"Urgent Wind Chill Advisory"

Jose writes:

It is extremely difficult to get an answer about how something works
these days. However, it's very easy to find out how to work it. People
want to be told what button to push. They don't want to know what
happens when they push it. I don't know what came first, but I find
very few people who even see a problem.

In a technologically advanced state, inevitably the percentage of the
population that knows how technologies work will shrink, whereas the
percentage of the population that uses those technologies regularly will
increase. Thus, the more advanced the state, the more people you have who
regularly use technologies they don't understand.

When people lived in caves, it's likely that everyone understood all the
technologies he had to use, or nearly so. Today, almost nobody understands
even a fraction of the technology that he uses each day, and indeed we all
depend on technologies the workings of which we don't fully understand.

The problem, then, arises whenever someone must step outside the very small
envelope of interactions with a technology for which he is competent. We all
know how to push buttons on a telephone to make a telephone call (the standard
envelope), but how many of us know what to do if the buttons don't work as
expected.

Aviation is just one of many high-tech domains in which there are many who
understand the standard envelope while not mastering the extended envelope;
and I'm talking pilots here, not passengers.

I notice this in discussions on this group. Most pilots (like most people in
general) learn by rote, because this allows people to make use of technologies
that they wouldn't be able to easily understand if they had to study the
fundamental theory. This is why, for example, pilots here will insist that
trim is used to relieve control pressures, and reject any other explanation of
trim, even when the other explanations are precisely equivalent to their own.
They learned the control-pressure explanation by rote, and they don't actually
understand the theory behind trim, so they reject any explanation that doesn't
correspond to what they were taught. Only someone who learned the actual
theory will recognize multiple explanations as being mutually equivalent, and
such people are rare. Training programs for complex activities typically
emphasize rote learning, in order to keep those activities accessible to
people with a wide range of intelligence levels. Forcing everyone to learn
theory would exclude a significant chunk of trainees who might have trouble
grasping abstract theory as opposed to a cookbook, rote approach to tasks.

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