saper vedere

the biggest hurdle honestly is probably just that at a certain point the rate of a device results in qualitatively different capabilities as you ascend the power-law curve. babbage could envision a general purpose computation device in the early 19th century, and the biggest conceptual leap from that to a cell phone is orders-of-magnitude improvement, but this gets you from "a way to speed up tedious by-hand computations for mathematics" to "a complete modern information-technology ecology," which is qualitatively fundamentally different. there are people who do grasp the Implications of that sort of thing intuitively (ray kurzweil predicting AI in the 2020s just based on increasing computational power) but there are a lot of smart people who have trouble with that sort of thing. and then of course "at a certain point of computing sophistication you can use statistical methods to train a machine on the whole corpus of human language and get a computer program that has enormous general-purpose capacities starting from nothing but blobs of random numbers" is also deeply counterintuitive. i still have trouble with it!

but i wonder how far back you can go and still find somebody smart you could Explain The Smartphone To. you would have to explain a lot more about the basic operation of electricity and magnetism to newton, hooke, and huygens; but they seem like they'd get there pretty quick. certainly newton would. and you don't have to delve into relativity here or anything that's really going to cause a philosophical headache: newton might be quite relieved that you can point to specific physical waves as your medium for electromagnetism, especially if you mention as an aside that that model works for gravity, too. i guess if you go back too far and you lose symbolic algebra--and concepts like "the square of the distance" become principally about geometry, and not a free-moving mathematical abstraction, you lose a major conceptual tool for the formalisms. and once you hit the 15th century you might lose inertia, momentum, and the idea that terrestrial and celestial matter all obey the same rules.

I can't begin to know when...

But then I know it's growing strong...

Wasn't the spring...

Then spring became the summer...

Who'd have believed you'd come along...

TOUCHING HAAAAAANDS

REACING OUT

TOUCHING ME

TOUCHING YOUUUUUUU

Me 1 day later: I need to be left alone to gather the pieces of Me together

The assumer will see a social media post about someone's mushroom harvest, which clearly only contains exactly two distinct kinds of mushrooms, which the poster has identified and correctly named in the post itself, and the assumer will feel compelled to warn the forager to be careful out there! Some mushrooms are poisonous and they should be very careful to only pick ones they can identify! The assumer, who has ignored the fact that the poster did identify both of the mushroom species they had picked, and can most likely be trusted to do so in the future as well, has naturally assumed that the person showing off the results of their latest mushroom haul must have been obliviously picking them at random like an unsupervised toddler who is lucky to be alive.

If someone makes a post talking about how they just got a new job as a bus driver, the assumer might swoop in to warn them that driving a bus is extremely dangerous! It's so dangerous that it's literally illegal to do that unless you have a specific special training for doing that! Even a normal driver's license isn't good enough, you need a special license for it! And when the person who just got hired as a bus driver verifies that yes, they know that, they do have the license to drive a bus, and that they wouldn't have even hired someone who doesn't. The first question of the job interview was about making sure that they have a valid license for driving this type of vehicle.

You see this a lot in tech support. Everybody hates those basic questions like "Have you tried turning it off and on again?" It feels ridiculous and condescending both to the person being asked and the person asking, and you honestly just want to skip it because surely nobody would bother calling tech support waiting without checking something so basic?

...and then you get that call. The one where you spend twenty minutes troubleshooting only to figure out that not only haven't they tried turning it on and off again, the device isn't even plugged in. After that, you always ask.

Somebody posts about picking mushrooms. Did they correctly identify the species? Or did they just get very, very lucky? Emergency rooms (and funeral homes) have seen a lot of people come through who were very confident in their mushroom identification skills.

I'm sure your bus driver example was intended to be an exaggerated strawman, because obviously nobody would hire someone to drive a bus without making sure they're qualified, right? You can totally just assume that from context clues.

The fact that someone, somewhere, has found a way to do things that make literally no sense, is not an argument for treating everybody like they're about to make the stupidest possible decision at all times.

The examples given were also very specifically about the explainers very clearly knowing less than the person they're talking to/at.

