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Be careful how much credit you give them, I find they often speak with great confidence about things they clearly know nothing about.
by pogimabus 5y ago
Be careful how much credit you give them, I find they often speak with great confidence about things they clearly know nothing about.
- burnoutgal 5y agoGlad to see this perspective. I find the industry in general is full of very confident people who will try to bowl you over with their cursory understanding of topics.
- relativeadv 5y agoI find that in tech you run across more people than usual where because they are very intelligent and successful within various tech domains they think this also sets them up to uniquely be an expert at other domains. Politics, law, public health, economics, etc. This is not true.
- spacemanmatt 5y agoYeah, I took freshman sociology, and I don't even see that level of experience expressed often here.
- zozbot234 5y agoSociology is not really a social science. It deals in just-so stories, platitudes and bizarre musings. Science (of the non-experimental sort) is about making precise, rigorous arguments that can be checked for their soundness and assessed together with any available evidence.
- yunohn 5y agoYeah, I think this is exactly what the commenter meant - are you seriously beating the “social science is not a science” horse in this unrelated thread?
- j4yav 5y agoYes exactly, they sound just like that. And worse sometimes too, but that’s not a bad parody.
- karpierz 5y agoI can't tell if this is trying to demonstrate how HN users don't have a solid grasp of social sciences via parody, or a genuine post.
- Kye 5y agoI think you've confused popular attempts to over-fit the findings of sociology to social ills with sociology itself.
- spacemanmatt 5y agoFor reference, sociology is a statistical science. Like physics. It does seem like you are strictly unfamiliar with the practice of sociology.
- matsemann 5y agoBut also, it's not necessarily the same people being knowledgeable of everything. Reading HN it's easy to think everyone else is intimately familiar with the fine details of a microchip, is the CTO of a big business, is at the frontier of machine learning applications, contributes to the Linux kernel, has run medical trials, etc. Because for every topic here, there will be someone knowledgeable commenting. But it's different people for different subjects. So don't get impostor syndrome thinking everyone is so good at everything. That's one of the nice things about HN, though, that subject matter experts show up and discuss things.
- CoastalCoder 5y agoI'm glad you mentioned this, because I'm looking for a related term. Sometimes in discussions (often political ones), I see this pattern: 1. Person A and person B are both members of group G. 2. Person A advocates view P. 3. Person B advocates view Q, which is logically incompatible with P. 4. An outsider concludes that some persons in G are logically inconsistent, because "G has members who believe both P and Q". Is there a name for the fallacy in step 4? It reminds me a little of kettle logic[0], or the association fallacy [1], but it's clearly different. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kettle_logic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kettle_logic [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy
- mbrudd 5y ago100% this!
- ginnungagap 5y agoDefinitely this, everyone sounds like an expert to me in the programming/engineering/humanities threads until I see a one about mathematics (I am a mathematician) and I remember that it is just my ignorance of the other topics preventing me from being able to tell whether people actually know what they are talking about!
- matsemann 5y agoGell-Mann amnesia effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnesiaEffect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...
- ginnungagap 5y agoI wasn't aware this is a named phenomenon, thanks!
- dochtman 5y agoAka the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect: https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/ https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/
- Jensson 5y agoThis isn't a site for mathematicians though. HN is extremely naive about math, not about programming, I am experienced enough in both fields to tell the difference.
- Kye 5y agoI remember when I made my first HN account in 2010 or so. I felt so overwhelmed by how smart everyone seemed. Sometimes someone on HN still surprises me, but wow was I easily impressed back then.
- otterley 5y agoEspecially about the law. I really wish HNers would refrain from giving legal advice because it’s often wrong, sometimes dangerously so.