That's because I know jack squat about cars. So every time I go to my mechanic, I'm at a huge knowledge disadvantage. Even being a 'responsible consumer' and finding out some basics doesn't help a ton because I don't fit in his culture–I've never watched a NASCAR race and I have no desire to.

So to this guy, if he were a jackass, I'd be a colossal idiot. He could easily think to himself, “What a tool. He spends a ton of time in his car, his economic livelihood depends on his car and thousands of others getting where they belong on a regular basis. If his car broke down, he's screwed. And he barely knows how to turn the thing on. Seriously, what a loser.”

Of course, he's not a colossal jackass, and that's part of why I go back to him. He knows I'm in a different domain than he is, and that both domains are useful and helpful. But his choice of cars and my choice of computers says almost nothing about our 'smarts' — and too often computer people think that, by virtue of being computer people, they're already in a league of their own.

No, you're just jackasses.

Who the hell is asking for serious legal advice on hacker news? Why is our information feedback system so inefficient that people have had to resort to a site with a lack of specialists in a field and way too many egos?

It seems like the community doesn't suck, but the expectations of the community does.

Take away that and your post just turns into a rant about human behavior.

Speaking as layman, I see value in non-experts being involved in the conversation. Experts can fall foul of many different things which negatively affect good decision making and judgement. No shortage of theory or research to reference (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_…). Sometimes those outside can see things more clearly, with less bias and baggage.

I do empathize with the general essence of the article. Everybody claims to be an expert on everything these days and shouts like we all should just listen to them. It strikes me as being incredibly ignorant to not understand your own limitations and assume others are inherently limited.

One of the most interesting things I observe is how people fail to relate what they comment on to their own lives. It's *obvious* when the President is doing something really stupid with Russia, for instance, yet day-to-day most of us balance constraints and make all kinds of compromises, deals and prioritization decisions to get things done through people – which without context can look like poor decisions. Yet we defend those and somehow fail to understand that all decisions have these attributes and go through these messy steps.

None of this is to defend bad decisions and we absolutely have to question and hold 'experts' accountable – just a little more wisdom in understanding the complexity of things would not go amiss.

Also, much of what you mentioned is an observational bias. If an expert says 10 things and 9 of them turn out to be correct, you don't notice because he's an expert. That's what he's supposed to do. However the one time they say something like “nobody cares about search, we should just build a portal” it goes down in history.

And you're wrong that smart hackers would respond that way to the music industry problem. They might never get in that situation in the first place, but if they did, they'd respond logically to their incentive structure just like all humans do. In fact, building the very disruptive systems that lead to that sort of conundrum is evidence of that. They don't give a shit that the P2P programs they build will put thousands of people out of work, greatly reduce the amount artists make from their work, etc. They just care that at the end of the day they built something grand, because that's how they get ego points and/or money.

And I think you're 100% wrong about the legal advice thing given the usual phrasing of the question and answers. People are usually posting the questions to save legal fees, which is a bad idea, and the vast majority of respondents don't say anything like “well, I saw a similar situation play out like this, but you should ask a lawyer.” Instead they give definitive advice (without any sort of disclaimer or statement of credentials) that is often obviously just an incorrect regurgitation of something they once saw on TechCrunch.

Now, in this hypothetical example, did I do anything wrong? I didn’t pretend to be an expert and I didn’t pretend to be able to solve her problem. All I did was note that similar things had happened before and point my friend-of-a-friend in the direction of someone who might be able to help her. This, in a nutshell, is what I believe is happening when someone posts a question on HN: somebody describes their problem to a bunch of friends-of-friends (at least, I’d like to believe that metaphor is valid on HN) and they all do basically what I just did in my example—contribute what little they know and offer directions for further study. People do this all the time in the real world—they ask their friends for advice, even if their friends aren’t authorities. I’m sure everyone knows someone whose opinions they value and respect, and who they turn to for advice even if the problem is outside their mentor’s area of expertise. In the real world it’s not a big deal; on the Internet it is for some reason. Maybe what you’re seeing is more strident than what I’m seeing, but to me this doesn’t seem like an issue.

There’s another point that’s related to this one, and I think it helps explain both why hackers feel qualified to opine on any subject and why we’re so distrustful of “official” advice. As PG himself has noted, credentials don’t go very far with hackers: “People hiring for a startup don't care whether you've even graduated from college, let alone which one. All they care about is what you can do. Which is in fact all that should matter, even in a large organization.” Hackers are highly sensitive to, and highly skeptical of, rhetorical appeals to authority, which is basically the appeal you’re making on behalf of the music industry lawyers; they went to college for this stuff and they’re experienced at it—they’re “authorities” on it—so therefore they must know better than everyone else. Hackers naturally revolt at this idea, and I’m not convinced that we shouldn’t: history is rife with examples of people with supposedly authoritative knowledge who did things that were short-sighted or ill-fated or just plain dumb. Even on an everyday level, the correlation between competence and positions of responsibility tends to break down all too often; we’ve all known too many people who were very good at looking competent but who didn’t really know anything. The appearance of expertise is not a guarantee of expertise. I don’t necessarily have a problem with that, but I think we sometimes take it too far and start viewing authority as evidence of incompetence. Often, in a hacker’s mind, if you have to appeal to some authority—be it a credential or an endorsement from some Big Important Person or a nice suit or whatever—then you obviously can’t stand on your work alone. That’s patently false—the existence of some incompetent “authorities” does not imply that all authorities are incompetent. If we’re guilty of anything it’s that mental shortcut.

Perhaps it’s more a simple case of hacker projection than anything else. Hackers get apoplectic at the sort of thinking you ascribe to the music industry executive you describe because no hacker would ever think that way. You write, “So what do you do? Do you destroy your major source of revenue…because you realize it’s going to die one way or another in the next 10-20 years and you might as well get on with it? Or do you use your legal muscle to keep revenues as high as you can for as long as you can?” Music industry executives would choose/have chosen the second option; a hacker would pick the first option every time. Remember, hackers are problem solvers and perfectionists by nature: when they see a problem, they throw all their energy into fixing it, often at the expense of personal comfort and status and even physical well-being. After all, these are the sort of people who will stay up for days on end fixing every last bug in a program they may or may not ever be able to sell for a profit. Why? I can’t say exactly, other than that finding a solution to a problem is important to a hacker on a deep, emotional level. The things that entice your music executive—money, status, sex, drugs—wouldn’t even show up on the hacker radar.

I’m not saying the hackers have it all figured out—in fact, I’m sure these sorts of cultural prejudices create blind spots in our thinking, and in that I agree with you (and I say this as someone who likes wearing nice suits). I guess what I’m saying is that these attitudes are highly ingrained in hacker/technical culture, and I’m not sure how much luck you’re going to have trying to fight them. When you say, “Don’t be so skeptical of authority and don’t be so sure of yourself,” you’re basically saying, “Don’t be hackers.”