11 ms·

There’s no such thing as a tech expert anymore

130 points by snadahalli 6y ago

qPM9l3XJrF 6y ago
Yes, and there's no such thing as a medicine expert because no single person knows every little detail of how your body works.
galaxyLogic 6y ago
"Nobody understands the tech-companies, but they sure do understand us"
sien 6y ago
Yes there is. It's everyone on Hacker News! Just post about about some Unicorn here and at least half a dozen people are pretty confident they know more about the company in question than the founders or the people running it. In the future Congress can just post questions here.
- Shared404 6y ago
  I recognize this is sarcastic... but I must point out, I'm an idiot who doesn't know much about anything.
- mdoms 6y ago
  I will never stop being amused by the original post about Dropbox here on HN, where a large contingent of the audience was so critical of it, it was destined to fail. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
  - sien 6y ago
    No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame. https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/Apple-releases-iPod https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/Apple-releases-i...
    - icebraining 6y ago
      cmdrtaco was giving his personal opinion on the device, not predicting its commercial success or lack thereof. Slashdot wasn't focused on "the market" nearly as much as HN is.
    - starky 6y ago
      And for many years after the release of the iPod it was "lame" compared to other products on the market. It was really the introduction of the iPod Nano that was the first product that improved on the competition. But Apple markets well and was able to get the market share (and really it was only the click wheel ones that were really popular).
  - tluyben2 6y ago
    While funny, that is a little while ago. What is depressing now is that it became worse but people are not that vocal in public anymore. Many people I encounter say they can do things in days but when hired they really can't (not even close) (and these are seniors with proven experience doing things but just not very fast at all; I cannot figure if it's the frameworks as I know I could do it in days with jquery/lamp + normal hosting which is what I was asking for). Sometimes (well, generally actually always) I need something fast, not robust, maintainable and definitely not with docker/k8s/microservices etc etc. I have not found many people who can just practically do things they say they can; then in 2007 with the dropbox thing or now on freelancer sites or forums; when you hire people, even (because I understand you want more hours / security / whatever) when I can promise you that IF you can, I have work for you basically forever (considering I have a 20 year trackrecord of doing these kind of applications and i'm not stopping any time soon). I even don't care about the tech; if you want to use the latest/greatest/cv-driven crap for it; be my guest, as long as it works and delivery is fast. Seems perfect for people; I cannot find any that go beyond big talk on sites like HN.
    - juped 6y ago
      It's only possible to get hired by anyone (including, probably, by you - how do you select candidates, exactly?) by resume-padding with trendy largely-useless items like kubernetes microservices etc. Be the change you want to see in the market.
      - tluyben2 6y ago
        I have a feeling that many people I interview/test actually see this as an opportunity to learn these technologies, while normally it's definitely not, so I don't select based on that; quite the opposite. They won't have this on their resume often, but want to 'learn on the job'. And yes, what you say happens also; for a recent project where we did need all this tech, sometimes I'm sitting with people with 'years of experience' in containerisation etc and during the interview it turns out they have no clue besides the absolute bare basics. And ofcourse, this causes now that CTO's/CIO's not only see these terms in magazines online, but also see it on all their resumes so they start demanding the use in projects while there is no reason to do so.
  - sien 6y ago
    To be fair, with most start ups if you say 'this will fail' you're probably right, what, about 4/5 times at least. But you'll never invest in Google, Dropbox, AirBnB or whatever. Even the smartest VC's hit rates wouldn't be that great (i.e. say 3/4 of their investments make it) even though they make overall by picking the occasional drop box.
  - in3d 6y ago
    Most of the comments in that thread were quite positive. This certainly doesn’t support your point.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- ozim 6y ago
  Wait until uncle Jim comes to the wedding and gets two shots of whiskey. He will tell you how all those talking heads in the TV know nothing about life and he should be running the country and those stupid tech companies. In plain words I would say it is quite common in the population and not specific to HN. Just ignore it, take a shot with the uncle and tell him that he is right, carry on with your life.
TomMarius 6y ago
So what do you call a (tech) (expert) if not a (tech expert)?
logicslave 6y ago
Theres definitely experts, if youre an above average developer, you meet one once a decade.
scarface74 6y ago
Is it too much to expect that a representative knows that Zuckerberg runs Facebook and not Twitter? https://reason.com/2020/07/29/mark-zuckerberg-twitter-donald-trump-jr-censorship-antitrust/ https://reason.com/2020/07/29/mark-zuckerberg-twitter-donald... Or to know enough to know which tech CEO to subpoena in the first place? https://money.cnn.com/2016/10/27/media/att-time-warner-senate-confusion/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2016/10/27/media/att-time-warner-senat... But let’s look at the last two major tech anti trust cases and what came of them. Microsoft was the most valuable company in the US in 2000 and had a monopoly on computer operating systems, productivity apps, and web browsers. In 2020, Microsoft still has the same share in operating systems, office productivity and no one cares about browser market share but Google. MS is now the 3rd most valuable company in the US. Before that the government sued IBM for being a monopoly in 1969. The suit was dropped in 1982 and nothing came of it. Most recently, the CEO’s of the four biggest tech companies came before Congress and people everywhere are saying that they (at least FB and Google) are threats to Democracy. Then the government goes after TikTok and WhatsApp. Edit: WeChat.
- poisonborz 6y ago
  Is it too much to expect that a commenter knows that the government went against WeChat and not WhatsApp?
  - scarface74 6y ago
    Good thing I am not making the laws and I’m just a random person on HN....
  - chillwaves 6y ago
    The government was recently against WhatsApp as well over encryption. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/03/us/politics/barr-whatsapp-facebook-encryption.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/03/us/politics/barr-whatsapp... Not the worst mistake from OP.
  - DecoPerson 6y ago
    Yes, it is. When preparing notes for a congressional hearing, you’d hope they carefully triple check everything. Not just by re-reading, either, but also by cross-referencing with other documents and asking others to proof-read. I don’t expect a commenter on any forum to do more than a cursory re-read for spelling errors.
andersco 6y ago
This seems to imply that “tech expert” is someone all-knowing regarding tech. In my mind “tech expert” is about literacy. You may not know the specifics of all technologies but you have the mental toolkit for understanding them conceptually. But it is also about context. If you are the person who people ask for help with tech stuff, well, then you’re an expert, at least in their minds.
- goatinaboat 6y ago
  This seems to imply that “tech expert” is someone all-knowing regarding tech No one was ever literally all-knowing but tech people never used to be as micro-specialist as is common now. In the 90s it was quite normal for one person to understand everything from the hardware and networks up to how to make HTML look pretty. In the early days of Google they probably did have guys who really did understand it all. But not any more.
  - mrmonkeyman 6y ago
    They still exist in massive numbers. Jesus. It's not _that_ hard.
  - ekidd 6y ago
