logoalt Hacker News

fidotrontoday at 1:26 PM1 replyview on HN

Like your sibling comment I saw this mainly with physics people doing data science:

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

There is nothing more frustrating as a colleague than having a smart person walk in, insist you're all wrong, and then burn all the energy and goodwill in the organisation having to rebuild absolutely everything from the principles they currently understand because they refuse to listen to the experience that has built up already (in the entire field, let alone the organisation), only to produce something worse on every dimension than what already existed.


Replies

chunky1994today at 2:21 PM

But there is a difference between not listening to experience and examining whether the resulting implementation/decisions based on the experience are actually valid. 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.

At least in my experience (as a physics grad), me and all my fellow grads are much more likely to apply Chesterton's fence and then make decisions than not doing that and steamrolling existing decisions.

show 1 reply