11 ms·

Cocktail party ideas

188 points by Naac 5y ago

Malic 5y ago
I can't emphasize enough how much I like a browser's Reader View for web pages like this.
friedman23 5y ago
Absolutely everything has more complexity than is visible on the surface. Just go in with that assumption and you wont make yourself look like a fool. I also often find you only really look like a fool when you confidently make incorrect statements and denigrate others. Making incorrect statements / assumptions with the openness to learn from a small horse instead of a high horse is admirable not foolish.
- bee_rider 5y ago
  Ah, isn't it more fun to just gleefully embrace your ignorance and arrogance? Come up with a back of the napkin solution and throw it out there. The professional will probably enjoy the opportunity to show off by picking it apart, right?
tompccs 5y ago
People mistake schoolchild-level analogies for the way the real world works all the time. Kids grow up disillusioned that the neat causal view of history with a strong moral arc they learned at school is a gross simplification, and assume they've been hoodwinked as opposed to just talked down to. Likewise, schoolchildren learn a simplified version of physics and mistake that for the real thing (for example, believing that water has set freezing and boiling points rather than phase boundaries on a pressure/temperature plot). Actually, there is probably a trap which certain people who pay a lot of attention in school but never deeply pursue any subject outside of it fall into, which is to grossly overestimate their understanding of things. Whereas the class bozo is probably closer to the mark in his assessment of his own abilities. This cocktail party observation is definitely common in certain circles, but I think particularly American culture, where maverick thinking is so highly prized. This type of thinking is a true wellspring of innovation, but is not accessible to the vast majority of people. It does remind me of this xkcd: https://xkcd.com/675/ https://xkcd.com/675/ I'd also caution against being too harsh in such people, especially in informal situations. "Why don't you just..." type questions are actually a great way to improve your understanding of a field, and should be taken in the spirit of curiosity, and not necessarily as an indicator of extreme hubris.
- function_seven 5y ago
  I've always liked this one: https://xkcd.com/277/ https://xkcd.com/277/ as well when it comes do "Why don't you just..." things. As an aside, looking at that comic now I get the same feeling as I did when I watched a Season One episode of The Simpsons. Randall has refined his stick-figure technique!
  - narag 5y ago
    I used to live next to an urban intersection. I have no experience designing intersections, but after five minutes looking from my fourth floor apartment down to the intersection, I concluded that it had been designed by either a moron or an enemy of human kind. Next year I heard no less than five accidents, one of then ending with a car upside down. Then they probably called the same person to re-design the interception and it was a total success: less accidents, but a constant horns concert complaining of people that gets fooled into getting into a turning lane, but doesn't want to turn and trying to go back to their path... that provoked some accidents, but not so many. From early morning everyday, a huge noise. After some months, everybody in the neighborhood learned you should exit the lane in advance so you won't get caught. But being one main street in the city, there's always someone that doesn't know. I just had to wait ten minutes looking at it, and it happens. Then a lot of horns. The people complaining had surely made the same mistake some day earlier, but anyway. Maybe the bad attitude comes from observing that there are often persons out there that makes a very bad job.
exolymph 5y ago
Relevant classic that's been on HN many times: Reality has a surprising amount of detail http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-detail http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...
- spirographer 5y ago
  Also, very relevant to discussions of whether we live in a simulated universe!
vincentmarle 5y ago
> People often discuss the standard trendy topics (some recent ones I've observed at multiple parties are how to build a competitor to Google search and how to solve the problem of high transit construction costs) and explain why people working in the field today are doing it wrong and then explain how they would do it instead. This is exactly why I moved away from SF. Can't stand these alpha nerds trying to one-up each other at parties.
BurritoAlPastor 5y ago
The core point about people systemically underestimating the complexity of any field outside their own is well taken. Joseph Conrad writes: "Men earning their bread in any very specialized occupation will talk shop, not only because it is the most vital interest of their lives but also because they have not much knowledge of other subjects. They have never had the time to get acquainted with them." However, if I were to decline to speculate on any matter on which I lacked an expert-level understanding, the number of subjects on which I could hold a conversation would dwindle to virtually nothing, and I'd be much more boring to talk to at these cocktail parties. So, I intend to continue to spitball blindly, just for fun.
- dylan604 5y ago
  It's okay to not be well versed in a subject outside of one's area of expertise. You can still carry on a conversation and ask engaging questions to have an intelligent conversation. If one is unable to engage in a meaningful manner outside their area of interest/expertise, then that's an entirely different situation. And probably another interesting subject up for discussion if it can be handle delicately an non-hostile.
  - a9h74j 5y ago
    > ask engaging questions to have an intelligent conversation Read a book once which outlined 30--40 occupational areas and two or three interesting questions in each of these areas -- to serve as reliable conversation starters.
    - ashwal 5y ago
      Which book, do you recall?
      - a9h74j 5y ago
        Found it on my shelves! Closer to 100 main categories! [1] Random example: Talking to Kitists. Do you fly a traditional or manueverable Kite? How big is it? .. (If maneuverable: How many lines does your kite have?) .. Do you have trouble finding enough open space to fly your kite? .. Have you ever been dragged by your kite? .. Do you anchor your kite, or do you hold onto it. .. Do you fly your kite in competitions? .. Do you do any kite building or kite painting? [1] By Leil Lownes How to talk to anybody about anything: Breaking the ice with everyone from accountants to zen buddhists 1993 Offhand I am seeing no match on archive.org or Amazon. Worth hunting down. Thanks for the prompt to look for it!
emtel 5y ago
It’s not surprising to me that people underestimate the complexity of fields not their own - I do it all the time myself. What I think would be more interesting is the question: when are outsider critiques or suggestions likely to be valid? To stay with the construction example, it is clear that construction in the US is more expensive than it needs to be in many cases - railroad construction costs are famously many times higher in the US than in other industrialized countries. Is there insider knowledge I don’t have that would make this observation fallacious? And what about cases where one isn’t simply pointing to a counter example? Are there cases where outsiders have made arguments from first principles that were correct, despite their lack of expertise in the field?
- reidjs 5y ago
  When I hear about something being much more expensive in the states, I assume it has to do with our litigious nature and everyone is afraid of taking on liability. But this is outside my expertise ;)
- mc10 5y ago
  I would be curious to hear a response from an insider to Alon Levy's post about why American transit construction costs are so high: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/03/03/why-american-costs-are-so-high-work-in-progress/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/03/03/why-american-c...
MattGaiser 5y ago
On the other hand there have been numerous examples of people who knew relatively nothing about a field and came to completely dominate it. That is the incredible thing about Silicon Valley. People who knew/know nothing about various industries when starting come to utterly dominate them. Amazon should never have succeeded. They knew nothing about books compared to booksellers. They won anyway. And then proceeded to utterly crush every other company in retail. And they continue to do so. SpaceX is utterly absurd in its existence. Utterly absurd. Boeing and Lockheed had way more knowledge and experience. Yet they are about to be pushed out of a lot of launch.
