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When the push button was new, people were freaked

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Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked

#151

Post by eru »

eastbound wrote: post #67
hilbert42 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I'm of 20th C. origin—not 19th—and the first electrical things I played with as a young kid were electric bells, buzzers, batteries, flashlight globes and reels of bell wire—lots and lots of it. (Experimenting with such items wasn't an unfashionable activity when I was a kid.) Bell wire, which usually came in the form of two single-stranded copper wires twisted loosely together and insulated in red and white PV…

Living in Europe, I’m one of the rare millionaires so I have a house, 150m2 (on the Côte d’Azur, I admit it’s expensive), but even for me, thinking of “a bell for mother to signal us to come to dinner” is the thing that belong to the times when energy was unlimited, and therefore house sizes and taxes on inhabitable square meters. It’s not that we do have bells here, but we don’t have the square meters anymore.

If you have more than one story, a bell can still make some sense.

And of course, the bell doesn't have to make much sense. It doesn't have to work better than yelling, if the kids just like having it around.

Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked

#152

Post by blix »

pas wrote: post #146
blix wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Ammon not absolutely right? New information technology induces changes with how we interface with information, almost certainly a mixed bag of good and bad. Writing is directly associated with the decline of memory-based oral traditions. You can probably safely argue that writing brings many positives, but that does not preclude the existence of negatives.

Not really. He mentioned instruction, but he fails to notice that reading and hearing can both happen, as they do happen without instruction. And the crux of the matter is not the mode of information transmission, it's the veracity of the content. And if someone has the time, attention, effort to speak to you they usually want something. How do you know your interests are aligned? Reciting things from memory doesn't…

> He mentioned instruction, but he fails to notice that reading and hearing can both happen, as they do happen without instruction.

> ... they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant

By claiming he doesn't notice something that he clearly and explicitly mentions, I feel you are directly making his point.

Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked

#153

Post by serf »

SilasX wrote: post #86
cercatrova wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.”

Any reason you couldn't have made the point explicit the first time? Were you worried that others' reading skills would atrophy if they only needed to read 100 words to get the point, and so you posted 400 words while still missing a critical block of 50?

>Were you worried that others' reading skills would atrophy if they only needed to read 100 words to get the point, and so you posted 400 words while still missing a critical block of 50?

If you truly think that's why people write long-form prose then I totally understand your ire towards it -- but unfortunately that idea is so far away from reality that I'm afraid I don't understand at all.

At the risk of being an inaccurate arm-chair psychoanalyst I think that your anger and aggression towards it comes from a fear of missing out. Rather than skipping the things that are written in a style that you disagree with you read them anyway -- upset the entire time that the prose isn't written how you want it to be -- and then vent your frustrations by accusing the author or post writer of machinations that simply do not exist.

No one is worried about your reading skills. I initially had the urge to meet that sarcasm (is it sarcasm? hard to tell) with more of my own ("Oh yeah, you figured it out, that's exactly what the author meant to do") until I considered that perhaps you would misunderstand that as acceptance from peers.

My perspective in a few words : Some things don't compress. Long-form has a place in my life for that reason.

Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked

#154

Post by quelltext »

lupire wrote: post #135
sarchertech wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always skeptical of those man on the street interviews. How many students did they interview to find the handful who couldn't do it? And how many of those were just flustered by the situation.

Well they found a MechE not an EE. They also made them do it standing up with an awkwardly shaped bulb, and only a single wire, so the task was basically impossible, without a cutter and/or some tape. Still, people should know why they are failing. Of course, they are being caught out of context and are guessing the "rules" of the "game".

The task was impossible because they gave them light bulbs that simply cannot light up with a low V battery.

The one scene where a student appears to succeed (this clip is spliced in after the segment where the professor says "it's not the case [it's not a trick question]") is not with the light bulb they were given (they essentially say "here, I can show you, see, with a small bulb I would do this and it works", laughing which to me indicates they didn't get it done with the initially given large bulb).

But maybe not? Maybe they were given several bulbs to choose from. And yeah some people clearly didn't figure out the basics ("I need two wires"). The others, unclear, they showed short cuts of them fumbling around (possibly after failing a few times) but they might have already tried the right approach before that.

The core issue with the video is that it doesn't establish a base line. What is it they expected from the students? That they identified they cannot do it with just any bulb or any battery before saying yes? I don't think so, based on the professor interview that really seems to imply that the folks should know how to do it (and get it done).

If there was a way to do it they should have shown. They just go on to folks saying "see, we need to teach the basics better" and I still don't know how it connects to the "experiment".

The way it stands it really does seem to be designed to make the graduates fail the test without making clear (to the viewer at least) what the test really was.

