[HN Gopher] Experts vs. Imitators
___________________________________________________________________
Experts vs. Imitators
Author : harperlee
Score : 188 points
Date : 2024-06-16 18:33 UTC (4 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (fs.blog)
| incognito124 wrote:
| That was on a today's newsletter
| garciasn wrote:
| Imitators may get frustrated by the need to go deep with others
| because they can't, but to say that experts don't share that same
| frustration is nonsense.
|
| There are many audiences who want you to go deep, but are not
| capable of a necessary level of understanding. In fact, these
| audiences are the ones who become what the author claims are
| imitators; pretending to understand when they do not.
|
| Experts are experts not because they're teachers; they're experts
| because they're experienced and are executionally excellent.
| nickelpro wrote:
| In my career I've at times been a leading expert on, as is the
| way of these things, a couple niche technologies. I'm speaking
| from that perspective.
|
| While certainly there are those who struggle to connect with
| layman audiences, especially in academia, a complete inability
| to communicate the challenges and successes of a technology,
| technique, or theory to laymen is a huge demerit against a
| claim of expertise.
|
| There's a huge difference between walking through technical and
| theoretical mechanical specifics, and being able to communicate
| about a subject at different levels of abstraction. The
| greatest experts can often walk with a laymen right down to and
| rub against the jargon-filled specifics in a way that leaves no
| doubt they're able to step over that line without problem.
|
| This is important because we don't perform ideation,
| architecture, or structural problem solving in the terms of
| white papers and technical specifications. If an expert does
| not have an abstract internal narrative with which to navigate
| the mechanics of the subject, they are likely not an expert at
| all.
| mjburgess wrote:
| This isn't really true for anything but the basics.
|
| If you're having a conversation with someone who asks more
| than surface-level questions, but hasnt more than surface-
| level knowledge, the answers can require many years of study
| -- or, at least, hours of conversation to get anywhere. This
| situation is incredibly frustrating if you're an expert,
| often because these question-askers aren't at all willing to
| listen to hours of you explaining many things to them.
|
| Consider a person who says, "I heard rust was better than
| python because its safe" -- where would one even begin?
| Suppose now you're dealing with a person who knows enough to
| make the claim, but isnt patient enough to have memory
| safety, garbage collection, interpreters, etc. explained
|
| This is often the situation experts are in. Indeed, it's a
| majority of hackernews threads.
| Espressosaurus wrote:
| It's easy.
|
| "Rust is better for safety than C because it makes it
| harder or impossible to make certain kinds of mistakes that
| are easy to make than C."
|
| "What kind of mistakes?"
|
| "There are times when you need to acquire some shared
| resource. Let's say memory. In Rust, it's easy to ensure
| you return that memory when you're done with it. In C, it's
| easy to forget to return that memory when you're done with
| it. This is called a memory leak, and you might find that
| eventually there's not enough memory for other programs to
| run."
|
| "What's memory?"
|
| "Think of a program as a recipe you're performing. Memory
| then is like working space. Like your counter space in your
| kitchen. If you run out of counter space, you don't have
| room to chop up more vegetables or temporarily store your
| cooked meat or what-have-you. Maybe you ran out of counter
| space because you left last night's dirty dishes on it.
| Rust automatically puts the dirty dishes in the dishwasher.
| In C, you have to remember to do that yourself, and
| sometimes you forget to."
|
| And so on.
|
| There's an easy explanation as long as you're not expecting
| them to perform detailed analysis. And I'm not.
|
| edit: eventually you'll get to your limit of simplicity,
| things like "what is fire?" and maybe you need to say "I
| don't know, let's find out together!" We all have limits to
| our expertise, after all.
| hurril wrote:
| This hinges on a thorough understanding of safety. It
| also does not even mention trading things off. Both of
| which are topics that will require further
| clarifications. And as it were: and so on.
| Espressosaurus wrote:
| "Why doesn't everyone use Rust then?"
|
| "Because it turns out that people aren't using the
| language too much yet, and it makes some things that are
| easy to do in C, hard to do in order to keep the language
| safe. It's all tradeoffs."
|
| At some point the person asking is satisfied and that
| tangent ends. This is how conversation works.
|
| You aren't trying to teach a layman how to write
| production-ready Rust code, and they aren't interested in
| learning how.
| alexey-salmin wrote:
| > what is fire
|
| Funny you ask, this was the most frustrating question in
| my childhood because no one could give a satisfactory
| answer of what exactly is the visible part of fire or
| whether it even exists as a body.
| mjburgess wrote:
| fire is a fundamentally organic phenomenon. you heat dry
| organic material until there's a gas-like emission of
| particles, these are then nearly instantaneous oxidised
| causing more light and heat. The emission of heat and
| light in this gas-like state ("plasma") then causes more
| emission and so on.
| jcynix wrote:
| You can burn certain metals (magnesium, sodium, sulfur,
| even iron (wool)) neither of which is "organic". So fire
| isn't _a fundamentally organic phenomenon_ ...
| mjburgess wrote:
| Well I meant several things with that claim, which is
| why, per the theme of the thread, you cannot summarise
| these matters in cute sentences.
