[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.