[HN Gopher] No-one knows what they are doing
___________________________________________________________________
No-one knows what they are doing
Author : charly357
Score : 264 points
Date : 2022-06-20 06:54 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (successfulsoftware.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (successfulsoftware.net)
| LeonM wrote:
| I stopped reading the original article when the OP started
| including politics.
|
| Invoking anger by reminding your audience that some 'current'
| government of $random_country that they are not 'having a clue'
| is a really cheap trick to grab attention of lesser informed
| people. Of course it only applies to the 'current' government,
| because everything was obviously better in the past.
|
| It makes me sad, and angry at the same time to see that even on
| forums like HN, people fall for it. This thread is mostly
| hijacked by a 'discussion' about politics, completely ignoring
| the subject of the OP.
|
| What's even more sad, is that if you look at the 'social proof'
| section of perfecttableplan (the company the author is promoting,
| and where he is CEO), you'll see that they serve loads of
| government organizations. So here is the 'CEO' of a company,
| making cheap shots at their own customers, just to get some
| eyeballs on his content marketing.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| There is a kind of subtle clickbait title style well suited for
| the HN audience and this article had it. Appealing to
| intellectual curiosity to read more, promising something like a
| PG essay but not delivering anything like that. It is the one
| weird trick of the HN world.
| 0xRusty wrote:
| It is a pointless piece of writing. It says nothing. It's a
| thinly veiled advert for OP's software, clickbaited by a
| unprovable political opinion. This type of thing should be
| removed from HN.
| TedShiller wrote:
| > Just look at the current British government
|
| LOL I think he means the US government
| ben_w wrote:
| Did Biden face, and somehow win, a vote of no-confidence from
| his own party after photographic evidence emerged that forced
| the police to fine him for violating regulations that he had
| personally introduced, publicly supported, and denied
| violating? Because that's the state of the British government
| at the moment.
| KSteffensen wrote:
| In democracies the populations get the politicians they
| deserve. It's not like it's a surprise to anyone that Boris
| Johnson's sole political project is Boris Johnson, but people
| still voted for him.
| blibble wrote:
| US presidential system doesn't have votes of no confidence
| minimilian wrote:
| > Most of us who are running businesses had no real idea what
| they were doing when they started
|
| Who are they?
| giantg2 wrote:
| "No-one knows what they are doing"
|
| Thanks. I'll tell my boss and let you know how my performance
| review goes...
| sylens wrote:
| I think realizing this was the biggest disappointment of my adult
| life. As a kid, you think that there are people looking after the
| world, looking out for the best interests of society, etc. When
| you get enough and can see behind the curtain, it's very
| depressing.
| vasco wrote:
| I think it's not depressing but wonderful. All software sucks,
| nobody knows what they're doing, etc, yet the world keeps
| chugging along and there's all these incredible things to do,
| amazing foods to eat and marvels of technology to play with.
| Imagine if we actually knew what was going on! Rather than
| feeling depressed that there's nobody with an actual plan, why
| not be amazed that all these things can come out of such chaos?
| karaterobot wrote:
| I call this the hyper-competence fallacy: the mistaken idea that
| some group of people (usually the ones in charge) are
| consistently and significantly more likely to have their shit
| together than the median person. I've met extremely smart people,
| and extremely competent people, but they were only smart at
| certain things, and only sometimes. They still made lots of
| mistakes, even basic ones.
|
| Some people are certainly better at their jobs than others, but
| that you shouldn't just assume that the people in charge are
| right without thinking things through and raising your hand to
| ask questions.
|
| Much more common are the people who are typically _incompetent_ ,
| but who manage to make people think they know what they're doing.
| People want to believe somebody knows the way. It can be hard to
| spot incompetent leaders until it's too late, which is all the
| more reason to be politely skeptical of anybody who acts like
| they aren't playing catch up most of the time.
| ardit33 wrote:
| Not true at all at things that need practice and that are
| recurrent.
|
| From sports, to many other activities that have repetition,
| people know what they are generally trying to do. That doesn't
| mean that there is not a large degree of randomness, and some
| improvisation. Eg:
|
| 1. A penalty kicker knows what he/she is trying to do. Power over
| placement, what corner they want to shoot it, etc. They have
| practiced many times. Same with the goalie. The goalie will try
| to guess, left, right, center, etc...
|
| They have practiced this many time as well. Both parties know
| what they are doing (at a professional level), yet there is
| always a degree of randomness, and improvisation.
|
| 2. A cop knows that in some corner it is much easier to catch
| people that are speeding, and they can give tickets easy.
|
| 3. A dentist has seen a root canal many times, and it is easy for
| him/her to just fill another one. All teeth are different, yet
| they are similar at the same time. Practice makes perfect. First
| time doing a root cannal, or an extraction must be tough/nerve
| racking. 10th time, a bit easier. 100th time, just another
| routine day.
|
| Anyways... but these type of articles are really good feel good
| articles.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| I don't think running a business is anything like kicking
| penalties. So many more variables and unknowns.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| If the goal is clear, and the rules are clear, the knowing-
| what-to-do-level can be relatively high. As an example, a
| typical game can be won with executing on the set rules with
| skill. You can measure the success of your actions by looking
| at the outcome. This seems so obvious that I don't think the
| author would argue against it.
|
| I think what the author is talking about is the space where
| things become so complex that it's hard to attribute any action
| to the outcome or, even worse, you can't even realistically
| measure the outcome.
|
| Applying this to your penalty kicker: Sure, you practice, you
| get better. But so does everyone else. The question then is:
| How and what to get better than the other guys? Why does one
| guy succeed and the other doesn't? Yeah sure, because they hit
| the ball in such a way that it enters the designated space -
| but how do they set themselves up to accomplish that? How many
| of the 24 hours you have in a day do you spend kicking the ball
| from the penalty point? How much of it is recovery? When do you
| get up? Planing and theory? Mental strength exercises? Food
| intake? Massages, strength or balance workouts?
|
| The failure is simply defined: You did not hit the ball in such
| a way that it entered the goal. Sure - but why? How do you
| adjust your routine in such a way that next time it's going to
| be better, relative to everyone else, who is also trying to
| improve?
|
| In reality it's obviously more complex even still, because
| there is no "penalty kicker" in football. So to become the best
| possible soccer player, how much of your time should be
| allocated to penalty kicking at all? And then how does your
| penaltykickability scale while working on the other stuff that
| you are also looking at?
|
| And then, when we are exiting game space, it gets really
| complicated, because all of a sudden it's not even clear what
| winning even means. In soccer a win is neatly defined. It's
| usually not the case in the real world. Is it a win to provide
| health care to all? Is Bitcoin a win for humanity? Is it a good
| goal to get people out of poverty or is the goal something else
| and we trust that this will be a side effect of that goal? You
| and I might agree on an answer, and then there is millions or
| billions of people who don't, in theory or at least in
| practice.
|
| It's messy stuff.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| _Some people do_ , but they're the minority, and you might not
| even notice them in the crowd.
|
| I've seen well over a hundred organisations, small and large, in
| my careers as a consultant. They're all run by the 90% that have
| no idea what they're doing. They're chair warmers. Paper pushers.
| Project mismanagers.
|
| Then there are the 10% that keep the lights on, put the fires
| out, have the brilliant ideas, and keep science and society
| progressing.
|
| Generally they're under-appreciated and under-paid. Sometimes
| they're not noticed at all. That doesn't mean they don't exist!
|
| _Someone_ figured out all of the amazing things that you take
| for granted in your life. The x-ray lasers use to make your
| iPhone. The 5G protocol that lets it get gigabits while you 're
| standing at a bus stop. The encoding that lets you stream your
| own personal "TV channel". The chemistry that made up the OLED
| panel that is bright enough to see in sunlight. On and on...
|
| Companies... including startups... are like this. There are the
| 90% that just keep treading water, and then there's the 10% that
| push the boundaries.
| niko001 wrote:
| I don't think that necessarily contradicts what the author is
| saying. Even you describe how these top 10% performers are
| often underpaid, so in some areas (getting noticed, managing
| office politics, switching companies to get pay rises) they
| seemingly "don't know what they're doing". A lot of people are
| brilliant in one particular area and at the same time fail
| basic life tasks, even though to someone from the outside it
| looks as if they've got everything figured out.
| manmal wrote:
| I guess if everybody were pushing the envelope, things would
| get unstable quickly. Humanity survives on a lot of dumb grunt
| work.
| thom wrote:
| Blast from the past! I used PerfectTablePlan for our wedding,
| tweaked by the far superior 'do what your better half tells you'
| algorithm. We used the same approach later when naming our first
| child, I built a complicated machine learning system to learn
| what names and sounds we liked, then we settled on my wife's
| first choice.
|
| The thing I've learned in life (and especially in sports
| analytics where variance can dominate) is that "knowing what
| you're doing" isn't any number of instances where you got
| something right first time. It's having a process (or even a
| process-creating-process!) that you're willing to stand by even
| when individual results don't work out. The question isn't "would
| you do it all again, knowing what you know now?" it's "would you
| learn the same way in the future?" I think being open about this
| with kids is pretty helpful.
| thathndude wrote:
| This second paragraph is consistent with advice from a piece on
| HN about a month ago, describing how playing poker can make us
| better at life. And one of the key principles was being process
| oriented.
| nahuel0x wrote:
| _Can you remember when you first started to read? Doubtless you
| thought that some day you would find in books the truth, the
| answer to the very puzzling life you were discovering around you.
