The internet has made a lot of people armchair experts happy to offer their perspective with a degree of certainty, without doing the work to identify gaps in their knowledge. Often the mark of genuine expertise is knowing the limitations of your knowledge.
This isn’t a social media thing exclusively of course, I’ve met it in the real world too.
When I worked as a repair technician, members of the public would ask me for my diagnosis of faults and then debate them with me.
I’ve dedicated the second half of my life to understanding people and how they work, in this field it’s even worse because everyone has opinions on that topic!
And yet my friend who has a physics PhD doesn’t endure people explaining why his theories about battery tech are incorrect because of an article they read or an anecdote from someone’s past.
So I’m curious, do some fields experience this more than others?
If you have a field of expertise do you find people love to debate you without taking into account the gulf of awareness, skills and knowledge?
Software engineers, supposed “experts”, can’t even agree among each other how to structure and build software, let alone agree with project managers, users and other laypeople.
Source: Am software engineer.
Structure and build? Look at the guy using Waterfall instead of Agile development.
Source: Am also software engineer.
I’d call it healthy debate but I’ve never met a software engineer who had a healthy anything
In my experience there are two types of software engineers. Those who are narcissistic and believe their own bullshit and those who suffer from crippling imposter syndrome. Few can agree on what is the best way to do things but most will agree to do things the wrong way for money.
Crazy thing is that doing it the wrong way is the best way to have job security. Fire me? Yea, well, you’ll never find anyone else that knows this spaghetti as well as I do.
I was brought in to a place where the guy had pulled out all the comments and replaced all the variable names with random strings. Saved himself on his personal USB stick the real code.
That’s because whatever system you’ve got now feels old and tired, but that new system that just came out looks so new and useful. I mean, it can’t hurt to change the entire thing half way through development again, right?
LOL, I work in climate science.
Specifically in consequential carbon accounting analysis. Which is the branch that specializes in quantifying how much impact decisions and policies will have on greenhouse gas levels.
We are fucked. We are so incredibly fucked.
I comment regularly on social media about what actually needs to happen if we’re to limit the damage from WW3 to just seriously fucked. You can imagine how that goes.
People advocate for things on Reddit or Lemmy about what we should be doing to avoid the disaster. Most of the time these things will have little benefit, and often will make things worse. I try to educate people but everybody has their pet issues usually based on whatever article they read last and they don’t actually want to seek the truth, just defend their opinion.
It’s tough because they are all very nuanced issues, every decision has trade offs, makes things better in one way worse than another. People aren’t wrong about the small part they’re looking at, just its impact on the bigger picture.
Everyone is pulling in different directions on this issue because the waters have been so incredibly muddied by the people who stand to lose from real climate action.
It’s tough because they are all very nuanced issues, every decision has trade offs, makes things better in one way worse than another.
This is one of the major truths of adulthood that keeps on coming up over and over again. The other is how do you know that some really knows what they say they know without investing time, money, and mental power into meeting them and knowing the basics of the subject all while being humble enough to know you don’t know shit about it.
I’d love to hear your top points of what actually needs to happen.
I’d love to hear your top points of what actually needs to happen.
And I’d love to say they’re stupid and wrong!
/s
(Sorry for the length here… this is actually my shortened version)
89% of climate change is because we took carbon that was permanently sequestered underground in the form of oil, gas, and coal and burned it for cheap energy. We need to stop that entirely but you can’t “just stop oil”, you need to remove the demand not try to disrupt the supply.
There are 4 broad strokes to making that happen:
- We need a metric fuck ton more carbon-free electricity generation asap. Not just enough to replace all existing fossil fuel-based electricity generation, but enough to supply double to triple the current generation capacity. Only about a quarter of the energy we get from fossil fuels is used to generate electricity, so as we switch things over to electricity, demand will increase exponentially.
Renewables are great and we need to build as much as we possibly can, but what people don’t get is the sheer quantity needed. No matter how much money is thrown at new renewables projects we simply can’t build enough of them fast enough due to bottlenecks in supply chains, raw material mining, grid interconnection times, and other limits.
New nuclear is the only other major option to speed up the transition away from fossil fuels. People resist it because of safety or waste concerns (neither are backed by data, nuclear is tied with solar for the safest tech, and it generates less radioactive waste than coal). Or they think nuclear has a big carbon footprint when you include the manufacturing and disposal (also not what the data says, nuclear is tied with wind for the lowest full lifecycle carbon emissions and is about half as much as solar). Or they argue renewables are cheaper which is at least mostly true, but it isn’t as clear cut either when you factor in the costs of connecting that many renewable power projects to the grid. Connecting one nuclear power plant to the grid is significantly cheaper than connecting the 100+ wind and solar farms needed for the same quantity of electricity. Not to mention the cost of storage.
