Fascinating. There’s always a loss of lower-level knowledge when we introduce abstractions. Yet “we stand upon the shoulders of giants,” it’s the layers of abstractions underneath us that we don’t have to understand or even think about that free our minds to compose ever more amazing technology on top. Still, progression from the layer that you know and love to the next that paves over it is bittersweet.
Philosophizing a little bit (and in agreement with one of the quotes in the conclusion), I think the bittersweet feelings are precisely because very few people try to understand the box, because they consider it to be a black box.
But it's often a white box in reality. When the electric push buttons came out, you could trace the wires and usually see the mechanisms which were being triggered. The doorbell, for example.
But curiosity rarely seems to push us in that direction, it seems.
But also don't have to make all the same mistakes other folks did / toil our way through to the ... potentially same endpoint. At least as far as code goes I've gone through plenty of experiments that go:
"Man I don't need this complex chunk of software, let me just try ..."
"Ok now I understand why that chunk of software is the way it is... and it's better than mine... I'll use that."
Good learning experience! But do that enough and you just spin your wheels endlessly.
I don't do that at all these days. It's almost a guarantee that I'll eventually use the big complex thing, so I rarely even consider trying anything else if it's a project that actually matters.
While I agree that bouton can mean pimple or zit, it's the rest of the phrase that I don't understand. Bouton doesn't mean projection, and sure isn't a verb...
Note that the English word was derived from Old French, not Modern French. And Old French noun boton/bouton (”bud”) is itself formed from the Old French verb boter/bouter, “to thrust.” It’s had a variety of meanings in French generally related to ”thing that pushes out.”
Google Translate is not a very complete dictionary. You can find many more definitions in Trésor de la langue française informatisé :
And obviously, projection can be a noun in its probably most common usage as in "an estimate or forecast of a future situation or trend based on study of present ones". In the phrase, "this is the projection of where the hurricane will go", "the projection" is a noun. The verb in this phrase is "is", a linking verb.
"Wall Street bankers crafted a projection of the market." The verb here is "crafted". What did they craft: a projection. A noun.
"I watch the projection on the screen." - The verb here is watch. What am I watching: the projection. A noun.
It seems like basically the same problem, really. The "some" is a small chunk of the population maybe, but it is the chunk that is interested in this sort of stuff and would normally use this as a stepping stone on the path to designing the next thing.
The hope is that our abstractions are not too good, and the clever kids manage to bash them into something that does what their imagination wants.
I'm pretty sure there were way more children back then who had practical skills, now everyone is pushed into "college prep" and discouraged from having practical skills, as they are associated with the lower class workers.
The people who keep us all alive are viewed as less worthy... that's our problem in a nutshell.
Is that true? I feel like the drumbeat I constantly have heard for the last 10 years is that the trades pay really well and are easier to get into. Most of the electricians I know are definitely not "lower class". That said, they're harder jobs physically. They're not particularly good for your body a lot of the time.
There are more levels to class than 'aristocracy'. A lot of it is just perception and known rules, and so the fact you know to compare a clerk and a workman means you already know there's a perceived or known difference in status.
Two days ago we returned home from a short trip and when we turned on the tap for the first time the water pressure seemed unusually high for 5-10 seconds before returning to normal. I would have thought nothing of it except that about fifteen years ago I had experienced the same phenomenon after installing a water pressure booster pump in our house and so I learned the hard way about the need for thermal expansion tanks in modern domestic plumbing [1] and so I knew right away that our tank had failed and needed to be replaced. It's a pretty trivial DIY project, but only if you do it before your pipes burst. I suspect most people have never even heard of a thermal expansion tank.
> I suspect most people have never even heard of a thermal expansion tank.
I suspect that if you did surveys every year going back to the 19th century, in every single one of them the majority of people would have never heard of a thermal expansion tank.
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 PVC plastic, was installed under the house, in ceilings, in wall cavities and elsewhere by yours truly to enable us perform all sorts of electrical tasks—door bells, for mother to signal us to come to dinner, etc.
Isn't that standard kids' stuff anymore? The thought of an electrician being called to fix these Rube Goldberg/Heath Robinson-type installations would have been preposterous. If No.-1 son wasn't about say to change a battery then my parents would do it themselves.
This already is a massive difference. Large majority of children in the 19th century did not have any access to electricity, let alone knowing how to fashion an electric bell.
Yes, there's a huge difference between the amount of information that 19th C. and 20th C. kids had access to, but then this is a broad generalization and it requires qualification. In fact I'd argue that some 19th C. kids (albeit few in relative numbers) would have had access to more information than many of their 20th C. counterparts.
Broadly, the reason for why some 20th C. kids would have had access to less information is that they were more protected from dangers than those in 19th C. (and in some ways that's problematic when it comes to learning). Also, clearly, the types of information available in each era would have been different—and this difference would have been accentuated depending on which part of each century we're referring to.
The 19th C.—being the height of the Industrial Revolution—change came thick and fast, so it's almost superfluous to say kids' knowledge of electricity at the turn of the 20th C. would have been much greater than at the beginning of the 19th however this difference wasn't anywhere near as stark at other times throughout the 19th C.
So by 1858 enough information was known about electricity to include technical aspects about it including its industrial applications such as electroplating, p129, and the telegraph, pp273-280 in a kids' book. I'd also posit that some 20 years later (by say 1880) with the coming together of electrical engineering—telephone, electric motors, generators, transatlantic cables, theory by Maxwell, Wheatstone et al, that much more information about the subject would have been available to kids.
Noyce's book was a true eye-opener to me when I came across it some two to three decades ago, so much so that I now truly regret not having a copy of it as a kid. I know I would have gained a great amount of useful knowledge from it despite the fact that it was published a century before my time.
