>I doubt that the likelihood that your average person needs to know the difference between manslaughter and murder is close to the likelihood for being in the sort of situation being discussed here.
Okay, what about if you want to renovate your house? Is the bureaucracy utterly out of control because you can't legally make modifications to your house without getting a permit from the city? Most people know they have to get a permit, and maybe that they need to go to city hall to get it, but good luck getting a permit without asking someone working there or looking it up the internet.
That’s moving the goalposts, not knowing it’s possible to do something is quite different than needing to look up how to do something.
I suspect the vast majority of people aren’t going to add a major addition to their house without having someone to do the work who knows about permits, or actually knowing about it themselves. It’s like complaining about how few people know seamanship rules when most people don’t own or operate a boat.
> That’s moving the goalposts, not knowing it’s possible to do something is quite different than needing to look up how to do something.
In this day and age, is there a meaningful difference between those two? If someone got a call from a debt collector for a debt they weren't responsible for, don't you think they'd know to "look up how to do something"?
Yes absolutely, the concept you are missing is "culture" - the majority of knowledge a "citizen" or "consumer" is taught is either picked up through cultural context (parents, TV, books, online articles), or through a common cultural ritual (often school, maybe some game).
You won't even know what to search for if you don't know its something you can do - heck, given certain cultural contexts, you won't even know you can search for "what to do when" X happens.
And that goes back to the earlier point - unless your problem is something low-hanging on WikiHow, commercial/legal construct is such that you probably won't find the answer to your problem, and end up having to "hire an expert", assuming you have the money to do so. So, anti-patterns, yes, absolutely.
By now, your claims have become so weakened that they no longer have any relevance to the original issue, which is whether there is a better way than the current method for handling the problem of loans fraudulently acquired through identity theft.
Yes, many people don’t even read the manual when they can’t get something to work. Expecting everyone to look up how to solve problems they can seemingly ignore is simply not how many people are wired.
Okay, what about if you want to renovate your house? Is the bureaucracy utterly out of control because you can't legally make modifications to your house without getting a permit from the city? Most people know they have to get a permit, and maybe that they need to go to city hall to get it, but good luck getting a permit without asking someone working there or looking it up the internet.