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Computer Voodoo?
jbeaupre asks: "A corollary to 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic' is that sometimes users have to resort to what I call 'computer voodoo.' You don't know why it works, you barely care how it works, but you find yourself doing the strangest things because it just seems to work. I'm talking about things like: smacking a PC every 5 seconds for an hour to keep it from stalling on a hard drive reformat (with nary a problem after the reformat); or figuring out the only way to get a PC partially fried by lightning to recognize an ethernet card, after booting into Windows, is to start the computer by yanking the card out and shoving it back in (thereby starting the boot processes). What wacky stuff have you done that makes no obvious sense, but just works?"
That has to be about the most insightful thing I've ever seen here on Slashdot. And, of course, you got modded funny.
Actually, to be honest, I find that creating an incentive for the user to understand the technology is a much better long run solution. The average person nowadays can accomplish an awful lot with a very basic, approximate functional understanding of the system. Unless there is some reason that they need to learn the details, they will likely never do so.
The truth is that this does not merely apply to "lusers," but to many of the most brilliant programmers you'll find. How many programmers know the deep details about the electronics that make up the processor? Or about the connection between doping, band-gap effects, and statistical mechanics that regulate the real-world execution of logical operations? I have dual degrees in Physics and CS, yet I would not include myself in that category.
I think what we need is users that aren't necessarily "theoretically" educated (this can, in practice, be quite useless), but rather have the appropriate metaphors (pipes, not tubes) to understand the majority of what to do in a given situation. Know what different symbols and actions connote, and where to find help (besides just asking the "computer guy").