This comments illustrates the article, which has nothing to do with "fake it till you make it", and is all about how people often think they know something, when, in fact, they have little knowledge on the subject (in this case, the subject being the article in question).
To clarify: "fake it till you make it" is pretending you know something when you know you don't, the exact opposite of what the article is about (not knowing that you really don't know something, and being confident that you do).
Not to knock the OP (hey, we all go straight into the comments from time to time) :)
Or, at least, the realisation that everyone else is probably faking it too.
What's most interesting is the nuance of what 'faking it' really means. The woman making up a whole narrative about 'Tonya and the Hardings' - was she thinking 'shit, I know nothing about this band but I like the idea of being on TV so I'm going to make up some lies and hope the conversation moves on to something else'. Or did she genuinely in that moment believe that she knew of this band?
Both seem sort of unlikely, yet one of them has to be true (or a combination of them - as long as you discount the possibility of her being a shill or realising it's a joke and playing along for fun).
There's also some interesting self-selection bias going on - by standing on a street with a microphone you're only going to get people who are more extroverted. Perhaps that's linked with willingness to 'fake it'.
I just find this stuff fascinating.
I hated you at first for modifying the core libraries to break standard fuctionality, writing 500-line SQL statements full of string concatenations and using mutable globals all over the place, but now I see your point. Thanks, I have been earning an above average salary fixing your bugs and I will have a job for life. Still, fuck you man.
"they also serve, who only stand and stuff up the codebase"
Also, FORTRAN globals and variables called i,j and k ROCK!
I always thought they're great in any language with globals, is there a reason they're especially good in FORTRAN?
Offhand, (it has been a long time since I programmed in FORTRAN) I do not know how the scoping rules regarding `implicit none` function with globals. Presumably i, j, k are integers (which would be the implicit type) so it might not be a problem, but they are also often used as basis vectors... so they might be vectors and `implicit none` becomes important.
Also possible, you are dealing with some really old FORTRAN60 compatible code and they are actually iteration control variables and a subroutine wrapped around an arithmetic if is advancing the control variables (which is why they are in global scope) and the outer arithmetic if is performing the branch control as an ur-for loop with gotos. This was the original spaghetti code.
Whenever I go to the pub and meet old timers still working there keep telling me funny stories about how you swear loudly every time you open a code file I've touched.
Thanks for all the laughs.
For that, I humbly concede you the title of my "BS Master".
I sincerely do not know if I should: ingest all Knuth, Sedgewick, Cormen, Ulam, Lorenz, VonNeumann, Fermi and Gauss entire scribings[0]
or if I should just lie, make bold claims and ask for 1.5x the usual salary.
[0] I have them on disk.. you can guess what path I picked for now.
I found particularly interesting his evidence that the effect of education and training can be to increase your confidence in your wrong opinions, rather than reduce the prevalence of those opinions.
Once upon a time, I thought it would improve my driving to take advanced driving classes, and maybe do some practice in a skid-pan (it looks like fun). Now I realise that I'm just not wired to be a skillful driver; I'm not sufficiently risk-averse. Lessons would just make me more confident, and I would take bigger risks. Nowadays I cycle most places, and let my wife drive me to most other places.
I like Dunning's writing; he seems to be a funny man.