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I respect Jon Skeet very much and it's by his book that I learned C# when I needed. I do feel that we tend to treat people we admire as gods, this being detrime

I respect Jon Skeet very much and it's by his book that I learned C# when I needed. I do feel that we tend to treat people we admire as gods, this being detrimental to the learning process. Especially in a global market without boundaries, like the software industry, it's easy to compare oneself with the best of us and this ends up being quite depressing. We shouldn't forget that such people are humans as well, continuously learning, improving and prone to do mistakes like the rest of us. Here is an example: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1426754/linkedblockingqueue-vs-concurrentlinkedqueue/24439878 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1426754/linkedblockingque...

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
rjzzleep 11y ago
The biggest issue with idolizing people this much in my opinion is that it puts a huge divide between you and that idol. People have heroes, and heroes do things normal humans can't. That further translates into other parts of life where really terrible things are done by villains and the only ones being able to counter it are those heroes we created. I don't understand why people fetishize names that much. It's almost as if they are subconsciously saying: "Given that xyz is so much better than I and he's a genius, I can therefore never hope to reach that goal, so there's no point in trying" While at the same time consciously saying: "I wish I could be like him" As the germans say: "Keine Bange, der kocht auch nur mit Wasser" There's a whole bunch of inventions we accredit to different people than actually did them and we praise them like gods. And there is no rational behind that behavior. Yes, it's still a great achievement, but no it doesn't matter as much as we like to pretend. On a step further we get to the discussion of what success is. Is success when everyone knows you? Is it when you have a lot of money? If it's all about the money, no european startup will ever be as great as its american counterpart. There's just not as much money.
- Retra 11y ago
  People fetishize names because they fetishize knowledge as a form of social status, and being able to say "I know who Jon Skeet is and will talk about him, and if you don't, then I'm better than you." But of course, you have to roll some humility into it by talking about people who are also presumably better than you.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    >People fetishize names because they fetishize knowledge as a form of social status, and being able to say "I know who Jon Skeet is and will talk about him, and if you don't, then I'm better than you." What you describe is name dropping, while what the parent described is hero worship / idolizing. The two have very little to do with each other. In fact it's the inverse: people not only don't idolize names to be smug over people not knowing them, but actually tend to idolize those that most other people already know (the "stars") that they've seen in the media. Nobody felt smug because of knowing who Skeet is.
    - Retra 11y ago
      That's a good point. I'm wrong about this.
- jonskeet 11y ago
  > The biggest issue with idolizing people this much in my opinion is that it puts a huge divide between you and that idol. If it's any help, I'd be happy to give a huge list of bugs I've caused due to inexperience and incompetence. I'm not going to pretend I don't enjoy the micro-celebrity status SO has given me, but I'd be happy to help correct any impression that there's a huge gulf between me and any "regular" programmer. Maybe a gulf in "time spent answering questions on SO" but not some massive intellectual divide.
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    Honestly, I was expecting a list of projects that you delivered with great code quality, tools you built to improve programming, and so on. I have that for Margaret Hamilton, from Apollo to 001. Bernstein of Qmail and Rod Chapman of Praxis Correct-by-Construction come to mind. Answering lots of questions about programming indicates something about knowledge but that depends on the questions & answers. I know lots of programmers value people doing hands-on parts. So, all in all, I guess I'm wondering what writings or work you did that puts you on list of top programmers. I mean, is it just how many aspiring or professional programmers you've helped day to day? The amplification effect of your SO activities on our field? Or specific, jaw-dropping software or books I don't know about? Or both? Just curious.
    - jonskeet 11y ago
      Well, my C# book (C# in Depth) has been well received. I'd like to think my date/time library for .NET (Noda Time) is mostly well-written. But no, nothing that I'd expect to put me in the top 15 (or top 1500) programmers in the world.
      - nickpsecurity 11y ago
        That's honest. Appreciate the feedback. In case you missed the other comment, I do think we should have recognition of contribution to educating programmers in practical ways. I think your StackOverflow work and book should earn you some place high on that list. :)
- golemotron 11y ago
  Couldn't it be Crab Mentality? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality
- drumdance 11y ago
  I learned to stop automatically admiring celebrities when I learned that Miles Davis, my all-time favorite jazz musician, was kind of a shithead.
  - sc90 11y ago
    In what way?
    - dekhn 11y ago
