Hacker News Disease
mattmaroon.com
mattmaroon.com
However, I must take issue with you singling out "intelligent" people for thinking other people with expertise are idiots. I invite you to have a drink (on me) at any sports bar in Toronto and we will trip over people who think that various professional players, coaches, and analysts are idiots.
And likewise if we seat ourselves on any transit bus or train we will have no trouble earwigging a dozen conversations in which people with no experience or expertise in government will denounce their elected representatives as idiots, and then toss in the unelected civil servants as being twice as dumb.
I suggest what you are seeing on HN is a fairly common phenomenon. So while I liked your insight into the executives and their entirely rational behaviour in beating a reluctant and bloody retreat, I take issue with the title.
It's simply Peanut Gallery Disease.
The truth is, while intelligence isn't knowledge, it can be rapidly converted into it. In fact that would do fairly well as a definition of intelligence.
And in any case, credentials aren't knowledge either. Ultimately you have to judge any argument by what it says, not who said it.
You're right about credentials though for sure, but how do you judge an intricate argument on its merits when you just don't know much about the topic? For instance, read some of the articles for and against anthropogenic global warming written by scientists. I can find very convincing arguments on either side, full of lots of facts I probably can't easily verify and lots of conclusions drawn from them that I can't easily validate are sound logic, because I know so little about climate science.
Without me spending years rapidly converting my intelligence into domain specific knowledge, as the people making those arguments have done, how do I know which side to believe when I step into the voting booth? It's an epistemology problem, and a tough one.
On the other hand, 80% of men think they're an above average driver.
Known as the Lake Wobegon Effect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Wobegon_effect
This study on the subject was especially good reading: http://www.apa.org/journals/features/psp7761121.pdf
Most interestingly, the study points out that people who are truly way above average underrate themselves, illustrating the old adage that the more you know, the more you realize you don't know.
When I began I thought I was great at golf, it helped that I was actually making near 300 yards with a driver. However I quickly learnt that I nearly always slice the ball, and when I don't I can break 300 yards.
A similar thing happened with my writing, once I broke a certain point and I suddenly realized I'd just climbed a molehill and noticed the mountain. It's incredible how a small amount of knowledge will make you feel smart, but a moderate amount of knowledge will make you feel stupid, and a considerable amount of knowledge will make you feel just plain ignorant.
Isn't a top quarter member 'better' than those in the other (lower) quarters by definition?
Ironically, the third quartile is the most accurate at estimating their own abilities, being almost spot on. The people in the other three quartiles generally also believe they are in the third.
To quote liberally from the paper to save everyone reading the whole thing:
"As Figure 2 (page 5 of the pdf) clearly illustrates, it was participants in the bottom quartile [...] who overestimated their logical reasoning ability and test performance to the greatest extent. Although these individuals scored at the 12th percentile on average, they nevertheless believed that their general logical reasoning ability fell at the 68th percentile and their score on the test fell at the 62nd percentile. Their estimates not only exceeded their actual percentile scores, [...] but exceeded the 50th percentile as well. [...] Thus, participants in the bottom quartile not only overestimated themselves but believed that they were above average. [...] Other participants were less miscalibrated. However, as Figure 2 shows, those in the top quartile once again tended to underestimate their ability. Whereas their test performance put them in the 86th percentile, they estimated it to be at the 68th percentile and estimated their general logical reasoning ability to fall at only the 74th percentile"
At the end of the day you suggested that postulating an opinion on a subject should be left to the experts.
I think were looking at things the wrong way: people should be free to express themselves and their thoughts how they wish. It's up to each of us to decide who is "right" and who we wish to listen to.
I think basically I approach this the opposite way from yourself :)
The enforcement of pseudo political correctness by having to post IANAL at the front of every opinion that may have even remotely looked like legal advice is part of what degraded the quality of Slashdot's comments way back when, if you ask me. Of course you're not a lawyer, this is not a legal community.
1. You mistakenly come out thinking you were more informed than you were before you asked (dangerous).
2. You ignore it, in which case it's a bunch of wasted time.
Because chances are, some people here might have actually paid $200 an hour and talked to a lawyer about this subject. I can't afford that on a regular basis for one off questions.
