The silent majority of experts (2012)
prog21.dadgum.com
prog21.dadgum.com
However, the actual experts I knew in high school who later went on to great institutions like MIT or applied and got into extremely competitive investment banks didn't browse the internet very much, or relied on supplements and these books.
Similar to the ideas expressed in the submitted article, these people didn't spend time online reading blogs and Reddit, or blogging/self-promoting themselves. They generally were involved in a sport (track and field or squash), spent little time online, and spent a lot of time using a lot of paper studying.
They also were careful who they associated with as friends (they hung out with studious people). Less in one's control, their parents were financially successful or were in competitive positions (e.g. were professors or physicians), so they may have learned these strategies from them, versus inventing them independently.
Long story short: there is absolutely a culture of improvement that is primarily offline and less visible, because people either don't record it, or people do record it and it doesn't get upvoted or ranked highly on Google searches. Examples of recorded good advice appeared on HN recently, shared by computer scientist Donald Knuth who is also usually offline: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31482116
However there are people who have gotten help and made real progress. Think of some of the hardest things one can do: dealing with addiction, overcoming crippling fear, radically changing bad habits etc.
There's people who were weak and gotten strong. Some of them read self help books, some found social support. That's were the focus should be, not on the people who always walked the happy path and just "worked hard". Overcoming hopeless situations, stigma, bias, ego. That's actually hard.
Absolutely. I've also personally benefitted from some self-help books, though I've read many other self-help books that seemed to be useful at the time, but were ultimately forgettable and likely a distraction from issues I would have been better off directly taking of.
A good heuristic I've found is to prefer self-help books written by academics over influencers (anyone with a marketing background or associated with the word "guru"). Good books included those written by BJ Fogg (professor at Stanford) on habits, David Burns on useful versus self-defeating beliefs (psychiatrist and professor also affiliated with Stanford), and to a less extent Cal Newport (computer science professor at Georgetown).
As a side note, Cal Newport's advice was generally good, but — though I may be misremembering — his advice appeared to mostly be useful for people who already have a very clear goal and strong motivation about what to do, and didn't really struggle with self-defeating beliefs, close relationships that were unhealthy in life, or people who had fallen behind in mathematics skill development.
It's a similar thing with dieting, the number of people who have gone to the trouble of actually counting every calorie they eat, restricting themselves to a certain amount to lose weight, and not lost weight is pretty small. But the number who tell themselves that they've done it is much higher.
About 2.8% of the US population has a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. (In a wider study including other countries, the average is 2.4%) I have no reason to doubt this because I have far too many people I knew before my diagnosis who have since told me they have an extended family member who are bipolar. And not the “oh they have a diagnosis” kind, but people who destroy their own lives and those of the people around them. I was shocked how common it is.
And this is just bipolar. There are many other mental and physical problems that affect the ability to have discipline if they just worked on it.
Edit: I should state I definitely believe focus and attention is a skill, but you can’t effectively use a skill when your tools are broken. Good luck racing a car that’s disassembled in the garage.
After awhile I didn't want to be a smoker anymore and found a self help book - "Allen Carr's Easy Way To Stop Smoking." Friends of mine suggested it, and I found a PDF and read it during a dead afternoon at work.
Instead of focusing on the "hard" trope of quitting smoking it presented it as easy - hence the title. It framed the habit for exactly what it was, a drug addiction, but it never talked harshly to you about how you became a nicotine addict or the quitting process. It focused on telling you exactly what to expect if you decide to quit, and then gave you a positive framework to help overcome the effects of quitting. The overall message was always "think of how much you're going to gain by quitting... health, money, etc."
It worked, I am no longer a nicotine addict. I don't think I would have had the capability to quit without some mental reframing which that book 100% helped me accomplish.
> That's were the focus should be, not on the people who always walked the happy path and just "worked hard". Overcoming hopeless situations, stigma, bias, ego. That's actually hard.
Agree.
There's always the "work hard" narrative and I find it's often coupled with a discrediting attitude like OP's comment. The effect of that attitude demotivates more than it helps. As cheesy as it was I found the tools to fix my nicotine addiction in a self-help book ha
Almost all diets work if you stick to them, and almost nobody does. People want behavioral changes to be easy but they're not - they require hard work.
Perhaps more diet books would be successful if they treated it as a food addiction instead of a "eat healthy to look sexy".
I now occasionally a smoke a cigarette (say, once every month or two), something that, according to the vast majority of many ex-smokers, appears to be almost impossible to do.
If you are interested in the solution, you can signup for my . . .
Seriously though the answer was to just do something else. Don't sit around thinking about the problem; just do something else and the problem will be easier to solve the next time you try to solve it.
But as you've shown, often a good mentor can do just as well, or better.
If you could make that part about 5 minutes longer you'll have a future in YouTube commercials
* Huge procrastination problem in college melted away as soon as I started working 9-5 in an office.
* Couldn't run 5 minutes, until I incidentally started wearing a smart-watch, tried running again, and noticed the heart rate monitor telling me to slow down.
* Doom-scrolling trances easily broken by shutting down the computer or putting the phone out of arm's reach.
I don't think any particular advice in the self-help genre is likely to be true, but these "one weird trick" style solutions do keep on working for me.
It's especially difficult because there is actually good advice mixed with the bad and unsubstantiated. I've taken good advice from certain comments (e.g. that led to the discovery of open courseware and actually quality resources on physical exercise programs).
But part of maturity is learning to be skeptical of advice independent of upvotes, so one can get the good advice while avoiding getting mislead. To answer quick questions, I try to search for articles from reputable newspapers first (to see if a verified expert interviewed by a journalist is quoted at length) and possibly HN's archives via Googling with site:news.ycombinator.com. For more complex questions and topics, I try to find book recommendations from Reddit that were written by academics or low-profile experts over influencers, and then reading about the topic at length (e.g. it's usually far better to learn about big social problems if curious through well-sourced books, versus any hot takes online, regardless of the popularity of these hot takes).
you just failed your own test. "reputable" and "expert" indicate you're offloading evaluation to others rather than doing the hard work yourself of discerning the validity or plausibility of those claims.
I could study economics textbooks, take online courses, and get a part-time degree in economics over hundreds of hours, read economics papers from journals and the NBER (and equivalent institutions), develop a reputation and a network of experts, and then develop my own analysis and debate with these experts.
