6 ms·

Armchair scientists

105 points by pilif 14y ago

vecinu 14y ago
That was a great post that encompasses most reactions on the internet and strangely enough, in real life. I have found that since the internet has gained popularity, people are not taking everything they read with a grain of salt and therefore know 'everything better than anyone else'. I argue with people daily about wages, eating healthy, global issues, technology, etc... but I try to admit that I cannot accurately discuss these issues without intimately familiarizing myself with the subject matter. I'm a computer scientist. I'm not an economist, a biologist, an astronomer or politician. Life is hard and complicated, don't be so quick to judge.
NathanKP 14y ago
I think there is a place for productive criticism, and asking questions like "Why is it so hard to scale 4chan?" or "Why couldn't Amazon keep their cloud service online?" But the key is you must be asking the question to learn, not just to ridicule. The intent can't be just to say "I could do a better job if I was doing it" but to discuss what shortcomings are there or improvements could be made with the goal of learning.
- timwiseman 14y ago
  All true. And if you say "I could do better..." and it is in a remotely profitable field, perhaps you should be doing just that. Much of innovation happens because someone said, "I could do better" and then did. Nothing good came of people saying "I could do better..." and then watching TV.
languagehacker 14y ago
This is a very belabored metaphor for something that has happened for a long time before 1890, and has continued since. It seems a little ludicrous that we're bashing the year of the Wounded Knee Massacre solely on its perceived surplus of haughty bystanders. But I guess when you're padding "quit pontificating and start participating" into a blog post consisting of several paragraphs, you have to get a little creative.
- eragnew 14y ago
  It seems a little ludicrous that we're bashing the year of the Wounded Knee Massacre solely on its perceived surplus of haughty bystanders. What?
  - tjr 14y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wounded_Knee_Massacre http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wounded_Knee_Massacre
- batista 14y ago
  Chosing a random year for his example story gave you the impression that it was "bashing 1890"? Or that it had anything to do with the wounded knee massacre? Talk about non sequitur...
roc 14y ago
Inasmuch as this post is about encouraging people to follow Wheaton's law and give a little more benefit-of-the-doubt to those actually in the trenches, I concur. But I read it as dipping toward "defer to consensus" and I'm not sure that's necessarily desirable. Haven't we seen that pressing forward with your own pet theory, in relative ignorance to the size of the challenge being undertaken, is a key driver of innovation? So, yes to improving tone, presentation and not immediately assuming everyone else is an idiot. But, no to actually deferring to their research, their solutions, or even their statement of the problem.
- harshreality 14y ago
  Furthermore, in the soft sciences (including politics and economics), much of the status quo is built on assumptions that, while they have a basis in historically observed human behavior, are still not "true" in the hard-science sense, and might become false if aggregate human behavior changes even a little.
  - zmjones 14y ago
    Almost all of the empirical work done by political scientists and economists is on aggregate human behavior. Yes, the predictive power of the social sciences is often very weak, but social systems are incredibly complex, and in many ways vastly more difficult to understand than physical systems.
- ketralnis 14y ago
  > Haven't we seen that pressing forward with your own pet theory, in relative ignorance to the size of the challenge being undertaken, is a key driver of innovation? But we're not talking about innovation. We're talking about people saying "I could do better" and then doing nothing.
  - roc 14y ago
    I'm working from the assumption that the more people talk about something, and the more we view that talk as acceptable, the more likely people are to follow through on that talk and do those things. And vice-versa. (The more we shut down communication the more we shut down action.) I don't believe it can be absolutely effective. And I don't have any data to support the notion. But in looking at various social strategies aimed at encouraging/discouraging various behaviors, it certainly seems to be accepted wisdom. And, anecdotally at least, it seems to effect real behavior among people I've known.
bengillies 14y ago
