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A real-life example:- a significant chunk of people I have worked with, who are working with computers every day, don't know how to open an application if the application's icon does not appear on the desktop. Seriously.

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I am 23 years old and today I watched a youtube video to learn the proper way to cut up an onion. I cook a lot with onions, maybe two or three times a week, and before today I didn't know how to dice an onion except to slice it into rings and then hack at it a lot. Seriously.

Is this evidence that I am fundamentally unable to cut an onion? No. After I watched the video I went and did it. It's just that in the past I knew enough to get the job done and so learning anything more on the topic didn't have a huge priority.

I have spent hours in a class room trying to teach adults to reliably save a file in a known location and later open it. How to create folder to hold related files for a project. Some students are insulted by the simplicity of those exercises, but others _never get it_. I can walk them through the motions, draw tree diagrams till we are all sick of them. Some times I can train them to recreate a particular example, but they are still unable to generalize what is going on. And the are not dummies I'm talking about.

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