I've never had impostor syndrome, but I imagine it comes from not realizing that everyone is finite and has a finite amount of time to experience the universe. But the universe is infinite, so you can never know everything there is to know. Even if you limit it to a narrow field like programming, the infinitude is still there. The universe is literally infinite in every respect; you cannot escape it. No matter how small you limit your focus, there is an infinite amount of information to learn in that thing. I think studying fractals gave me this insight, but it's not hard to realize that the universe itself has the same property that no matter how carefully you examine some aspect of it, the complexity is never eliminated. In fact it only increases.
I've never had imposter syndrome either. I don't really relate to your fractal example. My experience was when I was 13, my older cousin was bragging that he'd used up all the memory on his trs-80 making an adventure game (BASIC). I was very impressed until I saw his program. It was all if/else statements, he hadn't used any subroutines. I was astounded. That was an early lesson to me, no one knows all this stuff. That and the realization that these damn machines make fools of us all at one time or another :)
Everyone is just at different stages of learning. When you've been doing this long enough, you've forgotten a lot you knew before. At some level, 'refreshing your memory' about what your forgot is not much different than learning it the first time.
Yeah, agreed. I guess the real point I want to make is that you need to forgive yourself for not knowing everything, and don't delude yourself into thinking your value as a human being is based on how much you know about computer stuff. It's a fine thing to learn, and we have a professional responsibility to learn on a constant basis, but if your whole identity is defined by your work, then you're building your house on sand.
The main insight here is that people don't need more software. There are a lot of people out there that can validate whether your product is cool, or provides something that nobody else does, or that there is a pain point they're currently working around. But especially in B2B, most people aren't in the business of buying software.
To get around this, you need to paint the picture of what life will be like after they've bought your software. With good products, this can be as easy as explaining it to them, then helping them rally the support to sign the $25,000 check to purchase the software. With less good products, this can mean doing providing real, actionable advice that the software sort of supports.
I'll give you an example. I used to sell performance monitoring software: think of New Relic or Datadog, but better for distributed environments. This is pretty crucial for bigger teams, as performance problems tend to cross ownership boundaries. Most engineers believe that performance is important. However, it is not easy to convince any given engineer to make performance their crusade, especially their crusade across multiple teams. So not only do they have to be convinced the product is easy to set up and maintain (a good onboarding flow in product can do most of this for you), but you also need to educate them on how to sell this to their boss and how to evangelize this to other teams. Or go evangelize for them. Our best customers had one person who was fired up about what we did, but a lot of their help was to point us to the right 5 people in their organization that might also care about performance.
Freemium helps here, but if the main problem is "getting my coworkers to care sounds hard", freemium and frictionless signup will never be the answer. So you need to sell the product, even if it's something the organization desperately needs.
Maybe the key idea is to put all the global state mutations as closely together as possible, so they can be compared and contrasted as easily as possible.
Probably something along the lines of, "If you call them fools, you probably deserve the alienation."
Edit: Read that wrong, but I'll change my answer:
I feel that a large amount of the issues in science and "exclusive knowledge groups" stem from alienation at its root. Exclusivity, obfuscation, lack of publishing, "no true Scotsman", "othering", etc. By calling them fools, you're only contributing to the sorts of alienation that causes these issues to exist.
There are so many issues here I hardly know where to begin. I've made similar arguments myself in the past and you have to be very careful to compartmentalize what you hope to say and accomplish when debating someone directly affected by these issues.
What do you want to accomplish? Do you believe that all the world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations?
Do you believe that the complexity of modern science and the scale of the problems inherently requires increasing specialization and an inherent detachment for modern scientists from the impact of the work in a cultural context? Does that lead us toward a specialization in being a spokesperson for science? Should large institutions feel obligated to create such positions?
Because if you're simply pining for the days of natural philosophers who were statesmen, lawyers, political figures, and leading minds embodied in one person you're at a dead end.
Whatever you do, don't bring up ethics. A required college course wraps up any and all debate on that front!
We are all fools to some extent - to be totally alienated from fools is to be alone.
I'm not sure that when problems are systemic that everyone swayed by that system, knowingly or unknowingly, is a fool by the definition you mean. Not being foolish in this regard is only something you can be constantly vigilant about, you can't master it. You can never say "I am not such a fool." If you do, you increase your chances of being what you despise.
They're just vested in a system which (seem to) promise some semblance of security and (a feeling of) group belonging, in exchange keeping their heads down, and their nose to the grindstone -- and not rocking the boat, generally.
It's a trap that's very, very easy to fall in. Especially if you have people who depend on you -- you know, kids, older family members -- that sort of thing.
1. We don't know if the universe follows any rules precisely. We can never know because the only way to know that a rule is being followed unconditionally would be to exhaustively verify every event in the universe to see if it follows that rule, which is impossible.
2. There's not just one mental process. There are an infinite number (most likely) of mental processes. But even though we're not both part of the same mental process, we're both part of the same causal process. The reason we perceive ourselves as discrete entities is: 1. mental processes (thoughts) can be both true and false, 2. true thoughts are more rare than false thoughts, 3. false thoughts are still capable of doing work, and therefore, our survival has relied on the false thought that each of us is a separate individual, even though the truth is that we're causally dependent on one another, our environment, etc.
