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Comment by bonecrusher2102 | Hacker News Reader

It's obvious to me that this is because of the bubble that I ostensibly live in, but this is still simply shocking data. Only 5% of people can perform more complex tasks than finding an email with a particular sender, subject and date? I suppose I severely take for granted and upbringing that surrounded and supported me in learning to adapt to new tech.

It does make me wonder about the sustainability of technological growth however. If there is such a small portion of folks that can use all of this new tech, how far reaching can it really be? Will this divide begin to shrink? Or stay static as one small portion of the population drifts further and further away from the other...

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When this came out I was skeptical and looked at transactions that I had metrics for to corroborate with some colleagues. Not at liberty to discuss specifics, but we all rejected the proportions that the study used.

End of the day, complex processes get completed when offered to the public, and computer based processes are generally the norm. People somehow get hunting licenses, navigate complex DMV processes, book transportation, and get passports, even when they are not above average IQ.

I think if you asked these questions based on end goal rather than method, you’d see smaller numbers of level 0/1 people.

It sounded to me like the assessment was framed around PC use — most people don’t use PCs! I’ve seen scenarios where complex workflows delivered in social services scenarios (where education, literacy and language competency are an issue) where getting tasks completed in mobile (which is ubiquitous and often more complex) is significantly better than a similar complexity task (travel vouchers) with a professional audience on PC.

If less than 5% of the population is capable of performing complex tasks, society would break down. Something is wrong with the assessment of complexity or questions asked.

There's some technical blindness that comes with PC use. While people can navigate complex situations fine by talking to humans, put them in front of a user interface and they can't tell an affordance from a hole in the ground. They're not dumb people, they just spent all their time interfacing with humans instead of with computers, so when faced with a technical challenge they don't really know how to start.

(I'm sure you've met people who are the inverse.)

There are, but based on the limited information, I remain skeptical of the study.

The example of a difficult task was to “schedule a meeting room in a scheduling application, using information contained in several email message”. Many of the other examples given are email related tasks.

If you meter and study Office app use, you’ll find that features like this are rarely invoked. For the example above, Where I have studied behavior on significant user populations, I would guess that 5% of users book a meeting room resource in any 30 day period, and only 2-3% do so more than once in a 30 day period. The numbers will vary in some populations, but usually you see 80% of the booking done by a small number of people (managers and admins).

The problem with this is that the study is looking at a narrow range of office worker tasks and applying them to the public at large. It’s an assessment of MS Office skill sets across the population, not ability to perform complex tasks.

There may be more depth in the paywalled study, but this article didn’t surface it.

Right, but if you give that task to pretty much anyone here, they'd nail it no prob. Even if they had to do it in Thunderbird or GCal instead of Outlook. Heck, I'm sure I could manage it in Lotus 1-2-3. I don't think reliance on office software or oddness of the task is in question -- and if you're saying it's due to unfamiliarity with the software, well, that's still very bad news for all the software writers out there.

I think part of that contrast is in face to face situations, the person on the other side knows inside and out what needs to be done as part of their job. You can call a hotel with zero knowledge on how to book a room, and the concierge will hold your hand and walk you through the process until you have a room booked.

Even online chat support is pretty lackluster and puts a lot of work on the user. At an old job of mine, IT wouldn't even mess around with trying to troubleshoot a ticket going back and forth chatting or emailing. They'd just remote in to your workstation and fix the problem, same thing a concierge at a hotel would do with their keyboard and mouse rather than you struggling through booking on hotels.com and managing an online chat.

I sometimes go to "kaiten sushi" (sushi comes around on a conveyor belt and you can pick what you like) with my mother in law. There is an order system where you can use a touch panel to order something specific if you want it. Granted my mother in law is 86 and hasn't really used computers before, but it always amazes me that she can't figure out "buttons" on the screen. For her, they are just text with coloured backgrounds She tries reading the text, but it just doesn't make sense to her because it is essentially splatted randomly around the screen. Eventually she realised that text with a red background is a button and so now she thinks that all buttons are red! She has not been able to jump to the idea that these rectangular areas of the screen with the same background colour are buttons. I've tried explaining in the past, but she's completely uninterested and so never listens to me. In the end, watching her struggle is so interesting that I've stopped trying to help her. We take a lot of things for granted when we think about UX.

> I've tried explaining in the past, but she's completely uninterested and so never listens to me.

All it takes is one of her friends or influencers to explain it, and viola, no longer allergic to technology.

I don't think this is a new feature of humanity. Consider the people you know who don't care to learn about, or pay attention to: Food (cooking, sourcing ingredients), cars, health care (e.g. what drugs do what and how; what makes your body+mind feel good or bad in the long term), electrical wiring, plumbing, "nature", etc. Computer technology just seems like another aspect of the world which many people are happy to ignore. Also... consider the number of professional computer programmers you know who don't read the readme+API dox but jump straight to stack overflow

Wow, I regard all of those to be interesting subjects, and consider that an adult should have at least a cursory knowledge of all of them. However, you are right, plenty of people just don't want to know anything about any of the above.

I have a cursory knowledge of how a car works but if there was a problem where it couldn't start and the problem wasn't that the battery is flat or out of fuel then I would have no idea what to check.

I also don't drive a car so this skill is mostly useless to me much like some people don't need any more computer skill than just being able to send emails and read websites.

Consider this fact: 70% of the adult population of the United States is overweight or obese.¹ An uncharitable interpretation would be that 70% of adults in the United States cannot manage to feed themselves appropriately.

¹ https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statisti...

...or that they really really love to eat.

Reminds me of "Profession", a great short story by Isaac Asimov:

https://www.abelard.org/asimov.php

That site has horrible design, that hurts my eyes so much. I've resorted to just copy/paste the text there to my preferred editor to read it. That said, I did enjoyed the story, so thank you.

Firefox's reading mode solved this problem for me.

But, it cuts off the story at the word "Always.", just before the image of the planet on the original page.

100% agree that the site was subpar. Plus, the URL was confusing. Oh well, worth every cent I paid for it :)

While that is true, I think it (the site) gets something of a pass for being almost 20 years old.

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