I am, however, reasonably competent with technology. Growing up in a congregation of all age groups, this made me one of the go-to people whenever somebody had computer problems. I’m talking middle-aged and above, the kind of people who fall for blatant phishing scams, have 256mb of RAM, and don’t know what right-clicking is.
Without fail, these people had been aware that losing all their data would be very painful, and that it could happen to them, and that backing up their data could prevent that. Their reaction was universally “this is embarrassing, I should’ve taken that more seriously”, not “I didn’t know a thing like this could happen/that I could have done something simple to prevent it”. Procrastination, trivial inconveniences, and not-taking-the-idea-seriously-enough are the culprit in a large majority of cases.
In short, I think it requires some contortion to construe the typical customer as rational here.
I note an amusing and strange contradiction in the sibling comments to this one:
VAuroch says the above is explained by hindsight bias; that the people in question actually didn’t know about data loss and prevention thereof (but only later confabulated that they did).
Eugine_Nier says the above is explained by akrasia: the people did know about data loss and prevention, but didn’t take action.
These are contradictory explanations.
Both VAuroch and Eugine_Nier seem to suggest, by their tone (“Classic hindsight bias”, “That’s just akrasia”) that their respective explanations are obvious.
I meant less that the explanation was obvious and more that it was a very good example of the effect of hindsight bias; hindsight bias produces precisely these kinds of results.
If something else is even more likely to produce this kind of result, then that would be more likely than hindsight bias. I don’t think akrasia qualifies.
To elaborate on what I think was actually going on: People ‘know’ that failure is a possibility, something that happens to other people, and that backups are a good way to prevent it, but don’t really believe that it is a thing that can happen to them. After the fact, hindsight bias transforms ‘yeah, that’s a thing that happens’ to ‘this could happen to me’ retroactively, and they remember knowing/believing it could happen to them.
Limits of language, I think. Both explanations are possible, giving what the parent post said; both VAuroch and Eugine_Nier may have had experience with similar cases caused, respectively, by hindsight bias and akrasia, which makes their explanation appear obvious to them.
A lot of the time, I’ve noticed that “it’s obvious” means “I have seen this pattern before (sometimes multiple times), and this extra element is part of the same pattern every time that I have seen it”
Their reaction was universally “this is embarrassing, I should’ve taken that more seriously”, not “I didn’t know a thing like this could happen/that I could have done something simple to prevent it”.
Classic hindsight bias. If you went to a representative sample of similar people who had not recently suffered a backup-requiring event, they would probably think the second version, not the first.
Hindsight bias is almost certainly a component. Plus, I was a friendly member of their in-group, providing free assistance with a major problem, so they had two strong reasons to be extra-agreeable.
Even so, in my experience, your second sentence does not match reality. As in, doing exactly that does not in fact yield responses skewing toward the second option, even among the very non-tech-savvy. Many of them don’t know exactly how to set such a thing up (but know they could give a teenager $20 to do it for them, which falls under “trivial inconveniences”), but the idea is not new info to them.
My sample size here is small and demographically/geographically limited, so add as many grains of salt as you see fit.
I am not a salesman.
I am, however, reasonably competent with technology. Growing up in a congregation of all age groups, this made me one of the go-to people whenever somebody had computer problems. I’m talking middle-aged and above, the kind of people who fall for blatant phishing scams, have 256mb of RAM, and don’t know what right-clicking is.
Without fail, these people had been aware that losing all their data would be very painful, and that it could happen to them, and that backing up their data could prevent that. Their reaction was universally “this is embarrassing, I should’ve taken that more seriously”, not “I didn’t know a thing like this could happen/that I could have done something simple to prevent it”. Procrastination, trivial inconveniences, and not-taking-the-idea-seriously-enough are the culprit in a large majority of cases.
In short, I think it requires some contortion to construe the typical customer as rational here.
I note an amusing and strange contradiction in the sibling comments to this one:
VAuroch says the above is explained by hindsight bias; that the people in question actually didn’t know about data loss and prevention thereof (but only later confabulated that they did).
Eugine_Nier says the above is explained by akrasia: the people did know about data loss and prevention, but didn’t take action.
These are contradictory explanations.
Both VAuroch and Eugine_Nier seem to suggest, by their tone (“Classic hindsight bias”, “That’s just akrasia”) that their respective explanations are obvious.
What’s going on?
I meant less that the explanation was obvious and more that it was a very good example of the effect of hindsight bias; hindsight bias produces precisely these kinds of results.
If something else is even more likely to produce this kind of result, then that would be more likely than hindsight bias. I don’t think akrasia qualifies.
To elaborate on what I think was actually going on: People ‘know’ that failure is a possibility, something that happens to other people, and that backups are a good way to prevent it, but don’t really believe that it is a thing that can happen to them. After the fact, hindsight bias transforms ‘yeah, that’s a thing that happens’ to ‘this could happen to me’ retroactively, and they remember knowing/believing it could happen to them.
Limits of language, I think. Both explanations are possible, giving what the parent post said; both VAuroch and Eugine_Nier may have had experience with similar cases caused, respectively, by hindsight bias and akrasia, which makes their explanation appear obvious to them.
A lot of the time, I’ve noticed that “it’s obvious” means “I have seen this pattern before (sometimes multiple times), and this extra element is part of the same pattern every time that I have seen it”
Well, it depends on what precisely we mean by them “knowing” about data loss.
Classic hindsight bias. If you went to a representative sample of similar people who had not recently suffered a backup-requiring event, they would probably think the second version, not the first.
Hindsight bias is almost certainly a component. Plus, I was a friendly member of their in-group, providing free assistance with a major problem, so they had two strong reasons to be extra-agreeable.
Even so, in my experience, your second sentence does not match reality. As in, doing exactly that does not in fact yield responses skewing toward the second option, even among the very non-tech-savvy. Many of them don’t know exactly how to set such a thing up (but know they could give a teenager $20 to do it for them, which falls under “trivial inconveniences”), but the idea is not new info to them.
My sample size here is small and demographically/geographically limited, so add as many grains of salt as you see fit.
That’s just akrasia.