[HN Gopher] The Scientific Virtues: Stupidity, Arrogance, Laziness
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The Scientific Virtues: Stupidity, Arrogance, Laziness
Author : bobcostas55
Score : 47 points
Date : 2022-02-11 13:00 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (slimemoldtimemold.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (slimemoldtimemold.com)
| readingnews wrote:
| I wonder if these quotes are all accurate? Some of them are very
| good indeed.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I'm dumb and ask stupid questions. My curiosity has only hurt me.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| You have to ask the stupid questions of the right people,
| unfortunately.
| nanomonkey wrote:
| "What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger" -Nietzsche
| giantg2 wrote:
| Or leaves you chronically damaged/paralyzed/etc.
| circlefavshape wrote:
| Seriously? People are still quoting this as if it's true?
| wongarsu wrote:
| Nobody is born knowledgeable, and asking questions is almost
| always better in the long run than looking smart while staying
| ignorant.
|
| There there are ways to make questions sound less dumb, mostly
| involving that you made an effort at finding a solution. "Why
| is the sky blue?" sounds like a dumb question, "I saw that
| liquid oxygen is blue, is that why the sky is blue?" sounds
| much better (even though the assumption is completely wrong)
| giantg2 wrote:
| Yeah, but most of success in today's world is built off of
| the perception that others have of you.
|
| In fact, some of the feedback I have gotten throughout the
| years is that I have lots of potential, I'm smart (smarter
| than I really am), well spoken (for an IT guy), etc. It
| doesn't mean anything because they always seem to think that
| I should be driving every meeting or conversation. If there's
| another person in the meeting with more knowledge in that
| specific area and I agree with their direction, why would I
| take over? So their perception is that I'm smart, but that I
| lack some other quality. My perception is that I'm dumber
| than the other guy but just smart enough to know to defer to
| their expertise. It leaves me stuck and unsuccessful.
|
| I'm stupid enough to ask certain questions... which I suppose
| makes them stupid questions. If we are a company notorious
| for value shopping, and the company says we're seeing
| deadlines or capacity slip due to not filling open positions,
| and is costing the company money, risk of tech debt not being
| addressed... it's stupid for someone like me to question
| that, but I do. If it were really costing the company money,
| then wouldn't we increase pay or not force people back to the
| office to increase headcount? There seems to be a
| contradiction here, and the people in power don't have an
| answer that makes sense (possibly because there are things
| they can't tell a peon me).
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| For your first part, you don't need to take over. But you
| should find a way to contribute. At the very least if
| there's an expectation that you drive meetings, but you
| want to defer because someone else has more knowledge in a
| specific area, you need to make it clear why you're
| deferring.
|
| For your second part, it seems like the questions are you
| asking are not stupid in themselves. Rather they are
| uncomfortable and/or threatening to the audience. Like your
| question is driving at a real point which is that likely no
| one actually sat down and tried to rationalize
| (quantitatively or however) the cost and benefits of their
| course of action. The "stupid" part is poking at this
| sensitive topic in ways that don't give people a graceful
| way to interact with it. Most people do not want to admit
| that they're just autopiloting a decision that might have
| made sense as a quick heuristic based on assumptions (which
| are okay!) that have since provided to be wrong and have
| just been running with it ever since. Or that no, they've
| never actually sat down and quantified (ballpark) how much
| company the strategy is costing them, and that they're just
| making stuff up.
|
| To back up to your original point, uncontrolled curiosity
| can definitely be harmful. You absolutely need to temper
| and control it, especially when interacting with human
| systems. That doesn't mean that curiosity is bad though. I
| do sympathize that the usual formulation of "there are no
| stupid questions here" is almost always misleading, and
| encodes a pile of unsaid assumptions.
| giantg2 wrote:
| There really shouldn't be a need to explain the deferral
| for each occurrence. I have explained it in general to my
| manager and participated, in my opinion, appropriately.
| They have not given concrete steps that they would like
| to see me take. For context, I'm only a midlevel dev.
|
| "The "stupid" part is poking at this sensitive topic"
|
| Exactly, but without bringing it up, that curiosity
| wouldn't be satisfied. They talk about being candid as a
| positive trait. It appears that isn't true - just
| typically corporate doublespeak.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| You can drive a meeting among others who are more
| knowledgeable in certain fields. Leading meetings is a
| different, and in my experience, more unique, skill from
| expertise in a specific IT field; leadership is harder to
| replace than domain specific knowledge.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I guess what I mean, is they want you to talk... a lot.
| Apparently it's one of the ways they measure "engagement"
| - how loud is someone.
| zhoujianfu wrote:
| The programmers virtues: Impatience, Hubris, Laziness
|
| -Larry Wall
| pvaldes wrote:
| Where is Masochism in this list?
| goatsneez wrote:
| Just wonderful presentation of what values to hold for a curious,
| serious person trying to understand the (physical) world. Of
| cause, there is little bit of hyperbola on labeling some of these
| virtues, however, it is so enjoyable to put it this way
| nonetheless, and I would say does drive home the main point: the
| courage to be say I do no know.
