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gwern comments on Rationality Quotes September 2011 - Less Wrong
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He was the guy who thought that people were too dumb to operate a two-button mouse. It's not that the networks conspired to dumb us down, and it's not that people want something exactly this dumb, but it's that those folks in control at the networks, much like Jobs himself, tend to make systematic errors such as believing themselves to be higher above the masses than is actually the case. Sometimes that helps to counter the invalid belief that people will really want to waste a lot of effort on your creation.
And many of his other simplifications were complete successes and why he died a universally-beloved & beatified billionaire.
Seems like a bit of an exaggeration. Almost universally respected, sure.
Yep. Respected and admired at a distance, certainly. But a lot of people who knew him personally tend to describe him as a manipulative jerk.
Which has little to do with how he & his simplifications were remembered by scores of millions of Americans. Don't you remember when he died, all the news coverage and blog posts and comments? It made me sick.
Meh, I thought of him as a brilliant but heavy-handed and condescending jerk long before I heard of his health problems. I refused to help my family and friends with iTunes (bad for my blood pressure) and anything Mac. My line was: if it "just works" for you, great, if not, you are SOL. Your iPod does not sync? Sorry, I don't want to hear about any device that does not allow straight file copying.
Heh. I have been known to engage in "What do you mean you are having problems? <blink> That's impossible, there's the Apple guarantee It Just Works (tm) (r) <blink> <blink>" :-D
Actually, no, I don't remember because I didn't read them. I'm particular about the the kind of pollution I allow to contaminate my mind :-)
Anyway, we seem to agree. One of the interesting things about Jobs was the distance between his private self and his public mask and public image.
I am too, but I pay attention to media coverage to understand what the general population thinks so I don't get too trapped in my high-tech high-IQ bubble and wind up saying deeply wrong things like private_messaging's claim that "Jobs's one-button mice failed so ordinary people really are smart!"
Yeah, that's so totally what I claimed. Not. My point is that a lot of people overestimate how much smarter they are than ordinary people, and so they think ordinary people a lot dumber than ordinary people really are.
Also, the networks operate under the assumption that less intelligent people are more influenced by advertising, and therefore, the content is not even geared at the average joe, but at the below-average joe.
Free free to elaborate how your one-button mouse example and all Jobs's other successes match what you are claiming here about Jobs being a person who underestimated ordinary people's intelligence. (If Jobs went broke underestimating ordinary people's intelligence, then may heaven send me a comparable bankruptcy as soon as possible.)
"No one in this world, so far as I know-and I have searched the record for years, and employed agents to help me-has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people." -- H.L.Mencken
The original quote itself is a fairly good example - he assumes that the networks produce something which is exactly what people want, whereas the networks should, ideally, produce something which the people most influenced by the advertising want; a different, less intelligent demographic. If he was speaking truth in the quote, he had to have underestimated intelligence of the average people.
Secondarily, if you want to instead argue from the success, you need to outline how and why underestimation of intelligence would be inconsistent with the success. Clearly, all around more complicated user interfaces also enjoyed huge success. I even give an explanation in my comment - people also tend to massively over-estimate the willingness of users to waste cognitive effort on their creations.
As for what lessons we can learn from it, it is perhaps that underestimating the intelligence is relatively safe for a business, albeit many failed startups began from a failure to properly explore the reasons why an apparent opportunity exists, instead explaining it with the general stupidity of others.
edit: also, you could likewise wish for a comparable bankruptcy to some highly successful but rather overcomplicated operating system.