Comment by xenotux
2 days ago
> I think it's fascinating to follow her trajectory.
I think it's a lesson that we all consistently fail to apply to ourselves. It is so pervasive on social media - HN included - yet it's something we only attribute to others. Our hot takes on quantum physics, molecular biology, and economics are always reasonable and rooted in keen insights.
It happens for a reason. There's something deeply satisfying about being a contrarian: the implication that you're smarter than the masses. It's usually hard to be a contrarian in your primary field of expertise. It's a lot easier to be a contrarian in someone else's.
To add to this, I think we have a tendency to underestimate how much of our mental model derives from "direct working experience" type hours vs discussion/reading/listening hours.
E.g. I've probably talked about various aspects and extensions to the ISIS routing protocol with in-field experts for more hours than I could think to add together... but the bulk of my practical understanding really comes from the (comparatively) small amount of time I spent building custom implementations, debugging other implementations, and deploying ISIS in various locations. I probably couldn't have done the latter nearly as well without the former, but the latter is where I went from suggesting protocol changes that sounded reasonable to making critiques that were actually actionable
Similarly, I know I know BGP more than your average person, enough to sound like the protocol experts, but I lack most all of the practical working and experimentation knowledge. If you asked me what I think should be changed about BGP I'd probably rattle off a decent list, and it'd probably sound pretty convincing, yet I doubt I would even agree with half of it if I had the other half of the mental model built (or I told it to someone who specialized in BGP). That kind of step doesn't (and usually can't) come from working deeply in a different area (even if similar) and "talking the talk" about the other area.
That said, what makes social media addicting, especially in areas where specialists like to coalesce (HN is one such place, IMO) is you can get a TON of that kind of conversation, data, and readings about anything. Then it makes you overconfident because you got that style of interaction without even doing anything remotely related to that area.
All of this reminds me I've spent far too much time on HN... and I'm entering 12 days of PTO. Time to set noprocast to something ridiculous :).
Someone once posted a video by Jonathan Bi, a lecture on Rousseau and his views that intellectuals with large egos eventually play contrarian positions just to have a chance to argue and prove how smart they are; Rousseau’s opinion was that the democratization of knowledge, the printing press at the time as he couldn’t foresee the internet, would amplify this phenomenon until society would lose itself arguing about pretty much everything, and people would delight being contrarian even about the most mundane of things.
https://youtu.be/C8ucJ29O1kM?feature=shared
I have watched that lecture 6 months ago and I haven’t been able to read any forum, HN included, without being reminded of Rousseau’s discourse. The Internet and social media is a cacophony of skeptics and big brains that, if you were to tell water is wet, would earnestly open a debate on why that is not the case. It’s endless churning around the obvious, as everyone’s opinion is valid however idiotic and off-topic it is, there’s no foundation to build an intelligent argument before Johnny Anonymous comes to sidetrack it either with intentional trolling or just pedantic nonsense.
> The Internet and social media is a cacophony of skeptics and big brains that, if you were to tell water is wet, would earnestly open a debate on why that is not the case.
Sounds like the ancient Greeks or scholastic philosophers...
But I agree social media has also made this dynamic more pervasive as well as distorted it in many ways
> Sounds like the ancient Greeks or scholastic philosophers...
I don't see how you can make this claim. Putting aside the fact that these two groups were diverse, contrarian they were not. (Socrates, known for posing questions to fellow Athenians and his students, wasn't a contrarian. He was interested in arriving at the truth and challenging the Sophists, the quintessential bullshitters, who were interested in power.)
If anything, modernism tends to be more contrarian, and even when not by intention, then at least by construction. Think of the philosophical positions that fall under this label. Skeptical denial and making weird assumptions is sort of characteristic.
> Our hot takes on quantum physics, molecular biology, and economics are always reasonable and rooted in keen insights.
That's a very shallow view, have you never heard people explicitly stating that their views on some matter are rooted in thin air they've pulled them from instead of keen insights?