Sometimes though, it is enough just to criticise. Sometimes it's someone else's job to make things right and to listen to other people who may not be able to spend the time and effort on getting stuck in and doing it themselves. Sometimes that person isn't even capable of joining in, due to factors outside their control (it's a closed insular corporation for example). And sometimes, the people dealing with the problem are only taking the approach that they're taking because they're tackling the problem from within a particular organisation that has its own related set of problems that affect its take on the solution. And in such cases, the best solution is sometimes not the one that's open to that organisation, so they take a different (less good) path. The best solution may even be one that destroys the organisation involved, and it may be really obvious. If nobody is allowed to criticise anything that they're not actively involved in trying to fix, the world would be a very boring place (and Government would have a very easy job).
- timwiseman 14y ago
  I do not think that this post is against all criticism, but it is against the non-productive "How hard can it be?" or "This is terrible" type or criticism, especially by someone who has never stepped into that arena and has no clue "Hard hard it can be." This is different from more constructive criticism like, "This would be better if it also had feature xyz". Even "I will pay for this service when, and only when, reliability is above xyz..." can be meaningful.
deleted 14y ago
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deleted 14y ago
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eragnew 14y ago
I literally could not agree more with the sentiment expressed in this article. Good stuff.
janto 14y ago
Never attribute to stupidity that which can be attributed to you not understanding the situation.
dennisgorelik 14y ago
What's the harm in making quick judgement? Usually you would be wrong, but occasionally it would add missing perspective and would help solve the problem.
- orangeduck 14y ago
  Even if a snap judgement were right or did add missing perspective it would only be by chance, or only useful in hindsight. Such as the distinction between "knowledge" and "a true belief", armchair commentary is basically unproductive even in the cases where it looks good.
  - dennisgorelik 14y ago
    Say, armchair's scientists' advice has only 1% chance to help find better solution to hard problem. Would you still recommend to withhold such advice?
    - scott_s 14y ago
      Put another way, your question is "What if an armchair scientists' advice was unlikely to help, but still likely enough to make it worth considering?" By picking 1%, you're begging the question. You probably picked it because it sounds small, but if we could do some task that helped us solve our problems about 1 out of every 100 times we did it, we would do it all the time. And, in fact, we do. We consult related literature that might help, we talk to colleagues whose complimentary knowledge might help and so on. The crux of the disagreement is in what the probability is. orangeduck's point is that the probability is more like 1e-100 than 1e-2.
Xcelerate 14y ago
It's interesting in a way. When people have conversations with me about all of the popular topics (news, politics, religion, sports, etc.), they'll ask what I think about some issue, and normally I'll say that I don't know enough about the subject to comment. Don't do this! I've learned it makes everyone think you're antisocial. So the goal is to keep discussing the topic, but in a manner that doesn't make yourself seem like an expert if you're not.
bluekeybox 14y ago
(Warning: armchair analysis here.) Does anyone else see a similarity between what is described in the OP and the halting problem?
- scott_s 14y ago
  Hmm. Yes, interesting. Halting problem: it is impossible to determine if an arbitrary program will terminate without executing it to find out. Armchair problem (postulated): it is impossible to understand the full complexity of a problem without honestly trying to solve it.
  - bluekeybox 14y ago
    Yes. The similarity struck me when I was thinking of Misesean economic calculation problem and why free-market pricing mechanism (probably) cannot be replaced with something else. (Disclaimer: I tend to agree with Austrian economists on most things, so I'm biased).
mhb 14y ago
Chesterton said it much, much better: http://stuartbuck.blogspot.com/2004/05/chesterton_14.html http://stuartbuck.blogspot.com/2004/05/chesterton_14.html
fromhet 14y ago
Posting HN comments in the comments section instead of in a submission? Truly, it can't be that hard!
- scott_s 14y ago
  HN has a long history of people turning comments into blog posts.
scott_s 14y ago
I am currently reading "The President's Club" (http://www.amazon.com/The-Presidents-Club-Exclusive-Fraternity/dp/1439127700/ http://www.amazon.com/The-Presidents-Club-Exclusive-Fraterni...), which is a book about the unofficial club formed by former presidents. It's also, necessarily, about the relationships that all of the presidents in the modern era (Hoover on up) have had with each other, both in and out of office. One of the major themes (so far) is the notion that nothing can prepare you for being president. The job is so hard, so complex, and the amount of information the president has access to is so much more than everyone else, that all new presidents have I-knew-it-was-hard-but-not-this-hard moments. The only exception perhaps being Eisenhower, whose job as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during WWII actually did prepare him for being president.
