I wonder why programming culture is (on average) so enamoured with smartness over reasonableness.

It's particularly striking if you hang out with people who have the opposite values (e.g., trades, which, on average, strongly value reasonableness over smartness). By contrast, programming culture seems quite ridiculous?

For example, valuing "very smart" complex stuff that add little value (often negative value) over simple solutions that add a lot of value, e.g., https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1129519032783200256.

The kind of reasoning used above would get you laughed out of the room in the trades but, in software, it's quite common to have some notion of complexity explicitly encoded in promo criteria.

And, unofficially, people are often impressed when someone builds some super complex thing you'd have to be very smart to pull off, even if that thing is worthless or negative value where, as in the trades, if you do that once or twice, you'll get a bad reputation that will follow you around for life.

Programming adjacent communities (modern board games, rationality, etc.) generally have this as well, e.g., if you follow anyone reasonable in the rationality community, the replies to anything they post inevitably end up with "smart" but obviously wrong replies, as in https://www.patreon.com/posts/38866741 or below.

Sure, you can say smart phrases (null hypothesis!), but any idiot can tell you that elite athletes generally massively improve at&after 16, so comparing based on population size alone is absurd.

@danluu I'm not sure I understand what you're saying about Redacted's null hypothesis. It *sounds* like you're saying it's stupid because it should be obvious that a 16yo today should be nowhere near as good as an elite athlete 50 years ago, even in a sport that grew in significance?

In more than a few sports, high-schoolers today could roll with elite athletes from 40–50 years ago – even sports that were pretty big back then – so that assumption seems like a "wrong to anyone who has contact with the real world" kind of thing.

@ech Yes, that's the point.

The original post was that technique/training has improved enough that teenagers can smoke anyone in the world from decades ago and the "very smart" response was that the default assumption should was that this is due to population size changes, which is obviously absurd to anyone who's watched or participated in sports or looked at data on how age impacts sports performance.