[hathawsh]

I think you're headed in a helpful direction, but I'm looking for ways to narrow the phenomenon a little more. For example, yesterday I heard from my mom, who is not into technical things, that a lot of the Internet was down. She had heard it on the news. I didn't believe it at first because that information was surprising and clearly targeted at laypeople, but soon I learned it was true: AWS us-east-1 had major issues. So my doubt was unfounded. I'd like my doubts to be more accurate.

[Daishiman]

The statement "most of the internet seems to be down" is somewhat easy to verify without too much research.

Complex statements requiring lots of specialist knowledge available to very few human beings that are difficult to disprove is where the challenge lies.

[hnuser123456]

So many things are actually concentrated on the "cloud" providers now that significant chunks of "the internet" can all go down at the same time for everyone in a way that was supposed to be impossible with the many-fault-tolerant mindset the internet was originally engineered with. Laypeople don't need to understand any technical topics to understand "a bunch of websites/apps broke for everyone on Sunday". Some are even noting that this is happing more often and affecting more apps at once.

anyways, more on topic with TFA, of course lots of people are looking for excuses for why they aren't what they want to be, and it sounds like this book flips the causation, so that people can say e.g. "I was perfectly healthy until I went through some difficult stuff and now I'm disabled" rather than much more sober but accurate "I was born with some relative weaknesses that make things more difficult for me than others." It looks like he keeps trying to claim that bad experiences leave reliably measurable marks in some way but it simply never holds to the claimed reliability under scrutiny.

Of course, knowing exactly what specific "weaknesses" one actually has compared to a statistical average is the hard part, and jumping to conclusions in that area is just as much playing with fire.

Someone could write a book about "bad experiences give you bad memories, which can bring down your mood when you remember them and demotivate you", but everyone already knows that, and leaving it at that doesn't give the reader the feeling of understanding why they feel less than whole.

[parliament32]

But it's not really true, is it? "The Internet", as in the network, was doing just fine. A large number of services that chose to build their business on the back of another were down, of course, but "a lot of the internet is down" is different than "a lot of websites are down".

If, say, Level 3 and Tata and Telia had a simultaneous outage, that would qualify for "a lot of the internet is down".

[B-Con]

To be fair, from a functionality standpoint, AWS hosts like 1/3 of the value that a layperson gets from the Internet, which is all that a non-technical person really cares/things about. ie "the Internet" essentially refers to the top 10-30 services they use.

Which is uncomfortably pragmatic. Many people can go weeks while only directly interacting with a handful of Internet-based services, most of which are presented as apps.

I'm waiting for the day that the lines blur even further and people start saying "my Apple doesn't work" when AWS goes down and 1/3 of their iPhone apps stop working. Or the day that ISPs stop acting as carriers and the Internet truly factions.

[hooch]

Actually the internet was not down at all. It was perfectly up.

[scubbo]

Synecdoche