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rsynnott parent
I think there's a certain type of person, particularly common in tech, who thinks this way about _everything_; "oh, that's way easier than what I do, how hard could it be". A kind of reverse impostor syndrome. See the cryptocurrency space; it's more or less been 15 years worth of crypto people accidentally repeating all the failures of conventional finance from the last couple of centuries, because, after all, how hard could it be?
zamnos
> Technical people suffer from what I call "Engineer's Disease". We think because we're an expert in one area, we're automatically an expert in other areas. Just recognizing that helps.

https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=10812804

hnfong
I think the more interesting question is why this symptom mostly happens to "engineers".

I've seen enough engineers presume they can easily become experts in law; I haven't seen many lawyers presume they can easily become experts in engineering.

Why?

rsynnott OP
It's certainly not _just_ engineers; you see it in the hard sciences and medicine to an extent, as well. Someone recently posted a study purporting to show harm caused by masks to HN, say; while its authors didn't appear to include anyone with expertise in the relevant medical specialties, they did include a chemist and a veterinarian. And, if you're a fan of Matt Levine, you'll know that dentists stereotypically tend to think of themselves as being experts at high finance.

But it definitely does seem to be especially pronounced with engineers.

(NB. I am a software engineer, and not a sociologist, so, argh, this is potentially getting a bit meta.)

jimmydddd
Re: dentists. I have a few friends who are MD's who say they went into it to "help people," and that if they "just wanted to make money," they would have been "one of those tech CEO's." But when you look at how they run their offices and finances, you see that there is very little crossover between their medical skill into business. They just assume that they would be a successful CEO.
sn9
I've noticed it as a pretty widespread phenomenon for anyone who has the subjective experience of being competent and thinking that's enough to translate to other fields.

Super common in hot takes on politics, medical contrarianism, etc.

Though it's probably true that certain fields are more predisposed to it than others.

OkayPhysicist
IMO, there's a certain level of arrogance intrinsic to engineering: To build something new, you need a belief, first and foremost, that you can build it at all, and almost as importantly better. Weeding out all the people who don't have, at least to some degree, that belief, and you end up with a disproportionate fraction of people who think that way about everything.
Aerbil313
I can confirm I think this way about almost everything. Because I can’t see why I can’t be a lawyer, or a farmer, or a dentist given that I spend enough time to learn it.
wakaru44
you could also call it 'the halo effect'.
OOPMan
You hit the nail on the head. There are definitely these kinds of people and they are definitely highly concentrated in tech.
Gravityloss
https://xkcd.com/793/
clarge1120
Perfectly describes your non-engineer neighbor or best friend when he encounters an idea he’s never heard of before.
jeffhwang
“Reverse imposter syndrome” is a great coinage; I’m going to start using this!
rsynnott OP
Actually, on second thoughts, I should possibly have called it intruder syndrome :) (Reverse imposter syndrome could just describe Dunning-Kruger depending on which axis you're reversing...)
herval
it's called dunning-kruger, the epidemic syndrome of silicon valley
rsynnott OP
It's definitely similar, but I think it's _subtly_ different (though it's often found in the same people).

Dunning-Kruger is, approximately "I'm good at the thing I do" (by someone who is actually incompetent).

What I'm talking about is "That thing that other people are doing is really easy; I'd be good at it" (the thing is not easy, and they would not be good at it).

If the person in the latter case actually ends up doing the allegedly easy thing, they may realise that actually they are not good at it, in which case it's not Dunning-Kruger. This is pretty common, I think; person barges in, saying "this will be easy, because I've decided the thing I'm good at is more difficult than it", admits it's not easy, and either leaves or learns. Alternatively of course they may retreat into full Dunning-Kruger; see the Musk Twitter debacle, which is _both_, say.

herval
100 years from know, it'll be known as "the musk-trump complex"
rsynnott OP
I think, and, well, here's a phrase I've never used before, that may be slightly unfair on Trump. Trump does actually take 'expert' advice; he's just astonishingly bad at choosing experts (witness the amazingly weird lawyers he surrounds himself with). But he does seem to at some level realise that he doesn't know everything.
jimmydddd
I think it's because not many non-wierd folks want to work for him. If he were just 5% better at supporting those who work for him, he might increase his success rate by 50%.
herval
having worked in his general vicinity briefly, I can attest he doesn't take any advice unless it's pushed on him. His PR people, at least, seem to be constantly manhandling/damage-controlling the man
hnfong
the "Musk-Trump complex" is more commonly known as "narcissism". I think what is being discussed here is somewhat different.
herval
fair :-)
dahart
> Dunning-Kruger is, approximately “I’m good at the thing I do” (by someone who is actually incompetent).

Nope, but I can overlook because DK is misunderstood this way by almost everyone, and the authors have caused & encouraged the misunderstanding.

Dunning and Kruger didn’t test anyone who’s actually incompetent at all! The use of that word in the paper is so hyperbolic and misleading it should have been rejected on those grounds alone. They tested only Cornell undergrads. They didn’t check whether people were good at what they do, they only checked how well people could estimate the skill of others around them. The participants had to rank themselves, and the whole mysterious question in the paper is why the ranking wasn’t perfect. (And is that a mystery, really?) It is hypothesized that DK measured nothing more than a statistical case of regression to the mean, which is well explained by having to guess how good others are: https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-...

Contrary to popular belief, DK did not demonstrate that people wildly overestimate their abilities. The primary data in the paper shows a positive correllation between self-rank and skill. There’s no reversal like most people seem to think. Furthermore, they only tested very simple skills at and least one of them was completely subjective (ability to get a joke.) Other papers have shown that no such effect occurs when it comes to complex subjects like engineering and law; people are generally quite good at knowing they didn’t major in a subject.

dahart
Meaning people in SV are subject to the same cognitive biases as everyone? Knowing how to say Dunning-Kruger doesn’t exempt one from it’s effects, right? The paper didn’t show less skilled people estimating their abilities to be higher than skilled people, it only showed a self eval / skill curve that has a slope less than 1.

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