[chiefalchemist]

> "Many people can't tell you the difference between a modem, router, OS, browser, or website."

They don't care, nor should they. How many people know how many spark plugs are in their car?

You're correct. We, the more tech-literate, take too much for granted; and most experiences and learning curves are too far over the head of the "average" user.

It's not them. It's us.

[philwelch]

It's not about knowing how many spark plugs are in their car. It's more about buying a car that comes with a custom power adapter plugged into the cigarette lighter, never realizing that you can plug your own accessories into the cigarette lighter instead of buying your phone charger or GPS from the car company, and then not caring when they just take away the cigarette lighter and replace it with their own custom port.

[TheSpiceIsLife]

Since we know all analogies breakdown under close inspection, I'm pushing the idea that the best analogy is actually a brief description of the event / idea itself.

So in this case:

Not display www. in the address bar is actually a whole lot like not display www. in the address bar.

[philwelch]

And if anyone doesn't understand why that is a bad idea, maybe we should explain it to them, which might require using admittedly imperfect analogies that they can nonetheless understand.

[pvorb]

I think the comparison to spark plugs is misleading when we talk about URLs and security.

It's more like looking in the mirror before changing lanes. It's something you need to check in order to stay safe.

Mirrors, like URLs, are just an implementation detail. But since currently driving works with mirrors, you have to learn how to use them.

[pests]

The benefit is obvious in that instance. There is a very direct connection between checking your mirrors and not hitting a car as you merge or similar.

Where is the cause and effect for a URL or SSL cert? There is no learning experience.

Furthermore as some have claimed, and I've personally witnessed, for some URLS's literally dont exist. Just type whatever site you want into the google box and hope you get lucky.

[Godel_unicode]

I think the spark plugs example is an excellent one. People used to require an extensive knowledge of how cars worked in order to have a prayer of using them effectively. Now they don't, because we realized none of that knowledge is necessary if you design the system correctly.

We have enough historical context to realize that things like parsing URLs by eye is unsafe for the general population, and always will be. The solution is to engineer that need out of existence.

You might want to consider that manufacturers have added blind spot detectors to cars as people are bad at changing lanes safely, even with all the training in the world.

[mirko22]

when did you have to know how spark plugs work to drive a car? And isn’t this why car mechanics exist? On the other hand you had to learn at some point what and RPM gauge is... And we still have it in cars even though you could say you don’t really need it.

[EmpirePhoenix]

My car does not have a RPM gauge, instead it has two arrows that suggest when to gear up or down (it is manual)

One could say the interface was dumbed down to the minimum.

[mirko22]

my brand new one has a lot of gauges... so i’d say my point is still valid. And i find them extremely useful, cos you can make better use of fuel if you know what they mean.

[jwalton]

Do you seriously not know how many spark plugs are in your car? It's the same as the number of cylinders. How could you not know that?

They absolutely should care. They should be aware that when they store things in "the cloud" they are not stored on their device and are visible to third parties. They should understand what encryption is and how to use it. "I don't know what I'm doing, and I didn't get the result I wanted, but it's not my fault it's the machine" is not an acceptable statement, whether we're talking about cars or computers.

[pests]

I don't even know how many cylinders I have!* Why should I care? Put key in. Press gas down. Car goes forward. Works for me.

"How do you not know that?"

Why would I need to know this? Why do I need to know what a cylinder is to drive? Is this even a logical question with electric cars now?

You are arguing what should be vs. what is.

* Well, I don't currently drive but I couldn't tell you with 100% accuracy the number of cylinders my last car had.

[masswerk]

I guess, the simile isn't entirely on the same level. You may not know how many cylinders there are in your car, like you may not know the number of cores in the CPU of your computer. They are both essentially hidden.

But you do know how many pedals there are in the car and probably, how many switches there are for the lights, and that the wiper has different steps of speed etc. You even manage to control these few elements, because they are the user facing elements your dealing with, the interface. There's no need to unify the pedals into a single one and to have the car to decide, whether it means accelerate, break, or clutch. Doing so would alienate you from the very task of driving, from what it means and what risks are involved. Taking these few controls away from you in favor of an ambiguous I-know-it-all-so-you-should't-care interface of ultimate convenience would probably not increase the security of operations.

On the other hand, we may expect you, as a driver, to know that there is a engine, that this is why the car moves, that it needs gas/petrol in order to run, that deacceleration is proportional to speed, etc.

Why is it so different with anything involving a computer? Is it, because we're telling them so?

[pests]

Computers are magic to the majority.

I bring up in a previous reply that mirrors, and now lights, pedals, and other controls, that these are directly user-facing and must be interacted with in order to get anything done. Even knowing there is an engine that might need engine-y things like water and oil.

But where is the requirement a user knows about URLS in order to use the web?

