17 ms·

The silent majority of experts (2012)

309 points by bluedino 4y ago

planarhobbit 4y ago
> Yes, there are many people who blog and otherwise publicly discuss development methodologies and what they're working on, but there are even more people who don't. Blogging takes time, for example, and not everyone enjoys it. Other people are working on commercial products and can't divulge the inner workings of their code. There’s a subset of this silent majority who tried to contribute to discussion platforms but gave up when they saw prominent voices that had next to no idea what they were talking about being promoted, hailed, and so on. The loudest voice is rarely the most articulate, and for subject matter experts articulation, nuance, and other learned-through-experience things count for a lot, one would assume.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Almost certainly if you're good at blogging, speaking, self-promotion you're not the most expert in some other field. The cases where there's a cross-over are perhaps not surprisingly rare (Raymond Chen is a good one, John Carmack) or are indirect (Linus doesn't "blog" per se but some of the mailing list emails are as good as one). And if there's not something to "verify" the writer/performer, it can get wildly out of control. The streamers that claim to be good at the game they're playing can be verified (and many don't even need to be, it is entertainment after all) but the agile evangelist doesn't have the same way to prove it. If you try to say something that's not the "defacto thought" of the group, you have to be even better at all the above, which makes it even more likely that those who go against the grain remain silent.
  - bluedino 4y ago
    >> Almost certainly if you're good at blogging, speaking, self-promotion you're not the most expert in some other field. This would explain a lot of bad programming books.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Those can be even worse, because the publishing company is also not an expert and just wants to get a book out the door. e.g.: https://wozniak.ca/blog/2018/06/25/1/index.html https://wozniak.ca/blog/2018/06/25/1/index.html In this it is a writer who is arguably knowledgeable in one programming language (BASIC) writing a book about another (C) and getting fundamental things wrong. Being a domain expert in one even relatively close area doesn't mean it automatically applies in another.
  - a4isms 4y ago
    Here's a comment I made a few days ago here on HN about a blog post, it may be relevant: ————— The author is relating second-hand information. That’s useful, it’s good to have people who have a skill of curating business advice and pointing us in good directions. But my first-hand advice is to recognize the difference between: Alice: “I’m making five figures a month for five hours a week reselling five products.” And Bob: “People like Alice make as much as five figures a month for five hours a week reselling five products.” In the first case, Alice has direct experience with success. In the second case, the incentives are such that Bob is someone whose experience and expertise is in selecting stories that have verisimilitude, that is, things that sound true. And what makes something sound true? Quite often, something we want to be true sounds true even if it isn’t, and something we don’t want to be true doesn’t sound true, even if it is. Bob nearly always sounds more authoritative than Alice, because Bob’s business is sounding authoritative, whereas Alice’s business is being authoritative. Why doesn’t Alice always sound authoritative? Because she speaks the truth whether it appeals to our biases or opposes them, whether we want her truth to be true or not. Bob, on the other hand, is an authority on what people want to hear. Bob is just as expert in Bob’s business as Alice is in hers. Bob uses metrics and data to write headlines and even choose the most compelling adjectives to use in his posts. Bob sounds authoritative to people lacking expertise in whatever Bob is talking about. The Bobs of this world can (but don’t always) become “a poor man’s idea of a rich man, and a failure’s idea of a success,” because their customers are people early in their lives and careers. So what to do when a Bob suggests something is true? Well, we shouldn’t dismiss it. But let’s think of it the way we’d think of Bob referring a candidate for a job in our businesses. We might fast-track them into an interview, but we’d still interview the candidate. And so it must be with business advice. Bob pointing us to an idea is Bob referring an idea to us. Our job is to take Bob’s referral and still validate the idea by seeking original, authoritative expertise. Bob’s value is suggesting ideas to think about, not teaching us about business. p.s. I say all of the above as an authority on the subject: I’m a Bob. ——— https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31715485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31715485
    - bombcar 4y ago
      The other huge hidden danger is the Bobs of the world can generalize, intentionally or accidentally, a situation and make it seem that anyone can be an Alice; but it may be (and Alice may openly admit if you ask) that there's only room for one Alice, and her mechanism simply will not work for anyone else. The biggest example of this is in things that involve large amounts of luck (or are even totally luck-driven); think gambling or stock market picks or startups - the "winners" have a hard time distinguishing what they did from the luck involved, and often give too little to luck. If the Bobs are not drawing out the luck side of things but instead amplifying the apparent skills, it can be a huge disservice, but, hey, it's usually more popular than saying "it's luck".
- samstave 4y ago
  I know a number of "secret experts" -- one of which has been a good friend of mine for more than 20 years. He is an expert you have never heard of, but you have interacted with his efforts in everything from VoIP, streaming, ads, all sorts of stuff... He is a cowboy from texas with a stereotypical texas accent, looks like he works at a gas station, but can look at a PCB, take the labels of the chips on the board and the layout, and actually write linux drivers for said board. (HE ACTUALLY DID THIS) - but he will regularly tell me "goin hog huntin" in the most deadpan texas drawl... and this week was "went deep sea fishin. back in dallas." I am really lucky to be on a firstname call any time basis with this guy. There are TONs of them.
  - clairity 4y ago
    i grew up in the south but lived on the east and west coasts as an adult. my experience is that intelligence and aptitude are more evenly distributed than insecure city slickers would love to believe. there are homeless people in LA who can rejigger electric scooters for free rides in 2 minutes flat, and they didn't watch youtube to figure it out.
  - fleddr 4y ago
    I have a colleague similar to that. Although it's not a popular term, he truly is a super architect and 10 x coder. You can throw any problem at him and he'll solve it, fast and with quality. As part of this, he explores new technologies and seems to master them in hours or days at most, and it all looks so effortless. Even more rare for such a powerhouse of tech skill, he's no nerd. An excellent communicator with deep business insight. I often wonder about him, if you can do all that...if you can manage such absurd scope and complexity in your mind whilst it seems you're not even breaking a sweat...doesn't that mean you can do anything? Anything at all? Anyway, his online exposure: he has an email address, but don't expect a response. He has a smartphone but I never see him use it. He has no social media. If he would post online, he'd inevitably be recognized as a guru. But he won't, he goes home to his family. Not just smart, also wise.