    In the 90s it was quite normal for one person to understand everything from the hardware and networks up to how to make HTML look pretty. The last time I looked, a good CS curriculum still teaches people how a half-adder circuit works, how to write code in assembly, the basics of UDP and TCP, how to build a web app, and fundamental algorithms and data structures. Additionally, students might do a couple of the following: implement a primitive SQL engine, write a simple compiler, program a robot, add features to a kernel, or study introductory machine learning. These are all common undergraduate electives. You don't need to be polymath to switch from debugging packet dumps to writing CSS. I'm actually a huge fan of good bootcamps, because some people out there will absolutely love coding, and bootcamps give them a chance. But it's perfectly possible to understand computer architecture and networking protocols and React, and a good university CS curriculum should cover many of those topics at an introductory level.
djcapelis 6y ago
US society, discourse, media, and government structures have sidelined experts to the extent we’ve finally managed to forget they exist. Instead we’re left with reporters who write articles that bemoan that since they’re lost and unable to determine truth in a sea of technology, we all must be.
- opportune 6y ago
  Yeah, to me this just looks like a journalist complaining that they shouldn't be expected to understand the things they write about. There are hundreds of people who more or less understand any given product or project with large impact. Society just doesn't care what they think. Why listen to an accomplished engineer who might very well have lots of opinions on the impact of technology, when we can complain that our graduate degrees in American studies [0]didn't prepare us to understand the complex systems in the technology industry? [0] Not trying to strawman here, but since the author of TFA thought it was relevant to include, I think it's fair game
  - syshum 6y ago
    >>journalist I dont think we have any of those any more, if we do they are few and far between and I would venture to guess that none of them work for Wired
    - chiefalchemist 6y ago
      You're spot on. This is a great reference, especially when I try to to reason with people who misuse and misunderstand the word. https://kottke.org/20/01/jim-lehrers-rules-of-journalism-1 https://kottke.org/20/01/jim-lehrers-rules-of-journalism-1
hyko 6y ago
“I am not a tech expert” != “There’s no such thing as a tech expert”. Edited to add: all of science is beyond the comprehension of one person, but we wouldn’t say that scientists don’t exist anymore. I think the shock experienced in these kind of hearings has more to do with leaders and law makers being hopelessly out of touch with common technologies that are used by most people every day; it’s akin to them puzzling over how to operate a flushing toilet. They don’t need to interact with the world as other citizens do, because they have layers of abstraction shielding them from it. Not a good thing. The example of the B-2 Spirit is such a strange one, given the complete absence of civilian oversight to the programme. It was essentially built for military experts by engineering experts. Non-experts are expected to provide oversight in highly technical issues, but they should be working closely with advisors who have cutting edge domain knowledge and can translate that into policy implications. The leaders and law makers do not need specialist knowledge, but they -do need to be on top of their brief as it relates to society and the laws that govern it. A person of reasonable intelligence can provide essential oversight to a machine like Google, even if they could not construct such a machine themselves. Nobody can even create a human being themselves from scratch, but that’s not an excuse for being a bumbling lawmaker.
- aaron695 6y ago
  > but we wouldn’t say that scientists don’t exist anymore. Yes we do. They don't exist as we have romantically understood them. Scientists used to take risks, play with the entire world, question things, actually be open, actually play with science as a child. Now they join the Facebook group "Fuck I love science" and be done with it because they are pushed into STEM as an ultra narrow career and don't actually understand or want to understand science. The real scientists may still exist hidden somewhere but you never see them. For Tech, I've never seen a correct understanding of the Russians online influence during the 2016 elections on HN. I don't know what it is, and I've never seen anyone explain it with authority other than vague hand waving trying to sound like they know, this is from both links and comments on HN.
  - willis936 6y ago
    Spoken like someone who doesn’t interact with any scientists. I work at a university and have a friend group of chemists PhD students. Every single one of them fit your requirements for the romantic vision of a scientist, yet have far more accurate models at their disposal than previous generations of scientists. “You never see them.” because you choose not to look. You look at your algorithm driven feed and shape your worldview around it. Incredibly dangerous. We are one second from midnight on the cyberocracy doomsday clock.
Guthur 6y ago
The problem described here is only tangentially connect to technology. All that is described is really the challenge of complex systems and that could exist in any domain whatsoever. The inner workings of oh so human system of the UK government sometimes baffles me. And it exists in nature where the complex interactions of many diverse organisms converge to form a complex ecosystem. There might be problems of a lack of understanding in certain cases but what this journalist is describing is complex systems not technological problems.
cblconfederate 6y ago
Ha! Imagine writing this about medicine. Computers are 100% deterministic, from top to bottom. Even their effects of society can clearly be tracedback.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  > Computers are 100% deterministic, from top to bottom. Not in every respect. Concurrency and C's undefined behaviour spring to mind.
  - grayhatter 6y ago
    It's still deterministic. It doesn't randomly do something different with the exact same IO. Just because it's hard to recreate the exact same state with concurrent processes on a modern CPU doesn't change it's determinism. Also, undefined behavior in C only means a compiler can do what ever it likes. It doesn't make it random. People need to stop pretending UB in C is magic. It's not going to delete your hard disk, or make you a pizza unless that's already part of your program. GARBREPLEDFAH.../rant
    - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
      Sure, but in both cases, the way to model it is with something like nondeterminism. Computers have no nondeterminism, but computer science does. Formally verified C code is guaranteed to be free of UB, as this is necessary in order for there to be guarantees about the behaviour of a program written in standard C. The underlying compiler and hardware are still deterministic. A similar thing happens with concurrency. > People need to stop pretending UB in C is magic. It's not going to delete your hard disk, or make you a pizza unless that's already part of your program. It probably won't delete your hard-disk, but complacency with UB is still a bad idea. C is a strange language. UB is permitted to travel back in time. [0] Even in the absence of UB, the optimiser is permitted (but not obligated) to eliminate empty infinite loops, so even a basic property like whether your program will ever terminate, may be up to the whims of the optimiser. [1] Anyway that was a long way of saying I agree, computers are deterministic, but something akin to nondeterminism can happen in the abstractions we use. [0] https://stackoverflow.com/a/39915175/ https://stackoverflow.com/a/39915175/ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13640636 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13640636
camillomiller 6y ago
