You can easily accumulate depth of knowledge from reading in areas that are well documented.
True “depth” comes from the know-how acquired in digging through all the minutia nobody else though to document, on your way to producing a new creation nobody else thought to build.
The trope that software projects are poorly documented is so pervasive as to be saying nothing at this point. Despite extremely useful and celebrated documentation projects (MDN and Python off the top of my head) that dramatically accelerate other peoples' learning and productivity.
But when the topic is raised, the response is always "But we don't have time for documentation".
And when that time is given it becomes "It will be useless or out of date soon anyway, just go read the code" (As if there is nothing between non-practical high-level docs and per-line code comments.)
And when forced it becomes "Fine, but it won't be any good" or "Other people won't read/benefit from it anyway".
And when it's done, often as little effort as possible is put into it.
All of which smell to me like cover stories for: "I just don't want to do it."
Supremely narrow minded. Knowledge has many facets.
In other words: example?
Henry Heimlich used "the heimlich maneuver" for the first time when he was 96 (in 2016), 40 years after inventing it, in the "senior home" where he was staying. But according to you, having invented was nothing in the first 40 years, because he didn't actually use it, never mind that it was used by others and taught as a life saving technique.
You're just beathtakingly ignorant of how progress actually happens. It's like your understanding of the world comes exclusively from thinking about the world in abstract hypotheticals, rather than interacting with it, which is ironic coming from someone stating that only action matters.
If all he did was read books about things other people did, he certainly would not have invented that.
Your following attempt at armchair psychology is humorous, but not much beyond that I’m afraid. Don’t quit your dayjob.
And my specialty is spotting morons on social media.
Do you have a real counter example? Someone that through reading the material of others alone, with no practical/“hands on” experience, was able to develop what you consider “deep” knowledge?
Edit: A day ago you were arguing talent can’t come without training. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39656444
In fact much of your comment history is dedicated to claiming knowledge requires product. How bizzare.
> In fact much of your comment history is dedicated to claiming knowledge requires product.
Your comment is a great example of someone putting their (mis-)interpretation into something.
No, I didn't say anything about products. I leave that for tinkerers and sales people.
> Do you have a real counter example?
Already gave you one, no idea why you're asking again.
^Or at least something with approximately that level of intellectual capacity/honesty.
In fact that’s what I would consider the critical dividing line between a regular genius and a bonafide super-genius. Someone who almost supernaturally acquires expertise/intuition/depth/etc. with very little visible effort.
There aren't any Tony Starks who become experts in thermonuclear astrophysics overnight.
Richard Feynman was as close to this trope as you can get in reality, but insisted that his reputation for being able to solve difficult problems was due to having a "different box of tools" than others. And he obtained that by studying rather obsessively, well beyond assigned texts.
I have been lucky enough to know a few people who also might qualify as geniuses able to produce miraculous results. One of them decorated his laptop with the logos of defunct computer companies of the 1950s-1980s. He drew a lot of inspiration from papers and books that few others have read in thirty years.
I'm an atheist but when someone like him tells me that god gave him all of his equations - I'm not going to respond with "well ackshully". I'm going to ask them how we can make it easier for them to listen to god.
Assuming you don’t have a direct line to divinity yourself, you would need to have that profound genius in the first place to evaluate…
The original claim was that a genius should be able to easily and quickly attain mastery of any topic, given a grounding in the basics. Like, you give Mr. Super Genius IQ a book on quantum chemistry and the next day they’re putting things together so cleverly they are on the precipice of new discoveries.
Feynman actually did this a couple of times! But I think that just shows the “unreasonable usefulness” of mathematics, as well as his own spirit of curiosity. (And at least one time that we know of, he faked it by reading a colleague’s research before he presented it. Not to take credit, but just as a prank, so he could interrupt and predict every conclusion before the presenter finished.)
If you really still can’t bring yourself to believe this, then my only suggestion is to meet a lot more interesting people.
In the cases where I got to see them work later, I found that they weren't nearly as impressive as they looked at first.
Yes, there really are people like Wozniak in the world.
They seem to be around 1 per hundreds of millions, though. The odds of meeting one are ludicrously small.
These are the kind of people that would probably create weapons of mass destruction and if you might discuss with them with the scale of destruction of their products they have nothing to offer yet they will giddily discuss the technical achievements of their projects.
there are people out there who are better than you in every single regard. dont be jealous, be happy that the world can be composed of people better than you dreamed
What kind of person thinks that the people whose “brilliance” led them to invent weapons of mass destruction are better than anyone that cannot solve technical problems as fast as they can? Do you apply the same reasoning for wealth also? I suppose might is right for you?
You might not see this — for whatever reason — but it is indisputable: history is filled with the types of “geniuses” who in their rush to the prestige of being first they leave in their wake destructive effects on humanity. I argue that when people say “these are 1 in a hundred million” that yeah, because most of the people with similar aptitudes would pause and consider the implications of their actions while you argue that they are gods amongst men that we are “lucky to have met”.
Yet you are willing to cast ridiculous assertions about groups of people - stating as fact as though you are the canonical source of truth.
> But perhaps your characterization is to protect the comfort you draw from your world views.