- fleddr 4y ago
  You're absolutely right and this problem is getting worse and worse. As one example, Twitter has this concept of "Topics", which you can kind of see as a sub community. Take a topic like "Web development" and the grifters are constantly on top. They know exactly how to work the algorithms. They'll post something stupid like "HTML is not a programming language" to get maximum engagement. There's a rich playbook of such engagement patterns to win the game. And they do win. Same situation on Medium, where there's "Categories". They're all gamed and corrupted like this. The value adding voices are not heard, and will therefore give up.
- hinkley 4y ago
  I still recall the first time I worked on a successful project where the manager started talking about writing articles or a book about it. How important it is that we do X. Yes, X is important, but what's really saving our bacon is all of the people doing Y. The more you focus on X, the more the Y-focussed people are going to start wonder why they're here, since you don't appreciate their efforts. I mean you didn't even mention it in any of your articles... Let's see what happens when nobody does Y anymore, smart guy.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  I do it for myself[0]. It helps me to think about my methodologies, when I articulate them. Much of my work is basically "muscle memory." I do a great deal of stuff without a thought. This discussion reminds me of this posting, from three years ago[1]. [0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19877916 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19877916
dang 4y ago
Related: The Silent Majority of Experts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7015139 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7015139 - Jan 2014 (37 comments) The Silent Majority of Experts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4243573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4243573 - July 2012 (115 comments)
swatcoder 4y ago
A great point well made. And I think it’s especially important to keep in mind that we have a generational divide among experts even now, that introduces a bias to the particular expertise that gets shared. Not only have many deeply experienced, talented experts naturally shifted their surplus attention to other life responsibilities like families, health issues, etc — but many younger experts grew up with a social media fluency that makes engaging online more natural to them. So even without evaluating what’s said by each, you inevitably see a lot more of the opinions of these younger experts and less from the old greybeards with differently informed perspectives.
- bombcar 4y ago
  And the young are filled with vim and vigor, the older you are the less likely you want to have the same dang discussion for the hundredth time why rewriting the Linux kernel in "pop language of the week" is not a great use of time. The real hard part is keeping your mind open to newer ways without either spending all your time on them, or getting fed up with it.
blueflow 4y ago
This is sometimes a bit infuriating, because due to these online forums, there developed some "common sense" that is factually wrong. I can recount following misbeliefs from my head: - Wine is not an emulation - MS-DOS is not an OS because it cant do paging and virtual memory - Microprocessors are not Microcontrollers because they have paging There are also some tinier things like notorious NIH syndrome due to not reading documentation, like the tons of blog articles about SSH features that could all be replaced by ten minutes of reading ssh-keygen(1). I've seen that on IRC, Reddit and HN as well, and i ended up preferring official documentation over anything else what people online say. If this writing sounds like venting, it surely is.
- bombcar 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_(software) - "Wine (formerly a recursive backronym for Wine Is Not an Emulator, now just "Wine")" - depends on how technical you want to get about it, does emulation just mean translating one machine code into another, or can you "emulate library calls"? Official documentation can be a great source, but in things like ssh-keygen there are often just way too many options and so people want "just tell me how to do what I want to do". One of the reasons sane defaults are so important.
  - blueflow 4y ago
    Check out https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=emulation&rdfrom=Emulation https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=emulation&rdfrom... Its actually a pretty generic term that is used similarly like "imitation". You can see it used like that in xterm, which is a terminal emulator. For some reason, many people believe it means something like "virtual machine", to the extent that the Wine project needed to rename to avoid being understood as a virtual machine, which is was associated with really bad performance back then. > just tell me how to do what I want to do I think this attitude is part of the problem. Like, when you try to weld you need to know about many details like preventing heat-corrosion and inclusions, otherwise your seam is going to be unacceptably bad. Welders do have training for that reason, but yet we dont apply the same standards to computing.
insightcheck 4y ago
Yep. On a related note, when I was younger, I searched for advice from experts for how to develop expertise in studying and productivity on Reddit. It led to lots of highly-upvoted advice (including stuff like supplements, largely with few real benefits besides placebo), popular blogs by influencers (like Scott Young), and popular self-help books. However, the actual experts I knew in high school who later went on to great institutions like MIT or applied and got into extremely competitive investment banks didn't browse the internet very much, or relied on supplements and these books. Similar to the ideas expressed in the submitted article, these people didn't spend time online reading blogs and Reddit, or blogging/self-promoting themselves. They generally were involved in a sport (track and field or squash), spent little time online, and spent a lot of time using a lot of paper studying. They also were careful who they associated with as friends (they hung out with studious people). Less in one's control, their parents were financially successful or were in competitive positions (e.g. were professors or physicians), so they may have learned these strategies from them, versus inventing them independently. Long story short: there is absolutely a culture of improvement that is primarily offline and less visible, because people either don't record it, or people do record it and it doesn't get upvoted or ranked highly on Google searches. Examples of recorded good advice appeared on HN recently, shared by computer scientist Donald Knuth who is also usually offline: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31482116 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31482116
- bombcar 4y ago
  It's part of the reason the self-help and diet book section is so large; people love the idea that they can get what they want with one weird trick; but the reality is it's not very complicated, it's just hard.
  - dgb23 4y ago
