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The world needs more humble geniuses. We’re few and far between nowadays.
The world has plenty. They just aren’t on social media.
I think you missed my sarcasm.
Well, they were right; not a genius because they are on social media.
The more I’ve learned about email while writing my own email server, the more I’ve realized I knew basically nothing about email when I started. Now, I’m at least somewhat knowledgeable, but god damn it’s so fucking complicated. Even something as seemingly straightforward as email has such a deep complexity that it takes years of study to even approach being an expert.
The single most useful thing I’ve learned doing this is that you should never assume you know a lot about a topic. There are a. always more things to learn, and b. always people who know more than you.
I have long said the only truly stupid people in the world are those who think that have nothing left to learn.
I like that line. I’m stealing it. Might paraphrase to fit the situation.
I did technical trainings, and I always used to say that the only stupid question is the one you don’t ask.
“All I know is that I know nothing”, Socrates.
With time I came to understand this as meaning that there’s always far more left to learn than one could possibly know.
Maybe not the original meaning (the whole Cave Allegory apparently comes from him via Plato, so maybe it’s about how the World is not really what we perceive), but it kinda fits.
This is, of course, a perfect example of D-K in action. This dude is writing his own email server, FFS, and he characterizes himself as, “at least somewhat knowledgeable”.
I’ve read a bunch of the old RFC’s for email services years ago, when you needed some of that info in order to do interesting things with sendmail. I figure that might have put me in the top 20% of programmers/admins/techies back in the day. But to actually consider writing an email server - no way. That’s a different level of “at least somewhat knowledgeable” .
The 500 mile email comes to mind.
https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html
Next. Level. Troubleshooting.
Oh man, that’s such a good debugging story. I really like the can’t print on Tuesday bug too:
Running your own email server is a dark and lonely road that can only lead to crippling insanity. We can thank Google for that.
I’m definitely aware. I run an email service at https://port87.com/. Google is absolutely awful to deal with.
In many collectivistic societirs, humility is a virtue.
Job before that was like this. No one will believe me.
Family run, small business, run by well-off, conservative Southern Baptists. Sound like hell?
Admitting you made a mistake was a fucking virtue. You weren’t forgiven, your mistake was ignored, except for everyone teaming up to figure a way to not let it happen again. No names, nothing said, let’s figure it out.
I’ve never worked such a culture. My next job paid double. Fucked a thing up right off the bat, no big deal, was never trusted again. I could go on about that job, but on paper, it would sound like heaven. Had so much PTO I didn’t bother tracking it, WFH, dev company.
I’d crawl on my hands and knees to get my office back with the Southern conservatives. And no one, not once, asked me about my beliefs or asked me to church.
Used to work in a place like this earlier in my career. It was a multinational, but not in the US. I transferred to another unit within the company completely different culture. It’s a place by place kind of deal.
Why did you think email was simple? Every sysadmin knows this is the most difficult system, so we outsource it whenever possible
Well, maybe physical printers are worse. Both should be outsourced. They’re both a PIA
I never thought email was simple. I thought it was straightforward. It’s not. It doesn’t matter if you follow the RFCs, you won’t have a working email server unless you listen to what the experts say.
For example, there are no RFCs about an IP address’ reputation, but that’s a real thing. When you sign up with your ISP, they’re not giving you a brand new IP address. Someone has used it before. They might have trashed its reputation, and there’s very little you can do about that. Then your emails will probably be blocked or delivered to the spam folder.
I find that folks that just keep their mouths shut, do their jobs quietly, competently and correctly are far better to have on your team than the loudmouth know-it-all.
Bonus is that when the former does open their mouth you know you should be paying attention.
I think they call it “quiet competence”.
All too common I’ve seen those loudmouths promoted, and the quiet competent are then talked down to about something they know far more about. Then they leave.
Middle management doesn’t understand a skillset unless someone tells them directly they are skilled, it’s a culture of failure.
IME the loudmouths are mostly mouthing off about things that are totally unrelated to the problem at hand. all in some weird big to appear confident and in control.
I wish I had this but I’m in the between both of those people and incompetent
A mindset I just fell into as a much younger man for reasons I no longer remember was assuming everyone knew more than I did and did things the way they did them for a reason. And I should learn what that reason is before I go proposing changes.
That mindset has never steered me wrong. Even when I change something someone else put in place what I come up with is a better solution for taking the time to understand why the previous person did it the way that they did.
I had a soccer coach from age 7-18. Same guy, brilliant dude, Dean of law at a very large state school. He told me at 12 to never talk to the other kids at the summer camps (competition) about what i was working on. “Just go out and do it and shut your mouth about it. That’s how you impress on the field.”
It’s stuck with me since then.
This principle is sometimes called “Chesterton’s Fence” (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Chesterton’s_fence)
i assumed there was some kind of story here - it being a parable - but its kinda more like a koan.
So much anger I see in the world is directed at policies, laws, procedures, whatever, that make perfect sense if one understands the background.
