Tag: Training

My dog and his human

This is how he sleeps. With five pillows.

I use one. R uses three. I’ve always been on her case for using three pillows.

The boy has learnt from her, and then left her behind.

Then there’s me.

I’m not allowed, by R, to put dishes in the dishwasher. She has her method of placing the dishes, and I apparently mess it up.

I’ve been trained to rinse the dishes and place them on the kitchen top above the dishwasher. She puts them in later.

Last night I cleared the sink after dinner and placed the dishes above the dishwasher. Took me a moment to realise that she’s been in India for a couple of days, and I am allowed to put the dishes in while she’s away. My training has been thorough.

To confuse the anthropomorphizing further, my dog learns better than me, while I’m trained better than him!

Is Ctrl+Z handicapping us in the real world?

Has an easy undo feature trained us to work at high-speed but low focus?

When it’s always easy to undo and correct, there’s no reason to focus on getting things right, or even thinking things through before doing them.

Handwriting (or typing on a typewriter) a document meant being focused on the task because any mistakes meant ugly cross marks or rewriting the page.

Similarly, working with physical objects – in a carpentry class in college, or cooking a simple dish – required strong focus. A wrong cut in a wood slab meant a wasted slab or a hacked joint. A dish could end up overcooked or unsalted.

But when working on a computer, any errors due to a lack of attention can easily be rectified with a simple undo, removing the need for full focus in the moment.

As we (I) spend more of our time—work and leisure—on computers, we may have trained ourselves to expect the undo feature everywhere.

This mental training (‘all errors are undoable’) creeps into our non-computer activities and interactions. We may be forgetting to stay fully focused in the moment, to think ahead (before we speak/do), and thus may be becoming more inefficient/incapable than before.

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