The argument this piece is built around is flawed on so many levels. 1) the author conflates tech basic literacy and preparation on the specific topic by the congress members and marks them as “being a tech expert”. Nobody asks them to know the ins and outs of the companies they’re scrutinizing, but just to be prepared about the matter that’s being discussed and to show some minimal tech literacy. 2) the author proceeds to switch to a different meaning of “expert” with a falsely modest tirade about he himself not being an expert. Sure you are, by all common meanings of “expert”, as you immodestly point out namedropping all your publications and collaborations. 3) after all this, the author settles for a meaning of expert that makes absolutely no sense: an all-knowing being that, thanks to some genius-like trait, is able to see everything from the outside and know the very specifics of everything they run. Once he sets this new meaning nobody has ever agreed on, he proceeds to point out no such person exists. Maybe it could exist, but such a CEO-savant would be anti-economical to any company, a horrible stickler with a micromanaging obsession, that would spend time about knowing every new detail of his company (just check the amount of patents these companies file every year) instead of focusing on the vision and the long term. The piece also completely disregards the fact that humanity has evolved to the point where we are right now exactly because humans are very good at building unsupervised complex system that don’t rely on the knowledge of the individual to function. We, as societies, are fundamentally primed to do that. Our social systems are exactly that. Now, Silicon based technology has brought us another step forward in this, and we feel lost as we fail to grasp the enhanced complexity of what underlies out lives. I don’t see it as something new, and humans will evolve to adapt to this new layer of technology. What I just read is a piece that tries to bend the meaning of “expert” to prove the point that nobody knows what tech is doing, as if big tech was just perpetuating itself as a sentient being. It’s a very slippery slope, that could be used to justify the people that physically drive the decisions of these companies. Decisions that are strategical, political, and above all taken by humans, not machines, who are well aware how to drive complex and multifaceted organizations to maximize profit and return to their investors.
- neohed 6y ago
  Exactly right. As an experienced software developer, there's a ton I don't understand about the intricacies of OS kernels and integrated circuits, but I don't need to know that stuff and nobody can learn everything. Popular science books can explain quantum theory well enough for a layperson to at least get enough of a clue to have an opinion. All politicians need is enough knowledge to make an informed decision about the effect of various technologies on society.
fizixer 6y ago
This is bs. In order for outsiders to understand tech, you need to invite engineers/researchers, not CEOs. And you need marathon sessions, not sprints. Go figure!
ElFitz 6y ago
Lazy so-called journalist, I'd like to present to you... drums rolling... Ben Thompson of Stratechery[1]! Followed by.... rolling drums... John Gruber of Daring Fireball[2]! And quite frankly, these two are just the ones I thought of, from the top of my head. And, I couldn't say why, I think nowadays the Financial Times could write pieces on the matter more interesting than nearly anyone at Wired could. [1]: https://stratechery.com/ https://stratechery.com/ [2]: https://daringfireball.net/ https://daringfireball.net/
bubblethink 6y ago
>Last week’s effort by the antitrust subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee was no exception. "The technological ignorance demonstrated by our elected officials ... was truly stunning," I skimmed through parts of the hearing, and I found most of it alright. I don't remember anything glaringly bad. There was a minor gaffe about twitter v/s facebook, which everyone mocked on the internet, but even that wasn't so bad. The efficacy of the hearing wrt any outcome is a different matter. What's the author talking about ?
mlazos 6y ago
This author appears to think that you need to understand the intricate details of a search algorithm, distributed computing, and machine learning before you understand what their general use is? I don’t need to understand how a car engine works before I can understand how to drive or how cars have changed society. The only argument this article proves is that google and Facebook have lowered the bar on journalism so far that this is considered publishable.
- hurrdurr2 6y ago
  Totally agreed. What drivel. I couldn't even finish reading the article. We have senators grilling tech CEOs that don't understand the difference between an iPhone and an Android device. This is unacceptable to say the least.
  - flohofwoe 6y ago
    To play devil's advocate: What is the difference between an Android phone and an iPhone phone, and if there is, what does it matter to a customer? Both can make phone calls, both can display web pages, both can run apps. There's one fairly irrelevant difference because it's an historical accident so it will probably be eliminated soon: one platform owner already controls the platform completely, and the other not yet.
    - ben_w 6y ago
      For a normal customer with no tech skills? Android is the one which comes in a full range from “cheap” to “premium” while Apple only comes in “premium”. You also get to choose which app store you get, Apple or Google, but I’m not sure if normal people know what one of those is.
      - Nursie 6y ago
        The new iPhone SE is definitely a mid-market play, blurring it further.
    - hurrdurr2 6y ago
monadic2 6y ago
Why is there no ideology in tech culture?
- scollet 6y ago
  What do you mean by ideology? I think I have a response, but I would like to know this first.
loopz 6y ago
This article is really about possible social consequences of tech like Facebook and Twitter, not about knowing all the technical implementation details. A "tech expert" speaking in front of congress would be expected to answer to how the tech affects governance and civic matters. Nobody know the consequences in full, and how effective mass-communication might affect society. It's problematic when the leaders and overseers seem unfamiliar or uncertain with the overall operation of these tools, and even abuse them for egotistical benefits, instead of acting as elected servants of the people.
jondubois 6y ago
I think that's the point. No one in these big corporations understands what they're doing... They don't know half of the story. But they're so large and powerful that this doesn't prevent them from succeeding anyway. That's the danger. Also there is no incentive for anyone to understand what they're doing. It's like that saying that people tend to not understand things when good performance at their job depends on them not understanding things.
sradman 6y ago
> Members of Congress clearly don’t understand the tech companies they’re supposed to regulate. But neither does anyone else. Siva Vaidhyanathan [1], the author of this Wired article, seems to be a fine representative of the humanities half of what C.P. Snow called The Two Cultures [2]. The ability to craft sentences is an admirable skill, one I wish I had, but innumeracy and the inability to grasp causation seems to be a badge of honor among the non-STEM elite. The question is not whether regulators understand tech, it is whether they understand the principles that limit regulating consenting adults. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siva_Vaidhyanathan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siva_Vaidhyanathan [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures
Aeolun 6y ago
I do not expect Congress to know how a B2 works, no. That would certainly be asking too much. What I do expect them to know is what it is/does.
aronpye 6y ago
Oh God, another wired article. This is written in a similar vain as “What’s a computer?”
say_it_as_it_is 6y ago
So, a politician, who is usually an attorney, doesn't understand the business that tech companies engage in and therefore no one understands the business?
amelius 6y ago
We should also update the definition of tech. Every company has a website these days, but does that make them "tech" companies?
neohed 6y ago
I had an issue with this: "while in graduate school in American Studies, I realized that computer science was a method of understanding much like many others . . . I’d also misunderstood coding as a craft instead of a field of knowledge and inquiry." I agree that computer science is a field of "knowledge and enquiry" (aren't all academic disciplines?) but disagree with his conflation of CS and "coding." Computer science has little to do with most software development which is very much a "craft"
- lordgrenville 6y ago
  This sentence seems like a bizarre non sequitur. Absent some explanation of how American Studies connects to CS (perhaps this is obvious to American Studiers?), it reads like the equivalent of "while backpacking through Laos, I realised the New York subway system was in urgent need of repair".
