There’s no such thing as a tech expert anymore | Hacker News Reader

There’s no such thing as a tech expert anymore

wired.com

130 pointssnadahalli106 comments

That's a really long article to say what we already know: That "expert" means to know in detail a narrow thing.

It hasn't been possible to be a true polymath in like 500 years. Surely this isn't news to the author?

There's no such thing as "an expert on everything"? Yeah, no shit. It's almost tautology, due to the limitations on human brains and the advancement of science since the renaissance.

Another way I think this article misses the point is that they're not dragging Sundar in front of congress because he knows everything about Google (he can't), nor for the congresspeople to learn it (they can't, even if Sundar knew, and could convey, and had infinite time).

They do not start from "let's understand everything first", because they can't. They are dragging them in to answer a question.

You don't need to know the lunch schedule of the San Bruno office, or how many registers the x86 processor has, to answer the question of how political ads should look in today's world (or whatever the question is).

So the article doubly misses the point.

Yes. If you go to one of the first legal definitions of the term expert, that is what you get

"person who, by virtue of special acquired knowledge or experience on a subject, presumably not within the knowledge of men generally, may testify in a court of justice to matters of opinion thereon, as distinguished from ordinary witnesses, who can in general testify only to facts"

Regulators are not experts and they're not meant to be experts, they may consult experts if they require their knowledge. I'm also not sure what the point of the entire discussion is, I hope nobody believes that regulators somehow need to be quantum physicists and physicians and computer scientists and artists at the same time to make judgements about tech or anything else.

Have you read any other wired articles in the last 10 years? They're all like this.

People like von Neumann were considered polymaths

I also disliked the article. Systems are complex, so it's suddenly pointless to try to understand them? Or, if you don't understand every detail of a system, you don't understand the system? Give me a break. I suppose we may as well give up on trying to understand natural systems while we're at it.

Maybe there's an alternative?

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3828902-thinking-in-syst...

for other reasons, i do feel like we need a more digitally literate political leadership base

US society, discourse, media, and government structures have sidelined experts to the extent we’ve finally managed to forget they exist. Instead we’re left with reporters who write articles that bemoan that since they’re lost and unable to determine truth in a sea of technology, we all must be.

Yeah, to me this just looks like a journalist complaining that they shouldn't be expected to understand the things they write about. There are hundreds of people who more or less understand any given product or project with large impact. Society just doesn't care what they think.

Why listen to an accomplished engineer who might very well have lots of opinions on the impact of technology, when we can complain that our graduate degrees in American studies [0]didn't prepare us to understand the complex systems in the technology industry?

[0] Not trying to strawman here, but since the author of TFA thought it was relevant to include, I think it's fair game

>>journalist

I dont think we have any of those any more, if we do they are few and far between and I would venture to guess that none of them work for Wired

You're spot on.

This is a great reference, especially when I try to to reason with people who misuse and misunderstand the word.

https://kottke.org/20/01/jim-lehrers-rules-of-journalism-1

This seems to imply that “tech expert” is someone all-knowing regarding tech. In my mind “tech expert” is about literacy. You may not know the specifics of all technologies but you have the mental toolkit for understanding them conceptually. But it is also about context. If you are the person who people ask for help with tech stuff, well, then you’re an expert, at least in their minds.

This seems to imply that “tech expert” is someone all-knowing regarding tech

No one was ever literally all-knowing but tech people never used to be as micro-specialist as is common now. In the 90s it was quite normal for one person to understand everything from the hardware and networks up to how to make HTML look pretty.

In the early days of Google they probably did have guys who really did understand it all. But not any more.

In the 90s it was quite normal for one person to understand everything from the hardware and networks up to how to make HTML look pretty.

The last time I looked, a good CS curriculum still teaches people how a half-adder circuit works, how to write code in assembly, the basics of UDP and TCP, how to build a web app, and fundamental algorithms and data structures.

Additionally, students might do a couple of the following: implement a primitive SQL engine, write a simple compiler, program a robot, add features to a kernel, or study introductory machine learning. These are all common undergraduate electives. You don't need to be polymath to switch from debugging packet dumps to writing CSS.

I'm actually a huge fan of good bootcamps, because some people out there will absolutely love coding, and bootcamps give them a chance. But it's perfectly possible to understand computer architecture and networking protocols and React, and a good university CS curriculum should cover many of those topics at an introductory level.