petercooper 14y ago
And armchair sociologists.
- ceslami 14y ago
  Your meta-pedantics are killing me. Love JS Weekly btw :)
  - petercooper 14y ago
    Haha, yes, I was hoping for a response like "And armchair comedians." ;-)
alayne 14y ago
Half the fun of online discussions is being an armchair whatever. Telling people how to behave sounds awfully judgmental to me.
- sophacles 14y ago
  If I were trying to get people to stop armchairing, or at least be more productive about it, I would just write a simple personal story about how I used to armchair, possibly with some allegorical overtones.
  - alayne 14y ago
    That's a great idea. Pick one instance where you got out of the armchair and applied your idea. Inspire instead of creating a guilt trip.
    - sophacles 14y ago
      Argh, Poe's law strikes again. I can no longer tell if this thread is jokingly or seriously armchairing a discussion on how to tell people about the problems of armchairing. To that I say either "well done" or "seriously?".
      - alayne 14y ago
        My first post was serious, but it was hard to resist creating an online armchair scientist support group.
soup10 14y ago
He calls out my post so I'm obliged to respond. First I know my first post there was kind of arrogant and comes off sounding like an armchair expert. But I have scaled similar code, by having extremely efficient barebones code. And I stand 100% behind that approach as valid, and something many websites do. Look at instagrams architecture for an example of simple infrastructure doing massive workloads. I gave my thoughts as a way to get discussion over what the challenges of scaling a site like 4chan would be, not because I meant to be arrogant about it. 4chan sounds like its based off some php/perl scripts +databases, and I think that approach is fundamentally bad for high performance sites with very well defined usage patterns. You wouldn't cut a steak with a plastic knife, therefore you shouldn't be writing a website that's meant to scale in php or perl. Sure you can do it with a lot of effort, but it's ass backwards. The advantage of databases and scripting languages is flexibility with how you can add features and do queries on the data. Once you have a well-defined usage model and queries, it makes complete sense to change to the customized highly optimized approach with java servlets or something for the queries that need to be fast. Also if you have a small enough data set that can live in memory like 4chan does (text), it makes complete sense to have it all in memory ready to serve up on demand super quickly. I didn't mean to trivialize the efforts to scale such a website, but on a conceptual level, if you can fit all your data in memory, and you don't need to customize pages per user as 4chan doesn't, it really isn't that complex to scale.
- rbranson 14y ago
  Instagram infrastructure engineer here. Our infrastructure is far from simple. However, I confirm that it does, indeed, handle a fairly large workload.
beloch 14y ago
Believe it or not, this conflict plagues even real science. In physics (and probably most other hard sciences as well), there is actually a fairly sizable rift between theorists and experimentalists. If you're a theorist, you can deal in idealized systems. You can dream up an experiment with a perfect component X in it and work out what theory says should be the result. In a morning you can create a dazzlingly complex theory that would take billions of dollars and thousands of man-years to test, calculate the theoretical result on a napkin over lunch, and then move on to something completely different in the afternoon. Experimentalists look at such complex theories and immediately give up. They're not interested in such theories because nobody will ever pony up the cash to test 99.999999% of them. Experimentalists like things nice and simple. They'll pick an experiment that looks dead-easy to test, spend thousands of dollars on a component Y that can't do X worth a darn until they find a way to jury rig it to sort-of do X a little bit on good day if the stars align just right. They'll spend six months sorting out the bugs in the experiment and, in most cases, find it matches the theory pretty well. Then they'll submit a paper to a journal which will send it out to referees. Frequently, one of those referees will be a theorist who will say, "Why did you bother doing something so simple when the theory is so clear?" (Some theorists do not appreciate that theories are occasionally wrong, and this is the whole point of actually doing experiments!) Of course, experimentalists and theorists need each other desperately and frequently work together closely. It's just a little frustrating at times and hysterical at others.

