I'm forking off a new thread about this quote, since the discussion in the original thread has moved past it. I think the quote is exactly backwards — that, rather, the fields where practitioners don't want to impress peers end up rotting. Taken to an extreme, those following the example of these imagined plumbers would have no interest in learning from another's work, or striving for a higher ideal through friendly competition, or acknowledging the excellence achieved by peers. In my encounters with anyone doing a trade or craft (whether plumbing, electrical, framing, carpentry, leatherwork, weaving, etc) the people who seem to genuinely care about doing good work themselves always also care about identifying good (and bad) work around them. I think there's probably a strong correlation here, if not causation.

the problem is that at least is my understanding that our core metric is to help "normal" people get the power we get from computers, or said another way, make the computers they have be computers and not consumption devices, if that's our metric, then yes, competition and impressing our peers is ok. but when your core metric is to maximize cleverness or advanced type systems or something else, then yes, there's advance but you forgot about the end itself. The architects should make buildings that are pleasant looking, nice places to live in, that generate emergent behaviours like livable cities and neighbourhoods, when the architects forget that and start doing works of art for themselves, then yes, they may be advancing the field and impressing peers, but their end objective is lost, which is to make livable places for human beings.

I generally agree with the Taleb quote. It reminds me of this idea from Christopher Alexander in Timeless Way of Building, and I feel it says what Taleb is trying to say in a better way:

So long as I build for myself, the patterns I use will be simple, and human, and full of feeling, because I understand my situation. But as soon as a few people begin to build for “the many,” their patterns about what is needed become abstract; no matter how well meaning they are, their ideas gradually get out of touch with reality, because they are not faced daily with the living examples of what the patterns say.

If I build a fireplace for myself, it is natural for me to make a place to put the wood, a corner to sit in, a mantel wide enough to put things on, an opening which lets the fire draw.

But, if I design fireplaces for other people — not for myself — then I never have to build a fire in the fireplaces I design. Gradually my ideas become more and more influenced by style, and shape, and crazy notions — my feeling for the simple business of making fire leaves the fireplace altogether.

So, it is inevitable that as the work of building passes into the hands of specialists, the patterns which they use become more and more banal, more willful, and less anchored in reality.

you wouldn't pay a plumber that expresses herself in your kitchen, you wouldn't pay an architect that expresses herself and tries to impress their peers with the plans for your house. I don't know why we would expect to effect change in end user's lives by using some clever type system when they want to capitalize text in a list of names. Yes, if the type system helps you achieve the end goal better/faster/simpler go for it, but we shouldn't loose the end goal from sight, and I see cases where the end user is an excuse to play with fancy toys and I never read about what was like to put prototypes in front of end users and see them try to achieve day to day activities with them.

That’s interesting - I wonder if that’s even possible. One thing that comes to mind is that there are subgroups inside that first group, like @yoshiki’s comment in that previous thread about neurodiversity. Something like Ruby, for certain groups of programmers is seen as a more powerful tool and has also been used as a tool to enable a much broader group of people get started in programming

and the category of tools that solve a general problem and run on a device/setup other than the main developer is close to zero, if we are a group that builds tools it's weird that those tools are never available for anyone else to play with, not even for a short period of time. Some of them do, but it's hard to understand what they do and tend to break if not following the steps from the public demos it was built to work.

I think both views have aspects of truth— a craftsman who isn't taking in new ideas from his peers will stagnate, and operate by rote instead of innovating/improving. But also one who loses sight of the ultimate purpose of his work will make things that can't be used. I do think it is possible to do the former without falling into the trap of the latter. FWIW, I've had to spend time in a few buildings that were probably designed to look good in architecture magazines, and I hated it. Those buildings were unusable objects; almost hostile. I've said before that I think the programming community often measures success in a way that's incompatible with making programming tools for end users. Programmers generally like and are impressed by "puzzle-y" systems (and are self-selected by the tendency of the community to be this way), and for people who don't operate that way, the same design decisions can feel hostile/exclusionary.

Peer interaction, criticism, recognition etc. seem critical to the advancement of any craft - how could it not? The lens I find useful here is to look at this through 'values'. The thing with values is they are held but not justified. So if I don't particularly care for deeply formal and provable type systems, I don't value it, but I do value other properties of systems e.g. liveness, transparency, etc. Values are how we pick the people we want to impress and learn from. Empowering more people to use computers is another value some of us hold - and then we'd select peers that hold similar values, and still want to interact, impress, learn etc. I think what taleb is saying has nothing to do with peer impressing generally but only specific cases where this may be problematic. We absorb values from our community as well. So it seems there's a kind of back and forth happening where 'your values pick your peers and then your peers pick your values'. In the end, we always want people to impress, but we also should review the context of values the impression is evaluated in.

I think the Taleb quote from @Mariano Guerra and @Scott Werner’s connection to Christopher Alexander's similar statements is orthogonal to having a healthy culture of peer criticism, competition, and excellence. They are pointing out that in the cultures of some prestigious professions -in both cases mainly architecture- social and material incentives can appear that make members care more about their peers' reactions and approval than an ostensibly more fundamental goal. In architecture's case Alexander asserts the deeper goal is making places for people to live and thrive in, and that peer approval for its own sake gets in the way of that. So then I would assert: a culture of excellence and craftsmanship is distinct from one of obsessive peer approval.

Good thread

Like an addict, I gave up on peer approval several times and I believe that I've finally given it up for good. It's a really tough one to shake. I've wasted so much time and energy on it.

Anarchists unite!