- pavlov 5y ago
  How is Amazon part of Silicon Valley? Bezos worked at Wall Street for almost a decade in roles like VP at a hedge fund, then started a company in Seattle. If anything, you might say that hedge fund experience qualifies one to dominate industries — if one extreme outlier is to be believed anyway.
- FanaHOVA 5y ago
  Nothing in the article says that knowledge cannot be acquired. The examples that you mentioned aren't cocktail party ideas, but groups of smart people working 100 hours weeks to figure out a new market. I can give you a ton of examples of founders trying the same but failing very hard because they don't take the time to learn and just use cocktail party ideas.
  - kragen 5y ago
    > I can give you a ton of examples of founders trying the same but failing very hard because they don't take the time to learn and just use cocktail party ideas. Maybe you don't have the time to deliver the entire ton, but could you give one example?
- xbar 5y ago
  Your examples are not my favorites, but you are right. And even when folks who don't know the field don't dominate, there have been lots of cocktail party conversations that led to massively successful ventures. I do not go to cocktail parties any more, but I think I was more creative for having endured more regular bullshit sessions with people who thought greatly of themselves, even if I did not. I would not try to "fix" that experience. But the author did have a number of references and comments about knowledge and knowledge seeking that are useful.
crsv 5y ago
The author seems insufferable at cocktail parties.
- ripper1138 5y ago
  Maybe, but the type of people he describes are insufferable too. Tech people are usually the worst offenders of thinking/acting like they are smarter than everyone.
- narag 5y ago
  The author seems insufferable at cocktail parties. Those cocktail parties seem insufferable.
dustintrex 5y ago
There's a classic cocktail party icebreaker related to this: when you ask the usual awkward intro question about what somebody else does, and they tell you "X", reply with "wow, that sounds really hard!". They'll almost certainly tell you "yes!", explain a bit about why it's hard, and now you have a genuine conversation going.
- dstroot 5y ago
  One of my earliest "ah ha" moments in managing software engineers is asking them to do something and the answers tended to be "that's really really hard" or "that's simple". The realization was they were actually telling me "I don't know how to do that" or "I know how to do that". Once someone figured out how to do the really really hard thing it somehow became "simple". Now when someone tells me something is "hard" I can't seem to shake the bias that they just don't know... Conversely, non-technical business people are very highly likely to tell me some piece of engineering is "easy" or "simple" when they have no background, or knowledge, at all.
  - psidebot 5y ago
    I find it helpful to use a range of descriptors. A "simple" task is easy and can be done quickly. A "straightforward" task is easy but may be larger in scope. A "tricky" task needs study to determine where it falls. A "hard" task has known complexity and is just plain hard.
    - Espressosaurus 5y ago
      I agree with this. I also like to divide things into "this requires research/invention" and "this does not require research/invention, just work". Anything requiring invention by definition is not straightforward because its potential timeline may be functionally infinite if it cannot be solved with the tools at hand. A task like changing all APIs to accept a different set of parameters might take 6 months, but is straightforward. "Easy" is the one line change that has no side effects, and is uncommon in practice. After all, sometimes it is that one line change, but there are ramifications elsewhere in the system that need to be thought through.
dahart 5y ago
> No one thinks about moving the starting or ending point of the bridge midway through construction. […] But Hillel interviewed a civil engineer who said that they had to move a bridge! My local Department Of Transportation has this notice on the info page of the bridge construction project nearest to me: “This is a design-build project, meaning the design and construction will happen simultaneously, which allows DOT and the contractor to include the most innovative and current construction solutions while ensuring a quality product.”
- tomcam 5y ago
  I... that's... surely there's more context here? Nice work if you can get it, I guess!
  - dahart 5y ago
    Well, working in software, I pretty much only have experience doing design-build work; I’ve never designed something in it’s entirety before building it (except maybe for a touch of hardware design, but even that is iterated and prototyped and tested and simulated…). I took this DOT page as a sign that maybe construction is becoming more like software over time, and I can no longer wax philosophical at cocktail parties about how they’re different. A little context perhaps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design–build https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design–build
    - tomcam 5y ago
      OK that all helped a lot. Thank you
Avalaxy 5y ago
What kind of lame parties does this guy go to? I expected an article about dope things to make a cocktail party more awesome. Like fireworks, or a poker table.
- tomcam 5y ago
  TIL people still actually have cocktail parties. Thought that was a boomer thing
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - fuzzer37 5y ago
    When you're young they're just called parties lmao.
  - true_religion 5y ago
    All parties with food and drink but no other activity are basically being called cocktail parties now. If you want to be informal about it, it’s just hanging out.
  - kerneloftruth 5y ago
    And I learned that the cool kids say "trad" for "traditional".
- vincentmarle 5y ago
  I bet you it doesn't even involve cocktails.
- imwillofficial 5y ago
  I vote for fireworks at my next party
  - cjohnson318 5y ago
    It's all fun and games until the neighbor's gutter catches fire and the cops come out, but who knows, YMMV.
imwillofficial 5y ago
The author misses the point that at parties, people are talking to connect and socialize, not solve world hunger, despite the topic at hand.
- tedunangst 5y ago
  I think you're missing the point that this phenomenon is not exclusive to cocktail parties.
  - imwillofficial 5y ago
    I think you’re missing the point that… Damn, I got nothing
newbie789 5y ago
transitivebs 5y ago
dunning kruger effect is as valid at cocktail parties as it is everywhere else
- dahart 5y ago
  Dunning Kruger isn’t particularly valid anywhere, but even if it were, you should re-read the paper because it demonstrates that people more confident in their abilities are statistically more competent; the correlation is positive. Other papers have shown reversals and/or demonstrated difficult tasks don’t exhibit the so-called DK effect. Nobody remembers the attempts to reproduce, no wonder science has a replication crisis. This is a good article about it explaining why the effects Dunning & Kruger measured are probably regression to the mean: https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-kruger-effect-is-and-isnt/ https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-... BTW, the sample size in the DK paper was tiny, it was voluntary, and it measured only Cornell undergrads (no participants were actually “incompetent” in a meaningful way). The authors were barely out of undergrad themselves at the time. The survey didn’t have people rate themselves, it had people rank themselves against other people they don’t know (think about this!). The tasks were extremely simple, like getting a joke (seriously! no discussion in the paper of what the actual joke(s) were) and basic English grammar (no mention of how many ESL participants there might have been). So many methodological red flags in the DK paper, and so many counter-examples immediately after it, it’s really truly astounding that it caught on. Apologies for unloading, but I’m hoping to help educate and make a dent in the casual mentions of DK because it’s so widely and completely misunderstood and also because it’s such bad science, it needs to be revealed as a bad example and not used for it’s non-existent explanatory powers.
  - bee_rider 5y ago
    Huh. But doesn't this in some sense make it the perfect meta-example for not knowing enough to know how little we know?
    - dahart 5y ago
