Users: How stupid are they really?

We have been house hunting lately. Sometimes we take the kids along, and sometimes we go without them. The other day we took them when we went to look at houses in a city that's about an hour away from where we live now. They were excited at the prospect of a road trip at first, but just about the time we were reaching our destination, my three-year-old son asked, "Where are we going again?"

"We're going to find a house," I said.

"Well, there's one!" he said, proud and satisfied that he had solved the problem (and that we could finally stop driving). One of the things I love about kids is how logical they are. Max's answer was absolutely right -- in a way. He was just missing some layers of complexity which we happen to have and he happens not to have yet.

Of course, we did laugh when he said it. But he didn't mind, probably because it was not laughter of derision, but of appreciation.

Users say the darnedest things
Users, when they make an innocent (and often logical) mistake like the one Max made, are usually not appreciated. We tend to laugh at them, too -- and many of them don't like it. Even users who can laugh at themselves under normal circumstances dread being laughed at when it comes to computers. And who can blame them? The so-called computer experts to whom they are forced to appeal for help are, all too often, sniggering sadists who take full advantage of every opportunity to make their inevitable point: all users are idiots. Then there's the other kind of expert, the smug kind whose patronizing advice is delivered with a paternal air of self-satisfaction for being "the genius who understands computers." I wouldn't want to be laughed at by either of these kinds of self-important jerks, either.

User n

1. Someone doing "real work" with the computer, using it as a means rather than an end. Someone who pays to use a computer. See real user. 2. A programmer who will believe anything you tell him. One who asks silly questions. [GLS observes: "This is slightly unfair. It is true that users ask questions (of necessity). Sometimes they are thoughtful or deep. Very often they are annoying or downright stupid, apparently because the user failed to think for two seconds or look in the documentation before bothering the maintainer."] See luser. 3. Someone who uses a program from the outside, however skillfully, without getting into the internals of the program. One who reports bugs instead of just going ahead and fixing them. The general theory behind this term is that there are two classes of people who work with a program: there are implementors (hackers) and lusers. The users are looked down on by hackers to some extent because they don't understand the full ramifications of the system in all its glory. (The few users who do are known as "real winners.") The term is a relative one: a skilled hacker may be a user with respect to some program he himself does not hack. A LISP hacker might be one who maintains LISP or one who uses LISP (but with the skill of a hacker). A LISP user is one who uses LISP, whether skillfully or not. Thus there is some overlap between the two terms; the subtle distinctions must be resolved by context. from The Jargon File http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/user.html

I guess I should mention that by user I mean the average person who has no interest in computers as Neat Things to Take Apart, but sees them rather as smart typewriters that are used primarily for sending email, browsing the Web, keeping accounts, and writing letters and reports.

The first time you heard about a user like this asking "Which is the 'any' key?" (because he or she got the message "Press any key to continue"), you probably chuckled. The thousandth time a user asks the same "stupid" question of the geeks in tech support, it has long since ceased to be amusing. When this happens, geeks are pushed to one of two extremes.

He ain't stupid, he's my user
There seem to be but two schools of thought on the subject of users in the Linux (and general, all-purpose geek) community. One of these schools concludes, from the number of "any key" queries that there are in the world, that all users are idiots. They say, "Linux is a server environment. Let the stupid users run sissy operating systems like Mac or Windows. And if they really do want to try Linux, then they'll have to learn the hard way, like I did."

The other school of thought is made up of people who claim to like users and would like to welcome them to the Linux fold. Unfortunately, these same people seem to be under the mistaken impression that the word nonexpert is equivalent to idiot. They often resort to speaking baby-talk to users, spoon-feeding them with GUIs that "simplify" (and dumb down) the whole environment to "protect" the idiot user.

It is unfortunate that both schools believe that users are basically stupid.

The first school postulates that only the smartest users -- those who can manage to bootstrap themselves to a certain level of expertise -- may be awarded a junior membership in the Linux clubhouse (which has a sign reading "Super sekrit, no lusers allowed" posted on the door).

The second school of thought believes that you shouldn't have to be a quasiexpert just to use a Linux-based computer (or any other computer, for that matter). This latter attitude would appear to be the opposite of the first school, but it is not. For these developers will good-naturedly go around creating padded-cell GUIs to protect the idiots from themselves, making it "easy" and "safe" for the dummies to use a computer. Simply stated, this school believes that users are just too stupid to be given any real control over their environment, or any responsibility for learning or for figuring things out for themselves.

The really ironic thing about the second school is that the user-loving developers are torn between adding Outlook-like auto-open capabilities to GUIed Linux email applications (because users are too stupid and lazy to figure out how to open a multimedia file?) and protecting users from themselves (because users are so stupid they will contaminate their computers with viruses and other ugly things when using an email program that has Outlook-like auto-open capabilities).