    I think in many cases it might be hard but in an unfair way. I think some people are just wired differently. It is easy for them to stay focused and disciplined for longer, so they never worry about it or try to seek help and just do the work. People who do seek help often have some weaknesses that they cannot seem to overcome by themselves. They are vulnerable and they can be exploited by snake-oil salesmen. Some get stuck that way in a perpetuating, self indulging loop. However there are people who have gotten help and made real progress. Think of some of the hardest things one can do: dealing with addiction, overcoming crippling fear, radically changing bad habits etc. There's people who were weak and gotten strong. Some of them read self help books, some found social support. That's were the focus should be, not on the people who always walked the happy path and just "worked hard". Overcoming hopeless situations, stigma, bias, ego. That's actually hard.
bluedino 4y ago
This isn't limited to programming. Take automotive forums, for example. You will have someone go on all day about how a certain engine or something will not make a certain number of HP. They'll say they have never seen it, after all, they have visited all the websites and watched all the Youtube videos. Then someone that runs a performance shop will pipe in with, "Of course it's possible. We've built six of them this year alone. The owners just don't post their cars on the internet."
- drc500free 4y ago
  There's a weird parallel to the pizzagate kerfuffle. Lots of people who wanted to get to the "real truth" by only looking at online sources, like it's some sort of virtual escape room that's been pre-built with clues. Staring at google street view images and trying to find the pattern in all the store signs on the same block, coming up with bizarre circular logic around "cp" where references to pizza at a pizza parlor meant children were being abused. Finally one of them bothered to show up in person (with a rifle, to "save the children") and found... a neighborhood pizza shop with no basement. And when he went back online and said "hey guys, I checked it out and there's nothing there" they all decided he was a government plant. It's like people have forgotten the real world exists, and is the actual reality that's being referred to online.
  - jancsika 4y ago
    I'm not sure I see the parallel. In the first example, a forum poster was taking the absence of evidence to be evidence of absence. In fact I've never met a person who didn't have a story about making such a mistake, so I'd venture to guess we all do that at some point in our lives[1]. In your example, however, people were confusing the absence of evidence with an imagined preponderance of evidence. That's an error on a very different level, like accidentally joining a pyramid scheme or getting sick from eating an entire piece of plastic fruit. 1: See? :)
    - drc500free 4y ago
      I think I see the parallel as being more a streetlamp problem (looking for the keys under the streetlamp even though you dropped them in the yard, because there's no light in the yard). "Absence of evidence/evidence of absence" and "seeing patterns in random noise" are just two different ways brains mess up when confronted with empty sample data. The thing that's in common is a belief that if there was something to observe, it would necessarily be in the place you're looking. Maybe it's a form of map-territory confusion. I've seen it quite a lot professionally, whether it's "let's sell business travel via facebook rather than linkedin, because facebook has better analytics and conversion tracking" or "a disorder is only real once it's listed in the DSM-V" or "this UX issue can't be a real issue because all of our current customers say they are ok with it." People sometimes just pick a systematically wrong approach to learning about the world, leading to a wide range of silly outcomes.
maxk42 4y ago
I think about this constantly while reading Hacker News. So many articles and comments by people whose level of enthusiasm doesn't match their experience. Try to voice a comment that goes against the flow of that enthusiasm and you'll be downvoted to oblivion, even if you speak with more experience and context than the masses. I'm horrified by some of the stuff I see here and feel like it's often useless to speak out.
- deleted 4y ago
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- boris 4y ago
  "The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt." Bertrand Russell
- d23 4y ago
  I've become a lot more willing to burn my karma on here as of late. Not because I want to, per se, but what's the point of getting it if you can't spend it occasionally when you really have something you need to say?
  - RealityVoid 4y ago
    That, and, well, there isn't _really_ a cost to burning Karma, it's all the same anyway. I find it much better and more interesting to speak truthfully (while not being an asshole!) than just to go with the hive mind.
    - zionic 4y ago
      >I find it much better and more interesting to speak truthfully (while not being an asshole!) But that’s just it, the truth will always be offensive to someone. You’ll always be the asshole to “someone”. If we structure discourse around never being perceived as an asshole by anyone we effectively yield the zeitgeist to whoever is the biggest crybaby. It’s not just this site, this line of thinking has infected most western dialog.
pacetherace 4y ago
This is where I feel listening to talks at conferences is more important than participating in random online discussions (but that's what I am doing right now :D)
d23 4y ago
I can't help but think this way about nearly everything. Almost all compound, higher order effects are hidden from the naked eye and cursory glances. We tend to focus on superficial, simplistic explanations, or, at least, things that are imminently visible. Negative space is much larger and has more impact on our world but rarely gets much attention.
arbuge 4y ago
This comes to mind for me: https://observer.com/2011/05/keith-rabois-says-great-founders-dont-blog-bloggy-new-yorkers-appalled/ https://observer.com/2011/05/keith-rabois-says-great-founder...
systems_glitch 4y ago
I love that FORTH is the cited example :P
softwaredoug 4y ago
In my field (search) there is a strong strong bias towards cutting edge, machine learning, etc etc in conference talks and blogs (including my own). It's exciting to peer into the future and push the boundaries of what's possible. Not many people are blogging about the standard, block and tackle techniques that feel 'obvious' (yet aren't quite obvious to non-experts)
andi999 4y ago
Although with forth i would argue the experts were not a silent majority...
crispyambulance 4y ago
I am going to propose a radical idea: There is NO PATTERN. People reach mastery and expertise in all different kinds of ways. Some folks have it handed to them on a silver platter, others overcome outrageously unfair circumstances, some do it alone, some have mentors, some read-learn-do, some just do, some do it despite hating what they do, others do it out of love.
charlie0 4y ago
I've heard about this before. The very very best are people you've never heard of. Why? Because they spend nearly all their mental resources on perfecting their craft, not writing blogs or marketing themselves online (which is an entirely different skillset). Not to say that there aren't very good people who also write blogs or give talks on certain subjects. Just thinking about it from first principles. All things being equal, those that give 100% in one thing will edge out someone who split spent 90%/10% blogging/marketing on that same topic.
- robocat 4y ago
