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I think anyone who has inhabited planet earth for more than 25-30 years or so starts to realize that most of people are either: 1. “Geniuses” of speculation an

I think anyone who has inhabited planet earth for more than 25-30 years or so starts to realize that most of people are either: 1. “Geniuses” of speculation and every topic under the sun (overconfident braggarts that make sweeping claims that are difficult to criticize because they are so general; such dreamers talk big but really have little expertise) 2. People that actually are “deep-knowledge” experts, but only in one particular, very specialized domain and can otherwise barely tie their shoelaces And that the 1. Kind of people make visionary, ridiculous claims that are then tempered and shored up by the 2. Kind of people behind the scenes that actually do the work so as not to cause horrific catastrophes and that true genius is rare and hardly ever recognizable as such within the genius’s own lifetime. If you have no knowledge but boundless confidence and a good sense for what kind of statements you can make without actually resulting in direct (i.e. traceable to your statements) physical or financial injury to other people you can get pretty far in life. I’m aware of the irony that the claims in this post put me in the 1. category.

Kye 6y ago
There's a subset of 1 who are good at making wild guesses while leaving open the possibility they're wrong so 2 has an opportunity to share what they know.
- tapland 6y ago
  I don't have actual expert knowledge in anything but a bit of knowledge of a broad range of things. So there's certainly a spectrum of "1" where you have all levels of actual knowledge. It reads like someone is just grumpy dividing it up like that.
xwolfi 6y ago
There are also a lot of people who know nothing and struggle to understand anything new and don't either brag about it or have any deeper field on understand. They can also usually tie their shoelace.
- voidhorse 6y ago
  Of course, and of all the categories, it is those of this bunch that actually keep the world running in terms of what ultimately matters for us humans.
colechristensen 6y ago
I'm skeptical of any sorting of things into two bins, people or otherwise. https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-12-28 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-12-28 You do have a point though (why I recall decade old comics as conversation pieces and not people's names... sigh) There are a lot of people on "mount stupid", in fact the chance that someone talking about a subject is trapped in the overconfidence of mount stupid is very high. In other words, most of the people you'll hear talking about something are entirely full of shit. (this is a large source of problems in our time) There are people who don't know anything and realize it, then there are a whole lot of people who know enough to be aware that their knowledge is limited and don't want to try to talk over the overconfident folks (refuting someone sure of themselves is a lot more difficult than jabbering about your own feelings) The people who really do know a whole lot and have the confidence to match are rare. One thing that sticks out on HN are long discussions about things that folks have not much of an idea about. Non-computer-related engineering and farming threads are usually a shitshow of overconfident nonsense. Something to notice about computer people is they have the confidence that they can figure anything out (generally good) but frequently lack the wisdom to be aware of their knowledge (generally bad).
- incanus77 6y ago
  > I'm skeptical of any sorting of things into two bins, people or otherwise. Reminds me of the saying that there are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don’t.
  - philipswood 6y ago
    10 kind of people: Those who understand binary, Those who don't, Those who understand ternary...
- harperlee 6y ago
  > I'm skeptical of any sorting of things into two bins, people or otherwise. I get what you are saying, but let me elaborate it a little bit for fun. If you project anything into one dimension and define a threshold, you have 2 bins, and you describe it with 1 bit. The fact that you are projecting does not make it an suspicious oversimplification per se. You can then add more dimensions into study and further classify the part of reality under study, and get more fancy with your bins, but from several points of view, there will be one master bit - that is, you have a classification tree, and a first level classification. So you can for sure talk about 2 bins, irrespective that there are other ways to look at the data, or funny cases near the threshold. So for example it makes sense to talk about people from Fidji vs. people not from Fidji in some contexts, and that should not be suspicious. So really what we should be suspect is from people who constantly jump to oversimplified models of reality to make grandiose takes on reality without first spending some time in explaining why that dimension dominates over others, why that threshold in particular, and why alternatives are not so useful as this simple model.

Kye 6y ago

There's a subset of 1 who are good at making wild guesses while leaving open the possibility they're wrong so 2 has an opportunity to share what they know.

tapland 6y ago
I don't have actual expert knowledge in anything but a bit of knowledge of a broad range of things. So there's certainly a spectrum of "1" where you have all levels of actual knowledge. It reads like someone is just grumpy dividing it up like that.

xwolfi 6y ago

There are also a lot of people who know nothing and struggle to understand anything new and don't either brag about it or have any deeper field on understand. They can also usually tie their shoelace.

voidhorse 6y ago
Of course, and of all the categories, it is those of this bunch that actually keep the world running in terms of what ultimately matters for us humans.

colechristensen 6y ago

I'm skeptical of any sorting of things into two bins, people or otherwise. https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-12-28 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-12-28 You do have a point though (why I recall decade old comics as conversation pieces and not people's names... sigh) There are a lot of people on "mount stupid", in fact the chance that someone talking about a subject is trapped in the overconfidence of mount stupid is very high. In other words, most of the people you'll hear talking about something are entirely full of shit. (this is a large source of problems in our time) There are people who don't know anything and realize it, then there are a whole lot of people who know enough to be aware that their knowledge is limited and don't want to try to talk over the overconfident folks (refuting someone sure of themselves is a lot more difficult than jabbering about your own feelings) The people who really do know a whole lot and have the confidence to match are rare. One thing that sticks out on HN are long discussions about things that folks have not much of an idea about. Non-computer-related engineering and farming threads are usually a shitshow of overconfident nonsense. Something to notice about computer people is they have the confidence that they can figure anything out (generally good) but frequently lack the wisdom to be aware of their knowledge (generally bad).

incanus77 6y ago
> I'm skeptical of any sorting of things into two bins, people or otherwise. Reminds me of the saying that there are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don’t.
- philipswood 6y ago
  10 kind of people: Those who understand binary, Those who don't, Those who understand ternary...
harperlee 6y ago
> I'm skeptical of any sorting of things into two bins, people or otherwise. I get what you are saying, but let me elaborate it a little bit for fun. If you project anything into one dimension and define a threshold, you have 2 bins, and you describe it with 1 bit. The fact that you are projecting does not make it an suspicious oversimplification per se. You can then add more dimensions into study and further classify the part of reality under study, and get more fancy with your bins, but from several points of view, there will be one master bit - that is, you have a classification tree, and a first level classification. So you can for sure talk about 2 bins, irrespective that there are other ways to look at the data, or funny cases near the threshold. So for example it makes sense to talk about people from Fidji vs. people not from Fidji in some contexts, and that should not be suspicious. So really what we should be suspect is from people who constantly jump to oversimplified models of reality to make grandiose takes on reality without first spending some time in explaining why that dimension dominates over others, why that threshold in particular, and why alternatives are not so useful as this simple model.