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Cocktail party ideas

danluu.com

188 pointsNaac110 comments

I worked deep in the mortgage backed security industry for a decade before the financial crisis and for some years since. I know a lot about it, and some big events firsthand. I find that people are interested in my thoughts on the causes until they hear them: while there were some really bad actors at the margins, the bulk of the crisis was caused by many, many people making good-faith, rational decisions which in hindsight proved foolish.

Of course I could be wrong — consciously or unconsciously I could simply be voicing my own bias. But I think at some level people prefer a simple narrative with a hero and a villain regardless of whether the narrative is true.

many, many people making good-faith, rational decisions which in hindsight proved foolish.

Rational, yes, but rational only in the sense of "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay liquid".

My experience is many MBS and finance people, during 2003-2008, knew that a ton of debt was garbage, that LTCM's blowup in 1998 showed massive structural weakness that was never repaired, and that a crash was going to come SOMETIME.

But the problem is that the rational decision in such a market is to keep investing and making money on the irrational rise, because no one knows when the crash will come or how bad it will be. It's actually rational to keep buying trash debt when the crash timing is unpredictable.

In the end, the finance people were actually correct to keep buying –– the gov't (that is, me you and every US taxpayer) bailed them out, and most of the traders did come out ahead after a bit of time.

> knew that a ton of debt was garbage

The GFC was not a crisis of credit or trash assets. It was one of liquidity and hidden interconnections. (In America.)

If you look at how those supposedly-toxic CDOs actually paid out, including the CDOs squared and synthetics and whatnot, the ones rated AAA, the ratings agencies were--by and large--on the money [1]. The AAA tranches paid out AAA cash streams.

The problem was market participants took this to mean they'd behave like other AAA assets in all capacities. Including liquidity. That was a bad assumption. When people are scared, they'll trade for Treasuries. Not the thing that by all reason should pay out like a Treasury, and in fact, with the benefit of hindsight, did.

To the extent there was high hooliganery afoot, it was around e.g. CDSs written by non-bank actors, e.g. AIG. Which was a result of the liquidity problem described above.

[1] There is an obvious asterisk here in the endogeneity of the bailouts and these assets' performance. But given the pattern holds across borders and industries, irrespective of bailout intensity, the hypothesis that tranching works carries more weight.

Where would I find data about “toxic assets” from the crisis and how they actually fared? I’m very curious about the details.

I’m going to disagree, and to some extent I think you prefer the simple narrative with bankers as villains.

I worked on a prop trading desk with some housing bears, who made some significant gains with shorts. While they understood that certain markets were overheated, I don’t think any of them suspected the breadth and depth of the crash that was coming. While their models were better than the other guys, in the end they were really wrong too. Just less wrong then the guys who went long.

I wonder if the same thing will be said about crypto or about current asset prices (e.g. TSLA mkt cap of +$1tn.. in what time horizon are they going to recoup that in actual profits?)

Yes, and it is already being said.

There are a lot of people talking of the problems and reasons behind "investing in Growth" that we have seen the past few decades instead of investing in Value

Is there anyone /not/ saying that about crypto?

> the bulk of the crisis was caused by many, many people making good-faith, rational decisions which in hindsight proved foolish

I've been working in investment banking for a very long time now and this is simply not true. The whole trading floor knew exactly what they were packaging and selling and how this would eventually end.

Kitchen conversations prove everyone knew months before the crash.

Can you be precise about what they knew? Knowing a crash is coming isn’t necessarily that interesting - a crash is always coming, it’s just not clear on what time horizon, or what its secondary effects will be.

JumpCrisscross did make the interesting point that the “bankers were selling crap” narrative about the crisis is often overstated - the real reason that the situation was a crisis was the cascading liquidity issues, not so much defaulting debt.

> I find that people are interested in my thoughts on the causes until they hear them: while there were some really bad actors at the margins, the bulk of the crisis was caused by many, many people making good-faith, rational decisions which in hindsight proved foolish.

