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The silent majority of experts (2012)

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Re: The silent majority of experts (2012)

#11

Post by blueflow »

bombcar wrote: post #8
blueflow wrote: post #5

This is sometimes a bit infuriating, because due to these online forums, there developed some "common sense" that is factually wrong. I can recount following misbeliefs from my head: - Wine is not an emulation - MS-DOS is not an OS because it cant do paging and virtual memory - Microprocessors are not Microcontrollers because they have paging There are also some tinier things like notorious NIH syndrome due to not re…

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 peopl…

Check out https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=emulation&rdfrom...

Its actually a pretty generic term that is used similarly like "imitation". You can see it used like that in xterm, which is a terminal emulator.

For some reason, many people believe it means something like "virtual machine", to the extent that the Wine project needed to rename to avoid being understood as a virtual machine, which is was associated with really bad performance back then.

> just tell me how to do what I want to do

I think this attitude is part of the problem. Like, when you try to weld you need to know about many details like preventing heat-corrosion and inclusions, otherwise your seam is going to be unacceptably bad. Welders do have training for that reason, but yet we dont apply the same standards to computing.

Re: The silent majority of experts (2012)

#12

Post by bombcar »

swatcoder wrote: post #4

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 m…

And the young are filled with vim and vigor, the older you are the less likely you want to have the same dang discussion for the hundredth time why rewriting the Linux kernel in "pop language of the week" is not a great use of time.

The real hard part is keeping your mind open to newer ways without either spending all your time on them, or getting fed up with it.

Re: The silent majority of experts (2012)

#13

Post by bombcar »

bluedino wrote: post #10
bombcar wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost certainly if you're good at blogging, speaking, self-promotion you're not the most expert in some other field. The cases where there's a cross-over are perhaps not surprisingly rare (Raymond Chen is a good one, John Carmack) or are indirect (Linus doesn't "blog" per se but some of the mailing list emails are as good as one). And if there's not something to "verify" the writer/performer, it can get wildly out o…

>> 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.

Those can be even worse, because the publishing company is also not an expert and just wants to get a book out the door.

e.g.: https://wozniak.ca/blog/2018/06/25/1/index.html

In this it is a writer who is arguably knowledgeable in one programming language (BASIC) writing a book about another (C) and getting fundamental things wrong. Being a domain expert in one even relatively close area doesn't mean it automatically applies in another.

Re: The silent majority of experts (2012)

#14

Post by nathias »

insightcheck wrote: post #6

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…

reddit is a system where a guy with 100 IQ decides what is best for all, it isn't that suprising that it doesn't work well for anything more complex or nouanced

Re: The silent majority of experts (2012)

#15

Post by bluedino »

This isn't limited to programming. Take automotive forums, for example.

You will have someone go on all day about how a certain engine or something will not make a certain number of HP. They'll say they have never seen it, after all, they have visited all the websites and watched all the Youtube videos.

Then someone that runs a performance shop will pipe in with, "Of course it's possible. We've built six of them this year alone. The owners just don't post their cars on the internet."

Re: The silent majority of experts (2012)

#16

Post by bombcar »

blueflow wrote: post #11
bombcar wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 peopl…

Check out https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=emulation&rdfrom... Its actually a pretty generic term that is used similarly like "imitation". You can see it used like that in xterm, which is a terminal emulator. For some reason, many people believe it means something like "virtual machine", to the extent that the Wine project needed to rename to avoid being understood as a virtual machine, which is was associ…

Both points are spot on - people nowadays forget just how amazing things like Rosetta are; around the time WINE began emulation was synonymous with "slow as hell".

The second is why things really need to have sane defaults, especially in cryptography - learning all the why's and wherefores for someone who is NOT a specialist is quite difficult and foot-guns abound.

We're just starting to get the idea of failsafes and safe by design in coding, and we need more of it. Too often the answer has been "you're holding it wrong" instead of "oh, wow, the way this is setup you could easily make it insecure".

The Unix/Linux philosophy has been a bit hard to grow here; the "you should have known to use --no-foot-gun" mentality can be hard to overcome, especially if you battled through them on your way up.

Re: The silent majority of experts (2012)

#17

Post by LordDragonfang »

nathias wrote: post #14
insightcheck wrote: post #6

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…

reddit is a system where a guy with 100 IQ decides what is best for all, it isn't that suprising that it doesn't work well for anything more complex or nouanced

I have to wonder whether the average IQ on reddit is higher or lower than the general population average, because based on my experience there, I could see arguments for either direction.

Re: The silent majority of experts (2012)

#18

Post by LeifCarrotson »

nathias wrote: post #14
insightcheck wrote: post #6

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…

reddit is a system where a guy with 100 IQ decides what is best for all, it isn't that suprising that it doesn't work well for anything more complex or nouanced

Where 100 guys with 100 IQ decide what is best for all, which may or may not be better than one guy with 120.

Re: The silent majority of experts (2012)

#19

Post by dgb23 »

bombcar wrote: post #9
insightcheck wrote: post #6

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…

It's part of the reason the self-help and diet book section is so large; people love the idea that they can get what they want with one weird trick; but the reality is it's not very complicated, it's just hard .

I think in many cases it might be hard but in an unfair way. I think some people are just wired differently. It is easy for them to stay focused and disciplined for longer, so they never worry about it or try to seek help and just do the work. People who do seek help often have some weaknesses that they cannot seem to overcome by themselves. They are vulnerable and they can be exploited by snake-oil salesmen. Some get stuck that way in a perpetuating, self indulging loop.

However there are people who have gotten help and made real progress. Think of some of the hardest things one can do: dealing with addiction, overcoming crippling fear, radically changing bad habits etc.

There's people who were weak and gotten strong. Some of them read self help books, some found social support. That's were the focus should be, not on the people who always walked the happy path and just "worked hard". Overcoming hopeless situations, stigma, bias, ego. That's actually hard.

Re: The silent majority of experts (2012)

#20

Post by insightcheck »

nathias wrote: post #14
insightcheck wrote: post #6

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…

reddit is a system where a guy with 100 IQ decides what is best for all, it isn't that suprising that it doesn't work well for anything more complex or nouanced

It's clear in hindsight, but a high school student with little life experience who sees a long text post with hundreds of upvotes and a couple awards can be an easy mark.

It's especially difficult because there is actually good advice mixed with the bad and unsubstantiated. I've taken good advice from certain comments (e.g. that led to the discovery of open courseware and actually quality resources on physical exercise programs).

But part of maturity is learning to be skeptical of advice independent of upvotes, so one can get the good advice while avoiding getting mislead. To answer quick questions, I try to search for articles from reputable newspapers first (to see if a verified expert interviewed by a journalist is quoted at length) and possibly HN's archives via Googling with site:news.ycombinator.com. For more complex questions and topics, I try to find book recommendations from Reddit that were written by academics or low-profile experts over influencers, and then reading about the topic at length (e.g. it's usually far better to learn about big social problems if curious through well-sourced books, versus any hot takes online, regardless of the popularity of these hot takes).

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