Comment by alan-kay
5 years ago
This is an old original post, but it still worries me.
Consider: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switched-mode_power_supply
To find this requires a combination of a few keystrokes and button pushes plus an "outlook" (rather than "inlook") attitude.
Instead, as with so many discussions in a so-called "CS" community, we find something like adolescents trying to BS each other by presenting their mere opinions as facts.
Come on! Please!
Long ago my research community put in a lot of work to make it easy to deal with many simple questions, but we didn't reckon with the sheer inwardness of so many end-users. A similar problem is that most people in CS have no idea what Doug Engelbart really did, yet just typing his name into Google will provide great info in just the first few hits.
How can the current community repair itself and start trying to become a real field again?
it is the paradox of the information era: society has never had such easy and immediate access to the limits of human knowledge, and at the same time, society can’t agree on whether the earth is spherical, vaccines work, or if demonstrably corrupt politicians are really that bad.