What's with the "hobbyist" mindset?

In My Humble Opinion
21

I’ll comment on cycling seeing as I’m a little familiar with it and you might be able to extrapolate the mindset out to other subjects.

First, the quote above is a false dichotomy, the cyclist can have super light parts AND take a dump.

I think all cyclists who have ridden up a hill in a heavy bike and a light bike know that weight matters. The serious amateur cyclist is often middle aged with significant disposable income to spend on their hobby. Once they have all of the actual bicycles they “need” (a road bike, a track bike, a hard tail mountain bike, an all mountain mountain bike, downhill mountain bike, fat bike, bad weather road bike, cyclocross bike, hybrid bike with child seat on the back, then another road bike that is significantly better than the first one they bought) they start looking for ways to upgrade their bikes. The only real way to upgrade a road bike is to make it lighter and/or more “aero”. Once they’ve done the big things like wheels, they are forced to look into areas where the gains are progressively smaller.

Because they know they are spending lots of money on something they do some research and end up finding the cycling websites and a group of people who will encourage their spending habits.

When they actually make their purchase it may not be the most expensive and lightest piece of gear because that may be out of their budget, but it will be expensive and light. They will then be forced to find noticeable gains from this new piece of gear.

“Yeah man, I’m putting out the same watts as before but going .00127% faster, remember that race with Bob where it was a photo finish? Well with this derailleur I would’ve won it by 2 cm!”

This is partly to justify it to themselves, and partly to justify it to their partner, or wife, let’s be honest, it’s mainly men who spend like this.

They will be back on the cycling forums now because they became attached to them, and they will be both promoting and defending their purchase to keep up the illusion that it was worthwhile. Promoting to the newbies who are looking for advice, and defending against those who could afford even lighter gear. The fact that the most aerodynamic gear is not necessarily the lightest gear (wheels are a good example) leads to a fertile breeding ground for discussion.

“Yeah, I tried the XL5 with the drilled cogs but I found the holes created turbulence close to the rear wheel which actually increased the drag enough to offset the weight advantage.”
“You must have the Mavic DR1 wheels do you?” (It’s in their profile)
“Yeah great wheel.”
“It is, but it doesn’t play well with the drilled XL5, you need to upgrade the spokes in the wheel to the 2016 Aero Delta, then you will get the advertised gains from the derailleur”
“But the Aero Deltas are .0052 grams heavier for the set”
“That’s the 2015 ones, the 2016 spokes are .0005 grams lighter than the 2015 ones but have a new profile designed specifically to interact with the drilled XL5 in a way that actually produces thrust from the turbulence eddies.”

Etc.

22

I know that when I program at home, I tend to get a bit more esoteric in design and try to make everything perfect. And, I think, it comes from the lack of a deadline. I mean, if there were no deadlines, wouldn’t you want to make something perfect? No shortcuts. No compromises. Do all the engineering, do all the research, and come up with the best, most perfectly selected option and implement it.

Of course, then you end up with an end product that ends up worse than something you made at work, because you were spending so much time obsessing over the minutiae that you forgot the big picture and how everything is supposed to tie together. :smack:

23

I own four different bike helmets.

Any suggestion that fewer or different bike helmets might be a better approach would mean that I am flailingly throwing money at my lack of speed, rather than making a calculated and aerodynamically sound decision.

And we can’t have that. No we can’t.

24

My guitar hobby. I have spent crazy money to build my ideal guitars, going to great lengths to make them perfect in ways that few people besides myself would notice or care. Crazy, because I am a very limited player. I haven’t really practiced much or learned new stuff since about 2013. Long story but I’m hoping to get back to it eventually.

25

I find that if my question isn’t answered in the first 10 questions, it most likely won’t be on that board. I skim through the rest and only read the short posts. Someone new may parachute in and have a similar problem they solved or they may ask the question in a way that gets a better answer.

26

I’ve contemplated the premise of the OP on occasion. My take on this, and it transcends hobbyists, is that as any of us gets “good” at anything we tend to get more and more precise in our execution. Thus we get more focussed on the best, thus “correct,” solution/procedure/algorithm/etc.

As a trivial example, I regularly make home made biscuits and gravy for breakfast. In the original incarnation I followed the recipe verbatim. After five or so iterations I began to modify the recipe to fit my palatte. My recipe these days is close to the original, but “better,” because I enjoy the taste more.

If someone were to ask me for my recipe I would pass along the one that I use now, not the original. Thus my mindset has become focussed on the minutiae of my recipe.

I personally think this is a common characteristic of anyone with a lot of experience in anything, not just hobbyists.

27

Yes, I am obsessed with my hobby. But I also was obsessed with being a good teacher, a good father, a good Air Force officer, and so forth.

Partly this is due to an inner drive that I have to become “expert” in whatever field I am involved with, and partly it is because of the feeling of satisfaction that I get from becoming proficient and helping others in the field.

Yes, it is outside of the normal range of human behavior, but my hobbies never interfere with my normal life, and in fact has lead to positive involvement with many others (as long as I remember that other people are not as into my interests as I appear to be.)

