this seems different in that there are big communities that are into doing a lot of (1).

There are people who are famous for complaining that people do X stupidly but have never fixed any of the stupid things they complain about in major domains or even suggested a remotely plausible fix, there are forums for communities of people who are really "good at" coming up with obviously incorrect reasons things are done stupidly, etc.

IMO, this is much stranger than p95 just not being that good.

With Twitter being in the news so much, there are examples from Twitter, e.g., https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1606354058280779779. The direction this guy was going was silly enough that a number of folks, unsolicited, messaged me in the early days saying that, based on the public tweets, this guy had no chance (h/t https://sigmoid.social/@swyx for images).

That example is only notable because the person actually tried and failed. There are plenty of more absurd claims from people who didn't try, like https://mastodon.social/@danluu/109374630690202023.

A popular take on George Hotz's failure to ship anything useful at or really make any difference at all has been that you can't really make a difference at a big company which, per (2), seems wrong.

E.g., I shipped https://danluu.com/metrics-analytics/ basically immediately at Twitter and, once it was shipped, there was a clear path to scaling it up to $100M/yr/yr cost savings and, off the top of my head, I can think of multiple domains where an outsider could pick from multiple problems with similar impact.

I don't think Hotz's failure at Twitter is particularly interesting but, at a meta level, I wonder why nearly everyone who's railing against industries for doing silly things picks the wrong things and fails, causing big wins to generally come from insiders, when there are so many easy wins around.

See also, Alan Kay on how computers could be 1000x faster (https://www.patreon.com/posts/54329188), Forth supremacists, performance engineers who don't know a domain claiming people should make X faster, etc.

And BTW, I think I have a decent claim to being an outsider at Twitter in that, except for 1 year writing C++ for Bing, my prior professional experience was all in hardware jobs, and C++ is basically unused at Twitter (there's one important piece of software that Twitter maintains that's in C++, but I didn't touch it at all).

Anyway, even when I look at wins that were simple enough they could've come from outsiders, they almost always come from insiders because outsiders tend to be cranks, e.g.

, for a simple example, if you look at the bent-shaft paddle (https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1476260570370232323), an extremely obvious-in-retrospect invention, it came from Jensen, the most insider-y insider w.r.t. canoe racing there ever was.

Or to pick a more involved example, there are a handful of "standard" naive ideas that freshman (and Alan Kay) like to throw around to explain why hardware engineers are doing hardware wrong and hardware would be 1000x faster if engineers only did X.

Yossi Kreinin wrote a nice series of posts explaining a set of naive misconceptions in https://yosefk.com/blog/the-high-level-cpu-challenge.html, https://yosefk.com/blog/high-level-cpu-follow-up.html, and https://yosefk.com/blog/its-done-in-hardware-so-its-cheap.html.

One person followed up with "neural nets in hardware worked out, so weren't the high-level CPU people right?". I can see how someone would say that, but if you look at the early successes, those all came from insiders.

Yossi himself (VP and Fellow at Intel/Mobileye) was involved in one of the first at-scale production successes.

The other big early success was the TPU, which was Andy Phelps's 20%-time project. Before Google, he was a distinguished hardware engineer at Sun. I was the 2nd engineer at the project and had previously only worked in hardware. The 3rd engineer, Greg Thorson, was a long-time Cray hardware engineer, etc.

And if you look at the approaches software folks proposed, they were as hopeless as Hotz, "J" and "O" in https://mastodon.social/@danluu/109374630690202023, etc., just absolute nonsense.

I was chatting with Yossi about a failed attempt that was contemporary with the TPU but earlier; his comment on the paper was "from just [redacted] in the title, I could tell you they were going to fail".

One of the responses to https://twitter.com/altluu/status/1594372539568250881 was that outsiders can see all sorts of inefficiencies because things are so bad. While I agree that's true in principle, people who make a big deal about being smart outsiders seem to generally have the same 6 boring ideas every freshman has.

My guess for one reason there's a discrepancy between (1) and (2) is that the people who are famous for talking about how stupidly things are done have totally the wrong meta approach and that they end up with these communities that grow up around them that copy the same doomed meta approaches.

The people who are famous for this stuff are bombastic, dogmatic, and generally do not attempt to learn much about the domain before coming up with solutions, which seems like a poor approach.