      Yeah, it does feel like there’s something kinda meta about it. ;) Except that because the paper’s data shows a positive correlation between self-ranking and skill, it seems like the meta-ness is mainly based on the misunderstood DK concept. So, I won’t call it the meta-DK-effect or claim it’s incompetence or even a cognitive bias necessarily. The article and this meta effect are perhaps just about making assumptions and jumping to conclusions, which humans at all skills levels do often and well. It doesn’t mean that anyone is incompetent or less skilled, it just means we love to guess based on our limited and available information & experience.
Hermitian909 5y ago
I see this in HN in regards to education. Education in the US leaves much to be desired, and there are many ways we could improve it, but the complaints here rarely touch on the most dire problems e.g. comments like "what we really need to do is bust the teacher's union" which is an insane complaint compared to the fact that most schools teach reading wrong as policy by mandating the three cueing system be taught instead of phonics[0]. [0] https://fivefromfive.com.au/the-three-cueing-system/ https://fivefromfive.com.au/the-three-cueing-system/
gnicholas 5y ago
+1 for the appendix reference to Scout Mindset. It's a really great read, with practical steps you can take to start down the path of scout mindset thinking. https://www.amazon.com/Scout-Mindset-Perils-Defensive-Thinking/dp/0735217556 https://www.amazon.com/Scout-Mindset-Perils-Defensive-Thinki...
JackFr 5y ago
I worked deep in the mortgage backed security industry for a decade before the financial crisis and for some years since. I know a lot about it, and some big events firsthand. I find that people are interested in my thoughts on the causes until they hear them: while there were some really bad actors at the margins, the bulk of the crisis was caused by many, many people making good-faith, rational decisions which in hindsight proved foolish. Of course I could be wrong — consciously or unconsciously I could simply be voicing my own bias. But I think at some level people prefer a simple narrative with a hero and a villain regardless of whether the narrative is true.
- zzleeper 5y ago
  I wonder if the same thing will be said about crypto or about current asset prices (e.g. TSLA mkt cap of +$1tn.. in what time horizon are they going to recoup that in actual profits?)
  - di4na 5y ago
    Yes, and it is already being said. There are a lot of people talking of the problems and reasons behind "investing in Growth" that we have seen the past few decades instead of investing in Value
  - llamataboot 5y ago
    Is there anyone /not/ saying that about crypto?
- mhneu 5y ago
  many, many people making good-faith, rational decisions which in hindsight proved foolish. Rational, yes, but rational only in the sense of "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay liquid". My experience is many MBS and finance people, during 2003-2008, knew that a ton of debt was garbage, that LTCM's blowup in 1998 showed massive structural weakness that was never repaired, and that a crash was going to come SOMETIME. But the problem is that the rational decision in such a market is to keep investing and making money on the irrational rise, because no one knows when the crash will come or how bad it will be. It's actually rational to keep buying trash debt when the crash timing is unpredictable. In the end, the finance people were actually correct to keep buying –– the gov't (that is, me you and every US taxpayer) bailed them out, and most of the traders did come out ahead after a bit of time.
rq1 5y ago
Where are the cocktails? I thought there would be some interesting cocktail ideas
soheil 5y ago
Yes this so much. Also true about when it comes to any subject that people feel like you "know" the solution or at least feel like they know more than the idiot next door. This happens so often, people see the tip of the iceberg and assume they know the shape of the whole thing. I think it's pretty logical to do this, however, otherwise how are we going to make sense of the world? We have to use whatever incomplete information we have to form a hypothesis of what is really true. Are we supposed to outsource our sense making to a third party? I think what Dan is suggesting here is even more dangerous than what the people at cocktail parties are doing. Namely, refrain from forming any conjectures about the state of the world because you could be wrong.
eyelidlessness 5y ago
(Disclaimer) I’m not fun at parties. I don’t think this is fun at parties.
supernova87a 5y ago
I have a counter/corollary(?) to the idea that often people don't know what they don't know or assume that their surface knowledge can accurately understand a field, and they should stop making such bold statements: If an executive with some great new idea or strategy not grounded in the full detail were to pay attention to the all the details, they might never try or get anything new done. Because if you listen to and empathize with all the details of how complicated something is and how there's this subtlety or that follow-on issue, you start to accept all the reasons it can't be done (either at all, or quickly). So in some cases, you only get progress because of persisting in ignorance that you can do something new that breaks the rules. Of course I don't mean doing something that is structurally or physically impossible -- just in cases where the legacy of "why it can't be done" has created inertia that stops progress if you accept it a little too much.
bradleyjg 5y ago
I’m sure this is true. But when a project is 7 years and billions of dollars over due (east side access in nyc, in this case but there are similar examples) it seems more than far for the people that have spent that money and have thus far gotten no benefits to spout ignorantly about why. Indulging us seems the least the responsible industries can do. I’m exchange I’m happy to listen to civil engineers and construction workers theories about why Tesla is taking so long to deliver the full self driving software they’ve been charging for.
- nikisweeting 5y ago
  I was all ready to get up in arms and disagree with you but after thinking about it more I actually really like this approach. I would be more than happy to hear a mechanical engineer or geotechnical engineer's takes on why my software project is bad. Perhaps most of the time their advice will be useless due to lack of context/experience, but if they are nice it's endearing, entertaining, and rarely--but still sometimes--helpful.
gundmc 5y ago
I came in looking for fun ideas for the next cocktail party and found an interesting opinion piece. I particularly enjoyed this as someone who has worked in both aerospace and software engineering.
TameAntelope 5y ago
I noticed how people tend to vastly underestimate a topic's complexity too, but I'm not sure what to do with it. I feel like a constant buzzkill when hanging out with people, and I do my best to hide it, but most of the time I end up thinking about how incomplete our conversation is, and how therefore useless/wasteful it is. In my more charitable moments, I think that it's good mental exercise, but it's hard to think generously about someone else when you hear them say superficial "I could do better" statements like the topic of this article. How could they be so naïve, to think that they can, casually, upend an entire field? It happens on Reddit (and HN) all the time, too. Every community centered around a creative work is lousy with, "Why didn't they just" style arguments. Also, not for nothing, but I've never heard the "building an airplane while flying it" analogy used to suggest software is harder than building an airplane. Pardon my cursing, but who the fuck thinks programming is harder than aerospace engineering??? Finally, I found this super duper hard to read all the way through, due to the lack of formatting. I'm assuming that decision is somehow intentional, but it's not a kind one. My eyes hurt. :(
- FearNotDaniel 5y ago
  > and how therefore useless/wasteful it is My suggestion here would be to think about the purpose of the conversation. The goal of cocktail party conversations is not to create working solutions to real world engineering problems. It is to create connections between people, and to have fun. Speculative but uninformed discussions about hard problems are indeed useful if they fulfil this goal. Let's face it, if all the "amateurs" in the room had enough insight to produce workable solutions, it would still be a "useless" conversation on a practical level because those people, working in unrelated fields, do not have the means or the opportunity to put their theories into practice.
