River: Colleen:computers::me:people

[mdlbear]

I just realized, while helping Colleen navigate around an unfamiliar part of LJ and teaching her about the "find" feature of her browser, that her attitude around computers was exactly like my attitude around people. ("Attitude" isn't the right word here; I don't know what is. I also tried "situation" and that didn't work either. Emotions? Maybe.)

Anyway: unfamiliar, scary, confusing, frustrating; easy to get into situations that one doesn't know how to get out of without rebooting and losing a lot of context. A lot of terminology that everyone else seems to have absorbed long ago. Inability to explain to someone else what the problem is, because you don't have the right words. The feeling that you're going to break something, or get something hopelessly messed up. The feeling that everything you've done has just made the situation more and more broken, messed up, and hopeless.

The difference is that computers are infinitely patient, totally consistent, mostly comprehsible, and don't go into a feedback loop when you panic or get stuck.

(23:18) pocketnaomi quite rightly points out that what she and Colleen feel about computers is exactly as valid as what I feel about people, and adds a list of differences that are almost a perfect mirror-image of mine:

To me, the difference is that people are able to catch imprecise statements and translate them in their own minds into precise ones. You don't HAVE to do absolutely everything right with people... doing them marginally close is usually good enough. With computers, there are only two options: 100% perfection and absolute failure. If you don't do EVERYTHING right, it will block you again and again and again. It has no pity or compassion, no willingness to meet you halfway or help out when you are exhausted from trying.

I think the problem on both sides is that I'm trying to think about people the way I think about computers, and "people people" like Naomi and Colleen think about computers the way they think about people. It's the natural, obvious thing to do, and it's equally wrong in both directions.

We're both learning.

Comments

[callibr8]

I think the word you seek may be, "mindset". Or "paradigm". To Colleen, people are a familiar paradigm whose vocabulary and rules she knows. To you, the "world inside the crystal" is that.

So look at it as doing some cross-training, maybe? :-)

[mdlbear]

Unfortunately I don't think either of us is very good at teaching the things that are so natural to us that we do them without thinking. That's why the kids go to Colleen for help with their math homework.

[pocketnaomi.livejournal.com]

Since I have precisely Colleen's attitude, also about computers, I can understand it completely. I'm uncomfortable with your last sentence however, which seems to imply dismissively that your feeling that set of ways about people is "right" whereas to feel that way about computers is "wrong." I don't imply that your feelings are invalid; I am distressed that you appear to be implying that mine and your wife's are.

To me, the difference is that people are able to catch imprecise statements and translate them in their own minds into precise ones. You don't HAVE to do absolutely everything right with people... doing them marginally close is usually good enough. With computers, there are only two options: 100% perfection and absolute failure. If you don't do EVERYTHING right, it will block you again and again and again. It has no pity or compassion, no willingness to meet you halfway or help out when you are exhausted from trying.

Just trying to give you another camera angle on the question.

[mdlbear]

Not invalid at all. Just very different. And thank you. Your feelings about computers are exactly as valid as mine about people, and your list of differences is the exact mirror image of mine. You and Colleen are looking at it from the other side.

[pocketnaomi.livejournal.com]

I think the reason I felt dismissed by comparison was the phrasing of "the difference is..." rather than "some differences are..." and then followed by a very one-sided (favoring the computers) set of distinctions. That combination made it sound as if the only differences, or the only ones worth naming, were those which favored the computer side of things.

I realize that in being disturbed by this, I am demonstrating some of your points: that humans take offense when you accidentally say things which sound painful to them and machines don't. OTOH, if you say something that a computer, for whatever reason, isn't equipped to handle, it will simply throw it back in your face until you get it right, whereas my human response was to reach out and try to talk things through with you. So we've proven both of our points in this interaction. :)

[mdlbear]

Indeed.

There are ways of figuring out what the computer wants, or why it's not doing what you expect it to, but it doesn't seem to be a skill that comes naturally to most people. (It's always been one of my less-recognized job functions, in fact.)

[rowanf.livejournal.com]

Heh, it is a mystery. I'm just glad there are folks who do grok it. I'm somewhere in the middle, I think. I like solitary things but I'm not a great computer thinker despite having learnt various incantations over the years.

[mdlbear]

... and clearly what I should have said was "to me the difference is..."

[pocketnaomi.livejournal.com]

I think the problem on both sides is that I'm trying to think about people the way I think about computers, and "people people" like Naomi and Colleen think about computers the way they think about people. It's the natural, obvious thing to do, and it's equally wrong in both directions.

Yes, exactly. One of the things I find myself feeling most often when I have trouble with a computer is, said with teary-eyed rage, "Dammit, machine, why won't you HELP me?!?!?

The answer is, of course, because it's a machine and they don't do that. But I cannot keep from taking personally that it won't do that, or avoid being deeply upset at having to work with something that cannot/will not reach out to do so when I'm having trouble.

[mdlbear]

Oh, yes; that's dead on!

