[gridlockd]

> Your editor was very fucking wrong.

The editor is completely right in what they were saying. You just want them to be wrong, because you'd prefer to live in the fantasy world where they are wrong.

Let's say you go to get a surgery. You don't want the doctor to tell you about all the times they fucked up and what the awful consequences were. It doesn't matter that they're probably a better surgeon now, having learned from their mistakes. Psychologically, you need that person with the sharp tool poking around inside your body to be a superhuman.

To a lesser degree, the same is true for any expert. Of course everybody makes mistakes. Notice the de-personalization in the word "everybody". You can talk about the mistakes everybody makes, or those ones that many people make. If you talk about your own mistakes however, you lose the superhuman status. There may be a few situations where that somehow helps you, but not when you want to sell books.

[sokoloff]

I sure do want that surgeon to have been presented/instructed on the common ways that surgeons before them have made mistakes and how to avoid or overcome them.

That they won’t tell me (the patient) is quite a different question from whether they got the material from someone more experienced in their primary or continuing medical education.

[gridlockd]

The situation is different, the psychological effect is not.

[justinclift]

> Let's say you go to get a surgery.

Shouldn't that be more like "Let's say you're learning to be a surgeon."?

For that situation, the person they're learning from discussing problems they hit and how they solved them does sound like it would be very useful.

[gridlockd]

> Shouldn't that be more like "Let's say you're learning to be a surgeon."?

No. It is an exaggerated example, because I am illustrating a psychological effect.

The point is that you are consulting an expert, and you don't want that expert to tell you about all their mistakes, because your mind is now occupied with doubting that expert. It's not rational.

> For that situation, the person they're learning from discussing problems they hit and how they solved them does sound like it would be very useful.

It's useful to present common mistakes, but mentioning who made the mistake is both irrelevant and damaging.

[fnord123]

>The point is that you are consulting an expert, and you don't want that expert to tell you about all their mistakes, because your mind is now occupied with doubting that expert. It's not rational.

Sometimes books are written for entry level people (to the technology or topic) and they're written in an authoritative tone. But I work with people who write books. And I read their books. I don't read them like some kind of expert oracle distributing the blessed texts. I read them as a work of documentation from a friend or colleague, so I don't really feel this veneer of expertise is necessary.

Sometimes the experts try hard to scrape away the veneer of expertise by adding side fluff like in Learn you a Haskell for Great Good. Or, Alex Crichton, who is undoubtedly an expert in Rust and compiler technology giving this talk where he keeps saying things like "it does a process called quasiquoting which doesn't make any sense to me", "I don't know what hygiene means"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4SYTOc8fL0

[gridlockd]

> But I work with people who write books. And I read their books. I don't read them like some kind of expert oracle distributing the blessed texts. I read them as a work of documentation from a friend or colleague, so I don't really feel this veneer of expertise is necessary.

Yes, you feel that way. You feel like you're a rational person who values humility, whose judgement isn't clouded by the effects that I am describing.

Well, maybe you really are that person. It doesn't matter. We cannot assume that the buyers are such noble beings.

[justinclift]

> The point is that you are consulting an expert, and you don't want that expert to tell you about all their mistakes, because your mind is now occupied with doubting that expert. It's not rational.

In the situation where I'm consulting an expert - hired to fix a problem or find a solution - then I'd tend to agree with you.

But when I'm reading text from a person in my field in a subject area of interest (eg learning from a book), then I definitely want to hear of things that went wrong, and how they fixed them.

I think they're two different situations, and the one you described above isn't the correct one for a person who's bought a book to learn from.

It could just be us valuing different things in our learning though. :)

[robertlagrant]

A patient is not consulting an expert. A medical student is. Who would be very keen to hear some war stories.

[fnord123]

I wonder if we're on the same page. Should a book on a programming language discuss compilation errors and how to interpret them? Should a book like Effective C++ (afaik the most popular series of books on C++) exist?

[gridlockd]

The answer (yes) is already in my reply, in the second paragraph.

[0xFF0123]

The book is not presenting to the patient, the book is presenting to another surgeon. If I was a surgeon, I would find value in learning about previous mistakes, and thankfully in programming as a general rule the cost of error is lower (but still a valuable learning).

[bsd44]

"The book is not presenting to the patient, the book is presenting to another surgeon"

I like this analogy and I agree that the previous person saying the publisher was right, completely missed the point.

[Igelau]

Found the editor!