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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 lo

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.
  - insightcheck 4y ago
    >"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." Absolutely. I've also personally benefitted from some self-help books, though I've read many other self-help books that seemed to be useful at the time, but were ultimately forgettable and likely a distraction from issues I would have been better off directly taking of. A good heuristic I've found is to prefer self-help books written by academics over influencers (anyone with a marketing background or associated with the word "guru"). Good books included those written by BJ Fogg (professor at Stanford) on habits, David Burns on useful versus self-defeating beliefs (psychiatrist and professor also affiliated with Stanford), and to a less extent Cal Newport (computer science professor at Georgetown). As a side note, Cal Newport's advice was generally good, but — though I may be misremembering — his advice appeared to mostly be useful for people who already have a very clear goal and strong motivation about what to do, and didn't really struggle with self-defeating beliefs, close relationships that were unhealthy in life, or people who had fallen behind in mathematics skill development.
  - nradov 4y ago
    I'm skeptical about most people being wired differently. Almost anyone can greatly increase their ability to stay focused and disciplined. Those are learned skills and mainly a matter of building good habits. But sometimes people need to fail hard first due to lack of focus and discipline in order to gain the motivation necessary to improve. https://davidgoggins.com/book/ https://davidgoggins.com/book/
    - bombcar 4y ago
      There are people who are "wired differently" but as with many things, there's majority who insist they are and it's the source of their failings don't actually have a major issue. It's a similar thing with dieting, the number of people who have gone to the trouble of actually counting every calorie they eat, restricting themselves to a certain amount to lose weight, and not lost weight is pretty small. But the number who tell themselves that they've done it is much higher.
- mmcgaha 4y ago
  Sometimes there really is a "one weird trick" that can help people. I used to get stuck on problems and it would cripple my productivity. A programmer with two decades more experience than me noticed what I was doing and gave me the best advice of my career. If you are interested in the solution, you can signup for my . . . Seriously though the answer was to just do something else. Don't sit around thinking about the problem; just do something else and the problem will be easier to solve the next time you try to solve it.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    That's the problem - the self help books often have good actionable advice just like the diet books do; but it can be summed up in a few paragraphs. Most of the book is often trying to convince someone it's worth doing, or providing ways to get around procrastination, etc that might prevent it. But as you've shown, often a good mentor can do just as well, or better.
    - pseudalopex 4y ago
      Many people reading self help books would prefer a good mentor. Books are easier to find.
  - bluedino 4y ago
    >> Sometimes there really is a "one weird trick" that can help people. I used to get stuck on problems and it would cripple my productivity. A programmer with two decades more experience than me noticed what I was doing and gave me the best advice of my career. If you could make that part about 5 minutes longer you'll have a future in YouTube commercials
  - criddell 4y ago
    The wait until tomorrow advice works well when learning a musical instrument too (at least in the beginning). I still really can't play my guitar, but when I'm trying to learn something new, I work on the hard part until I stop making progress then take a break. Often, the next day I can get a little further.
  - 4y ago
- closeparen 4y ago
  Several times in my life I have seen what I thought were crises of willpower turn on silly contingent circumstances. * Huge procrastination problem in college melted away as soon as I started working 9-5 in an office. * Couldn't run 5 minutes, until I incidentally started wearing a smart-watch, tried running again, and noticed the heart rate monitor telling me to slow down. * Doom-scrolling trances easily broken by shutting down the computer or putting the phone out of arm's reach. I don't think any particular advice in the self-help genre is likely to be true, but these "one weird trick" style solutions do keep on working for me.
nathias 4y ago
reddit is a system where a guy with 100 IQ decides what is best for all, it isn't that suprising that it doesn't work well for anything more complex or nouanced
- LordDragonfang 4y ago
  I have to wonder whether the average IQ on reddit is higher or lower than the general population average, because based on my experience there, I could see arguments for either direction.
  - monkeybutton 4y ago
    With 50M DAU its going to be the population average, no?
    - dan-robertson 4y ago
      There’s surely still some selection effects, eg younger (average iq scores have gone up over time), college-educated, more literate (ok this one is questionable for Reddit), and so on.
  - nathias 4y ago
    I'm sure its average, but the self-reported IQ might be way higher ...
- LeifCarrotson 4y ago
  Where 100 guys with 100 IQ decide what is best for all, which may or may not be better than one guy with 120.
  - walkhour 4y ago
    This is indeed the relevant question. There are similar scenarios where the answer is the 100 guys, like some markets, that when organized centrally by "smart" people, they stop working.
  - 4y ago
peterangular 4y ago
> 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. As I grow older, I see a huge divide between those who have/had parental support vs those who don't/didn't. It doesn't even take financially or professionally successful parents. Many of my peers had middle-class parents working normal jobs who just loved unconditionally + put effort forward... the difference between them and those who had less than ideal upbringings is typically vast. Having loving parents who teach, model, and promote healthy discipline habits is paramount for a kid's success. Unfortunately many children don't win that lottery.
- plonk 4y ago
  > Many of my peers had middle-class parents working normal jobs who just loved unconditionally + put effort forward... the difference between them and those who had less than ideal upbringings is typically vast. Do you mean their career success, or their personalities in general?
  - peterangular 4y ago
    Both. Positive upbringings helped those folks navigate everything in life better from simple chores like laundry, to relationships, to school, to careers... etc. People are more healthy when they're in an environment that promotes emotional/educational growth vs. when they're forced into a survival mentality. Those who had the opportunity to grow in safety have an easier time socially vs. those who had to navigate turbulent childhoods. Much of it is just trust
    - creakingstairs 4y ago
      I always didn’t understand how some of people were so positive/nice all the time and I thought they were really good at faking it. Then one time I spent a bit of time with their family and immediately understood why. > Much of it is just trust You are absolutely right. There was so much trust between the kids and the parent. You could tell from the way they act and talk around each other. That experience was very enlightening for me.
