The Silent Majority of Experts • Hacker News Board

Re: The Silent Majority of Experts

#21

Post by mattmanser » Tue, Jan 07, 2014, 2:29 PM UTC

This seems wrong to me, and fairly obviously wrong.

If you take a group X, a certain percentage Y hang out in newsgroups and blog. He himself was part of that Y for Forth.

Why would the percentage Y be significantly different for any given language?

The number of bloggers/newsgroup users is like a survey, it's not complete, but it's a very good indicator of how popular a language is. The popularity of a language increases its ease of use by a considerable factor (libraries, help, documentation, etc.).

Hence Forth being a language no-one uses today, which actually contradicts his point, rather than illustrating it as he seems to think. Elizabeth Rather was right, there were people doing interesting things with Forth, but there weren't many.

And for most of us, that's an important thing to consider when using any tool.

That there is a huge number of bloggers looking down their nose at Perl & C++ simply shows there's something wrong with both those languages. It doesn't mean that they're not still useful though, nor does it mean something else solved the problem until a lot of 'I used Go/Rust/Haskell/Whatever to make non-trivial program' posts appear.

Re: The Silent Majority of Experts

#22

Post by netcan » Tue, Jan 07, 2014, 2:34 PM UTC

drewcrawford wrote: post #20

netcan wrote: post #15

There's some sort of point about experts in general which I am not sure exactly how to articulate but I think is relevant. I'm going to try to klutz through it anyway. There are lots of fields where fundamental theories are relatively weak or have poor predictive powers. Macroeconomics, climatology, nutrition etc. Basically, we don't have real Knowledge. We have a bunch of data and a bunch of theories. Some of the th…

This comment is sufficiently interesting that I want to grab a coffee with you and talk about it IRL, but you don't have any contact information in your profile so I don't know where in the world you are. The next time you roll through Austin make sure to look me up.

Dublin Ireland, If you're over digging up ancestors, give me a shout.

And thanks for the compliment :)

Re: The Silent Majority of Experts

#23

Post by eitally » Tue, Jan 07, 2014, 3:08 PM UTC

edanm wrote: post #14

barrkel wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Availability heuristic. I think your perspective may be warped by two things: not having worked with excellent engineers in person, and only considering relatively famous devs in your set of people who "participate online" - e.g. you're excluding the denizens of the last 80% of pages on StackOverflow. One of the most capable engineers I've ever worked with is a guy called Yooichi Tagawa. The guy has an incredible app…

"Availability heuristic." It's certainly possible. And there are definitely a great many devs who don't participate online but are brilliant, don't get me wrong. But I still think the average person who does participate online is better than the average person who doesn't . In retrospect, what bothered me was the implication that participating online is detrimental, when I think it's just the opposite, if for no othe…

The problem is that you're missing a huge swath of deep (as in, learned over decades of practical work) knowledge that exists within the community of engineers -- not just programmers, but all types of engineers -- in the 40+ age range, who have been working and learning and applying in industry since before the social/online boom, and may well be uncomfortable participating in the same way as the current generation tend to. Generally speaking, and I know this is an unfair generalization, that generation tended to have an approach to problems of "let's reduce this to it's core pieces and see what we know, then experiment until we understand it well enough to solve the macro- problem" In other words, the scientific method. My experience with folks who've entered the market in the past 5-10 years is that, when they first receive a problem, their inclination is to search the web for possible solutions and then hack other people's code to address the 80% easy part of the issue, while often completely ignoring or potentially just misunderstanding the more difficult 20%. This kind of behavior is one of the reasons company culture is critical, and employing senior, experienced engineers & technical managers who have at least a partial focus on engendering critical thinking and problem solving skills in their younger team mates.

Point of reference: I manage a team of about 100 programmers, analysts and DBAs in India, Mexico, Brazil, Scotland, and the US.

