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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Maintain distrust
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
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Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general.
Charles Miller gives a great example of how little it takes to make you wonder. In discussing "The DaVinci Code", he describes how he felt after reading a segment that talked about Cryptography, a subject he knows something about:
It would be easier to overlook this if the name-drop served any purpose other than as a shout-out to crypto nerds. It 19s not as if Bob Bookreader is going to think 1CAha! The writers, respectively, of Applied Cryptography, and PGP! 1D, A small part of one percentile of the book 19s audience would have the vaguest clue who the names belonged to, and those people would also understand why it 19s wrong. For everyone else, you may as well have skipped the names entirely. Surely that 19s worth the two minute Google search to find out who to credit?
This is the same kind of Cognitive Dissonance I experience every time I read a story in the popular press about software developement (or just about any aspect of computer science). It's a subject I know well enough to know when I'm reading uneducated cruft, and it then makes me ponder the other news in the journal/newspaper - I think "If this section is so bad, then just how much should I trust the information they convey on technical subjects I don't know much about?". I've gotten really cynical about science reporting in general because of this...
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