Users don’t need to know what’s going on under the hood; the algorithms and proofs generally “just work” without the user needing to worry about the details. The user’s job is to understand the language of the framework, the interface, and translate their own problems into that language.
Interesting, my gut reaction to this approach as applied to math was “ugh, that sounds horrible, I don’t want to ignore the under the hood details, the whole point of math is understanding what’s going on” .
Yet when I consider the same approach to programming and computer sciency stuff my reaction is “well duh, of course we’re trying to find good abstractions to package away as much of the nitty gritty details as possible, otherwise you can’t make/build really big interesting stuff.”
Perhaps the difference is what you’re imagining as “under the hood”. Nobody wants to think about the axiom of choice when solving a differential equation.
I was going to just write a comment, but it turned into a post. Here, I outlined the models I was using to think about this, and what that said about my reaction to ignoring “under the hood” stuff.
of course we’re trying to find good abstractions to package away as much of the nitty gritty details as possible, otherwise you can’t make/build really big interesting stuff.”
As a user, when chrome wheeled out it’s new “you can search bookmarks from the same place you type URLs” “feature” the first response was “where can I disable this in settings, when I don’t want it on”. When it became apparent they didn’t do that, the second response was “how do we change what shows up in this manner”—it may be useful to bookmark this page, for instance, but we might not want it showing up everytime we start typing in lesswrong, and just want to go to the main page. When it became apparent they didn’t do that, the third response was “let’s try some other browsers”.
Users do want to be able to crack open the hood in at least one place—settings, or advanced settings.
Interesting, my gut reaction to this approach as applied to math was “ugh, that sounds horrible, I don’t want to ignore the under the hood details, the whole point of math is understanding what’s going on” .
Yet when I consider the same approach to programming and computer sciency stuff my reaction is “well duh, of course we’re trying to find good abstractions to package away as much of the nitty gritty details as possible, otherwise you can’t make/build really big interesting stuff.”
I’ll think more about why these feel different.
Perhaps the difference is what you’re imagining as “under the hood”. Nobody wants to think about the axiom of choice when solving a differential equation.
I was going to just write a comment, but it turned into a post. Here, I outlined the models I was using to think about this, and what that said about my reaction to ignoring “under the hood” stuff.
As a user, when chrome wheeled out it’s new “you can search bookmarks from the same place you type URLs” “feature” the first response was “where can I disable this in settings, when I don’t want it on”. When it became apparent they didn’t do that, the second response was “how do we change what shows up in this manner”—it may be useful to bookmark this page, for instance, but we might not want it showing up everytime we start typing in lesswrong, and just want to go to the main page. When it became apparent they didn’t do that, the third response was “let’s try some other browsers”.
Users do want to be able to crack open the hood in at least one place—settings, or advanced settings.