4 ms·

"the more you feel like a noob, the better." I am not convinced. With experience it should become rarer and rarer to encounter some things that makes so little

"the more you feel like a noob, the better." I am not convinced. With experience it should become rarer and rarer to encounter some things that makes so little sense that you feel like a noob, and you certainly shouldn't feel aimless. The more systems you explore, the bigger the toolbox you acquire. And there are not infinitely many existing tools because they once have been invented. And often these tools can be categorized by their operating principles which are even fewer. Because most disciplines overlap, the more you explore the faster the exploration goes. Sure, when you encounter something new you will need to gather some info before you are operational, but when you are enough of a generalist, you will have picked up enough heuristics to know who, where, and what to look for, and it shouldn't take long. Sure, we can dig and make any subject arbitrarily deep so there are infinitely many new things to explore and be amazed by. Staying humble, curious, honest and acknowledging that there are plenty of things that you have explored yet is also necessary. But if you disperse by being contempt of being a noob you risk becoming lost in a senseless experiencing of a chaotic mess, and not gather experience by seeing the order things could be arranged into. So when you feel like a noob, sort it out.

cirgue 7y ago
> So when you feel like a noob, sort it out. I feel like this is exactly the point he's making: if you're not putting yourself in positions where you feel like a noob, you'er not engaging your skills to their fullest potential, because the 'sorting it out' part is the thing that's really good for you. Nowhere here does he say 'feel like a noob and stay that way."
- GistNoesis 7y ago
  That's not my way of reading it. He seems to imply that feeling like a noob is normal due to the modern age complexity of this world. If I understand correctly he is telling go and don't be afraid of feeling like a noob. I'm saying if you feel like a noob, stop and fix it before exploring further or risk being lost. I take the contrarian opinion that even though there is growing complexity it is still orderly enough that once experienced enough feeling like a noob should be something akin finding a gem, or having a paradigm shift, which although you should be happy to find, it should remain occasional. I don't believe you need to feel like a noob to be engaging your skills at their fullest potential. In fact that's quite the opposite. It's akin to having bugs in software. Having bugs in software could be a symptom of engaging your skills to the max. But it's more likely the symptom of sloppiness that has accumulated. In fact when your software has bugs, you spend your time doing some bug fixing, instead of doing more interesting things. If you are in position that you are feeling like a noob, or have bug in software, try to understand what went so wrong that you are in this situation and try as much as possible to not be again (but keep exploring and building software). This is a symptom that you are working in a messy environment that is on a path to more mess where you will get lost. You won't sculpt a fine piece of art if you spend your time fixing your chisel every ten minutes.
andrewzah 7y ago
> With experience it should become rarer and rarer to encounter some things that makes so little sense that you feel like a noob, and you certainly shouldn't feel aimless. Then you're not pushing yourself or trying new things. Noob == newbie, so it applies even to experts who are learning things in an unfamiliar area. I felt like a noob when I learned about functional programming. Then I felt like a noob again when I started learning Haskell. I read about Coq yesterday and felt like a total and utter noob. I read about the `nom` lexing crate for Rust recently and felt like a noob getting up to speed. I still am a noob when it comes to using every unix utility: I recently learned about gnu parallel and read about xargs more finely. I never want to be in a situation where I never feel like a noob, because in computing alone that's basically impossible unless I'm not challenging myself.
- GistNoesis 7y ago
  I agree that you want to attempt things that may fail to challenge yourself. But rewarding libraries (by using them) that make you feel like a noob is kind of rewarding an abusive behavior. Before you use something you probably should already have a good model of how it operates from a high level perspective, what you need to give them, why you are using them... The software should serve your need instead of forcing you to adapt conventions. If you invest time learning a bad software then the sunk cost fallacy will make you keep using the bad software and sunk-in more time. Exploring is hard, you should have a strategy for it, you should explore things in the right order so that exploring is easy, and you explore what you want. If your exploring strategy is to follow the steepest learning curve you will get lost in an infinite hellish mess like Sisyphus.
  - andrewzah 7y ago
    Nowhere did I state that I had to use any such libraries. The only reason I started learning nom, is because I received multiple recommendations to check it out. Regardless if I use it or not, it still was a fun learning experience.
- bonoboTP 7y ago
  I interpreted the post much more broadly, way beyond software tools. There are tons of things in existence outside of computers, and each of us is a noob in most things. Just some examples that come to mind: Playing musical instruments and singing, yoga poses, barbell training with correct form, Buddhism, how to negotiate in an Arab bazaar, tax returns, training animals, riding a motorcycle, how to navigate forests, how to navigate the sea on a sailboat, how to direct and edit a movie, reciting poems, how to structure a novel, cooking and baking well, brewing beer, how the electric wiring works in a house, hobby electronics, how to build furniture, how to shoot guns and how they work, self defense and martial arts, fixing a car, hunting and fishing, BDSM and fetishes, finance products and the stock market, law and the court system in various countries, foreign languages, diet and nutrition, amateur radio, physics, painting, calligraphy, psychedelic drugs, networking effectively with important people, being a bartender or other service personnel, backpacking alone, raising children... Some may say "I may not have much practice in [particular thing], but surely it's easy, it's just [...]", but I really recommend reading that blog post called "Reality has a surprising amount of detail", which shows how many things there are to learn about simple sounding special cases (like building a staircase). All these things and hundreds more are rabbit holes with more and more branches of rabbit holes of communities, cultures, various levels of expertise attainable in each branch and subbranch etc.