Seems like you define projection.
See if you can find a way to get a colleague or two to tell you what they honestly think of you. I'm sure you will be surprised at how they judge you. The trouble is getting honest feedback - people say they want it but few people receive it well so over time most people learn not to give their opinions.
I read a relevant comment today from Madmallard that rings true: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39661279
One of the joys of HN is that many commenters can be thoughtfully blunt.
Moderator also asks that we avoid doing "internet psychology diagnosis": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38589525 - this thread is not good and I'm not helping sorry...
If you don’t see how many of these types are so immersed in their craft that they are oblivious to their impact on the world then you really haven’t interacted with many high-functioning types. If you have I encourage you to try and discuss these types of things with them.
Do you have an example of bonafide super-genius?
He once mentored a guy who was so ridiculously good at writing programs, that he wrote out (once) a 5 foot stack of punch cards (back when that was how you would code), to create a program that was needed by the company for some purpose.
It worked, flawlessly, the FIRST time.
This was his MO.
Once, he wrote a program for an internal client, and it got shipped. They ran the program and ran into a problem. My friend told him to debug it for them… he replied “I don’t know how”. Up to that point in his life, He had never had to debug a single piece of software…
My friend helped him debug the program: Turns out, the problem was not an issue with his code, the customer had given him the wrong spec for a critical interface… and that was the only reason it had not worked the first time.
There are truly people that qualify. The only note I will make is that generally if you are a super genius in one dimension, you likely have something you are absolutely terrible at in another. Hopefully it is in a dimension that either doesn’t matter, or you have enough complementary people around you to mitigate it.
You're pulling our leg or in denial.
FWIW, apparently back before Intel released a particular 4 bit processor, this guy made an emulator and compiler for the chip so they could start writing code in anticipation of its release.
Once again, not direct experience… but trusted source.
Every CS department has these legendary tales that grow more hyperbolic over time (See "never" above.)
They are fun to tell!
Two alternate stories I didn’t tell:
First is about my two friends (both ridiculously smart) who in undergrad became the TAs for the Operating System class at Carnegie Mellon as undergrads (normally taught by grad students)… this is the hardest CS course taught there. As part of their summer prep, they wrote a new file system example… I believe based on a b-tree.
The next was my AI professor, Andrew Moore [0], he was legendary at the school… eventually becoming dean after doing a stint at Google (he has since stepped down). By far, he is the smartest person I have ever personally known. To give you context (and we did this regularly in his class), you could ask him a question on anything and he would pause, think about it, and come up with a well reasoned answer that would be both insightful and illuminating… from first principles. On any subject. You could not throw him (we tried). I am still in awe of him.
While I agree that legendary tales grow… they are almost always based on a kernel of truth. The reality is most people don’t often interact with folks at these levels. I was very lucky, and I have only interacted with a handful.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterhigh/2017/10/30/carnegie-m...
Given that specific knowledge relevant to a field may be of a highly specific and hard to understand nature it increases the risk that any attempt to understand that knowledge by simply reading it will fail due to simple misunderstanding of what one reads.
In documenting things there are always points in which documenting minute details of a thing starts to detract from the purpose of documentation, that is to say the more in depth and detailed one documents the less readable the documentation becomes, therefore one leaves out things that should be easily understood by others when trying to use the documentation to actually work in the field or will quickly be imparted by other practitioners in the field if it is one with easy access to others.
Documentation by its nature is aimed at everyone, but there may be particular things that would be obvious to many people but not some specific person, and that specific person when reading the best documented guides to the area of knowledge will still not be as knowledgeable as they believe, because everybody is different.
Very many areas of knowledge have specific relation to things that people do with their bodies, martial arts, sex, cooking, etc. etc. In such cases there is of course muscle memory, thus no matter how precise and painstaking the documentation will be in these areas you will not be as knowledgeable as one that builds up muscle memory in the field by doing if you rely on only reading the documentation.
I could go on, but given my point about minute details it might be self-defeating.
The default action for an autonomous entity or system is to do nothing. It’s really odd to phrase doing nothing as a choice. Anything other than doing nothing is a choice. Especially when it comes to work, most humans just don’t want to bother spending time thinking about work outside of paid work time.
I'm so tired of (mostly boomers) talking about learning how to work on cars like it's easy. Sorry guys, but the companies who make those DIY repair manuals that you guys keep talking about using to learn wrenching don't seem to make stuff for any modern vehicles. Don't believe me? Go check out how pathetic their selection is right now: https://haynes.com/en-us/
It is nigh impossible for a non-car person to learn how to wrench without direct literal hand-holding from those who do.
It's also lead to the mechanic industry being FAMOUS for scamming grandmas, mothers, US soldiers, and other captive audiences. I think the only groups with a worse reputation are lawyers and car salespeople.
The boomer way wasn't that easy, but it actually finally IS easy to learn to work on cars.
There's also this, I can recommend it: https://www.howacarworks.com/
Watch even experienced mechanics works on new cars. They tend to bumble around for awhile.
“While breadth comes from reading and talking and seeing, depth comes from doing. The way to really learn about some domain is to have to solve problems in it”