  - TameAntelope 5y ago
    Oh I enjoy bullshitting as much as the next person, I get bothered mostly when people genuinely don't think that's what we're doing. But yeah, I'm able to mostly suppress this feeling and live my life, but it's really annoying, to me, when people take themselves too seriously.
nikisweeting 5y ago
I feel like even the most egregious offenders I know of in this area are still aware that designing/building planes is far harder engineering than most software projects.
cycomanic 5y ago
A good friend worked as a the transport manager for for a smallish ecological diary producer. When the original owners sold the business, the new owners (a financial consortium with some food experience) brought in a new executive team in, who had previously worked together to create direct to consumer food startup (something like hello fresh IIRC). Initially my friend was very excited because the owners looked like they wanted to really grow the business. Unfortunately it became soon apparent that the execs mainly had "cocktail party ideas" about changes, "we created a new business in this area that didn't exist before, which is much harder than running an established business. therefore we know best. How hard can it be". So the production manager and my friend soon became the naysayers because they said when they thought things wouldn't work. Soon after they both were made redundant, but the business is now very close to going under. All this story just to say, that this is not just at cocktail parties, but also in work situations people like to discard established knowledge because they think they know how to "disrupt" .
raldi 5y ago
So what’s the actual reason that public transit projects are wildly more expensive and slower to build in the United States than in other countries?
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Most of the money is not being spent on things that advance the project. The people most involved don't want it ever to be finished; that is when the money stops. None of the money is wasted, as such; every penny goes into a pocket.
  - raldi 5y ago
    If this is the true answer, why doesn’t it happen in other countries?
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      Things like it happen here and there. It took very long to build that Finnish nuke, which might be an example. It depends on the political conditions: typically, to get a big pot of money together needs support from a broad swath of supporters, who then each expect patronage, a piece of the pie. As long as the money is flowing, everybody involved stays happy, regardless of how much actual work is getting done. Even in the US, not all public-works projects are afflicted. Solar and wind power systems seem mostly not afflicted.
      - ncmncm 5y ago
        When it seems like the money might stop flowing, there is some motivation to actually deliver a result, if just to save face or avoid prosecution for fraud. Even if not, indictments are rare, and in any case none of the money is ever returned.
sampo 5y ago
Here's an opposite point of view: "Sometimes the Best Ideas Come from Outside Your Industry" https://hbr.org/2014/11/sometimes-the-best-ideas-come-from-outside-your-industry https://hbr.org/2014/11/sometimes-the-best-ideas-come-from-o...
acrump 5y ago
This reminds me of what Socrates said in his defense at his trial. He told the court that he was wise becase he knew the boundries of his own wisdom; and that when he would speak to experts in the city he found them only to be wise in their own fields, yet suffering with the falicy that they were wise in the fields of others. "At last I went to the artisans, for I was conscious that I knew nothing at all, as I may say, and I was sure that they knew many fine things; and in this I was not mistaken, for they did know many things of which I was ignorant, and in this they certainly were wiser than I was. But I observed that even the good artisans fell into the same error as the poets; because they were good workmen they thought that they also knew all sorts of high matters, and this defect in them overshadowed their wisdom" https://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/apology/full-text/apology/ https://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/apology/full-text/apol...
wink 5y ago
I think the author has a few too many misconceptions about the programmers' misconceptions. "How long will it take to implement search here?" "Wait, why does it take longer than a week, Google can do it". Things I've heard an actual Product Owner once say. Please tell the the one automobile engineer who was asked to make a car in a week. So yes, I absolutely believe that /some/ programmers will say that their work is so complicated and like engineering, there are just a lot of seemingly exaggerated examples that have actually happened. I'm not saying it's harder. I'm just saying there are classes of problems that should not happen in civil engineering. Project is halfway done, written in Python. Someone: "Can we not switch to Java?". I would equate that to "The metal bridge is halfway done, can we switch to wood?". This is not inferring that this is the most concerning problem in a problem, and that's my gripe with this article. And the moving bridge is also an exaggerated example taken for shock value. How often does that really happen? And would you put a random engineer of medium seniority in charge of this? Disclaimer: I am not saying programming is harder or special. I've worked on construction sites and I've seen my fair share of ridiculous requests. But people are often simply persuaded a lot easier if you point to a physical wall and explain the problem, versus software where you need to start explaining at the very beginning. Sadly, often also for customers or product managers.
- jounker 5y ago
  Counterpoint: The Berlin airport. They built the foundations, and then they decided to redesign it.
  - wink 5y ago
    Yeah ok, but that one falls under "freak accident" in my book. Hard to think of a more spectacular failure in the recent past :)
jiveturkey 5y ago
a tale as old as time!
matsemann 5y ago
> The predictability of a true engineer’s world is an enviable thing. But ours is a world always in flux, where the laws of physics change weekly. Heh, I also disagree with this quote, but for a different reason than the author. I mean, what's nice about CS is that's it's pure, deterministic, straight forward. It's like doing basic physics problems and the text states "assume zero air resistance and zero friction". We have the simple laws of physics. I don't envy those having to deal with the messiness of the real world. They have it far harder than me as a programmer.
midenginedcoupe 5y ago
This could have just as easily been titled "HN comments". The amount of woefully uninformed soap-boxing on here is staggering!
chrisseaton 5y ago
These seem like the least-chill cocktail parties ever.
dfan 5y ago
There was a fun Hacker News post last year that consisted just of searching HN comments for the phrase "why not simply": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27415725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27415725
throwawayarnty 5y ago
Little knowledge is a dangerous thing. And as more and more information is distilled into sound bites, tweets, and simplified visualisations, I am afraid more and more people will spend their brain power acquiring little bits of knowledge, never going deeper than a 10-minute TED talk. The end result will be great cocktail party conversations, but very few people actually solving real problems.
Isamu 5y ago
More fun at a party to be had when you find out what a person’s true expertise is and probe that until you find something surprising. Doesn’t take long to find something that can change your views or offset your ignorance.
andmarios 5y ago
Most startups probably start as a cocktail party idea, so although the author is correct, he underestimates the value of the concept. Also, whilst it is intuitive that someone without expertise in a field is easy to get everything wrong, it is more interesting that often experts also get everything wrong. Sometimes this happens because the problem may affect an expert's field but belongs to another field, or the problem just exists from someone else's point of view. In Greece we refer to people who always know everything better than experts as couch coaches. :)
temptemptemp111 5y ago
spirographer 5y ago
The whole discussion of whether we live in a Matrix-like simulation falls into this category as well. There are so many layers of oversimplification at play in most peoples' conceptualization of a simulated universe that it is hard to even begin to have a conversation about it.