Would it be correct to say the really bad actors at the margins caused a cascade of events that snowballed and caught the people making good-faith decisions?

The bad actors being the people who did not do proper underwriting and verification (“liar loans” or “stated income loans”), and they did this intentionally under the guise of plausible deniability because they were earning profits on volume rather than quality.

IMHO at the margins, bad actors did make what was bad worse. But I think the crisis would have happened regardless.

> The bad actors being the people who did not do proper underwriting and verification (“liar loans” or “stated income loans”)

It's funny that somehow people want to hold people who lie on loan applications blameless. Aren't the victims of the bad underwriters the people they sold the loans to?

"You should have known I was lying and not lent me the money."

(I don't deny that predatory lending exists, but I don't think it was a major contributor to the crisis. I think home buyers and underwriters colluded because they were afraid of missing out on a hot housing market. And for many years this had been the right decision. And back to my original point, when it became the wrong decision, people looked for a simple answer, preferably a one in which they were blameless.)

I did not intend to imply that the people submitting fraudulent applications are blameless.

But I expect better and more from professionals working in lending operations to do their due diligence and verify incomes. I believe I read about underwriter who were simply signing out stamping that they verified the loan application, but did not actually check anything, committing fraud also.

There's a classic cocktail party icebreaker related to this: when you ask the usual awkward intro question about what somebody else does, and they tell you "X", reply with "wow, that sounds really hard!". They'll almost certainly tell you "yes!", explain a bit about why it's hard, and now you have a genuine conversation going.

One of my earliest "ah ha" moments in managing software engineers is asking them to do something and the answers tended to be "that's really really hard" or "that's simple". The realization was they were actually telling me "I don't know how to do that" or "I know how to do that". Once someone figured out how to do the really really hard thing it somehow became "simple". Now when someone tells me something is "hard" I can't seem to shake the bias that they just don't know...

Conversely, non-technical business people are very highly likely to tell me some piece of engineering is "easy" or "simple" when they have no background, or knowledge, at all.

I find it helpful to use a range of descriptors. A "simple" task is easy and can be done quickly. A "straightforward" task is easy but may be larger in scope. A "tricky" task needs study to determine where it falls. A "hard" task has known complexity and is just plain hard.

I agree with this. I also like to divide things into "this requires research/invention" and "this does not require research/invention, just work".

Anything requiring invention by definition is not straightforward because its potential timeline may be functionally infinite if it cannot be solved with the tools at hand.

A task like changing all APIs to accept a different set of parameters might take 6 months, but is straightforward.

"Easy" is the one line change that has no side effects, and is uncommon in practice. After all, sometimes it is that one line change, but there are ramifications elsewhere in the system that need to be thought through.

I really like your use of "straightforward" here. Not a word I would have thought to use, but does a great job describing the nuance of something that's well-understood, but may not be quick to do.

nice scale for technical risk, is there room in it for scientific risk?

Telling you “this is hard” is not usually saying “I don’t know how to do this”, it’s usually “I recognize this and it’s more involved than the thing you think you’re asking for”.

Related to "why don't you just..." to solve any seemingly trivial problem, which isn't.

I hope a follow-up moment was realizing that sometimes when an engineer says something is "simple" it's that they don't yet know that they don't know how to do that.

And when an engineer says something is hard, sometimes it's because they've done it before, and it really really sucked and burned months of their life and can we please not talk through the details that still make me cringe?

And occasionally there's that one engineer who describes stuff as "simple" after watching an old Rich Hickey talk.

This hits on a subtlety that I see all the time, which is that simple and hard are not opposites.

Some things are simple, some are complicated or complex. The degree of difficulty is basically orthogonal.

Running a marathon in under 2 hours is incredibly simple. All you have to do is pick a point 26 miles away and run in that direction. But it sure isn't easy.

