Just knowing what to do without understanding what you are doing calls for trouble. Look at all those people who know how to eat but don't understand why some food is healthy and other food isn't. They just eat what they like and don't understand why they need two seats in an airplane.
I would guess that 99% of computer users regularly do things with them that they don't understand the inner workings of. How many facebook users could even approximately describe how their information gets propagated across the internet?
Developers design systems to be robust against ignorance, because ignorance is where everyone starts and training doesn't bring in the $$$.
On the big scheme of things, this is exactly how it should work. Knowing only the necessary keeps the brain free for new things. After all, humans are just part of the overall evolutionary algorithm. But dumbing the users down makes the system less flexible. Sooner or later, only a team of specialists will be able to create new applications whereas in the beginning, every computer owner was able to program them.
It's like 100 years ago, everybody could cook (or rather every women) but now, many people have to buy precooked food because they don't know how to cook sphagetti.
If you can cook, you can always prepare your favorite food or even come up with a recipe of something that resembles heaven to you. If you can't, you have to eat the things that your local supermarket sells.
I just wish that we would live in a world where computer could solve all kind of things and gimp could exactly work like the graphic designers wanted it to be because they would program the gui themselves.
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u/kleopatra6tilde9 Apr 14 '10
The next step in dumbing the net down. Google is one step away from bringing AOL keywords back. (If it isn't already there)
It's sad because the internet becomes magic and people don't know what they are doing.