Ask HN: Are people only smart until they talk about things you know more about?

> “Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Speeches)

This may be part of the rub: there are a bunch of bullshitters on the internet.

When you see this situation, ask yourself "why is this person wrong? why are they so confident in their opinion?" Often its because we think we know more than we actually do, we believed the things we read without bothering to give them the basic smell test for rationality. Where someone involved in the area has had exposure to the basic realities the readable sources do no or cannot impart.

Computer folks are especially subject to this error, I think, because all of our work is essentially readable, all the knowledge is communicable via text, and almost all the "rules" were created by human design that intended rational ends, even when it missed.

Carpenters by contrast get early and unavoidable lessons in the perversity and stubbornness of the real world, the effects of entrapped tradition, and the occasional need for black magic and blood sacrifice to get the job done.

This doesn't make them any less predisposed to error than the computer scientist in areas outside their competence, but it informs the shape of the errors they make.