I’m curious—I was under the impression that lesswrong.com was a community dedicated to rationality. Some may be like your father—good at math, but bad at navigating computers. Why did you assume that people on this site are computer oriented?
I know that a number of people here are programmers, for one thing. For another, I deliberately aimed very low with the anecdote about “clueless users”, so that even LW readers who are not programmers would feel, with respect to someone that clueless, the same way I feel with respect to my dad, whose confusions about computers are quite a bit more sophisticated.
The implication isn’t that the reader is a computer expert, but that they have some area of expertise in which they feel as clued in as I feel in computers, and I’m inviting them to identify with me when I tell the anecdote about my dad.
Would it make more sense for you if I amended the sentence starting “If you are a software developer”, so that it read “I’m a software developer, so for me that tends to be...”
As an anecdotal comparison: my father has been a computer programmer since back in the day when there was no such thing as “software”. He changed vacuum tubes...and went with it through I am not even sure how many iterations. He was still doing pramming until he retired last year.
He, cliche-edly, can barely program a VCR (blinking noon for 6 years...)
On another note, I teach the use of software for architects (it’s a side thing I do), and I watch students try to come to grips with modes of thought they are not familiar with (vector based v. raster images, for example). I can sit and watch a person freeze solid in dismay when I’ve asked them to do something I’ve seen them do dozens of times within the last hour.
Sometimes it’s not an issue of “being” clueless as it is “feeling” clueless. A student who has done a task recently is not actually clueless when flummoxed by something he/she has done before, nor is my father actually clueless about VCR’s. But they definitely feel clueless. Behavioraly the result is the same: inaction or incorrect action. But the source is different.
“To that end, I want to start off by considering some comfortable examples, where someone else is the butt of the joke, and then consider examples which might make you more uneasy.”
This is before you mention software development. Software developers are over-represented in general on the internet, and I sort of glazed over and wondered if I was back on Reddit/digg/slashdot/… .
Software developers are over-represented in general on the internet, and I sort of glazed over and wondered if I was back on Reddit/digg/slashdot/… .
I don’t think ‘the internet’ and ‘Reddit/digg/slashdot/...’ are really the same thing anymore… Software developers are a disproportionate percentage of participants in some parts of the internet but probably not on, say, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube or many of the other sites with the highest traffic. It is not really true any more that software developers are ‘over-represented in general on the internet’. They probably are on this particular site however.
I’m curious—I was under the impression that lesswrong.com was a community dedicated to rationality. Some may be like your father—good at math, but bad at navigating computers. Why did you assume that people on this site are computer oriented?
That’s a fair question.
I know that a number of people here are programmers, for one thing. For another, I deliberately aimed very low with the anecdote about “clueless users”, so that even LW readers who are not programmers would feel, with respect to someone that clueless, the same way I feel with respect to my dad, whose confusions about computers are quite a bit more sophisticated.
The implication isn’t that the reader is a computer expert, but that they have some area of expertise in which they feel as clued in as I feel in computers, and I’m inviting them to identify with me when I tell the anecdote about my dad.
Would it make more sense for you if I amended the sentence starting “If you are a software developer”, so that it read “I’m a software developer, so for me that tends to be...”
As an anecdotal comparison: my father has been a computer programmer since back in the day when there was no such thing as “software”. He changed vacuum tubes...and went with it through I am not even sure how many iterations. He was still doing pramming until he retired last year. He, cliche-edly, can barely program a VCR (blinking noon for 6 years...) On another note, I teach the use of software for architects (it’s a side thing I do), and I watch students try to come to grips with modes of thought they are not familiar with (vector based v. raster images, for example). I can sit and watch a person freeze solid in dismay when I’ve asked them to do something I’ve seen them do dozens of times within the last hour. Sometimes it’s not an issue of “being” clueless as it is “feeling” clueless. A student who has done a task recently is not actually clueless when flummoxed by something he/she has done before, nor is my father actually clueless about VCR’s. But they definitely feel clueless.
Behavioraly the result is the same: inaction or incorrect action. But the source is different.
It looks like you say:
“To that end, I want to start off by considering some comfortable examples, where someone else is the butt of the joke, and then consider examples which might make you more uneasy.”
This is before you mention software development. Software developers are over-represented in general on the internet, and I sort of glazed over and wondered if I was back on Reddit/digg/slashdot/… .
I don’t think ‘the internet’ and ‘Reddit/digg/slashdot/...’ are really the same thing anymore… Software developers are a disproportionate percentage of participants in some parts of the internet but probably not on, say, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube or many of the other sites with the highest traffic. It is not really true any more that software developers are ‘over-represented in general on the internet’. They probably are on this particular site however.