This has happened to me frequently at my current company. I get pulled into a meeting about something that I have no context on because it touches my area of expertise, and the discussions have apparently been stalling out.
I brace myself to be the idiot. I'm going to waste everyone's time asking questions that everyone knows the answer to, and I just got looped in, so everyone's going to feel like they need to walk through all the super-obvious stuff to satisfy the one guy who didn't do his homework.
So I start asking questions, and slowly begin to realize that nobody in the room has any idea what they are talking about. That there are fundamental misunderstandings and misconceptions about existing systems. And, naturally, it turns out that the questions I have are questions that other people have.
This has happened to me so often now that you would think the sinking feeling I get before I brace myself to look stupid would go away, but it never does.
One of the best people I've ever worked with used this approach. "I'm going to ask stupid questions now." and "Just so I'm understanding the problem, <here's my interpretation of what you just said>." were two phrases she used all the time.
I am surprised at how difficult it has been to emulate her technique. Feeling comfortable asking the obvious questions is one half of the battle, but the other, more difficult half, is knowing what obvious questions to ask. Most of the time when I ask obvious questions, the replies are yes/no. She knew how to ask them in such a way that gets the person talking in greater detail.
It's kind of like being a great interviewer, there's a technique to asking questions in a manner which gets someone talking.
VP in my org does this, and it really disarms the room.
She’s big on that exact phrase of “this could be a really stupid question, but…”
She’s also really good about making sure other people are rewarded for doing the same by reassuring someone asking what might be a dumb question as, “that’s a a great question and I’m sure others were wondering the same…” before responding.
In the group where I did my PhD, one of the professors would do this (but without pre-announcing). He would start with really basic questions and gradually build up to more complex questions.
This was great for two reasons: 1. it builds up large common ground for understanding; 2. if someone in a leadership position does this, others will not feel ashamed of asking questions that they think may be basic.
An EVP of Ops of a fortune 500 did this to an entire room of functional experts.
We were there to discuss a technical implementation.
She kicked it off by saying "Let me start by asking a simple question, why do we do this function?"
I am now considered a domain expert. I love this question. It surprises me at how few people start with the why, or even can articulate the why.
The room of experts, were assembled to roll out a new product in their area of functional expertise. None of us had an articulate answer as to the why. She kept on asking. She gently challenged bad answers with a follow up why. Then when everyone gave up, she gave her answer as to the why. It was brilliant.
Always start with the why. Then ask why again. Keep on asking until you understand why.
There is an interrogation technique called Five Whys. I believe it was created by S. Toyoda, and was and very is effective in root cause analysis. The basic idea was to ask a question and follow up with "Why?" until an answer contained an alterable behavior... that answer would usually come with the fifth why. Once in a while I use it in a business meetings, and as long as the person who is being questioned doesn't get defensive or hostile, it is surprisingly effective.
5 Whys is great for getting depth into one causal subtree, but based on a paper I once read, answers can lack breadth when there is more than one cause (which is often the case). It said that "Why" is often best answered with a directed acyclic graph of causal relationships.
(Though when I tried to use a causal DAG for root cause analysis of an incident at my current company, I was told that I was wasting time and no one cares. But I thought the data I found was pretty interesting and worth exploring.)
Similar here. Was pumped in an RCA with "why?" multiple times. The 'root cause' was I fucked up and missed something. But that was because "prod was broken right then, fix ASAP!" and no one else understands the problem, and we're understaffed, and people 'reviewed' the code without understanding what it was doing (or why) and one 'fix' led to another problem, and that 'fix' led to a third, and trying to explain this in an 'RCA' meeting confused the heck out of everyone because there were 3 different days/times people saw the problem, and could not understand it was one original thing that triggered, with cascading problems in the 'fixes', etc.
You keep asking "why?" and only want one 'thing' to be 'actionable'... you will raise my frustration level. The root cause is an emergent property of understaffing, poor communication practices and a belief that everything can be reduced to a jira card providing sufficient context and understanding for a diverse audience with different skills and needs.
In a japanese company that I worked at previously, answering RCA must be clear and in detail way. I got used to it so when I explain something to people, I want them to NOT ask any further question again because I compiled all the information they needed, including prevention. Their next response should be "got it understood" or clarifying their action. Other than that, I think I failed to explain things in a very basic way
> The 'root cause' was I fucked up and missed something.
It's really hard to do RCA when people are blaming themselves. It had to suck to be in that meeting. A really good RCA isn't about finding a single actionable thing, it's about finding our what the root cause of the problem is... which in this case, might have been whatever originally broke production and caused an emergency fix that failed three times.
"It's really hard to do RCA when people are blaming themselves"
Often, the root cause is someone made a mistake. You can say there should have been other systems to prevent/review/etc, but the root cause is a mistake a person made. You can '5 whys' it to death, but I made a mistake (or... someone did).
"whatever originally broke production" - in this case, I made a mistake. That mistake wasn't caught until production. Then the fixes were all broken too.
I don't always blame myself for everything, but if I've made a mistake, I'll own up to it. For me, it helps me be aware of what I can do to avoid those in the future. This may or may not be some rca-checklist other people can refer to, because... it's not 'actionable' to anyone but me.
If it was just a setup to eventually providing an answer she already had in her pocket, is that the same thing really that's being discussed? Willingness to look stupid and earnestness to find an answer?
Sounds a bit like the Socratic method [1], just used for making sure everyone is aligned with the fundamental goals.
As someone who's recently been put in a position to make sure everyone's aligned (and failing quite a bit at it), it sounds like genius, in my opinion.
I like to assume everyone has a positive intent, until proven otherwise.
I always ask people why, because I sometimes learn something new, I often learn about the knowledge level of the other participants, and it anchors everyone to the fundamental problem we are trying to solve.
It may be that along the course of asking why 10 different times from different people she was able to identify the answer. It sounds like she got quite a few fragments of answers first.
I love these examples, they helped me realize that I'll often preface "this could be a really stupid question" and then ask the question—even though I'm quite confident I already know the answer—because I had sensed that other people in the room might have been feeling lost. I actually do this quite often, even when I'm hearing two people talk with each other but actually talking past each other.
Also, I just took a training and observed the trainer hear a participant say that she felt frustrated with the process, and then the trainer immediately asked the room something like, "How many other people are feeling frustrated as well?" And of course, numerous hands went up, and it seemed to help show the person she wasn't alone.
Long time CTO here. I brazenly and declaratively ask stupid questions and suggest stupid ideas. It usually leads to a break in a logjam, and I recognize that people in the room don’t always feel as free as me to be naive or uninformed. It’s the nature of my job and the coverage I need to manage across the org… devs aren’t as inclined to go this route, but this is also why some of my personality driven PMs are often so successful in a similar vein… they’re not invested in being or looking right, or even smart.
Yes, thank you, this is very important. Whenever someone says they might be asking a stupid question, I make sure to interrupt and remind that there are no stupid questions, only stupid people asking questions.
One thing you learn in sales is the value of open-ended questions. Until you consciously look at it, it's hard to realize how bad the questions we tend to ask are.
Yes/no questions are the worst. But even questions like "What did you do?" aren't great because the answers can often be rather short.
A better question is often posed like "Tell me about X" or "Describe how you did Y".
Of course this isn't universally true, there is value in binary answers.
But often you may find yourself, let's say in a sales context, asking something like "What tool are you using for project management?"
The answer will then be something like, "I'm using Jira".
Instead, if you ask, "Tell me about what you're doing for project management on your team", the answer may be much more detailed.
"We follow the agile methodology and use Jira for our task management. We've got a dedicated project manager on the team who..."
Getting good at asking the right questions is worth the effort.
That depends. Yes/no questions are great when you want to quickly validate something. Open-ended questions are great when you want to get a lot of information. Yes/no are for confirmation, open-ended for exploration. Different goals.
Hmm. Often times, an open ended question results in a much more accurate answer. Humans tend to approximate or even lie to force an answer to fit a limited choice question. Example: you want to know if water is falling out the sky. You ask: Is it raining?
Response is no. You walk out the door and are rendered unconscious by golf-ball size hail.
Better to have asked, "what's it like outside?" or, "what's the weather right now?"
I think his response meant in situations where you just need to figure out which project management tool they use so you can log in for the first time, binary questions are the right tool for the job (information gathering). But I mostly agree that, in the big picture, the broad questions are more helpful for solving the complex problem you’re facing.
and nobody is going to say it’s not raining when it’s hailing outside… but I understand if that was just a metaphor. You’re probably asking that question to figure out what kind of clothes to wear, and they would probably infer that. It’s so contextual though.
Again, I think that depends on where you are in the exploration/confirmation spectrum. I don't really think about it when doing it, but usually I use open ended questions for stuff I don't know, and yes/no questions to link things to my existing mental model.
That also depends on the person. With some people open ended questions are great, with others yes/no are better.
I'll also add that yes/no questions are often faster if you get the response you expect.
Usually I don't think it's necessary. My yes/no questions are something like "Okay, so we need to put some more info into that file since that's what exported to the billing database, is that correct?". When I don't know something, I try yes/no questions at first. If I get "yes", then it's resolved. If I get a no, I will ask open-ended questions to explore the subect. Once I think I have a correct mental model ready, I will ask yes/no questions to validate it. If I get a no, then it's the cycle again.
For the "Is it raining outside", I honestly don't know anyone that would just tell me "no" when there's hail outside. For the "Do you like Vi or Emacs or something else?", it would be "What text editor/IDE do you use? Why?". "Do you like Vi or Emacs" by itself is not a yes/no question, it's a "what box are you in" question. For "Do you want to hang out for a coffee or something else?", that would be something like "Do you want to hang out at <TIME>?".
An important part for me is that in yes/no questions, no are supposed to be the exception. In my mind, when I ask them, it's not a 50/50 chance. It's more of a 80/20. If it was a 50/50 chance, that means my mental model is not precise enough.
A similar technique is demonstrated in the old Video Arts So You Want To Be A Success at Selling? video series starring John Cleese, in the Part 2 video ("The Presentation") iirc, in a scene where a salesman uses the Five Whys (or what is effectively that, though the term isn't used) to prevent the loss of a customer account.
Reminds me of something from decades ago in India, there was only television channel and it was state run. Early evenings were dedicated to rural areas and farmers there.
Most of them were illiterate and did not understand what plant scientists or professors were talking about re inputs or seeds or Tractors etc needed to modernize Ag.
So the format would be an interview in the middle of a coconut grove or a farm. The interviewer(usually female) would ask a question and the expert would answer. After he finishes answering, she’d turn towards the camera and go like “what you are basically saying is..” or “what he is saying..”..and she’d give the wrong details. Then the expert would interrupt her and explain it again with the correct answer. There were a lot of English words he’d use and she’d break them down in the vernacular and also in the same order as his sentence.
These wrong things repeated by her were obvious misunderstandings anyone unfamiliar with fertilizer application would make…it was probably scripted so that the answer can be ‘corrected’ multiple times and also probably reflected mistaken notions by the viewer. Never once was the viewer(here, it was the illiterate non English speaking village farmer) made to feel dumb but always as though they are learning something valuable and special.
It was like Sesame Street for farming adults. It was awesome and kept me glued to the television screen. I would memorize all the IRRI rice hybrids and probably was the only one in school who knew IR20, IR64 and IR8…and urea application rates for them.
Ask anyone of a certain age who their favourite Sesame Street character is …and you would have cracked effective communication technique for that time period.
This is brilliant. I sometimes produce educational videos to teach kids programming. A recurring challenge we have is pitching the information at a level that’s interesting but not confusing for beginners and kids who are less literate. This format I’d like to try out
I don't like to say "I'm going to ask a stupid question". First of all, it feels disingenuous to me, people who say that never actually think that their questions will be stupid. And the second reason is that I think I might even convince myself that my questions are stupid... I know it sounds silly to some but little things like how you talk about yourself (and your questions) is important.
I often ask these "stupid" questions, though. I usually start with: "it might have been said in other meetings, but just to be sure, what is...", "I might be a bit slow, could you explain X once again just to make sure I understand it", "So just to paraphrase what we've been discussing, X is Y, is that correct?", and sometimes I just ask "what does $acronym stand for and why is it important for us now".
I, too, often find that nobody knows the answers to very basic questions and we are in a meeting of 6-12 people...
> First of all, it feels disingenuous to me, people who say that never actually think that their questions will be stupid.
No, I often legitimately think that my question might (!) be stupid, because I'm aware that I'm coming into the discussion with less domain knowledge and experience than the other people in the room. I still think it's good for everyone (ie, not just me) to explain. (Sometimes it's clear that everything is just out of my league, in which case I shut up and let the meeting go on.)
It's this very awareness of one's own limitations that allows folks to overcome those limitations. If I might add my own (personal, biased, narrow) understanding; the whole concept of "stupid" is like a cognitive filtration mechanism. We filter ideas that others have by calling them "stupid" and then we attempt to avoid being filtered in that way, but that filter is kind of stupid. Unless you already know everything (protip: you don't) you run the risk of filtering based on an incorrect assumption.
Yeah I feel the same way. I never understood the "This may be a stupid question..." framing.
Asking fundamental questions in order to build up to a more complex understanding is the most effective way to learn, I have no hesitation about asking such questions.
One reason for the framing (when used by a senior person or someone in authority) is to give permission to more junior people who may be holding back on their own questions because they are afraid of looking bad.
It can easily backfire. Some one who has an urgent but basic question might refrain from speaking up if, beforehand, a senior prefaces their pointed probing question with "this is a stupid question...".
It's better to just kick things off with naive questions or even use a bit of humor to disarm people, so they don't feel like they have to be "advanced" all the time.
Depending on who is asking, the intention behind such framing is different. For someone in a leadership position, the point is to open up dialog and make folks comfortable enough to ask questions without them feeling they're at risk of humiliation or judgement. For others it may be to signal politeness and deference to the speaker.
Whatever the case, there are more effective, more genuine phrasings to use than to literally invoke "stupidity".
Yeah, to pretend to be "stupid" and basically dismiss your own question is kind of cloying or may be seen as disingenuous or even passive aggressive.
Folks who are good at communicating can always keep everyone feeling engaged and comfortable, while still getting to nitty-gritty WITHOUT resorting to saying stuff like "... this is stupid question, but...".
They're not pretending to be stupid. It's that they think their question might be stemming from not understanding something fundamental that everyone else in the room already knows.
If you think they're being disingenuous because you think they do understand what's going on, then it actually supports why they feel the need to preface their question with that phrase. You expect that they know it, so they make questions around it less jarring by admitting that they probably don't know enough.
In my view, admitting that you "might have a stupid question" is not disingenuous, it's a form of self-depreciation that disarms people and relaxes the room.
It's important to treat yourself with respect, but people also respect when you admit that you don't know something simple.
It's "self deprecation", depreciation is something different.
I'm not sure what kind of audience you think it works on.
I tend to get (particularly from people under 40) one of two inappropriate reactions to reflexive self deprecation - either exaggerated sympathy for my plight, or treating it as an exposed weakness to attack.
It's all about reading the room. If you're talking to a hostile crowd you're not going to expose weakness. I hope that most of these internal alignment meetings are not hostile, and are instead conducted with the intent to best deliver value to the business. In these instances, I have found comments like "I'm sorry to ask a basic question here..." work well to explain that I probably don't have as much domain experience as the others in the room; that I'm not trying to school them on their domain; and that I'm simply trying to gain understanding so that I can contribute.
Sure...but I think that an insight that I've gained is that this is an example of a formula which doesn't really communicate or explain all the things you mention. You aren't sorry, you don't know that your question is basic, and you don't think you're wasting peoples' time.
In effect, it's a "pointer" to a bunch of things, so it only works with people that are conditioned to such things and have them in their memory. One of the things you mention, "not trying to school them" sounds to me like deference, and I don't think deference can be quickly established without a formula. Like a salute, you have to do something arbitrary in a mutually understood way.
Whoops, yes I meant self-deprecation (I added an 'i' by accident)
Yes, some people will pity you, or treat it as a weakness. But having the courage to admit when you don't know something is a valuable trait that most people (in my experience) respect.
Also if you demonstrate your knowledge in other areas and contribute value to the meeting, people tend to forgive a few stupid questions in another area.
But "courage" is exactly the sort of response that bugs me. It's not courage, or passive-aggressiveness, it's etiquette. Responding with praise, or pity, or a put-down, it's all a failure to appreciate the formula for what I consider basic etiquette.
It's like when I'm having a meeting with my manager and I want to talk, so I start, they stop, I apologize for interrupting, and they say no, no, go on.
I assume there is no emotional drama going on. If they really want to continue talking, they can do so. That's why I apologize and pause. I'm not sorry, but I need to show appropriate deference.
It would be unfortunate if someone was building up resentment because they're not on the same wavelength about appropriate behavior. The purpose of etiquette seems to me to provide a formula to negotiate common situations without having to navigate emotional complexities.
But when different people have different rules, there's not much that can be resolved.
I think some of this might be cultural. For example, I think self-deprecation may be in general more widely appreciated in the UK than the US (though perhaps this is gradually changing).
I’m reminded of Arthur Dent (British) in the Hitchhiker’s Guide telling Zaphod, modestly, “oh, it was nothing” about something great he did, and Zaphod responding along the lines of “oh, it was nothing? In that case forget it then”, which was not at all what Arthur intended.
Well, I'm American, and there were definitely bits in that book that totally failed to translate for me. For instance, "Ford Prefect" seemed like a perfectly normal name - IMO the American edition should've changed it to "Ford Escort".
But being self-deprecating was not one of them. I feel like I'm surrounded by Zaphods, or something, and I'm not sure when it happened.
Yeah, I like this tactic, but I don't think phrasing it with the word "stupid" is helpful.
I prefer to say things like "I'm not fully up to speed on this, so let's go back to basics/fundamentals for a moment", or "sometimes we're so focused on the details that we can't see the wood for the trees - let's take a step back and just run through it at a high level again".
> people who say that never actually think that their questions will be stupid
I use it all the time. Oftentimes they are stupid questions. Sometimes they're not, but generally that's when I'm not sure if it's a stupid question or not. And that's okay—the point is, it's fine to ask stupid questions.
> ...it feels disingenuous to me, people who say that never actually think that their questions will be stupid.
I ask questions that have a decent chance of making me look stupid all the time. Even when the rational part of my brain says "if you have this question, it's likely that other people do too," there's a big part of me that worries, "nah, I'm the odd one out here."
>> First of all, it feels disingenuous to me, people who say that never actually think that their questions will be stupid.
I preface some of my statements with this, and I fully expect them to be stupid. In fact, many of the questions I ask that I don't preface with the above disclaimer are in fact quite stupid.
I prefer using “basic” over “stupid”. A basic question is literally about the basics or fundamentals, while a stupid question implies something is wrong with the asker to even need to pose it.
> "I'm going to ask stupid questions now." and "Just so I'm understanding the problem, <here's my interpretation of what you just said>." were two phrases she used all the time.
This is my approach when getting pulled into something. If I have no idea, I want to get that idea. I'll also use "this may sound stupid, but..."
One of the smartest people I've ever met in business was also this way. He also never nodded his head in agreement unless he actually understood and agreed. If he wasn't sure, he'd pause for a minute and work it out, even if it meant pausing the flow of the meetings. Some people interpreted it has him being "slow" but it really meant he actually understand all of the things he was nodding to.
Whenever new people join the team, I always say, "Please ask stupid questions. I mean questions so stupid that you might think we would question why we hired you, because you think we think you should already know. Ask those types of really stupid basic questions. It will educated you, make us think, and I'm certain at least one other person already on the team doesn't know either."
I usually say, "please ask stupid questions, because if you don't then you'll run off in the wrong direction and work on the wrong thing for a week before the next review, and you'll have wasted a lot of project budget."
At my work, there's a bad combo of senior folks who whip off vague instructions in a single sentence, and junior folks who are afraid to ask questions. I'm in the middle, and I try hard to demonstrate that it's fine to badger the senior folks with questions, and to check in with them constantly. The senior folks like it because it gives them confidence that you're working it out. But some of our straight outta school colleagues just don't do this ("Gotcha. Sounds good!" is a very common email reply from them) and it leads to confusion down the road. After giving them the "ask questions" talk two times, I usually give up on them.
Also, in my position, I often have to review and edit reports that are largely written by electrical engineers and architects, and they all probably think I'm super dumb. I read the reports as the target audience (often non-subject matter experts), and so my comments are things like, "What do you mean by this [basic EE concept]?" I don't preface it with, "I know what this means, but the client might not, please elaborate..."
Please, please keep doing this and encouraging this behavior. The more senior on the ic track you get the harder it is to find time to mentor. The reality is that is a core tenet of our position and we may be staying silent to not smother the room. If you need help and you have a competent senior they should encourage your questions or delegate to an appropriate senior if they are too busy.
> I usually say, "please ask stupid questions, because if you don't then you'll run off in the wrong direction and work on the wrong thing for a week before the next review, and you'll have wasted a lot of project budget."
Does it help?
This sounds like they are expected not to waste time, so it might get even harder to ask a stupid question a minute too late, and especially to ask something tomorrow.
But you’re right that it might not be the best technique. I understand the hesitancy to ask questions after a certain amount of time has passed.
I work as a consultant and our time has to be billed to projects. The onboarding stinks, so the new hires often have no concept of billability/utilization nor project budgets. So I’m trying to drill in those concepts, too.
One of the additional lessons here is “the boss doesn’t always know what they’re talking about.” And that’s another hard one for them to accept. Question authority! If the instructions aren’t clear, then they might be nonsense. Have the guts to challenge the boss. And sometimes the challenge can come in the form of a million stupid questions.
> The onboarding stinks, so the new hires often have no concept of billability/utilization nor project budgets.
As an aside, do you think there is a business opportunity in teaching companies better onboarding? Growing headcount seems like an afterthought most places, and it’s a colossal waste.
The worst example I’ve seen is one company hiring some very expensive onshore consultants to build the basic structure of the application and then quickly hand it off to cheap offshore ones.
What really happened is that the onshore guys created a horrendous mess of untested and undocumented code full of bugs that the offshore ones had no hope of making sense of. And being remote and from a culture of high power distance further exacerbated the problem. It certainly worked out well for the onshore guys who got to bleed the client out of a whole other year’s worth of expensive hours.
The company I work for has 60k employees. I think during the pandemic - which started before I joined - we let go of a ton of office managers and the in-house IT team. So now there is one office manager for each local office, and she had no capacity or skill to answer my semi-technical questions when I joined (“how does the software licensing work?” etc).
> But you’re right that it might not be the best technique. I understand the hesitancy to ask questions after a certain amount of time has passed.
Something like this maybe: go to the new person, in the beginning every day, then once a week, then once a month, and say:
"Can you please ask three (3) basic questions about things you're slightly struggling with, and that you think everyone expects you to know, but that you don't?"
>> Most of the time when I ask obvious questions, the replies are yes/no. She knew how to ask them in such a way that gets the person talking in greater detail.
Dumb question here, but is it as simple as starting your question with "how" or "what" rather than "does"? The former invite explanation and the later looks for a yes/no.
My big thing lately is to not ask rhetorical questions (which can be sarcasm in disguise) as they either cause people to be defensive or simply agree. Either way they do not speak directly about the "obvious" problem.
> Dumb question here, but is it as simple as starting your question with "how" or "what" rather than "does"? The former invite explanation and the later looks for a yes/no.
Yes, this is the 101 of basic interviewing in journalism. Inexperienced reporters often ask too many "does" questions and are puzzled afterwards as to why the interviewee didn't talk much.
"Does" is also used when the journalist aims or pushes for a straightforward, yes-or-no answer. For example to interfere to a politician who is trying to avoid direct answers by trolling the interviewer with some off-topic agenda.
> Dumb question here, but is it as simple as starting your question with "how" or "what" rather than "does"?
I really appreciate that you used the technique that people were discussing and it still seemed to work here, at least it worked on me. I found myself thinking, "No no, that's not a dumb question at all and I feel grateful that you asked it!"
I've stolen a similar technique from one of my favorite coworkers ever, which is to preface my questions but "This might be a silly question, but...".
I like this because I feel like it kind of de-stigmatizes asking "obvious" questions. If you acknowledge that the the question might be redundant, but ask it anyway, I think it makes the dialog more approachable.
I've had PMs always lead questions like that, using "this is probably a stupid question..." and alternatives and I came to dread discussions with them, as I knew this meeting would involve loads of wasted time constantly 'excusing' their question instead of just asking it.
Just how long do they draw it out? Phrasing "So, stupid question: [insert question" really shouldn't add that much time, right? Or is the problem that the questions really are stupid?
I have a weird job title but my position is probably closer to your PM, and I also use this strategy, so I'd like to know how to not annoy people!
For me, I think it's about your speed of thinking. If you ask a probing stupid question and get a "yes". If you are quick to reassemble your very low level of understanding into a (wrong) model, you can ask question about this model. "So that means that x goes into y to do z?" which makes you indeed look stupid but it also triggers the person explaining into "ok, this is a full out idiot, I need to go slow and explain in extreme detail". But then I interrupt when it goes to slow with a new pieced-together temporary model from some fact they let out and ask a new maybe less stupid question that makes the explainer go "ok, maybe they understand a bit more" and goes faster/skips details. And then it's like that back and forth until I understand it all and my questions goes into the territory of "yeah, that bit I don't understand either..." which leads us to go on a joint adventure into even greater understanding. A fellowship of the stupid.