Alternatively, I could accept that I'm a non-expert for this particular domain, read some in-depth analyses in the Financial Times (a better source than Reddit), realize I should be cautious and save more, and move on with my life.
If the subject is more important, e.g. I want to work on a months-long project that requires an understanding of a specific economic concept, it would be useful to search for reputable books related to that topic and then study them.
don't look for experts, look for arguments you can verify through your own experience and validate through your own thought experiments. don't reach for immediate judgment, but rather, leave questions open until the evidence is conclusive. the term "expert" is rhetorical at best, and manipulative in most cases. relying on experts is a surefire way to be misled.
as a side note, there's an entire branch of marketing dedicated to using social proof manipulatively.
1) Successful people tend to be found in selective environments. A website that lets anyone in will by definition be filled with junk, bored people, teens, and time-wasters. Since 'successful people' know this, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy (they know their peers aren't there).
2) Most professional peer connections are still offline. Want to know what your peers think about a recent paper? If you're established in your field you'll know them on a first-name basis and will just call them.
Twitter is the only exeption to both these rules, miraculously, though only to a degree.
As I grow older, I see a huge divide between those who have/had parental support vs those who don't/didn't. It doesn't even take financially or professionally successful parents. Many of my peers had middle-class parents working normal jobs who just loved unconditionally + put effort forward... the difference between them and those who had less than ideal upbringings is typically vast.
Having loving parents who teach, model, and promote healthy discipline habits is paramount for a kid's success. Unfortunately many children don't win that lottery.
Do you mean their career success, or their personalities in general?
Positive upbringings helped those folks navigate everything in life better from simple chores like laundry, to relationships, to school, to careers... etc.
People are more healthy when they're in an environment that promotes emotional/educational growth vs. when they're forced into a survival mentality. Those who had the opportunity to grow in safety have an easier time socially vs. those who had to navigate turbulent childhoods.
Much of it is just trust
> Much of it is just trust
You are absolutely right. There was so much trust between the kids and the parent. You could tell from the way they act and talk around each other. That experience was very enlightening for me.
Presumably there are many factors. One worth considering could be "frustration tolerance" as a construct or capability.
The friends with troubled upbringing often do find success in one area of life, but they seem unstable overall and often crash or stall in multiple other areas.
> The extra years of "streetwise"
Let's acknowledge exactly what "streetwise" is... it's the ability to operate in unsafe and not ideal environments in a way that maximizes personal safety.
It's a privilege to not have to be "streetwise" in regards to your parents/upbringing. So many kids are just out there trying not to get their asses beat only to get steamrolled by a crippled education system that has no resources to help them.
The setback that comes along with "streetwise" is immense
Interesting. I was nodding in somewhat agreement until this, because as a city kid I don’t see it as a set back, just another tool in the utility belt of life.
That said, if all one has are ‘street-smarts’ (just like if all one has is ‘book-learning’) well, it may just mean the pivot point is they’re just gonna have a different calculus for getting by, than someone on the opposite end.
When it is a constant in your life to stay "street-smart" it is a setback because it drowns out other intelligence - this happens with abusive parents.
Although related, I am not referring to the traditional city kid's need for some "street smarts" - I'm referring to unsafe environments at home/with parenting which I specifically stated in parent comment:
> Let's acknowledge exactly what "streetwise" is... it's the ability to operate in unsafe and not ideal environments in a way that maximizes personal safety.
> "streetwise" in regards to your parents/upbringing
---
My overall point is if one has to get "street-smart" because of what is happening at home... that's heinous because children should be safe, and I 100% see it as a setback inflicted on the child.
The downside is I don’t know how to turn that off. Or to put it in other terms, I don’t have the capacity to choose whether I track other people’s emotional state or not. Tracking people’s emotional state all the time is exhausting, and distracting. When I’m doing that I’m not in touch with what I want or need in that moment. Growing up for me (with the help of a good therapist) currently involves learning to put that down. And it’s terrifying.
Basically every survival strategy also gives us superpowers. But it’s ok - we get to keep those superpowers even after we’ve healed those wounds.
I think we all know what we're talking about when we use terms like "street smarts" and "streetwise" instead of "common sense" or "vigilance" or "poise". So, then, I'm hoping that there's clarity with regards to the kinds of policies the above statements, if accepted, should lead us to support. I'm trying not to state them directly because their utterance tends to lead to a kneejerk reaction; let's see if some rhetorical remove is helpful in quelling passions.
I almost cried reading this sentence. I've never realized how my precocious adulting wasn't healthy: every adult compliments you about how "mature" and "responsible" you are. You're actually just anxious because you paternal responsibility on yourself: I had to basically raise myself. The cost of this "independence" has been that, at 27 I feel like a 50 years old with multiple regrets: as a simple, non threatening example, I watched an anime episode or played a video game for the first time as a 25 years old. I've never learned how to relax, or how to have faith in the future for that matter. And it hasn't been positive: life is becoming more and more heavy on my shoulders.
Wishing you the best.
26 years old with a father with Asperger's (with the anger issues and emotional non-understanding that comes with it), an over-bearing mother who sheltered me from pretty much everything crippling my social and personal skills growing up preventing me from getting help when I needed it - now I'm playing perpetual catch-up with both my personal life (social/romantic relationships), and the untreated mental problems I've been suffering from - I'm finally realizing the problems I've been beating myself up about through my whole life are not really my fault and I should have gotten help with my issues much much earlier.
I can only wonder what life would have been like if I would have stood up for myself much earlier and gotten the help I need - despite the repeated claims from both parents that I'd ruin the family and rip everybody apart if I did try to get help.
Even a lot of people with seemingly 'good jobs', I would argue, are not necessarily providing a ton of material value.
For example, I'm coming to the point where I believe the vast majority of 'Data Science' is 'Business Academia' and a giant pile of over-optimization and busy work.
The surpluses are concentrated in groups that have power, but those dollars are not necessarily used to maintain or support those systems directly, rather, they become applied R&D shops.
There is certainly a lot of busy work in DS like there is a lot of busy work in any non-critical pockets of operations, software engineering included.
I don't know what "over-optimization" means. If it means that, for instance, that the accuracy provided by the models is greater than the business needs, sometimes that's true and I agree. But are other parts of the business at fault for not being, broadly speaking, responsive enough or it is an "over-optimization" problem?
There are few business that have the kind scale in which a lot of that will be hugely useful (at high degrees of sophistication), let alone, afford the teams of researchers. Most of the optimizations are low hanging fruit which can be achieved via some kind of basic algorithm.
