[HN Gopher] Willingness to look stupid
___________________________________________________________________
Willingness to look stupid
Author : Samin100
Score : 704 points
Date : 2026-03-09 10:21 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (sharif.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (sharif.io)
| ljlolel wrote:
| AI has no ego
| applfanboysbgon wrote:
| ...but is specifically reinforced into generating text that
| satisfies the humans training it, and therefore is innately
| predisposed towards approval-seeking generations.
| ronjakoi wrote:
| Are you sure?
| Lionga wrote:
| AI also has no intelligence
| nephihaha wrote:
| Depends on your definition of intelligence.
| dworks wrote:
| A willingness to look stupid is a core requirement for learning
| languages. I look stupid everyday.
| FreePalestine1 wrote:
| I actually don't like this statement. I'd rephrase it because
| trying to speak in a language doesn't make you look stupid, or
| at least it shouldn't. Saying "I look stupid everyday" just
| reinforces that there is something inherently stupid about not
| knowing a language and trying to learn it. If anything trying
| to learn a language when it's not a requirement for something,
| is really anything but stupid.
| rvrs wrote:
| Whether you like it or not you will look stupid to native
| speakers. It's a subconscious bias
| tayo42 wrote:
| Idk if that's universal, when I run into people who
| struggle with English or just don't know it my first
| thought has never been this is a stupid person.
| klausa wrote:
| "Looking stupid" and "being a stupid person", or even
| "coming off as a stupid person" are not the same things.
| zephen wrote:
| I think the phrasing is fine. It's self-aware. It
| acknowledges that stupidity, like beauty, is in the eye of
| the beholder.
|
| "Looking stupid" is not the same as "being stupid." It could
| be very smart indeed, depending on your circumstances, to
| learn an additional language, and the point being made is
| that when going out in public and _speaking_ it in front of
| native speakers, ridicule is not unexpected, and should be
| embraced.
| dworks wrote:
| No, it does. Even if the audience knows that your English or
| other languages is perfectly professional, speaking Chinese
| at a lower level does leave a certain negative impression.
| orthoxerox wrote:
| True. When we were in Italy, my wife couldn't say a single
| phrase in Italian because she was afraid she might make a
| mistake. I _knew_ not making one would be impossible, so I just
| geared down to "barbarian" to get my point across.
|
| "Good morning. Tickets destination Grossetto, please. Two
| adults, one child. Six years. Yes, return. Card acceptable?
| Thank you."
| yen223 wrote:
| Bears look smart, bulls do things
| emil-lp wrote:
| I would think that bears are much smarter than bulls?
| reverius42 wrote:
| Let's see a bull open a very complicated garbage dumpster in a
| national park. Maybe bears are actually smart and not just
| looking smart?
|
| > Said one park ranger, "There is considerable overlap between
| the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest
| tourists."
| saulpw wrote:
| I think they are probably referring to marketplace bears and
| bulls.
| csin wrote:
| It's a horrendous example.
|
| Bears are the same thing as bulls. Just the opposite.
|
| You can look like a degenerate wallstreetbets gambler,
| being a bull, buying puts.
|
| You can equally look like a degenerate wallstreetbets
| gambler, being a gay bear, shorting the stock.
|
| The "beauty" of our modern stock market, is it provides
| both sides the avenue to lose stupid amounts of money.
| stefap2 wrote:
| I found it gets easier as you get older. Somehow I care much less
| what others think
| b3lvedere wrote:
| I find it incredibly easy on people and processes my life does
| not depend on being the way it is. I find it incredibly
| annoying and unconfortable when around people and processes my
| life depends on.
| bolangi wrote:
| Definitely needed to succeed in theater and take risks in life.
| hyperhello wrote:
| Caring if you get downvoted makes your posts dull.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Measured. If what you are saying is being downvoted this group
| might not be ready for it.
|
| Saying something like Claude is over rated as a general llm
| because of loftly guardrails will get downvotes today but seen
| as insightful down the road. You can be too early or late.
|
| Take Tailwinds. Is it loved or hated now? We went through
| different phases.
| hyperhello wrote:
| I don't even consider assigning a numerical score to a post
| meaningful. Downvoting is for trash posts that we all agree
| are trash, like the weirdos who write angry insults or the AI
| spam, not a quantitative metric. When applied to honest
| commentary it feels like twelve year olds yelling shut up at
| you.
| b3lvedere wrote:
| Somehow sometimes it's not so easy, for me at least. Not that i
| care about the number, but more that it wasn't beneficial or i
| offended someone.
| nephihaha wrote:
| It's been very interesting to see what does and doesn't get
| downvoted. A couple of people didn't like me pointing out the
| reality of STIs for example although no one really wants to get
| one.
| gopalv wrote:
| > The writing isn't the problem. The problem is that when I'm
| done, I look at what I just wrote and think this is definitely
| not good enough to publish.
|
| Ira Glass has a nice quote which is worth printing out and
| hanging on your wall
|
| _Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone
| told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because
| we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple
| years you make stuff, it's just not that good. It's trying to be
| good, it has potential, but it's not. But your taste, the thing
| that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is
| why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past
| this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting,
| creative work went through years of this. We know our work
| doesn't have this special thing that we want it to have. We all
| go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are
| still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most
| important thing you can do is do a lot of work._
|
| Or if you're into design thinking, the Cult-of-Done[1] was a
| decade ago.
|
| [1] - https://medium.com/@bre/the-cult-of-done-
| manifesto-724ca1c2f...
| randallsquared wrote:
| That's the exact opposite of OP's issue, right? He was
| producing, and it was good, but somewhere along the way he
| developed good taste (or some facsimile). Ira is claiming that
| people who are creative beginners _start_ with good taste,
| which doesn 't seem to be the case for a lot of us.
| MinimalAction wrote:
| It's a numbers game in the end. Law of large numbers at play
| again. The noise drops with more tries.
|
| I suppose the corporate culture thinking is exactly opposite to
| this with metrics like efficiency, productivity etc. You cannot
| afford to try a lot and look stupider.
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| Efficiency, metrics, and willingness to look stupid works when
| nobody has much future power over you. If you can just refresh
| to a new pool, that is fine but if it is the same pool, it has
| consequences.
|
| I was on an interview panel for a role and a guy lost out on
| the role because about 18 months prior, he had asked too many
| questions one time and because of that the PM thought he
| struggled to grasp concepts.
|
| One meeting did in his promo.
| paulluuk wrote:
| > One meeting did in his promo.
|
| Although true, I feel it's worth adding here that the problem
| is that PM. While looking stupid by asking questions can "do
| you in" when working with incompetent managers like that, I'd
| argue that most managers will look at results -- and asking
| dumb questions can lead to much better results compared to
| just staying quiet and hoping for the best.
| danpalmer wrote:
| > Some of the best research ... has come from surprisingly young
| people. ... They're not afraid of looking stupid.
|
| Young people aren't doing things without worrying about looking
| stupid, they just don't know that they look stupid. I say that as
| a former young person who was way more naive than I thought I was
| at the time. This is good and bad.
|
| Also I think this point ignores that as people grow in their
| careers they often become more highly leveraged. I've moved from
| writing code to coaching others who write code. It is very normal
| for much of the "important" stuff to be done by relatively young
| people, but this understates the influence from more experienced
| people.
| eucyclos wrote:
| There's also the fact that there's a lot less social pressure
| for young people not to look stupid. If you're the senior
| subject matter expert and get a question you can't answer,
| people still expect you to make an educated guess. The junior
| guy they expect to ask someone.
| iamflimflam1 wrote:
| The sign of true subject matter expert is someone who has the
| confidence to say when they don't know the answer.
| chris_money202 wrote:
| Sounds more like the sign of just a humble, honest person
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Yes, but that better not be all the time, and around basic
| questions.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| input("ask me any question") print("I don't know")
|
| behold, Plato's PhD level expert on any topic.
| xorcist wrote:
| That does not match with my, very much anecdotal, experience.
|
| Real subject matter experts are generally very clear about
| where their expertise ends. Less experienced people, not so
| much.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > There's also the fact that there's a lot less social
| pressure for young people not to look stupid.
|
| Also also they tend to be less financially "tethered" for
| want of a better word - mortgages, families, children, etc. -
| which makes it easier for them to be risky (consciously or
| not) about what/who/where they work on/with.
|
| Probably not likely to be jumping from your stable 9/5 to a
| startup when you've got your semi-detached with 4 kids.
| cal_dent wrote:
| And people wonder why society failed to embed the idea of
| being a blessing to say "I don't know" in llms....
|
| That alone would save so much trouble. We, particularly bad
| workplaces, have a real fear of not knowing so much so that
| being confidently wrong is a better position in the whole
| game.
| alwa wrote:
| If you haven't had the pleasure of Los Angeles public-access
| television's Let's Paint TV...
|
| https://www.letspainttv.com/
|
| Or, to save your eyes,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let's_Paint_TV
|
| For more than 20 years, Mr. Let's Paint TV (artist John Kilduff)
| has encouraged viewers to "EMBRACE FAILARE"--charitably put, to
| pass through the valley of incompetence as it's the only path to
| the slopes of mastery. Just do the thing.
|
| I couldn't agree more with that impulse and TFA's: the common
| trait that cuts across all the most impressive people I know--
| from artists to businesspeople to scientists to engineers to even
| leaders-of-organizations--is a cheerful unselfconsciousness, a
| humility, a willful simplicity--a willingness to put it out there
| while it's raw and stupid and unformed, and hone it through
| practice with the people around them.
|
| A taste:
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PvbL_5rH1QQ
| byproxy wrote:
| goddam, that's beautiful. thanks for sharing!
| katzenversteher wrote:
| That's super trippy but I like it.
| moss_dog wrote:
| Fantastic, thanks for sharing! I hadn't heard of this before.
| Very entertaining video!
| morbusfonticuli wrote:
| Well, now I went down that rabbit hole. Thanks, I guess :-)
| xorcist wrote:
| > "EMBRACE FAILARE"--charitably put, to pass through the valley
| of incompetence as it's the only path to the slopes of mastery
|
| Instructions unclear. Have pushed secrets to github. When will
| slope to mastery commence?
