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It's weird that the author contrasts experts with novices. There should be layers upon layers of expertise in between those two options. What happened to the people who do solid work in their field with varying levels of experience without being necessarily experts? Are they irrelevant?

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(author here) I agree, although I only realised this after the essay hit the internet. I think keeping things simple probably helped with the overall argument, but polarising things into "experts" and "novices" isn't a good abstraction to work with.

I now think it's more accurate to think that someone is an expert relative to someone else, and only for a specific field. But that'll have to be another essay (:

They are effective at solving mazes. They have enough tools to solve most of them, but not as efficiently as they could. They leave more broken branches and string around because they didn't understand an abstraction and tried to break it down in detail to cover every conceivable scenario.

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