Cocktail Party Ideas

> If you want a sample of similar comments online

If you want a sample of this online, you can just come to HN and read the discussions on theoretical physics research, where people say funny things like no progress has happened in fundamental physics since the Higgs boson paper.

Anyway, my theory for the phenomenon is that social status and money boosts ones ego. Once youve made good money coding for long enough, and have long had people saying youre smart because youre a software "engineer", you start overestimating the depth of your understanding of the world. I would like to see what would happen if youd ask unqualified people like janitors how they think engineers build bridge. My guess is that theyd start off from the assumption that the subject is too complicated for their understand, but when it comes to the details youd get a cartoonish picture in a sense not unlike that of the software "engineer".

Bigger picture, I see people repeating ideas thoughtlessly ALL THE TIME. These cocktail parties where people discuss trendy topics, its basicall the same 3 ideas per topic that get brought up, because thats what their favorite influencer said. Extremely depressing.

I notice people do this a lot. The way I think about it is this:

If I believe that I can do better than someone with a career in X, that’s actually hugely insulting. Because with my assertion that I can do better, I’m basically saying that those people were all basically screwing around for the duration of their entire career. That my 0 years experience is comparable to their 5 or 10 or 15.

Luckily, we don’t have a bunch of super rich and powerful software people wading into areas where they have no experience and making a big mess because of assumptions like this. Right? Ha ha ha.