Knowledge Is Not Wisdom

“Wisdom gained is proportional to the size and number of f**k-ups”
 — Me

Herewith an excellent collection of Fun Things You Can Do With Virtual Memory. It’s really kinda cool, in that it’ll walk you through how you can use virtual memory to
• create Monster arrays (easy!)
• have performant Unique IDs (hint: it’s the VM address)
• create gapless ring buffers (by mapping multiple virtual pages to the same physical page
and oh, so much more, all of it really, really nifty. And when I read it, well, I shuddered.

“Why” you wonder?
Because these are exactly the kind of tricks that
• Beginners use because… “Hey, Cool! Check out what I just did!”
• TechBros use because they believe they are smart enough to (safely!) use.
• But the only people who should be using these are people who are wise (and that is, like, very, very few people)

And that brings me to the topic at hand, which is our world is seemingly composed of an infinity of TechBros (•) who believe — and have internalized! — that Knowledge == Wisdom

The progression is supposed to be Data → Information → Knowledge → Wisdom. The problem however is that TechBro culture is such that it never manages to make the last leap.

See, thanks to the Miracle that is StackOverflow (••), there is any amount of Information out there.
And given enough reps, even the Bro-est of TechBros figures will end up internalizing a lot of these solutions. (Knowledge!)
The sticky bit though, is that Wisdom lies in knowing when not to apply a specific solution, and that is where TechBros run into a brick wall.

Picture your average TechBro. When describing him, do the words Humility, Teachability, and Self-awareness, come to mind?
I thought not. After all, “Wisdom gained is proportional to the size and number of f**k-ups”.

Ask yourself

• • What are the odds that your average TechBro will admit to a f**k up? The most you’ll ever get is a HumbleBrag, something along the lines of “Yeah, the message broker I wrote was badly broken, but I pulled 4 consecutive all-nighters and it’s fixed now!”. Humility this isn’t…
• • In the — inconceivable! — event that there is an actual f**k-up, actually learn anything from it? The most that I’ve ever seen them get is “I can fix anything” and “All I need are sufficient all- nighters”. But the larger lessons around the boundaries of one’s knowledge, and the soft-skills around interactions with the rest of the team — these all come from Teachability…
• • There is an old proverb that goes “You can’t argue with a man who knows, because, he knows”(•••). This is doubly true for TechBros, and largely has to do with a toxic mixture of insecurity, need for respect, and lack of intellectual curiosity. (••••). Self-awareness is about as far from their nature as it can possibly get.

/via http://lakenowhere.com/self-awareness/

In short,

1. 1. Your average TechBro is convinced he isn’t — and can’t! — f**k up.
2. 2. Even if he does f**k-up, he probably hasn’t learned anything from the experience.
3. 3. If he does learn anything, he’s certain that there is nothing else to be learned.

The odds of any TechBro actually making it past -3-, and actually gaining Wisdom is, well, vanishingly small.

Which brings me back to the article I led with. When you read it, if your first reaction was “That’s Cool! But Boy Howdy, I hope I never need to use them”, then you might be Wise .

(•) #CowboyDevelopers are interchangeable with #TechBros. The caveat here is that #TechBros are, well, Male…
(••) The StackOverflow Miracle. 
(•••) “You can’t argue with a man who knows, because, he knows” — Provenance unknown, but I heard it for the first time in Russia, back in ‘94
(••••) “Cowboy Developers and Intellectual Curiosity” has much more on this.