mathattack 4y ago
Yes. Generally people giving advice publicly are in the advice business, not the business on which they are advising. I worked with a Salesperson who got fired for non-performance, who then reinvented themselves as a Sales guru by publicly giving tons of advice. People who are experts in their business (as opposed to being advice folks) tend to give it quietly 1 on 1 to people they trust. It’s a Close Friend game rather than an Acquaintance game.
- hbn 4y ago
  "Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach."
  - zhengyi13 4y ago
    Please don't perpetuate the misuse of this phrase, which is so often used to denigrate those with expertise and desire trying so hard to pass them on. Consider the possibility, say, in a guild context: those who can, do. They work for the guild, and do whatever the guild does. Those who can't, from age, infirmity, injury: they teach, passing on knowledge and wisdom.
  - photik 4y ago
    In my experience this is likely one half of a principle in which there are at least as many examples of people who can do things really well, but have no idea how to pedagogically transmit the building blocks of their domain understanding to others in a tractionable way. Maybe a more wholistic take on this is something like: 'Those that can't do, teach, and those that can't teach would really be doing everyone a huge favor if they would just go do somewhere.' If this is a more complete take, it suggests to me that the master/apprentice paradigm existed for so long for a reason; masters have spent their lives specializing narrowly, not necessarily transmitting their understanding, thus the deconstruction of their expertise is only accessible via osmosis over time, because essentially they can't teach.
  - Uehreka 4y ago
    As a former teacher who is currently by all accounts a fairly capable software developer, this saying drives me up a wall. I took 2 years out of my life to work for almost nothing so I could share my love of math and programming with the next generation. That I eventually gave in and moved into software engineering to make money says far more about my lack of altruism than my competence then or now. But forget me, I taught in a cushy city post, I know some people in the peace corps (I taught abroad) who are still in the game, teaching math and English out in the sticks, sometimes having to build or maintain their own school buildings and learning the local language with no assistance. The idea that the defining trait of teachers is a lack of competence is laughable.
tester756 4y ago
>didn't browse the internet very much I see it other way Internet allows you to discuss everything you want with various people from your industry I think it allows you to become better not only faster, but also makes you more aware of different perspectives Why wouldn't you want to do so?
- vlunkr 4y ago
  The point of the article is that experts don't always hang out on the internet. There's a small cross-section of people who are truly experts at something, and also blog or discuss it in online forums. So yeah, you can talk to people from the industry online, but how do you know if their advice is worth anything?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- bena 4y ago
  You realize what you did here, right? You said you disagreed with the experiences of the OP and essentially the article. Posited as evidence that your view was correct based on your opinion on what you perceive as the advantages of the internet. Then treated your opinion as a fact that would be crazy to be argued against. It's true. The internet does allow for easy communication between people. It does contain a whole lot of information. You can get the documents to most things. You can access most information quickly. But that information doesn't require commentary. And it's not a guarantee that the people you want to talk to want to talk to you. If I want to learn Rust, I don't go to a Rust forum, I look up the Rust documentation. If I want to know how to do something Rust, I search for the specific information. Oftentimes, my issue is a faulty assumption about how something works or not knowing the exact name of the method I want to call. Once again, that's not something I need personal interaction for. The very last thing I do, is ask people on the internet. Not out of any misguided misanthropy, but just because it's hardly ever needed.
  - nescioquid 4y ago
    I think it is reasonable to rebut the premise of an argument (in fact, if the reasoning of the argument is sound, that seems to be the only basis on which a rebuttal can be formulated). Article Premise: [the internet provides] an intersection of the people working on interesting things and who like to write about it--and that's not the whole story. Article Conclusion: Your time may better spent getting in there and trying things rather than reading about what other people think. tester756: I think [the internet] allows you to become better not only faster, but also makes you more aware of different perspectives Charitably reading, I understand tester756 to be saying that in fact, that intersection is broad enough that the article's conclusion doesn't readily follow. Did tester756 provide enough of a warrant for the rebuttal? Maybe, maybe not. Frankly I don't think this article warrants a high degree of rigor to comment on it, though, so I think it's fine.
bena 4y ago
This largely tracks with my own opinions on certain things. Mostly why moderation eventually fails and how social interaction doesn't scale well. People doing shit don't have time for bullshit. If you have hours to dedicate defending your pet fan theory online, you clearly aren't using those hours to do anything meaningful. And I'm not talking side-hustle-gotta-make-that-bread kind of stuff, I'm talking about just more fulfilling pursuits in general. Learning an instrument, tinkering with projects with no other goal but messing around, reading, etc. So while you think you may have "won" the argument about whether or not Superman can beat Wolverine, the truth is the other person left because you and the discussion in general wasn't worth their time. And they don't need your validation. They find fulfillment in the stuff they do outside of the internet.
- clairity 4y ago
  > "...the truth is the other person left because you and the discussion in general wasn't worth their time. And they don't need your validation. They find fulfillment in the stuff they do outside of the internet." yup. i almost never go back and forth more than a couple times with anyone here, because it's most common that the other person is bullshitting, and i don't really need or want that. if i argue a point, i want the other person to bring something new to the table that i didn't know before, not rehash tired old platitudes. relatedly, experts don't need to claim for themselves the term "expert", and folks who start conversations with their credentials have already "lost" the discussion, so to speak. if your arguments can't stand on their own merits, proffering a credential won't help.
JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> these people didn't spend time online reading blogs and Reddit, or blogging/self-promoting themselves Or they’re online, they’re just not talking about what they’re experts in. Because they don’t want to spend their free time teaching a 101 class.
