I feel like the people I interact with irl don’t even know how to boot from a USB. People here probably know how to do some form of coding or at least navigate a directory through the command line. Stg I would bet money on the average person not even being able to create a Lemmy account without assistance.
Something that amazes me that I often see is tech literate people wastly over estimating the tech literacy of an average person. Any amount of tech support would tell you that most people barley know the basics and doesn’t care for anything else.
Relevant xkcd:
It’s easy to forget the average person probably only knows terminal commands for Debian. And Fedora, of course.
Whenever this topic comes up particularly with tech literacy, this article never ceases to amaze me: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/
The curse of knowledge; makes you lose the perspective of the average man in the field of your expertise.
How bad this is in practice is something you can choose to mitigate simply by regularly talking to normal people.
Source: I’m a climate scientist, I do this all the time (and only rarely get looks of complete confusion)
As someone in wildlife conservation, this doesn’t work for everyone. For me, it just makes me hate talking to people. They will be confidently wrong and nothing you say will convince them otherwise. Doesn’t help that I live in one of the worst educated states in the union.
Also, the 'tism puts me at a disadvantage out the gate. So I might be biased.
I don’t necessarily mean trying to convince people of something, I more mean conversing with interested, but less educated people. Convincing people is a whole separate skill set to just explaining your technical knowledge in plain language (which is the part that’s beneficial here).
Climate is something people already understand to some extent. If you start talking about different climate models and their assumptions, you should get those confused looks straight away.
Once you work at a place doing lvl 1 tech support, like say a Geek Squad, the perspective smacks you in the face everyday until you’re broken.
I know people who claim to be tech literate but then keep sending me actual photos of their screen whenever they want to share anything. :|
Admittedly, I do almost all of my messaging from my phone, and 100% of Lemmy. Most of the time if I have something on my computer to share, it’s easiest to just take a picture. If fidelity matters, I can take a screen grab and share it to my phone via KDE connect. It’s not a matter of knowing how, it’s the effort required for a slightly clearer image.
No, farmers know barley, average people bearly know
No, Baloo, Paddington, Winnie the Pooh, and Yogi know bearly. Average people barely know.
whelp, I guess that’s the end of that joke thread
No, biologists know bearly, average people, bairly know
There’s a huge number of people here who would learn a lot from giving tech support to someone like my mum.
When something goes wrong the average response is some amount of confusion and anger with rapid clicking