I think that if a non-technical business person says something is not hard, it's "someone else must be able to do this, it can't be too complicated!" Yes, it could be done, but "easy" doesn't imagine costs (time, money) enough. If I am asked that and find that I can't do it, who will then? Trying to find someone to do the "easy" thing could turn out to be more complicated than judging the complexity level of a task.

One of my favorites! Source: "How to Be Polite", https://medium.com/s/story/how-to-be-polite-9bf1e69e888c

"So, what do you do?"

"I'm retired."

"Wow, that sounds really hard!"

This has always been my go to and it works like a charm. I ask “and what do you do?” and follow up whatever they say with “that sounds incredible! Tell me more!”

The core point about people systemically underestimating the complexity of any field outside their own is well taken. Joseph Conrad writes: "Men earning their bread in any very specialized occupation will talk shop, not only because it is the most vital interest of their lives but also because they have not much knowledge of other subjects. They have never had the time to get acquainted with them."

However, if I were to decline to speculate on any matter on which I lacked an expert-level understanding, the number of subjects on which I could hold a conversation would dwindle to virtually nothing, and I'd be much more boring to talk to at these cocktail parties. So, I intend to continue to spitball blindly, just for fun.

It's okay to not be well versed in a subject outside of one's area of expertise. You can still carry on a conversation and ask engaging questions to have an intelligent conversation. If one is unable to engage in a meaningful manner outside their area of interest/expertise, then that's an entirely different situation. And probably another interesting subject up for discussion if it can be handle delicately an non-hostile.

> ask engaging questions to have an intelligent conversation

Read a book once which outlined 30--40 occupational areas and two or three interesting questions in each of these areas -- to serve as reliable conversation starters.

Which book, do you recall?

Found it on my shelves! Closer to 100 main categories! [1]

Random example: Talking to Kitists. Do you fly a traditional or manueverable Kite? How big is it? .. (If maneuverable: How many lines does your kite have?) .. Do you have trouble finding enough open space to fly your kite? .. Have you ever been dragged by your kite? .. Do you anchor your kite, or do you hold onto it. .. Do you fly your kite in competitions? .. Do you do any kite building or kite painting?

[1] By Leil Lownes How to talk to anybody about anything: Breaking the ice with everyone from accountants to zen buddhists 1993

Offhand I am seeing no match on archive.org or Amazon. Worth hunting down. Thanks for the prompt to look for it!

Bookfinder to the rescue: https://www.bookfinder.com/search/?author=&title=&lang=en&su...

This is fascinating, but it seems like a specialized profession in and of itself to remember all of these questions. Maybe you can look it up a during a bathroom break...

I don't believe it has to be about rote memory or repeating any questions verbatim, necessarily. Rather, as with learning from converstation, from the half-conversations in this book one's imagination and knowledge of another person's perspective will already have been sparked to some degree. That, plus having some hint of what is of open interest in different fields, is part of the value.

I think there's two parts to it. Theres talk about how it could/should have been done. Then there is rating the result.

I know very little about the makings of a movie. There is a long list of job titles after a movie and I know not what they do.

But I can tell you I think a movie is shit.

I can't meaningfully tell you how the movie process should have gone to make it a good one.

It’s not surprising to me that people underestimate the complexity of fields not their own - I do it all the time myself.

What I think would be more interesting is the question: when are outsider critiques or suggestions likely to be valid? To stay with the construction example, it is clear that construction in the US is more expensive than it needs to be in many cases - railroad construction costs are famously many times higher in the US than in other industrialized countries. Is there insider knowledge I don’t have that would make this observation fallacious?

And what about cases where one isn’t simply pointing to a counter example? Are there cases where outsiders have made arguments from first principles that were correct, despite their lack of expertise in the field?

When I hear about something being much more expensive in the states, I assume it has to do with our litigious nature and everyone is afraid of taking on liability. But this is outside my expertise ;)

I would be curious to hear a response from an insider to Alon Levy's post about why American transit construction costs are so high: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/03/03/why-american-c...