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Once you realize your mistake, and only do it once or twice
| more times in your life, often when stressed or some other
| external stressor causes you to not follow your hunch.
| xorcist wrote:
| See also:
|
| Impostor Syndrome (noun), pathologic avoidance of
| identifying mediocrity in oneself, e.g. _" I'm not
| mediocre, I just have impostor syndrome!"_
| alwa wrote:
| Nobody said the valley was without fog
| nom wrote:
| Looks like he is still doing his thing here
|
| https://www.instagram.com/letspainttv/
| bdunks wrote:
| There is a book called Art & Fear which explores this in depth.
| A quick read and worth it for people that don't consider
| themselves artists.
|
| It has a great story (allegory) about a pottery class, which
| was shared here in the past. Six sentences. Worth a read:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6097663
| lioeters wrote:
| "Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish
| someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into
| it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the
| first couple years you make stuff, it's just not that good.
| It's trying to be good, it has potential, but it's not. But
| your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still
| killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A
| lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most
| people I know who do interesting, creative work went through
| years of this. We know our work doesn't have this special
| thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if
| you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you
| gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do
| is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every
| week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a
| volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work
| will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to
| figure out how to do this than anyone I've ever met. It's
| gonna take awhile. It's normal to take awhile. You've just
| gotta fight your way through." -- Ira Glass
| esafak wrote:
| He should have co-hosted with Max Headroom.
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| I'm a nearly 40 year old man and I skip through the halls at work
| most days. It's something I've been doing for a long time because
| it's fun, it's faster than walking, and it looks silly. It seems
| to help some people loosen up when they see their colleague
| skipping down the hall and I think that helps team morale.
| strken wrote:
| > There might be a good reason why smart people want to avoid
| looking stupid ... The only plausible explanation is that our
| egos are fragile
|
| I disagree with this, at least in how it regards ego as
| pointless.
|
| Humans are tuned to win a delicate social competition by becoming
| popular and therefore having a bunch of kids with other popular
| (and therefore reproductively successful) people. The most
| plausible explanation is that our ancestors have been through
| millions of years of evolutionary selection to try to become the
| most popular in a social group by taking risks, but then cease
| all risk-taking and guard their position after they get there.
|
| Ego is the mechanism by which this happens, but it's there for a
| reason. Social status is really, really important - if you don't
| buy the evolutionary reasons, it's still important for basic
| human connection. We haven't always lived in societies which are
| so open to failure, experimentation, or looking stupid.
| rapnie wrote:
| Can we ascribe it all to ego, I wonder, or is it just one of
| several mechanics at play, albeit an important one. A Dutch
| saying is that there's a lid for every pot ("op elk potje past
| een dekseltje") i.e. that the most unlikely people still manage
| to find a partner and form a family. That very clumsy person
| who stutters, and is perceived by an ego-driven person as "a
| loser" still finds someone who thinks they are adorable and
| attractive.
| mettamage wrote:
| At work I dare to look stupid and in my friend group too. It
| hasn't always led to a good outcome since people simply
| believe you're actually stupid and the problem with that is
| that they don't take you seriously enough. Now, you can say:
| their loss. But man, I need to eat. With friends, sure. At
| work? After years of looking stupid, I had enough of it.
|
| Also finding a partner is mostly about being silly with each
| other. So looking a bit stupid is a plus there and had no
| issues about it on that front
| WalterBright wrote:
| Being silly is not being stupid. Being stupid is investing
| in lottery tickets, driving drunk, etc.
| smackeyacky wrote:
| Maybe not adorable and attractive, but just enough to settle
| for.
| 9rx wrote:
| The actual most plausible explanation becomes clear when you
| rearrange the words into the right order: _" There might be a
| good reason why people who want to avoid looking stupid are
| smart ..."_ Forcing oneself to become smart is the only escape
| from looking stupid.
| Jensson wrote:
| "The people I think are smart are those that try to look
| smart", that is the most plausible. There are probably many
| smart people who aren't afraid of looking stupid that you
| think are stupid for that reason.
|
| Personally I dislike people who never say stupid things,
| because they are focusing too much on appearances and too
| little on trying to figure things out.
| 9rx wrote:
| _> "The people I think are smart are those that try to look
| smart", that is the most plausible._
|
| The story does not appear to define smart as "not looking
| stupid", rather something more towards "mastered the
| creative process".
|
| There is only so much time in the day. An hour spent in
| interaction where you might look stupid is an hour not
| spent directly working on your craft. The most plausible
| explanation is that those who don't want to look stupid
| turn towards becoming smart as the escape. As in, a
| tendency to use time spent alone locked up in a room
| learning how to use a new tool instead of galavanting at an
| art show is what makes them become smart.
| ahf8Aithaex7Nai wrote:
| Somehow, it always triggers my skepticism when supposedly
| sociobiological or evolutionary anthropological or evolutionary
| psychological arguments are brought up. My suspicion is that it
| is far too easy to simply pack in the story you want to have in
| there. I can think of dozens of objections to your description.
| For example, in small groups, the social game in terms of
| status may not be that complex, and the choice for pairings may
| be very limited.
|
| I'll leave it at that because I don't want to write a novel.
| But when I look at your description, I don't see any
| plausibility at all. I only see projections. Like in The
| Flintstones or in old movies about Stone Age people, who have
| strangely short haircuts and go hunting the way people go to
| work today. What I mean is: the social dynamics you're assuming
| here may be primarily shaped by your experiences in the present
| and are far from as universal as you believe.
| casualscience wrote:
| Even in small groups, being respected and considered valuable
| is important? I'm not sure what you mean here.
|
| I take your point, and I too get triggered when people invoke
| mate selection and dopamine. I could be with you in being
| skeptical about that specific angle... but absolutely if you
| look at lawless or less institutionalized cultures, there is
| a trend towards appearing strong/tough and hiding any
| weaknesses
| WalterBright wrote:
| I've never encountered a person who was attracted to a stupid
| person.
|
| BTW, the Flintstones is just The Honeymooners without Jackie
| Gleason. One could also argue that Family Guy and The
| Simpsons are also reboots of The Honeymooners.
|
| > who have strangely short haircuts and go hunting the way
| people go to work today
|
| "They're the _modern_ stone age family " are the words in the
| Flintstones' theme song.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Never heard of "bimbos"/"himbos"?
| strken wrote:
| Fair enough, but if you remove the evo psych explanation
| you're still left with "people don't want to look stupid in
| front of their peers because it might have consequences".
| This seems plausible to me regardless.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| Not sure if this is the right place to respond, but I've only
| seen this play in situations where people visibly want to look
| better than others, because they feel insecure about their
| status.
|
| Frankly, I have no idea how to explain it in words, but when
| you're in a setting where everyone knows they're good at their
| own thing, but also know the others are also exceptional at
| their thing, this game goes away. Like it actually becomes the
| opposite. Everyone calls themselves stupid, become more
| cordial, and things get fun. Trying to not to look stupid
| signals negative status, or whatever you call it.
|
| It's very funny to write this out, because I've never thought
| about it on purpose. Everything has just felt natural at the
| time of the event.
| AznHisoka wrote:
| >> Social status is really, really important - if you don't buy
| the evolutionary reasons, it's still important for basic human
| connection.
|
| You dont want to do dumb things that might get you in jail and
| have rveryone shun you.
|
| But should u be so afraid of brusing your ego that you shy away
| from: starting a business (if u have the financial means),
| asking someone out, publishing something in public, etc
|
| Sometimes evolution overshoots, esp when our environment
| changes
| paganel wrote:
| I agree with the popular thing, but only up to a point, for a
| certain type of people, or from a certain age on (for me this
| latter case holds true), competing against other people just
| isn't a valid concern anymore, the societal "recognition" stops
| being a thing.
|
| In my case, and I suppose this holds true for others, too, the
| "fiercest" competition is with one's inner-self or, at the very
| most, with past/dead/way-out-of-line-of-sight "competitors"
| that have nothing to do with current society and its
| recognition. I know that this "competing against one-self"
| sounds trite, but, again, this is how things are for some of
| us.
| tombert wrote:
| Queue obligatory Weird Al: https://youtu.be/SMhwddNQSWQ
|
| I'm human so I'm certainly not immune to social anxiety or
| embarrassment from looking stupid, but I have been trying to do a
| manual override that for the last year.
|
| Something it took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize is
| that the first draft of nearly everything I do is bad. The first
| draft of my code is usually bad, the first draft of an essay I
| write is usually bad, the first version of something I draw is
| usually bad. If I don't allow myself to look stupid, even if only
| for the first draft of something, then I'll never accomplish
| anything. Doing something crappy is a means to doing something
| not-crappy.
|
| I don't think I'm alone with this. There appears to be some
| ambiguity on who actually first said this, but there's an adage
| of "There's no great writing, only good rewriting".
| mnw21cam wrote:
| It's "Cue", rather than "Queue".
| tombert wrote:
| You are right. My comprehension of words isn't always the
| best :)
| helloplanets wrote:
| This is also what's called the beginner's mind, Shoshin. [0] One
| of the core concepts of Zen Buddhism. Tangentially related would
| be the concept of no-mind, Mushin. [1]
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshin [1]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-mind
| arjie wrote:
| Realistically it's just audience capture. Happens to everyone.
| Guy makes one hit tweet. He becomes that tweet guy. Always trying
| to recapture.
|
| I like to think that my blog is mostly for my daughter to read
| and think to herself "oh that's who dad was". And secondarily for
| AI. That helps.
| cjlm wrote:
| See also: https://danluu.com/look-stupid/
| KuSpa wrote:
| What a genuine read. And it is kinda the whole reason why i
| started blogging (shameless plug: stupid-ideas.com). You never
| git gud if you never start. And you innevitably look stupid to
| some people when starting.
| abcde666777 wrote:
| I don't think we ever escape the desire to avoid looking bad - we
| just recontextualize it. For instance the article is basically
| making a short vs long term argument - in the short term you
| might look foolish, but as a result you might produce something
| of value (which in the long term will make you look fantastic).
|
| So personally I prefer to frame these things that way - it's not
| that we should want to look foolish for its own sake (obviously),
| it's that part of getting anywhere in life is taking some risks
| and developing your threshold for doing so.
| Animats wrote:
| Never make it to management that way. Other people have to do the
| failing.
| PotatoShadow wrote:
| This reminded me of this essay by Isaac Asimov on creativity
|
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2014/10/20/169899/isaac-asi...
| dugidugout wrote:
| I enjoyed this read. Thank you for sharing!
| akhrail1996 wrote:
| The fear of looking stupid is basically a false positive machine.
