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by loup-vaillant
3939 days ago
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Looks like the unreasoned fear of the technically inept. And I do mean visceral fear, like a sense of imminent danger. I remember once in "technology" class where we were asked to compose a small document with Corel WordPerfect, with a clip art. Well, I mistook "graph" for clip art, and got a weird square where I should have had a pretty icon. And I didn't know how to remove the square (couldn't select it with the mouse, and I didn't think of trying backspace or undo at that time). So I asked for help. The instant the teacher saw my document, she said "Ahh, he crashed my computer!", then promptly closed the document without saving it. (15 minutes of work, dammit!) Simply put, she didn't have the slightest idea about what went wrong, and assumed the worst. I flipped the bozo bit at that point, and never trusted her again. |
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But I wanted to ask you about your use of the term "flipping the bozo bit". I've seen others use that as a derisive way towards people they think less of, but curiously the source of this expression is prescribing precisely NOT doing this behaviour:
> McCarthy's Rule #4 is "Don't Flip The Bozo Bit". McCarthy's advice was that everyone has something to contribute — it's easy and tempting, when someone ticks you off or is mistaken (or both), to simply disregard all their input in the future by setting the "bozo flag" to TRUE for that person. But by taking that lazy way out, you poison team interactions and cannot avail yourself of help from the "bozo" ever again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bozo_bit