Dear Francois,

Your response to Terry puzzles me. Jaime Henriquez posted a problematic
rant. For Terry to suggest that within the Henriquez rant lay a good PhD
on superstitious behavior made little sense. Henriquez attributed
motives and beliefs to users by observing physical actions without
enquiring into the reasoning behind such actions. That’s a bit like
those charming science fiction stories in which a visitor from Cygnus
517 observes the actions of human beings while describing them in the
language of religious ritual or Cygnean mating dances or some trope that
leads us to reflect on how easily we can mistake sensible daily action
for something exotic. If Henriquez is foolish enough to go on a Cygnus
517 rant by attributing superstitious motives to puzzled computer users,
that’s his problem. When a member of our research community suggests
that this is the beginning of a PhD, it’s our problem. Thus Gunnar’s
reaction and my own.

The rant failed to account for such possibilities as anxiety, fear, or
the simple inability to get comfortable with the equipment or the
interface. Being a superstitious fellow myself, I have often experienced
these problems with computers that use an operating system I will not
name and different software applications from many firms. Most of us
have seen the behaviors that Henriquez describes. Those of us who have
studied human behavior in its many forms can account for these behaviors
in ways other than superstition.

While one can argue that behaviors “resulting from ignorance, [or]
fear of the unknown” fit a partial definition of superstition, I’d
expect anyone who designs artifacts, processes, or systems for human use
to be more reflective, especially given the common associations to the
term superstition.

Merriam-Webster’s defines supersitition as: “1 a: a belief or
practice resulting from ignorance, fear of the unknown, trust in magic
or chance, or a false conception of causation  b:  an irrational abject
attitude of mind toward the supernatural, nature, or God resulting from
superstition. 2: a notion maintained despite evidence to the
contrary.”

When people use new tools, they normally don’t maintain ill-informed
notions once they have had a chance to see, learn, and understand how to
use the tool. They may remain anxious or have difficulties – but this
is not superstition. People often have difficulties with equipment when
techies like Henriquez make assertions and set up systems – or repair
them – without explaining what they’ve done, or why, and without
demonstrating or teaching people how to make things work in a way that
users can understand. Tool use and system use is highly situational.
There are gradations of learning, many located within other ranges of
learning, knowledge, and experience. This can make it difficult to teach
other people what we ourselves know about complex equipment involving
multiple systems, interfaces, and software operating together. But
that’s not what Henriquez was doing. He was on a rant condemning
superstitious behavior without actually speaking with users to
understand why they behave as they do.

My wife Ditte can do all sorts of things that I can’t do. She was a
skilled executive and manager before we moved to Australia. She is a
psychotherapist and a theologian. She knows how to fix many kinds of
equipment I can’t handle and she does all our household repairs. She
also knows how to plan and manage architectural renovations and
restorations – she has done this for buildings ranging from a
century-old house on the Oslo Fjord to the thousand-year-old cathedral
complex in Lund. Nevertheless, computers make her nervous. She can
explain her anxieties, and even with a user-friendly Mac, she struggles.
I can’t always explain things well enough to help. Even so, I do not
attribute this to superstition. Even though some of her behaviors
resemble the behaviors in Henriquez’s rant, the attributions he loads
on anxious users just don’t fit. Given that a doctoral thesis requires
real observation, the thesis could just as well address the inability of
techies to understand the people who use the tools they create.

Your reply to Terry conflates sociology, history, historical sociology,
social history, cultural anthropology, economics, and several other
fields into an all-encompassing explanation of mythology and
socio-technical superstition.

Human societies of all kinds build myths and superstitions. From loose
and relatively democratic wandering peoples to highly complex feudal
states, from primitive agrarian societies to advanced technical
societies, all have their myths and superstitions, and not all of these
are forced on people by an elite. You’ve essentially described all
human history and all human cultures as being of one quality, kind, and
nature. Human beings have physical and neurological qualities that occur
across all cultures. In contrast, those qualities arising from culture,
history, social and psychological conditions differ greatly.

Any account of social psychology based primarily on technical and
economic determinism leaves gaps, big ones. Things are far more complex
than this. I find it difficult to accept any account of an
“ever-lasting divide” in the way this paragraph describes it, nor
of things we all supposedly know. I do know something about the Middle
Ages and feudal society, and while I understand what you’re writing,
this description is to the centuries-long development of the
multi-dimensional Middle Ages as a shadow theater is to motion pictures,
especially where it comes to the complex. You’ve boiled the
alternately competing, cooperating, and conflicting roles of the church,
the clergy, the administrative apparatus of the fledgling European
states, the nobility, and the commons in one big pot, and with these,
the several roles of the universities and the professions.

Without going point by point to suggest my view of where you might want
to deepen your analysis, I want to say you’ve raised interesting
issues here that contain valid details. Even so, they do not come
together in an explanatory account.

But I make this statement in a very specific context. This is not a
seminar on the social history of the European middle ages, nor of the
very different era in China or the still different development of myth
or superstition in a hundred other cultures. This is a list with a focus
on design research.

On this list, Terry referred to a silly rant as the basis of a PhD
thesis. I said then and say now, “Come on!” Terry is widely
respected as an extraordinarily sharp polymath. I enjoy Terry’s
iconoclasm and willingness to challenge most conventions. But Terry and
I differ on how much you can address to engineering and algorithms, and
I suspect that Terry has been led astray by the style of the Henriquez
rant. Henriquez seems to believe that everyone ought to do things as he
does – and he seems to believe that if it works for highly skilled
techies, it ought to work for the rest of us. This is not my view of
things. If one is as ill-inzformed on human behavior as Henriquez seems
to be, I can’t see why we should attend to his rant nor make it the
starting point of any serious research project.

Yours,

Ken

Professor Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished
Professor | Dean, Faculty of Design | Swinburne University of Technology
| Melbourne, Australia | [log in to unmask] | Ph: +61 3 9214 6078 |
Faculty www.swinburne.edu.au/design

--

Francois Nsenga wrote:

—snip—

In a socio-psychological perspective, the core of the issue is the ever
lasting divide in human societies the world over, between the ruling
elite and the rest of the ruled population. As we all know, this kind of
human relationship is based on the former mystifying the latter as a
means to efficiently ‘perform’ the ruling; i.e. having this
‘domination’ easily and benevolently accepted by the
‘populace’. By all means, both soft and if needed harsh ones,
the elite makes its myths strongly believed by the ruled, to the point
that the entire ways of life of every individual are conducted along the
diktat of those myths. Thus completely mystified, individuals become
superstitious, i.e. life conduct not based on ‘objective’, pristine
and imperative local chemo-physical environmental conditions. And
superstitions hold as long as myths of a particular elite groups hold.
The elite changes, superstitions change respectively.

Among many world cases of such a mystification by the elite, here in
West we all are daily experiencing what is known as “clericalism”,
the medieval scholastic and the current scientific (1).

—snip—