| But you never did. If you were alert, you discovered that books
| were conventions, as unlike life as a game of chess. The written
| word is a sieve. Only so much of reality gets through as fits the
| size and shape of the screen, and in some ways that is never
| enough. . . . Most of the real difficulty of communication comes
| from social convention, from a vast conspiracy to agree to accept
| the world as something it really isn't at all._
|
| _Literature is a social defense mechanism. Remember again when
| you were a child. You thought that some day you would grow up and
| find a world of real adults -- the people who really made things
| run -- and understand how and why things ran. . . . Then, as the
| years went on, you learned, through more or less bitter
| experience, that there aren't, and never have been, any such
| people, anywhere. Life is just a mess, full of tall children,
| grown stupider, less alert and resilient, and nobody knows what
| makes it go -- as a whole, or any part of it. But nobody ever
| tells._
|
| _Henry Miller tells. Andersen told about the little boy and the
| Emperor's new clothes. Miller is the little boy himself. He tells
| about the Emperor, about the pimples on his behind, and the warts
| on his private parts, and the dirt between his toes. Other
| writers in the past have done this, of course, and they are the
| great ones, the real classics. But they have done it within the
| conventions of literature. They have used the forms of the Great
| Lie to expose the truth._
|
| / Kenneth Rexroth.
| sickcodebruh wrote:
| _See, that will all make sense when I am older
|
| So there's no need to be terrified or tense
|
| I'll just dream about a time
|
| When I'm in my age of prime
|
| 'Cause when you're older
|
| Absolutely everything makes sense_
|
| - Olaf the Snowman, Frozen 2
| seaerkin wrote:
| I like this post a lot, and I can certainly relate to this
| working in the business technology sector as a developer and as a
| generalist technology consultant for a large firm. Contracts get
| signed, and half the time, the seller doesn't understand what
| they're selling, and the buyer is buying an idea and truly
| doesn't get it either, then it's up to the technical consultants
| to take their best stab at it while being billed out as an
| "expert."
|
| Then you have professions that are much more black and white,
| mainly the trades and non-technology engineering. Their survival
| is contingent on knowing what they're doing, most of the time and
| they gain more profit by being efficient with tasks they've seen
| time and time again. Think of a plumber or garage door repairman
| whose seen your specific problem hundreds of times before. A good
| tradesperson will know precisely what they are doing.
|
| I'm not sure where I'm going with these rambles, but the
| encouraging view of what the author is writing about here can
| almost be described as embracing uncertainty in the business
| world where the rules aren't clearly defined. Much different than
| the trades or non-tech engineering, where the end deliverable is
| something that is more concrete (no pun intended) and easily
| understood by the average person.
| taylodl wrote:
| Actually people do know what they're doing. They're simply making
| decisions with incomplete and/or probabilistic data. They want to
| make decisions maximizing the most likely scenarios while
| minimizing the most negative outcomes. That's why it's called a
| balancing act and there's various techniques one can utilize for
| making decisions in such an environment.
|
| This is a reason why many businesses fail. Sure, just about
| everybody can make good decisions if you have accurate and
| complete data with which to make those decisions. That just
| doesn't typically happen too often when running a business. It's
| a far cry though from saying "nobody knows what they are doing."
| That's just simply not true.
| Hoasi wrote:
| That's when "you don't know what you are doing" that you can do
| your best work. If you know what you are doing all of the time,
| it means you are not learning new things.
| iamdamian wrote:
| The Gervais Principle shows up every once in a while on Hacker
| News and seems relevant:
|
| https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/
| EnKopVand wrote:
| I'm going to let you in on a little secret. I spent almost a
| decade in public sector digitalisation in Denmark, and those
| politicians who look like they don't know what they are doing in
| the media, well, they absolutely know what they are doing. Not
| only that, but they get advice from a bureaucracy full of well
| educated, really smart people, who also know what they are doing
| and have known so for decades. One of the things that struck me
| going in was just how much people know exactly what they are
| doing, and, to my own discredit, just how engaged and well
| meaning those people are. What eventually led me to leave the
| public sector is that there is a very big difference between
| knowing what you're doing and doing the "smart/right" thing,
| especially when you're held accountable by an entire country, if
| not the world.
|
| I've seen the same sort of thing in the private sector. Once you
| zoom out enough to understand decisions from the perspective they
| are being taken from, they very often make perfect sense. That
| doesn't mean those very same decisions aren't a load of bollocks
| from a lot of perspectives, but they are rarely just "fake it
| till you make it" sort of deals.
|
| I think this author suffers from childhood delusion in that the
| author still thinks adults are supposed to have the answers for
| everything, which isn't true. There is a lot to be said about
| figuring things out a long the way, but it's not like people
| don't know what they are doing, because we learn, we adapt and we
| very often plan ahead. I mean, the author even sort of
| contradicts the title or the article in the discussion on whether
| to do more SEO, YouTube, and/or, networking because that is
| already knowing a lot, just not everything.
|
| A more accurate way to view the world would be that most people
| don't know exactly how they are going to execute their long term
| plans, but almost every successful adult I have ever met did have
| both a plan and a genuinely good idea on how to execute it. From
| everything to their careers to raising their children, and I
| think it's very easy to see when someone actually doesn't know,
| because often they are either drowning, looking for help or both,
| or, alternatively never even beginning on the thing they want.
| durnygbur wrote:
| The bureaucrats one has to deal with as taxpayer, insuree,
| petent, or immigrant are different kind of bureaucrats from
| those holding high positions and advising to them. That's how
| one gets idea that they don't know what they're doing, they job
| is to push you away, hold you back. The second kind though...
| yes it takes enormous volume of cunningness, insight, non-
| public information to acquire and expand position of power.
| tokai wrote:
| Well digitalization in Denmark is an absolute train wreck of
| ill thought out decisions. To such a degree that the people in
| charge of it are either dumb or have ulterior motives. Having
| worked with bureaucrats as an external consultant and as
| someone that provided information to the answers for minister
| questions, I have a much different opinion of our dear
| bureaucrats.
|
| They might be smart, but it has no impact on the quality of
| their work. Right or wrong, good or bad, non of that has any
| bearing on how they do their work. They want to get stuff done.
| Without getting in any political trouble. In a way that can be
| claimed as a win (if it actually is a win is immaterial).
| m0llusk wrote:
| Sometimes the idea is to do things wrong and then use that
| experience to do things correctly later and if possible use
| events to sweep aside the current political order.
| EnKopVand wrote:
| > Well digitalization in Denmark is an absolute train wreck
| of ill thought out decisions.
|
| Yes, and it's also competing with Estonia at being the best
| in the world.
|
| One of the things that burned me out was actually the poor
| decision making, from my technical point of view mind you.
| I'll simplify what I mean by a made up example of a platform
| selection process. Your organisation needs a headless CMS,
| your external consultants tells you this, your tech staff
| tells you this and even your friends from competitors that
| you network with privately tell you this. The issue is that
| your company strategy is to rely as little on internal IT
| resources as possible, and any available headless CMS
| (because you can't outhouse the data) requires technical
| talent. So what do you do? Well, you pick something else,
| like Wordpress, the Microsoft powerplatform or similar, and
| you do fine. The solution is shit technically, but it also
| works good enough while achieving its primary strategic goal
| within your organisation.
|
| Public sector digitalisation is that, except a billion times
| more complicated and with the added bonus of having changing
| political leadership. For a few years we had a designated
| minister in Sophie Lohde, who setup a branch of the
| digitalisation ministry to build a cross sector national
| enterprise architecture inspired by the one they run in the
| municipalities (KL) called rammearkitekturen. The group had
| an extreme amount of talent and improved on the 20 years of
| KL work so much it was like the whole thing went from the
| stoneage to the spaceage in less than a year. Then Sophie
| Lodhe got a different job, the task force was disbanded and
| everything related to governance went back to the
| municipalities (KL and KOMBIT) whom through out the process
| had suffered from an extreme inability to kill their
| darlings.
|
| I mean, that's just a glimpse of it, but you don't have to
| work with other European countries for very long until you
| relive just how awesome digitalisation is in Denmark by
| comparison. Part of my current job is dealing with the fact
| that FTP is still a very common data transfer channel in
| Germany and France, and I didn't miss that S in SFTP, because
| that's something even massive tech companies that shall
| remain unnamed hadn't heard about until I asked them why it
| wasn't encrypted.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| That the UK government basically knew what they were doing may
| have been true 5 years ago. Today, not so much.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Do you think? They're starting to cut into our human rights,
| and workers rights, they've brought in measures to stop
| democratic protests, stripped public services, they've
| increased tax on the poor and removed tax from business/rich
| (cutting tax on Champagne whilst lecturing the populace on
| the need for austerity was a particularly evil-villain
| twist); they straight up funneled PSBillions out of the
| Exchequer under the guise of PPE payments and then just said
| that the whole scandal want going to be investigated, they
| clearly had arrangements with the Met to allow them to avoid
| the law ... they seem to be doing exactly what they intend,
| making oodles of money.
|
| They removed EU oversight and loaded top civil service
| positions with yes-men.
|
| They've achieved a lot, all to the detriment of the country
| and regular people. What makes you say they don't know what
| they're doing?
| hermitcrab wrote:
| I don't disagree with any of the above. But it is probably
| at least as much down to incompetence as greed. Please
| don't try and tell me that Nadine Dorries is some sort of
| evil genius.
| tpoacher wrote:
| I think this largely depends on the definition of "know".
|
| E.g., when I used to work as a doctor in hospital, the last
| thing I would describe my colleagues as would be incompetent or
| un-knowing. They all "knew" stuff. Heck, they had to pass
| stringent exams, and were still accountable to several agencies
| to ensure being up to date.
|
| The thing is, 50% of what they "knew" was wrong. And if you
| looked a bit under the surface, what one person "knew" was very
| different, and often contradicting what the other one "knew",
| even though they both "knew" stuff. And after many years, I've
| come to the conclusion that the number one cause of modern
| disease is iatrogenic, but most doctors seem not to want to
| admit this, and stick to what they "know" from textbooks
| instead. This is something I now "know".
|
| And that doesn't even take the whole "is 'know' a binary or
| fuzzy concept, and if it's the latter, how much 'know' counts
| as actual 'know'" argument into account to begin with.
|
| So, I hear the argument that "maybe OP is just an impostor
| projecting their views in a world full of experts" (wildly
| paraphrasing, obviously), but I also think you're perhaps being
| a bit too rigid here in discounting that expertise is a
| relatively fuzzy term.