My own issue with this method is trying to avoid sounding like I'm vying for brownie points by demonstrating knowledge after asking (what to them might be) a rudimentary question, especially so if my "update" is partially incorrect. It is to the point where I won't show someone I am aware of something simple they have just pointed out to me. Which either is something the author of the blog would condone or I have misconstrued in which instance it is useful to look like you have less understanding than you really do.
this is also part of a coterie of non-threatening communication most women implicitly learn while growing up, to realize desired outcomes without negative pushback.
When you active listen, even if the question might feel stupid, the feeling gets lost in the fact hat the other person is receiving your attention. This technique is also teach for other contexts like counseling, or debating using the Socratic method.
Huh, interesting. I've done this pretty much my whole (programming) career. As a non-traditional, I always felt it was a weakness to be "that guy", but it's good to know that it's a common tactic.
Luckily, I've always been around coworkers that never put me down for asking those questions.
I do this all the time. I'm a non computer engineer who gets pulled into all sorts of computer related things as the contact point with the actual business. Having a good BA and someone who asks stupid questions make such meetings end in positive results much more often.
I also preface with saying I'm going to ask stupid questions and if anyone holds it against me I'm ok with it. If I'm asking a question it's usually because I don't understand a consequent of something someone said that everyone seems to just nod their heads and agree with, and that gives everyone an opportunity to reconsider the fundamentals.
I think I possess this skill (at least partially), and the trick of "knowing what to ask" is to train yourself heuristics that guide you towards questions that reveal outstandingly large amounts of new information. Of course you have limited information, so those determinations about how much information a question's answer would yield are plagued by that. Hence the heuristics.
This is not easy to learn, and great understanding ability is a prerequisite.
> Most of the time when I ask obvious questions, the replies are yes/no.
I guess you might be asking straight up binary questions like - is it happening due to xyz? Maybe, changing the question format to something like - what do you think could be the cause behind _fill the situation here___? Just my humble opinion.
the problem with this approach is that it makes building trust very difficult, as trust is based on a combination of character and competence.
inquisitiveness during problem solving is admirable and good, but in the article many of the applications of 'looking stupid' only serve to render the author untrustworthy.
I know this might come off as adversarial, but might that say more about your metrics for trustworthiness than the party at question? Which bullets from the article would you consider untrustworthy?
Yes, these are two great phrases and methods to vastly improve your communication skills! Many people seem to be OK with leaving a conversation with assumptions instead of assurances.
On my last team I coined the hashtag #StupidQuestionsEncouraged and used my role as a lead to both ask stupid questions and encourage others to do the same.
> That there are fundamental misunderstandings and misconceptions about existing systems.
This is debugging 101. You have assumptions about how a system works, but the output isn't matching those assumptions. You walk backwards over your assumptions and test them to see if they are true. Eventually you get to the precise place where your assumption is wildly different than the output, and there is your bug.
The more systems (or people) involved, the longer it takes, the more complexity.
Yep, eventually you're asking things like, "does the variable called 'username' contain the username?" Not too long ago I found that 'username', in fact, did not contain the username.
I once had a co-worker at a small company (2 developers, me and him).
In the spirit of doing less work, he proposed to me changing the meaning of "someProperty" to mean something different, without changing the name of that property.
Also, it was a boolean; so he wanted true values to actually represent false, and vice versa.
I work for the government so really know this feeling. I have a funny exemple in mind. Months ago I got pulled into a meeting because 'I know data'. The phrasing alone was a red flag. Lots of high level people in the meeting. Like 10 people, each one payed at least twice as much as me. The goal is to transfer data that is too big for our 'standard pipelines'. They are discussing building a whole new pipeline, contractors would be involved and all. I asked 'stupid questions':
"- How big is the data we are discussing ?
- '200 Go'
- is it recurring ?
- No
- is it sensitive ?
- No
- Why don't we buy a 50$ 1to hard drive and transfer the data manually ?"
Last question was followed by the longest silence I ever heard in a meeting... I wasn't invited the next meetings. I heard it took them more than 5 other meetings to reconsider my solution. An intern has finally been sent to buy the hard drive last week.
A lesson I've learned over time is that it's incredibly common for people within a company to have very different mental models of what different terms mean - especially if they work in different teams or departments, but sometimes even people the same team.
My favourite examples are things like "what is a user?" - the marketing department may be counting leads generated, engineers are thinking about records in a database table, some other team may think of users as company or group accounts.
This holds true for all kinds of other things too. You might have a project called "the login optimization project" and find that some people think it's about page load performance while others think it's about increased conversions.
For this reason, I'm always ready to ask the stupid questions.
I identify with this situation but my feelings about it are a bit different, although not intentionally. This mirrors my general disconnect with the article.
In this situation I feel some anxiety or hesitation about asking these questions, but I don't feel it as a fear of appearing stupid. Instead the anxiety seems to come from worrying that I am annoying or offending everyone with questions about things that are obvious.
I have no way of knowing which question is going to reveal the problem, so I will need to shotgun questions. I know that some people that I work with get this completely and will cooperate. Others will get defensive or tune out, so I need to find a balance or tone to try to avoid that.
It is similar to when I did tech support as a teenager and someone would call with a problem, wanting a tech sent to their house. I would start asking questions about the problem and they would not want to spend 5 minutes going through a few steps to try to solve it over the phone. I never felt that they thought I was stupid, I just felt they were impatient. Maybe they did think I was stupid, but I was so sure that I could find the answer that I never considered that.
I did support when I was in my late teens and I ALWAYS started at the very bottom, with the questions that seemed obvious, and worked my way up. Most callers thought it was annoying, so I would often prepare them for the silly simple stuff I was about to ask and ask them to humor me. It was especially painful if I was the 3rd person they had talked to.
I guess I still work this way although I've fallen out of the habit of warning people and asking them to humor me.
The "humor me" tier 2 or 3 tech support people are the best. By the time I've called in I've already done the usual stuff, that's why I called, at least they crack me up "what color is the light on the left side" or whatever, not just silence and clacking and background yelling of tier 1 while they "wait for me to power cycle".
Turns out I absolutely cannot do tier 3 support, but I can do 1 and 2 for friends and family and I'm the "whiz" or whatever. Tier three, for me, was basically me in a bad mood talking to me in a bad mood, in order to gatekeep the poor dev/DBA/NOC that had to actually fix things. No thx!
This is a useful skill to employ, though at the same time the frequent need of it is a sign of a dysfunctional system. Not always, but a lot of the time, I think. For one, many of these issues would be avoided if, for example, engineers were included in meetings with decision makers and designers during early phases of development, rather than introduce engineers to effectively tell them what to do now that all the decisions have been made absent any shared knowledge of how things can work under the hood. Not only could this result in reduced time spent, but it could result in less time performing re-iterations once engineering concludes that a request/feature is impractical. Impracticalities or better alternatives should be discovered as early in the process as possible, not later, because inevitably wasted time will be made up for via shortcuts and duct tape. Unless a company really cares about good craftsmanship and not releasing something until it's in an adequate state, quality will almost certainly be sacrificed.
Playing dumb, if you will, has served me well, yet it is also odd to me just how often it needs to be employed in the field of software.
You call it dysfunctional but I think it's just a communication technique to accelerate learning, like the author describes, that can be used in a plethora of situations and not just business meetings.
Oh, I definitely agree. My point, and maybe you still wouldn't agree, is that it can be a good technique to use under ideal or adequate circumstances yet also be a sign of functional weakness if it needs to be used too frequently.
Plenty of otherwise good things can be signs of dysfunction. An example could be a workplace where people are free to chill, do what they want, ride scooters, play games, etc., which can be really healthy and good for creativity, but also may be a sign of weak leadership and nothing actually getting done (wasting time and jeopardizing the future of teams). Having process is usually better than no process at all, but process can also waste time and be counterproductive.
In other words, nothing is necessarily to be viewed as good or bad.
Such behavior can be a good thing, but you could fall in your own bias thinking you know the problem better than them, to finally realize the problem outpace your scope and you are just impacted as anyone in the room.
It happen for me once, and this was an humility lesson.
Now I keep in mind I can feel I understand the problem then realize later I was all wrong too.
For sure! Another comment noted that this might be a sign of a dysfunctional organization, and I think there's a lot of truth there -- where systems have grown to such complexity that people involved in a larger project can't keep the whole thing in their head, and you get groups of people sort of faking it, assuming other people can fill in the details, and not wanting to appear ignorant about areas outside of your expertise.
I've been in other organizations (and even within this one) where my stupid questions revealed nothing new except that I had to go back and do some studying before I could usefully contribute.
I remember when I took a course in General Relativity as an undergraduate; I was much more math/CS focused than most people in the class, who were mostly physics people. And we would get together in study groups, and although I was respected for my general intelligence, it became clear that the questions I was asking were simply not the right ones -- that a physical/geometric intuition was something I did not have. In other words, I was actually the stupid one.
Much later I took a course in differential geometry, and eventually started seeing how it made sense mathematically, but I could never really connect it back to physical intuition. I think the problem that broke me was talking about the behavior of a point mass, and I had literally no idea how to attack that with the tools we had.
Yes, and I would argue this is one of the goals of asking basic questions. Specifically, when asking foundational questions, one of the objectives I keep in mind is to figure out the scope and my ability to understand the scope of the problem. Understand where that boundary exists is useful information.
Personally, I don't really care about this second-order effect that asking such questions might identify others that don't understand the problem correctly. I think it's, as you say, creating its own bias that pollutes your thinking. I've worked with enough experts outside of my own domain expertise, that this is not something that happens often.
Early in my career, I was conscious of asking these questions, so as to not appear like a fool, I thought I was expected to know the answers.
I took a remote job a while back and realized that the only way to be successful in my role was to keep asking questions, learning about systems and the product. I did not care if my questions seemed stupid. I just asked away. And, it helped..immensely!
Yes and it feels like the older I get the more I have to be the one that plays this role to ask these basic questions as younger professionals are fearful to look dumb in front of others
The fear of looking stupid is a profound motivator in many professions. If you want to understand why so many of the stories posted about people using this technique are of more senior folks or people with more authority (bosses, mentors, professors, etc), this is why. Being willing to potentially "look stupid" requires enormous self-confidence.
This is me all the time haha sometimes I really am just "stupid" and the only one in the room without a clue, but many many times my stupidity has revealed no one really has any idea what they or the others are talking about.
I'm grateful to my parents or whatever it was that enabled me to not take myself too seriously and not care too much about people thinking I'm stupid, even at work, and even though it may cost me dearly in terms of career progression. (because I do think not all but many people who get ahead do so by very successfully avoiding being perceived as stupid, even if they are)
> you would think the sinking feeling I get before I brace myself to look stupid would go away
I can highly recommend reading, or listening to "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!". Asking "stupid" questions does not automatically make you intelligent, but it is a trait of highly intelligent people, exactly because of the reasons you describe.
We all know the story about how Newton asked why an apple fell to the ground, surely a lot of people would have thought you're a total idiot for asking that, and yet at the same time no-one would have been able to explain why.
The reason stupid questions are uncomfortable is that you're very likely to insinuate other people don't know the answer to a simple question, and we don't like making other people uncomfortable. Which is why you have to be humble when asking them.
> So I start asking questions, and slowly begin to realize that nobody in the room has any idea what they are talking about. That there are fundamental misunderstandings and misconceptions about existing systems. And, naturally, it turns out that the questions I have are questions that other people have.
I've had similar situations, it feels analogous to group based "rubber ducking"... having someone ask the questions perceived to be known or obvious by the existing groups can be extremely beneficial for all kinds of reasons, in the same way that a rubber duck (real or imagined) will get you to re-evaluate all of your assumptions and usually get you to find the assumption that's incorrect or problematic.
Imagine your comment being made in a meeting I got pulled into.
I brace myself. I'm going to waste your time. This is super obvious.
Here it goes: so uh, why do you continue to work with incompetent idiots instead of finding a workplace where people know what they are talking about instead?
Poor communication does not imply everyone involved is incompetent idiots. It's unfortunate, and important to address, but if you quit any project every time there is inadequate communication, you'll never get anything done.
Assumptions are inevitable. They get harder to question the longer they go unquestioned. Newcomers to a group can see them better.
Perhaps cutting people some slack and helping them work better by asking basic questions is a skill we all need to learn.
If someone asks a simple question, it’s great - because most likely executives will have the exact same question, but depending on your relationship with them, it could go a few ways (or more): 1) they just think you don’t get it because they assume the answer to the basic question and it’s not the assumption you’re operating off of 2) they call you on it during the presentation and make it look like you have failed to explain the fundamentals 3) they wait until after the presentation to ask the question, and others in the room aren’t really sure about it either, because you just assumed everyone knew.
I think it’s OK to ask dumb questions twice. If you don’t get it by the third time (or fail to remember), then we might need to step back and revisit fundamentals, or your mental model might need adjustment so that the information makes sense in context.
I work with good people, and when they screw up, I cut them some slack.
Everyone sometimes screws up. Some more than others. Some distractingly so, and some so often that it's not worth continuing the relationship. But the mere fact that someone at some point screws up does not make them irredeemable. So, yes, I think cutting people slack is important.
This is totally orthogonal to being qualified for a job, or being good, or any other attributes people have that puts them out of their depth. If you work with a bunch of unqualified poseurs, then sure, slack isn't what's missing, and you should quit. But if you find yourself in that situation very often, I'd be asking different questions...
And nobody can know and do every damn thing that's why we have teams and an org. Sometimes you're in the room with experts from different specialties that don't understand each other. Sometimes you're in a team with very disparate domain expertise... Not getting anywhere in meetings is not always the sign of a dysfunctional org or stupid colleagues. It's everyday, everywhere, with everyone.
And. What if it's your customer in the room? Are you firing them for being 'stupid'?
The superclever types that thing their colleagues are stupid are often the most dangerous, as they'll just 'go it alone' and then leave when they fuck up and suddenly everyone is stupid and not grateful.
A team I work with sometimes was blocked on a couple of PRs for about a week. I needed one of the team members for something and their lead wasn't doing much to help remove his roadblocks to helping me so I stepped in asking my really basic questions about what they were trying to achieve.
Within about 30 minutes we released one PR and deleted the other. The one we deleted was blocking the other but there wasn't actally a need for it due to some spec change that happened earlier, just nobody could figure out why it was needed or what needed to be finished before it could ship.
IMO this is the hallmark of a good engineer. One of my absolute favorite engineers/mentors did this. Having just one of these people in the room can be a huge differentiator in problem solving in a group setting.
This is feasible as long as your expertise is recognised in the organisation or you are in a position of power or your organisation is open to this kind of behaviour (quite often it isn’t the case). A junior asking this kind of questions in the wrong organisation may help fixing the problem at hand, assuming they are taken seriously, but they are likely to hinder their career progress if they repeat this behaviour too often. In many many many organisations looking smart is way more important than being smart.
This is essentially the Socratic method. Arriving at a shared understanding through the asking of questions. I employ this technique regularly and it rarely fails me.
This works and should be encouraged if you are indeed very smart and very quick, typically introverted and are actually going to be rolling up your sleeves to pitch in.
This approach is painful for everyone else and should be discouraged if you are a very extroverted and very non-technical person with no plan on actually helping out whatsoever with the actual execution on solving the problem at hand and really are only contributing to look smart in front of any leadership who happens to be in the room.
Definitely be aware of the Dunning–Kruger effect - which is a cognitive bias stating that people with low ability at a task overestimate their own ability, and that people with high ability at a task underestimate their own ability.
I do this all the time too and have observed the same results! I ask a lot of dumb questions like "what does XYZ stand for?" and "what was the original problem you were trying to solve by taking this course of action?". Even though I always have that same sinking feeling, usually by the 4th or 5th question I have a very clear idea of what's going on.
This is my life at the moment. Even when I think I may know what is being discussed, experience has shown that a lot of people will try and fake it and being the idiot who doesn’t have a clue and needs it explained is useful for everyone.
I don’t know what it is about the IT trade, but so many people seem to find it difficult to admit that knowing everything is impossible.
This is such an eye opening experience, especially when you are new to the corporate world.
It's amazing how frequently fancily dressed, well speaking, high paid people sit in rooms and essentially role play being adults while just having absolutely no clue what is going on.
Probably because of status loss. Do they acknowledge your perceptiveness, intelligence and intellectual honesty after you demonstrate it each time? It would undermine their own status.
->nobody in the room has any idea what they are talking about
I have seen a few people unwilling to admit that they don't know...when they're supposed to know. The easiest way out they come up with is 'we will discuss this offline'.
When I was younger, I often met people who seemed kind of dim to me, at first, and later found the majority of them to be orders of magnitude brighter than me.
It was not hard to connect the dots, the reason they were so much brighter was (in part) exactly because of what made them initially seem dim.. They asked questions, honestly. Not the showoff kind of question you ask to show how much you know, but real, honest questions that not only showed how little they knew, but importantly, allowed them to actually learn and understand, rather than just nod and not get it.
My intuition has changed from this, I find it that most times, when someone shows genuine interest and asks honest, revealing questions about some new topic, they often excel at many other things (and will likely on the new topic as well).
I'm adapting this myself, being honest, asking honestly, and sometimes looking really stupid (because, in that context, I am!), and I appreciate greatly both the wealth of information that allows me to access, and that almost anybody worth their salt recognizes this trait as well.
Failing an interview due to looking stupid is probably a blessing in disguise, you don't want to be hired by people who can't see this, and you don't want to work next to people who's just pretending to understand, not learning because they can't afford to look stupid when they are (and thus stay stupid, and be much more inclined to try to pass blame to someone else, like you, who look stupid).
This reminds me of the simple brilliance of Socrates. He began from the premise that he knew nothing, and would ask all manner of simple questions building on top of the previous answers. It wasn't long before he uncovered how little everyone else actually knew, but what separated Socrates was his honesty: he knew nothing and admitted it.
Naturally, the established powers and polite society didn't find this to their liking. We all know how his story ended.
> Naturally, the established powers and polite society didn't find this to their liking. We all know how his story ended.
Socrates was sentenced to death not for exposing how little everyone else knew. The esteemed philosopher was sentenced to death because he was deliberately annoying people - like a fly - with badgering questions that would force the questionee into a corner.
Today we call this method of exposing contradictions in one's mindset the Socratic Method.
> The esteemed philosopher was sentenced to death because he was deliberately annoying people
No. Socrates was executed because he was associated with the worst rulers that the city of Athens had ever known, all former students of his, who notably went on to kill thousands of Athenian citizens (not enemies, strangers, or slaves), following the defeat in the Peloponnesian War.
After the tyrants were killed and democracy was restored, general amnesty law was granted to anyone involved except the Thirty Tyrants themselves and their direct aides. However resentment, understandably, remained.
> There was a lot of bad blood between the people of Athens and Socrates’ followers. That wouldn’t have been enough by itself. But the murder of between 5% and 15% of the citizen population in 404 must have pushed things over the edge. Imagine if Osama bin Laden, Timothy McVeigh, and Saddam Hussein had all had the same person as their ethics teacher: would you be very surprised if that person got harsh treatment from a jury? And would you then call that person a martyr?
Well, he was executed because when asked what punishment seemed just to Socrates, he said he should be given free meals (like the Olympic champions), rather than suggesting a fine of 50 minas. So Hemlock it was.
Yeah, there's some people that when faced to what they believe is an injustice go all in and decide the world is entirely unjust and there's no point on defending from anything, because the result is already set. See Galileo for another example.
I guess there's some platonic happiness in thinking you have it all figured out.
Ah, didn't expect the venerable Meletus to show up in the conversation today. How's the weather in Athens?
> sentenced to death because he was deliberately annoying people
I see you're still certain of Socrates' motives.
When you claimed he was 'corrupting the minds of the youth' and 'denying the gods of the city' you were simply repeating the charges laid at any philosopher who threatens the powers that be.
If anyone asks too many uncomfortable but honest questions these days, in some societies you will still be met with death, though here we have a milder but still harsh punishment known as 'deplatforming'.
But more to the point, if you are so certain of what you know, you could explain it and wouldn't find questions 'annoying'. Frustration justifies the case, because it means you really do know nothing but simply aren't honest enough to admit it.
Actually, I haven't been to Athens since summer 2019. Lovely place, so long as you avoid the touristy places.
Though I do like your form of expressing your frustration about the trial and sentencing of Socrates at myself as though I were his prosecutor, I assure you that I'm an under-50 mortal not born of gods and not atanatos.
> you could explain it and wouldn't find questions 'annoying'.
A question would not be annoying. Badgering, accusations, and pestering would be. And quite frankly, as we both know, every single one of us has contradictions in their beliefs and their actions. I'm not going to defend mine in public to a beggar following me around with the explicit intention of exposing my contradictions to my peers as a way to demonstrate that I (and for that matter, anybody) am not fit for the office I hold.
Hi, Minneapolitan here. I try not to wade into these sorts of discussions because it is usually unproductive or even counterproductive, but since you have expressed a sincere interest in talking about the facts of the situation, here’s what they actually are here.
The police budget for MPD in 2014 was $145.6M for 850 officers. In 2020, the year you suggest they were defunded, the budget was $181.9M for 770 officers—a 38% increase per officer from 2014 (28.7% after adjusting for inflation)[0]. In fact, that department is ending the current fiscal year $5M under budget[1], and the current mayor has proposed an additional 17% expenditure increase for 2022.[2]
The police in Minneapolis were never defunded. They have more money than ever. Efforts to introduce meaningful reforms (inaccurately called “defunding the police” by some) have also not been abandoned by the city council. We are currently voting on a charter amendment that would replace the Minneapolis Police Department with a new Department of Public Safety. The new department would still include police officers but would be coequal with all other departments in the city (it currently has a unique status where it is controlled exclusively by the mayor), and its focus would be on preventing crime instead of policing people.
On the other hand, other parts of the city budget are underwater due to hundreds of former officers quitting and claiming PTSD[3], and the officers who remain are engaged in an intentional work slowdown[4] while blaming others[5] for what is a largely self-inflicted wound.
What I think the other participant in this discussion was suggesting—and something that I would echo—is that your sources for news don’t seem to be giving you accurate information and you may want to reconsider using them as primary sources, at least on this topic.
No, it's not. It's a fact. Seeing as how you have the means to comment on Hacker News, you can easily fact-check this for yourself if you're concerned about its validity.
one example: vaccines are the status quo, I presume you agree on that. Most platforms are removing content that cause "vaccine hesitancy". YouTube has even expanded their this to apply to all vaccines [1]. Furthermore, it seems relevant to point out that dictionaries have updated their definitions of "anti-vaxxer" to include anyone questioning even the government mandates themselves [2], which has opened the door to many cases where people have supported the vaccine, but opposed the mandates, yet still been deplatformed labeled as anti-vaxxer.
I’m not sure what this has to do with an ancient Athenian philosopher being stoned to death for saying things other people didn’t want to hear, such as “I can’t possibly be both an atheist and worship false gods”.
Maybe not, but opinions about how we should conduct our societies depend on feelings, and things that appear true but are subtly wrong can cause great harm.
> The esteemed philosopher was sentenced to death because he was deliberately annoying people - like a fly - with badgering questions that would force the questionee into a corner.
It had more to do with revolutions in city just before, when two his students and friends worked with enemy to make dictatorship out of Athens. They killed and tortured quite a lot of people. Then it reversed. Now, he did not participated actively and citizens behavior during above was supposed to be forgiven anyway. It was miscarriage of justice.
But, these events in combination with what his ideas actually were were closer to why they wanted him killed then general "asked too many questions". As far as they were concerned, he was actually dangerous.
The yet other official reason was impiety, which despite sounding ridiculous to us, to them was important too.
Going by Wikipedia, it's not agreed why exactly he was executed, but you don't execute someone for being annoying. The official charges were impiety and "corrupting the youth". Probably some political groups felt threatened by the idea of lots of people turning to a different set of ethics or starting to distrust authority.
> but you don't execute someone for being annoying
Of course you do, you just wait until you have a more ethically "usable" argument than that, you build a solid case, then you have a mock trial and a fully expected conviction.
His students and friends took power once before and instituted dictatorship with help of Sparta (enemy city). Killed and tortured opposition, then were taken down in contra revolution.
So yeah, "different set of ethics or starting to distrust authority" but no necessary in a nice way.
The Little Schemer is a wonderful book that teaches functional programming and Scheme by just asking the reader questions (aka the Socratic Method). Off putting to me initially, but now I'd love it if more books were like this!
<<It wasn't long before he uncovered how little everyone else actually knew, but what separated Socrates was his honesty
<<The esteemed philosopher was sentenced to death because he was deliberately annoying people - like a fly - with badgering questions that would force the questionee into a corner.