I believe you could nuke Snowflake and all their giant lakes of historical data and the world would not skip a beat.
I try to explain.
Recommender systems add tremendous value, millions when not billions in revenue, to any retail business, streaming business. Is it by chance that all the online retailers had to set up a recommender system?
A/B tests are not needed? If A/B testing and actions taken looking the results would not be useful, don't you think that business would know it?
Forecasts in business are nearly irrelevant, or rubbish, you say. Like in the sense that in complex systems is irrelevant to know what's going to happen next, that is better just to play it along at best? Having worked in companies in media, retail, healthcare, and telco for which forecasting is crucial for planning the use of resources, negotiation of contracts etc., this comment is off-base.
Going from abstract to practical, I have worked recently with one telco giant on one of the services they offer. Their forecast of subscribers done by drawing a straight line that follows the latest data is making them leave tens of millions on the table each year. I proposed to make some A/B testing on their "coupon" strategy and they were not interested, preferring to send a "coupon" to everybody and their grandfather because they did not want to study for a week how to set up an experiment. It is mostly laziness. Clearly to know if A/B testing is working or not (say increase engagement, revenue etc.), one has to try it. But they don't, because they are mentally lazy.
One thing I agree with is that most legacy business are not ready to adopt a data-driven modern way of doing business, due to stiff processes, old-timers that would like to go on with their business like they were doing 30 years ago, and general fear of changing.
The fact that the legacy businesses are still "working" may give the impression that all these data-driven "baloney" is subtracting rather than adding to the business. Why do we need forecasts, they say, I cannot believe that these people want to use data, isn't our expertise enough? Don't you see we are the still among the 5 top companies that do what we do?
But their position in the market is not due to sound business practices, but due to their dominant position in the market. But then the dominant position goes away and the old-timers finally recognize that A/B testing, forecasting etc. combined with domain-knowledge are a plus for the business.
Maybe you don't need 1,000 DS, maybe you need 20 (practitioners, not "researchers"), that depends on the business. Clearly the mom and pop business does not need any data science.
Chess is a more extreme example. Grandmasters regularly play their best games in their late 20s for a reason. Super grandmasters all started playing around the same age.
Not having to worry about that stuff, whether it's immediately after graduating from high school or college or when thinking about taking all your money and investing it in yourself/your new business venture is liberating.
Of course, this require two things of the parents, to put forth the effort like you say, and also to have the means to support a dependent.
This really gets lost in the traditional nuclear family argument. From personal experience, having both biological parents in the same house doesn't mean a healthy family environment, and no amount of moralizing is going to wish it into being.
Also overlooked is the impact one can have through simple acts of support and empowerment.
Had a High School teacher that let me into a photojournalism class that was already full (the school admins denied my schedule transfer after we had moved to the 'correct' side of the street (literally) and into an upper middle class school district). This teacher simply allowed me to be socially-weird-awkward-me and set a basic structure to thrive in (eventually winning state and national awards with the school newspaper). By giving me (and others) a chance to show we belonged and could compete helped build my self-esteem after it had been consistently torn down at home.
Didn't know it then, and doubt that teacher has any idea, but it changed the course of my life. I think I'm more a practical realist or even a cynic about life and society than I am optimistic - still, that experience reminds me to try and build others up and pay that empowerment forward
The 'moralizing' is from those who want to equivocate.
This is also from deep life experience myself, with close family and colleagues.
In everything but the best scenarios: 'Everything Is Hard' in a single family household, whereas things 'Can Be Hard' in regular family scenarios.
I think a 'single mentor' can make a big difference, but nowhere near most of the other things put together.
And FYI I don't think parents provide very good 'professional mentorship' for the most part. They're there for other reasons.
i.e. if I found out that a mom was coming to pick up her kids laundry and leave some meals because 'Uni Exams' ... I will be $1000 immediately that kid will do well without knowing a single other thing about that family or situation. Not a guarantee of anything, but an easy bet.
Narrow bet, yes. But I'd put $100 on them having high risk of entitlement issues and being an overweight office stinker who is a loner, because they never learned to wash, cook and manage their time. Not certain, but this is a pattern with risks: kids need to learn self reliance in the ordinary.
I'd take the other side of that bet; in my experience, a parent who still feels the need to take on their adult child's domestic labor likely hasn't prepared them well for independence in other respects, such as managing their own education well enough to get good grades in university classes.
My native culture prizes gender equality and self-reliance; has washer-dryers in every home; and doesn't care about wrinkled clothes. If a grown man from my culture needed help with his laundry, it's probably because his life's a shambles - if you're struggling with depression or something, that ain't a good sign for your exam success.
On the other hand, someone from a more patriarchal culture; where white goods aren't in everyone's reach; and they like clothes that need to be carefully ironed? That might just indicate they have the support of their very traditional parents.
Nobodies 'native culture' prizes 'equality' to that extent, if you're from a culture we're all familiar with I'd fathom you're projecting pretty hard.
In some places in the world, there are some 'modern ideals' around those types of things, but it's more 'ideology' than 'culture'.
Students are not running around forlorn about not having their 'pressed khakis and dinner shirts needing pressing'. God forbid. The Mother who pops in with Rizotto & Scnitzel for their kid and her roommates, grabs their laundry, making sure they have their train ticket to 'Auntie Lucy and Uncle Chuck's Wedding' (because the date was changed!), gossips about their cousin who just got into Flight School in the Air Force. That's 'conscientious parenting' and extremely hard to do as a single parent at that level. 20-year-olds are barely adults, arguably, transitioning to adulthood.
In my experience teenagers are eager to establish their own identity, independent of their parents - to the point of being embarrassed, at some ages, to even be seen with their parents. Until they're grown enough that their relationship is more like one of equals. Most people over the age of 17 would be embarrassed if someone said they were merely transitioning to adulthood.
Leaving home means doing your own cooking, cleaning and laundry, and paying your own bills - in exchange for freedoms like exploring your sexuality; experimenting with drink and drugs; and occasionally staying in bed until noon.
Granted, some students choose a school close to home and some even keep living with their parents - but it's far more common to choose a school 2+ hours away from home. Having a parent drive two four-hour round trips to collect and return some laundry, to save their child 15 minutes loading and unloading the laundry machine would be very unusual.