This reminds me of what Socrates said in his defense at his trial. He told the court that he was wise becase he knew the boundries of his own wisdom; and that when he would speak to experts in the city he found them only to be wise in their own fields, yet suffering with the falicy that they were wise in the fields of others.

"At last I went to the artisans, for I was conscious that I knew nothing at all, as I may say, and I was sure that they knew many fine things; and in this I was not mistaken, for they did know many things of which I was ignorant, and in this they certainly were wiser than I was. But I observed that even the good artisans fell into the same error as the poets; because they were good workmen they thought that they also knew all sorts of high matters, and this defect in them overshadowed their wisdom"

https://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/apology/full-text/apol...

Relevant classic that's been on HN many times: Reality has a surprising amount of detail http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...

Also, very relevant to discussions of whether we live in a simulated universe!

What kind of lame parties does this guy go to? I expected an article about dope things to make a cocktail party more awesome. Like fireworks, or a poker table.

I was at a party with Dan once. We talked for a couple hours, getting pretty deep into several topics. I don't remember what we talked about, but I enjoyed the conversation a lot.

I vote for fireworks at my next party

It's all fun and games until the neighbor's gutter catches fire and the cops come out, but who knows, YMMV.

But is also makes for a story to tell at the next party you go to.

I bet you it doesn't even involve cocktails.

TIL people still actually have cocktail parties. Thought that was a boomer thing

All parties with food and drink but no other activity are basically being called cocktail parties now.

If you want to be informal about it, it’s just hanging out.

When you're young they're just called parties lmao.

And I learned that the cool kids say "trad" for "traditional".

> People often discuss the standard trendy topics (some recent ones I've observed at multiple parties are how to build a competitor to Google search and how to solve the problem of high transit construction costs) and explain why people working in the field today are doing it wrong and then explain how they would do it instead.

This is exactly why I moved away from SF. Can't stand these alpha nerds trying to one-up each other at parties.

> No one thinks about moving the starting or ending point of the bridge midway through construction. […] But Hillel interviewed a civil engineer who said that they had to move a bridge!

My local Department Of Transportation has this notice on the info page of the bridge construction project nearest to me:

“This is a design-build project, meaning the design and construction will happen simultaneously, which allows DOT and the contractor to include the most innovative and current construction solutions while ensuring a quality product.”

I... that's... surely there's more context here? Nice work if you can get it, I guess!

Well, working in software, I pretty much only have experience doing design-build work; I’ve never designed something in it’s entirety before building it (except maybe for a touch of hardware design, but even that is iterated and prototyped and tested and simulated…). I took this DOT page as a sign that maybe construction is becoming more like software over time, and I can no longer wax philosophical at cocktail parties about how they’re different.

A little context perhaps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design–build

OK that all helped a lot. Thank you

Absolutely everything has more complexity than is visible on the surface. Just go in with that assumption and you wont make yourself look like a fool. I also often find you only really look like a fool when you confidently make incorrect statements and denigrate others. Making incorrect statements / assumptions with the openness to learn from a small horse instead of a high horse is admirable not foolish.

Ah, isn't it more fun to just gleefully embrace your ignorance and arrogance? Come up with a back of the napkin solution and throw it out there. The professional will probably enjoy the opportunity to show off by picking it apart, right?

I think the author has a few too many misconceptions about the programmers' misconceptions.

"How long will it take to implement search here?" "Wait, why does it take longer than a week, Google can do it".

Things I've heard an actual Product Owner once say. Please tell the the one automobile engineer who was asked to make a car in a week.

So yes, I absolutely believe that /some/ programmers will say that their work is so complicated and like engineering, there are just a lot of seemingly exaggerated examples that have actually happened. I'm not saying it's harder. I'm just saying there are classes of problems that should not happen in civil engineering.