188 points by Naac 5y ago

I can't emphasize enough how much I like a browser's Reader View for web pages like this.

Absolutely everything has more complexity than is visible on the surface. Just go in with that assumption and you wont make yourself look like a fool. I also often find you only really look like a fool when you confidently make incorrect statements and denigrate others. Making incorrect statements / assumptions with the openness to learn from a small horse instead of a high horse is admirable not foolish.

bee_rider 5y ago
Ah, isn't it more fun to just gleefully embrace your ignorance and arrogance? Come up with a back of the napkin solution and throw it out there. The professional will probably enjoy the opportunity to show off by picking it apart, right?

tompccs 5y ago

People mistake schoolchild-level analogies for the way the real world works all the time. Kids grow up disillusioned that the neat causal view of history with a strong moral arc they learned at school is a gross simplification, and assume they've been hoodwinked as opposed to just talked down to. Likewise, schoolchildren learn a simplified version of physics and mistake that for the real thing (for example, believing that water has set freezing and boiling points rather than phase boundaries on a pressure/temperature plot). Actually, there is probably a trap which certain people who pay a lot of attention in school but never deeply pursue any subject outside of it fall into, which is to grossly overestimate their understanding of things. Whereas the class bozo is probably closer to the mark in his assessment of his own abilities. This cocktail party observation is definitely common in certain circles, but I think particularly American culture, where maverick thinking is so highly prized. This type of thinking is a true wellspring of innovation, but is not accessible to the vast majority of people. It does remind me of this xkcd: https://xkcd.com/675/ https://xkcd.com/675/ I'd also caution against being too harsh in such people, especially in informal situations. "Why don't you just..." type questions are actually a great way to improve your understanding of a field, and should be taken in the spirit of curiosity, and not necessarily as an indicator of extreme hubris.

function_seven 5y ago
I've always liked this one: https://xkcd.com/277/ https://xkcd.com/277/ as well when it comes do "Why don't you just..." things. As an aside, looking at that comic now I get the same feeling as I did when I watched a Season One episode of The Simpsons. Randall has refined his stick-figure technique!
- narag 5y ago
  I used to live next to an urban intersection. I have no experience designing intersections, but after five minutes looking from my fourth floor apartment down to the intersection, I concluded that it had been designed by either a moron or an enemy of human kind. Next year I heard no less than five accidents, one of then ending with a car upside down. Then they probably called the same person to re-design the interception and it was a total success: less accidents, but a constant horns concert complaining of people that gets fooled into getting into a turning lane, but doesn't want to turn and trying to go back to their path... that provoked some accidents, but not so many. From early morning everyday, a huge noise. After some months, everybody in the neighborhood learned you should exit the lane in advance so you won't get caught. But being one main street in the city, there's always someone that doesn't know. I just had to wait ten minutes looking at it, and it happens. Then a lot of horns. The people complaining had surely made the same mistake some day earlier, but anyway. Maybe the bad attitude comes from observing that there are often persons out there that makes a very bad job.

exolymph 5y ago

Relevant classic that's been on HN many times: Reality has a surprising amount of detail http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-detail http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...

spirographer 5y ago
Also, very relevant to discussions of whether we live in a simulated universe!

vincentmarle 5y ago

> People often discuss the standard trendy topics (some recent ones I've observed at multiple parties are how to build a competitor to Google search and how to solve the problem of high transit construction costs) and explain why people working in the field today are doing it wrong and then explain how they would do it instead. This is exactly why I moved away from SF. Can't stand these alpha nerds trying to one-up each other at parties.

BurritoAlPastor 5y ago

The core point about people systemically underestimating the complexity of any field outside their own is well taken. Joseph Conrad writes: "Men earning their bread in any very specialized occupation will talk shop, not only because it is the most vital interest of their lives but also because they have not much knowledge of other subjects. They have never had the time to get acquainted with them." However, if I were to decline to speculate on any matter on which I lacked an expert-level understanding, the number of subjects on which I could hold a conversation would dwindle to virtually nothing, and I'd be much more boring to talk to at these cocktail parties. So, I intend to continue to spitball blindly, just for fun.

dylan604 5y ago
It's okay to not be well versed in a subject outside of one's area of expertise. You can still carry on a conversation and ask engaging questions to have an intelligent conversation. If one is unable to engage in a meaningful manner outside their area of interest/expertise, then that's an entirely different situation. And probably another interesting subject up for discussion if it can be handle delicately an non-hostile.
- a9h74j 5y ago
  > ask engaging questions to have an intelligent conversation Read a book once which outlined 30--40 occupational areas and two or three interesting questions in each of these areas -- to serve as reliable conversation starters.
  - ashwal 5y ago
    Which book, do you recall?
    - a9h74j 5y ago
      Found it on my shelves! Closer to 100 main categories! [1] Random example: Talking to Kitists. Do you fly a traditional or manueverable Kite? How big is it? .. (If maneuverable: How many lines does your kite have?) .. Do you have trouble finding enough open space to fly your kite? .. Have you ever been dragged by your kite? .. Do you anchor your kite, or do you hold onto it. .. Do you fly your kite in competitions? .. Do you do any kite building or kite painting? [1] By Leil Lownes How to talk to anybody about anything: Breaking the ice with everyone from accountants to zen buddhists 1993 Offhand I am seeing no match on archive.org or Amazon. Worth hunting down. Thanks for the prompt to look for it!

emtel 5y ago

It’s not surprising to me that people underestimate the complexity of fields not their own - I do it all the time myself. What I think would be more interesting is the question: when are outsider critiques or suggestions likely to be valid? To stay with the construction example, it is clear that construction in the US is more expensive than it needs to be in many cases - railroad construction costs are famously many times higher in the US than in other industrialized countries. Is there insider knowledge I don’t have that would make this observation fallacious? And what about cases where one isn’t simply pointing to a counter example? Are there cases where outsiders have made arguments from first principles that were correct, despite their lack of expertise in the field?

reidjs 5y ago
When I hear about something being much more expensive in the states, I assume it has to do with our litigious nature and everyone is afraid of taking on liability. But this is outside my expertise ;)
mc10 5y ago
I would be curious to hear a response from an insider to Alon Levy's post about why American transit construction costs are so high: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/03/03/why-american-costs-are-so-high-work-in-progress/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/03/03/why-american-c...