No. That is a legend promoted by Plato. He was not making the "youth" (in general) distrust authority, he was going around telling the sons of nobility and highest ranking officials that democracy was a stupid idea and that they would be better off seizing power for themselves.
When trying to approach sacrosanct 'truths' from a clean slate, I've met torrents of emotional resistance. Yes, from others. But also inside myself. It is quite something.
I wish I could spend my days wandering the marketplaces asking sincere and pointed questions, but I have to get back to work.
Socrates was deeply ironic, and usually only played the fool. In very few (maybe all but one) of his dialogues is he actually less informed than the people that he’s talking to.
Strictly speaking yes, but I think it is a poetic way of saying that Socrates was better attuned to the limitations of his knowledge, as opposed to most people, who believe they know things they actually don't know (what is the good, etc). As a result, Socrates is actually wiser than most.
Anytime I learn anything new, I imitate until I can’t anymore, then I meditate to understand why I think I can’t imitate anymore, then I experience my meditation, then I go back to mediating based on that experience.
Repeat until you can’t OODA loop effectively anymore.
This article speaks to my soul. All my life I've been told how intelligent I am. It's been such a massive driver for my own insecurities and fear around anything I do, since my identity is tied up so much in being right and not being wrong, in continuing to present this image of infallible intelligence. It's likely also fed into my issues with depression I've had all my life. I can consistently get people to see how intelligent I might be, but it's always such a struggle. It's like walking a tightrope. I hate it.
What helps me is to view intelligence as strictly a matter of brain power. I can use my intelligence to do things that are stupid, unwise, misinformed, harmful, etc.
What I take from the article is that saying stupid things is the best way to avoid doing stupid things.
Whenever I ask questions, I tend to go to the very bottom of it. And I am not satisfied as long as I get a very intuitive and fundamental understanding of the topic. I have seen, however, that this can be tiring. Unless you are having the conversation with someone who has the time, willingness, and the knowledge to satisfy my curiosity, it is pointless to keep probing. People would often be exasperated or would be unable to provide me the intuition.
Therefore, these days, I pretty much probe very little and if it seems that my questions won't really be answered, I leave it at that, mentally noting to do some independent research on the internet.
This is especially tough because of how much skill it takes for you the questioner to not make the other person feel stupid when they realize they can't answer your questions.
Yeah, I think the other thing that's made me shy away from it more as I've gotten older is asking the "stupid" question, getting a jargon-laden response, and realizing: this person isn't equipped to communicate the concept. It can be pretty exhausting to be the questioner in that case.
I think people who are afraid to ask questions are conditioned to be that way. It is just easy to keep quiet in a team meeting than risk asking/saying something that might expose one's lack of knowledge on the topic being discussed. People also secretly hope that someone else might ask the same question that they are thinking about, so the other person can take that risk.
The environment largely shapes people's behavior. Of course, we can argue that we should work towards changing the environment for the better, but practically, how much influence does a person (who is not in a position of authority) have? In the end, people simply take the easy way out, which is keep quiet and only speak when they're absolutely sure that whatever they're about to say/ask is fully accurate.
So, there's that saying, "stay quiet and be thought a fool; open your mouth and remove all doubt." In a team meeting, it's easy to feel like you'll not only look foolish because you asked a question that everyone else knows the answer to, but you're also wasting everyone's time.
I certainly remember feeling that way when I was a junior engineer. It was kind of a shock to me when I realized how many others generally had the same questions I did.
You've mistaken "wanting to be right" with wanting to "be correct".
I've never inferred stupidity or lack of intelligence with asking questions. The only thing I've inferred was lack of knowledge. And the best way to get knowledge is to ask. People who ask want to know. They want the information to get to correct.
People who don't ask questions eventually make assumptions that are wrong. Because they're so wrapped up in "looking smart" and they think being "smart" means having all the knowledge. They "want to be right" so they don't look information because looking would expose they don't already have it.
Smart people seek information so they can apply it. Genuinely intelligent people just have faster processors.
There are questions and there are questions. Some questions in meetings are 'smart questions' intended to show you off and boost your stock a little, or move conversation to an area beneficial to you. Some questions are just ridiculous time wasters asked to show that you are there. There is a slim minority that asks questions to actually learn something and from experience I learned that those questions are best asked after the meeting directly to the person.
this^. it took a lot of intentional practice for me to shake the fear of looking dumb when in front of peers. however, i've since realized that pretty consistently the people who share this willingness to come off as uninformed are the best people to work with -- they openly admit gaps in their knowledge and are eager to close them.
conversely, when interviewing or evaluating people, if i observe someone pretend s/he knows something, that's often a really bad sign…
One way to prove that he truly doesn't mind looking stupid would be to list times when he risked looking stupid... and it turns out he actually was.
It's happened to all of us though we dont like to admit it.
I'm sure it's happened to him too and I looked but I didn't see any of those examples listed.
Giving only examples of when people thought he was dumb and it turned out he wasn't... that's kind of just a roundabout way of humblebragging that you're an unrecognized genius.
Sadly I think this undermines the point of the article which otherwise makes a good point.
"people think I'm stupid because I'm not scared to show that I don't know about something"
and some of the examples which are more along the lines of
"people think I'm stupid because I act as a self-entitled genius who provides little context or reasoning behind choices and expect everyone to line up behind with no question"
What is the Apple store employee supposed to do to not make someone feel stupid when they ask for the smallest box? What are the chances they're not a clueless customer in need of help and have solid reasons behind?
The boss raises an eyebrow when someome proposes to skip half of the test suite? Means a lack of trust.
The insurance dealer does his job and tries to get a higher premium? Not surprised.
There's quite a bit of narcissism here: "They though I'm stupid but I'm not", " I was right in the end". It's actually arguing how everyone else is dumber in the end.
A more sincere approach would have been to explain how he realized how stupid he actually was and how not being defensive about it helped. But perhaps the author knows better after all.
Yes, he clearly states he thought that the student group that thought he was stupid were stupid. And later that the only people that would think his test thing was stupid would be the incompetent ones.
So his thesis is also that stupid people assume that intelligent people are stupid. He considers himself more intelligent than those people.
I wonder if he would be as willing to look stupid in front of people that he considers as intelligent as him.
It sounded to me like he was saying: I am willing to look stupid to people that I consider inferior (dumber than me).
I read this more as: "stupid is an important step in the process of fostering smart". It's someone's unwillingness to look dumb that stalls them at the gate.
I think this is the impetus behind the whole 'crawl, walk, run' thing. If you're always hot to trot and pushing an image of "I know everything already and I don't need to ask basic questions", you're never going to build the foundations of understanding necessary to construct more complex understandings.
> The insurance dealer does his job and tries to get a higher premium? Not surprised.
This is actually an example of where the author IS stupid. You will often be found "at fault" in cases where you are not actually at fault (the other driver lies better than your truth) and there are many cases (at least in Ontario) where you are legislatively at fault even if you did nothing out of the ordinary (making a left turn while overtaking traffic attempts to pass rather than yield). That the broker was trying to protect them from this isn't even a conflict of interest for the broker.
I wonder how many insurance brokers encounter the "I'm such an amazing driver, I don't really need insurance." macho man ... I'm presuming the broker, at least initially, assumed the author was one of "those drivers" and not "stupid".
I don't think it's about who's at fault, it's about what risks you're willing to tolerate.
Insurance is always a trade-off of EV for tail risk. In exchange for losing money on average (the insurance company has to earn money somehow, after all), you're protected from the worst case scenario. You can think of it like, yourself from parallel universe where you don't get into a crash, pays yourself in the parallel universe where you do get into a crash. And the insurance company skims a little off the top as payment for the service of sending money across parallel universes.
But if you can afford to just eat the cost of a crash, you don't need to pay the insurance company for that service. And maybe you can eat the costs of some crashes but not others: If you crash into a rich guy's car, maybe you can't afford those costs, but damage to your own car is capped at the price of your own car. So that's all Dan's doing: insuring the costs he can't pay (damage to others) but not the ones he can (damage to his own car).
The math isn't affected by his chances of being found at fault, or how good of a driver he is, at all.
It's my understanding that most insurance companies earn most of their money by investing their float, not by paying out less than they bring in from customers.
In defense of the author, maybe they have a dashcam and that's what increases their confidence.
But that's where I see a problem: this (or another reasonable thing) is not something that would take long to explain.
Looking stupid is a failure of communication. You're right, but you failed to give enough rope for others to follow, and that wastes everyone's time.
The improvement I'd suggest is to dig into why someome thinks you look stupid. You could think "they must be stupid", but that, in itself, is an overly simplistic and inefficient model.
I think you’ve got that backwards - he wanted to only buy coverage for damage he did to other vehicles / people & not to cover his own vehicle.
However, sometimes, for some drivers, fully comprehensive insurance can be cheaper than 3rd party only for arcane internal insurance risk-accounting reasons. So by not letting his agent even look at the whole market he was cutting himself off from the possibility of cheaper insurance.
I am curious to the mechanics of how the accounting situation arises that an insurer would benefit from taking on more liability for less revenue.
The entire business is heavily regulated and based on accurately accounting and pricing risk. It seems suspect that a regulator would allow such an obviously mispriced insurance product.
The explanation I saw was that people who buy comprehensive insurance are by and large regarded as lower risk than 3rd party only buyers & sometimes that weighting can tip the balance to make comprehensive cheaper than 3rd party, if the insurer thinks you’re otherwise a low risk buyer.
All insurers have to go on to gauge your risk are the signals available to them & the type of insurance you’re buying is a signal.
Whether this is still true in the modern world I don’t know - I probably saw this advice ten years or so ago on a well regarded money saving site.
Interesting, I had not thought of that. I have been purchasing auto insurance for over 10 years, and I get prices every couple years. I always buy extremely high liability only insurance because I can easily afford to replace my car if anything should happen to it. I have always found liability only insurance to be much cheaper than comprehensive and collision and liability insurance.
It would greatly surprise me if buying comprehensive insurance itself served that good of a signal to offset comprehensive/collision insurance for say, a $20k to $40k car.
Yes, on the other hand if you own a $5k car then the insurer’s liability is much smaller & there are plenty of older cars on the road driven by older, safer drivers that fit into that category.
This was regarded as a weird corner case even then & was mostly just used as an example of why you should try tweaking various features of the insurance you were after, because the price could sometimes change in ways that might seem counter-intuitive.
That ... still makes no sense. "Discounting insurance for revealed [lower] risk class" doesn't work if the insured can easily fake membership in the lower risk class, which is trivial here -- just ask for comprehensive!
What I think you might be confusing this with, is that one piece of the insurance is cheaper if you bundle it with others. That is, liability-only might be $50, but if you if you get liability + collision, it's $80, which breaks down into $40 for liability and $40 for collision. The insurer is taking more liability -- but also more revenue, so no funny business.
The "high-risk poor" can't "cheat" here because they can't afford the extra $30 to begin with, and "being willing/able to spend $30 just to be safe" is an actionable signal of being low risk.
But you still shouldn't have a scenario where you get strictly greater coverage for strictly less money.
There's also a scenario where only people who don't look at prices buy liability-only, which signals poor decision making or carelessness and justifies higher cost to regulators.
The phrase “not looking at prices” generally means willing to buy the more expensive products or services. If you buy liability only, it means you are looking at prices and coverage.
pja made the claim that in some instances, collision/comprehensive + liability can be cheaper than just liability alone.
I expressed surprise that collision/comprehensive + liability can be cheaper than just liability alone, since, on the face of it, the insurance company seems exposed to more losses due to possibly having to pay the insured for their car damages.
In my comment, I wrote liability referring to the insurer’s liability for paying to fix/replace the insurer’s car, not liability as in auto liability insurance where the insurance company pays others for damage you cause to them.
> You will often be found "at fault" in cases where you are not actually at fault (the other driver lies better than your truth) and there are many cases
As I understand it, Dan wants to skip on collision / comprehensive, not liability. I can imagine a number of scenarios in which you might not want to bother insuring an asset, even as you insure yourself for damage to others you might be at fault for.
Here in the US, and I assume in Canada as well, there are two main kinds of car insurance:
Liability - that pays for damages/injuries to others
Collision/Comprehensive - that pays for damage to your car
It sounds like the author wanted Liability but didn't want to pay for Collision. If you have significant assets and/or a cheap car, it may be to your advantage not to get the collision. Except he didn't use the customary terms but described them rather elliptically.
In fact, take the money you save on Collision and get more Liability is not a bad idea.
I don't think that's what the author was getting at here - a compelling reason is that the value of the payout to fix your own car x the probability of it happening is lower than the total premium extra. Eg the "Insurance is only worth it for things you can't afford" mentality.
This also checks with the OP in this subthread: The insurance seller will always push for more coverage for self-interested reasons.
That's opposite my experience: I took an appointment a few weeks ago from my insurance agent (Texas) who wanted to review my existing insurance vs my needs. On the call I laid out that same logic -- I can afford repairs to my car out of pocket, so it doesn't make sense to insure it, so maybe I should drop it (just keep liability) -- and she agreed, and was happy to tell me the savings!
(I didn't go through with it on the call and maybe she would have put up resistance then, so who knows.)
Edit: From reading the source, it seems like the author didn't clarify that that was the logic he was using, or that he could afford the damage to his car out of pocket. Insurers are probably accustomed to people overextending themselves and skimping on insurance without being able to afford such things, which is risky and something agents have to head off early on.
Salespeople have different strategies, so you aren't always going to get one who tries to sell you a bunch of stuff you don't need.
Some will try to milk you for all you're worth. Others will try to stick to things that you plausibly need and hope that selling to more people and having a higher renewal rate will make up for the extra amount that they aren't squeezing out of each person.
It may be an unusual preference, but I don't think there's anything wrong with it. Maybe he drives an inexpensive car and can afford to repair/replace it himself, so he doesn't want to pay the premium to insure against that risk.
I had exactly the same impressions as you, and initially I thought that it was my non-native English interpretation (I felt sort of stupid), happy to know I am not the only one considering those examples (more-than-a-little) self-entitling the author as the ultimate genius on earth.
It seems to me like he puts some intentionality in attempting to look stupid and a sort of satisfaction when this happens.
“What is the Apple store employee supposed to do to not make someone feel stupid when they ask for the smallest box?”
Maybe ask the customer, “can I ask why you would like the one with the smallest box?” instead of making assumptions? Although note that this might also be classified as a question where the person asking is admitting they don’t understand why someone would want this aka “looking dumb” in the wording from the article
I don't understand why he was asking for the smallest box, though? Isn't that an inefficient proxy? Wouldn't asking to see the computers have been more accurate?
The author's refusal to explain to the store employee why he wants the smallest box makes me think he actually is stupid, or at least lacks the emotional intelligence to understand that when someone is trying to help you, you should explain your intentions to them. If I worked at the Apple store, and somebody insisted they want the laptop in the 'smallest box' without explaining why, the only reasonable conclusion is that they're experiencing the XY problem. Not to mention that Macbooks of the same form factor all come in boxes of the same size, so there's a million other configuration options he'd need to provide... https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/66377/what-is-the-x...
I think that is the funniest part of this article.
I read his post to the end looking for the answer to why he wanted the smallest box, furiously thinking of why. I could only think of three reasons that I rejected as unlikely. Frustrated, I came here to look at the comments. So many comments about the box. It's like the contents of the briefcase on Pulp Fiction. It's like a McGuffin that forces everyone to talk about his article.
I once give a laptop as a birthday present on a weekend trip with my girlfriend, traveling in a small two-seat convertible. I struggled somewhat to figure out how to pack presents without it being obvious I was bringing presents. Fortunately the laptop box was small enough to fit behind the seat.
I don’t why the author needed a small box, but I did think of my experience when I read his anecdote. I think a large part of his appearing impaired is not even attempting to explain his rationales, suspicions or methods in the moment. His goal seems to be to engineer these awkward interactions, when they could be otherwise lubricated or alleviated. He’s acting as though other people and their understanding are irrelevant to him; they are furniture or fixtures that should trust and obey unquestioningly, which is a bit ironic.
I am really curious what his end goal here was. Apple's boxes are all very small — in what situation would a few centimeters in box size outweigh all other considerations?
I assume it has to do with sneaking the machine in and out of a place. The other alternative is something to do with storage. Maybe it's a backup machine they want hidden somewhere in case the feds seize all his electronics.
That last one makes the most sense, and explains why he didn't divulge it. That way, when the author is raided, they aren't going to ask, "hey, where's that computer that, comes in the smallest box?"
I'm imagining the author has this big book case, and one of the books is hallowed out and has an Apple machine in it. Maybe it's built into a false floor of a cabinet.
But as the employee pointed out, smaller box does not mean smaller machine. And I don't see the point of hiding the machine with the box still around it.
Not the OP. In my case the client want many all-in-ones.I proposed a small CPU to fit into the notches on the back of a Specific monitor. I used an Intel Compute stick which only needs power, an HDMI cable and a powered USB hub.
This gave me an All in One Computer functionally for less than half the price. It also had the benefit of being up-gradable by swapping out the Compute stick for a newer model. When the client saw it he thought it was an all in one and thankfully appreciated the cleverness. (Financially, I got the contract)
On the other hand, he doesn't spend much time talking about the case that could have him die or the one that could have him go blind. If something like that happened to me, I would probably have a position like the author. There are also a few cases (COVID, air filtration) where people disagreeing with him had relatively serious health consequences.
While this guy is clearly smart, and willingness to ask simple questions is a worthy quality that many people possess, this is an article about what happens when decent intelligence and a good instinct is accompanied by narcissism and delusions of grandeur. Being right about something feels even better if other people thought you were wrong about it.
With his COVID action— people disagreeing with him, at first, wasn't what had serious health consequences. He said he started wearing N95s several days before the initial r0 estimate was even published, and that he based his opinion on SARS-CoV-1 data which many relevant experts didn't think was applicable. There's a reason they didn't jump to the same conclusions he did, and that reason is why they're experts. He essentially won a bet talks about it like he figured out how to beat poker.
And if he recieved a torrent of negative feedback for his penchant for air filtering in 2012, that says a lot more about his friends and family than his very not radical adoption of home air filters less than 10 years ago? The whole sick building/mold aversion/exhaust fumes/smoke/spent cooking fuel/etc realm of AQ concerns has been a publicly accepted health concern waaaaaaaaaaaaaay longer than 2012. Sharper Image was making a mint off of their Ionic Breeze air purifier at least a decade before that.
Like I said, he's obviously a smart guy, but this whole 'they all laughed at me and look at me now!' narrative is just not that impressive.
I agree he's probably a self-entitled know-it-all, but I think at least his conclusion for COVID was spot on. By 2020-01-26 Wuhan (a major Chinese city) was already under lock down, so it was pretty clear CoVID19 was serious. I live in Asia, so I'm not in a position to understand the sentiment in (for example) the US, so the "let's wait until we have more data" attitude is really perplexing to me.
Sure, there was no public data on r0 and no proof that COVID19 was similar to the other SARS viruses. But given only the info of "Wuhan was under lockdown", wouldn't it be indicative of the seriousness and the contagiousness of the virus, at least in the eyes of Chinese government officials?
I always thought the "West" misinterpreted the events in China at their detriment. Perhaps they assumed that it merely reflected the inability of the Chinese government to control a pandemic instead of actual seriousness of the disease?
Anyway I started wearing a surgical mask regularly and made sure I washed hands thoroughly after the Wuhan lockdown was announced. I hate wearing masks but it was less than $1/day and some inconvenience compared with an unknown but potentially scary disease. Not sure how anyone would come to a conclusion that taking precautions could be a bad bet (on a personal level at least).
I agree with you about COVID. In January, we had videos of China blocking roads that led to Wuhan, soldiers in the streets, people disinfecting the streets. At this point, I knew that it was probably going to be serious.
He said he was wearing N95 masks for a week before the 26th. Wuhan locked down on the 23rd.
Ebola was a large and growing problem in Africa in 2015 which covered a larger swath of the population, had nearly identical messaging from the Government, and would trigger a lockdown in Sierra Leone. Lots of folks regularly travel between the west coast of Africa and major American cities. I'd argue it would not have been prudent to start wearing Ebola PPE at that point, either. Of course, because it was Africa and not China, it only got marginal news coverage compared to the enormity of the problem on the ground, and much less traction on technology platforms because to this day, 25% of Sierra Leone's population has internet access. Epidemiologists were every bit as concerned about Ebola as they were about COVID before COVID's higher initial R0 number was released.
I'd like to hear the justification for not donning Ebola PPE given what was ostensibly a nearly identical situation that fortunately ended up being handled a whole lot better. Or maybe he did and he left that one off?
I'm not sure why you're painting him as having psychological issues based on a blog post.
> He said he started wearing N95s several days before the initial r0 estimate was even published, and that he based his opinion on SARS-CoV-1 data which many relevant experts didn't think was applicable. There's a reason they didn't jump to the same conclusions he did, and that reason is why they're experts.
The same experts that were telling the public that masks were useless in March 2020. Experts are not always giving the best recommendations for your specific case.
> Like I said, he's obviously a smart guy, but this whole 'they all laughed at me and look at me now!' narrative is just not that impressive.
That's a very uncharitable way of interpreting that blog post. I personally see it as "next time you feel too stupid to do something, think about that blog post and maybe I'll give you the strength needed to do something that will have a good outcome".
I read the article as the author sharing how he was trying to be intelligent instead of appear intelligent. There are a surprising number of people who desire, above all, to be seen as the smartest person in the room.
I was enjoying this article right up until he started shaking his fist at the heavens. As it meandered into rambling he undermined what was shaping up to be a good read. Losing me with foregone conclusion his roommate's hesitance to go all-in on masks was the reason she got, "long-covid".
Seems he glommed onto the mask because it was something an individual can control in the face of an ultimately nihilistic reality, over which one has little influence. Like buying toilet paper despite assurances there is no shortage, myopic assertions on the observable sure seems to make people feel better. Speaking of shortages, the criticisms of n95's stemmed from a legitimate shortfall among medical personnel, despite questionable value to panic-buying consumers. "The Science" I'm sure he cites behind this rationale has been pretty clear regarding how Covid spreads. Prolonged close indoor personal contact. Wearing the n95 at the grocery store or while walking the dog poses little benefit because those situations pose little risk. Given serological investigation puts the rates of asymptomatic infection anywhere between 10 to 40:1, his roomie is more likely to have contracted it from him than from her unwillingness to wear a mask. Possibly while sitting at the dinner table with our author, rolling her eyes as he urgently espoused the virtues of the public N95. We'll never know for certain, but he'll surely continue to conversely reason her disagreement on the matter led to that, "stupid" conclusion.
Given the clarity of hindsight, global epidemiological statistics remaining largely unaffected by public mask policy starts to makes sense. After all if his reasoning behind the mask had an air of truth to it you'd be able to observe at least some impact on infection rates before and after mandates. Yet for the most part communities all followed a the similar bell-shaped trajectory, regardless of policy or political orientation. I see a lot of people pretending this isn't the case, that there isn't two years of data suggesting otherwise, meanwhile the rest are quietly bartering with their gods the others will get over it and move on with their lives. It's really a shame his article blundered into Covid territory, because he was starting to say something worthwhile. Like most conversations Covid, the substance evaporated as we were left with largely emotional appeals. Shame we can't talk about politicized risks pragmatically, trying to fit them into a wider context of facts and numbers. Like, why am I even talking about Covid when upwards of 8M people, largely children under 5, die every year from respiratory diseases caused by pollution? Sure seems the world has other problems. Maybe, like politics and religion, the topic just isn't suited for polite company.
At the point he started wearing masks, there was absolutely no significant knowledge of how SARS-CoV2 spread. In fact, I saw a well-constructed paper a few folks were passing around in February noting that surgical masks were no less effective at protecting health care workers in actual clinical settings than N95s during recent respiratory disease outbreaks. We now know that such is not true for this one, but to claim that your sole ability to power through the haters and champion the truth was the reason you took that path, rather than just having taken a bet, is bizarre.
Agreed—- it somehow ties into the opposite of the ability to fake sincerity: the inability to show sincerity. I am still traumatized by the times the second case happened. The times when people dismissed me because they thought (perhaps rightly?) that I was acting like a self entitled genius.. (and I am inferring, because why would normal intelligent adults say such things??)
Another perhaps relevant thought, which is perhaps crass: If PG or Alan Kay ever claim that they are willing to look stupid, I feel like people would not believe them. On the other hand if Feynman does it, people would feel the sincerity. (At least the version of Feynman Feynman marketed, not the Feynman who couldnt suffer Gellman)
Another thought: maybe its better to be willing to look immature.
Good points, to which I'll add, how the heck is he surrounded by so many people who a) give a shit at all, and b) are so willing to let him know they think he's stupid? No one cares or dares in my case. Maybe it's my "tall privilege" again?
In would say it goes even further than humblebragging, and ventures into narcissism and an inability to handle criticism, explain oneself, or accept help.
If the car insurance salesperson disagrees with you, maybe you should try to understand why? Did you really consider the possible that a tree branch could fall in front of your car or that you could get caught in a hail storm?
If the Apple store employee doesn’t understand why you’re obsessed with box sizes, explain that the MacBook in the smaller box is the one with the features you want and that’s the easiest way to identify it.
