So for context, she is a lawmaker and government in my country is proposing a law to make all things crypto illegal, so she asked for my professional opinion and after I wrote it up, the really wanted to dominate it, as, like myself, she can’t bring herself to speak publicly about something she does not understand at some level.
I was very proud of both her and myself.
If you have to build up "what the hell is an EUV machine?" from first principles, you are going to lose them somewhere around linear algebra.
If something seems difficult to explain, even with analogies, consider if you should abstract the concern away and say something handwavy like "that's wizard crap, don't worry about it. Just call me if this light turns red."
Some just don't have enough "room" to learn new things without sufficient motivation. Day-to-day life-- anxiety, responsibilities, etc. --all work to cloud working memory even when the subject seems to be at rest and/or distracted by something else.
Years and years of not having a trusted system (ala GTD) in place to get all of this out can create an extremely-frazzled old person. My mother is unfortunately like this.
Your expectations of where the other persons baseline knowledge is will always be off and your assumptions of what is “common knowledge” will be wrong.
A lot of things are also just hard to explain. Many things we know have been learnt by experience - we may not actually know the underlying logic or reasons for doing something - we just know that it’s what you have to do.
Explaining these things to someone who has not gone through the experience is very difficult.
Then again they are 60+ and worked with computers. I remember my mother having a Windows NT laptop in the early 00s for example.
About four people in their later 30s, and one person in their upper 70s.
Honestly, I thought it would be an easier sell, being in person and all, and being well-known as a tech person. I wasn't pushy at all. But it was impossible.
The first several times I focused on Matrix/Element, since that is mainly what my interest was in offering accounts-- as a comms channel other than email or text/iMessage for us, to increase our dialog.
In one conversation, I tried heavy use of analogy. Have you heard of newer A, B, C, D messengers, there's a gap for the way people used to use the old E, F, G messengers.
I described, accurately I think, my intended use case for us, for discussion of things that really do not arise to the formality of email, nor to the urgency of a notification for text/iMessage. For links we find to share, or topics to discuss, etc. To manage notifications appropriately. To only check or respond when there happens to be time or interest.
I know nothing is secure. But the idea is also somewhat, this service is at least not provided/managed by the ISP or by now pretty widely known demonstrably bad actors in tech, I won't name names.
People actually think tech co's don't spy on content. One person in gov said, that even they would need a warrant. Yeah, right. That's their understanding, though. (I mentioned targeted advertising. I did not bring up so-called AI.)
Mostly met with resistance:
- I don't message (older person); although, they check their phone regularly, and they do email
- I don't have time--pretty much everyone else
That was, yeah, sort of a wakeup call, but not really.
Regular people really have no interest in (philosophically, ideologically, or marginally) better tech, and regular people really have no time at all in general for thinking about just about anything.
Back to the battlestations for some of us. (For what, one is occasionally brought to wonder.)