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One of the great joys of following guys I admire like Carmack is the little smile I get when I see one of his tweets and go, "yeah, John Carmack was totally wro
by bitwize 19d ago
One of the great joys of following guys I admire like Carmack is the little smile I get when I see one of his tweets and go, "yeah, John Carmack was totally wrong about that." For example he argued that UI buttons should act on press rather than waiting for the release, and it's been a UI principle for decades that once a button is pressed you wait for the release on the button, giving the user one last chance to back out of a destructive operation by letting them move the pointer off the button and release. And I was like no, I don't care if you wrote Quake, or the Principia Mathematica, don't fuck with my UI expectations.
Carmack has cheerfully admitted to being wrong in the past, for example admitting that the Saturn port of Doom should have used the Saturn's hardware primitives for a smoother experience rather than a faithful replication of the PC's BSP renderer which made it slow. When brilliant guys like him are wrong, they often are in profound ways.
- tclancy 19d agoI would suggest that last line is both wildly indulgent and dangerous. Inventing reasons why someone being completely wrong is actually helpful is a level of freedom no one really deserves.
- bitwize 18d agoSomeone being wrong almost always offers an opportunity for them or others to learn. If someone extremely smart is wrong, the gaps in their knowledge may point to interesting directions for the curious. Einstein was wrong to doubt the principles of quantum mechanics, but the conflicts with relativity he elaborated helped point the way for future physics work. Of course, it's important to be right when there are consequences on the line, but being wrong isn't ipso facto something bad.