思考与写作prog21.dadgum.com
沉默的专家大多数（2012）
The silent majority of experts (2012)
2012 — 2022，它一次次回到首页
黑点是上首页（≥ 50 分）的那次投稿，空心点是没冲上去的投稿，点越大分数越高。
导读
这篇 2012 年的文章指出，网上公开写作、发声的开发者只是少数，大量真正的专家默默工作、不写博客也不自我宣传，因此网络上的技术讨论被一个并不具代表性的“发声群体”主导。作者以游戏物理引擎等实际工程成果为例，说明许多出色的工作从未进入公共视野。
为什么经久不衰：它点破了网络讨论的幸存者偏差——最响亮的声音未必最有经验，这一观察在社交媒体时代反而愈发成立，所以十年来反复被顶上首页。
HN 评论精选
用汽车改装圈的例子印证：真正的实践者往往不上网发声。
这不限于编程。拿汽车论坛来说：有人整天争论某台发动机不可能达到某个马力，理由是他看遍了所有网站和 YouTube 视频。然后一家改装店老板出来说：“当然可能，我们今年就造了六台。车主只是不发网上而已。”
bluedino查看英文原文
This isn't limited to programming. Take automotive forums, for example. You will have someone go on all day about how a certain engine or something will not make a certain number of HP. They'll say they have never seen it, after all, they have visited all the websites and watched all the Youtube videos. Then someone that runs a performance shop will pipe in with, "Of course it's possible. We've built six of them this year alone. The owners just don't post their cars on the internet."
以亲身经历佐证：顶尖者的成长路径是线下且不公开的，网上流行的“专家建议”多为噪音。
我年轻时在 Reddit 上找学习和效率方面的专家建议，得到的是高赞但收效甚微的补剂建议、网红博客和畅销自助书。而我认识的那些后来进了 MIT 或顶级投行的真正高手，几乎不上网，不打补剂，靠大量纸质笔记学习，身边也都是爱学习的人。确实存在一种主要在线下、几乎不可见的精进文化。
insightcheck查看英文原文
Yep. On a related note, when I was younger, I searched for advice from experts for how to develop expertise in studying and productivity on Reddit. It led to lots of highly-upvoted advice (including stuff like supplements, largely with few real benefits besides placebo), popular blogs by influencers (like Scott Young), and popular self-help books. However, the actual experts I knew in high school who later went on to great institutions like MIT or applied and got into extremely competitive investment banks didn't browse the internet very much, or relied on supplements and these books. Similar to the ideas expressed in the submitted article, these people didn't spend time online reading blogs and Reddit, or blogging/self-promoting themselves. They generally were involved in a sport (track and field or squash), spent little time online, and spent a lot of time using a lot of paper studying. They also were careful who they associated with as friends (they hung out with studious people). Less in one's control, their parents were financially successful or were in competitive positions (e.g. were professors or physicians), so they may have learned these strategies from them, versus inventing them independently. Long story short: there is absolutely a culture of improvement that is primarily offline and less visible, because people either don't record it, or people do record it and it doesn't get upvoted or ranked highly on Google searches. Examples of recorded good advice appeared on HN recently, shared by computer scientist Donald Knuth who is also usually offline: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31482116
HN 本身就是例证：经验之声被热情淹没，沉默的专家干脆不发言。
我在读 Hacker News 时 constantly 想到这一点：太多文章和评论的热情与作者的实际经验不匹配。想发表与主流热情相左的意见，哪怕你更有经验和背景，也会被踩到看不见。我常觉得在这里发声是徒劳的。
maxk42查看英文原文
I think about this constantly while reading Hacker News. So many articles and comments by people whose level of enthusiasm doesn't match their experience. Try to voice a comment that goes against the flow of that enthusiasm and you'll be downvoted to oblivion, even if you speak with more experience and context than the masses. I'm horrified by some of the stuff I see here and feel like it's often useless to speak out.
反方观点：杰出工作终会发光，“沉默专家”叙事迎合了普通开发者的自我安慰。
如果文章的意思是少花时间布道工具、多花时间用它做出好东西，我同意。但如果是说有一大批因为太忙做项目而无人知晓的顶级程序员，那就是胡扯。真正杰出的人总在推动边界，他们的工作迟早会被看见。这篇文章受欢迎，恐怕是因为很多开发者愿意相信自己也属于那个“沉默的大多数”。
dkhenry查看英文原文
If the point of this article is to say that you should not be spending time worrying about and evangelizing your tools and more time using them to create awesome stuff then I agree. However if its to say that there is a large crowd of exceptional programmers and engineers that no one hears about because they spend _too_ much time creating great projects then this is baloney. There are some people out there who are truly exceptional and might never be heard from. However in general the real exceptional people are the ones pushing the envelope of whats possible forward. Their work _always_ finds the limelight. The author uses an example of a rigid body physics implementation in a game, and while that's great work and the team should congratulate themselves its not that big of a deal BLAS had been around for decades by that point. That does not describe experts doing amazing things. It describes software developers doing a good job and not being cocky about it. I think why this has received such a warm welcome here is so many of us software developers want to think we are part of that silent majority. That we are doing amazing things too and if we cared to we could write articles and become famous. The truth is we are not experts we are people who have jobs to feed our families and we may be just as skilled and talanted as the vocal minority, but we would never be able to reproduce their success. That's not a bad thing. I have no problem being an unknown developer working on a piece of corporate software and providing a good living for my family. Its ok if others get press time for their contributions I might take from them and learn, but it doesn't change the fact that they at the end of the day have moved our profession further and I haven't.
用达克效应解释为什么网络上低水平声音反而被放大。
写博客还需要自信——相信自己有值得说的东西。由于达克效应，真正聪明的人反而自我怀疑更多，这意味着不太聪明的人在博客圈和搜索引擎中被过度代表。再加上互联网的人气竞赛机制，问题比传统出版媒体（有专家同行评审）更严重。结论：网上读到的一切都要打个问号。
zerostar07查看英文原文
Blogging also takes confidence, that you have something substantial to say and that what you say is valid. Unfortunately, due to the Dunning-Kruger effect[1], actual smart people have too much self-doubt, which would imply that not-so-smart people are overrepresented in the blogosphere/google search/messageboards. Couple that with the internet's popularity-contest dynamics and you have a larger problem than earlier publishing media (which required a substantial level of peer-review-by-experts)/ Take home message: read everything on the net with a grain of salt. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
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