[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.