28

The mindset being complained about goes along with the need to feel superior. It is necessary to complicate the hobby beyond all reason so that one can perplex and talk down to the “newbies”. Thankfully, gardening is less prone to it, but I still sometimes see patronizing attitudes in garden forums.

It’s the absolute worst in my experience in computer and related forums. I have given up on asking questions on such topics, after the last experience where I stated in my OP that I had a software problem and used a MacBook Pro. I got a bunch of advice relating to Windows PCs. When I patiently pointed out that I needed help applicable to a Mac, I was either ignored or got commentary along the lines of “Macs suxxs! har har har har”.

29

True… I should have said “only bring along their car key, instead of the entire keyring” as that would effectively be the same thing for many people.

And I agree- I think there must be a sort of echo chamber effect that amplifies and reinforces this thinking, and convinces these people that brand X is absolute garbage, and brand Y is Zeus’ own choice.

And those of you talking about astronomy are half reinforcing my point. I know that there’s a world of difference between a $200 eyepiece and a $30 one. But if some guy asks what he should get for his 5 year old, it’s absurd to push him toward a 6" catadioptric telescope on an equatorial mount, versus a smaller alt-az of some kind. While they’ll certainly get better views, they’ll also have correspondingly higher expectations(“I spent 500 on this telescope and NOTHING is in color! This thing sucks!”) than if they spent a quarter of that on a solid small refractor and could get good views of the moon and planets, and nothing else.

I admit to having a bit of insight into the phenomenon when it comes to booze/cocktail stuff; I can see where the real nerds are coming from when they geek out about how certain drinks are best made with a particular brand of gin, or how some particular brands are terrible for certain drinks and better in others. But understanding that is where I draw the line; I don’t think it’s appropriate to castigate someone because they like bourbon instead of rye in their manhattans, or because they like ice in their scotch. Truth be told, you’re supposed to dilute it some, especially on cask-strength ones. But if someone likes it neat, then more power to them.

I’ve noticed in gardening forums that there’s a LOT of disdain for people who aren’t gardening organically or growing heirloom vegetables. I’d bet if you went in and said that you were growing BHN444 tomatoes using osmocote and wondering whether you should spray with bifenthrin or malathion for worms, people wouldn’t know what to say, as it doesn’t follow the hobbyist wisdom of using chicken manure, growing Black Krim tomatoes and using neem oil and an infusion of chewing tobacco in water or some other silly stuff like that.

And I even get the whole gear nerd phenomenon. Sometimes the researching and getting of the gear is more fun than the actual hobby itself. I know over the years, I’ve probably spent 10x the amount of time looking at shooting gear and various guns/ammo than I ever have shooting. And when I was actually doing a lot of shooting, I wasn’t really researching gear, as I was spending that time at the range.

I don’t get the whole need to feel superior thing though. In my experience, the most fun hobby communities are the ones where the communities are dedicated toward being very collegial and lifting everyone up, instead of being exclusive. That’s actually a large part of why I’ve stuck around homebrewing for so long; that community is crazy inclusive of the rankest newbies with good advice and suggestions all around. Nobody’s going to recommend a RIMS system for a newbie- at worst, they’ll recommend moving up from the plastic bucket, going to a full boil, and maybe going all-grain eventually. But there’s plenty of recognition that there are very experienced brewers who primarily use extract, hop pellets and partial boils, and that’s ok.

30

Obligatory XKCD strip.

Meant to lampoon connoisseurs, but hobbyists suffer from the same condition.

31

I don’t even need to ask which message board you’re talking about :wink:

32

You and me both - I posted some long threads on one of my Telecaster builds in CS a few years ago. And I will occasionally post links to threads on guitar forums about the kerfuffle du jour.

When folks are getting heated about whether a copper wide should be wrapped uniformly vs “scatterwound” to emulate that “True Gibson PAF guitar pickup tone” you know you’re in murky waters.

33

Audiophiles are the worst breed of these crazy animals.

34

oh my god yes.

35

I believe this is the xkcd you are looking for:

36

I find myself compelled to agree. The discussion that takes up most of that page appears to do a fine job of exemplifying the phenomenon being discussed in this thread.

37

I think that also people have lots of things in our lives we don’t care that much about and then a few we do, or we simply stumble into something where we happen to be at the top easier than elsewhere.

Those “A personalities” and “B personalities”? The difference isn’t in how engrossed they get when they do, it’s in how many things they get engrossed on.

38

Some of the things I am passionate about are at risk of being eliminated or proscribed at all times, so obsessive detail matters. When it comes to things like guns the devil is very much in the details, because the details are what make the difference between something that is legal and something that is not.

That is naturally going to manifest itself in discussions of great detail that the average person would not ordinarily care about, until they realize how much it really does matter. The sympathetic person will then admire the depth of knowledge, compliment the post, and gain a greater understanding. The person who opposes your viewpoint will criticize the post for being too bogged down in minutiae, dismiss it as a purely technical argument, and counter it with a generalization, which then requires another detailed refutation.

39

A lot of people suffer from OCD?

40

There is a strict dichotomy between people I’ve met, they either strive to be “well rounded” individuals, or their motto is “Be good at one thing or suck at everything.”

(I am in the latter camp.)