cirgue 7y ago

> So when you feel like a noob, sort it out. I feel like this is exactly the point he's making: if you're not putting yourself in positions where you feel like a noob, you'er not engaging your skills to their fullest potential, because the 'sorting it out' part is the thing that's really good for you. Nowhere here does he say 'feel like a noob and stay that way."

GistNoesis 7y ago
That's not my way of reading it. He seems to imply that feeling like a noob is normal due to the modern age complexity of this world. If I understand correctly he is telling go and don't be afraid of feeling like a noob. I'm saying if you feel like a noob, stop and fix it before exploring further or risk being lost. I take the contrarian opinion that even though there is growing complexity it is still orderly enough that once experienced enough feeling like a noob should be something akin finding a gem, or having a paradigm shift, which although you should be happy to find, it should remain occasional. I don't believe you need to feel like a noob to be engaging your skills at their fullest potential. In fact that's quite the opposite. It's akin to having bugs in software. Having bugs in software could be a symptom of engaging your skills to the max. But it's more likely the symptom of sloppiness that has accumulated. In fact when your software has bugs, you spend your time doing some bug fixing, instead of doing more interesting things. If you are in position that you are feeling like a noob, or have bug in software, try to understand what went so wrong that you are in this situation and try as much as possible to not be again (but keep exploring and building software). This is a symptom that you are working in a messy environment that is on a path to more mess where you will get lost. You won't sculpt a fine piece of art if you spend your time fixing your chisel every ten minutes.

andrewzah 7y ago

> With experience it should become rarer and rarer to encounter some things that makes so little sense that you feel like a noob, and you certainly shouldn't feel aimless. Then you're not pushing yourself or trying new things. Noob == newbie, so it applies even to experts who are learning things in an unfamiliar area. I felt like a noob when I learned about functional programming. Then I felt like a noob again when I started learning Haskell. I read about Coq yesterday and felt like a total and utter noob. I read about the `nom` lexing crate for Rust recently and felt like a noob getting up to speed. I still am a noob when it comes to using every unix utility: I recently learned about gnu parallel and read about xargs more finely. I never want to be in a situation where I never feel like a noob, because in computing alone that's basically impossible unless I'm not challenging myself.

GistNoesis 7y ago
I agree that you want to attempt things that may fail to challenge yourself. But rewarding libraries (by using them) that make you feel like a noob is kind of rewarding an abusive behavior. Before you use something you probably should already have a good model of how it operates from a high level perspective, what you need to give them, why you are using them... The software should serve your need instead of forcing you to adapt conventions. If you invest time learning a bad software then the sunk cost fallacy will make you keep using the bad software and sunk-in more time. Exploring is hard, you should have a strategy for it, you should explore things in the right order so that exploring is easy, and you explore what you want. If your exploring strategy is to follow the steepest learning curve you will get lost in an infinite hellish mess like Sisyphus.
- andrewzah 7y ago
  Nowhere did I state that I had to use any such libraries. The only reason I started learning nom, is because I received multiple recommendations to check it out. Regardless if I use it or not, it still was a fun learning experience.
bonoboTP 7y ago
I interpreted the post much more broadly, way beyond software tools. There are tons of things in existence outside of computers, and each of us is a noob in most things. Just some examples that come to mind: Playing musical instruments and singing, yoga poses, barbell training with correct form, Buddhism, how to negotiate in an Arab bazaar, tax returns, training animals, riding a motorcycle, how to navigate forests, how to navigate the sea on a sailboat, how to direct and edit a movie, reciting poems, how to structure a novel, cooking and baking well, brewing beer, how the electric wiring works in a house, hobby electronics, how to build furniture, how to shoot guns and how they work, self defense and martial arts, fixing a car, hunting and fishing, BDSM and fetishes, finance products and the stock market, law and the court system in various countries, foreign languages, diet and nutrition, amateur radio, physics, painting, calligraphy, psychedelic drugs, networking effectively with important people, being a bartender or other service personnel, backpacking alone, raising children... Some may say "I may not have much practice in [particular thing], but surely it's easy, it's just [...]", but I really recommend reading that blog post called "Reality has a surprising amount of detail", which shows how many things there are to learn about simple sounding special cases (like building a staircase). All these things and hundreds more are rabbit holes with more and more branches of rabbit holes of communities, cultures, various levels of expertise attainable in each branch and subbranch etc.