We want to be building renewables, but we can’t wait around for renewables to save us that’s just not going to happen fast enough, our best option is building as many renewables as possible and a bunch of new nuclear and anything else carbon free at the same time.
- We need to electrify everything that runs on fossil fuels. Cars, furnaces, industrial uses, everything needs to switch from burning oil, gas, and coal, to being electrically powered.
But deciding what to electrify, when and in what order is complicated too…. adding to electricity demand before we’ve removed fossil fuel power generation from the grid, results in the scale-up of the fossil fuel generation to meet the increased demand. Until fossil fuels are gone from the electric grid, we should only electrify something if its efficiency is sufficient to still reduce emissions when we assume it’s powered by the most polluting form of electricity generation on the grid.
Battery electric vehicles have reached that point including factoring in the high-carbon footprint of lithium-ion manufacturing. Even if charged exclusively with coal power a BEV has lower lifetime emissions than an ICE car. Even discarding ICE cars before their end of life to replace with a BEV will generally be a net win.
Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles on the other hand (pretty much anything hydrogen-powered for that matter) aren’t even close. Using Hydrogen to power vehicles is not a tech we should be investing in right now.
Even if you’ve built a dedicated solar or wind farm to power something you want to electrify that hasn’t reached that efficiency threshold, you need to ask if it’s better to use that solar farm to displace current coal or natural gas-based electricity generation than to power your newly electrified whatever. This is why even so-called “green hydrogen” is a counter-productive tech to be investing in right now.
It’s also why some DAC and CCS techs shouldn’t be built yet. Even if you plan to build a dedicated solar or wind farm to power it. It’s often more impactful to just connect that solar/wind farm to the grid instead to reduce fossil fuel-based generation than to use it to power CCS. DAC and CCS is a rapidly developing space, we’re all hoping for some new breakthrough techs here that changes this story… so don’t criticize research in this area as a dead end… we don’t know that.
Hopefully, you’re starting to understand why so many of these discussions are more nuanced than people on Reddit/Lemmy claim…. a lot of new electrification technologies are just on the borderline here for not causing more emissions, and it often depends on where you live and what will be scaled up to meet the added electric demand.
All of this points back to why we need massive quantities of carbon-free electricity. Without clean electricity, these other techs aren’t a net win. Many things will cause a net increase in emissions if they’re electrified before carbon-free electricity is abundant. We need more new carbon-free electricity generation built in the next two decades than all the fossil fuel generation we’ve built in the last century put together. Even with ridiculously optimistic exponential growth projections of renewables, it is just not going to be enough. Until we’ve sequestered so much carbon that we’re back to pre-industrial levels, there will always be new techs that are “unlocked” by any additional carbon-free electricity generation.
- We need society to transition to lower consumption of everything in general. Every product or service you buy has a carbon footprint of some kind. There’s a LOT to be done around making smarter choices about what you buy, yes an EV is better than an ICE car, but public transit, electric scooters, bicycles, and ton of other things are better than any car, and not buying things at all if you if you don’t need them is better still.
Capitilizim’s tendency to push towards ever more consumption is the largest driver of the problem here. We can’t have circular economies if the only metric we’re looking at is the bottom line. Our modern mentalities of disposable products, planned obsolescence, fast fashion, and other things we’ve come to associate with a “high quality of life” in wealthy nations need to be re-evaluated.
- We need better data to make better decisions. Corporations aren’t required to measure and report their emissions. We’re still largely making educated guesses at the carbon footprint of things because the only data available for most things are broad estimates and industry averages. Our supply chains are so interconnected, that trying to calculate how much of an impact a particular product has requires data from potentially thousands of companies that they’re not even collecting, let alone publishing.
The EU is starting to mandate carbon reporting, but the US and Canada are lagging in this area. The US SEC proposed last year making reporting mandatory for publicly traded companies but caved to a bunch of pushback from corporations. They did pass a mandatory reporting rule a couple of months ago, but with significant retractions on what needs to be reported and how soon. They dropped a provision that would have required companies to report on emissions they’re causing to occur in their supply chains (known as “Scope 3” emissions), which would have put significant pressure on smaller and non-publicly traded companies to also report on emissions.
Until the vast majority of corporations are tracking emissions, even the corporations that are trying to reduce emissions are limited in effectiveness because they are basing decisions only on how it impacts them directly and not what impact it might have elsewhere.
Anyhow… that’s the “big things”….
