I get that, really the concerning example is electrical. That’s a bad task to be confident about “knowing how to perform a task yourself at all” and the problem isn’t “slowly or jankily”, it’s safety.
OP sounds overconfident given the stakes in electrical and illegibility of whether you did it safely. If they really want to push back against me, the most concrete way to do that is to write a case study on how they did their own electrical. And why not? It puts a lot of teeth on their thesis if they can do it successfully, might teach me something, and they either win the debate or learn about a real possible error they should fix.
You really do have to make more than a single mistake to burn your house down if you’re building to modern codes. And there are ways to check your work—including paying a professional to tell you if you did it right, but also checking resistance w/ a multi-meter and looking for hot spots w/ a thermal camera if you’re really worried (the main latent fault that could start a fire and not get caught reliably by protective equipment + inspectors is poor quality connections or damaged wires, causing high resistance, and localized heating). There’s other mistakes you could make but they’re more visible.
I think you’re also underrating how much you get to spread out the cost of this sort of strategy if you’re consistently doing it and picking up skills and background knowledge. It’s a lot less daunting if you’re going in already understanding how to use (and having) common tools and a grasp of electricity and related basic science vs starting from scratch.
I get that, really the concerning example is electrical. That’s a bad task to be confident about “knowing how to perform a task yourself at all” and the problem isn’t “slowly or jankily”, it’s safety.
OP sounds overconfident given the stakes in electrical and illegibility of whether you did it safely. If they really want to push back against me, the most concrete way to do that is to write a case study on how they did their own electrical. And why not? It puts a lot of teeth on their thesis if they can do it successfully, might teach me something, and they either win the debate or learn about a real possible error they should fix.
You really do have to make more than a single mistake to burn your house down if you’re building to modern codes. And there are ways to check your work—including paying a professional to tell you if you did it right, but also checking resistance w/ a multi-meter and looking for hot spots w/ a thermal camera if you’re really worried (the main latent fault that could start a fire and not get caught reliably by protective equipment + inspectors is poor quality connections or damaged wires, causing high resistance, and localized heating). There’s other mistakes you could make but they’re more visible.
I think you’re also underrating how much you get to spread out the cost of this sort of strategy if you’re consistently doing it and picking up skills and background knowledge. It’s a lot less daunting if you’re going in already understanding how to use (and having) common tools and a grasp of electricity and related basic science vs starting from scratch.