Top-tier from Willison himself:
The learning isn’t in studying the finished product, it’s in watching how it gets there.
Mate, if that's true, my years of Gentoo experience watching compiler commands fly past in the terminal means I'm a senior operating system architect.
That whole paragraph is on the money, really. It dovetails with my perspective that EA, even though it's billed as a higher calling, is just an extension and redirection of consumerism. As it's a libertarian ideology, it assumes the primacy and pursuit of more satisfactory "customer service" as the only effective model for societal adaptation. And that carries an implicit demand for an engineered control and feedback loop. It seems to me that EAs like to think they're avoiding top-down social engineering by states, but really...