Invictus0 6y ago
It's almost as if the author is projecting his own imposter syndrome on the Congress.
decasteve 6y ago
Tech has become a marketing term. Might as well call them synergy companies. There's a conflation of concepts and how the various "tech" companies make their money. How can anyone keep track when "tech" is such a broad brush to paint with?
knorker 6y ago
That's a really long article to say what we already know: That "expert" means to know in detail a narrow thing. It hasn't been possible to be a true polymath in like 500 years. Surely this isn't news to the author? There's no such thing as "an expert on everything"? Yeah, no shit. It's almost tautology, due to the limitations on human brains and the advancement of science since the renaissance. Another way I think this article misses the point is that they're not dragging Sundar in front of congress because he knows everything about Google (he can't), nor for the congresspeople to learn it (they can't, even if Sundar knew, and could convey, and had infinite time). They do not start from "let's understand everything first", because they can't. They are dragging them in to answer a question. You don't need to know the lunch schedule of the San Bruno office, or how many registers the x86 processor has, to answer the question of how political ads should look in today's world (or whatever the question is). So the article doubly misses the point.
- Barrin92 6y ago
  Yes. If you go to one of the first legal definitions of the term expert, that is what you get "person who, by virtue of special acquired knowledge or experience on a subject, presumably not within the knowledge of men generally, may testify in a court of justice to matters of opinion thereon, as distinguished from ordinary witnesses, who can in general testify only to facts" Regulators are not experts and they're not meant to be experts, they may consult experts if they require their knowledge. I'm also not sure what the point of the entire discussion is, I hope nobody believes that regulators somehow need to be quantum physicists and physicians and computer scientists and artists at the same time to make judgements about tech or anything else.
- grogenaut 6y ago
  Have you read any other wired articles in the last 10 years? They're all like this.
- alirsgp 6y ago
  People like von Neumann were considered polymaths
- echlebek 6y ago
Hippocrates 6y ago
This is a horribly wrong take. The premise that nobody understands these tech issues at the level needed to address them is not even close to true. In fact, this sounds like an argument one of the luddites in congress would make rather than a tech journalist.
- almost_usual 6y ago
  The argument is no one knows the exact details of the whole system. That is obviously true, the only experts at these companies are the engineers who write code. There are still details they don’t understand. An expert would have to be the collective knowledge of every engineer that worked at the org and there would still be missing detail and ‘bugs’. This is literally why the security industry exists, bugs are inevitable. I don’t think the argument is ‘crazy’, it’s accurate when speaking about data protections. To assert your data is safe is to assert there are no security issues with your software. The only way of asserting this is to either encrypt everything or not store it at all. These companies will never do that so we end up with these complex arguments in Congress justifying it’s ‘safe’.
  - _jal 6y ago
    The implicit argument is that one must wholly comprehend the exact details of a company's systems in order to meaningfully control them. This is obviously false reductio ad absurdum given the existence of managers doing exactly that right now. CEOs are not testifying to congress about exploiting side channels in hypervisor memory management. On one level, they're offering industry viewpoints on policy issues; on another, they're actors in a political game.
    - almost_usual 6y ago
      > This is obviously false reductio ad absurdum given the existence of managers doing exactly that right now. Managers don’t know the details of any system unless they wrote it when they were an engineer (and it hasn’t been modified). They are trusting their engineers’ interpretation of the system, which is a game of telephone up the management chain. > CEOs are not testifying to congress about exploiting side channels in hypervisor memory management. On one level, they're offering industry viewpoints on policy issues; on another, they're actors in a political game. The largest account takeover incident recently was an unsophisticated social engineering attack executed by a 17 year old. I’d argue most system and data vulnerabilities aren’t sophisticated or complicated yet companies like the idea of this because it makes them seem more improbable. Vulnerabilities happen because security guarantees and understanding cost time and time is limited when shipping a product faster than a competitor. In reality if Congress wants an expert they need to have a team of engineers at the company performing audits and code reviews.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
shekharshan 6y ago
I think the author meant to say even developers do not understand the decisions some of the ML algorithms make. Anyone who had to debug ML may partially agree with that. But this doesn’t mean people don’t understand infrastructure. Fundamentally we are dealing with compute, storage and networking. We just combine them in different ways to come up with solutions optimized for different workloads.
known 6y ago
Sounds like sarcasm;
starky 6y ago
The author seems way too focused on the exact meaning of "expert" without thinking about what they actually need from a subject matter expert for a specific hearing. Who you need for an ethics hearing will likely be different than who you need for a political hearing even though they are both "experts". A subject matter expert before a political hearing needs to understand the societal and financial decisions of a class of technology and be able to explain it in a way that others can understand. Pretty much any tech leader should be able to do this. A major issue with this is that politics in the US (and plenty of other countries) are so driven by money that you end up with a bunch of politicians that are willfully ignorant of the sectors they are supposed to legislate for because they are paid to just do what the people with the money want you to do.
LockAndLol 6y ago
> We don’t insist that everyone in Congress understand how the B2 Spirit “stealth” bomber works, or how serotonin reuptake inhibitors help manage depression, or even how the internal combustion engine works. Yet we justifiably expect our government to regulate them. Indeed, that's not what I'd insist. I'd insist on elected officials to have a team surrounding them who they can ask and who in turn can ask others when decisions have to be made. In other words, leaders have to know how and when to delegate. If they don't know how to do that, then I assert that they aren't and cannot be good leaders.
Fricken 6y ago
It's getting disingenuous to call it tech. At the point of interface it is media. The effects of these new media have on society are not well diagnosed by tech experts, who specialize in understanding how a thing works, less so with how it affects.
polynomial 6y ago
It's like the inimitable Buckminster Fuller's analysis of the _cost_ of expertise hidden in the dangers of specialization never happened.
almost_usual 6y ago
The article is true, there isn’t an expert or collective group of experts that can guarantee a complex system’s behavior. This is why bugs exist, why there is a security industry, why these companies have bug bounty programs. The safest way of protecting information is not creating it or using strong encryption.
makach 6y ago
only a fool would call himself an expert. What others call you is a different matter.
LifeLiverTransp 6y ago
The actual elephant in the room - nobody even talks about, unlike this article, is the effectively privatization of what used to be calle psychology,neuro-sciences, you name it. If you have all the data, and you have a private database to query it- your defacto privatized a whole field of academia, which is cut off from the most valuable thing to have. Data. You could write simulations, displaying the outcome of each of your actions on a psychological acurate model of a society. And you would be defacto invisible with your knowledge, forever in the blindspot of us mamals.