- pvarangot 4y ago
  The main reason why I don't usually talk seriously about what I'm an expert in on Reddit is that I sometimes can't deal with the cringe from the replies, usually it's ok but it's been really bad a couple times and that just pushed me off. Now when I am commenting on something I consider myself an expert of it's usually jokes and sarcasm. Reddit is seriously full of teenagers LARPing as adults, or adults stoned to the point where they basically are behaving like teenagers... not that I have anything against that. When you start seeing it like that it's much easy to get what you want from it, like when I realized The Economist is mostly idealist very smart mid 20s college graduates on their first serious job.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    Places like HN and Reddit are fun for things one has an understanding of but not expertise in. You can hash out arguments, get corrected when wrong and genuinely learn from the experience. For matters I have expertise in, I know the other experts. They’re more rewarding conversation on those topics.
  - Claude_Shannon 4y ago
    In their defence, often there's no way of telling who is expert and who is faking. Though it applies to almost everywhere online.
jollybean 4y ago
" Less in one's control, their parents were financially successful or were in competitive positions" Yeah that's 50% right there and 'learning strategies' is only a part of it. The other 'strategy' is 'being rich' or 'connected' or knowing a few arcane insights that do not amount to 'competitive strategies' so much as 'inside knowledge'. "Long story short: there is absolutely a culture of improvement that is primarily offline and less visible" Let's not conflate 'climbing the social ladder' with 'improvement'.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
hinkley 4y ago
It's practically a game for me at this point to just 'roll with it' when I have a raft of mutually consistent ideas, and 3 of them get upvoted, and the last one gets ignored completely, or once in a while downvoted to oblivion. The most important lessons are the counterintuitive ones - if they were all intuitive, you wouldn't need to be taught them, and the pain and loss of figuring them out organically might be extreme. If someone is earnestly asking, you should hit them with some knowledge, not drop populist nonsense they can find on the front page of Google. But it can often be a case of subtlety - planting enough of an idea that they can chew on it and accept this new reality at their own pace, rather than blurting out the 'answer' that nobody likes to look at. Not unlike how explaining some great movies to people makes them sound unpalatable. Just watch it, you'll like it.
magic_hamster 4y ago
Sad as it may sound, your upbringing is the key to most things, while the opportunities given to you (mostly by your parents' financial ability) complete this picture. When I took EE in University, everybody's parents were engineers or another form of STEM. Which also means they are not doing too bad in money and assets. The best, most accomplished researchers I know all had a parent coming from a similar background, giving them extra lessons from a young age, so they were always a couple of years ahead of their class. This stuff doesn't come from nowhere. Today I firmly believe that even a mildly talented person would go much further ahead with the right upbringing and opportunity than a potentially much more talented person who had to learn everything the hard way.
- CodeSgt 4y ago
  I largely agree. I had a very bad upbringing, as did most of my childhood and teenage friends. I've just in the past year or two managed to "break the cycle", but it wasn't (isn't) easy. Now that most people in my life are themselves successful professionals, getting glimpses into their family life and childhood is surreal. It's a completely different culture, typically a much, much, much healthier one. It's shocking how many people don't consciously acknowledge this fundamental chasm between people.
sharadov 4y ago
I disagree, it depends on the subreddit - a subreddit that discusses supplements is by it's very nature going to be populated with snake oilsmen selling remedies or doofuses who believe them. Similarly self-help books. You have provided examples of domains where charlatans are most likely to operate. I have learned a lot from user communities in reddit and hackernews. And hopefully contributed back as well. There are folk who have domain expertise and have time on hand and are hungry to contribute. You need to find them and pick their brains.
- insightcheck 4y ago
  >“There are folk who have domain expertise and have time on hand and are hungry to contribute.” There are great people willing to share who do exist, though there is a selection bias where experts with certain values and beliefs are far more likely to post than experts with minority views about technical subjects. From the article on popular beliefs in online communities at the time: “Just because looking down your nose at C++ or Perl is the popular opinion doesn't mean that those languages aren't being used by very smart folks to build amazing, finely crafted software. An appealing theory that gets frantically upvoted may have well-understood but non-obvious drawbacks.” The view expressed in the article, which I agree with, is that there are experts with minority views on technical topics, who are difficult to find on forums. >“You have provided examples of domains where charlatans are most likely to operate.” I agree that you’re unlikely to find these kinds of life advice on technical niche subreddits (like on r/compilers). However, let’s say a user is a young person looking for life advice. This subject would typically be off-topic on r/compilers and similar forums, so it’s off to more lifestyle-oriented forums (like r/decidingtobebetter or r/selfimprovement). >“a subreddit that discusses supplements is by it's very nature going to be populated with snake oilsmen selling remedies or doofuses who believe them. Similarly self-help books.” This isn’t wrong, and there has since been more awareness of paid marketing on subreddit. However, it’s non-obvious to new users, especially young people. If legitimately useful comments get lots of upvotes, there’s an effect where the ones promoting self-help books and supplements seem credible too. For lifestyle advice in particular, sticking to smaller technical communities may not yield useful discussion. Going to other online communities leads to the problem you’ve described. By process of elimination, it’s viable to start observing and talking with people in real life.
simonebrunozzi 4y ago
I came back to this thread the day after reading it, specifically to upvote your comment. It seems quite obvious, but it's brilliant nonetheless.
duxup 4y ago
The internet expert phenomenon is brutal. I'll ask a question online and get a superficial answer. It gets all the upvotes or whatever because everyone else has heard some of the stuff in the reply. It's ... not always wrong, but also very generic / not REALLY an answer. I really want to say "Yeah I watch the Discovery Channel too bro... I saw that episode, but that really doesn't answer my question, those circumstances don't necessarily cause that result." (Discovery Channel is probably outdated but it is often what I want to say). I often come to HN because you can ask such a question and generally folks think it through a few steps before answering. Elsewhere it is internet expert hell...