Whilst I had access to more modern texts they didn't provide the information in such a useful and meaningful way. Moreover, much of that information is still very relevant and valuable today. For instance, I refer you to pp57-58 on the dangers of lead and lead poisoning, therein Noyce issues a stark warning especially so with respect to white lead as used in paint.
(This advice would have been invaluable to boys who would have gone into industries where they'd be exposed to such dangers. It also infomes us that knowledge of and concerns about bad and dangerous working conditions of the era may have been better understood at the time than some modern history books would have us believe.)
Keep in mind this warning was in a book for boys written to provide them with practical and useful information—not published in some erudite scientific publication. The fact that by 1858 the dangers of lead had filtered down not only to ordinary people but also to their kids makes the failure of governments and those knowledgeable of the facts to act in a decisive way over the forthcoming century all the more tragic (when I first read Noyce's warning I was quite horrified that so little action had been taken until recent decades).
As you see, with actual information to hand things seem a little more nuanced.
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.
I well understand what you say having lived in a crowded part of Europe for a time. It made me all the more appreciative of the fact that I grew up in a big home with a large front and back yard and that our house was only a few hundred metres from bushland.
Nevertheless, in some ways I envy you living in the Côte d’Azur. That is one of my most favorite parts of Europe.
"a bell for mother to signal us to come to dinner” is the thing that belong to the times when energy was unlimited
Well, practically so. My mother had a massive copper (I think) cowbell at the bottom of the stairs to signal us. All it required was the muscle energy to give the 2-kilogram monstrosity a little shake.
Yeah, my mother also had a hand bell as a backup to the pushbutton system. It was of some 3-4 inches in diameter with a black handle that had been turned to give it an ornate pattern. The bell was attached by string to a hook on a shelf in the kitchen so it wouldn't go walkabout.
It worked marvelously and almost always the dog would arrive there first (it was usually my job to feed the dog before our food was served).
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.
"...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."
You're right, encouraging kids to explore the world at an early age is all important for their development. As a kid I was a past master at pulling all sorts of things apart and somewhat less successful at putting them back together again. And from that I learned a great amount about how stuff worked ('hands-on' at a very young age I reckon is essential to get the feel and measure of stuff).
My parents never discouraged me from playing with all sorts of rather strange things—except perhaps in my preschool years when I started rummaging around amongst the inner workings of our large console radio set in the lounge room. At the age of about four or five my mother took exception after I discovered that touching the top cap [aka grid-1] of one of its valves (tubes) caused a very loud humming noise (she came bounding into the room somewhat alarmed to find No.-1 son arm-deep amongst the electrics).
By that age I'd already become an inveterate collector of junk—everything from screws, nuts and bolts to discarded power pole wire and insulators.
Once I found an old transformer out of a radio set that had green silk-like insulation on its windings (which I found fascinating) and in the evening when my parents told me to stop playing with it I disobeyed the order and hid it in my bed (I know, a very strange kid). Now, you can imagine the furore and trouble I was in when this large metal object came crashing to the floor in the early hours of the morning waking up the whole household.
I cannot envisage how horrible my childhood would have been had my parents forbidden me from following my natural instincts (as strange and as odd as they may have seemed).
I'm sure many other parents would have been much less tolerant of my strange predilections. In hindsight, I reckon my only saving grace was that my father was an engineer.
Children today cannot even walk around their own neighborhood because they must be chauffeured by car since the urban environment is more and more suburban, and this makes them not even really understand the layout of even their immediate environment[0]. American children in particular are being robbed of a lot of experience with hands-on learning because of the parenting climate today.
It's a reinforcing phenomenon, with helicopter parenting being one of the facets. The usual way it goes is
1. Parents say the street / road is too dangerous.
2. Parents drive their kids everywhere.
3. They induce more road usage, demand more road infrastructure. They move to suburbs which are more car centric, force more pedestrianized areas (downtowns) to become more car centric.
4. Places become less walkable, and more dangerous for people outside of a car.
5. Go to 1.
Some of helicopter parenting is mostly over imagined or exaggerated fears ("crime", being abducted by predators which is rather rare, etc), but fear of car death is in fact valid given it is a leading cause of child death (was number 1 until this year gun death became #1). The unfortunate reality is the very act parents in the US take to make it safe for their children perpetuates the issue the ecogecko video I talk about has.
Given at this point no one will let their children be the first to face danger, likely the issue will not ameliorate itself naturally, and government action (pedestrianization, change of streetscapes, change of landuse and zoning, etc) is required.
Anyway, rereading your post, cars aren't the only factor in childhood stunting in the US. I'm not sure because I haven't researched outside of the car centric bits (that is supported in research) but it does feel like a culture wide issue in the US.
About the self-reinforcement: London is a great example of how to evade this trend.
You see, London pedestrians seem almost suicidal. They often cross the road without even looking. In addition, by law traffic-lights in the UK are only advisory for pedestrians: crossing the road when the lights are red is legal and common.
Individually, each 'suicidal' pedestrian endangers their own life. But collectively they train drivers to watch out and make London safer for everyone.
It feels like some sort of inversion of the tragedy of the commons.
(London still has helicopter parents. At least more than they used to have in previous decades. But the feedback loop seems weaker than what you describe for the US.)
Your point is a little off-topic here but I understand how the thread developed (as it's loosely implied in my post). I've been vocal about this for years—not out of any deep understanding of childhood psychology but rather from my own experience as a child. Given the autonomy and freedom that I had as a kid I cannot imagine living the restrictive cloistered life as experienced by many of today's kids—it'd be just terrible. FYI, here's one of my more recent posts (I've written more to this effect in recent years): https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=32681125
I know it's a joke, but "some" children in the developed world give their parents stuff they made themselves... like macaroni "images", clay pots and ashtrays, painted rocks, etc.