| It optimizes so hard for not being wrong (type I error?) that it
| rejects way more ideas than it should. And most of the time the
| "that I'll look dumb" signal is just noise - nobody actually
| cares or even notices. You're always standing on the safe side of
| a threshold that's set way too conservatively.
| geocrasher wrote:
| I've never been afraid to share bad ideas because the best way to
| get to a good one is to go through the bad ones. Sometimes my bad
| ideas will spark a good idea from somebody else or sometimes it
| even turns out that my bad idea isn't bad at all and people like
| it and we end up adopting it.
|
| Either way, not being afraid to look dumb keeps the juices
| flowing. And keeps the conversation going. Or sometimes it starts
| the conversation that nobody else is willing to start.
| imiric wrote:
| Great article.
|
| I've observed this behavior at work. It doesn't present itself
| only as not sharing. People with recognition and political
| leverage can share wrong ideas confidently, and others will
| naturally follow them. If they're challenged on that idea, and
| even presented evidence that it's wrong, they often push back and
| double down on it, or don't acknowledge the correction at all.
|
| I think this is more detrimental to the team and organization
| than the fear of sharing the wrong idea. For some reason, some
| senior people will do anything to avoid losing face in public,
| yet they still seek recognition for their work.
|
| On the other hand, it is a real pleasure to work with senior
| people who can acknowledge their mistakes, are willing to learn
| from them, and course correct if needed. It shows maturity and
| humility, and sets a good example for others, which is exactly
| what good leaders should do.
| bhanuhai wrote:
| Nice work
| wcfrobert wrote:
| Good advice to the younger folks. You can afford to look stupid.
| So go ahead and do that thing you wanted to try. There's more
| acceptance because of your age. You're expected to fail in some
| ways.
|
| Once you have a mortgage, a reputation to maintain, an image of
| competence to uphold at work, you pretty much can't afford to
| look stupid in my opinion.
| Jensson wrote:
| Trump and Elon still afford to look stupid, you can do it your
| whole life.
| b3lvedere wrote:
| There's a huge 'Emperor's New Clothes' vibe going on with
| those two.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_New_Clothes
| ghywertelling wrote:
| Max Tegmark, a cosmologist and MIT professor, is known for his
| "provocative ideas" and has a self-imposed rule regarding his
| work: "Every time I've written ten mainstream papers, I allow
| myself to indulge in writing one wacky one". This approach
| allows him to pursue unconventional, "crazy" theories without
| jeopardizing his reputation as a serious scientist.
| themafia wrote:
| Intelligence and ignorance are two different things. It is a
| sign of intelligence to be able to acknowledge your ignorance
| when it exists. Then you use your intelligence to correct that.
| Even with a mortgage this has never failed me. 20 years, 2
| employers due to an ownership change, and several RIFs
| survived.
|
| The power of saying, "I don't know, but I will find out" is
| underestimated.
| shevy-java wrote:
| A certain president?
|
| However had, at any level, people may look stupid for doing
| something that was not clever. I don't think even very smart
| people are 100% of the time very clever.
| onion2k wrote:
| It's easy to look stupid with no one around (editing your own
| writing), or with someone you trust deeply (choosing what to put
| on a cake with a friend), or if you're a jellyfish apparently.
| Those are spaces with people, or jellyfish, who you trust.
|
| What's much, much harder is being willing to look stupid in front
| of people who have an interest in proving your competence (e.g. a
| manager or a customer) or who would be willing to hold it against
| you in the future (competitors, and jellyfish probably).
|
| Being OK with taking a personal knock by asking a question that
| might set you back but that moves everyone else forward is a
| superpower. If you can build enough resilience to be the person
| in the room who asks the question everyone else is probably
| wondering about, even if it makes you look bad, eventually leads
| to becoming a useful person to have around. That should always be
| the goal.
| israfilc wrote:
| So true! If you are in a relation focused environment/culture ,
| looking stupid may harm your success. Context is really
| important as you explained.
| nlawalker wrote:
| Exactly, when your paycheck depends on you not _being_ stupid,
| it takes some finesse, you can 't just ask the silly questions
| and drop the mic.
| allie1 wrote:
| I would have loved for the author to cover the 3rd category -
| people whose ego doesn't let them post anything even before
| they're known. Everyone in small towns and cities already feels
| "known" and exposed vs living in big cities like NYC.
| Razengan wrote:
| Human society is too stifled by expectations of how every
| _should_ behave, from the people who raise you and you grow up
| with and shows and movies, so much that we try to match that and
| be happy /sad/angry/prim/proper/etc. at times even when we don't
| really feel that way.
| oldestofsports wrote:
| Just a few sentences in and the author is already comparing
| himself to nobel prize winners. Love it! Nice article!
| Tazerenix wrote:
| Willingness to look stupid and intellectual self-confidence are
| two sides of the same coin.
|
| If you can find _internal_ (rather than _external_ ) reasons to
| trust/believe in your own intelligence and capabilities, it makes
| it easier to be willing to look foolish. Also, a lack of
| knowledge/ability in a new area (or even a familiar area) is not
| a sign of a lack of capability. There's a difference between
| being a novice and being an idiot. So long as your source of
| intellectual self-confidence is strong enough (say, you have made
| great intellectual achievements in some other area of your life
| unrelated to the thing you're struggling with right now) its
| irrelevant if other people think you the fool: they're simply
| mistaken, and that's no skin off your back.
| eucyclos wrote:
| Someone (supposedly) published da Vinci's to do list a while
| back, and from the snippets I read he seemed to spend most of
| his time talking to experts about subjects he didn't know much
| about. Pretty telling if true.
| luxpir wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13187316
|
| (posted many times, this has biggest comment section)
| cal_dent wrote:
| Something I was told, very luckily I now believe, early in life
| is that for the most part we are all as smartish as each other,
| the only real difference is how much attention & time you're
| willing to pay to a particular thing(s). Yes, it's glib but I
| continue to believe it holds more truth than many of us would
| like to believe
| nickvec wrote:
| Yeah, I'm not sure if it's the prevalence of AI-generated text on
| the Internet now, but I feel more motivated to just... type stuff
| out and post it now without giving it too much thought (where
| previously I would overthink things.) Could be all the Claude
| Code prompting I've been doing too? Not sure.
| famahar wrote:
| I feel more motivated to write now because a "badly" written
| text made by a human to me is always better than a "perfect"
| text completely made by AI. Everyone has their own way of
| writing. Embracing that in these times is something to find
| motivation in.
| john-j wrote:
| - Could be a much higher prevalence of badly written AI-
| generated articles, awful AI slop code etc - you know you can
| do better
|
| - Could be the opposite, the fact that a lot of what is AI-
| generated is well polished, at least on a surface - your raw
| input is distinguishable as a human and rated higher by
| yourself or others
|
| - Could be the motivation to try to keep internet human-made
| even if it seems like a lost fight
|
| - Could be the fact that people overall take less effort to
| write things as you can always polish it up with AI - some
| decide not to do that and still post it - you feel safer doing
| the same
| multidude wrote:
| YES! happens to me all the time in things big and small. At work,
| at home, with the kids, my wife, and their birthday presents. I
| once talked to a somewhat famous writer who told me this very
| thing. He said his worst critic was his inner demon biting him at
| every thought, every phrase, questioning his wording, waiting for
| the greatest possible idea, discarding all that was not
| breathtaking enough.
|
| Why do we have to be great all the time? Who is telling us to be
| best? And i know that in writing this i am pruning myself again
| trying to find the best words here.
|
| Imagine that: i want enough points for karma to be able to post
| here my greatest idea. Which ironically enough, is the best
| greatest idea i had in a loooong time, and the moment i want to
| share it i must wait to be found good enough and worth to be
| heard.
|
| I guess the only thing we can do is to disconnect our feeling of
| self worth from outside signals and be happy with the little
| things that made us smile when we did not know nor care about
| other peoples opinions.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| I'm not sure this is the same thing but I waffle between wanting
| to not look stupid and also not wanting others to think I'm not
| trying hard enough.
|
| Let's say there is something I need to do at work. I could read
| docs in the company internal site. I could read the code. Maybe
| the thing I need to do is figure out why a test is failing. It's
| possible it's failing because there's a bug in the code. It's
| possible it's failing because there is a bug in the test. It's
| possible it's failing because there's a bug in the CI/CQ. It's
| possible it's failing because some other dependency changed
| something.
|
| The question is, when do I keep digging on my own vs ask for
| guidance and how much guidance? I never have a good feeling for
| that. I kind of wish the guidance was offered or encouraged as "I
| know you're not familiar with this stuff so let me walk you
| through this issue and then hopefully you can do it on your own
| the next time". But, I never know. I feel compelled to try to
| work it out on my own. Some of that is ego, like I can't do it on
| my own I must not be as good as others on my team. But I have no
| idea how much they asked vs figured out.
|
| A few times when I do get guidance it's not enough. the person
| giving it isn't aware of all the hidden knowledge that's helping
| them figure out the issue and therefore doesn't pass it on.
| plewd wrote:
| As an intern I feel the same everyday. It feels more natural to
| me to just keep digging into the codebase until I figure
| something out instead of asking for help.
|
| Part of it is what you mentioned, as well as the fact that I
| sometimes feel bad for "wasting" a much more productive
| engineer's time.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| It's also not clear from the other side. Do you give a lot of
| guidance, so the intern becomes reliant on always having
| someone telling them what to do exactly on the micro level? Or
| let them work it out slowly, and during that process get
| familiar with the systems more closely? I find that having a
| clear task to solve actually gets me more of an understanding
| of how everything works, than reading a top-down documentation
| where I don't have any context of "why".
|
| Also interns can differ a lot. They can need different levels
| of guidance and can come with widely different levels of prior
| experience, even in unrelated debugging and troubleshooting
| like fixing network ports for LAN gaming or whatever kids these
| days might be doing. Setting up VPN to evade geoblocking or
| whatever. Others may have no idea what to even do. And those
| who can do it may take widely different time.
|
| I think an internship is, in fact, a good place to learn these
| meta-lessons too. You ask for some guidance, then you see it
| was maybe too much. Another time you don't and spend a lot of
| time, and have your supervising engineer say "oh I could have
| told you XYZ very quickly", then you update and recalibrate.
| There is no single short message that can convey this. That's
| why experience is valuable.
| otras wrote:
| As a mentor, I like to set explicit expectations for how much
| time someone should spend digging before asking for help, and I
| encourage others to do the same.