I've read a number of posts asking for legal advice here, and a number of those posts contain the answer, "Here's my opinion, but you _really_ need a lawyer, dude."
Case in point, I actually really enjoyed your legalesque advice on sweepstakes vs gambling in different states a while back. http://searchyc.com/sweepstakes+gambling+mattmaroon
I'm sure with your background in the gambling world, you've had some exposure to those laws. I took what you said at face value and with a big pinch of salt. Should my site ever create a sweepstakes, I'll certainly be more cautious as a result of what you said, and I probably will pony up the Benjamins and talk to a lawyer about it.
You also have a good point in that anyone who makes legal decisions about things pertaining to their business because of what they read in an online forum has problems.
If you ask the question here, and it's about startup law, you can get great responses from people who say, "Our startup ran into the exact same issue and our $500/hr lawyer told us the following information". Gather enough responses like there and you have:
1) Maybe enough information to keep you from needing to talk to your lawyer at all or
2) A good foundation of information that results in you needing less of your (really expensive) lawyer's time.
Of course, if you're smart, you'll throw out any response that doesn't begin with some explanation as to why the commenter knows wtf they are talking about.
I stopped reading your post when I felt your arguments were depending on a piling up of assumptions on other people's mental state - their motivations, comprehension and intentions.
On his specific example he assumes that his sequence of events (1,2,3 and 4) actually happened. Without knowledge of the IP lawyers Warner hire, which one (if any) decided on that course of action and the process that it went through. Without that information he falls foul of his own fallacy.
I think you missed this part. He readily admits he doesn't know who or what was responsible for Warner's actions.
Indeed from my experience of huge corporations (which comes from fairly regular contact) none of his (3) scenarios are particularly likely...
EDIT: (because the above was an unclear reply). my point being he is trying to say the people in that thread are probably wrong whilst offering 3 or so alternatives that are, equally, probably wrong too. Whilst he does admit he cant know what really went down that is not what he seems to suggest in the rest of the post.
My point is like PG's: he is falling foul of his own arguments :( and badly.
His example is like many of the "culprits" he ID's on here who lay out their opinions in a very specific way and then throw in a "but it could be like a, b, c of course" as a way to make out they are open to any suggestion... ;) :P
For subjects with depth, this is wrong. And I think that's part of the reason why HN discussions of many subjects with some depth (politics, finance, economics, legal issues, and so on) often seem shallow. I'm not an expert in any of those areas, and maybe my judgement is wrong. But I am an expert in the physical sciences, and Matt's post looks pretty spot on as a diagnosis of what's wrong with some of the HN threads related to the physical sciences.
None of this is to say that HN isn't still a great forum. But it remains at its best on the subject of startups and (to a lesser extent) related technical subjects.
Hackers should focus on hacking and be more humble when treading on unknown territory, imho.
HOW to BECOME a GOOD THEORETICAL PHYSICIST
by Gerard 't Hooft
This is a web site (still under construction) for young students - and anyone else - who are (like me) thrilled by the challenges posed by real science, and who are - like me - determined to use their brains to discover new things about the physical world that we are living in. In short, it is for all those who decided to study theoretical physics, in their own time.
http://www.phys.uu.nl/~thooft/theorist.html
See also:
Herring Brain Box http://large.stanford.edu/herring/brain/
It is no joke. Nobel laureate in physics t'Hooft wrote the page to give serious advice to people who aspire to understand theoretical physics.
An anecdote, FWIW ;)
Once Pierre Deligne, and few fellow mathematicians, annoyed at their utter lack of understanding of QFT and involved physics, decided to sit down for a year and learn some. Notes they've took during that year of effort are now a standard reference (http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Fields-Strings-Course-Mathemat...)
In particular, I love how commenters on HN will unhesitatingly dismiss any peer-reviewed, published scientific paper with a dismissive sneer, and the comment that "correlation doesn't equal causation," as if they were the only people on earth to whom this axiom had been communicated, and that the scientific establishment was completely unaware of statistics, untrained in even the most basic aspects of hypothesis testing.
