After years of being on this site I strongly suspect there is absolutely no correlation between being a good software engineer and being able to extrapolate into other fields without also putting in about the same amount of studying time. A lot of people in our field are extremely logical, but there are so many posts like this where decades of research are ignored from other very smart people in favor of conclusions drawn from thinking "logically" about the problem for ten minutes similar to Aristotle. Every so often someone happens upon a good conclusion, but not usually. There are so many studies, over decades, showing these thoughts to have no grounding.
But very true regardless. Reading HN for health advice is like talking to your barber about stock options. A way to spend time but not to get information to work off of
Personally I really reject the notion that an area of knowledge is strictly reserved only to those who are "officially", if you will, acknowledged as experts. On the one hand, there are many, many studies and bodies of research and so on once accepted that later have been proven wrong and even deceitful in purpose, so there go your "experts".
And in the other hand there are countless examples of people sharing knowledge on topics they are "not experts" in. These are maybe more difficult to document, for obvious reasons, but at least at a personal level I've had enough of them to become keen on listening to personal anecdotes and "the wisdom of the village elders" if you get my meaning.
I actually find it a helpful reminder. "People spout shit. Don't just blindly trust it". Otherwise, you end up chasing things, thinking they help, when there is little evidence backing it up other than someone's opinion.
> There are so many studies, over decades, showing these thoughts to have no grounding.
Can you be a little bit more specific? I'd be interested to hear what the counterpoint is as personally I feel refreshed after a 15 min lie down in the back of my car at work, even if I didn't perceptibly fall asleep.
Sure, I agree with all that. Although, I have two heuristics:
- 1. listening to my body's tiredness is probably a safer general strategy than pushing myself to the brink as a general strategy. It would be extremely surprising if this was not the case, going in the face of thousands of years of folk wisdom and decades of research. I'd welcome that finding since it'd be a rich source of future discoveries, turning much of common wisdom about sleep and rest upside-down
- 2. it confirms my biases about the ideas I've liked and cherry-picked from [0], [1], [2], and [3] :^) - I'm willing to update my beliefs in the face of new analyses/results, but is there really any epistemological way for me to try to derive real life benefit in a valuation-free way? At some point one makes a lossy approximation of reality in one's desired habits. At some level this is scientism, sure, since it's dangerous to assume one's observations are reality itself, but, it keeps me happy enough with the results. And it's fun to watch the meshing together of ideas over the years, as research pierces deeper into the world's veil..
I'm not the arbiter of the mechanics of internal bodily conscious experience, however, so, grains of salt and all that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
So true. And in fact I would argue that it is more often than not the opposite (they apply logic to things that are not, in fact, at all straightforward logical - like biology)
OTOH, if "simple logic" (or, often enough, thinking from first principles) seems solid, and no one seems able to point out a specific error in logic or a specific faulty assumption, and all the criticism boils down to "smart people write smart papers on this therefore you know nothing therefore you are wrong" - I'll put my bet on the "simple logic".
Before the Snowden leaks, it was generally considered to be a conspiracy theory, that the NSA hacks allmost everyone, ignoring any law.
But to technical people, it was a sound theory, that proofed out to be right.
That's the difference between a theory that lizard people invented Covid, or that Kubrick shot the moon landing.
Those theories fall apart very quickly, if you apply logic.
So I am no fan of appeal to authority arguments. If the experts are real experts, then they can use logic, to simply show where the layperson's arguments are flawed, where it is missing context or deep understanding of the field and point in the right direction. But if they cannot - then maybe the layperson has a point.
Conspiracy theories make several bad assumptions that are easy to spot once you know what they are. Sure, that's knowledge, but arguably generic one.
What I'm saying is, "you don't know a thing 'cause it's not your field" is a good heuristic in absence of any extra information, but if the logic is sound, the author seems to have high generic skills in reasoning/logic/rationality and good model of the world, and no one closer to the field is raising any specific objections, then that heuristic breaks down, as it's becoming more likely that the author got the gist of it right.
I wouldnt rely nor use this approach at all, it is not only dangerous but feels useless
>logic is sound, the author seems to have high generic skills in reasoning/logic/rationality and good model of the world
What is good model of the world? The one that is coherent with yours?
Ive witnesses too many stupid ideas based on this "sounds logically" that Im fully against suggestions like this
But there is solution!
Just put effort into learning your stuff, so you aint gonna have to make a guess and waste time convincing yourself how rational your "not so educated guess" may sound
I think you two are collectively very close to describing “science”. It’s good to acknowledge what we don’t definitively know, but generating testable hypothesis or theories based on experiences and known phenomena is an important step.
There are topics we don’t know the truth on, so we have to theorize. For instance, dark matter, or origins of Covid, or evolution, even. We could throw our hands in the air and say “we don’t know anything”, but part of coming into knowledge is taking an educated guess on the answer, testing it, and being right or wrong. From there, we recalibrate.
The problem comes when people dogmatically defend their old, disproven hypotheses in the face of insurmountable evidence. Not situations where people have valid critiques or are skeptical, but situations which are pretty open-and-shut. For instance, flat earth has always seemed to me to be a very obviously wrong theory.
