(it reminds me of a piece from....maybe like six or seven years ago? in I think the Atlantic? which argued that there's never been a worse time to be stupid, and it's something we ought to worry about as it's fundamentally not a crime to be stupid, and I still think about it a lot)
I live on the Gulf Coast. I agree with everything you’ve stated.
I think there's a correlation between stupid, uneducated, and just lacking the ability to access good information and where we are.
I was taken by the comment about risk. A number of yrs ago I stopped a university from buying an 'electronic well being service' for students by pointing out things like it wasn't QA'd by the BPS, staff weren't accredited counsellors, no out of hours service, no process for acute crises etc etc...
...BUT ooo expensive shiny technological thing has to be better than paying real, qualified humans to support other, suffering and at risk, real humans. Still infuriates me.
And we're all actually quite stupid, fundamentally. The hardest thing to learn in life is understanding your own stupidity.
I remember the Australian social researcher Hugh Mackay many years ago saying something along the lines of our society is unkind to those who aren’t very bright (talking about the complexity of navigating daily life and systems, and what enable material comfort etc). Can’t recall where tho sorry!
I think people are especially susceptible as developers are under no obligation to explain the limitations of their products, or even how they work. A current ad just says something like “check output”. Not much use if you think it’s magic and/ or you’ve fallen in love with it.
For whatever it's worth, the best ways I've seen this very legitimate concern addressed are less "there are utter fools among us" (which makes it easier to blame "those people" for inevitable failure states) and more "we all benefit from these protections when we're not at our best".
This is very true !
yes I like this!
It's something I've noticed in areas that we've tended to just kind of push through, like health and safety on building sites was seen as super patronizing and was basically the 'woke' when I was growing up, but we just pushed through and now builders take it (more) seriously (mostly).
I was talking today about the high pass mark and making a comparison with A* star in maths. Forgetting how to calculate the internal volumes of a sphere won't kill you , unlike ignoring the rules for working at height near power lines, or excavation safety errors.
yea, I mean, it's a much easier sell for this reason. But it was still mocked mercilessly and seriously opposed in the 2000s, largely because it aimed to make sure 'everyone' on a site was safe, so it included things that seemed like common sense.
Also the CSCS (Construction Skills Certification Scheme) Health and Safety Green Card, the exam to get this has a pass mark of 90%. You also need a Level 1 Certificate in Health and Safety ,( 80% pass mark) before you can do the CITB CSCS exam. Almost universal now.
Has the advantage of being particularly true with things like phishing scams, which are set up to work on psychological weaknesses pretty much everyone has, so all you need to do is be a bit tired or anxious one day and then...
Similar in principle to the idea that adaptations/policies designed for disabled people make it better for everyone.
The tiring problem is that when you engineer a solution and people demand you to remove it. When GPT-5 came out and it was tuned to act less like a person, people complained that it made their friend chatbot stop working and demand them to allow the older version up. When OpenAI
says they will start monitoring chat and call police as needed, people complain about big brothers. When we ask for a better password with policies, people complain about it being "hard to remember". Two factor authentication? Oh it's so hard to use and how dare you
discriminate against the poor by requiring a smart phone? It's the same in every engineering. "Sure it's safe, but it's so ugly, can't you make it just as safe while using an unsafe design to make it not ugly?"
The problem isn't just fools, it's entitled fools. It's fools who think they deserve to not be treated like a fool while asking to be protected for being a fool. Or worse, entitled fools who didn't pay, like many, many, many users of online techs.
As frustrating as all that is, it seems you're missing my central point: people are not static categories. We are all involved in processes and we can all change. People certainly behave foolishly, but writing people off as "fools" does nothing to change the behavior & just casts it as immutable.
Not just fools. Entitled fools, fools who believe that their foolishness deserves to get coddled without judgement. Fools who WILL judge you if you don't coddle them enough, or coddle them in ways they don't like. Fools that will go out of their way to bypass all your safeguards and then blame you
when they hurt themselves. The same kind of fools that anti-vaxxers are. Why do you think a lot of people in tech tend either towards one extreme or another (authoritarian big brother or libertarianism everything goes)? Because then you get only idiots on one side screaming at you.
And before you ask, I don't have all the answers of how to change other people to act better. I wish I did! But I know that imagining that the can change their behavior as changeable is step zero.
I think this is a great way of putting it. Every person will pass through at least one hugely vulnerable state (childhood, grief or illness, and hopefully old age.)
Also there are more people working full time and overtime at exploiting our vulnerabilities than ever before. Is there an area of life untouched by scammers, charlatans and con artists? Think about the funeral home scandal - not even safe after you die!