The upshot of this is that a lot of the X you hear about have very small Y and will never get wide adoption, but it won't seem that way from how you hear about it. That's why it makes sense to be conservative.
This kind of digital signal amplification is distorting any and all knowledge about our world! These will be known as the Digital Dark Ages to our great grandchildren. What, you say, with access to all this information how could it be? Are we not information technologists? Isn’t the answer obvious? Signal to noise. What’s the point of the information if the message is too distorted by the transfer medium to be coherent?
The trick is then being skeptical without becoming cynical, not to withdraw but to balance. Probably to slow down. Like described by the last word in the quote, to be conservative. Chesterton’s Fence was shattered by an electric truck going 0-60 in 3 seconds, and as wood and stone splintered off of stainless steel and bulletproof glass, we all celebrated the global democratization of politics, labor and information. How do the Arab Spring, Lyft, and Google look 12 years after the party peaked?
There are many ways to use the word conservative. In this case, I think he is talking about conservative in the technologies you choose to use in the critical path.
You absolutely should learn languages (as but one example) outside the TIOBE top 20. You should be very selective in where you choose to implement them. (with exceptions, of course - TypeScript is likely a pretty safe choice now, but maybe wait to hitch your trailer to Mojo in a production environment.)
But he’s also situating this discussion in the context of how information about X reaches Y in the first place. I’ve expanded not the context but the content by replacing programming language/framework/tool marketing with every information transaction on the internet.
Again, all of this is situated in a world of upvotes, advertising, global politics, venture capital, smartphones in every pocket, etc. The systemic effects are similar across a broad range of knowledge dissemination.
This kind of digital signal amplification is distorting any and all knowledge about our world! These will be known as the Digital Dark Ages to our great grandchildren. What, you say, with access to all this information how could it be? Are we not information technologists? Isn’t the answer obvious? Signal to noise. What’s the point of the information if the message is too distorted by the transfer medium to be coherent?
The trick is then being skeptical without becoming cynical, not to withdraw but to balance. Probably to slow down. Like described by the last word in the quote, to be conservative. Chesterton’s Fence was shattered by an electric truck going 0-60 in 3 seconds, and as wood and stone splintered off of stainless steel and bulletproof glass, we all celebrated the global democratization of politics, labor and information. How do the Arab Spring, Lyft, and Google look 12 years after the party peaked?