That describes a CS degree heavily biased towards practical application instead of towards theory, like mine was. We only had a couple of the things in your lists.

Anything that involves the physical world went in the engineering degrees - we didn't do circuits, assembly, or programming a robot. Likewise networking I think was an elective, as might have been kernels (though I don't recall that one, and didn't take either of those myself). We did talk about kernels in our systems programming course, but the extent of practical work was things like creating our own malloc and creating a simple shell.

Web apps were in the ITM courses (Information Technology something), which was where people learned specific practical skills and most people doing CS degrees didn't touch - I took one out of curiosity and it was so absurdly low-skill-level: The first assignment was creating mockups for site, then imagine spending the next few months on just HTML and CSS implementing it.

One specific example of the theory-vs-practical-application difference between our CS degrees, we didn't do compilers, we did programming language design. Parsing theory, grammars, and after learning Scheme we used it to implement an interpreter for our own language.

I feel like I ought to defend the honor of my school's theoreticians. :-)

Their CS program had two theory-heavy courses. In the harder of the two, the homework worked out to 10 pages/week of proofs written in LaTeX. Honors students could also take a functional programming course early on, where they usually got to write a metacircular evaluator.

The same CS program also had a software engineering course that required a 5-student team to spend half a term building a group project. (Teams were picked by the professor, for that real-world feel.) This usually required a UI, which meant that we got to learn Motif or web programming or something.

This has always seemed like a sensible way to organize a CS curriculum: Everyone needs to write proofs, and everyone needs to write code. Then you can throw in kernels or networking as electives.

I agree, and will add:

An expert in any field must also be well connected so they know who to call / ask / refer to when they don’t know how to proceed.

Agreed. I would add ability to do effective and applicable research.

The writeup is not so much about the semantics of the words, but more about the fact that there are so many moving parts designed by diverse teams that no one individual (or even team) has a complete enough understanding of the whole that's sufficient to predict it's consequences on society in relation to its values.

I find it ironic that many are refuting the article based on semantics, or trying to explain what it "really means" to be an expert in tech.

The topic of regulating tech is as much about financial management as about algorithms. One needs to understand the costs and revenue streams in detail to devise intelligent regulation. I tend to believe swaths of the tech industry are built on obfuscation of finances and that is where we are losing the expertise in a regulatory context.

Look back on past tech booms and note that engineering work was highly financial in nature (rooted in cost benefit analysis). In the software industry it seems like engineering has hardly anything to do with managing costs. Just ship it, they say, and let the "business people" handle the pesky money part.

I think you make an important point that it's about tech literacy. I think the bar is in practice lower. Congress people need to be barely tech literate themselves. They have aids and advisors that should brief them and get them the relevant information for the decision that needs to be made and the questions that need to be asked in hearings.

This is a horribly wrong take. The premise that nobody understands these tech issues at the level needed to address them is not even close to true. In fact, this sounds like an argument one of the luddites in congress would make rather than a tech journalist.

The argument is no one knows the exact details of the whole system.

That is obviously true, the only experts at these companies are the engineers who write code. There are still details they don’t understand.

An expert would have to be the collective knowledge of every engineer that worked at the org and there would still be missing detail and ‘bugs’.

This is literally why the security industry exists, bugs are inevitable.

I don’t think the argument is ‘crazy’, it’s accurate when speaking about data protections.

To assert your data is safe is to assert there are no security issues with your software.

The only way of asserting this is to either encrypt everything or not store it at all.

These companies will never do that so we end up with these complex arguments in Congress justifying it’s ‘safe’.

The implicit argument is that one must wholly comprehend the exact details of a company's systems in order to meaningfully control them.

This is obviously false reductio ad absurdum given the existence of managers doing exactly that right now.

CEOs are not testifying to congress about exploiting side channels in hypervisor memory management. On one level, they're offering industry viewpoints on policy issues; on another, they're actors in a political game.

> This is obviously false reductio ad absurdum given the existence of managers doing exactly that right now.

Managers don’t know the details of any system unless they wrote it when they were an engineer (and it hasn’t been modified). They are trusting their engineers’ interpretation of the system, which is a game of telephone up the management chain.

> CEOs are not testifying to congress about exploiting side channels in hypervisor memory management. On one level, they're offering industry viewpoints on policy issues; on another, they're actors in a political game.