      If he was the opening act for a musician he didn't respect, he would show up late so the headliner would have to play first. He was probably right on that one, though.
- dave_sullivan 11y ago
  >> I don't understand why people fetishize names that much. I think it's basically the same phenomena as "judging a book by its cover" and "can't overcome a bad first impression". Our brains are constantly putting things in "bins" and these bins cost energy to move around. Looking at it from a minimization of energy perspective, it's basically because minds are lazy and need a way to quickly make decisions without arriving at everything from first principals. The extent to which this is true or not (I think) has to do with levels of intelligence. Higher intelligence (or, related, neuroplasticity) allows someone to alter the structure of their brain at a lower energy cost. Personally, I think this is why cognitive dissonance is often accompanied by anger because the brain literally just realized how much work it would be to rewire a mental model to account for such dissonance and would prefer a way to avoid it, hence fight or flight.
- TheTrotters 11y ago
  As Nietzsche once wrote, "To call someone 'divine' means 'Here we do not have to compete.'"
- diskcat 11y ago
  People do like to hero worship. I think it's a psychological thing. Although I disagree with saying that you can never reach a level of somebody that's you idolise. What I observe with myself and others is that people emulate those they idolise and emulating people who are really good at something would help you improve.
- grkvlt 11y ago
  > As the germans say: "Keine Bange, der kocht auch nur mit Wasser" Meaning? My high school German and a bit of Google translate give me "Don't worry, he also cooks with water" or something similar? Can anyone (native German speaker would be good) clarify further, please.
  - fao_ 11y ago
    Not a native German speaker (One side of my family is German so I have assimilated some of the culture, but I know only small amounts of german), but I would hazard a guess that an expanded form of it is Don't worry, [no matter how great they are,] they also cook with water meaning something along the lines of "No matter how great they are, they are still human in the end".
    - JdeBP 11y ago
      ... or probably https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/put_one%27s_trousers_on_one_leg_at_a_time https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/put_one%27s_trousers_on_one_l...
inglor 11y ago
I don't know how much you've been in SO but Jon gets as much shit when he's wrong as the other guy and none of the other high-rep users gives him any special treatment for being himself although it's safe to say we all respect him. The only thing you're measured by when you answer by other users - at least in high profile questions - is whether or not you're correct and your answer is useful.
golemotron 11y ago
> I do feel that we tend to treat people we admire as gods, this being detrimental to the learning process. Especially in a global market without boundaries, like the software industry, it's easy to compare oneself with the best of us and this ends up being quite depressing. It's almost obligatory now that whenever someone raises a person up above the herd, someone immediately knocks them down with a comment like yours. You have a choice. You can take his success as inspiring or depressing. Why did you choose the latter? Do you really feel that doing that is what is best for you? Few of us will ever approach his level but we can try. If we don't succeed that's okay. It's possible to feel good about our part in this bigger thing, the spread of knowledge. Feeling bad because you're not someone else is ego transmuted to envy.
mathattack 11y ago
If it's any consolation, many of us have more HN karma than him. :-) His work on SO massively adds to the canon of programming knowledge. We owe a lot to his service - and I suspect his prodigious output there comes as much from a service mentality as raw talent. This is what I got out of the article.
phkahler 11y ago
Agreed. I'm not sure, but I get then impression that some people vote on an answer based on who posted it. I don't want people to research an answer and post it, I prefer answers from people who know from experience. That said, a researched answer is better than none.
fit2rule 11y ago
>I do feel that we tend to treat people we admire as gods I think it is our nature as a species, collectively as well as at an individual level, to attempt to create supra-/super- states of being, and we do this progressively or conservatively, or not quite much at all, in pretty much all of our cultures. We, are the very definition of God. (In fact, the word "we" is as good as one can get to the question 'what does the word god mean?', Christian/monotheistic/contempt-of-religion cults notwithstanding.) I think in fact, We become Gods by our associations, where god is 'any being with an extreme grasp of the subject'. The godhead, as in a sort of supreme state of being which can be expressed as the 'sum total of all being', for any particular subject, must be expressed. The head of any group, given rightful access to the means of that group, becomes an extraordinarily effective unit of life. Look at it this way.. Alien observers looking at your odd battleship cruising across the ocean might be suddenly awestruck to see it suddenly disgorge itself of its bodily contents, and .. played with roughly as aliens do .. end up 'dead', just like any other living creature in the universe. Will they even bother to perceive us as individual humans? No, I think they'll be here to kill our gods. Where gods are, toxic slime, cities, etc.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