Not sure where single parents come into this? I have no strong opinion on it one way or another. I was referring to the the argument for having both biological parents in the house, that it doesn't automatically mean the home environment is healthy. It doesn't mean that having both biological parents in the home automatically equals support for the child. That is what is lost on that argument, that the actual physical and mental well being and support of the child is not automatically granted just because it's traditional nuclear family home.
There are other family structures that can more than provide for the physical, monetary, and mental health of the child. Coming from a traditional (US) Southern up-bring, the moralizing I heard is how all the social problems can easily be solved if the parents would just "work out" their problems. At that time, and still in places today, it was code for the wife to shut up and obey her husband - and if he beats her, what did she do to upset him? if he sexually assaults her, wait, just kidding, he cant because providing sex was her on-demand-duty. Is he beating, berating or sexually abusing the children? No one will ever know because if it's happening, the wife is socially blamed (if it leaks out) for failing her duties and no-one dares talk about it. Mostly the same for the wife treating a child in this way, except this time the blame and responsibility is rightfully hers, if it ever gets out. Having women work outside of the house really messed up this racket, thats a lot of self-serving control to lose for those that have lost it, or the promise of it, and the moralizing I hear because of it got louder. My point being, obviously our experiences of childhood and family are all different - however, this is the lens I, and many others, view through
Reach out to him and let him know. It's these kinds of feedback that can really, really make a person's day, and it's what every engaged teacher dreams of/works for.
Maybe it worked out better this way, it keeps me honest - like the lack of closure keeps me from storing it away and forgetting the lesson in it.
I think it's definitely a starting handicap, no doubt about it. But I'd be very wary in telling those people - if any are reading this - that they're just not going to be successful.
Without getting too touchy feely - I definitely had un-supportive, unstable, conditionally-loving parents. Was it a setback? Yes. Would I be financially ahead of where I am now had they been better? Probably. But you know what, I'm doing alright. Maybe not by HN silicon valley standards well ahead of the curve in my little first world country. Never lost ambition even if I stumbled a lot along the way.
So yeah if you're younger, and reading this, and a bad childhood is still messing with your mind - please don't think all hope is lost. It will be harder but not impossible.
If they're reading this, they're already the type of person trying to find success. It's important to remember that a lot of these results about families and finances are _statistical_. There are a myriad of other factors, whether known or not, that lead to success and anyone reading this who thinks they aren't cut out for success should never let that get to them.
I also grew up in a similar family to you, but (other than the crazy amount of times I've gotten lucky) I distinguished myself from my peers in my income-depressed area by being excited and interested in trying to get out of my circumstances. Most didn't. So if you're reading this and worried you aren't as far ahead as your peers, don't. The fact that you're worried will go a long way.
There are a lot of people who are "excited and interested" and never amount to anything because of the above mentioned "circumstances" that you were able to overcome, given a series of factors: natural predisposition, hard work, luck, gravity of the initial conditions and so on. Textbook survivorship bias.
A good work ethic isn't "luck". If someone has a good work ethic it's because the people in their life when they were growing up worked their butts off to give it to them. People don't escape poverty because of luck (look at lottery winner outcomes). They escape poverty after about three decades of hard work toward that goal, usually spread across multiple generations.
>Textbook survivorship bias.
Textbook "doesn't fit my narrative, find a way to discount it" bias.
> "Where does personal agency end and circumstances begin?"
If it's "I choose to work harder", it's personal agency. If it's "we're voting away support systems because I turned out OK and you should just work harder" it's not.
The kind of parents who are organised enough to give you support, or probably also the kind of people who give their kids the genes to be organised and productive.
It's still a lottery in either case.
Yes, "can". Because we are not clones of our parents. It doesn't mean that conscientiousness hasn't something like 60-80%of hereditability.
People who are experts in their business (as opposed to being advice folks) tend to give it quietly 1 on 1 to people they trust. It’s a Close Friend game rather than an Acquaintance game.
Consider the possibility, say, in a guild context: those who can, do. They work for the guild, and do whatever the guild does. Those who can't, from age, infirmity, injury: they teach, passing on knowledge and wisdom.
Maybe a more wholistic take on this is something like:
'Those that can't do, teach, and those that can't teach would really be doing everyone a huge favor if they would just go do somewhere.'
If this is a more complete take, it suggests to me that the master/apprentice paradigm existed for so long for a reason; masters have spent their lives specializing narrowly, not necessarily transmitting their understanding, thus the deconstruction of their expertise is only accessible via osmosis over time, because essentially they can't teach.
I took 2 years out of my life to work for almost nothing so I could share my love of math and programming with the next generation. That I eventually gave in and moved into software engineering to make money says far more about my lack of altruism than my competence then or now.
But forget me, I taught in a cushy city post, I know some people in the peace corps (I taught abroad) who are still in the game, teaching math and English out in the sticks, sometimes having to build or maintain their own school buildings and learning the local language with no assistance. The idea that the defining trait of teachers is a lack of competence is laughable.
If instead you had 30 relationships, whilst for sure you had a lot of experience, I wouldn't really trust your advise as an "expert".
But I think it's possible to be a relationship expert even with one or two real relationships. Two sets of people that have been married to only one person are not necessarily equally happy or fulfilled. A person could also make relationships their personal interest and spend a lot of time thinking about the topic on top of their lived experience which might make them more capable of giving advice.
I think it's wrong to say anyone giving advice isn't worth listening to.
Twitter has lots of tech advice, and most of these authors don’t give advice for a living. People like John Carmack regularly share how they achieved things.
Authoring a book or hosting a podcast is btw often not a great deal from an ROI perspective. It could help you get hired, but it’d be way easier to just study leetcode instead.
I think you could cut people and their intentions a bit more slack.
I see it other way
Internet allows you to discuss everything you want with various people from your industry
I think it allows you to become better not only faster, but also makes you more aware of different perspectives
Why wouldn't you want to do so?
You said you disagreed with the experiences of the OP and essentially the article.
Posited as evidence that your view was correct based on your opinion on what you perceive as the advantages of the internet.
Then treated your opinion as a fact that would be crazy to be argued against.
It's true. The internet does allow for easy communication between people. It does contain a whole lot of information. You can get the documents to most things. You can access most information quickly.
But that information doesn't require commentary. And it's not a guarantee that the people you want to talk to want to talk to you.
If I want to learn Rust, I don't go to a Rust forum, I look up the Rust documentation. If I want to know how to do something Rust, I search for the specific information. Oftentimes, my issue is a faulty assumption about how something works or not knowing the exact name of the method I want to call. Once again, that's not something I need personal interaction for. The very last thing I do, is ask people on the internet. Not out of any misguided misanthropy, but just because it's hardly ever needed.