In china, those children can give their parents smartphones and other electronics :)
An inspector refused to come look at our house because there is a power line near it. People are still afraid of electricity. It's funny because he probably uses a cell phone, drives a car, lives in his own house, uses a microwave, owns a computer, all situations in which ghasp electricity is close to his body! We're just glad we didn't actually hire him.
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.
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.
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.
The whole point of MIT is supposed to be concentrating 0.5% top smartest people from all over the country (~1mil /5000 MIT graduates every year). It doesnt look good if 5% of the 0.5% top smartest people are still idiots.
> Today, you’d probably have to schedule an electrician to fix what some children back then knew how to make: electric bells, buttons, and buzzers.
Where I live you are technically not allowed to install equipment on 120 or 240 if you are not a certified electrician. Insurance won't cover water damage if installation hasn't been done by a professional plumber. People still do it, but this is not going in the right direction.
on the trend you back up, I see a future where you cannot cook your own food unless you've become a professional specialist of cooking (for food safety).
going to cartoon levels of ridiculousness, a society in which you cannot do anything other than consume unless you're doing a job (which would involve safety, insurance, and other various legal and bureaucratic requirements).
what keeps things sane where you live is the 'technically' aspect. which I read as "individuals often ignore those rules for personal reasons (meaning when no businesses are involved)"...
Yeah I think that you mis-interpreted what I meant. Being prevented to do stuff as simple as changing a switch, a plug or a faucet is plain stupid, and I'm pretty sure it's not even backed by data (or if it is, it's probably overconservative).
> I see a future where you cannot cook your own food unless you've become a professional specialist of cooking (for food safety).
This has already happening to some degree in the US, in the sense that one has to follow a lot of food safety practices in order to keep from getting violently ill eating food sold in a grocery store. The best example being the poultry industry.
Instead of our government requiring chicken farms control salmonella (which is required of European farmers), the poultry industry has convinced both the government and the consumer that it's totally cool to shift things to "you didn't cook your chicken properly so it's your fault that you got salmonella." Processed chicken in the US is washed in chlorine because there's so much salmonella and it would spoil the chicken between the packing plant and consumer's fridge.
Similarly, eggs sold in the US can't be stored outside the refrigerator because they've been washed to attempt to control salmonella; the washing destroys the egg's natural protective barrier.
We can't eat vegetables bought in a grocery store without washing them; otherwise we might get e.coli, because corporate megafarms refuse to provide proper sanitation for field workers and use enormous field sizes in order to eek out as much profit as they possibly can. Yet again: it's your fault you got e.coli because you didn't wash your vegetables well enough, not the fault of the farms and distributors and grocery stores for selling you unsafe food.
But it keeps work coming to the electricians' and plumbers' unions (motto: "If you didn't make any mistakes, you're not working fast enough"), and isn't that the important thing?
For the story, I used "professionals" to rebuild drywall after a flood. They managed to fuck up my ethernet network in the process, but they don't want to admit guilt, and they're telling me to "use wifi instead".
Strange, my experiences with unionized labor have found the exact opposite - safety conscious to the nth degree, and much more likely to criticize each other for working too quickly than too slowly. They seem to be incentivized to 1) not get dinged for safety infractions and 2) get as many billable hours out of every work order as possible.
This is very much like this in Australia. I had friends warning me against setting up my own pendant light because of insurance and other blabla and was denied to buy some electrical cables at the local hardware shop as I wasn't certified even though I hold a bachelor in electronics .... Compared that to France where I spent time at uni building my own guitar amplifier for my bachelor thesis, manipulating 300V-500V and blowing a couple valve along the process, ha fun time
Wow the insurance is one thing but not even bring able to buy electrical cable is crazy to me. Australia's government truly is more dystopian than most people give it credit for being.
Every now and then I hear about another fundamental freedom I take for granted that they just don't have and it just reminds me how lucky I am not to live there.
This sounds trivially correct but the short article doesn't do enough to support it other than the few anecdotes that are mentioned. This is similar to today when, as an example, the NYT tries to get in front of a trend by highlighting and cherry picking a few examples of people who are doing what one of their articles purports in so many words is more widespread than it really might be.
Then take a statement like this:
"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"
What does 'many people' exactly mean? Nothing at all you wouldn't say 'many people got sick from the pandemic' you'd back it up with some type of figure or number.
Rachel Plotnick's book (Power Button, referenced in the article) is very good. Here's a much longer excerpt from it, on the button as it relates to carrying out life-and-death decisions (e.g., warfare and executions): https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/of-war-and-electric-death...
(Full disclosure: I work for the MIT Press, who published Power Button. But it really is one of my favorite history of tech titles we've published in the 10+ years i've been here)
The concept of mechanical push (and pull) buttons have been long present in locks and alarm triggers long before electricity was introduced to general public.
I don't think the appehresion was so much of the button interface but of the 'black box' automation aspect of it. Where the button isn't physically triggering a function like a spring or lever, instead some 'magic' happens in the behind the scenes. The interface was no longer directly connected to a simple, easily understood sequence of actions.
> 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.” They thought the world needed less thinking though and tinkering, and more automatic action. “You press the button, we do the rest”—the Eastman Company’s famous slogan for Kodak cameras—could be taken as the slogan for an entire way of life.
> Plotnick quotes an educator and activist from 1916 lamenting that pushing a button “seems to relieve one of any necessity for responsibility about what goes on behind the button.”
The new concept was power amplification: a small effort causing a larger than "natural" effect.
E.g. you were always able to press a button to tinkle a bell, but pressing a button and obtaining a sustained electrical ringing was new.