| platz wrote:
| what is an example of a modern disease whos main cause is
| iatrogenic
| mellavora wrote:
| I was also curious, so looked it up on Wikipedia:
|
| > Iatrogenesis is the causation of a disease, a harmful
| complication, or other ill effect by any medical activity,
| including diagnosis, intervention, error, or
| negligence.[1][2][3] First used in this sense in 1924,[1]
| the term was introduced to sociology in 1976 by Ivan
| Illich, alleging that industrialized societies impair
| quality of life by overmedicalizing life.[4] Iatrogenesis
| may thus include mental suffering via medical beliefs or a
| practitioner's statements.[4][5][6] Some iatrogenic events
| are obvious, like amputation of the wrong limb, whereas
| others, like drug interactions, can evade recognition. In a
| 2013 estimate, about 20 million negative effects from
| treatment had occurred globally.[7] In 2013, an estimated
| 142,000 persons died from adverse effects of medical
| treatment, up from an estimated 94,000 in 1990.[8]
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iatrogenesis
| platz wrote:
| I know the word has a definition.
|
| I wanted to know what tpoacher's lived experience and
| personal observation was to cause him to make the
| statement.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Doctors are great if you have a problem doctors are great at.
| Otherwise for something like CFS the best resources are CFS
| communities and a doctor without all the answers, willing to
| help you explore.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| >Doctors are great if you have a problem doctors are great
| at.
|
| This is tantological- but it has some great depth. I'd like
| to quote you on this, if I may.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Almost tautological: because it is not "doctors are great
| at helping with any medical problem". And by great I
| don't mean cure anything, but give the best outcome
| possible with technology and budget for the person.
| t-0 wrote:
| I appreciate that you are using exageration to make a point,
| but it's worth noting for the record that iatrogenicity is
| hardley the number one cause of modern disease. Having a
| medical problem is a prerequisite to the chance of iatrogenic
| harm after all. Furthermore, a patient can suffer from
| iatrogenic harm even if everything was done correctly, and
| does not imply that someone didn't "know" something
| correctly.
| tpoacher wrote:
| It is not intended as an exaggeration. Though I fully admit
| I'm using 'iatrogenic' in the broader sense of "things
| people do or have done to themselves for the sake of
| treating or preventing a condition, perceived or
| otherwise". This includes alternative therapies, over the
| counter medications, etc. So I fully agree if your
| perception of iatrogenic was only things like "removed the
| wrong kidney", then I can see why you might have thought I
| was exaggerating, since that is indeed pretty rare, and
| there are safeguards in place for that kind of thing.
|
| The statement is not intended as an attack against the
| medical professions or the effectiveness of medicine. It is
| intended as pointing out my observation that, typically, a
| doctor would list such iatrogenic causes very low on their
| list of differentials to consider, preferring to consider
| 'textbook' causes first. However, my own experience (which,
| is medical, but admittedly "anecdata") is that at present,
| iatrogenic causes are very relevant, and at least as
| likely, if not more, to yield a relevant diagnosis compared
| to textbook stuff in a high proportion of presentations.
|
| A classic example of this is doctors treating symptoms by
| adding more medication/treatment options, rarely removing
| medications/treatments that may be causing those symptoms
| in the first place. Especially if that medication was
| started by a different specialist. It usually takes several
| rounds of inconclusive investigations and experimenting
| with treatments before altering an existing medication is
| even considered.
|
| At the very least, having a "exclude iatrogenic causes
| first, before moving on to 'classic' stuff" is a good
| mindset to have.
|
| > Furthermore, a patient can suffer from iatrogenic harm
| even if everything was done correctly, and does not imply
| that someone didn't "know" something correctly.
|
| There's a popular quote often said to medical students when
| they start: "50% of what we'll be teaching you will have
| become obsolete or proven wrong by the time you graduate;
| unfortunately we don't know which 50%.".
| mrtksn wrote:
| > adults are supposed to have the answers for everything, which
| isn't true
|
| That's the gist of all of it. No one knows what are they doing
| because the adults actually don't have all the answers, on the
| other hand smart people know what they want to achieve and they
| have idea and a plan for it and simply try their best. They
| know what are they doing in the context of their understanding,
| idea and desires, it's just that their understanding and ideas
| have limits.
| p0d wrote:
| I also prefer your comment to the post. The most successful
| people in business I know are very bright and hard workers. I
| like the fact that the writer of the original article is
| showing some humility. I don't think we should signal however
| that anyone can succeed in business by bluffing it. I say, have
| a go at business but don't give up the day job if you can't
| afford it.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Ex-British politician, Rory Stewart, said that (paraphrasing
| from memory) that every time he started to understand about a
| ministerial appointment, he would get promoted to another
| department.
| hyperpallium2 wrote:
| Politicians, on politicized issues, come across as children.
| But I was amazed to discover, in a document discussion non-
| politicized legislation, they were well-informed and sensible,
| and, as you say, supported by extremely capable members of a
| bureaucracy. Each conclusion was tempered by how confidence
| levels in its supporting material. In other words, it was just
| what you'd want it to be. Also, clearly written and a pleasure
| to read.
|
| They are only idiots on stage. Which says something about our
| democracy.
|
| OTOH mathematically speaking, if you don't perfectly know what
| you are doing... _you you don 't know what you're doing_.
| smitty1e wrote:
| > They are only idiots on stage. Which says something about
| our democracy.
|
| 1. Savvy across the organization adds like resistance in a
| parallel circuit: the org as a whole is slightly less savvy
| than the biggest doof therein.
|
| 2. Restated: people scale poorly.
|
| 3. In the government case, minimizining flailing and tyranny
| equates to minimizing the size of government.
|
| 4. We seem to trend the opposite direction from (3).
| audunw wrote:
| > 3. In the government case, minimizining flailing and
| tyranny equates to minimizing the size of government.
|
| Whoa there. There are plenty of very small governments that
| have plenty of flailing and tyranny. In the limit, if
| government is just one guy, he clearly won't have clue
| about 99% of what he's doing, and will be extremely easy to
| corrupt since he has no-one else to hold him accountable.
|
| If you want to have even a chance of having a competent
| government you need at least three fully independent
| branches of government with their own internal systems of
| accountability.
|
| I could just as easily argue that you need to maximize the
| size of the government.
|
| The problem is you hit issues both at the small and the
| large end. It's like goldilocks. You shouldn't minimize or
| maximize. You should aim at _just the right size_ for the
| country /region you're trying to govern.
|
| What's WAY, WAY more important is HOW you govern.
|
| What's really scary these days is how many people think
| we'll solve all our problems if we just make government
| smaller and smaller. I guess so much time has passed since
| the various parts of our government was set up that we've
| kind of forgotten why the government is the way it is.
|
| Not that we shouldn't have a process that trims down parts
| of government that has become redundant. But we should have
| a deep understanding of the problem that part of the
| government is solving before doing so.
| smitty1e wrote:
| > What's really scary these days is how many people think
| we'll solve all our problems if we just make government
| smaller and smaller.
|
| You said "solve". I said "minimize". Details matter,
| boss.
| rayiner wrote:
| > What's really scary these days is how many people think
| we'll solve all our problems if we just make government
| smaller and smaller.
|
| And what's really really scary is how many people, at
| least in the US, worry about government being too small
| when in reality it has been almost monotonically growing
| since the 1960s. Non defense federal spending as a share
| of GDP is bigger than the 1960s. And state and local
| government spending has grown twice as fast as GDP since
| 1960.
|
| I think people confuse Reagan's rhetoric with the reality
| that Democrats controlled the House, and thus spending
| bills, his entire presidency. The Reagan era was a period
| of government retrenchment in the same sense as Biden is
| the second coming of FDR.
| 10000truths wrote:
| As with other things, quality matters more than quantity.
| A village elder or city mayor are just as fallible as a
| parliament, or a king and his council. The mechanism of
| corruption may vary with historical circumstance,
| culture, and/or technology. But at the end of the day, if
| the "people in charge" are unaccountable and have no
| desire to exercise their power for the common good, there
| is no system of checks and balances that will save such a
| government from collapse.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > the org as a whole is slightly less savvy than the
| biggest doof therein.
|
| I've seen about 220 'orgs' from the outside in, interviewed
| a few thousand people in those orgs and have done the write
| up on the state of affairs. I've yet to find a single
| example that would support this claim, where did you get
| this from?
| smitty1e wrote:
| Personal observation of Congress.
| adrianN wrote:
| >Savvy across the organization adds like resistance in a
| parallel circuit: the org as a whole is slightly less savvy
| than the biggest doof therein
|
| That seems like a very bold premise to me.
| raducu wrote:
| > well, they absolutely know what they are doing
|
| My grandfather had neighbours whom he routinely looked down
| upon because of their alcohol problem.
|
| Very late in the life of one of their children I talked with
| him and found out he was a really smart guy, knew a lot of IT
| stuff, 3D design an all, but he simply lucked out in late 90's
| Romania, used a lot of alcohol and could not pull himself out
| of it. He died because he was drunk and after loading a wagon
| of wood for my grandma he struck his head on the pavement. My
| father insisted he went to the hospital because he has not
| feeling well but the guy refused. He died a couple of days
| later because of brain hemorrhage, in his early 50s.
|
| Another guy in the village, a really helpful fellow, you would
| never believe it by his appearance or demeanor, but he was a
| retired secret-service officer and used to brief the president.
|
| A female child development therapist that made a bad impression
| on myself(she seemed fixated on puzzle solving) was later
| recommended by others as an expert in her field.
|
| So yes, everybody can have a bad day and its really easy to
| misjudge someone by their appearance.
| dhosek wrote:
| I'm reminded of when I was in college in Model U.N., there
| was one guy in the group who presented very socially awkward
| (his posture made him look like a question mark in profile,
| he was kind of physically awkward, didn't participate in the
| social activities of the club). My senior year, I was the
| secretary-general1 of the club. We'd finally let him chair a
| committee at our annual conference that we held for Southern
| California high school students. I was walking from committee
| room to committee room during the conference checking on how
| things were going and when I looked in on his committee--
| well, he was totally rocking it. I realized we had squandered
| his talents for four years because of surface appearances.