Article Premise: [the internet provides] an intersection of the people working on interesting things and who like to write about it--and that's not the whole story.
Article Conclusion: Your time may better spent getting in there and trying things rather than reading about what other people think.
tester756: I think [the internet] allows you to become better not only faster, but also makes you more aware of different perspectives
Charitably reading, I understand tester756 to be saying that in fact, that intersection is broad enough that the article's conclusion doesn't readily follow.
Did tester756 provide enough of a warrant for the rebuttal? Maybe, maybe not. Frankly I don't think this article warrants a high degree of rigor to comment on it, though, so I think it's fine.
How about scenerios like: you have 3 solutions to one problem, but you want opinion about which one is the best?
For example endless discussions about OOP / DDD / Microservices / SOLID / FP, etc.
>Then treated your opinion as a fact that would be crazy to be argued against.
That wasn't intended
My opinion is still just my opinion. I've spent years on various reddits/discords/hns/forums and I do really believe that you can get a lot out of those discussions
Internet here is just medium, it may be similar to talk with your colleagues, attending debate, etc.
People doing shit don't have time for bullshit.
If you have hours to dedicate defending your pet fan theory online, you clearly aren't using those hours to do anything meaningful. And I'm not talking side-hustle-gotta-make-that-bread kind of stuff, I'm talking about just more fulfilling pursuits in general. Learning an instrument, tinkering with projects with no other goal but messing around, reading, etc.
So while you think you may have "won" the argument about whether or not Superman can beat Wolverine, the truth is the other person left because you and the discussion in general wasn't worth their time. And they don't need your validation. They find fulfillment in the stuff they do outside of the internet.
yup. i almost never go back and forth more than a couple times with anyone here, because it's most common that the other person is bullshitting, and i don't really need or want that. if i argue a point, i want the other person to bring something new to the table that i didn't know before, not rehash tired old platitudes.
relatedly, experts don't need to claim for themselves the term "expert", and folks who start conversations with their credentials have already "lost" the discussion, so to speak. if your arguments can't stand on their own merits, proffering a credential won't help.
Or they’re online, they’re just not talking about what they’re experts in. Because they don’t want to spend their free time teaching a 101 class.
Reddit is seriously full of teenagers LARPing as adults, or adults stoned to the point where they basically are behaving like teenagers... not that I have anything against that. When you start seeing it like that it's much easy to get what you want from it, like when I realized The Economist is mostly idealist very smart mid 20s college graduates on their first serious job.
Though it applies to almost everywhere online.
Yeah that's 50% right there and 'learning strategies' is only a part of it.
The other 'strategy' is 'being rich' or 'connected' or knowing a few arcane insights that do not amount to 'competitive strategies' so much as 'inside knowledge'.
"Long story short: there is absolutely a culture of improvement that is primarily offline and less visible"
Let's not conflate 'climbing the social ladder' with 'improvement'.
The most important lessons are the counterintuitive ones - if they were all intuitive, you wouldn't need to be taught them, and the pain and loss of figuring them out organically might be extreme. If someone is earnestly asking, you should hit them with some knowledge, not drop populist nonsense they can find on the front page of Google. But it can often be a case of subtlety - planting enough of an idea that they can chew on it and accept this new reality at their own pace, rather than blurting out the 'answer' that nobody likes to look at. Not unlike how explaining some great movies to people makes them sound unpalatable. Just watch it, you'll like it.
When I took EE in University, everybody's parents were engineers or another form of STEM. Which also means they are not doing too bad in money and assets.
The best, most accomplished researchers I know all had a parent coming from a similar background, giving them extra lessons from a young age, so they were always a couple of years ahead of their class.
This stuff doesn't come from nowhere. Today I firmly believe that even a mildly talented person would go much further ahead with the right upbringing and opportunity than a potentially much more talented person who had to learn everything the hard way.
Now that most people in my life are themselves successful professionals, getting glimpses into their family life and childhood is surreal. It's a completely different culture, typically a much, much, much healthier one. It's shocking how many people don't consciously acknowledge this fundamental chasm between people.
Similarly self-help books.
You have provided examples of domains where charlatans are most likely to operate.
I have learned a lot from user communities in reddit and hackernews.
And hopefully contributed back as well.
There are folk who have domain expertise and have time on hand and are hungry to contribute.
You need to find them and pick their brains.
There are great people willing to share who do exist, though there is a selection bias where experts with certain values and beliefs are far more likely to post than experts with minority views about technical subjects.
From the article on popular beliefs in online communities at the time: “Just because looking down your nose at C++ or Perl is the popular opinion doesn't mean that those languages aren't being used by very smart folks to build amazing, finely crafted software. An appealing theory that gets frantically upvoted may have well-understood but non-obvious drawbacks.”
The view expressed in the article, which I agree with, is that there are experts with minority views on technical topics, who are difficult to find on forums.
>“You have provided examples of domains where charlatans are most likely to operate.”
I agree that you’re unlikely to find these kinds of life advice on technical niche subreddits (like on r/compilers).
However, let’s say a user is a young person looking for life advice. This subject would typically be off-topic on r/compilers and similar forums, so it’s off to more lifestyle-oriented forums (like r/decidingtobebetter or r/selfimprovement).
>“a subreddit that discusses supplements is by it's very nature going to be populated with snake oilsmen selling remedies or doofuses who believe them. Similarly self-help books.”
This isn’t wrong, and there has since been more awareness of paid marketing on subreddit. However, it’s non-obvious to new users, especially young people. If legitimately useful comments get lots of upvotes, there’s an effect where the ones promoting self-help books and supplements seem credible too.
For lifestyle advice in particular, sticking to smaller technical communities may not yield useful discussion. Going to other online communities leads to the problem you’ve described. By process of elimination, it’s viable to start observing and talking with people in real life.
I'll ask a question online and get a superficial answer. It gets all the upvotes or whatever because everyone else has heard some of the stuff in the reply. It's ... not always wrong, but also very generic / not REALLY an answer.
I really want to say "Yeah I watch the Discovery Channel too bro... I saw that episode, but that really doesn't answer my question, those circumstances don't necessarily cause that result." (Discovery Channel is probably outdated but it is often what I want to say).
I often come to HN because you can ask such a question and generally folks think it through a few steps before answering. Elsewhere it is internet expert hell...