|
| For an intern or new grad whose information gathering skills
| likely have gaps they don't even know about, I'll tell them to
| come check with me if they're completely blocked and haven't
| made progress for an hour, as it's frequently a small pointer
| or hint from me that can get them back on track. As they get
| more more knowledge about the systems and experience unblocking
| themselves, this grows to half a day, a day, and more from
| there.
|
| The same applies even for experienced engineers who are new to
| the team, though the timeboxes grow much faster. There will
| always be little things to learn, and there's no point burning
| a day of chasing threads if it's some quirk in the system you
| just happen to not be aware of.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| Let me add a nuance to this after seeing the replies. I've got
| 40years of experience. I'm not an intern. I still feel this.
| Just because I could write Linux, Photoshop, or Unreal Engine
| from scratch doesn't mean I know my particular company's
| massive infrastructure or their million file code base.
| 21asdffdsa12 wrote:
| This posts observation have interesting side-effects.
| Measurements, metrics and surveillance kill creative work. And
| hierarchies and the fear of embarrassment do too. So, the more
| you try to force "excellence" into existence via external
| pressures and resource tracking, the more it disappears.
|
| Which leaves as observation, you can only do truly creative work
| - in a high trust society, where people trust you with the
| resources and leave you alone, after a initial proof of ability.
|
| Or in a truly low-trust society, where you are part the
| kleptocrat chieftain system and you just use your take to do this
| kind of work. The classic MBA process will totally destroy any
| scientific or creative institution.
| AIorNot wrote:
| This comment is spot on
| miroljub wrote:
| Nicely put. That's why most of the innovation over the
| centuries came from the high trust style societies.
|
| With the decline of trust, I fear we as a civilization are
| going into a long period of stagnation or even regression.
| Unfortunately, at this point there's no socially acceptable way
| to reverse the trend of trust destruction.
| vincnetas wrote:
| Reputation. Its a good concept. We might need to bring it
| back and not externalise it to linked-in blindly. Honour is
| also nice to have.
| miroljub wrote:
| To bring the honor system back, we need to value honor
| again as a society. Doing honorable things should be
| compensated in some tangible way, as well as doing
| dishonorable things should be punished by society.
|
| PS: I'm not talking about fake "honor" based power systems.
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| I have often thought that there should be a public ledger
| of some sort for people (powered by vouching), and then
| immediately forseen the negative externalities and
| abandoned that idea.
|
| Reputation is as harmful as it is good. Anyone who survived
| being unpopular in high school, or seen the dummies that
| can be elected in democracies, should be able to explain
| how.
|
| No, it is better to judge works by their merits than it is
| to judge people by their popularity. Though it is far more
| expensive.
| thwarted wrote:
| Popularity and reputation are not the exact same thing.
| Reputation is about trust and predictability, while
| popularity is about awareness of the person and/or their
| reputation.
|
| But your points largely stands. However, reputation is
| one of many tools that can be used to assess the
| worthiness of giving some work attention, but should be
| given a relatively low weight compared to other tools.
| Giving reputation a low, but non-zero weight allows bad
| actors to be rightfully put in their place and allows
| someone the ability and chance to "clean up" their
| reputation with effort.
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| When I first considered this in the late 90's I was
| inspired by Google's Page Rank algorithm, and wanted
| something akin to that for humans in a social network.
|
| My core idea (back in the early 00's when I cam up with
| it originally) was to identify a small cadre of
| trustworthy individuals in various sectors - lets say
| finance, computing, healthcare, etc (but more granular)
| and give them high trust (maybe a manual score of 10).
| Then let who they score, and who those people score
| "trickle down" as it does in Googles page rank. It was a
| variation on what Google later called trust rank, I
| suppose.
|
| It would have either failed to launch completely or
| turned into a dystopian nightmare akin to China's Social
| Credit System. It may have even turned out worse than
| China's system because the goals of finance do not always
| align with the goals of humanity.
|
| A more modern implementation could be built on the block
| chain and be made very profitable... while it crushes us
| all.
| pibaker wrote:
| A public ledger is antithetical to "high trust" anyway. A
| high trust society is one where you give hitchhikers
| rides without questioning too much about their
| motivations. If you have to do a criminal background
| check -- which is just another form of consulting a
| public ledger of reputations -- before letting him in
| your car, you are by definition not trusting him.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I am not sure whether we can call Ancient Athens or Early
| Modern Italy "high trust". Both were pretty warlike, though -
| another source of innovations.
|
| The fact that wars tend to result in extremely quick
| innovation cycles (both out of fear of losing and from usual
| bureaucracy being shoved away) is quite nasty ethically, but
| cannot be wished away.
|
| Neither Ukraine nor Russia are high-trust societies, but they
| have done more drone development in four years than the
| entire world together in forty.
| miroljub wrote:
| > I am not sure whether we can call Ancient Athens or Early
| Modern Italy "high trust". Both were pretty warlike, though
| - another source of innovations.
|
| The class that brought most of the innovations, citizens of
| Rome or Athens, a privileged ruling class, had a strong in-
| group honor system. The rest of the society was not so, but
| they were so divided that those other parts didn't even
| count.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Pashtuns in Afghan mountains have a strong in-group honor
| system and they are one of the least technologically
| developed societies in the world. So were many Early
| Medieval societies, where honor was _the_ only valuable
| quality a noble person could possess.
|
| Meanwhile, Early Modern Italy (Renaissance) was
| notoriously treacherous and, at the same time, very
| mentally productive.
|
| When I skim across societies and ages, that correlation
| does not seem to be there.
| themafia wrote:
| I've never understood the "high-strust/low-trust" social
| dichotomy. I've never processed "society" as a single entity,
| but a large system with many independent aspects, and my levels
| of trust vary wildly across them and over time.
|
| I'd also offer that there's no difference between "truly
| creative work" and "truly creative and profitable work" but we
| often see the two as separate because we only have convenient
| access to one or the other.
| kjksf wrote:
| It's not that complicated: statistics matter.
|
| 5% of people create 90% of the crime. Double 5% to 10% and
| you double the crime. Make it 50% and and you 10x the crime.
|
| You still have 50% of non-criminals but society with 50%
| criminals has way more crime than society with 5% criminals.
|
| You might say high-crime society is much worse than low-crime
| society even though they both have individuals that are
| criminals and non-criminals.
|
| Replace "crime" with "trust" and you understand high-trust
| vs. low-trust society. They both have individuals with
| various levels of trust, but emergent behavior driven by
| statistics creates a very different society.
|
| > there's no difference between "truly creative work" and
| "truly creative and profitable work"
|
| To state the obvious, the difference is "profit".
|
| Also I don't see you're bringing the "true scottsman"
| judgement here. What's the difference between "creative" and
| "truly creative" work. Who gets to decide what is "truly
| creative" vs. merely "creative".
| themafia wrote:
| > Replace "crime" with "trust" and you understand high-
| trust vs. low-trust society.
|
| We already have "high-crime society" and "low-crime
| society." What this has to do with overall levels of trust
| in different parts of the system, say, education, is not
| immediately clear to me. Do all high crime societies have
| untrustworthy education systems as well?
|
| > To state the obvious, the difference is "profit".
|
| To make my intention clear, the other difference is
| "popularity," which exemplifies the precise confusion I was
| reacting to.
|
| > What's the difference between "creative" and "truly
| creative" work.
|
| I didn't invoke it. The GP did. I'm willing to admit to
| whatever their subjective judgement is. I wonder if their
| connection between trust and "true creativity" is valid
| regardless of any possible definition. My gambit above was
| to openly suppose a good faith reason for the difference in
| my point of view.
| gzread wrote:
| The point was that both crime and trust are aggregate
| statistics.
| esafak wrote:
| Have you not been to any so called low trust country? The
| difference is quite apparent in how people regard each other.
| With your alias, parts of Italy would qualify.
|
| https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/12/01/where-
| mos...
| inglor_cz wrote:
| That indicates that you live in a relatively high-trust
| society. Obviously there is a spectrum and aspects, but they
| tend to correlate.
|
| I don't know of any real-world society that would be very
| high-trust in one regard (say, keeping their doors unlocked),
| but very low-trust in another (say, routinely poisoning their
| spices with lead to make them look more appealing - yes, this
| happens [0]).
|
| [0] https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/11/02/how-to-stop-
| tur...
| grigri907 wrote:
| I think you gotta define where you're drawing the box.
| Depending on the context, "society" might be your nation,
| your office, or just a 1:1 relationship with your coworker.
| ludicrousdispla wrote:
| I agree with your main points, but as I have both a BFA and an
| MBA I want to point out that the MBA focused very much on
| creating high-trust work environnments.
|
| I think there must be a better label for the process that is
| destroying scientific and creative institutions.
| vjvjvjvjghv wrote:
| Just an observation from a non-MBA. I feel that the MBA
| management class likes to create two class society where
| there is management class and a worker class. The management
| class has high trust amongst each other but no trust for the
| workers. The workers need to be controlled tightly and can't
| be trusted. They are extremely reluctant to take feedback
| from the people who do the work. Better to pay consultants a
| lot of money. I have seen that in almost every larger company
| where I was employee or contractor.
| RHSman2 wrote:
| How do you know if someone has an MBA? They'll tell you.
| gdorsi wrote:
| I see this post as something motivational around public writing
| or public speaking.
|
| It's true that the more you are afraid of expressing yourself,
| the worse your "performance" is going to be.
|
| On general work level it's different.
|
| There the trust needs to be balanced.
|
| People should feel free to express themselves, but also that
| they need to meet some certain standards of quality at work.
|
| Otherwise we may tend to relax too much and become sloppy in
| certain areas.
| timr wrote:
| > Which leaves as observation, you can only do truly creative
| work - in a high trust society, where people trust you with the
| resources and leave you alone, after a initial proof of
| ability.
|
| I don't know about "high trust", but I can say with confidence
| that the "make more mistakes" thesis misses a critical point:
| _evolutionary winnowing isn't so great if you're one of the
| thousands of "adjacent" organisms that didn't survive._ Which,
| statistically, you will be. And the people who are trusted with
| resources and squander them without results will be less
| trusted in the future [1].
|
| Point being, mistakes always have a _cost_ , and while it can
| be smart to try to minimize that cost in certain scenarios
| (amateur painting), it can be a _terrible_ idea in other
| contexts (open-heart surgery). Pick your optimization algorithm
| wisely.
