[Tharkun]

Learning to drive a car is hard. You have to watch the road, coordinate hands and feet, anticipate other drivers' moves and so on. No one bats an eye about this, because "it's a skill you have to learn". If you don't play by the rules of the road, you'll end up killing someone, or getting killed.

But for some reason (maybe because it's generally less life-threatening), people seem to expect deeply complex subjects, like e-mail encryption and identity management, to be easy. "Yeah, if you can just give me a fancy, easy-to-use GUI with forward secrecy, that'd be great!" Sure, it'd be great. But it's not going to happen. And that's not because PGP is broken -- of course, it does have its weak points. It's because people are too lazy to bother to learn.

What's the old addage? You can have quick, cheap and reliable. Pick two? Same here. You can have secure, easy to use, and reliable. Pick two.

[godDLL]

I can't drive. Not for lack of trying.

I seemingly can't develop the the muscle memory of unintuitive (to me) concepts like "clockwise is right" and "counter-clockwise is left", nor can I get used to the way a gas pedal actuates non-linearly. These are just two examples of a long list of problems that I have with the controls.

Then there is the utterly confusing signage.

I just can't do any of it, not without sweating like a pig. And I definitely can't be doing all of it at the same time. That's just nuts.

Every time I pick up a PS3 controller I have to learn to use it again, which depending on my withdrawal period can take anywhere from a couple of minutes to like half an hour. The only reason I can touch-type is because I'm doing it every day.

Please don't make the assumption that other's experience of the man-made world around us is in any way similar to yours, that's just not true.

Oh, and I have had absolutely no problem figuring out PGP encryption usage.

[Cederfjard]

In what way are you contradicting Tharkun? I can't figure it out.

"Please don't make the assumption that other's experience of the man-made world around us is in any way similar to yours, that's just not true." Where did s/he? I'm genuinely stumped.

Learning to drive a car IS inherently hard (as in complex), just as "e-mail encryption and identity management", and that is a fact. If you for some reason are more or less adept than the average person at either of these things, I don't see what difference that makes to the reality of the situation. Like driverdan said, if you simply can't do something, you'll have to find a workaround.

[godDLL]

What I said was to augment what he said.

But here's a true, I swear, you can probably check that it is, story just for you:

I didn't know how the whole army thing works when my time came. Just wasn't ever interested. Didn't know my sergeant from my brigadier.

The army took me seeing that I'm fit, for certain values of fit. Put me through boot-camp. That's when I landed in military jail for the first time. I could take everything that was going on in there only with a dose of humour, but grinning 24/7 was apparently not acceptable behaviour. But that wasn't what got me in jail.

There was one thing I could not take, absolutely. Still can't. There wasn't a moment to myself, I couldn't ever get alone in there. I had to always be accounted for, from their point of view; but from mine I couldn't find a place or the time to take a short meditation. I don't know what I have, but I've been getting through it all my life with meditation, and once that wasn't available I was heavily depressed. I thought of suicide, I talked of suicide, and that's basically all I ever talked or thought about. While grinning at anything they had to say to me in return.

So I went home. Took my stuff and went out the gate.

Later came back and went to military jail for a sentence. Then for boot-camp number two, as I didn't finish one.

But later when I did finish it on my second attempt, they didn't want me anywhere near a base anymore. They wanted me out of base for most of the time. They way to achieve this in the army is to make you a driver. This way you're driving around, not being in the base, problem solved.

If you read my previous comment, you know what the problem with that approach is. They didn't. So I explained, repeatedly. Any time they'd let me see an officer that was in charge of that kind of thing, I'd explain that I can't drive, won't ever be able to, and not even torture can "change my mind".

Either they have decided to test that last bit empirically, or just couldn't wrap their heads around the idea of someone not being able to do something that "any idiot could"; but long story short I've done 7 months of prison time in three separate terms over the span of 1.5 years before they saw me as unfit for service and let me go, and be as I am.

That is to say, you're not always in a position to find a workaround, if I may refer to your closing sentence.

[driverdan]

If you can't figure out how to drive what do you do? You don't drive, you use an alternative. The same could be said for tech you can't learn.

[idlewords]

The analogy to learning to drive is flawed, because we learn to drive with muscle memory, and our intuitions about the physical world serve use well when driving.

Neither of these obtains with cryptography. Mistakes are not obvious and you have to concentrate to get it right.

[CJefferson]

It is a matter of skills which people find useful.

Learning to fly a plane is much harder than learning to drive a car, and almost no-one learns how to fly a plane because it just isn't a useful skill for most people.

I did spend time learning all about PGP, and I wish I hadn't bothered, as the skill of learning PGP has zero value to me. On the other hand, learning to drive a car, which took longer, is much more useful.