Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.
Over and over again financial experts and wonkish talking heads endeavor to explain these mysterious 'toxic' financial instruments to us lay folk. Over and over they ignobly fail because we all know that no one understands credit default obligations and derivatives except perhaps Mr. Buffett and the computers who created them.
Well my wife always says to me and I think it's true it's very difficult for us to understand the Elizabethan understanding and enjoyment and perception of form as it is to say... it would be for them to understand computers or going to the moon or something.
People don't understand computers. Computers are magical boxes that do things. People believe what computers tell them.
Eventually I believe current attempts to understand the mind by analogy with man-made computers that can perform superbly some of the same external tasks as conscious beings will be recognized as a gigantic waste of time.
Computers are scary. They're nightmares to fix lose our stuff and on occasion they crash producing the blue screen of death. Steve Jobs knew this. He knew that computers were bulky and hernia-inducing and Darth Vader black. He understood the value of declarative design.
Computers have become more friendly understandable and lots of years and thought have been put into developing software to convince people that they want and need a computer.
People who are more than casually interested in computers should have at least some idea of what the underlying hardware is like. Otherwise the programs they write will be pretty weird.
The guy who knows about computers is the last person you want to have creating documentation for people who don't understand computers.
I understand that computers which I once believed to be but a hermaphrodite typewriter-cum-filing cabinet offer the cyber literate increased ability to communicate. I do not think this is altogether a bad thing however it may appear on the surface.