Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

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You think my options are "live with it" or "be frustrated?" I choose the third option, to advocate for improvement

Then you've chosen my second choice, living with it. Advocating for improvement is exercising your options to participate in the conversation, even if your participation only amounts to acknowledging our collective lack of knowledge.

Isn't it great that reasonable people can discuss things that are complicated? Think of how many intractable problems have been solved because people were too stupid not to know they were insolvable?

Expertise is easy -- you can rent it when you need it. Highly-effective teams working tough problems are not easy. It's perfectly legitimate to say something along the lines of "hey, we're sadly lacking in knowledge here, and here are the steps we should take to improve things" but that is a just another form of participation.

You're conflating what I was saying with the idea that we should just say "it's complicated, everyone should give up," which is just silly. What I'm saying is that if we don't stand on the shoulders of giants, there is a limit to how far we can go. And specifically, I'm talking about subjects which are counterintuitive at a basic level, and are not well learned by informal discussion, but instead demand rigorous study. The pernicious thing about these subjects is that it is hard for an outsider to judge good from bad without doing the math or scientific experiments themselves. Most subjects thankfully don't fall into this category, but economics, quantum physics, a lot of medicine, and a lot of math do.

This, by the way, is precisely why it is so difficult for us to "rent" certain expertise when you need it: non-technical people have a hard time hiring a good programmer because they don't have a basis to judge programmers off of. As it turns out, the guy who can talk the most convincingly is often not the person who is the most knowledgeable or skilled.

An aside:

"Then you've chosen my second choice, living with it."

That's ridiculous. The idiomatic phrase "live with it" means that you put up with or endure it. It is pretty much the opposite of working to change something. By your logic, "be frustrated" would also be "living with it" as anything short of killing myself or becoming a hermit would. This is just being obtuse.

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