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Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

It's not just ordinary stupid people. I've known people with advanced degrees who ostensibly make a living making predictions who don't believe it. Sometimes their arguments get very very intricate. There's just so many layers to the onion it's impossible to do in a conversation, rather than say an essay.

Other friends have CS degrees and don't believe it either.

It's particularly hard because there's a lot of little battles that they might win in an argument.

In the end it all comes down to secondary source critique, since nobody is ever sitting there with actual data. It's often "I don't believe in this guy, he's made a career out of scaremongering".

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> Other friends have CS degrees and don't believe it either.

I have three CS degrees. Our field has a real problem with hubris and reinterpreting everything through a CS lens, particularly assuming everything is discrete, falls into neat categories, and is not subject to noise.

I had a decade long debate with a friend from Chemical Engineering about whether the Universe was continuous or discrete, and also about whether it was deterministic. I recall confidently stating tons of crap about quantum mechanics, and it turns out I was completely full of shit because I did not understand probability theory or wave functions.

> the Universe was continuous or discrete

It's both and neither at the same time.

After many years, I realized that's not even the central question of importance. Rather, is the universe representable with finite information? If so, then its description can be written as a series of digits, and all such series are somewhere in the number π, in fact, and infinitessimally small part π, of which is mind-blowing.

Out of curiosity, how can one have three CS degrees? Do you mean you went through the (1) undergrad, (2) masters, (3) PhD cycle?

> Our field has a real problem with hubris and reinterpreting everything through a CS lens

Man, I agree if only because I, too, am guilty of at least having a phase like this. But I think I also observe it in the dev and academic CS community in general. I just don't know if this is a generic intellectual hubris or a type of superiority complex specific to "hackers". Of course my opinion is very biased and maybe even cynical but I'm tending towards the latter. I wonder how that came to be; I can only speak for myself, unfortunately.

> It's not just ordinary stupid people. I've known people with advanced degrees who ostensibly make a living making predictions who don't believe it. Sometimes their arguments get very very intricate. There's just so many layers to the onion it's impossible to do in a conversation, rather than say an essay.

You've just described the "bullshit asymmetry principle," AKA Brandolini's Law: "The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude greater than to produce it."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

It's a nice variation on the theme of destruction being a lot simpler than creation. Any idiot with a rock can break a window but it takes a couple of thousand of years of technological development to make that window.

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