

Schneier on Security : Fixing Intelligence Failures - billswift
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/01/fixing_intellig.html#comments

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billswift
One point Schneier made is about the "generational gap" in technology. But I
think this is wrong - I left this comment:

The real divide is between people who are comfortable with technology and
those who aren't. The divide is sharper now for several reasons: first, higher
technology is harder to understand so fewer are intellectually capable.
Second, even formerly high technology requires effort and fewer seem to be
making even the effort to understand how basic electricity and automobiles
work, how many people now routinely change their own oil or really do any
other maintenance on their own cars (which was normal in the 1970s). Finally,
the US (and probably other Western countries) have been picking up the
aristocratic and Hispanic disdain for people who do manual work (see the
chapter on Feynman's visit to Brazil in "Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman!"
for how this attitude can screw up even academic physicists).

Learning to use the technology, more or less by rote, is not the same as
understanding it. And I have seen no evidence that people who routinely use
the Web and its accretions actually understand it any better than they do cars
or electricity.

Those of you who are younger may not realize quite how things have changed
since the 1970s. The majority of men I knew then usually changed their own
cars oil, and often did a lot of their own maintenance work. How many of the
people that use computers now know _anything_ about how they actually work,
can do any programming, or understand the basics of internet routing or how
viruses and other malware infect their computer? Judging from what I have read
on HN and the Daily WTF even many, maybe most, so-called computer
professionals don't understand what they are doing.

Also see <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1056904>