|
| What you're characterizing as "low trust" is, in most cases, a
| system that isn't trying to optimize for creativity, and that's
| fine. You don't want your bank to be "creative" with
| accounting, for example.
|
| [1] Sort of. Unfortunately, humans gonna monkey, and the high-
| status monkeys get a lot of unfair credit for past successes,
| to the point of completely disregarding the true quality of
| their current work. So you see people who have lost _literally
| billions of dollars_ in comically incompetent entrepreneurial
| disasters, only to be able to run out a year later and raise
| hundreds of millions more for a random idea.
| matt3210 wrote:
| Leadership requires hourly updates all the way down to me so I
| barely get anything done
| criddell wrote:
| I always wonder how they justify stuff like that. What's the
| cost of producing those updates (including the opportunity
| cost of not doing something else) vs the value of the report?
| flats wrote:
| Interesting--this feels like a very "engineering manager" sort
| of observation that isn't actually all that generalizable.
|
| My observation is that people share incredibly creative work
| all the time in all different sorts of societies. Humans are
| inherently creative beings, and we almost always find a way.
| Certainly a person needs _some_ resources (time, most
| importantly) in order to work creatively, but confidence in
| one's abilities can and does regularly get the better of fear
| (e.g. that which can emerge from observation, measurement,
| hierarchies, etc.).
|
| I can think of countless artists--writers, musicians, visual
| artists--who have succeeded in both doing & sharing "truly
| creative work" (however that's defined) in the face of
| "success" & all of its concomitant challenges.
| mvrckhckr wrote:
| I find that restrictions not only don't kill creative work,
| they enable it. Measuring anything makes you consider
| constraints, which helps foster better creativity - at least
| for me, and I see the same in others as well.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| Restrictions have dimensions. I have enjoyed working in
| highly cooperative situations where we had restrictions of
| resources and rules but no restrictions in terms of allowing
| us to find solutions. Infact those solutions were celebrated
| by my manager who had to work within the confines of rules
| and resources defined for him. It was great fun.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| That isn't really correct.
|
| Fear of observation is highly correlated with neuroticism.
| Creativity, on the other hand, is a component of openness which
| is highly correlated with intelligence. The most creative
| people are those who measure both high intelligence and low
| neuroticism, which simultaneously are the people least
| concerned by impacts of increased observation.
|
| Furthermore, high trust social environments only contribute to
| the degree of disclosure, not creativity. In low trust social
| environments creative people remain equally creative but either
| do not openly expose their creative output or do so secretly
| for subversive purposes.
| atoav wrote:
| I teach at an art university for 8 years now. I would highly
| doubt that: _The most creative people are those who measure
| both high intelligence and low neuroticism_.
|
| In my experience that isn't the complete picture. I have met
| highly creative people who are _extremely_ (unhealthy so)
| concerned with what others think, yet go their own path
| anyways. It is true that creative people often tend to do
| things in a way that appears as if it is outside of the frame
| of normal parameters. But this isn 't so simple either,
| because maybe it is context dependent. A punk musician may
| live in disregard of the aesthetical conventions of society,
| but they also may have a traded canon of styles and works
| their own subculture. So maybe that punk doesn't care what
| society thinks about them, but they may care about what other
| punks think.
|
| My experience with hundreds of art students is that there is
| no correlation between how independent someone works and how
| creative their output is. There are many ways of producing
| interesting ideas and the lone (usually: male) genius being
| the only true way is by this point a well-refuted idea.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| I did not base my comment on personal observations. It
| comes straight from psychology and the big 5.
|
| I was also once an art student myself. Creativity extends
| far beyond individual contributions, which becomes evident
| in resource and personnel management. Creativity is highly
| correlated to openness, as is intelligence, and is least
| restricted by those who are most eager to exercise
| decisions and try new things without fear of consequence,
| whether real or perceived.
| vixen99 wrote:
| Two folk who set the direction of the modern world -
| Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin.
|
| https://historycollection.com/16-examples-of-the-madness-
| of-... https://www.science.org/content/article/origin-
| darwins-anxie...
|
| Can't vouch for the accuracy of these descriptions but
| they don't suggest lack of neuroticism however brought
| on. Bodily dysfunction of whatever kind can be causative
| of course.
| vodkadin wrote:
| Openness is on the closed minded-openness axis.
| Neuroticism is on the neurotic-stable axis. These are
| independent things. You can be highly open-minded and
| highly neurotic. I'd seriously question your
| understanding of the Big 5.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| > These are independent things.
|
| I never claimed otherwise. You have invented your own
| strawman to attack.
| vodkadin wrote:
| The logic in your OP is absolutely muddled. And it's
| evident I'm not the only one that followed your reasoning
| to you implying neuroticism is negatively correlated to
| creativity.
|
| To restate your argument: openness is correlated to
| creativity (not controversial) and being neurotic dampens
| that because you care a lot what people think (no
| evidence).
|
| There is no correlation between neuroticism and
| creativity. Neuroticism doesn't effect openness so it
| makes no sense. Either your argument is that neuroticism
| influences openness and that influences creativity or
| your argument is I just think neuroticism makes you less
| creative because I just think so. You might as well not
| even mention the Big 5 because it doesn't effect your
| last point.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| What are you talking about? In your previous comment you
| suggest I correlated neuroticism to openness, which I did
| not. Now you are claiming I correlated neuroticism to
| creativity, which I did do. Neuroticism dampens many
| things, not specifically because what other people think,
| but because it imposes hesitation and artificial
| restraints on decisions in general.
|
| In order to better understand what neuroticism really is
| and how it really works I suggest reading about the
| amygdala, gaba, fear impressions, and looping. The less a
| person is so restricted the more free they are to
| universally experiment, consider alternatives, and act.
| That is generally how people perceive creativity.
| Lalabadie wrote:
| I think the idea that one must be naturally impervious to
| shame to be "the right sort" of creative is attractive, but
| it's used to disregard the courage necessary to show
| oneself and open up in the way that builds the creator.
|
| Lots of amazing artists, creators and researchers are
| obviously highly neurotic.
| OrderlyTiamat wrote:
| This feels like it's conflating a couple of different things.
|
| Firstly, in the Big five model, which you seem to be
| referencing, openness and neuroticism are separate factors-
| Low neuroticism isn't correlated with high openness. Yes,
| since neuroticism is a negative trait, one would expect
| people low in neuroticism to do better than people who are
| high in neuroticism. This does not equate to "the most
| creative people" though.
|
| Secondly, I'd push back that people low in neuroticism would
| be "least concerned by" surveillance. While strictly
| technically true, that's not a helpful framing, as it
| seemingly implies surveillance would have a negligible
| negative impact for people low in neuroticism. If that's what
| you're implying, I'd like to see references.
|
| I'm not able to comment at all on the conclusing about
| "degree of disclosure" being moderated by trust level in
| social environment, especially how "creative people remain
| equally creative but do not openly expose their creative
| output". If true, this implies that trust in society doesn't
| impact primary (unshared) creative output at all- that's a
| very strong claim in my opinion. I'd very much like
| references on this.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| > Low neuroticism isn't correlated with high openness.
|
| I never claimed this and I have no idea why you would think
| I did.
|
| What I do know is that nearly 1 in 3 JavaScript developers,
| based upon large anonymous polls, self identify as
| autistic. If that is representative of software employment
| as a whole then software employment is full of self-
| indulgent and highly neurotic people at levels far
| exceeding the outside population. Everybody wants to think
| they are more awesome, creative, and highly intelligent
| compared to everybody else, but that is numerically
| irrational.
|
| Low neurotic people are generally less scared of just about
| everything including third party observation. Less fear and
| less anxiety is the very definition of low neuroticism.
| OrderlyTiamat wrote:
| > The most creative people are those who measure both
| high intelligence and low neuroticism
|
| You did claim this.
|
| > self identify as autistic. (...) then software
| employment is full of self-indulgent and highly neurotic
| people
|
| This is hateful and wrong. Autistic people aren't
| necessarily self indulgent, and not self evidently
| neurotic, though it happens to be the case that autistic
| people have a higher incidence of neuroticism, which is
| partially due to people describing them, for example, as
| "self indulgent".
|
| You've shifted your claims, you're not supporting your
| claims by either argument or reference, and you've added
| hateful rhetoric. This is very regrettable.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| You need to get over yourself. Autism is a medical
| diagnosis. If things like medicine and psychology and not
| reading people's comments correctly makes you sad then it
| does not matter what the comments actually say.
|
| And yes, many autistic people, though not all, are
| exceptionally self-indulgent, which just literally means
| self-preference. Its a problem of less developed
| introspection which parallels a less developed
| interpretation of social intelligence.
|
| I have not shifted my claims. I originally said people
| with fear of observation, a trait of high neuroticism, is
| a major constraint of many things including creativity. I
| also said creativity is an aspect of high openness, which
| is closely correlated to high intelligence. I never said
| neuroticism is in any correlated, either positively or
| negatively, to either openness or intelligence. I think
| you have trouble with bias, as in you want statements to
| imply something not stated.
| dominotw wrote:
| recently execs in companies think software dev isnt creative
| work because llm can churn out equivalents. So they are openly
| tracking all sorts of metrics on devs now.