|
| Fire is only possible in an atmosphere with
| extraordinarily high accumulations of oxygen on planets
| with an atmosphere, etc. The only known process to bring
| this about, as far as I know, is life.
|
| Generically, lighting is the 'original' fire on earth.
| But I take it the commentor was thinking more in their
| school days of the sustained sort of burning commonly
| called 'fire'.
| nanomonkey wrote:
| While oxygen is the most common oxidizer, it's entirely
| possible to have combustion without it. Such as utilizing
| halogens.
| sseagull wrote:
| This is the genesis of the "Flame Challenge" by the Alan
| Alda Center for Communicating Science (yes, that Alan
| Alda).
|
| https://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/alda-
| center/thelink/posts...
| mjburgess wrote:
| I said python, not C. Answering the C vs. Rust question
| would be presumably easier, because the claim is true
| (ie., it doesnt rest on a misunderstanding) and the
| person asking is likely familiar enough with the relevant
| concepts.
|
| The person claiming Rust is safer than _python_ is so
| whoely confused this 2min tap-dance isnt good enough.
|
| When you're dealing with people with a-bit-more-than-
| surface understandings, the main problem is their head is
| full of misunderstandings. It is these that can take
| hours, or years, to undo.
|
| To suppose otherwise is to suppose that all questions can
| be answered in a cute couple of setences. This is,
| indeed, the opposite lesson of expertise.
| Espressosaurus wrote:
| I shifted it to C because I am intimately familiar with
| C's drawbacks. I don't have the same understanding of
| Python's drawbacks.
|
| And it's always about explaining to the target person's
| level of understanding. A layman isn't going to know the
| difference between languages and why pick one vs.
| another. That's a long digression. Explaining why to use
| Rust to a Python expert is a very different discussion.
|
| An expert can switch between explanations as required for
| the audience. Non-experts, in my experience, cannot
| tailor the explanation for the audience. They typically
| bottom out at a level that leaves them unable to meet the
| questioner in the middle.
|
| Hell, _I 've_ been the non-expert, especially when it
| comes to something like why a particular material was
| acting like a diode instead of not passing the signal or
| passing the signal intact. I can regurgitate that the
| half-rectified signal from the aggressor is bleeding into
| the signal of interest, but I can't tell you why. That's
| when I'll tell you to talk to the EE team for specifics
| on why, as well as what they plan to do to fix it.
| mjburgess wrote:
| The purpose of my choosing python is that the comparison
| is essentially a category error. Python's semantics, and
| that of all GC'd interpreted languages, make memory
| safety irrelevant.. there is no manual allocation of
| memory in the language.
|
| I chose this example as I assumed it would be clear and
| non-controversial enough to make my point, ie., I assumed
| most HN readers would appreciate that a person claiming
| Rust's memory safety model made it safter than an
| interpreted language would be a person clearly deeply
| confused about the meaning of any of these terms.
| wruza wrote:
| You and the commenter above are confusing expertise with
| ability to determine and speak someone's language. It's
| just a distinct skill.
|
| You may not understand their level, and may be unable to
| negotiate it due to vocabular barrier (people invent non-
| standard vocab all the time). Your oversimplifications
| may bear unintended consequences, etc. You must take that
| into account and create a plan to make it clear.
|
| And when you have that skill without any expertise, they
| call you politician. Only a politician may answer "easy"
| on a hard question and tell something unrelated for few
| paragraphs cause he doesn't know anything on the original
| one.
| johnny22 wrote:
| > You may not understand their level, and may be unable
| to negotiate it due to vocabular barrier (people invent
| non-standard vocab all the time). Your
| oversimplifications may bear unintended consequences,
| etc. You must take that into account and create a plan to
| make it clear.
|
| This isn't actually bad in all cases though. It's like
| learning about science in primary school. You're gonna
| get some things simplified in a way that might be
| considered incorrect by those who are experts, but
| without some base layer of understanding to bootstrap
| from, you won't be able to become an expert.
| kragen wrote:
| it's somewhat true, though; python is vulnerable to
| concurrency errors that rust isn't (rust's concept of
| safety isn't just memory safety), and while python can
| detect type errors reliably at run time, that only makes
| the program fail in a way that is easy to debug and
| probably won't corrupt your data. for many purposes that
| is not an adequate substitute for detecting the problem
| at compile time so that it cannot fail at run time
|
| on the other hand, python is more productive than rust,
| so if you're time-constrained, sometimes using python
| will get you a higher-quality product, for example
| because it's better tested or has a less error-prone or
| more forgiving user interface. both python and rust fail
| only at run time when they detect index errors, and users
| can make dangerous errors with any potentially dangerous
| program
|
| on the gripping hand, rust runs enormously faster than
| python, and sometimes optimization trades off against
| testing time and ui iteration time in the same way that
| writing more code does, and while _writing_ python is
| faster, _reading_ it often isn 't, so there may be some
| size of program above which python has no advantages
|
| so i think it's better to say that the question is based
| on an oversimplification rather than an error. to explain
| this to a layman i would probably tell some stories of
| programmers working late nights and delivering unusable
| guis
| User23 wrote:
| Rust is safer than Python though, at least until the
| inevitable Rust rewrite of cpython. A hosted language is
| going to inherit the safety or lack thereof of the host
| language, barring a level of rigor (think theorem
| proving) that so far as I know cpython doesn't have.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Notice that you've shifted the parent's question from
| Rust vs _Python_ to the entirely different discussion of
| Rust vs C.