Obviously there are examples in the other direction as well, but I dont see it as a common problem on HN.
Also its worth noting, that the more difficult it is to grasp the subject matter of a paper, the less likely it is that peer reviewers are actually reviewing it any better than a common reader. Evidenced by the multitude of papers in the recent past that have been discredited as academically dishonest to fraud, and the hilarious meta-studies slipping computer generated gibberish through journal review processes.
Sorry, but no.
Papers are reviewed by researchers who are intimately familiar with the subject and techniques used in the paper under review. Journal editors don't give papers to people who are incapable of reviewing them. That would be dumb.
"...evidenced by the multitude of papers in the recent past that have been discredited as academically dishonest to fraud, and the hilarious meta-studies slipping computer generated gibberish through journal review processes."
You're exaggerating. Out of the thousands and thousands of peer-reviewed articles that are published each year, a small handful are later shown to be fraudulent. Overall, peer review has a pretty great track record.
I was exaggerating, and for the most part respected journals are of high quality. That does not necessarily have anything to do with the review process. I tend to believe it has more to do with the character of those who choose to do such research (without other significant monetary motivations than the long-shot that what they're working on may produce marketable results).
Regardless, I would not suggest that the review process is not useful and necessary, as it is the best system we have, and works well for the most part given the dynamics of the system it exists in. I simply wanted to point out that it is very far from perfect or provably reliable (I'd argue most academically dishonest research slips through as not notable enough to warrant particular scrutiny anyway and fades into obscurity without question) and that it is vulnerable to gaming by sufficiently knowledgeable people.
Well, that got me off topic without even being the main thrust of my original post. Hit a nerve and started rambling. apologies if my comments came out more critical than I actually feel.
The problem (which I agree exists) arrives when people fail to realize that even extremely rapid conversion of intelligence to knowledge does not make you an expert in many fields without years of fairly dedicated study.
Example: "What if we launched an orbital rocket from a balloon? Do the math, guy, what that saves you isn't worth the effort. You're not open to my ingenious new idea!"
^_^
This is a reasonable statement about what mainstream psychology says is a consequence of IQ (the operationalization of "intelligence" among psychologists). Having some of the mental faculties tapped by IQ tests generally results in more accumulation of the kind of knowledge imparted by school lessons or self-study, so that adult IQ tests have a lot of item content that consists of tests of knowledge.
But cognitive psychologists point out that intelligence (I would say "IQ") does not imply rationality.
http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=97803001238...
http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Tests-Miss-Psycholog...
The behavioral economists who study judgment under uncertainty repeatedly replicate results showing that high-IQ individuals are very capable of making irrational, inexpedient decisions. And even when challenged about those decisions, most people persist in their irrational thinking.
There is also a widely replicated result in psychological research showing that most people overestimate their competence in most domains.
http://www.apa.org/journals/features/psp7761121.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect
So it shouldn't suprise any of us that most online discussion consists of people expressing opinions that they are more confident about than is warranted by the evidence supporting the opinions.
Ultimately you have to judge any argument by what it says, not who said it.
This is the best cultural way that HN can support the development of rationality among its participants. It happens that I am self-taught in the psychological literature I have just mentioned. I am fortunate, in my community service work, to have acquaintance with several Ph.D. psychologists who provide me with reading suggestions and bounce ideas off me. They like the working paper on IQ testing I presented in public in 2006, and they encourage me to keep on researching. I in turn like all HN participants to feel free to ask follow-up questions asking for evidence and checking assumptions and logic as each HN participant posts opinions. I think Matt's point in the submitted article is well taken--law is a specific body of knowledge (a body of knowledge in which I DO have a credential and work experience), and many guesses about what the law is made by laymen are not correct. If someone makes a statement about a verifiable fact, it is a good idea for other participants to check the fact and verify what the best course of action is for a hacker trying to build a start-up.
I don't see that he's arguing for credentials. Just that smart+experienced > smart+inexperienced.
Some arguments can be judged by what they say. But ones that involve a prediction of how a complicated system will behave can't be judged by people without much experience. Most of the comments on the Lessig/DMCA story revolved around what precedent would be set by a lawsuit, which I don't feel confident to judge merely by reading the arguments.
