In some cases, that can definitely be a problem. If I'm buying a product because 'X is hard and I don't want to have to think' then there are plenty of vendors that will sell me on an overcomplicated solution to X that induces so much parasitic draw on my system that it collapses, and I am enslaved to them because I have no idea how to cope without.
In other cases, I might very well know how to do X - but someone else already has a fantastic solution that I can just buy, trading a significant portion of my time for a relatively small amount of money.
Wisdom is knowing whether you're buying a bicycle - or a stationary bike.
You're talking about specific cases, but I think the problem is cultural, has metastatized into a place where radical change in wide ways looms, has to blow away a corrupt fallen shitty & malignant way of thinking that has taken over & which poisons society at large. Consumerism lowers us.
Finding higher paths is not going to be trivial, but there are promising signs we approach the local shitty maxima that consumeristic communicative-Capitalism has bound us inside of.
To all of you I'd ask, what do you think constitutes general systems research in this age?
What are potentially transcendental pieces of computing, that can value all applications? What would making computing at large better? What paradigms, what information architectures, what systems architectures, what connectivities wouldn't specifically "ground down" enable, but what would rise up & be broadly different? What are the widely applicable techniques of computing?
General systems research- aka making computers (not applications) better- only has teunous guesses right now. No one knows, or we'd already be winning greatly. We have to guess here, about what on the ground experiences of computing would be most portably useful across problems & concerns. What operating systems would better help us compute?
In some cases, that can definitely be a problem. If I'm buying a product because 'X is hard and I don't want to have to think' then there are plenty of vendors that will sell me on an overcomplicated solution to X that induces so much parasitic draw on my system that it collapses, and I am enslaved to them because I have no idea how to cope without.
In other cases, I might very well know how to do X - but someone else already has a fantastic solution that I can just buy, trading a significant portion of my time for a relatively small amount of money.
Wisdom is knowing whether you're buying a bicycle - or a stationary bike.