105 points by pilif 14y ago

That was a great post that encompasses most reactions on the internet and strangely enough, in real life. I have found that since the internet has gained popularity, people are not taking everything they read with a grain of salt and therefore know 'everything better than anyone else'. I argue with people daily about wages, eating healthy, global issues, technology, etc... but I try to admit that I cannot accurately discuss these issues without intimately familiarizing myself with the subject matter. I'm a computer scientist. I'm not an economist, a biologist, an astronomer or politician. Life is hard and complicated, don't be so quick to judge.

NathanKP 14y ago

I think there is a place for productive criticism, and asking questions like "Why is it so hard to scale 4chan?" or "Why couldn't Amazon keep their cloud service online?" But the key is you must be asking the question to learn, not just to ridicule. The intent can't be just to say "I could do a better job if I was doing it" but to discuss what shortcomings are there or improvements could be made with the goal of learning.

timwiseman 14y ago
All true. And if you say "I could do better..." and it is in a remotely profitable field, perhaps you should be doing just that. Much of innovation happens because someone said, "I could do better" and then did. Nothing good came of people saying "I could do better..." and then watching TV.

languagehacker 14y ago

This is a very belabored metaphor for something that has happened for a long time before 1890, and has continued since. It seems a little ludicrous that we're bashing the year of the Wounded Knee Massacre solely on its perceived surplus of haughty bystanders. But I guess when you're padding "quit pontificating and start participating" into a blog post consisting of several paragraphs, you have to get a little creative.

eragnew 14y ago
It seems a little ludicrous that we're bashing the year of the Wounded Knee Massacre solely on its perceived surplus of haughty bystanders. What?
- tjr 14y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wounded_Knee_Massacre http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wounded_Knee_Massacre
batista 14y ago
Chosing a random year for his example story gave you the impression that it was "bashing 1890"? Or that it had anything to do with the wounded knee massacre? Talk about non sequitur...

roc 14y ago

Inasmuch as this post is about encouraging people to follow Wheaton's law and give a little more benefit-of-the-doubt to those actually in the trenches, I concur. But I read it as dipping toward "defer to consensus" and I'm not sure that's necessarily desirable. Haven't we seen that pressing forward with your own pet theory, in relative ignorance to the size of the challenge being undertaken, is a key driver of innovation? So, yes to improving tone, presentation and not immediately assuming everyone else is an idiot. But, no to actually deferring to their research, their solutions, or even their statement of the problem.

harshreality 14y ago
Furthermore, in the soft sciences (including politics and economics), much of the status quo is built on assumptions that, while they have a basis in historically observed human behavior, are still not "true" in the hard-science sense, and might become false if aggregate human behavior changes even a little.
- zmjones 14y ago
  Almost all of the empirical work done by political scientists and economists is on aggregate human behavior. Yes, the predictive power of the social sciences is often very weak, but social systems are incredibly complex, and in many ways vastly more difficult to understand than physical systems.
ketralnis 14y ago
> Haven't we seen that pressing forward with your own pet theory, in relative ignorance to the size of the challenge being undertaken, is a key driver of innovation? But we're not talking about innovation. We're talking about people saying "I could do better" and then doing nothing.
- roc 14y ago
  I'm working from the assumption that the more people talk about something, and the more we view that talk as acceptable, the more likely people are to follow through on that talk and do those things. And vice-versa. (The more we shut down communication the more we shut down action.) I don't believe it can be absolutely effective. And I don't have any data to support the notion. But in looking at various social strategies aimed at encouraging/discouraging various behaviors, it certainly seems to be accepted wisdom. And, anecdotally at least, it seems to effect real behavior among people I've known.

