The Internet age/reputation paradox
A person's reputation tends to rise together with the age. The older one is, the more opportunities one had to do notable
things, and to meet people who could appreciate those things and tell others about them. So this makes sense.
An online document's reputation also tends to rise together with the age. The older the document, the more documents link to
it, and the more documents in turn link to those documents, raising the old document's PageRank. So this makes sense, too.
The paradox is that the older documents are written by the younger people. That is, it is one's younger version that wrote
one's older documents. So the documents with the most reputation will tend to be written by people (or more precisely snapshots
of people) with the least reputation; one's dumb young stuff may well pop up first in a Google search.
(Not that there aren't any counter-tendencies to cancel this effect at times; my old anxious, moronic report of an imaginary
bug in ALL CAPS no longer shows up in my egosearches. So no, I'm not bitter. In fact, Google loves me more than I deserve – for
instance, my review of Extreme Programming Explained
has appeared in search results right after the Amazon entry for the book ever since I published it, and I've only skimmed
through the thing. The only thing that bothers me in the SEO department is that the search for "C++ FQA" gets corrected to "C++
FAQ" – didn't expect that once the query got past the spell check barrier. I hope my collegue's riskily named DreamPie project will not experience a similar setback.)
This leads to the question of how to divide my efforts, and also
touches on why I am often not an early adopter. I have to decide how
much work to put into revising my old output vs. plowing ahead into new
projects. Every new project carries the same possibility of seeming
incredibly stupid in retrospect, so if I haven't come to terms with a
strategy for dealing past mistakes, I'll never make any progress.
It is a tough balance to attain. Conservatism has huge benefits, but
the opportunity cost of conservatism makes it a poor choice when you
value innovative thinking. Personally, I try to practice as much as
possible in a sandbox, and when that isn't a possibility, I just accept
that I can't always appear as intelligent as I'd like. It is not easy to
develop humility, but it makes life a lot easier knowing that however
stupid I think my younger self was is only a fraction of how stupid my
older self thinks I am.
Revising old output, when it's not outright impossible 'cause I can't
look at without tears appearing in my eyes to begin with, is so painful
that I almost invariably charge ahead to do something new instead –
redoing something, especially if it was done a long time ago, is usually
almost as hard as doing something anew, and more aching psychologically.
And specifically with writing as opposed to coding, for example,
changing old stuff effectively breaks others' links. Another rule is
that the dumbest stuff is precisely the stuff for which a reediting is
not even an option – say, when you post to a public forum in the heat of
an argument.
So true. Thanks to the Internet, we live with our mistakes
forever.
Well, I own the website with my published articles, so I can edit
them with corrections. Yes, I'm fallible, but I'm grateful for those who
get my point and offer the needed corrections.
Your analysis presupposes that younger, unreputable (not
disreputable) people are incapable of doing reputable things. How then
would they become reputable old people?
It only presupposes that they are not incapable of doing disreputable
things.
eh.. I'm not sure that your paradox holds, there are plenty of old
documents written by people who were old when they wrote them and are
now dead; which sort of means they aren't getting older while their
documents are getting older and.. um.. I'm not really sure where I was
going with that.
Well, the document is still older than its author at the time of
writing, so it's just about one's perception of death.
i very much enjoyed your C++ article, though i'm not a C, C++
programer. (am lisp, mathematica) I more so enjoyed your article on
Extreme Programing. It is exactly my view. I have links to your article
collected here http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/paradigm.html
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