Sucks, but we can’t all understand everything. I try, but I ain’t that smart, and certainly can’t be that experienced.
Its at least partially a statistical trick. People of lower competence rate themselves closer to the middle, but people with high competence also do this.
I also find it hilarious how virtually everyone acts like an expert in diagnosing dunning-krueger. Like looking at a graph for a second and then repeating an academic mystification and 5-10 word snippet repeated ad nauseum is pretty fucking ironic given the subject
No no you see, because I have heard of the Dunning-Krüger effect on no fewer than two separate occasioms, I am a master at recognizing it in people no matter where they fall on its spectrum. You just don’t understand because your overexposure to the concept has dulled your natural instincts, unlike me. /s
Pretty sure most lemmy users are up there. But now that I say that… could very well be wrong. Sorry everyone
most replies to my comments on here seem to think their are foolproof geniuses while espousing that there is no such thing is nuance or complexity in the world. there is only good (agree with them) or bad (disagree with them).
super big-brained thinking, that.
That graph is shaped like a gun.
Please shoot me with it, I cant take any more of those smart people
Today?
It has been a fad for some time.
Ironically mostly used by people who think they’re smart bcs they’ve heard of it.Knowledge doesn’t just diffuse into everyone’s minds when it hits a fad threshold. There’s still a point where one first learns about it. Shocking, I know.
You gotta be part of the hive mind man, it’s pretty cool
smart doesn’t mean anything.
It means a lot of things according to the dictionary.
You might want to look it up.
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
— Isaac Asimov
As far as I can tell, we all have this, even people who are experts, it’s just in different domains that those of their expertise.
what baffles me is that so many experts just willfully refuse to apply there general intelligent to problems outside of their field of expertise in the most basic ways.
like so many ‘genius’ techies who can’t cook or understand a sentence with more than two clauses. it’s not really that hard… just break it down into the functional components like you do with your code, bucko.
It has been my experience that actual domain experience almost invariably beats genius-level intelligence, even that which is all the way up at the level of Einstein (so well beyond mere genius IQ).
What intelligence does bring is a faster ability to grasp things when explained and even to ask the right questions and piece a few more things together naturally than most people would, but that’s still not enough for a very high intelligence newbie to beat somebody with years of expertise on a domain: a newbie doesn’t just lack direct knowledge, they even lack knowledge of what are the right things to do to get that knowledge are as well as, in many domains, training to do it in a time effective way (or to put it another way, they don’t just lack the answers, they even don’t know the right questions to ask).
A last point: don’t confuse tech domain expertise with very above average intelligence - domain expertise in a complex intellectual domain tends to look from the outside as very high intelligence but that’s really an error in perception due to the unbalance in knowledge of the domain expert versus a non-expert. In my experience, there aren’t that many actual geniuses (IQ of 120 or above) in Tech even if some areas of it seem to require above average intelligence to master.
I don’t. Most techies are idiots outside of anything technological.
and they overcompensate hard by trying to turn everything into a problem to be solved with a convoluted technological solution.
That’s a general problem with domain experts in highly specialized intellectual areas: everything looks like a nail when the only tool in your toolbox is a hammer.
It also dovetails with what I wrote before and the Dunning-Krugger effect - just like everybody else, they are prone to think they know a ton about things outside their expert domain they really know little about, so come out as a idiots in those things. It doesn’t help that Tech has been glorified in present day society causing a lot of people within it to have seriously inflated egos well beyond what their actual achievements would justify - you see this kind of thing in all “glamour” areas: for example in my experience lots low-level barely-making-ends-meet actors seem to think of themselves as “superior to the common man”.
I like to think most people affected by such delusions about their inherent worth and capabilities get over it as they get older, after life has had the time to slapped them a couple of times.
Everyone has an opinion and nobody holds the absolute truth. Fun thing, reality is.
that sounds like it’s part of the homosexual/trans agenda!
Isn’t it more that people who are given a test will tend to think that the test was easy when they score well (when they actually scored well because they’re an expert) and people will think a test is hard when they aren’t familiar with the subject (nobody could’ve answered these question!) .
So it’s more that experts and non-experts both assume their knowledge level is more average than it actually is. Not as fun as “dummies think they’re smart and smarties think they’re dumb.” We all just tend to think we’re average and most people are at a similar level of expertise to ourselves.
I think the “dumbies” and “smarties” part comes to play when people decide or not to open their big fat mouths and share their “great knowledge” in a domain they have barelly learned about, especially when they’re dismissing expert opinions with their “great knowledge”.
So whilst being in that very special point of the Dunning-Krugger Effect isn’t really a metric of smarts (we’re all there in at least a few domains), the likelihood of actually dismissing the opinion of domain experts when one’s knowledge in that expert domain is at that point of the curve, is probably positvelly correlate with dumbness.
Are you dismissing my interpretation of the Dunning-Krugger effect based on specific expertise on the subject?
Your point is about causes, my point is about expression and is actually wider than just the Dunning-Krugger effect.