bengillies 14y ago

Sometimes though, it is enough just to criticise. Sometimes it's someone else's job to make things right and to listen to other people who may not be able to spend the time and effort on getting stuck in and doing it themselves. Sometimes that person isn't even capable of joining in, due to factors outside their control (it's a closed insular corporation for example). And sometimes, the people dealing with the problem are only taking the approach that they're taking because they're tackling the problem from within a particular organisation that has its own related set of problems that affect its take on the solution. And in such cases, the best solution is sometimes not the one that's open to that organisation, so they take a different (less good) path. The best solution may even be one that destroys the organisation involved, and it may be really obvious. If nobody is allowed to criticise anything that they're not actively involved in trying to fix, the world would be a very boring place (and Government would have a very easy job).

timwiseman 14y ago
I do not think that this post is against all criticism, but it is against the non-productive "How hard can it be?" or "This is terrible" type or criticism, especially by someone who has never stepped into that arena and has no clue "Hard hard it can be." This is different from more constructive criticism like, "This would be better if it also had feature xyz". Even "I will pay for this service when, and only when, reliability is above xyz..." can be meaningful.

deleted 14y ago

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eragnew 14y ago

I literally could not agree more with the sentiment expressed in this article. Good stuff.

janto 14y ago

Never attribute to stupidity that which can be attributed to you not understanding the situation.

dennisgorelik 14y ago

What's the harm in making quick judgement? Usually you would be wrong, but occasionally it would add missing perspective and would help solve the problem.

orangeduck 14y ago
Even if a snap judgement were right or did add missing perspective it would only be by chance, or only useful in hindsight. Such as the distinction between "knowledge" and "a true belief", armchair commentary is basically unproductive even in the cases where it looks good.
- dennisgorelik 14y ago
  Say, armchair's scientists' advice has only 1% chance to help find better solution to hard problem. Would you still recommend to withhold such advice?
  - scott_s 14y ago
    Put another way, your question is "What if an armchair scientists' advice was unlikely to help, but still likely enough to make it worth considering?" By picking 1%, you're begging the question. You probably picked it because it sounds small, but if we could do some task that helped us solve our problems about 1 out of every 100 times we did it, we would do it all the time. And, in fact, we do. We consult related literature that might help, we talk to colleagues whose complimentary knowledge might help and so on. The crux of the disagreement is in what the probability is. orangeduck's point is that the probability is more like 1e-100 than 1e-2.

Xcelerate 14y ago

It's interesting in a way. When people have conversations with me about all of the popular topics (news, politics, religion, sports, etc.), they'll ask what I think about some issue, and normally I'll say that I don't know enough about the subject to comment. Don't do this! I've learned it makes everyone think you're antisocial. So the goal is to keep discussing the topic, but in a manner that doesn't make yourself seem like an expert if you're not.

bluekeybox 14y ago

(Warning: armchair analysis here.) Does anyone else see a similarity between what is described in the OP and the halting problem?

scott_s 14y ago
Hmm. Yes, interesting. Halting problem: it is impossible to determine if an arbitrary program will terminate without executing it to find out. Armchair problem (postulated): it is impossible to understand the full complexity of a problem without honestly trying to solve it.
- bluekeybox 14y ago
  Yes. The similarity struck me when I was thinking of Misesean economic calculation problem and why free-market pricing mechanism (probably) cannot be replaced with something else. (Disclaimer: I tend to agree with Austrian economists on most things, so I'm biased).

mhb 14y ago

Chesterton said it much, much better: http://stuartbuck.blogspot.com/2004/05/chesterton_14.html http://stuartbuck.blogspot.com/2004/05/chesterton_14.html

fromhet 14y ago

Posting HN comments in the comments section instead of in a submission? Truly, it can't be that hard!

scott_s 14y ago
HN has a long history of people turning comments into blog posts.

scott_s 14y ago

I am currently reading "The President's Club" (http://www.amazon.com/The-Presidents-Club-Exclusive-Fraternity/dp/1439127700/ http://www.amazon.com/The-Presidents-Club-Exclusive-Fraterni...), which is a book about the unofficial club formed by former presidents. It's also, necessarily, about the relationships that all of the presidents in the modern era (Hoover on up) have had with each other, both in and out of office. One of the major themes (so far) is the notion that nothing can prepare you for being president. The job is so hard, so complex, and the amount of information the president has access to is so much more than everyone else, that all new presidents have I-knew-it-was-hard-but-not-this-hard moments. The only exception perhaps being Eisenhower, whose job as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during WWII actually did prepare him for being president.

