The more I’ve learned about email while writing my own email server, the more I’ve realized I knew basically nothing about email when I started. Now, I’m at least somewhat knowledgeable, but god damn it’s so fucking complicated. Even something as seemingly straightforward as email has such a deep complexity that it takes years of study to even approach being an expert.
The single most useful thing I’ve learned doing this is that you should never assume you know a lot about a topic. There are a. always more things to learn, and b. always people who know more than you.
I have long said the only truly stupid people in the world are those who think that have nothing left to learn.
I like that line. I’m stealing it. Might paraphrase to fit the situation.
I did technical trainings, and I always used to say that the only stupid question is the one you don’t ask.
This is, of course, a perfect example of D-K in action. This dude is writing his own email server, FFS, and he characterizes himself as, “at least somewhat knowledgeable”.
I’ve read a bunch of the old RFC’s for email services years ago, when you needed some of that info in order to do interesting things with sendmail. I figure that might have put me in the top 20% of programmers/admins/techies back in the day. But to actually consider writing an email server - no way. That’s a different level of “at least somewhat knowledgeable” .
The 500 mile email comes to mind.
https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html
Next. Level. Troubleshooting.
Oh man, that’s such a good debugging story. I really like the can’t print on Tuesday bug too:
“I’ll just validate email addresses with a bit of regex. How hard could that be?”
Right!? Fun fact, this is a perfectly valid email address:
"Pooper Scooper 💩"@[69.69.69.69]
In many collectivistic societirs, humility is a virtue.
Job before that was like this. No one will believe me.
Family run, small business, run by well-off, conservative Southern Baptists. Sound like hell?
Admitting you made a mistake was a fucking virtue. You weren’t forgiven, your mistake was ignored, except for everyone teaming up to figure a way to not let it happen again. No names, nothing said, let’s figure it out.
I’ve never worked such a culture. My next job paid double. Fucked a thing up right off the bat, no big deal, was never trusted again. I could go on about that job, but on paper, it would sound like heaven. Had so much PTO I didn’t bother tracking it, WFH, dev company.
I’d crawl on my hands and knees to get my office back with the Southern conservatives. And no one, not once, asked me about my beliefs or asked me to church.
I find that folks that just keep their mouths shut, do their jobs quietly, competently and correctly are far better to have on your team than the loudmouth know-it-all.
Bonus is that when the former does open their mouth you know you should be paying attention.
I think they call it “quiet competence”.
All too common I’ve seen those loudmouths promoted, and the quiet competent are then talked down to about something they know far more about. Then they leave.
Middle management doesn’t understand a skillset unless someone tells them directly they are skilled, it’s a culture of failure.
IME the loudmouths are mostly mouthing off about things that are totally unrelated to the problem at hand. all in some weird big to appear confident and in control.
A mindset I just fell into as a much younger man for reasons I no longer remember was assuming everyone knew more than I did and did things the way they did them for a reason. And I should learn what that reason is before I go proposing changes.
That mindset has never steered me wrong. Even when I change something someone else put in place what I come up with is a better solution for taking the time to understand why the previous person did it the way that they did.
I had a soccer coach from age 7-18. Same guy, brilliant dude, Dean of law at a very large state school. He told me at 12 to never talk to the other kids at the summer camps (competition) about what i was working on. “Just go out and do it and shut your mouth about it. That’s how you impress on the field.”
It’s stuck with me since then.
This principle is sometimes called “Chesterton’s Fence” (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Chesterton’s_fence)
i assumed there was some kind of story here - it being a parable - but its kinda more like a koan.
So much anger I see in the world is directed at policies, laws, procedures, whatever, that make perfect sense if one understands the background.
Sucks, but we can’t all understand everything. I try, but I ain’t that smart, and certainly can’t be that experienced.
Isn’t it more that people who are given a test will tend to think that the test was easy when they score well (when they actually scored well because they’re an expert) and people will think a test is hard when they aren’t familiar with the subject (nobody could’ve answered these question!) .
So it’s more that experts and non-experts both assume their knowledge level is more average than it actually is. Not as fun as “dummies think they’re smart and smarties think they’re dumb.” We all just tend to think we’re average and most people are at a similar level of expertise to ourselves.
Today?
It has been a fad for some time.
Ironically mostly used by people who think they’re smart bcs they’ve heard of it.Knowledge doesn’t just diffuse into everyone’s minds when it hits a fad threshold. There’s still a point where one first learns about it. Shocking, I know.
smart doesn’t mean anything.
It means a lot of things according to the dictionary.
You might want to look it up.
People with low competence fail to understand their limits, and people who are competent can identify theirs.
Removed by mod
Pretty sure most lemmy users are up there. But now that I say that… could very well be wrong. Sorry everyone
most replies to my comments on here seem to think their are foolproof geniuses while espousing that there is no such thing is nuance or complexity in the world. there is only good (agree with them) or bad (disagree with them).
super big-brained thinking, that.
Welcome to the internet
Ok, but what if I am smart enough to know I’m not?
One can be never too smart not to know their limits.
The point is a smart person knows his or her limits. It is safer to be conservative and underestimate.
Lol flat earthers
That graph is shaped like a gun.
Everyone has an opinion and nobody holds the absolute truth. Fun thing, reality is.
that sounds like it’s part of the homosexual/trans agenda!
You move like Dunning-Kruger, truth is overdone
A father like his son, look after number oneSo people with high competence are too dumb to know how smart they are ? m’kay…
A 7 year old could see the flaw in this nonsense.
The real DK effect is very average people believing in the DK effect because it tells them they must be smarter than all evidence shows they are…
^ You seem to be proving the hypothesis by completely misunderstanding.
Experts think they understand everything, can’t see that their expertise is limited to, well, their expertise. I’m sure you’re smart enough to have parsed that. :)
