I never hear this sentiment on HN when it comes to writing code. Only the other, less-noble job classes.

I definitely understood the parent comment differently than you did.

My read of it is that they are criticizing those predicting low probability events, and then cherrypicking the predictions that turned out correct as misunderstood predictive geniuses.

A similar event in tech is the analysis of a potential AI singularity event, which comes up plenty often. We'll only be able to tell who is right in retrospect, and plenty of folks call each other quacks over that.

You've never heard of the term "code monkey"? Jonathan Coulton even wrote a song about it.

Yup yup yup. Glad someone brought this up.

It would take a lot to prove that they actually had good foresight since it’s so likely that they just happened to be the ones who guessed right out of a large population of equally well informed people who guessed lots of other things using similar reasonings.

I think it's probably a strength of science that at any one time there's at least one person yelling about the dangerous of any possible event. It's also a strength that, as in the case of the LHC, the people who were shouting "this will cause a black hole" were drowned about by the ones who were being more realistic.

The philosophy of science precisely prefers knowledge which gives falsifiable, testable theories. A hypothesis indicating every possible outcome with little differentiation is worthless.

> The philosophy of science precisely prefers knowledge which gives falsifiable, testable theories.

Knowledge doesn't give falsifiable, testable theories. Falsifiable, testable theories give knowledge. That's why the philosophy of science prefers them.