Don't you know that it just takes 10,000 hours of practice to become a master of anything: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/01/opinion/01brooks.html?_r=1 ?
David Brooks has been trotting this theme out for years now.
That's not sufficient. You have to consider incentives, motives, history, etc. etc. Arguments do not stand alone in a vacuum, neither do "facts." The selection of facts, the selection of arguments, have everything to do with who says them... and why.
What he's really saying is that he doesn't like hearing people's opinions when they're not experts, especially if they're condescending, dismissively rude, or disrepectful. I feel the same way, but not enough to write a long post on it-- I'm more of the type to provide my own comment for temperance or move on to a thread where people are being less judgemental and know-it-all-ish.
I think his best bet, on a site like Hacker News, is to avoid reading the comments for border-line inappropriate posts about YouTube takedowns, Disney acquisitions, international trade, etc. All the hacker-specific topics are bound to have some experts floating around here, though.
When there's not an expert on a given topic, I do like to hear polite advice from other smart people that may have had an alternative idea in mind that didn't occur to me. This site has always been good about that. It's one of the benefits of having smart people floating around since knowledgeable people aren't always handy.
Many of us are mavericks, non-conformists, even revolutionaries. We may be that way by nature, may have become that way in the field, or more likely, a little of each.
Why? Because it works.
I know people who have slaved away in the same "paradigm" for years, with a cynical view of the world, and an "acceptance" of the status quo.
But not so much for us hackers. Especially those of us starting our own businesses. It's not only acceptable to go against the grain, it's often necessary for great success.
That certainly doesn't give us carte blanche to question everything, but questioning too much without benefit of background and experience gives rise to "Hacker News Disease".
That's the price we pay for pushing the envelope too hard and too often. We overstep our bounds once in a while and have to be put back into our place. Frankly, I'd rather have it this way and ruffle a few feathers along the way than to never make a mistake and fade away into oblivion.
Why dabble in things that you don't understand? Why treat the world as if it were one big toy? Why pretend that duct tape is a reasonable substitute for the correct part, as designed by an expert? Because it's fun! And educational. As many people know, a good way to learn how to do things correctly is to begin by doing them wrong, and then let experience, the laws of nature, trial and error, the advice of friendly, expert onlookers, and the guidance of your peers guide you toward something better.
Obviously you can take this too far. There's a difference between armchair lawyering and actually practicing law, just as there's a difference between armchair quarterbacking and actually playing quarterback. But every quarterback started out as someone having fun, and every expert, trained lawyer got their start by being an inexpert, untrained, full-of-crap college sophomore with an interest in the law. Hacker News isn't a law firm. Its knobs aren't connected to anything vital. [1] Why not fiddle with them? You might learn something.
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[1] How would you recognize someone on HN who probably is a real lawyer, or law student? They take pains to explicitly disconnect the knobs before they frob them, by saying something like: "I am a lawyer, but this is not sound legal advice. Blah blah blah highly meaningful defensive boilerplate blah blah blah." Usually the disclaimer is three times longer than the post itself.
Often enough, by their very reluctance to contribute opinions in threads that are discussing legal issues. I AM a lawyer (although I'm not particularly experienced about many of the legal issues that show up most on HN). I often don't hazard an opinion at all, because the thread leaves me feeling I have too little sure knowledge of the relevant facts to offer an opinion. Someone who spouts off an opinion instantly after reading an "Ask HN: . . . ?" post is, as you correctly suggest, almost certainly not a lawyer.
Which is very sensible of you, of course. As a professional, you have to act with a certain degree of professional detachment and care. Your words matter in ways that mine do not. You charge money for your words, because they have a power and authority that mine lack.
But what you seem to be saying is that we, the general public, have a choice: We can discuss legal issues amongst ourselves. We can not discuss them at all. Or we can abandon the discussion of legal issues to lawyers and people who can afford lawyers.
Does anybody really think it would be a good idea for the public to just be quiet and leave the issues of IP law to credentialed experts? Isn't that just how abominations like the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act happened in the first place? It turns out that large media companies can afford to hire a lot more experts than the EFF can. And that just because a lawyer understands more about law than you do doesn't mean he's more inclined to use that power in your interest than you are.
