None of Us Knows What We're Doing
feross.org
None of Us Knows What We're Doing
1–10 of 53 posts
Re: None of Us Knows What We're Doing
#2What's with all the bold and italics? I feel like I'm being yelled at in the face.
Re: None of Us Knows What We're Doing
#3I'm surprised this didn't get much of a response on HN - I really enjoyed the article. Very inspirational and candid.
Re: None of Us Knows What We're Doing
#4I don't usually play the part of armchair psychologist, but this essay appears to me to be an excellent example of projection.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projection_bias
The author assumes that because he doesn't know what he's doing, other people also don't.
I disagree. Sometimes people can know exactly what they're doing, and be fairly confident about the possible consequences.
I made a viral hit similar to the author's YT instant, and I very much did not know what I was doing. Then I did it again with different code, without leveraging the existing user base, just to see if it was all luck. It wasn't. I think a better argument would be that "sometimes successful projects are successful by accident", but that would make a terrible post title.
Re: None of Us Knows What We're Doing
#5I don't usually play the part of armchair psychologist, but this essay appears to me to be an excellent example of projection. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projection_bias The author assumes that because he doesn't know what he's doing, other people also don't. I disagree. Sometimes people can know exactly what they're doing, and be fairly confident about the possible consequences. I made a viral hit similar to the a…
I agree with you completely, but I do think the biggest thing holding people back is fear, either that they won't do the right thing or they will fail.
As I told my kids tonight, be do-ers, not spectators.
Re: None of Us Knows What We're Doing
#6The grammar of this headline really bugs me. The author correctly remembers that "None of us" is singular, but then spoils it by throwing in the plural "we're".
The correct version would, I think, be "None of us knows what he's doing", although both the feminists and the languagelog folks would complain about that.
Re: None of Us Knows What We're Doing
#7I don't usually play the part of armchair psychologist, but this essay appears to me to be an excellent example of projection. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projection_bias The author assumes that because he doesn't know what he's doing, other people also don't. I disagree. Sometimes people can know exactly what they're doing, and be fairly confident about the possible consequences. I made a viral hit similar to the a…
Yeah, according to the author I guess Einstein was "winging it" too.
Re: None of Us Knows What We're Doing
#8The grammar of this headline really bugs me. The author correctly remembers that "None of us" is singular, but then spoils it by throwing in the plural "we're". The correct version would, I think, be "None of us knows what he's doing", although both the feminists and the languagelog folks would complain about that.
How about "None of us knows what they're doing"? Hasn't it become generally accepted that 'they' can be used as a gender neutral singular pronoun?
Re: None of Us Knows What We're Doing
#9I don't usually play the part of armchair psychologist, but this essay appears to me to be an excellent example of projection. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projection_bias The author assumes that because he doesn't know what he's doing, other people also don't. I disagree. Sometimes people can know exactly what they're doing, and be fairly confident about the possible consequences. I made a viral hit similar to the a…
I agree with you completely, but I do think the biggest thing holding people back is fear, either that they won't do the right thing or they will fail. As I told my kids tonight, be do-ers, not spectators.
"We have to create culture. Don't watch TV, don't read magazines, don't even listen to NPR; create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you're giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told 'no', we're unimportant, we're peripheral. 'Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.' And then you're a player, you don't want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world."
Re: None of Us Knows What We're Doing
#10The grammar of this headline really bugs me. The author correctly remembers that "None of us" is singular, but then spoils it by throwing in the plural "we're". The correct version would, I think, be "None of us knows what he's doing", although both the feminists and the languagelog folks would complain about that.
Are you sure about “none” being singular in that context? I agree that the title is inconsistent, but I'd have written “None of us know what we're doing” (if I couldn't just pick some other phrasing).
gcide defines “none” as “No one; not one; not anything; – frequently used also partitively, or as a plural, not any.” and also offers “None of their productions are extant. –Blair”, both purportedly from 1913 Webster. So it seems that the pronoun can be interpreted in either number as needed.