The largest account takeover incident recently was an unsophisticated social engineering attack executed by a 17 year old.

I’d argue most system and data vulnerabilities aren’t sophisticated or complicated yet companies like the idea of this because it makes them seem more improbable.

Vulnerabilities happen because security guarantees and understanding cost time and time is limited when shipping a product faster than a competitor.

In reality if Congress wants an expert they need to have a team of engineers at the company performing audits and code reviews.

Luddites were mostly concerned with the protection of their livelihoods from the powers of larger producers of equipment at the time. I think we as a society could learn a lot about our situation by looking closer at Ludditism

This author appears to think that you need to understand the intricate details of a search algorithm, distributed computing, and machine learning before you understand what their general use is? I don’t need to understand how a car engine works before I can understand how to drive or how cars have changed society. The only argument this article proves is that google and Facebook have lowered the bar on journalism so far that this is considered publishable.

Totally agreed. What drivel. I couldn't even finish reading the article.

We have senators grilling tech CEOs that don't understand the difference between an iPhone and an Android device. This is unacceptable to say the least.

To play devil's advocate: What is the difference between an Android phone and an iPhone phone, and if there is, what does it matter to a customer? Both can make phone calls, both can display web pages, both can run apps. There's one fairly irrelevant difference because it's an historical accident so it will probably be eliminated soon: one platform owner already controls the platform completely, and the other not yet.

For a normal customer with no tech skills? Android is the one which comes in a full range from “cheap” to “premium” while Apple only comes in “premium”.

You also get to choose which app store you get, Apple or Google, but I’m not sure if normal people know what one of those is.

The new iPhone SE is definitely a mid-market play, blurring it further.

Google’s CEO had to remind Congress that Google doesn’t make iPhones.

Seriously?

How can our reps make sound decision regarding tech when they don't even understand this simple distinction?

The difference is that proposed regulation against Apple affects iPhones and not Androids.

You may as well ask what the difference is between Huawei and Cisco in terms of functionality - and certainly there's no difference to a customer - but that difference matters a lot to the US government.

> To play devil's advocate: What is the difference between an Android phone and an iPhone phone, and if there is, what does it matter to a customer?

One is a device that works for the customer, the other is a device that works for advertising companies.

> What is the difference between an Android phone and an iPhone phone

What is the difference between a cheap Android and a premium Android device relative to difference between iPhone and premium Android?

I would add that you don't need to understand the implementation details to understand privacy of citizens, tracking of users, and accountability. It doesn't take years of programming experience to understand that the big data companies wield incredible power and are also vulnerable to security breaches. (Maybe you shouldn't collect data that you can't protect.)

Your car engine doesn’t store information about everywhere you go and what your interests are.

Your car engine probably doesn’t experience data leaks, social engineering, or 0 day bugs.

The argument is Google and Facebook don’t 100% know their data usage and risks and I’d agree that’s true.

Complex software systems are impossible to 100% guarantee expected behavior. This is why bug bounties and the security industry exists.

The safest way to protect information is to not store it, the second safest is strong encryption.

The metaphor seems apt to me, if anything, we should have and do have a much greater interest in regulation of automotive products, which themselves are absurdly complex. How is a regulator to know about various emissions, chances of explosion/fire, engine longevity and warranties? Engines can kill you with fuel leaks, poor materials engineering, or unknown manufacturing bugs. I'd argue that your car engine is much more likely to harm you in a significant way. Car engines had, and continue to have, albeit at a much lower rate,issues related to these things, and we came up with various bodies to help manage it. The people writing the legislation need to better surround themselves with people to advise them on the topics related to Google and Facebook, that is their job as a representative of their constituents; instead they come to the meeting barely prepared and ask a series of poorly worded and unimaginative questions, showing they didn't ask their aides to do even basic research on their behalf, while Google and Facebook bring Harvard lawyers to their corner.

In reality if Congress wants an expert they need to have a team of engineers at the company performing audits and code reviews.

No different than a company that does due diligence before an acquisition.

For sure, the FDA employs pharmaceutical engineers to regulate the companies. The FAA employs pilots and aviation engineers. Do we have a corollary for software? Sort of, in specific domains, but not really.