Way back when we had AOL keywords. Now we have Google and apps and other tools that make URLS unnecessary.

My grandmother that I I mentioned before. She browses solely through bookmarks and via Google results. That a URL exists is not only an implementation detail but completely unneeded and unused in her case.

Then something like an SSL cert? Where it will work just fine without? I don't even want to imagine trying to explain that to my grandmother before sending her off to her decades old AOL mail inbox.

Only recently with Chrome displaying "Not Secure" have I even noticed any concern or interest amongst non-technical friends and aquaintances.

[masswerk]

But why is it that computers are that magical? Computers have been now around for nearly 70 years. It's a technology as new as airplanes were in 1980. (If we include digital accounting machines with storage, they have been around even before the first flight of the Wright brothers, they are even older than any living person.) Computers are also the means by which many, if not most, are dealing with for a living on a daily basis. If we consider users generally as unfit to grasp even the basics, why is it that anyone is still admitted to their kitchen? (There are really dangerous, pointy objects there, which may cause real-life harm, and, if you have a gas oven, you may even blow up the house or the entire block. How could ordinary people tell a knife from a dish and how could we assume that they would know where they put them? Isn't it possible that someone just wanted to have a glass of water from the tap and blew up the house instead?)

Also, I consider some of this very US centric. In many parts of the world, AOL wasn't a big thing. In many languages, people are used to the fact that important parts of a sentence come at the very end, e.g., the verb, at least in some tenses. Moreover, most important identifiers go from the minor, less important part to the bigger, most significant ones. Why can't we tell users that domains work just like their post address? (As in "street-city-country". And there are even funny ones, like "street-city-state-country" and even funnier ones, like "c/o", meaning it's not the usual addressee. Why are people able to deal with this?) If you're living in a western country, even your own name works probably like this. Why this, oh, it's magic, don't care?

I'd say, it is mostly, because we encourage them not to care. Because we say, "Yes, that's really difficult", where we ought to say, "No, it's really simple and you ought to know." The user is still the person in charge. Pampering and flattering the person in charge into incompetence isn't apt to end well.

I'd say, there's a chance to convey simple things, like, the cloud is not on your local machine, or how a URL is principally constructed. Or that a file is saved only, when you safe a file.

Edit: Returning to the obligatory-car-simile, when I did my driver's test, I had to know the intrinsics of an engine, of the braking mechanism, of the steering. I was tested for knowledge of ad-hoc technical repair. It was assumed reasonable for a driver to grasp, to memorize the details, to minutely describe them, and it was even mandatory to do so in order to obtain a license. However, it was less important to drive a car then (you could do well without this in most occupations) than it is to operate a computer nowadays.

Edit 2: And, to level up a bit, how comes that academics are able to correctly cite a book and page, but are unable to parse a URL – and are even flattered for the latter?

[tialaramex]

Without prejudicing the rest of your points, computers are very unlike most inventions. Computation is extremely powerful, our only working definition for what it is even is relies on an intuition, called the Church-Turing thesis, that essentially says the computers are doing categorically the same thing we are, but doesn't purport explain why that's so. It looks observably true and that's the best we have.

So, it's entirely unfair to suppose that since people got used to having tap water and so we are surprised if a person can't operate a tap, therefore they should be used to the entire complexity of computation by now.

You definitely _should not_ count machines that aren't actually computers ("digital accounting machines with storage") since those aren't Church-Turing, they're just another trivial machine like a calculator. Instead, compare the other working example we have of full-blown Church-Turing: Humans. Why aren't people somehow used to everything about people yet? People have been around a long time too. Why isn't everyone prepared for every idiosyncratic or even nonsensical behaviour from other people, they've surely had long enough right?

[j0057]

> Is it, because we're telling them so?

Anti-intellectualism runs deep in our society.

[mirimir]

Some engines have two per cylinder :)

[pests]

I find this interesting. The parallels up to this point. My intent is not to pick fun on anyone but to just relook at the conversation just had.

We're talking about users not understanding the technology they use daily.

jwalton, in trying to give an example with spark plugs, allowed a more knowledgeable user or practitioner, mirimir, to give a more technically-correct description.

It seems to echo the main problem we are discussing in which users of a technology are not the same as those who design or know the nitty-gritty details of that technology.

Assumptions learned from day to day use in that technology (all cylinders have one plug, the google box is the only box I need) can so easily be proven incorrect when speaking to an actual expert in that field.

[mirimir]

Well, I was just being pedantic, I suppose.

But it's arguably not such a great example, because details of engine design are generally trivial for drivers. Maybe a better example is the low oil pressure indicator. Maybe most people don't know what that actually means, but not having one can lead to severe engine damage. Years ago, I had a car with an oil radiator, and the oil line failed. So I knew to stop immediately.