Comment by threethirtytwo
1 day ago
Well how is his experience valid? He may be lying or unaware or delusional or lying to himself. All very common human behaviors.
> Your argument is now incomplete
If my argument is scientific and it’s incomplete then are all scientific arguments incomplete? If science is our best way of determining fact from fiction in reality then based off of the aforementioned logic isn’t the best possible way for humans to determine truth incomplete?
Also in Your attempt to prove me wrong have you thought about how MORE incomplete his argument was?
Everyone can be lying. But I’ve been around human beings long enough to know that there are two very different types of self delusion: valiant assumptions about what you will do in a never before seen situation, and observations about what you have done. GP’s was an objective statement:
> I've worked with people who were super productive with high quality work, and my reaction was to... gravitate toward working more with them.
Neither type of statement is perfectly trustable (nothing is) but IME there is a categorical difference. Your paper (and first comment, “don’t be so quick to judge”, which imo was ironically prescient) are about the former type.
Of course if you disagree with me on this fundamental distinction then we have found our contention :) which would be a nice end to this debate. Don’t you think?
Aren’t my statements exactly in line with what “he has done”? Why don’t you read it more carefully. I never denied what he “did”. More like I requested better evidence and I denied his rationalizations behind his life choices. I never claimed he didn’t do what he said.
If he’s drawn to people who do productive work that’s fine. I turned around and asked him for instances where someone’s work humiliated him or completely eclipsed any utility his work offers. Imagine he worked 10 years to invent the slide rule and some genius invents the electronic calculator in one day right after he showed his invention to the world. That’s devastating status damaging stuff. That’s the type of example I asked him for. Not “oh I’m drawn to work with productive people” lol. That kind of comment he made leaves room for him to imply he’s “more productive” than the people he wants to work with. He’s a poser but then that’s not abnormal… tons of people pose and are fake as hell.
Literally look at what he writes. He’s just incapable of admitting any trivial fault. He’s fucking controlled by status above a normal extent for sure. We don’t even have to get into the pedantics of science for this just use your common sense brain.
I have plenty of faults. Depending on your perspective, my entire point is a "fault": I'm lazy and unambitious and decided to top out and coast in my career when I was like 30.
I'm simply happy with that. I can't offer a situation where I've been humiliated because it hasn't happened. I've never seen anyone get humiliated at work. Most work is honestly pretty boring and straightforward. I'm not Leonardo da Vinci here hoping I don't get scooped.
I mean I suppose a week or two ago another engineer proposed some simplification to a problem that I'd prototyped a solution for that basically eliminated 90% of the work I was doing (basically smuggling some information into SNI so that I wouldn't have to build a bunch of code to track it), so I guess that happened? But I just said "oh, yeah, you're right. I can delete like 90% of my MR. Nice."
But then I do that to myself all the time too. I have some first approach, and then like a week later notice some simplification I missed. That's normal? I just join stand-up that day and day "good news I realized this problem is way simpler so I can delete half the work I did."
In fact that's why I like working with smart people. They can help see things you missed when you accidentally get stuck in a rabbit hole. I'm not going to be mad at someone for making my life easier. And as I've said, I go to work to support my family, not to fulfill some existential need. Whatever makes work simpler is good in my book. That's also why I've enjoyed adopting LLMs this year: they make it so I don't have to spend as much mental energy on things that are fundamentally not that interesting to me
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