[extropy-chat] Shallow learning (was PR: Lanier trashing >Hism again...)

[Emlyn]

An email I sent to Damien, which he advised I should forward to the list...

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Emlyn <emlynoregan at gmail.com>
Date: 05-Aug-2005 11:02
Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] PR: Lanier trashing >Hism again...
To: Damien Broderick <thespike at satx.rr.com>


Thanks. Yes, I find myself working on the bleeding edge at the moment,
which is incredibly fascinating, but not completely fun,
interestingly. I'm surrounded by future shocked collegues who cope
varyingly from not at all well to ok.

A really interesting observation (to me) is that the main way of
coping is via shallow learning. When things change really quickly, and
you can get by with a technology by looking up a few webpages and
cribbing a bit of code from someone else, it becomes increasingly
difficult to justify (on a day to day basis) actually learning
something so that you really understand it. I had a couple of guys
giving me shit the other day because I have decided to spend the next
year getting to know everything about one of the more basic
technologies that we use; they just couldn't understand why you would
do that, when you can just cobble along (very successfully I might
add) by grabbing examples and so on from the web written by other
people who understand. One guy eventually concluded that I wanted to
"give back", purely altruistically, and said "yeah, I guess it would
be nice to do that" with the subtext "jeezus you are some kind of
circus freak".

When I started programming, you couldn't do this because there was no
web. You had to actually learn things yourself the hard way. These
days it is exactly opposite; people in general do not have deep
understanding. And this is a good thing, because you cannot speed up
the industry without it; the people who leech rather than know can
move at a blinding speed using bits and pieces from everywhere. This
is one feedback loop at the heart of accelerating technology; the
usefulness of people needing to know less gives rise to technologies
that enable that, which in turn makes it mandatory to know less, which
makes improvements in the enabling technologies even more important,
etc. Even the people who really know some stuff, are clueless about
other stuff and likewise leech. It's how technology works now, and a
really good clue as to how dumb meatbrains will ever get to the
singularity.

--
Emlyn

http://emlynoregan.com   * blogs * music * software *