In recent years (and due to the toxicity of the Twitter) term "thought leader" became a negative thing to me.

None-scientific matter

Some none-scientific subjects introduced as if they are proven to work. For example, clean code, TDD, agile, type systems. Are there empirical evidence that those things work? I haven't seen any which proves a definite positive effect without caveats.

I don't say that those things are bad I'm just saying that we don't know for sure if they are good or how good they are.

Out of all "best" practices out there we have some kind of evidence of positive impact for:

• code reviews
• good sleep

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Please don't trust me - read papers yourself.

Biased

Another problem when technology is presented as if it is a silver bullet.

If a person doesn't present downsides of the solution it means:

• either they don't have enough experience and haven't seen edge cases yet
• or they know downsides but present you malformed information, because they try to "sell" you this information

For example, I like that Dan Abramov, inventor of Redux, himself wrote an article "You Might Not Need Redux".

Solution?

Is there a solution to this problem?

• Maybe CoC help will help? I guess not.
• Maybe we need "Hippocratic Oath" for scientists? Like "I will act in the interest of science..." and every thought leader should have a badge if they gave oath or not.
• Maybe we need to improve education, so people would be able to "call bull" themselves?

PS

I hope my articles don't have this overconfident tone. What are examples of good thought leaders? Who do you follow and feel like you could learn from?

Photo by Juan Rumimpunu on Unsplash