This is a classic dilemma, since both alternatives have serious drawbacks. If the computer is too hard to use, the idiots will not be able to use it. Meanwhile, if you make the computer easy enough for the idiots to use it, you introduce security holes. Luckily there is a way out of this dilemma. The answer is that users are not idiots.

The fact of the matter is that a frickin' monkey could be taught how to open a multimedia file. And users most emphatically do not want viruses on their own computers any more than you do. So it isn't the user who is at fault here, but the teaching methods we are using.

4bdrm/2.5 bath house w/lrg yd no pets avail 8/1
My three-year-old son Max is no dummy. He knows his alphabet and can count to 50 (sometimes higher). The other day he even figured out -- all by himself -- that Bruce Wayne and Batman are one and the same person.

We didn't teach him these things. He seems to pick them up through osmosis. All of the pieces exist in his environment (in many cases, we have strategically placed them there for him to find). Eventually, he puts all of the pieces together and figures out how they work. And he of course gets help whenever he asks.

Therefore, we aren't really worried about his current lack of house-hunting skills. We're pretty confident that he'll be up to speed on house hunting by the time he needs to know how to do it. And if he's not, he'll probably be able to figure out how to ask the right questions in the right way of the right people, to find out what he needs to know.

But if I were to treat him the way most geeks treat users, he'd probably never move into his own flat -- heaven forbid!

A child reared by the "reinvent your own wheel, luser!" school of thought would be raised in a vacuum. Upon reaching his or her 18th birthday, the kid would be thrown out into the world with no prior exposure to concepts or terms like "escrow," "renter's insurance," "down payment," or even "credit check." Surely a few would find shelter in the end. But not many. The lucky ones would sit together in their houses and ridicule the rabble outside who are still trying to figure out how to calculate compound interest rates.

Meanwhile, a child brought up by the second school would have been raised like the Buddha, in a sheltered environment where he or she had been given all earthly pleasures, but had never seen (nor even heard of) life's little unpleasantries. Things like clogged pipes, garbage collection, vacuuming, and roof repair would have been hidden away from this child from birth by the "we'll give you all the wheels you'll ever need, don't worry, be happy" school. This child would have a comfortable place to live, but would know nothing about mortgages, home repair, utility bills, or anything else. Even worse, the child would be stuck in a house that had been bestowed by kind Protectors and would be thoroughly dependent upon them if a move to another kind of house became necessary.

How people learn
Not even babies take baby steps. Babies get up, take three flying leaps, then fall on their faces. They like it that way, and get very frustrated whenever you try to coddle them too much -- even if you are only coddling them to try to keep them from breaking their heads open.

The thing about kids is that, if you ignore them, they'll learn to walk anyway. And if you ignore users, they'll learn to use a computer anyway, too. They probably won't be using it very well -- they will turn it off without shutting it down first, they will hand-type email addresses because they don't know that it is possible to add an alias to their address book. I have even seen a case in which a user printed out everything he typed into a word processing program that he wanted to keep -- because he didn't know how to save files. In a vacuum, users will teach themselves.

But at what cost? With everyone connected to the Internet, we probably do not want to leave users to their own kludgey devices. Especially as the number of computer users overall -- and the number of computer users connected to the Internet -- is only going to keep increasing. Whether you love them or hate them (or love to hate them), users aren't going to go away any time soon.

And unless views about users change, the situation isn't going to get any better, not even when my kids are grown up. Nowadays, users are being raised by the "reinvent your own wheel, luser!" and the "we'll give you all the wheels you'll ever need" schools, instead of being given the skills they really need to become self-sufficient computer citizens.

The prepared environment
One of the best "children and electricity" ideas that I have ever seen was a house in which all the sockets were not in the wall at floor level (as they usually are in the United States) but were instead at the same level as the light switches. So long as the administrator was careful to reconfigure the furniture so that Things That Could Be Climbed Up On were not positioned directly underneath the sockets, everyone was happy. The children didn't even notice the sockets because they were out of their line of vision way up there. If and when they noticed that the administrator was doing something with them, they quickly forgot about it -- because the sockets were just not a part of their day-to-day world. And by the time the kids were big enough to reach the sockets, they were also old enough to understand (or at least take it on good faith) that you shouldn't stick your fingers in them.

Meanwhile, adults could use the sockets without having to step up to root and take out and put in those blasted little plastic childproofing plug thingies all the time.

This is an ideal environment. Novices are protected, but nobody who is at the right level is impeded in any way. The ideal GUI environment would be a lot like that: any customization or configuration that is needed at the novice level should be safe and easy to perform, but the more advanced things should always be available, too.

Of course, I have lots more to say on the subject of users -- and you probably do, too. But I have tortured you all enough for one day, and so I'll have to return to my rant another time. Until then, let me know what you think by sending a mail straight to /dev/null!