I mean at this point I'm not even clear if the reporters were the stupid ones not realizing it cannot be done. Again, they didn't show it. It's more likely they did actually make it impossible / pose a trick question.

I am not doubting the professor as much. They probably conducted an actual experiment that showed a significant number of subjects (was it MIT grads though) weren't able to accomplish it despite feasibility. It's just that the adhoc on-video tests there seem to provide a false hook into the story, like all these types of on the street interviews.

Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked

#155

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

"At the end of the nineteenth century, many laypeople had a "working knowledge not only of electricity, but also of the buttons they pushed and the relationship between the two," according to Plotnick. Those who promoted electricity and sold electrical devices, however, wanted push-button interfaces to be "simplistic and worry-free.""

Imagine people promoting websites and apps not wanting "laypersons" to have working knowledge of computers and computer networks.

Imagine them artificially separating all people using computers into two categories: "developers" and "users".

"They thought the world needed less thinking though and tinkering, and more automatic action."

https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/think_cul...

Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked

#156

Post by rasz »

lupire wrote: post #135
sarchertech wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always skeptical of those man on the street interviews. How many students did they interview to find the handful who couldn't do it? And how many of those were just flustered by the situation.

Well they found a MechE not an EE. They also made them do it standing up with an awkwardly shaped bulb, and only a single wire, so the task was basically impossible, without a cutter and/or some tape. Still, people should know why they are failing. Of course, they are being caught out of context and are guessing the "rules" of the "game".

Is this a higher level of sarcasm Im failing to detect?

You cant make a circuit with one wire? People arent being caught, the rules are basic physics, ohms law is taught to 14 year olds in high schools. We have Mechanical Engineer unable to fix a flashlight coming out of MIT.

Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked

#157

Post by ck2 »

Not even "new" my mother refused to use a touch-tone phone when they came out.

She rented with payment every month for years a rotary phone in the kitchen with a massive 25 foot spiral cord I'd have to untangle every week as it was stretched across the house.

When I got older I went and found the exact model in the "Bell store" and bought it and secretly swapped it out one night and returned/cancelled the rental so her bill would go down like $5/mo which back then was a lot. Left the old tangled cord on it so she'd never know.

Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked

#158

Post by quelltext »

skydove wrote: post #36

It's interesting to see that what some companies like Apple are doing nowadays has such historic precedence. And it ties in with the current state of affairs - fewer and fewer people understand electronics. Children are less computer-literate than ever.

> Children are less computer-literate than ever.

Is there any evidence for this?

Is it a definition issue?

My grandparents and some people in my parents' circle of friends are not computer-literate. And by that I mean they don't know how to use double click, what a file or browser is, or even how to use a touch focused device. They are utterly unfamiliar with the abstractions and UIs computing devices afford.

Even in my generation many kids didn't have PCs or devices with interfaces more complex than an NES until later in high school.

That is different today from what I've observed. It's true that for many the first computer is not always a PC as I would have had, but a smartphone or a tablet. But does it matter? They are able to harness the power of computing devices to get things done.

Needing to know how computers work internally, or making use of traditional computers with mice, keyboards and monitors on a desk, these things were never really the definition of "computer-literate".

Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked

#159

Post by samplatt »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #82
MereInterest wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on where you draw the boundary between "you" and "not-you". If that boundary extends only as far as your skin, then your cell phone makes you forgetful and dependent. If that boundary extends to tools that you use, books in front of you, texts that you can summon up at a moment, then your cell phone gives you a phenomenal recall for facts, though also an increased risk of mind control. For me, I draw the b…

Your system of distinguishing "me" from "not-me" via a quantitative metric is interesting to me because it's not a binary. Human reaction time for hands is a bit faster than feet. Are my hands more "me" than my feet? Well, that kind of intuitively checks out to me. But reflex reactions, like blinking, have less than half the latency of conscious reactions. Are my reflex reactions more me than my conscious decisions?…

>Are my hands more "me" than my feet?

Meta's avatars (and many other ingame models representing a human) would have you believe so, since they don't have legs.

Re: When the push button was new, people were freaked

#160

Post by starrygordon »

MereInterest wrote: post #72
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How dare Amun-Ra come into my house and attack me like that! Sure, I'm using Wikipedia to debate stuff on the Internet, but my cell phone makes me a post human augmented, cybernetic being, not a half-educated layman with a fondness for sophistry. Right?

It depends on where you draw the boundary between "you" and "not-you". If that boundary extends only as far as your skin, then your cell phone makes you forgetful and dependent. If that boundary extends to tools that you use, books in front of you, texts that you can summon up at a moment, then your cell phone gives you a phenomenal recall for facts, though also an increased risk of mind control. For me, I draw the b…

The _me_ should be regarded as a field.
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