Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What if I’m wrong? (2023)

behavioralscientist.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 294 posts

Re: What if I’m wrong? (2023)

#51

Post by QuercusMax »

javajosh wrote: post #31
delichon wrote: post #2

Ptolemy was wrong. But he was wrong with a large pile of actual measurements of celestial bodies, and a falsifiable theory. That made him wrong in the positive sense of wrong in the phrase "not even wrong", where wrong is just the first step of the ladder. I wish I could say the same about Freud, but that ladder is distressingly horizontal.

There is a strong analogy in software engineering here. Often the first implementation is "wrong" in the sense that it doesn't resolve the inherent tensions in the system. But that doesn't make it useless - in fact, it's quite useful because it actually showed you what is important. Plus, the people who attempt the initial solution to a problem deserve special honor, even if their work is eventually tossed away, spec…

I work on healthcare at Alphabet, and in late 2016 I set out to build a flexible DICOMweb STOW-RS receiver in the form of a GCP API - the first time anyone had done that at Alphabet. (I've worked on the same project across Verily and Google). In the process I researched and built a bunch of little prototypes built in a variety of ways, and for example had to rule out building it as an App Engine API - because DICOMweb uploads can potentially be gigabytes in size, and App Engine didn't support handling a POST as a stream as it arrived.

At any rate, along the way over the course of 9 months or so I found a technology stack that supported all my requirements and ran into a bunch of roadblocks. Lots of things related to how internal bits of GCP APIs are handled - the internal libraries had documentation indicating that streaming APIs were supported, and that each chunk of the request would be passed from the API proxy/backend multiplexer to the actual API server as they arrived. This worked for streaming responses, but not for streaming requests, and so I had to add that functionality to the API proxy. That was a huge pain - really hairy c++ code using fibers with multiple layers of request processing wrappers. But I worked thru that and got it landed into the google-wide binary, and never worried about it again.

I got this project to the level I needed it to support the precise requirements for the (regulated medical device) system I was working on. Around this time the GCP Cloud Healthcare group was getting started, and they built a new system using a fair number of bits of my implementation, which they'd eventually replace completely. But my first system saved them most of a year or work, resulting in the CHC feature set rapidly leapfrogging what I'd built.

Re: What if I’m wrong? (2023)

#52

Post by randomdata »

thfuran wrote: post #45
randomdata wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d rather not ever be right. If I am that means I learned nothing, making it a waste of time.

If you've never been right about anything, you might need to reconsider your approach to learning. I think you're doing it wrong.

Perhaps you missed the communication subtext? Once I'm certain I'm right I'm not going to talk it about it ever again. What would be the point? There's nothing left to learn. I'll have moved on to new topics where I don't yet know what is right – where I'm hopefully wrong so there is something to learn.

Re: What if I’m wrong? (2023)

#53

Post by efitz »

ben_w wrote: post #50
haswell wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also notice that argument by analogy is being over-used This one seems especially pernicious, not because of extremely over-wrought comparisons, but because sometimes the analogy fits really well on the surface. But beyond the structural fit, it does not really help prove anything. Too often I'll encounter an analogy wielded as if it proves the underlying point, when the reality is that it breaks down quickly if…

Analogies are like a box of chocolates: overused clichés, but we hand them out and gobble them down with delight.

Analogies are decorative writings, not arguments.

Re: What if I’m wrong? (2023)

#54

Post by [deleted] »

haswell wrote: post #47
ggm wrote: post #3

I've grown used to being corrected, to the point that it's a pleasant surprise to be told I might be right. What I notice more and more, is the "you're wrong" is used to buttress opinion masquerading as fact. If you preface "I think that.." to asserts it doesn't stop the "you're wrong" but it at least puts the discussion into the realms of conjecture about things, including facts, rather than simple asserts of facts…

> I also notice that argument by analogy is being over-used This one seems especially pernicious, not because of extremely over-wrought comparisons, but because sometimes the analogy fits really well on the surface. But beyond the structural fit, it does not really help prove anything. Too often I'll encounter an analogy wielded as if it proves the underlying point, when the reality is that it breaks down quickly if…

[deleted]

Re: What if I’m wrong? (2023)

#55

Post by ggm »

ben_w wrote: post #50
haswell wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also notice that argument by analogy is being over-used This one seems especially pernicious, not because of extremely over-wrought comparisons, but because sometimes the analogy fits really well on the surface. But beyond the structural fit, it does not really help prove anything. Too often I'll encounter an analogy wielded as if it proves the underlying point, when the reality is that it breaks down quickly if…

Analogies are like a box of chocolates: overused clichés, but we hand them out and gobble them down with delight.

