I can't help but think this way about nearly everything. Almost all compound, higher order effects are hidden from the naked eye and cursory glances. We tend to focus on superficial, simplistic explanations, or, at least, things that are imminently visible. Negative space is much larger and has more impact on our world but rarely gets much attention.
The silent majority of experts (2012)
31–40 of 206 posts
Re: The silent majority of experts (2012)
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ge…
I'm skeptical about most people being wired differently. Almost anyone can greatly increase their ability to stay focused and disciplined. Those are learned skills and mainly a matter of building good habits. But sometimes people need to fail hard first due to lack of focus and discipline in order to gain the motivation necessary to improve.
Re: The silent majority of experts (2012)
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 .
Sometimes there really is a "one weird trick" that can help people. I used to get stuck on problems and it would cripple my productivity. A programmer with two decades more experience than me noticed what I was doing and gave me the best advice of my career. If you are interested in the solution, you can signup for my . . . Seriously though the answer was to just do something else. Don't sit around thinking about the…
That's the problem - the self help books often have good actionable advice just like the diet books do; but it can be summed up in a few paragraphs. Most of the book is often trying to convince someone it's worth doing, or providing ways to get around procrastination, etc that might prevent it.
But as you've shown, often a good mentor can do just as well, or better.
Re: The silent majority of experts (2012)
#34Yep. 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…
Yes. Generally people giving advice publicly are in the advice business, not the business on which they are advising. I worked with a Salesperson who got fired for non-performance, who then reinvented themselves as a Sales guru by publicly giving tons of advice. People who are experts in their business (as opposed to being advice folks) tend to give it quietly 1 on 1 to people they trust. It’s a Close Friend game rat…
"Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach."
Re: The silent majority of experts (2012)
#35I think about this constantly while reading Hacker News. So many articles and comments by people whose level of enthusiasm doesn't match their experience. Try to voice a comment that goes against the flow of that enthusiasm and you'll be downvoted to oblivion, even if you speak with more experience and context than the masses. I'm horrified by some of the stuff I see here and feel like it's often useless to speak out…
I've become a lot more willing to burn my karma on here as of late. Not because I want to, per se, but what's the point of getting it if you can't spend it occasionally when you really have something you need to say?
Re: The silent majority of experts (2012)
#36Yep. 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…
>didn't browse the internet very much
I see it other way
Internet allows you to discuss everything you want with various people from your industry
I think it allows you to become better not only faster, but also makes you more aware of different perspectives
Why wouldn't you want to do so?
Re: The silent majority of experts (2012)
#37This 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…
When it comes to names, I prefer not to be too pedantic. Names are for people to communicate with other people, and most humans naturally and successfully cope with irrationality all the time. A more concise, accurate name is always better to start out with when possible, but it isn't always easy. We can all just agree to call it Wine, and appreciate it running crappy productivity software and 20 year old games on our modern Linux computers.
Re: The silent majority of experts (2012)
#38Yep. 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…
> 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. As I grow older, I see a huge divide between those who have/had parental support vs those who don't/didn't. It doesn't even take financially or professionally successful parents. Many of my pe…
> Many of my peers had middle-class parents working normal jobs who just loved unconditionally + put effort forward... the difference between them and those who had less than ideal upbringings is typically vast.
Do you mean their career success, or their personalities in general?
Re: The silent majority of experts (2012)
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ge…
I'm skeptical about most people being wired differently. Almost anyone can greatly increase their ability to stay focused and disciplined. Those are learned skills and mainly a matter of building good habits. But sometimes people need to fail hard first due to lack of focus and discipline in order to gain the motivation necessary to improve. https://davidgoggins.com/book/
There are people who are "wired differently" but as with many things, there's majority who insist they are and it's the source of their failings don't actually have a major issue.
It's a similar thing with dieting, the number of people who have gone to the trouble of actually counting every calorie they eat, restricting themselves to a certain amount to lose weight, and not lost weight is pretty small. But the number who tell themselves that they've done it is much higher.
Re: The silent majority of experts (2012)
#40This comes to mind for me:
https://observer.com/2011/05/keith-rabois-says-great-founder...