Whatever you think of the original discussion, I want to share two lessons I learned, in the hopes they'll help someone: (1) never wrestle a pig. You both end up covered in mud and the pig likes it; and (2) if you're trying to teach or share, argue for the audience. If you try to level with the antagonistic person, people watching from outside will have a hard time differentiating you from them. If the response is not about helping others, well, my sarcastic side will advise you to argue as much as possible with strangers on the Internet. That's what life is for.
> But pyon can’t see the forest for the trees. Experts have spent a lot of time and energy learning what they know. They love their knowledge.
Discernment and seeing the forest for the trees is part of being an expert, too.
~~Just out of curiosity what did pyon really say? I couldn't find the comment any longer (assuming they'd be attached to https://nedbatchelder.com/text/slowsgrows). If we're gonna throw stones at anonymous cowards, as it were, let us evaluate what they said perhaps. Did Ned feel embarrassed and scrubbed the comment section?~~
> Points of correctness are useless without points of connection.
There are two points in a connection, and one way to sever it is to follow author's advice to "ignore them". Or you could try to learn and maybe even engage.
(also, the "non-coward" way would be to actually link to the comment so that we could try to understand how toxic / irrelevant expert peons are)
For decades, as a career mentor, I've strongly advised (younger) folks to quickly learn how to 'avoid experts who have forgotten what its like to be a beginner.'
I will now adopt 'Toxic Experts' in to my teaching mantras.
Maybe... maybe Pyron from the article is a toxic expert. Its hard to say because the article is entirely one sided.
A problem that is encountered frequently among people with exceptionally low social intelligence is the inability to separate agreeability from social intelligence. Those concepts are completely unrelated.
Agreeability is the need to please others and to a lesser extent seek reciprocity for kindness. Kindness lives here. This is completely and utterly unrelated to social intelligence and when signals are confused acts in opposition to social intelligence.
Social intelligence is a perceptual skill. It is the ability to both introspect and perceive the motivations of others. You can have exceptionally high social intelligence and still be a cold asshole.
For people with exceptionally low social intelligence they lack the perceptual skills required to both introspect and discern the emotional communication of others. So... they may confuse that with something else, like kindness, where they strive to fill an unfillable gap.
It is fun talking about this with my wife. I am a software developer and software is staffed with males with low social intelligence at a much higher rate than the population at large. My wife works in education and its the same thing there for females.
> I am a software developer and software is staffed with males with low social intelligence at a much higher rate than the population at large. My wife works in education and its the same thing there for females.
Female teachers are disproportionately unable to perceive the emotional communication of others?
Yeah I think the article would have more weight if he posted the actual discussion, because it's linked elsewhere here and it very clearly shows that Pyon is a nitpicking arsehole.
There is a stereotype that males in software are more inclined to be on the ASD spectrum. According to my wife, and all her coworkers that I have spoken to, education lives up to that stereotype in spades. It is likely a gravity for people on the spectrum because it is a highly structured environment and if you are in elementary education your primary audience will never question the insanity.
BTW, there is a common assumption about the correlation between autism and low social intelligence. While that may or may not be true more often than not it is not universally correlated.
Weirdly anti-intellectual. I'm not sure what the subtle nitpick the expert brought up, but from reading the comments I gathered that they correctly pointed out that appending to a vector is merely amortized O(1), not truly worst case constant time. This is actually kind of a big deal and is an important distinction to make. As a corollary, it means you can't just use a vector as a constant time sequence data structure in a real time application unless you preallocate it.
I didn't get that from it. This is just venting from a teacher irritated by someone being toxic about something they made to inform people. Not sure I'd have named the person that was the "inspiration" for this. At best it probably won't change a lifetime of learned behavior, and at worst they will take glee in 15 min of fame.
I like this term because it describes this type of person so well that it's immediately obvious why you'd want to stay away from them.
Toxic experts are not interested in getting things done, or actually making any real world difference. In fact they'd _rather_ nothing happens at all. They were the kids who were bullied in the playground, and this is their little bit of power.
If anything, this sounds like a toxic person trying to project or provoke.
It reads like a character assassination piece superficially presented as nuanced philosophy, and we don't even have the actual exchange, only this person's account of it, which we are meant to trust in terms of both wording and demonstrated intent.
"If you have nothing kind to say" as the quote goes ...
When someone rags on me or my work in a way I interpret as aggressive or dismissive, I make a point to go look at what they're up to. More often than not: nothing, or, something that screams "oh, your problem with me is despite you knowing things I don't, I also know things that you don't."
I agree with the general sentiment here, but it helps to mentally filter the passive aggression and condescension from the point they're making. More often than not they're correct, you just have to cut through the weeds to get to it. I'd say that's an occupational hazard as a programmer.
Good? No. But a reality (on the personality level) you have to deal with in this business. It sucks, but it is what it is.
