Slashdot Mirror
Why Smart People Defend Bad Ideas
CHESTER COPPERPOT writes "Scott Berkun writes an interesting essay on 'Why smart people defend bad ideas'. He states a number of interesting highlights on smart people and dumb ideas. From the article: 'In the software industry, the common example of thinking at the wrong level is a team of rock star programmers who can make anything, but don't really know what to make: so they tend to build whatever things come to mind, never stopping to find someone who might not be adept at writing code, but can see where the value of their programming skills would be best applied.'."
Ego.
a lot of it has to do with ego, and a lot of it has to do with committing to something and saying "this is what we are going with"
some people invest a lot of time into ideas and when they see their ideas threatened, they throw up the defense like no other. it transends programming all the way up to world politics.
i am guilty of it, but i have gotten better at admiting my mistakes and using it as something to build upon. it takes a lot to realize when you are at fault and you fucked up.
Yeah, I had a friend that did the same thing.. and I didn't have the heart to say a word.
He's currently working for Apple pulling in a quarter million a year, while I sit here in Engineering school.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
considered smart?
Probably because they did well in school. But school (at least in the US) wasn't designed to teach people to think, but to teach them to memorize facts and follow directions.
There are lots of very capable coders out there who make excelent code for other techies, but for this very reason the UI often sucks. The individualism and "if you don't like it, fix the code yourself" attitude of many open source projects means that people who aren't code junkies, but are excelent at understanding what a user might want get excluded from the process far too often.
You're describing somebody who is so afraid of making a bad decision, they can't make any. TFA describes pretty much the opposite problem: being unfraid to risk a bad decision, but never being able to admit that it was bad.
Isn't that what they feed everyone in school; "You can do anything if you just put your mind to it"?
In my younger years, I took this to mean "Do everything, because you can". Now that I'm in college, that entire lesson was bunk, and now I'm stuck with a bunch of what I'd consider useless knowledge.
The "Pretender" gene, as I often call it (after the TV series) is something a lot of us are blessed/cursed with. We have the ability to sit down at a computer and code anything, then get up, walk into a garage or workshop, pick up a hammer and build something, then go to a rally and speak about how you can change the world if your party will support you.
The problem with it is futility. Others like me, myself included, find it futile at times to do anything, since we've done everything we're interested in doing. Us general-purpose, disposable task people have to cast ourselves into single purpose, repetitive task people, and that's really hard for us, in college, and in life.
Sadly, I don't see an easy solution. Except I won't be telling my children that "They can do anything". I'll tell them "you can do something. but it's up to you to choose what that something is."
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
I think the issue at hand is that many people confuse leadership ability with skill. Being a good programmer doesn't necessarily make you a good project manager, nor is the best manager also the best coder. It's sometimes the case, and certainly some very skilled people successfully rise into management because their skill translates into seeing the big picture and hence being a good manager.
But not all really skilled people see the big picture, and that's when ego kicks in. They can't stand taking orders from somebody less skilled than them. People complain about pointy-headed PHB's with no skills getting paid more that them, but the reality is that having 20 coders is a waste if they lack direction, and ideally, that's what the PHB is there for.
Whether the PHB is actually effective is another story. Leadership is a nebulous thing and much harder to quantify and identify than skill - hence the embarrasing examples that slip through the cracks.
The problem with smart people is that they like to be right and sometimes will defend ideas to the death rather than admit they're wrong.
I've known smart people like that.
And fantastically dumb people like that.
I've had someone argue that the queen of England isn't rich, and get this, when I explained that she's the biggest land owner in the U.K. and she made about 27 million a year last time I checked, he argued that she isn't rich because when she dies someone else will inherit her money (unlike Bill Gates, who'll bring it with him to the afterlife?).
Smart people just defend their insanity with more flair.
You can't take the sky from me...
Michael Bolton: You think the pet rock was a great idea?
Tom: Of course it was! The guy made a million dollars!
There are lots of very capable coders out there who make excelent code for other techies, but for this very reason the UI often sucks.
