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Comment by wyager | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if I agree with this. The author might be incorrectly projecting his feelings onto other people. There are a fair number of people in the world who know exactly what they're doing.

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The funny thing is, whether you're right or not, you're going to be perceived by people who agree with him as having been duped by the people in the second, dangerous category.

> There are a fair number of people in the world who know exactly what they're doing.

That seems like a very broad claim that can't possibly be true without some sort of qualification. Are you saying that there are people who know 100% what they're doing 100% of the time in 100% of endeavors across every category relevant to living life? I feel like what you mean to say is that there are people who know exactly what there doing when it comes to X, where X is a well-defined, specific subject-area.

Assuming that statement is true with the scoped qualifier, even that wasn't always true for this hypothetical person. They had to have learned how to do X and gained enough experience over time to know exactly what they're doing in the matter. Which means, there was a time when they didn't know what they were doing. And I'd say this hypothetical person at that hypothetical time before they knew what they were doing is really the target audience for whom the article was written.

This falls under the "shit you know you don't know" category.

Exactly. Two of the most powerful things you can learn in life are "There's so much more to learn" and "Nobody knows what they're doing".

Early in life you get the impression that parents know everything, then it's teachers, then it's bosses. When in fact they don't.

We're not robots with perfect abilities, understanding that everyone to a degree doesn't know what they're doing gives you a different outlook on the world.

Note, that doesn't mean everybody is incompetent.

>"Nobody knows what they're doing".

How can you possibly make this assertion? I have a direct counterexample; I know what I'm doing. There's a lot of stuff I don't know, but I would not describe my state of being as "not knowing what I'm doing".

>everyone to a degree doesn't know what they're doing

This is very different from "Nobody knows what they're doing". Just because no one has a perfectly clear idea of everything doesn't mean they don't know what they're doing.

You are absolutely right about the title. Though, I should probably clarify, the more accurate title would be "Nobody knows what they're doing all the time." That was the intent when I wrote it, but it could be argued that if the title weren't a bit sensationalist, we may not be having this meaningful discussion with points and counterpoints on HN right now.

EDIT: Actually "all the time" doesn't quite cover it, I'd say it's "most of the time".

"I know what I'm doing." - No, at some level, you don't know what you're doing. And I bet that, in certain situations, you act like you know what you're doing. Or, perhaps you didn't know that you didn't know what you were doing.

>This falls under the "shit you know you don't know" category.

Then so does the statement "Nobody knows what they're doing.". The author has no idea what people know or don't know.

"Sure, it looks like I created a useful app that numerous people use, and debugged numerous API problems that popped up and impeded its successful operation, but the reality is I was just aimlessly groping through life, and people don't realize that every once of enjoyment or efficiency they got from the app was entirely fake."

... Er, no. There's only so much complex, useful stuff one can produce, before you have to conclude, "okay, that person understands something."

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