  Working alone prevents you from standing on the shoulders of the giants around you. Working alone prevents you from challenging yourself against the best and learning from them. Teaching others close to your skill level, forces you to understand your own skills and gives you more insight into changes you can make. In my experience, highly skilled people seem to be unusually skilled at a wide variety of disciplines, including soft-skills and apparently unrelated skills to the one they are known for. Edit: sure, there are a lot of bullshit bloggers and marketers. One signal of very talented people is they are good at filtering for good information. Or they can pay attention to bullshit and pick out the one useful insight. Or perhaps use bullshit as abstract noise to smash out interesting ideas or test themselves against. Edit 2: The problem is not that experts don’t publish, it is that “unskilled and unaware” is published in such abundance. I think Dan Luu writes about the problem very well: https://danluu.com/hn-comments/ https://danluu.com/hn-comments/ . . . I do think there is confirmation/selection bias that we only see the talented that write, but I also believe that the most talented communicate to better themselves, and those that don’t communicate are holding themselves back from their potential.
tomohawk 4y ago
It's really the silent majority of everyone. Very few people exhibit themselves on social media.
99_00 4y ago
You are reading an online discussion about how online discussions lack value.
YeBanKo 4y ago
This is survivorship biased and does not pertain to software or tech exclusively. Same think happens everywhere: from any niche informational space to rumors on social media. What is most interesting to me it can cut you twice, because you don’t see 2 things: other advice by silent expert, that can be as good or better, but also when most popular advice fails in practice for someone, other than the author. Thus not only you are missing out on not seeing the best, but you also maybe looking at something subpar, because there is no efficient feedback loop that would differentiate appropriately.
pavon 4y ago
On the other hand, the internet has exposed me to people who are highly skilled and blog about it who have taught me lessons I would have been unlikely to learn on my own, and would have never been able to learn from 1-on-1. Folks like Bruce Dawson, Brenden Gregg, Raymond Chen, Joel Spolsky, John Carmack, and many others. And people with strong experience to chime in on forums like HN not unfrequently. I've never had much issue taking popular opinion with a grain of salt (as least consciously), the main challenge I have is finding the right balance of time to spend online looking for the wheat in the chaff.
deleted 4y ago
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magic_hamster 4y ago
People who write blogs and post frequently sometimes think that everybody else is doing something similar. However, the more years I spend as a software engineer, the more obvious it becomes that the visible online presence is not even 1% of engineers (and not necessarily the best ones). Some people work very hard on their online presence, which is fine, but sometimes it seems like they're compensating for something. The really truly great engineers know that they are good, or at least above average, so they will always be in demand - they have no need to maintain ultra visible personas. Their CVs will probably get them wherever they want to go. Also, the best resource for expert advice is probably senior mentoring rather than blogs. Blogs are ok for exploratory reading but when you're in a pinch and you need an expert that understands your problem, the solution space and the stack you're on, you will be looking for a senior.
antipaul 4y ago
I believe this phenomenon to be very true in ML/AI today.
ggm 4y ago
This is very true. Self help books feed a mania for advice, and manage to imply the knowledge is pearls of wisdom when the truly wise are not reading or writing these books, or responding to the "how" question. I don't count myself amongst the wise btw. But I am at times surprised by how age masks foolishness, and people ask me for advice which I wouldn't trust! Richard Rhodes discusses the scientists at Los Alamos, confounding the more urbane partners: Fermi insisted on leading square dances at the saturday socials, despite not having danced the square in his life: he just spent some time beforehand watching how it was done. Apparently he did it perfectly. I consider that evidence of wisdom beyond words: He watched, he learned, he didn't ask. A scientists wife called Claus Fuchs "penny in the slot" because he said nothing, unless asked. He didn't volunteer. When you consider his role in history, maybe he was well schooled? A natural spy? Again, he didn't proffer advice, but he was very good at what he did (as were the Krogers, and many others. Whereas the amateurs recruited in the US were by and large bumbling fools) I suspect spying-wisdom, like other wisdom, is not found in self-help books.
infologics 4y ago
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Apex-Consultant 4y ago
[flagged]
usrbinbash 4y ago
> That we're unable to learn from the silent majority of experts casts an unusual light upon online discussions. This has been a problem with (and not just) online discussions since...well...ever. What is discussed the loudest or most frequent, isn't necessarily the most important topic in the field.
CM30 4y ago
This article has a great point, though it definitely also depends on the field in question. The best web developers/software engineers may or may not be visible online, since they could be working on internal stuff at companies with NDAs, or dislike marketing, or whateber else. But the top experts for a lot of 'internet first' fields will likely overlap heavily with those who are loudest about them online. The world's foremost experts in say, blogging, SEO or content marketing will probably be extremely active online, since their expertise is in large part about marketing themselves and their work. The best speedrunners, game modders and others in such communities will probably have a visible online presence, since the community only exists on the internet and someone who does well at one of these things has a decent chance of getting a YouTube/Twitch career out of it. And on the contrary, I suspect a lot of fields with an older demographic will probably be more representative of the situation in this article, where many of the people who are best at them aren't used to the internet or social media, and stick to doing their work/hobby offline instead. So it's very much based on the field. The world's best carpenter or sprinter might not be on Reddit or Twitter that much if at all, whereas the world's best Super Mario 64 player is probably going to have quite the internet presence.
DeathArrow 4y ago
Sometimes I have the impression that just small, vocal minorities of software developers are visible. Some frontend developers using the latest trends in JS frameworks. Some FAANG developers doing hyped stuff. Some mobile developers who can effectively promote their apps. Some AI and ML developers doing the stuff that is reported in newspapers. All the rest are unseen. The millions of developers using C++, C# and Java everyday to make the actual World work, are unseen. People working on financial transactions, traffic management systems, security systems, telecom and so on, don't have a voice. All that people that are hard at work so we can keep our current ways of living, are not seen. They aren't doing fancy things, they aren't using latest fads, they aren't being promoted in news bits.
gradschoolfail 4y ago
I think the best counterexample of this, much more so than HN, is MathOverflow. Recognized experts, like Terence Tao and of the respective subfields, aren’t silent at all. They speak seriously, and more importantly, sincerely and humbly. This is less true for the other science & (trad) engineering stackexchanges, but still quite true.

