It's likely that he will borrow a mental model from another field. He might try to treat the computer like a pet.
I think...this might actually be a possible mechanism behind really dumb computer users. I'll have to keep it in mind when dealing with them in future.
Comparing to Achmiz above:
Most people don't have mental models.
Both of these feel intuitively right to me, and lead me to suspect the following: A sufficiently bad model is indistinguishable from no model at all. It reminds me of the post on chaotic inversions.
Both of these feel intuitively right to me, and lead me to suspect the following: A sufficiently bad model is indistinguishable from no model at all.
Mental models are the basis of human thinking. Take original cargo cultists. They had a really bad model of why cargo was dropped on their island. On the other hand they used that model to do really dumb things.
A while ago I was reading a book about mental models. It investigates how people deal with the question: "You throw a steel ball against the floor and it bounches back. Where does the energy tha...
r/Fitness does a weekly "Moronic Monday", a judgment-free thread where people can ask questions that they would ordinarily feel embarrassed for not knowing the answer to. I thought this seemed like a useful thing to have here - after all, the concepts discussed on LessWrong are probably at least a little harder to grasp than those of weightlifting. Plus, I have a few stupid questions of my own, so it doesn't seem unreasonable that other people might as well.