Valves and transistors took it to the present stage, by cascading the effect of small inputs switching larger amounts of power from an external supply.
(Yes, power amplification could be done mechanically before electricity with energy from water, weights, etc. but it was too cumbersome.)
Let's return to the button where possible. I often prefer physical buttons due to the feedback I get. I know it does nothing, but I'll still press extra hard on a stupid touchscreen if it's not responding.
On how touchscreens are over-used for the sake of updating without physical constraints. "The software guys can independently do the design of the UI, changing things down to the very last moment, or even after the last moment if the car can be updated." [1]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32494497
On making light of people born post-1990s how no one can fix anything now. "We care less about repair as most would rather just scrap that broken TV and get a new one. The electronic and small appliance repair store are all but gone" [2]
[2] https://qr.ae/pv5PjI
> Let's return to the button where possible. I often prefer physical buttons due to the feedback I get. I know it does nothing, but I'll still press extra hard on a stupid touchscreen if it's not responding.
Unless, of course, your phone is one of the few where pushing harder will make it perform a different action, if used in the right place (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_Touch).
> On how touchscreens are over-used for the sake of updating without physical constraints. "The software guys can independently do the design of the UI, changing things down to the very last moment, or even after the last moment if the car can be updated." [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32494497
This is akin to frontend developers doing everything in their power to make their development environment the most comfortable, while sacrificing end-user performance/bandwidth/usability for getting it.
Force Touch was discontinued in 2019 and replaced with a simple “long press” feature called Haptic Touch. iPhone 11 and later and Apple Watch 6 and onwards don’t have the pressure sensitive layer anymore.
> On making light of people born post-1990s how no one can fix anything now. "We care less about repair as most would rather just scrap that broken TV and get a new one. The electronic and small appliance repair store are all but gone"
Very few people have ever been capable of fixing things, especially electronics. As electronics got smaller, more integrated and more complicated the bar got higher, reducing the pool of capable people even more.
The other problem is that TVs have gotten cheaper at the same time labor prices have gone up. This drove all the TV repair shops out of business because the bench time alone to even do a quick diagnosis is already starting to approach the cost of a new TV. Spending hundreds of dollars to (maybe) repair your 5+ year old TV just doesn't really make a ton of sense to most people. And that's assuming there's not a major fault: replacing a few capacitors is one thing; replacing the mainboard or LCD panel can cost more than buying a new TV.
This same pattern repeats for most consumer electronics, sadly.
What we really need is more standardized swappable modules.
The odds of me replacing a BGA chip are low. By the time one fails, the device may be obsolete, the part may be expensive, my soldering skills probably could never be as good as a robot, etc.
But if my computer has an issue, I can totally replace a bad drive in full confidence that it's probably worth it.
The fact that there's no standards body for modular consumer goods really sucks.
>On how touchscreens are over-used for the sake of updating without physical constraints. "The software guys can independently do the design of the UI, changing things down to the very last moment, or even after the last moment if the car can be updated."
Or just changing the underlying software. Especially insidious things like inserting new functionality that the user never wanted. Like clicking on the text entry part of a chatbox and instead of getting a blinking cursor to begin typing, getting a User agreement dialog and an "I accept button". Utterly infuriating change.
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.
The question is wether you really need to be literate. As a software developer I cannot write correct assembler code ( with aligning rules, red zone and what not), but at least I can read it. I would guess most programmers cannot do even that. But do they really need it? Isn’t that the advance?
I can't write or read assembler, but I can program modern languages.
We're talking about a whole different level, people who don't even know how to effectively use what they have, troubleshoot basic issues, etc.
It's not "This is a magic box" so much as "I don't even know how to use the controls on this box and even if I could there's no button to do that thing anymore".
"I can't type or use a calculator" not just "I don't know how to divide numbers on paper"
Going back 20 years, I wouldve never guessed this would be the current state of affairs! As an industry we've succeeded in unlocking computing as a background enabler, but have utterly failed in making create-side computing friendly and accessible
Apple is a unique case. The CAD app might make you forget math, but it lets you make stuff with CAD.
Apple hides the filesystem and such but it doesn't really replace it with anything. It's not like they have some super ultra abstraction on top of it, they just straight up reduce the functionality a bit.
I don't see much critical value in understanding the things only specialists can or want to do, like how a CPU actually works or how to make an OS, but before Apple every generation had a level of abstraction they could work at that had the full power of previous levels(So long as you accept having to buy all the underlying stuff off the shelf).
Now it seems that the very newest computer users actually have less capability, because the abstraction doesn't expose the full power of the machine.
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".
Tangental, but the physical mechanisms of electronic controls are often worth study. Ingenious mechanisms move little slivers of metal around in carefully engineered enclosures. It's a more accessible magic that's easy to disregard.
The "channel dial" switch on old TV's was awesome.
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.
Well, they must not actually be doing that on cheap switches, they fail probably 10x as much as anything except maybe power supply equipment and connectors.
Mechanical keyswitches have some pretty amazing reliability though.
I actually like the touchscreen everything movement in most applications, partly because of this. A screen may be expensive, but good switches might be just as expensive.
> They wondered if such devices would seal off the wonders of technology into a black box: “effortless, opaque, and therefore unquestioned by consumers.”
I used to spend ridiculous amounts of money on Halloween displays. The thing that scared people the most was a big red button I encouraged them to press. My plan was to give the first person who pressed it all of our candy and a cash prize. No one ever did.
Not only that I answered all questions, things like "Will it scare me?" No. "Will something jump out if I press it?" No. "What's going to happen?" I can tell you that nothing bad will happen and you'll probably like the result. And so on.