Lawyers understand the law. But citizens make the law (very indirectly, of course). And citizens suffer the consequences of laws. So it's our job to care about laws. Even if our mental models of how they work are a little... rough.
(Of course, it would be great if the public had better grounding in legal education, just as it would be great if we all knew more quantum mechanics. This is why so many people love Larry Lessig in the first place -- the guy writes books for non-lawyers.)
A lot of lawyers do volunteer time and effort to educate the general public about the law, and I am one of them. I write mostly about the law of parental freedom in education, my chosen legal specialty, and I welcome questions about that area of law from anyone.
I think people are more accepting of expert opinion about quantum mechanics than they are of expert opinion on the law because most people have preexisting lay opinion about the law before they seek advice. But, yes, we should all be talking with one another in a democratic republic as the law-making powers revise laws.
Very good point. I might add that people whose expertise provides a comfortable income are especially likely to think of themselves as experts on things they know nothing about. I hope that they learn to contribute their intelligence to doing nonprofit community service and solving intractable social problems.
I feel there are all sorts of industries and occupations that are far more difficult to learn and require far more intelligence than my skills in programming, design, and systems administration. Most I think I could probably learn and excel at, given a long enough timeline, but others I feel are likely beyond my grasp. I see no way I could ever become a Mathematician, for example.
I think this might be why we are all willing to judge the efforts of politicians, managers, etc - what they do seems to simply require having an opinion and acting on it. In the sciences, though, we know that you have to be really knowledgeable to be successful.
At the same time, I don't claim I could walk off the street and build a better house than a construction worker, or fix broken pipes better than a plumber. I couldn't even be a better politician; they are better at social hacking such as faking sincerity. I have a low threshold for that stuff. Still, I consider sciences harder in general than those, even if that isn't actually true.
The only thing I truly claim to know is that I know nothing. I have a feeling I'll die without truly knowing anything, but that's fine by me.
It seems to me that many of the geniuses I've read biographies of started with a similar humility and a healthy dose of curiosity, so I always figured that was a good place to start too.
I feel like it doesn't exist so much in many broader industries. Great businessmen realize that success is about getting people who are good at what they do and giving them everything they need to succeed, and then staying the hell out of their way. In a biotech company, for instance, some of the skill sets required are science, sales, accounting, politics/lobbying, manufacturing, etc.
Successes in an industry like that sort of requires you to be willing to admit other people are as smart as you and know more than you about many things.
On a different note, I agree with the idiocy of arguing about fair use without any background in it. You will however see that I never brought up fair use in my writing. All and all, I'd say that Matt has badly mischaracterized the discussion that went on. I invite you to review it for yourself.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=586154
Also Matt, something to consider about the Lessig issue. Even if he loses, Warner's loss will be bigger. The more exposure the public gets to big business's senseless ideas about copyright, the quicker it will be killed off. When did RIAA's suits against individuals stop? When some court cases got serious publicity. The RIAA won the court cases in question, but what mattered more was the fact that the public was exposed to what was going on. The current iteration of copyright law and precedent is outdated and eventually it is all going to change. In the mean time they should just keep quiet and earn as much money as they can off of an outdated system. Suing Lessig strikes me as an effort to change the direction copyright reform is moving in. That simply is not going to happen.
Well, as you say, the alternative is that they're knowingly using the legal system to bully people into bankruptcy to stave off having to actually produce value for the money they're getting. We may hope that they're ignorant or stupid, because the alternative is worse.
If, as Matt describes, an executive at a major music label realized the emerging trends of the industry but chose the path that would maximize his stock options over the next 2-3 years at the long-run expense of the stockholders, this would be illegal, and not constitute the "no-brainer" decision that Matt describes.
Executives have a fiduciary duty to stockholders to place long-run stockholder interest above their own. In fact, if this was found to be the case, he would most likely lose these options as well as suffer other legal ramifications. (disclaimer: not a lawyer, I just read blogs about lawyers :) You can argue that executives rarely do this, but nonetheless the legal obligation exists. I would like to think that those executives who take the attitude of "i just want to get my money and run, who cares about the long-term state of the corporation" is the minority, rather than the majority.
