now im curious. how does texting someone back on the iphone work?
I think you just enter another message and Send, and the address is assumed from context. Cool but definitely not obvious to everyone (me).
Compared to you, most people seem dumb
131–140 of 147 posts
Re: Compared to you, most people seem dumb
#132This reminds me of the mixup a few months ago where a site other than Facebook was the top Google result for "facebook login" http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/02/11/facebook-login . I find it rather depressing that while we've built up all these layers of abstraction there are still people who don't understand what the address bar is.
Because the address bar has become rapidly irrelevant. Domain name is almost as useless as ip address - its highly coded unrememberable nonsense, often unrelated to the product or company name.
Re: Compared to you, most people seem dumb
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not about whether Einstein should be known or not. The point is that he is an icon, one that the vast majority of people do know about. Not knowing about Einstein means you're really uninformed.
No, Really Uninformed is a whole nother level of ignorance. When pictures of Jupiter from Pioneer 10 were on the front page , a graduate student in my Engineering school asked me "Jupiter is a planet, right"? Astonished, I answered politely "Yes, its the 5th planet". Then, and this is the good part, she asked "So, is Earth a planet?"
Knowing that Jupiter is the 5th planet from the sun is practical knowledge for how many people?
edit: (HN wont let me reply again)
I understood your point. I think in the context of the article the only irony is you think the technical fact that astronomers label Earth as a "planet" is necessary knowledge for every field of engineering or anyone with an advanced education.
Yes, I learned about the solar system in elementary school too but I wouldn't judge someone who didn't. It's not much more useful than trivia to most people.
Discussion around another recent article on HN comparing C programming to a carpenter using a hammer demonstrated that even people with computer science degrees and years of experience writing software might no nothing about HTML or SQL.
Re: Compared to you, most people seem dumb
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, Really Uninformed is a whole nother level of ignorance. When pictures of Jupiter from Pioneer 10 were on the front page , a graduate student in my Engineering school asked me "Jupiter is a planet, right"? Astonished, I answered politely "Yes, its the 5th planet". Then, and this is the good part, she asked "So, is Earth a planet?"
Knowing that Jupiter is the 5th planet from the sun is practical knowledge for how many people? edit: (HN wont let me reply again) I understood your point. I think in the context of the article the only irony is you think the technical fact that astronomers label Earth as a "planet" is necessary knowledge for every field of engineering or anyone with an advanced education. Yes, I learned about the solar system in ele…
Way to totally miss my point. I guess I wasn't being obvious enough.
This highly educated Engineering graduate student didn't know that they lived on a planet. Its ironic.
Re: Compared to you, most people seem dumb
#135I've found a fairly useful analogy that helps most tech people. If you're into cars and the analogy doesn't work, just think of something you need to know about at some point, but probably don't know much about at all. Mostly this helps when a customer feels guilty about needing help, or someone in IT thinks "me > all" because they can enter a command line. I think of my role like this: Your average non-tech person p…
Broadly speaking, I disagree somewhat. I don't think there's anything I own without a working understanding of how it functions, or at the very least the ability and willingness to attain that understanding if required. If I owned a car, I might not learn how to strip and rebuild the engine, but I would learn how to check and replace any sensibly serviceable parts, and how frequently I needed to do things like an oil…
I agree. I don't expect people to become experts in cars or computers or anything else they use in their daily life that their job or safety may depend on, but I do have more respect for people that make an effort to learn the basics or try to understand what they're dealing with.
I don't assume someone is stupid for being clueless about technology. I might assume they're at least a little lazy.
When I started using computers in the 1980's I sat down with a 20 minute tutorial and learned the basics about the mouse, keyboard, interface elements, command line and components of the computer. I've met people that have spent years asking others for help with things I took less than half an hour to learn up front.
Re: Compared to you, most people seem dumb
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're doing a good job of proving the point. Advice from the 'guy who knows cars': Read the owner's manual. Are you using the type and grade of oil and filter they recommend? Listener response: I don't care. I just want the car to run. Advice from the 'guy who knows computers': Why are you still using IE7? Make sure you upgrade regularly. Listener response: I don't care. I just want to check my email and pla…
True, but if your car starts making noises and you ignore them, it may be your own fault when your car breaks down in the middle of the freeway...
Is that somehow more your own fault than when, after months of ignoring the strange popups that appear when windows starts up, your virus-ridden computer finally grinds to a halt and fails to boot?
Re: Compared to you, most people seem dumb
#137I've found a fairly useful analogy that helps most tech people. If you're into cars and the analogy doesn't work, just think of something you need to know about at some point, but probably don't know much about at all. Mostly this helps when a customer feels guilty about needing help, or someone in IT thinks "me > all" because they can enter a command line. I think of my role like this: Your average non-tech person p…
Broadly speaking, I disagree somewhat. I don't think there's anything I own without a working understanding of how it functions, or at the very least the ability and willingness to attain that understanding if required. If I owned a car, I might not learn how to strip and rebuild the engine, but I would learn how to check and replace any sensibly serviceable parts, and how frequently I needed to do things like an oil…
I don't know, I do a lot of work on both computers and cars, and I can understand why people want nothing to do with the internals of either.
