My parents and grandparents were this condescending to me. As well as my first-grade teacher.

Just the other day, Evangeline shocked me by picking up Louis Menand’s collection of essays “American Studies”—the actual book—and peering at its pages.

I was sure that this was some sort of pose, or a lark. It was impossible to imagine that she was actually reading it. But having picked it up, she then took the book outside and, as we put her brother in the car, stood with it open, in her hands, looking engrossed. She kept reading it in the car, until she finally put it down with a sigh.

I was reading National Geographic magazine in first grade. I constantly had to “prove” that I understood it to everyone, when in reality it was quite easy for me to understand. I think I typically understood more of it even then than the adults around me. Me reading “inappropriate” material in class was my first experience of getting into real trouble at school.

It was about that time that I realized school – at least for me – was a big batch of bullshit and stopped paying it any mind.

About the below, this comment is completely wrong.

Without fail, I am quicker at finding features and using software than any normal user even in software I’ve never used. And that’s because I’ve been doing it for over 30 years now and have seen just about every software context and interface there is.

At work, users often ask me about software they use every day and that I never use. Nine times out of 10, I am able to find what they need to in a few seconds in software that they’ve used for years and I have never even seen before.

My girlfriend can do the same thing, and it’s because she – like me – has been using computers since she was wee.

I really doubt whoever wrote that comment is truly experienced in IT or is a real power user. Probably one of those ersatz “power users” who thinks Windows 8 is the best thing since AOL and Microsoft Bob and who only learned to find his/her start menu a few months ago.

There’s a lot of them on sites like Ars, and many of them I suspect are paid Microsoft shills who show up whenever Windows 8 is mentioned, though that particular commenter is not actually a shill.

Microsoft, Canonical and Gnome are not alone in removing features that power users need to work from their OSes and interfaces. Apple is doing it, too.

It really has me worried about what people who actually know how to do things with their computers are going to manage in a few years. What will be left for them? I do a great deal of work on my computers, most of which simply cannot be done in a playtoy interface with all useful features relegated to the dust heap.

What sort of damn sense does it make to remove a feature from your desktop OS so that it can be like your tablet OS? That’s like tossing out your living room couch because it can’t fit in your car. It just makes no sense at all.

Nearly all content is created by people who actually know how to use their machines quite well and 100% need a powerful, configurable environment.

What are we supposed to do when everything of any use is taken away?

So many things that people do I just don’t understand. Things I can’t even imagine caring about, or even noticing. I read advice columns to try to understand humans because they are full of things like that.

So much of my life is me spent looking around with Marge Gunderson’s great closing bit from Fargo going through my head:

So that was Mrs. Lundegaard on the floor in there. And I guess that was your accomplice in the wood chipper. And those three people in Brainerd. And for what? For a little bit of money. There’s more to life than a little money, you know. Don’tcha know that? And here ya are, and it’s a beautiful day. Well. I just don’t understand it.

Except for me replace “money” with “nearly everything people do.”

The better you are at reasoning numerically, the more likely you are to let your political bias skew your quantitative reasoning.

I’m absolutely terrible at numerical reasoning — worse than many five-year-olds — so that must mean I am a frickin’ genius!

This might be part of the way to explaining or at least examining what I call engineeritis.

I don’t really appreciate how the article conflates numerical reasoning with intelligence, but that’s very common.

If you give me a numerical or strictly logic-based IQ test, I will score in the mildly mentally-retarded range, no matter how hard I try. If you give me a more word-based such test, I will score off the charts.

That’s why when I say that no amount or method of teaching me operational (rather than conceptual) math is likely to work.

And yet the quant types are always amazed when I can look at a huge mound of data, spend much less time doing anything with it, and get something out of it they never saw or ever could see.

This is a completely wrong explanation for why college education is so expensive now.

It speaks to the symptoms, not the causes.

The actual, real cause (at least the primary one) is that student loans became more widely available, sparking inflation and with it competition among schools. There are other factors, but that is by far the primary one.

Inflation in specific markets or in general is caused by an abundance of money. More money chasing roughly the same product (an education) means prices go up. Some of that money —  perhaps even most of it – gets channeled into less-than-useful avenues, just as McMansions did during the influx of easy loan money in the housing boom.

Those who don’t understand basic economics are doomed often to not understand much else.