You’re saying that having the effect is independent of intelligence, I’m saying that the frequency and form of people expressing themselves when they’re under the influence of that effect at the peak of the curve is shaped by their intelligence, not specifically because of that effect but because their broader behavioral pattern when it comes willingness to voice their opinions or advices or even the way they voice opinion or knowledge of which they aren’t sure of, is to voice it as a certain fact (“It is so”) rather than opinion (“I think that”, “I heard that”).
For example, my impression from observation is that people prone to Mansplaining are also broadly more likely to offer opinions and advice as a “sure thing” in subjects they are not expert in and to voice that a as a certainty rather that a possibility, which also includes the Dunning-Krugger effect situations.
Our points are actually complementary, IMHO.
Also, curiously, both of us didn’t put forward our points as certainty, you starting your post with “Isn’t it more that” and me starting mine with “I think”.
I’m surprised your take was that I was dismissing your interpretation of the Dunning-Krugger based on specific expertise on the subject given that I very purposefully tried to express my opinion in a way that avoided passing it as an expert opinion, much less fact.
And it’s been disproven
Could you elaborate? From what I read, Dunning and Kruger did find a real phenomenon where people with limited competence in a domain overestimate their ability, but they did not suggest these individuals thought they were smarter than experts; and one theory holds that it is a statistical truism, which still means it exists.
What happens is people have the Dunning Kruger effect on the Dunning Kruger effect itself. People call it up far too often and misuse the label
That is not the same thing as being disproven though.
Thats like saying ‘trauma bonding’ isn’t real…
…because most idiots on TikTok incorrectly think it means bonds generated through shared struggles.
As opposed to what it actually means, which is basically when someone normalizes being traumatized in an abusive relationship with someone who is very manipulative by way of this other person generally offering only negative reinforcement nearly all of the time, with tiny morsels of occasional positive reinforcement handed out only after absurd feats from the ‘trauma bonded’ person.
I never said it’s not real, in fact if you reread my statement it makes no sense if ones premise was that it doesn’t exist.
I know, I am just providing an example of another thing that is misunderstood but not ‘false’.
They fun part here is how they performed a cognitive distortion in a discussion that is based on a theory about a specific type of cognitive distortion.
Our minds seem to default to cognitive distortions. Turtles all the way down. That’s why the concepts around cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) should be a subject covered through a students education.
Teaching people to spot “fake news” has become popular it it’s a sliver of a much larger issue. It’s almost certainly one of The Great Filters we need to overcome if we ever want to make out of this solar system.
Moveis with space travel typically suffer from a sense of ridiculousness that can be tied back to the portrayed society being based on the same cognitive errors of today.
I 100% agree that CBT should basically just be taught in schools as part of a kind of fundamental ‘how to be a human with thoughts and feelings’ class, lol, before moving onto ‘how to do critical analysis’ and 'how do you know what you “know” ’ class.
Our brains literally are heuristic-driven hallucination generators.
We need to make an effort to understand how they function and why and where they often break down, and how to manage their troublesome quirks…
… otherwise we will just revert to impulsive superstition in an incressingly overwhelmingly complex world, which will then guarantee our being forced into draconian social structures to more brutally manage our unexamined foolishness.
Our hardware has advanced beyond the default configs of our wetware, and Sagan’s nightmare is becoming more and more realized every single day.
Yeah, as far as I know, it hasn’t been disproven. Its scope has narrowed and is more nuanced. And it has made its way into the public lexicon like PTSD, OCD, ADHD, etc. so it gets thrown around a lot.
I’ve often heard it’s misunderstood and used in inappropriate situations, but it’s still a real phenomenon.
Like laypeople tossing around “OCD” when they shouldn’t. Absolutely real, but not in the same way that it’s commonly used.
I don’t think it actually has.
I did a little digging on this, and there was one study that just threw some random numbers together and claimed it disproved it, but it doesn’t seem to be widely regarded as a silver bullet to the DKE.
It’s been demonstrated that it’s mostly an illusion, and yet it’s hard to escape the observation that many people who haven’t studied it in detail understand the concept much less well than they think they do.
Came here to say this.
It is psychologically satisfying to believe DK, but ultimately just because you like the sound of it, doesn’t make it true.
Ive always joked that the biggest case of DK is people believing they understand and can identify cases of DK despite having no psychology education. This makes for a fun paradox.
This is about as stupid as claiming you’d need to be educated in psychology to identify a Freudian slip
Identifying a psychological issue involving a disconnect between education and confidence is hardly on the same level as a freudian slip.
Identifying a psychological issue involving a person’s philosophical intention and the context of linguistical expression is hardly on the same level as the DK effect.
I don’t think DK is really about intelligence but more on how averages work. I don’t know, I don’t have a degree in statistics just a basic biochem one.
Don’t discount yourself, I bet a lot of your education and research had to deal with statistics and deriving information from data. You’re practically using statistics
We see what you did there