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| If those metrics are good they will be able to use them to
| find out that the metrics themselves dont work.
| ferroman wrote:
| trust is very VERY expensive commodity
| fix4fun wrote:
| Fear of failure is a stumbling block for science.
|
| That's why many universities declare in their charter that
| research doesn't have to be practical. The practicality of RSA
| asymmetric encryption only became practical with the advent of
| the internet ;)
| gchamonlive wrote:
| > Fear of failure is a stumbling block for science. That's
| why many universities declare in their charter that research
| doesn't have to be practical.
|
| No, universities do that because it's limiting to only focus
| on practical science, not because scientists are afraid to
| fail. Theoretical breakthroughs often find their use in
| practice with time.
|
| Fear of failure is because we only put money on success, so
| researchers' livelihood, dignity and prestige depend on their
| research bearing fruit.
| zombot wrote:
| > after a initial proof of ability.
|
| This has just as much chilling effect. At the very least it's
| gatekeeping.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Graffiti on a bathroom stall is the purest form of art as it is
| not done for acclaim or monetary reward ... as the joke goes.
|
| But actually I don't think pressure and tracking are
| inextricably linked. The culture of experimentation is what is
| important. You can have metrics that can guide you with the
| understanding that they should not be prescriptive.
| c22 wrote:
| If it's not done for acclaim then why is it usually someone's
| handle?
| digitalsushi wrote:
| it's like bragging you're Spartacus
| jayd16 wrote:
| In this context, bathroom stall graffiti would be lewd
| limericks and the like. Tagging is different. But also it's
| just a joke.
| im3w1l wrote:
| I think the joke claimed to make a real point, and it's
| totally fair to critize that point.
| peacebeard wrote:
| We're going to have to collect data on the ratio of
| bathroom graffiti between tags and limericks.
| Anecdotally, where I live a it's mostly silly goosery.
|
| Just to be totally clear, here is an example. Please
| cover up my user name for an authentic experience.
|
| A dozen, a gross, and a score, Plus three times the
| square root of four, Divided by seven, Plus five times
| eleven, Is nine squared, and not a bit more.
| derangedHorse wrote:
| > Measurements, metrics and surveillance kill creative work
|
| No, not really. Broadly, it's not "measurements, metrics and
| surveillance" that kill creativity, it's the inability to make
| reasonable thresholds for failure. If the threshold is too low,
| one might never be able to get the critical mass of resources
| they need to achieve their task. If it's set too high, people
| will milk resources even when they have no creativity left to
| give to an unsolved problem.
| arabinda wrote:
| It is probably the most difficult and the most important life
| skill you need to develop
| samitugal wrote:
| It's actually a blessing when people don't have huge expectations
| of you. The higher their expectations get, the more your stress
| increases and your productivity drops. Forever the underdog :)
| Jur wrote:
| I like this post, and reality is of course more nuanced. You can
| read it between the lines of this article as well: by taking
| smaller more frquent steps (posting more regularly in context of
| the article) you can recover faster and and try more ideas in a
| short amount of time. I guess this is also what a lot of modern
| development methodologies and start-up mentality rely on too, so
| I hardly think I'm sharing something new. Still, if you have the
| option to make your attempt smaller it's generally worth it.
|
| Of course you still have to take the plunge no matter how small.
| karolusrex wrote:
| There is sibling concept of the Nobel prize winner ending up
| doing less meaningful work after they received their price. In
| history there are countless examples of the underdog emerging
| from the shadows and the dominant empire collapsing under its own
| weight; a natural rotation of roles. It is explained in detail
| here: https://youtu.be/ybufqRY77PQ
| WalterBright wrote:
| Young people care what others think of them.
|
| Middle age people don't care what others think of them.
|
| Old people know nobody thinks about them.
| sonofhans wrote:
| Ward said it succinctly, as was his wont: "The best way to get
| the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it's
| to post the wrong answer."
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law
| bear141 wrote:
| Reading this makes me think of the effect of doing something you
| do all the time, and are pretty great at, but when someone is
| watching you, you inevitably make a stupid mistake.
|
| It also makes me think of certain people that attain the level of
| fame where everything they do is praised, whether it is
| objectively good or not.
| teekert wrote:
| I think I was 35 when I first said to myself: "When you don't
| understand something, it's either because it's difficult, or
| because you don't have all information you need yet."
|
| Being able to think this (and really feel it) was a big step for
| me. I think objectively I was always quite smart and also highly
| educated but I still felt like an imposter. It's nice when you
| finally feel that trust in yourself. And indeed I probably
| sometimes look stupid, but I think I often come back quickly in
| smart ways afterwards anyway, so I don't care so much about it.
| satisfice wrote:
| "Fragile ego" is such a tired trope. It is certainly a factor,
| but its effects are way overestimated. Something about "fragile
| ego" seems to stop people from thinking any further.
|
| "Looking stupid" has an obvious downside. Just restate it as
| "proven incompetent." If you are proven incompetent within your
| social group, you lose your power. Loss of power has terrible
| consequences! Duh!
|
| When someone blames fragile ego, which is equivalent to saying
| "fear of losing self-respect" but ignores "being ostracized from
| access to resources and influence by people you depend upon and
| respect" I might conclude that I should ignore what that person
| thinks, because maybe they have a thinking impairment. (See how
| that works?)
|
| Young people are not trying things because they are fearless, nor
| do they have bullet-proof egos, they are trying things because
| they really are stupid (in a gentle manner of speaking). They
| don't know as much as they will know. Also, they know they have
| no social status and they must take risks to prove themselves.
|
| Finally, they do it because they have nothing else to do and
| nothing else to protect.
| bob1029 wrote:
| > The overwhelming majority of mutations end up being harmful or
| neutral. An exceedingly small fraction are beneficial.
|
| Neutral drift is perhaps the most important part of evolution.
| It's how you preserve diversity over time and avoid getting stuck
| in holes in the fitness landscape.
|
| If we only ever made steps that improved performance we'd
| inevitably see premature convergence. The neutral drift can
| overpower progress toward a global minimum, but it's a lot better
| to be going in circles than to not be moving at all. Diversity
| collapse is the worst thing that can happen to an evolutionary
| algorithm. You must reject superior solutions with some
| probability in order to make it to the next step. You can always
| change your selection pressure. You can't fix information that
| doesn't exist anymore.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _You can 't fix information that doesn't exist anymore._"
|
| Assuming there's no Deity or similar outside power seeding the
| initial system with information that can only be lost and never
| gained, then any information in the evolutionary system got
| there by some process that happened once, and presumably can
| happen again and fix (rediscover) the lost information?
| bob1029 wrote:
| The first law of thermodynamics has a pretty strong take on
| this one.
| bnlxbnlx wrote:
| > I keep thinking about the version of me from a few years ago.
| He was worse at almost everything. Worse writer, worse thinker,
| worse at making things. Nobody really knew him and nobody really
| cared what he had to say. And yet he had so much more courage.
|
| I would not agree that that earlier version had necessarily more
| courage. If no one cared than the associated risk is also lower,
| and thus less courage needed.
|
| I overall agree with how important the courage to do stuff that
| might make you look stupid is, though.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> Just this: are you willing to look stupid today? That's it.
| That's all there is to it._
|
| That's always been one of my strengths. I used to ask questions
| in classes, that would have the teacher look at me, like I was a
| dunce, and the rest of the students in stitches. It has always
| been important for me to _completely understand_ whatever I'm
| learning. I can't deal with "God said it, I believe it, and that
| settles it." I have to really know _why_ ; not just _what_.
|
| By the end of the class, the other students would be asking me
| for help, and no one was laughing at me. I tended to get good
| grades.
|
| The worst teacher that I ever had, was a genius mathematician,
| who shut me down, when I did that. It was the only incomplete
| that I ever had. The best teachers would wince, but treat the
| question as a serious one.
|
| One of the really nice things about using an LLM, is not having
| to deal with sneering.
| balamatom wrote:
| Need someone to look stupid for me, $100/hr.
| nephihaha wrote:
| Court jester?
| PeterUstinox wrote:
| This reminds me of "McDonald's Theory":
| https://jonbell.medium.com/mcdonalds-theory-9216e1c9da7d
| juleiie wrote:
| What has potential AGI teached me is that no matter what I write,
| as long as I do it manually, it has value. Not because it is good
| but because it is genuine.
|
| Before LLMs I would never think that what I have to say is
| valuable in any way. Now I realize my every comment, my every
| human input to the global internet and society is infinitely more
| valuable than ai slop.
|
| This has really given me a jolt I needed and confidence to freely
| voice anything anywhere knowing that I make a difference against
| the flood of auto generated soulless garbage.
|
| Flaws in human writing aren't an issue, they are the very feature
| I look for. These exaggerations, hyperboles, emotions. It's all
| unmistakably human.
|
| Even 4chan is an oasis of humanity in that way. Indeed it is
| bristling with genuine creativity despite its sole ingredient is
| 100% human flaws. No preservatives, no artificial sweeteners.
|
| Holy shit I really wrote it quite fun, I encourage everyone to do
| the same have some fun writing because each one of us is now
| highly valued artist in a flood of ai slop literally no matter
| what you type I want to read your flawed shit.
| CM30 wrote:
| Gonna be a bit controversial here, and say that sometimes the
| opposite can happen. That someone becoming successful can give
| them the confidence to share ideas they wouldn't have shared
| otherwise, and give ideas that people would have otherwise
| written off as 'ridiculous' a level of extra credibility in the
| process.
|
| And that can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, a lot of
| ideas put forward by successful companies and business people
| (like many from Apple or Google or Nintendo or whatever else)
| would never get off the ground if put forward by a random
| individual or company, and that risk taking gets us results that
| make the world better off.
|
| At the same time though, there are a lot of successful people and
| companies that get hung up on 'bad' ideas that should have been
| shot down earlier. Like ex Nobel Prize winners that get into
| psudeoscience or grand overarching theories of everything,
| popular artists and creators that get away with shaky writing and
| uninteresting story concepts (George Lucas and the Star Wars
| prequels, JK Rowling after Harry Potter, etc) or any number of
| celebrities and politicians completely detached from reality.
|
| So, there is a flipside to the article. Yeah, success can make
| you less likely to try stupid things because of your ego, but it
| can equally make you more likely to try them since your status
| gives you extra credibility and there's often no one there to
| tell you no.
| tamimio wrote:
| > Overshare, but look stupid
|
| I am definitely positioning myself in this category, even here in
| HN discussions, I prefer to do so rather than overthinking and
| undersharing. The reason was because few years ago I had an
| interview, and the company saw my portfolio and the work I did
| and they were overhyped about having me, they gave me 5 stars
| service to get me to the company HQ for the interview, but in
| real life I am too humble and not much of an over seller of
| myself, so the bar they had about me was waaay higher than how I
| was IRL, and got rejected haha, it was brutal rejection because I
| really wanted to work there and they evaluated me based on the
| few hours interaction rather than what I am able to do. Since
| then I try to keep the bar low early on and take it from there.
| chris_money202 wrote:
| There's different levels to stupidity as well, coming up with a
| "bad" idea, writing a very brief prototype of it, and presenting
| it to a senior for feedback is one level that is typically
| harmless. Coming up with a "bad" idea, going skunkworks on it and
| when you think you have something demoing it to many seniors and
| managers and showing them you've been working out of scope for a
| month on a bad side project that doesn't work while the rest of
| the team is burdened in tasks is another much higher level
| nephihaha wrote:
| "There's this unfortunate pattern that happens when someone wins
| a Nobel Prize. They tend to stop doing great work."