But that’s just it, the truth will always be offensive to someone. You’ll always be the asshole to “someone”. If we structure discourse around never being perceived as an asshole by anyone we effectively yield the zeitgeist to whoever is the biggest crybaby.
It’s not just this site, this line of thinking has infected most western dialog.
The entire metric is flawed and useless.
That's not to say, "be an arsehole" or go against ToS, but definitely it's made me willing to stand my ground even when I hold unpopular opinions or opinions where my culture clashes with the dominant one.
Because if you do it enough you’ll find yourself with a 3 comment per hour rate limit or shadowban. The moderation here actively discourages meaningful discussion in favor of sterile communication. It’s boring.
Another interesting effect I experienced is regarding expert credibility.
When I found this place, I was impressed. I figured the world's top engineers are posting. I see them writing about very advanced topics I know little about. Comments are well written, and combined this creates trust.
But there's been incidents. I'm the type of person that has an extremely deep level of knowledge in about 2 or 3 very niche topics that frankly normally nobody cares about. I know that sounds pretentious, but for the sake of argument, let's accept it for now.
By chance, very infrequently, an article and discussion may be about those extremely niche topics. And now things are falling apart. As before, seemingly insightful professional-level comments are written. The problem is, 70% of them are wrong. I'm not talking "different opinion", I mean factually wrong, that's not how this works, and you seem to have no idea what you're talking about.
I imagine to the outsider not in the niche reading along: interesting expert discussion. Just as I was reading about all those topics I know little about.
This raises the obvious question: when I read impressive comments regarding topics I know little about, how many are actually trustworthy and accurate expertise versus how many are just well written made up nonsense?
This question hits me hard because it kind of forces you to become skeptical and cynical by default, which I don't want to be.
I you want to see this escalated to an Olympic level, watch Meta Stack Exchange over time. It has quite a few characters that are writing lecture-length posts on a daily basis. About...nothing of any remote importance or relevance. Usually concerning some petty complaint or idea about the site, none of which any actual user will ever know about.
In a way, they are 5 star trolls. The most difficult ones to recognize as they seem to well-worded.
FWIw, contrarianism has kind of become, in technical forums, a proxy for correctness and value.
Fighting idiocy that gets entrenched by the even a few comments is challenging. But depending on circumstances, there are specific rhetorical strategies that can be effective. IE, sometimes they work and sometimes they're futile. I like to flatter myself that deciding whether you can make an impact is bit like looking for a good shot in advanced pool.
But the thing here is, there's no guarantee that an actual expert "old hand" is going to know any of these approaches. So you have to read the discussion with this in mind.
Years ago I attended a small code conference in my city; just a general "programmers hang out and give talks type of thing".
Someone gave a presentation about Scala (I think it was Scala anyway); it was a general introduction explaining the semantics, ideas, syntax, etc. At the end someone asked a question: "In our experience [some practical problem they encountered, I forgot what exactly], how do you deal with this"?
"Oh, we haven't really used Scala in production, I just learned it; I don't really know".
That also perfectly describes LinkedIn these days
There’s a subset of this silent majority who tried to contribute to discussion platforms but gave up when they saw prominent voices that had next to no idea what they were talking about being promoted, hailed, and so on. The loudest voice is rarely the most articulate, and for subject matter experts articulation, nuance, and other learned-through-experience things count for a lot, one would assume.
And if there's not something to "verify" the writer/performer, it can get wildly out of control. The streamers that claim to be good at the game they're playing can be verified (and many don't even need to be, it is entertainment after all) but the agile evangelist doesn't have the same way to prove it.
If you try to say something that's not the "defacto thought" of the group, you have to be even better at all the above, which makes it even more likely that those who go against the grain remain silent.
This would explain a lot of bad programming books.
e.g.: https://wozniak.ca/blog/2018/06/25/1/index.html
In this it is a writer who is arguably knowledgeable in one programming language (BASIC) writing a book about another (C) and getting fundamental things wrong. Being a domain expert in one even relatively close area doesn't mean it automatically applies in another.
—————
The author is relating second-hand information. That’s useful, it’s good to have people who have a skill of curating business advice and pointing us in good directions. But my first-hand advice is to recognize the difference between:
Alice: “I’m making five figures a month for five hours a week reselling five products.”
And Bob: “People like Alice make as much as five figures a month for five hours a week reselling five products.”
In the first case, Alice has direct experience with success. In the second case, the incentives are such that Bob is someone whose experience and expertise is in selecting stories that have verisimilitude, that is, things that sound true.
And what makes something sound true? Quite often, something we want to be true sounds true even if it isn’t, and something we don’t want to be true doesn’t sound true, even if it is. Bob nearly always sounds more authoritative than Alice, because Bob’s business is sounding authoritative, whereas Alice’s business is being authoritative. Why doesn’t Alice always sound authoritative? Because she speaks the truth whether it appeals to our biases or opposes them, whether we want her truth to be true or not.
Bob, on the other hand, is an authority on what people want to hear. Bob is just as expert in Bob’s business as Alice is in hers. Bob uses metrics and data to write headlines and even choose the most compelling adjectives to use in his posts. Bob sounds authoritative to people lacking expertise in whatever Bob is talking about.
The Bobs of this world can (but don’t always) become “a poor man’s idea of a rich man, and a failure’s idea of a success,” because their customers are people early in their lives and careers.
So what to do when a Bob suggests something is true? Well, we shouldn’t dismiss it. But let’s think of it the way we’d think of Bob referring a candidate for a job in our businesses. We might fast-track them into an interview, but we’d still interview the candidate. And so it must be with business advice. Bob pointing us to an idea is Bob referring an idea to us. Our job is to take Bob’s referral and still validate the idea by seeking original, authoritative expertise. Bob’s value is suggesting ideas to think about, not teaching us about business.
p.s. I say all of the above as an authority on the subject: I’m a Bob.
———
The biggest example of this is in things that involve large amounts of luck (or are even totally luck-driven); think gambling or stock market picks or startups - the "winners" have a hard time distinguishing what they did from the luck involved, and often give too little to luck.
If the Bobs are not drawing out the luck side of things but instead amplifying the apparent skills, it can be a huge disservice, but, hey, it's usually more popular than saying "it's luck".
