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I think maybe yes, you've been around mostly good engineers. It's not a problem that's exclusive to coding, you find people talking loudly about absolutes in m
by post_below 7y ago
I think maybe yes, you've been around mostly good engineers.
It's not a problem that's exclusive to coding, you find people talking loudly about absolutes in most fields. People like definitive answers. Makes us feel secure.
Which makes absolutes easy to sell, and especially popular with people who feel out of their depth. It also makes them popular in academics.
You also find flexible, creative thinkers in the same fields. They're just not as loud, or as numerous, in my experience.
- cgriswald 7y agoAbsolutes can be indispensable when learning. An entire concept can be boiled down to black-and-white, and often can be completely forgotten about while a learner groks the rest of a subject. Part of the path to expertise for a learner is to go back and challenge those absolutes, because those absolutes are now part of the learner's assumptions. When people espouse absolutes, I generally (not absolutely) assume either they're not experts or they think their audience can't handle nuance.