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I am not a sociologist, but I think it's not only programmers. A lot of my FB friends suddenly became COVID-19 experts, or experts on US police violence (or lac
by stared 6y ago
I am not a sociologist, but I think it's not only programmers. A lot of my FB friends suddenly became COVID-19 experts, or experts on US police violence (or lack of thereof).
In programming, at least the code needs to work. Maybe it is a bad pattern or anything - but the barrier of entry is non-trivial. For anything else (e.g. politics), a lot of people have opinions, with their strength being not much correlated with their knowledge of the subject.
- umvi 6y agoThe main thing I learned with covid-19 is that you can put too much faith in science/experts. Or put another way, we should not forget to apply skepticism to science just because the situation seems "urgent". And people should not be browbeaten for expressing skepticism of hot-off-the-press science. Science will arrive at the truth, but it takes much more time and rigor than people generally acknowledge. Looking back, it seems Feburary/March/April covid-19 experts' expertise had the same (or worse) predictive power as random programmers on HN.
- andrewflnr 6y ago> I am not a sociologist, but... Please tell me you did this on purpose.
- diarrhea 6y agoIANAS!