| bragr wrote:
| In my experience, very few people are able to articulate
| their lack of understanding with straight forward
| questions like "What's memory?", and that's before we get
| into cognitive blind spots. For example, you've
| completely skipped over what it means to aquire and free
| memory, so I'm not sure your explanation is as clear as
| you think.
| exe34 wrote:
| They usually make several leaps of imagination from the
| lack of understanding to the question they actually ask.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| That's not an explanation, it's a description-by-analogy.
|
| If you think they're the same, consider why we need
| explanations at all if a description-by-analogy does the
| same job.
| ToValueFunfetti wrote:
| If someone thinks that they're the same, they probably
| don't already agree that we need both
| charleslmunger wrote:
| >In Rust, it's easy to ensure you return that memory when
| you're done with it.
|
| This is a false explanation though - the problem is that
| memory is returned before you're done with it.
|
| https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch15-06-reference-
| cycles.html
|
| This is extra-wrong as python has a garbage collector to
| break reference cycles. If giving a simplified
| explanation to a layman, it's important that if they
| repeat the explanation to another expert they don't hear
| "well that's wrong".
| kaba0 wrote:
| Okay, now do explain your paper's result on this specific
| JIT compiler optimization that allows vectorization in
| certain cases?
|
| Like, I never got further than "computers can only
| execute and understand these few specific commands"
| before the layman party gave up.
|
| It is absolutely the same with plenty of mathematical
| topics (like, just the field of abstract algebra is
| absolutely mind boggling for almost everyone), physics,
| engineering, etc. Sure, one might bring up Feynman, but
| physics _does_ have several topics that are easy to grasp
| - it's literally about the world around us, and while a
| layman may not understand anything about the complex
| calculations about, say, an internal combustion engine,
| they will find it accessible due to the common ground.
| jdefr89 wrote:
| Ironically Rust binaries link to libc.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| > what is fire
|
| It is the light of other days.
|
| Feynman explains it here:
| https://youtu.be/N1pIYI5JQLE?si=APotFnCuOVKN0wc8
| treflop wrote:
| It's all about analogies. You can explain anything to
| anyone.
|
| Rust is safer than Python in the way same way as having a
| backup sensor in your car versus not. Sure, you won't need
| most of the time but it may catch you that one time that
| you almost backed into a wall because you were still groggy
| after a night out.
|
| You got their attention and they understand your expert
| PoV. If they're still curious and want to know more, you go
| deeper.
| noobermin wrote:
| > Consider a person who says, "I heard rust was better than
| python because its safe" -- where would one even begin?
| Suppose now you're dealing with a person who knows enough
| to make the claim, but isnt patient enough to have memory
| safety, garbage collection, interpreters, etc. explained
|
| This means that the asker is impatient, not the expert. An
| expert _can_ explain everything from 0, and might even
| enjoy it.
| kaba0 wrote:
| Let the expert be a native Indonesian person who speaks
| no English, and I don't speak a word of his native
| tongue.
|
| _Can_ he _explain_ anything to me, given such a language
| boundary? Even though he _knows_ stuff from 0, that
| doesn't translate over to ability to explain.
| MrJohz wrote:
| I think you're both right, but I think you're talking about
| different kinds of knowledge transfer.
|
| Imagine, as a simple model of expertise, three different
| levels of knowledge in a subject: beginner, intermediate,
| and advanced. In my experience, an expert can always
| explain their knowledge to the next level down: if you've
| got someone at the advanced level in a room of
| intermediates, then if the person at the advanced level
| should be able to explain what's going on to their
| intermediate peers. If they can't, I would be deeply
| sceptical that they know their stuff.
|
| But beyond that - someone at the advanced level in a room
| full of beginners, for example - communication gets harder,
| and the expert usually needs to be skilled in teaching in
| addition to their specialist subject in order to
| effectively explain what they're on about.
|
| So in your example, the expert is dealing with someone who
| only knows the basics, and so will need to do a lot of
| explaining to get them up to speed. But if instead the
| expert was asked something like "How does the use of ADTs
| in Rust change how you would model data in comparison to
| Python?", then the person they're dealing with probably
| knows enough that the expert only needs to explain the
| relevant specifics to them.
|
| So in summary: yes, teaching someone who knows relatively
| little compared to you requires a lot of specific teaching
| skills, even as an expert. But if you really are an expert,
| you should be able to explain your expertise to peers who
| just don't have the specific knowledge you have.
| kaba0 wrote:
| This is a very wise point I haven's seen written out this
| concretely, thanks! I really do feel this additional
| detail is necessary to the above claims. No matter how
| much of an expert someone is, there are topics that have
| so many dependencies themselves, that are alsk advanced
| knowledge, that explaining it in one go is just not
| possible.
