A friend of mine who works as a college professor has a fun approach to deal with the kinds of random cranks who contact him out of the blue seeking someone to validate their wild Time-Cube-style theories and "research": he responds to each one by providing an introduction to the previous one. Apparently, he received followups from some of them afterward saying how much they appreciated the introduction and how much it helped them.
It seems that many of those scared are those who've learned in a time of knowledge scarcity (it was difficult to find any information at all on any subject. It took at least a trip to a library and some ability to search the index). Today the challenge is to critically navigate in an overdose of information, a lot of it complete rubbish. The hard part is about filtering out, not finding material.
Now what scares me is that, at least in my country, many teachers haven't realised that the times of knowledge scarcity are gone. They tell student that using Wikipedia is cheating, instead of teaching them how to understand and navigate its (wonderful) citation system, to properly assess information quality.
(note: I suspect your comment to be tongue-in-cheek, but I felt like interpreting it 1st degree anyway)
I am worried though about the (further) rise of anti-intellectualism and anti-science. The effects of this should be pretty clear just by reading the news. This does worry me more than the concerns you've described.
My mother is deeply into this stuff, and I have some friends through her who are lovely people aside from the part where they believe in this stuff. They don't make up a large proportion of my Facebook friends, but some of them are very loud about their beliefs.
Now imagine if you don't care a whole lot about this stuff one way or another, you get your shots on schedule because that's what people do, you never considered government conspiracies because the news never mentioned them, and you see the doctor when you get too sick because that's what everybody does. Then you become exposed to all this stuff, written very confidently and seeming to be backed up with solid facts, charismatic people, and high production values.
I think there's a good chance you'd start believing it!
http://captainranty.com/freeman-shafted-by-clueless-judge-2/
Rokeach brought together three men who each claimed to be Jesus
Christ and confronted them with one another's conflicting claims,
while encouraging them to interact personally as a support group.
[...]
While initially the three patients quarreled over who was holier and
reached the point of physical altercation, they eventually each
explained away the other two as being patients with a mental
disability in a hospital, or dead and being operated by machines.
Yes, be careful in that respect, because the story of Galileo is one of the common historical misconceptions.
EDIT: Sources - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10878748.
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...
doesnt end well
Anyone here recall?
They are not idiots, they are average people, tech is complex, I wonder if people who have to be told or explain things to represent a market to attend?
Imagine, something were you call a number ask for something to be bought; later someone go picking up the money, you perform the purchase and you later deliver.
No credit cards, no complex thing to go over.
I'd like to hope an "average" person would not gloss over gaps in their knowledge and jump to a hostile conclusion.
In your scenario, say you're the phone company - would you think it reasonable if the customer who called in your example blames you for their having made a call and placed an order, because the phone line must have made the call itself and faked the customer's voice?
To be fair, the email included in the OP is not really bellowing. She's politely explaining that she found his contact information inside the documentation distributed with the app, and providing screenshots as proof. I think a simple explanation that the name is included only due to technicalities of copyright law and that there is no direct involvement whatsoever is sufficient. After that reply, there is no need to respond further, and almost all lawyers will immediately understand and refuse to proceed with a case.
It should also be noted that hosting an ecommerce platform is a lot different from being one of the many low-level libraries employed by the application. It's not necessarily unreasonable to expect an ecommerce processor or host to have reasonable fraud detection schemes in place, and it's certainly plausible that some lawyers would consider suing the ecommerce vendor (especially if the company makes money).
This sounds like bellowing. It's borderline blackmail. Help me with my request or else I make sure Facebook knows what a scumbag you are.
The funny thing about this whole story is that she's not contacting him because she thinks he works at Instagram, which would be an understandable misconception, but instead she thinks he's with the hacking team. You have to be completely imbecile to think of villains answering with their real names.
This is what many "average" people do, and people have built businesses and political careers out of this.
-Defensive: Remove links to: "made by"
-Reactive: Handle the situation every time it appears.
-Proactive: See if this represents an opportunity for you and approach the market.
-Not responding.
Edit: format and form.
If you think everyone has to know everything before seeking help, then you are the idiot, sorry.
The woman probably doesn't know what a software is, other than a "Download" button on a website and an icon on the toolbar. Do you expect those people to differentiate between the software and the libraries underneath ?
Of course she doesn't understand, but she doesn't know she doesn't understand. That's the very source of the problem, and assuming they're idiot for not having spent the hundreds of hours necessary to understand what we're talking about is ludicrous.
But the thing is, does the bellower know they don't understand something? Few people are mature enough (especially when angry) to admit they really don't understand something (and this is probably prevalent in software development circles / communities, too)
I don't think these people are dumb, just frustrated. But your phrasing was curious to me.
That is to say: I know what I don't know in the fields that I study/practice in. I don't know what I don't know about the fields I don't.
No, they don't, that's what makes them an idiot.
A non-idiot doesn't have to know everything, but they do need to be aware of what they don't know.
They ARE idiots, but not because they don't know tech. They're idiots making strong accusations without having any idea what they're talking about or any evidence.
People finding scapegoats because they're afraid of the unknown is how we historically ended up with things like the witch trials.
Naiveté is fine, not everyone can know everything, but this sort of aggressive ignorance shouldn't be even remotely humored.
I know it sounds elitist but there are people out there who are completely morons. We have to get used to it.
"Look, I saw your company name under my bicycle seat; how can you say you're not involved in the problem of my pedal having broken off!"
Man made stuff is made from parts, and parts have different suppliers; they are not all original, and a given part is not involved in every conceivable problem that occurs somewhere in the whole. Very complicated, that!
"No wait, I know what you are. You're part of a bicycle vandal ring. You go around breaking pedals and sticking your 'calling card' sticker underneath bicycle seats."
Most are people that should not have stopped taken what their Psychiatrist has given them (or should go to one given the chance)
And let's not forget the scammers, of course
Never argue with an idiot. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.
We run an eCommerce platform, have a variety of clients using it, they have a number of customers. At least once a week we get an accusation either from a client or an end-user of some outlandish nefarious behaviour, usually due to some complete lack of understanding of the nature of technology.
Way back when, we responded, tried to help, tried to explain, but it tends to be the case that if someone has made their mind up, they've made their mind up, and anything you say can and will be used against you - confirmation bias is a harsh mistress.
The best response is usually no response, I'm afraid to say. It's a drain on your time, they won't be any the wiser unless you're prepared to sink serious time into educating a stranger, and more often than not responding results in escalation, and people doing stupid things like involving lawyers and law enforcement.
Case in point: About six years ago, we had an older guy phone us up frothing about how we'd hacked his wife's computer and she'd accidentally bought something from one of our clients. We explained that it would be hard to accidentally enter your address and credit card details, and that if they didn't want the order they should contact the merchant, not the web developer (they clicked our "ecommerce by" link in the footer of the client site - we don't do that any more!). We thought that was that. A week later we got a stern phone call from an ombudsman who wanted to know why we were ignoring the distance selling rules and taking advantage of old people... and they didn't understand that we weren't a merchant, didn't place an order on their behalf, either - so months of time were wasted, and we narrowly avoided ending up in court over a non-issue.
Anyway. When you have a conversation with an idiot, nobody watching can tell which one of you is the idiot.