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.
- insightcheck 4y ago
  >"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." Absolutely. I've also personally benefitted from some self-help books, though I've read many other self-help books that seemed to be useful at the time, but were ultimately forgettable and likely a distraction from issues I would have been better off directly taking of. A good heuristic I've found is to prefer self-help books written by academics over influencers (anyone with a marketing background or associated with the word "guru"). Good books included those written by BJ Fogg (professor at Stanford) on habits, David Burns on useful versus self-defeating beliefs (psychiatrist and professor also affiliated with Stanford), and to a less extent Cal Newport (computer science professor at Georgetown). As a side note, Cal Newport's advice was generally good, but — though I may be misremembering — his advice appeared to mostly be useful for people who already have a very clear goal and strong motivation about what to do, and didn't really struggle with self-defeating beliefs, close relationships that were unhealthy in life, or people who had fallen behind in mathematics skill development.
- nradov 4y ago
  I'm skeptical about most people being wired differently. Almost anyone can greatly increase their ability to stay focused and disciplined. Those are learned skills and mainly a matter of building good habits. But sometimes people need to fail hard first due to lack of focus and discipline in order to gain the motivation necessary to improve. https://davidgoggins.com/book/ https://davidgoggins.com/book/
  - bombcar 4y ago
    There are people who are "wired differently" but as with many things, there's majority who insist they are and it's the source of their failings don't actually have a major issue. It's a similar thing with dieting, the number of people who have gone to the trouble of actually counting every calorie they eat, restricting themselves to a certain amount to lose weight, and not lost weight is pretty small. But the number who tell themselves that they've done it is much higher.
mmcgaha 4y ago
Sometimes there really is a "one weird trick" that can help people. I used to get stuck on problems and it would cripple my productivity. A programmer with two decades more experience than me noticed what I was doing and gave me the best advice of my career. If you are interested in the solution, you can signup for my . . . Seriously though the answer was to just do something else. Don't sit around thinking about the problem; just do something else and the problem will be easier to solve the next time you try to solve it.
- bombcar 4y ago
  That's the problem - the self help books often have good actionable advice just like the diet books do; but it can be summed up in a few paragraphs. Most of the book is often trying to convince someone it's worth doing, or providing ways to get around procrastination, etc that might prevent it. But as you've shown, often a good mentor can do just as well, or better.
  - pseudalopex 4y ago
    Many people reading self help books would prefer a good mentor. Books are easier to find.
- bluedino 4y ago
  >> Sometimes there really is a "one weird trick" that can help people. I used to get stuck on problems and it would cripple my productivity. A programmer with two decades more experience than me noticed what I was doing and gave me the best advice of my career. If you could make that part about 5 minutes longer you'll have a future in YouTube commercials
- criddell 4y ago
  The wait until tomorrow advice works well when learning a musical instrument too (at least in the beginning). I still really can't play my guitar, but when I'm trying to learn something new, I work on the hard part until I stop making progress then take a break. Often, the next day I can get a little further.
- 4y ago
closeparen 4y ago
Several times in my life I have seen what I thought were crises of willpower turn on silly contingent circumstances. * Huge procrastination problem in college melted away as soon as I started working 9-5 in an office. * Couldn't run 5 minutes, until I incidentally started wearing a smart-watch, tried running again, and noticed the heart rate monitor telling me to slow down. * Doom-scrolling trances easily broken by shutting down the computer or putting the phone out of arm's reach. I don't think any particular advice in the self-help genre is likely to be true, but these "one weird trick" style solutions do keep on working for me.

