[MUD-Dev] Re: pet peeves

[diablo at best.com]

On Fri, 12 Feb 1999, Adam Wiggins wrote:

> I think what Caliban was getting at in a roundabout way is that those who
> qualify as "experts" in a field are often very much trenched into
> tried-and-true ways.  Someone that comes in and can view it with a fresh
> eye frequently might come up with new twists on an old technique, or even
> entirely new techniques, just because they aren't biased by preconcieved
> notions of "this is how it's always been done and it works just fine."

Nod. I know what he meant, but not being an expert in a field isn't the
same thing as being clueless. I agree fully that one of the problems,
especially in hard and social sciences, is the entrenchment of thought,
but again, not being an expert isn't the same as being clueless.


> On the other hand, 99% of time those suggestions *are* ludicrous and the
> old way actually *is* better.  But on ocassion that fresh view can provide
> insight that can lead to innovation.  I know that most of my crazy ideas about
> how I think I can advance the state of the art were formed back when I was
> a relative newbie and hadn't even begun to tackle any actual creation of my
> own.

I'll grant that in the mud world it requires much less of a clue to have a
fresh idea, because it is a very undeveloped field, but I still think you
need some sort of clue to have any worthwhile suggestion. This list seems
fairly state of the art to me, and in either the coding or design
discussions, I don't see a clueless person as being able to contribute
anything. (I'm not being semantic and using clueless to mean a drooling
idiot either.)

 
> So it's not so much "clueless" and "clueful" - it's more "old timers" and
> "fresh faces".  As with most things in life, a mix of both is your best bet.

Argh, sorry, and I mean no offence, but that last statement just reeks of
"common sense" which is almost always wrong. I think it was Einstein
(sorry to mention him twice in the same thread. I'm not obsessed.) who
said, "Common sense is a collection of prejudices acquired by the age of
18". (I think I saw that in a linux fortune).

--matt