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0 pointsjrmg3y ago0 comments

I often wonder: for someone with no understanding of how computers work; no idea about electricity and transistors, no idea about CPUs executing instructions, no idea about software and abstraction: what do they think about when they click a ‘play’ button in a music player, and the interface updates and music starts? Do they think about what is happening ‘inside’ the box? I think I do.

I suspect I have a completely different mental model than them - just a completely different casual understanding of it. I find it hard to imagine how they must see the modern world. It must seem like magic!

Note that I’m not at-all speaking about intelligence here. Just knowledge.

Anyway: for that person, I think that if they read ‘Code’, their entire understanding of the world would change, which is sort of amazing.

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pbourke3y ago

> I find it hard to imagine how they must see the modern world. It must seem like magic!

I think this is unnecessarily infantilizing. There are a great many very complex things in the modern world, and people must employ abstractions for most of it.

I think with the rise of multi form factor computing, there is more basic literacy about the nature of computers these days. People don’t think that a phone god makes their phone work and a laptop god lets them work on their document.

fn-mote3y ago

>> I find it hard to imagine how they must see the modern world. It must seem like magic!

> I think this is unnecessarily infantilizing. [...] people must employ abstractions [...]

"Magic" to me means "does not (appear to) obey laws of cause and effect".

When the phone doesn't work after you install App X, do you attempt to remove app X? Why would restarting the phone help the situation? If none of this is logical, you're just following the 16 step Apple Fixit Checklist, good luck... it might work... but if you miss something what happens? You're just back to the start and run the checklist again... or call the ~~witch doctor~~ knowledgable friend.

Now I won't say there's no magic in understanding computers. There certainly are cause and effect mechanisms that are too arcane for ordinary mortals to be familiar with (even like "don't build the project inside a directory that has a space in it" never mind "don't put a colon or slash in your filename").

The point is: "magic" does not have to mean infantilizing.

jrmgOP3y ago

I said ‘like magic’. I know they know they’re made by humans and understandable with effort.

Complex chemistry and materials engineering feels ‘like magic’ to me. I know I could understand it with enough effort - but I don’t understand it now. I’m sure my view of everyday things would change if I did.

bitwize3y ago

We etch runes into stones, imbue them with lightning, and thereby make them come alive and do our bidding... and you want to tell me computers are not magic?!

azov3y ago

What's your mental model of a dog?.. What's happening inside when he barks or wags his tail? Why does he like carrots more than cheese? How does his memory work?..

The way you think of dogs is probably not very different from the way many people think of computers.

dreamcompiler3y ago

It's different for me because I know that computers are knowable because they were built by people, and lots of people (including me) know how they work. I believe dogs are knowable too because I believe in science, but nobody really knows (yet) how dogs work at anything close to the same level of detail.

Lets take something I know nothing about: Industrial chemistry. That still seems less mysterious to me than dogs, because I know that I could find books about industrial chemistry at whatever level of detail I wanted. But dogs--not so much, beyond a rather superficial level.

thoms_a3y ago

I've asked very young students what they think a computer is and how it works. There's always at least one student who correctly replies: "It's a machine that does what someone told it to do".

Of course modern computing devices are absurdly complex and intricate machines all the way from silicon to software, but the basic mechanism is easily grasped by children. For all their complexity, computers are still just programmable calculators.

CamperBob23y ago

There's always at least one student who correctly replies: "It's a machine that does what someone told it to do".

That's correct, right up until someone tells a computer to beat a 9-dan Go master, but not how to do it.

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