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Comment by naasking | Hacker News Reader

> Have you heard (intelligent!) non-tech people talking about tech? Why would (intelligent!) tech people fare better talking about non-tech?

Becoming an effective programmer trains one's strict logical and causal reasoning skills, since we're always building or debugging large and complex systems from simpler components. We see all kinds of crazy emergent behaviours all of the time, and learn to understand how such things can happen. There are few other disciplines that exercise such skills so intensely (probably math and physics).

I would love to see a study on how effective various experts are at making predictions about something outside of their domain knowledge. I suspect computer scientists and physicists would fare better than most.

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My experience is quanty people (I'm one also) have too much confidence in their answers.

To make good predictions, you need to make good estimates AND understand what your confidence in your estimate should be.

"Sure, lots of people have very rigorous training in critical thinking, research skills, and other important aspects of analysis as part of their scientific, medical, or academic background, but we programmers are the specialest boys who are uniquely able to understand absolutely everything better than anyone else."

C'mon; I'm a programmer too, but this is just rank arrogance.

You mean the sentence you completely invented is rank arrogance? I agree.

Of course, a lot of strawman arguments are...

I think they would fare far worse. Because of the way that our economy is structured, tech people are overpaid and overvalued, and thus have an inflated sense of their own importance which causes them to overestimate their intelligence.

I don't think we're disagreeing. I was specific to use "computer scientists" rather than "tech people". Lots of tech people are not programmers, which is mainly who I was talking about.

We are disagreeing. In my experience computer scientists are the dumbest "tech people" of all.

I'm being facetious here, because I'm on a forum dominated by coders and it's a cheap thrill to troll a little bit. So to restate my opinion with less snark, I don't believe software engineers are any more rational or intelligent than other folks in the tech field. Most of the smartest tech people I've encountered have been product folks, designers, researchers, or engineering managers who don't touch so much code any more.

The reason? All those people acknowledge that all the important problems can only be solved collaboratively. They're also less likely to have come in through the comp sci funnel, and they have a more well rounded set of life experiences. Tunnel vision is exactly the problem being discussed. It's like if you're really good at crossword puzzles and you think that would make you a good English Lit Professor. That's coders thinking that their puzzle solving abilities yield philosophical insights.

All the best software engineers are the ones with an intellectual life beyond coding.

> So to restate my opinion with less snark, I don't believe software engineers are any more rational or intelligent than other folks in the tech field.

I think "rational" and "intelligent" are imprecise words that have different meanings to different people. I think if we restrict ourselves to the questions like, would a computer scientist or an English Lit professor be able to speak more intelligently about genetics, or psychology, or botany, we have a more well-defined question.

> Tunnel vision is exactly the problem being discussed. It's like if you're really good at crossword puzzles and you think that would make you a good English Lit Professor.

Crossword skills aren't transferrable to English lit, so the analogy fails. Computer science and programming are training in deductive and inductive reasoning, which are general cognitive skills.

It's just self-evident that someone who's experienced and adept at deductive and inductive reasoning would also be adept at solving problems and inferring facts in other domains. They are for sure hampered by a lack of domain knowledge, but my point was that, all else being equal (like their knowledgebase), someone who has this training and experience would simply be more effective at inferring facts about a topic they know little about.

I don't think any point you raised contradicts this argument. Yes, people with more life experience or more varied interests have more knowledge to draw upon from which they can infer tangential facts.

But if said person were also a programmer, they would perform even better at such a challenge. And so, in aggregate, such people would perform better overall at such challenges than other professions.

Edit: there could of course be other mitigating factors that overwhelm this argument, for instance, maybe programmers are less inclined to have varied experiences (hyperfocus on computers, say) and so they just have a smaller knowledgebase from which to argue from, and so they appear less effective at such a challenge. But then not all else is equal.

Thanks for engaging seriously even though I was being snarky. More than I deserve.

For starters, is the kind of problem solving that goes into coding trivially applicable to other problem spaces? That's why I used the crossword metaphor. To me, coding often feels like a puzzle where the reward in terms of serotonin boost far outweighs the effort put in. Now, if we're talking about higher order problems like system design, that I agree is the kind of complex reasoning that can be used in other contexts. However, that kind of thinking is far more similar to problem solving in other fields as compared to coding, and thus is not unique.

And in response to your edit, I do feel that programmers are less inclined to have varied experiences because, as I said earlier, the field has been placed on a pedestal due to our current economy. So even if the reasoning that goes into being a good coder was applicable to other kinds of problems in a unique way, engineers are stunted by their own prestige (and by other psychological factors we don't need to go into here).

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