
On the Internet, Nobody Knows You're a God - nreece
http://blogs.psychologytoday.com/blog/brainstorm/200803/the-internet-nobody-knows-youre-god
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phaedrus
This is an interesting and insightful article, but in my experience a person's
superstition leads to the exact opposite effect: it gets in the way a person
deducing a correct model of a how something works on a computer. The article
postulates that because the forces at work in software are unseen and made up,
that a person who believes in magic will be better equipped to understand it.
I counter that precisely because the mechanism is unseen, it takes a sharper
scientific mind to model the hidden mechanism - which is essential to predict
cause and effect for new phenomena. As a software developer I've worked very
hard to make things easy in a program's interface, only to find the users
perpetuating myths from trainer to trainee about very complicated things they
have to do to get it to work - sequences of actions which don't have any
effect but which worked once and are repeated superstitiously instead of doing
things easily.

Another example of how a belief in "spirits" hobbles your ability to properly
use the internet, would be my father: he consistently misspells URLs, and gets
angry when it doesn't work. When I tell him they have to be typed exactly, he
always dismisses it by saying "oh they'll know what I mean." No matter how
hard I try, I cannot convince him that _there is no THEY_ on the other end of
the address box!! But his superstitious nature will not allow him to change
his convictions that all these purely mechanical things the software does are
not orchestrated by "spirits" (a.k.a. imaginary human operators).