nathias 4y ago

reddit is a system where a guy with 100 IQ decides what is best for all, it isn't that suprising that it doesn't work well for anything more complex or nouanced

LordDragonfang 4y ago
I have to wonder whether the average IQ on reddit is higher or lower than the general population average, because based on my experience there, I could see arguments for either direction.
- monkeybutton 4y ago
  With 50M DAU its going to be the population average, no?
  - dan-robertson 4y ago
    There’s surely still some selection effects, eg younger (average iq scores have gone up over time), college-educated, more literate (ok this one is questionable for Reddit), and so on.
- nathias 4y ago
  I'm sure its average, but the self-reported IQ might be way higher ...
LeifCarrotson 4y ago
Where 100 guys with 100 IQ decide what is best for all, which may or may not be better than one guy with 120.
- walkhour 4y ago
  This is indeed the relevant question. There are similar scenarios where the answer is the 100 guys, like some markets, that when organized centrally by "smart" people, they stop working.
- 4y ago

peterangular 4y ago

> 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. As I grow older, I see a huge divide between those who have/had parental support vs those who don't/didn't. It doesn't even take financially or professionally successful parents. Many of my peers had middle-class parents working normal jobs who just loved unconditionally + put effort forward... the difference between them and those who had less than ideal upbringings is typically vast. Having loving parents who teach, model, and promote healthy discipline habits is paramount for a kid's success. Unfortunately many children don't win that lottery.

