| >In my experience, magpieism is associated with weaker programmers; not the very worst, but second quartile, say - people who get very engaged with superficial details, but don't think about deeper things. I may be biased because I know I talk a lot. But my experience has actually shown that this is not true. People who don't know a lot of things tend to stay silent. This strategy works consistently to allow many people to hide extraordinary gaps in knowledge. It's very common and the strategy works. When you see a person not talking too much... human bias tends to err on the fact that he's just not a talker or he may be deep in thought. Never do you think that a person isn't talking because he doesn't know anything. To be not biased is to consider all the possibilities and basically 90% of people just skip over the thought that the person isn't talking because he doesn't know anything. Now for a talker, the bias goes in the other direction because a talker has an incredibly higher chance of saying something you disagree with or is flat out wrong. This chance is higher EVEN when the talker is more knowledgeable than the non-talker simply because the talker places himself on the pedestal of judgement every time he opens his mouth while the non-talker avoids it. If you know a non-talker who may or may not have kept his trap shut after you explained something to him, really the only way to confirm whether he knows what you're talking about is to ask him confirmation questions after you talked to him. If you don't do this, likely he'll just google the info later and pretend that he always was on top of everything. You have to really watch out for this bias. Even as a talker I tended to bias towards thinking that the quiet nice guy was more intelligent. The reality is, "magpieism" has no correlation to how good or bad someone is... if someone talks a lot they could go either way, it's just that because they talk a lot, you have a ton of info on how good they are based off of what they say... while the non-talker you have no info and your judgement is (unknowingly to you) influenced by your biased optimistic assumptions. If someone is quiet there is a higher chance that he's quiet because he's totally lost. And if he's quiet often... then there's a higher chance that he's totally lost all the time. |