I know what camp I'm in. I have engaged in discussions around a difficult problem I solved, only to have one crowd come out and explain the algorithmic simplicity.
"How would you do it?"
"Oh I don't know about that."
Always a pleasure from the armchair theorists.
Weren’t these insults honed years ago at Xerox PARC?
Related:
How to Criticize Computer Scientists (2001) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26609492 - March 2021 (101 comments)
This article helped me understand the direction I want to go in life more than it should have.
Am I missing something here? Aren’t these ideas hashed out already 20 years ago by Tichy?
This article seems like a joke or a parody of something I lack context.
> I certainly hope faculty will take this essay to heart and sharpen their insulting skills. In the future please make all your thrusts count.
People who make these kinds of moves tend to stand out as noxious charlatans.
Having spent time in academia, this gave me a good chuckle.
> Am I missing something here?
A colleague of mine at a company I worked at, very intelligent, would often hurl this verbal weapon out at anyone delivering any kind of technical presentation. He was a very deep thinker and always had incisive insights. It was both a treat, and also terrifying to see him essentially interrogate the presenter. I only had to go before him one time, and it was both a test of one's knowledge of the material, and a measurement of one's emotional fortitude.
As for the question, the answer was almost always "No, you are missing nothing. The rest of us simply do not exist on the same level as you do".