petercooper 14y ago

And armchair sociologists.

ceslami 14y ago
Your meta-pedantics are killing me. Love JS Weekly btw :)
- petercooper 14y ago
  Haha, yes, I was hoping for a response like "And armchair comedians." ;-)

alayne 14y ago

Half the fun of online discussions is being an armchair whatever. Telling people how to behave sounds awfully judgmental to me.

sophacles 14y ago
If I were trying to get people to stop armchairing, or at least be more productive about it, I would just write a simple personal story about how I used to armchair, possibly with some allegorical overtones.
- alayne 14y ago
  That's a great idea. Pick one instance where you got out of the armchair and applied your idea. Inspire instead of creating a guilt trip.
  - sophacles 14y ago
    Argh, Poe's law strikes again. I can no longer tell if this thread is jokingly or seriously armchairing a discussion on how to tell people about the problems of armchairing. To that I say either "well done" or "seriously?".
    - alayne 14y ago
      My first post was serious, but it was hard to resist creating an online armchair scientist support group.

soup10 14y ago

He calls out my post so I'm obliged to respond. First I know my first post there was kind of arrogant and comes off sounding like an armchair expert. But I have scaled similar code, by having extremely efficient barebones code. And I stand 100% behind that approach as valid, and something many websites do. Look at instagrams architecture for an example of simple infrastructure doing massive workloads. I gave my thoughts as a way to get discussion over what the challenges of scaling a site like 4chan would be, not because I meant to be arrogant about it. 4chan sounds like its based off some php/perl scripts +databases, and I think that approach is fundamentally bad for high performance sites with very well defined usage patterns. You wouldn't cut a steak with a plastic knife, therefore you shouldn't be writing a website that's meant to scale in php or perl. Sure you can do it with a lot of effort, but it's ass backwards. The advantage of databases and scripting languages is flexibility with how you can add features and do queries on the data. Once you have a well-defined usage model and queries, it makes complete sense to change to the customized highly optimized approach with java servlets or something for the queries that need to be fast. Also if you have a small enough data set that can live in memory like 4chan does (text), it makes complete sense to have it all in memory ready to serve up on demand super quickly. I didn't mean to trivialize the efforts to scale such a website, but on a conceptual level, if you can fit all your data in memory, and you don't need to customize pages per user as 4chan doesn't, it really isn't that complex to scale.

rbranson 14y ago
Instagram infrastructure engineer here. Our infrastructure is far from simple. However, I confirm that it does, indeed, handle a fairly large workload.

beloch 14y ago

Believe it or not, this conflict plagues even real science. In physics (and probably most other hard sciences as well), there is actually a fairly sizable rift between theorists and experimentalists. If you're a theorist, you can deal in idealized systems. You can dream up an experiment with a perfect component X in it and work out what theory says should be the result. In a morning you can create a dazzlingly complex theory that would take billions of dollars and thousands of man-years to test, calculate the theoretical result on a napkin over lunch, and then move on to something completely different in the afternoon. Experimentalists look at such complex theories and immediately give up. They're not interested in such theories because nobody will ever pony up the cash to test 99.999999% of them. Experimentalists like things nice and simple. They'll pick an experiment that looks dead-easy to test, spend thousands of dollars on a component Y that can't do X worth a darn until they find a way to jury rig it to sort-of do X a little bit on good day if the stars align just right. They'll spend six months sorting out the bugs in the experiment and, in most cases, find it matches the theory pretty well. Then they'll submit a paper to a journal which will send it out to referees. Frequently, one of those referees will be a theorist who will say, "Why did you bother doing something so simple when the theory is so clear?" (Some theorists do not appreciate that theories are occasionally wrong, and this is the whole point of actually doing experiments!) Of course, experimentalists and theorists need each other desperately and frequently work together closely. It's just a little frustrating at times and hysterical at others.