It’s worth noting that there are always the fears of losing touch with the details of stuff that some along with various advances. The same thing was the case when I was in junior high with calculators, “how will you add and multiply if your batteries run out?” but the fact of the matter is, not having to be able to make your own push button switch freed people to advance to other topics. Similarly, in mathematics education, when I was in high school, there were classes entitled College Algebra and College Trigonometry¹ which had the implicit message that these were materials traditionally taught in college² and not in the third year of high school. On the other hand, things like calculating square roots by hand are no longer part of the curriculum, although they may still be taught on occasion by the rare teacher who has those skills as an enrichment topic to fill some class time or as part of the math club’s after-school explorations.
We may be filled with nostalgia for our own learning and think that it’s the only way to learn, but as time goes on, some skills just become less important.
?
1. The backs of the textbooks included printed tables for log (both base 10 and ln), sin, cos, tan, cot, sec and csc, with the latter six tables to three thanks to the fact that sin?=cos(?-p/2).³
2. The disjunction between practice and theory has led to this sequence being renamed precalculus in most (if not all) high schools now.
3. The skills to make those tables in the first place are yet another thing that we no longer dedicate long classroom hours to, although Charles Babbage would have thought that being unable to verify the accuracy of your tables was a sign of intellectual weakness.
Not much more magical than delivering a chicken to the butcher, and getting back pieces of meat. Or delivering a typed manuscript to your publisher, and getting a bound book. Or any trade essentially.
Having a machine do it - that was new. But not the part about abdicating responsibility for function.
Almost every trade has people freaking out and trying to push us all to be generalists.
And I'll continue ignoring pretty much all of them, because division of labor is a lot of why society is so advanced.
I'll grant them the chickens though, mass produced meat is one case where the abstraction hides some horrors that should be exposed.
But simple loss of skill isn't enough to convince me. I don't need to be able to build a CPU from scratch, any more than the CPU designer needs to know all of CSS.
These things are cool and worth exploring, but most any tech one person can understand themselves is probably a historical curiosity more than a practical thing. The rare exceptions like rope and knots are incredibly fascinating.
hey Joe, how can I get in touch with you regarding a RE project similar to what you did for Golem a couple years ago? I don't see any private messaging or ways to contact individuals through this site, so I am just responding to your most recent post in hopes to start a dialog. Do you still work on RE projects?
OK, I am apparently not smart enough to figure out how to do that! LOL When I click your name, there is no email address or option to email. Perhaps you could email mine? We have also posted the job on UpWork if you are on that website?
Socrates: I heard, then, that at Naucratis, in Egypt, was one of the ancient gods of that country, the one whose sacred bird is called the ibis, and the name of the god himself was Theuth. He it was who invented numbers and arithmetic and geometry and astronomy, also draughts and dice, and, most important of all, letters.
Now the king of all Egypt at that time was the god Thamus, who lived in the great city of the upper region, which the Greeks call the Egyptian Thebes, and they call the god himself Ammon. To him came Theuth to show his inventions, saying that they ought to be imparted to the other Egyptians. But Thamus asked what use there was in each, and as Theuth enumerated their uses, expressed praise or blame, according as he approved or disapproved.
"The story goes that Thamus said many things to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts, which it would take too long to repeat; but when they came to the letters, "This invention, O king," said Theuth, "will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered." But Thamus replied, "Most ingenious Theuth, one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs to another; and now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess.
"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."
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 boundary based on latency, unconscious guidance, and predictability. I can send a thought to move my hand, and it moves as I think of it. The hand is within the boundary of "me". Holding a pencil, I do not need to consciously consider how to form each curve of a letter. The pencil is within the boundary of "me". I can predict what emacs will do when given keystrokes, so emacs is within the boundary of "me".
On the other hand, there is a large delay between deciding to open a door and it responding to my pull, so it clearly is not "me". I need to consciously consider what search terms to query, and cannot do so at an unconscious level. Even when I repeat the exact same query as I did a year ago, I may not find the results I was searching for, and so there is no predictability. These lead me to feel that a search engine is not within the boundary of "me".
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?
Your door example raises further questions. When I pick up a remote control, the control moves just as easily as my hand. Does the remote become an equal part of me immediately?
It seems you suggest to base the boundary on how easy/trivial it is to make something go away from your posession, akin to "big man in a suit of armour — take that off, what are you?" line of reasoning. Well, the problem is that stripping tools from someone is not that much more difficult than stripping memory: some fair amount of violence would be necessary in both scenarios (blunt torso traumas vs. blunt head traumas).
> via a quantitative metric is interesting to me because it's not a binary.
It also means that it depends on the situation. If I'm reading a book, then the movement of my hands feels instant as I reach to turn the page. But back when I played the piano, at times my hands could feel like they are falling behind, not listening to what I'm telling them to do, responding too slowly for what is being demanded of them. Whether or not my hands feel like "me" depends on what I'm trying to have them do.
> Does the remote become an equal part of me immediately?
I've never really thought of it in terms of time, in part because it is only something to quantify in retrospect. A pencil in my hand feels like a part of me, that responds as I move it. If I press it against a piece of paper, I interpret the sensory input as "felt" from the tip of the pencil, even though I know that I have no nerve endings there. But a pencil on the table isn't part of me. Whether there's a smooth transition between the two as I pick it up and gain control over it, or whether it's something that just "clicks", I'm not sure.
I remember when Amun-Ra personally attacked me the first time. What with the calendar and the clock, oye nothings ever enough for the schmuck. He'd have my legs for their ability to atrophy my arm strength if he'd have his way, making me look like a Glukkon
Amun-Ra has missed one important part of writing. It is not just for remembering one's own thoughts but also for transmitting them over great distances of time and space.
