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Comment by VikingCoder | Hacker News Reader

The adults in the room are the ones who aren't looking for some omniscient overlord to have all the answers.

If you've realized this, you are one of the adults in the room.

That terrifying feeling when you realize the world is being run by people just muddling their way through problems one at a time and big grand plans rarely last very long.

Not to mention the eventual demise of everybody, plus the heat death of the universe!

That terrifying realization that the universe is ending? (I mean... very very very slowly)

Similar to that, I remember the feeling when I realized my parents were just normal people, they didn't know everything, they weren't right all the time, they could make mistakes, they had no fucking clue what they were doing when they had kids, but somehow they did it.

Or when you become a parent and start reading through some advice books (because I don't know anything about it) and discover that every single one has their own opinion and there is very little consensus about anything. Then you realize that the advice book authors don't really know any more than you do and are just telling you how they managed to muddle through it. Even the scientific studies in the area tend to be small or sourced from very noisy data.

Well, I haven't gotten to that point yet so at least I know what to look forward to. Though, it sounds like pretty much anything in life really.

Someone I knew put it nicely: life is improvization.

I can’t tell if the spelling was...improvised on purpose but I love it either way.

Even more scary, the people who running things who -think- they know everything and convince other people they do.

Or - they have the final say-so for projects and if they don't agree people either leave or they just learn not to present innovative (read different) solutions. Once the leader leaves, the ones left are so conditioned not to engineer (innovate) the status quo eventually sinks the ship (process, company, etc.)

There is a term for it - the Dunning–Kruger effect.

And then the really terrifying feeling when you realize that the people running the world, despite all the evidence that everyone is just muddling their way through and big grand plans don't work, continue to come up with big grand plans that they insist everyone must sign up to.

And the cultists are the ones who listen to the person who claims to have all of the answers.

If you're listening to a person who claims to have it all figured out, you're the cultist.

Who would you say is an example of a "person who claims to have all of the answers"?

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