When the push button was new, people were freaked

MIT graduates cannot power a light bulb with a battery. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIhk9eKOLzQ

I have noticed an effect similar to Gell-Mann amnesia:

Often you see news articles about new things freaking people out: technology, social changes, products, apps. Sometimes people are freaking out for good reason, and sometimes they're just silly, and you think: there are smart people and dumb people in the world, and the dumb people like to freak out about the wrong stuff.

And then you read about times in the past when people were freaking out about something that we now know to benign, but you easily forget that those might just be the dumb people from the past. Did anyone who was, like, intelligent or wise worry about push buttons? Presumably not.

It has a block of text, whose purpose isn't clear at the beginning [1], and requires you to read the entire comment, in its thick prose, and the article in order to understand, and even then you have to guess which point its referring, but could be wrong because cercatrova didn't actually own one.

Here is how I would have done the comment:

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>people worried that the electric push button would make human skills atrophy. They wondered if such devices would seal off the wonders of technology into a black box: “effortless, opaque, and therefore unquestioned by consumers.”

This reminds me of Socrates's story about how people in the ancient world worried about the atrophy from being able to use writing:

>>"For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise."

Full context (Plato's Phaedrus 14, 274c-275b): https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...

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Advantages:

A) Gets right to the point (so that if you already know the point, you can skip it.)

B) Saves everyone the time and effort of reading thick prose, most of which includes references to historical figures

C) Still quotes the relevant part.

D) Still contains a quick link to the rest of the context that cercatrova considered oh-so-important to add.

E) Contains a citation that can be googled in case the link goes dead.

F) Doesn't take a big wall of text.

But yes, it does have downsides: it G) takes actual communication effort, H) owns a specific point, and I) doesn't make cercatrova look cryptically wise. If those are your desiderata, then yeah, I agree he did it right, and everyone was right to vote it to the top of the discussion.

Can you elaborate on what you think we gain from making everyone read 6x as much with no indication of what the actual point is?

[1] I'm including people who weren't already aware of the quote, though you don't seem to think their vote matters here.

I was born in 84. And in the 90s I knew this 1 kid who told me on his 11th birthday his dad would raise his bicycle seat.

I was super confused as that an easy thing to do(loosen a bolt, adjust height and tighten the bolt). Turns out lots of parents don't allow their kids to touch their tools or tinker or do anything like that.

I was very fortunate that my parents encouraged me to do such things. E.g. take apart things to put them together but it doesn't surprise me why lots of people have all the creativity and curiosity purged from them from an early age.

The engineering & tolerances to make a typical microswitch (what makes the pushbutton actually do anything) would make most peoples eyes water. (from boredom, perhaps...)

Fun fact - if you engineer the people facing mechanism to keep the switch pin from being depressed all the way flush to the switch housing, the lifetime of the switch increases by roughly a factor of 10. A 0.1 mm difference in pushbutton throw is the difference between getting maybe a million cycles, say 3 ~ 4 years of constant use, and the switch outlasting everything else in the product.