plonk 4y ago
> Many of my peers had middle-class parents working normal jobs who just loved unconditionally + put effort forward... the difference between them and those who had less than ideal upbringings is typically vast. Do you mean their career success, or their personalities in general?
- peterangular 4y ago
  Both. Positive upbringings helped those folks navigate everything in life better from simple chores like laundry, to relationships, to school, to careers... etc. People are more healthy when they're in an environment that promotes emotional/educational growth vs. when they're forced into a survival mentality. Those who had the opportunity to grow in safety have an easier time socially vs. those who had to navigate turbulent childhoods. Much of it is just trust
  - creakingstairs 4y ago
    I always didn’t understand how some of people were so positive/nice all the time and I thought they were really good at faking it. Then one time I spent a bit of time with their family and immediately understood why. > Much of it is just trust You are absolutely right. There was so much trust between the kids and the parent. You could tell from the way they act and talk around each other. That experience was very enlightening for me.

mathattack 4y ago

Yes. Generally people giving advice publicly are in the advice business, not the business on which they are advising. I worked with a Salesperson who got fired for non-performance, who then reinvented themselves as a Sales guru by publicly giving tons of advice. People who are experts in their business (as opposed to being advice folks) tend to give it quietly 1 on 1 to people they trust. It’s a Close Friend game rather than an Acquaintance game.

hbn 4y ago
"Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach."
- zhengyi13 4y ago
  Please don't perpetuate the misuse of this phrase, which is so often used to denigrate those with expertise and desire trying so hard to pass them on. Consider the possibility, say, in a guild context: those who can, do. They work for the guild, and do whatever the guild does. Those who can't, from age, infirmity, injury: they teach, passing on knowledge and wisdom.
- photik 4y ago
  In my experience this is likely one half of a principle in which there are at least as many examples of people who can do things really well, but have no idea how to pedagogically transmit the building blocks of their domain understanding to others in a tractionable way. Maybe a more wholistic take on this is something like: 'Those that can't do, teach, and those that can't teach would really be doing everyone a huge favor if they would just go do somewhere.' If this is a more complete take, it suggests to me that the master/apprentice paradigm existed for so long for a reason; masters have spent their lives specializing narrowly, not necessarily transmitting their understanding, thus the deconstruction of their expertise is only accessible via osmosis over time, because essentially they can't teach.
- Uehreka 4y ago
  As a former teacher who is currently by all accounts a fairly capable software developer, this saying drives me up a wall. I took 2 years out of my life to work for almost nothing so I could share my love of math and programming with the next generation. That I eventually gave in and moved into software engineering to make money says far more about my lack of altruism than my competence then or now. But forget me, I taught in a cushy city post, I know some people in the peace corps (I taught abroad) who are still in the game, teaching math and English out in the sticks, sometimes having to build or maintain their own school buildings and learning the local language with no assistance. The idea that the defining trait of teachers is a lack of competence is laughable.

tester756 4y ago

>didn't browse the internet very much I see it other way Internet allows you to discuss everything you want with various people from your industry I think it allows you to become better not only faster, but also makes you more aware of different perspectives Why wouldn't you want to do so?

