Dan LuuJan 6, 2023

Even though they're technically not contradictory, I'm not sure how to reconcile the following two things:

1. Nearly every time an outsider says that people are doing X stupidly and could do way better, they're wrong for boring reasons that are obvious to any insider.

2. It seems fairly easy* to find huge wins as an outsider.

At some level, maybe this is like https://danluu.com/p95-skill/, where the median player in an objective-based game regularly loses because they don't touch the objective, but

95%-ile isn't that good

Show threadJeremy FitzhardingeJan 7, 2023

@danluu

People who are very close to a system and not thinking broadly will ask "How can I make this system faster?" If the system has already undergone multiple passes of optimization there won't be much left to win. Not many degrees of freedom.

Show threadJeremy Fitzhardinge

@danluu
Someone familiar with the domain but more removed will ask "how do I solve this problem better?" which focues on the higher-level - not just one system, but likely systems of systems. They're less beholden to history, and there's a lot more degrees of freedom to make improvements.

They're an "outsider", but not necessarily *that* outside.

Jan 7, 2023 at 10:27pmWeb
Show threadJeremy FitzhardingeJan 7, 2023

@danluu

Someone who is a complete outsider doesn't even know what the problems are, so their "solutions" are nonsense. We see this with all the re-engineer Twitter reply guys who have literally no idea what Twitter is as a business, let alone what technical mechanisms are needed to implement it.

Similarly with the math and physics cranks who are trying to redefine pi or design perpetual motion machines.