An executive's options sink or swim with the company's share price. If a company's investors really want their executives to focus on the horizon, they should adjust compensation accordingly. Lengthen CEO tenure, and give stock/option grants with 10 year vesting periods.
People will always act in accordance with their own incentives. That's the fundamental principle behind the free market. The only way to get a CEO to focus on your long term success is to tie his long term success to it too.
(Disclosure: I was linked as one of the cite examples, which I've replied to there as well: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=586345 )
It seems that it would be dangerous to take this view very far. Experts should be given weight in a discussion because they have better arguments, not simply because we assume they know what they're talking about...
I may have missed some subtleties, or the whole point :).
His entire political philosophy is anchored on the observation that knowledge is dispersed and that no one person's knowledge of the world entirely eclipses that of 12 random people.
1) Recency bias
2) Mistaking "Easy to have an interesting debate about" for "interesting".
That last one's a fine line, so to clarify, an example might be "Twitter's impact on X" vs. "Friendfeed's use of MySQL to store schemaless data"
Perhaps not a stupid course of action, but certainly a scummy one. So the sue-happy recording industry CEO isn't stupid; he's just a scumbag.
Experts though they may be, sometimes what looks like a screw-up is actually a screw-up.
rob
The problem as I see it is that I'm interested in what the best law/result would be, and they're focused on what's likely to happen in the real world. An abstract problem for me is making sausage for them. Of course, they might believe that the sausage is also the best result, and that there is no platonic ideal solution, or they might have just learned not to care, or something else. I don't know.
In any case, if you believe in being a responsible citizen in a democratic society, you should spend some time thinking about how government should work, and part of that is how the legal system works.
If you think that's all a pile of BS we teach our kids to keep them innocent, you probably aren't wasting your time on thinking about these kinds of problems, as it's just how lawyers justify their existence (in terms of making a living).
Good startup CEOs are able to recognize what is worth learning and how to tie different aspect of his knowledge together. I would be willing to take advice in may areas from a good Entrepreneur.
This is why take advice from PG on everything from how to be a great programmer, entrepreneur, angel investor, and much more.
The only problem I could see with that is if the one posting the legal question has any expectation that he'll get replies from attorneys. I think that's unlikely.
The part about dozen of replies from people who aren't attorneys is completely expectable given that it's Hacker News, not Attorney News.
You made me realize that we don't really know this. It does look like it, but what if networks and PCs (Windows) really were universally filtered? (Which is happening) It's unlikely, bad - but possible. Prediction can be tricky, particularly of the future.
Which is:
Intelligence (capability) is not knowledge (facts), AND knowledge (facts) do not equate to wisdom (judgment).
Many people here on HN pretend to have knowledge they don't, that's true. But they also do not have or exercise wisdom, or reason.
For an example, just go back to that thread where I baited that misogynist jerk time_management into revealing his true colors.
He may have been stating facts up to that point, and people defended his statement of facts or debated their factualness, but nobody else questioned that selection of "facts" -- and the motive behind stating them.
If only other people would study the art of rhetoric.
"Though not mathematically proven (which would be virtually impossible) it logically seems as if DRM must actually cost artists and labels money on recorded music sales."
So recording industry execs could increase short-term revenue - which is what they care about - by changing their strategy. How does this sit with "they're not stupid, and they know the situation far better than you"?
And now you claim that the industry is doing what you advised/predicted. So it seems that intelligent people can analyse situations where they are not in possession of as many facts as other intelligent people, and still come out with a more correct answer. (Or at least, an answer that appears more correct given the industry's actions at the time. Possibly it already had the correct answer, and was just moving slowly.)
Maybe these intelligent people will be wrong more often than not, but looking at incentives: if you're right, you look like a prophet or at least get to feel self-satisfied. If you're wrong, everyone forgets; you lose nothing except the time spent thinking and writing, which was probably fun and educational anyway. You probably don't even need a reward for being right to make this worthwhile.