I love the orange cream. I hate the nougat.

Re: What if I’m wrong? (2023)

#56

Post by efitz »

digbybk wrote: post #22
paulpauper wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have grown accustomed to being wrong a lot as well, especially online, but it would be nice being right more often too. It's like "Am I really that far off the mark? Maybe I am. Downvotes coming." I like to think my opinions are not that bad. Yet when it comes to investing in other aspects in life ,where money is at stake or making income, I have been right more often than not. So I guess I right where it matters m…

> I like to think my opinions are not that bad. I find this sentence kind of funny. If you thought your opinions were bad wouldn’t you change them?

The problem with opinions is not that they are good or bad, it’s how difficult they are to change. Other people who are unwilling to change “bad” opinions in the face of contradictory evidence is easily observed. If you find yourself never changing your own opinions, then you probably have a problem.

Re: What if I’m wrong? (2023)

#58

Post by roenxi »

ggm wrote: post #3

I've grown used to being corrected, to the point that it's a pleasant surprise to be told I might be right. What I notice more and more, is the "you're wrong" is used to buttress opinion masquerading as fact. If you preface "I think that.." to asserts it doesn't stop the "you're wrong" but it at least puts the discussion into the realms of conjecture about things, including facts, rather than simple asserts of facts…

On the topic of opinion masquerading as fact - if you check the dynamics there it quickly gets quite interesting. Political arguments are unusual if they involve an expert. On the big ones (economics, medical, military and technical policy) it is relatively rare to see an expert and doubly rare to find one who isn't pushing some sort of agenda. There tends to be a tiny pool of people doing a speaking circuit that turn up again and again and they're there for a reason. If you run the numbers on (informed people informing the discourse about a topic) / (people who know about topic) the numbers are a bit grim too.

And a big driver of that seems to be that either the debate isn't about facts so nobody cares, or frequently that the experts don't have a well advertised an opinion on an important subject. It really turns up in economics where finding facts is a challenge. The biggest economic miracle of our time is China's industrial policy and it isn't particularly obvious what the facts about that are.

I'm sure that there are economists who are devoting their lives to figuring out what happened in China because it is an interesting and important topic. But where the facts are being surfaced is not obvious and it isn't going to make its way through the broader public discourse.

TLDR; finding any facts in any public discussion is actually a bit of a challenge. It tends to be opinion all the way down until the trail goes cold.

Re: What if I’m wrong? (2023)

#59

Post by nonrandomstring »

efitz wrote: post #56
digbybk wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I like to think my opinions are not that bad. I find this sentence kind of funny. If you thought your opinions were bad wouldn’t you change them?

The problem with opinions is not that they are good or bad, it’s how difficult they are to change. Other people who are unwilling to change “bad” opinions in the face of contradictory evidence is easily observed. If you find yourself never changing your own opinions, then you probably have a problem.

The odd thing is, and I think this is Socrates, that it's hard to tell. Having been won over by the gentle force of the better argument what were once not your ideas feel like your ideas. In fact, now they are your ideas, and feel like they always were.

Re: What if I’m wrong? (2023)

#60

Post by Eisenstein »

pixl97 wrote: post #21
XorNot wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"best-practice" is a specific, over-used term in the tech industry. People instinctively give opinions and say "well best-practice is..." to fortify it against being criticized, and then lean heavily on the fact that if you actually ask them to support that notion then they imply or accuse the questioner of being hostile. "It's best practice" should invite the question of "according to who, in which publications? Wha…

I mean, not writing your own encryption library is best practice.

If someone asks you 'why?' can you tell them? If not, you are using it as a weasel word. If so, then you are using it as shorthand for 'I could explain it but I don't think I need to right now'.
Post reply on HN