Why Ask "Are You Sure?"

Joel Spolsky mentioned the question of why programmers bother having applications ask for confirmation from users before performing some task. He said that it seems to serve only one purpose; to make the user feel guilty.

The reasoning as I remember was that users, not being "computer people", don't know what to do when confronted with a confirmation. They don't care to know. They trust in the programmer...the "computer techie people"...to know what's best, so they just go ahead and confirm whatever it is that pops up.

So he said that the only reason to do it was to make them feel stupid. This way they confirm whatever it was that pops up, then find out it deleted something or did something they didn't mean to do, then know that they had the confirmation warning them not to do it and they said to do it anyway.

"Oh! I'm an idiot! I should have chosen something else!"

Personally I'm not sure that users feel stupid about making a mistake. They just blame the application, programmer, or "stupid computer". Maybe some feel like idiots, but I'm thinking they're not in the majority.

I hate those stupid confirmations. Users don't read confirmations or licenses or any of the "user friendly" crap that is thrown into Windows (do any tech people use the "friendly" control panel? I immediately switched to the old style while using XP).

I prefer having a straightforward set of tools that do what I want. Clear labeling for buttons, straightforward questions and queries that leave no ambiguity about what happens when you select yes or no (OS X is famous for eliminating a lot of the ambiguity from their selection dialogs), having a simple way to navigate the interface instead of five ways to accomplish one task...those are hallmarks of good design. Any roadblock you throw up in a workflow is a bad thing; users tend to not read them anyway! Even if they did, they claim they didn't understand it. So they just trust that the programmer selected sane defaults and click right through them.

I think this is what Mark Shuttleworth calls a papercut...little things that aren't bugs, per se, but added up create a bad user experience. It's a waste of bits and annoying as hell when you just want to get something done. I truly wish that there was a way to have an operating system that possessed an interface that doesn't try whatever it can do to get in your way with inane and worthless dialog boxes.

Is there any reason to have an "are you sure?" dialog box or other cutesy abstractions to the system? Maybe for things that are blatantly destructive (About to format volume C: in 10 seconds...), but other things...I'm not so sure. Anyone have experiences or opinions to share?