rjzzleep 11y ago

The biggest issue with idolizing people this much in my opinion is that it puts a huge divide between you and that idol. People have heroes, and heroes do things normal humans can't. That further translates into other parts of life where really terrible things are done by villains and the only ones being able to counter it are those heroes we created. I don't understand why people fetishize names that much. It's almost as if they are subconsciously saying: "Given that xyz is so much better than I and he's a genius, I can therefore never hope to reach that goal, so there's no point in trying" While at the same time consciously saying: "I wish I could be like him" As the germans say: "Keine Bange, der kocht auch nur mit Wasser" There's a whole bunch of inventions we accredit to different people than actually did them and we praise them like gods. And there is no rational behind that behavior. Yes, it's still a great achievement, but no it doesn't matter as much as we like to pretend. On a step further we get to the discussion of what success is. Is success when everyone knows you? Is it when you have a lot of money? If it's all about the money, no european startup will ever be as great as its american counterpart. There's just not as much money.

Retra 11y ago
People fetishize names because they fetishize knowledge as a form of social status, and being able to say "I know who Jon Skeet is and will talk about him, and if you don't, then I'm better than you." But of course, you have to roll some humility into it by talking about people who are also presumably better than you.
- coldtea 11y ago
  >People fetishize names because they fetishize knowledge as a form of social status, and being able to say "I know who Jon Skeet is and will talk about him, and if you don't, then I'm better than you." What you describe is name dropping, while what the parent described is hero worship / idolizing. The two have very little to do with each other. In fact it's the inverse: people not only don't idolize names to be smug over people not knowing them, but actually tend to idolize those that most other people already know (the "stars") that they've seen in the media. Nobody felt smug because of knowing who Skeet is.
  - Retra 11y ago
    That's a good point. I'm wrong about this.
jonskeet 11y ago
> The biggest issue with idolizing people this much in my opinion is that it puts a huge divide between you and that idol. If it's any help, I'd be happy to give a huge list of bugs I've caused due to inexperience and incompetence. I'm not going to pretend I don't enjoy the micro-celebrity status SO has given me, but I'd be happy to help correct any impression that there's a huge gulf between me and any "regular" programmer. Maybe a gulf in "time spent answering questions on SO" but not some massive intellectual divide.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  Honestly, I was expecting a list of projects that you delivered with great code quality, tools you built to improve programming, and so on. I have that for Margaret Hamilton, from Apollo to 001. Bernstein of Qmail and Rod Chapman of Praxis Correct-by-Construction come to mind. Answering lots of questions about programming indicates something about knowledge but that depends on the questions & answers. I know lots of programmers value people doing hands-on parts. So, all in all, I guess I'm wondering what writings or work you did that puts you on list of top programmers. I mean, is it just how many aspiring or professional programmers you've helped day to day? The amplification effect of your SO activities on our field? Or specific, jaw-dropping software or books I don't know about? Or both? Just curious.
  - jonskeet 11y ago
    Well, my C# book (C# in Depth) has been well received. I'd like to think my date/time library for .NET (Noda Time) is mostly well-written. But no, nothing that I'd expect to put me in the top 15 (or top 1500) programmers in the world.
    - nickpsecurity 11y ago
      That's honest. Appreciate the feedback. In case you missed the other comment, I do think we should have recognition of contribution to educating programmers in practical ways. I think your StackOverflow work and book should earn you some place high on that list. :)
golemotron 11y ago
Couldn't it be Crab Mentality? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality
drumdance 11y ago
I learned to stop automatically admiring celebrities when I learned that Miles Davis, my all-time favorite jazz musician, was kind of a shithead.
- sc90 11y ago
  In what way?
  - dekhn 11y ago
    If he was the opening act for a musician he didn't respect, he would show up late so the headliner would have to play first. He was probably right on that one, though.
dave_sullivan 11y ago
>> I don't understand why people fetishize names that much. I think it's basically the same phenomena as "judging a book by its cover" and "can't overcome a bad first impression". Our brains are constantly putting things in "bins" and these bins cost energy to move around. Looking at it from a minimization of energy perspective, it's basically because minds are lazy and need a way to quickly make decisions without arriving at everything from first principals. The extent to which this is true or not (I think) has to do with levels of intelligence. Higher intelligence (or, related, neuroplasticity) allows someone to alter the structure of their brain at a lower energy cost. Personally, I think this is why cognitive dissonance is often accompanied by anger because the brain literally just realized how much work it would be to rewire a mental model to account for such dissonance and would prefer a way to avoid it, hence fight or flight.
TheTrotters 11y ago
As Nietzsche once wrote, "To call someone 'divine' means 'Here we do not have to compete.'"
diskcat 11y ago
People do like to hero worship. I think it's a psychological thing. Although I disagree with saying that you can never reach a level of somebody that's you idolise. What I observe with myself and others is that people emulate those they idolise and emulating people who are really good at something would help you improve.
grkvlt 11y ago
> As the germans say: "Keine Bange, der kocht auch nur mit Wasser" Meaning? My high school German and a bit of Google translate give me "Don't worry, he also cooks with water" or something similar? Can anyone (native German speaker would be good) clarify further, please.
- fao_ 11y ago
  Not a native German speaker (One side of my family is German so I have assimilated some of the culture, but I know only small amounts of german), but I would hazard a guess that an expanded form of it is Don't worry, [no matter how great they are,] they also cook with water meaning something along the lines of "No matter how great they are, they are still human in the end".
  - JdeBP 11y ago
    ... or probably https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/put_one%27s_trousers_on_one_leg_at_a_time https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/put_one%27s_trousers_on_one_l...

