Expert asterisks

For a certain sort of person, overrepresented in the software field but still probably a minority, even when a beginner these asterisks can be useful, because they often direct you to a more complete understanding or better mental model (which is often why the expert gives them). Trouble is that you can’t gauge this sort of thing well in a chat room; in person it works much better, and you can pursue rabbit holes as long as the beginner is engaged, and drop them as soon as they’re not working.

i see this with my kid explaining board game rules, veering into "actually after you take a card there are three possible things you can do but if you do the reverse flibbety you can't undo the bloznarg unless you have the king haha so DON'T DO THAT or you'll lose after five rounds" before explaining what the object of the game is

The author is very generous in their interpretation of the motivation of the “expert” in this situation. I’ve often assumed (and have even been guilty of this myself at times) that these “experts” are enjoying a moment to show off how deep their knowledge of the subject goes.

I think this is the behavior I see very often in my colleagues engineers and myself even more often. Somehow on very direct question "Will it explode in 5 minutes or not?" I tend to answer "It will not... <here I should shut up> ...99.(9)%, as someone could add extra portion of TNT (and other unbelievable stuff)".

We tend to think about non-usual stuff because as programmers/engineers we are usually paid for making it either obvious or distinct. But this also makes us (at least me!) very rigorous at the meeting where most of decisions should be made on business, not technical level.

So have a little faith and tell normal people that 99% should be totally fine.

Unless it's not.

Some systems lend themselves better to progressive disclosure than others. Git's feature set and CLI UX are unfortunately famously baroque.

People do this because the audience is the other experts in the channel. And if they don't do it, someone else will.

I think it's a weird example because if it's anything that the experts have encountered (be it by someone using, misusing, or seen it in a blog post) then the newbie might also encounter it and fall into the same trap.

I think my last example of this was actually something with git switch (which is still kinda new to me, I've been a git checkout person for 15 years and I read about that and wanted to try it, and it didn't behave like I had expected).