Project is halfway done, written in Python. Someone: "Can we not switch to Java?". I would equate that to "The metal bridge is halfway done, can we switch to wood?". This is not inferring that this is the most concerning problem in a problem, and that's my gripe with this article. And the moving bridge is also an exaggerated example taken for shock value. How often does that really happen? And would you put a random engineer of medium seniority in charge of this?

Disclaimer: I am not saying programming is harder or special. I've worked on construction sites and I've seen my fair share of ridiculous requests. But people are often simply persuaded a lot easier if you point to a physical wall and explain the problem, versus software where you need to start explaining at the very beginning. Sadly, often also for customers or product managers.

Counterpoint: The Berlin airport. They built the foundations, and then they decided to redesign it.

Yeah ok, but that one falls under "freak accident" in my book. Hard to think of a more spectacular failure in the recent past :)

I have a counter/corollary(?) to the idea that often people don't know what they don't know or assume that their surface knowledge can accurately understand a field, and they should stop making such bold statements:

If an executive with some great new idea or strategy not grounded in the full detail were to pay attention to the all the details, they might never try or get anything new done. Because if you listen to and empathize with all the details of how complicated something is and how there's this subtlety or that follow-on issue, you start to accept all the reasons it can't be done (either at all, or quickly). So in some cases, you only get progress because of persisting in ignorance that you can do something new that breaks the rules.

Of course I don't mean doing something that is structurally or physically impossible -- just in cases where the legacy of "why it can't be done" has created inertia that stops progress if you accept it a little too much.

I see this in HN in regards to education. Education in the US leaves much to be desired, and there are many ways we could improve it, but the complaints here rarely touch on the most dire problems e.g. comments like "what we really need to do is bust the teacher's union" which is an insane complaint compared to the fact that most schools teach reading wrong as policy by mandating the three cueing system be taught instead of phonics[0].

[0] https://fivefromfive.com.au/the-three-cueing-system/

> The predictability of a true engineer’s world is an enviable thing. But ours is a world always in flux, where the laws of physics change weekly.

Heh, I also disagree with this quote, but for a different reason than the author. I mean, what's nice about CS is that's it's pure, deterministic, straight forward. It's like doing basic physics problems and the text states "assume zero air resistance and zero friction". We have the simple laws of physics.

I don't envy those having to deal with the messiness of the real world. They have it far harder than me as a programmer.

People mistake schoolchild-level analogies for the way the real world works all the time. Kids grow up disillusioned that the neat causal view of history with a strong moral arc they learned at school is a gross simplification, and assume they've been hoodwinked as opposed to just talked down to. Likewise, schoolchildren learn a simplified version of physics and mistake that for the real thing (for example, believing that water has set freezing and boiling points rather than phase boundaries on a pressure/temperature plot). Actually, there is probably a trap which certain people who pay a lot of attention in school but never deeply pursue any subject outside of it fall into, which is to grossly overestimate their understanding of things. Whereas the class bozo is probably closer to the mark in his assessment of his own abilities.

This cocktail party observation is definitely common in certain circles, but I think particularly American culture, where maverick thinking is so highly prized. This type of thinking is a true wellspring of innovation, but is not accessible to the vast majority of people. It does remind me of this xkcd: https://xkcd.com/675/

I'd also caution against being too harsh in such people, especially in informal situations. "Why don't you just..." type questions are actually a great way to improve your understanding of a field, and should be taken in the spirit of curiosity, and not necessarily as an indicator of extreme hubris.

I've always liked this one: https://xkcd.com/277/ as well when it comes do "Why don't you just..." things.

As an aside, looking at that comic now I get the same feeling as I did when I watched a Season One episode of The Simpsons. Randall has refined his stick-figure technique!

I used to live next to an urban intersection. I have no experience designing intersections, but after five minutes looking from my fourth floor apartment down to the intersection, I concluded that it had been designed by either a moron or an enemy of human kind.

Next year I heard no less than five accidents, one of then ending with a car upside down.