|
| What was not said explicitly in the article is that all these
| virtues while needed in trying to understand (and find out, cut-
| through "bullshit") one has to hold of emotions and value
| judgements. And that is mighty difficult (things that we
| intuitively feel like should be or ought to be true). This is
| what B. Russell articulated so well in several of his maxims as
| well: "..the will to find out has to be much greater than the
| will to believe".
|
| As a parting remark, one can observes the exact opposite is
| (implicitly) demanded from researchers, and vanishingly small
| number of people are able to stand their ground against the
| current of modern scientism (which infested normal discourse,
| education institutions, and even research). "Selling" yourself,
| selling results, being vocal, advertise, publishing for sake of
| publishing, those things are part of a metric these days. What to
| do when adhering to the real virtues touched upon in this writing
| will essentially kill ones career?
| jrd259 wrote:
| Agree with your summary, but I am not impressed by the use of
| "stupid". Maybe "being willing to appear stupid", or "having
| beginner's mind" or "not making assumptions". But "stupid" is
| just click-bait. For that matter "laziness" too. Author says
| "work hard, but not all the time".
|
| But the others (Arrogance, Carefreeness, Beauty, Rebellion,
| Humor) all seem right to me.
| contingencies wrote:
| In English when seeking to imply a guiltless stupidity the
| term _naive_ is often used.
| pdonis wrote:
| Of all the qualities described in this article, I think the most
| important is being able to live with not knowing things, as
| described by Feynman:
|
| "I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different
| degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not
| absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't
| know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why
| we're here, and what the question might mean. I might think about
| it a little bit and if I can't figure it out, then I go on to
| something else, but I don't have to know an answer"
|
| We humans are generally not wired to accept not knowing things;
| we are wired to believe _some_ answer to any question we can
| think to ask, whether we actually have any real basis for an
| answer or not. But giving in to that temptation just means our
| beliefs are out of sync with reality.
| hirundo wrote:
| This is particularly evident in creation myths. In answer to
| "where did we come from, how was the world made", instead of a
| shrug or some unsatisfying facts, we hear a story. And our need
| to understand is such that we cling to that story, no matter
| how bizarre. It was the Great Coyote. No, it was a war between
| the Sun and the Moon. No, it was the invisible Sky Fairy. Some
| times it takes an unusual person to hear such a story and think
| WTF? And decide that they just don't know.
| melony wrote:
| He is also a human calculator with tremendous aptitude for
| arithmetics. What works for him won't necessarily generalize to
| others.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> He is also a human calculator with tremendous aptitude for
| arithmetics._
|
| Even if this is true (and I'm not sure it is--Feynman had
| good intuition about a lot of things, but "human calculator
| with tremendous aptitude for arithmetics" seems more like a
| description of John Von Neumann or Norbert Wiener), I think
| it's orthogonal, so to speak, to the ability to live with not
| knowing the answers to questions.
| melony wrote:
| https://www.quora.com/How-good-at-math-was-Richard-
| Feynman/a...
| 11101010001100 wrote:
| And yet he understood that he wouldn't be able to answer all
| the questions that popped into his head with his human
| calculator ability. It's a matter of introspection.
| biomcgary wrote:
| Another framing of this: good scientists are comfortable with
| cognitive dissonance, which is a trait held by only a minority
| of most populations. Consequently, this means good science and
| politics are inherently at odds.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> good scientists are comfortable with cognitive dissonance_
|
| I'm not sure "cognitive dissonance" is the right term for
| what I was referring to, although it's related. "Cognitive
| dissonance" means that things you think you know appear to be
| at odds with each other. But "not knowing" just means you
| don't know; you don't hold _any_ belief with enough
| confidence to even make it a possible source of cognitive
| dissonance. The skills of being able to live with each of
| these things are probably related, but I don 't think they're
| quite the same thing.
|
| _> good science and politics are inherently at odds_
|
| In the sense that politics is set up to insist on answers to
| questions whether they are justified by current knowledge or
| not, yes, I agree.
| biomcgary wrote:
| You are right, of course, that cognitive dissonance is a
| slightly different thing. When a scientist has an
| inherently probabilistic epistemology, apparent conflict
| between known "facts" does not lead to cognitive
| dissonance, but the same facts (to the extent that they are
| attended to) often cause dissonance for the general
| population.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| This doesn't follow at all, unless you are also making the
| claim that if you are comfortable with cognitive dissonance,
| you will be unable to participate in communications with
| others in ways that do not make them uncomfortable.
| biomcgary wrote:
| As noted in a HN post from a few days ago, nuance doesn't
| really scale in communication. There exist a good number of
| questions where the best scientific answers are "unknown"
| or "possibly with X degree of confidence". A politician, a
| special interest, or even the average individual wants to
| set policy now, not wait for an answer.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Maybe explicit dissonance, but I assume most people are in
| cognitive dissonance with their view of reality, they just
| brush it off fast enough.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| I have struggled with this for the longest time. My field is
| nowhere close to Feynman's, but still, quite frequently I have
| found myself wondering "why", "why does this thing work this
| way?", "why is this, but not that?", leading invariably down a
| deep rabbit hole.
|
| Sometimes it's not a complete waste of time, as I learnt about
| the innards of the systems I interact with. Most of the time it
| kind of is.
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