And there are a lot of fake Alices. I mean, I'm bombarded with ads from people who apparently spend five hours a week making five figures per month... and then apparently spend the rest of their life promoting their ability to offer one on one "coaching" sessions to be just like them at rates which don't really make much sense if they're making $x,xxx per hour on their real gig. Which links back to the original post: the people who do make five figures per month for five hours a week reselling stuff tend to not talk about it. Or at least not nearly as much as the people cosplaying that lifestyle or the people whose interest in such businesses is purely academic.
He is a cowboy from texas with a stereotypical texas accent, looks like he works at a gas station, but can look at a PCB, take the labels of the chips on the board and the layout, and actually write linux drivers for said board. (HE ACTUALLY DID THIS) - but he will regularly tell me "goin hog huntin" in the most deadpan texas drawl... and this week was "went deep sea fishin. back in dallas."
I am really lucky to be on a firstname call any time basis with this guy.
There are TONs of them.
Although it's not a popular term, he truly is a super architect and 10 x coder. You can throw any problem at him and he'll solve it, fast and with quality. As part of this, he explores new technologies and seems to master them in hours or days at most, and it all looks so effortless. Even more rare for such a powerhouse of tech skill, he's no nerd. An excellent communicator with deep business insight.
I often wonder about him, if you can do all that...if you can manage such absurd scope and complexity in your mind whilst it seems you're not even breaking a sweat...doesn't that mean you can do anything? Anything at all?
Anyway, his online exposure: he has an email address, but don't expect a response. He has a smartphone but I never see him use it. He has no social media.
If he would post online, he'd inevitably be recognized as a guru. But he won't, he goes home to his family. Not just smart, also wise.
As one example, Twitter has this concept of "Topics", which you can kind of see as a sub community. Take a topic like "Web development" and the grifters are constantly on top.
They know exactly how to work the algorithms. They'll post something stupid like "HTML is not a programming language" to get maximum engagement. There's a rich playbook of such engagement patterns to win the game. And they do win.
Same situation on Medium, where there's "Categories". They're all gamed and corrupted like this.
The value adding voices are not heard, and will therefore give up.
Yes, X is important, but what's really saving our bacon is all of the people doing Y. The more you focus on X, the more the Y-focussed people are going to start wonder why they're here, since you don't appreciate their efforts. I mean you didn't even mention it in any of your articles... Let's see what happens when nobody does Y anymore, smart guy.
Much of my work is basically "muscle memory." I do a great deal of stuff without a thought.
This discussion reminds me of this posting, from three years ago[1].
You will have someone go on all day about how a certain engine or something will not make a certain number of HP. They'll say they have never seen it, after all, they have visited all the websites and watched all the Youtube videos.
Then someone that runs a performance shop will pipe in with, "Of course it's possible. We've built six of them this year alone. The owners just don't post their cars on the internet."
Finally one of them bothered to show up in person (with a rifle, to "save the children") and found... a neighborhood pizza shop with no basement. And when he went back online and said "hey guys, I checked it out and there's nothing there" they all decided he was a government plant.
It's like people have forgotten the real world exists, and is the actual reality that's being referred to online.
In the first example, a forum poster was taking the absence of evidence to be evidence of absence. In fact I've never met a person who didn't have a story about making such a mistake, so I'd venture to guess we all do that at some point in our lives[1].
In your example, however, people were confusing the absence of evidence with an imagined preponderance of evidence. That's an error on a very different level, like accidentally joining a pyramid scheme or getting sick from eating an entire piece of plastic fruit.
1: See? :)
The thing that's in common is a belief that if there was something to observe, it would necessarily be in the place you're looking. Maybe it's a form of map-territory confusion.
I've seen it quite a lot professionally, whether it's "let's sell business travel via facebook rather than linkedin, because facebook has better analytics and conversion tracking" or "a disorder is only real once it's listed in the DSM-V" or "this UX issue can't be a real issue because all of our current customers say they are ok with it." People sometimes just pick a systematically wrong approach to learning about the world, leading to a wide range of silly outcomes.
And I think it’s especially important to keep in mind that we have a generational divide among experts even now, that introduces a bias to the particular expertise that gets shared.
Not only have many deeply experienced, talented experts naturally shifted their surplus attention to other life responsibilities like families, health issues, etc — but many younger experts grew up with a social media fluency that makes engaging online more natural to them.
So even without evaluating what’s said by each, you inevitably see a lot more of the opinions of these younger experts and less from the old greybeards with differently informed perspectives.
The real hard part is keeping your mind open to newer ways without either spending all your time on them, or getting fed up with it.
The Silent Majority of Experts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7015139 - Jan 2014 (37 comments)
The Silent Majority of Experts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4243573 - July 2012 (115 comments)
- Wine is not an emulation
- MS-DOS is not an OS because it cant do paging and virtual memory
- Microprocessors are not Microcontrollers because they have paging
There are also some tinier things like notorious NIH syndrome due to not reading documentation, like the tons of blog articles about SSH features that could all be replaced by ten minutes of reading ssh-keygen(1).
I've seen that on IRC, Reddit and HN as well, and i ended up preferring official documentation over anything else what people online say. If this writing sounds like venting, it surely is.
Official documentation can be a great source, but in things like ssh-keygen there are often just way too many options and so people want "just tell me how to do what I want to do". One of the reasons sane defaults are so important.
Its actually a pretty generic term that is used similarly like "imitation". You can see it used like that in xterm, which is a terminal emulator.
For some reason, many people believe it means something like "virtual machine", to the extent that the Wine project needed to rename to avoid being understood as a virtual machine, which is was associated with really bad performance back then.
> just tell me how to do what I want to do
I think this attitude is part of the problem. Like, when you try to weld you need to know about many details like preventing heat-corrosion and inclusions, otherwise your seam is going to be unacceptably bad. Welders do have training for that reason, but yet we dont apply the same standards to computing.
The second is why things really need to have sane defaults, especially in cryptography - learning all the why's and wherefores for someone who is NOT a specialist is quite difficult and foot-guns abound.
We're just starting to get the idea of failsafes and safe by design in coding, and we need more of it. Too often the answer has been "you're holding it wrong" instead of "oh, wow, the way this is setup you could easily make it insecure".
The Unix/Linux philosophy has been a bit hard to grow here; the "you should have known to use --no-foot-gun" mentality can be hard to overcome, especially if you battled through them on your way up.
If i was a welder and "held it wrong" I'd get a written warning, which later might end up in a termination.
If i use ssh-keygen wrong in production because i did not read the documentation... then its the tools fault for not having sane defaults?
