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bogus comments on That Magical Click - Less Wrong
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Years ago I and three other people were training for a tech support job. Our trainer was explaining something (the tracert command) but I didn't understand it because his explanation didn't seem to make sense. After asking him more questions about it, I realized from his contradictory answers that he didn't understand it either. The reason I mention this is that my three fellow trainees had no problem with his explanation, one even explicitly saying that she thought it made perfect sense.
Could you clarify? To properly understand how traceroute works one would need to know about the TTL field in the IP header (and how it's normally decremented by routers) and the ICMP TTL Exceeded message. But I'm not sure that a tech support drone would be expected to understand any of these.
I did learn about this on my own that day, but the original confusion was at a quite different level: I asked whether the times on each line measured the distance between that router and the previous one, or between that router and the source. His answer: "Both." A charitable interpretation of this would be "They measure round trip times between the source and that router, but it's just a matter of arithmetic to use those to estimate round trip times between any two routers in the list" -- but I asked him if this was what he meant and he said no. We went back and forth for a while until he told me to just research it myself.
Edit: I think I remember him saying something like "You're expecting it to be logical, but things aren't always logical".
Jesus Christ. "Things aren't always logical." The hallmark of a magic-thinker. Of course everything is always logical. The only case it doesn't seem that way is when one lacks understanding.