[nradov]

You can save time by learning from the mistakes of others. I see no point in failing myself if I can do it right the first time by relying on expert guidance. For some things I do a single major mistake could leave me crippled or dead.

[coldtea]

>You can save time by learning from the mistakes of others.

Only barely. For important life decisions/paths, people only learn from their own mistakes (and often not even from those).

Heck, Computer Science as a field itself forgets its own collected wisdom every new generation hits the market, and re-invents BS that other eras have tried and buried with another fad name.

What's even worse, those "self-help" books are full of contradictory, snake-oily, and plain wrong information, and can even put people on BS priorities and give them a false sense of what it means to be happy/successful etc. Which is one reason people reading those books keep reading those books and going to those seminars -- they're not meant to get you somewhere, but to keep those believing them hooked forever.

There are exceptions, sure. But not 100.000 exceptions, and there are more than 100.000 such crap works.

[kdoherty]

>>You can save time by learning from the mistakes of others.

>Only barely. For important life decisions/paths, people only learn from their own mistakes (and often not even from those).

>Heck, Computer Science as a field itself forgets its own collected wisdom every new generation hits the market, and re-invents BS that other eras have tried and buried with another fad name.

Your last statement sounds like it's in favor of "learning from the mistakes of others" in that we could avoid re-inventing failed "BS" if we learned from others' mistakes. Are you saying that the idea that folks in CS re-invent work which has previously failed is evidence that it is not possible to learn from the mistakes of others?

[coldtea]

>Are you saying that the idea that folks in CS re-invent work which has previously failed is evidence that it is not possible to learn from the mistakes of others?

No, I'm not dealing in absolutes ("not possible").

I'm merely saying that the reality that "folks in CS re-invent work which has previously failed" is supportive argument in how people in general don't learn from other's mistakes.

Of course it IS possible. It's just that it's rare.

[nradov]

Speak for yourself. I have certainly learned enough from the mistakes of others to avoid many major mistakes in both life decisions and computer science.

[spraak]

> Heck, Computer Science as a field itself forgets its own collected wisdom every new generation hits the market, and re-invents BS that other eras have tried and buried with another fad name.

But how many of those people who are re-inventing what other eras tried already were aware of what those inventions were? That is, my point is that most often what is re-created is because the re-creators weren't aware of the past.