I was working on changing the oxygen sensor in my car this weekend, and it started raining. It is a major pain in the but when you have the car jacked up and the hood open and parts strewn about with tools and you get a random rain storm (I guess this is why I need a garage). I didn't finish the project and my girlfriend had to drop me off and pick me up at work yesterday. It would have been a lot better if I knew nothing about cars and just had a mechanic do it (hundreds of dollars extra aside).
The same goes for computers. I can reformat a hard drive and go through a Gentoo install - but I haven't done that in years. I don't have time to deal with that stuff anymore so I want it to just work. It is an inconvience to stay up on it.
Likewise, I know almost nothing about accounting or law. I have to do a little bit of both now for my startup, and I want nothing to do with it. I turn to people who know what they're doing and ask for help rather than dive into it. I am perfectly capable of learning it if I wanted to, but I just don't like learning it. Those guys come to me for car help and I go to them for legal advice.
Everyone has different passions, and when you get busy it is easy to just delegate/ignore the stuff you don't like.
Re: Compared to you, most people seem dumb
#138I've found a fairly useful analogy that helps most tech people. If you're into cars and the analogy doesn't work, just think of something you need to know about at some point, but probably don't know much about at all. Mostly this helps when a customer feels guilty about needing help, or someone in IT thinks "me > all" because they can enter a command line. I think of my role like this: Your average non-tech person p…
Broadly speaking, I disagree somewhat. I don't think there's anything I own without a working understanding of how it functions, or at the very least the ability and willingness to attain that understanding if required. If I owned a car, I might not learn how to strip and rebuild the engine, but I would learn how to check and replace any sensibly serviceable parts, and how frequently I needed to do things like an oil…
I appreciate the disagreement. And I do agree that some knowledge is better than no knowledge. But there are always limits to what we can know and do, if simply because of the number of hours we're alive.
But even the way you phrase your comments indicates you're wearing a large set of winkers. "If it's useful to my life" is so broad as to be unimaginably large. Just thinking through my day: do you know what makes good soap or shampoo, and could you make it on your own? Can you purify dirty water? Can you fix the plumbing in your house? Can you make a toothbrush or toothpaste? Spin yarn or other thread, and use it to make material goods like towels, clothes, or shoelaces? Can you hone a blade's edge to razor sharpness using a leather strap? Can you skin a cow? Can you re-sole shoes? Fell a tree and use the lumber to make a bed, dressers, cabinets, or a door? Can you make elastic? Harvest grain and use it to make food? GROW grain in the first place? Re-wire your house? Fix your fridge/stove/microwave/garbage disposal/dishwasher/vacuum cleaner/etc.? Power your house without relying on the grid? Make and level concrete? Build a house? And on and on...
I have no doubt that you could, should you want to, learn some of those things. But you have to rely on other people at some point -- even if just because "there's significant risk". But just because you can learn things you're actually trying to learn says nothing about the MYRIAD things you aren't learning. And the sooner people realize that OTHER people find those things interesting, and that some of those other things even take immense skill or knowledge, the better off they'll be. Right now, it mostly sounds like you're completely ignorant of how many things you rely on that you have no idea how to do yourself.
Re: Compared to you, most people seem dumb
#139I've found a fairly useful analogy that helps most tech people. If you're into cars and the analogy doesn't work, just think of something you need to know about at some point, but probably don't know much about at all. Mostly this helps when a customer feels guilty about needing help, or someone in IT thinks "me > all" because they can enter a command line. I think of my role like this: Your average non-tech person p…
If you are changing your oil every three months then you are almost certainly wasting money. You should trust the integrity of the oil change shop about as much as you would trust an 'SEO expert.' There might be good ones, but most are looking to maximize profit at your expense.
Months is not the metric, miles is. There is a maximum amount of time you want to leave the oil in but most people should be changing it sooner than that for mileage reasons.
Follow the manual on your car. In my case that is about every 3 months based on how much I drive. My brother drives a lot more, almost 2,000 miles a month, so he does it every other month.
Re: Compared to you, most people seem dumb
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not about whether Einstein should be known or not. The point is that he is an icon, one that the vast majority of people do know about. Not knowing about Einstein means you're really uninformed.
No, Really Uninformed is a whole nother level of ignorance. When pictures of Jupiter from Pioneer 10 were on the front page , a graduate student in my Engineering school asked me "Jupiter is a planet, right"? Astonished, I answered politely "Yes, its the 5th planet". Then, and this is the good part, she asked "So, is Earth a planet?"
There is something called "general culture". Not knowing that Einstein is a physicist, that Jupiter and the Earth are planets, that Christopher Columbus landed the Americas in 1492, is lacking general culture, i. e. being dumb. When you're so specialized you can't be bothered to know the bare "common sense" stuff, you can't even be a responsible citizen.