I believe this phenomenon to be very true in ML/AI today.
The silent majority of experts (2012)
141–150 of 206 posts
Re: The silent majority of experts (2012)
#142Yep. 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…
Sad as it may sound, your upbringing is the key to most things, while the opportunities given to you (mostly by your parents' financial ability) complete this picture. When I took EE in University, everybody's parents were engineers or another form of STEM. Which also means they are not doing too bad in money and assets. The best, most accomplished researchers I know all had a parent coming from a similar background,…
I largely agree. I had a very bad upbringing, as did most of my childhood and teenage friends. I've just in the past year or two managed to "break the cycle", but it wasn't (isn't) easy.
Now that most people in my life are themselves successful professionals, getting glimpses into their family life and childhood is surreal. It's a completely different culture, typically a much, much, much healthier one. It's shocking how many people don't consciously acknowledge this fundamental chasm between people.
Re: The silent majority of experts (2012)
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a bad assumption to make. Plenty of people just want to have fun dating.
Fine, change the term to "relationship expert". If you're good at maintaining a healthy romantic relationship, you'll have two, three, but optimally even one in a lifetime. That doesn't make you an expert, it still is the norm. If instead you had 30 relationships, whilst for sure you had a lot of experience, I wouldn't really trust your advise as an "expert".
Sure. I was mainly concerned with the idea that most people are dating for marriage which I don't think is the case, at least under age 30.
But I think it's possible to be a relationship expert even with one or two real relationships. Two sets of people that have been married to only one person are not necessarily equally happy or fulfilled. A person could also make relationships their personal interest and spend a lot of time thinking about the topic on top of their lived experience which might make them more capable of giving advice.
I think it's wrong to say anyone giving advice isn't worth listening to.
Re: The silent majority of experts (2012)
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
There probably is no getting to you, but “the book presented you information in a way that helped” is the whole point of a self-help book, and when someone arrives at a better understanding of themselves or a project via presented information, it does get easier for them.
Re: The silent majority of experts (2012)
#145I 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…
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.
Fighting idiocy that gets entrenched by the even a few comments is challenging. But depending on circumstances, there are specific rhetorical strategies that can be effective. IE, sometimes they work and sometimes they're futile. I like to flatter myself that deciding whether you can make an impact is bit like looking for a good shot in advanced pool.
But the thing here is, there's no guarantee that an actual expert "old hand" is going to know any of these approaches. So you have to read the discussion with this in mind.
Re: The silent majority of experts (2012)
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> As I grow older, I see a huge divide between those who have/had parental support vs those who don't/didn't. This really gets lost in the traditional nuclear family argument. From personal experience, having both biological parents in the same house doesn't mean a healthy family environment, and no amount of moralizing is going to wish it into being. Also overlooked is the impact one can have through simple acts of…
The data is conclusive on Single Parent vs. Two Parent and it's not even close. The 'moralizing' is from those who want to equivocate. This is also from deep life experience myself, with close family and colleagues. In everything but the best scenarios: 'Everything Is Hard' in a single family household, whereas things 'Can Be Hard' in regular family scenarios. I think a 'single mentor' can make a big difference, but…
> if I found out that a mom was coming to pick up her kids laundry and leave some meals because 'Uni Exams' ... I will be $1000 immediately that kid will do well without knowing a single other thing about that family or situation. Not a guarantee of anything, but an easy bet.
Narrow bet, yes. But I'd put $100 on them having high risk of entitlement issues and being an overweight office stinker who is a loner, because they never learned to wash, cook and manage their time. Not certain, but this is a pattern with risks: kids need to learn self reliance in the ordinary.
Re: The silent majority of experts (2012)
#147This 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…
There's a weird parallel to the pizzagate kerfuffle. Lots of people who wanted to get to the "real truth" by only looking at online sources, like it's some sort of virtual escape room that's been pre-built with clues. Staring at google street view images and trying to find the pattern in all the store signs on the same block, coming up with bizarre circular logic around "cp" where references to pizza at a pizza parlo…
I'm not sure I see the parallel.
In the first example, a forum poster was taking the absence of evidence to be evidence of absence. In fact I've never met a person who didn't have a story about making such a mistake, so I'd venture to guess we all do that at some point in our lives[1].
In your example, however, people were confusing the absence of evidence with an imagined preponderance of evidence. That's an error on a very different level, like accidentally joining a pyramid scheme or getting sick from eating an entire piece of plastic fruit.
1: See? :)
Re: The silent majority of experts (2012)
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
I tell myself it's the difference between starting adulthood at 14 or whenever your family fails you, and starting it at 24 or 26 after college. The extra years of "streetwise" usually come at an expense of early onset of burnout, for various reasons. Leaving your shell with the energy to take over the world at 26 usually results in more productive endeavors than when you are a teenager.
I can definitely see it being true in some cases, but in software I strongly disagree. I'm speaking as someone who started programming for clients at 15 and am poised to retire at 33. Everyone starts slowing down after 25. The extra years learning by experience gave me a leg up that was completely unmatched by others. It opened a ton of doors that shouldn't exist for a lower income kid with no opportunity for college.
Chess is a more extreme example. Grandmasters regularly play their best games in their late 20s for a reason. Super grandmasters all started playing around the same age.
Re: The silent majority of experts (2012)
#149Yep. 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…
I disagree, it depends on the subreddit - a subreddit that discusses supplements is by it's very nature going to be populated with snake oilsmen selling remedies or doofuses who believe them.
Similarly self-help books.
You have provided examples of domains where charlatans are most likely to operate.
I have learned a lot from user communities in reddit and hackernews.
And hopefully contributed back as well.
There are folk who have domain expertise and have time on hand and are hungry to contribute.
You need to find them and pick their brains.
Re: The silent majority of experts (2012)
#150This 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…
The biggest issue I've come across with some documentation is that it comes across as too "academic". Yes, it's very detailed, but doesn't immediately answer a very specific question.
One good example is the Angular documentation. It's very detailed, but rarely does it answer the question I have. Reading the documentation just leaves me with more questions than I started.
Of course, I will say this. I don't come from an OOP background, so maybe that's why it doesn't immediately click.
The other problem with documentation is lack of examples. That's why for command line help, I use tldr. 90% of the time, it gives me an example of the exact command I need.
Believe me, I get the whole RTFM and for things I plan to use often enough, I will definitely RTFM. But for rarely used commands, it does not make sense to spend even 10 minutes reading arcane documentation. It's much more efficient to skim a blog or two (or use something like tldr), find the command with the switches and copy pasta. The prevalence of these blogs in the results show others think the same way or there wouldn't be so many of them.