MattGaiser 5y ago

On the other hand there have been numerous examples of people who knew relatively nothing about a field and came to completely dominate it. That is the incredible thing about Silicon Valley. People who knew/know nothing about various industries when starting come to utterly dominate them. Amazon should never have succeeded. They knew nothing about books compared to booksellers. They won anyway. And then proceeded to utterly crush every other company in retail. And they continue to do so. SpaceX is utterly absurd in its existence. Utterly absurd. Boeing and Lockheed had way more knowledge and experience. Yet they are about to be pushed out of a lot of launch.

pavlov 5y ago
How is Amazon part of Silicon Valley? Bezos worked at Wall Street for almost a decade in roles like VP at a hedge fund, then started a company in Seattle. If anything, you might say that hedge fund experience qualifies one to dominate industries — if one extreme outlier is to be believed anyway.
FanaHOVA 5y ago
Nothing in the article says that knowledge cannot be acquired. The examples that you mentioned aren't cocktail party ideas, but groups of smart people working 100 hours weeks to figure out a new market. I can give you a ton of examples of founders trying the same but failing very hard because they don't take the time to learn and just use cocktail party ideas.
- kragen 5y ago
  > I can give you a ton of examples of founders trying the same but failing very hard because they don't take the time to learn and just use cocktail party ideas. Maybe you don't have the time to deliver the entire ton, but could you give one example?
xbar 5y ago
Your examples are not my favorites, but you are right. And even when folks who don't know the field don't dominate, there have been lots of cocktail party conversations that led to massively successful ventures. I do not go to cocktail parties any more, but I think I was more creative for having endured more regular bullshit sessions with people who thought greatly of themselves, even if I did not. I would not try to "fix" that experience. But the author did have a number of references and comments about knowledge and knowledge seeking that are useful.

crsv 5y ago

The author seems insufferable at cocktail parties.

ripper1138 5y ago
Maybe, but the type of people he describes are insufferable too. Tech people are usually the worst offenders of thinking/acting like they are smarter than everyone.
narag 5y ago
The author seems insufferable at cocktail parties. Those cocktail parties seem insufferable.

dustintrex 5y ago

There's a classic cocktail party icebreaker related to this: when you ask the usual awkward intro question about what somebody else does, and they tell you "X", reply with "wow, that sounds really hard!". They'll almost certainly tell you "yes!", explain a bit about why it's hard, and now you have a genuine conversation going.

dstroot 5y ago
One of my earliest "ah ha" moments in managing software engineers is asking them to do something and the answers tended to be "that's really really hard" or "that's simple". The realization was they were actually telling me "I don't know how to do that" or "I know how to do that". Once someone figured out how to do the really really hard thing it somehow became "simple". Now when someone tells me something is "hard" I can't seem to shake the bias that they just don't know... Conversely, non-technical business people are very highly likely to tell me some piece of engineering is "easy" or "simple" when they have no background, or knowledge, at all.
- psidebot 5y ago
  I find it helpful to use a range of descriptors. A "simple" task is easy and can be done quickly. A "straightforward" task is easy but may be larger in scope. A "tricky" task needs study to determine where it falls. A "hard" task has known complexity and is just plain hard.
  - Espressosaurus 5y ago
    I agree with this. I also like to divide things into "this requires research/invention" and "this does not require research/invention, just work". Anything requiring invention by definition is not straightforward because its potential timeline may be functionally infinite if it cannot be solved with the tools at hand. A task like changing all APIs to accept a different set of parameters might take 6 months, but is straightforward. "Easy" is the one line change that has no side effects, and is uncommon in practice. After all, sometimes it is that one line change, but there are ramifications elsewhere in the system that need to be thought through.

dahart 5y ago

> No one thinks about moving the starting or ending point of the bridge midway through construction. […] But Hillel interviewed a civil engineer who said that they had to move a bridge! My local Department Of Transportation has this notice on the info page of the bridge construction project nearest to me: “This is a design-build project, meaning the design and construction will happen simultaneously, which allows DOT and the contractor to include the most innovative and current construction solutions while ensuring a quality product.”

tomcam 5y ago
I... that's... surely there's more context here? Nice work if you can get it, I guess!
- dahart 5y ago
  Well, working in software, I pretty much only have experience doing design-build work; I’ve never designed something in it’s entirety before building it (except maybe for a touch of hardware design, but even that is iterated and prototyped and tested and simulated…). I took this DOT page as a sign that maybe construction is becoming more like software over time, and I can no longer wax philosophical at cocktail parties about how they’re different. A little context perhaps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design–build https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design–build
  - tomcam 5y ago
    OK that all helped a lot. Thank you

Avalaxy 5y ago

What kind of lame parties does this guy go to? I expected an article about dope things to make a cocktail party more awesome. Like fireworks, or a poker table.

tomcam 5y ago
TIL people still actually have cocktail parties. Thought that was a boomer thing
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- fuzzer37 5y ago
  When you're young they're just called parties lmao.
- true_religion 5y ago
  All parties with food and drink but no other activity are basically being called cocktail parties now. If you want to be informal about it, it’s just hanging out.
- kerneloftruth 5y ago
  And I learned that the cool kids say "trad" for "traditional".
vincentmarle 5y ago
I bet you it doesn't even involve cocktails.
imwillofficial 5y ago
I vote for fireworks at my next party
- cjohnson318 5y ago
  It's all fun and games until the neighbor's gutter catches fire and the cops come out, but who knows, YMMV.

imwillofficial 5y ago

The author misses the point that at parties, people are talking to connect and socialize, not solve world hunger, despite the topic at hand.

tedunangst 5y ago
I think you're missing the point that this phenomenon is not exclusive to cocktail parties.
- imwillofficial 5y ago
  I think you’re missing the point that… Damn, I got nothing

newbie789 5y ago

transitivebs 5y ago

dunning kruger effect is as valid at cocktail parties as it is everywhere else

dahart 5y ago
Dunning Kruger isn’t particularly valid anywhere, but even if it were, you should re-read the paper because it demonstrates that people more confident in their abilities are statistically more competent; the correlation is positive. Other papers have shown reversals and/or demonstrated difficult tasks don’t exhibit the so-called DK effect. Nobody remembers the attempts to reproduce, no wonder science has a replication crisis. This is a good article about it explaining why the effects Dunning & Kruger measured are probably regression to the mean: https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-kruger-effect-is-and-isnt/ https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-... BTW, the sample size in the DK paper was tiny, it was voluntary, and it measured only Cornell undergrads (no participants were actually “incompetent” in a meaningful way). The authors were barely out of undergrad themselves at the time. The survey didn’t have people rate themselves, it had people rank themselves against other people they don’t know (think about this!). The tasks were extremely simple, like getting a joke (seriously! no discussion in the paper of what the actual joke(s) were) and basic English grammar (no mention of how many ESL participants there might have been). So many methodological red flags in the DK paper, and so many counter-examples immediately after it, it’s really truly astounding that it caught on. Apologies for unloading, but I’m hoping to help educate and make a dent in the casual mentions of DK because it’s so widely and completely misunderstood and also because it’s such bad science, it needs to be revealed as a bad example and not used for it’s non-existent explanatory powers.
- bee_rider 5y ago
  Huh. But doesn't this in some sense make it the perfect meta-example for not knowing enough to know how little we know?
  - dahart 5y ago
    Yeah, it does feel like there’s something kinda meta about it. ;) Except that because the paper’s data shows a positive correlation between self-ranking and skill, it seems like the meta-ness is mainly based on the misunderstood DK concept. So, I won’t call it the meta-DK-effect or claim it’s incompetence or even a cognitive bias necessarily. The article and this meta effect are perhaps just about making assumptions and jumping to conclusions, which humans at all skills levels do often and well. It doesn’t mean that anyone is incompetent or less skilled, it just means we love to guess based on our limited and available information & experience.

