2000-06-17 17:05:53+00 by
Dan Lyke
4 comments
Uplifting thought OTD:
"Here's a horrible thought: You know how dumb the average person is? Well, half the human race is even dumber than that..."
--- the .sig of Jean-Marc Libs in the Scary Devil Monastery
It's actually worse than that. The mean IQ is greater than both the median and the mode.
--- Paul Martin in the Scary Devil Monastery
Next time I've got some free time I'm gonna get a cardboard box and some large gravel and get some good pictures for splash screens and help files. "You must be smarter than a box of rocks to use this software/website/whatever." Alas that might limit my market too much.
comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):
#Comment made: 2002-02-21 05:30:06+00 by:
ccoryell
I have to disagree strenuously with these assertions. I see this attitude promoted on Slashdot all time and I think its embarrassing.
- People are far smarter than we give them credit for. Most knowledge is local and it just happens that we have great local knowledge about computer systems and networks and we don't value the knowledge and intelligence necessary to survive in a great many other contexts.
- This attitude is poisonous if you want to affect real change in the world, or even work with people outside your narrow priesthood. I won't support your positions if you think I am an idiot, and I doubt that anyone will. This thinking just isolates and marginalizes geeks even more.
- Just because we write software unusable without years of training doesn't put us in a fair position to judge.
Most people are very smart, but they choose to invest their time and attention to other things. While I may not agree with those choices, it doesn't make them dumb. The interesting problem that I see is how to convince people to apply their attention to more interesting problems than television.
Cheers,
Carl C-M
#Comment made: 2002-02-21 05:30:07+00 by:
Dan Lyke
I wanna give this a little more thought, but my knee-jerk responses are that I don't mean to exclude geeks in that cynicism, and that in the larger population attempts at placation and education have repeatedly failed. I once thought that the interesting problem was how to drag them away from the pretty blinking lights, I'm slowly coming 'round to finding ways to use the pretty blinking lights to work towards my greater goals for the culture.
#Comment made: 2002-02-21 05:30:07+00 by:
ccoryell
Wee, lets turn this into a dialog! (of knee-jerks)
I don't want to exclude geeks either. I just hear them saying this the most and I used to say it also. It's a fun cynicism, but I don't think its a helpful cynicism.
Carl C-M
#Comment made: 2002-02-21 05:30:07+00 by:
Dan Lyke
I find it a helpful reminder when designing interfaces, and when trying to write documentation. But I'm also of the impression that it's true, that intelligence doesn't map symmetrically. And while it sometimes leads to dismissive arrogance, I think politics, among other everyday occurrences, manages to keep us conscious that dealing with these differing abilities to learn and comprehend is a part of life.