If someone gives you a look like “you’re stupid” it’s most likely that they don’t understand your decision not that they think you have an inability to reason. Sometimes you simply need to explain yourself, but it seems the OP has such confidence in their own decisions that they won’t accept any help or input from even the experts. After all as you noted, it appears that the OP has always been right in the end.
I hate this, the idea that I should have to explain myself to a random stranger in a shop as if they are entitled to know anything about me. I buy a lot of sweets on Friday for the weekend and regularly the clerk behind the till will make a comment, "Thats a lot of chocolate! Who is going to eat all that! You must be having a party whats the occasion?". In front of a line of customers who are eager to get home I have to explain myself to the clerk "Im depressed!"... and then just stand there awkwardly waiting for them to finish doing their job.
I get it they are just trying to be friendly but I don't want it no one in the queue behind me wants it, no one wants to explain themselves to a stranger we will never meet again, I just want the sweets / laptop please and thank you.
You don't have to, and I personally also find small-talk with strangers rather tedious, but in the specific cases brought up by the author, it sounded like he would've saved himself time by just briefly explaining his reasoning. Which also would've had the nice side-effect of treating his interlocutors as rational human beings worthy of a measure of respect.
> no one wants to explain themselves to a stranger we will never meet again
Even though I, personally, feel the way you do, the above doesn't ring true. Many people crave those small interactions with strangers, and welcome the opportunity to talk about themselves. That's the reason they're a social norm.
I'm in a very similar boat as you two (why does the barista at Starbucks care what my weekend plans are?), but I don't think it's always that people want to talk about themselves, I think they just want to talk to somebody, period. Humans are social creatures and have survived on our ability to form communities, so there is part of us that sometimes just want people to talk to, not necessarily about ourselves. For sure there are narcissists who do only want to talk about themselves, but I wouldn't say that's everyone.
> I hate this, the idea that I should have to explain myself to a random stranger in a shop as if they are entitled to know anything about me.
You sound like someone who has never worked in any customer facing position. Many people come in wanting X. They don’t realize X has many consequences. You know if you just give them X then they’ll come back another day, leave a bad review, or say, “but why didn’t you tell me this?!?!”
I mean, ffs - this happens to me as a customer and I’m thankful. Sometimes there are obscene arcane scenarios that you can’t find out about through regular means that only that service rep will know about. They are mostly fine if you just explain what you’re doing - they’re safe guarding the company’s reputation. They have nothing against you asking for weird shit - they just don’t want your bad shit later.
> no one wants to explain themselves to a stranger we will never meet again
So you walk into the Apple store, walk up to an employee and when confronted with the question "How can I help you today?" what do you do?
Telling them "I would like X", seems like an unneccesary level of "explaining yourself". They should just know and understand exactly what you want from non verbal signals?
Thats not the scenario the scenario in the example was walking up to the staff and asking "I would like X" and then instead of selling you X they ask why you want X and would you not prefer Y?
Very annoying, I want X thats why I asked for it, I dunno if I want Y because I didn't spent time researching it like I did X. I want X not an argument there are lots of other place I can buy X if you are going to be difficult about it.
>humblebragging that you're an unrecognized genius
and this is why this article is popular. Everyone has to deal with looking foolish or telling a doctor they know their body better than them. I think playing it up this way and in this format really sells this idea of being this underappreciated genius in a sea of stupid people, which unfortunately a lot of people relate to, instead of attacking the social and systemic issues this person is actually experiencing. For example, poorly trained and non-empathic nurses or mask disinformation early during covid. Obviously these things are strongly liked to ruthless for-profit healthcare and how the right has politicized covid.
Most of the examples are bizarre. The air filter thing makes no sense. Its extremely rare to develop asthma in your own home because of being near wildfires. So there's no evidence his filters did anything. Also most of these are just being over-sensitive at not looking 100% competent all the time. Being bad or silly at videogames at first? That's a universal experience! Being right at work while others are wrong or lazy sometimes! That too. Doing the right thing when no one else is? That's universal too!
And like you said, they don't list the times they made a big seemingly merit-based action but ended up just being wrong.
This person just sounds socially maladjusted and probably suffers from a certain level of social anxiety. If they think acting normally is constantly making them look stupid, there there's something going on with them mentally that isn't healthy. Worse, it may reveal how they see others who aren't competent in the moment, which is really unfair to them. Does this person see us as stupid when we do everyday things? I suspect they do.
So the real take away here isn't "btw aren't we all geniuses if we're like this," I think he was aiming for intentionally or not, but a lesson on being tolerant of others who may not seem competent in the moment.
Lastly, this obsession with who is and isn't stupid is really unhealthy. I see it in a lot of tech people, and its just an ugly form of toxic masculinity. These people will mock sports people for being traditionally over-competitive, but don't see it in themselves when they do it in regards to smarts.
The unusual level of hostility the author encountered didn't seem right... Like you said, there's some over-sensitivity, a lot of jumping to conclusions, and hostile thinking from the author himself that led him to believe that so many people thought he stupid. Definitely some social anxiety in there as well, which is fine, but letting that turn into hostility is not.
It's a shame because the articles overall message isn't bad at all. Have the willingness to feel stupid for personal improvement is good advice but he just comes across it the wrong way.
The entire post is peak /r/iamverysmart material and I'm not surprised it is popular here because a lot of the HN crowd fits into that category as well.
This article does not undermine its own point. In fact, very, very few articles ever undermine their own point. In order to undermine your own point it means you've failed to construct a logical chain of thought. But that is what people do all the time in their daily lives. Maybe children would undermine their own points, or someone posting their first ill-thought comment on Facebook. But I think most people will learn how to construct an argument by their second time publishing one.
In this case, the article is not about 'the joys of being too dumb to breathe'. It's about how 1. looking stupid is not the same as being stupid, and 2. looking stupid can be beneficial in the long run. The author does not need to actually be stupid once in order to support this idea.
And I have to worry if you think he's "bragging" about merely looking stupid, as if that weren't bad enough. Maybe if you identify as stupid I could understand the offense.
To the author, Dan Luu: I like your article and I think you're on the right track!
You can construct an argument that we never landed on the moon if you cherry pick your data carefully.
That’s the point being made here: not that his examples are wrong, that they are cherry picked to support his views.
It may be superficially thought provoking, but it is not compelling as a logical argument.
There are tangible downsides to ignoring expert advice; you are not a god. You cannot be an expert at everything.
It is not possible to be an expert at everything.
Therefore, yes, asking questions to understand a topic is good, but no, ignoring the advice of an expert is not good.
The examples given only show examples where the result of ignoring the expert, or third party advice was positive; it can’t possibly be true that this can be the case in all circumstances, except by sheer good luck.
I whole heartedly agree that asking questions is more important than looking smart… but:
> Overall, I view the upsides of being willing to look stupid as much larger than the downsides. When it comes to things that aren't socially judged, like winning a game, understanding something, or being able to build things due to having a good understanding, it's all upside.
You don’t have to look stupid to be able to do all those things, you just have to be humble and work hard.
If the person actually is an expert, yes. But actual experts, at least outside hard science domains where we can run controlled experiments to nail down theoretical models to the point where the actually do have high predictive accuracy, are much rarer than most people suppose.
For example, the author says he ignored his doctor's advice; but that only counts as ignoring the advice of an expert if his doctor actually was an expert. Most doctors aren't--in fact, one could argue that no doctors are, since nobody has a really good predictive model for medicine. Many doctors know more than at least a fair number of their patients do, but that's a much lower bar to clear than "actual expert". And given the current state of medicine and the availability of information online, it's pretty easy for a reasonably intelligent person to know more than any of their doctors do about their own particular condition--since they both are more interested in accurate information, and have more time to devote to finding it out.
> You can construct an argument that we never landed on the moon if you cherry pick your data carefully.
This is a really nice, concise way to make the point you are making. Doesn't it seem like this is the central problem with politics today? Everyone has their own data and everyone is logical. You can't have a functional discussion under such scenario. People don't see any problem with their own logic because there isn't any. People can't definitively show a problem with the other's logic because there isn't any.
The article is interesting, but it fails for me to make a convincing case that looking stupid is necessary, most of the time.
Particularly in interviews, what I'd like to read is a reflection not on how to avoid thinking in the way that results in saying or asking things that sound stupid, but how to keep the same internal process without communicating the results in a way that confuses quite so much.
An analogy: a mathematician proves a non-obvious theorem. In their proof, they skip so many steps that it looks like they say intuitively wrong things.
It is NOT that they should stop thinking of these proofs in the same way, it's merely a failure of communication.
Yes. It seems the point of the article is to take revenge at those who might have thought he was stupid (although they didn't say anything at the time) and tell them: "See? I was right all along!"
He sounds more like my mother in law than like a keen philosopher.
Yes, every example is "I sounded stupid but I was actually correct". From the title I thought the article was going to be about not being afraid to learn new things.
Absolutely. There's a kernel of wisdom here, but the argument buckles without examples where the OP actually was "stupid" and wasn't proven to be "the smart one" in the end.
Learning isn't a straight path. It's unusual to not veer off and misunderstand something for a while, during which time others might be right to assume you are "stupid".
The willingness to look stupid will sometimes reflect that you are, in fact, actually stupid. A lack of any examples in this category makes this post read more like a humble brag.
> The person who helped me, despite being very polite, also clearly thought I was a bozo and kept explaining things like "the size of the box and the size of the computer aren't the same". Of course I knew that, but I didn't want to say something like "I design CPUs. I understand the difference between the size of the box the computer comes and in the size of the computer and I know it's very unusual to care about the size of the box, but I really want the one that comes in the smallest box". Just saying the last bit without establishing any kind of authority didn't convince the person
This is not "willingness to look stupid", it's obviously the will/need/want to look mysterious to stroke one's ego.
He could have chosen to behave like a good human and say why he wanted a smaller box so no one looks stupid (he to the the employee and the employee to him) and even give some new insights to the employee to help another customer with the same needs.
I can think of examples of stupid things I've done, but I have a hard time thinking of when a willingness to admit I don't know something, was itself a stupid thing to do? Can you give an example? For me, actually being stupid involves something I'm stubbornly wrong about, and willing to look stupid is openness and vulnerability to admit I don't understand something I "should" know.
> Going into an Apple store and asking for (and buying) the computer that comes in the smallest box, which I had a good reason to want at the time
> The person who helped me, despite being very polite, also clearly thought I was a bozo and kept explaining things like "the size of the box and the size of the computer aren't the same". Of course I knew that, but I didn't want to say something like "I design CPUs. I understand the difference between the size of the box the computer comes and in the size of the computer and I really want the one that comes in the smallest box", but just saying the last bit without establishing any kind of authority didn't convince the person
> I eventually asked them to humor me and just bring out the boxes for the various laptop models so I could see the boxes, which they did, despite clearly thinking that my decision making process made no sense
Oh c'mon, that's not fair. You have to tell us what the goal was. :) I'm super curious what a CPU designer wanted with the "laptop that came in the smallest box."
Perhaps smallest box = smallest laptop = they wanted to study the form factor. But does the smallest laptop really come in the smallest box? And did the results of this experiment influence your future CPU design decisions? I feel like this arc deserves its own page.
I have to say this part (and quite a few other parts of the post) come across as quite arrogant. I mean if he really wants the computer with the smallest box, why can't he explain why.
I agree with the general gist of the post: don't be afraid to ask stupid questions. However, the post has an underlying "feeling" of "my questions are not really stupid, I'm just so smart that others don't realise". I know that I ask plenty of stupid questions when I ask questions, I often realise how stupid they were just after the answer.
I frankly had the same impression. It felt it was less about the willingness to look to stupid, but rather the stupidity of people who surrounded him and their inability to see this individual's brilliance.
Perhaps this is an unkind reading, but particularly the laptop scenario felt telling that this person might feel above explaining why they might prefer a laptop which comes in a smaller box.
On the surface that is very much a ridiculous request, regardless of how sensible it might actually be. Surely that shouldn't stop you from making the request, but you must understand that someone is merely doing their job to make sure that you understand what you're asking for.
If I go to a tuba shop and ask how many litres of ranch dressing it holds, I'm not going to scoff when the salesperson reminds me that it isn't a fancy brass bowl.
Yeah, this looks like a typical case of the "XY problem" where it's really hard to tell if the person making the request is framing that request wrongly/with unnecessary constraints to satisfy what they actually want.
This is why I look for sales training in my hires. Its clear that the Apple rep was asking probing questions trying to wrestle him into a decision funnel. I've sold laptops to a bunch of grandmas who've given me questions like that, and never to a "CPU designer".
...come to think of it, maybe one of the grandmas was a CPU designer all a long!!
On the other hand, if I was in a situation where I wanted the computer with the smallest box for whatever reason, I would find it really difficult to ask for that because I would be embarrassed by how it doesn't fit the expected pattern of what I should be looking for. I will often wimp out and not be clear about my preferences in situations like these because I'm afraid of awkwardness. So I do admire the willingness to speak up about unusual preferences.
I think it is measure of time, for author it looks simple to put everything in few words instead of having long explanation, I find this typical in IT, where my coworkers all the time trying to compress explanation in fewest words possible. Maybe laziness or type of optimization, but usually back fires as other people ask you multiple questions, arising from their own point of view.
That doesn't sound like backfiring to me. The hardest part of explaining something complex is matching it to the recipient's existing frame of reference. Letting them lead the explanation by asking questions can be an effective way for them to fit the new information into their current understanding.
> The hardest part of explaining something complex is matching it to the recipient's existing frame of reference.
Nicely said, I was trying to say that significant number of us is quite bad at it. And on the other hand, if frames are completely different, first compressed explanation looks like "noise noise word noise noise ...". On the other hand, often I see people struggling to start explaining as they know they will loose 30 min of time just to get to basics, so saying "I need computer in smallest box" - can be translated to
"I want you to trust me and not bore me with you daily sale's pitch script you have learned by cart, I do not have time explain, I just need what I want not what you want to recommend me, unlike other customers I do not need your assistance I just need you to give me what I want. If customer is always right, just give me what I want, and I will make a purchase and you can move to the next customer."
Sometimes I think that this inpatient arose from search engines, where you type at most 3 words and you get your 10 results you were searching for. So, I assume it is reflected how we communicate with other fellow humans, demanding immediate results instead of 2 way communication.
We can argue it is rude, but for person who built his strong will over years in a hard way, attempt of manipulation and selling is also rude and intruding.
I do not have you ever been to Turkey or Greece where you have these shop owners who are literally trying to drag you in to the shop so you can buy something. For them it is like a ritual or the game, but if you do not want to be part of that theater show, you will find it very annoying.
In many Balkan countries they will ask you multiple times to eat or drink, and polite answer is "I cannot" but if you give that answer it is basically conversation starter for "Why? Are you ok? Is there something wrong...", it is part of social game to continue conversation. If you answer "I don't want to" although it is technically most correct, you will be showered with responses as "that is rude", "we will not poison you", "why is something wrong with my food", "why are you angry at me" ... and all you wanted to say is "I do not need any food or drink at this time as my body does not needed it, and I am perfectly content with my energy and liquid levels" :)
So, for many technical persons, who live most of their live in their own head, trying to juggle multiple ideas and resolve who knows what, small talk can be a major annoyance.
And I do not want to start with "this is secret project idea I am working on, I should not share it with anyone, someone may steal my idea ..." and everything along those lines...
I try to give short simple examples because when I try to tell people the truth their eyes glaze over and their brain turns off while the nerd talks his techno jumble.
Non technical people only have the patience to learn / listen to very basic concepts.
> but usually back fires as other people ask you multiple questions, arising from their own point of view.
I don't think this is back firing its just giving the non technical person the time to take in whats been said and then they ask follow up questions to confirm their understanding. I have had people get frustrated that I was talking down to them, when that happens I stop and talk to them as if they have my knowledge and they immediately regret that and ask me to go back to explaining like they are a child. Its not me trying to fluff my ego by talking down, I just legitimately know more about the topic than them, thats why they are paying me, I guess some times they just need reminded of that.
> Non technical people only have the patience to learn / listen to very basic concepts.
I know many people who would consider themselves non-technical, yet who certainly take the time to learn complex concepts. Some of those are indeed technological concepts.
> I try to give short simple examples because when I try to tell people the truth their eyes glaze over and their brain turns off while the nerd talks his techno jumble.
The short simple examples you give are also truthful, correct?
Perhaps the additional information you'd like to explain simply isn't needed for the other person's goal.
A great way to have both technical and non-technical people's eyes glaze over is detailing all kinds of minute details before describing some of the high-level goals or giving context as to why you're getting so deep into the details. As you mention, simple examples can get a lot across, and can be a springboard to more questions being asked, to allow the other person to decide what depth of knowledge they would like to know.
The non-technical person you're talking to may very well have the patience to learn the deep technical truth you'd like to explain, but they may have no reason to know it. In the scenario you're thinking of, you're doing the technical work, not them, correct? So why would they need to know deep technical details? A basic outline, with some corner cases pointed out, is likely all they need. Not because they don't have patience to learn what you're explaining, but because they have other things that are more important to their or your organization's success.
Our genuine joy and excitement about the minute details of subnetting or data compression or whatever; during those explanations often doesn't help either.
I scare people when im enthused about something. Its a bitch.
Yeah but we generally don't work with philosophers, we work with sales people and marketers. I respect their skill but they generally aren't the types to be interested in learning new things
>"my questions are not really stupid, I'm just so smart that others don't realise"
Sounds like this was the point of the blog post. He also drops that he was "very good" at Overwatch and "#1 in the world". Usually the people who want to tell others about this in public are not very good.
The ones who are very good are the ones who only tell you after you've tried teaching them. Since bad players in games often can't tell what good players look like, or how they play.
I think this interaction is an example of what "the customer is always right" is supposed to mean. Sure, the salesperson should verify that the person isn't using mistaken terminology, but past that, why not just help them? Or why didn't the salesperson take the initiative to ask them for the reason, instead of continuing to insist they were mistaken?
But they did help him. I don't see this as a huge indictment on the rep here — they _do_ deal with people who are very ignorant of tech everyday. Maybe it took a while to convince them, but I think that's just as likely a failing of communication.
> I eventually asked them to humor me and just bring out the boxes for the various laptop models so I could see the boxes, which they did, despite clearly thinking that my decision making process made no sense
I wondered about that story and concluded that the author knew which computer they wanted. They also knew that this computer came in the smallest box. So they only had to give that second bit of information to get what they wanted.
It is a bit condescending in my view to withhold that information from the clerk. But then again, I'm only making assumptions. Also, I've done similar things where I refused to let on my internal reasoning for various reasons. Sometimes just to mess with people. And clearly, many people thought me a fool for it. If I'd actually told them my reasoning? In many instances that would not have improved their opinion of me. So no loss.
There are also many instances where I could have benefited immensely from sharing my reasoning, because people could have corrected my mistaken assumptions. Can't say I've got it figured out when to keep shut and when to share.
If it happened, he purposefully chose a request that he knew would generate confusion and discomfort in a situation with someone he has power over. It reminds me of the high school bully who fake-punches you, knowing you'll react, and then punishing you for how you react.
At best he purposefully made things more difficult than they had to be. She was absolutely right to think that he was a "bozo." I generally strive to make things as easy and painless as possible for service workers I deal with, because I've been a service worker. It wouldn't surprise me if he has never spent a day in his adult life working a service job.
Regarding whether this actually happened or not: did any notice that "small box" item is one of the few he doesn't actually explain and he's withholding information from us just like he did from the salesperson? It feels like a "look at me, I'm so very smart, watch me manipulate my audience" move.
His disdain for his readers is pretty obvious from the fact that he puts zero effort into readability; there isn't an drop of formatting, it's just a massive wall of text from edge to edge of the browser window.
I notice he doesn't afford his victim any generous assumptions.
He's like; fuck you for thinking the guy basing his $2000 computer purchase on cardboard is an idiot - I'm actually a secret genius CPU designer don't you know??
Well yeah like, maybe she's got a Master's degree in Packaging Design and knows that the smallest box, in fact, has weak cornering or cannot be reclosed because it has to be ripped open or something.
Is his request even well defined? There might be different, shortest, thinnest, shallowest boxes. Does it need to fit through a letterbox? Oh, ok, you don't care about depth then...
Not to mention the double meaning that "box" has in computing...
I noped out of the article at that point which is a shame because I do agree with the general idea.
> His disdain for his readers is pretty obvious from the fact that he puts zero effort into readability; there isn't an drop of formatting, it's just a massive wall of text from edge to edge of the browser window.
You can see this as disdain, or as respect: I'm free to bring my own CSS to this page, and have things look exactly how I want them too.
I don’t share your assumption that he purposefully made things more difficult.
My assumption is that he really didn’t know which computer came in the smaller box (since, computer size, which is the public info about the product, doesn’t exactly correlate with the box size).
My guess is that he wanted to know which, if any, impact a small box would potentially have on computer components (like different impact absorption on transportation) that would require some CPU design adaptation. Like (speculation here, as I am nowhere near a CPU specialist): is a second memory clip more susceptible to be affected by transportation impact? So the box size is correlated with cheaper computers. Which tend to be larger computers, but can come in a smaller box because they don’t have that second memory clip?
Idk, but I am assuming good intent and reasoning behind the anecdote.
"Hi, I'm doing research on $WHATEVER_IT_WAS, could you show me the computer you sell in the smallest boxes?" would prevent the confusion and awkwardness. It seems he gets out of his way to encounter these situations which is kinda rude.
I still liked the article, I certainly have a problem with trying to avoid looking stupid too hard, at least in certain contexts.
Yeah, exactly. I build weird machines, and I need parts that aren't designed for the weird machines (because nobody has built them before), so I usually go to unrelated shops.
Last time this happened, I needed steel wire, and I went to a guitar shop to buy guitar strings. I told the employee "this is going to be a bit weird but I want a string that is 0.3mm in diameter for a machine I'm building, do you have any?" instead of letting him be puzzled why I would want a "0.3mm string" rather than a "C string".
Usually people even ask and talk about about what I'm building, which is nice, but if it will take a long time to explain I say something like "it's not very easy to explain what it does because it's for a specialized purpose, but essentially it does <whatever general thing>".
I've never had anyone think I'm stupid, but not for lack of asking stupid questions, I think. I just take a little more care to spend two seconds explaining why I'm asking the thing.
There is nothing like the joy that lights up the face of a bored Home Depot employee when you say "looking for <weird thing>; it's for a kids costume". You can get several of them happily brainstorming alternatives and running around the store
I agree it's condescending, especially as the clerk obviously wanted to find out why he wants the smallest box to better help him. If your experience from working at a computer store is that 50% of the customers ask for thing A but really want thing B because they have little knowledge about computers, it's correct to assume that the customer that wants the machine in the smallest box also has a weird idea of what that means, and probably really needs a different selection criterion.
Saying "It's a gift so I don't care about the model but it needs to fit in my carry-on bag" (or whatever the reason) would have explained it, and nobody would have thought the other was stupid. So in this case he's actively inviting that judgement.
Yeah, I went buy a tablet and I wanted a specific form factor. So when the retail worker asked me what I wanted, I told them the specific product. They mentioned other models that were newer, faster, better, etc. And I simply told them that I was looking for one I could fit in my hand by basically palming it. (Being in person, I could just hold up my hand and say "hold it like this").
Once I explained that, I was able to get what I wanted with no more questions. Now that they knew why I wanted what I wanted, they also knew what information was relevant to me. And I had already chosen the best model they had in that form factor.
Communication should be simple, direct, and complete. That's where I don't care if I "look stupid". I'll go over basics if there's a chance someone doesn't know the basics. Because you can say, "Oh I'm aware of X", but if you aren't and I assume you are, you may be too embarrassed to bring that up because you're afraid I think you're stupid if you don't know it.
I have to say, this example did make me switch my view of the author from some one who wasn't afraid to ask the "stupid" questions to being either a deliberately "just asking questions" asshole who likes to fuck with people or, to be more charitable, someone with a bit of a spectrum disorder.
I think it's better to be a bit more charitable here indeed.
I also found it striking how the post is emphasizing how important transparency in asking questions is which might or might not reveal the intelectual qualities of the person asking, but then failing to be that transparent towards both the clerk and the reader of the blog post about the internal thought process.
If one would like people to learn, enlighten them. :-)
I have encountered both, I'm sort of leaning towards being charitable since the "just asking questions" crowd tends not to write articles about their behaviour!
That lack of transparency seems to be a theme. I have difficulty with blood draws as well and I have never encountered a health care professional that didn't immediately switch to "ok, which arm is usually best" mode.
I've seen people getting a blood draw that the nurse wasn't willing to listen to. They'd tell them what usually happens, and how it goes best, and the nurse would ignore them.
In the end, every single one of the patients was correct. Anyone who typically had problems with blood draws knew their problems well.
Yes, most nurses listen. But there are enough out there that don't that I've seen it multiple times.
I've said nurses, but I don't actually know their professions.
> I've seen people getting a blood draw that the nurse wasn't willing to listen to. They'd tell them what usually happens, and how it goes best, and the nurse would ignore them.
