It’s also why our cars keep running people over and our websites keep overturning democracies

The proliferation of Hanlon's Razor has been one of the most damaging things to society.

People as a whole are not incompetent, every individual (and every grouping of individuals) have goals and will take appropriate actions to achieve them with intent, but somehow a neologism has tricked people into believing this is the exception and not the norm.

It's because most of the time people see mostly powerless people trying to do their jobs and messing up. They don't have as much of a frame of reference for how powerful people act, especially because there is so much mystification in the media (literally owned by the said powerful people). The rule you apply to your friends and co-workers isn't suitable for the maniacal supervillians running society. Of course, those guys also fuck up in bizzare and stupid ways too, so people will point that out and be like look, they're just bad at their evil jobs!

There's two different questions here: one is "is the way things are currently done stupid" (to which the answer is often "yes"). The other is "can a random outsider do better just by thinking about it" (to which the answer is usually, though not always, "no").

It's the same principle as another comment I made a few days ago ([1]). It's not hard to identify problems that really are problems, but finding effective and feasible solutions to those problems is often far more difficult, especially if you're an outsider. The mistake isn't in identifying the problems, it's in thinking that you can come in totally blind and know how to solve them. (Or, put another way, in thinking that you as an outsider can tell the "dumb and easily fixed" problems from the "horrifying systemic nightmare" problems.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43265532

It can make it difficult to work in the industry because you find yourself surrounded with expert beginners who (generally privately) think they're geniuses.

I love working with people who aren't afraid to solve problems, but are also firmly in the camp of recognizing how clueless we usually are. We shouldn't be terrified of failure, anxious about what we don't know, etc. But man, some humility goes a long way.

The alternative leads to terrible software, team dynamics, work-life balance, etc.

I only feel like a genius after I solved a hard problem[1].

https://programmerhumor.io/programming-memes/the-two-stages-...

[1] Otherwise I have a serious impostor syndrome.

Heard a guy about six months out of undergrad once declare (completely serious) that of course he knew how to run a school district, he attended public school! Wow did that make me distrust every suggestion he made.

Hahaha. As an undergrad in my University, I asked a guy just before an exam on electro magnetic waves if he had studied properly, and the guy told me dead serious, that he knows Ohm's law, and he can derive everything from it!

Did he pass the test?

law and medicine communities definitely have similar qualities in this way imo

In a different way. There's the old joke and doctors and God, and you will certainly find attorneys who are full of themselves. But while I've never met an attorney who thought they were an engineer simply because they were excellent lawyer, I've encountered plenty of engineers who believe themselves to be masters of the law (including here on Hacker News), having logically deduced it from first principles with their superior intellect.

> I've never met an attorney who thought they were an engineer simply because they were excellent lawyer

Not sure about attorneys, but there are certainly legislators / regulators who think that, or who at least think that every problem they throw at engineers, like implementing end-to-end encryption that their government can backdoor but foreign governments can't, is instantly and easily solvable.

That's basically the opposite phenomenon: you know so little about how an industry operates that everything they do seems like magic to you, so you end up making absurd demands of them.

The phenomenon discussed here has engineers believe they can practice law and medicine themselves. So they're not asking lawyers to get them out of a murder caught on national television, or doctors to cure their cancer in three days. They think they can do these themselves.

Completely agree w this clarification

One of the most important skills a lawyer can have is being able to comprehend highly complex topics in a very short time with minimal information to a reasonable level of confidence that they can advise genuine subject matter experts (experts the lawyer counts on knowing more about a topic than the lawyer does) about risk issues.

This is, of course, one of the most important skills anybody can have, but most people are terrible at it (whether by lack of talent or lack of practice) so our society pays lawyers to do it for them.

"I've encountered plenty of engineers who believe themselves to be masters of the law"

So much so that this is a running joke among nearly every lawyer I know in private practice.

> I’ve never seen it at the remotely same level anywhere else.

To be fair to the other ones trying, we’ve set a fairly high bar recently, with "Let me show you how to run the world’s first superpower".

Maybe because others aren’t “disrupting” everyone else

econ on hackernews be like