prohibitive for users. Most of us here are all power users and it's natural to want more people to be like us, but the reality is we are not the majority of people on the planet.

As an aside, most of us also gloss over how computers work without a care even as we preach about how the commons must understand the complexities. I doubt most tech bros and neckbeards would understand electrical engineering even as they preach how everyone must understand bash and Powershell.

I don't think we're talking about tuning or power users -- this is the equivalent of folks who don't know how to check their engine oil or their tire pressure.

Someone doesn't care how their car works _until their car doesn't work_. Or they want to change something relatively minor:

"Hey I just bought these awesome tires. Please put them on the car."

"Well, those are too big for your rims so you'd need new rims. And I'm not sure if your car can handle larger rims..."

"Why are you making this so difficult?"

Oh, that's a nice car analogy! (It'd be a shame if something were to happen to it :D)

... but on a bit more serious note, yes, this is an absolute hard question of how to provide "informed user experience". We all know that using phones, GPS, 4G networks, wikipedia, google translate, NFC payment, etc. makes us rely on them. We don't prepare for long trips, we don't even buy maps, nowadays I even forget to download the offline map.

All models are wrong, some are very useful. Picking the model that >> computers are mysterious and some apps "just work" and anything that doesn't work is "fuck that shit" << works for many people. (And if there's enough social pressure then suddenly even the most user-hostile UX becomes "just open that there, scroll for 10 minutes, tap on that small thing, fill out that form, wait until Zuckerberg personally approves in a few minutes, fill out that 30 CAPTCHA, yes, type your bank account number there, it's just how it works, and sure you can see the funny dancing Asian girls!".)

And ... sometimes people put their cat in the microwave, and open every and all malware, and ...

I'm a SWE by trade, but I'm trying to start a business with my spouse that is, traditionally, 100% not dependent on computers. Every time my brain starts to go toward the path of _lets improve this process with technology_, I do a little research, fiddle with code, and find that the solution I think I want would be a few days work minimum. But none of that work actually addresses the IRL work that needs to get done in the meantime. The opportunity cost of introducing technology, even coming from a technologist with a quick-learning partner, is still too high.

Instead, we get the job done with a whiteboard, lists (digital and paper), shared calendars, and a couple Google Docs / Spreadsheets. Post-its, markers, blank labels… office supplies! Incredible technology of the 20th century! Try it!

I was initially frustrated, like this author and other posters, that there's so much intermediary technology to learn to get anything done with. OMG — even getting a point of sale app going on our Very Capable Pocket Computers in 2023 BCE requires Xcode and staring blankly at docs on Stripe that appear flagrantly wrong.

I've seen this pattern at organizations too, where the thing that will clearly fix our problem is actually many tens of thousands of dollars and requires dedicated resources to use, and just slogging through the problem and being scrappy is ultimately _most_ efficient for the company.

The good news is technology really has made a lot of humanity more productive, and the average adult uses quite a lot of it to get their everyday job done. But there's only so much time and resources. Technology we're already super familiar with gets a lot of the job done already. Making portable and sharable lists, communicating about dates and times, traveling many miles or zero miles to see someone's face — that is advanced civilization shit, and we do it all the time already.

The same can be said for education in general. Many people openly state that it's not worth their time. But most of us would agree that "life's short, ain't nobody got time for education" approach would be devastating for society.

The problem with technology is that people are using it everywhere without having any clue of what it does, let alone how it works. Common sense stops working the moment anything tech becomes involved. Businesses and governments have clearly noticed, and is actively exploiting this. Invasive tracking, DRMs, illegal mass surveillance, or the constant encryption ban proposals might not have gone this far if people had a little more understanding of computers.

The thing is Joe Average is going to reply "So what?", and they have a point: Invasive tracking, DRM, illegal mass surveillance, banning encryption, literally none of that affects them insofar as whether they can do whatever it is they want on their computer.

Those things and more negatively affect us as power users, but those things are all complete non-issues for the common man and consequently not worth their time to care.

I'm sorry, what? There's a lot to unpack here. You think basic human rights and equality are only relevant for computer power users? That the erosion of privacy or due process isn't an issue for ordinary people? That people aren't affected by security issues unless they have a software engineering degree? That anti-consumer practices doesn't affect consumers?

I'm not buying any of that.

Joe Average doesn't care whether his communiques are encrypted, Joe probably doesn't even know (nor care) what "encrypted" means. All Joe cares about is whether he can talk with whoever's on the other side: Their spouse, a friend, a business acquaintance, whoever.

Joe Average doesn't care if he's the subject of invasive tracking, Joe probably doesn't even know (nor care) what "tracking" means. Can he read Twitter and Facebook? Can he watch Youtube? Can he shop on Amazon? Yes? That's all that matters.

Joe Average doesn't care about DRM, Joe probably doesn't even know (nor care) what "DRM" stands for. All Joe cares about is whether he can listen to the album he bought, watch the movie he bought, play the game he bought. Can he? Yes? That's all that matters.

Joe Average doesn't care about illegal surveillance, Joe probably doesn't even know (nor care) where the cameras even are. Does the surveillance get in the way of doing whatever he wants to do? No? That's all that matters.

Basically: Life is short, we only have so much time and so much to do. We straight up don't have the time to give an individual shit to each and every thing in our lives.

For most people, a computer is an appliance; it serves a purpose and there is next to no need nor desire to devote any additional time or thought to it. We as power users must respect that reality even if we don't necessarily subscribe to that world view.

It sounds more like you've mistaken the average Joe for the obedient, privileged, and unempathetic Joe. You're making a blanket claim that any social problem that involves a technological solution is insignificant, be it about human rights, democracy, or fraud and abuse. That defense of tyranny and oppression can hardly be framed as respecting other's viewpoints.

> not understanding how technology works when it's so central to our everyday lives just seems baffling

I don’t know. I appreciate the sentiment and would also like more tech literacy, but there are lots of areas central to our lives and I think it’s unrealistic to expect a good understand across it all.

I think it’s on us to be able to adequately communicate and understand the needs of those that ask us for help.

Just as you would want a doctor to explain what your condition is in a way you would understand.

Having buildings to live in is pretty central to most of our lives too, and we have some knowledge and intuition of what looks safe and can be used, but most of us leave the engineering to someone more in the know.

Farming too, I rather people in the industry work on maximising yield to feed us all with tools made and tailored for them.

I think when people go to the quickest solutions for them in tech (i.e. Ms 365, Spotify, John Deere, ABC MRI Scanner etc), I’d rather have them focused on the details of their trade than learning how to use a terminal, jailbreak a tractor or replace a magnet in an MRI scanner.

Those that want to, great, but I think most don’t have the time or interest to take on that kind of deeper learning.

The relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2501/

Markdown is incredibly accessible to people who know how to drag files around on a file system and open them with a click, and every laptop/desktop operating system includes a fast and reliable text editor.

But many people don't have one of these "real" operating systems. Most non-technical people I know would need to build the mental modals of having "files" existing on a "file system" before they could even begin to create, organise and edit text files. Even as I describe this I wonder If I am parroting the xkcd...

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