If one is to read Wikipedia and repeat it verbatim without understanding then one is only a single component of a greater transportation medium. But if in contrast, if one was to internalise those words and draw lines of inference between ideas so elusively captured therein and a wider base of knowledge then maybe you are something more.
Did you have a point with this? That couldn't be placed at the top?
I don't know how hating on writing is related to people being disoriented by pushbuttons, and maybe if you stated what you thought the parallel was, you could have saved everyone some time and effort in reading hard-to-parse prose.
> 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?
I spotted this gem of a comment while scrolling and had to scroll back up to be sure I hadn't misread it. It's both hilarious and pertinent! Well said, "Big Toe."
I think the reference is cliché to the point that I usually hate to see it, but did understand the original post's intent in context (that is, the context provided by skimming the linked article to which the post is a reaction) without issue. It didn't even occur to me that it was anything other than plain.
For this reason I actually thought it was a good comment. I've seen the reference come up almost without fail in discussions like this, but I've never seen it so elaborated.
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:
---
>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."
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.
Like "life isn't fair" and "most vendors have an abusive EULA", if you ever find yourself saying that to defend your side ... you're probably on the wrong side.
Clear communication is good. You should welcome suggestions for how to communicate better. "Try it sometime", as it were.
> It has a block of text, whose purpose isn't clear at the beginning [1], and requires you to read the entire comment
Nah. It makes you think, I personally like to practice the art of thinking, of making connections between seemingly unconnected things, like Socrates and push buttons. Try to guess the point of a big comment by a first few sentences. And here I guessed right, that it would be about dangers of writing. But it was easy here, because letters are mentioned in a third sentence with emphasis: "and, most important of all, letters."
> its thick prose> 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?
I force myself to read thick prose sometimes, it is a way to practice attention and an ability to understand others. Maybe it was the reason why it was easy to me to guess the point of the comment?
But no one is forced to read it. For example, it seems to me you didn't read it through. I didn't read it. I read first few sentences, and skimmed to the end, to ensure that my guess is right.
> Advantages:
You are silently assume that a clarity and the ease of consumption is among of the top priorities. But it may not be so. Didn't you think that a comment about letters can be composed in a thick and hard to comprehend prose on a purpose to make some point about letters (that are supposed to be easy)? And about buttons too (that are supposed to be easy too)? I do not see what this point may be, but it could be because I'm too stupid to see it.
>It makes you think, I personally like to practice the art of thinking, of making connections between seemingly unconnected things, like Socrates and push buttons
So I guess I can add you to the list of people missing the irony.
There three "technologies" here: writing, push buttons, and clear writing.
In historical context -- because of cercatrova's oh-so clever, unclear comment -- we can laugh at how foolish it was to dismiss writing or push buttons as "causing atrophy".
Now, I'm advocating the third "technology", clear writing, and you're responding exactly like the very same ridiculed people: "Oh no, if people write clearly, then others won't get necessary practice in tolerating crappy prose! I'm a superior person who can parse crappy prose -- don't take that advantage from me!"
> force myself to read thick prose sometimes, it is a way to practice attention and an ability to understand others. Maybe it was the reason why it was easy to me to guess the point of the comment?
So, what, you're saying you're more deserving of knowing the point of the comment than others? That it's good that they didn't get it?
>You are silently assume that a clarity and the ease of consumption is among of the top priorities. But it may not be so. Didn't you think that a comment about letters can be composed in a thick and hard to comprehend prose on a purpose to make some point about letters (that are supposed to be easy)? And about buttons too (that are supposed to be easy too)? I do not see what this point may be, but it could be because I'm too stupid to see it.
Or because the point could have been made explicit, but wasn't. In any case, with this comment, you've indicated you've drunk the koolaid. You're actually defending people making themselves harder to understand than necessary, rather than maturely accepting feedback on how to make your point clearer.
> Now, I'm advocating the third "technology", clear writing,
And you are doing it in a response to the obscure prose of Socrates. It shows one more time that Socrats' obscure prose make people think. Cleverer people than me and you read Socrates in a search of novel ideas. And you succeeded.
> and you're responding exactly like the very same ridiculed people: "Oh no, if people write clearly, then others won't get necessary practice in tolerating crappy prose! I'm a superior person who can parse crappy prose -- don't take that advantage from me!"
Yes. Do you think it makes me a bad person? I believe not: I did my best to explain you benefits of my skills and how to acquire them. I'm not so egoistic, I'm ready to share my wisdom with a random person without charging them money.
> Or because the point could have been made explicit, but wasn't.
Had you experience of deciphering such an obscure point? Did you feel the fun it gives? I cannot agree that everyone on every occasion must seek the maximum clarity, it would take away the fun.
> In any case, with this comment, you've indicated you've drunk the koolaid.
Wow. You've almost won. But no. I checked wikipedia and urbandictionary, and I know what you mean by "you've drunk the koolaid". Urbandictionary explains: "Kool-Aid" is what one drinks metaphorically, in the context of a political campaign, when faced with an eminent loss. The term was popularly referenced in the 1993 film, "The War Room" by George Stephonopolous when he states, "I'm afraid we're all going to have to drink Kool-Aid."
My skills of understanding are stronger than your skills of making yourself obscure by using references to a folklore. Though it was a nice attempt to win argument by using a form as a point. I like it, really. Much better than obscure Socrates' prose arguing that letters are easy. I can say even I'm a little frustrated to decipher it, because it would be a really good point, you deserved to win just for being able to use it.
> You're actually defending people making themselves harder to understand than necessary, rather than maturely accepting feedback on how to make your point clearer.
Why do you think they need your feedback? With all we know about them they can be better than you and me combined at making their point clear, but decided on this specific occasion to speak riddles.