130 points by snadahalli 6y ago

Yes, and there's no such thing as a medicine expert because no single person knows every little detail of how your body works.

galaxyLogic 6y ago

"Nobody understands the tech-companies, but they sure do understand us"

sien 6y ago

Yes there is. It's everyone on Hacker News! Just post about about some Unicorn here and at least half a dozen people are pretty confident they know more about the company in question than the founders or the people running it. In the future Congress can just post questions here.

Shared404 6y ago
I recognize this is sarcastic... but I must point out, I'm an idiot who doesn't know much about anything.
mdoms 6y ago
I will never stop being amused by the original post about Dropbox here on HN, where a large contingent of the audience was so critical of it, it was destined to fail. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
- sien 6y ago
  No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame. https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/Apple-releases-iPod https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/Apple-releases-i...
  - icebraining 6y ago
    cmdrtaco was giving his personal opinion on the device, not predicting its commercial success or lack thereof. Slashdot wasn't focused on "the market" nearly as much as HN is.
  - starky 6y ago
    And for many years after the release of the iPod it was "lame" compared to other products on the market. It was really the introduction of the iPod Nano that was the first product that improved on the competition. But Apple markets well and was able to get the market share (and really it was only the click wheel ones that were really popular).
- tluyben2 6y ago
  While funny, that is a little while ago. What is depressing now is that it became worse but people are not that vocal in public anymore. Many people I encounter say they can do things in days but when hired they really can't (not even close) (and these are seniors with proven experience doing things but just not very fast at all; I cannot figure if it's the frameworks as I know I could do it in days with jquery/lamp + normal hosting which is what I was asking for). Sometimes (well, generally actually always) I need something fast, not robust, maintainable and definitely not with docker/k8s/microservices etc etc. I have not found many people who can just practically do things they say they can; then in 2007 with the dropbox thing or now on freelancer sites or forums; when you hire people, even (because I understand you want more hours / security / whatever) when I can promise you that IF you can, I have work for you basically forever (considering I have a 20 year trackrecord of doing these kind of applications and i'm not stopping any time soon). I even don't care about the tech; if you want to use the latest/greatest/cv-driven crap for it; be my guest, as long as it works and delivery is fast. Seems perfect for people; I cannot find any that go beyond big talk on sites like HN.
  - juped 6y ago
    It's only possible to get hired by anyone (including, probably, by you - how do you select candidates, exactly?) by resume-padding with trendy largely-useless items like kubernetes microservices etc. Be the change you want to see in the market.
    - tluyben2 6y ago
      I have a feeling that many people I interview/test actually see this as an opportunity to learn these technologies, while normally it's definitely not, so I don't select based on that; quite the opposite. They won't have this on their resume often, but want to 'learn on the job'. And yes, what you say happens also; for a recent project where we did need all this tech, sometimes I'm sitting with people with 'years of experience' in containerisation etc and during the interview it turns out they have no clue besides the absolute bare basics. And ofcourse, this causes now that CTO's/CIO's not only see these terms in magazines online, but also see it on all their resumes so they start demanding the use in projects while there is no reason to do so.
- sien 6y ago
  To be fair, with most start ups if you say 'this will fail' you're probably right, what, about 4/5 times at least. But you'll never invest in Google, Dropbox, AirBnB or whatever. Even the smartest VC's hit rates wouldn't be that great (i.e. say 3/4 of their investments make it) even though they make overall by picking the occasional drop box.
- in3d 6y ago
  Most of the comments in that thread were quite positive. This certainly doesn’t support your point.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
ozim 6y ago
Wait until uncle Jim comes to the wedding and gets two shots of whiskey. He will tell you how all those talking heads in the TV know nothing about life and he should be running the country and those stupid tech companies. In plain words I would say it is quite common in the population and not specific to HN. Just ignore it, take a shot with the uncle and tell him that he is right, carry on with your life.

TomMarius 6y ago

So what do you call a (tech) (expert) if not a (tech expert)?

logicslave 6y ago

Theres definitely experts, if youre an above average developer, you meet one once a decade.

scarface74 6y ago

Is it too much to expect that a representative knows that Zuckerberg runs Facebook and not Twitter? https://reason.com/2020/07/29/mark-zuckerberg-twitter-donald-trump-jr-censorship-antitrust/ https://reason.com/2020/07/29/mark-zuckerberg-twitter-donald... Or to know enough to know which tech CEO to subpoena in the first place? https://money.cnn.com/2016/10/27/media/att-time-warner-senate-confusion/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2016/10/27/media/att-time-warner-senat... But let’s look at the last two major tech anti trust cases and what came of them. Microsoft was the most valuable company in the US in 2000 and had a monopoly on computer operating systems, productivity apps, and web browsers. In 2020, Microsoft still has the same share in operating systems, office productivity and no one cares about browser market share but Google. MS is now the 3rd most valuable company in the US. Before that the government sued IBM for being a monopoly in 1969. The suit was dropped in 1982 and nothing came of it. Most recently, the CEO’s of the four biggest tech companies came before Congress and people everywhere are saying that they (at least FB and Google) are threats to Democracy. Then the government goes after TikTok and WhatsApp. Edit: WeChat.

poisonborz 6y ago
Is it too much to expect that a commenter knows that the government went against WeChat and not WhatsApp?
- scarface74 6y ago
  Good thing I am not making the laws and I’m just a random person on HN....
- chillwaves 6y ago
  The government was recently against WhatsApp as well over encryption. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/03/us/politics/barr-whatsapp-facebook-encryption.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/03/us/politics/barr-whatsapp... Not the worst mistake from OP.
- DecoPerson 6y ago
  Yes, it is. When preparing notes for a congressional hearing, you’d hope they carefully triple check everything. Not just by re-reading, either, but also by cross-referencing with other documents and asking others to proof-read. I don’t expect a commenter on any forum to do more than a cursory re-read for spelling errors.

andersco 6y ago

This seems to imply that “tech expert” is someone all-knowing regarding tech. In my mind “tech expert” is about literacy. You may not know the specifics of all technologies but you have the mental toolkit for understanding them conceptually. But it is also about context. If you are the person who people ask for help with tech stuff, well, then you’re an expert, at least in their minds.

