Comment by fendrak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fendrak | Hacker News Reader

I can sympathize with the author's lack of understanding of people's fear of breaking things, especially of those that are tech-related. Take computers for instance. It seems that to the average Joe, they're magical black boxes; they put in passwords, discs, and mouse clicks, and out come YouTube videos and tax returns. To this person, if they don't click on the right series of "OK" buttons, they can put the computer in a permanent state of hopelessness from which it can never recover. It's like they're in some finite state machine with no idea what states the state transitions take them to. To someone in the know, they can be sure that any state in the FSM they go to was intended to be visited in that manner, and they can surely get back to the state they came from by simply exploring. But to Average Joe, the next state could lead him off a cliff or set his pants on fire. This "fear" of exploring could simply be the manifestation of a deep-seated misunderstanding of the concept of software in general. It's really no different than the kettle corn, despite its apparent complexity; it just looks prettier and makes different noises.

I can really see this in myself. I have a deal with my father: I fix his computers and he fixes my car. He's scared that he could break his computer, and lose his data. I'm scared that I'll fuck up something on my car, and need to have it fixed by a proper mechanic, costing me time and money.

I think most people are scared of breaking something, if they're sensible. I know a couple of people who aren't scared to 'try' anything and the result has been a semi-burned down apartment (I can do my own wiring!) and a new set of dining furniture (I can sand it down myself!).

I think that the fear that people tend to have is from ignorance though. I'm trying to learn about being my own atuo-mechanic; I'm teaching my father more about the computer. What people maybe don't realise is just how hard it is to break a computer permanently. This is one of the biggest factors in people being poor with computers; I think that another is that there is often no clear indication of partial success, which is pretty discouraging for an adult who is starting to learn.

True; nobody can be an expert in every field. Our job in that case is to make the tools/resources necessary to be proficient easier to access (done, thanks internet!) and to spread the knowledge that computers are really hard to break permanently. Hopefully the next generation grows up without this particular fear!

There is a sense in which there's justified fear of "trying things" on a computer. While it's fairly hard to permanently break one, it's fairly easy to lose the document you've been writing for the past hour. I remember this being a major issue for my mom back in the early 1980s.

It's not all that difficult to screw things up enough to require a reformat, either, or at least to make a reformat the easiest solution. I think of myself as pretty tech-savvy, and I've had to reinstall Windows before because I somehow borked my registry.

Your example disproves your point. Most people don't even know what a registry is. In general, people don't realize what you can do with a computer aside from the basics, which is what keeps them (relatively) safe.

> To someone in the know, they can be sure that any state in the FSM they go to was intended to be visited in that manner, and they can surely get back to the state they came from by simply exploring.

Sadly this is not always the case; I once broke the xfce version of Ubuntu within 10 minutes of installing it by playing around with the configuration options.

But you could still get back to the original state by reinstalling it.

Most people never reinstall their OS at all, so this is analogous to saying that you shouldn't be worried about what can go wrong with doing your own wiring (to use someone else's example) because, after all, you could just rebuild the house.

I expect going into Gnome or KDE and resetting the settings for xfce would have also worked. Though frankly I didn't bother -- if an experienced Unix user can break it in 10 minutes without trying, it clearly isn't stable enough to use.

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