So for context, she is a lawmaker and government in my country is proposing a law to make all things crypto illegal, so she asked for my professional opinion and after I wrote it up, the really wanted to dominate it, as, like myself, she can’t bring herself to speak publicly about something she does not understand at some level.
I was very proud of both her and myself.
Your mother seems like a very curious and inquisitive person, who actually wants to learn about something before gravitating to strong opinions about it. That's respectable.
Seems like she also challenged you (in a positive way), by asking you to reformulate your explanations until they were approachable but not too ELI5. That takes a lot of patience and solid communication from both participants. Seems like a win-win situation in the end, enabling her to gain a solid understanding of the fundamentals, while allowing you to refresh your own understanding, and strengthen your technical communication skills.
Kudos to both of you, and thanks again for sharing.
If you have to build up "what the hell is an EUV machine?" from first principles, you are going to lose them somewhere around linear algebra.
If something seems difficult to explain, even with analogies, consider if you should abstract the concern away and say something handwavy like "that's wizard crap, don't worry about it. Just call me if this light turns red."
Volts: Water pressure. The higher the pressure, the more forceful it goes through, but you can have a large or small diameter pipe with high and low pressures. But water can be highly pressurized without actually moving.
Amps: Water flow rate. More amps means more water flowing through the pipe, per second.
Watts: Power of the water. Multiply the pressure by the flow rate to get this. Higher with more water flow (amps) and higher pressure (volts).
In a solar powered system with limited supply being able to power a limited amount of devices - how is that calculated? What is a mental model I can use for that?
Some just don't have enough "room" to learn new things without sufficient motivation. Day-to-day life-- anxiety, responsibilities, etc. --all work to cloud working memory even when the subject seems to be at rest and/or distracted by something else.
Years and years of not having a trusted system (ala GTD) in place to get all of this out can create an extremely-frazzled old person. My mother is unfortunately like this.
The idea that you might have to randomly drag around an image a bit to hopefully get Word to lay it out the way you want, without actually even knowing what "the way you want" is until you see it, must be pretty alien.
To me, it's a million line layout algorithm, I don't know how it works, I don't particularly care to spend years learning all hardcoded edge cases it propably has, I just know that I've always been able to get it to work, even if sometimes I don't know how I did it. To them, it's probably like trying to use a chainsaw at the end of a slinky, they're expecting it to do what they say, but it doesn't offer any way to tell it what to do, just some latent variables that are kind of related to what you want.
Your expectations of where the other persons baseline knowledge is will always be off and your assumptions of what is “common knowledge” will be wrong.
A lot of things are also just hard to explain. Many things we know have been learnt by experience - we may not actually know the underlying logic or reasons for doing something - we just know that it’s what you have to do.
Explaining these things to someone who has not gone through the experience is very difficult.
I really like the concept of “it’s tremendously difficult to remember what it’s like to not know something.” I think it frames really well the challenge of explaining a concept to someone.
Then again they are 60+ and worked with computers. I remember my mother having a Windows NT laptop in the early 00s for example.
About four people in their later 30s, and one person in their upper 70s.
Honestly, I thought it would be an easier sell, being in person and all, and being well-known as a tech person. I wasn't pushy at all. But it was impossible.
The first several times I focused on Matrix/Element, since that is mainly what my interest was in offering accounts-- as a comms channel other than email or text/iMessage for us, to increase our dialog.
In one conversation, I tried heavy use of analogy. Have you heard of newer A, B, C, D messengers, there's a gap for the way people used to use the old E, F, G messengers.
I described, accurately I think, my intended use case for us, for discussion of things that really do not arise to the formality of email, nor to the urgency of a notification for text/iMessage. For links we find to share, or topics to discuss, etc. To manage notifications appropriately. To only check or respond when there happens to be time or interest.
I know nothing is secure. But the idea is also somewhat, this service is at least not provided/managed by the ISP or by now pretty widely known demonstrably bad actors in tech, I won't name names.
People actually think tech co's don't spy on content. One person in gov said, that even they would need a warrant. Yeah, right. That's their understanding, though. (I mentioned targeted advertising. I did not bring up so-called AI.)
Mostly met with resistance:
- I don't message (older person); although, they check their phone regularly, and they do email
- I don't have time--pretty much everyone else
That was, yeah, sort of a wakeup call, but not really.
Regular people really have no interest in (philosophically, ideologically, or marginally) better tech, and regular people really have no time at all in general for thinking about just about anything.
Back to the battlestations for some of us. (For what, one is occasionally brought to wonder.)
I periodically get someone trying to get me to sign up for the New Hot Thing. If I had time for that, I can find better uses for it elsewhere.