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wedrifid comments on The fallacy of work-life compartmentalization - Less Wrong
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Not that this matters, but one of my father's friends frequently asks me for computer help. He was rebooting because he was "missing emails". He was also opening the wrong program (he uses webmail in a browser, but was opening outlook express) in order to find them. For some reason, he thought that "they" had changed the interface on him, and didn't realize he was clicking on the wrong icon.
I stand corrected!
"Real users would never do that" is a phrase of art among professional software testers, and they use it with heavy irony. For vastly more values of that than you care to imagine, there are real users who in fact not only do it, but expect it to work.
I still don't understand how a normally smart person's inability to work with a computer is parallel to the way rational people operate irrationally in the work place. The latter, I agree, is an example of compartmentalization, as people prioritize their personal life to the extent that they are willing to rationalize operating in a lousy office environment to support their lifestyle. But I don't think people are compartmentalizing when they can't understand computers--I think they simply aren't familiar with the system. If it was compartmentalization you wouldn't see computer literacy increase with familiarity--which you do. And you wouldn't see people's ability to become more literate increase when the percentage of their life in which they have been exposed to computers increases--which you also do.
Your other example about your mathematician father doesn't clarify things for me either. It actually seems like a non sequitur.
Wikipedia Entry for Compartmentalization
I don't interpret your thoughts on work-life compartmentalization to be a criticism--so I don't think you need to set it up with an example to soften the blow, especially since it's confusing (to me at least) how your example logically supports the second half of your post.
Let me know if I'm misinterpreting something.
The idea I'm trying to get at is "failure to apply insight across domains". Scientists, including mathematicians, gain in the domain of science insights such as "formulating experiments that provide evidence for hypotheses", or "observing regularities in behaviour", or "forming conceptual models which explain phenomena".
When these scientists, faced with a computer, tell me that they have "tried" various random things and appear unable to express these "tryings" in the language of experimentation and regularities, I come to the conclusion that they are failing to transport these insights from the domain of science into the domain of "dealing with the goddam computer". Hence the quote about people's brains switching off.
This generalizes somewhat from trained scientists to "smart" people in general, if you allow that by "smart" we often mean people who use insights of the same sorts that scientists use: logic, deduction, and so on.