You're really on this aren't you? Seems like everyone else here except you understood the point I was trying to make by referencing Socrates' story. No one else but you in this thread had I problem with how I did it. Perhaps if everyone else around you gets it but you, it might be time to ask yourself why.
I guess you feel that you're speaking for some imagined group who demands digestible, workmanlike prose at all times. I guess I'll speak up for the others?
Frankly, fully rewriting someone's comment and including a 9-item list of what you think are advantages comes across as more than a little intense.
Y’know…it was clear that the original commenter was telling a story. If you didn’t want to read it, you could’ve stopped. Nobody was making you. :) There are plenty of other comments, and I found this one fascinating; myself.
Maybe it’s just that some of us still have patience - and don’t need things condensed into sound bites or summations for our convenience.
I have to say, this post if anything is a meta argument that Plato was actually right. Behold the impatience and inattentiveness to read a short section that literally takes two minutes to parse. The internet has made people far to impatient.
No, Plato wasn't right that you should make people take 2 minutes to listen to your point when you could have made it in ten seconds.
And not that the personal attack was warranted, but: I'm happy to read dense material; I'd just like to know if it is worth my time first. By making me read all of the material first before I know what point it's building to, and not knowing the relevant to the article, you've made me take a lot of time just to learn that you were making a point I already agreed with.
>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.
Indeed, I did not understand the aggressiveness either, in both their comment before I quoted the article as a reason, and in their comment afterwards. I too wanted to match it with sarcasm, but I stopped myself for the same reason as you did.
>If you truly think that's why people write long-form prose then I totally understand your ire towards it
Woosh? That was a tongue-in-cheek reference back to the original Socrates/Plato quote worrying about thinking skills atrophying due to writing.
For someone so married to the idea of being a deep thinker, who rigorously and patiently reads thick prose, you sure missed an obvious reference.
>At the risk of being an inaccurate arm-chair psychoanalyst I think that your anger and aggression
There's no need to psychoanalyze. Cercatrova took ~400 words, most of which were unnecessary, to bring up an idea, and not even make clear what part of the article it was related too. That's a really wasteful form of communication, and I pointed out why, then later on showed a better way to do it.
Most people would appreciate being told how they could communicate an idea better, and if there's someone here with a toxic personality, I would say it's the one who's trying to medicalize it and act like it's some kind of mental illness, rather than a request for common courtesy.
If you want to ascribe a personality trait to me, how about "distaste at people who waste others' time making their ideas obscure through poor communication", and I have to ask -- why don't you have that personality trait as well? Do you not like when others understand your ideas? Are you worried they'll better see the flaws?
Let’s just cut ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ down to 40 minutes, because - why couldn’t Kubrick just compress all that slow motion classical music stuff down to the actual point of the movie?
‘Humanity makes first contact. They send out a spaceship to the source. The AI on the ship becomes sentient and murderous. One man escapes, and arrives at the source. He exits his 3 dimensional existence and enters a psychedelic-esque state whereupon he transcends humanity as we know it.’
Okay, now nobody needs to see ‘2001’ again - ever!
Symphonies - what the fuck?
Why couldn’t Mozart have just written a 3 1/2 minute long pop song instead of wasting all of our time?
What an asshole! Yet we celebrate this music as some of the greatest of all time? Shame on us.
Shakespeare? Ugh. They fall in love. Their love isn’t approved. They kill themselves. Get to the point!
You’re totally right. There’s absolutely no reason for us to do anything but compress all information into Tweet-level hyperchunks. :)
What is that responding to? I wasn't opposed to reading or referencing the full text. My criticism was that it should have led with the core point, so people know what point you're making before they dive into the long exposition of it.
What you're advocating here is basically saying that people should never read the description of a movie, or know anything about it, before starting on it, because that's mainly what my edit change. Do you really believe that?
Furthermore, HN isn't a movie. If you're going to take two and half hours to make a point, just don't bother with posting.
Here's an easy rule of thumb for when someone posts a passage from Socrates - they're probably saying that Socrates already made this point a couple millennia ago.
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.
This allegory is a trope at this point, but it is sort of true in some sense. People seem to internalize (yes, memorize) facts less and less nowadays because such facts can be queried immediately from the internet. While being able to look things up is great, without memorization synthesizing information is difficult because it's harder to draw connections between facts without having them in your head at the same time.
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 help much with applied epistemology (rationality).
I wasn't too clear apparently. More instructions needed :)
So, yes, he explicitly mentioned something, that's why I mentioned too.
What I think the problem is that he implies in that sentence that either reading is more instructionless than hearing/talking, or that somehow good instruction itself should just grow on trees, or that instruction is always good, or that ratio of instructioned knowledge vs "ignorance" matters.
What I try to point out is that what matters is applied knowledge, which is still very rare even today, yet the chance of picking up a book that helps with acquiring the skills to gather and apply knowledge has more chance than hearing it from someone.
Dialogue has several distinct advantages over reading when it comes to learning. I think we both agree that applied knowledge is best, but this can only be gained through application. Dialogue forces you synthesize ideas into new statements and respond to challenges to those statements which is intrinsically more applied than simply reading alone.
There's a good amount of research inicating that discussion and speaking lead to significantly more information retention than hearing or reading. The more individual the learning process is, the fewer opportunities there are for discussion. This is why I get into silly arguments on HN in the first place, gotta supplement that reading ;)
Reading makes knowledge acquisition easier, but it also decreases the fraction of knowledge that comes bundled with expert 1-on-1. This has both advantages and disadvantages.
> Dialogue forces you synthesize ideas into new statements and respond to challenges to those statements which is intrinsically more applied than simply reading alone.
Exactly!
Talking about a subject helps organize it.
