5 ms·

I'd wager it was way worse "before" when there was way less access to information. Nowadays you can at least google almost anything which isn't intentionally ob

I'd wager it was way worse "before" when there was way less access to information. Nowadays you can at least google almost anything which isn't intentionally obscured while "before" there was no "global knowledge storage". I feel like the article is mixing "scale" with "obscurity". Yeah things are more automated but they are doing the same thing many more times before, it's not like the average person cannot comprehend what is happening if they invested enough time to have the necessary knowledge

vidanay 6y ago
It's amazing how we have forgotten that until relatively recently, the average person's "world" consisted of a 10 mile radius around their village. It's much easier to comprehend that world than the modern world - of course, that's until some invaders come over the hill or sea that you've always wondered "what's over there?"
- newsbinator 6y ago
  There was a time, not long ago, when a person could wonder about something that is well understood, try for an hour to get the answer, fail, and give up. Now with every passing month the set of known things that are hard to find out gets smaller and smaller. Or even the set of speculative things. You want to know how a warp drive might work? There's a Youtube video for that. You want to know what that Youtube video about how warp drive might work means? There's a Youtube video for that too.
  - vidanay 6y ago
    That was me in elementary school trying to do a research report at the crappy local 1970's era library.
- mikem170 6y ago
  The problem isn't that the average person can't understand all of the modern world, the problem is that them and the politicians they elect and the experts they count on can't understand it well enough to avoid really large mistakes in interconnected systems that can affect everyone.
robocat 6y ago
> Nowadays you can at least google almost anything which isn't intentionally obscured Pick one “simple” part in say an iPad. You might be able to get a general overview on how the part is made, but if you try to drill down the slightest then there is immediately huge swathes of questions that are unanswerable without deep industry knowledge. A recent example was a “simple” cellphone PCB[1] that was very well documented, plus the help of the manufacturer, yet on every single step in the article there are large quantities of unanswered questions. Mind boggling complexity. [1] https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=6011 https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=6011
- richardwhiuk 6y ago
  This isn't really new. It's existed in human inventions for a long time, and the natural world forever.
hindsightbias 6y ago
Before, you only needed domain experts. Nobody thought they could do more complex things w/o education. Now, knowledge is google/wiki shallow even in simpler domains. I've seen "experts" who really did not invest in depth and before they couldn't even try because it was obscured enough that you had to actually work to find it. It scares me to think how much engineers or doctors may be just googling around because Material Thermodynamics/Vascular course got split up into electives because the domain wouldn't fit into a semester anymore. Chip engineers tell me they used to actually understand what was going on and could converse about any part of the chip. They understood a lot about the fab process. Software people knew a lot about the chip. Now, no one has the big picture. Scale this up to airplanes, civil construction, large embedded systems, power grids... people may know their domain if lucky but the integration of complex projects is filled with gaps people don't know how to bridge - they don't even know where the gaps are. It's not brand new - no known engineer/software person grok'd speculative execution exploits for the two decades it was possible. Now, kernel people know a lot more about chip pipelines and cache architectures because they got bit.
- kungito 6y ago
  Oh please, only thing happening was people shot themselves in the foot more often. This reminds of the whole debate "C engineer who never makes security mistakes vs 10 years younger Rust developer who uses a tool which makes sure it doesn't happen". Planes didn't suddenly start falling from the sky because people chose wrong electives. That why we have PROCESS where we make sure dumb things cannot happen because we explicitly check for them. When you add automated checking on top of that you get way further than some galaxy brain old school chip designers. Besides, things are moving way to fast for people to get to know too much about one thing
- ivan1783 6y ago
  I work in automotive, its the same here. There isn't a single person who you can find that has a big picture detailed understanding of the whole system.

vidanay 6y ago

It's amazing how we have forgotten that until relatively recently, the average person's "world" consisted of a 10 mile radius around their village. It's much easier to comprehend that world than the modern world - of course, that's until some invaders come over the hill or sea that you've always wondered "what's over there?"

newsbinator 6y ago
There was a time, not long ago, when a person could wonder about something that is well understood, try for an hour to get the answer, fail, and give up. Now with every passing month the set of known things that are hard to find out gets smaller and smaller. Or even the set of speculative things. You want to know how a warp drive might work? There's a Youtube video for that. You want to know what that Youtube video about how warp drive might work means? There's a Youtube video for that too.
- vidanay 6y ago
  That was me in elementary school trying to do a research report at the crappy local 1970's era library.
mikem170 6y ago
The problem isn't that the average person can't understand all of the modern world, the problem is that them and the politicians they elect and the experts they count on can't understand it well enough to avoid really large mistakes in interconnected systems that can affect everyone.

robocat 6y ago

> Nowadays you can at least google almost anything which isn't intentionally obscured Pick one “simple” part in say an iPad. You might be able to get a general overview on how the part is made, but if you try to drill down the slightest then there is immediately huge swathes of questions that are unanswerable without deep industry knowledge. A recent example was a “simple” cellphone PCB[1] that was very well documented, plus the help of the manufacturer, yet on every single step in the article there are large quantities of unanswered questions. Mind boggling complexity. [1] https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=6011 https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=6011

richardwhiuk 6y ago
This isn't really new. It's existed in human inventions for a long time, and the natural world forever.

hindsightbias 6y ago

Before, you only needed domain experts. Nobody thought they could do more complex things w/o education. Now, knowledge is google/wiki shallow even in simpler domains. I've seen "experts" who really did not invest in depth and before they couldn't even try because it was obscured enough that you had to actually work to find it. It scares me to think how much engineers or doctors may be just googling around because Material Thermodynamics/Vascular course got split up into electives because the domain wouldn't fit into a semester anymore. Chip engineers tell me they used to actually understand what was going on and could converse about any part of the chip. They understood a lot about the fab process. Software people knew a lot about the chip. Now, no one has the big picture. Scale this up to airplanes, civil construction, large embedded systems, power grids... people may know their domain if lucky but the integration of complex projects is filled with gaps people don't know how to bridge - they don't even know where the gaps are. It's not brand new - no known engineer/software person grok'd speculative execution exploits for the two decades it was possible. Now, kernel people know a lot more about chip pipelines and cache architectures because they got bit.

kungito 6y ago
Oh please, only thing happening was people shot themselves in the foot more often. This reminds of the whole debate "C engineer who never makes security mistakes vs 10 years younger Rust developer who uses a tool which makes sure it doesn't happen". Planes didn't suddenly start falling from the sky because people chose wrong electives. That why we have PROCESS where we make sure dumb things cannot happen because we explicitly check for them. When you add automated checking on top of that you get way further than some galaxy brain old school chip designers. Besides, things are moving way to fast for people to get to know too much about one thing
ivan1783 6y ago
I work in automotive, its the same here. There isn't a single person who you can find that has a big picture detailed understanding of the whole system.