309 points by bluedino 4y ago

> Yes, there are many people who blog and otherwise publicly discuss development methodologies and what they're working on, but there are even more people who don't. Blogging takes time, for example, and not everyone enjoys it. Other people are working on commercial products and can't divulge the inner workings of their code. There’s a subset of this silent majority who tried to contribute to discussion platforms but gave up when they saw prominent voices that had next to no idea what they were talking about being promoted, hailed, and so on. The loudest voice is rarely the most articulate, and for subject matter experts articulation, nuance, and other learned-through-experience things count for a lot, one would assume.

bombcar 4y ago
Almost certainly if you're good at blogging, speaking, self-promotion you're not the most expert in some other field. The cases where there's a cross-over are perhaps not surprisingly rare (Raymond Chen is a good one, John Carmack) or are indirect (Linus doesn't "blog" per se but some of the mailing list emails are as good as one). And if there's not something to "verify" the writer/performer, it can get wildly out of control. The streamers that claim to be good at the game they're playing can be verified (and many don't even need to be, it is entertainment after all) but the agile evangelist doesn't have the same way to prove it. If you try to say something that's not the "defacto thought" of the group, you have to be even better at all the above, which makes it even more likely that those who go against the grain remain silent.
- bluedino 4y ago
  >> Almost certainly if you're good at blogging, speaking, self-promotion you're not the most expert in some other field. This would explain a lot of bad programming books.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Those can be even worse, because the publishing company is also not an expert and just wants to get a book out the door. e.g.: https://wozniak.ca/blog/2018/06/25/1/index.html https://wozniak.ca/blog/2018/06/25/1/index.html In this it is a writer who is arguably knowledgeable in one programming language (BASIC) writing a book about another (C) and getting fundamental things wrong. Being a domain expert in one even relatively close area doesn't mean it automatically applies in another.
- a4isms 4y ago
  Here's a comment I made a few days ago here on HN about a blog post, it may be relevant: ————— The author is relating second-hand information. That’s useful, it’s good to have people who have a skill of curating business advice and pointing us in good directions. But my first-hand advice is to recognize the difference between: Alice: “I’m making five figures a month for five hours a week reselling five products.” And Bob: “People like Alice make as much as five figures a month for five hours a week reselling five products.” In the first case, Alice has direct experience with success. In the second case, the incentives are such that Bob is someone whose experience and expertise is in selecting stories that have verisimilitude, that is, things that sound true. And what makes something sound true? Quite often, something we want to be true sounds true even if it isn’t, and something we don’t want to be true doesn’t sound true, even if it is. Bob nearly always sounds more authoritative than Alice, because Bob’s business is sounding authoritative, whereas Alice’s business is being authoritative. Why doesn’t Alice always sound authoritative? Because she speaks the truth whether it appeals to our biases or opposes them, whether we want her truth to be true or not. Bob, on the other hand, is an authority on what people want to hear. Bob is just as expert in Bob’s business as Alice is in hers. Bob uses metrics and data to write headlines and even choose the most compelling adjectives to use in his posts. Bob sounds authoritative to people lacking expertise in whatever Bob is talking about. The Bobs of this world can (but don’t always) become “a poor man’s idea of a rich man, and a failure’s idea of a success,” because their customers are people early in their lives and careers. So what to do when a Bob suggests something is true? Well, we shouldn’t dismiss it. But let’s think of it the way we’d think of Bob referring a candidate for a job in our businesses. We might fast-track them into an interview, but we’d still interview the candidate. And so it must be with business advice. Bob pointing us to an idea is Bob referring an idea to us. Our job is to take Bob’s referral and still validate the idea by seeking original, authoritative expertise. Bob’s value is suggesting ideas to think about, not teaching us about business. p.s. I say all of the above as an authority on the subject: I’m a Bob. ——— https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31715485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31715485
  - bombcar 4y ago
    The other huge hidden danger is the Bobs of the world can generalize, intentionally or accidentally, a situation and make it seem that anyone can be an Alice; but it may be (and Alice may openly admit if you ask) that there's only room for one Alice, and her mechanism simply will not work for anyone else. The biggest example of this is in things that involve large amounts of luck (or are even totally luck-driven); think gambling or stock market picks or startups - the "winners" have a hard time distinguishing what they did from the luck involved, and often give too little to luck. If the Bobs are not drawing out the luck side of things but instead amplifying the apparent skills, it can be a huge disservice, but, hey, it's usually more popular than saying "it's luck".
samstave 4y ago
I know a number of "secret experts" -- one of which has been a good friend of mine for more than 20 years. He is an expert you have never heard of, but you have interacted with his efforts in everything from VoIP, streaming, ads, all sorts of stuff... He is a cowboy from texas with a stereotypical texas accent, looks like he works at a gas station, but can look at a PCB, take the labels of the chips on the board and the layout, and actually write linux drivers for said board. (HE ACTUALLY DID THIS) - but he will regularly tell me "goin hog huntin" in the most deadpan texas drawl... and this week was "went deep sea fishin. back in dallas." I am really lucky to be on a firstname call any time basis with this guy. There are TONs of them.
- clairity 4y ago
  i grew up in the south but lived on the east and west coasts as an adult. my experience is that intelligence and aptitude are more evenly distributed than insecure city slickers would love to believe. there are homeless people in LA who can rejigger electric scooters for free rides in 2 minutes flat, and they didn't watch youtube to figure it out.
- fleddr 4y ago
  I have a colleague similar to that. Although it's not a popular term, he truly is a super architect and 10 x coder. You can throw any problem at him and he'll solve it, fast and with quality. As part of this, he explores new technologies and seems to master them in hours or days at most, and it all looks so effortless. Even more rare for such a powerhouse of tech skill, he's no nerd. An excellent communicator with deep business insight. I often wonder about him, if you can do all that...if you can manage such absurd scope and complexity in your mind whilst it seems you're not even breaking a sweat...doesn't that mean you can do anything? Anything at all? Anyway, his online exposure: he has an email address, but don't expect a response. He has a smartphone but I never see him use it. He has no social media. If he would post online, he'd inevitably be recognized as a guru. But he won't, he goes home to his family. Not just smart, also wise.
fleddr 4y ago
You're absolutely right and this problem is getting worse and worse. As one example, Twitter has this concept of "Topics", which you can kind of see as a sub community. Take a topic like "Web development" and the grifters are constantly on top. They know exactly how to work the algorithms. They'll post something stupid like "HTML is not a programming language" to get maximum engagement. There's a rich playbook of such engagement patterns to win the game. And they do win. Same situation on Medium, where there's "Categories". They're all gamed and corrupted like this. The value adding voices are not heard, and will therefore give up.
hinkley 4y ago
I still recall the first time I worked on a successful project where the manager started talking about writing articles or a book about it. How important it is that we do X. Yes, X is important, but what's really saving our bacon is all of the people doing Y. The more you focus on X, the more the Y-focussed people are going to start wonder why they're here, since you don't appreciate their efforts. I mean you didn't even mention it in any of your articles... Let's see what happens when nobody does Y anymore, smart guy.
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
I do it for myself[0]. It helps me to think about my methodologies, when I articulate them. Much of my work is basically "muscle memory." I do a great deal of stuff without a thought. This discussion reminds me of this posting, from three years ago[1]. [0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19877916 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19877916

