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No-one knows what they are doing

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Re: No-one knows what they are doing

#101

Post by quickthrower2 »

geoduck14 wrote: post #80
quickthrower2 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doctors are great if you have a problem doctors are great at. Otherwise for something like CFS the best resources are CFS communities and a doctor without all the answers, willing to help you explore.

>Doctors are great if you have a problem doctors are great at. This is tantological- but it has some great depth. I'd like to quote you on this, if I may.

Almost tautological: because it is not “doctors are great at helping with any medical problem”. And by great I don’t mean cure anything, but give the best outcome possible with technology and budget for the person.

Re: No-one knows what they are doing

#102

Post by stef25 »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #77

This is a very comforting fiction to tell yourself when you’re faced with new and unfamiliar challenges. However, it’s not really true. Plenty of people within an industry or field know enough of what they’re doing because they’ve gone through it before and/or done all of the heavy research to prepare for these situations. I see the “nobody knows what they’re doing” fiction brought out as an easy antidote for imposto…

Wrt to imposter syndrome - I often have this feeling, especially since I don't have any formal training in anything IT related.

Recently a kid showed up at work to do an internship. He's studying computer science, all kinds of advanced algorithm stuff. He's utterly clueless at even beginning to find the cause of a simple bug in a php application. Incapable of interpreting a bug report, finding the class that serves a certain route etc.

Made me really reconsider my imposter syndrome feelings.

Re: No-one knows what they are doing

#103

Post by marginalia_nu »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #77

This is a very comforting fiction to tell yourself when you’re faced with new and unfamiliar challenges. However, it’s not really true. Plenty of people within an industry or field know enough of what they’re doing because they’ve gone through it before and/or done all of the heavy research to prepare for these situations. I see the “nobody knows what they’re doing” fiction brought out as an easy antidote for imposto…

> The dark side of this mentality is that it creates the same situations whereby people believe their own intuitions are equal to professional scientific research. If you believe no one knows what they’re doing and all adults are just making it up as they go, why would you listen to experts instead of inserting your own opinions based on your Facebook research or some quip you saw online?

Well there's a reason to resist this notion on the grounds that knowledge is personal, not transitive. Following John Carmack on twitter does not transfer the ability to design game engines onto me, even though he surely has deep expertise in the area.

My opinions may not be the result of professional scientific research, but that is also true even if I echo the opinions of someone who claims to be a practitioner of such. At least if we accept a definition where justified true belief is necessary for knowledge. Either I know something, or I don't know it. There is no middle ground where I know something by extension of faith in an authority that claims to know it. That's the entire point of science, it isn't doctrinal! The scientific authority may well possess an ability to produce true statements through their knowledge of the topic, but I don't share this knowledge by parroting their true statements; I need to understand why in order to know.

Re: No-one knows what they are doing

#104

Post by xorcist »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #77

This is a very comforting fiction to tell yourself when you’re faced with new and unfamiliar challenges. However, it’s not really true. Plenty of people within an industry or field know enough of what they’re doing because they’ve gone through it before and/or done all of the heavy research to prepare for these situations. I see the “nobody knows what they’re doing” fiction brought out as an easy antidote for imposto…

Thank you. I'm hearing enough things along similar lines to feel odd about it.

So many people wear their impostor syndrome with pride I don't know how to handle it. It's supposed to be ok to have no idea what you are doing. Except it's not. We're living in an era where information is more abundant than ever before. Just read the manual. At least get a basic idea how that library or framework works before putting two lines together. If not for the end result then at least for intellectual pride.

It's probably partly down to age, but it's more and more common and I am uncomfortable.

Re: No-one knows what they are doing

#105

Post by dhosek »

raducu wrote: post #25
EnKopVand wrote: post #5

I’m going to let you in on a little secret. I spent almost a decade in public sector digitalisation in Denmark, and those politicians who look like they don’t know what they are doing in the media, well, they absolutely know what they are doing. Not only that, but they get advice from a bureaucracy full of well educated, really smart people, who also know what they are doing and have known so for decades. One of the…

> well, they absolutely know what they are doing My grandfather had neighbours whom he routinely looked down upon because of their alcohol problem. Very late in the life of one of their children I talked with him and found out he was a really smart guy, knew a lot of IT stuff, 3D design an all, but he simply lucked out in late 90's Romania, used a lot of alcohol and could not pull himself out of it. He died because h…

I’m reminded of when I was in college in Model U.N., there was one guy in the group who presented very socially awkward (his posture made him look like a question mark in profile, he was kind of physically awkward, didn’t participate in the social activities of the club). My senior year, I was the secretary-general¹ of the club. We’d finally let him chair a committee at our annual conference that we held for Southern California high school students. I was walking from committee room to committee room during the conference checking on how things were going and when I looked in on his committee—well, he was totally rocking it. I realized we had squandered his talents for four years because of surface appearances.

⸻

1. The pretentious way that Model U.N. clubs name what’s effectively the president.

Re: No-one knows what they are doing

#106

Post by platz »

mellavora wrote: post #66
platz wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what is an example of a modern disease whos main cause is iatrogenic

I was also curious, so looked it up on Wikipedia: > Iatrogenesis is the causation of a disease, a harmful complication, or other ill effect by any medical activity, including diagnosis, intervention, error, or negligence.[1][2][3] First used in this sense in 1924,[1] the term was introduced to sociology in 1976 by Ivan Illich, alleging that industrialized societies impair quality of life by overmedicalizing life.[4]…

I know the word has a definition.

I wanted to know what tpoacher's lived experience and personal observation was to cause him to make the statement.

Re: No-one knows what they are doing

#107

Post by l33t2328 »

stef25 wrote: post #99
highwaylights wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* Except politics. It's verifiable that no politician can possibly be qualified for whatever they're doing at any point in time as there exists no threshold of experience for doing any job to which they might be assigned and it (at least in democracies) actively ignores experience and selects for pandering.

Do you think of president Zelenskiy of Ukraine is an exception?

Why did you choose him in particular? Do you believe him to be the most capable politician today?

Re: No-one knows what they are doing

#108

Post by psyc »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #77

This is a very comforting fiction to tell yourself when you’re faced with new and unfamiliar challenges. However, it’s not really true. Plenty of people within an industry or field know enough of what they’re doing because they’ve gone through it before and/or done all of the heavy research to prepare for these situations. I see the “nobody knows what they’re doing” fiction brought out as an easy antidote for imposto…

I don't know by exactly which route I'm going to reach delivery of X project, but I know that I know how to navigate.

Re: No-one knows what they are doing

#110

Post by tylergetsay »

hermitcrab wrote: post #32
yieldcrv wrote: post #6

People know what they're doing the second and third time that they launch the same product. Like when you see founders of large VC backed companies go off to launch the same thing. Or why business practices calcify and people aren’t open to a new theoretically efficient process, they have already failed at so many other things that they don't want to risk again. Its not arbitrary why people become this way, there is…

Even if you are launching a near identical product a second time, the market, staff and technology will be different. You can't stand in the same river twice (Heraclitus).

Why can't I hire the same people, use the same technology, and sell to the same market? This is basically the story of a lot of small business owners; they learned from somebody and then applied that for their own. If I only make 50% of what the previous company made but own 5x as much, it might look like a failure to some but net I am better off.
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