I wonder if there are common themes you can teach people about technology!<p>For example: Many family members of mine inherently don‘t understand E-Mail or messaging like WhatsApp. They think their Mail or texting app on the phone receives a text and don‘t understand the client/server model and how packages are getting send through the internet.
Tech people think like doctors not computers. Non-tech people think I somehow have deep knowledge about all forms of technology. I don't.<p>I have two things they don't: abstractions, and problem solving.<p>My abstractions range from algorithmic and mathematical, to organizational[networking, hardware], to taxonomic and ontological. I have dozens if not hundreds of abstractions that I can draw from. This allows me to frame problems correctly. Sometimes we all chose the wrong abstraction, but 99% of the time we avoid that and it's a shortcut to weeding out all of the unnecessary details of a problem. Ever helped a newbie with a problem and they either misidentify what's important or overlook an obvious/crucial piece of information? I'm operating with 10 times the number of abstractions that they have and likely drew the right one whereas they are operating in a pre-theoretic world.<p>The second thing I have is problem solving. I can craft information-rich hypotheses and test them much more quickly(or at all) than non-tech friends. That means when I look for something, I'm much faster at finding the root cause and being able to tell whether something is a root cause or if I need to keep digging.<p>Having these two things mean I don't need encyclopedic knowledge of technology. In fact, I probably rely on Stack Overflow much much more than they would think. Can this be taught? Yes, but it isn't teaching someone _what_ to think more than it's teaching them _how_ to think. That takes a certain amount of deliberate sustained effort.
Best bang for the buck: teach non-tech folks to internalize the basic outline of the client/server model. You have a program on your machine that is your view of the website. The company operating the website has their own machines where the site "lives". They are constantly talking over the internet, your wifi router and every computer in between, a third class of machines.<p>My wife is proudly non-technical but has internalized this to the extent that she can self-identify the source of most availability problems. "Is it my program, the internet, or the site itself that's down?" is basic question that any user should be able to troubleshoot.
Probably not exactly what your looking for, but our home has a number of lights on timers that turn on at roughly dusk and turn off at our nominal bed time. I adjust them a few times a year as the days get longer and shorter. My wife of 40 years, an otherwise smart and wise woman, cannot comprehend why we don't need to change the timers by an hour when Daylight Savings Time starts and ends. I tell her that the sun doesn't know what time it is, but it doesn't help. Twice every year.
I’m sure many people if they stop and think about it view email and texting as the same as snail mail and telegrams. And to a reasonable degree the similarity holds - things get originated, they travel through one or more “hubs” or “stops” and then get delivered to the recipient. Faster, yeah, but similar. Does it matter how they go from place to place to be useable? No, not really. As long as people know how to use the tools. Few care how a transmission works but have a working knowledge of gears if they drive in multiple weather conditions.<p>There’s magical stuff in tech but the best implementation just fades into the background. Proper abstraction lets people concentrate on more important things.
Conversely, tech folks can learn a lot from non-technical people. Watching my mom deal and helping her with technology has shown me over and over again how no piece of consumer tech is well designed in terms of UX. Printers, iPhones, laptops, routers, modems, digital radios, web & mobile apps - all have inconsistent and often shit UX. My mom will never understand how data is nested in folders, trying to replicate some sort of real-world filing system, for example. Similarly, what is and isn’t a button is not clear enough, and especially in apps, there’s no reason why things couldn’t be more standardized. Tech design should be pragmatic and not an end in itself.
Recognize when you've fallen off the happy path, slow down, and don't panic. For better or worse, much of recent UI design improves the Happy Path at the expense of tools when you fall off. But if you can get folks to recognize that they've gotten into a bad state, they can at least stop making it worse and ask for help. Quick examples:<p>If it froze after pressing a button, don't continuously press the button, at best it does nothing and at worst it ruins everything (looking at you "transaction processing don't hit refresh" messages in 2022).<p>"I deleted photos from my phone, panic, instantly mash sync to cloud!" - and now they're gone from the cloud too because its a 2 way sync<p>"The internet doesn't work, should I factory reset my phone?" - no, not as step number one.<p>Mostly, non-technical people don't know or care about why something is happening, or even really what is happening, and that's not a bad thing. But at least knowing if whats happening is "Good" or "Bad" can go a long way, though its getting harder now that OSs in general will signal less and less that you've gotten into a bad state.
