Compared to you, most people seem dumb
thenextweb.com
Compared to you, most people seem dumb
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Re: Compared to you, most people seem dumb
#2See the comments at the bottom of http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_wants_to_be_yo... for a practical example. See also http://xkcd.com/763/.
Re: Compared to you, most people seem dumb
#3This is a really good article when considering use cases for your users. Sometimes classifying it under 'stupid user syndrome' just isn't good enough, you have to understand that they are not unintelligent, they just don't grasp the same domain knowledge as we do.
Re: Compared to you, most people seem dumb
#4It's a matter of specialization, if you will. Technology literacy is not the only talent in the world, but if that's what you choose to define yourself with, then it's easy for you to classify people in a related hierarchy.
Granted, this sort of relativism can only cover so much, since you'll also come across people who don't seem to know anything at all.
Re: Compared to you, most people seem dumb
#5This is a pretty condescending article. I mean, it's certainly true that your average Silicon Valley engineer or entrepreneur is of far above average intelligence, but things like knowing what a URL is isn't a good way to measure it. For the literal argument of this article, it's a specialization. I'm sure there are military commanders that are strategic geniuses who wouldn't immediately know how to get to special characters on the iPhone, or highly skilled pilots who can't answer the question, "what's a browser?" accurately.
These are pieces of topic knowledge, orthogonal to the question of "smart".
All of this said, having worked in consumer internet, I totally agree that the vast (read: vast) majority of internet users are absolute retards (or at least play them online).
Re: Compared to you, most people seem dumb
#6The underlying issue is that people are afraid to try and explore. They form a mental model of how to do something, look for something that fits into that model, and then are happy. If they guess the wrong model, though, then they are stuck forever.
Skilled computer users, on the other hand, don't let a failing model bother them. They just try something else.
Most people will do this for anything but computers, though, which is weird. If their favorite road to the CHEZBURGER store is closed, they will find another road. But if it happens online... panic, frozen.
People basically need to be taught that you can't break computers. Programmers need to provide better undo functionality, so that this is not a lie.
Re: Compared to you, most people seem dumb
#7This is a really good article when considering use cases for your users. Sometimes classifying it under 'stupid user syndrome' just isn't good enough, you have to understand that they are not unintelligent, they just don't grasp the same domain knowledge as we do.
As Merlin Mann said, we're all nerds (see http://www.43folders.com/2010/09/10/my-paladin). We're just not all nerds in the same disciplines. E.g. I couldn't care less about lawn mowers but I wouldn't dare say that to a clerk at Home Depot.
Re: Compared to you, most people seem dumb
#8I wish I could wrap my head around the size of the subset in relation to the larger set of users of the internet. I think that those are able to accomplish this have a huge leg up in product design, and this ability is something that is incredibly taken for granted.
One time my non-technical partner was attempting to access something I had been working on for a day or so and he told me that it wasn't working at all (even though I had confirmed it was before I had left) and I started to panic as we were close to a deadline for a client. Turns out that when i was telling him to access dev.somesite.com he was putting in www.dev.somesite.com and it was screwing up the javascript... because he naturally thought everything started with a 'www'.
It blew me away that he didn't understand the concept of subdomains, but also it was a reality check that he sort of knew his way around a computer and websites, and that it meant there was a much much larger set of users that couldn't grasp the concept of a subdomain. It can be difficult sometimes when you have the perception (especially on HN) that so many people out there know more than you about everything. I guess you just have to take a step back and realize you are still in the 99th percentile of the rest of the world when it comes to this stuff.
Re: Compared to you, most people seem dumb
#9My dad is a Master Electrician but he still asks me questions about his hotmail account and to resend a link to my Picasa albums. He deals with megawatts of electricity on a daily basis. I would hesitate to call him dumb...
Re: Compared to you, most people seem dumb
#10Two things to say here. First, "dumb" is not the right word. My wife is a theoretical physicist - thus pretty much guaranteed to be "not dumb" - but is not fully cognizant of the fact that URLs exist. She, too, has Google as her default home page and types what she wants into it. And she has Google search on the toolbar and types what she wants into that. Even if what she wants is the name of the site, she goes through Google first. Always.
The corollary to the observation that most people don't know what you take for granted in the computer realm, though, is that your customers know all kinds of stuff you have no idea about.
Think about that a little.