Ned Batchelder is a highly toxic person who supported the ban of Tim Peters.
And implicitly supported people like Gregory P. Smith who proudly stated that any person who was banned deserved to have difficulties finding a job (because of course the Steering Council, which is unable to summarize a simple conversation and just lies, is always right).
I remember having used to follow Python's core developers back when I did more Python, because they had interesting things to say at the time. Later I unfollowed them all in disgust as I started getting more and more of "better than thou" vibes from that bunch.
That was some years before Tim Peters incident, and when it had happened, I was sad but not surprised at all.
Dan Luu, the submitter, has not been kind to Ed Zitron lately. I suppose the allowed dose of "toxicity" is proportional to one's popularity in the tech world.
This is from 2017 and didn't really age well. Posts like these prepared the ground for the takeover of CPython by non-experts, narcissistic bureaucrats and corporations, all of whom pretend to represent the unwashed masses. As many politicians from Pol Pot to Mussolini have done.
That is always what happens when you get rid of the experts. Ruthless mediocrity takes over!
> They pointed out a detail of algorithmic analysis that I had not mentioned. It’s a detail that I had never encountered before. I think it’s an interesting detail, but not one that needed to be included.
Who cares? We have a clear term for this and it is called "point scoring".
Just give the rest of the group further reading material if they want to study it in their own time and to not talk over minute details.
So just dismiss them with a "Great point" remark and tell everyone else to read the reading list later.
An important life lesson: Some people are assholes all of the time; All people are assholes some of the time. Is it really such a big deal?
Maybe someone was having a bad day. Maybe this is an argument they had with a peer and it triggered a peeve. Whatever.
Tangential, but if I had to rank toxicity, someone going overboard at being a pedant in the easily censored comments under a blog post ranks far below overreacting and clutching pearls to try to pillorize and rile a torch mob, hoping to put them on blast and make them pay for their transgression. The latter is significantly more toxic, and it is what absolutely destroys communities.
>An anonymous coward named “pyon” said I should be ashamed. They pointed out a detail of algorithmic analysis that I had not mentioned. It’s a detail that I had never encountered before. I think it’s an interesting detail, but not one that needed to be included.
on the one hand it's a nasty thing to say he should be "ashamed" for not mentioning it. on the other, it is a little strange he hadn't come across the "amortized O(whatever)" concept before. esp if doing a talk about it..
Plain old vanity (specifically, intellectual pride), pedantry, a lack of neighborly love, a wish to dominate others (libido dominandi), pettiness, pusillanimity, and insecurity. Magnanimous people do not feel the need to flaunt, certainly not in the faces of beginners. They are generous, patient, and gentle with those who know less. They desire the good of the other in sharing what they know.
I am reminded of the most common reading at wedding masses, 1 Cor 13 [0].
I guess unpopular opinion but (1) I doubt this person is actually an expert and (2) I think the actual problem is that being anonymous is a coddling blanket that absolves you of the social cost of anti-social behaviors (i.e., acting like a dick) or holding an unpopular view. Obviously anonymity has uses, too, but that is now how it is actually used on the Internet most of the time.
The only reason I bring this up is because I think it is counterproductive to view these people as experts when they are likely not.
This describes just about everyone who works at a FANNG company or in the valley. The system rewards acting like this so it’s better to not get bent out of shape about it just focus on actually intelligent people.
I may be one of the folks who work at a FANNG company, but honestly I have seen almost none of this in my years there. On the contrary, I have seen mostly experts who are thoughtful, bright and open to sharing their knowledge and experience. Some can improve interpersonal skills, but so could the populace at large. I have seen more, nicer, smarter and engaging people here than almost any other genre of business I have worked at, e.g. Wall Street, tech startups, etc.
Whatever you think of the original discussion, I want to share two lessons I learned, in the hopes they'll help someone: (1) never wrestle a pig. You both end up covered in mud and the pig likes it; and (2) if you're trying to teach or share, argue for the audience. If you try to level with the antagonistic person, people watching from outside will have a hard time differentiating you from them. If the response is not about helping others, well, my sarcastic side will advise you to argue as much as possible with strangers on the Internet. That's what life is for.
The flipside to this is if you're a pig, always wrestle a man. And on the internet, no one knows you're a pig
And that is how pigs won.
Oink oink!
I consider going online in general as going into the pig pen at this point
I’ll still go in to see what’s happening but don’t forget where you are and don’t take it too seriously
> But pyon can’t see the forest for the trees. Experts have spent a lot of time and energy learning what they know. They love their knowledge.
Discernment and seeing the forest for the trees is part of being an expert, too.
