There are 2 kinds of smart successful people out there: those who realize that they have great instincts/intelligence in an area, and those who think that because of that, they now have great instincts/intelligence in all areas.
The latter are your Elon Musks, Jordan Petersons and DHHs. This is incredibly idiotic. You get deeply successful in your expertise, get used to feeling smart, and start thinking that scratching the surface of other topics is just like that. But the processes that led you to that successful place are not the same everywhere.
Yes, you can go from developing a web framework with great DX to developing an operating system with great DX - the new challenge will start slow and slowly pick up as you're learning. But something like politics has very little fundamental overlap with any of that. You have to consider way more factors, because politics is literally, by definition, about people. Politics is in many ways about stepping outside of your own lived experiences and opinions to understand complexities of society, not just solve an aesthetics/DX/UX problem you perceive on your side, like it is with OSS.
So now you're barely scratching the surface, you're driven by some influencers opinions out there who tell very selective stories (basically lie) and only exude aesthetics of intelligence, and you're self-indulging in the same vibes like a college kid who thinks they're being deep. All because you've been conditioned most of your life that you're smart and people look up to your opinions.
I can hope that people can grow out of this, but given how some of the aforementioned persons are already old, and so much of their life has been people looking up to them, I understand why that may be impossible.
hakunin•1m ago
The latter are your Elon Musks, Jordan Petersons and DHHs. This is incredibly idiotic. You get deeply successful in your expertise, get used to feeling smart, and start thinking that scratching the surface of other topics is just like that. But the processes that led you to that successful place are not the same everywhere.
Yes, you can go from developing a web framework with great DX to developing an operating system with great DX - the new challenge will start slow and slowly pick up as you're learning. But something like politics has very little fundamental overlap with any of that. You have to consider way more factors, because politics is literally, by definition, about people. Politics is in many ways about stepping outside of your own lived experiences and opinions to understand complexities of society, not just solve an aesthetics/DX/UX problem you perceive on your side, like it is with OSS.
So now you're barely scratching the surface, you're driven by some influencers opinions out there who tell very selective stories (basically lie) and only exude aesthetics of intelligence, and you're self-indulging in the same vibes like a college kid who thinks they're being deep. All because you've been conditioned most of your life that you're smart and people look up to your opinions.
I can hope that people can grow out of this, but given how some of the aforementioned persons are already old, and so much of their life has been people looking up to them, I understand why that may be impossible.