Then they probably called the same person to re-design the interception and it was a total success: less accidents, but a constant horns concert complaining of people that gets fooled into getting into a turning lane, but doesn't want to turn and trying to go back to their path... that provoked some accidents, but not so many.

From early morning everyday, a huge noise. After some months, everybody in the neighborhood learned you should exit the lane in advance so you won't get caught. But being one main street in the city, there's always someone that doesn't know. I just had to wait ten minutes looking at it, and it happens. Then a lot of horns. The people complaining had surely made the same mistake some day earlier, but anyway.

Maybe the bad attitude comes from observing that there are often persons out there that makes a very bad job.

There was a fun Hacker News post last year that consisted just of searching HN comments for the phrase "why not simply": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27415725

+1 for the appendix reference to Scout Mindset. It's a really great read, with practical steps you can take to start down the path of scout mindset thinking.

https://www.amazon.com/Scout-Mindset-Perils-Defensive-Thinki...

The author misses the point that at parties, people are talking to connect and socialize, not solve world hunger, despite the topic at hand.

I think you're missing the point that this phenomenon is not exclusive to cocktail parties.

I think you’re missing the point that… Damn, I got nothing

This could have just as easily been titled "HN comments". The amount of woefully uninformed soap-boxing on here is staggering!

The author seems insufferable at cocktail parties.

Maybe, but the type of people he describes are insufferable too. Tech people are usually the worst offenders of thinking/acting like they are smarter than everyone.

The author seems insufferable at cocktail parties.

Those cocktail parties seem insufferable.

A good friend worked as a the transport manager for for a smallish ecological diary producer. When the original owners sold the business, the new owners (a financial consortium with some food experience) brought in a new executive team in, who had previously worked together to create direct to consumer food startup (something like hello fresh IIRC). Initially my friend was very excited because the owners looked like they wanted to really grow the business.

Unfortunately it became soon apparent that the execs mainly had "cocktail party ideas" about changes, "we created a new business in this area that didn't exist before, which is much harder than running an established business. therefore we know best. How hard can it be". So the production manager and my friend soon became the naysayers because they said when they thought things wouldn't work. Soon after they both were made redundant, but the business is now very close to going under.

All this story just to say, that this is not just at cocktail parties, but also in work situations people like to discard established knowledge because they think they know how to "disrupt" .

Here's an opposite point of view:

"Sometimes the Best Ideas Come from Outside Your Industry"

https://hbr.org/2014/11/sometimes-the-best-ideas-come-from-o...

Yes this so much. Also true about when it comes to any subject that people feel like you "know" the solution or at least feel like they know more than the idiot next door. This happens so often, people see the tip of the iceberg and assume they know the shape of the whole thing. I think it's pretty logical to do this, however, otherwise how are we going to make sense of the world? We have to use whatever incomplete information we have to form a hypothesis of what is really true. Are we supposed to outsource our sense making to a third party? I think what Dan is suggesting here is even more dangerous than what the people at cocktail parties are doing. Namely, refrain from forming any conjectures about the state of the world because you could be wrong.

The whole discussion of whether we live in a Matrix-like simulation falls into this category as well. There are so many layers of oversimplification at play in most peoples' conceptualization of a simulated universe that it is hard to even begin to have a conversation about it.

On the other hand there have been numerous examples of people who knew relatively nothing about a field and came to completely dominate it.

That is the incredible thing about Silicon Valley. People who knew/know nothing about various industries when starting come to utterly dominate them.

Amazon should never have succeeded. They knew nothing about books compared to booksellers. They won anyway. And then proceeded to utterly crush every other company in retail. And they continue to do so.

SpaceX is utterly absurd in its existence. Utterly absurd. Boeing and Lockheed had way more knowledge and experience. Yet they are about to be pushed out of a lot of launch.

