

Armchair scientists - pilif
http://pilif.github.com/2012/07/armchair-scientists/

======
roc
Inasmuch as this post is about encouraging people to follow Wheaton's law and
give a little more benefit-of-the-doubt to those actually in the trenches, I
concur.

But I read it as dipping toward "defer to consensus" and I'm not sure that's
necessarily desirable.

Haven't we seen that pressing forward with your own pet theory, in relative
ignorance to the size of the challenge being undertaken, is a key driver of
innovation?

So, yes to improving tone, presentation and not immediately assuming everyone
else is an idiot. But, no to actually deferring to their research, their
solutions, or even their statement of the problem.

~~~
ketralnis
> Haven't we seen that pressing forward with your own pet theory, in relative
> ignorance to the size of the challenge being undertaken, is a key driver of
> innovation?

But we're not talking about innovation. We're talking about people saying "I
could do better" and then doing nothing.

~~~
jeltz
If people are not allowed to talk how could any of them ever innovate?

~~~
tedunangst
By doing. Instead of talking about how you'd build a reliable cloud service,
you can innovate by actually building it. Feel free to tell people how easy it
was after you've done it.

------
scott_s
I am currently reading "The President's Club" ([http://www.amazon.com/The-
Presidents-Club-Exclusive-Fraterni...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Presidents-
Club-Exclusive-Fraternity/dp/1439127700/)), which is a book about the
unofficial club formed by former presidents. It's also, necessarily, about the
relationships that all of the presidents in the modern era (Hoover on up) have
had with each other, both in and out of office.

One of the major themes (so far) is the notion that nothing can prepare you
for being president. The job is so hard, so complex, and the amount of
information the president has access to is so much more than everyone else,
that all new presidents have I-knew-it-was-hard-but-not- _this_ -hard moments.
The only exception perhaps being Eisenhower, whose job as Supreme Allied
Commander in Europe during WWII actually _did_ prepare him for being
president.

------
bengillies
Sometimes though, it is enough just to criticise. Sometimes it's someone
else's job to make things right and to listen to other people who may not be
able to spend the time and effort on getting stuck in and doing it themselves.
Sometimes that person isn't even capable of joining in, due to factors outside
their control (it's a closed insular corporation for example).

And sometimes, the people dealing with the problem are only taking the
approach that they're taking because they're tackling the problem from within
a particular organisation that has its own related set of problems that affect
its take on the solution. And in such cases, the best solution is sometimes
not the one that's open to that organisation, so they take a different (less
good) path. The best solution may even be one that destroys the organisation
involved, and it may be really obvious.

If nobody is allowed to criticise anything that they're not actively involved
in trying to fix, the world would be a very boring place (and Government would
have a very easy job).

~~~
timwiseman
I do not think that this post is against all criticism, but it is against the
non-productive "How hard can it be?" or "This is terrible" type or criticism,
especially by someone who has never stepped into that arena and has no clue
"Hard hard it can be."

This is different from more constructive criticism like, "This would be better
if it also had feature xyz". Even "I will pay for this service when, and only
when, reliability is above xyz..." can be meaningful.

------
NathanKP
I think there is a place for productive criticism, and asking questions like
"Why is it so hard to scale 4chan?" or "Why couldn't Amazon keep their cloud
service online?"

But the key is you must be asking the question to learn, not just to ridicule.
The intent can't be just to say "I could do a better job if I was doing it"
but to discuss what shortcomings are there or improvements could be made with
the goal of learning.

~~~
timwiseman
All true. And if you say "I could do better..." and it is in a remotely
profitable field, perhaps you should be doing just that. Much of innovation
happens because someone said, "I could do better" and then did. Nothing good
came of people saying "I could do better..." and then watching TV.

------
vecinu
That was a great post that encompasses most reactions on the internet and
strangely enough, in real life. I have found that since the internet has
gained popularity, people are not taking everything they read with a grain of
salt and therefore know 'everything better than anyone else'.

I argue with people daily about wages, eating healthy, global issues,
technology, etc... but I try to admit that I cannot accurately discuss these
issues without intimately familiarizing myself with the subject matter.

I'm a computer scientist. I'm not an economist, a biologist, an astronomer or
politician. Life is hard and complicated, don't be so quick to judge.

------
languagehacker
This is a very belabored metaphor for something that has happened for a long
time before 1890, and has continued since. It seems a little ludicrous that
we're bashing the year of the Wounded Knee Massacre solely on its perceived
surplus of haughty bystanders. But I guess when you're padding "quit
pontificating and start participating" into a blog post consisting of several
paragraphs, you have to get a little creative.

~~~
eragnew
_It seems a little ludicrous that we're bashing the year of the Wounded Knee
Massacre solely on its perceived surplus of haughty bystanders._