|
| That is as true of literature as of science. It is not just some
| curse, but rather because they tend to get recognised after their
| peak anyway.
| beaker52 wrote:
| I don't mind looking stupid. It's actually an important part of
| my identity - I lay my humanity bare. I am of flesh after all.
|
| I'm starting to suspect that it's making it more difficult for me
| to land a job though. I don't know. There's something about it.
| It's almost as if businesses aren't hiring human beings, but I
| can't quite put my finger on it.
| nsavage wrote:
| Reminds me of the Dan Luu article from a few years ago:
| https://danluu.com/look-stupid/
| adverbly wrote:
| I have very little pride or shame.
|
| It's a superpower.
|
| Look like an idiot and you'll learn the fastest!
| herbertl wrote:
| > So instead of trying and occasionally failing, they just...
| stop trying. The fear of making something bad is worse than
| producing nothing at all.
|
| "Loosening up" is a way to describe this skill.
|
| It reminds me of a story from Richard Feynman. In his book,
| Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, he recalls an art class when
| he was instructed to draw without looking at the paper. The first
| time he did it, his pencil broke at the very beginning and he had
| nothing but impressions in his paper.
|
| The second time he did it, he was impressed with the results,
| noticing a "funny, semi-Picasso like strength" in his work.
|
| He knew that it would be impossible to draw well without looking
| at the paper, so he didn't consciously try. He writes, "I had
| thought that 'loosen up' meant 'make sloppy drawings,' but it
| really meant to relax and not worry about how the drawing is
| going to come out."
|
| Being allowed to fail is a condition for your mind to want to try
| new ideas. I elaborate on this here in my book, Creative Doing:
| https://www.holloway.com/g/creative-doing/sections/relinquis...
|
| There is a lot I like about this post, including the author's
| intuition to invoke the jellyfish.
|
| A lion's mane jellyfish can release up to 45,000 eggs per day.
| The jellyfish's strategy is to lay as many eggs as possible and
| leave them to fend for themselves. Most of these eggs don't
| survive, probably fewer than 0.1%.
|
| Compare this with an elephant, which can only give birth to one
| calf at a time. The elephant's strategy is to dedicate its effort
| into raising a relatively small number of calves. Many of these
| calves survive to see adulthood. This approach might sound
| familiar because it's how we raise our kids as well.
|
| If you're feeling stuck, and unwilling to look stupid, maybe it's
| time to approach your creative ideas less like an elephant and
| more like a jellyfish. I write more about this here:
| https://herbertlui.net/the-jellyfish-knows-how-to-survive-un...
|
| The advantage to writing a blog, nowadays, is because your
| writing will be so difficult hard to discover, you can put all
| your ideas out there--good and bad--and only become known for the
| good ones. (That's what I'm hoping to do!)
|
| In other words, "Publish everything, promote selectively"
| (Elaborated on this here: https://herbertlui.net/publish-
| everything-promote-selectivel...)
| grvdrm wrote:
| Looks like a fresh take on the topic.
|
| But I was reminded immediately of this Dan Luu post with the same
| title.
|
| https://danluu.com/look-stupid/
| ontouchstart wrote:
| The epiphany for me this week was a long list of rabbit holes
| from this long post:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47324054
|
| https://medium.com/@acidflask/this-guys-arrogance-takes-your...
|
| https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/E...
|
| https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD638...
|
| https://www.cs.umd.edu/~gasarch/BLOGPAPERS/social.pdf
|
| https://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2021/06/i-went-to-d...
|
| https://6826.csail.mit.edu/2020/papers/noproof.pdf
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9948767
|
| Now I have no illusions about who looked stupid and who were
| stupid. It really doesn't matter.
|
| The jury is still out.
| coffeemug wrote:
| _> Now I have no illusions about who looked stupid and who were
| stupid._
|
| Could you expand on what you mean?
| ontouchstart wrote:
| Stupid/smart are social construct and illusions.
|
| The reality is different.
| kalimatas wrote:
| On top of fear of looking stupid, my bigger concern is lack of
| novelty in my work. Seems like any idea I have for a blog post or
| book, or any photo I'm planning has already been explored in
| depths by someone else. I know the joy is in the process mostly,
| not the result. But doing something while knowing it is certainly
| not original make it really hard.
| Lalabadie wrote:
| You shouldn't disregard that even when you have the same intent
| as someone else, you work _your way_ to get there, and that 's
| usually more than enough to build a distinction.
| t43562 wrote:
| It probably has. It's super difficult to be truly unique in a
| world where billions have learned to read and write. It doesn't
| matter however. The people who see your work haven't seen/read
| everything out there. You can be unique for them.
| what-ifs wrote:
| In this comment I'll use the words useless and "useless". The
| former's definition is the one we are most familiar with, while
| the latter, in quotation marks, is the literal definition if you
| break the word useless into its two components: use + less. So we
| have of no use whatsoever and of less use. Reminder: I am not
| using these words as insults, but rather neutrally. Also, I am
| using the general "you" here, similar to using "one", rather than
| referring to the reader or the author of the article in specific.
|
| The problem with this article is that you're telling yourself
| you're not afraid of stupidity, which in this case is synonymous
| to incompetence or uselessness, yet your endgoal betrays
| otherwise. You're presenting a bunch of ideas that are 'useless'
| hoping amongst them is one of more use, hoping it all ties
| together and produces a wonderful result, as you get to yell
| "eureka". You do not want to accept uselessness, but to set your
| expectations of yourself, that either you or another person or
| persons have imposed, lower, back to where they once were. Or
| even lower. The reason your or another's expectations of you have
| risen after becoming older, as many comments have also wrote, is
| because your effort is being externally recognized by others,
| either by a Nobel price or a promotion. Regardless, your issue is
| self-esteem related. To combat lower(ing) self-esteem or
| insecurity, (and even accept uselessness!), you must love
| yourself.
|
| Now a question: have you ever loved someone you didn't know at
| all? I don't mean in the physical sort of attraction, I mean
| someone that you knew nothing about whatsoever, not even how they
| look or act. It's impossible, isn't it? It is those we know the
| best that we feel love for, is it not? Now consider what the
| opposite of insecurity is. Security in one's abilities and self,
| knowledge of one's limits as well as one's capabilities, and an
| acceptance of who one is. The more one grows, the more they
| change, so it is possible to know oneself and then not, as it is
| also possible the view others have make one to muddle their own
| perception. You won't find confident people who aren't aware of
| their own abilities or cannot accurately access what tools they
| have at their disposal. Confidence in abilities one doesn't have
| is not confidence, but overconfidence, and overconfidence is
| false confidence, which is as maladaptive as insecurity. I'll
| focus on those with low self esteem, because you fall into that
| category; these people are aware of their shortcomings or their
| potential shortcomings, their 'uselessness', because the higher
| you are the easier it is to fall, perhaps even inflate how many
| shortcomings they have. When you accept your "uselessness" you
| may produce some bad ideas, a few good ones, but in the end the
| fact that you're ok with it it makes you feel less distress about
| yourself, does it not?
|
| Tie these together; you cannot love someone you do not know, and
| people who love themselves know their limits and what they can
| achieve, to be insecure is to misjudge your achievements, so
| because of this I assume, could be wrong, you do not love
| yourself enough. And watch, I said "enough", because knowing
| oneself completely is impossible. Similar to how reaching the
| truth is impossible, but becoming less wrong isn't.
|
| Now uselessness. No one likes being bad at something; even babies
| are afraid of failure. I do not remember my time as a baby, but I
| remember being frustrated when I couldn't do certain things, like
| reaching a high place, as a toddler. Perhaps one of the reasons
| babies cry is because they cannot move their legs by their will.
| "Uselessness" can be overcome, but sometimes one may be actually
| useless and never learn how to walk. Does it sting, being called
| useless? I don't mean it as an insult here. I am using the
| literal definition of the word; complete inability to do
| something, rather than partial/subpar. It stings because it has
| been instilled on one that incompetence is negative, and thus
| something that should not be a part of you, a flaw needing
| purification. But if incompetence didn't exist, neither would
| competence, similarly to how life wouldn't be valuable without
| death or happiness without sadness.
|
| However I like the gist and the thought behind this article.
|
| Overall, I think acceptance that one might be unable to do
| certain things, can make one's life easier. The bad ideas you
| produce are as much of a part of you as your good ones. And
| accepting both is crucial.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Plot twist: anything original will look stupid, until some
| cultural event makes the original thing the new "way," then all
| the small minds will act like that was the only way the thing
| should have been done all along.
|
| "The emperor has no clothes" is a much deeper story about society
| and human nature than people realize.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > Plot twist: anything original will look stupid
|
| Clearly not true, lots of original things that instead looks
| like "Ah yeah, obviously, duh!" once they're public, rather
| than looking stupid. Browsers/WWW, the iPhone and putting
| wheels on suitcases are things that come into mind that the
| amount of people thought "looked stupid" was very low, and they
| became very popular relatively quickly.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Those things are all incremental improvements based on
| existing patterns that people were familiar with. Also, Apple
| is the king of "no clothes". People shill Apple products even
| when they suck.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > Those things are all incremental improvements based on
| existing patterns that people were familiar with
|
| So what in your mind has ever been "truly original" then
| that someone couldn't argue is just "incremental
| improvements" instead?
|
| > People shill Apple products even when they suck.
|
| I agree, but don't think I'm doing so myself here.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Look at Vincent Van Gogh's art. He didn't sell shit
| except to his own brother in life, people hated it. Fast
| forward to now and his art is among the most valuable in
| the world, and people consider him one of the greatest
| geniuses of all time.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| How is one person's art not just incremental improvement
| on other's art? I expected some actually insightful
| answer, not just "Person Bs media creation was better
| than Person's A media", does that really count as "truly
| original" in your mind here? Yet browsers/WWW was just an
| incremental improvement? I'm sorry but I'm really
| confused now, sounds like we're really talking past each
| other here.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Browsers are just better gopher. If the WWW hadn't
| existed, we'd have xGopher 8.0 NG and our user experience
| would be mostly the same. Evolutionary pressures drive
| convergent evolution to stable solutions. We're on a
| technological gradient, and these things are incremental
| jumps driven by common human need (otherwise they
| wouldn't gain traction).
|
| Creativity at the deepest level is seeing the cultural
| slope you're doing gradient descent on, and taking a hard
| left through the trees to a hidden slope that's way
| better rather than the one you were on.
