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Comment by Slighted | Hacker News Reader

Its not only limited to pg, either. There are lots of big-name programmers that look at their programming skills and think it means they're good to speak on other, totally unrelated topics as if they're super geniuses.

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It's his personal website, not a philosophy journal. Can we scrutinize all your comments for subject matter expertise? What is your expertise anyway?

Regardless of whether or not its his personal website, my point still stands, although reading my previous post I think I should be more specific. There are quite a lot of big-name programmers that gain large amounts of ego from their work to the point that they feel confident to speak on matters they're not terribly educated to the point that they're fantastically incorrect, and confidently so.

>Can we scrutinize all your comments for subject matter expertise?

Absolutely.

I don't know any "big name programmers" but this is definitely a thing socially. Think actors and musicians commenting on social causes and whatnot.

When I was writing my post Jamie Zawinski (The "Mozilla guy") was what I had in mind. A great programmer but very outspoken in his social views to the point that he's entirely disconnected from reality. Lacking perspective. This is a blog post of his that I find to be one of the better examples of what I'm referring to: https://web.archive.org/web/20221211061513/https://www.jwz.o...

In that case I have to recuse myself because of the hairy balls thing.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

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