"This really challenged my perspective on technical know how."

A good 25% or so of "tech knowhow" is just thinking that you can in the first place. A lot [1] of "tech ignorance" isn't actually tech ignorance, but people who have for one reason or another simply decided they can't.

[1]: And as I've come to learn the Internet's ability to misread things over the years, let me note that had I meant to say "all of", I would have. There are some who have decided they won't, for instance, and that's different, along with all sorts of other special cases. But I know a lot of people in my life who can't use tech because of what is basically a self-fulfilling prophecy.

There's also the "stacked problem" thing.

Most problems we encounter in tech have multiple layers of problem-solving: we're installing this, when that goes wrong. To fix that we discover that we need to change this other thing. Changing that other thing means the jobbie over there breaks. Fixing that involves installing a widget over here, and so on. When you reach the end of the chain, and this fix means that thing works, which means the other thing suddenly springs into life, and so on up, is a great feeling.

I've discovered that some people can only do this one or two layers deep: as soon as this fix depends on that, which depends on the other... they give up because it's "too hard"

Everyone I know with "an aptitude for tech" is pretty comfortable going at least five layers deep.

I know this has no relevance to the gender discussion from the OP. I just find it interesting ;)

I’d put the number at much higher than 25%. And not just “tech” knowhow, but knowhow about any subject, whether that is archaeology, law, clothing production, journalism, astrophysics, or web programming.

Schools are in general pretty bad at teaching people that everyone is pretty smart, brains are incredibly plastic, and you personally can learn any topic and take up any field you put your mind to, and make a positive contribution, just by trying. For some fields getting to the cutting edge might take 10 years of intense study, and having a meaningful career might take credentials, but usually it’s possible to make some contribution much earlier than that.

I have some friends who are willing to let themselves be curious about a topic, and just dive in and start trying stuff, and they usually can get incredibly far in a short amount of time (months), and come up with new ideas that have not been tried before, often surprising and impressing the “experts”. And other friends who are outright terrified of anything that seems confusing to a layman at first glance, and never try anything they aren’t already good at. For the most part schools rarely pushed the latter group to break out of their cocoons, and often explicitly held the former group back.

Yes, that's basically how I started my tech career.

Honestly I think it just means that they're smart. My girlfriend in college didn't remotely fit any tech stereotypes, but when she saw how much more functional my Linux laptop was than everyone else's, she spent a day and set up Linux for herself. We're still friends, and ten years later she's still happily using desktop Linux and grumbles to.me on the rare occasion she needs to run a windows VM for some specialty software.

The idea that being tech savvy requires lots of hobbyist time investment and a deep interest in the topic is insane, like saying that being a good driver requires being independently interested in cars as a hobby.

To a large degree, I think that Apple's marketing and the rest of the industry following (cf Google's shift in product design and focus six years ago) shoulders a big chunk of the blame. Endemic short term thinking in the form of only considering how easy to use something is in the first ten seconds has led to an entire generation of computer users quarantined into a tiny fraction of what their devices can do and how well they can fit their needs. (For example, my dad is _also_ on Linux, and he has barely managed to figure out copy and paste. Windows is simply too buggy and difficult an OS for users as novice as he is)

You're still describing just a portion of the population, at best. Yes, your point about the myths is fair. But even with those myths dispelled, there's going to be at least XX% of the population that struggles with or is unwilling to put in that work.

Think about other super important areas of life like finances and health. Perfectly capable, developed, functional adults still routinely neglect these things because they don't want to 'deal with' the mental overhead of 'figuring it out'.

As long as this population remains, there will be a market for solutions that offload some of the 'work'.

> Think about other super important areas of life like finances and health. Perfectly capable, developed, functional adults still routinely neglect these things because they don't want to 'deal with' the mental overhead of 'figuring it out'.

Not sure these are great examples. There is a LOT of good self-learning information out there about computers and tech. One could not know anything about Linux, study online references, experiment a little, and become competent. And you can always find a Linux nerd to give you advice and help. Contrast:

(Personal) Finance:

Most investing information on the net will not produce any kind of outsized returns, and quite a bit of it are scams and plain bad advice. You're not going to become rich by following r/PersonalFinance. And unlike tech, where a bad experiment means you need to wipe the hard drive and try again, a bad investing experiment can lose you money. And all those financial advisors out there? LOL, they're crooked as a bag of snakes and are primarily out to milk you.

Health and fitness:

Health is even more of a shit show. Good luck finding any consistent reliable information through self-study. This good for you. Now it's bad for you. This causes cancer. Now we know it doesn't. Now it does again. Every month there's a new diet fad. Online, quackery is the rule rather than the exception. Top 100 search results are going to be weight loss spam. And your doctor? LOL, he just wants to charge you for repeated visits and sell you whatever pill he's being incentivized to push this month.