Is it too much to expect that a representative knows that Zuckerberg runs Facebook and not Twitter?

https://reason.com/2020/07/29/mark-zuckerberg-twitter-donald...

Or to know enough to know which tech CEO to subpoena in the first place?

https://money.cnn.com/2016/10/27/media/att-time-warner-senat...

But let’s look at the last two major tech anti trust cases and what came of them.

Microsoft was the most valuable company in the US in 2000 and had a monopoly on computer operating systems, productivity apps, and web browsers. In 2020, Microsoft still has the same share in operating systems, office productivity and no one cares about browser market share but Google. MS is now the 3rd most valuable company in the US.

Before that the government sued IBM for being a monopoly in 1969. The suit was dropped in 1982 and nothing came of it.

Most recently, the CEO’s of the four biggest tech companies came before Congress and people everywhere are saying that they (at least FB and Google) are threats to Democracy. Then the government goes after TikTok and WhatsApp.

Edit: WeChat.

Is it too much to expect that a commenter knows that the government went against WeChat and not WhatsApp?

Good thing I am not making the laws and I’m just a random person on HN....

The government was recently against WhatsApp as well over encryption.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/03/us/politics/barr-whatsapp...

Not the worst mistake from OP.

Yes, it is.

When preparing notes for a congressional hearing, you’d hope they carefully triple check everything. Not just by re-reading, either, but also by cross-referencing with other documents and asking others to proof-read.

I don’t expect a commenter on any forum to do more than a cursory re-read for spelling errors.

Yes there is. It's everyone on Hacker News!

Just post about about some Unicorn here and at least half a dozen people are pretty confident they know more about the company in question than the founders or the people running it.

In the future Congress can just post questions here.

I recognize this is sarcastic...

but I must point out, I'm an idiot who doesn't know much about anything.

I will never stop being amused by the original post about Dropbox here on HN, where a large contingent of the audience was so critical of it, it was destined to fail.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.

https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/Apple-releases-i...

cmdrtaco was giving his personal opinion on the device, not predicting its commercial success or lack thereof. Slashdot wasn't focused on "the market" nearly as much as HN is.

And for many years after the release of the iPod it was "lame" compared to other products on the market. It was really the introduction of the iPod Nano that was the first product that improved on the competition. But Apple markets well and was able to get the market share (and really it was only the click wheel ones that were really popular).

While funny, that is a little while ago. What is depressing now is that it became worse but people are not that vocal in public anymore.

Many people I encounter say they can do things in days but when hired they really can't (not even close) (and these are seniors with proven experience doing things but just not very fast at all; I cannot figure if it's the frameworks as I know I could do it in days with jquery/lamp + normal hosting which is what I was asking for). Sometimes (well, generally actually always) I need something fast, not robust, maintainable and definitely not with docker/k8s/microservices etc etc. I have not found many people who can just practically do things they say they can; then in 2007 with the dropbox thing or now on freelancer sites or forums; when you hire people, even (because I understand you want more hours / security / whatever) when I can promise you that IF you can, I have work for you basically forever (considering I have a 20 year trackrecord of doing these kind of applications and i'm not stopping any time soon). I even don't care about the tech; if you want to use the latest/greatest/cv-driven crap for it; be my guest, as long as it works and delivery is fast. Seems perfect for people; I cannot find any that go beyond big talk on sites like HN.

It's only possible to get hired by anyone (including, probably, by you - how do you select candidates, exactly?) by resume-padding with trendy largely-useless items like kubernetes microservices etc.

Be the change you want to see in the market.

I have a feeling that many people I interview/test actually see this as an opportunity to learn these technologies, while normally it's definitely not, so I don't select based on that; quite the opposite. They won't have this on their resume often, but want to 'learn on the job'.

And yes, what you say happens also; for a recent project where we did need all this tech, sometimes I'm sitting with people with 'years of experience' in containerisation etc and during the interview it turns out they have no clue besides the absolute bare basics.

And ofcourse, this causes now that CTO's/CIO's not only see these terms in magazines online, but also see it on all their resumes so they start demanding the use in projects while there is no reason to do so.

I assure you that k8s etc. have not been requirements in any job that I have interviewed for or hired for. Including ones where k8s is in use.

Principles still matter more unless you are in an exclusively bolt-turning role.

To be fair, with most start ups if you say 'this will fail' you're probably right, what, about 4/5 times at least. But you'll never invest in Google, Dropbox, AirBnB or whatever.

