this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2026
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It is absolutely this, in my opinion, and for the same reason as Maths. It pretty much applies to any and all specializations that intersect in our average lives.
A reasonable person might read a medical journal describing the exact set of symptoms they're facing, but being reasonable, they rightfully acknowledge they lack the expertise required to utilize that information and apply it, so they seek a professional.
Another human being who they have been conditioned to believe has dedicated a special amount of effort (and often also characterized as possessing extraordinary traits that allowed/empowered said special effort to work for them in this arena) to the pursuit of mastery in a discipline that they themselves believe they do not have the inclination/ability/time to achieve.
I.e. They go to see a Doctor.
This is the pattern, and for something like medicine, it is both very true, very apt, and very neat and straightforward: Not everyone has the baseline capacity/capital/time/what-have-you to get through Medical school.
Now extrapolate that to "advanced mathematics", and it remains largely true. It does take a very discrete set of parameters to produce a master Mathematician that not everyone has.
But the pattern starts to break down the more granular you get. Not all specializations are created equal, the world has changed, and many aspects of complicated disciplines have ever increasingly intertwined with our daily lives.
Mathematics still works for the next example, but it's time to get back to coding and error messages.
Computer Programming can be a vast and deep discipline, and has a lot of the same baggage as Medicine.
Especially in the minds of those who were born and experienced significant portions of their lives before computing made up more of our lives, and those who were born after computing was commodified down to interfaces that do not require all that expertise.
That leaves us with people, who are stuck interacting in/with systems they conditioned to believe would be beyond them to understand, and they always need an expert.
The joke of course, is that we're all humans within the same capacity bands, and there's as much room between complete ignorance and adept usage, as there is between adept usage, and total mastery.
But most don't dare take that step out of ignorance, they don't think they can be Masters, so what's the point of just being Adept, and that's assuming they even know or believe adepthood is possible.
So instead of reading the error message and thinking back to their interactions with the system and trying to fashion some sort of working model...
They just ping the computer guy.