Fair, it could just be my experience as a middle aged, white male coming into play here.
I'm surprised I had to scroll this far to see someone suggesting this, since it seems extremely obvious to me that this is part of the case. It's becoming fairly well-documented that one of the primary differences in people on the spectrum is a difference in communication style, which anecdotally seems to be more direct and less apologetic or prone to "superfluous" verbal (/nonverbal) contextualizing.
With the prevalence of people on the spectrum in STEM, it's no surprise that you'd see it here, and indeed looking at the comments you can see quite a few people talking past each other about what OP "should" say with what is clearly a mismatch in communication style.
> I'm surprised I had to scroll this far to see someone suggesting this, since it seems extremely obvious to me that this is part of the case.
The whole thread has currently 1471 points and 681 comments. I seem the be the 4th person realising, that the whole discussion is about "communication advices given by someone fighting the spectrum disorder". I don't know wat to say.
I think the problem is that there are really three people this behaviour would apply to:
1. Someone with a spectrum disorder.
2. Someone who enjoys dicking around with people.
3. Someone with a spectrum disorder who enjoys dicking around with people.
I'm trying to figure out if the person is in group 1 or 3. If you encounter a few people in Group 3, it's then harder to see people in Group 2 in a good light.
I think that this is unfair to the poor Apple Store employee. There is no reason to not state the motivation, why you ask for the smallest box.
Other than that, I also try to employ the naive question and to some people these might sound stupid. But they are really useful because they can clear up lots of implicit implications and misunderstandings.
Did the Apple store employee ask why he wanted a computer that comes in the smallest box, or did he just assume the customer is stupid or ignorant? He doesn’t say either way, but most people will make an assumption instead of asking. The downside to this approach in retail is that it invites a long story…
I expect Apple store employees to deal with both "I want the 15 inch MacBook Pro in Gun Metal Gray with 16GB ram and 1TB drive" and "I'm looking for a good laptop for my daughter for university but I don't know anything about computers"
Making any kind of judgments about their reaction to "I want the one that comes in the smallest box" is ludicrous; the behaviour itself is mildly sociopathic.
When you work with the general public long enough, you kind of learn to spot when people are fucking with you and to just leave them be. This is especially true when working with technical stuff like computers.
Good customer service is all about figuring out what people mean when they say ask for things. Sometimes they need genuine assistance, sometimes they just want to prove they are smart than you.
If one was truly not afraid to ask stupid questions, they would have humored the sales person. Just recently I got a discount on some laptop parts, entirely because I asked the sales guy questions about upgrading ram in a laptop I was buying, even though I already knew the answers, I just wanted someone to double check my assumption. So I asked if he could help me pick it out.
Turns out, he remembered that someone ordered, then cancelled the exact ram I was looking for, so he went to the upgrade center and got me a brand new stick of memory for the price of an "open box return."
Be nice to sales people, even if you build the things they are selling.
Here’s a hypothesis: Dan needed to transport the laptop before opening it. It could have been a gift and the goal was for it to fit, wrapped, in a small suitcase. Or for some reason he needed a shrink-wrapped unopened laptop somewhere (as evidence that it hadn’t been tampered with) and the quality of the laptop made no difference whatsoever.
Even if this is wrong, I bet telling the salesperson that it was a gift and he wanted the smallest package would have avoided funny looks.
>The funny thing is that "I design CPUs" has nothing to do with being able to pick the best possible laptop for one's needs
No, but it heavily points to that you know basic things, like box-size != laptop size, or what CPUs do, and how to compare them, which is all the author claims.
Or at least, if you don’t want to say why, it could be smoothed over with “I know this is going to sound like a bizarre request, but I want the one that comes in the smallest box. I have my reasons.”
Acknowledging that you know your request is unusual makes it sound a lot less stupid.
I'm thinking the reason why people think the author is "stupid" is because each is working with a different set of base assumptions. The worker can't imagine a case where the box dimensions would be material as that box is likely to be in the trash can in n minutes. The author wouldn't hit so many cases of being looked at crossly if they worked to bridge understanding with the other person. All of the cases presented suggest to me person may have some emotional intelligence to develop.
You can also take out all the awkwardness with a disclaimer: "This may sound stupid, but I really care just about the packaging here: Would it be possible to show me... "
We keep coming back around to why didn't the author say:
"I want the one in the smallest box for <reason>"
Instead of providing no reason and being smug in their assumption that they are both very clever and the barely over minimum wage employee assumes they are "stupid".
It's also funny that he didn't even put it in the post. I'm not sure it's because of length restrictions, since the post is 4,495 words long. Maybe he wanted to keep under 4,500.
Also perplexing: footnote 2 mentions the car tire paradox. (Traction is determined by weight and coefficient of traction, and those two things only. So why do high performance cars have wider tires, which shouldn't make a difference? Because softer and stickier tires are mechanically weaker and tolerate heat less well, so you need to spread the force out over a larger area.) But it doesn't actually mention the answer besides noting many other people are wrong, and also is separately incorrect and says contact area doesn't change based on tire width?
Like, there's no clever counterintuitive Boyle's law/hydraulics effect where at the same air pressure a tire twice as big deforms half as much or whatever. Just the very obvious intuitive case that wider tires have bigger contact patches, which you can calculate yourself by plugging numbers into this tire calculator: http://bndtechsource.ucoz.com/index/tire_data_calculator/0-2... and the BMW i3 electric car has a crazy thin tire to have a smaller contact patch and less rolling resistance: https://www.bmwblog.com/2015/04/24/bmw-i3s-tires-more-import...
And the css thing... notoriously, everything on danluu.com has been completely unstyled for years. So every time one of his posts is on HN, someone comments about the unreadably wide lines, which could be fixed with a single `body{max-width:600px}` CSS rule.
But the reason everything is unstyled is because Dan installed octopress seven years ago, which had a braindead default theme that used custom fonts for everything, causing a glacial 15 second time to first paint: https://danluu.com/octopress-speedup/ Irritated, Dan ripped out all the CSS entirely, and the site loads in a flash. But now he has a trapped prior,[1] and any time someone says "CSS" to him he thinks, "ugh, that awful garbage which ruined my site" and refuses to touch it.
> now he has a trapped prior,[1] and any time someone says "CSS" to him he thinks, "ugh, that awful garbage which ruined my site" and refuses to touch it.
Do you know that's true? Are you extrapolating his mental activity from a limited set of facts?
TSA might not ask you to turn on an unopened laptop, perhaps; but it had to do with the CPU above all else, I don't understand it but I don't understand half the stuff on that website. Still like reading it, though.
I think the sales person was causing the trouble tbh, if a customer knows what they want take the sale don't waste their time with 20 questions at the end of the day we both know the sales person was just trying to upsell the customer something they clearly didn't want. Its the sales persons job to take the hint and just make the sale tbh.
There are dozens of configuration options for Macbooks that all come in the same size box. The size of the box is not enough information to select a laptop. The author was being intentionally difficult under the guise of superiority, and the Apple store employee was just doing their job.
It's my understanding that when a customer appears this confused, they'll come back with loud complaints and bad reviews if you just sell them what they asked for. And the Apple Store doesn't want to look like they do bad service, regardless of what happened.
Thats fair enough if its a wee old granny trying to buy a laptop box I would question it, but if I work at a computer store and some one comes in and asks me for a specific one of the computers we sell I would just sell them that computer.
I work at an advertising agency if we buy something for a giveaway we care a lot about the box it comes in, not whats inside it as we will never open it. The person buying the laptop is probably a currier that knows nothing more than to buy a laptop. If the currier is getting interrogated by a 16 year old sales clerk thats costing us money and more importantly time.
I get they are just trying to be helpfull maybe even trying to save us money, but we only ever use retail because shipping takes to long. For example we have 20 laptops being shipped but need to take a picture of the box for promo material, we will happily pay for a new laptop and curriers simply so we can get a box in front of a camera so we can meet our dead lines.
If we spend £2k on a new laptop and curriers just for a picture thats money well spent if we meet our dead lines. If we miss our dead lines because some kid was trying to save us £100 its going to cost us a fortune / client.
There is no indication at all that the clerk was causing any trouble, and Apple retail employees never try to upsell, whatever else you could accuse them of.
I'm having a hard time believing that you have a history in retail computer sales AND thought the Apple sales rep was the trouble maker in this scenario.
Seems pretty obvious to me that the job of the sales person is to make sales not talk people out of sales because the company is worried about returns.
We never worried about returns, if some one buys something they don't want we checked the recipt and checked for rocks in the box then just sold them something else, because you know sales?
The only reason I can think of a sales person being worried about returns is if a customer walks in asking for X and the sales person talks them into Y. Customer will be back fuming if it doesn't do X and you won't sell them anything else.
1) Apple is pretty well known for NOT up-selling and for right sizing customers, so you could actually get reprimanded at an Apple store if the sale was something as egregious as "gave customer laptop in smallest box".
2) The example we are talking about is a perfect setup for a "fuming customer"; smallest box laptop was "wrong laptop".
3) Apple depends on repeat sales and eco-system lock-in. The customer who returns the laptop may not upgrade their iPhone.
4) The request was ludicrous ... the Apple sales associate is not in the wrong for not simply going with it.
1) Have you compared their price of ram to competitors? You clearly have never bought anything apple.
2) They got what they asked for I know customers get upset easily but there is no easier customer to handle than one that got exactly what they asked for.
3) They won't upgrade their iPhone? I thought apple didn't push that sort of thing? Anyway they are coming back in store to exchange you can easily make another sale there.
4) The request was simple, the apple sales associate is in the wrong for not helping the customer.
I'll venture a guess why they asked for the computer that comes in the smallest box. They were buying a computer as a present, and they needed to pack it for travel before unboxing.
Only half plausible reason I can think of is for a 'Pass The Parcel' prize.
Anything else, surly the smallest laptop would be preferable and you could repackage it.
If someone gives me a weird, unusual input that is often wrong, they know is often wrong, I know is often wrong and they don't even try to explain why on this case the input is valid, I'll definitely roll with "they're a moron".
Not explaining is just playing games at that point... Like morons do.
Maybe. But now I can't get it out of my head -- is it true that the smallest box contains the smallest laptops in general?
It raises even more (admittedly pointless) questions, like "Is that true for Apple laptops, or all laptops? I bet Dell packs their tiny laptops with a bunch of peripherals or padding. A larger box might get sold more frequently."
And even for Apple, are the boxes physically smaller between different models? I unpacked an M1 MBP the other day and was surprised how large the box was compared to the laptop. I think there's a 13 inch and a 15 inch, and it almost seemed like the box was designed for the 15 inch.
Hmm... This calls for an empirical study. Too bad I don't live across the street from an Apple store anymore, or I'd just go look.
But "How could any of this possibly matter to a CPU designer?" won't be so easily resolved. E.g. even if it's true that the smallest laptop comes in the smallest box, why didn't they ask for the smallest laptop? The salesperson would've been like "Of course, it's right over here." It sounds like he compared the actual sizes of boxes, which is fascinating.
It's clear OP _wants_ to illicit this feeling of superiority from others, as even after the fact - and with unlimited time and space - they do not state the actual reason.
Hypothetical time:
Let's say we have some reason to want to buy the laptop with the smallest box. We'll say it's some reason so incredibly intellectual we could never explain it to anyone else because everyone else is so much dumber than we are.
So, the best we can do while remaining perfectly honest is simply state we have this desire. Actually explaining it will either not work or cause the apple employee to turn in to a black hole.
So, we stand around asking them like an idiot for the laptop with the smallest box, which we know is easily misinterpreted, but for no reason at all we feel like we must remain perfectly honest. This creates a back and forth as the employee - predictably (especially so to someone of our amazing intellect) - tries desperately to help us see our error in thinking.
The whole process takes much longer and has been unpleasant for all involved.
But hey... at least we got to feel really smart?
Rubbish. The actually smart thing to do is to come up with a plausible reason for the stupid request. It's not even hard.
"This is a vanity gift for my rich employers spoiled kid, to unwrap in some stupid status showcase. None of them understand computers. I know the request is stupid, but let's just get it over with. Can you show me the smallest packaged laptops please?"
There. Nobody's time is wasted.
There is a difference between a willingness to look stupid in order to achieve your goal, and a desire to look stupid while enjoying being a conceited "smart" person at the expense of achieving your goal.
It's amusing how many people are literally offended that they didn't explain why. But the answer we have is: because they wanted the smaller box. They are paying for it, no further explanation is required to the employee or anyone else. The employee should get the smallest box as requested and then they can try something like "may I know why you want the smallest box? I might be able to provide better help".
It sounds like they politely tried to clarify. Dan was amused that they thought he might be stupid. But asking for a laptop based on such bizarre criteria without attempting to set any context for the human person who deals with not CPU designers 99.9999% of the time, and then smugly calling out said human person for not immediately giving him the benefit of the doubt, then blogging about the exchange in a self-glorifying post… I mean, I’m not personally offended, but I can see why people would be bothered.
I'll try my best to alleviate you bewilderment. I think people are offended because there is a certain "contract" to social interactions that people are expected to comply with, and this behavior broke that unwritten contract. Furthermore, it's not apparent to readers what could be gained from breaking the contract like that, so it seems like breaking the contract for no reason.
There's a bit of a disconnect between the the purported theme of this article, being okay looking stupid, and the actual contents, which is just a catalogue of times other people were stupid, posted on the internet so everyone knows the author is clever.
Being willing to look stupid involves actually being able to deal with mistakes and failure, with actually _feeling_ stupid sometimes. Just listing a bunch of great decisions you made that other people thought were stupid seems less life-changing to me.
That feels unfair. Part of the point of the article is that though looking stupid has a cost, it's sometimes worth it, for example, to ask an important question or to share an interesting idea, but maybe not just to prove that you're okay with looking stupid.
The title is about looking stupid, but that's not what the author is communicating, to me or many others in the comments here. At no point did the author ever risk any ego, because they knew they were right every time, and no morons were going to convince them otherwise. Willingness to look stupid isn't just about ignoring other people's opinions, it's about actually being willing to find out you _are_ stupid sometimes. Nobody can avoid being stupid their whole lives, whatever cherry picked lists we might publish on our blogs. You are either willing to suffer the risk of people seeing that, and learning something, or you can hide from that risk. The author clearly has a good track record of hiding from that risk, because everything they've ever done has turned out to be correct. But that seems deeply uninteresting as a life lesson. Much more important is what happens when you try something, and the people telling you you're stupid are _right_. How you and your ego handle that is an important part of your character.
Maybe that's a subtle distinction, but I think it's important.
After a terrible breakup years ago I took a trapeze class. Before we got up on the trapeze bar, I spent most of the class telling everyone how bad I was going to be at it. When I got home I lay in bed confused. Why did I do that? This article is spot on. I was afraid of being seen to be bad at something.
Have you noticed? We spend almost our entire adult lives doing things we’re good at. Anything we do that we’re bad at, we either stop doing or we get good at it. So all roads lead us away from the experience of being a beginner. For me, it had been too long. And I’d accidentally forgotten how to do it.
So I took up dancing (which I’m bad at). That was really terrifying. And trampolining. And more recently improv. At the moment I’m learning to draw - which I spent most of my life wanting to do. But I never stuck with it because I hate drawing badly. But that’s just what it feels like to be a beginner. The trick is letting that go, because it doesn’t matter. You don’t get to be good at anything without first being bad at it. And being comfortably, visibly bad at something gives everyone else permission to play.
I have a 5 year old and a 2.5 year old, and hang out with lots of small children. Fear of looking stupid as a beginner is something that most people have right from the start: I have watched kids be afraid of incompetence (to the point of not wanting to try) at riding a bike, running, swinging across monkey bars, drawing, singing, reading, learning a new language, ...
Similar situation here. One of the things I found useful for skill-based activities is to take video. I took my kid's swim lesson from 3-6, the improvement is obviously drastic. Now, my oldest is starting to understand that while she's not good at something right now, she just need more practice. It's a huge mental change for her.
> Fear of looking stupid as a beginner is something that most people have right from the start
I'm a parent of a 5yo and surprised this is your experience. If anything, I'd say child behavior is the perfect anti-example of fear of trying new things.
Take one of the examples you provide: language. Young children ages don't care about using incorrect grammar or using the wrong words. This is why they're so good at progressing so quickly. Kids are way less afraid of failure than adults.
I also wouldn't be surprised if there's a significant environmental impact to children's behavior as well; in most ways, they're blank canvases when it comes to skill-based behavior. Personality...not so much.
Kids don’t mind listening to someone speaking a new language or reading them a story they can’t understand, and they don’t mind trying to communicate, but if you put them on the spot by asking them to do some kind of formal lesson, they freak out just like anyone else.
The most important thing I have found when trying to teach kids [and probably most other people too] is (1) break tasks into very small steps, (2) make the lesson as low-pressure and fun as possible.
I view performance anxiety and fear of looking stupid as a beginner as completely separate things.
When you put the average adult learning a new language in a foreign country, they'll pause before new words, think before conjugating a verb, etc. Kids don't do that; they just talk. They don't worry about making a mistake, but adults (on average!) do.
> performance anxiety and fear of looking stupid as a beginner as completely separate things
The same kid will happily try riding a bike if you just leave one sitting around where they can find it, but will balk if you ask them to try in front of their friends who already know how. I think a huge part (the majority) of people’s fear of learning new skills is a kind of performance anxiety. Both fear of looking bad in front of others, and to some extent fear of looking bad to themselves. The other significant problem is an inability to break the new skill down into small enough pieces to manageably tackle independently.
Speaking a language is always and inevitably a performance. But kids are typically given much more time and space to just listen without trying to speak, and are judged less when they do try. Some kids who move to a new country will just quietly listen for months before ever trying to say something in the new language; adults rarely have that luxury.
But in any event, there are plenty of adults who are willing to try speaking foreign languages imperfectly, and studies have shown children and adults have comparable ability to learn a second language (indeed adults often improve faster at the start).
Actually data shows that adults are way better at learning languages than children. Children just have 100s of hours of doing nothing besides learning languages so they succeed faster in calendar time. If you spent all day every day learning a language you’d be way faster at it than your kids.
This might be culturally dependent, as in some cultures there is much more emphesize on competition than in others. Have you reflected on your behaviour towards your children with respect to this?
I think there is a significant (inherent or deeply ingrained) personality component to people’s initial outlook. E.g. there was a pair of fraternal twins who we used to play with at the playground, and one of the pair was much more willing to try things while the other was much more afraid of being judged. More generally I have regularly seen substantial differences between siblings despite a lack of obvious differential treatment from their parents or any change of cultural values/norms.
Kids of 2–4 years old seem to have similar range of behaviors across substantially different cultural groups, e.g. comparing kids raised by tolerant non-confrontational hippies vs. strict immigrant professionals.
I imagine that learning to be comfortable as a beginner is something that can be trained / practiced. Some people certainly improve at it as they get older.
There is a pretty well known speaker who wrote about his first public speech. He was to record himself, and it would listened to by some 5,000 people. He spent hours and hours re-recording himself, until a older friend stopped by and laughed at him, as follows:
"You are being nervous because you think that you might not be perfect, and doubt creates a feeling of nervousness and unsurety.
Well, I can dispel the doubt. You won't be perfect. In fact, you will be pretty lousy, because it is your first time, and it it is in front of a relatively large crowd.
So two pieces of good news. You needn't be nervous. And its not so bad that it will go lousy. Because everyone knows it is your first time, anyway, and they are expecting you to mess up. And this way, in the future, you will actually be great!"
Exactly! We should practice being a beginner for our entire lives. It's a constant reminder to have that beginner mindset even where you think you are an expert.
I took up Jiu-Jitsu at age 40. Talk about humbling. I also catch myself occasionally doing what you did and mention how terrible I am/will be as a defensive mechanism.
But, the more comfortable I got at being a beginner led to even faster learning. This attitude has spread through other parts of my life, even areas where I'm not a beginner, and has led to improvement across the board.
> But, the more comfortable I got at being a beginner led to even faster learning. This attitude has spread through other parts of my life, even areas where I'm not a beginner, and has led to improvement across the board.
I think there's a ton of wisdom in this. You learn to learn by, surprise surprise, being a beginner at something. Exposing yourself to broad areas in which you're a total newb can teach patience (I've yet to learn basic carpentry because I am one of those people who hasn't got the patience to measure twice), too.
This is really insightful: being a beginner is going to teach you how to learn things, and that's a hugely transferable skill. (Besides, it's also really enjoyable.)
Martial arts are a hobby where I think this happens often. You could practice your whole life, but then you change disciplines or face a new teacher and suddenly you're doing everything wrong.
I don't know, I generally like being bad at things. Not because of the state of being bad itself, but because if I'm not doing something new, it's boring, and to be doing something new is to be doing something you're bad at. So I'm basically trying stuff and asking everyone for help all the time. I don't care what others think of me, I like learning.
I don't even think they think I'm stupid, I'm sure they appreciate the fact that I've made every mistake before when they come to me for help later. I enjoy doing stuff more than I enjoy looking like an expert.
Can I ask a stupid question? Who is Dan Luu and why does he keep appearing here? The content hasn’t been amazing. It’s not amazing here either.
The blog doesn’t have an about me page as far as I can tell. Google says Dan is a systems engineer at Nvidia.
Edit: Found the About page https://danluu.com/about It's at the bottom of articles, but not accessible on the home page.
If this were an actual technical topic, I'd be more inclined to continue reading, but here, it's musings framed as a life lesson that could have come from anyone in my circle of friends. Life lessons from people whose only achievement is working at big tech. At least for my friends, they don't walk around assuming they're smarter than people.
The reoccurring theme in this post from Dan is he's not the one that's stupid, it's the people around him who are too stupid to see his underlying genius. Dan comes off insufferable.
I'm not a fan of this article because it seems like Dan doesn't understand that people are much more willing to work with people who aren't purposefully being obtuse.
But Dan is on here because he generally writes well researched articles like [0] [1] and his minimal website aesthetics appeal to the HN crowd.
Dan's posts are usually a pretty good mix of engineering, analysis, and engineering org dynamics. I think his diagnosis is correct that a lot of junior engineers prioritize avoiding looking dumb than coming out of a meeting knowing more than you started.
In this case, the post leans more heavily on personal anecdotes than survey data, so I can see why people are finding it a bit grating. And that mcguffin about laptop boxes isn't helping =)
I'm not sure why he's been posting more frequently lately. Usually I'd expect 1 a month.
In my experience, there is a slight nuance in the frame here. It isn't just that Mr. Luu is "willing to look stupid", it is that he has confidence that his decision making process will on average turn out better decisions than the go-to default strategy that most people employ ("copy the crowd").
Most people, if they rely on their own research and decision making, will do poorly. And even moderately clever people generally do better by copying the rare stray geniuses that float around in polite society. This manifests as an "unwillingness" to "look stupid". It is important to ask "what does stupid mean" and "how do I measure 'looking something'" when this sort of topic is bought up.
I am - and I don't think this is that unusual - willing to go about a decade ignoring the opinions of others if I'm really confident that I have an objectively good idea. It is a high-risk high-reward strategy and not for everyone.
I think this is a good observation about the impact that confidence can have on some (mine included) peoples ability to learn.
In this way, low confidence can have both the direct effect of denying you access to information that would allow you to improve, but also more sinister, it can deny you the mental ability to actually learn something, even if the information was available to you, since the learning itself will mean that there's things you don't know. Being aware that you don't know or can't do something can feel very bad if you lack the confidence in your ability to get to know or do it, and we tend to avoid feeling bad, and so may abandon the endeavor.
This is true when it comes to actual decision making, but what about asking questions? Isn't being willing to look stupid clearly important here regardless of how smart you are? Even if you actually are stupid, you'll end up knowing more if you ask stupid questions, then you would have if you tried to hide your stupidity.
Have you never seen a restaurant location that is always changing owners, names, etc? Or downtowns of smaller cities where there's tons of empty shops? Cheesegraters.com ?
People are hilariously bad at induction, deduction, and making decisions based on their own research.
We're biased because we're already on the internet, on this site, and nothing is on fire in our vicinity.
"Looking stupid" is an assessment of what other people think. Eg, asking for the smallest box isn't stupid - Apple expects all the boxes to be good products. Even picking a product randomly isn't stupid and therefore shouldn't look it. The looking stupid part is an assessment of what the store clerk is thinking.
That is a very subtle, fraught and complicated assessment. There is a lot going on to do with the audience, context, risk and the truth. There is a lot going on behind the term "looking stupid" and it undersells the complexity of the social interaction. There are two parties, multiple issues and a lot to think about.
Yes, but in general it's pretty noticeable when someone thinks you're stupid, because when people find a reason to place you "below" so to speak, all kinds of behaviour quickly come out.
People are, generally, thinking about you a lot less than you perceive them to be thinking about you.
So in general it may seem pretty noticeable, but in reality it's rarely so.
> In particular, it's often the case that there's a seemingly obvious but actually incorrect reason something is true, a slightly less obvious reason the thing seems untrue, and then a subtle and complex reason that the thing is actually true.