|
| [?]
|
| 1. The pretentious way that Model U.N. clubs name what's
| effectively the president.
| rawbot wrote:
| I agree with you. One other point I would like to make is that
| it seems a lot of decisions are made after a lot of fatigue-
| inducing processes, which just seem to lead to a lot of
| compromises nobody really wants, but that also no one wants to
| rebuke, since the process to arrive to the decision was already
| too drawn-out.
| nathias wrote:
| They know what they are doing in their immediate context, they
| follow the rules of their bureacuracies but have no idea nor
| possible idea of the consequences of their policies. And their
| being "well-meaning" has a very narrow scope limited to their
| immediate social and economic class.
| NewEntryHN wrote:
| The author is not talking about the same standard. "Knowing
| what you're doing" means that you're familiar with a situation
| and you know exactly the correct course of action. This is not
| the case for most things in adult life (especially politics),
| in which every problem is a new problem, for which you use
| heuristics to converge to a solution, that isn't perfect, but
| at least tries something out.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| The person drowning looking for help can become the person in
| the know with a plan. Easy to forget we were all babies once
| and learned everything from others. Attitude of course makes a
| difference. So does luck.
| kortilla wrote:
| > be that most people don't know exactly how they are going to
| execute their long term plans
|
| That's "not knowing what you're doing" and not really different
| from "fake it until you make it" either.
|
| If you don't have a really concrete plan to achieve a certain
| goal, you quite literally don't know what you're doing.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| "Fake it until you make it" involves bluffing and deception.
| Which is very different to asserting that we are all just
| muddling along, doing the best we can.
| [deleted]
| spupe wrote:
| > A more accurate way to view the world would be that most
| people don't know exactly how they are going to execute their
| long term plans, but almost every successful adult I have ever
| met did have both a plan and a genuinely good idea on how to
| execute it.
|
| Yes, absolutely. I think there is a specific niche of
| motivational "you can do it!" stuff which basically boils down
| to "everyone is winging it, so fuck it", and it's dishonest.
| Few hard things are achieved with this attitude, even if
| sometimes it's true that you improvise a lot.
|
| Beautifully written post by the way, it really nails down some
| major points that I find more motivational than the original
| post.
| mypastself wrote:
| Another one I've seen is interpreting the statement "if you
| have an imposter syndrome, you can't be an imposter" as "if
| you _feel like_ an imposter, you can't be an imposter". I'm
| sure that approach can have the effect of temporarily helping
| someone's self-esteem, but it's based on highly questionable
| reasoning.
| roenxi wrote:
| Here we run into the philosophical question of what it means to
| "know what you are doing".
|
| On the one hand people may have the best of advice and make
| decisions that are extremely clever in a specific context. And
| on the other the world is fundamentally too chaotic - the most
| important factors are generally unknowns or unanticipated.
| benjaminwootton wrote:
| I've been fairly close to the digitalisation agenda in UK
| public sector, and apart from pockets, I find it hard to be so
| generous.
|
| Horrible outsourcing deals with the usual suspects and enormous
| failed programmes are still the default.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Reading the parent comment about Denmark made me sad. I feel
| that in the UK we have smart, dedicated, well intentioned
| people just like Denmark, but if the NHS RiO system and
| Track-and-Trace are anything to go by we are plagued by
| massive corruption in the IT sector.
|
| This is the country of Alan Turing, Sir Tim Berners-Lee and
| Acorn RISC Machines. We need a new broom on public IT. I
| think we also need an outright ban on using Microsoft and
| other Big Tech contracts and a policy to rebuild skills and
| bring them back in.
|
| One of the most disgraceful episodes of late was the UK
| basically outsourcing our whole intelligence show to Amazon.
| Our corrupt minister Priti Patel sold out MI5/6/GCHQ. For
| over a year she has refused to answer questions on the
| decision, her connections and kickbacks.
| shrikant wrote:
| FWIW, I've done some work in the UK public sector,
| including but not limited to the NHS.
|
| In my experience, any time the tech folks were in-house,
| the "doer class" (i.e. the boots-on-the-ground engineers)
| were some of the smartest, most motivated individuals I've
| worked with, who pretty consistently gave great output (for
| e.g., shipping products, system design, software
| architecture, balancing tech debt with delivery velocity)
| in the face of almost uniformly painful obstacles, like the
| tooling they could work, or being jerked around by changing
| political priorities.
|
| OTOH, any time the tech folks were a long-term outsourced
| arrangement, you could expect to find (WITHOUT EXCEPTION)
| ridiculous amounts of cruft, hacks and frankly unacceptable
| shortcuts in the tech systems and interfaces, and the few
| people of this ilk that I did deal with, were entirely
| focussed on Goodhart's Law-ing their way to their next gig.
| (TBH, I can't really blame the individuals as they're
| merely responding in the most rational manner to their
| incentives).
|
| > I think we also need [...] a policy to rebuild skills and
| bring them back in.
|
| Absolutely 100% agreed, but I suspect we lack the political
| will/vision, and the requisite leadership/management
| abilities to be able to do this in a manner that doesn't
| just result in the next round of useless bungs to
| politically connected mates.
|
| P.S.: Entirely off-topic -- do you compose your replies in
| Emacs or something like that? Or at least resort to using
| semantic line breaks? (https://sembr.org/) I ask because
| your comment looks fine on the website, but shows line
| breaks after sentences in an HN reader app that I use.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > In my experience, any time the tech folks were in-
| house, the "doer class" (i.e. the boots-on-the-ground
| engineers) were some of the smartest, most motivated
| individuals I've worked with
|
| Lions led by donkeys as they used to say.
|
| > I suspect we lack the political will/vision, and the
| requisite > leadership/management abilities
|
| I'll differ a little here. I think we _can_ have capable
| people at all levels and I am generally confident in the
| UK to come through in the end. We can do good leadership
| too. The reason the donkeys won 't carry their load is
| that they're corrupt, undisciplined and disloyal. They're
| there to serve us but we forget who holds the stick.
|
| > manner that doesn't just result in the next round of
| useless bungs > to politically connected mates.
|
| Precisely. My guess is Nick Clegg and Priti Patel are the
| tip of a gargantuan iceberg. We're becoming a vassal
| state to the third richest "nation state" on Earth [1],
| because they have our politicians in their pockets.
|
| [1] The combined wealth of Google, Microsoft, Apple,
| Amazon and Facebook now places them collectively above
| Russia as the number three "superpower".
| https://www.wired.co.uk/article/big-tech-geopolitics
|
| > P.S.: Entirely off-topic -- do you compose your replies
| in Emacs or something like that? Or at least resort to
| using semantic line breaks? (https://sembr.org/) I ask
| because your comment looks fine on the website, but shows
| line breaks after sentences in an HN reader
|
| Yes, Emacs, Well spotted. Yet another fingerprint to
| watch for! :)
| benjaminwootton wrote:
| I think the bigger problem is the consultancies and system
| integrators.
|
| The government sign huge outsourcing which propose large,
| expensive, long waterfall style projects with outdated
| architecture etc.
|
| Time and time again these programmes fail, but the
| government money just keeps on flowing.
| DanBC wrote:
| RiO isn't an NHS product, it's made by Servelec who sell it
| to some NHS organisations. Yes, it's terrible.
|
| https://www.servelec.co.uk/product-range/rio-epr-system/
| radu_floricica wrote:
| Danmark vs Britain. From what I read occasionally in Dominic
| Cumming's blog, Boris isn't particularly good at using the
| bureaucracy.
| ben_w wrote:
| Not to defend Johnson, but DC has an axe to grind.
| alvperez82 wrote:
| Absolutely true, the most realistic post about business that
| I've red in time
|
| you are complaining about Boris, you have to see here in
| Spain to Pedro Sanchez, it's a completely mess
| ben_w wrote:
| Given even just Johnson's COVID history -- banned
| unnecessary gatherings under penalty of fines with a large
| publicity campaign, attended at least eight of the at least
| sixteen unnecessary gatherings at No. 10 (including his
| birthday and a Christmas party), caught COVID and almost
| died from it, repeatedly asserted that there had not been
| any party and that if that no rules wrote broken, was fined
| for breaking the rules, and still hasn't resigned -- I
| dread to think what you have in mind for Mr Sanchez.
| bluefone wrote:
| What's this fuss about parties and rules? If these are
| biggest issues you worry about, then your country is
| being run by some very good politicians who ensured that
| there are no other bigger problems for you to worry
| about.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| That's an interesting take on subverting the rule of law.
| Most law breaking in Western Democracies by first
| ministers is probably not as obvious?
|
| Johnson also, with the help of the Queen, unlawfully
| prorogued (ie ended the session of) parliament in order
| to avoid democracy acting against him.
|
| He lost two previous jobs for lying (in politics and
| journalism; you have to try really hard to lose a post
| for lying in either occupation it seems). Apart from his
| handlers I can't see how anyone would employ him for any
| role.
|
| He's very bright, his team manipulate the news/news cycle
| in similar way to Trump, and it's documented fact that he
| purposefully plays the fool.
| bluefone wrote:
| first world problems. lol
| lbriner wrote:
| Yes I agree, that it is easy to assume people are not clever
| but you only have to see most Politicians after they leave
| Government to hear how (usually) perceptive, articulate and
| intelligent they are - which presumably is how they convinced
| people to vote for them.
|
| However, Government is like a big corporation with extreme
| levels of power and corruption in every country. It is also
| largely unique in that the Prime Minister/President can't just
| get rid of people they don't like or are not very good at their
| job, the voters recruited them! So then you balanbce priority,
| idealism, party politics, saving-face, money, making yourselves
| look powerful to the world, trade agreements and loads of other
| things. To be fair, it is remarkable we get anything useful out
| of it.
| borroka wrote:
| I had very different experiences.
|
| I worked for an acronym company in which the majority of
| "leaders" were smart, driven, capable, and despite mistakes
| that anyone can make, it would have not been fair to call them
| incompetent.
