Hacker School User's Manual
hackerschool.com
hackerschool.com
The "well-actually" problem is particularly rampant on HN.
in a 3 person private conversation, a factual inaccuracy that is not central to the point isn't going to harm the participants. Online, the conversation is public. People who don't know what they're talking about should be politely called out before they stir up FUD or otherwise cause harm.
(i am a hackerschool alum)
The first commenter proposes a device that would use a Molex connector. The second points out that the device needs to interface with a wire not found on the Molex 8981 connector, a useful correction. The third makes the inane observation that Molex the company makes many connectors, when it is obvious that the first two commenters were referring to the Molex 8981 connector specifically.
I can understand "This is especially annoying when the correction has no bearing on the actual conversation." case in a face-to-face conversation but the manual forbids all corrections whether they are essential to the discussion or not. Or should the rule be interpreted as: essential corrections are allowed but the literal phrase "well, actually" is forbidden?
If someone says if X then Y; you should be allowed to say: actually X' and therefore Z i.e., a subtle imprecision in the premise might lead to the big difference in outcomes.
Otherwise technical discussion degrades to a smalltalk.
A good well-actually here often adds a lot to the discussion: it brings up points that others may have forgotten, elaborates on concepts that can be very complex, points the anonymous reader toward other resources that they may never have heard of, and can lend validation and social proof to ideas. And the negatives are curtailed by the short, high-population, transactional nature of message boards. When someone corrects you on Hacker News, it doesn't make you feel stupid (I hope): it just means that someone out there, among the hundreds of thousands of readers, had better information than you did. There's no real jockeying for social status on Hacker News, because if you get karma or score that point - who cares? You never see them again.
That's very different from a school environment, where you are pushing your comfort zone in front of a small number of classmates, and a correction can make you feel stupid and negatively impact your confidence. You have to learn with these people for a while; if you feel devalued from the beginning, your learning is going to suffer.
I checked out the application, though, and noticed something that's pretty odd, if not downright disrespectful. At the bottom of the application there's a lone checkbox labeled "I'm a Woman". Given the behavior of the following checkbox, it's clear that the point of this box is to indicate that financial aid is available for female applicants. Regardless, the presence of a field labeled as such, given that it seems to suggest that the default gender of a hacker is male, is pretty jarring.
I get it, but surely a couple of radio buttons labeled "Boy" and "Girl" could do the job just as well as the checkbox.
I would have thought the more common problem is when people are honestly surprised about someone's lack of knowledge, and then show it. That hurts more. I can usually tell if someone trying to show themselves off as a bigshot. That doesn't bother me as much as if someone genuinely thinks I'm ignorant about something that I ought to know.
Better to say, "Please feign unsurprise when you encounter ignorance." Or better yet, don't use the word "feign." Just tell participants that they may encounter people from a variety of backgrounds, and they should not assume that every understands what everyone else is talking about.
Yes, I think so, or at least the common reaction is usually over-dramatized. I've observed this behavior in friends, colleagues, and in myself. When learning about someone's lack of knowledge, it's very common for the other party to react with "Really?! You don't know xyz??" I think 99% of the time the person saying this is not actually surprised, and does not actually need confirmation by asking again "You don't know xyz??" It's just a social tic ends up being kind of exclusionary and negative.
> Just tell participants that they may encounter people from a variety of backgrounds, and they should not assume that every understands what everyone else is talking about.
This is fine and well, and I'm sure the people running HS would agree with this, but tbh it is a little obvious sounding. The thing with avoiding "feigning surprise" is that some people (like myself!) might not even realize that they do this. After I read about this rule of theirs last year, I've been trying to cut down and was a bit saddened to realize how much I do it.
It's a pretty similar attitude to this comic, in the sense of adding a twist to the more general form the rule that you proposed. Recognizing that this is a positive opportunity for sharing some neat factoid instead of an opportunity to put someone down is not obvious, unfortunately.
I'd add that the intent is pretty clear in the explanation. Surprise evokes fear of ignorance.
For one thing, there's hard-core dimensionality in what we do. There are things I consider to be huge areas of computer science that I know nothing about, and many of those didn't even exist when I was in school.
It's really admirable that they're paying attention to the behaviors ("well, actually" and unsolicited advice) that make this worse and cause communication breakdowns. Of course, tone is more important than what is actually said, but that can't be legislated.
I've struggled to find an explanation for this, the closest being Prospect Theory. The theory states that people make decisions based on the potential value of losses and gains rather than the final outcome.
My best guess is that less secure people worry more about not looking bad rather than the final outcome. They optimize for minimizing losses, and are thus represented on the bottom left quadrant of the theory graph[1].
Which means the less confident you are the more successful you are[2].
[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Valuefun.jpg
[2] - http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/07/less_confident_people_are_mo...
I think that for technical tasks, ones with a good deal of depth that need to be performed precisely, insecurity correlates highly with success. For two reasons. One is that insecurity is a very potent emotional driver: if you think that being good at X is going to give your life meaning, then you'll probably spend a lot of time getting good at X. Time spent mastering a subject is probably the best predictor of how good you get at it.
The other works in the other direction. The more skilled you get at something, the more you understand the complexities of the problem domain, in sort of a reverse Dunning-Kruger effect. And so as you become more successful, you start seeing that your knowledge, as a fraction of the total knowledge out there, is much less than you thought. The result is insecurity.
For people tasks, where a significant part of your success is convincing other people to go along with you, success is correlated with confidence. There's a game-theoretical explanation for that. When evaluating the credibility of a proposal, a random person has very little information to go on. They also know that the person proposing it has more information than they do. So a major information channel for them is how sure the proposer seems to be of their proposal, and they naturally follow subconscious signals that telegraph how the proposer really feels about himself.
Whether high confidence or low confidence is better for you depends on which stage of your career you're at, and also who you're talking to. In particular, you don't want to project high confidence when the listener has backchannels that can tell them unequivocally that you're wrong: you lose all credibility then, which makes you seem deathly insecure. When the listener has poor or no information, though, you want to project high confidence because that's the only information they have available to them. When evaluating yourself, you'd ideally want to have no confidence as that would give you the greatest drive to improve. Unfortunately, confidence doesn't work that way: it's very difficult to have no confidence and then suddenly "turn it on" for an important client. Instead, an optimum solution usually involves having supreme confidence in your ability to learn anything required for the job, no confidence that you actually know anything right now, and the ability to fudge the distinction between those when you talk to other people.
The scientific method actually enshrines this into a well-known process.
The only problem is explaining the program to the Immigration Officer. Mentioning "Hacker" or "School" is not recommended. I used the phrase "programming workshops" :)
I guess I'll just try next time.. and I hope Norvig stays for a few more batches.
n.b. Hacker School have asked me to stop using their name - I don't mean to mislead or imply any affiliation with them. I'll change it shortly. But I do want to copy the idea :)
I could have used better fonts.
We've decided to published[sic] it in the hope
You're welcome :)
rofl
Sounds more like a cult, like they're grooming you for corporate serfdom. Having the most bitter basement dwelling neckbeard with a self taught PHD ream you out thoroughly and colorfully on a public mailing list for a less than perfect commit is a true hacker tradition. It's usually pretty hilarious, and prepares you for when you show up to defcon or the chaos congress and meet real actual hackers who shockingly will not have any social rules.
This school will groom good employees, not hackers. It's a bootcamp that uses 'hacker' for marketing. It's great this exists for people who want to work doing code, but 1980s MIT AI lab Stallman would prob be kicked out the first day, same with every other hacker throughout history.