I write apps for techies and I write apps for non-techies. The UIs and requirements are very different. Apps written for techies and accepted by techies is not proprly judged by non-techies, and vica versa. The arrogance is found in the people in both camps who insist that UI should fit their camp when it was written for the other camp.
If I write an app for techies and they like it, there is nothing "wrong" with it. Often, "techie" interfaces are aimed at functionality, not "point click drool". Thus any remarks about it being ugly are simply irrelevant.
The individualism and "if you don't like it, fix the code yourself" attitude of many open source projects means that people who aren't code junkies, but are excelent at understanding what a user might want get excluded from the process far too often.
And if they aren't the "target market" of the code author(s) that is just fine. Quite frankly much of the apps I write are not intended for end-user non-technical people and I don't care if they don't like it. Nor should I. Making it pretty will NOT enhance my market in the slightest, it will only pollute it. The same goes for end-user non-technical apps I write.
And finally, there is the "you get what you pay for" comment. Most open soruce apps are done for free. As such, Joe EndUser has no right to be "included" in the process.
Now to tie it all up with the favorite computer analogy: cars. GM (for example) sells cars. They sell cars for the enduser, and cars for the techie. Most people are familiar with the first category. But they also sell race-only versions of some of their cars, such as the C5R or upcoming C6R. The general public has zero input into these models, as it should be. Other companies also make race cars. These are oriented around a specific purpose.
The Mosler for example is a race-oriented car. Sure you can drive it on the street (and end user could buy and drive one), but it is aimed at being a performance auto for the track. It is the "code written by geeks for geeks" side.
Then you have the minivans and sedans, for example. They are built for the general consumer (the end user w/o technical skills). Sure a racer can drive one, even adapt it for racing (tens of thousands of Americans do this every year), but as a racer their input is not part of the design process or feature list. Witness the near-universal elimination of options like radio-delete and ac-delete.
IMO, nearly all these rants about ugly yet functional interfaces versus pretty but reduced functionality but pretty shiney interface fall under the categories above. Everybody wants a hand-built Ferrari for the price of a 10 year old wrecked and stripped Geo Metro. And they blame the "industry" for them not getting it.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
Geeks can get infatuated with an idea that seems good, ignoring other good ideas that conflict with it. We used to call this "the tyranny of the single idea" - especially ideas that seem so good that they're treated as a "magic bullet", or (from a perhaps gentler folk era) a "panacea". This seems to be an variant of the Usenet wisdom immortalized in /usr/bin/fortune as "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail".
--
make install -not war
Are the Chinese dumb? No. The average score of a Chinese on a calculus/trigonometry test is significantly above average, outscoring the nearest American.
That is because they actually use that stuff over there. We don't make physical stuff anymore, and thus don't deal with geometry etc. as much. We make junk bonds and bad movies, and you don't need trig for that.
Table-ized A.I.
Maybe... they aren't all that smart. Now, to answer the question why does society recognize absolute cretins as people of respectable intelligence?
I think you may be confusing agreement with people who decide that you're a complete idiot (rather than a condescending nuisance), nod politely and look for an escape route. Certainly, whenever someone starts yammering to me about "sheep" (or worse, "sheeple"!), I "agree without justification" and flee as soon as an opportunity permits...
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
That's the essence of what the military calls command presence. When there are two passes through a mountain range, and they are both very much equal obstacles, a good commander swiftly declares, "That one, it's obviously better!", and gets everyone moving.
If you don't have enough clear criteria to evaluate a situation to your satisfaction, don't waste time evaluating it by ambiguous criteria. If the situation looks very much 50-50, then either choice is as right as right can be.
'Either bale might be wrong' paralizes - 'either bale must be right' frees.
Who is John Cabal?
In my younger years, I took this to mean "Do everything, because you can". Now that I'm in college, that entire lesson was bunk, and now I'm stuck with a bunch of what I'd consider useless knowledge.
[...] something a lot of us are blessed/cursed with [...]
The problem with it is futility [...]
Sadly, I don't see an easy solution.
In art, it's known as the "white page syndrome".
You have a clean, white canvas, on it your talents enable you to paint anything. So you sit there, awash in the mental miasma of the endless possibilities assailing you.
