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Comment by epo | Hacker News Reader

It is not clear whether she is genuinely techno-challenged or was playing devil's advocate to see if these 'experts' could explain things in ordinary language. I hope the latter, I suspect the former.

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I've met her - and heard her questions at an Internet conference - she is that stupid. See http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2012/10/the-eye-of-the-storm/

Isn't it a bit harsh to say she's stupid? Ignorance of a given field isn't a strong indicator of stupidity.

If that field is your day job it is either stupidity or lack of effort.

EDIT: Appears she is not an Internet Minister so I give her some benefit of doubt.

That reminds me of Poe's law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

As she didn't state she was trying to look stupid on purpose, it's very possible it was genuine.

Regardless which it is, it's still dangerous. The argument is for doing something ineffective that damages everyone's freedom because some parents are stupider than their children.

As a minister it only matters that she is clever enough to take expert advice and run with that. She's there to represent us, it's unfair to ask her to have an in depth knowledge of any portfolio that she could possibly be given.

Having said that MPs, like the general population, seem to undervalue expert advice and value 'gut feeling'. This is especially true if their gut senses media controversy or 'giving the opposition a stick with which to beat them at the next election'.

While it would be nice to see a tech savvy person in such a position they may well not understand the social implications of policy (such as most people don't know how to search in the internet for a filter let alone understand what a filter is) and that would be equally painful to watch.

> As a minister it only matters that she is clever enough to take expert advice and run with that. She's there to represent us,

And the problem is, in matters of technology and privacy, they usually take (industry) expert advice and run with that, instead of representing us.

> it's unfair to ask her to have an in depth knowledge

Double clicking install.exe is now considered "in depth knowledge"

Where do you find the proper "install.exe" to use? How do you know it's the one you want? How do you set it up? How do you know it's not a crapware/malware/whatever? How do you know it's up and running? How do you prevent your children from disabling it? ...

> As a minister it only matters that she is clever enough to take expert advice and run with that.

  Helen Goodman: But I don’t know how to download parental  
  controls. I can send an email, I can click onto Windows but 
  the minute you talk about downloading software, my brain
  goes bzzzz.

The problem is not that she does not have in-depth knowledge. The problem is that (assuming she is not trolling the vendor) she appears to have no knowledge at all. What is she going to do when two experts give her two opposing advices, roll a dice? Besides, if even a talk about "downloading software" makes her "brain go bzzz", I'm not confident she'd be able to tackle any sort of issue involving words with more than three syllables.

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