Somewhere between "everything is a death-trap, learn how to use it" and "this device is perfectly safe, because it cannot do anything" lies the mean we need to hit.
More seriously, the actual objective is not blaming the guilty but rather avoiding the problems.
If system A interacting with system B is likely to causes an incident then either A, B, or the interaction need to change.
For surgeons all three have happened, the same for airline pilots.
The surgeon had to swear very convincingly to have "read the documentation" before being even allowed to think about "holding it wrong".
In the case of people using GPG wrong the only solutions you have is to make is easier to "hold right" or make is so heavy and painful that anyone without true determination gives up trying to "hold it" at all.
You can explain your tinc mesh setup, but as soon as you call it "VPN" some people will believe its some sort of proxy to hide your IP address while watching porn.
You can explain how PHP interacts with the server environment, but as soon as you call it "Server API", some people will think its a machine-consumable REST/Json/Xml service or sth like that.
This generates many landmines you might step onto. Sometimes you need to argue total nonsense to work around these people. Painful. So yeah you are right, but it doesnt solve the Problem.
One good example is the Angular documentation. It's very detailed, but rarely does it answer the question I have. Reading the documentation just leaves me with more questions than I started.
Of course, I will say this. I don't come from an OOP background, so maybe that's why it doesn't immediately click.
The other problem with documentation is lack of examples. That's why for command line help, I use tldr. 90% of the time, it gives me an example of the exact command I need.
Believe me, I get the whole RTFM and for things I plan to use often enough, I will definitely RTFM. But for rarely used commands, it does not make sense to spend even 10 minutes reading arcane documentation. It's much more efficient to skim a blog or two (or use something like tldr), find the command with the switches and copy pasta. The prevalence of these blogs in the results show others think the same way or there wouldn't be so many of them.
Because they spend nearly all their mental resources on perfecting their craft, not writing blogs or marketing themselves online (which is an entirely different skillset). Not to say that there aren't very good people who also write blogs or give talks on certain subjects. Just thinking about it from first principles. All things being equal, those that give 100% in one thing will edge out someone who split spent 90%/10% blogging/marketing on that same topic.
In my experience, highly skilled people seem to be unusually skilled at a wide variety of disciplines, including soft-skills and apparently unrelated skills to the one they are known for.
Edit: sure, there are a lot of bullshit bloggers and marketers. One signal of very talented people is they are good at filtering for good information. Or they can pay attention to bullshit and pick out the one useful insight. Or perhaps use bullshit as abstract noise to smash out interesting ideas or test themselves against.
Edit 2: The problem is not that experts don’t publish, it is that “unskilled and unaware” is published in such abundance. I think Dan Luu writes about the problem very well: https://danluu.com/hn-comments/ . . . I do think there is confirmation/selection bias that we only see the talented that write, but I also believe that the most talented communicate to better themselves, and those that don’t communicate are holding themselves back from their potential.
But the top experts for a lot of 'internet first' fields will likely overlap heavily with those who are loudest about them online. The world's foremost experts in say, blogging, SEO or content marketing will probably be extremely active online, since their expertise is in large part about marketing themselves and their work. The best speedrunners, game modders and others in such communities will probably have a visible online presence, since the community only exists on the internet and someone who does well at one of these things has a decent chance of getting a YouTube/Twitch career out of it.
And on the contrary, I suspect a lot of fields with an older demographic will probably be more representative of the situation in this article, where many of the people who are best at them aren't used to the internet or social media, and stick to doing their work/hobby offline instead.
So it's very much based on the field. The world's best carpenter or sprinter might not be on Reddit or Twitter that much if at all, whereas the world's best Super Mario 64 player is probably going to have quite the internet presence.
People reach mastery and expertise in all different kinds of ways. Some folks have it handed to them on a silver platter, others overcome outrageously unfair circumstances, some do it alone, some have mentors, some read-learn-do, some just do, some do it despite hating what they do, others do it out of love.
Some frontend developers using the latest trends in JS frameworks. Some FAANG developers doing hyped stuff. Some mobile developers who can effectively promote their apps. Some AI and ML developers doing the stuff that is reported in newspapers.
All the rest are unseen. The millions of developers using C++, C# and Java everyday to make the actual World work, are unseen. People working on financial transactions, traffic management systems, security systems, telecom and so on, don't have a voice. All that people that are hard at work so we can keep our current ways of living, are not seen. They aren't doing fancy things, they aren't using latest fads, they aren't being promoted in news bits.
I don't count myself amongst the wise btw. But I am at times surprised by how age masks foolishness, and people ask me for advice which I wouldn't trust!
Richard Rhodes discusses the scientists at Los Alamos, confounding the more urbane partners: Fermi insisted on leading square dances at the saturday socials, despite not having danced the square in his life: he just spent some time beforehand watching how it was done. Apparently he did it perfectly. I consider that evidence of wisdom beyond words: He watched, he learned, he didn't ask. A scientists wife called Claus Fuchs "penny in the slot" because he said nothing, unless asked. He didn't volunteer. When you consider his role in history, maybe he was well schooled? A natural spy? Again, he didn't proffer advice, but he was very good at what he did (as were the Krogers, and many others. Whereas the amateurs recruited in the US were by and large bumbling fools)
I suspect spying-wisdom, like other wisdom, is not found in self-help books.
Not many people are blogging about the standard, block and tackle techniques that feel 'obvious' (yet aren't quite obvious to non-experts)
Some people work very hard on their online presence, which is fine, but sometimes it seems like they're compensating for something. The really truly great engineers know that they are good, or at least above average, so they will always be in demand - they have no need to maintain ultra visible personas. Their CVs will probably get them wherever they want to go.
Also, the best resource for expert advice is probably senior mentoring rather than blogs. Blogs are ok for exploratory reading but when you're in a pinch and you need an expert that understands your problem, the solution space and the stack you're on, you will be looking for a senior.
https://observer.com/2011/05/keith-rabois-says-great-founder...
Folks like Bruce Dawson, Brenden Gregg, Raymond Chen, Joel Spolsky, John Carmack, and many others. And people with strong experience to chime in on forums like HN not unfrequently. I've never had much issue taking popular opinion with a grain of salt (as least consciously), the main challenge I have is finding the right balance of time to spend online looking for the wheat in the chaff.
This has been a problem with (and not just) online discussions since...well...ever. What is discussed the loudest or most frequent, isn't necessarily the most important topic in the field.