Even the smartest VC's hit rates wouldn't be that great (i.e. say 3/4 of their investments make it) even though they make overall by picking the occasional drop box.

Most of the comments in that thread were quite positive. This certainly doesn’t support your point.

Wait until uncle Jim comes to the wedding and gets two shots of whiskey. He will tell you how all those talking heads in the TV know nothing about life and he should be running the country and those stupid tech companies.

In plain words I would say it is quite common in the population and not specific to HN.

Just ignore it, take a shot with the uncle and tell him that he is right, carry on with your life.

“I am not a tech expert” != “There’s no such thing as a tech expert”.

Edited to add: all of science is beyond the comprehension of one person, but we wouldn’t say that scientists don’t exist anymore.

I think the shock experienced in these kind of hearings has more to do with leaders and law makers being hopelessly out of touch with common technologies that are used by most people every day; it’s akin to them puzzling over how to operate a flushing toilet. They don’t need to interact with the world as other citizens do, because they have layers of abstraction shielding them from it. Not a good thing.

The example of the B-2 Spirit is such a strange one, given the complete absence of civilian oversight to the programme. It was essentially built for military experts by engineering experts.

Non-experts are expected to provide oversight in highly technical issues, but they should be working closely with advisors who have cutting edge domain knowledge and can translate that into policy implications. The leaders and law makers do not need specialist knowledge, but they -do need to be on top of their brief as it relates to society and the laws that govern it. A person of reasonable intelligence can provide essential oversight to a machine like Google, even if they could not construct such a machine themselves. Nobody can even create a human being themselves from scratch, but that’s not an excuse for being a bumbling lawmaker.

> but we wouldn’t say that scientists don’t exist anymore.

Yes we do.

They don't exist as we have romantically understood them. Scientists used to take risks, play with the entire world, question things, actually be open, actually play with science as a child.

Now they join the Facebook group "Fuck I love science" and be done with it because they are pushed into STEM as an ultra narrow career and don't actually understand or want to understand science. The real scientists may still exist hidden somewhere but you never see them.

For Tech, I've never seen a correct understanding of the Russians online influence during the 2016 elections on HN. I don't know what it is, and I've never seen anyone explain it with authority other than vague hand waving trying to sound like they know, this is from both links and comments on HN.

Spoken like someone who doesn’t interact with any scientists. I work at a university and have a friend group of chemists PhD students. Every single one of them fit your requirements for the romantic vision of a scientist, yet have far more accurate models at their disposal than previous generations of scientists.

“You never see them.” because you choose not to look. You look at your algorithm driven feed and shape your worldview around it. Incredibly dangerous. We are one second from midnight on the cyberocracy doomsday clock.

Of my science friends, a few in chemistry, with and without PHD's, no they don't do science. At best they fetishize science pop culture. They are very good at their specializations though.

My tech friends do however do science, obviously a subset of my tech friends, for a lot it's also a means to an ends.

Those tech friends mess with chemistry, mess with electric experiments, stay up and watch the Higgs Boson announcements and rocket launches. They make rockets with 3D printers(fail). And they mess with computers in their own time.

I would say "There’s no such thing as a scientists anymore", where's the HN for scientists?

There isn't the "universal scientist" like a Leonardo da Vinci anymore as there are too much knowledge, but scientists who have broader impact do exist, while most science is in specialisation these days - we are so deep in many fields, that going deeper can't be done equally well in multiple fields.

Ah. So when you say “do science” you mean “worldly and balanced”. Those people exist. Current culture no longer regiments it because it is less effective at making progress. If you’re wealthy, it’s a great way to keep yourself entertained. It’s akin to traveling. There is no doubt that it makes you interesting and valuable and expands your worldview, but it doesn’t actually do anything in terms of adding to the value of humanity.

Also, I strongly disagree that scientists are not “doing science”. They are: at an incredible pace on a tight budget. I consider myself more towards the wordly side and less on the specialized side, but I’m an engineer. I don’t need to dedicate my life to focusing in on a series of complicated fields because I don’t need to understand biological mechanisms. I can be one of the best people in my field and then spend my free time dabbling with other things. Saying that people who dedicate their life to actually pushing scientific progress forward are “not doing science” while the people who kick back and play with toys are is incorrect and disrespectful.