Re: The Silent Majority of Experts

#24

Post by gwern » Tue, Jan 07, 2014, 3:27 PM UTC

xmonkee wrote: post #6

gwern wrote: post #2

But without any way of correcting for this silent majority, or any sort of predictable systematic tendency, so what? We don't know everything? There's a lot of things we don't know, and on most topics we hear from only a small fraction of people, both expert and otherwise. Why is this worth pointing out? (The point of knowing about things like publication biases in science is that they are systematic: once you know a…

>so what? I think his target audience here is the {PHP,Java,C++,etc}-sucks crowd. Don't believe you know the global consensus on any technology just because the vocal minority (places like HN) seem to have a consensus. He even closes the article with the following: > Your time may better spent getting in there and trying things rather than reading about what other people think.

> He even closes the article with the following: > >> Your time may better spent getting in there and trying things rather than reading about what other people think.

But collectively, those people have spent a lot more time on the technologies, in many more situations, than I have used them or am likely to use them. How am I better off ignoring them and throwing away data? How does listening to them make me worse off?

When I was looking at statistics languages, I didn't spend a year trying Stata, a year trying SAS, a year trying Julia, a year trying Matlab, a year trying Panda+Python, a year trying R; I just looked at what people were using and blogging about and opinions on them, and picked R. How would I have been better off ignoring all of the community discussions and picking on my own? What systematic tendency causes the discussions to be literally worse than random noise?

Re: The Silent Majority of Experts

#25

Post by dap » Tue, Jan 07, 2014, 4:03 PM UTC

mattmanser wrote: post #21

This seems wrong to me, and fairly obviously wrong. If you take a group X, a certain percentage Y hang out in newsgroups and blog. He himself was part of that Y for Forth. Why would the percentage Y be significantly different for any given language? The number of bloggers/newsgroup users is like a survey, it's not complete, but it's a very good indicator of how popular a language is. The popularity of a language incr…

> If you take a group X, a certain percentage Y hang out in newsgroups and blog. He himself was part of that Y for Forth. Why would the percentage Y be significantly different for any given language?

There are lots of reasons I can imagine: people trying out newer languages have more reason to talk publicly about what they're doing, since they usually have a vested interest in the growth of that language. Organizations with tight rules on secrecy are often risk-averse in general and less likely to try out new languages. So new languages wind up with users that are more open, and they appear even more active. (I don't know if this is true -- it's just a guess. But your assertion that the percentages would likely be uniform across languages feels unlikely to me.)

I'm not sure the argument is that the percentage who hang out in newsgroups and blog is different, anyway, but rather that looking at newsgroup activity and blogs specifically selects out many of the actual experts. This has absolutely been my experience, and one of the most damaging assumptions I see is that surveying blogs and twitter feeds is enough to get a complete understanding of how people use a piece of software and what they think of it.

Re: The Silent Majority of Experts

#26

Post by joshuahedlund » Tue, Jan 07, 2014, 4:08 PM UTC

netcan wrote: post #15

There's some sort of point about experts in general which I am not sure exactly how to articulate but I think is relevant. I'm going to try to klutz through it anyway. There are lots of fields where fundamental theories are relatively weak or have poor predictive powers. Macroeconomics, climatology, nutrition etc. Basically, we don't have real Knowledge. We have a bunch of data and a bunch of theories. Some of the th…

I think you are referring (at least partially) to something called the Dunning-Kruger effect[1], where people who know less about something tend to express more certainty about what they know (and thus tend to get more attention as well) than people who actually know more about it

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

Re: The Silent Majority of Experts

#27

Post by FigBug » Tue, Jan 07, 2014, 4:20 PM UTC

mattmanser wrote: post #21

This seems wrong to me, and fairly obviously wrong. If you take a group X, a certain percentage Y hang out in newsgroups and blog. He himself was part of that Y for Forth. Why would the percentage Y be significantly different for any given language? The number of bloggers/newsgroup users is like a survey, it's not complete, but it's a very good indicator of how popular a language is. The popularity of a language incr…

I don't find this true at all. Lisp for example has tons of people blogging about it for the size of it's user base. Other things like firmware and DSP almost no experts are blogging. There are hobbyist, and that's about it. Or maybe they hang out in completely different circles.

