The silent majority of experts (2012)

> Yes, there are many people who blog and otherwise publicly discuss development methodologies and what they're working on, but there are even more people who don't. Blogging takes time, for example, and not everyone enjoys it. Other people are working on commercial products and can't divulge the inner workings of their code.

There’s a subset of this silent majority who tried to contribute to discussion platforms but gave up when they saw prominent voices that had next to no idea what they were talking about being promoted, hailed, and so on. The loudest voice is rarely the most articulate, and for subject matter experts articulation, nuance, and other learned-through-experience things count for a lot, one would assume.

A great point well made.

And I think it’s especially important to keep in mind that we have a generational divide among experts even now, that introduces a bias to the particular expertise that gets shared.

Not only have many deeply experienced, talented experts naturally shifted their surplus attention to other life responsibilities like families, health issues, etc — but many younger experts grew up with a social media fluency that makes engaging online more natural to them.

So even without evaluating what’s said by each, you inevitably see a lot more of the opinions of these younger experts and less from the old greybeards with differently informed perspectives.

Yep. On a related note, when I was younger, I searched for advice from experts for how to develop expertise in studying and productivity on Reddit. It led to lots of highly-upvoted advice (including stuff like supplements, largely with few real benefits besides placebo), popular blogs by influencers (like Scott Young), and popular self-help books.

However, the actual experts I knew in high school who later went on to great institutions like MIT or applied and got into extremely competitive investment banks didn't browse the internet very much, or relied on supplements and these books.

Similar to the ideas expressed in the submitted article, these people didn't spend time online reading blogs and Reddit, or blogging/self-promoting themselves. They generally were involved in a sport (track and field or squash), spent little time online, and spent a lot of time using a lot of paper studying.

They also were careful who they associated with as friends (they hung out with studious people). Less in one's control, their parents were financially successful or were in competitive positions (e.g. were professors or physicians), so they may have learned these strategies from them, versus inventing them independently.

Long story short: there is absolutely a culture of improvement that is primarily offline and less visible, because people either don't record it, or people do record it and it doesn't get upvoted or ranked highly on Google searches. Examples of recorded good advice appeared on HN recently, shared by computer scientist Donald Knuth who is also usually offline: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31482116

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_(software) - "Wine (formerly a recursive backronym for Wine Is Not an Emulator, now just "Wine")" - depends on how technical you want to get about it, does emulation just mean translating one machine code into another, or can you "emulate library calls"?

Official documentation can be a great source, but in things like ssh-keygen there are often just way too many options and so people want "just tell me how to do what I want to do". One of the reasons sane defaults are so important.

>> Almost certainly if you're good at blogging, speaking, self-promotion you're not the most expert in some other field.

This would explain a lot of bad programming books.