Hacker News Reader

Comment by SemioticStandrd | Hacker News Reader

This sentiment is so incomplete as to be utterly useless outside of a very narrow scope.

Good engineers are right a lot very specifically within their technical competency.

Simply saying "good engineers are right a lot" has pretty clearly resulted in a large group of people who think that because they're right a lot about things within their field, that quality of 'being right a lot' extends to things outside of their field, and that is terribly wrong as often as not. The hubris and entitlement that I've seen engendered in people who take this creed too seriously is really something to behold. It's part of what directly leads to the 'techbro' stereotype.

No, Kyle, just because you're right a lot about all things relating to Rust does NOT mean you know a fucking thing about economics, healthcare, or whatever the hell else it is you espouse your strongly held opinion on.

View on HN

I don't think that is incompatible at all. It's a restatement of the same thing:

If someone is right a lot they are likely not making assertions about things that they know nothing about.

If they are making assertions about a domain and those assertions are correct then that domain is one of their competencies.

"Utterly useless" is a bit extreme but it's a reasonable observation to say it doesn't have predictive power.

I suggest people badly underestimate how very rapidly expertise falls of as one moves away from a specific tightly-scoped feedback-intensive area of skill. Ask a wizzy quantum chemist a protein chemistry question, and don't be surprised to get the answer of a grad or undergrad student. There's a news genre of "Harvard MBA's don't understand seasons!"-like stories - if someone last saw something years ago in middle school, don't be surprised now by a middle schooler's understanding. A person can both be a highly-regarded <model organism> researcher, and have gone rather nutter on <diet thing> that very isn't their research area.

Physicists are stereotypically famous for misjudging expertise decay. https://xkcd.com/793/ Some things, like deep intellectual humility, do seem to consistently transfer well between fields. Being "right, a lot", not so consistently.

That’s never been my observation. Tech people are some of the most arrogant people I’ve encountered, often asserting things outside of their domain. The delusion that being right in one area makes them right in other areas is real.

It’s the whole circle jerk about STEM being the ultimate degree fields in university, while humanities and liberal arts are looked down upon and sneered at.

I’ve studied both STEM and humanities.

The humanities is a lot of nonsense. And any STEM student can read a humanity study and understand it and write a valid critique. The opposite is definitely not the case.

STEM students are just better at modelling than non-STEM (on a whole).

As for programmers. I’ve met several who only work in a specific industry for a few years. They have no problems moving to a new industry and within 6 months they understand the new domain and can model that accurately as well.

I have not once met a marketing or hr guy who was able to model anything, let alone a different domain.

I assume you meant this is a rebuttal of the parent comment. It's interesting that it could just as well be seen as confirmation.

Funnely enough I was nodding to parent post until I read your answer and was abit emberrased. I got a bad case of STEM hubris too. The STM can go home though.

How you see it depends on how highly you think of non-STEM work, I guess - but I will say anecdotally that the folks who were good at math/science when I was in school also seemed to be solidly above average at English.

Couldn’t you just as well say that the people who were above average at English were good at science/math?

It didn't seem to go the other way. Lots of folks were passable writers but terrible at the other subjects.

I wish those sorts of people would realize that they are showing their whole ass when they act like that. Only the deeply insecure mask their ignorance with arrogance. We can hear your thoughts and feel your motivations.

It is actually very easy to correctly assert certain statements outside of your domain as long as the domain you are butting in on is obviously fraudulent, pseudoscientific, full of charlatans, practitioners don't have any skin in the game, is almost entirely funded by political money (and wouldn't be funded otherwise), or is heavily based on some sort of mysticism, and I'm sure this isn't an exhaustive list. Turns out that is a lot of domains of human activity.

I'm reminded of the quote "he knows everything, but that is also all he knows".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com