begin quoting Cameron Gary as of Wed, May 25, 2005 at 07:28:00PM -0700: > Lan Barnes wrote: [snip] > >I don't think it's intelligence, and I don't think it's age. I'm not > >sure, really, what it is. We're all good at something and we're all bad > >at something (I'm musically hopeless, which is funny, because I _like_ > >music). > > > >This isn't the first human endeavor that has required the ability to > >trace events not seen (I mean real events, not theology). Auto
Hey! Theology is good training for all that! > >mechanics, internists, electronic engineers have always had to have > >X-ray vision in their fields. But this may be the first time appliance > >end users have ever been asked to steer their possessions down roads > >that exist just in their minds. I figured that's what poetry was all about. > Very well said, Lan. It's not intelligence, but maybe abstract thinking > ? I think that intelligence more complicated than that -- and that "intelligence" isn't the same thing as IQ. (Heh. Haven't thought about that point since the last time I read Van Vogt's _Supermind_.) > Not making it harder than it needs to be ? We have a family friend > who is a brilliant linguist, speaks German, English, Hopi (At which he > is a world-class expert). He cannot seem to grasp the difference > between the A: and the C: drive. My Dad has tried all sorts of > analogies, visual metaphor, literal explanation, etc. Nothing seems to > stick. Get better labels. Literally. Make sure they stick to the drive in question. Or does he look in the knife drawer for spoons in a house that looksl like the bat-cave? That /would/ be hopeless. > It's the classic Slashbot outrage - "I wouldn't trust a surgeon who > couldn't save a file to a floppy !" Well, I wouldn't trust the Slashbot > to cut me open. The /. crowd suffers from "all the world is X" more than most, it seems. > I had a CAD/GIS person at work ask me where his files are on the disk. > Saying that they are stored as patterns of magnetism didn't work for > him. He wanted to SEE it ... Actually, that's just an amusing thing to do. One ought to be able to put up a diagram of the disk, and color the diagram according to where the data for a particular file is stored. It may not be useful, but it's *interesting*. Shoot, I often want to know where application data is stored in the filesystem, especially when applications do their best to hide it from me (such as Netscape mail!) out of some misbegotten perversity. > I do end-user computer support, so I need to understand how the users > conceive of this stuff. It's a fascinating subject Do you find that users misunderstand in creative ways, or do they all pretty much make the same conceptual errors as all the rest? -Stewart "Still remember asking 'how is that like a tree?'" Stremler
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