dang 4y ago

Related: The Silent Majority of Experts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7015139 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7015139 - Jan 2014 (37 comments) The Silent Majority of Experts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4243573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4243573 - July 2012 (115 comments)

swatcoder 4y ago

A great point well made. And I think it’s especially important to keep in mind that we have a generational divide among experts even now, that introduces a bias to the particular expertise that gets shared. Not only have many deeply experienced, talented experts naturally shifted their surplus attention to other life responsibilities like families, health issues, etc — but many younger experts grew up with a social media fluency that makes engaging online more natural to them. So even without evaluating what’s said by each, you inevitably see a lot more of the opinions of these younger experts and less from the old greybeards with differently informed perspectives.

bombcar 4y ago
And the young are filled with vim and vigor, the older you are the less likely you want to have the same dang discussion for the hundredth time why rewriting the Linux kernel in "pop language of the week" is not a great use of time. The real hard part is keeping your mind open to newer ways without either spending all your time on them, or getting fed up with it.

blueflow 4y ago

This is sometimes a bit infuriating, because due to these online forums, there developed some "common sense" that is factually wrong. I can recount following misbeliefs from my head: - Wine is not an emulation - MS-DOS is not an OS because it cant do paging and virtual memory - Microprocessors are not Microcontrollers because they have paging There are also some tinier things like notorious NIH syndrome due to not reading documentation, like the tons of blog articles about SSH features that could all be replaced by ten minutes of reading ssh-keygen(1). I've seen that on IRC, Reddit and HN as well, and i ended up preferring official documentation over anything else what people online say. If this writing sounds like venting, it surely is.

bombcar 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_(software) - "Wine (formerly a recursive backronym for Wine Is Not an Emulator, now just "Wine")" - depends on how technical you want to get about it, does emulation just mean translating one machine code into another, or can you "emulate library calls"? Official documentation can be a great source, but in things like ssh-keygen there are often just way too many options and so people want "just tell me how to do what I want to do". One of the reasons sane defaults are so important.
- blueflow 4y ago
  Check out https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=emulation&rdfrom=Emulation https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=emulation&rdfrom... Its actually a pretty generic term that is used similarly like "imitation". You can see it used like that in xterm, which is a terminal emulator. For some reason, many people believe it means something like "virtual machine", to the extent that the Wine project needed to rename to avoid being understood as a virtual machine, which is was associated with really bad performance back then. > just tell me how to do what I want to do I think this attitude is part of the problem. Like, when you try to weld you need to know about many details like preventing heat-corrosion and inclusions, otherwise your seam is going to be unacceptably bad. Welders do have training for that reason, but yet we dont apply the same standards to computing.

insightcheck 4y ago

Yep. On a related note, when I was younger, I searched for advice from experts for how to develop expertise in studying and productivity on Reddit. It led to lots of highly-upvoted advice (including stuff like supplements, largely with few real benefits besides placebo), popular blogs by influencers (like Scott Young), and popular self-help books. However, the actual experts I knew in high school who later went on to great institutions like MIT or applied and got into extremely competitive investment banks didn't browse the internet very much, or relied on supplements and these books. Similar to the ideas expressed in the submitted article, these people didn't spend time online reading blogs and Reddit, or blogging/self-promoting themselves. They generally were involved in a sport (track and field or squash), spent little time online, and spent a lot of time using a lot of paper studying. They also were careful who they associated with as friends (they hung out with studious people). Less in one's control, their parents were financially successful or were in competitive positions (e.g. were professors or physicians), so they may have learned these strategies from them, versus inventing them independently. Long story short: there is absolutely a culture of improvement that is primarily offline and less visible, because people either don't record it, or people do record it and it doesn't get upvoted or ranked highly on Google searches. Examples of recorded good advice appeared on HN recently, shared by computer scientist Donald Knuth who is also usually offline: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31482116 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31482116

bombcar 4y ago
It's part of the reason the self-help and diet book section is so large; people love the idea that they can get what they want with one weird trick; but the reality is it's not very complicated, it's just hard.
- dgb23 4y ago
  I think in many cases it might be hard but in an unfair way. I think some people are just wired differently. It is easy for them to stay focused and disciplined for longer, so they never worry about it or try to seek help and just do the work. People who do seek help often have some weaknesses that they cannot seem to overcome by themselves. They are vulnerable and they can be exploited by snake-oil salesmen. Some get stuck that way in a perpetuating, self indulging loop. However there are people who have gotten help and made real progress. Think of some of the hardest things one can do: dealing with addiction, overcoming crippling fear, radically changing bad habits etc. There's people who were weak and gotten strong. Some of them read self help books, some found social support. That's were the focus should be, not on the people who always walked the happy path and just "worked hard". Overcoming hopeless situations, stigma, bias, ego. That's actually hard.

