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The silent majority of experts (2012)

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Re: The silent majority of experts (2012)

#81

Post by bombcar »

peterangular wrote: post #45
dgb23 wrote: post #19

Earlier 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 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. Instea…

That was the point I was getting at - the book presented you information in a way that helped, but you still did the hard work of actually implementing it.

Almost all diets work if you stick to them, and almost nobody does. People want behavioral changes to be easy but they're not - they require hard work.

Perhaps more diet books would be successful if they treated it as a food addiction instead of a "eat healthy to look sexy".

Re: The silent majority of experts (2012)

#82

Post by crispyambulance »

I am going to propose a radical idea: There is NO PATTERN.

People reach mastery and expertise in all different kinds of ways. Some folks have it handed to them on a silver platter, others overcome outrageously unfair circumstances, some do it alone, some have mentors, some read-learn-do, some just do, some do it despite hating what they do, others do it out of love.

Re: The silent majority of experts (2012)

#83

Post by Claude_Shannon »

pvarangot wrote: post #70
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> these people didn't spend time online reading blogs and Reddit, or blogging/self-promoting themselves Or they’re online, they’re just not talking about what they’re experts in. Because they don’t want to spend their free time teaching a 101 class.

The main reason why I don't usually talk seriously about what I'm an expert in on Reddit is that I sometimes can't deal with the cringe from the replies, usually it's ok but it's been really bad a couple times and that just pushed me off. Now when I am commenting on something I consider myself an expert of it's usually jokes and sarcasm. Reddit is seriously full of teenagers LARPing as adults, or adults stoned to the…

In their defence, often there's no way of telling who is expert and who is faking.

Though it applies to almost everywhere online.

Re: The silent majority of experts (2012)

#84

Post by samstave »

planarhobbit wrote: post #2

> 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…

I know a number of "secret experts" -- one of which has been a good friend of mine for more than 20 years. He is an expert you have never heard of, but you have interacted with his efforts in everything from VoIP, streaming, ads, all sorts of stuff...

He is a cowboy from texas with a stereotypical texas accent, looks like he works at a gas station, but can look at a PCB, take the labels of the chips on the board and the layout, and actually write linux drivers for said board. (HE ACTUALLY DID THIS) - but he will regularly tell me "goin hog huntin" in the most deadpan texas drawl... and this week was "went deep sea fishin. back in dallas."

I am really lucky to be on a firstname call any time basis with this guy.

There are TONs of them.

Re: The silent majority of experts (2012)

#85

Post by kayodelycaon »

nradov wrote: post #32
dgb23 wrote: post #19

Earlier 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/

I sincerely hope ”almost anyone” doesn’t include the vast number of people with a mental disability that severely affects executive function.

About 2.8% of the US population has a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. (In a wider study including other countries, the average is 2.4%) I have no reason to doubt this because I have far too many people I knew before my diagnosis who have since told me they have an extended family member who are bipolar. And not the “oh they have a diagnosis” kind, but people who destroy their own lives and those of the people around them. I was shocked how common it is.

And this is just bipolar. There are many other mental and physical problems that affect the ability to have discipline if they just worked on it.

Edit: I should state I definitely believe focus and attention is a skill, but you can’t effectively use a skill when your tools are broken. Good luck racing a car that’s disassembled in the garage.

Re: The silent majority of experts (2012)

#86

Post by clairity »

bena wrote: post #54
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…

This largely tracks with my own opinions on certain things. Mostly why moderation eventually fails and how social interaction doesn't scale well. People doing shit don't have time for bullshit. If you have hours to dedicate defending your pet fan theory online, you clearly aren't using those hours to do anything meaningful. And I'm not talking side-hustle-gotta-make-that-bread kind of stuff, I'm talking about just mo…

> "...the truth is the other person left because you and the discussion in general wasn't worth their time. And they don't need your validation. They find fulfillment in the stuff they do outside of the internet."

yup. i almost never go back and forth more than a couple times with anyone here, because it's most common that the other person is bullshitting, and i don't really need or want that. if i argue a point, i want the other person to bring something new to the table that i didn't know before, not rehash tired old platitudes.

relatedly, experts don't need to claim for themselves the term "expert", and folks who start conversations with their credentials have already "lost" the discussion, so to speak. if your arguments can't stand on their own merits, proffering a credential won't help.

Re: The silent majority of experts (2012)

#87

Post by nescioquid »

bena wrote: post #62
tester756 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

You realize what you did here, right? You said you disagreed with the experiences of the OP and essentially the article. Posited as evidence that your view was correct based on your opinion on what you perceive as the advantages of the internet. Then treated your opinion as a fact that would be crazy to be argued against. It's true. The internet does allow for easy communication between people. It does contain a whol…

I think it is reasonable to rebut the premise of an argument (in fact, if the reasoning of the argument is sound, that seems to be the only basis on which a rebuttal can be formulated).

Article Premise: [the internet provides] an intersection of the people working on interesting things and who like to write about it--and that's not the whole story.

Article Conclusion: Your time may better spent getting in there and trying things rather than reading about what other people think.

tester756: I think [the internet] allows you to become better not only faster, but also makes you more aware of different perspectives

Charitably reading, I understand tester756 to be saying that in fact, that intersection is broad enough that the article's conclusion doesn't readily follow.

Did tester756 provide enough of a warrant for the rebuttal? Maybe, maybe not. Frankly I don't think this article warrants a high degree of rigor to comment on it, though, so I think it's fine.

Re: The silent majority of experts (2012)

#88

Post by clairity »

insightcheck wrote: post #20
nathias wrote: 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

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 exerci…

> "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)..."

you just failed your own test. "reputable" and "expert" indicate you're offloading evaluation to others rather than doing the hard work yourself of discerning the validity or plausibility of those claims.

Re: The silent majority of experts (2012)

#89

Post by notahacker »

a4isms wrote: post #23
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…

Here's a comment I made a few days ago here on HN about a blog post, it may be relevant: ————— The author is relating second-hand information. That’s useful, it’s good to have people who have a skill of curating business advice and pointing us in good directions. But my first-hand advice is to recognize the difference between: Alice: “I’m making five figures a month for five hours a week reselling five products.” And…

The flip side of that is: the Bobs of this world sometimes have seen enough to (i) not be fooled by survivorship bias into believing their way is the best way and (ii) spot patterns in what many Alices do and many people trying to be like Alices don't

And there are a lot of fake Alices. I mean, I'm bombarded with ads from people who apparently spend five hours a week making five figures per month... and then apparently spend the rest of their life promoting their ability to offer one on one "coaching" sessions to be just like them at rates which don't really make much sense if they're making $x,xxx per hour on their real gig. Which links back to the original post: the people who do make five figures per month for five hours a week reselling stuff tend to not talk about it. Or at least not nearly as much as the people cosplaying that lifestyle or the people whose interest in such businesses is purely academic.

Re: The silent majority of experts (2012)

#90

Post by criddell »

mmcgaha wrote: post #28
bombcar wrote: 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 .

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…

The wait until tomorrow advice works well when learning a musical instrument too (at least in the beginning). I still really can't play my guitar, but when I'm trying to learn something new, I work on the hard part until I stop making progress then take a break. Often, the next day I can get a little further.
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