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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Relevant fiction: "Pump Six" by Paolo Bacigalupi.

Progress is made by most people not needing deep understanding. There's only so much attention to go around. If people really needed to understand most of the things they dealt with, little would get done.

He doesn't mean deep understanding of the subject matter. He means detailed knowledge about the inner workings. Those are different. For his database example, deep understanding would involve understanding third normal form, the history of databases from ISAM to CODASYL through relational databases to large key-value stores, with a side trip into eventually-consistent systems. Understanding the inner workings is knowing how an InnoDB table in MySQL is represented on disk.

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Progress in a purely capitalistic sense, maybe—but in terms of human knowledge and innovation in technology, absolutely not.

Besides, in the same way that being an engineer with no people skills isn’t a desirable thing, there are plenty of problems with knowing one’s business domain only at the surface-level:

1. It’s always these types of people who end up pushing for unrealistic, and many times, senseless engineering goals from management positions so that they waste a lot of the company’s time and money just by existing in it.

2. It’s these types of people who prioritize profits at all costs, even if it could endanger a customer’s life or data security.

3. These types of people are very easily replaceable, because people are by default not inclined to learn about the world around them, and hence they’re dime a dozen.

I thought everyone understood Progress® as a marketing term and a type of theater with the only real progress being the net worth of the actors.

I didn't think people actually confused the theatrical performance with the progress of Boltzmann or Newton. Come on!

> Progress in a purely capitalistic sense, maybe—but in terms of human knowledge and innovation in technology, absolutely not.

No this is still the case, because even folks who understand deeply can only understand a few things deeply. I recently spent several years working in battery tech. The field could be years ahead of where it is now if so many of the field's most pressing problems didn't require researchers to deeply understand programming as well as their field.

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