bluedino 4y ago

This isn't limited to programming. Take automotive forums, for example. You will have someone go on all day about how a certain engine or something will not make a certain number of HP. They'll say they have never seen it, after all, they have visited all the websites and watched all the Youtube videos. Then someone that runs a performance shop will pipe in with, "Of course it's possible. We've built six of them this year alone. The owners just don't post their cars on the internet."

drc500free 4y ago
There's a weird parallel to the pizzagate kerfuffle. Lots of people who wanted to get to the "real truth" by only looking at online sources, like it's some sort of virtual escape room that's been pre-built with clues. Staring at google street view images and trying to find the pattern in all the store signs on the same block, coming up with bizarre circular logic around "cp" where references to pizza at a pizza parlor meant children were being abused. Finally one of them bothered to show up in person (with a rifle, to "save the children") and found... a neighborhood pizza shop with no basement. And when he went back online and said "hey guys, I checked it out and there's nothing there" they all decided he was a government plant. It's like people have forgotten the real world exists, and is the actual reality that's being referred to online.
- jancsika 4y ago
  I'm not sure I see the parallel. In the first example, a forum poster was taking the absence of evidence to be evidence of absence. In fact I've never met a person who didn't have a story about making such a mistake, so I'd venture to guess we all do that at some point in our lives[1]. In your example, however, people were confusing the absence of evidence with an imagined preponderance of evidence. That's an error on a very different level, like accidentally joining a pyramid scheme or getting sick from eating an entire piece of plastic fruit. 1: See? :)
  - drc500free 4y ago
    I think I see the parallel as being more a streetlamp problem (looking for the keys under the streetlamp even though you dropped them in the yard, because there's no light in the yard). "Absence of evidence/evidence of absence" and "seeing patterns in random noise" are just two different ways brains mess up when confronted with empty sample data. The thing that's in common is a belief that if there was something to observe, it would necessarily be in the place you're looking. Maybe it's a form of map-territory confusion. I've seen it quite a lot professionally, whether it's "let's sell business travel via facebook rather than linkedin, because facebook has better analytics and conversion tracking" or "a disorder is only real once it's listed in the DSM-V" or "this UX issue can't be a real issue because all of our current customers say they are ok with it." People sometimes just pick a systematically wrong approach to learning about the world, leading to a wide range of silly outcomes.

maxk42 4y ago

I think about this constantly while reading Hacker News. So many articles and comments by people whose level of enthusiasm doesn't match their experience. Try to voice a comment that goes against the flow of that enthusiasm and you'll be downvoted to oblivion, even if you speak with more experience and context than the masses. I'm horrified by some of the stuff I see here and feel like it's often useless to speak out.

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boris 4y ago
"The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt." Bertrand Russell
d23 4y ago
I've become a lot more willing to burn my karma on here as of late. Not because I want to, per se, but what's the point of getting it if you can't spend it occasionally when you really have something you need to say?
- RealityVoid 4y ago
  That, and, well, there isn't _really_ a cost to burning Karma, it's all the same anyway. I find it much better and more interesting to speak truthfully (while not being an asshole!) than just to go with the hive mind.
  - zionic 4y ago
    >I find it much better and more interesting to speak truthfully (while not being an asshole!) But that’s just it, the truth will always be offensive to someone. You’ll always be the asshole to “someone”. If we structure discourse around never being perceived as an asshole by anyone we effectively yield the zeitgeist to whoever is the biggest crybaby. It’s not just this site, this line of thinking has infected most western dialog.

pacetherace 4y ago

This is where I feel listening to talks at conferences is more important than participating in random online discussions (but that's what I am doing right now :D)

d23 4y ago

I can't help but think this way about nearly everything. Almost all compound, higher order effects are hidden from the naked eye and cursory glances. We tend to focus on superficial, simplistic explanations, or, at least, things that are imminently visible. Negative space is much larger and has more impact on our world but rarely gets much attention.

arbuge 4y ago

This comes to mind for me: https://observer.com/2011/05/keith-rabois-says-great-founders-dont-blog-bloggy-new-yorkers-appalled/ https://observer.com/2011/05/keith-rabois-says-great-founder...

systems_glitch 4y ago

I love that FORTH is the cited example :P

softwaredoug 4y ago

In my field (search) there is a strong strong bias towards cutting edge, machine learning, etc etc in conference talks and blogs (including my own). It's exciting to peer into the future and push the boundaries of what's possible. Not many people are blogging about the standard, block and tackle techniques that feel 'obvious' (yet aren't quite obvious to non-experts)

andi999 4y ago

Although with forth i would argue the experts were not a silent majority...

crispyambulance 4y ago

I am going to propose a radical idea: There is NO PATTERN. People reach mastery and expertise in all different kinds of ways. Some folks have it handed to them on a silver platter, others overcome outrageously unfair circumstances, some do it alone, some have mentors, some read-learn-do, some just do, some do it despite hating what they do, others do it out of love.

charlie0 4y ago

I've heard about this before. The very very best are people you've never heard of. Why? Because they spend nearly all their mental resources on perfecting their craft, not writing blogs or marketing themselves online (which is an entirely different skillset). Not to say that there aren't very good people who also write blogs or give talks on certain subjects. Just thinking about it from first principles. All things being equal, those that give 100% in one thing will edge out someone who split spent 90%/10% blogging/marketing on that same topic.

robocat 4y ago
Working alone prevents you from standing on the shoulders of the giants around you. Working alone prevents you from challenging yourself against the best and learning from them. Teaching others close to your skill level, forces you to understand your own skills and gives you more insight into changes you can make. In my experience, highly skilled people seem to be unusually skilled at a wide variety of disciplines, including soft-skills and apparently unrelated skills to the one they are known for. Edit: sure, there are a lot of bullshit bloggers and marketers. One signal of very talented people is they are good at filtering for good information. Or they can pay attention to bullshit and pick out the one useful insight. Or perhaps use bullshit as abstract noise to smash out interesting ideas or test themselves against. Edit 2: The problem is not that experts don’t publish, it is that “unskilled and unaware” is published in such abundance. I think Dan Luu writes about the problem very well: https://danluu.com/hn-comments/ https://danluu.com/hn-comments/ . . . I do think there is confirmation/selection bias that we only see the talented that write, but I also believe that the most talented communicate to better themselves, and those that don’t communicate are holding themselves back from their potential.

tomohawk 4y ago

It's really the silent majority of everyone. Very few people exhibit themselves on social media.