What?

~~~
tjr
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wounded_Knee_Massacre>

------
beloch
Believe it or not, this conflict plagues even real science. In physics (and
probably most other hard sciences as well), there is actually a fairly sizable
rift between theorists and experimentalists.

If you're a theorist, you can deal in idealized systems. You can dream up an
experiment with a perfect component X in it and work out what theory says
should be the result. In a morning you can create a dazzlingly complex theory
that would take billions of dollars and thousands of man-years to test,
calculate the theoretical result on a napkin over lunch, and then move on to
something completely different in the afternoon.

Experimentalists look at such complex theories and immediately give up.
They're not interested in such theories because nobody will ever pony up the
cash to test 99.999999% of them. Experimentalists like things nice and simple.
They'll pick an experiment that looks dead-easy to test, spend thousands of
dollars on a component Y that can't do X worth a darn until they find a way to
jury rig it to sort-of do X a little bit on good day if the stars align just
right. They'll spend six months sorting out the bugs in the experiment and, in
most cases, find it matches the theory pretty well. Then they'll submit a
paper to a journal which will send it out to referees. Frequently, one of
those referees will be a theorist who will say, "Why did you bother doing
something so simple when the theory is so clear?" (Some theorists do not
appreciate that theories are occasionally wrong, and this is the whole point
of actually doing experiments!)

Of course, experimentalists and theorists need each other desperately and
frequently work together closely. It's just a little frustrating at times and
hysterical at others.

------
soup10
He calls out my post so I'm obliged to respond. First I know my first post
there was kind of arrogant and comes off sounding like an armchair expert. But
I have scaled similar code, by having extremely efficient barebones code. And
I stand 100% behind that approach as valid, and something many websites do.
Look at instagrams architecture for an example of simple infrastructure doing
massive workloads. I gave my thoughts as a way to get discussion over what the
challenges of scaling a site like 4chan would be, not because I meant to be
arrogant about it.

4chan sounds like its based off some php/perl scripts +databases, and I think
that approach is fundamentally bad for high performance sites with very well
defined usage patterns. You wouldn't cut a steak with a plastic knife,
therefore you shouldn't be writing a website that's meant to scale in php or
perl. Sure you can do it with a lot of effort, but it's ass backwards.

The advantage of databases and scripting languages is flexibility with how you
can add features and do queries on the data. Once you have a well-defined
usage model and queries, it makes complete sense to change to the customized
highly optimized approach with java servlets or something for the queries that
need to be fast.

Also if you have a small enough data set that can live in memory like 4chan
does (text), it makes complete sense to have it all in memory ready to serve
up on demand super quickly.

I didn't mean to trivialize the efforts to scale such a website, but on a
conceptual level, if you can fit all your data in memory, and you don't need
to customize pages per user as 4chan doesn't, it really isn't that complex to
scale.

~~~
rbranson
Instagram infrastructure engineer here. Our infrastructure is far from simple.
However, I confirm that it does, indeed, handle a fairly large workload.

------
bluekeybox
(Warning: armchair analysis here.) Does anyone else see a similarity between
what is described in the OP and the halting problem?

~~~
scott_s
Hmm. Yes, interesting.

Halting problem: it is impossible to determine if an arbitrary program will
terminate without executing it to find out.

Armchair problem ( _postulated_ ): it is impossible to understand the full
complexity of a problem without honestly trying to solve it.

~~~
bluekeybox
Yes. The similarity struck me when I was thinking of Misesean economic
calculation problem and why free-market pricing mechanism (probably) cannot be
replaced with something else. (Disclaimer: I tend to agree with Austrian
economists on most things, so I'm biased).

------
mhb
Chesterton said it much, much better:

<http://stuartbuck.blogspot.com/2004/05/chesterton_14.html>

------
dennisgorelik
What's the harm in making quick judgement? Usually you would be wrong, but
occasionally it would add missing perspective and would help solve the
problem.

~~~
orangeduck
Even if a snap judgement were right or did add missing perspective it would
only be by chance, or only useful in hindsight. Such as the distinction
between "knowledge" and "a true belief", armchair commentary is basically
unproductive even in the cases where it looks good.

~~~
dennisgorelik
Say, armchair's scientists' advice has only 1% chance to help find better
solution to hard problem. Would you still recommend to withhold such advice?

~~~
scott_s
Put another way, your question is "What if an armchair scientists' advice was
unlikely to help, but still likely enough to make it worth considering?"

By picking 1%, you're begging the question. You probably picked it because it
sounds small, but if we could do some task that helped us solve our problems
about 1 out of every 100 times we did it, we would do it all the time. And, in
fact, we do. We consult related literature that _might_ help, we talk to
colleagues whose complimentary knowledge _might_ help and so on.

The crux of the disagreement is in what the probability is. orangeduck's point
is that the probability is more like 1e-100 than 1e-2.

------
janto
Never attribute to stupidity that which can be attributed to you not
understanding the situation.

------
Xcelerate
It's interesting in a way. When people have conversations with me about all of
the popular topics (news, politics, religion, sports, etc.), they'll ask what
I think about some issue, and normally I'll say that I don't know enough about
the subject to comment.

Don't do this! I've learned it makes everyone think you're antisocial.

So the goal is to keep discussing the topic, but in a manner that doesn't make
yourself seem like an expert if you're not.

------
alayne
Half the fun of online discussions is being an armchair whatever. Telling
people how to behave sounds awfully judgmental to me.

~~~
sophacles
If I were trying to get people to stop armchairing, or at least be more
productive about it, I would just write a simple personal story about how I
used to armchair, possibly with some allegorical overtones.

~~~
alayne
That's a great idea. Pick one instance where you got out of the armchair and
applied your idea. Inspire instead of creating a guilt trip.

~~~
sophacles
Argh, Poe's law strikes again. I can no longer tell if this thread is jokingly
or seriously armchairing a discussion on how to tell people about the problems
of armchairing. To that I say either "well done" or "seriously?".

~~~
alayne
My first post was serious, but it was hard to resist creating an online
armchair scientist support group.

------
petercooper
And armchair sociologists.

~~~
ceslami
Your meta-pedantics are killing me. Love JS Weekly btw :)

~~~
petercooper
Haha, yes, I was hoping for a response like "And armchair comedians." ;-)

------
eragnew
I literally could not agree more with the sentiment expressed in this article.
Good stuff.

------
fromhet
Posting HN comments in the comments section instead of in a submission? Truly,
it can't be that hard!

~~~
scott_s
HN has a long history of people turning comments into blog posts.