vlunkr 4y ago
The point of the article is that experts don't always hang out on the internet. There's a small cross-section of people who are truly experts at something, and also blog or discuss it in online forums. So yeah, you can talk to people from the industry online, but how do you know if their advice is worth anything?
- deleted 4y ago
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bena 4y ago
You realize what you did here, right? You said you disagreed with the experiences of the OP and essentially the article. Posited as evidence that your view was correct based on your opinion on what you perceive as the advantages of the internet. Then treated your opinion as a fact that would be crazy to be argued against. It's true. The internet does allow for easy communication between people. It does contain a whole lot of information. You can get the documents to most things. You can access most information quickly. But that information doesn't require commentary. And it's not a guarantee that the people you want to talk to want to talk to you. If I want to learn Rust, I don't go to a Rust forum, I look up the Rust documentation. If I want to know how to do something Rust, I search for the specific information. Oftentimes, my issue is a faulty assumption about how something works or not knowing the exact name of the method I want to call. Once again, that's not something I need personal interaction for. The very last thing I do, is ask people on the internet. Not out of any misguided misanthropy, but just because it's hardly ever needed.
- nescioquid 4y ago
  I think it is reasonable to rebut the premise of an argument (in fact, if the reasoning of the argument is sound, that seems to be the only basis on which a rebuttal can be formulated). Article Premise: [the internet provides] an intersection of the people working on interesting things and who like to write about it--and that's not the whole story. Article Conclusion: Your time may better spent getting in there and trying things rather than reading about what other people think. tester756: I think [the internet] allows you to become better not only faster, but also makes you more aware of different perspectives Charitably reading, I understand tester756 to be saying that in fact, that intersection is broad enough that the article's conclusion doesn't readily follow. Did tester756 provide enough of a warrant for the rebuttal? Maybe, maybe not. Frankly I don't think this article warrants a high degree of rigor to comment on it, though, so I think it's fine.

bena 4y ago

This largely tracks with my own opinions on certain things. Mostly why moderation eventually fails and how social interaction doesn't scale well. People doing shit don't have time for bullshit. If you have hours to dedicate defending your pet fan theory online, you clearly aren't using those hours to do anything meaningful. And I'm not talking side-hustle-gotta-make-that-bread kind of stuff, I'm talking about just more fulfilling pursuits in general. Learning an instrument, tinkering with projects with no other goal but messing around, reading, etc. So while you think you may have "won" the argument about whether or not Superman can beat Wolverine, the truth is the other person left because you and the discussion in general wasn't worth their time. And they don't need your validation. They find fulfillment in the stuff they do outside of the internet.

clairity 4y ago
> "...the truth is the other person left because you and the discussion in general wasn't worth their time. And they don't need your validation. They find fulfillment in the stuff they do outside of the internet." yup. i almost never go back and forth more than a couple times with anyone here, because it's most common that the other person is bullshitting, and i don't really need or want that. if i argue a point, i want the other person to bring something new to the table that i didn't know before, not rehash tired old platitudes. relatedly, experts don't need to claim for themselves the term "expert", and folks who start conversations with their credentials have already "lost" the discussion, so to speak. if your arguments can't stand on their own merits, proffering a credential won't help.

JumpCrisscross 4y ago

> these people didn't spend time online reading blogs and Reddit, or blogging/self-promoting themselves Or they’re online, they’re just not talking about what they’re experts in. Because they don’t want to spend their free time teaching a 101 class.

pvarangot 4y ago
The main reason why I don't usually talk seriously about what I'm an expert in on Reddit is that I sometimes can't deal with the cringe from the replies, usually it's ok but it's been really bad a couple times and that just pushed me off. Now when I am commenting on something I consider myself an expert of it's usually jokes and sarcasm. Reddit is seriously full of teenagers LARPing as adults, or adults stoned to the point where they basically are behaving like teenagers... not that I have anything against that. When you start seeing it like that it's much easy to get what you want from it, like when I realized The Economist is mostly idealist very smart mid 20s college graduates on their first serious job.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  Places like HN and Reddit are fun for things one has an understanding of but not expertise in. You can hash out arguments, get corrected when wrong and genuinely learn from the experience. For matters I have expertise in, I know the other experts. They’re more rewarding conversation on those topics.
- Claude_Shannon 4y ago
  In their defence, often there's no way of telling who is expert and who is faking. Though it applies to almost everywhere online.

jollybean 4y ago

" Less in one's control, their parents were financially successful or were in competitive positions" Yeah that's 50% right there and 'learning strategies' is only a part of it. The other 'strategy' is 'being rich' or 'connected' or knowing a few arcane insights that do not amount to 'competitive strategies' so much as 'inside knowledge'. "Long story short: there is absolutely a culture of improvement that is primarily offline and less visible" Let's not conflate 'climbing the social ladder' with 'improvement'.