|
| Some were incompetent, they got promoted into positions of
| responsibility and power when the company was scaling up so
| fast that they could not hire externally for those positions
| fast enough, and the internally vetting was weak. Then, they
| created their "network of power" within the company and they
| went on working incompetently for a few years. And then there
| were people like my former boss who are idiots with an academic
| title of some weight. Many such cases.
|
| I then worked for a huge company, but not an acronym one, and
| at the Director/VP/C- level there are pockets of incompetence
| that are difficult to explain to others and to accept as
| possible.
|
| CTOs that know little about technology, VPs that ask LinkedIn
| for surveys of employer retention to make the case that they
| were not losing more people in a year than, say, Google, but
| not accounting for the fact that we could not hire anyone for
| months while Google is so worried about false positives that
| they reject plenty of very viable candidates. The same slides
| presented at each all-hands meetings not to reinforce the
| vision or goals, but because they are too lazy to prepare new
| slides for an audience of 500 people, who looked at themselves
| asking: again?
|
| One might say that they are competent at navigating company
| politics, which is like saying that the employee sleeping with
| their bosses are competent at getting promotions.
|
| When I worked in academia (not in the US, if that matters),
| there were plenty of tenured professors that I would say were
| in the bottom 5 or 10% in terms of competence, research plans,
| management of students and postdocs, when compared to all
| postdocs in the same research area. Useless professionals that
| schemed their way through academia. And everybody knows that,
| but people who are inside have nothing to gain by exposing
| them, and people who leave academia they say, well, not my
| problem anymore, f them.
|
| In my home country, the vast majority of politicians are
| incompetent outside of their core competence, which is getting
| votes.
|
| I was under the impression, when I was younger, that I was
| wrong whenever I saw someone in a position of power, be it in
| the private sector or public office, who I saw as incompetence.
| How is it possible, I was asking myself, that somebody can get
| promoted, assigned huge responsibilities, be accepted by their
| peers when they are not at their level or at the level of
| competence required by their position. But it is very possible
| and in reality quite frequent.
| _zamorano_ wrote:
| >>> when you're held accountable by an entire country...
|
| This is blatantly untrue.
|
| Heck, the infamous trifecta Bush-Blair-Aznar led their
| countries on a war that destroyed a country and costed many
| human lifes, based on what we know were lies and invented data.
| What consecuences did they face?
|
| And that's just an example. I can show you as many corruption
| cases as you want, and see how the subjects go on with their
| careers untouched.
| lbriner wrote:
| OP wasn't saying that all people are always held accountable
| for all of their actions but the Iraq war caused a massive
| problem for Labour at the polls that they never really
| recovered from. Also, the incessent onslaught of media
| vultures trying to stir trouble for a headline will certainly
| make it harder for people to make decisions that they believe
| to be right because most people won't understand all of the
| variables and will cause massive criticism.
|
| Until we are front page news for being "naive", "stupid",
| "arrogant", "monster", we can't really understand the
| pressure that Governments are under.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> When I was a child I assumed that all the adults running the
| world knew what they were doing. Now that I am an adult, I am
| under no such illusions. Just look at the current British
| government. They clearly don't have a clue. A more mediocre bunch
| of individuals would be hard to find._
|
| I remember viewing an interview with John Cleese, and he said
| almost exactly the same thing.
|
| I feel as if I have a "heuristic" for life, as opposed to
| "rules." It helps that whole "making up as we go along" thing.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| If you accept the adage "the greater my sphere of knowledge, the
| greater my contact with the unknown" (I do), you can see how the
| author's sentiment exists even as we age and even grow in wisdom
| and knowledge.
|
| One of my realizations is that it's harder to telegraph what you
| don't know than what you do know. It's easy to see that older
| people have journeyed the paths were on, and seem to "know what
| they're doing." In reality, what they know (to some degree) is
| what _we_ (the less traveled) are experiencing. But they, having
| thought they were coming to the end of their journey, have found
| their is yet more to learn and sometimes pop up in moments like
| this to exclaim "guys, this journey just keep going! I still
| don't _know_! Acquisition of knowledge and experience has no end
| game!" It's humbling.
| polynomial wrote:
| Great adage. It's from David Christian in Origin Story: A Big
| History of Everything, but really it's just a paraphrasing of
| Einstein, who compared knowledge to a circle, and referred to
| the circumference of darkness, rather than the unknown.
| rpmisms wrote:
| I know what I'm doing, I just don't always know how to do it. But
| I know how to find out, and I have the mental framework to pick
| it up quickly. That's what juniors should understand about how
| this works. You'll never know everything, but you should know
| _how_ to know.
| [deleted]
| hkon wrote:
| Having worked many places and looked at various technical
| solutions developed and used, I can understand where the author
| is coming from. Many things work and get the job done, but it's
| clear that the creators had little knowledge about how to solve
| the problems they solved from a mere technical know-how
| perspective.
|
| I read him as don't think you need to know everything about
| something to start doing it.
| rockbruno wrote:
| Agreed that this is a thing, but this is not what the article
| is about. Running a business and having software engineering
| prowess are two different problem areas.
| hkon wrote:
| I know, it was just an example of the same in another area.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| "don't think you need to know everything about something to
| start doing it" is probably a more accurate title, but less
| snappy. Also it doesn't hurt for the title to be a bit
| polarizing. ;0)
| c03 wrote:
| Why is this so far up on hacker news? It's 3 paragraphs of
| groundless whining and self-promotion with absolutely no
| substance.
| vasco wrote:
| Give me a second, let me check the "reason" field next to each
| upvote in the HN database real quick.
| js8 wrote:
| To save you writing the DB query: I sometimes upvote based on
| the discussion itself.
| blibble wrote:
| because it's attacking the tories
| hansword wrote:
| I agree with the sentiment that adults are much better at
| projecting confidence than actually knowing what the heck they
| are doing or even making smart decisions.
|
| The advice of just founding a company without a plan? Not so
| much....
| lbriner wrote:
| I don't know who said it but "Failing to plan is planning to
| fail, however, no war was ever won by planning alone".
|
| In other words, most of business (as well as life) is both
| strategic and tactical. My strategic plans are needed because
| things take time and investment and we need a direction to give
| assurances. However, things change every day and the tactical
| side is working out how to deal with those.
|
| I certainly think adults are better at projecting confidence
| but I also think as you grow older, you are more likely to be
| realistic about how messy things are.
| websitescenes wrote:
| Sounds like a complete lack of recognition for expertise,
| specialization and experience. Same attitude that leads people to
| distrust science.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| People know what they're doing the second and third time that
| they launch the same product.
|
| Like when you see founders of large VC backed companies go off to
| launch the same thing.
|
| Or why business practices calcify and people aren't open to a new
| theoretically efficient process, they have already failed at so
| many other things that they don't want to risk again. Its not
| arbitrary why people become this way, there is a lot of crap out
| there.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Even if you are launching a near identical product a second
| time, the market, staff and technology will be different. You
| can't stand in the same river twice (Heraclitus).
| tylergetsay wrote:
| Why can't I hire the same people, use the same technology,
| and sell to the same market? This is basically the story of a
| lot of small business owners; they learned from somebody and
| then applied that for their own. If I only make 50% of what
| the previous company made but own 5x as much, it might look
| like a failure to some but net I am better off.
| ball02488 wrote:
| only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing." -socrates
| freiherr wrote:
| What people know is just practical knowledge of their immediate
| surrounding and a bit of theoretical models of what is outside.
| If by "knowing what they are doing" you mean deep understanding
| of everything from the big picture then it's impossible. Doing
| your own local stuff as good as possible is the best we can get
| and it usually works reasonably well. Until we get a dictator in
| an information bubble, but well that's just life.
| lbriner wrote:
| That's not quite true. There is a difference between e.g.
| making a really nice design "as good as possible" but producing
| something that is not best-practice, doesn't solve the problem
| well, isn't a standard look for whatever it is that you are
| designing.
|
| There are many people who at least think they are working hard
| and well but the piece that is missing is the context that the
| work needs to fit into and the ability to evaluate it. There
| are a gazillion different ways to do marketing (and to do it
| "well") but most of those will either have little or no effect
| in a certain context so the true person who knows what they are
| doing knows the landscape, knows the costs, knows the trade-
| offs and knows how to measure success.
| mr_gibbins wrote:
| Of course, it depends on the context. As a casual chess player,
| it's fine that I don't really know what I'm doing, and that I'm
| apt to be roundly beaten 7 times out of 10. There are no
| consequences to being bad at chess, except for feeling a bit sad
| if I lose too many games in a row.
|
| As a senior DBA, it is absolutely unacceptable if I do not know
| what I am doing. I look after software which runs a fairly
| important part of the machinery of government. There is not much
| tolerance for incompetence in my little niche, although granted
| that no-one dies if I get it wrong, the consequences for the end-
| consumers of my little bit of the world can be life-changing.
|
| Same applies (in a more important sense than just DBA work) for
| e.g. paediatric heart surgeons, rail drivers, airline pilots,
| people whose incompetence can kill. Skill and professionalism are
| very much key, and cannot be hand-waved away with platitudes to
| make people feel better about their own inabilities.
| BarryMilo wrote:
| A valid point, I think the sentiment is more common in the
| development world because things change so fast you can't
| really master the entirety of even a very specific domain for
| very long.
|
| However, it seems IT over time has grown to be (or aim to be)
| "incompetence proof". That is, even if you mess up, there
| should be mechanisms in place to prevent a catastrophe, so that
| at least two people must be majorly incompetent to create a
| disaster. I guess we call it redundancy.
|
| Compare with medecine, if your doctor is bad you can die. And
| people frequently do. I tend to prefer our base assumption that
| everyone is incompetent, that way we're prepared when someone
| makes a mistake.
| ball02488 wrote:
| only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing. .. -socates
| GistNoesis wrote:
| I think the classic scene from Armageddon can sum-up this feeling
| pretty well. https://youtu.be/qk9MK5smzVE?t=397 "Couldn't read
| the plans right and did a piss-poor job of putting it together."
