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Comment by divbzero | Hacker News Reader

The issues we face are complex and technical enough that I would like our leaders to be well-educated, preferably better educated than me or the public in general. It reminds me of the time ‘orthogonal’ came up in oral arguments and it was such a novel word for the Supreme Court that a justice paused to ask and remark on the word.

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> The issues we face are complex and technical enough that I would like our leaders to be well-educated

I don't think we are facing much complex issues beyond anyone's grasp. Of course it takes some level of study to understand the issues, but as the french citizen convention on climate [0] (started by the government itself) has shown, given appropriate information ordinary citizens are very capable to grasp complex issues (and ordinary leaders are very capable to ignore those citizens and wipe their asses with their proposals).

What you advocate for, whether consciously or not, is not a democracy but a form of technocracy [1]. It sounds like a good idea at first, but:

- centralizing power (eg. in a parliament/government) is always always the recipe for abuse [2], even if you take the 500 best people you can think of

- political issues are not just technical issues, and we science/tech people from our somewhat-comfortable ivory towers are in a very bad position to make diagnostics on what goes right and wrong in society (except on a micro level where our science applies)

- solving complex problems requires a level of coordination/participation which can only be consented; trying to force the people against its will "for its own good", often results in exactly the opposite of what you wanted to achieve in the first place

All in all, i would personally argue as long as "leaders" is a thing there's a very little hope for humanity.

[0] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_citoyenne_pour_le_c... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy [2] One could argue if you have elected representatives deciding for the people, then it is not a democracy because the power is not operated by the people directly.

I feel like orthogonal is a fairly basic logical concept, which makes that a little concerning.

I once made a bet that most people know what a prime number is, being sure that at least for my closest environment of 5-7 highly educated people it is undoubtedly true. A bet was lost after a quick asking round - I’ve got only a couple of confident answers. But what hit me hard was not that the specific term was forgotten, but that most of them were not even familiar with the concept.

Another thing I figured out too late is that after someone (not me) explains a complex topic to a group, everyone seems to agree by silence and ready to get to work on it. But my habit of asking if they understand the terms A and B and how it all works made me discover that essentially nobody gets it. People just don’t ask questions and delay their research for some reason. A thought that maybe they do that all the time in every situation or conversation is pretty discomforting.

I'm coming to the same conclusion; it blows my mind how people can just run off and confidently implement something vaguely related to what was talked about. People seem very sure about what's supposed to be built, its context, and how. No questions asked. (am I the stupid one for not understanding?) Turns out they just made something up in their head that didn't make sense. As a leader, how does one work with such people? It feels condescending quizzing your team members to verify understanding and I can't spend my time specifying work down to the most minute details.

In a competitive environment it's a strategy to look smarter than your peers. The hope is that they can go and figure out whatever they missed during implementation (often this is not the case, of course).

There's social value in appearing to "get it", and social cost in being the one to ask (especially if others in the group, hearing the explanation, pretend they knew all along).

I'm sure there is a more elegant way of saying this, but I judge people a lot more for coming back 2 days later with a solution to the wrong problem than silly questions asked on the spot.

All of my initial conversations with clients start with me asking them (usually multiple times in different ways) what they’re actually trying to achieve. A large proportion of those conversations end with them saying they have to go figure that out.

A surprising amount of human activity takes place with no clear understanding of the goal.

I just joined a new software team. I had a time where I felt like I couldn't really get a point across to a teammate. Not that he didn't agree, but I just didn't feel understood. Then it happened with someone else. Well, after the seventh time with the fourth person over the third medium, the common denominator became obvious (me).

I think part of the problem is my whole team is honest and direct. They really engage with ideas. Sometimes they'll engage with an idea different than the one I intended to communicate. Because they're really taking the idea on, the misunderstanding will stand out.

Maybe most people don't do that as often. They just nod along and passively agree. Only when it comes to the final decision/action will they fully engage. And if they disagree with that, they'll let you know (maybe) even if they've been uh-huh-ing every supporting argument on the way.

I’d imagine the justice knew perfectly well what it meant in common usage, and was just checking that there wasn’t some obscure precedent establishing another legal meaning. No different to a software developer seeing a function called “push” and checking the documentation to find out exactly what it does.

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