by beeflet | 2025-09-01 18:41:22+00:00
>And the solution to cavities is to increase self-dentistry literacy?

This is what is done, in practice. You teach people at a young age how to take care of their own teeth and gums. The majority of the problem is preventative, you don't outsource the management of your health to some monopoly. And it's not unimaginable that the average person would have the ability to fill a cavity or something. If anything, dentistry is less archaic than computer software, the reason it's a profession is a more a matter of skill.

>The solution to a bridge collapsing is to increase civil engineering literacy? The solution to a plane crash caused by a cracked turbine blade is to increase casual aerospace engineering literacy?

I think that the difference in this situation is that anyone can play a role auditing and changing computer software they use (and recognize malware vs well built open software), but not everyone gets to build the bridge that everyone uses.

You might say that a lot of the world's software right now exists in the form of services, and you would be right. The goal is to make a world in which people are less dependent on centralized services. I think that most programmers here get paid to think in terms of client-server architecture instead of directly create useful software which is harder to monetize.

>When people were coming up with the idea of computer literacy being ubiquitous like math, they meant math like addition and subtraction. To make the kind of impact that "free/libre" advocates want the everyday Joe to be responsible for, Joes need to know the CS equivalents of perturbation theory and how to solve partial differential equations.

Not really, I think most computer software is a lot simpler than that. And I also generally don't believe that complex topics are inaccessible to most people. If it's the kind of information you learn about in college, then you just have to read textbooks and digest the information. Thanks to the internet, information on most topics are pretty accessible. I don't think there is some sort of "IQ" cap on the vast majority of topics, and you can pretty much learn anything as long as you are reasonably intelligent and motivated.

I think you are stuck in this "consumer vs producer" mentality with regards to technology, where some part of the population is destined to be drooling serfs and we just have to design everything to accommodate them. I take the opposite stance, which is that people are generally capable of learning and adapting to a far wider range of challenging environments than exist in modern society, and that those who can't are a small minority that should be culled anyways.

It was only a couple of decades ago that access to computers was limited to the elite few who understood computers, and society seemed to hum along fine back then.

With increasing automation and access to information, you would think that people would have more time and info to study and become knowledgeable on a wider range of topics. Instead, they are even busier working fake jobs and competing in zero-sum arenas. Instead of setting lower standards for competence in society, why not increase standards and elevate the agency of the common man?