It’s helpful to take a few steps back from time to time to reassess where we’re each coming from on our knowledge of tech (or anything) to better communicate.
It’s helpful to take a few steps back from time to time to reassess where we’re each coming from on our knowledge of tech (or anything) to better communicate.
Tech people presume that normal people think about how technology works
They don’t even try to conceptualise how something on their phone gets there from the internet or ‘the cloud’ - when things stop working they don’t think about the fact that their an app on their phone is using a network connection to a router, which distributes an internet service that connects them to a server, that is running a program, on which they have an authenticated account…
They wouldn’t even know where to begin with troubleshooting, it’s just ‘broken’ and they get frustrated
Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And for many people, computers are basically at that level. As long as it works, it’s convenient magic.
honestly it’s magic even when you understand it. Computers are pieces of rocks drawn on with runes in rare mineral ink, infused with lighting, and then made to do maths by generations of magicians perfecting the translation from the primal language of what can be only described as a pulse of being only made apparent by the times when it’s not being, to words humans can comprehend, then with that maths they somehow they create illusions of entire new worlds, and did I mention they can telepathically communicate with other magical rocks? all through mystical waves all around us created by beacons big and small in key locations. Previously, to talk with a person on the other side of the planet, a single attempt to communicate would require months, if not years, now? seconds. if not less. Computers are magic.
You can hardly call them rocks. Sure, they are Si based, but it’s so beyond purified and rearranged, that you should think of it as just any other chemical plating. I loved that my engineering degree covered a bit of the basics of computers, math and and logic, because I actually can conceptualise the different levels of computation and abstraction that are required. Starting from how theoretical logic works, binary logic gates, machine code, programming, protocols, networks, as well as the physics of radio communication and electricity. It’s mind blowingly hard to fully understand but I can say I don’t find it magical at this point.
mehh, I can find wonder and magic even in things I can fully understand. It’s just a matter of perspective
That’s basically me when my car has an issue. I don’t care how it works, I just want someone to fix it.
Here’s the difference you’re probably not understanding about your self: people don’t need to know everything about everything, and they couldn’t if they tried.
A very small part of my job involves lubricating large industrial fans. Easy enough. What grease should we use? Hang on to your fucking panties
Lube or grease? Lithium-based? Urea? Composite? What was used previously? What should have been used previously? Have you ever done sampling? What’s the vibration frequency?
Did you know there are people with PhD’s in grease composition?
I bet you never even realized that was a thing.
So no, I don’t know what TCP/IP means, or what port and protocols are or what the hell a subnet mask is. I don’t even know what I don’t know. And that’s okay, because YOU know. Doesn’t make you any smarter than me, any more than it makes a grease expert smarter than either of us.
Nothing I said was critical of anyone, any set of skills, any profession. I’m glad that you have specialist skills, everyone does because no-one can know everything
I was responding to a particular question about technology, and how non-techies approach it. I explained in another comment that this complexity in technology is fundamentally different from many other fields of everyday experience
If the industrial fan stops working, they call you, and somewhere between the power point and the air they want to move is the problem you can fix and diagnose
If someone can’t see their cat photos, it could be anywhere from their device to their network, their ISP to the server, the programs on that server, the other server that holds the photos… Like with the fan they know the power is generally ok because the lights didn’t go out, but from that point you actually need some conceptual model of the complexity to even know who to call
part is because the technology tries to hide the inner workings for the user experience and the profit. part is because education systems dont teach any systems concepts, and if they tried to they would be hopelessly outdated. part is because repairability and support are loss centers.
There was a period of time, way back when, in which personal computers were relatively common in households, but repair services basically didn’t exist in most places. Computers were still expensive, and not really useful enough that you’d just go buy a new one when it broke, you’d either fix it or hope someone you know could show you how.
That was a time of “learn or don’t use it” (we had a pc we couldn’t use for 6 months until we figured out how to fix it) and it’s sad that it was so short, because only a very specific age group of people grew up with that pioneering mindset. Since then it’s gotten more “user friendly/foolproof” (locked down and hidden) and the knowledge of how to do stuff with it is becoming more rare on the whole.
I always sort of expected that generations younger than mine would be more tech inclined (inner workings, not just using it) but they really aren’t due to how so much of our modern tech is just… not approachable, locked, or hidden.
This is very well put, I was in this as well. Everything was so much more tinker-able. I miss that. I took felt that people would just be inherently more knowledgeable.
The primary reason is that the technology is designed in such a way that large distributed teams of people can build them without anyone needing to understand the entire structure, because the entire structure is beyond the understanding of a single mind.
A software developer wouldn’t even try to read all the source code of all the libraries their app relies on, nor the machine operations and logic operations and character encodings and chip design and the chemistry and physics of computation.
We’ve consciously decided to abstract things down to reliable interfaces, and as long as the thing behind the interface works, we can understand the interface and build on top of it.
These other reasons are secondary to this one: people don’t understand fully because we’ve gone beyond what a human can fully understand, and deliberately and consciously, decided to adopt this system of abstractions and interface contracts to allow ourselves to operate in the space beyond where the human mind can go.