| j7ake wrote:
| The pilot flying your airplane would disagree.
|
| The chefs cooking your meals at restaurants would disagree.
|
| Your surgeon would definitely disagree.
|
| I could go on.
| onetokeoverthe wrote:
| darepublic wrote:
| Good advice. A moral oft repeated in stories. They said it well
| in Kung-Fu Panda: there is no secret ingredient.
|
| I remember as a junior developer caring a ton about programming
| but constantly feeling like my skills weren't up to par. I read
| some quote from Ray Bradbury about how he wrote for 10 years
| before he created anything he himself liked. I mulled over that
| idea and it gave me hope. Years later I am now writing code that
| I think is good. Hopefully more than the senility kicking in.
| shantnutiwari wrote:
| I dont know why this is getting so much hate, I agree with it.
|
| Engineer types want everything to be neat and tidy, well planned
| and thought out. But this doesn't work in the business world,
| which is messy and chaotic. If you can't live with th chaos,
| starting a business is a bad idea. (And I say as someone who had
| failed to start a profitable-compared-to-day-job business)
| pier25 wrote:
| I agree. It's true for many things in life.
|
| I don't think surgeons are winging it, at least in the
| operating room, but in life the majority of things are chaotic
| and unpredictable. Specially running a business.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| s/business/kids/ and it is also true!
| marban wrote:
| _The opinion of 10,000 men is of no value if none of them know
| anything about the subject._
|
| Marcus Aurelius
| throwaway14356 wrote:
| i too as a child thought the grownups knew what they were doing.
| I decided that my ignorance about all things would make for a
| great opportunity to imagine how i would organize all things.
| Unbothered by previous art i could have original ideas all the
| way!
|
| big mistake, the grownups didn't know, they didn't want to
| know.... wtf
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| This is a very comforting fiction to tell yourself when you're
| faced with new and unfamiliar challenges. However, it's not
| really true. Plenty of people within an industry or field know
| enough of what they're doing because they've gone through it
| before and/or done all of the heavy research to prepare for these
| situations.
|
| I see the "nobody knows what they're doing" fiction brought out
| as an easy antidote for impostor syndrome or as comforting words
| to people struggling to learn. While intentions might be good, it
| had an unintended side effect of creating an illusion that
| expertise doesn't exist or that everyone's knowledge is equal
| regardless of their level of experience.
|
| The dark side of this mentality is that it creates the same
| situations whereby people believe their own intuitions are equal
| to professional scientific research. If you believe no one knows
| what they're doing and all adults are just making it up as they
| go, why would you listen to experts instead of inserting your own
| opinions based on your Facebook research or some quip you saw
| online?
|
| The real key is to identify who really knows what they're doing
| and to what degree, then leverage those people for advice as much
| as possible. Going through life assuming everybody is equally
| incompetent will leave you blind to these huge opportunities to
| learn from other people's expertise and experience.
| louthy wrote:
| I think a better phrase is "everybody is winging it", because
| once you get good at something, then you tend to end up working
| on something that's at the edge of your current understanding,
| either through promotion or some sense of seniority in the
| industry.
|
| This isn't necessarily true for all jobs, but I think it's
| especially true in the software industry. I've been a CTO for
| 17 years, but I still feel like I'm winging it. It doesn't mean
| I don't know what I'm doing, I have enough experience to make
| good judgements; but to be the best at something you often have
| to be on the edge of your understanding at any one point in
| time.
|
| I don't remember exactly when I realised that everybody is
| winging it (to one extent or another), but it made it easier to
| trust my own judgement, it made it easier to push for something
| I believed in, but it also gave me a sense of how little I
| still know - which helps me to not get too arrogant about my
| current abilities.
| frostwarrior wrote:
| "Real impostors don't have impostor syndrome"
|
| To me, that is even better.
|
| It means that you care and you are in an uncomfortable zone,
| which means you are probably growing.
| zelos wrote:
| Could it be that the more you know, the more you realise how
| much more there is to know? That would explain the feeling of
| impostor syndrome in more senior people - they're judging by
| different standards.
| zcw100 wrote:
| I'm going to go with "Not everything is designed, or planned.
| Sometimes the result is just the sum of a bunch of not
| necessarily coordinated decisions."
|
| Some people know a lot about what they are doing and are
| highly skilled. A concert pianist doesn't just walk up on
| stage and wing it. What I think you realize when you grow up
| is not every decision or outcome was deliberately thought out
| and coordinated. Sometimes things just happen. They can even
| be the result of a collection of individual people who each
| is highly knowledgeable about their individual contributions
| with no single person responsible for the ultimate outcome.
| I'd imagine this is the way something like an automobile is
| designed.
| vharuck wrote:
| >Some people know a lot about what they are doing and are
| highly skilled. A concert pianist doesn't just walk up on
| stage and wing it.
|
| If I may torture your example to defend the GP, concert
| pianists trying to improve will wing it during the steps
| leading up to the stage: negotiating with a venue,
| exploring new ways to practice, writing or choosing music
| pieces, and the all the other tasks unknown to this layman.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Ruuning a business is like playing a piano at a concert,
| except the keys sometimes change position and sometime
| disappear completely.
| halostatue wrote:
| I think that's life, except that sometimes the piano
| becomes a cello, then a pair of bongo drums.
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| > A concert pianist doesn't just walk up on stage and wing
| it.
|
| The concert pianist couldn't wing it with an oboe, violin
| or trumpet. But that's what the full stack dev does. Wing
| it with this service, that framework, some other language,
| etc
| tacon wrote:
| >A concert pianist doesn't just walk up on stage and wing
| it.
|
| Well, sometimes they have to. There is the famous example
| where a professional concert pianist realizes when the
| orchestra starts that she practiced the wrong piece. They
| happen to have been making a documentary, so we get to see
| her face as she realizes what is happening. And then she
| "wings it", and manages to play very well anyway.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJXnYMl_SuA
| grujicd wrote:
| This is trully amazing!
| zcw100 wrote:
| I was going to add something about improvisation and
| jazz. While it's not planned out you wouldn't describe
| them as "not knowing what they're doing" nor are they
| just blindly mashing the keys.
|
| They're feeling their way through a dynamic situation
| guided by skill, experience and luck.
| SilasX wrote:
| That's not what is normally meant by "winging it" though.
| That's applying deep, rigorous expertise, just faster
| than normal.
| lostcolony wrote:
| >> Not everything is designed, or planned. Sometimes the
| result is just the sum of a bunch of not necessarily
| coordinated decisions.
|
| I'll go one further. Almost always. Organizations are
| basically distributed systems; you theoretically could have
| fully coordinated decisions with an elegant and efficient
| network topology (i.e., the decisions involve only those
| people with relevant information, and don't pass through
| umpteen unrelated routing layers), but I've yet to see
| that. Invariably those orgs favoring coordination (CP from
| a CAP perspective) are slow and inefficient, with too many
| meetings seeking signoff from stakeholders who have no
| relevant knowledge or responsibility. The more 'agile' orgs
| (including suborgs routing around that kind of
| inefficiency) end up with eventually consistent systems,
| more AP, and, well, yeah, they're necessarily not
| coordinated. Hopefully they still have clearly defined
| areas of responsibility, interfaces, and useful sets of
| abstraction, but those abstractions are leaky, and the
| interfaces themselves developed as needs arise.
| [deleted]
| kurthr wrote:
| I like this take. A lot of times for an experienced team
| there are multiple solutions to a problem that will work
| and you can quickly start with the one that seems to best
| fit the circumstances... if circumstances change (and
| you'll notice if you've been doing it a while) then you can
| often (and with some hard work) transition to a different
| solution and still hit timeline (or immediately warn of the
| miss). If they team works together well, this happens
| quickly, if not seamlessly. If you don't have experience,
| just figuring out which way to start is a huge effort and
| changing direction even a larger struggle, and you're
| almost guaranteed to take longer, with higher risk, or
| worse product.
|
| What I found making a few hundred sourdough loaves over the
| last 2 years, is that there is a recipe (or several), and
| you should follow it... but then unexpected things happen
| (changing starter/temp/gluten, humidity/hydration, forgot
| something or want to add something, different size loaf or
| tools/oven, not enough time, missed alarm) and the skill is
| in knowing quickly what to do and how to work with it to
| make things right. Rarely do I make what I consider a
| perfect loaf, because I don't make 100/day every day... but
| even though I often make one/two mistakes or changes,
| recovery is automatic and almost imperceptible in the final
| product.
| lowercased wrote:
| > The dark side of this mentality is that it creates the same
| situations whereby people believe their own intuitions are
| equal to professional scientific research. If you believe no
| one knows what they're doing and all adults are just making it
| up as they go, why would you listen to experts instead of
| inserting your own opinions based on your Facebook research or
| some quip you saw online?
|
| Or folks on your own team?
|
| I've got a colleague with over 20 years of software/web/dev
| experience, working as a contractor on a poorly run team.
| Routinely there are questions about "how should we do X?".
|
| My colleague has done much of these X situations for 10+ years,
| and says "we need to do it like Z. I've done Z for 8 years and
| this is the normal pattern for this scenario".
|
| There's always regular pushback from others on the team with
| "well, I read $foo which says Z can't scale!" and similar
| things. These are typically coming from people with ... 1-2
| years experience. One guy just graduated high school last year,
| but the PM gives everyone's views equal weight because "well,
| no one can know everything, and everyone's got a right to their
| opinion!"
|
| Just because the 20 year old doesn't know how to do X, or read
| that Z is 'slow' does not mean their views are equally as valid
| as someone who has actually _done_ X multiple times over years,
| and in some cases has already implemented the X on a project.
|
| He's likely not going to be there much longer - he's already
| splitting time with other projects, and will ramp down if
| there's not some bigger changes on that team.
