Ask HN: Is the world suffering from shallow knowledge?

I couldn't help but notice that many young people don't want to spend months pulling their hair off to get a deeper understanding of what they do... they want to obtain value very quickly.

Paul Graham once tweeted that he was explaining to his son that he can't be Einstein and Messi, and his son said so I will be Messi. But no Messi if there is no Stadium, Stream, Cameras, etc...

The existence of a big number of people who can do complicated jobs is crucial for the modern world, and I think this whole thing will fall down if it continued with the current mode.

Just my own speculation, but yes. The lack of deep focus is endemic in the culture. There is too much cheap distraction. I’ve gone through my phase of thinking it will collapse. I think that’s possible, but a more realistic base case is a consolidation of key technologies and methods that can get the job done, although standard of living may reduce drastically.

I think incentives are there already, but more and more people start to say "we will leave this to the boring people who love books, and we get all the fun".

They are not built in a way that helps them read a large book for example. They don't appreciate attention to details. They don't know how to find joy in something like that, they don't know how to value someone like Dennis Ritchie for example. If you told them a few recommendations, they start to lecture you about the bad side of perfection :) ....I be like ...you and I didn't even smell perfection yet, but they have no idea what you are talking about.

I don't feel that incentives will change how they are built.

> many young people don't want to spend months pulling their hair off to get a deeper understanding of what they do

Every generation says this about the next generation, and yet here we are with scientists in their 30s making huge advancements in things like mRNA vaccines.

If you think that laziness (what you're implying this is) will be the end of the world, there are many things that are far more urgent. No high-tech industry is collapsing because they can't find enough STEM graduates.

The tech industry has "eaten its young."

By this, I mean that it has systematically destroyed the source of people who grow up with the passion to learn tech at the deep levels that make for the people the tech industry likes to hire for the core, foundational stuff that makes things run.

About a decade ago, I understand Google's SRE hiring pipeline was struggling, because Google had singlehandedly destroyed their best source for hiring - university student sysadmins. Google Apps for Education was great, and allowed shutting down a ton of annoyingly expensive server rooms at universities - but it also meant that those universities no longer had nearly the number of various student sysadmins who were entirely unfazed by "The mainframe is serial linked to the G3 Mac for ethernet access, with software written by someone long since graduated, and..." sort of systems. It was a wonderful filter for people with a diverse set of experience across a range of "You did what to the what now? In assembly?" sort of systems, and they could usually translate that experience to the sort of "haven't seen this before..." stuff that Google ran at the time.

The same seems to be true in the really foundational parts of computing. I know very, very few people under the age of about 40 in the firmware/osdev/hypervisor/etc spaces, and that age has more or less been tracking along with me. It's not a base age for people getting into the space, it's the age of the youngest of the last generation to know how to do that stuff.

There are exceptions, but they're few, far between, and seem to not go into those spaces terribly often either.

The modern tech industry is just focused on distracting people as much as possible, as long as possible, to look at as many ads as possible, and that's entirely at odds with the requirements to get good at the deep weeds, which is long, sustained focus, in challenging and arcane spaces.

But it's worse, because the complexity of modern tech is increasing at such a rapid rate that you have to run to stand still. All the microarchitectural vulnerabilities and such have been "patched" with... complexity. When they stem from complexity. And the whole stack at this point can be summed up as "Complexity created to hide the problems caused by the previous round of complexity." It's nasty, all the way down, and then you discover that the people who are designing the foundations have no idea what they're doing either! Intel clearly doesn't understand their chips, given how many times the stated guarantees of SGX (that malicious ring 0 code can neither observe nor modify the state of production SGX enclave computation) have been violated by a range of mechanisms. L1TF/Foreshadow cracked production enclaves wide open with demonstrations of how to single step them and pull full state from every step, and Plundervolt involved undervolting the chip to the edge of faulting (so multiply and AES operations would fault but simpler stuff would retire fine), and then launching an SGX enclave that ran faulting operations. Whoops.

I don't know how much longer this sort of thing can continue, because the last wave of people who do understand the deep weeds that make it work are starting to retire, with nobody to replace them. And they just want to go do "something that has nothing to do with computers" anymore.

A recent comic on Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/vnmmuo/whe...) demonstrates just how strong this sentiment has become in recent years. The hypervisor hackers and firmware devs are going to retire and rapidly forget everything they've known, and have a grand old time doing "anything else." I know an awful lot of these people, myself included.

It's going to be a very real problem in the decades to come.