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There’s no such thing as a tech expert anymore

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Re: There’s no such thing as a tech expert anymore

#81

Post by mistermann »

scrps wrote: post #58
mistermann wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you reference the section of the Mueller report that covers BLM?

"Initially, the IRA created social media accounts that pretended to be the personal accounts of U.S. persons.[44] By early 2015, the IRA began to create larger social media groups or public social media pages that claimed (falsely) to be affiliated with U.S. political and grassroots organizations. In certain cases, the IRA created accounts that mimicked real U.S. organizations. For example, one IRA-controlled Twitter…

Is any of the evidence supporting these claims of IRA actions disclosed, or is that to be taken on faith?

I ask because having been through the aluminum tubes, baby incubators story a few years back, I now have fairly strict epistemic standards when it comes to military related matters. I realize skepticism of one's government isn't a terribly popular stance here on HN, but to me it is important.

Re: There’s no such thing as a tech expert anymore

#82

Post by LockAndLol »

> We don’t insist that everyone in Congress understand how the B2 Spirit “stealth” bomber works, or how serotonin reuptake inhibitors help manage depression, or even how the internal combustion engine works. Yet we justifiably expect our government to regulate them.

Indeed, that's not what I'd insist. I'd insist on elected officials to have a team surrounding them who they can ask and who in turn can ask others when decisions have to be made.

In other words, leaders have to know how and when to delegate. If they don't know how to do that, then I assert that they aren't and cannot be good leaders.

Re: There’s no such thing as a tech expert anymore

#85

Post by almost_usual »

Hippocrates wrote: post #75

This is a horribly wrong take. The premise that nobody understands these tech issues at the level needed to address them is not even close to true. In fact, this sounds like an argument one of the luddites in congress would make rather than a tech journalist.

The argument is no one knows the exact details of the whole system.

That is obviously true, the only experts at these companies are the engineers who write code. There are still details they don’t understand.

An expert would have to be the collective knowledge of every engineer that worked at the org and there would still be missing detail and ‘bugs’.

This is literally why the security industry exists, bugs are inevitable.

I don’t think the argument is ‘crazy’, it’s accurate when speaking about data protections.

To assert your data is safe is to assert there are no security issues with your software.

The only way of asserting this is to either encrypt everything or not store it at all.

These companies will never do that so we end up with these complex arguments in Congress justifying it’s ‘safe’.

Re: There’s no such thing as a tech expert anymore

#86

Post by [deleted] »

mdoms wrote: post #18
sien wrote: post #4

Yes there is. It's everyone on Hacker News! Just post about about some Unicorn here and at least half a dozen people are pretty confident they know more about the company in question than the founders or the people running it. In the future Congress can just post questions here.

I will never stop being amused by the original post about Dropbox here on HN, where a large contingent of the audience was so critical of it, it was destined to fail. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

[deleted]

Re: There’s no such thing as a tech expert anymore

#87

Post by starky »

sien wrote: post #29
mdoms wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will never stop being amused by the original post about Dropbox here on HN, where a large contingent of the audience was so critical of it, it was destined to fail. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame. https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/Apple-releases-i...

And for many years after the release of the iPod it was "lame" compared to other products on the market. It was really the introduction of the iPod Nano that was the first product that improved on the competition. But Apple markets well and was able to get the market share (and really it was only the click wheel ones that were really popular).

Re: There’s no such thing as a tech expert anymore

#88

Post by almost_usual »

mlazos wrote: post #27

This author appears to think that you need to understand the intricate details of a search algorithm, distributed computing, and machine learning before you understand what their general use is? I don’t need to understand how a car engine works before I can understand how to drive or how cars have changed society. The only argument this article proves is that google and Facebook have lowered the bar on journalism so…

Your car engine doesn’t store information about everywhere you go and what your interests are.

Your car engine probably doesn’t experience data leaks, social engineering, or 0 day bugs.

The argument is Google and Facebook don’t 100% know their data usage and risks and I’d agree that’s true.

Complex software systems are impossible to 100% guarantee expected behavior. This is why bug bounties and the security industry exists.

The safest way to protect information is to not store it, the second safest is strong encryption.

Re: There’s no such thing as a tech expert anymore

#89

Post by mcrad »

sriku wrote: post #74
andersco wrote: post #9

This seems to imply that “tech expert” is someone all-knowing regarding tech. In my mind “tech expert” is about literacy. You may not know the specifics of all technologies but you have the mental toolkit for understanding them conceptually. But it is also about context. If you are the person who people ask for help with tech stuff, well, then you’re an expert, at least in their minds.

The writeup is not so much about the semantics of the words, but more about the fact that there are so many moving parts designed by diverse teams that no one individual (or even team) has a complete enough understanding of the whole that's sufficient to predict it's consequences on society in relation to its values.

I find it ironic that many are refuting the article based on semantics, or trying to explain what it "really means" to be an expert in tech.

The topic of regulating tech is as much about financial management as about algorithms. One needs to understand the costs and revenue streams in detail to devise intelligent regulation. I tend to believe swaths of the tech industry are built on obfuscation of finances and that is where we are losing the expertise in a regulatory context.

Look back on past tech booms and note that engineering work was highly financial in nature (rooted in cost benefit analysis). In the software industry it seems like engineering has hardly anything to do with managing costs. Just ship it, they say, and let the "business people" handle the pesky money part.

Re: There’s no such thing as a tech expert anymore

#90

Post by almost_usual »

The article is true, there isn’t an expert or collective group of experts that can guarantee a complex system’s behavior.

This is why bugs exist, why there is a security industry, why these companies have bug bounty programs.

The safest way of protecting information is not creating it or using strong encryption.

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