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How Do You Stay Upbeat Amidst the Idiocy?
Techdirt has a wonderful summary of how hard it is sometimes to stay upbeat when faced with some of the complete idiocy that intelligent, tech-savvy readers often have to deal with in their day-to-day lives. While the frustration will probably never go away, nor will the news calling attention to it, it does seem that opening people's eyes to problems helps things move in the right direction, so keep it up. "Yes, we're in the midst of a brutal financial mess — but that won't stop innovation. Yes, incumbent forces, with short-sighted plans and a desire to hold back the tides are annoying and disruptive (not in a good way) in the short run. But even they are finding they can't hold back progress. Robert Friedel has a wonderful book called A Culture of Improvement that details how we, as a society, are constantly looking to improve on what we already have. We add ideas and ingenuity to old concepts and build something better — not because of the desire to grab some "intellectual property," but because of the desire to improve our own lot, to build a better tool that we want to use. Incumbent short-sighted players have been able to hinder and harm progress, but they can't keep it down completely. That culture of improvement can't be stopped entirely."
Instead of focusing on all the tech details that other folks get wrong, think of all the economic dogma and confused legal interpretations that otherwise intelligent people allow themselves to parrot.
You are an idiot, I'm an idiot, we are all an idiot. A month ago, I called the cable company to complain about how the History Channel never seemed to come in clearly. The lady on the phone walked me through basic trouble shooting. She had me re-seat the coax connector on the back of the tuner. Well gee I thought, I had the wire tightened down to the back of the tuner with a cresent wrench, what will this solve? Guess what, after re-seating the damn thing, the History Channel worked like a charm.
Did I feel like an idiot for having to call for tech support only to have my problem resolved after walking through the "is the computer plugged in" level of troubleshooting? Yeah. But if I didn't call, the History Channel would still come in pretty shitty.
We are all idiots. All you can do is laugh at yourself and enjoy your life. When I did tech support, I enjoyed it simply because I enjoyed chatting with the people whose computer I was fixing, and I enjoyed how thankful most of them were that I was able to fix their black box.
I dont do tech support anymore, but it was a lot of fun when I did.
Recognize that intelligent, tech-savvy people are just as much a font of ignorance, error, and groupthink as anyone else. Study the psychology of learning and decision making and discover that most of what you call "idiocy" is actually the same set of heuristics and biases that make us intelligent in the first place applied in situations where they don't work. Now, for the real mind-binder -- start looking at what you think you know and how you came to know it. How much of it is based on your own direct research and controlled experimentation? How much of it is based on incomplete information or a biased investigation? How much of it is just stuff your friends happen to believe?
The answer is "almost all of it". Turns out it's really hard to actually *know* anything at all, even from a practical standpoint. We get away with being wrong most of the time because there are few direct consequences for most of our beliefs (when was the last time your political opinions really mattered?). And once you understand how easy you are to fool, it becomes a lot easier to see how other people can make the same mistakes, and how often they're the ones who are right, not you.
But before you do any of that, drop the Slashdot Superiority Complex. There are few things in this story more ridiculous than the implicit idea that the world should be run by the same people who write comments on tech news sites.
Visit the
This is what the Socratic Method is for. Instead of just giving them the answer, you ask them a lot of questions that they can answer until they've reached the desired solution. If people aren't willing to try to learn what it is you're helping them with, then they won't bother coming to you.
The added bonus to this method is that people can't tell when you're spinning a line of bull because you don't know the answer yourself... ;*)
You've paraphrased something I've being saying for decades. Back in my university days, I was a TA. I quickly learned that if 1 or 2 of my students (in a class of 15) didn't get it, it was them. If 12 or 13 didn't get it, then it was me. It meant I hadn't explained it properly, or I'd made a false assumption about what they knew.
The other important thing is that even when it was one student who didn't get it, it didn't mean that the student was an idiot. It often meant he or she simply marched to a different drummer. I had one student pass by the skin of her teeth, and even that was only after considerable tutoring. But that same student went on to get a PhD in a totally different discipline. There's a difference between being a fool and being a fish out of water.
Unfortunately, far too many people take an attitude of "if you don't know what I know, you're an idiot". I know quite a number of people who are constantly stressed out, because they expect anyone and everyone to be fully up to speed on everything that they are interested in. Engineers seem to be particularly susceptible to this, because unlike writers, musicians, or artists, we deal with deterministic systems. We design, build, and fix things so that they are reliably predictable. But people aren't reliably predictable, and expecting them to be is going to stress you out.
I've seen people get bitterly angry because someone didn't know the difference between an AMD processor and an Intel one. I know one person who, when a co-worker on a project casually asked why Linux would be a better choice than Windows, got so angry his hands were physically trembling with rage, and he had to walk out of the room, because "otherwise I'd have to punch that stupid bastard in the face for such a retarded question". I know one person who has exploded in a rage in a restaurant, because the waitress brought his sandwich on the wrong type of bread.
Not surprisingly, two of the people I know like this have already had heart attacks.
The problem with stress like this isn't that there are foolish or annoying questions about. Of course there are. Always have been, always will be. The problem is how seriously you take it. If you treat foolish questions as personal insults, if you expect everyone to have your level of expertise in your field, then you're going to be stressed out. Let's face it; if you get angry about bread, the problem isn't with the bread.
If a discussion of bracing styles forces you to leave the room because you're going to hit someone, you're either wound too tight, or you're in the wrong profession. Possibly both.
Sit back, take a break, and wonder why it is that you're always so angry about everything, when everyone else seems to take it in stride. And if you come to the conclusion that "that's because everyone is stupid and I'm not", resign yourself to be miserable and angry for the rest of your life, cause life isn't going to change any time soon.