It's funny you say that, I once figured out a problem for someone by diagnosing an error message with C++ templates. Wizardry! However, the "base" of the error message looked roughly like

error: unknown type "boost::python::specify_a_return_value_policy_to_wrap_functions_returning<Foo>"

Cryptic, right? It turns out he needed to specify a return value policy in order to wrap a function returning Foo. All I did for him was scan past junk visually looking for anything readable or the word "error".

I usually start with Google :)

I have observed similar behavior in others. Only I called it 'blackboxing', for lack of a better word. I think this might actually be a slightly better term than 'learned blankness', so I hereby submit it for consideration. It's borrowed from the software engineering idea of a black box abstraction.

People tend to create conceptual black boxes around certain processes, which they are remarkably reluctant to look within and explore, even when something does go wrong. This is what seems to have happened with the dishwasher incident. The dishwasher was treated as a black box. Its input was dirty dishes, its output was clean ones. When it malfunctioned, it was hard to see it as anything else. The black box was broken.

Of course, engineers and programmers often go out of their way to design highly opaque black boxes, so it's not surprising that we fall victim to this behavior. This is often said to be done in the name of simplicity (the 'user' is treated as an inept, lazy moron), but I think an additional, more surreptitious reason, is to keep profit margins high. Throwing out a broken dishwasher and buying a new one is far more profitable to a manufacturer than making it easy for the users to pick it apart and fix it themselves.

The open source movement is one of the few prominent exceptions to this that I know of.

That's something that I think laypeople never realize about computer science - it's all really simple things, but combined together at such a scale and pace that in a few decades we've done the equivalent of building a cat from scratch out of DNA. Big complex things really can be built out of extremely simple parts, and we're doing it all the time, but for a lot of people our technology is indistinguishable from magic.

-- wtallis

That is brilliant, I'm taking that one. It's refreshing to see an alternative to the typical belligerently optimistic 'motivational' quotes that deny the rather significant influence of chance.

The Boy Who Cried Wolf is a pretty good example of updating on new information, I guess.

But it seems sort of pointless to attempt to find old stories that show the superiority of a supposedly new way of thinking. If the way of thinking is so new, then why should we expect to find stories about it? And if we do, what does that say about the superiority of the method (that is, that it was known N years ago but didn't take over the world)? Perhaps this is too cynical?

I like doing math that involves measuring the lengths of numbers written out on the page—which is really just a way of loosely estimating log_10 x. It works, but it feels so wrong.

• Randall Munroe

It has been said that the past is a foreign country. Well, it is certainly inhabited by foreigners, people whose mindset was shaped by circumstances we shy from remembering. The mother of three children who gave birth eight times. The father of four children, the last of whom cost him his wife. Our minds are largely free of such horrors, and not inured to that kind of suffering. That is the progress of technology. That is what is improving the human race.

It is a long, long ladder, and sometimes we slip, but we've never actually fallen. That is our progress.

• Derleth on Hacker News.

Sometimes I still marvel about how in most time-travel stories nobody thinks of this.

The alternate way of computing this is to not actually discard the future, but to split it off to a separate timeline so that you now have two simulations: one that proceeds normally aside for the time-traveler having disappeared from the world, and one that's been restarted from an earlier date with the addition of the time traveler. Of course, this has its own moral dilemmas as well - such as the fact that you're as good as dead for your loved ones in the timeline that you just left - but generally smaller than erasing a universe entirely.