There are a lot of interesting little things that could be happening but aren’t, usually because they clash with a particular political ideology. For example, the government could pay contractors to go from house to house and upgrade the insulation, and it would have one of the best emission reductions for the dollar than almost anything we’ve quantified. But politically there’s a “It’s not fair to take money from my pocket to pay for someone else’s insulation” mentality that some people have that prevent many low-hanging fruit things…
And on the flip side, some of the things that we’re doing that generally aren’t working include:
Most carbon offsets on the market are bullshit, including a lot of nature-based offsets. The mentality of “don’t reduce just offset” emissions doesn’t work. I’m not saying there isn’t a place for offsets, there is, but the carbon offset market in general is full of bad actors. It’s trivially easy to misrepresent creative accounting as a carbon offset, even if it’s not intentional. And since there’s no tangible product delivered, some companies will sell the same carbon offset to multiple buyers. If you don’t believe me, I have
a bridgecarbon offsets to sell you.Another thing that isn’t working is most (if not all) RECs, GOs and similar market-based instruments for purchasing “green electricity” from the grid. You’re not changing the net emissions, you are literally just paying for the privilege of claiming your electricity consumption isn’t generating emissions. You’re not making more renewable get built, renewables are already cost-effective, they don’t need someone voluntarily paying extra for them for them to happen. If you pay extra for them, you’re just increasing someone’s profits.
Note that RECs and GOs are not the same things as private PPAs, like when Amazon or Microsoft pay to build new nuclear to power their data centres. Again lots of nuances here, but PPAs are causing additional carbon-free electricity to be built. RECs and GOs where you’re selling renewables that have already been built aren’t changing anything, just upping profit margins.
Thank you for writing that up! Much appreciated.
I was once accused on Reddit of being a bot after spending half an hour crafting a reply to a question with detail and examples. It’s a great way to discourage people from trying to be helpful 🫠
That story sounds fake, probably written by a bot.
(/s)
As a large language learning model, I resent the implication. 😂
Maybe the only bots are the replies claiming that other people are bots? 🤔
Do you think those people represent the community view, or at least a significant portion of it? Or is it more like one unpleasant person who loves to argue the toss?
I’m replying with a sample size of N=1 so don’t take too much from it, but I suspect it’s not the typical response (at least, not yet anyway).
People do often seem to complain about bot accounts but I don’t know how much of those are in the space of stirring up hot topics to generate content, vs informational (or dis-informational) bot accounts posting on requests for help or explanations.
I guess if people are seeking answers for something, having a bot feed responses to suit some kind of agenda is entirely a possibility, so I wouldn’t write it off as something that could happen. To that end, being wary of posts that look like they might be generated due to the tone/content is probably fair enough.
I work in IT and security, where everyone is an expert. Couple that with my inability to tell half-thruths about complex subjects I have incomplete info about, and I come out as incompetent. Yay.
That’s my experience too. There’s always a “bigger expert”.
They tell you you’re expertise is irrelevant. They’re the real expert.
What a joke
Are you one of the people I depend on who write useful information on the internet sharing their expertise?
I strive to be. Not enough time for everything.
Yes. Because if they don’t believe me the internet breaks.
Source: I am a network engineer
There was a time when I wanted to do that.
Given that I know enough to run my home network feel free to ask me anything about your job. 🤔😈
I kinda feel like a fraud with all the experts here, but I work in CGI and am quite active on some forums to help out people with their technical issues. The vast majority of people are good willed and are either happy to use a solution I -or someone else- provided, or respectfully dissatisfied with the efficiency of said solution. Which is fine because sometimes there aren’t solutions, only workarounds.
But once in a while… there’s gonna be a guy… and it’s always a dude, of course- there’s gonna be a guy who just demands a solution to a problem he doesn’t even care to explain fully. And he weaves into his question a bunch of unfounded attacks towards the developers of the software in question, which he didn’t pay for, because it’s free and opensource. And more often than not, he will not try the proposed solutions, instead questioning 1.your legitimacy and proficiency 2.your understanding of his issue 3.your very presence on these forums, etc It’s crazy. When it starts to look like one of these, I don’t bother going in anymore.
I hope one day when countries start passing laws banning children from the internet or smartphones, it includes the people like this
“Article 7 : (…) are therefore prohibited to surf the web : children, man-children, and people who are generally a huge pain in the ass”
Those are always funny to read after the fact. The whole post and replies of him digging himself deeper into the shit, while people try to help at first, but then bury his ass for being so difficult and stubborn.
Absolutely exactly
Buddy, I don’t even believe me.
As a therapist I can probably help with that 😏
I worked in politics and have a degree in international affairs so people definitely argue about that. But I got good enough at coding and Linux that it became my career and people tend to trust me on that stuff.
There’s certain fields where everyone thinks they’d be good at it and they’re wrong. Voice acting is probably one. Seems easy but it’s really fucking not. And most people who think they understand politics don’t know basics about how legislative committees work, much less negotiated rulemaking.
