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palmoteatoday at 5:46 PM1 replyview on HN

> Wisdom is not appreciated in our industry. Everyone in tech with a modicum of status or power thinks they got there because they're smarter than everyone else and there is nothing of value to be learned from others. Thus, our leaders blunder in to the same mistakes everyone else is making over and over again. We never learn.

It's not just people "with a modicum of status or power," it's almost everywhere in tech. Just look at all the software engineers that contemptuously look down on other fields (except maybe hard science and economics), or talk like they're experts because they read a couple of papers.

IIRC there was a recent blog post or article (I wish I could find it) that had a nice section just running through a series of software-engineer ideas (like Effective Altruism), and pointing out they're basically re-inventing wheels that were already better explored by Philosophy. And the people who do that think they're brilliant innovators.


Replies

Chu4eenotoday at 7:35 PM

Mocking effective altruism is not really a difficult or complex philosophic endeavor though, even without pointing out how it's old ideas for a new audience.

And most philosophers aren't exactly immune to the quasi-Gell-Mann-Dunning-Kruger effect that plagues engineers.