Read Muellers report, it's rather good and detailed. It just your "normal" meddling, the difference is that thanks to internet its so much cheaper and easier. Muellers report also revealed that Russians ran biggest BLM social media to they can divide you, should give you an idea what is going on right now in your country. Strangely enough media doesn't talk about it. There is no Russian connection there, it's all 'grass roots'.

Can you reference the section of the Mueller report that covers BLM?

"Initially, the IRA created social media accounts that pretended to be the personal accounts of U.S. persons.[44] By early 2015, the IRA began to create larger social media groups or public social media pages that claimed (falsely) to be affiliated with U.S. political and grassroots organizations. In certain cases, the IRA created accounts that mimicked real U.S. organizations. For example, one IRA-controlled Twitter account, @TEN_GOP, purported to be connected to the Tennessee Republican Party.[45] More commonly, the IRA created accounts in the names of fictitious U.S. organizations and grassroots groups and used these accounts to pose as anti-immigration groups, Tea Party activists, Black Lives Matter protestors, and other U.S. social and political activists." [1]

[1] Page 22: https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf

Is any of the evidence supporting these claims of IRA actions disclosed, or is that to be taken on faith?

I ask because having been through the aluminum tubes, baby incubators story a few years back, I now have fairly strict epistemic standards when it comes to military related matters. I realize skepticism of one's government isn't a terribly popular stance here on HN, but to me it is important.

It appears (discussion on such topics seems taboo) that a faith based approach is in play - which is fine, I'm just suggesting that it may be worthwhile to explicitly realize and acknowledge the true nature and contents of one's belief system.

The HN link for the report was - [flagged] The Mueller Report [pdf] (justice.gov)

It's good, thanks. Learned a lot. It tried to quantify bot sizes between platforms for instance which was good. I now have many more questions, but I'll try and build on that.

Yes, and there's no such thing as a medicine expert because no single person knows every little detail of how your body works.

The argument this piece is built around is flawed on so many levels.

1) the author conflates tech basic literacy and preparation on the specific topic by the congress members and marks them as “being a tech expert”. Nobody asks them to know the ins and outs of the companies they’re scrutinizing, but just to be prepared about the matter that’s being discussed and to show some minimal tech literacy.

2) the author proceeds to switch to a different meaning of “expert” with a falsely modest tirade about he himself not being an expert. Sure you are, by all common meanings of “expert”, as you immodestly point out namedropping all your publications and collaborations.

3) after all this, the author settles for a meaning of expert that makes absolutely no sense: an all-knowing being that, thanks to some genius-like trait, is able to see everything from the outside and know the very specifics of everything they run.

Once he sets this new meaning nobody has ever agreed on, he proceeds to point out no such person exists. Maybe it could exist, but such a CEO-savant would be anti-economical to any company, a horrible stickler with a micromanaging obsession, that would spend time about knowing every new detail of his company (just check the amount of patents these companies file every year) instead of focusing on the vision and the long term.

The piece also completely disregards the fact that humanity has evolved to the point where we are right now exactly because humans are very good at building unsupervised complex system that don’t rely on the knowledge of the individual to function. We, as societies, are fundamentally primed to do that. Our social systems are exactly that. Now, Silicon based technology has brought us another step forward in this, and we feel lost as we fail to grasp the enhanced complexity of what underlies out lives. I don’t see it as something new, and humans will evolve to adapt to this new layer of technology.

What I just read is a piece that tries to bend the meaning of “expert” to prove the point that nobody knows what tech is doing, as if big tech was just perpetuating itself as a sentient being. It’s a very slippery slope, that could be used to justify the people that physically drive the decisions of these companies. Decisions that are strategical, political, and above all taken by humans, not machines, who are well aware how to drive complex and multifaceted organizations to maximize profit and return to their investors.

Exactly right. As an experienced software developer, there's a ton I don't understand about the intricacies of OS kernels and integrated circuits, but I don't need to know that stuff and nobody can learn everything. Popular science books can explain quantum theory well enough for a layperson to at least get enough of a clue to have an opinion. All politicians need is enough knowledge to make an informed decision about the effect of various technologies on society.

> Members of Congress clearly don’t understand the tech companies they’re supposed to regulate. But neither does anyone else.