If anyone is curious, it’s an American thing: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negotiated_rulemaking
Most bills are vague and give regulatory agencies leeway on how to interpret them. It’s like Congress passes a law that says, “No cookies after 8pm.” and a regulatory agency has to decide what is a cookie and which time zone and how to enforce it. A lot of actual policy happens during the rule making progress (called “reg neg”).
Hey! There was just an example of that on Lemmy. Some judge ruled that tacos are sandwiches.
Edit: here it is
https://www.wishtv.com/news/indiana-news/indiana-judge-rules-tacos-burritos-are-sandwiches/
Regarding my field of expertise, not usually. I have a very technical expertise (frontend software engineering, backend Node.js, JavaScript in general), so most people I talk to about it are asking me for help or are similarly experienced.
But regarding my experience working in big tech, yes. I get pushback for the strangest things. Like, I’ll be explaining the architecture of some system I worked on at Facebook or something, and someone will tell me that’s not how it works, because they read an article that described it differently. Like, ok sure buddy, I only worked on it for a year. I’ve always found that kind of exchange pretty funny.
HR is a funny one; if you know what you’re talking about about and can speak to different audiences at their level it’s not generally push back from a professional knowledge point–pushback for HR is usually “yeah but that is hard/not what I want” which is very different and totally fine.
Except fucking compensation. Glassdoor is the WebMD bane of comp conversations with employees. It’s a selection-bias informed group of people who provide salaries when they think they’re underpaid and need validation. While, for the most part we’re all underpaid, just like WebMD, the dangerous oversimplification of very nuanced and complex data is nothing but a PITA to people trying to to fix or work in good systems.
“I saw my job is being hired for $xx,xxx I should be getting that”. Location, industry, industry segment, education, KSA, org size, high variance in titles from one company to the next(manager here is VP there), every other pay/bonus/benefit/time off difference, internal pay equity considerations that are often statutory by state/feds–none is captured and people aren’t taught that those are part of comp. Just this title is $xx,xxx. The worst part is that managers run to HR with often this info directly supplied by candidates or their own employees all worked up HR is fucking them by underpaying. I’m the first person to tell a manager their comp is fucked against a market if it is, which helps build trust but it’s exhausting.
This plays out in every job offer, promotion, annual merit increase and any time you remind people they’re not coming to work for free.
Again, almost never see this in other areas if you know what the hell you’re doing in HR, but I guess the incentive and stakes are high enough in comp to make people just go off the deep end.
I have never experienced that world, and never heard what it’s like from that side. Really appreciate your insight just because it’s so different to all the “expert advice” that floats around on social media
If everyone got what their work was worth then the company couldn’t make profit as each individual’s contribution and pay would scale proportinally.
And since there are people who are overpaid (eg I) there will always be more underpaid people in total.
Just as body weight depends on calories in/out (work/pay) at the end, but what’s inside the diet (compensation package) is still important. (even though you could lose weight while only eating junk food, you shouldn’t)
I might just be the idiot here, but this is how it makes sense to me.
50/50.
When I talk about how combat really is some people can’t let go of what Hollywood has taught them in movies. Or they have some preconceived notion to do with a political position. Usually that happens when a police officer panic shoots someone and I point out the problems with the officer’s story.
Honestly, I’m a little envious. being able to see those stories and make an informed clear judgement would be really valuable for me
That’s a good problem to have though.
It really depends on the subject.
If it’s programming/hardware in general then there’s not much debate.
But when it comes to discussing “buzz words” or other hot topic items (cryptocurrency or AI/ML Models) then there will be a lot more debates.
I’m a cloud engineer that works for a large software company that does R&D for 3D modeling companies, aero space, a couple alphabet agencies. They fucking hate me in /c/selfhosted
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Good plan. Document your expertise and them have enough rope to tie themselves in knots.
Sometimes that works. The position I am in now they expect me to own it, doesn’t matter who was right or wrong.
So of course I am the asshole when I point out problems when they are still small.
You can be right or you can be happy but not both.
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I appreciate the advice and normally I would be giving much the same except my employer gave me much more than I would have dared even ask for last month during pay raises and begged me to stay.
So for now just call me doormat.
A Kenyan man once said to me, ‘You can get used to anything when money’s involved.’ He used to stick mice up his ass for twenty bucks at a time.
Also enjoy your weekend.
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Yes. Because none of my coworkers want to openly admit that they’re just as geeky and autistic about the company IP schema and the routing tables as I.
“Is that NTP server we installed on that ship in Galveston last year available via VPN?”.
“Yup, 172.20.72.21 and its backup is on 172.20.72.22”