| fdgsdfogijq wrote:
| This is common, and so is the 1-2 years experience dev
| churning out a ton of code. It gets work done and builds
| credibility, but then they make some glaring architectural
| mistake thats tough to rip out. PM can't see it, and eggs the
| dev on to keep delivering. Sometimes this is great, sometimes
| not. Depends on the company and the needs of the tech stack
| lowercased wrote:
| Further to the point above, the 20 year old in this story
| _does not actually deliver_ anything. But his protestations
| about 'slow' and 'legacy' and 'best practices' are like a
| siren song to some other non-tech folks who keep saying
| "well, sure, we don't want to be slow - we want to scale -
| let's do what $person is suggesting". Except... nothing
| gets done. Months have gone by with no measurable progress,
| but lots of 'review sessions' identifying $newStackX as the
| gold standard.
|
| If someone wants to challenge or push back on decisions I
| make (for example), you better be able to deliver something
| a) good or b) fast. IDEALLY both, but... if you give me POC
| code _quickly_ with obvious issues BUT demonstrate some
| improvement - that 's great. We can iterate, if it's quick.
| Give me some fully fleshed out measurable improvement that
| takes a bit longer, but has some tests, docs, etc. That's
| good too.
|
| Sit around and just continually 'back seat dev' on stuff I
| ship, while literally being incapable of delivering working
| software of any size, or even supporting your own stuff
| that you think is 'awesome'... we won't be in agreement on
| anything.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| While I agree with most of what you say, I'm almost on a daily
| basis hit by how clueless many so called tech leads and
| architects in the field are. A lot of cargo cult programming
| and blind repetitions of what someone heard on the latest
| conference.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| I'm pretty junior in terms of YOE, but I hate when I see people
| say things like "don't worry, I have no idea what I'm doing and
| I have x YOE. You're fine!" to people on the internet.
|
| I have a decent understanding of what I'm doing, but I worked
| for it by doing exactly what you described in your last
| paragraph and then synthesizing that knowledge into an explicit
| process.
|
| If you don't know what you're doing you're either bad or don't
| have a conscious understanding of your process. Both are not
| good.
| SilasX wrote:
| Well said! I would add that, I'd you feel you don't know what
| you're doing, there's a third possibility: you actually do
| know what you're doing, in any meaningful sense, but your
| memory of your past work is dominated by the few cases where
| there wasn't a clear right answer, and you made a call you
| couldn't rigorous justify, even though you were doing most of
| the job very competently.
|
| Those situations make it _seem_ like you're just shooting
| from the hip /groping in the dark all day ... but that belief
| is wrong.
|
| Either way, the right response to the feeling of impostor
| syndrome should _not_ be to shrug and say "oh everyone's like
| that" (which is how you get the Elizabeth Holmeses of the
| world); it should be to look for objective heuristics to
| identify whether you are, in the large, performing
| competently.
|
| Edit: earlier comment on this issue:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19214749
| abakker wrote:
| Not to mention that people who say that they don't know what
| they're doing, but are earning 6 figure salaries are being
| extremely condescending to everyone else. The idea here is
| that you get paid for your expertise. If you don't have it,
| get it!
| bitexploder wrote:
| I sometimes say it for fun, but yeah, it's weird. I worked
| very hard over multiple decades to acquire specific sets of
| skills that are hard to acquire. It's fun to plunge into
| something and maybe joke about not knowing what you are
| doing, but the reality is if you spent as much time as I have
| and don't actually know what you are doing that is very sad
| indeed.
| Swizec wrote:
| > no one knows what they're doing and all adults are just
| making it up as they go
|
| IMO the most interesting software engineering happens at the
| edge of the adjacent possible. Where _nobody_ knows what
| they're doing. Because it hasn't been done before. You're
| adding net new knowledge to the universe.
|
| Doesn't even have to be a ground breaking new idea or a
| completely new technique. It's already net new if you're
| adapting an otherwise well-know solution to a new situation. Or
| dealing with a unique set of constraints that haven't been seen
| before. That's _fun_.
|
| But that's not the same as walking into a thing blind and
| hoping for the best. You can only do that by relying on a
| wealth of experience and expert intuition that's been honed
| over a long series of smaller challenges.
|
| The optimal situation is to always aim to work at the very edge
| of your understanding. Not so easy that it's boring, not so
| hard that you don't know where to even begin.
| lettergram wrote:
| "Expertise" is often less and more valuable than perceived,
| depending on the situation.
|
| Give me a programming related question and I could have solved
| it a two decades ago on paper. The expertise allows me to solve
| it with more efficiency today.
|
| Similarly, there are things that lack of expertise help you
| with. You can see different perspectives. Have to research the
| topics fresh (find latest frameworks, etc).
|
| I also think expertise is far more transferable than ever. I
| hadn't driving a tractor in 18 years. But I was able to watch a
| few YouTube videos for an hour, go out and immediately attach
| equipment, start one up and get to work.
|
| The internet is still amazing. To your point though, there are
| things I could miss that would get me killed (using a tractor),
| so a neighbor helped me with some tips after watching;
| expertise is still very necessary.
| highwaylights wrote:
| I feel like "find latest frameworks" as a positive might get
| you downvoted here. I get what you mean, unless I don't, in
| which case.. really?
| lettergram wrote:
| Just mean you don't have any preconceived notions
| abakker wrote:
| yeah, but, preconceived notions are not necessarily
| wrong. I think there's a reason why Software companies
| disrupt each other a lot more than they disrupt other
| industries. its because of their obsession with the
| beginner's mind when whole industries have been created
| and studied for a long time. Sometimes, starting from
| first principals is a terrible waste of time and capital.
| cupofpython wrote:
| >expertise is far more transferable than ever
|
| Small nitpick on this statement that makes a significant
| difference to me. I think the spirit of what you are saying
| is that "Experts are far more accessible than ever"
|
| The youtube video that helped you, your neighbor, the
| instruction manual, are all sources of expert information. In
| earlier times people would have to find the right book in a
| library, or travel the world in search of an expert.
|
| You are still trusting experts, which implies that they
| exist, which is different than assuming "well, some guy on
| youtube could do it - so it cant be that hard ill figure it
| out myself". you are instead acknowledging that the "guy on
| youtube" is an expert that you thankfully have access to
| _because_ of youtube
| lettergram wrote:
| Fair enough! You're correct
| tootie wrote:
| I've been around some very successful people and execs at
| mature companies and you're sorta right but also so is the
| title. People with experience have more expertise than most
| people but they're also just much more comfortable making low-
| information decisions because they know they'll get away with
| it most of the time and they can recover from a mistake. There
| is a common misperception that they know exactly what they're
| doing when they really just know slightly more than the rest of
| us and are comfortable being decisive.
| danieldevries wrote:
| This is just an honest assessment of one individuals
| experience. I've heard it myself from my father who was at the
| top of Europe's largest corporation. He definitely is an expert
| in his field, but still had a healthy dose of doubt and was
| clearly honest with himself. Hubris is a far more dangerous
| imo.
| stef25 wrote:
| Wrt to imposter syndrome - I often have this feeling,
| especially since I don't have any formal training in anything
| IT related.
|
| Recently a kid showed up at work to do an internship. He's
| studying computer science, all kinds of advanced algorithm
| stuff. He's utterly clueless at even beginning to find the
| cause of a simple bug in a php application. Incapable of
| interpreting a bug report, finding the class that serves a
| certain route etc.
|
| Made me really reconsider my imposter syndrome feelings.
| sicp-enjoyer wrote:
| How long do you think it would take someone who has the
| learning capability to understand algorithms well, to read a
| bug report?
|
| I find this sentiment very strange. I think you're right that
| jobs require a different kind of work than they may have
| previously encountered, I just don't think it's very
| difficult.
|
| To put it another way, some developers are not smart enough
| to understand inductive proofs of algorithms not matter how
| much time they spend, the reverse is not true. Perhaps the
| individual you know likes to use a lot of academic vocabulary
| which gives such an appearence.
| crispyambulance wrote:
| > ... studying computer science, all kinds of advanced
| algorithm stuff. He's utterly clueless at...
|
| One thing I notice in some rhetoric (not necessarily yours)
| is the idea that people are static. That if one is clueless
| now, they'll always be clueless.
|
| People continuously evolve personally and professionally. The
| road to mastery and understanding always begins with
| confusion and uncertainty. It's totally reasonable that a
| student learning complex theoretical material will have a
| hard time, initially, with the day-to-day grind of doing
| practical work in a job.
|
| Many workplaces have unreasonable expectations usually framed
| around the vaguely militaristic notion that their people have
| to "hit the ground running". It's based on bull. The only way
| to progress towards mastery is to periodically do stuff that
| one is "unqualified" for, sometimes that involves failure,
| re-tries, wasted time, and being seen as incompetent.
|
| So many folks who are now "ninja's", "rockstars", or
| "10x-ers" started out as clueless newbs who were willing to
| put themselves out there, make embarrassing mistakes, be
| called cargo-cult practitioners, and who nonetheless
| continued with grit. Along the way, some helped and mentored
| them and others dismissed them.
| vxNsr wrote:
| I think the GP's point is that, despite not having a formal
| education in CS/CE their self taught skills are pretty good
| and the formal education doesn't appear to be teaching
| computer engineering in any case. So while this intern will
| probably have a better understanding of how to traverse a
| tree or w/e, they're still starting in the same place the
| the GP did when it comes to actual CE.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| Because people don't understand what a CS degree is and
| what it isn't, and that's assuming most CS degrees are
| fairly similar (they aren't).
|
| A CS degree isn't a 3-5 year road to understanding the
| protocols and nuances of webdev. Personally, I was able
| to choose courses in webdev and took _zero_ of them. I
| came out of it with zero knowledge of how routing works
| in practice, even if I could guess it in theory.
|
| What a CS degree _is_ (or at least _should be_ ), is a
| set of courses teaching fundamentals, how to think in
| logic, solutions and pseudocode, and being able to map
| this decently well to some language. Which means there's
| a high guarantee they will pick up the skills necessary
| on the job.
|
| And yes, I know some people get through degrees without
| being at least okay programmers. I do consider that a
| failure of the system.
| stef25 wrote:
| You're right, it's probably unreasonable to expect them to
| be able to grasp the day to day grind immediately, it's
| just that 2 months later he still wasn't able to work
| independently and we had to spend a lot more time with him
| than we expected. We assumed he had enough common sense to
| pick things up quicker.
|
| But no doubt, he's probably smarter than I am and will go
| further in his IT career.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| That's the essence of the issue yes. Learning on the job is
| considered bad, but learning on the job is how most people
| learn. So really, we just fake it till we make it[0], and
| then we start doing what top comment mentions, actually
| knowing what we're doing.
|
| This is then exaggerated by sayings such as "it takes half
| a year to get to full speed" in an attempt to either try
| and lowball learners, or as a defense mechanism as to why
| society should just cater to the whims of companies so they
| don't have to carry the risks. Despite the fact most people
| will be profitable very shortly after they get hired in a
| job remotely fitting them, if the company has any proper
| documentation on procedures.
|
| [0]: And this is bad for the more anxious / modest / shy
| people. "Fake it till you make it" should be good advice,
| but it doesn't overcome massively inflated "must have but
| not actually must have" lists discouraging them on the
| spot, or the hundreds of mismatched job interviews and time
| wasted. I still don't know who benefits from the status quo
| aside from middlemen getting jobs that shouldn't
| realistically exist.
| sdwr wrote:
| I was that kid not too long ago. All the classes I took
| started from first principles, most of my assignments began
| with an empty file. I had very little experience working with
| existing code or navigating w an IDE. It was humiliating
| taking hours to make a one-character change, or getting lost
| looking for a server endpoint, especially when I expected I
| should already know what I was doing!
