Why Nobody Reads the Manual
There’s a drawer in almost every household that contains at least one manual nobody has read. It sits there in its plastic sleeve, with its numbered diagrams and its safety warnings printed in six languages, radiating the quiet authority of something both important and completely ignored. This isn’t laziness. It’s something much more interesting than laziness. The manual assumes a model of learning that goes roughly like this: first you read, then you understand, then you do. It’s sequential and clean. It has the logic of a recipe. Step one, step two, step three. If you follow the instructions, nothing goes wrong. ...