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Comment by ChrisMarshallNY | Hacker News Reader

> Being skeptical of the conventional wisdom can be useful, but keeping yourself intentionally ignorant of it is generally a bad plan.

I can vouch for that.

I write software, but my original training was as an EE. My software development methodology was almost entirely self-taught.

This has been both good and bad. I will sometimes come up with some really interesting orthogonal approaches, but I will also sometimes "reinvent the wheel," with a naive approach.

Experience has taught me to seek out prior art, and established patterns. My creative way may still be the best way, but I've learned that is not always the case.

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I think ordering of exposure makes a difference. Being submersed in prior art and then trying to come up with something novel is much harder or less likely than having conviction around a novel idea/experience and then digging into prior art to strengthen your offering.

But doesn't that seem like a strategy for indulging in confirmation bias?

Uh that's entirely wrong. If you don't even know the tools available to the state-of-the-art, then how can you begin to build new things?

For example, in cryptography, if you don't know know about basic things like elliptic curves and hash functions, how are you going to solve any big problem?

Bitcoin is probably an example of this. I really doubt its creator knew about the state of the art in the field, yet he still created the state of the art in the field.

But yes, you are unlikely to do state of the art math without extensive education. However most other fields aren't like that, software engineering included.

As an EEE graduate myself I hear you. But now that I work in pure IT where I write programs for customer's requirements where nobody cares about a rock solid product vs a shiny new one that can ship next week (and I believe that was the context the article was written), and I hate to admit this - can't fault the author here.

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