goatinaboat 6y ago
This seems to imply that “tech expert” is someone all-knowing regarding tech No one was ever literally all-knowing but tech people never used to be as micro-specialist as is common now. In the 90s it was quite normal for one person to understand everything from the hardware and networks up to how to make HTML look pretty. In the early days of Google they probably did have guys who really did understand it all. But not any more.
- mrmonkeyman 6y ago
  They still exist in massive numbers. Jesus. It's not _that_ hard.
- ekidd 6y ago
  In the 90s it was quite normal for one person to understand everything from the hardware and networks up to how to make HTML look pretty. The last time I looked, a good CS curriculum still teaches people how a half-adder circuit works, how to write code in assembly, the basics of UDP and TCP, how to build a web app, and fundamental algorithms and data structures. Additionally, students might do a couple of the following: implement a primitive SQL engine, write a simple compiler, program a robot, add features to a kernel, or study introductory machine learning. These are all common undergraduate electives. You don't need to be polymath to switch from debugging packet dumps to writing CSS. I'm actually a huge fan of good bootcamps, because some people out there will absolutely love coding, and bootcamps give them a chance. But it's perfectly possible to understand computer architecture and networking protocols and React, and a good university CS curriculum should cover many of those topics at an introductory level.

djcapelis 6y ago

US society, discourse, media, and government structures have sidelined experts to the extent we’ve finally managed to forget they exist. Instead we’re left with reporters who write articles that bemoan that since they’re lost and unable to determine truth in a sea of technology, we all must be.

opportune 6y ago
Yeah, to me this just looks like a journalist complaining that they shouldn't be expected to understand the things they write about. There are hundreds of people who more or less understand any given product or project with large impact. Society just doesn't care what they think. Why listen to an accomplished engineer who might very well have lots of opinions on the impact of technology, when we can complain that our graduate degrees in American studies [0]didn't prepare us to understand the complex systems in the technology industry? [0] Not trying to strawman here, but since the author of TFA thought it was relevant to include, I think it's fair game
- syshum 6y ago
  >>journalist I dont think we have any of those any more, if we do they are few and far between and I would venture to guess that none of them work for Wired
  - chiefalchemist 6y ago
    You're spot on. This is a great reference, especially when I try to to reason with people who misuse and misunderstand the word. https://kottke.org/20/01/jim-lehrers-rules-of-journalism-1 https://kottke.org/20/01/jim-lehrers-rules-of-journalism-1

hyko 6y ago

“I am not a tech expert” != “There’s no such thing as a tech expert”. Edited to add: all of science is beyond the comprehension of one person, but we wouldn’t say that scientists don’t exist anymore. I think the shock experienced in these kind of hearings has more to do with leaders and law makers being hopelessly out of touch with common technologies that are used by most people every day; it’s akin to them puzzling over how to operate a flushing toilet. They don’t need to interact with the world as other citizens do, because they have layers of abstraction shielding them from it. Not a good thing. The example of the B-2 Spirit is such a strange one, given the complete absence of civilian oversight to the programme. It was essentially built for military experts by engineering experts. Non-experts are expected to provide oversight in highly technical issues, but they should be working closely with advisors who have cutting edge domain knowledge and can translate that into policy implications. The leaders and law makers do not need specialist knowledge, but they -do need to be on top of their brief as it relates to society and the laws that govern it. A person of reasonable intelligence can provide essential oversight to a machine like Google, even if they could not construct such a machine themselves. Nobody can even create a human being themselves from scratch, but that’s not an excuse for being a bumbling lawmaker.

aaron695 6y ago
> but we wouldn’t say that scientists don’t exist anymore. Yes we do. They don't exist as we have romantically understood them. Scientists used to take risks, play with the entire world, question things, actually be open, actually play with science as a child. Now they join the Facebook group "Fuck I love science" and be done with it because they are pushed into STEM as an ultra narrow career and don't actually understand or want to understand science. The real scientists may still exist hidden somewhere but you never see them. For Tech, I've never seen a correct understanding of the Russians online influence during the 2016 elections on HN. I don't know what it is, and I've never seen anyone explain it with authority other than vague hand waving trying to sound like they know, this is from both links and comments on HN.
- willis936 6y ago
  Spoken like someone who doesn’t interact with any scientists. I work at a university and have a friend group of chemists PhD students. Every single one of them fit your requirements for the romantic vision of a scientist, yet have far more accurate models at their disposal than previous generations of scientists. “You never see them.” because you choose not to look. You look at your algorithm driven feed and shape your worldview around it. Incredibly dangerous. We are one second from midnight on the cyberocracy doomsday clock.

Guthur 6y ago

The problem described here is only tangentially connect to technology. All that is described is really the challenge of complex systems and that could exist in any domain whatsoever. The inner workings of oh so human system of the UK government sometimes baffles me. And it exists in nature where the complex interactions of many diverse organisms converge to form a complex ecosystem. There might be problems of a lack of understanding in certain cases but what this journalist is describing is complex systems not technological problems.

cblconfederate 6y ago

Ha! Imagine writing this about medicine. Computers are 100% deterministic, from top to bottom. Even their effects of society can clearly be tracedback.

MaxBarraclough 6y ago
> Computers are 100% deterministic, from top to bottom. Not in every respect. Concurrency and C's undefined behaviour spring to mind.
- grayhatter 6y ago
  It's still deterministic. It doesn't randomly do something different with the exact same IO. Just because it's hard to recreate the exact same state with concurrent processes on a modern CPU doesn't change it's determinism. Also, undefined behavior in C only means a compiler can do what ever it likes. It doesn't make it random. People need to stop pretending UB in C is magic. It's not going to delete your hard disk, or make you a pizza unless that's already part of your program. GARBREPLEDFAH.../rant
  - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
    Sure, but in both cases, the way to model it is with something like nondeterminism. Computers have no nondeterminism, but computer science does. Formally verified C code is guaranteed to be free of UB, as this is necessary in order for there to be guarantees about the behaviour of a program written in standard C. The underlying compiler and hardware are still deterministic. A similar thing happens with concurrency. > People need to stop pretending UB in C is magic. It's not going to delete your hard disk, or make you a pizza unless that's already part of your program. It probably won't delete your hard-disk, but complacency with UB is still a bad idea. C is a strange language. UB is permitted to travel back in time. [0] Even in the absence of UB, the optimiser is permitted (but not obligated) to eliminate empty infinite loops, so even a basic property like whether your program will ever terminate, may be up to the whims of the optimiser. [1] Anyway that was a long way of saying I agree, computers are deterministic, but something akin to nondeterminism can happen in the abstractions we use. [0] https://stackoverflow.com/a/39915175/ https://stackoverflow.com/a/39915175/ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13640636 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13640636

