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TLDR: Old man yells at kids about thinking they know more
I’ve been meaning to make a video or something about this for a while but I’ll write out some of my thoughts in a blog post first. I wish I had a cool title, but it’s basically just about overconfidence in younger/less experienced people in speedcubing.
I think that cubing is one of the most Dunning-Kruger effected hobbies out there. If you don’t know what the Dunning-Kruger effect is, I’m an expert at it and I know everything there is to know about it. Sike lol. That’s basically what it is though is a huge overconfidence of skill in comparison to knowledge. So people who start out something will sometimes think that they know more than what they actually do.
Cubing been this way for a long time. I’ve been competing for 14 years now, so I’ve seen a lot. I’ve even been the one who was overconfident a few times. I think with me being older, more advanced, and the fact that there’s so many more people doing it now I’m noticing silly interactions more and more. On any tiktok about a ZBLL case or an F2L algorithm you’ll have people going “just do this instead” or “i do this” (less egregious). Most of the time they get torn to shreds in replies because they don’t understand what’s actually being solved in the video. I think people have heard more about ZBLLs recently with more people learning and using ZB, so they understand what’s going on with those cases. But with lesser known cases like COLL and Winter Variations if someone posts a video with them, the comments are ridiculous. I saw something like this in the comment section of a video recently:
*video showing Niklas for a COLL case*
“R U R’ U R U2 R'”
“It’s a COLL case, not OLL”
“I don’t know what that is”
I’m not saying this or pointing it out to be mean, everyone has to learn one way or another. It’s just silly to me how you can so confidently say “do this” when you aren’t understanding the case of what they’re solving.
This leads me into elitists or people who maybe know slightly more. If you know more, teach them, don’t call them dumb or make fun of them, you were in their shoes at one point. Cubing is meant to be fun and something to learn and take joy in, and ruining that for someone is lame.
I also don’t like it when faster people say general things as definite truths, like writing off a whole method or subset of algorithms without justification (if they’re saying you shouldn’t learn it for this or that reason, I’m more open to understanding their argument). I saw someone say “don’t use COLL”, but that’s just a crazy statement. I don’t think they even explained their rationale behind it, so I can’t argue their point directly. I think COLL is a fine set of algorithms to learn. Some cases are better than others, sure, it’s probably not worth it to learn the sune algorithms. But, it helps you start to understand and recognize corner permutation better and you can get PLL skips more often. Saying “don’t use COLL” without any explanation is asinine. There’s very few things you can say that you definitely should not use, and even if they are completely sub-optimal, some people might have fun with it.
I’ve always been a speed cuber, I try to break my own records and get faster. So I am somewhat concerned in what’s more optimal/faster. But that’s how I have fun. I think that’s what people don’t understand sometimes about cubing. It’s SUPPOSED to be fun.
This kinda went a few more small directions than what I meant, but it’s getting close to the end of the month and I wanna get this out. I’ll leave it at this. Basically don’t be a dork, and think before you type.