|
| There are some topics where analogies can sidestep some
| of this difficulty in teaching by basically keeping the
| _shape_ of the dependency graph, and replacing it with
| one that happens in ordinary life. But I don't think that
| every expert topic can have such a homology,
| fundamentally so. Complexity is unending, while "problems
| common in ordinary life" has limited complexity. That
| math paper that 10 people understand on Earth will not be
| readily accessible to Aunt Mary not even by the smartest
| person on Earth.
| a_wild_dandan wrote:
| _" If you can't explain something in simple terms, you
| don't understand it."_ - Richard Feynman
|
| Experts deeply understand their subject, and tailor answers
| to meet the audience where they're at. If you express
| genuine interest in someone's passion, they'll be ecstatic.
| That's what the OP is talking about. It's not about how
| experts (or anyone) interacts with belligerent and
| dismissive interlocutors. And observing teaching moments is
| just one aspect of a larger smell test for detecting
| imposters. I think it's a good heuristic within that scope!
| jwandborg wrote:
| Experts deeply understand their subject.
|
| - Experts that tailor their answers to meet the audience
| are experts, but not only experts, they also have the
| luck of finding good analogues for parts of a system or
| topic, and a skill, or luck, of story telling and
| structuring teaching.
|
| - Individuals who use analogues and simplifications to
| describe a system or topic are not necessarily experts,
| they can also be lucky or skilled imitators, or just
| teachers.
|
| - Experts who are experts by the definition of having a
| deep understanding of the subject, but who are incapable
| or unwilling to simplify and/or structure the story well
| (in your subjective opinion), are still experts, but
| unless you also become an expert on the topic, it will be
| hard for you, or anyone else, to trust their expertise.
| sqeaky wrote:
| If I were presented such questions I would provide some
| basic context in a sentence or two and then ask why they
| care about the difference. Perhaps something like this:
|
| Sqeaky: rust and python are both good programming languages
| rust is good for high performance, safety oriented, systems
| development. While python is good for hooking two systems
| together or processing a little data right in front of me.
| Why do you ask what are your goals, maybe some context
| would help me understand?
|
| Q: I'm a new developer and I want to build a web page I
| wasn't sure what to use?
|
| Sqeaky: well let's get into what programming you know and
| let's discuss some Libraries Python and rust both have
| options!
|
| Q: ...
|
| And the conversation would carry on from there based on the
| context the asker provided, because contextualizing
| conversations, questions, and data around a topic is part
| of having expertise.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| "Python is like your kid's room - clean and dirty clothes
| mixed up in the wardrobe and in random piles and boxes on
| the floor. Every now and then you come, take the dirty
| laundry away, and put the rest in some order - in
| programmer terms, you're acting as 'garbage collector'."
|
| "Rust is like the room of Steve, you know, the one with
| OCD. Separate drawers for underwear, separate for socks,
| all subdivided by days of the week. And nothing, _nothing_
| is. ever. out. of. order. Sounds like a lot of work up
| front, but you know what Steve never is? Late. Or in dirty
| or mixed up outfit. Or unsure whether something is lost or
| who was it lent to. "
|
| "Now, some programming is more like writing experimental
| music; other is more like double-entry bookkeeping for a
| company. The flexibility Python gives you is great for the
| former, but you'd likely prefer something more strict for
| the latter."
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| Reminds me of Feynman on magnets. He said something awhile
| back...basically said "ya'all are too dumb to understand
| magnets". That was my take-away anyway.
| jwiz wrote:
| My takeaway was more that it was along the lines of "you
| can't explain this in terms of other things because it is
| fundamental to the nature of reality."
| Espressosaurus wrote:
| Agreed. My experience with experts--both being one in my
| domain and working with others in their domain--is that if
| they can't explain how it works to a layman, chances are they
| don't know how it works.
|
| True experts can understand from the layman's perspective and
| tailor the response to that level of understanding.
| 77pt77 wrote:
| > True experts can understand from the layman's perspective
| and tailor the response to that level of understanding.
|
| The Feynman paradox:
|
| > if you can't explain it to a six-year-old you don't
| understand it yourself
|
| but also
|
| > If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn't
| have been worth the Nobel Prize
|
| The former probably apocryphal.
| edgarvaldes wrote:
| Not so sure. It implies that a bad communicator can't be an
| expert at anything.
| g4zj wrote:
| This is my take. As an autistic individual, I struggle a
| lot with communication in general, especially speaking in-
| person as opposed to typing slowly and carefully like I am
| doing now.
|
| No matter how well I understand something, my ability to
| relay that information effectively to another individual
| will always be another matter entirely. It's true that I
| can't explain something I don't understand, but it doesn't
| logically follow that I only truly understand something if
| I _can_ explain it.
| sqeaky wrote:
| I think a little piece of that idiom is left out for the
| sake of making it a good sound bite. An expert can
| explain something to an eager listener. Would you be able
| to explain something you're an expert in to a patient lay
| person who actually listened and tried to ask the best
| questions they could?
|
| It is an entirely different skill to educate someone with
| your expertise when you don't get their feedback (tv,
| radio, youtube) or when they don't want to learn
| (classroom teacher, office politics around bean
| counters). Those are two kinds of education and they are
| important skills all on their own but are in no way tied
| to other kinds of technical expertise.