camillomiller 6y ago

The argument this piece is built around is flawed on so many levels. 1) the author conflates tech basic literacy and preparation on the specific topic by the congress members and marks them as “being a tech expert”. Nobody asks them to know the ins and outs of the companies they’re scrutinizing, but just to be prepared about the matter that’s being discussed and to show some minimal tech literacy. 2) the author proceeds to switch to a different meaning of “expert” with a falsely modest tirade about he himself not being an expert. Sure you are, by all common meanings of “expert”, as you immodestly point out namedropping all your publications and collaborations. 3) after all this, the author settles for a meaning of expert that makes absolutely no sense: an all-knowing being that, thanks to some genius-like trait, is able to see everything from the outside and know the very specifics of everything they run. Once he sets this new meaning nobody has ever agreed on, he proceeds to point out no such person exists. Maybe it could exist, but such a CEO-savant would be anti-economical to any company, a horrible stickler with a micromanaging obsession, that would spend time about knowing every new detail of his company (just check the amount of patents these companies file every year) instead of focusing on the vision and the long term. The piece also completely disregards the fact that humanity has evolved to the point where we are right now exactly because humans are very good at building unsupervised complex system that don’t rely on the knowledge of the individual to function. We, as societies, are fundamentally primed to do that. Our social systems are exactly that. Now, Silicon based technology has brought us another step forward in this, and we feel lost as we fail to grasp the enhanced complexity of what underlies out lives. I don’t see it as something new, and humans will evolve to adapt to this new layer of technology. What I just read is a piece that tries to bend the meaning of “expert” to prove the point that nobody knows what tech is doing, as if big tech was just perpetuating itself as a sentient being. It’s a very slippery slope, that could be used to justify the people that physically drive the decisions of these companies. Decisions that are strategical, political, and above all taken by humans, not machines, who are well aware how to drive complex and multifaceted organizations to maximize profit and return to their investors.

neohed 6y ago
Exactly right. As an experienced software developer, there's a ton I don't understand about the intricacies of OS kernels and integrated circuits, but I don't need to know that stuff and nobody can learn everything. Popular science books can explain quantum theory well enough for a layperson to at least get enough of a clue to have an opinion. All politicians need is enough knowledge to make an informed decision about the effect of various technologies on society.

fizixer 6y ago

This is bs. In order for outsiders to understand tech, you need to invite engineers/researchers, not CEOs. And you need marathon sessions, not sprints. Go figure!

ElFitz 6y ago

Lazy so-called journalist, I'd like to present to you... drums rolling... Ben Thompson of Stratechery[1]! Followed by.... rolling drums... John Gruber of Daring Fireball[2]! And quite frankly, these two are just the ones I thought of, from the top of my head. And, I couldn't say why, I think nowadays the Financial Times could write pieces on the matter more interesting than nearly anyone at Wired could. [1]: https://stratechery.com/ https://stratechery.com/ [2]: https://daringfireball.net/ https://daringfireball.net/

bubblethink 6y ago

>Last week’s effort by the antitrust subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee was no exception. "The technological ignorance demonstrated by our elected officials ... was truly stunning," I skimmed through parts of the hearing, and I found most of it alright. I don't remember anything glaringly bad. There was a minor gaffe about twitter v/s facebook, which everyone mocked on the internet, but even that wasn't so bad. The efficacy of the hearing wrt any outcome is a different matter. What's the author talking about ?

mlazos 6y ago

This author appears to think that you need to understand the intricate details of a search algorithm, distributed computing, and machine learning before you understand what their general use is? I don’t need to understand how a car engine works before I can understand how to drive or how cars have changed society. The only argument this article proves is that google and Facebook have lowered the bar on journalism so far that this is considered publishable.

hurrdurr2 6y ago
Totally agreed. What drivel. I couldn't even finish reading the article. We have senators grilling tech CEOs that don't understand the difference between an iPhone and an Android device. This is unacceptable to say the least.
- flohofwoe 6y ago
  To play devil's advocate: What is the difference between an Android phone and an iPhone phone, and if there is, what does it matter to a customer? Both can make phone calls, both can display web pages, both can run apps. There's one fairly irrelevant difference because it's an historical accident so it will probably be eliminated soon: one platform owner already controls the platform completely, and the other not yet.
  - ben_w 6y ago
    For a normal customer with no tech skills? Android is the one which comes in a full range from “cheap” to “premium” while Apple only comes in “premium”. You also get to choose which app store you get, Apple or Google, but I’m not sure if normal people know what one of those is.
    - Nursie 6y ago
      The new iPhone SE is definitely a mid-market play, blurring it further.
  - hurrdurr2 6y ago

monadic2 6y ago

Why is there no ideology in tech culture?

scollet 6y ago
What do you mean by ideology? I think I have a response, but I would like to know this first.

loopz 6y ago

This article is really about possible social consequences of tech like Facebook and Twitter, not about knowing all the technical implementation details. A "tech expert" speaking in front of congress would be expected to answer to how the tech affects governance and civic matters. Nobody know the consequences in full, and how effective mass-communication might affect society. It's problematic when the leaders and overseers seem unfamiliar or uncertain with the overall operation of these tools, and even abuse them for egotistical benefits, instead of acting as elected servants of the people.

jondubois 6y ago

I think that's the point. No one in these big corporations understands what they're doing... They don't know half of the story. But they're so large and powerful that this doesn't prevent them from succeeding anyway. That's the danger. Also there is no incentive for anyone to understand what they're doing. It's like that saying that people tend to not understand things when good performance at their job depends on them not understanding things.

sradman 6y ago

> Members of Congress clearly don’t understand the tech companies they’re supposed to regulate. But neither does anyone else. Siva Vaidhyanathan [1], the author of this Wired article, seems to be a fine representative of the humanities half of what C.P. Snow called The Two Cultures [2]. The ability to craft sentences is an admirable skill, one I wish I had, but innumeracy and the inability to grasp causation seems to be a badge of honor among the non-STEM elite. The question is not whether regulators understand tech, it is whether they understand the principles that limit regulating consenting adults. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siva_Vaidhyanathan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siva_Vaidhyanathan [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures

Aeolun 6y ago

I do not expect Congress to know how a B2 works, no. That would certainly be asking too much. What I do expect them to know is what it is/does.

aronpye 6y ago

Oh God, another wired article. This is written in a similar vain as “What’s a computer?”

say_it_as_it_is 6y ago

So, a politician, who is usually an attorney, doesn't understand the business that tech companies engage in and therefore no one understands the business?

amelius 6y ago

We should also update the definition of tech. Every company has a website these days, but does that make them "tech" companies?

neohed 6y ago

I had an issue with this: "while in graduate school in American Studies, I realized that computer science was a method of understanding much like many others . . . I’d also misunderstood coding as a craft instead of a field of knowledge and inquiry." I agree that computer science is a field of "knowledge and enquiry" (aren't all academic disciplines?) but disagree with his conflation of CS and "coding." Computer science has little to do with most software development which is very much a "craft"

lordgrenville 6y ago
This sentence seems like a bizarre non sequitur. Absent some explanation of how American Studies connects to CS (perhaps this is obvious to American Studiers?), it reads like the equivalent of "while backpacking through Laos, I realised the New York subway system was in urgent need of repair".

