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The game of Who Knows What
Four people wrote yesterday after the previous postcard to tell me that journal-l had a meltdown and that I'd need to resubscribe. Thank you, all.
Unfortunately I am in one of those b**chy states of mind and will probably not resub for a while; I am annoyed. That's no way to run a list. First off, there should have been a backup of the subscriber list. Second, when it died, someone should have taken that list and notified the subscribers that they needed to resub. And if the list was in the hands of someone who didn't have the necessary knowledge to make a script which mails a form letter to every address in a file ... it takes about five minutes ... then that person shouldn't be running a mailing list at all.
I'm sorry. There are a few areas where I insist on standards of competence which I consider minimal ... but others may consider high. The majordomo program and its cousins (programs which run mailing lists) are notoriously finicky. A person who runs a list should have at least a rudimentary understanding of how it works and how to configure it. If you want to have a mailing list without needing to understand any of the guts, use OneList, where someone else does the maintenance for you.
The thing is, these days it has become way too easy for people to perform tasks without actually understanding those tasks ... which annoys the spit out of me.
Please don't flame me; I have already been flamed on this subject by the best. I had the audacity to suggest on a tech-discussion list that maybe people should understand the guts of their computers a little more and not just zoom directly to the few tasks they have learned by rote, like how to do a narrow range of things in Word. And I got my head handed to me. Apparently the conventional wisdom is that it's good that most people use these complex machines without the slightest idea how they work; "most people neither want or need to understand those things," is what I was told.
Fine. But don't expect me to provide technical support. While I don't expect everyone to be a programmer, there are some tasks where I don't think you should be entitled to use it - to have the top-level benefits - without being able to work the plumbing. And, yes, that does mean that I don't think you should be allowed to drive a car unless you can change your own oil. You should also be able to change a tire, know what all the fluids in your car do and how to check the level of each, and know where your fuse panel is and how to change them.
I said I was b**chy, didn't I?
People delude themselves into thinking this stuff is difficult in order to conceal the fact that they're scared of it. Listen: Computers aren't hard. My mother can explain rarefied principles of corporate accounting to me for hours and it'll just go in one ear and out the other - that stuff is truly impenetrable and she, with her high school diploma, has mastered it. On the other hand, when I try to get her to understand how the files on her computer are organized, her brain shuts down. Of course, she'd argue the other way; that the accounting's easy and the computers are incomprehensible.
The difference, of course, is that I'm right and everyone else is wrong. Things I think are easy are easy, things I think are hard are hard, and the rest of you should just accept my word for it.
Of course that last paragraph is a joke.
This comes back to my conversation with Patrick and Molly - otherwise known as the "I like string" conversation. The issue isn't erudition vs. ignorance. None of the three of us is ignorant. The issue is information overlap.
Each of us has some pieces of information we consider elementary. That's not always a good view to have, because some of those "elementary" pieces of information aren't really - but we expect people to know them anyway. And we get disappointed with people when they don't know the things we expect them to ... which is probably the wrong reaction to have.
I figured everyone knew what the allegory of the cave was. I was so stunned when I found out people didn't. That led to a big fight over whether I was an intellectual elitist - still one of the worst things you can call me, and I go into snarling fits if anyone dares come close to suggesting it.
But ... more rationally ... we're all a little elitist, in different ways. I am reading a book on hand tools. The gentleman in that book would think a little less of you if you were wielding a hammer and you didn't know how to use it properly ... the same way I expect you to know how to change the oil in your car, if you drive one. Molly gets unhappy at people who haven't mastered certain fundamental points of grammar ... and I agree with her, but as I've pointed out to her several times, a lot of people couldn't tell the difference between "criteria" and "criterion" to save their lives ... and most don't care. Hmm, they neither need nor care to know. That sounds like what I was told about software, doesn't it? Except that software is something I'm picky about and Latin plurals are not.
Patrick disparages his knowledge, but when I said "Tom Stoppard has a play where the audience has to learn a new language in order to understand what's going on," he had enough information to furnish the title immediately. Could you?
It's called Dogg's Hamlet. I would never look down my nose at you for not knowing that. Nor, as I've discussed with Lisa, do I expect you to know a Doric from an Ionic column, or the difference between "who" and "whom" - a distinction, I'm afraid, that has long been on its deathbed and is beyond the reach of life support. I expect you to know the difference between "imply" and "infer," between "principal" and "principle," and several others like that. Lisa would probably agree with both of those. On the other hand, Nonelvis has fits about "ensure" and "insure," which strikes me as merest hair-splitting.
We could go on like this all day long. The point is, we all need to be more forgiving about information other people don't have. (Myself included? Oh, definitely!)
Otherwise we just end up with a lot of bad blood that probably should be reserved for the more important battles.
I should close by adding that REM wrote me (after my previous rant on Who Knows What) to say that his personal test of a human is whether they know who Faust was. They don't have to mention Goethe or anything like that; they just have to know the salient point: sold his soul to the devil and regretted it. He figures that if they don't know that, they're not worth talking to.
I'd like to say I disagree, but I'm afraid I don't. Am I going to get tagged with elitism again now?
© Columbine
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