This is a good example of what's in the submission! It's "seemingly obvious" that people are judging you all the time, and slightly less obvious that people aren't actually thinking about you nearly as often as you think, but the few who are thinking about you might be indeed judging you to look stupid for asking "basic" questions.
> Going into an Apple store and asking for (and buying) the computer that comes in the smallest box, which I had a good reason to want at the time
This is such an odd example. Because OP makes an uncommon request, the sales person can't parse what this request is about, and neither can I for that matter, and OP doesn't give a reason.
So the sales person thinks: What an odd request, which in turn is parsed by the OP as sales person thinks I'm stupid for asking something that the sales person doesn't understand. In the end, OP might want to feel superior by asking stupid-looking questions on purpose and feeling above the sales person for not being able to get to why this question is asked.
Maybe just explain WHY you ask this or that and nobody thinks you're stupid anymore.
You don't even need to explain why. Just say "I need the computer that comes in the smallest box. I know this is weird, right? I need it for reasons that would take a long time to explain, but I promise they make sense." A bit of empathy for the baffled Apple store employee on the other side of the conversation and nobody has to waste time or feel stupid.
Perhaps this example is intentionally ambiguous in order to illicit an informal survey of how internet conversations deal with ambiguous tales of social interactions.
Taking OP's thesis about the origin of "stupid questions" at face value, this small meta lift seems fitting.
Why would the clerk need to know that, and why would the reader need to know that? Do you need a justification for buying something from a store? I think that's the lesson here. If you think he needed to give justification, you may still consider him stupid in a way.
Because most average users ask for one thing, but actually need something else and it is the job of a service person to get down to what the customer actually wants. Disclosing intent of unusual requests helps to find a solution in a faster way. It's also respectful to the clerk. Furthermore, people are more willing to cooperate if they know a reason.
> why would the reader need to know that?
Because it stands out as an odd story and it is quite important to establish context if the reader wants to evaluate if OP asks objectively stupid questions, has a way of phrasing questions in a stupid way, or if the person asked truly thinks OP is stupid.
That's what this post is about with a strong tendency that OP wants the reader to think that everybody judging him is stupid. In a way, the post is a humble-brag.
> Do you need a justification for buying something from a store?
No, but if I make people run around for me, I'd rather give them a reason.
> I think that's the lesson here. If you think he needed to give justification, you may still consider him stupid in a way.
I don't think he's stupid, but I think if someone is being judged as stupid all the time, it might not always be the other people (what OP makes us want to believe), but the way how OP interacts with his environment.
> Because most average users ask for one thing, but actually need something else and it is the job of a service person to get down to what the customer actually wants. Disclosing intent of unusual requests helps to find a solution in a faster way. It's also respectful to the clerk. Furthermore, people are more willing to cooperate if they know a reason.
Which is hilarious because as software developers, we run into this all the time. People who request things or ask how to do things and it turns out what they needed was something else entirely.
> Because most average users ask for one thing, but actually need something else and it is the job of a service person to get down to what the customer actually wants. Disclosing intent of unusual requests helps to find a solution in a faster way.
As I said elsewhere, I think it's an instance of the XY problem and we agree here, but I think the response of the clerk could have been something like "I have a lot of clients that ask for X when they need Y. If I give them X, they may come back and complain, and it will be a mistake on my part. So I'm sorry if I'm being too insistent with it, but I really need to be sure that you want X and not Y, especially since your request sounds a lot like what people say when they want Y", to which you could reply "Oh I perfectly understand, I work in software and we have this all the time with clients, I would do the same thing in your place. I assure you, I really need X and not Y." or something.
> It's also respectful to the clerk.
It may be more respectful than what happened the way the thing was narrated, but I think there is nothing "respectful" about disclosing information you may not want to disclose, which seem to be the case here (or the author is being obtuse).
> That's what this post is about with a strong tendency that OP wants the reader to think that everybody judging him is stupid.
I don't agree about the intentions of the author here. My interpretation is that he found something cool, efficient, somewhat counterintuive and want to share it. That seems to be in line with his other posts.
> I don't think he's stupid, but I think if someone is being judged as stupid all the time, it might not always be the other people (what OP makes us want to believe), but the way how OP interacts with his environment.
That's very true too. We only have his version so that's a possibility.
We don’t but we think we might learn something or be entertained. Withholding a piece of information that lots of readers are naturally curious about is odd. I like the post & Dan Luu’s writing in general but I’m dying to know the why behind the computer in the smallest box request.
I know nothing about the products involved, but I assume it was along the lines of "I want a Mac Foo 342, which happens to come in the smallest box, so you can't miss it".
But surely the "I want a Mac Foo 342" is sufficient? The latter part of sentence just adds unnecessary confusion.
I worked selling laptops before, and I honestly wouldn't remember which one came in the smallest box (and they usually came in very similar sized boxes anyway, so likely there would be several different models matching "smallest box" criteria). I think Apple employee was fully justified in their bafflement at the request.
I guess the "stupid question" I'd ask of this article is: why don't you reveal your goals or thought process when challenged after asking a question that might be perceived as stupid? Take the Apple Store example: why not explain the reason why you were asking for a product by the size of its box when they responded by saying that size of the box does not map to size of the product? Being open about your goal would've probably made it easier and less antagonistic as a process, right?
Yeah, the "smallest box" story comes to me very wrong. It basically shows him as really stupid -- as he is simply failing the "describe the goal, not the step" rule in most "how to ask questions" guides -- e.g., http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#goal .
Not only that, but he is also implying that people "who design processors" must also know our way around shopping for computers. This couldn't be farther from the truth.
So this story does not come off as an example of "I don't mind being seen as stupid", it comes off as a very strong example of "I'm holier than you"-attitude which is the entire opposite than the article author's is trying to make.
>So this story does not come off as an example of "I don't mind being seen as stupid", it comes off as a very strong example of "I'm holier than you"-attitude which is the entire opposite than the article author's is trying to make.
Exactly my thoughts.
Even the way the story is told to the reader with: "which I had a good reason to want at the time", has the same sentiment towards us.
"My reasoning is even above explaining to you, my reader."
It was antagonistic and condescending. But it's being framed in an /r/iamverysmart "ironic" way.
Extrapolating from this article, this individual is likely a nightmare to work with due to their closed nature and unwillingness to share thoughts or decision making points.
I particularly liked the juxtaposition of their behaviour in the Apple situation with their later comment ...
> I try to be careful to avoid this failure mode when onboarding interns and junior folks and have generally been sucessful, but it's taken me up to six weeks to convince people that it's ok for them to ask questions
I kind of get the impression that asking the author questions is actually a very painful process.
But why can't you just ask for what you want without people automatically assuming you're stupid? If you care that strangers think you're dumb you have to adjust your behavior a lot and some people would rather just be genuine. Besides, the easiest way to not look stupid is to make up a reason that sounds reasonable (i.e. lying) to get what you want. This is what many (most?) people do. If they want the Apple computer that comes in the smallest package they'll make up a BS reason (i.e. flight luggage restrictions) in order to seem reasonable to the stranger who works at Apple.
The question is really what kind of person do you want to be? Do you want a person who habitually lies about unimportant stuff in order to accomplish goals? Do you want to be a person who is genuine but gets unfairly judged by strangers? Or do you want to be a person who justifies themselves to strangers in order to avoid getting judged?
If you think lying is wrong and seeking the approval of strangers is a bad habit only one option remains.
The writer conflates "the person at the Apple Store was trying to be helpful" with "the person at the Apple Store thought I was stupid".
Part of the job of someone working in a customer-facing, sales job is to understand what the customer wants. A sales associate at an Apple Store probably has dozens of interactions every day where they're able to help people understand the products better and enable them to make a more informed decision. That is their job.
Saying "I just want the one that's in the smallest box" makes you look like a customer that's in need of guidance and help, and someone who's probably going to have a bad experience with the product if they don't get it.
Getting irritated by a response that is trying to help just shows a lack of empathy. People are not robots and there is a really good reason that the "white lie" is a thing.
Agree. To put it in the context of the article, if the author looked at getting desired outcomes as a video game, then this article is just a rant, and time would have been better spent analyzing the situations for how to improve. The recurring failure mode is ineffective communication.
I truly do not understand this attitude and I can only guess comes from repeated exposure to an unfriendly environment. We're not talking here about exposing your soul to the world, a few words to explain why you want the smaller box would actually save a bunch of time and misunderstandings. Given how society works today, it's just easier.
You can always explain in a few words why, even without stating your actual underlying reasons. The clerk doesn't need all the details. This person clearly struggled more than he had to if he would have just provided a reason the clerk could understand. I bet his lack of social skills and perceived "stubbornness" were a much higher contribution factor to the clerk being puzzled and may be even thinking he was being stupid.
But Dan Luu isn't obviously motivated by a desire to antagonize the Apple employee, and neither is he socially or morally obligated in the slightest to explain his consumer intentions during a purchase at the Apple store.
And was the encounter really antagonistic? Dan Luu is the one who left looking stupid.
I disagree. He might not be morally obligated, but his is certainly socially obligated. Customers ask for the wrong thing all the time. A problem solver, as any good retail sales person should be, will ask questions to help the customer understand their own needs and the available solutions. That story just shows that Dan Luu doesn't understand the social process that happens in the retail environment.
That he doesn't care if he looks stupid is besides the point here. He looked stupid to the retail worker not because he didn't explain his underlying reasons for wanting a small box. He looked stupid because he didn't understand the retail sales process. That is to say, he was stupid, about that one thing, and that is why he looked stupid.
Consider that the shop is unlikely to have the laptops stored or annotated by box size.
Dan was asking the employee to expend considerable additional effort to find the smallest laptop box when he potentially knew the model number, or least had a reason that would justify the extra work. I would have just said "I'm really tight on carry-on space", not to avoid looking stupid, but to assure the employee I wasn't breaking their balls for no reason.
He touches on this later in the article after comparing thoughts to another person (who is block quoted) who seems to wonder the same things as a lot of commenters here...
I would have synthesised a brief approximation of the real reason. Transport being one real possibility.
The point is that this is a two way transaction with a real person, who has their own hidden state, goals and limits that are not always apparent to a consumer.
E.g. company policy on deducing what the customer really needs.
How was the employee to know Dan was the one person who actually knew what they needed, out of 100 over confident buffoon's that came to the shop that week.
This is why I don't hassle the support person fixing my internet when they run through support script.
I don't say "skip this, I have an honours degree blah blah", cause they have enough constraints to deal with as is... And once in a 100 times, I will learn something I didn't know...
IMO, falsehoods do not constitute dishonesty anymore than truths constitute honesty. Honesty is about the sharing of clarity, and sometimes teachers Lie To Children¹ and other times people confuse or obscure with facts. What matters is a sensitive understanding of what clarity means to others.
Anyways, if you tell a store person "oh, I'm getting this for my husband" when it's a gift for yourself, that's more honesty than dishonesty, because to the store person, "clarity" with a customer is very goal oriented. Dan Luu wasn't trying to screw with the store person, and in the end they all got what they wanted, even if Dan Luu walked away "looking stupid".
I think Dan is on point here with asking questions for true understanding and not being afraid to do that. Our society, unfortunately, for the most part rewards those who are confident and act like they know everything instead of those who admit they don't know something. And being willing to look dumb/bad is crucial to learning a language, instrument, or new hobby well...
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But he lost me with the examples of the Apple computer box. Employees aren't little robots- they're actual humans that (mostly) are trying to be helpful. It would've taken Dan -significantly- less time and effort to just say WHY he was looking for a smaller box. Probably the same deal with the auto insurance agent- he could've just explained WHY he wanted such an unusual request, and the agent likely wouldn't have incredulously asked him 3 times.
In my experience people are straightforward and respectful with you when you're straightforward and respectful with them. Waltzing in and going "give me the thing in the smallest box" makes absolutely zero sense and it's like Dan was just purposefully playing a game of being obtuse towards random help staff... People aren't intelligent or stupid because they get confused when someone comes in with very unusual requests that they refuse to elaborate on.
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Also, I truly don't get the box thing. Technology-wise it makes no sense. Why doesn't Dan explain the reason in this post either?
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Last edit: I had an unusual situation once in Seoul at this one cafe that I visited a lot. There were two registers, and for some reason my credit card just wouldn’t work on the left register. So a few times I just asked “Hey, this is an unusual request, but could we use the machine on the right? My card works on that one, but not this one.” And guess what? The employees went “oh, ok” or “sure”.
It took slightly more effort on my part than saying “hey, use the machine on the right”. But then nobody was confused. It had nothing to do with the employees being intelligent or stupid or being perceived as such.
I expected a "don't be afraid to ask the stupid questions" article and this is sort of that.
The first few paragraphs are meandering and, seemingly, deliberately obtuse. Many of the examples are examples of a kind of "I'm so much smarter than you, I can play the stupid" arrogance that is incredibly off putting in real life because it leads to a bunch of bad faith questions and interactions.
I really get the impression that the author is an unreliable narrator and that they are always the hero of their story. It is pretty easy to read many of the examples as the person NOT thinking the author was stupid, but rather that the author was a arrogant, condescending ass (especially the Apple store employee, their insurance brokers and every medical professional they have seen).
There was a foreign student in my CS classes who asked lots of questions at the end of class while everybody rolled their eyes because they wanted to leave. I assumed he was having issues with the language barrier or was just slow.
Turns out he was the top student in the program and I would guess this was due in part to his willingness to ask questions and lack of fear in asking them in front of a room. He helped me get through an Operating Systems course the next semester.
More importantly, he showed a young me that asking questions is actually a sign of maturity and intellectual honesty and that what the peanut gallery thinks is of little consequence. That lesson has served me well in the last decade. He's now a PhD at a major research university and a close friend.
This post seems like some sort of humble-brag about not really being stupid, but being "willing to look stupid" to people who are actually stupid.
To be honest, this entire post make him look stupid, but we all know now that he doesn't care what we think. I'm probably stupid for falling for another one of his clever schemes where he's just pretending to be stupid.
Exactly. E.g. this:
"Although there are some downsides to people thinking that I'm stupid, e.g., failing interviews where the interviewer very clearly thought I was stupid"
This isn't just looking stupid, this is being stupid. Why in Heaven's name wouldn't you at least adjust your behavior when you're in an interview?
Acting stupid can be a convenient way to hold up your belief that you're smarter than the rest. Nobody will ever challenge your belief because hey, if they think you are stupid, it's because you made them believe that, which means that they are actually the stupid ones!
I don't change anything about myself when I interview for jobs. I can't even fathom why I would, in this industry (or really any not customer-facing industry, really).
They saw my weird resume - it always gets a comment. It was revised and edited under direction from a retired entrepreneur and CEO who explained how employee employer and employee/employer/HR/hiring managers interactions work "in real life".
They did a phone interview. They called me in. The only times I get the "thanks for interviewing, but" calls is when the recruiter or headhunter obfuscated the job description to prevent poaching and/or losing their commission/bonus and I had literally no idea about any of their stack/business/whatever.
I could just be lucky, I guess, not having to lie or embellish or present a facade.
Some of the things mentioned in the article make me think the opposite of what the article is titled. The lack of transparency into the thought process of the individual shows that there is a willingness to not look stupid by giving away reasons which might seem silly, otherwise they'd be more direct in the way they ask questions so as to also reveal their thought process.
If you care about what people think of you, perhaps you should first ask if there's anything you can change instead of expecting more from others.
I feel like I could have written this post, even the trouble getting blood drawn, and the response from nurses when you tell them.
Except for this part:
The person who helped me, despite being very polite, also clearly thought I was a bozo and kept explaining things like "the size of the box and the size of the computer aren't the same". Of course I knew that, but I didn't want to say something like "I design CPUs. I understand the difference between the size of the box the computer comes and in the size of the computer and I know it's very unusual to care about the size of the box, but I really want the one that comes in the smallest box". Just saying the last bit without establishing any kind of authority didn't convince the person
In that case I most certainly would have established that I knew what I was talking about, and also explained exactly why I cared about the box. Maybe the author never worked in retail or public facing tech support, but when you're in those jobs you learn to not believe anything the user/customer says. At least until they let you know they know what they're talking about.
The asking questions part also reminded me of a story from when I was a junior network engineer in my mid 20s, working with two guys in their 50s who had each been doing the job for over 15 years. A little bit after I started they gave me a task that required me to use a system they knew I didn't have access to. After about an hour I figured out that I would need it. I asked them how to use the xyz server, and they both started laughing. It was a test to see if I would ask for help. Apparently the last guy who had to do that task waited 3 days before asking for help, and didn't even figure out he needed to use the system in question. They decided to see how I would handle it, instead of just telling me outright.
As a man, every condescending comment you get in person only tells you one thing: your deadlift PR is still too low.
Get jacked and all these problems disappear. No matter how silly your questions and objections, no matter how dumb they may think you are, all your concerns will be treated very seriously, criticism couched in most polite terms, and weird stuff written off as eccentric.
(It helps to be taller, well-dressed, and sound sophisticated but solid deadlift is by far the most effective.)
It's amusing to see people get worked up over this. I'm not even jacked, but it's obvious that having a lot of muscle mass makes you look more intimidating and dominant.
Sounds like great advice! Why should I listen to guys like Dan Abramov when I can listen to you?
In all seriousness though, this comment almost sounds like its from another language when read here on HN. Its crazy how completely wierd some parts of the internet has become.
Dan Abramov has something greater than muscle: status. What a random guy says about being heard is probably going to be more useful than what Dan says because it's not confounded by having high status.
It's a social reality most nerds ignore at their own peril. The way you're treated is very loosely correlated with being smart, having unusual tastes, or asking questions but tightly with how you present yourself.
Attractive people generally illicit more empathy and cooperation in work settings, and are generally more successful in their careers, than those of average or below average physical appearance.
It's not the mark of an "incel" to take note and think this is important.
I've spent the majority of my career having plenty of my own ideas, thoughts, and opinions ignored only to see them seriously considered when echoed by taller, fitter, and more attractive male peers.
Software engineers and computer scientists like to think they're above this stuff, but they aren't.
I felt too insecure to ask (stupid) questions previously because, well, people around you are always confident. But with time I saw there's often not a lot behind this confidence, that someone who has a high opinion of himself is capable of really failing in a very basic way, and that most people are more or less the same. So I talk more freely now, and yes, some people are quick to judge. But whatever.
(OT, but nice username. "I hate when I get locallost on the way to localhost's LAN party...")
The judgmental people tend not to matter in the long run, by the way.
Sort of. There are two types of judgmental people. One, the people building a team, or making a bet. Two, the people looking to talk about others.
The latter don't matter. The former are quick to judge because they have to be. If they're wrong about their bets, it'll soon become obvious. Which means the optimal strategy is to make many bets, or to interview as many devs as possible, and then cull most of the candidates.
Right, I don't care. It's my opinion now that I have to be open about what I think or feel because it's just how I am. So if I don't find a common language with someone, then so be it. There are 7 billion other people on the planet.
By the way, consider throwing some contact info in your profile. It sounds like you have a lot of interesting ideas, and I've gotten a lot of random emails from HN people in the past.
(I reached for your profile to email you the "nice username" thing, but there wasn't any way.)
10 years ago in my mid 20s, I was a product manager at a tech BigCo (not FAANG). Just after starting, I was in a casual in-person meeting with my boss, my boss's boss, and a couple other executives (closer to a meet 'n greet than formal meeting). I don't remember much of what happened in the meeting, but I distinctly remember the feedback my boss gave me shortly after the meeting: "I think it'd help you if you don't ask obvious questions because it makes you look dumb" (I remember it being delivered more compassionately, but that was the essence).
At the time, I was young, insecure, and fraught with imposter syndrome (viewing virtually everyone as smarter than me) so I took it personally. That feedback gave me a visceral "that has got to be the worst feedback ever" reaction.
Fast forward 10 years, I've reached the point where I don't think twice about asking questions in any setting. I'm secure and confident in what I know, understand the vastness of what I don't know, and try to be vulnerable about this truth. I'm no longer worried about looking dumb. Maybe some people still think "well that's a dumb question, he should know that" but I'd rather have this experience, while retaining my adaptability "superpower" of being able to dig to the root of a problem, quickly learn context, and rapidly provide solutions.
There's a beautiful illustration from Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon on this topic:
===
They gave him an intelligence test. The first question on the math part had to do with boats on a river: Port Smith is 100 miles upstream of Port Jones. The river flows at 5 miles per hour. The boat goes through water at 10 miles per hour. How long does it take to go from Port Smith to Port Jones? How long to come back?
Lawrence immediately saw that it was a trick question. You would have to be some kind of idiot to make the facile assumption that the current would add or subtract 5 miles per hour to or from the speed of the boat. Clearly, 5 miles per hour was nothing more than the average speed. The current would be faster in the middle of the river and slower at the banks. More complicated variations could be expected at bends in the river. Basically it was a question of hydrodynamics, which could be tackled using certain well-known systems of differential equations. Lawrence dove into the problem, rapidly (or so he thought) covering both sides of ten sheets of paper with calculations. Along the way, he realized that one of his assumptions, in combination with the simplified Navier Stokes equations, had led him into an exploration of a particularly interesting family of partial differential equations. Before he knew it, he had proved a new theorem. If that didn’t prove his intelligence, what would?
Then the time bell rang and the papers were collected. Lawrence managed to hang onto his scratch paper. He took it back to his dorm, typed it up, and mailed it to one of the more approachable math professors at Princeton, who promptly arranged for it to be published in a Parisian mathematics journal.
Lawrence received two free, freshly printed copies of the journal a few months later, in San Diego, California, during mail call on board a large ship called the U.S.S. Nevada. The ship had a band, and the Navy had given Lawrence the job of playing the glockenspiel in it, because their testing procedures had proven that he was not intelligent enough to do anything else.
From the wording, it sounds like he only answered the one question. Since he kept his work, all they know is that he answered at most[0] one question correctly.
[0] It's possible he gave an answer that wasn't what they expected and it was "incorrect".
There's some "willingess to look stupid" here, but also some lack of emotional intelligence (which is probably not conscious/willed). There's a humble-brag/arrogance element too (which also marks for some "emotional stupidity").
As in, the reasoning applied to some of those cases is quite Vulcanian-like, maybe a comrade on-the-spectrum?
i have met people like this and never thought they were stupid, but really rude. The point is not that they not only do not care if they look stupid, they also don't care or enjoy if they confuse/ create unease in their conversation partner by witholding critical information to let them understand their reasoning. the best case is something like aristotle where at the end of a conversation there is some revelation that makes you take another standpoint. but the worst example is asking for a computer in the smallest box without sharing the WHY. this action likely shows that someone either treats the partner as a monkey working in a store whose human whish to understand is worth less than the energy to give a reason or it shows an autistic enjoyment if creating confusion because normal human interactions are perceived as boring.
Not sure if this is anyone's else's experience, but I relate this closely to First Principle's thinking.
1. You start by asking the "obvious" questions, the things everyone is supposed to already know. Question every assumption, every bit of "common sense".
2. Along the way, you discover that most people don't truly know what they claim to know. Instead, it's just years of built-up bias.
3. Soon you're asking questions no one thought of asking in the first place.
4. Finally, you understand the subject better than anyone, because you started by questions the foundational assumptions and built up from there. You see how all the pieces connect. (To my fellow programmers: This is, I think, why many of us dislike frameworks... too many levels of abstraction from the real thing.)
Related concepts:
- Always be willing to be the dumbest person in the room. It means you've surrounded yourself with people smarter than you, so you can learn from them. It also means they'll help you be far more successful than you could on your own.
- Don't try to outsmart everyone. Just try to avoid dumb mistakes. While everyone else is trying to impress each other with their brilliance, you can calmly do the next right thing, and avoid the next dumb thing. Charlie Munger credits the success of Berkshire Hathaway to this principle more than any other. It means being willing to LOOK stupid in order to avoid actually BEING stupid.
Seth Godin has a whole schtick on the high value of what he calls “intentional serial incompetence”. Basically, if you’re unwilling to be seen as incompetent, you can’t deal with change. Good summary here - https://www.fastcompany.com/38442/change-agent-issue-31
My own experience has been that if you’re pretty sure you’re one of the smartest people in the room, you have an obligation to ask the “stupid” questions, because the rest of the room will be too afraid to look stupid.
> ...you have an obligation to ask the “stupid” questions...
I really agree with that but it's all about being willing to take a risk.
Many settings, especially in corporate environments, are intrinsically hostile to inquiry. These are places where meetings are run with semi-parliamentary rules-- just pro-forma affairs to mark project transitions.
In such situations, it may be that the others know better than you do and thus STFU or else be silently, immediately, and permanently dismissed for future consideration by those who call the shots.
There are many skills where to acquire them you need to power through a phase of looking very stupid to make any initial headway at all. Getting through this is the difference between success and failure.
Recently, I've been learning to sing better, with a focus on my higher register. One of the reasons most people cannot sing high notes well is that you inevitably have to go though a phase of singing high notes badly (and very loudly) first. Being a 'bad singer' (especially thanks to TV talent shows) is often seen as a paragon of looking like a dumb, shameful, naive idiot who overestimates their ability and lacks talent. This is despite the fact that every good singer was once a bad one.