Invictus0 6y ago

It's almost as if the author is projecting his own imposter syndrome on the Congress.

decasteve 6y ago

Tech has become a marketing term. Might as well call them synergy companies. There's a conflation of concepts and how the various "tech" companies make their money. How can anyone keep track when "tech" is such a broad brush to paint with?

knorker 6y ago

That's a really long article to say what we already know: That "expert" means to know in detail a narrow thing. It hasn't been possible to be a true polymath in like 500 years. Surely this isn't news to the author? There's no such thing as "an expert on everything"? Yeah, no shit. It's almost tautology, due to the limitations on human brains and the advancement of science since the renaissance. Another way I think this article misses the point is that they're not dragging Sundar in front of congress because he knows everything about Google (he can't), nor for the congresspeople to learn it (they can't, even if Sundar knew, and could convey, and had infinite time). They do not start from "let's understand everything first", because they can't. They are dragging them in to answer a question. You don't need to know the lunch schedule of the San Bruno office, or how many registers the x86 processor has, to answer the question of how political ads should look in today's world (or whatever the question is). So the article doubly misses the point.

Barrin92 6y ago
Yes. If you go to one of the first legal definitions of the term expert, that is what you get "person who, by virtue of special acquired knowledge or experience on a subject, presumably not within the knowledge of men generally, may testify in a court of justice to matters of opinion thereon, as distinguished from ordinary witnesses, who can in general testify only to facts" Regulators are not experts and they're not meant to be experts, they may consult experts if they require their knowledge. I'm also not sure what the point of the entire discussion is, I hope nobody believes that regulators somehow need to be quantum physicists and physicians and computer scientists and artists at the same time to make judgements about tech or anything else.
grogenaut 6y ago
Have you read any other wired articles in the last 10 years? They're all like this.
alirsgp 6y ago
People like von Neumann were considered polymaths
echlebek 6y ago

Hippocrates 6y ago

This is a horribly wrong take. The premise that nobody understands these tech issues at the level needed to address them is not even close to true. In fact, this sounds like an argument one of the luddites in congress would make rather than a tech journalist.

almost_usual 6y ago
The argument is no one knows the exact details of the whole system. That is obviously true, the only experts at these companies are the engineers who write code. There are still details they don’t understand. An expert would have to be the collective knowledge of every engineer that worked at the org and there would still be missing detail and ‘bugs’. This is literally why the security industry exists, bugs are inevitable. I don’t think the argument is ‘crazy’, it’s accurate when speaking about data protections. To assert your data is safe is to assert there are no security issues with your software. The only way of asserting this is to either encrypt everything or not store it at all. These companies will never do that so we end up with these complex arguments in Congress justifying it’s ‘safe’.
- _jal 6y ago
  The implicit argument is that one must wholly comprehend the exact details of a company's systems in order to meaningfully control them. This is obviously false reductio ad absurdum given the existence of managers doing exactly that right now. CEOs are not testifying to congress about exploiting side channels in hypervisor memory management. On one level, they're offering industry viewpoints on policy issues; on another, they're actors in a political game.
  - almost_usual 6y ago
    > This is obviously false reductio ad absurdum given the existence of managers doing exactly that right now. Managers don’t know the details of any system unless they wrote it when they were an engineer (and it hasn’t been modified). They are trusting their engineers’ interpretation of the system, which is a game of telephone up the management chain. > CEOs are not testifying to congress about exploiting side channels in hypervisor memory management. On one level, they're offering industry viewpoints on policy issues; on another, they're actors in a political game. The largest account takeover incident recently was an unsophisticated social engineering attack executed by a 17 year old. I’d argue most system and data vulnerabilities aren’t sophisticated or complicated yet companies like the idea of this because it makes them seem more improbable. Vulnerabilities happen because security guarantees and understanding cost time and time is limited when shipping a product faster than a competitor. In reality if Congress wants an expert they need to have a team of engineers at the company performing audits and code reviews.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

shekharshan 6y ago

I think the author meant to say even developers do not understand the decisions some of the ML algorithms make. Anyone who had to debug ML may partially agree with that. But this doesn’t mean people don’t understand infrastructure. Fundamentally we are dealing with compute, storage and networking. We just combine them in different ways to come up with solutions optimized for different workloads.

known 6y ago

Sounds like sarcasm;

starky 6y ago

The author seems way too focused on the exact meaning of "expert" without thinking about what they actually need from a subject matter expert for a specific hearing. Who you need for an ethics hearing will likely be different than who you need for a political hearing even though they are both "experts". A subject matter expert before a political hearing needs to understand the societal and financial decisions of a class of technology and be able to explain it in a way that others can understand. Pretty much any tech leader should be able to do this. A major issue with this is that politics in the US (and plenty of other countries) are so driven by money that you end up with a bunch of politicians that are willfully ignorant of the sectors they are supposed to legislate for because they are paid to just do what the people with the money want you to do.

LockAndLol 6y ago

> We don’t insist that everyone in Congress understand how the B2 Spirit “stealth” bomber works, or how serotonin reuptake inhibitors help manage depression, or even how the internal combustion engine works. Yet we justifiably expect our government to regulate them. Indeed, that's not what I'd insist. I'd insist on elected officials to have a team surrounding them who they can ask and who in turn can ask others when decisions have to be made. In other words, leaders have to know how and when to delegate. If they don't know how to do that, then I assert that they aren't and cannot be good leaders.

Fricken 6y ago

It's getting disingenuous to call it tech. At the point of interface it is media. The effects of these new media have on society are not well diagnosed by tech experts, who specialize in understanding how a thing works, less so with how it affects.

polynomial 6y ago

It's like the inimitable Buckminster Fuller's analysis of the _cost_ of expertise hidden in the dangers of specialization never happened.

almost_usual 6y ago

The article is true, there isn’t an expert or collective group of experts that can guarantee a complex system’s behavior. This is why bugs exist, why there is a security industry, why these companies have bug bounty programs. The safest way of protecting information is not creating it or using strong encryption.

makach 6y ago

only a fool would call himself an expert. What others call you is a different matter.

LifeLiverTransp 6y ago

The actual elephant in the room - nobody even talks about, unlike this article, is the effectively privatization of what used to be calle psychology,neuro-sciences, you name it. If you have all the data, and you have a private database to query it- your defacto privatized a whole field of academia, which is cut off from the most valuable thing to have. Data. You could write simulations, displaying the outcome of each of your actions on a psychological acurate model of a society. And you would be defacto invisible with your knowledge, forever in the blindspot of us mamals.