inglor 11y ago

I don't know how much you've been in SO but Jon gets as much shit when he's wrong as the other guy and none of the other high-rep users gives him any special treatment for being himself although it's safe to say we all respect him. The only thing you're measured by when you answer by other users - at least in high profile questions - is whether or not you're correct and your answer is useful.

golemotron 11y ago

> I do feel that we tend to treat people we admire as gods, this being detrimental to the learning process. Especially in a global market without boundaries, like the software industry, it's easy to compare oneself with the best of us and this ends up being quite depressing. It's almost obligatory now that whenever someone raises a person up above the herd, someone immediately knocks them down with a comment like yours. You have a choice. You can take his success as inspiring or depressing. Why did you choose the latter? Do you really feel that doing that is what is best for you? Few of us will ever approach his level but we can try. If we don't succeed that's okay. It's possible to feel good about our part in this bigger thing, the spread of knowledge. Feeling bad because you're not someone else is ego transmuted to envy.

mathattack 11y ago

If it's any consolation, many of us have more HN karma than him. :-) His work on SO massively adds to the canon of programming knowledge. We owe a lot to his service - and I suspect his prodigious output there comes as much from a service mentality as raw talent. This is what I got out of the article.

phkahler 11y ago

Agreed. I'm not sure, but I get then impression that some people vote on an answer based on who posted it. I don't want people to research an answer and post it, I prefer answers from people who know from experience. That said, a researched answer is better than none.

fit2rule 11y ago

>I do feel that we tend to treat people we admire as gods I think it is our nature as a species, collectively as well as at an individual level, to attempt to create supra-/super- states of being, and we do this progressively or conservatively, or not quite much at all, in pretty much all of our cultures. We, are the very definition of God. (In fact, the word "we" is as good as one can get to the question 'what does the word god mean?', Christian/monotheistic/contempt-of-religion cults notwithstanding.) I think in fact, We become Gods by our associations, where god is 'any being with an extreme grasp of the subject'. The godhead, as in a sort of supreme state of being which can be expressed as the 'sum total of all being', for any particular subject, must be expressed. The head of any group, given rightful access to the means of that group, becomes an extraordinarily effective unit of life. Look at it this way.. Alien observers looking at your odd battleship cruising across the ocean might be suddenly awestruck to see it suddenly disgorge itself of its bodily contents, and .. played with roughly as aliens do .. end up 'dead', just like any other living creature in the universe. Will they even bother to perceive us as individual humans? No, I think they'll be here to kill our gods. Where gods are, toxic slime, cities, etc.