Maybe most people are wrong after all.

There's all this talk of ethics and of logical fallacies that's making the rounds, and then you have this failure to realize that non-techies are conditioned to see technology as some sort of black magic that you have to be a special kind of not-quite-person in order to be able to make sense of.

No matter what spin you put on it, life in our society is not simple. Any kind of tool tends to work better if you're using it with some degree of understanding how it works.

If only our industry would somehow magically stop enabling entitlement and complacency (and make it easier for users to "do their homework")... then maybe things would actually "just work" much more often.

You're missing the actual logical result of life in our society not being simple: people do not have enough time or available energy given the rest of the demands on their life. Civilization has evolved toward specialization, and the basic expectation of specialization is that the output of specialists is useful to individuals in other specialties. It is foolish to expect or require everyone to become an expert on bluetooth configuration options to have some headphones that don't work or a mouse without latency spikes. This isn't entitlement; this is efficiency and the way society is expected to function. It is a very long time since we have expected everyone in our society to be an expert at everything.

Good point - however, then at least have an option for specialists to get access to the info.

I also believe we haven't yet explored all options to make certain "specialist" topics more accessible to the general public. E.g., I'm continually surprised how much the actual network traffic between apps/devices and their corresponding servers is hidden. I believe a simple visualisation about what apps/devices are talking with who would do a lot to at least get some basic understanding of what's going on.

People seems to be very capable of learning concepts if they see personal relevance - e.g. teens know very well what the battery, wifi and signal strength indicators on their phones mean.

> e.g. teens know very well what the battery, wifi and signal strength indicators on their phones mean.

I will disagree with this whole-heartedly. Full bars are meaningless, and dBm is hidden (on Android at least). What we see is whatever the OEM chooses, with actual signal strength hidden away.

Also, RSSI is typically calculated from the successfully received frames. So you can receive a comfortable -60dBm signal.. for the most of the time.

Yours is a common argument which has a lot of merit, especially to quell naive youthful idealism. However I can't help but wonder if it really is so easy to untangle cause and effect, especially considering evolutionary incentives are also subject to change.

Consider we're not just already failing to build products that "just work", we're making it hard for users to make things work at all. There is obviously an incentive for that - Sinclair's law. However, imagine developers were actually incentivized to design beautiful, internally consistent systems, and expose their inner workings in an accessible way. How do you go from this proposition to the conclusion that everyone would have to become an expert in everything to do anything?

If everyone had access to the information needed to fix their problem using basic reasoning, but wanted to do other things, they could be able to find a nearby person who knows a little more and can help - as opposed to wasting time posting in support forums, waiting for customer support's non-answers, having to learn Google-fu to find if someone had the same issue, and eventually throwing the goddamn thing in the trash.

As an aside, I do have an axe to grind here; I did buy a pair of Bluetooth headphones the other day and, and do like chucking them in the bin even though they just work, just because I'm sick of being locked into yet another half-arsed wireless technology. I'll probably just give them to someone less demanding, because I don't want some landfill dwellers on the other side of the world inhaling my headphones. I've also reached the point when if anyone asks me for help with computers I recommend trying pen and paper instead.

Anyway, the fundamental distinction I'm trying to make is ternary: - having to learn things that make sense (competency and proficiency are enjoyable), vs. - having to learn things that pretend to make sense but don't (being good at those also feels good but I suspect is devastating to mental health), vs. - outsourcing all of your learning and going on with your life (until the Morlocks eat you)

History in general feels very much like one of those over-engineered legacy systems where every change is slow and painful, and the current maintainers can only guess why things have ended up being in a certain way, and hope trying to fix them doesn't suddenly make them worse. If you only have pure human universals to deal with in your life, I envy you. Otherwise, you might need to acknowledge that a lot of the "demands of life" are simply arbitrary constructs that beg to be challenged, renegotiated, optimized.

Maybe everyone becoming an expert in Bluetooth configuration or whatever is not pleasant or desirable, but in my book it beats destroying our economy, species or ecosystem by a thousand small cuts.

TL;DR: "Specialization is for insects," anyone?

But as Alfred North Whitehead wrote in 1911,

"It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them."

It's an absolute explosion of complexity. I'd have to talk for nearly an hour to explain the Bluetooth modes, and then longer if the user didn't understand radio interference. It's too much. It's like having to be able to tune a carbourator to run a car. It's a skill very few people have, and having less of it is actually good.

Explosions of complexity tend to happen when complexity is poorly managed in the first place.

If you need the person to understand Less need for specialized skills/info is good. Less availability of that info when needed, I just can't see how that can be good.

An hour of coherent explanation by a friend is worth more than an hour of pointless frustration at a company, no?

Correct me if I'm wrong (oh no, needing specialized info to make a general argument!) but modern cars don't have carburetors anymore, because it turned out to be an evolutionary dead end of sorts?

Maybe the same thing is bound to happen to Bluetooth anyway; and I believe that the better its workings are exposed to those who want to know it, the sooner people would be able to replace it with something that works better, thus generating less waste - of both resources and time

Idk where the "If you need the person to understand" part came from

There are better and worse ways to build the UI around this information, but to say it should be completely hidden from / impossible for the end user to find, is just outright hostile to the user.

Do you think people would be happy if the wifi status icon just became a boolean "on/off"? Of course not. They are able to make differential decisions in light of the (limited) information presented.

Empower users with information!

> Most people really just want one thing which says "headphones" and for the software/hardware to Just Work.

Sadly apple removed that option from phones, and other companies followed suit

There's a difference between making diagnostics and status info readily available and actually letting the user change the inner details. I think the point was that the OS could expose the result of negotiation so that it was easier to inspect later, either by a technical user or a support person helping a less technical user.

I like the idea and hope some MS engineers are taking note.