99_00 4y ago

You are reading an online discussion about how online discussions lack value.

YeBanKo 4y ago

This is survivorship biased and does not pertain to software or tech exclusively. Same think happens everywhere: from any niche informational space to rumors on social media. What is most interesting to me it can cut you twice, because you don’t see 2 things: other advice by silent expert, that can be as good or better, but also when most popular advice fails in practice for someone, other than the author. Thus not only you are missing out on not seeing the best, but you also maybe looking at something subpar, because there is no efficient feedback loop that would differentiate appropriately.

pavon 4y ago

On the other hand, the internet has exposed me to people who are highly skilled and blog about it who have taught me lessons I would have been unlikely to learn on my own, and would have never been able to learn from 1-on-1. Folks like Bruce Dawson, Brenden Gregg, Raymond Chen, Joel Spolsky, John Carmack, and many others. And people with strong experience to chime in on forums like HN not unfrequently. I've never had much issue taking popular opinion with a grain of salt (as least consciously), the main challenge I have is finding the right balance of time to spend online looking for the wheat in the chaff.

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magic_hamster 4y ago

People who write blogs and post frequently sometimes think that everybody else is doing something similar. However, the more years I spend as a software engineer, the more obvious it becomes that the visible online presence is not even 1% of engineers (and not necessarily the best ones). Some people work very hard on their online presence, which is fine, but sometimes it seems like they're compensating for something. The really truly great engineers know that they are good, or at least above average, so they will always be in demand - they have no need to maintain ultra visible personas. Their CVs will probably get them wherever they want to go. Also, the best resource for expert advice is probably senior mentoring rather than blogs. Blogs are ok for exploratory reading but when you're in a pinch and you need an expert that understands your problem, the solution space and the stack you're on, you will be looking for a senior.

antipaul 4y ago

I believe this phenomenon to be very true in ML/AI today.

ggm 4y ago

This is very true. Self help books feed a mania for advice, and manage to imply the knowledge is pearls of wisdom when the truly wise are not reading or writing these books, or responding to the "how" question. I don't count myself amongst the wise btw. But I am at times surprised by how age masks foolishness, and people ask me for advice which I wouldn't trust! Richard Rhodes discusses the scientists at Los Alamos, confounding the more urbane partners: Fermi insisted on leading square dances at the saturday socials, despite not having danced the square in his life: he just spent some time beforehand watching how it was done. Apparently he did it perfectly. I consider that evidence of wisdom beyond words: He watched, he learned, he didn't ask. A scientists wife called Claus Fuchs "penny in the slot" because he said nothing, unless asked. He didn't volunteer. When you consider his role in history, maybe he was well schooled? A natural spy? Again, he didn't proffer advice, but he was very good at what he did (as were the Krogers, and many others. Whereas the amateurs recruited in the US were by and large bumbling fools) I suspect spying-wisdom, like other wisdom, is not found in self-help books.

infologics 4y ago

[dead]

Apex-Consultant 4y ago

[flagged]

usrbinbash 4y ago

> That we're unable to learn from the silent majority of experts casts an unusual light upon online discussions. This has been a problem with (and not just) online discussions since...well...ever. What is discussed the loudest or most frequent, isn't necessarily the most important topic in the field.

CM30 4y ago

This article has a great point, though it definitely also depends on the field in question. The best web developers/software engineers may or may not be visible online, since they could be working on internal stuff at companies with NDAs, or dislike marketing, or whateber else. But the top experts for a lot of 'internet first' fields will likely overlap heavily with those who are loudest about them online. The world's foremost experts in say, blogging, SEO or content marketing will probably be extremely active online, since their expertise is in large part about marketing themselves and their work. The best speedrunners, game modders and others in such communities will probably have a visible online presence, since the community only exists on the internet and someone who does well at one of these things has a decent chance of getting a YouTube/Twitch career out of it. And on the contrary, I suspect a lot of fields with an older demographic will probably be more representative of the situation in this article, where many of the people who are best at them aren't used to the internet or social media, and stick to doing their work/hobby offline instead. So it's very much based on the field. The world's best carpenter or sprinter might not be on Reddit or Twitter that much if at all, whereas the world's best Super Mario 64 player is probably going to have quite the internet presence.

DeathArrow 4y ago

Sometimes I have the impression that just small, vocal minorities of software developers are visible. Some frontend developers using the latest trends in JS frameworks. Some FAANG developers doing hyped stuff. Some mobile developers who can effectively promote their apps. Some AI and ML developers doing the stuff that is reported in newspapers. All the rest are unseen. The millions of developers using C++, C# and Java everyday to make the actual World work, are unseen. People working on financial transactions, traffic management systems, security systems, telecom and so on, don't have a voice. All that people that are hard at work so we can keep our current ways of living, are not seen. They aren't doing fancy things, they aren't using latest fads, they aren't being promoted in news bits.

gradschoolfail 4y ago

I think the best counterexample of this, much more so than HN, is MathOverflow. Recognized experts, like Terence Tao and of the respective subfields, aren’t silent at all. They speak seriously, and more importantly, sincerely and humbly. This is less true for the other science & (trad) engineering stackexchanges, but still quite true.