Re: The Silent Majority of Experts

#28

Post by gwern » Tue, Jan 07, 2014, 4:23 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #8

gwern wrote: post #2

But without any way of correcting for this silent majority, or any sort of predictable systematic tendency, so what? We don't know everything? There's a lot of things we don't know, and on most topics we hear from only a small fraction of people, both expert and otherwise. Why is this worth pointing out? (The point of knowing about things like publication biases in science is that they are systematic: once you know a…

> But without any way of correcting for this silent majority, or any sort of predictable systematic tendency, so what? We don't know everything? There's a lot of things we don't know, and on most topics we hear from only a small fraction of people, both expert and otherwise. Why is this worth pointing out? Because it tells you that the more vocal people are usually full of BS, and you should take notice of what the s…

> Because it tells you that the more vocal people are usually full of BS

How's that? All the more vocal people tell you is that they're... more vocal. Where is the evidence that the more vocal people are correlated with systematically being wrong in a predictable and correctable way?

> you should take notice of what the silent experts and does-of-stuff practice.

And how do you do that when they are silent?

> Who said there's no way of "correcting for this silent majority"?

You still haven't given any way.

Re: The Silent Majority of Experts

#29

Post by gwern » Tue, Jan 07, 2014, 4:28 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #5

gwern wrote: post #2

But without any way of correcting for this silent majority, or any sort of predictable systematic tendency, so what? We don't know everything? There's a lot of things we don't know, and on most topics we hear from only a small fraction of people, both expert and otherwise. Why is this worth pointing out? (The point of knowing about things like publication biases in science is that they are systematic: once you know a…

But the non-expert bias online is systematic. Time spent participating online is time not spent honing your craft, and so there should be a strong inverse correlation between posting frequency and expertise. There are real, pragmatic ways to correct for this bias and get more useful information out of online forums, too. For example: 1.) Look for people who have a solid, independently-verifiable track record who are…

> Time spent participating online is time not spent honing your craft, and so there should be a strong inverse correlation between posting frequency and expertise.

I disagree. Many people (including myself) have observed that qui docet discit, and there is little better way to teach yourself than to discuss and debate and work with other people. This eliminates your claimed strong inverse correlation, and the rest of your suggestions simply become ways of finding additional information and not corrections for any systematic bias in available experts.

Re: The Silent Majority of Experts

#30

Post by coldtea » Tue, Jan 07, 2014, 5:45 PM UTC

gwern wrote: post #28

coldtea wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But without any way of correcting for this silent majority, or any sort of predictable systematic tendency, so what? We don't know everything? There's a lot of things we don't know, and on most topics we hear from only a small fraction of people, both expert and otherwise. Why is this worth pointing out? Because it tells you that the more vocal people are usually full of BS, and you should take notice of what the s…

> Because it tells you that the more vocal people are usually full of BS How's that? All the more vocal people tell you is that they're... more vocal. Where is the evidence that the more vocal people are correlated with systematically being wrong in a predictable and correctable way? > you should take notice of what the silent experts and does-of-stuff practice. And how do you do that when they are silent? > Who said…

>All the more vocal people tell you is that they're... more vocal. Where is the evidence that the more vocal people are correlated with systematically being wrong in a predictable and correctable way?

I'm sorry, if you want a verifiable proof with papers and references I don't have one for you. A lot of things in life don't have such proofs.

But my empirical experience has been that tons of people with no idea what they are doing are ranting on blogs and tutorials and such, where hardcore programmers I know are silently getting far more impressive shit done.

Let's say this: how many of the iOS, the Android or the Windows Phone teams blog, vs those working on the respective platform?

>And how do you do that when they are silent?

Watch them work, work with them or fucking talk to them. That they don't write blog posts like superstar primadonnas and that they don't give talks at conferences and rant on HN doesn't mean that they are impossible to find or unable to speak when found.