Honestly, the knowledge gap can be huge, but the usability and accessibility gap is much more important in my opinion. People don’t understand why updates exist, they don’t understand why their 5yo computer doesn’t work as well today as it did before, and they certainly don’t understand why “the button moved”.<p>Our computers, tablets, phones etc have become such general purpose devices it’s next to impossible for a layperson to even understand how to use them effectively, let alone how they work. So much of our society is now mediated by technology, and it pushes people who struggle with it to the fringes (and imposes a decent cost keeping tech up to date). My grandparents (pushing 90 now) can’t use any modern tech because it all does too much. They can’t remember what direction swiping reveals the hidden controls, or returns them home, or whatever it happens to be.<p>I hope that as HNers we can remember ordinary people when we’re working on our apps or hardware or whatever. One day it might be you struggling to make a payment because you can’t work the computer.
They think that an IP address in email headers is something you can realistically track a scammer.<p>I explain that the IP addresses belong to third parties, that proxies can be used to access the email accounts and so on. They are really lost on the whole address metaphor, and assume that all the properties of an official residence apply to them.
> Many family members of mine inherently don‘t understand E-Mail or messaging like WhatsApp. They think their Mail or texting app on the phone receives a text and don‘t understand the client/server model and how packages are getting send through the internet.<p>What does it matter if they don’t understand this?<p><i>I</i> barely understand this and as far as I’m concerned the mail app on my phone does receive messages even if I “get” the concept of a server somewhere doing something.
I know people who are very hand-wavy about technical development or engineering. They think everything just appears from thin air, like a cartoon genie. When I debunk that with details of even the simplest code, they respond "soon AI will be doing all that".
I term it the Deus Ex Machina syndrome.
That technology does not get better linear and some problems are extremely hard and maybe not completely solveable.<p>Like „self driving cars“ and how they are marketed by especially one company: Tesla<p>Even if you record every road with cameras in the world, a computer will make mistakes without radar or lidar, because he can not understand certain things without depth data.
My mother got her hands on one of Charles Stross' <i>Laundry Files</i> novels and thinks that since I write code for government projects I'm somehow involved in computational demonology. It doesn't help that some of the COBOL-based systems I've reverse-engineered for modernization are Lovecraftian horrors.
I know somebody who used to think that whenever anybody searches something on Google, a human at the other end manually finds the information and sends it back.<p>And that Google is hiring all their employees to do this manual work.
Sometimes my friends from other fields will ask me to explain/draw out how a computer works<p>Its much harder than I thought<p>I started off explaining binary and how groups of wires can be used to represent numbers<p>Lost them somewhere around explaining gates/adders<p>I think its so difficult because there are so many layers of abstraction and you really need some basic electronics knowledge
The developers I've spoken to. Have no idea about Linux in general. No didn't know WebM and webp, never heard of codecs. Didn't understand the differences between libraries.<p>These were tech-savy people and some people couldn't change paper role in the printer.<p>I'm astonished, but people are still gatekeeping in my area.
It's more simple than you think it is.
It's more complicated than you think it is.<p>(Didi! Don't touch that button!)<p>When I was teaching my mother to use a mouse she waved it around in the air and asked why nothing was happening on the screen. When I showed her a picture of water, she kept poking the LCD screen making it distort and laughing that it looked like real water, until I firmly told her to stop before she damaged it.<p>But even much younger people seem to have no clue. Some think their desktop is their browser, or their browser is the Internet. Some call their monitor (or UPS) their "computer". No understanding of hierarchical file organization. No understanding the difference between memory and storage. No understanding of "context".<p>My wife complains that Thunderbird is slow. I point out she has tens of thousands of unread emails in her inbox.<p>A neverending shitshow.