Re:Why can't films and TV accurately portray hackers?
by mercer on Saturday August 05, 2017 @04:51AM
(#14934841)
> I often wonder why it rarely occurs to people that they can subscribe or consume multiple sources of information in order to arrive at a more accurate conclusion?
[...]
> Likely, it's just laziness and apathy.
I find that 'laziness' is generally the laziest explanation for a phenomenon. Also the least charitable, which is an aspect of interpretation that I've been trying to pay more attention to.
That said, I don't disagree with you. In fact, I'm often baffled by how bad people are, in a more general sense, at exploration and search.
I feel like half the stuff I teach junior coders is simply how to search for solutions to a problem, or how to build up a collection of sources that can help with the particular domain they're working in. Or even just how valuable it is to take an hour or so to read through some library's documentation before or while using it. Not to mention how to develop heuristics to decide which library is the best one to use for a particular task.
In a world where most necessary information is at your fingertips, the skill to focus on is how to handle and filter all this information. Even just a cursory look at most people's google search queries makes it clear that there's a lot that people can learn in this regard. Or the fact that many people I know are barely aware of their mac's Spotlight feature, and instead click around through 'untitled folder (2)' to figure out which document named 'copy of <document> (2)' is the relevant one.
(Basically, aside from the more general value of 'learning how to learn' (for which Coursera offers a wonderful MOOC with the same name), I feel that 'learning how to find information' is something that most people are shockingly bad at.)
Anyways, I don't think laziness explains it. It's more that people are just not taught this as a basic skill in school, nor are they taught that this is a valuable skill. If you don't know how to find things, or how to learn things for that matter, or why this is something hugely valuable, how can you be expected to figure that out by yourself?
[...]
> Likely, it's just laziness and apathy.
I find that 'laziness' is generally the laziest explanation for a phenomenon. Also the least charitable, which is an aspect of interpretation that I've been trying to pay more attention to.
That said, I don't disagree with you. In fact, I'm often baffled by how bad people are, in a more general sense, at exploration and search.
I feel like half the stuff I teach junior coders is simply how to search for solutions to a problem, or how to build up a collection of sources that can help with the particular domain they're working in. Or even just how valuable it is to take an hour or so to read through some library's documentation before or while using it. Not to mention how to develop heuristics to decide which library is the best one to use for a particular task.
In a world where most necessary information is at your fingertips, the skill to focus on is how to handle and filter all this information. Even just a cursory look at most people's google search queries makes it clear that there's a lot that people can learn in this regard. Or the fact that many people I know are barely aware of their mac's Spotlight feature, and instead click around through 'untitled folder (2)' to figure out which document named 'copy of <document> (2)' is the relevant one.
(Basically, aside from the more general value of 'learning how to learn' (for which Coursera offers a wonderful MOOC with the same name), I feel that 'learning how to find information' is something that most people are shockingly bad at.)
Anyways, I don't think laziness explains it. It's more that people are just not taught this as a basic skill in school, nor are they taught that this is a valuable skill. If you don't know how to find things, or how to learn things for that matter, or why this is something hugely valuable, how can you be expected to figure that out by yourself?