this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2024
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Is your country the USA?
This is a way broader phenomenon than just the US, though granted the US educational system might skew things a bit in a negative direction versus most other supposedly "Developed" Nations.
IMHO, in general very few people have to really think things through in their life or work and most people can live life in what's pretty much an auto-pilot of habits most of which were picked up in childhood, teen and early adult years, and such people simply don't have any "training" on figuring complex things out by themselves and will have trouble understanding complex subjects.
Further, the instructions for advanced domain stuff (for example Medicine and some kinds of Tech) are often riddled with domain specific language that people without a broader vocabulary won't understand.
I call all the autopilot people "Listers" aka, they need a list of steps. If anything happens that the steps do not account for, they get stuck and cannot proceed.
I work in IT support and the number of times I've gotten a call from a lister who hit a random, benign dialog during a routine process, called me, and I only clicked "ok" to resolve the concern.... Well, it's too damn high.
The fact that we don't teach people critical thinking and problem solving in standard (and generally mandatory) education, is baffling to me. Education has become a list of things to memorize in order to pass.
Don’t get started on UI updates to their most used programs.