|
| If we were both working on a project that needed your and
| my expertise. If I understood that you had different
| sensibilities about social norms. If I respected those
| while asking questions about parts of your explanation I
| didn't understand. Would you be able to explain a
| detailed topic to me?
| g4zj wrote:
| Yes. I can answer questions far more easily than I can
| coherently give an impromptu explanation of a complex
| topic on which I am something of an expert.
|
| Even if the listener knows little to nothing about the
| subject, being eager to understand and asking questions
| while respecting my sensibilities, however realistic that
| expectation may be, makes all the difference for me.
| sqeaky wrote:
| One interesting thing about most communication is the
| implied context. It is no slight against you, but based
| on what you said here you think differently than others
| and you will imply different contexts.
|
| I know of no easy answer but I have met people like this
| and seen them succeed. I hope you're able to successfuly
| wrangle this extra complexity that the neurotypical will
| foist upon you and not even understand that they've done
| it.
| edgarvaldes wrote:
| Agree. Another thing I notice in this thread is that the
| implied context is a professional environment where you
| are expected to showcase your expertise to other
| teammates, colleagues, etc. As if solitary people,
| masters of their craft, could not exist in isolation.
| james_marks wrote:
| I sense some self-selection that experts tend to be decent
| communicators, at least in some mediums.
|
| How would anyone know they are an expert if they can't make
| themselves understood?
| tetha wrote:
| There is also a similar thing many experienced people
| complain about: Eventually, you'll have to be able to explain
| the cost and merit of a technical decision in business terms.
|
| Like, yeah I'm able to explain our postgres HA setup + DC-
| redundancy at fairly detailed technical level. But then a
| member of the board asks "Yeah but what does it cost and what
| benefit does it bring the customers and why?"
|
| Finding a satisfying and comprehensive answer to that
| question takes a whole new perspective and made me understand
| a few things more. And question a few more.
| sqeaky wrote:
| Being able to contextualize such data and such facts into
| actionable knowledge or wisdom is definitely a facet of
| expertise. It takes a different sort of expertise, some
| kind of communication expertise, to interject the need for
| actual study or research in the space.
|
| In my career I have many times been asked to understand a
| system and to evaluate it and come back with an explanation
| to the non-technical. The first few times I made no
| accommodations for cost or support planning. And when asked
| how much such a thing would cost I inevitably gave wrong
| answers based on sticker prices or cost of hardware or
| something similarly trivial. Today I'm always evaluating
| systems I work in in terms of technician and expert hours
| in addition to the cost of the things we purchased for them
| to work on.
|
| If somehow I were surprised today and asked to give a price
| of standing up such a system, I would know enough to say I
| need to do some review and formal planning. I would
| staunchly, but politely, refuse to give up any numbers and
| say that I can come back with a detailed plan with itemized
| costs after I actually write down all my notes because even
| after having worked and software for 20 or more years there
| are just too many little details that can add a million
| dollars to a project. After having bought such time I would
| write down all my thoughts and gather all my notes and look
| around for things I missed. Then provide such costs and
| benefits to the bean counters in the only language they all
| speak dollars, and I would be sure not to put a single
| number for any field they would all be ranges possible
| minimums and maximums. And I've been asked why they are
| ranges in the past, and those help to articulate
| uncertainty. That is another whole discussion but people
| who don't work with the technology often don't understand
| the uncertainty that come from these very certain, digital,
| and predictable machines.
| yencabulator wrote:
| > a complete inability to communicate the challenges and
| successes of a technology, technique, or theory to laymen is
| a huge demerit against a claim of expertise.
|
| Hard disagree. A person can be an internationally recognized
| expert working on e.g. a novel mathematical theory useful for
| cryptography, without being able to explain any of it to
| anyone without a university-level math education.
|
| I posit you're combining two orthogonal properties, expert
| knowledge and being a good communicator, into one axis
| because that's a _useful combo_ , or the make-up of _an
| expert that you 'd like to know and/or hire_.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| The problem isn't always whether an "expert" can, it's
| whether they _want to_.
|
| I've worked with plenty of experts who are also impatient,
| short and condescending with anyone who doesn't grasp things
| straight away. That doesn't mean they're an imitator, it just
| means they're an arsehole.
|
| People aren't binary. An expert isn't automatically a good
| teacher. And, in fact, some imitators are actually better
| teachers. It's almost as if teaching and "doing" are
| different skills ;)
| zh3 wrote:
| Indeed, this article could easily - and possibly should have -
| equate imitators to current AI (which tend to fail on deep
| knowledge, and - unlike experts - show inflexibility when
| challenged).
|
| Which is not to say that shallow knowledge (whether AI or
| human) is a bad thing. I'm very happy to be helped out by
| ChatGPT in places where I'd be in the shallow knowledge
| ('imitator') camp. Still, the limitations of current AI seem
| quite similar to the 'imitators' described here (noting that
| plenty of humans aren't above making stuff up either).
| Justsignedup wrote:
| What I found as an interesting point is the concept that an
| imitator can't really tell it a different way, because to
| explain something from a different angle requires you to see it
| as a 3d object, and not as a flat painting just seeing the
| result, not everything that goes behind it.