|
| I like Van Gogh as an example because of how hard he
| failed and the cultural U-turn, but hostility towards
| things that challenge the entrenched paradigm is a common
| response. Maybe Einstein and relativity is a more
| relevant example for you. People didn't read it at first
| and nod their heads, thinking to themselves "yes, of
| course!"
| r_lee wrote:
| I think the best example for this are the Airpods
|
| like, it was such a joke at first but then it just became the
| "new normal"
| jgwil2 wrote:
| I remember thinking that wheeled suitcases were funny the
| first time I saw them. How silly I was...
| gzread wrote:
| I got a pair of airpod clones on a whim (they were only $20
| in the impulse buy section). Sure, they have less cable, but
| keeping them charged is very annoying, especially if wearing
| them for a long stretch of time. The charging contacts also
| tend to oxidize and not make good contact, but that's
| probably because they're a cheap clone. I find wired
| earphones are more convenient for long stretches because they
| draw power from my phone. I also know the wired earphones
| don't broadcast a tracking signal.
| r_lee wrote:
| you can always buy a BT receiver and get the best audio
| quality/flexibility while mostly retaining the convenience
| taintlord wrote:
| What if the emperor had no clothes but he has a monster cock
| swanging left to right dickslapping the citizens as he walks by
|
| They would be like Sir, Hey put that huge dick away you're
| scaring people
|
| There would be a different lesson, is all I'm saying
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| I'm pretty sure this comment is going to get flagged, but I
| hope not because it's really funny.
| calebm wrote:
| "Failure is the mother of success."
| ge96 wrote:
| My burner account here, I be stupid so I learn
| NoSalt wrote:
| I am immune to this as I will never be "great" at anything. I am
| average, and I am OK with that.
| saimiam wrote:
| The trouble is that no one has a cogent definition of creativity.
| Without that, how would you even know whether you are being
| creative or not?
|
| Or is it like "I'll know it when it see it" smut?
| Lliora wrote:
| The most valuable debugging skill I learned in 15 years: asking
| "dumb" questions out loud. Last month I spent 3 hours chasing a
| race condition that disappeared the moment I explained the code
| to a junior dev who asked "why are we using a global here?" The
| willingness to look stupid just saved us from shipping a critical
| bug.
| pooplord69 wrote:
| It's not only a moat but a filter.
|
| It tells me immediately up front if they're a retard in
| competition with me or a retard I can work with.
| xkbarkar wrote:
| The best teams are the ones where "stupid" questions are always
| alowed.
|
| The worst ones are the teams where members treat everyone as
| stupid
|
| The absolute best will generate a creative discussion around a
| "stupid" question.
|
| The absolute worst will deliberately mislead collegues to make
| them look stupid.
| jrwan wrote:
| When I seen the title I thought it's https://danluu.com/look-
| stupid/.
|
| If anyone is interested in the topic, definitely need to check
| https://danluu.com/look-stupid/.
| matt-alive wrote:
| I really liked this article, thanks Samin
| swed420 wrote:
| > There might be a good reason why smart people want to avoid
| looking stupid. I've spent a long time thinking about what this
| reason could be. The only plausible explanation is that our egos
| are fragile, and by not sharing any work at all, we never have to
| risk our egos being damaged. If we never share anything, then
| nothing bad can ever happen to us. But the flip side to
| protecting our egos is that we never end up making anything
| worthwhile.
|
| This seems oversimplified, since there's a second, unmentioned
| possibility that somebody doesn't share an idea:
|
| In a capitalist society, people sense there could be monetary
| potential with their idea, so they sit on it quietly (often never
| getting around to developing it, etc).
|
| This fear has been amplified in recent years with AI vacuuming up
| everybody's intellectual property with zero reward. Can't really
| blame people for doing nothing in such conditions.
|
| And for the commenters complaining about "low/high trust
| societies," they ought to consider factoring the above into their
| definition.
| cushychicken wrote:
| _A few weeks ago my friend Aadil and I were at Whole Foods buying
| a birthday cake for a friend. We wanted to write something clever
| on the cake but couldn't really think of anything. We stood
| around thinking for a few minutes before Aadil said "Let's just
| say a bunch of bad ideas out loud so we can get to the good
| ones." And it worked!_
|
| It's a well known creative / brainstorming trick that the best
| way to have a lot of _good_ ideas is to have a _lot_ of ideas.
|
| Focus on genesis decoupled from critique, then critique later.
| bitroughj wrote:
| Been out here lookin stupid since before I wasn't and yet very
| few upvotes. Whst does that tell you?
| keithxm23 wrote:
| "The biggest things in life have been achieved by people who, at
| the start, we would have judged crazy. And yet if they had not
| had these crazy ideas the world would have been more stupid." -
| Arsene Wenger
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I see it as more of a function of age/experience.
|
| Whey you are young and inexperienced, you don't know enough to
| know somethig is a "bad" idea.
|
| When you are older and experienced, you've seen a lot of bad
| ideas and you worry about it because you don't want to look bad
| among your peers.
|
| When you are much older, you don't give a shit. You know that
| none of it really matters and when you are dead nobody is going
| to be talking about all the bad ideas you had.
| mygooch wrote:
| People in their 20s care way too much about reputation and ego
| - as did I when I was in my 20s. So much that it's paralyzing.
| It will prevent them from saying or doing the things they
| really need to say and do.
| paultopia wrote:
| Successful professor with a very theoretical (as opposed to
| empirical) research trajectory here: this feels extremely
| accurate to me.
|
| I see this with students all the time: they're so afraid of
| making mistakes that they refuse to write anything.
|
| I often say "I think in print." If I believe something is true
| and I can defend it, I publish it. If it turns out to be wrong,
| fine, I'll correct it in the next paper and the conversation has
| moved forward. Nobody is going to think I'm an idiot for being
| wrong.
|
| This, however, might work better the more senior one is. There
| may be a failure mode, at least in academia, where you start
| publishing mistakes and lose all credibility. But then again, I
| know a lot of people who have published a lot of mistakes
| starting young and who seem to still be doing fine, so... perhaps
| not!
| agcat wrote:
| This is true. It's okay to overshare and look stupid.
| MoltenMan wrote:
| While I don't necessarily disagree with this, I also wonder how
| much his 'data' about Nobel Prize winners and Institute of
| Princeton grads actually holds up vs how much of it is just very
| expected regression to the mean. He talks about Shannon; at some
| point Shannon was always going to have his last great idea. Given
| that the idea that made him famous was his greatest, you wouldn't
| expect many other ideas like that just from normal variation.
|
| Essentially, if you take scientific ideas, including Nobel Prize
| ideas, and put them all on a bell curve of how difficult it is to
| find them, you wouldn't expect the same person to have multiple
| ideas all the way on the right, even if they are very above
| average.
| lutusp wrote:
| It's true that a Nobel prize can blunt a scientist's
| productivity, but for balance, the kind of extraordinary result
| that merits a Nobel might also not be replicable in one
| scientist's career, regardless of how the world reacts to it.
|
| We would need to compare career trajectories of productive
| scientists who did, and didn't, receive that class of
| recognition, see whether this disruption changed a person's
| ability to function.
|
| But if a Nobel prematurely blunts a person's productivity, that
| might sometimes turn out to be a good thing. Consider Antonio
| Egas Moniz, whose career seems to have withered after his 1949
| Nobel. Such a shame, really -- Moniz invented the Lobotomy,
| eventually applied to roughly 40,000 unruly, hard-to-manage
| mental patients, many of whom became quite docile, assuming they
| lived through the procedure.
|
| Without Moniz' Nobel, who knows what might have happened? What
| might Moniz have created, had the world not thanked him so
| profusely for his breakthrough procedure?
| tyleo wrote:
| I have a principle similar to this. The First Idiot Principle:
| never be afraid to be the first idiot in the room. Usually others
| have the same reservations you do about sharing.
|
| If you want to hear more I wrote a small post.
|
| https://www.tyleo.com/blog/the-first-idiot-principle
| mygooch wrote:
| I have no problem being the first, it's that I'm also the ~3rd,
| ~9th, ~24th and then they realize, wait, he's not a creative
| genius at all, we hired a total fucking retard!
|
| Just when they give up on you hit em with a masterpiece.
|
| You can roil economies by acting like this.
| erikerikson wrote:
| > they just... stop trying
|
| This foundational premise seems flawed. Surely there are
| pressures but it's a privilege hypothesis used to write the piece
| so the objection is important.
|
| Once you achieve notoriety the world changes around you. Not only
| that but by the time achieve notoriety the world already changed
| around you. The lead time to novel prize is high.
|
| Just to be concrete about one way the world changes is that
| you're no longer a great student with time to while away. Now
| everybody wants to congratulate you and learn your theory from
| you. They won't leave you the f** alone. When you were just some
| random promising grad student, you had mental quiet and peace.
| Academia, industries, responsibilities, they take that away.
|
| And let's be fair, if you've done Nobel worthy work, then you've
| contributed enough that you deserve to just slack off and be left
| in peace for the rest of your life.
| lkm0 wrote:
| It is sort of funny to think of Nobel prize level work in
| relation to blogposting. A couple of examples that don't conform:
| Marie Curie won another prize. Josephson in general (check him
| out). Feynman did greatly contribute to other fields after his
| prize. You can find as many counterexamples as examples if you
| dig a bit. I've witnessed a few times that looking like an idiot
| is the least of their concern.
| 1johnny wrote:
| yep; happened to me, too;
|
| I just feel that having fun doing what you're (becoming) good at
| should never be ruined by extra pressure from other people or
| even from yourself.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| This was on a poster in my 8th grade English teacher's class:
|
| "He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes. He who does
| not know and does not ask remains a fool forever."
|
| Becoming proficient enough in my professional life such that I no
| longer felt anxiety about admitting what I did not know through
| asking questions was a massive achievement. Fortunately, I
| learned that lesson well and started applying it everywhere, not
| just in my work.
| forinti wrote:
| I make it very clear to those around me that no question is too
| stupid to be asked and nobody is going to be reprimanded for
| asking basic questions.
|
| I once had an awful manager (a terrible human being overall)
| who wanted to censure people for their questions; I'm pretty
| sure he was trying to hide his insecurities and was actually in
| panic that his project decisions would be revised.
|
| So I really don't want that kind of environment where I work.
|
| PS. And that is the exact phrase I often use.
| schnau_software wrote:
| dude's RSS feeds return 404
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-03-13 23:01 UTC)