Hermitian909 5y ago

I see this in HN in regards to education. Education in the US leaves much to be desired, and there are many ways we could improve it, but the complaints here rarely touch on the most dire problems e.g. comments like "what we really need to do is bust the teacher's union" which is an insane complaint compared to the fact that most schools teach reading wrong as policy by mandating the three cueing system be taught instead of phonics[0]. [0] https://fivefromfive.com.au/the-three-cueing-system/ https://fivefromfive.com.au/the-three-cueing-system/

gnicholas 5y ago

+1 for the appendix reference to Scout Mindset. It's a really great read, with practical steps you can take to start down the path of scout mindset thinking. https://www.amazon.com/Scout-Mindset-Perils-Defensive-Thinking/dp/0735217556 https://www.amazon.com/Scout-Mindset-Perils-Defensive-Thinki...

JackFr 5y ago

I worked deep in the mortgage backed security industry for a decade before the financial crisis and for some years since. I know a lot about it, and some big events firsthand. I find that people are interested in my thoughts on the causes until they hear them: while there were some really bad actors at the margins, the bulk of the crisis was caused by many, many people making good-faith, rational decisions which in hindsight proved foolish. Of course I could be wrong — consciously or unconsciously I could simply be voicing my own bias. But I think at some level people prefer a simple narrative with a hero and a villain regardless of whether the narrative is true.

zzleeper 5y ago
I wonder if the same thing will be said about crypto or about current asset prices (e.g. TSLA mkt cap of +$1tn.. in what time horizon are they going to recoup that in actual profits?)
- di4na 5y ago
  Yes, and it is already being said. There are a lot of people talking of the problems and reasons behind "investing in Growth" that we have seen the past few decades instead of investing in Value
- llamataboot 5y ago
  Is there anyone /not/ saying that about crypto?
mhneu 5y ago
many, many people making good-faith, rational decisions which in hindsight proved foolish. Rational, yes, but rational only in the sense of "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay liquid". My experience is many MBS and finance people, during 2003-2008, knew that a ton of debt was garbage, that LTCM's blowup in 1998 showed massive structural weakness that was never repaired, and that a crash was going to come SOMETIME. But the problem is that the rational decision in such a market is to keep investing and making money on the irrational rise, because no one knows when the crash will come or how bad it will be. It's actually rational to keep buying trash debt when the crash timing is unpredictable. In the end, the finance people were actually correct to keep buying –– the gov't (that is, me you and every US taxpayer) bailed them out, and most of the traders did come out ahead after a bit of time.

rq1 5y ago

Where are the cocktails? I thought there would be some interesting cocktail ideas

soheil 5y ago

Yes this so much. Also true about when it comes to any subject that people feel like you "know" the solution or at least feel like they know more than the idiot next door. This happens so often, people see the tip of the iceberg and assume they know the shape of the whole thing. I think it's pretty logical to do this, however, otherwise how are we going to make sense of the world? We have to use whatever incomplete information we have to form a hypothesis of what is really true. Are we supposed to outsource our sense making to a third party? I think what Dan is suggesting here is even more dangerous than what the people at cocktail parties are doing. Namely, refrain from forming any conjectures about the state of the world because you could be wrong.

eyelidlessness 5y ago

(Disclaimer) I’m not fun at parties. I don’t think this is fun at parties.

supernova87a 5y ago

I have a counter/corollary(?) to the idea that often people don't know what they don't know or assume that their surface knowledge can accurately understand a field, and they should stop making such bold statements: If an executive with some great new idea or strategy not grounded in the full detail were to pay attention to the all the details, they might never try or get anything new done. Because if you listen to and empathize with all the details of how complicated something is and how there's this subtlety or that follow-on issue, you start to accept all the reasons it can't be done (either at all, or quickly). So in some cases, you only get progress because of persisting in ignorance that you can do something new that breaks the rules. Of course I don't mean doing something that is structurally or physically impossible -- just in cases where the legacy of "why it can't be done" has created inertia that stops progress if you accept it a little too much.

bradleyjg 5y ago

I’m sure this is true. But when a project is 7 years and billions of dollars over due (east side access in nyc, in this case but there are similar examples) it seems more than far for the people that have spent that money and have thus far gotten no benefits to spout ignorantly about why. Indulging us seems the least the responsible industries can do. I’m exchange I’m happy to listen to civil engineers and construction workers theories about why Tesla is taking so long to deliver the full self driving software they’ve been charging for.

nikisweeting 5y ago
I was all ready to get up in arms and disagree with you but after thinking about it more I actually really like this approach. I would be more than happy to hear a mechanical engineer or geotechnical engineer's takes on why my software project is bad. Perhaps most of the time their advice will be useless due to lack of context/experience, but if they are nice it's endearing, entertaining, and rarely--but still sometimes--helpful.

gundmc 5y ago

I came in looking for fun ideas for the next cocktail party and found an interesting opinion piece. I particularly enjoyed this as someone who has worked in both aerospace and software engineering.

TameAntelope 5y ago

I noticed how people tend to vastly underestimate a topic's complexity too, but I'm not sure what to do with it. I feel like a constant buzzkill when hanging out with people, and I do my best to hide it, but most of the time I end up thinking about how incomplete our conversation is, and how therefore useless/wasteful it is. In my more charitable moments, I think that it's good mental exercise, but it's hard to think generously about someone else when you hear them say superficial "I could do better" statements like the topic of this article. How could they be so naïve, to think that they can, casually, upend an entire field? It happens on Reddit (and HN) all the time, too. Every community centered around a creative work is lousy with, "Why didn't they just" style arguments. Also, not for nothing, but I've never heard the "building an airplane while flying it" analogy used to suggest software is harder than building an airplane. Pardon my cursing, but who the fuck thinks programming is harder than aerospace engineering??? Finally, I found this super duper hard to read all the way through, due to the lack of formatting. I'm assuming that decision is somehow intentional, but it's not a kind one. My eyes hurt. :(