|
| Thinking up how to use that.. How to use the concept of explain
| something to me, and me not understanding to see how deeply
| they get it.
| swayvil wrote:
| Experts may have a deep understanding etc but it's the imitators
| that you want to invite to the party.
| yonz wrote:
| Party maybe, your company hard no.
| jdlshore wrote:
| I think you're implying that imitators are more interesting or
| fun, but I disagree. I'm in a field that became very popular
| and lucrative. It has far more imitators than experts. Some of
| them are interesting and fun, but a lot are shallow snake-oil
| salesmen. Namedropping and self-promotion abounds.
| thot_experiment wrote:
| 100% disagree, often I meet bullshitters and I think, well this
| is a person I would never invite to anything.
| Espressosaurus wrote:
| Why?
| yonz wrote:
| I love fs.blog, a relevant one for this is the chauffeur test
| from https://fs.blog/two-types-of-knowledge/
| glutamate wrote:
| "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the
| expert's there are few" (Shunryu Suzuki)
|
| Not always bad not to be an expert. And it's fairly rich to start
| with an example from asset management, which is an industry that
| habitually mistakes luck for expertise.
| stanleykm wrote:
| This is better off as a linkedin post.
| mikemitchelldev wrote:
| I've heard some professors stop publishing once they receive
| tenure not wanting to risk losing the aura of being an expert
| with a low-quality research.
| a_wild_dandan wrote:
| A more charitable explanation: universities use publication
| frequency as a proxy for your academic worth. Once the "publish
| or perish" pressure is released, you can focus on paper quality
| over quantity. Given the fire hose of trivial academic
| publications filling up journals, that's good news for
| everyone.
| paulpauper wrote:
| tenure means you can just coast . the incentives are misaligned
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| There are a lot of professors out there, so "some" doesn't
| really mean much by itself.
|
| Tenure allows lazy to be lazy, perhaps, but 'most' are not lazy
| by any reasonable standard. Tenure does allow tackling harder,
| more risky or non-normative research programs, which is
| probably a huge net positive
| nimbius wrote:
| "If you want the highest quality information, you have to speak
| to the best people."
|
| what a silly thing to say. High quality information is derived
| from accurate sources subjected to scientific rigor over time.
| The best people? Best at what? Character and competence arent the
| same.
| skilled wrote:
| High quality information comes from direct experience.
| g4zj wrote:
| So do anecdotes. How does one tell the difference?
| oopsallmagic wrote:
| Epistemology is not new.
| paulpauper wrote:
| High quality information withstands the test of practice or
| evidence. It's not time, as bad practices can still persist a
| long time. It's more like, what produces the best results.
| agumonkey wrote:
| it should be 'the people which can bridge your pov with the
| domain' .. a lot of advanced masters are incapable of matching
| impedance with most lay persons. Sometimes an intermediate
| craftsman can be a better catalyst here.
| doctorhandshake wrote:
| In my line of work, clients are often looking for something new -
| something that hasn't been done before or is at least
| substantially novel in important ways. I've noticed that the
| difference between neophytes and experts in my biz is that
| amateurs say 'I've never done that before but how hard could it
| be?', whereas experts say 'I've never done that before but I
| assume it's full of unknowns and traps.'
| etbebl wrote:
| There's something like this as well in academia or at least
| science: because only successful studies get published (the
| file drawer problem), it's easy for someone who's read a lot of
| papers but not gotten their hands dirty yet to think that a
| technique is much easier and less failure prone than it
| actually is. Of course it's necessary to try new things and
| every so often they succeed, but if there are 50 papers on some
| system and none of them have been able to answer a question
| that seems obviously important, there's probably a reason why.
| I realized this too late and am now dealing with the
| consequences as a senior grad student.
| ramenbytes wrote:
| Soon-to-be grad student here. Could you expand a bit? Is
| there anything you recommend doing ahead of time to weed out
| some of these tarpits, or is the already mentioned heuristic
| the best we've got so far?
| jeffrallen wrote:
| An expert can also say, "I've never done that before, but I did
| this other thing, and if we adapt your requirements like this,
| we can derisk the problem by applying part of the previous
| solution".
| mrtksn wrote:
| > I've never done that before but how hard could it be
|
| Funny, the founders of a lot of successful startups usually
| tell an anecdote similar to this. They will often undertake a
| challenge, naively thinking that it's easy only to find out how
| colossal actually is. Then this becomes their moat or
| differentiator.
| kaba0 wrote:
| Sounds like survivorship bias.
| mrtksn wrote:
| How so? Moat by definition is something hard to do, its
| only normal for many to fail trying.
|
| Naivete can be a factor which would amplify number of
| people trying.
| Wololooo wrote:
| "We did it not because it was easy, but because we
| thought it was going to be easy."
| yencabulator wrote:
| The true expert is the one who can say "yeah we've done
| something like that before, here's what's going to be the
| hardest part".
| cess11 wrote:
| It's just an ad?
|
| Anyway, doesn't work on me, I'm not afraid of not being able to
| tell bullshitters from people with experience, and I'm also not
| afraid of listening to bullshitters.
|
| As the Principia Discordia reminds us, "bullshit makes the
| flowers grow, and that is beautiful".
