“be prepared to accept that what seems obviously true now may turn out to be false later.” —Philip E. Tetlock, *Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction*
Words to live by. This book is 🔥.
“#Beliefs are hypotheses to be tested, not treasures to be guarded.”
*Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction*, by Philip E. Tetlock
1/2 “#police officers spend a lot of time figuring out who is telling the truth and who is lying, but research has found they aren’t nearly as good at it as they think they are and they tend not to get better with experience. That’s because experience isn’t enough. It must be accompanied by clear feedback. …” —Tetlock & Gardner.
2/2 “… Psychologists who test police officers’ ability to spot lies in a controlled setting find a big gap between their confidence and their skill. And that gap grows as officers become more experienced and they assume, not unreasonably, that their experience has made them better lie detectors.” —#Tetlock and Gardner.
This is exactly how I feel about coders. We get paid to write code for years. We ship products. We mentor and interview. We *have* to be good, right? Maybe, maybe not. We lack a way to measure how good we are, we have very slow feedback (only later do bugs and inextensible design become apparent). I bet I’m pretty bad at programming relative to how great I think I am.
(Yes I’m still thinking about Steve Yegge’s https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/being-the-averagest and Anders Ericsson and the thread from last month: https://octodon.social/@22/99637730196296990)