> This is why I get into silly arguments on HN in the first place, gotta supplement that reading ;)
Ah, the good old Feynman criterion. You don't understand something until you can explain it to a 6th grader or a HNer ^^
> Reading makes knowledge acquisition easier, but it also decreases the fraction of knowledge that comes bundled with expert 1-on-1.
Experts are scarce, books are cheap.
Also if a bunch of people read a book, it has the same content for everybody. So if people recommend a book and you read it you can be fairly sure that you all read the same thing. But if a bunch of people talk to someone, and they say oh that someone is great, but then they don't like you, or they are in a bad mood, or ... or, you won't really know what's up. (Recently happened to me with a recommendation to a doctor. I'm still fed up with how useless it was to spend money on that doc and how high praise he got.)
I feel your doctor pain. I hope you find an answer. Actually, doctors may be one the more guilty professions when it comes to shallow knowledge without application. I like to see how many times I can ask a doctor 'why' or 'how' before they become frustrated with me for wasting their expensive time :P
> you can be fairly sure that you all read the same thing
I don't think this is a given. The bible has been around for a long time, but for whatever reason there have been disputes over what information exactly is encoded in it that have been going on for centuries. It's definitely a little more consistent the spoken word though!
It would be interesting to see articles like this for various common elements of UI widget toolkits, which I guess kind of mix metaphors in that some of them (buttons, sliders) evoke electromechanical devices while others (checkboxes, text boxes) evoke paper forms.
I'm going to write one about the idiocy of the "flat" design fad. I wonder how people of 1900 would have felt about having to experimentally poke at things that looked like plain labels or placards, or decorative swatches of paint, to operate a machine.
"Every time you try to operate on of these weird black controls that are labelled in black on a black background, a little black light lights up black to let you know you’ve done it."
I guess flat design can be tied back into that tension/mixed metaphor between electromechanical and print analogs - it's based on a decision to lean towards the print side of things. Actually the designers of early-ish influential "flat" designed systems such as Windows Phone 7 were quite self-conscious about this, e.g., https://web.archive.org/web/20120322023540/http://mkruzenisk... (from 2011)
Thanks for the reply and that link. That article is replete with pretty bogus assertions, even for its time. Print is not all that informative for interactive presentations, aside from general principles of good layout with whitespace and appropriate visual emphasis. The article does indeed mention those, but goes on and on about print without saying what it has to do with buttons you need to press or values you need to adjust.
The article also treats all physical-control analogies as bad because of their (now-recognized-as) ridiculous descent into skeuomorphism. But before we had cheesy "leather" textures in "notebook" UIs, or "painted felt" that you could click on in a Blackjack game UI, we had simple two-pixel-wide highlights or shadows on the edges of buttons that instantly told you
A. This is a button.
B. The button is "pressed."
At some point you can't do better than cues afforded by the real world. In the real world (even one full of touchscreens instead of mechanical switches), when you press on something malleable it will deform, and the light and shadow on it will change, showing you it's now concave where you pressed it. If it retains its shape, someone can come along an hour later and say, yep, this thing has been pressed.
This doesn't need to be (and never will need to be) learned. Therefore it makes much more sense to stick with minimalist real-world analogs than trying to invent some new design "language" that we're all supposed to memorize and that makes sense across all cultures. No no, blue means ON! Brown means OFF!
There's room for new clues, of course. "Greying out" unavailable functions is the best example I can think of. But I'd argue that reducing the contrast on something and making it less visible tells the user intuitively that it's ineffective (or less effective).
I haven't heard it in a long time - I think it was mostly confined to people born before 1930, and there aren't many of them around anymore, but "what if I press the wrong button?" used to be a major concern people had about new gadgets. A lot of it came from the shift from appliances like old time wringer washers, where every control has a visible mechanical function or other affordance, to more automated "pushbutton" appliances with internal sequence "programs".
Also the change over from a solid visible control panel with a combination of switches, knobs and dials, buttons, LEDs, and maybe an LCD readout, all clearly labeled, to more modern stuff with just a few barely distinguishable unlabeled buttons so tiny you could very easily accidentally press one.
And now touch screens where who knows what will happen if you accidentally brush the screen and it interprets that as some secret hidden swipe gesture.
>The mundane interface between human and machine caused social anxiety in the late nineteenth century
The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster (written in 1909) has a lot of buttons. The novella is an indication that they were more of a symbol than the real source of the anxiety. It was caused by anticipation of things like:
- Disconnect of people from nature an each other.
- Replacement of real things with simulacra, which then begins to be perceived as the real thing.
- Mounting, yet fragile complexity of systems people interact with (initially) and within (eventually).
Looking at our society today, it's pretty clear that none of these fears were irrational.
>They wondered if such devices would seal off the wonders of technology into a black box: “effortless, opaque, and therefore unquestioned by consumers.”
rings true to me. I think this was and still is a valid concern. At the very least it's a real trade-off. I almost get the feeling that the author in the OP looks down on the knowledge needed to understand machines/technology since it can be replaced by a button. That misses the point entirely though. Taking technology for granted makes you a mindless consumer in my opinion. That's why we're so instinctively disgusted by the population in The Machine Stops. They don't exist in any real sense; they're just the exit nodes of the machine's functions.
The article treats skepticism of buttons as some quaint silly thing when it was part of a general criticism of technological society that carried over to the present day and made some valid point. And I don't, by far, embrace the critique of technology but one should indeed take seriously the "criticism of a push-button society".
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.
I think buttons for clothing were around centuries before electric push buttons, and the electric buttons were named for the clothing buttons they resembled. Is that not so? So the fact that "button" in French could mean "push" would just be a coincidence, since you don't push clothing buttons. Or at least I don't.
"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."
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.
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