Siva Vaidhyanathan [1], the author of this Wired article, seems to be a fine representative of the humanities half of what C.P. Snow called The Two Cultures [2].

The ability to craft sentences is an admirable skill, one I wish I had, but innumeracy and the inability to grasp causation seems to be a badge of honor among the non-STEM elite.

The question is not whether regulators understand tech, it is whether they understand the principles that limit regulating consenting adults.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siva_Vaidhyanathan

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures

I had an issue with this:

"while in graduate school in American Studies, I realized that computer science was a method of understanding much like many others . . . I’d also misunderstood coding as a craft instead of a field of knowledge and inquiry."

I agree that computer science is a field of "knowledge and enquiry" (aren't all academic disciplines?) but disagree with his conflation of CS and "coding." Computer science has little to do with most software development which is very much a "craft"

This sentence seems like a bizarre non sequitur. Absent some explanation of how American Studies connects to CS (perhaps this is obvious to American Studiers?), it reads like the equivalent of "while backpacking through Laos, I realised the New York subway system was in urgent need of repair".

The problem described here is only tangentially connect to technology. All that is described is really the challenge of complex systems and that could exist in any domain whatsoever. The inner workings of oh so human system of the UK government sometimes baffles me. And it exists in nature where the complex interactions of many diverse organisms converge to form a complex ecosystem.

There might be problems of a lack of understanding in certain cases but what this journalist is describing is complex systems not technological problems.

Tech has become a marketing term. Might as well call them synergy companies. There's a conflation of concepts and how the various "tech" companies make their money. How can anyone keep track when "tech" is such a broad brush to paint with?

It's getting disingenuous to call it tech. At the point of interface it is media. The effects of these new media have on society are not well diagnosed by tech experts, who specialize in understanding how a thing works, less so with how it affects.

This article is really about possible social consequences of tech like Facebook and Twitter, not about knowing all the technical implementation details. A "tech expert" speaking in front of congress would be expected to answer to how the tech affects governance and civic matters.

Nobody know the consequences in full, and how effective mass-communication might affect society. It's problematic when the leaders and overseers seem unfamiliar or uncertain with the overall operation of these tools, and even abuse them for egotistical benefits, instead of acting as elected servants of the people.

I do not expect Congress to know how a B2 works, no. That would certainly be asking too much.

What I do expect them to know is what it is/does.

"Nobody understands the tech-companies, but they sure do understand us"

The author seems way too focused on the exact meaning of "expert" without thinking about what they actually need from a subject matter expert for a specific hearing. Who you need for an ethics hearing will likely be different than who you need for a political hearing even though they are both "experts".

A subject matter expert before a political hearing needs to understand the societal and financial decisions of a class of technology and be able to explain it in a way that others can understand. Pretty much any tech leader should be able to do this. A major issue with this is that politics in the US (and plenty of other countries) are so driven by money that you end up with a bunch of politicians that are willfully ignorant of the sectors they are supposed to legislate for because they are paid to just do what the people with the money want you to do.

This is bs.

In order for outsiders to understand tech, you need to invite engineers/researchers, not CEOs.

And you need marathon sessions, not sprints.

Go figure!

> We don’t insist that everyone in Congress understand how the B2 Spirit “stealth” bomber works, or how serotonin reuptake inhibitors help manage depression, or even how the internal combustion engine works. Yet we justifiably expect our government to regulate them.

Indeed, that's not what I'd insist. I'd insist on elected officials to have a team surrounding them who they can ask and who in turn can ask others when decisions have to be made.

In other words, leaders have to know how and when to delegate. If they don't know how to do that, then I assert that they aren't and cannot be good leaders.

>Last week’s effort by the antitrust subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee was no exception. "The technological ignorance demonstrated by our elected officials ... was truly stunning,"

I skimmed through parts of the hearing, and I found most of it alright. I don't remember anything glaringly bad. There was a minor gaffe about twitter v/s facebook, which everyone mocked on the internet, but even that wasn't so bad. The efficacy of the hearing wrt any outcome is a different matter. What's the author talking about ?

So, a politician, who is usually an attorney, doesn't understand the business that tech companies engage in and therefore no one understands the business?

I think the author meant to say even developers do not understand the decisions some of the ML algorithms make. Anyone who had to debug ML may partially agree with that.