| Tao3300 wrote:
| This is an effect you see on Reddit a lot. The fitness sub used
| to have some pretty knowledgeable people in it, but over time it
| got clogged up with imitators who would just parrot answers from
| more credible accounts. It's one of the worst side effects of the
| dopamine rush from fake internet points. I haven't read it in
| probably a decade for that reason, but that's how it was at the
| time.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Which fitness sub? there are so many of them
| paulpauper wrote:
| I have basically been an imitator my whole life...being
| reasonably good at approximating an expert in certain domains but
| never quite reaching the levels of true expertise--except for
| maybe one or two things. As Covid showed in which experts could
| not decide what policy, if any worked, or endless forecasts of
| recession/crisis that are worse than flipping a coin, the value
| of expertise in many respects is overrated anyway.
|
| _Think of all the money managers who borrow their talking points
| from Warren Buffett. They might sound like Buffett, but they
| don't know how to invest the way Buffett does. They're imitators.
| Charlie Munger once commented: "It's very hard to tell the
| difference between a good money manager and someone who just has
| the patter down."_
|
| The best ones will not take your money, or there is no easy way
| to invest (e.g. Renaissance Technologies) . the bad ones are
| practically begging for clients and spend lots of $ on
| advertising. Also, performance metrics...
| upmind wrote:
| >> Imitators can't answer questions at a deeper level Not sure
| about others but I feel like most engineers (I know) only learn
| what they need, are these engineers all imitators? How does one
| become an expert?
| pojzon wrote:
| You become an expert by spending absurd amounts of time on
| something practicing it and having a specific set of additional
| characteristics that help you get to that level like excellent
| memory, excellent analytical thinking, excellent ppl skills.
|
| A real expert is extremely rare to find.
|
| Ppl who think and present themselves as experts in the field is
| plently.
|
| You will know you met a real expert when you talk to them long
| enough. Ive met few, the knowledge difference was a canyon the
| approach to solving problems was superb.
|
| I try to keep contact with those ppl coz out of few hundred
| devs I met I considered only 3-5 a real expert.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| The article is conflating buzzword laden hype-cycles with
| qualitative artifacts.
|
| It takes experience to recognize most software is still garbage,
| but more importantly determine which parts of the garbage heap is
| useful.
|
| The primary problem is the very definition of any unique
| terminology or product is distorted by the industry itself to fit
| a marketing niche.
|
| After a few years people sound like they had a stroke, and bought
| a Turbo Encabulator:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ac7G7xOG2Ag
| paulpauper wrote:
| yeah I m not sure why that blog is so popular. A lot of its
| analysis is shallow and easily countered. It subscribes to a
| view that it's possible to reduce the world to logical
| heuristics. This works sometimes but often fails greatly too.
| tlogan wrote:
| Nonsense post.
|
| If you are not familiar with the area there is no way distinguish
| experts vs. imitators. In order words, imitators are not stupid:
| they are just not expert in the field.
| pojzon wrote:
| I have met many engineers with senior and expert engineer titles.
|
| I can count on a single hand the number of ppl I considered
| experts in their field.
|
| Titles are not given based on expertise but how many years of
| experience you have and how many ppl you know.
| arp242 wrote:
| The problem is that if you're using a reasonable and modest way
| to describe your level of knowledge, then that's a good way to
| shaft yourself over if the other guy is bullshitting with
| titles like "senior" and "expert", either in terms is salary or
| not getting the job at all.
| begueradj wrote:
| That's one of the consequences of the popular advice: "Fake it
| till you make it".
| michaelhoney wrote:
| Buffett this, Buffett that. People could do better than idolise
| someone whose wealth came from parasitic speculation on
| productive activity.
| wudangmonk wrote:
| I got a chuckle out of having the 'expert' be Buffet and the
| subject be finance. I don't think there is a worse example of a
| subject that lacks first principles and where vocabulary is
| used to obfuscate and give it a veneer or credibility. Why not
| pick astrology? those guys will give insight and agree with
| each other at a higher rate than anyone in economics.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Buffett is rich precisely because he's not just running off
| with a fraction of a percent stolen from real investors. He's
| the real investor.
|
| His strategy is to take a controlling stake in a struggling
| company with good fundamentals but poor management. Then he'll
| "fix up" the small problems and return the company to
| profitability.
|
| How exactly is that parasitic?
| risenshinetech wrote:
| > How exactly is that parasitic?
|
| Because shallow dismissals of wealthy / successful people is
| all the rage. Surely none of these people can actually have
| any talent. They're all just lucky or irredeemably evil,
| right?
| fullstackchris wrote:
| sounds like every AGI huckster out there vs those who have been
| in the weeds with ML / NLP since 2010s
|
| but yes AGI will be here in 2 years... if only I was an expert
| and could know this for sure!!! :D
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Is "AI" an imitator or an expert?
|
| It is performing mimicry.
|
| What happens when people try to "learn" from imitators.
| motohagiography wrote:
| to add, an imitator can't tell the difference between the
| questions, "do you know this?" and "is this knowable?"
| breck wrote:
| It's a great post. However, I don't think I've ever met someone
| who was _trying_ to be an "imitator".
