Discernment and seeing the forest for the trees is part of being an expert, too.

~~Just out of curiosity what did pyon really say? I couldn't find the comment any longer (assuming they'd be attached to https://nedbatchelder.com/text/slowsgrows). If we're gonna throw stones at anonymous cowards, as it were, let us evaluate what they said perhaps. Did Ned feel embarrassed and scrubbed the comment section?~~

EDIT: Ned fixed the comments. Thank you, Ned!

There are two points in a connection, and one way to sever it is to follow author's advice to "ignore them". Or you could try to learn and maybe even engage.

(also, the "non-coward" way would be to actually link to the comment so that we could try to understand how toxic / irrelevant expert peons are)

I will now adopt 'Toxic Experts' in to my teaching mantras.

Toxic experts are not interested in getting things done, or actually making any real world difference. In fact they'd _rather_ nothing happens at all. They were the kids who were bullied in the playground, and this is their little bit of power.

It reads like a character assassination piece superficially presented as nuanced philosophy, and we don't even have the actual exchange, only this person's account of it, which we are meant to trust in terms of both wording and demonstrated intent.

"If you have nothing kind to say" as the quote goes ...

A problem that is encountered frequently among people with exceptionally low social intelligence is the inability to separate agreeability from social intelligence. Those concepts are completely unrelated.

Agreeability is the need to please others and to a lesser extent seek reciprocity for kindness. Kindness lives here. This is completely and utterly unrelated to social intelligence and when signals are confused acts in opposition to social intelligence.

Social intelligence is a perceptual skill. It is the ability to both introspect and perceive the motivations of others. You can have exceptionally high social intelligence and still be a cold asshole.

For people with exceptionally low social intelligence they lack the perceptual skills required to both introspect and discern the emotional communication of others. So... they may confuse that with something else, like kindness, where they strive to fill an unfillable gap.

It is fun talking about this with my wife. I am a software developer and software is staffed with males with low social intelligence at a much higher rate than the population at large. My wife works in education and its the same thing there for females.

When someone rags on me or my work in a way I interpret as aggressive or dismissive, I make a point to go look at what they're up to. More often than not: nothing, or, something that screams "oh, your problem with me is despite you knowing things I don't, I also know things that you don't."

I agree with the general sentiment here, but it helps to mentally filter the passive aggression and condescension from the point they're making. More often than not they're correct, you just have to cut through the weeds to get to it. I'd say that's an occupational hazard as a programmer.

Good? No. But a reality (on the personality level) you have to deal with in this business. It sucks, but it is what it is.

And implicitly supported people like Gregory P. Smith who proudly stated that any person who was banned deserved to have difficulties finding a job (because of course the Steering Council, which is unable to summarize a simple conversation and just lies, is always right).

That is always what happens when you get rid of the experts. Ruthless mediocrity takes over!

However, I have to agree with the substance of the comment; it is a pretty lousy explanation of amortized performance to simply equate it with a kind of average:

> If you read more about big-O, you may see the word “amortized” thrown around. That’s a fancy word for “average,” meaning that individual occurrences don’t all behave exactly the same, but over the long run, averaging over many operations, the behavior has a certain characteristic.

While the result of amortized analysis gives us a kind of average, averages show up in more than way in performance analysis not necessarily via amortization.

The author complains that "[Pyon] pointed out a detail of algorithmic analysis that I had not mentioned. It’s a detail that I had never encountered before."

But the author obviously encountered amortization before, and mentioned it in the article, and not in a very good way.

Amortized analysis isn't something obscure; it is the basis for understanding everyday algorithms such as chained hash tables and garbage collection. It's covered in like third year CS courses.

When an algorithm touts amortized performance, that's a red flag: it suggests that certain operations are infrequently hit with a pretty big cost. For example, a hash table insertion that has to resize the table doesn't just not act "exactly the same" as a previous insertion, or following one; it takes much longer. All the items inserted so far (or at least their hash table entries) have to be visited to redistribute them to a larger table. That could be hundreds of millions: the larger the table, the more expensive this is, yet less frequent. So yes, the amortized performance (like O(1) constant time for hash table insertions) is a kind of average, but the distribution may be heavily skewed, with implications particularly for real-time work. It's not a "nice" average with a tight bell curve distribution jittering around a mean.

A better way would be to say that "amortized" is a kind of average where operations are infrequently penalized with a substantial performance hit, which helps make most other operations faster: the "amortized analysis" which calculates this kind of average works by pretending to redistribute the large cost incurred by one operation among the others. And not all average performance figures are derived using amortized analysis. The word is only used when that particular reasoning was applied, and is mentioned as kind of warning label.

An example of average that is not amortized is, say, searching an unordered list of unique keys, where we expect on average successful search for a random key to process half the list. Readers do deserve to know that they should not use the word "amortized" for this kind of average!

Who cares? We have a clear term for this and it is called "point scoring".

Just give the rest of the group further reading material if they want to study it in their own time and to not talk over minute details.

So just dismiss them with a "Great point" remark and tell everyone else to read the reading list later.

Job done.

Maybe someone was having a bad day. Maybe this is an argument they had with a peer and it triggered a peeve. Whatever.

Tangential, but if I had to rank toxicity, someone going overboard at being a pedant in the easily censored comments under a blog post ranks far below overreacting and clutching pearls to try to pillorize and rile a torch mob, hoping to put them on blast and make them pay for their transgression. The latter is significantly more toxic, and it is what absolutely destroys communities.

on the one hand it's a nasty thing to say he should be "ashamed" for not mentioning it. on the other, it is a little strange he hadn't come across the "amortized O(whatever)" concept before. esp if doing a talk about it..

neither of them come across well here.

I am reminded of the most common reading at wedding masses, 1 Cor 13 [0].

[0] https://www.bible.com/bible/59/1CO.13.ESV

The only reason I bring this up is because I think it is counterproductive to view these people as experts when they are likely not.