Nothing in the article says that knowledge cannot be acquired. The examples that you mentioned aren't cocktail party ideas, but groups of smart people working 100 hours weeks to figure out a new market.

I can give you a ton of examples of founders trying the same but failing very hard because they don't take the time to learn and just use cocktail party ideas.

> I can give you a ton of examples of founders trying the same but failing very hard because they don't take the time to learn and just use cocktail party ideas.

Maybe you don't have the time to deliver the entire ton, but could you give one example?

How is Amazon part of Silicon Valley?

Bezos worked at Wall Street for almost a decade in roles like VP at a hedge fund, then started a company in Seattle.

If anything, you might say that hedge fund experience qualifies one to dominate industries — if one extreme outlier is to be believed anyway.

Your examples are not my favorites, but you are right. And even when folks who don't know the field don't dominate, there have been lots of cocktail party conversations that led to massively successful ventures.

I do not go to cocktail parties any more, but I think I was more creative for having endured more regular bullshit sessions with people who thought greatly of themselves, even if I did not. I would not try to "fix" that experience.

But the author did have a number of references and comments about knowledge and knowledge seeking that are useful.

Where are the cocktails? I thought there would be some interesting cocktail ideas

More fun at a party to be had when you find out what a person’s true expertise is and probe that until you find something surprising.

Doesn’t take long to find something that can change your views or offset your ignorance.

Most startups probably start as a cocktail party idea, so although the author is correct, he underestimates the value of the concept.

Also, whilst it is intuitive that someone without expertise in a field is easy to get everything wrong, it is more interesting that often experts also get everything wrong. Sometimes this happens because the problem may affect an expert's field but belongs to another field, or the problem just exists from someone else's point of view.

In Greece we refer to people who always know everything better than experts as couch coaches. :)

I came in looking for fun ideas for the next cocktail party and found an interesting opinion piece. I particularly enjoyed this as someone who has worked in both aerospace and software engineering.

I’m sure this is true. But when a project is 7 years and billions of dollars over due (east side access in nyc, in this case but there are similar examples) it seems more than far for the people that have spent that money and have thus far gotten no benefits to spout ignorantly about why. Indulging us seems the least the responsible industries can do.

I’m exchange I’m happy to listen to civil engineers and construction workers theories about why Tesla is taking so long to deliver the full self driving software they’ve been charging for.

I was all ready to get up in arms and disagree with you but after thinking about it more I actually really like this approach.

I would be more than happy to hear a mechanical engineer or geotechnical engineer's takes on why my software project is bad. Perhaps most of the time their advice will be useless due to lack of context/experience, but if they are nice it's endearing, entertaining, and rarely--but still sometimes--helpful.

I feel like even the most egregious offenders I know of in this area are still aware that designing/building planes is far harder engineering than most software projects.

(Disclaimer) I’m not fun at parties.

I don’t think this is fun at parties.

Little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

And as more and more information is distilled into sound bites, tweets, and simplified visualisations, I am afraid more and more people will spend their brain power acquiring little bits of knowledge, never going deeper than a 10-minute TED talk.

The end result will be great cocktail party conversations, but very few people actually solving real problems.

So what’s the actual reason that public transit projects are wildly more expensive and slower to build in the United States than in other countries?

Most of the money is not being spent on things that advance the project. The people most involved don't want it ever to be finished; that is when the money stops.

None of the money is wasted, as such; every penny goes into a pocket.

If this is the true answer, why doesn’t it happen in other countries?

Things like it happen here and there. It took very long to build that Finnish nuke, which might be an example. It depends on the political conditions: typically, to get a big pot of money together needs support from a broad swath of supporters, who then each expect patronage, a piece of the pie. As long as the money is flowing, everybody involved stays happy, regardless of how much actual work is getting done.

Even in the US, not all public-works projects are afflicted. Solar and wind power systems seem mostly not afflicted.

When it seems like the money might stop flowing, there is some motivation to actually deliver a result, if just to save face or avoid prosecution for fraud. Even if not, indictments are rare, and in any case none of the money is ever returned.

