How Offended Amateurs Can Be!

'YOU SUCK BECAUSE YOU KNOW MORE THAN I DO!'

What has constantly amazed me throughout my life is how threatened people are by competency.

Amateurs, even professionals that are amateurs in another field are so threatened and offended by competent professionals. Surprisingly I have found this in every field I have participated in.

Who knows, maybe it is personal. I know that I am a challenging person, but it is not all that. When professionals speak with competency it attacks the biases and ignorance that amateurs have cultivated and so preciously guard.

Just one look at history is evidence enough - Darwin is still hated in many quarters. When people do not understand science and the process of learning they often feel threatened by those that have made the effort to learn and understand. This is true in every field. Knowledge evolves as does everything else. No scientist is 100% right, not even Einstein! I am no exception.

Sadly cognitive biases are the basis of most of this and are perhaps the greatest threat to our intelligence and civilization. Yet most adults cannot even name five cognitive biases, much less the hundreds that every human has. Overcoming them is not very easy, but learning they are there and how to recognize them is vital for us all. Even believing in our own knowledge is a cognitive bias - mea culpa!

As I have reached the end of my career, I look back with sadness at how little could be accomplished or how much time was wasted because of the biases of amateurs. I have seen many of the companies that I helped to found or were my employers disappear because of it: Atari Inc., TigerDirect, and more. (yes yes those brands are still around but they are not the original companies!)

In the activities I am engaged in now, I have spent tens of thousands of hours understanding these subjects, and the hate that comes from amateurs never fails to amaze me. Perhaps I should just give up and crawl into a cave and die. Certainly, some would be happy for that, I have no doubt.

This is, it appears to me, to be the essential nature of haters and trolls.

Isn't there plenty we all can be doing to advance humanity? If you hate me, go do better! Advance the state of the art, there is room for everyone!

In the meantime, I and those I work with are going to do our best to help others, learn more and improve our collective knowledge. I will make mistakes along the way, such as trusting generative AI - that honeymoon did not last long. But I fix my mistakes, as we all should!

I am old enough that I am fairly impervious to the cancel culture, or maybe I am too dumb to give up as long as I see problems that need to be solved! Either way, I will continue to keep pounding my head against the wall in front of me.

But I will continue to speak the truth, blunt and brutal though it may be at times. If truth offends you then maybe you should look at your biases or just block me and get on with your life! It is a big world and there is room enough.

After all, I grew up with 'Stick and stones ...'

I am curious if you all have encountered the same?

Tim