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.
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.
> 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)
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.
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.
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].
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.
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.
> 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 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..
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!
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.
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.
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 ...
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.
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.
> 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)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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 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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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...