FearNotDaniel 5y ago
> and how therefore useless/wasteful it is My suggestion here would be to think about the purpose of the conversation. The goal of cocktail party conversations is not to create working solutions to real world engineering problems. It is to create connections between people, and to have fun. Speculative but uninformed discussions about hard problems are indeed useful if they fulfil this goal. Let's face it, if all the "amateurs" in the room had enough insight to produce workable solutions, it would still be a "useless" conversation on a practical level because those people, working in unrelated fields, do not have the means or the opportunity to put their theories into practice.
- TameAntelope 5y ago
  Oh I enjoy bullshitting as much as the next person, I get bothered mostly when people genuinely don't think that's what we're doing. But yeah, I'm able to mostly suppress this feeling and live my life, but it's really annoying, to me, when people take themselves too seriously.

nikisweeting 5y ago

I feel like even the most egregious offenders I know of in this area are still aware that designing/building planes is far harder engineering than most software projects.

cycomanic 5y ago

A good friend worked as a the transport manager for for a smallish ecological diary producer. When the original owners sold the business, the new owners (a financial consortium with some food experience) brought in a new executive team in, who had previously worked together to create direct to consumer food startup (something like hello fresh IIRC). Initially my friend was very excited because the owners looked like they wanted to really grow the business. Unfortunately it became soon apparent that the execs mainly had "cocktail party ideas" about changes, "we created a new business in this area that didn't exist before, which is much harder than running an established business. therefore we know best. How hard can it be". So the production manager and my friend soon became the naysayers because they said when they thought things wouldn't work. Soon after they both were made redundant, but the business is now very close to going under. All this story just to say, that this is not just at cocktail parties, but also in work situations people like to discard established knowledge because they think they know how to "disrupt" .

raldi 5y ago

So what’s the actual reason that public transit projects are wildly more expensive and slower to build in the United States than in other countries?

ncmncm 5y ago
Most of the money is not being spent on things that advance the project. The people most involved don't want it ever to be finished; that is when the money stops. None of the money is wasted, as such; every penny goes into a pocket.
- raldi 5y ago
  If this is the true answer, why doesn’t it happen in other countries?
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    Things like it happen here and there. It took very long to build that Finnish nuke, which might be an example. It depends on the political conditions: typically, to get a big pot of money together needs support from a broad swath of supporters, who then each expect patronage, a piece of the pie. As long as the money is flowing, everybody involved stays happy, regardless of how much actual work is getting done. Even in the US, not all public-works projects are afflicted. Solar and wind power systems seem mostly not afflicted.
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      When it seems like the money might stop flowing, there is some motivation to actually deliver a result, if just to save face or avoid prosecution for fraud. Even if not, indictments are rare, and in any case none of the money is ever returned.

sampo 5y ago

Here's an opposite point of view: "Sometimes the Best Ideas Come from Outside Your Industry" https://hbr.org/2014/11/sometimes-the-best-ideas-come-from-outside-your-industry https://hbr.org/2014/11/sometimes-the-best-ideas-come-from-o...

acrump 5y ago

This reminds me of what Socrates said in his defense at his trial. He told the court that he was wise becase he knew the boundries of his own wisdom; and that when he would speak to experts in the city he found them only to be wise in their own fields, yet suffering with the falicy that they were wise in the fields of others. "At last I went to the artisans, for I was conscious that I knew nothing at all, as I may say, and I was sure that they knew many fine things; and in this I was not mistaken, for they did know many things of which I was ignorant, and in this they certainly were wiser than I was. But I observed that even the good artisans fell into the same error as the poets; because they were good workmen they thought that they also knew all sorts of high matters, and this defect in them overshadowed their wisdom" https://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/apology/full-text/apology/ https://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/apology/full-text/apol...

wink 5y ago

I think the author has a few too many misconceptions about the programmers' misconceptions. "How long will it take to implement search here?" "Wait, why does it take longer than a week, Google can do it". Things I've heard an actual Product Owner once say. Please tell the the one automobile engineer who was asked to make a car in a week. So yes, I absolutely believe that /some/ programmers will say that their work is so complicated and like engineering, there are just a lot of seemingly exaggerated examples that have actually happened. I'm not saying it's harder. I'm just saying there are classes of problems that should not happen in civil engineering. Project is halfway done, written in Python. Someone: "Can we not switch to Java?". I would equate that to "The metal bridge is halfway done, can we switch to wood?". This is not inferring that this is the most concerning problem in a problem, and that's my gripe with this article. And the moving bridge is also an exaggerated example taken for shock value. How often does that really happen? And would you put a random engineer of medium seniority in charge of this? Disclaimer: I am not saying programming is harder or special. I've worked on construction sites and I've seen my fair share of ridiculous requests. But people are often simply persuaded a lot easier if you point to a physical wall and explain the problem, versus software where you need to start explaining at the very beginning. Sadly, often also for customers or product managers.

jounker 5y ago
Counterpoint: The Berlin airport. They built the foundations, and then they decided to redesign it.
- wink 5y ago
  Yeah ok, but that one falls under "freak accident" in my book. Hard to think of a more spectacular failure in the recent past :)

jiveturkey 5y ago

a tale as old as time!

matsemann 5y ago

> The predictability of a true engineer’s world is an enviable thing. But ours is a world always in flux, where the laws of physics change weekly. Heh, I also disagree with this quote, but for a different reason than the author. I mean, what's nice about CS is that's it's pure, deterministic, straight forward. It's like doing basic physics problems and the text states "assume zero air resistance and zero friction". We have the simple laws of physics. I don't envy those having to deal with the messiness of the real world. They have it far harder than me as a programmer.

midenginedcoupe 5y ago

This could have just as easily been titled "HN comments". The amount of woefully uninformed soap-boxing on here is staggering!

chrisseaton 5y ago

These seem like the least-chill cocktail parties ever.

dfan 5y ago

There was a fun Hacker News post last year that consisted just of searching HN comments for the phrase "why not simply": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27415725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27415725

throwawayarnty 5y ago

Little knowledge is a dangerous thing. And as more and more information is distilled into sound bites, tweets, and simplified visualisations, I am afraid more and more people will spend their brain power acquiring little bits of knowledge, never going deeper than a 10-minute TED talk. The end result will be great cocktail party conversations, but very few people actually solving real problems.

Isamu 5y ago

More fun at a party to be had when you find out what a person’s true expertise is and probe that until you find something surprising. Doesn’t take long to find something that can change your views or offset your ignorance.

andmarios 5y ago

Most startups probably start as a cocktail party idea, so although the author is correct, he underestimates the value of the concept. Also, whilst it is intuitive that someone without expertise in a field is easy to get everything wrong, it is more interesting that often experts also get everything wrong. Sometimes this happens because the problem may affect an expert's field but belongs to another field, or the problem just exists from someone else's point of view. In Greece we refer to people who always know everything better than experts as couch coaches. :)

temptemptemp111 5y ago

spirographer 5y ago

The whole discussion of whether we live in a Matrix-like simulation falls into this category as well. There are so many layers of oversimplification at play in most peoples' conceptualization of a simulated universe that it is hard to even begin to have a conversation about it.