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hinkley 4y ago

It's practically a game for me at this point to just 'roll with it' when I have a raft of mutually consistent ideas, and 3 of them get upvoted, and the last one gets ignored completely, or once in a while downvoted to oblivion. The most important lessons are the counterintuitive ones - if they were all intuitive, you wouldn't need to be taught them, and the pain and loss of figuring them out organically might be extreme. If someone is earnestly asking, you should hit them with some knowledge, not drop populist nonsense they can find on the front page of Google. But it can often be a case of subtlety - planting enough of an idea that they can chew on it and accept this new reality at their own pace, rather than blurting out the 'answer' that nobody likes to look at. Not unlike how explaining some great movies to people makes them sound unpalatable. Just watch it, you'll like it.

magic_hamster 4y ago

Sad as it may sound, your upbringing is the key to most things, while the opportunities given to you (mostly by your parents' financial ability) complete this picture. When I took EE in University, everybody's parents were engineers or another form of STEM. Which also means they are not doing too bad in money and assets. The best, most accomplished researchers I know all had a parent coming from a similar background, giving them extra lessons from a young age, so they were always a couple of years ahead of their class. This stuff doesn't come from nowhere. Today I firmly believe that even a mildly talented person would go much further ahead with the right upbringing and opportunity than a potentially much more talented person who had to learn everything the hard way.

CodeSgt 4y ago
I largely agree. I had a very bad upbringing, as did most of my childhood and teenage friends. I've just in the past year or two managed to "break the cycle", but it wasn't (isn't) easy. Now that most people in my life are themselves successful professionals, getting glimpses into their family life and childhood is surreal. It's a completely different culture, typically a much, much, much healthier one. It's shocking how many people don't consciously acknowledge this fundamental chasm between people.

sharadov 4y ago

I disagree, it depends on the subreddit - a subreddit that discusses supplements is by it's very nature going to be populated with snake oilsmen selling remedies or doofuses who believe them. Similarly self-help books. You have provided examples of domains where charlatans are most likely to operate. I have learned a lot from user communities in reddit and hackernews. And hopefully contributed back as well. There are folk who have domain expertise and have time on hand and are hungry to contribute. You need to find them and pick their brains.

insightcheck 4y ago
>“There are folk who have domain expertise and have time on hand and are hungry to contribute.” There are great people willing to share who do exist, though there is a selection bias where experts with certain values and beliefs are far more likely to post than experts with minority views about technical subjects. From the article on popular beliefs in online communities at the time: “Just because looking down your nose at C++ or Perl is the popular opinion doesn't mean that those languages aren't being used by very smart folks to build amazing, finely crafted software. An appealing theory that gets frantically upvoted may have well-understood but non-obvious drawbacks.” The view expressed in the article, which I agree with, is that there are experts with minority views on technical topics, who are difficult to find on forums. >“You have provided examples of domains where charlatans are most likely to operate.” I agree that you’re unlikely to find these kinds of life advice on technical niche subreddits (like on r/compilers). However, let’s say a user is a young person looking for life advice. This subject would typically be off-topic on r/compilers and similar forums, so it’s off to more lifestyle-oriented forums (like r/decidingtobebetter or r/selfimprovement). >“a subreddit that discusses supplements is by it's very nature going to be populated with snake oilsmen selling remedies or doofuses who believe them. Similarly self-help books.” This isn’t wrong, and there has since been more awareness of paid marketing on subreddit. However, it’s non-obvious to new users, especially young people. If legitimately useful comments get lots of upvotes, there’s an effect where the ones promoting self-help books and supplements seem credible too. For lifestyle advice in particular, sticking to smaller technical communities may not yield useful discussion. Going to other online communities leads to the problem you’ve described. By process of elimination, it’s viable to start observing and talking with people in real life.

simonebrunozzi 4y ago

I came back to this thread the day after reading it, specifically to upvote your comment. It seems quite obvious, but it's brilliant nonetheless.

duxup 4y ago

The internet expert phenomenon is brutal. I'll ask a question online and get a superficial answer. It gets all the upvotes or whatever because everyone else has heard some of the stuff in the reply. It's ... not always wrong, but also very generic / not REALLY an answer. I really want to say "Yeah I watch the Discovery Channel too bro... I saw that episode, but that really doesn't answer my question, those circumstances don't necessarily cause that result." (Discovery Channel is probably outdated but it is often what I want to say). I often come to HN because you can ask such a question and generally folks think it through a few steps before answering. Elsewhere it is internet expert hell...