I've noticed this same pattern in varying degrees of extremity across many sills I've picked up over the years. It is when you are in the 'stupid' phase, regardless of what is is you are learning, you're unlikely to get any sympathy positive reinforcement from the world, before then hitting an inflection point where you get loads. Knowing that you need to push through this to succeed is golden.
A related "power" I've found in the past is being willing to say "I don't know".
Fundamentally I work as a consultant. It's my job to solve other people's problems, which we usually (but not always) do by building something for them. Often our clients deal with a lot of consultants of different forms - they use consultants because they have specific skills and knowledge in different areas. Unfortunately this means that everyone is always trying to sounds as smart as possible and never admits to not knowing something. For the client they then don't know if they're getting "this is something that I know from doing 100 times" from "I'd guess this is the answer".
I've found that answering the occasional question with "I don't know (but I'll find out and get back to you)" changes people's opinion of me (and my company) for the positive. They suddenly (usually subconsciously) have greater trust of what we're telling them, because they know we'd admit if we didn't know.
I loved the first paragraphs but then they lost me with their list of examples.
Those are not examples of asking stupid questions. Those are examples of asking good questions in a stupid way, almost like he is trying to look stupid, for no good reason. Why don't you give your interlocutor some context so they can help you better? Is your goal to instead make them look stupid? I truly don't understand.
I learnt a long time ago by a director (CEO) of a large UK company on how to assess people, their technical abilities and personality
and that is to act stupid/ daft - not just one question, but for periods of time. and see how they respond to you
a very effective technique when dealing or interacting with so called Subject Matter Experts. If they're an expert they should be able to explain complex stuff at a High/ medium/ low levels or just say they do not know.
If they're not really an expert then they cover up their lack of knowledge
If they're not really an expert then they cover up their lack of knowledge and then get promoted into a management position telling the actual subject matter experts how to do their jobs.
This is great to see on the front page and I hope it positively influences the culture here. HN is larger than it used to be and it's harder to ask "stupid sounding" questions and get meaningful, civil engagement than it used to be. You are more likely to get guff for it than used to be the case.
I fell in love with HN because of the quality of the discussion which was rooted in a sincere attitude of "There are no stupid questions" (assuming you were asking in good faith and not trolling or sea lioning or something like that).
And I'm not enjoying HN as much as I used to and I think part of it is I love asking the "stupid" questions and getting real answers from knowledgeable people and I feel like that's much harder to find than it used to be.
I don't know. HN seems like the gold standard in that regard though you might be able to find some reddits that suit you that do a fair job for the topic in question.
I think that sometimes "willingness to look stupid" can simply be a function of your power situation.
When I was a respected Principal Engineer, secure in my position, I was willing to look stupid.
When I was in a contract-to-hire position, where I had spent months looking for a job and where I was constantly judged and I thought I might be let go at any moment, I was not willing to look stupid.
When I was a long-time group leader and project architect, I was willing to look stupid.
When I worked at a place where I was in the political and religious minority, I was not willing to look stupid.
One shouldn't be afraid to look stupid in situations where that fear is groundless. But I think it's worth having some empathy for people who are in a situation where looking stupid could actually be a threat.
The author mentions this as the biggest drawback, understandably so - if getting a job depends on knowledge and confidence, which it usually does, you really need to be careful with how you come off
I think there is wisdom in this, but I also think there is value in some circumstances to making efforts toward behaving in a way that gets respect from others, because then they take you seriously. This can come down to manner of dress and tone of voice. It likely doesn't matter most of the time, but I feel that making an effort to not appear stupid in order to get the person drawing your blood to take you seriously is not a waste of time.
It's true that I often care way too much about looking stupid and this post is really useful for reexamining that mindset and seeing how it's a mistake. Setting my ego aside and doing the best action regardless of how it makes me look would benefit me 99% of the time. BUT, I've had people in charge of some thing I care about dismiss my thoughts or contributions because it appears to them that it's not worth their time to pay attention to me. If I am collaborating on something that I know or care a lot about, I want my questions answered well and I want my contributions taken seriously. Sometimes that means I need to go out of my way to get the respect of this person. Being professional, making efforts to let someone know WHY I am asking a question, and asking revealing questions that benefit others' understanding, are not always a waste of time.
This is terrible advice, I would call it a lack of willingness to communicate openly. Also even if you are in the highest echelons of intelligence making yourself look stupid will close access to some opportunities that might propel you forward. Also, over time this behaviour might form a habit that will also influence your personal life.
> Also even if you are in the highest echelons of intelligence making yourself look stupid will close access to some opportunities that might propel you forward.
But maybe we should educate our society so that this isn't the case anymore? I know this sounds unattainable, but we should still try to make such outcomes invalid.
There's a flip side to this. Not sure if it's mentioned in the article since I only skimmed it. The complementary point is that it really is stupid to try and make other people look stupid. And it's stupid because it's counter-productive, not because it reveals that you're trying to learn something, which is covered by the article. This problem seems to be endemic in tech (although, subjectively, it seems to have improved over the past couple years or so). It's such a trope and a drag to deal with people who act like everything is obvious. Don't they enjoy talking about things they understand? Then they should act like all questions are great and answer them with words. It's fun for the whole family. Actually, that does seem to maybe cut to the heart of the matter. Maybe those types don't like "dumb" questions because they don't really understand anything and are trying to hide it.
P.S. I guess the article does touch on this when it mentions the anecdote about the people in class and the "dumb" questions being posed to the teacher. Come to think of it, I guess the whole article is kinda like a commentary on this phenomenon actually :).
The fact that the author withheld information from the Apple clerk suggests to me that the author thought the Apple clerk would not understand the “real” reason why he wanted the smallest box.
I believe the author thought the clerk was too stupid to understand the real reason and it would be a waste of time to explain to the clerk why.
Is this post about being willing to look stupid or about not being afraid to ask questions? In my own experience, I was more afraid of asking questions because I was afraid it would expose me as not paying attention in class or not being prepared. I was afraid of being embarrassed by the question. I suppose one could say this might also be read as afraid of looking stupid, but stupidity itself is ironically not as simple as some might believe.
I remember the first time I heard the statement: The only stupid question is the question you don't ask. This statement bewildered me, because I thought I might be the one that asked "that" question. If this sounds confusing, I most likely read that statement as "the only stupid question is the the one you shouldn't ask and if you don't know what makes a question stupid, you're probably too stupid to know."
This fear of asking stupid questions made me unwilling to take math courses beyond Geometry. I ended up getting further math education when I started my IT career in 1990. I overcame my fear of asking questions in the course of doing my student teaching assignment before that.
The problem with looking stupid is that actually stupid people (i.e., people who do actually stupid things) are dangerous both to themselves and others. So, seeming to be stupid leads people to distance themselves from you, to avoid being caught up in expected consequences of stupid actions.
Donald Rumsfeld was both actively intelligent and very actively stupid. Staying away from him was smart.
He could have just asked the Apple droid to bring out one of each laptop in its box, and picked one without saying why he was picking that one. The whole transaction would have gone quicker. So, making himself look stupid produced a predictably suboptimal result in that case.
If you're rich, it's called being "eccentric", not "stupid."
When I turned 40 about 10+x years ago, I started wearing garish colors and weird jewelry, and styling my hair differently every few months. I'm talking mullets, or perms, with yellow blazers, leather bracers with gems, purple pants, rings on all fingers, red shoes, bright green shirts with zebra stripes... I rotate everything routinely.
Now people expect I'm going to say weird things and look at me suspiciously.
Random people start friendly conversations, local people I see when I walk to the store tell me the look forward to seeing me.
It's called not giving a fuck and it feels fantastic...
I used to work with a kid who while very smart and energetic but would start every conversation as though he had started it 10 minutes ago in his head and just let it come out of his mouth when he saw you. Everything would be pronouns and it would cause an amazing amount of cognitive dissonance listening to him trying to figure out what "it" was.
The best part was how condescending he would be when you asked him to explain himself. You could tell he thought you were a dope because you couldn't follow him because in his head he was a genius.
This whole post just reads as a shallow attempt to justify odd behaviour and poor communication and try to disguise it as some argument against vanity (while ironically being quite vain as his tone comes off as high handed).
I wonder how many times he thought he knew better and it bite him in the arse? He did allude to it, but I suspect it far more often than he would be willing to admit.
> Car insurance: the last time I bought car insurance, I had to confirm three times that I only wanted coverage for damage I do to others with no coverage for damage to my own vehicle if I'm at fault. The insurance agent was unable to refrain from looking at me like I'm an idiot and was more incredulous each time they asked if I was really sure
This is typically more expensive as people that get third party insurance are usually newer (and younger drivers) so the insurance company will charge you more because their algorithm for determining cost will factor that in. So I don't doubt he was getting strange looks because it likely cost him more money and you don't get the obvious benefit of full comprehensive.
This and the laptop situation screams of "I made a strange request and didn't explain my motivations and then I wondered why I got strange looks".
It is just him communication poorly. Which isn't anything to brag about.
> On the flip side, the person I was living with at the time didn't want to wear the mask I got her since she found it too embarrassing to wear a mask when no one else was and become one of the early bay area covid cases, which gave her a case of long covid that floored her for months
The whole mask effectiveness isn't as straight forward as he thinks it is. His flatmate after the mixed messaging from the media probably thought it was a wash and decided to just fit in with everyone else and was unlucky as a result.
I have no idea why this guy is so popular. Whenever I read anything from him he seems completely unlikeable.
> I added more air filtration capacity when I moved to a wildfire risk area
Well, okay, but maybe the non-stupid thing is to not move to a wildfire risk area.
In general the list of circumstances where the author was willing to "look stupid" to strangers because he was, in fact, clever and seeing into the future, is mildly irritating.
Feynman's first wife put it better: "what do you care what other people think?"
There is a particular American culture twist to this though as Americans are conditioned to be over-confident and project knowledge even if they know little.
An American asking a Brit "Do you know XYZ?" The foreigner will reply "A little" and to an American that means the know nothing - an American who knows "a little" will say they are good at it.
I preface mine with "In the words of the great philosopher Yankovic, I am going to dare to be stupid ..."
Partially, because in IT -- seemingly more than in other industries -- variations of the phrase "Why haven't you just ..." arise, "just" being that magical simplifier which compacts all complexity into a single and obvious step, and often come with some measure of "why haven't the boffin pressed the button, I told the boffin that the button needs to be pressed" attitude, and I do not want to do that to someone else.
The other portion of it is being the rubber duck, quack quack.
> Going into an Apple store and asking for (and buying) the computer that comes in the smallest box, which I had a good reason to want at the time
I think that's a case where the Apple store employees err on the side of caution. I would bet that they have more clients asking for the smallest box while wanting the smallest computer compared to clients asking for the smallest box while needing the smallest box. I think that's an instance of the XY problem https://xyproblem.info/, and people being trained to recognise it and having a false positive.
> Air filtration: I did a bit of looking into the impact of air quality on health and bought air filters for my apartment in 2012
To take the "opposite view" (as in, don't be afraid of talking to people who look stupid) from this, I love talking to people about these kind of things (if they are willing to talk about them, of course). In many circumstances, I learned a lot by being charitable, open and ready to hear the thoughts of someone about something, even when they're unconventional/look stupid. I think I have that position because I deal more with "look stupid but are smart"-type people, while the Apple employee store or the stackoverflow user seem to deal more with the "look stupid so I have to protect them from themselves"-type people.
Epictetus said something similar almost 2000 years ago: "If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid with regard to external things. Don't wish to be thought to know anything; and even if you appear to be somebody important to others, distrust yourself. For, it is difficult to both keep your faculty of choice in a state conformable to nature, and at the same time acquire external things. But while you are careful about the one, you must of necessity neglect the other."
One of the most intelligent people I went to college with just always seemed to ask the dumbest, most simple questions to the professor. I know now, that what he was doing was establishing the ground floor so to speak of his knowledge. The first principles. Once he had those in hand, he knew he could use logic and deduce most of the rest. Especially when grounded in the mathematical equations that went along
with the first principles.
No question that most of us needs to have the ego take a backseat more often.
But I cannot help but compare this to negotiation. It is a lot easier when you negotiate from a place of abundance. Negotiating salary is easier when you do not need the job. Negotiating a house is easier when you do not need to buy that house.
I feel like the same applies here. Willingness to look stupid is a lot easier in situations where you have confidence and nothing to lose.
> No question that most of us needs to have the ego take a backseat more often.
Nothing says ego in the backseat like an iamsosmart blog post. Bonus points if the website looks like it's from 2005 and if you write it in a tone as if you just invented penicillin.
The author's approach is that he has a reason for his behaviour that others don't understand, and he says they treat him as "stupid," which may not be accurate. The pop culture trope about "genius and insanity," resembling each other has always been presented as mysterious, but the link is that both people are indexed on things others can't see. The difference is that one person is persuasive and manages to cohere, persist, and realize ideas from those things others can't see, and the other person fails for a variety of reasons related to just being high functioning nuts.
The examples the author gives are more about being indexed on what others can't see than him being ignorant - but "stupid" is an interesting one because that means something else. If you separate intelligence and smart as being a capactity for abstraction and clarity vs. being able to get or achieve the things you want, one person can easily be both hyperintelligent and completely un-smart. Nerd is the cliche for that. The low cunning of a middle manager can produce outcomes that are very smart, without much talent for complexity, discovery, truth, or consideration, which is reflected in other archetypes.
I often admit I'm not particularly smart, and that mostly I'm stupid in such unexpected ways that people conclude I must know something they don't, because nobody with a rudimentary apprehension of reality would attempt the things I have. Beware an idiot with the element of surprise. This is to say, I look stupid every day, and it is often painful and has a permanent record, but I see it more like lifting weights, where given the options, using your body to shift hundreds of pounds without leverage is definitely short term stupid, but the effects of persisting are long term smart.
If you're looking for resilient, growth-minded friends, I'd recommend taking up a class where everyone is guaranteed to look bad in the beginning. Only those that can get through the rough waters in the beginning will make it to the "shore" of basic competence. It can be a great filter.
I realized this when trying to learn Salsa dancing. Some people have a natural talent, but most don't and that includes me. It was one of the most difficult things for me to learn and it took months of very very bad dancing to get to a passable level.
As a guy, it can be tough post-college to make other good male friends, but I look back at all my male friends now and they are almost all from Salsa. There's a real camaraderie that comes from passing through a challenge together and making it to the other side.
Sure - it's not a Navy Seal experience or something that intense, but the fear of social humiliation is a strong one and if you can get through that with some other solid people, it builds a real bond.
CURSE OF DEVELOPMENT: the depth of any transaction is limited by the depth of the shallower party. If the situational developmental gap between two people is sufficiently small, the more evolved person will systematically LOSE. A trivial example: if you speak English and French, and your friend only speaks English, you will be forced to converse in English.
My transition from developer to founder is marked by needing to win more (all) transactions with minimized variance. As Warren Buffet says "never lose money", you might think it's +EV to apply Kelly Criterion here and risk a bit to maximize alpha, but in soft human affairs there are too many unknown unknowns to quantify risk, you need to keep it simple and not lose transactions. IMO
This is also why a lot of people who are actually ignorant get really aggressive when someone points out a mistake. Because they care A LOT about appearances. They don't actually care about improving or actually being correct, so long as people think they're smart. Or really, as long as they think that other people think they're smart.
I'm very much like the author, in that I just ask questions and don't worry about looking stupid (what a silly thing to worry about), but I think my friend is the polar opposite, and this article really helped me understand the dynamic between the 2 of us a little bit better. I always wondered why he would get super defensive if I correct him on anything, but it makes sense if he thinks I'm stupid and is getting corrected by the stupid guy lol
This reads like this flip side of Paul Graham's essay, "Why Nerds are Unpopular" http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html Spoiler alert: he thinks it's because whereas most people try really hard to be popular, nerds focus on other things. Like understanding the root cause of an issue, even if it involves making yourself appear stupid.
I can't say it's news: I'm like that myself. It has it's downsides though. I focus so much on the real world, things like spending hours on personal grooming to impress others just don't happen. My wife thinks I'm a slob. I'm a very tidy & clean slob, but it's true.
More often than not when I ask a "stupid" question it turns out that the answer isn't known (to the people I'm asking). So I try to do so more often. I've noticed that it also makes others feel empowered to ask "dumb" questions too (which usually aren't), so it's a good policy for the team as well as the individual.
I'd imagine that it's not so viable in more aggressive/competitive/toxic environments though? But I've been lucky avoiding those.
Edit: Oh and sometimes my questions do turn out to be ... a bit dim. Most recent case that springs to mind was asking the local equivalent of "what does SSN stand for?" in a context where I really should have known. But the average outcome is good.
Dan Luu interprets confusion from his lack of explanation as people thinking he is stupid. It almost seems the other way around, Dan Luu is the one who thinks other people are stupid (Apple Store clerk, insurance salesperson) because they don't know what he knows.
*Learning things that are hard for me: this is a "feeling stupid" thing and not a "looking stupid" thing, *
When I was younger I found out that things that were hard for me were making me angry. I would say that "this thing is stupid" or "it sucks". Where in reality I was stupid and I sucked.
At some point I realized it was that I simply don't understand something that made me angry and then I started using that emotion as a telltale that I should step back and learn a bit more about the thing.
In the end it evolved that I don't get angry anymore at things. I directly realize that I don't understand something and accept that I have more work to do on understanding it.
Re: "You are not noticing when people think you're stupid"
and particularly
> it's very important that you know that they think that you're stupid and will keep increasing the intensity of their responses until you acknowledge that they think you're stupid.
I rarely get criticised or mocked and I think it's because I'm tall, white, and male. If I say something naive, people are almost always accommodating (ok, not on the Internet) because they don't want to risk offending the big beardy dude.
This is a shame because I've spent much of my life:
a) thinking people are basically kind and accommodating
b) not being questioned, so missing a potentially valuable source of data with which to check myself and improve
Reluctance to ask stupid questions comes from a fear of rejection. I studied physics in undergrad and I found it pretty difficult, but wanted to be a part of the group of smart physics kids. It left me with a pretty strong fear of looking stupid and a reluctance to speak up in class when I didn’t understand.
Not minding if you might sound stupid comes from a place of security in your life. If you already have a solid in-group, then the fear of being rejected by some other group starts to go away and you feel more comfortable risking looking dumb in front of people.
I think it comes from a deep instinct to find allies and show that you’ll be a valuable member of a group, or at least not a liability.
When I recognize fear of looking stupid prevents me from doing something I see it as a challenge to do it. This makes it easier to push through. Most of the time it was the right decision, but not always.
When picking up my kid at kindergarten once, I got an urge to jump over the fence into the yard, rather than using the gate. Of course, a 49-year old doing that might look stupid to all the kids and staff present (lots), so I did it. Then a 20-year old staff member comes up to me and says “Yeah…so we try to teach the kids here not to climb the fence. It’d be great if you didn’t do what you just did..”
Sometimes looking stupid means being stupid too. But that’s ok.
Meh. Non-fence-climbing isn't some important skill children need to learn
I applaud your fence-jumping! I think children learning that it's ok to have fun as an adult is a much more important (and rare) lesson than learning that sometimes you have to abide by arbitrary rules
Asking "stupid questions" frees you from the trap of assumption. This is why people who are good at solving (or helping others solve) problems ask "stupid questions".
I suppose "rubber duck debugging" is a form of this.
Some years ago, I learned that I'm better at finding things when high. For context, my GF misplace things a few times a week, and I like finding them before she can. I realized pretty quickly that I did better under the influence, because I didn't rule out places the things might be. When sober, I wouldn't check certain places, because, That'd be a ridiculous place to leave that.
Sounds kinda dumb, but it was an ah-ha realization that extended beyond finding misplaced items.
i struggle with adhd and have both the same problem (frequently misplacing things) and a similar solution (checking everywhere, twice, even if im "sure" it wont be there)
My variation on this is based on years of management. My quip:
+ I only hire people who are smarter than I am.
+ I am the dumbest bloke in the business. Everyone is smarter than I am.
Like "Willingness ..." it's a tool to remove your ego from and look-for/work-with 'talent' thru a (slightly more) objective lens.
As an individual contributor, it opens you to alternative ideas (learning from others). As a manager, it allows your team to build confidence and be open with you about problems and potentially radical alternatives.
A variation on this idea:
+ the only things I know I learned from other folks.
I get the appeal of minimalism in the format, but at the very least some margins or a max line length would be welcome. Having to read this with lines extending all across the screen is ridiculous.
I mean sure, I can, but it's kind of silly having to put the effort to make the content more readable. I think that should be on the presenter rather than the receiver.
4k screens can easily support ridiculously small font sizes, but you wouldn't decide to use that just because it's there. Similarly, you would not want 15 inches long lines of text completely breaking the concept of paragraphs just because your screen can reach that width.
Unfortunately common among many technical users, they have no sense of page design whatsoever, and instead go for the "raw data" approach. It is bizarre
Minor point: I assume the author's rationale for carrying only liability insurance is that he has enough money to comfortably self-insure the risk of an at-fault accident. For businesses that approach makes sense - big companies self-insure most or all of their fleets, because buying third-party insurance costs more than the actuarially fair cost of risk. But those businesses also have teams of people to deal with the giant hassle that is the claims process, including dealing with the other party's (or parties') insurers, determining fault, and suing and/or negotiating a legal settlement as needed.
For individuals that service is largely inseparable from risk transfer, i.e., you can really only get it through insurance. Lawyers can handle a subset of the process, but not all of it, and besides, relying on lawyers for it is probably at least as expensive as the non-risk-transfer component of insurance in expectation.
In general, if someone's wealthy enough that they can effectively self-insure, even if they're completely risk-neutral, their time is probably valuable enough that they'd be better off buying insurance just to avoid having to go through the equivalent of the claims process themselves. So unless the author's rationale is wildly different than I'm thinking, in that example his insurance agent was right and he did make a stupid decision.
From my experience, the Japanese people have really mastered the art of looking stupid. Going as far as acting like they don't understand anything and has zero clue of what you're talking about.
In nicer cases, they get so amazed of how well you play the piano when in reality they're one of the greatest of pianists and you're just a beginner.
It's difficult to tell who is who. Knowing this, I cautiously assume everyone is smart. Sometimes, it's scary how smart/skilled someone actually turns out to be.
I think he's almost flaunting it - but there's real value in the concept. One thing I have realized is that "was I stupid to do this" feeling has something to it. Like being laughed at by my colleagues because I was carrying a "Programming Python" book in ~2008, when Java was the rage. Like buying that odd exercise equipment on eBay, which felt really stupid, and then it's been my desk-side companion over the last 18 pandemic months. Stupid is sticking your neck out, stepping out of the herd and being alone. Like me leaving an established metro and buying a house online in a smaller town (never having seen in person) - and it turning into an amazing home, a cheaper, popular destination in the covid-migration, getting amazing neighbors - leaving some friends behind, and maybe paying covid-prices (those still feel a bit stupid).
Being in that 'good stupid' state makes you initially acutely uncomfortable (once the decision sinks in), but later on it proves to be not so stupid, in fact the best thing you could have done. 'Ignorance is bliss' may be related. Lots of 'stupid' simple minded people have come out well in life.
But often times stupid is real stupid and lands you in trouble - we all know that side of the equation - now maybe even that has a reward to it - in terms of the lesson learnt.
This reminds me of something I stumbled onto in grade school.
In 7th grade, a teacher upset me for some reason I can't even remember. But being a brat, I went through this phase where I decided to waste her time and constantly pepper her with just tons and tons of questions about what we were learning. Some just "stupid" questions I already could surmise but wanted her to have to frustratingly retread over. And some legitimate things too where I just wanted her to go deeper into something.
I would love to apologize to that teacher of course. I was definitely being a spiteful jerk.
But incidentally, I noticed my grades were getting better.
It dawned on me: the more time I spent coming up with questions, even ones that students would groan over how stupid they were, the better I'd do. Admittedly some of my questions probably didn't even need to be asked, but I decided to stop filtering myself on what's a good question. If there was any doubt at all in my head, from something a teacher would say, my hand would shoot up.
And so I just kept doing that through high school and college and noticed when I was vigilent at this, my grades were great. I think some of this behavior has stuck with me, maybe not perfectly though. I think getting older and being seen as an "expert" in some fields now, has probably biased me to stop asking as many questions unfortunately. But ruminating on this experience and the OPs is a great reminder of that bias, and maybe something I can keep improving in myself.
>The benefit from asking a stupid sounding question is small in most particular instances, but the compounding benefit over time is quite large and I've observed that people who are willing to ask dumb questions and think "stupid thoughts" end up understanding things much more deeply over time. Conversely, when I look at people who have a very deep understanding of topics, many of them frequently ask naive sounding questions and continue to apply one of the techniques that got them a deep understanding in the first place.
>Learning a sport or video game: I try things out to understand what happens when you do them, which often results in other people thinking that I'm a complete idiot when the thing is looks stupid, but being willing to look stupid helps me improve relatively quickly
Overall author came up with this concept of "looks stupid", yet it does already exist as "failure teaches more" or just "curiosity" in my opinion.