These seem like the least-chill cocktail parties ever.

I can't emphasize enough how much I like a browser's Reader View for web pages like this.

a tale as old as time!

I noticed how people tend to vastly underestimate a topic's complexity too, but I'm not sure what to do with it. I feel like a constant buzzkill when hanging out with people, and I do my best to hide it, but most of the time I end up thinking about how incomplete our conversation is, and how therefore useless/wasteful it is.

In my more charitable moments, I think that it's good mental exercise, but it's hard to think generously about someone else when you hear them say superficial "I could do better" statements like the topic of this article. How could they be so naïve, to think that they can, casually, upend an entire field? It happens on Reddit (and HN) all the time, too. Every community centered around a creative work is lousy with, "Why didn't they just" style arguments.

Also, not for nothing, but I've never heard the "building an airplane while flying it" analogy used to suggest software is harder than building an airplane. Pardon my cursing, but who the fuck thinks programming is harder than aerospace engineering???

Finally, I found this super duper hard to read all the way through, due to the lack of formatting. I'm assuming that decision is somehow intentional, but it's not a kind one. My eyes hurt. :(

> and how therefore useless/wasteful it is

My suggestion here would be to think about the purpose of the conversation. The goal of cocktail party conversations is not to create working solutions to real world engineering problems. It is to create connections between people, and to have fun. Speculative but uninformed discussions about hard problems are indeed useful if they fulfil this goal. Let's face it, if all the "amateurs" in the room had enough insight to produce workable solutions, it would still be a "useless" conversation on a practical level because those people, working in unrelated fields, do not have the means or the opportunity to put their theories into practice.

Oh I enjoy bullshitting as much as the next person, I get bothered mostly when people genuinely don't think that's what we're doing.

But yeah, I'm able to mostly suppress this feeling and live my life, but it's really annoying, to me, when people take themselves too seriously.

dunning kruger effect is as valid at cocktail parties as it is everywhere else

Dunning Kruger isn’t particularly valid anywhere, but even if it were, you should re-read the paper because it demonstrates that people more confident in their abilities are statistically more competent; the correlation is positive. Other papers have shown reversals and/or demonstrated difficult tasks don’t exhibit the so-called DK effect. Nobody remembers the attempts to reproduce, no wonder science has a replication crisis.

This is a good article about it explaining why the effects Dunning & Kruger measured are probably regression to the mean: https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-...

BTW, the sample size in the DK paper was tiny, it was voluntary, and it measured only Cornell undergrads (no participants were actually “incompetent” in a meaningful way). The authors were barely out of undergrad themselves at the time. The survey didn’t have people rate themselves, it had people rank themselves against other people they don’t know (think about this!). The tasks were extremely simple, like getting a joke (seriously! no discussion in the paper of what the actual joke(s) were) and basic English grammar (no mention of how many ESL participants there might have been). So many methodological red flags in the DK paper, and so many counter-examples immediately after it, it’s really truly astounding that it caught on.

Apologies for unloading, but I’m hoping to help educate and make a dent in the casual mentions of DK because it’s so widely and completely misunderstood and also because it’s such bad science, it needs to be revealed as a bad example and not used for it’s non-existent explanatory powers.

Huh. But doesn't this in some sense make it the perfect meta-example for not knowing enough to know how little we know?

Yeah, it does feel like there’s something kinda meta about it. ;) Except that because the paper’s data shows a positive correlation between self-ranking and skill, it seems like the meta-ness is mainly based on the misunderstood DK concept. So, I won’t call it the meta-DK-effect or claim it’s incompetence or even a cognitive bias necessarily. The article and this meta effect are perhaps just about making assumptions and jumping to conclusions, which humans at all skills levels do often and well. It doesn’t mean that anyone is incompetent or less skilled, it just means we love to guess based on our limited and available information & experience.

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