The way I deal with it is to stop thinking and draw a random line, then based on what this restricts the possibilities to, I can build around it.
And the use I found for my "useless" knowledge is to wait for the conditions under which it will become usefull.
Maybe you'll be at a job interview and you'll have knowledge of something the interviewer is passionate about: Bang, you have the edge, you get chosen over the other equally qualified applicants.
My knowledge of all-around trivia actually became usefull when I was employed in a company that did some localisation work, it wasn't what I did there, but whenever the translators were faced with a subject they were unfamiliar with, they came to me. The kids in highschool were hostile to me for being a know-it-all, but at that job it made me quite popular.
Off course, I still feel this... lassitude, sometimes. I haven't found an easy solution, but since in a hundred years' time we'll all be dead, we might as well be ourselves while we can : )
You can't take the sky from me...
A friend of mine was taught a nifty lesson from her parents. It's in the vein of your "You can do anything..." quote, but maybe more apt, with a minor change.
The quote was "You can have anything you want--but you can't have everything you want."
Substitute "do" for "have" and booya!
Why Smart People Defend Bad Ideas
Because their parents, and/or religious leaders, tell them to.
*puts on asbestos suit*
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Maybe not, but it was *their* totalitarian theocratic regime.
Imagine how people would feel if the Chinese tried to overthrow the totalitarian theocratic regime in Saudi Arabia, or the United States...
The face of 'evil' is always the face of total need
In any case, six-figure salaries aren't really uncommon for senior programmers / engineers with a couple decades of experience.
In fact, it's quite the opposite of what you're thinking. A post like that isn't ego driven; it's frustration. Nothing has pissed me off more in life than "trying to find a purpose", ie something to do with my life, since I know I can "do anything if I put my mind to it". The problem isn't capability of our youth. I feel like anyone else; we all can learn to do anything if we choose to, but the question is "how do we choose to?" So instead of teaching us how to choose a task, our schools pack us with so many choices that it's generally impossible to choose.
I chose something because it's what I spent most of my time doing, even if I don't really enjoy it.
Implicit understanding of my philosophies kind of drove your post off into a misunderstanding of what I'm getting at. Not all kids, myself included, know exactly what to do. My high school graduates less than a hundred students a year. Fourty of them leap off into state schools and different colleges. Twenty jump into vocations and tech schools. The other ten of us, the few that never really excelled at any one thing, the few that were completely and totally average in every subject (or in the case of my friends, completely and totally ABOVE average in every single subject) had no clue what to do. So we scatter off into collleges and universities, spending who knows how much on even more education towards even more indecision.
I don't consider myself superior, nor do I find myself below everyone else. I'm just your standard, middle class American with student loans and misunderstandings. Ever seen American Beauty??
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
There are people in this world who simply could not be replaced with any number of 'normal' employees -- because most employees want a 9 to 5 job and a paycheck, and that's it. From Starbucks to NASA. Some people make their jobs their lives -- hey, whatever makes you happy.
;~) ).
And.. I want to say *ANY 'employee' making over a few mill a year, but really it is just MOST people being paid such is being paid as a form of recognition, not because the person being paid cares about the money itself.
And a CEO with vision can be worth infinitely more than 500 programmers -- because a company without a PURPOSE goes bankrupt and there are no more programmers (div by zero
That said, writing a contract that lets a CEO commit murder and still get paid is pretty damned stupid.
Sorry
This is the "argument from authority", which - as a student of Plato - you should know is the weakest of all arguments:
"There are degrees and areas of expertise. The speaker is actually claiming to be more expert, in the relevant subject area, than anyone else in the room."
I've met lot's of "smart guys" like you in the tech industry who throw up a whole set of ridiculous notions in the hope that some "idiot" (like me) won't notice how stupid the basic premise is.
And the whole thing is based on "who's the biggest prat in the room?" You propose something outside the comfort zone of the victim and try to take the audience with you.
Unfortunately, it such a cheap trick, it's dumb, and you don't do yourself any favors.
Haven't you ever heard the advice "don't argue with a fool - people watching can't tell the difference"
A PhD doesn't validate every idiotic opinion you have you know, only the one that was the subject of your thesis.