And the fact that people do take things personally is, of course, one of the things I have the most trouble with. That, and the fact that there's no manual I can go read.

[moshez.livejournal.com]

Well, I guess the comfort you can take here is normal: Psychological studies have shown that when a machine behaves in a complex enough manner, our responses to it shift from "it's a tool" to "it's a person". The common solution to it in modern interaction design is to take this into account, and try hard to make the machine behave like a reasonable person rather than a moronic sociopath.

[pocketnaomi.livejournal.com]

So far I haven't seen anything do a very good job of it except for some GPSs. And I remember we were talking about those on the way down, and how totally differently they think from the way humans do, and how annoying people can find some of that, too.

[phillip2637.livejournal.com]

"people are able to catch imprecise statements and translate them in their own minds into precise ones"

That's the part that throws me off when dealing with other people. Those precise ones they create are so frequently nothing like the precise ones that I had in my head before I opened my mouth.

With a computer the acceptance of communication has two distinct phases. The first is checking whether it understood what I said. In most cases, if it did not, it tells me that rather than attempting to invent a meaning and then act on its own invention.

(It's interesting to note that gesture-based interfaces remove much of the two-phase interaction and thereby increase the opportunity for immediate computer misinterpretation of intent.)

[mdlbear]

Yes. Exactly.

Long long ago

[capplor.livejournal.com]

I read a book called "How Children Fail" (author John Holt). He had exactly that kind of aversion/fear attitude towards learning to play flute, and described it well, including an incident where he was so pressured by his teacher, everything he did know totally desserted him. "I became not-blind; the overwhelming impression was that I'd never seen music before and what was in front of me to play meant nothing" (approximate quote)

He then asserted that it was a very good thing for him to have that experience, because some of his bad students were a lot like that in the classroom.

Re: Long long ago

[mdlbear]

I think it's probably much easier to deal with aversion to some specific activity like playing flute, working with computers, or doing math. Aversion to interacting with people seems different -- they don't teach it in school. Or rather, they don't teach it as a specific subject. If you're an A student in all the subjects they do teach, they don't seem to notice that you're failing at social interaction.

Re: Long long ago

[artbeco.livejournal.com]

I may have to find that book. I've had very similar experiences, usually when being tested in math or physics or other subjects of that kind. It's really as if all knowledge of the subject has leaked out of your brain and it's frustrating and frightening. I always thought it was just me, some weird personal block. Very shaming experience, really.

Re: Long long ago

[judifilksign.livejournal.com]

Yes, and then I get those students at my treatment school, and they are desperate to avoid all interactions with the subjects that cause them so much shame and trauma.

We *do* now try to teach social skills to students, even the A students, so they can integrate better into today's "team mindset" working environments.

[moshez.livejournal.com]

"It has no pity or compassion, no willingness to meet you halfway or help out when you are exhausted from trying."

I think that's a sad way of putting it. Computers have no hate or bad feelings -- just infinite patience. Even if you did it wrong a thousand times, you can attempt to fix it, and try again. Above all, computers are fair. I think that sense of fairness (even when it's harsh, unyielding fairness) is what makes me like computers.

"svn merge -rHEAD:$BEFORE_I_MADE_THE_FAUX_PAS .;svn ci -m 'Sorry'"-ly yours :)

[mdlbear]

Good point. And a well-designed program (of which there are distressingly few these days) is perfectly capable of telling you exactly what you did wrong, so you can fix it without having to guess what the problem was.

[firecat]

One of these days I will try to puzzle out why I feel like I understand animals and computers but not (a great many) people.

[mdlbear]

Yes. Computers and animals are a lot simpler; that's certainly part of it for me. Computers, in particular, are actually simple enough that I know in a general way what's going on inside them at multiple levels -- at one time or another I've worked on everything from the bits up.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[mdlbear]

I tried that, but quickly realized that, although I could easily understand and work with machines, I didn't understand people at all, and couldn't learn about them by merely analyzing their behavior (which was and often still is completely baffling), interacting with them (which was usually very painful), or reading a manual (which doesn't exist).

My interaction style and learning style work pretty well with machines. People are different, and I haven't figured them out yet.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

I don't see human behavior as any more (or any less) baffling than the often Murphy-designed behavior of machinery. Someone told me that I treat humans, cats, and machines alike as "people"... I just have a very inclusive definition of "people".

[montemplar.livejournal.com]

My parents get confuzzled very easily by the computer. Unfortunately, a lot of this is down to the fact that Windows is only user-friendly when it's working - as soon as there's a problem, out come the cryptic messages and (more often than not) into the grimy innards of the OS I have to go to fix things. Admittedly, Vista and 7 tidied up the Control Panel a lot, which was long overdue, although it threw me for a loop for a time as I was used to the old 95/98/2000/XP system.

[mdlbear]

That's why I got Mom a Mac after Dad died. She's had a few problems with it, most recently a crashed hard drive, but nowhere near the disaster a Windows machine would have been for her.

Mom's pretty tech-savvy, but still...