chunky1994 a day ago

I was responding to you in the context of the GP.

> The flip side of being confidently wrong sometimes is that we treat understanding new systems as something approachable. So, yeah, it's annoying that we don't stay in our lane, but, from my boss's perspective, I'm the only one who's actually willing to just read code, investigate, possibly read a paper, and figure out what's going on instead of punting and saying it's someone else's turf I'm blocked until they get back to me.

Eventually you have to understand something. And part of that process is being wrong and annoying people.

GP here is suggesting that accepting established status quo at face value (i.e relying solely on other people's experience/letting them deal with problems you face in their domain without being able to examine why they arrived at the decisions they did) can lead to worse outcomes, and I agree.

Your response was that it is frustrating to have someone walk in and question things (precisely what GP is suggesting), only to have the final product of whatever decisions these people make be worse than the status quo (not what GP is suggesting).

I responded by saying - there is a difference between not listening to experience and examining whether the resulting implementation/decisions based on the experience are actually valid.

You did not address that. Is there not a difference between these two things? GP is suggesting to do the latter, not the former. i.e question why things are the way they are, crucially not that people should make decisions based on things we don't understand about the status quo.

You only responded to - * I doubt that someone smart (as you put it) would deliberately want things redone because they don't understand it, that's a trait borne of arrogance not intelligence.*

Your response claimed that I am denying the validity of your experience, when I made no such statement. All I said was there is a difference between questioning things and forcing decisions based on things they dont understand - smart people don't do the latter, arrogant people do. Someone doing what you are suggesting, is not doing what GP is suggesting, they are different. The former is smart, and the latter is not smart.

When I pointed this out here: I was just trying to examine the problem - if this behaviour is something you see often exhibited by “smart” people then: either you are unable to convince them of your side of the argument for different reasons, or you are not actually arguing with smart people. Do you see the distinction?

You accuse me of gaslighting you.

> Intelligence and arrogance are somewhat contra-indicative.

There might be a trend of this in academia (which is where the xkcd joke stems from), but in my personal experience I dont see this much in industry, and you can disagree with that.

I also don't see an xkcd joke being an actual basis of anything either. You are making declarative statements - but a _lot_ that many physics (and pure mathematics) grads are enormously more arrogant than the general population, enough that the trend under discussion has actual basis. - without any backing of this other than anecdata, and I was pointing out a different anecdotal experience.

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fidotron a day ago | parent [-]

> You only responded to - * I doubt that someone smart (as you put it) would deliberately want things redone because they don't understand it, that's a trait borne of arrogance not intelligence.*

> Your response claimed that I am denying the validity of your experience, when I made no such statement.

But it is exactly what you are doing in the exact quote of yours you even put there.

I am being nice, but it's quite clear you are a near perfect example of this stereotype (if actually a relatively polite one), right down to the wall-of-text when cornered.

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chunky1994 a day ago | parent [-]

I'm being nice too and all I've been trying to do in this thread is point at a distinction between GP's point and yours which you seem unwilling to engage with.

It is valuable to ask questions about why things are the way they are in order to understand the fundamentals of it vs we should change these things because I am 'smarter than you' and I don't understand why things are done this way (which I called dumb, and not smart). Perhaps the issue is that these two behaviours are easily confused.

I had to write the long comment to illustrate this difference. I'm saying in mine and GP's definition doing what you are suggesting people usually do is not smart, its dumb, and that is not what GP or I are suggesting people do.

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fidotron a day ago | parent [-]

> It is valuable to ask questions about why things are the way they are in order to understand the fundamentals of it vs we should change these things because I am 'smarter than you' and I don't understand why things are done this way (which I called dumb, and not smart).

But you expressed doubt of stated (and frankly not even remotely subjective) experience, so if we dropped you in an organisation your immediate response to anything you don't understand is "That doesn't match my mental model, so I doubt it actually happened", followed by either everyone giving up or you insisting everyone persuade you of absolutely every last detail of everything. It's enormously tedious, and the reason it comes across as arrogant is the demands put on everyone else to explain everything to you because you clearly see everyone else as incapable of the same level of insights that you are, all the while you are telling people what they experience is them being mistaken.

Just look at the way you questioned whether or not I could tell if someone is actually smart or not. It's just plain insulting. And it's not just me, it's everyone that has this same experience which forms the basis of the stereotype.

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chunky1994 a day ago | parent [-]

You seem to be imputing a lot of intent into my comment and then extending that to value judgements about smartness etc. I don't know what any of this has to do with what GP was saying. Yeah, there's a balance between questioning everything and questioning nothing, but there are a lot of bureaucratic things that happen in organizations and its generally a good thing to question certain things that don't have clear explanations, isn't there?

The doubt was simply about whether or not what GP is saying is smart behaviour to exhibit - Eventually you have to understand something. And part of that process is being wrong and annoying people. is the same behaviour that you are saying you've experienced ( i.e you are talking about different things).

I'm not even questioning if you can tell if someone is smart or not - its just obvious that forcing decisions based off things that are not understood is not a smart thing to do - which..we all agree on -, and neither I nor GP were saying people should do this?

Maybe I could've phrased it better but my whole point was GP says X, you are saying Y. I think there is a distinction between X and Y and I doubt that the people GP is talking about are the same people you are talking about (hence, smart as you put it vs smart as GP put it).

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fidotron a day ago | parent [-]

I see you don't understand the point, and you're doing that thing of imposing on me trying to help you understand it, which seems highly unlikely to work. Going back, again, to your quote:

> I doubt that someone smart (as you put it) would deliberately want things redone because they don't understand it

And yet that is quite simply exactly what I have seen multiple times in multiple organisations on multiple continents, but for some reason you "doubt" this because it doesn't fit what you think of as "smart behaviour" when spelled out like that, and then spend ages arguing that now there's no intent to this comment? Or any of the others . . .

I am going to do what I always end up doing in such situations, of just giving up and walking away, which every normal person does way earlier in proceedings. Ils sont fou ces physiciens.

	▲	chunky1994 a day ago \| parent [-]
		Its clear that you are taking great offence to that particular quote and determined to misunderstand my point due to your pre-existing bias, despite my many attempts to clarify it, so let me finish the quote for you. I doubt, that someone smart (as you put it) ..and not as GP put it..who..would deliberately want things redone because they don't understand it..are..the same people that GP is talking about when they say there are advantages to being "like this". This is no longer fruitful, but I only hope that this thread might to be a reason to more charitable in your interpretation next time regarding such a discussion.