Not being able to discuss literally anything without being talked down to, leading to feeling the need to include giant paragraphs of asides that will get get ignored and/or picked apart, is *not fun*.

Sharing an experience in a social space is not a request for basic guidance on a topic you have in no way demonstrated any need for.

I think most people understand that if they responded that way irl chatting with someone they are vaguely friendly with, it would not go down well.

If you’re excited to share knowledge, then you can politely reach out your hand to share, rather than instantly assuming the other person is in need of correction or lecturing.

everything needs a disclaimer. everybody needs to set up buffers, all the time, against other people making silly or dangerous mistakes. its not necessarily directed at the OP and I think its even well meant most of the time.

like the mushroom example above, the Less Knowledgeable Corrector isn't only telling OP about the hazards of mushroom foraging but also all their own followers who see their reblog, and anyone who spots the reblog in the notes.

i think some of that is performative, ie people feel they need to demonstrate that Don't Worry, I Know The Risks, Don't @ Me. which is born from this practice becoming a norm - if you don't add the disclaimer ppl think you didn't know, bc the norm especially here on Tumblr is to tack on a bunch of disclaimers to Protect Your Naive Followers From Their Own Mistakes.

To the average person, it looks like we're just tearing up all the parks for development. But there were meetings and posts and announcements, and there was community input and awareness programs and we did our absolute best to keep everyone in the loop but some people still fell through the cracks.

So they think we're destroying all the parks.

"Why did parks and rec get rid of the fence at this park??? All parks should have fences!"

The fence was damaged and we thought it might be more convenient to open up the area so that people using the shelter didnt have to walk all the way around to get into the playground. The fence was damaged because people would climb it as a shortcut. (I personally disagree that all parks should have fences.)

"Why did they tear down the playground at Miller Park? It was perfectly fine- they wouldn't have to tear it all down if they bothered to maintenance it like they're supposed to."

Playgrounds are suggested to be replaced every ten years to keep up with accessibility updates. Likewise, it was decided that while we're updating the playground it would be a good opportunity to address the safety concerns brought to our attention in the past decade.

"THEYVE COMPLETELY TORN APART WILLOW RIDGE PARK! How dare they take away our precious few greenspaces and line their pockets with kickbacks from high density housing???"

-deep breath-

If you had bothered to go to any of the four public meetings, read the announcements, or looked at the giant sign in front of the park, you would notice that we are remodeling the park to include a wetland restoration area to address the flooding issues, which was voted on by the neighborhood it is adjacent to.

How the FUCK do you reach the most people with your information?

Our little queer nonprofit does its best with a monthly newsletter, facebook, Instagram, meetup, physical posters, and our good old fashioned schmoozing. All that for about.... 500 people to show at pride, out of a city of 34k.

City management has 31k followers on facebook, a monthly magazine with a calendar of events that citizens get for free, open monthly meetings, an email list, and all the resources available to them and we STILL have people asking why we dont have amenities we already have.

To distinguish the hands of Painters I esteeme difficult, not but that a continuall obseruation shrowd guesses may be giuen, as when one sees Nerues Muscles Veines and Bones too mutch appeare one is apt to Father it on Michaell Angelo, who knew too well anotomy, a bold and fierce looke yet the Painting soft on Raphael Vrbino; shepheards Joviallity and Heards to Hanniball Carachio, Battles and a well-made horse to Tempesta, shipping and Landshape worke to Albert Durer or some other Flemming yett these are suted nice and subtile points soe uncertaine as I would not haue our young Gentleman too confident in, least hee might like an Ill swimmer bee drowned because he went out of his debts and verifie the Italian Proverbe chi tutto abbraccia nulla strigne [sic].

This is from a late 17th-century English travel journal by a young gentleman whose name I didn't write down. Basically it's advice for people doing a grand tour. It cracks me up both because of his descriptions of the artists (it is also interesting who is included and who is not), and because it's so clearly aimed at not looking like a dope when seeing Italian paintings. The Italian proverb means "who embraces everything holds nothing" (the final word in the passage should be stringe).