I'm biased because I'm neurodivergent, which means I don't have as much experience with neurotypical thought processes.
While I do use search engines and the resultant resources all the time, I don't follow steps completely cluelessly/mindlessly and later forget that I did it. I don't know what the equivalent would be for non-tech - I at least try to understand what a guide is doing so I can reproduce it independently later. I try to develop basic intuition for everything that I do. It is hard for me to imagine someone who lacks that ability. I don't mean to be offensive to anyone in particular, I just use "idiots" for the sake of argument to explain how any setting will eventually be found and changed.
Is it normal to forget the steps you took to accomplish a task? To, say, specifically turn off a setting for crash protection, then completely pull a blank if the program gets into a crash loop later?
It’s not necessarily that you will forget that you changed a setting.
What’s more likely is that if you change a setting with an incomplete mental model of what that setting affects, you might later discover that it opened you up to some risk that you did not appreciate when you made the change.
This affects technical users just as much as nontechnical users, it just kicks in at a different level.
A user who clicks the ‘install anyway’ button on an OS warning dialog telling them they are about to run untrusted software might be doing so without an appreciation of quite how many safety features they just disabled, so when asked later on ‘when did you turn off your firewall?’ they honestly don’t know that was something they ever did.
But likewise, a developer who enables a setting to solve problem A, without realizing that that setting will also screw them when they run into problem B, is… basically the cause of 99% of debugging.
‘It can’t be DNS because that would always be cached, unless there’s some setting that… son of a bitch, who knew that when you enable debug logging it disables DNS caching?’ - some developer somewhere at least once a day
> Yes, it’s very common. Immediately after doing it, in fact.
Do you not even make mental notes of permanent changes you've made to the system...?
I mean, I don't think you'd, say, turn off some crash protection and then later complain about crashes. You'd remember that you previously turned it off, wouldn't you?
> I’m biased right now because you assume stuff about me that you maybe shouldn’t.
I only talked about "typical thought processes" because you said "we all" which I assume meant the general population. Didn't assume anything about you.
Even though the base problem was given to me by another, everything I wrote about "what makes a resourceful idiot / how they are a problem" is based on my personal perception of the ones that I've seen. Which is most likely going to be a neurodivergent's impression of certain neurotypicals. AKA biased.
And the "I don't think" was leading a question, not making an assumption about you.
> Everyone’s experiences and thought processes might be starkly different from each other.
...which is I'm so hesitant to believe that everyone is a resourceful idiot.
And why I made a disclaimer about the fact that my own thought processes might be starkly different from not just who I'm describing, but other brains in general.
At this point I don't really know if you understand what 'neurodivergent' means. People who suffer for neurodivergency does not have different mental mappings than those who are neurotypical. Also, the way they construct their own world does not differ from neurotypical.
The mind process you have described is pretty standard, even using some different things to recover information instead of saving it. There is no neurodivergent path of extracting information and there is no neurodivergent understanding of reality or neurodivergent thought process.
No, some set of people will forget. Even if they intended or desired to remember. Mental notes fade for some set of people. And at different time lengths.
hmm, I suppose that's true. I have a lot of friends who also have dissociative disorders, and some of them just dissociate all the time and forget everything, regardless of whether they would've forgotten normally
While I do use search engines and the resultant resources all the time, I don't follow steps completely cluelessly/mindlessly and later forget that I did it. I don't know what the equivalent would be for non-tech - I at least try to understand what a guide is doing so I can reproduce it independently later. I try to develop basic intuition for everything that I do. It is hard for me to imagine someone who lacks that ability. I don't mean to be offensive to anyone in particular, I just use "idiots" for the sake of argument to explain how any setting will eventually be found and changed.
Is it normal to forget the steps you took to accomplish a task? To, say, specifically turn off a setting for crash protection, then completely pull a blank if the program gets into a crash loop later?