Never trust a Doctor on how easy it is to use Linux

I recently read a positive review of Linux by a man who said he was a doctor, not a programmer, and that he found Linux very easy to set up and use.

That's great, but you have to take recommendations like that with a grain of salt. I'm not a doctor, but three of my siblings-in-law are doctors, and a fourth is a nurse, and one thing I've noticed is that medical professionals are extremely good at following technical directions. I think it's a skill that comes from how medicine is practiced -- you diagnose the patient, then apply a recommended treatment. Just like debugging a computer problem!

Maintaining Linux, like maintaining a patient's health, requires researching a scattered body of knowledge and deciding how to apply a mass of conflicting advice. Both tasks reward careful study, and exact replication of the recommended treatment. For doctors this way of working is second nature, but I don't think laymen will find it so easy.

Comments

Stoffie said…
I like your point about how similar certain processes are, even though they occur in different disciplines. Like you say, diagnosing a patient, and diagnosing a technical pc problem, are both the same 'task' (of 'diagnosing' something), but just applied in two different situations. A bit like re-using the same program, but using different data ... something like that. (Actually quite a bit of research has been done along these lines.)

Anyway, just to drop off a comment and to say thanks for an informative blog!
May 6, 2008 at 8:46 PM
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