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by cle
2761 days ago
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I've been thinking a lot about this lately. We have under-appreciated the costs of hyper-connectivity. See for example this paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=832627 By modeling communication in the context of problem solving and running simulations with that model, the authors show that less efficient communication can have better long-term results. I'm afraid that the speed, ease, and low cost of communication is increasingly encouraging us to look outwards instead of inwards when faced with problems to solve. Which means humanity will tend to quickly converge on the first "solution" instead of spending more time searching the solution space for better solutions. This really bothers me, and I don't know what we can do about it (or if we should do anything about it). |
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It's especially bad among coders.. There seems to be a lot of people who got sucked into software work for financial reasons, but never really learned the basics of how to research something and apply their knowledge. Instead of treating software development as a form of engineering, they treat it like a puzzle and kludge their way through with a hodgepodge of copy-pasted snippets they don't ever try to understand.
I'm also not sure what (if anything) to do about the issue, though.. I don't run into those people in the belly of big OS/platform vendors I've worked for, so maybe it's really just a minor annoyance in the grand scheme of things