~~Just out of curiosity what did pyon really say? I couldn't find the comment any longer (assuming they'd be attached to https://nedbatchelder.com/text/slowsgrows). If we're gonna throw stones at anonymous cowards, as it were, let us evaluate what they said perhaps. Did Ned feel embarrassed and scrubbed the comment section?~~
EDIT: Ned fixed the comments. Thank you, Ned!
Hmm, there are no comments on the page, I think that's a bug I introduced when I removed the ".html" suffix from the URLs maybe? I'll look into it.
Fixed! The comments are back on the page.
Thank you, Ned!
> Points of correctness are useless without points of connection.
There are two points in a connection, and one way to sever it is to follow author's advice to "ignore them". Or you could try to learn and maybe even engage.
(also, the "non-coward" way would be to actually link to the comment so that we could try to understand how toxic / irrelevant expert peons are)
The comments were gone due to a bug. They are back now: https://nedbatchelder.com/text/slowsgrows#comments
For decades, as a career mentor, I've strongly advised (younger) folks to quickly learn how to 'avoid experts who have forgotten what its like to be a beginner.'
I will now adopt 'Toxic Experts' in to my teaching mantras.
Maybe... maybe Pyron from the article is a toxic expert. Its hard to say because the article is entirely one sided.
A problem that is encountered frequently among people with exceptionally low social intelligence is the inability to separate agreeability from social intelligence. Those concepts are completely unrelated.
Agreeability is the need to please others and to a lesser extent seek reciprocity for kindness. Kindness lives here. This is completely and utterly unrelated to social intelligence and when signals are confused acts in opposition to social intelligence.
Social intelligence is a perceptual skill. It is the ability to both introspect and perceive the motivations of others. You can have exceptionally high social intelligence and still be a cold asshole.
For people with exceptionally low social intelligence they lack the perceptual skills required to both introspect and discern the emotional communication of others. So... they may confuse that with something else, like kindness, where they strive to fill an unfillable gap.
It is fun talking about this with my wife. I am a software developer and software is staffed with males with low social intelligence at a much higher rate than the population at large. My wife works in education and its the same thing there for females.
> I am a software developer and software is staffed with males with low social intelligence at a much higher rate than the population at large. My wife works in education and its the same thing there for females.
Female teachers are disproportionately unable to perceive the emotional communication of others?
Yeah I think the article would have more weight if he posted the actual discussion, because it's linked elsewhere here and it very clearly shows that Pyon is a nitpicking arsehole.
Take a(nother) look at the post he linked to. Comments were broken previously, but they're showing up now.
Pyon indeed seems like a complete asshat.
I'm surprised that females in education would have a higher rate of low social intelligence. I might have expected the opposite. Say more?
There is a stereotype that males in software are more inclined to be on the ASD spectrum. According to my wife, and all her coworkers that I have spoken to, education lives up to that stereotype in spades. It is likely a gravity for people on the spectrum because it is a highly structured environment and if you are in elementary education your primary audience will never question the insanity.
BTW, there is a common assumption about the correlation between autism and low social intelligence. While that may or may not be true more often than not it is not universally correlated.
Weirdly anti-intellectual. I'm not sure what the subtle nitpick the expert brought up, but from reading the comments I gathered that they correctly pointed out that appending to a vector is merely amortized O(1), not truly worst case constant time. This is actually kind of a big deal and is an important distinction to make. As a corollary, it means you can't just use a vector as a constant time sequence data structure in a real time application unless you preallocate it.
The comments are preserved here: https://web.archive.org/web/20171108220351/https://nedbatche... It's a more subtle nitpick about how amortized runtime analysis is done.
Ok, yeah that guy was pretty rude. That said I still wouldn't write a whole blog post about how I was wrong, but the other guy was an asshole...
I will still stand by my opinion though that this whole thing was remarkably light on technical substance.
Interesting that the holier-than-thou people immediately try to dox the evil pyon.
I didn't get that from it. This is just venting from a teacher irritated by someone being toxic about something they made to inform people. Not sure I'd have named the person that was the "inspiration" for this. At best it probably won't change a lifetime of learned behavior, and at worst they will take glee in 15 min of fame.
I like this term because it describes this type of person so well that it's immediately obvious why you'd want to stay away from them.
Toxic experts are not interested in getting things done, or actually making any real world difference. In fact they'd _rather_ nothing happens at all. They were the kids who were bullied in the playground, and this is their little bit of power.
If anything, this sounds like a toxic person trying to project or provoke.
It reads like a character assassination piece superficially presented as nuanced philosophy, and we don't even have the actual exchange, only this person's account of it, which we are meant to trust in terms of both wording and demonstrated intent.
"If you have nothing kind to say" as the quote goes ...
https://web.archive.org/web/20171108220351/https://nedbatche...
The comments were gone due to a bug, but are back: https://nedbatchelder.com/text/slowsgrows#comments
Always consider the source.
