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The silent majority of experts (2012)

prog21.dadgum.com

41–50 of 206 posts

Re: The silent majority of experts (2012)

#41
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

With 50M DAU its going to be the population average, no?

Re: The silent majority of experts (2012)

#42
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is indeed the relevant question. There are similar scenarios where the answer is the 100 guys, like some markets, that when organized centrally by "smart" people, they stop working.

Re: The silent majority of experts (2012)

#43
post #25

I 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…

"The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt." Bertrand Russell

Re: The silent majority of experts (2012)

#44
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

Please don't perpetuate the misuse of this phrase, which is so often used to denigrate those with expertise and desire trying so hard to pass them on.

Consider the possibility, say, in a guild context: those who can, do. They work for the guild, and do whatever the guild does. Those who can't, from age, infirmity, injury: they teach, passing on knowledge and wisdom.

Re: The silent majority of experts (2012)

#45
post #19
post #9

Earlier 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 was a smoker for many years... everyone in the family smoked - father, mother, and brother. I was a dumb kid in an industrial town in Iowa - constant opportunity and social pull to consume nicotine.

After awhile I didn't want to be a smoker anymore and found a self help book - "Allen Carr's Easy Way To Stop Smoking." Friends of mine suggested it, and I found a PDF and read it during a dead afternoon at work.

Instead of focusing on the "hard" trope of quitting smoking it presented it as easy - hence the title. It framed the habit for exactly what it was, a drug addiction, but it never talked harshly to you about how you became a nicotine addict or the quitting process. It focused on telling you exactly what to expect if you decide to quit, and then gave you a positive framework to help overcome the effects of quitting. The overall message was always "think of how much you're going to gain by quitting... health, money, etc."

It worked, I am no longer a nicotine addict. I don't think I would have had the capability to quit without some mental reframing which that book 100% helped me accomplish.

> 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.

Agree.

There's always the "work hard" narrative and I find it's often coupled with a discrediting attitude like OP's comment. The effect of that attitude demotivates more than it helps. As cheesy as it was I found the tools to fix my nicotine addiction in a self-help book ha

Re: The silent majority of experts (2012)

#46
post #25

I 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…

[deleted]

Re: The silent majority of experts (2012)

#47
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…

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 ou…

You can say "We'd need something that emulates the Windows ABI like Wine does" and you will get a misinformed person derailing the discussion.

You can explain your tinc mesh setup, but as soon as you call it "VPN" some people will believe its some sort of proxy to hide your IP address while watching porn.

You can explain how PHP interacts with the server environment, but as soon as you call it "Server API", some people will think its a machine-consumable REST/Json/Xml service or sth like that.

This generates many landmines you might step onto. Sometimes you need to argue total nonsense to work around these people. Painful. So yeah you are right, but it doesnt solve the Problem.

Re: The silent majority of experts (2012)

#48
post #9

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 .

Several times in my life I have seen what I thought were crises of willpower turn on silly contingent circumstances.

* Huge procrastination problem in college melted away as soon as I started working 9-5 in an office.

* Couldn't run 5 minutes, until I incidentally started wearing a smart-watch, tried running again, and noticed the heart rate monitor telling me to slow down.

* Doom-scrolling trances easily broken by shutting down the computer or putting the phone out of arm's reach.

I don't think any particular advice in the self-help genre is likely to be true, but these "one weird trick" style solutions do keep on working for me.

Re: The silent majority of experts (2012)

#49

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…

>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?

The point of the article is that experts don't always hang out on the internet. There's a small cross-section of people who are truly experts at something, and also blog or discuss it in online forums. So yeah, you can talk to people from the industry online, but how do you know if their advice is worth anything?

Re: The silent majority of experts (2012)

#50
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If i was a surgeon and "held it wrong" I'd probably get sued or fired. If i was a welder and "held it wrong" I'd get a written warning, which later might end up in a termination. If i use ssh-keygen wrong in production because i did not read the documentation... then its the tools fault for not having sane defaults?

If you were a pilot and "held it wrong" you'd probably be dead, and Boeing would get away scott-free ... the first time.

Somewhere between "everything is a death-trap, learn how to use it" and "this device is perfectly safe, because it cannot do anything" lies the mean we need to hit.

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