|
| Keep in mind that the majority of the world's population grow up
| in places with little access to the information one needs to be
| exposed to to become an "expert".
|
| So go easy on imitators. Help guide them to enlightenment.
|
| Don't flip the bozo bit.
| sarreph wrote:
| I find it kind of ironic that an article about misperceiving
| expertise fails to mention the Dunning-Krueger effect[0],
| especially with passages like:
|
| > Imitators don't know the limits of their expertise. Experts
| know what they know, and also know what they don't know. [...]
| Imitators can't. They can't tell when they're crossing the
| boundary into things they don't understand.
|
| [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
| paavope wrote:
| IMO Dunning-Krueger has become such a cliche that it's more
| refreshing to _not_ read a reference to it in a piece where one
| could've been made. Kinda like quantum mechanics and that
| stupid cat in a box.
| LegionMammal978 wrote:
| I don't think that D-K really has much to do with it: as
| originally presented, it predicts that the worst performers
| tend to think of themselves as close-to-average performers, not
| as the best performers. (In particular, there's no "U curve" of
| self-assessment.) Imitation of expertise is more of a kind of
| personal bravado.
| caseyy wrote:
| An expert can often quickly apply their knowledge to solve a
| practical problem. But someone only posing as an expert will
| usually not.
|
| In my experience interviewing game dev SWEs, especially around
| mid-level, 3/4 will present themselves as experts, and 3/4 will
| fail to solve industry-standard day-to-day problems. I mean
| things like "show me how you would change a value for a variable
| in memory in any C language, with any debugger you prefer". Or
| "show me how you would approach fixing a memory access violation
| at address <some non-null address less than 0x1000 (4096)>". Most
| experienced mid-level programmers for AAA games would immediately
| pop a breakpoint in their IDE for the first problem and change
| the value in locals, and look for an uninitialized pointer for
| the second. But the majority of people applying for mid-level
| engineering positions will have a pretty difficult time with 10
| such questions.
|
| To give a more interesting example, if I was interviewing someone
| for a machine learning position, I would ask them to build a
| simple model to identify digits 0-9 in hand-drawn images. This
| will be easy for an expert, they will draw 20 of each number in
| 28x28 or similar images, label the data set, and train a simple
| net with 80% or so accuracy with tensorflow. 80% is sufficient
| for a simple demonstration and it will be quick, 99% is SOTA for
| image classification so they'd know not to expect that. Then
| they'd use some sort of a python library to find the text in an
| image, crop it, and scale it down to the right size, and feed it
| through the model. Most people who pretend to be experts in
| machine-learning these days would go very very off-track -- calls
| to OpenAI API levels of off-track. Though I myself am _not_ an
| expert in machine learning, I am surprised by some applicants who
| claim to be and are very off-track as they have never once tried
| to solve a ML problem themselves practically.
|
| These are just my thoughts. But I would say testing the practical
| knowledge is probably one of the best ways to know if someone is
| an expert.
| bjackman wrote:
| I think a positive sign of expertise is when you question someone
| and they go "oh right, I neglected to establish this foundational
| concept before making my main point". Or "oh right, let me step
| back and answer the question again from a different angle".
|
| Basically, sometimes if you bounce your ignorance off a true
| expert you can see it reflected back in a positive light as they
| try to massage ideas into your perspective. Bullshitters aren't
| able to do this.
| dmitrijbelikov wrote:
| > Real experts have earned their expertise and are excited about
| trying to share what they know.
|
| Depends on a lot of things. Preferably not for free.
| User23 wrote:
| How does this relate to imposter syndrome?
| steelframe wrote:
| Because I'm a senior engineer I am giving a lot of "Expertise"
| interviews for my company. Recruiters tend to presume that
| seniority implies broad expertise. In my case it doesn't. There's
| really only one subject that I feel I'm qualified to assess for
| expertise, but hardly anyone who interviews at the company claims
| anything about that subject on their resume.
|
| Ninety percent of the time when I interview on that subject the
| candidate ends up getting a "hard no" from me just based on the
| first ~10 minutes of the interview, but on a very rare occasion I
| run across someone who's actually an expert in the field. I'll
| know because we'll quickly blast past all of the "<subject> 101"
| questions in the first 5 or 6 minutes, and then I can quickly
| adapt to deep-dive into technical details, giving them what I
| know to be fairly novel problems in the domain and then seeing
| how they apply first principles to tackle them. The "interview"
| ends up looking more like a collaborative brainstorming session
| at that point. It's incredible when that happens, which sadly is
| only maybe once or twice a year.
|
| But usually I end up giving an "Expertise" interview for whatever
| it is they claim expertise in, whether I myself possess expertise
| in that subject or not. For the past several months the most
| prominent subject on literally every single resume has been
| AI/ML. I certainly don't claim expertise in that field, although
| I did take a graduate course on computational machine learning
| theory at university. That gives me "just enough" of a handle to
| not come across as a completely incompetent interviewer, but it
| feels like a farce.
|
| With all this AI/ML hype I feel like the "Expertise" interview
| just ends up being someone pretending to have expertise in AI/ML
| being interviewed by someone pretending to be able to assess
| expertise in AI/ML.
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