I'm pretty solidly in the same came as Marcus' programmer acquaintance. The working philosophy in my case being, "Shit: if I can do it, how hard could it be? You must want someone to spoon feed you."
I've got relatives who fall squarely into the polar opposite camp, that of studied naivete. They are so good at it, if fact, that it comes clearly across as studied stupidity. This approach didn't serve either of them very well throughout the course of their now, in both cases, nearly finished lifetimes. To be fair to Nick, however, once you realize that he uses his big, bold naivete as the vehicle to get others to expound on why <whatever is the current topic of interest>, then it's all ok again. --Doug On Sat, Jan 19, 2013 at 11:40 AM, Marcus G. Daniels <mar...@snoutfarm.com>wrote: > On 1/19/13 10:35 AM, Nicholas Thompson wrote: > >> This material is way too good to be packed down into the midden of old >> email. >> > I know someone who is a good programmer. He's generally better than the > people around him and among other things he has been accused of being > purposely uncommunicative. He's smart. He has said things like "If you > want to know what's going on, read the commit log and read the source code > diffs." Other people felt that he should write high level documents, give > talks, and so on. He felt it was not his problem if people were not > willing or were not able to bring themselves up to speed. To him, they > just would not engage. He was interested in the problem and not in > educating people. He had no problem educating himself. > > There's a similar situation here. A goal a person can have from a > conversation is to extract some information from another, as if acquiring > an asset. Another goal a person can have is to just have a conversation > or argument for its own sake. > > A slightly motivated person can handle some headers. > > Marcus > > > ==============================**============================== > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > to unsubscribe > http://redfish.com/mailman/**listinfo/friam_redfish.com<http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com> > -- *Doug Roberts drobe...@rti.org d...@parrot-farm.net* *http://parrot-farm.net/Second-Cousins*<http://parrot-farm.net/Second-Cousins> * <http://parrot-farm.net/Second-Cousins> 505-455-7333 - Office 505-672-8213 - Mobile*
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