When someone rags on me or my work in a way I interpret as aggressive or dismissive, I make a point to go look at what they're up to. More often than not: nothing, or, something that screams "oh, your problem with me is despite you knowing things I don't, I also know things that you don't."
I agree with the general sentiment here, but it helps to mentally filter the passive aggression and condescension from the point they're making. More often than not they're correct, you just have to cut through the weeds to get to it. I'd say that's an occupational hazard as a programmer.
Good? No. But a reality (on the personality level) you have to deal with in this business. It sucks, but it is what it is.
Ned Batchelder is a highly toxic person who supported the ban of Tim Peters.
And implicitly supported people like Gregory P. Smith who proudly stated that any person who was banned deserved to have difficulties finding a job (because of course the Steering Council, which is unable to summarize a simple conversation and just lies, is always right).
I remember having used to follow Python's core developers back when I did more Python, because they had interesting things to say at the time. Later I unfollowed them all in disgust as I started getting more and more of "better than thou" vibes from that bunch.
That was some years before Tim Peters incident, and when it had happened, I was sad but not surprised at all.
Dan Luu, the submitter, has not been kind to Ed Zitron lately. I suppose the allowed dose of "toxicity" is proportional to one's popularity in the tech world.
That article was not unkind.
%s/toxic expert/hn commenter/
This is from 2017 and didn't really age well. Posts like these prepared the ground for the takeover of CPython by non-experts, narcissistic bureaucrats and corporations, all of whom pretend to represent the unwashed masses. As many politicians from Pol Pot to Mussolini have done.
That is always what happens when you get rid of the experts. Ruthless mediocrity takes over!
also known as Douchebags
> They pointed out a detail of algorithmic analysis that I had not mentioned. It’s a detail that I had never encountered before. I think it’s an interesting detail, but not one that needed to be included.
Who cares? We have a clear term for this and it is called "point scoring".
Just give the rest of the group further reading material if they want to study it in their own time and to not talk over minute details.
So just dismiss them with a "Great point" remark and tell everyone else to read the reading list later.
Job done.
An important life lesson: Some people are assholes all of the time; All people are assholes some of the time. Is it really such a big deal?
Maybe someone was having a bad day. Maybe this is an argument they had with a peer and it triggered a peeve. Whatever.
Tangential, but if I had to rank toxicity, someone going overboard at being a pedant in the easily censored comments under a blog post ranks far below overreacting and clutching pearls to try to pillorize and rile a torch mob, hoping to put them on blast and make them pay for their transgression. The latter is significantly more toxic, and it is what absolutely destroys communities.
>An anonymous coward named “pyon” said I should be ashamed. They pointed out a detail of algorithmic analysis that I had not mentioned. It’s a detail that I had never encountered before. I think it’s an interesting detail, but not one that needed to be included.
on the one hand it's a nasty thing to say he should be "ashamed" for not mentioning it. on the other, it is a little strange he hadn't come across the "amortized O(whatever)" concept before. esp if doing a talk about it..
neither of them come across well here.
pyon's comment wasn't about the idea of amortization. He claimed that the order of the operations mattered. The comments are back: https://nedbatchelder.com/text/slowsgrows#comments
Plain old vanity (specifically, intellectual pride), pedantry, a lack of neighborly love, a wish to dominate others (libido dominandi), pettiness, pusillanimity, and insecurity. Magnanimous people do not feel the need to flaunt, certainly not in the faces of beginners. They are generous, patient, and gentle with those who know less. They desire the good of the other in sharing what they know.
I am reminded of the most common reading at wedding masses, 1 Cor 13 [0].
[0] https://www.bible.com/bible/59/1CO.13.ESV
I guess unpopular opinion but (1) I doubt this person is actually an expert and (2) I think the actual problem is that being anonymous is a coddling blanket that absolves you of the social cost of anti-social behaviors (i.e., acting like a dick) or holding an unpopular view. Obviously anonymity has uses, too, but that is now how it is actually used on the Internet most of the time.
The only reason I bring this up is because I think it is counterproductive to view these people as experts when they are likely not.
This describes just about everyone who works at a FANNG company or in the valley. The system rewards acting like this so it’s better to not get bent out of shape about it just focus on actually intelligent people.
I may be one of the folks who work at a FANNG company, but honestly I have seen almost none of this in my years there. On the contrary, I have seen mostly experts who are thoughtful, bright and open to sharing their knowledge and experience. Some can improve interpersonal skills, but so could the populace at large. I have seen more, nicer, smarter and engaging people here than almost any other genre of business I have worked at, e.g. Wall Street, tech startups, etc.
Person in the in group thinks people in the in group are great.
I am a trust fund baby, and I think trust fund baby’s are the hardest working most deserving class of people.
Get on the blocked list for not being part of the herd from those places then let me know how nice they are.
Getting herd down voted just proves the point.