Strangely, I was going to write something almost identical to this about the average Hacker News user, but never got around to it. Hacker News is a good place.

Strangely, I was going to write something almost identical to this about the average Hacker News user, but never got around to it. Hacker News is a good place. It still -- after the decline of Reddit -- has the smartest mix of stories around. But the average HN user has a huge case of engineer-itis. What’s engineer-itis and its etiology? Though not found in engineers only, it is the belief that because you are good at something, that you are good at everything; furthermore, it is the belief that if someone is not in your field, then they are good at nothing, not even their own choice of endeavor. This develops, I theorize, because engineers usually deal with completely comprehensible systems that have manageable complexity, and because they’ve spent their lives being told how smart they are (that’s the etiology). I call it engineer-itis because it is typically found in engineers and those in the IT field, though it’s by no means confined to that arena -- it's just more prominent there. What’s most striking about engineer-itis and is perhaps its most recognizable feature is that, in a variant of the Dunning-Kruger effect, no one will ever admit to having this pathology, even when decades of science and praxis contradict your opinion. Engineer-itis is a strange disease for which there is no known cure.