I do in fact treat myself that way in cases where the assumptions bind—i.e. cases where I have in fact tried the first basic things and they didn’t work and need debugging. And I do have sympathy for others in those cases.
I do not think that is the typical case in my experience; “you’ve already tried to do X, but they don’t know that, because they’re so convinced that you’re wrong that you can’t get a word in edgewise” is not actually how it usually works. (Indeed, on occasions when this sort of thing explicitly comes up in conversation, I go out of my way to make sure that they do have plenty of room to correct me if I’ve misunderstood what they’ve done so far! In general, I specifically put a lot of effort into not trampling over people in conversation.) The typical case is that they have some internal narrative about how The Thing isn’t so bad, or it’s not really something which needs fixing at all, or it’s normal, or it’s not really under their control (and therefore not their fault), or fixing The Thing is supererogative, or [...]. And that narrative excuses the fact that they have not, in fact, put in real effort, other than sometimes clearly-performative “trying”.
Consider the example from the post of my teammates on that project. Why didn’t they study any ML? Well, it’s not like the school had any requirement for them to do so. They took the classes they were required to take, and did reasonably well in those classes. They followed the path as it was laid out. What they failed to do was take any responsibility for themselves. The Thing was presumably seen as supererogative. It’s not like they tried to do it and failed; they just never had enough agency over their own lives to figure out what skills they would need and acquire those skills, other than deferring to the school’s requirements.
I do in fact treat myself that way in cases where the assumptions bind—i.e. cases where I have in fact tried the first basic things and they didn’t work and need debugging. And I do have sympathy for others in those cases.
I do not think that is the typical case in my experience; “you’ve already tried to do X, but they don’t know that, because they’re so convinced that you’re wrong that you can’t get a word in edgewise” is not actually how it usually works. (Indeed, on occasions when this sort of thing explicitly comes up in conversation, I go out of my way to make sure that they do have plenty of room to correct me if I’ve misunderstood what they’ve done so far! In general, I specifically put a lot of effort into not trampling over people in conversation.) The typical case is that they have some internal narrative about how The Thing isn’t so bad, or it’s not really something which needs fixing at all, or it’s normal, or it’s not really under their control (and therefore not their fault), or fixing The Thing is supererogative, or [...]. And that narrative excuses the fact that they have not, in fact, put in real effort, other than sometimes clearly-performative “trying”.
Consider the example from the post of my teammates on that project. Why didn’t they study any ML? Well, it’s not like the school had any requirement for them to do so. They took the classes they were required to take, and did reasonably well in those classes. They followed the path as it was laid out. What they failed to do was take any responsibility for themselves. The Thing was presumably seen as supererogative. It’s not like they tried to do it and failed; they just never had enough agency over their own lives to figure out what skills they would need and acquire those skills, other than deferring to the school’s requirements.