I don't think it's about people not wanting to deal with the mental overhead of figuring it out. It's really a challenge to figure out and sort good from bad information.

Honestly I just think it means that this stuff really isn't all that difficult. I mean, sure, the first person that figured it out and posted a "how to" blog article is usually pretty smart (or at least a domain expert) but it really doesn't take much intelligence to follow the steps in an article posted online.

I think many of us overestimate our own intelligence just because we have worked with computers our whole lives. The rest of the world caught up with us circa 2010 and technical proficiency (and even basic development skills) are table stakes. Hell, they teach machine learning in high school these days.

Everyone is tech savvy these days. It's no longer a differentiator unless you gain some specialized knowledge and keep it current.

> Honestly I just think it means that this stuff really isn't all that difficult.

I mean, I agree. I don't personally think this stuff is difficult; "smart" in this case can be in opposition to either "too irrational to spend the time on high ROI computer literacy" or "unintelligent enough that the ROI _isn't_ worth it". I really don't think that the latter is true of most people, but that's the excuse people often give for making intentionally uninformed personal computing decisions.

> I think many of us overestimate our own intelligence just because we have worked with computers our whole lives.

Yea, this is definitely not what I'm saying. Frankly, I don't think you have to be all that smart to be an engineer, let alone computer literate.

> cf Google's shift in product design and focus six years ago

I haven't heard of it. What was it about?

Personally, I wouldn't say this is necessarily a strange approach. In fact, I'd say it may support my own hypothesis about tech knowhow and what not.

Namely, that it's not generally about some people being more 'inclined to it' or 'skilled' or 'intelligent' in some vague sense, but simply about whether it's necessary for somehow to be tech savvy in their situation.

It's like learning to code. Many people could do it, especially if they put their mind to it.

But for many people, they don't because there's no pressing reason them for them to know how to program. If they had an idea or pet project which needed them to make an app for it... well they may end up learning a hell of alot faster.

That's just my opinion on why this could have come about anyway.

I hated CS classes in HS and my first two years of college. Couldn't understand what learning about pointers and OO would let me do because all the assignments in the classes were so obviously stupid toy problems that had no real-world application.

Ended up getting into it due to a upper-level undergrad Math class where I realized if I dusted off those old skills I could write programs to help me with the math much more effectively than Excel or a calculator or such.

It isn't, right.

I think the point is, that high-tech like computers are more omnipresent now than they were in the past.

So back in the days, only "nerds" were inclined to get to know it inside out, because they liked it and thought it was cool etc.

You could get along in other fields of work without much in depth knowledge.

But today, with the rise of smartphones and the Internet, this kind of technology has a much higher direct impact on our life. So people who would be smart enough but didn't care before are now forced to do such things. They could have done it back in the days, but they simply didn't care.

Everyone has all of the world's knowledge at their fingertips, the hard part is asking the right questions.

This is only surprising for some subset of the 'tech crowd' who like to presume in a very self serving way everyone else is an 'idiot' and they are 'smart'.

The vast majority of human beings have innate intelligence and a large proportion are educated or highly educated and can get things done if required.

But no one is going to mess around with tech unless it is their core thing or a personal interest just like no techie is going to try to understand sales and marketing out of the blue.

Some people are also lazy and 'encourage' their tech friends and relatives by playing dumb and talking them up to get work done.

The let phone get real old and then buying great new and playing with it a lot would describe me too. I am female programmer.

I feel guilt when buying things like that to play with if I don't really need them. It is just how I was raised and it stayed with me.

Yes, my friend said something like that. Her father told her if she wants to do something she should do it right or leave it be, lol.

My girlfriend is rather practical with this kind of stuff.

She works as a marketeer and if she needs some coding, she reads stuff about it online and does it herself if it's something you can learn in under a day.

Also, she was rather poor as child, so she likes to keep things she paid for longer than the manufacturers want her too.

Tbh, neither of those tasks actually require much understanding to perform; the ability to google things, and a decent attention span is more than sufficient. Both tasks have well guided tours, and you just can mostly get by just c&p'ing any errors into gooogle.

However, I've met a lot of people, even in tech, who can't imagine using google for more than the simplest query, and refuse to read anything longer than a paragraph unless absolutely necessary.

I'm currently of the opinion that the "tech-illiterate" mostly consist of those who almost actively don't want to have to solve the problem themselves.

This is also enforced by the opinion that the majority of the "tech" hobby isn't difficult, and doesnt require much intelligence at all; its mostly manual labour, but on the computer.

There are youtube videos and guides online, if children can get things going anyone can. Most people are not incapable, they just don't want to bother.