The computer example confused me, because I’m not sure what it has to do with compartmentalization. Compartmentalization means you neglect to apply knowledge from one domain in another; people being unable to understand computers seems to happen because they don’t have any applicable domain knowledge in the first place.
Thanks, that’s a good point. There’s some authorial sleight of hand going on with that anecdote: I’m telling it to give the reader the feeling of what it’s like to see a smart person fail at something basic because they fail to cross domains, but when writing I couldn’t actually come up with a real example that was simple enough to fit in one paragraph.
The kind of real examples I had in mind involve the “tests” that people come up with when trying to diagnose a bug or other kind of breakdown, and they make a basic category mistake like trying to “fix” a keyboard stuck in AZERTY instead of QWERTY by unplugging the keyboard and plugging it back in. (And here again, I’m resorting to a simplified example to get my point across.) They know the hardware/software distinction, but they’re failing to apply it to their current situation, and instead falling back on “trying” random things. With some justification, because quite often it’s what they see “experts” do...
Oddly though, ‘turn it off and back on again’ or ‘try disconnecting and reconnecting the cable’ really does solve a remarkably large number of tech related problems. Arguably a non-expert without any special knowledge is probably quite rational in trying that as the first approach to solve any given tech related problem. It may even be that the next best thing to try if it fails is to try it again. Further attempts probably have rapidly diminishing utility however.
It actually seems to me that the trouble computer-illiterate people have is often a case of insufficient compartmentalization, not too much. To take your keyboard example—they know things that work in a software domain, and know things that work in a hardware domain, and are failing to keep these separate. Kids, who start with far fewer preconceptions of how things should work, pick up the use of computers much faster.
Also, we computer-literate people probably underestimate how sheerly arbitrary many things must seem like to people who haven’t had a long exposure to computers. (How is a person to know that keyboard settings aren’t stored in the keyboard? After all, you could toggle the write-protect status of a 3½ inch disc by flipping the right tab on the disc. And the amount of region switches on a DVD drive is stored in the device itself. And once you know that electrical devices lose at least some of their settings when the power is turned off, it isn’t too unreasonable of a hypothesis that unplugging the keyboard might reset the settings.)
If the keyboard was USB I might have given unplug and plug in a shot. That’s the kind of software intervention that often works. I have never had cause to investigate where keyboard settings are configured.
In general, as the devices become more complex and “intelligent” the number of plausible hypotheses about any failure starts to rise rapidly. Also, the ability to rule out possibilities on the basis of knowledge about the system starts to drop… When I was a kid, most communications channels were analog, and unidirectional. I could bound what was failing by knowing that the transmitter had no clue what happened at the receiver. That is no longer true. “sheerly arbitrary” things are a problem—“sheerly arbitrary” things that sometimes change from release to release of code can be much worse...
I’m telling it to give the reader the feeling of what it’s like to see
a smart person fail at something basic because they fail to cross
domains, but when writing I couldn’t actually come up with a real
example that was simple enough to fit in one paragraph.
I would suggest the example of someone not getting the
evil bit
joke.
It’s good because it works both ways. You only need common sense to
understand it, but lay people can be intimidated by the context into not
applying common sense, and you’ll sometimes see domain experts try to
implement essentially the same thing because they turn off common sense
while in their domain.
The computer example confused me, because I’m not sure what it has to do with compartmentalization. Compartmentalization means you neglect to apply knowledge from one domain in another; people being unable to understand computers seems to happen because they don’t have any applicable domain knowledge in the first place.
Thanks, that’s a good point. There’s some authorial sleight of hand going on with that anecdote: I’m telling it to give the reader the feeling of what it’s like to see a smart person fail at something basic because they fail to cross domains, but when writing I couldn’t actually come up with a real example that was simple enough to fit in one paragraph.
The kind of real examples I had in mind involve the “tests” that people come up with when trying to diagnose a bug or other kind of breakdown, and they make a basic category mistake like trying to “fix” a keyboard stuck in AZERTY instead of QWERTY by unplugging the keyboard and plugging it back in. (And here again, I’m resorting to a simplified example to get my point across.) They know the hardware/software distinction, but they’re failing to apply it to their current situation, and instead falling back on “trying” random things. With some justification, because quite often it’s what they see “experts” do...
Oddly though, ‘turn it off and back on again’ or ‘try disconnecting and reconnecting the cable’ really does solve a remarkably large number of tech related problems. Arguably a non-expert without any special knowledge is probably quite rational in trying that as the first approach to solve any given tech related problem. It may even be that the next best thing to try if it fails is to try it again. Further attempts probably have rapidly diminishing utility however.
It actually seems to me that the trouble computer-illiterate people have is often a case of insufficient compartmentalization, not too much. To take your keyboard example—they know things that work in a software domain, and know things that work in a hardware domain, and are failing to keep these separate. Kids, who start with far fewer preconceptions of how things should work, pick up the use of computers much faster.
Also, we computer-literate people probably underestimate how sheerly arbitrary many things must seem like to people who haven’t had a long exposure to computers. (How is a person to know that keyboard settings aren’t stored in the keyboard? After all, you could toggle the write-protect status of a 3½ inch disc by flipping the right tab on the disc. And the amount of region switches on a DVD drive is stored in the device itself. And once you know that electrical devices lose at least some of their settings when the power is turned off, it isn’t too unreasonable of a hypothesis that unplugging the keyboard might reset the settings.)
If the keyboard was USB I might have given unplug and plug in a shot. That’s the kind of software intervention that often works. I have never had cause to investigate where keyboard settings are configured.
In general, as the devices become more complex and “intelligent” the number of plausible hypotheses about any failure starts to rise rapidly. Also, the ability to rule out possibilities on the basis of knowledge about the system starts to drop… When I was a kid, most communications channels were analog, and unidirectional. I could bound what was failing by knowing that the transmitter had no clue what happened at the receiver. That is no longer true. “sheerly arbitrary” things are a problem—“sheerly arbitrary” things that sometimes change from release to release of code can be much worse...
I would suggest the example of someone not getting the evil bit joke.
It’s good because it works both ways. You only need common sense to understand it, but lay people can be intimidated by the context into not applying common sense, and you’ll sometimes see domain experts try to implement essentially the same thing because they turn off common sense while in their domain.