But this doesn’t mean people don’t understand infrastructure. Fundamentally we are dealing with compute, storage and networking. We just combine them in different ways to come up with solutions optimized for different workloads.

The article is true, there isn’t an expert or collective group of experts that can guarantee a complex system’s behavior.

This is why bugs exist, why there is a security industry, why these companies have bug bounty programs.

The safest way of protecting information is not creating it or using strong encryption.

It's like the inimitable Buckminster Fuller's analysis of the _cost_ of expertise hidden in the dangers of specialization never happened.

We should also update the definition of tech.

Every company has a website these days, but does that make them "tech" companies?

It's almost as if the author is projecting his own imposter syndrome on the Congress.

Oh God, another wired article. This is written in a similar vain as “What’s a computer?”

So what do you call a (tech) (expert) if not a (tech expert)?

only a fool would call himself an expert.

What others call you is a different matter.

Theres definitely experts, if youre an above average developer, you meet one once a decade.

Sounds like sarcasm;

Why is there no ideology in tech culture?

What do you mean by ideology? I think I have a response, but I would like to know this first.

Ha! Imagine writing this about medicine. Computers are 100% deterministic, from top to bottom. Even their effects of society can clearly be tracedback.

> Computers are 100% deterministic, from top to bottom.

Not in every respect. Concurrency and C's undefined behaviour spring to mind.

It's still deterministic. It doesn't randomly do something different with the exact same IO. Just because it's hard to recreate the exact same state with concurrent processes on a modern CPU doesn't change it's determinism.

Also, undefined behavior in C only means a compiler can do what ever it likes. It doesn't make it random. People need to stop pretending UB in C is magic. It's not going to delete your hard disk, or make you a pizza unless that's already part of your program. GARBREPLEDFAH.../rant

Sure, but in both cases, the way to model it is with something like nondeterminism. Computers have no nondeterminism, but computer science does.

Formally verified C code is guaranteed to be free of UB, as this is necessary in order for there to be guarantees about the behaviour of a program written in standard C. The underlying compiler and hardware are still deterministic.

A similar thing happens with concurrency.

> People need to stop pretending UB in C is magic. It's not going to delete your hard disk, or make you a pizza unless that's already part of your program.

It probably won't delete your hard-disk, but complacency with UB is still a bad idea. C is a strange language. UB is permitted to travel back in time. [0] Even in the absence of UB, the optimiser is permitted (but not obligated) to eliminate empty infinite loops, so even a basic property like whether your program will ever terminate, may be up to the whims of the optimiser. [1]

Anyway that was a long way of saying I agree, computers are deterministic, but something akin to nondeterminism can happen in the abstractions we use.

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/a/39915175/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13640636

That's exactly what I mean about UB in C. I mean I agree with you If you don't know exactly what your compiler will do with the UB, (or if you ever might want to use a different compiler and or comp options) you probably want to avoid writing any UB. But it's not magic, and it can't time travel. That segment makes explicit that UB doesn't need to create a sequence point around UB. This is important because if it did need to do that (to protect the non-UB code) the compiler would need to keep a list of all UB. I'm pretty sure that if you're going to create a list of all undefined behavior, you might as well just define it. It's not magic, it's just allowing the compiler to YOLO it, using optimizations it already knows how to do.

I have a really cool example of how/why this is actually a good thing for compilers if you're interested.

Some useful models of computation are deterministic. But modern computer systems are rarely deterministic as a whole (even if some of their components are).

For example, CPUs can change their clock rate in response to temperature. This can make it impossible to trace exact behavior, especially if there's any timing dependent code or complex multi-threading going on.

I think that's the point. No one in these big corporations understands what they're doing... They don't know half of the story. But they're so large and powerful that this doesn't prevent them from succeeding anyway. That's the danger.

Also there is no incentive for anyone to understand what they're doing. It's like that saying that people tend to not understand things when good performance at their job depends on them not understanding things.

Lazy so-called journalist, I'd like to present to you... drums rolling... Ben Thompson of Stratechery[1]! Followed by.... rolling drums... John Gruber of Daring Fireball[2]!

And quite frankly, these two are just the ones I thought of, from the top of my head.

And, I couldn't say why, I think nowadays the Financial Times could write pieces on the matter more interesting than nearly anyone at Wired could.

[1]: https://stratechery.com/

[2]: https://daringfireball.net/

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