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| > The dark side of this mentality is that it creates the same
| situations whereby people believe their own intuitions are
| equal to professional scientific research. If you believe no
| one knows what they're doing and all adults are just making it
| up as they go, why would you listen to experts instead of
| inserting your own opinions based on your Facebook research or
| some quip you saw online?
|
| Well there's a reason to resist this notion on the grounds that
| knowledge is personal, not transitive. Following John Carmack
| on twitter does not transfer the ability to design game engines
| onto me, even though he surely has deep expertise in the area.
|
| My opinions may not be the result of professional scientific
| research, but that is also true even if I echo the opinions of
| someone who claims to be a practitioner of such. At least if we
| accept a definition where justified true belief is necessary
| for knowledge. Either I know something, or I don't know it.
| There is no middle ground where I know something by extension
| of faith in an authority that claims to know it. That's the
| entire point of science, it isn't doctrinal! The scientific
| authority may well possess an ability to produce true
| statements through their knowledge of the topic, but I don't
| share this knowledge by parroting their true statements; I need
| to understand _why_ in order to know.
| xorcist wrote:
| Thank you. I'm hearing enough things along similar lines to
| feel odd about it.
|
| So many people wear their impostor syndrome with pride I don't
| know how to handle it. It's supposed to be ok to have no idea
| what you are doing. Except it's not. We're living in an era
| where information is more abundant than ever before. Just read
| the manual. At least get a _basic_ idea how that library or
| framework works before putting two lines together. If not for
| the end result then at least for intellectual pride.
|
| It's probably partly down to age, but it's more and more common
| and I am uncomfortable.
| strgcmc wrote:
| IMHO, the "don't worry, nobody knows what they're doing"
| advice, has a sort of "Laffer curve"-esque quality to
| describe its relative danger (or inverse curve, for utility).
|
| On the lower end of experience/expertise (I acknowledge
| they're not actually the same thing), it is minimally
| dangerous and highly useful advice -- in the sense that, it
| helps lower the barrier to entry for beginners into a field.
| Making something approachable, is generally worth it, even at
| the risk of giving beginners undue overconfidence or letting
| them make early mistakes. Just getting someone to even start
| (and making it easier for them to stick to something new, and
| not give up too early because it's hard), is more important
| than doing "the right thing" (pragmatism > perfectionism)...
| assuming guardrails exist to prevent beginners from doing
| fatal damage (not true in all domains).
|
| In the middle range of experience, is where this advice
| becomes maximally dangerous and minimally useful -- it
| doesn't just give false confidence, but specifically to those
| in this range who "know just enough to be dangerous." The
| advice can become an impediment to learning, if someone comes
| to believe "I don't need to learn anything more, since no one
| else knows anything, and therefore nobody can teach me
| anything." People who get stuck here, are the most dangerous.
|
| At the high end of experience/expertise, the advice actually
| becomes useful again. The expert can appreciate the dangers
| of ignorance, while also appreciating the need for them to
| manage/mentor/guide beginners in the field. Likewise, the
| expert generally re-learns a certain level of humility,
| because now that they "know everything there is to know",
| they also appreciate how little they actually know in the
| grand scheme of things (e.g. see cosmologists or particle
| physicists).
|
| I seem to recall some kind of saying, something about how
| hard and precious/valuable it is, for an expert to be able to
| re-learn the ability to approach problems with a beginner's
| mindset, with naive curiosity and unburdened by years of
| accumulated fears or biases? So anyways, the "nobody knows"
| advice becomes useful again, and helps experts renew their
| perspective.
| OtmaneBenazzou wrote:
| If you really know what you're doing, are you learning
| anything?
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| Knowing what you're doing doesn't mean you're omniscient. In
| an unbounded domain it might mean you have very good
| intuition for what to do and you're often directionally
| correct. There's still a lot of room for learning there.
| MobileVet wrote:
| Absolutely. There is a massive spectrum between knowing what
| you are doing and knowing everything there is to know about a
| subject. We are all constantly adding to our knowledge
| base... no matter our starting point.
|
| In addition to the base knowledge is the ability to do
| something well. I know how to do a lot of home maintenance
| tasks. Due to a lack of practice, I don't have the skill to
| do them all very well.
| polynomial wrote:
| I see it as coming from 2 different perspectives. One is as you
| note, an antidote to imposter syndrome ("no one _else_ knows
| what they are doing so I 'm not alone"); the other coming from
| the opposite perspective: the autodidact who realizes no one
| around them understands the underlying systems and principles
| as well as they do, and so is frustrated for the opposite
| reason.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| Yes, it also degrades the possibility of getting higher
| confidence from practice and training.
|
| I can recommend Kathy Sierra's book "Badass - Making your users
| awesome" on a refreshing perspective on learning, teaching and
| communication
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24737268-badass
| enkid wrote:
| I think the problem is that people will optimize for a task
| they are incentivized for. Many people are just incentivized to
| appear competent enough to get a promotion or some sort of
| reward: votes for a politician, sales for a salesperson, a
| promotion for a manager. This means they don't actually have to
| be competent, they just have to have the appearance of
| competence to who ever is doling out those awards. These also
| happen to be the most visible professions. These things
| combined create the impression that no one knows what they are
| doing, and everyone is faking it.
| throwaway44f1 wrote:
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| I think this comment is a comforting fiction as well. Of course
| "no one knows what they're doing" isn't literally 100% true -
| it's just hyperbole. The essence of the message remains: the
| vast majority of people only know just enough to survive (and
| that's okay!). Survive well enough, long enough, and fortune
| may favor you.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| In software development, a lot of this sentiment gets thrown
| around to avoid the perception that one's knowledge is somehow
| gatekeeping others from entering the profession.
|
| This doesn't actually level the playing field, it probably
| makes it worse because it discourages people from doing the
| thing that would cause them to get better at software
| development.
|
| Spend more time developing and less time signaling.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| On the contrary, I've been inside of institutions that appear
| to be a bastion of knowledge and expertise, a castle of wisdom
| and englightment; only to see the stilts that the whole thing
| is sitting on after entering inside. Having worked in extremely
| large corporations and government institutions, leading teams
| and people, auditing suppliers and vendors; it is humbling to
| see the contrast between external appearance and internal
| construction.
|
| I like Peter Thiel's take on this:
|
| Between excessive dogmatism and excessive skepticism, therein
| lies human progress.
| cgh wrote:
| The article is specifically talking about starting and running
| a business, not imposter syndrome in general.
| psyc wrote:
| I don't know by exactly which route I'm going to reach delivery
| of X project, but I know that I know how to navigate.
| highwaylights wrote:
| * Except politics.
|
| It's verifiable that no politician can possibly be qualified
| for whatever they're doing at any point in time as there exists
| no threshold of experience for doing any job to which they
| might be assigned and it (at least in democracies) actively
| ignores experience and selects for pandering.
| stef25 wrote:
| Do you think of president Zelenskiy of Ukraine is an
| exception?
| l33t2328 wrote:
| Why did you choose him in particular? Do you believe him to
| be the most capable politician today?
| stef25 wrote:
| Yes. He certainly shines in the spotlight but maybe
| that's not how we should judge him.
| twawaaay wrote:
| I think the problem needs to be thought through separately for
| individuals and for organisations.
|
| For individuals -- yes, no-one knows what they are doing. Most
| people, including successful ones, are too embarrassed or
| insecure to admit this. The world is divided into ones that
| understand this and ones that do not.
|
| For organisations -- no, that is not true. Some organisations
| accept the above limitation and rather than ignore it, try to
| build systems that take it into account. My company does this --
| CEO knows this, senior leadership knows this, we are working
| together accepting our individual limitations and trying to find
| ways to work around them. We hate internal politics and put
| premium on being honest about problems or capabilities.
|
| Unfortunately this does not seem to work for governments.
| Governments is all about politics, all about image. It is not
| fundamentally incompatible with being honest about ones
| limitations but in practice very close to being so.
| mhb wrote:
| Competent Elites:
|
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CKpByWmsZ8WmpHtYa/competent-...
| sebastianconcpt wrote:
| This is what Jordan Peterson refers to when stating that
| Postmodernist claim about reality having an infinite number of
| objects that can be interpreted in an infinite number of ways is
| a fair valid claim.
|
| And nature, somehow, made us evolve with the machinery optimized
| to adapt to a finite number of interpretations.
|
| Hence, our cognitive machinery is made up of "Maps of Meaning"
| that with a finite number of meanings, make feasible for us to
| navigate the infinite sea of ignorance of what we can't make a
| sensical meaning of.
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