This really resonated with me. When I was learning to program I had a mentor (who was just a few years older than me at 17) who was an amazing learner but was an incredible teacher. I didn't have any money for programming books and libraries at the time didn't carry many.
His ability to explain the complexities of Pascal, Basic and eventually C++ totally changed my life. I never became an amazing programmer, but I was a hacker at a time when that was valuable and it completely changed the trajectory of my life.
He set the bar for simplification of a subject and edification of an individual. It's something I look for and at some understanding someone's ability to explain something became the primary way for me to assess their intelligence.
The best way to do that? Ask really stupid questions.
That has really really worked against my in some contexts. I spent a lot of time working for a large US company and while many of the smartest and most capable executives LOVED those conversations where would explore the outer bounds of their new ideas, many of the mid level mangers truly thought I was a f$#ing idiot. They could not get past their impression of my after one simple, stupid, question.
I still don't know how many people I have left in my wake who truly think I am dim. I don't really care, but it took me a lot of years to realize how it was perceived.
My golden skill at my last job was asking questions. My director, who was a peer at a prior startup, knew this about me, and dragged me into meetings where my core interest was only peripherally related. I often spent time in the meeting with my head slightly tipped back and my eyes closed, because I would have already read through the prepared slide deck twice before the meeting, and I wanted to concentrate on what was being said. A lot of times, people thought I was asleep. They were wrong. One of the first meetings at this fortune 100 company, a chip architect was running through the design (too many details) and he mentioned one particular communication link they were going to use, because that was the only port available on the companion chip they were using to constrain costs. I immediately opened my eyes and asked one question on the bandwidth/latency for one use case, that would be heavily used, and the room went silent. The architect tried to wave it off, but another hardware engineer I had worked with for three years at a prior job said he would run the numbers on it and get an answer. In the end, the design was cancelled, because that one flaw (there were likely others) meant the design would never work.
People at that company didn't know me well, yet, and as I said, I wasn't core to many of the meetings I attended, and I spent most of the meeting sitting quietly with my eyes closed. Never assume I am sleeping. And don't try to wave off my 'stupid' questions. I ask the stupid questions, because if you cannot address it with a simple direct answer, then you don't understand the stupid question.
I try to lead by example on this one - particularly in front of customers or other junior team members. There is a huge hazard in training people to avoid looking like they are doing the wrong thing. Most of our struggle today is extracting useful information from the business so we can deliver a properly-configured product to them. You don't want anyone to feel like they are being persecuted for not knowing something or you will not be able to get much worthwhile information out of them.
The way I push myself in front of the stupid bus is by intentionally putting myself into situations where I cannot possibly provide a 100% smooth delivery. For example, instead of spending an hour to refresh myself on a complex code question before hopping on a 1:1 screenshare (presumably so I can look like a total smartass), I will ask the other teammember to fire up a screenshare right away without any planning. The consequence is that I inevitably look a little lost every time and the other team member has to remind me of the gaps as we go through the problem.
Over time, I believe this builds a strong sense that even the lead/architect is not better than anyone else and that we all have an ongoing role in keeping each other synchronized on the relevant domain knowledge.
People need to be absolutely fearless about looking stupid. Whether or not you look stupid at any given moment is an imponderable, an unanswerable question. The fear of looking stupid is more paranoia and insecurity than anything else. As long as you do your absolute very best to communicate to other people, even when that's difficult or impossible, that's the only thing that matters. If someone else decides you're an idiot you have no control over it, and if you're truly doing your best to communicate then someone else dismissing you as stupid is on them.
What's much more self-destructive than being afraid of looking stupid is feeling like you need to look like you know 100% of what is going on at all times- this inevitably leads to bullshitting and half-truths and weird circuitous conversations where it's unclear who actually knows what. Never try to conceal ignorance. People who matter and people who you actually would want to work with and work for would never judge someone for admitting ignorance or asking questions. People who don't matter, and people no one would want to work with or for are the ones who get on someone's case for asking what they think is a stupid question.
I have thousands of these stories. The only reason why I understand so many things today is because I dare asking stupid questions, and I do it a lot.
During my master, one of the students laughed out loud after I asked a question during class. I told him "there are no stupid questions" and he replied "your question was stupid though". Guess who ended up with the better job.
In my previous job some guy berated me publicly (on slack) for asking too many questions.
This really resonates with me. I've always had the strong opinion that a corporate culture of open, cooperative, non-judgemental dialog is critical to building strong teams. The OP's experiences mirror my own:
I try to be careful to avoid this failure mode when onboarding interns and junior folks and have generally been sucessful, but it's taken me up to six weeks to convince people that it's ok for them to ask questions and, until that happens, I have to constantly ask them how things are going to make sure they're not stuck. That works fine if someone is my intern, but I can observe that many intern and new hire mentors do not do this and that often results in a bad outcome for all parties
In almost every case, the person had at least interned at other companies, but they hadn't learned that it was ok to ask questions. P.S. if you're a junior engineer at a place where it's not ok to ask questions, you should look for another job if circumstances permit
If you want dependable, competent people to work with, you need to give them the space to become those kinds of colleagues.
All the talk in the comments on this post about how smart people ask stupid questions and how great it is to ask 'why' and explore assumptions kind of feels a bit off, and I think I know why.
Over on another danluu post thread about productivity, I kept asking why it was assumed that one had to maximize productivity and go fast as a prerequisite for having leisure time. But no matter how I asked why it was asserted that leisure is dependent on productivity and why relaxing is predicated on first clearing some bar of an acceptable amount of work, nobody really wanted to examine that. It was just taken as a given. One response even shut down further discussion with "this isn't a philosophical discussion".
So it seems to me that it's really only considered ok to ask stupid questions and look stupid within a framework of what's acceptably 'stupid'. But probing into the underlying assumptions themselves is not an acceptable kind of stupid.
Which leads to my stupid question: who determines, and how, what the acceptable limits of "stupid" are? And how are those norms communicated and enforced?
The article does give the impression that the author has a superiority complex, and that many people are judging him often, where most likely people just don't care all that much either way. Perhaps what they're describing is being defensive over low self-confidence? They don't seem to be all that easy to work with. "I'm not stupid, you're stupid" is the vibe I'm getting.
You surely need a fair measure of confidence and security to absorb the downside risk.
It’s a lot easier when you are established in a career/network/relationship and have erected a safe space around yourself. You can unmuzzle your inner confusion without threat to your status or ego, as you know you’re not really stupid.
Not so easy as an outsider, or as a junior where you secretly worry that you might be stupid.
He writes "the smallest box". But the set (width, height, depth) of the dimensions of the boxes is not totally ordered. So this question makes no sense.
Maybe he means another metric, e.g. by volume? But:
- first problem, he seems to expect that people with whom he talks should not make assumptions
- second problem, does he really expect the store clerk to calculate the volumes of all the boxes?
I don't know, are we sure he is not actually stupid?
I think the conclusion I draw from this is that, on the margin, there should be more times when people think I am stupid. I can’t think of a good example off the top of my head of this happening.
I think the car insurance example is perhaps an example of the three-part explanation talked about in the article because sometimes comprehensive cover is cheaper than third party cover (the argument goes 1. Comprehensive is better because it covers everything, 2. Third party is cheaper because it covers less, 3. Actually comprehensive is sometimes cheaper for weird reasons like riskier drivers self-selecting for third party cover) but I could also be wrong here. An obvious way would be that the author’s case is not one where comprehensive cover is cheaper and a less obvious way would be if comprehensive cover is deceptively cheap (eg maybe if you get into an accident where the insurer covers first-party damage because you have a comprehensive policy, your future premiums under any policy are higher than if your insurer had only paid for third party damage.)
One of my favorite is “I don’t know how to do that.” I’ve found that people absolutely love demonstrating that they know something and will happily show you how to do X. Or, everyone says that they don’t know how to do X either. Then we all figure out how to do X or give someone the task to research it and report back. A good thing to remember is nobody knows what you don’t know.
After reading the first couple paragraphs it felt like Dan was telling stories about my life, not his, down to the detail it's almost creepy. Specifically this paragraph stood out:
Back in college, there was one group of folks that, for whatever reason, stood out to me as people who really didn't understand the class material. When they talked, they said things that didn't make any sense, they were struggling in the classes and barely passing, etc. I don't remember any direct interactions but, one day, a friend of mine who also knew them remarked to me, "did you know [that group] thinks you're really dumb?". I found that really delightful and asked why. It turned out the reason was that I asked really stupid sounding questions.
And that group of people, when they failed tests or scored badly, it was always the test that was "unfair".
I wanted to write a blog post about this very topic for a long time, but it has now become obsolete because there's no way I could do a better job than Dan. Outstanding.
I'm really surprised by a lot of the negativity here. The author never claimed to actually be stupid, nor did they claim to be humble, nor did they claim that this particular essay was an exercise in looking stupid or an exercise in humility. All they did was claim there were some situations where it was beneficial to be willing to look stupid, and listed those situations.
Asking for the computer in the smallest box ruined the rest of the article for me... that isn't the same as asking a silly question when trying to learn, that's just making things unnecessarily difficult. There were otherwise good points though such as willingness to ask what a question means, but that first example really threw off the rest of it for me.
I think willing to look stupid is easy, because you already figured it out. So you know you are not stupid and you are kind of showing off in a weird way.
The one step forward is willing to be stupid. That is you know you are stupid but still not try to hide it. And most of the time it'll just be that: you are stupid. But once in a while you discover something deep.
I had this happen to me at a company recently. They were initially impressed with my linux knowledge and how I could port many of the processes they were previously confined to windows with. However, they had an unusual server setup, and when I asked a few very basic questions about it they totally reversed their opinion of me.
When my ability to actually implement functionality was incommensurate with their perception of my level of understanding, they would still privilege their perception as colored by me asking very basic questions (which despite appearances can often yield surprisingly useful/surprising information).
Despite being aware of what was 'going on', and generally having high confidence, this still impacts my self perception on some level. I find when I optimize for being perceived as intelligent instead of actually trying to understand things effectively I get much better reviews. It's difficult to know which is appropriate if you want to advance your career.
I consider this the to be the opposite -- smart people that ask questions straight away when they don't understand something is the opposite of looking stupid, and it's the first thing I ask new hires to do. I don't want employees that say "yes" but rather ask "why?", and I most definitely don't want employees to answer questions if they don't know what they mean to begin with just to save their face.
There's a difference between not saying anything and asking "What are you referring to right now specifically?", "What does DMA mean in the context of the server?" and "Sorry, I'm very experienced with X. How hard would you say is it to do Y with it compared to doing it with Z, which I have worked with in the past?".
Not only does it show that a person is listening, but it also improves the ability of everyone in the team to express and elaborate on details that are relevant to the topic being discussed.
Exploring Requirements: Quality Before Design by Donald Gause and Gerald Weinberg is a great reference for learning how to ask questions and what questions to ask.
Here is when I feel really stupid.
There is a highly upvoted post on HN. Read the article and feel like you have learnt something really impactful. Largely agree with the content. Only to get to the comments section to see the article getting torn apart left right and centre. Thank you HN. You make me look and feel very very stupid. :)
Through whatever quirk of my psychology, looking stupid has always been something that I have been 100% ok with. There are various stories that come to mind, but the two that stick out the most happened in middle school science class.
One time we were learning about volcanoes. And, of course, that they erupt. I was thinking about how the eruption is dangerous and causes harm, and what we could do to prevent it. My first thought was, well, to put a cap on the volcano. So I raised my hand and asked the teacher "what if we put a cap on it?", and everyone laughed.
Another time we were learning about plants, and how if you give them too much water they will die. That immediately sounded insane to me and I raised my hand to ask, "Wait, why don't they just not drink it?!"
Both of these stories lingered around for years and people knew me as someone who lacks "common sense" and who is known for asking silly questions.
Many look at a problem as a frustating situation, and wish it would go away.
That's what "they think I'm stupid" is mostly about.
Most people just want things to work, which is understandable and reasonable, but not rational. It's wishful thinking, that has no action or teeth.
In reality, constant change and development will always bring about frustration.
The true problem is accepting that you can't control everything.
But after realizing that, pretend that you are in control.
Be ok with the results, no matter what's the ultimate solution.
ie. Ignore what you can't control, and BE YOURSELF.
BUT, listen to your elders.
Listen for at least 3 months. Think about it. If you're still willing to listen to their advice, but don't want to take it, go slowly forward, and live your life.
The next generation is always unfathomable to their parents, but you need to respect, and listen, for they truly do know things you don't know, but the reverse is true as well.
I find such willingness very helpful in many meetings with difficult vocabulary. Instead of nodding to sentences which make no sense to me I like to take the risk and admit that I have no clue what is going on. More often than not I'm not the only person who got lost so it ends up beneficial to the meeting as a whole.
Yeah. Its weird but I find doing this makes people respect you more.
If you ask dumb questions, the person speaking (if they’re any good) will start looking to you to figure out if they’re pitching their language correctly. The other people in the room who didn’t understand will be relieved and quietly thankful of you because they didn’t have to be the ones to ask. And people who understood already are usually way more chill about this sort of thing than you would expect. Especially if you give them the opportunity to explain something in front of everyone. And then thank them for doing so.
I don’t think I fully understand why, but asking dumb questions is often a subtle act of leadership.
> I don’t think I fully understand why, but asking dumb questions is often a subtle act of leadership.
Very much so. It helps establishing an environment with less ego, more helpful people, and people who aren't afraid to learn. It also diminishes feelings of imposter syndrome in other people, by showing that not everyone knows everything.
All of those are things leaders should incentivize.
I'm a natural at looking stupid. I'm always thinking outside the box and don't conform to most groupthink. My experience is that it doesnt help.
The only way to get power and money is to have people with power and money want to give it to you. For that to happen, you have to share a majority of thought process, opinion, etc.
Intelligence is cultural and I think many people don’t realize that. If I were to be dropped off in a random place on Earth I would encounter people, most likely, I wouldn’t be able to communicate with and even if they did understand me based upon who they are I may seem very stupid. In the wilderness I don’t have a lot of real survival skills and if someone discovered what I was doing to survive I may come off as very stupid in that context as well. Lots of examples and scenarios for this. For myself I have to consider things like just because someone hasn’t read history or literature and doesn’t understand the references I’m making does that make them stupid? Does their culture even concern itself with these things? Who am I to judge ultimately what makes someone stupid or not?
> if a date thinks I'm stupid because I ask them what a word means, so much so that they show it in their facial expression and/or tone of voice, I think it's pretty unlikely that we're compatible, so I view finding that out sooner rather than later as upside and not downside.
This generalises well... ultimately if being pretentious is valued over being genuine then it's probably not a valuable or healthy place for you to be, situation to be in, or person to be around.
For the other more common example of the intern/junior who fears looking stupid to their own detriment. Their only defence is that work places exist which _do_ actually prosecute people for asking "stupid" but useful questions - if they happen to be at such a workplace, it's not worth staying anyway.
Its actually pretty amusing to watch the "cognitive dissonance" on the other persons face when they clearly labelled you "stupid" but your solution to problem the problem at hand is clear/concise/defined. They eventually learn to fear you :(. Ah humanity!
This resonates pretty well with me, re: asking questions
I noticed in classes that people were afraid to ask questions, and when they did, everyone else was happy they did so since we all had the same question in mind, usually. So at some point I decided I'm just going to ask any question that pops into my head and stop caring what others think.
It worked out great, but now that I'm married, it annoys my wife to no end, especially with an engineer mindset. Like the old joke "go to the store and get milk, if there are eggs, get a dozen", and the husband brings home a dozen milks. I ask these seemingly subtle, stupid, clarifying questions all the time (ie: "a dozen eggs, right?"), and it makes my wife angry -- still after 10 years of marriage.
Hah! I can relate. My wife and I have conversations like this all the time. I've been trained to take an engineering mindset towards things because, frankly, it's how I earn a living and rarely lets me down.
Earlier in our marriage, she would make a vague request or statement as a prompt for me to do something. Instead of asking for clarification, I would do what I _guessed_ she wanted. And I would often get it wrong and be met with the response of, "You knew what I meant!" No, clearly I didn't, or I wouldn't have done the wrong thing.
These days she is getting better at being clearer about her needs and I am (maybe?) getting more diligent about asking for clarification.
> Going into an Apple store and asking for (and buying) the computer that comes in the smallest box, which I had a good reason to want at the time
This seems fine, but I've found a better approach in this sort of situation is to—as much as possible!—explain your reason to the person helping you. It's not about seeming less stupid (although that is one of the outcomes) but about giving the other person room to help you with your actual goal. When somebody understands why you need the smallest box, they'll have no reservations about finding it for you, and they might have even better suggestions you didn't consider (eg "order this laptop online, the boxes they use for shipping are more efficient").
Lesson learnt from the blog post.: Avoid Jane Street. Hostile interviews are a red flag. It's okay for the interviewer to be unconvinced. But active hostility in a setting like this with a stranger indicates serious problems with the organisation's culture.
One important point made is that leaders should build environments where people aren't afraid to look stupid. I worked at a place where a senior developer would laugh after "winning" an argument with me[1]. I have to say that's the only work environment where I wanted to punch a member of my team. It was also the environment least conducive to dialogue and learning. Even if you're right and the person is genuinely being stupid, you don't need to rub it in. Chances are they'll already feel stupid from their own judgement.
[1]: A lot of our arguments boiled down to us debating stuff where neither of us knew what we were talking about, but I was the only one willing to admit that.
If there is one thing I learned is that what makes you being pervecived as stupid is the way you are asking the qestion, rather than the thing you dont know.
For example for some bizzare reason I am percieved as strange bu very inteligent and yet when I ask the questions they are rarely percieved stupid.
Why I am not going out of my own way to sound smart or anything I display depth of knowledge at certain areas and the way I'm asking questions is in an honest inquisitive matter of fact way.
The other side of this is the way one perceives the reactions, for example they might not reacted as if one was stupid as much as they are confused at disparity between the question asked and the knowledge one has showcased before that question.
Apparently I have a talent for asking basic questions in a way that doesn't make me look stupid, because I ask a lot of questions, especially when learning new things, and I don't think I've ever been called stupid because of it.
I used to work at a place where we recognized each other for the ability to "stick our hand in the fan."
Meaning, we know that some things cannot be understood until they are tried, and trying such things often leads to failure (though there's an art to keep the failure small and learn fast.)
So we'd basically recognize and reward people for embracing that reality, for the ability to say "yup I am gonna probably do this wrong the first time but that's gonna lead to progress"
Inverse of that is fear of failure - inability to do something unless you are certain you're capable of securing a successful outcome. Basically that means you only do things you already know how to do.
On the "learning new things" point: I have often thought it is a bit of a super power to enjoy that feeling of being stupid and incompetent. It's a necessary stage in learning new things, and learning new things often is the only way to avoid stagnation. Many people really dislike that initial stage. Lots of successful people are just good at pushing through it in order to get the useful new expertise. But actually being able to enjoy that feeling of stupidity makes it far more likely that you'll learn new things more often. My ability to do this ebbs and flows, but when I do have it, it's a wonderful feeling.
This title spoke to me. I work with some very talented engineers. I often feel like I'm asking stupid questions. A couple coworkers treat me like I'm an idiot. But I don't really care. I'd rather know than have an ego.
I'll add to the voices here mentioning vulnerability. I believe it takes strength and courage to choose vulnerability.
I am starting to recognize that the courage is required because it can be a filter. It isn't just the chance that a "nurse or phlebotomist" might judge you harshly, there are many people in the world that'll sooner reject than connect with you.
Still, if we are to be true to ourselves, perhaps vulnerability can minimize the total amount of pain in our lives. It'll take weighting the acute pain of rejection as vulnerable as lesser than the chronic pain of acceptance with insecurity.
This is something I'm working on. It's a lifelong process, especially when you get into the mindset of thinking you're smart (a problem for most folks on HN, and not necessarily because they're wrong).
Nobody knows everything, and even if you're a hyper-conformist who always tows the line and parrots experts instead of evaluating ideas from first principles, you ought to find peace in the fact that 500 years from now (and perhaps even some in our lifetimes), people will look back at many of our most fundamental, passionate, and obviously true opinions with a mix of disdain, pity, and fascination.
A problem with asking stupid questions is that if the person you're asking is not smart, you're gonna get stupid answers. Sometimes you have to ask it in a "smart way", or you'll be sitting there going back and forth for an hour while the other person keeps giving you stupid answers, because they couldn't see why you were asking a stupid question.
The opposite also happens. You ask a stupid question, and people try to give you "smart" answers that aren't actually answering your first question, because they assume you're stupid / "doing it wrong".
I did an MBA which involved plenty of consulting projects for real firms. I pride myself on being brave enough to ask stupid questions and I found that this was a superpower when consulting on complicated projects. Often the instigators don't know the answers themselves so you go on journey of discovery together in the first few meetings.
A lot of the international students, especially from Asian countries, would never ask such 'stupid' questions for fear of losing face. This became apparent for a lot of them in the final presentations when they still didn't understand the real problems
Come back to academia, I keep along stupid questions all the time. Granted, my defence is I'm no longer paid to do science so don't mind looking stupid in that regard infront of the boss. I just build things for them to use.
It's remarkable how many of the "stupid questions" ends up sounding like the synonymous "reviewer 1". And how many end up catching out high level problems which are lost in the detail in something new and exiting.
Such as "OK we build and install it there and calibrate it, but what about networking and power in year 2 after the upgrade?"...
Let the haters hate, just ask questions and move on.
One of the hardest lessons to learn in life is to not concern yourself with what others think of them.
Be polite, courteous, and caring because you want people to like you and you don't want to be ostracized but those things come from within.
But, "I want them to think I'm successful/hot/smart/cool/etc" is just a good way to show how you're not any of those things. So many stories are about people who try really hard to maintain these personas and they all fall apart from the tension.
I'm not sure if this is the same thing but insecure people like me find the lack of affirmation of others troubling sometimes. How many of us get upset/offended if what we think is a high-quality comment on HN gets voted down by a load of people?
We should be confident enough that we stand by comments even if we expect some of them to be misunderstood/unpopular. There are always people who will agree and always some who will agree. Once we can judge ourselves fairly, we won't care what other people think - we can be judged by our outcomes.
In my experience this is what humility is; not making yourself out to be more than you are, as well as not putting yourself down (deprecating humour aside - which is more about connection).
"You don't need more control over everything, you need more courage". In a lot of ways that dovetails with Dan's comments.
You look smart and are smart, but people think you're just virtue signaling. But you know that virture signaling actually saves you time discussing why your aren't stupid while still looking so.
etc. pp.
In my opinion, real gain in looking stupid is when you actually are and then know how to accept valid critique, or at least try to understand where it comes from before you know it's valid.
Because then you actually learn something that could improve your situation.
Wow, this describes me to a T. The only difference being, you (Dan Luu) are much smarter than me.
The other day I got confused by a decimal separator on Hacker News and posted a comment saying so. I am pretty sure some people assumed I was stupid. Perhaps they did not want to put in the effort required to understand why some one might get confused in the given situation.
I will admit sometimes I fall into this trap too and assume the other person is stupid. Nobody is perfect.
I have nothing profound to say, just wanted to share this.
> The other day I got confused by a decimal separator on Hacker News and posted a comment saying so. I am pretty sure some people assumed I was stupid. Perhaps they did not want to put in the effort required to understand why some one might get confused in the given situation.
When you try to post low-level questions on a high-level forum (no matter what trade it is), you will get negative responses, because you dilute the topic. It's like having speed bump in fast lane.
I failed a technical interview at a large financial institution and I'm sure the interviewers thought I was stupid. As I gazed at the atrocious code they wanted me to make changes to and listened to them misuse programming terms as they tried in vain to communicate what changes they wanted me to make I'm sure my bewilderment was all over my face. Everything else about the company was great, but all my enthusiasm died when I saw into the engineering side of the business.
This is a great premise, and in my experience spot on both in terms of avoiding feelings of being stupid.
But some of the items are more about presenting information in a way that makes people change their actions without feeling stupid.
Like the ones about blood draws. I've seen my wife do this so well, and I honestly never knew it was possible to live so harmoniously with society. People are just so much more helpful and flexible with her and I attributed it to her Dale Carnegie levels of persuasiveness.
The masks and air filters make me wonder if my refusal to patronize restaurants that require paying via their website and signing up for an account with email and phone number, both verified by codes. It puts my friends out who just wanted to eat but I'm not eating if they require an account (which always says "we will use your info for marketing").
Maybe it's not the same thing, masks and air filters have more obvious benefits than avoiding accounts at restaurants.
The fear of looking stupid cripples me in just about everything I do. Work, both professionally and personal projects, competitive videogames, even playing piano or guitar. Maybe I can take a hint from this post and embrace it rather than avoiding it.
I think this post might be triggering a lot of people who feel it might be criticizing them. It takes a lot of emotional energy to _look_ stupid in front of people, in ways that I would guess most people here (including myself) don't.
I’m in academia and willingness to look stupid (sometimes to be stupid) is an important and difficult skill that we try hard to train and almost all of my colleagues now have.
But I believe that it’s also very cultural and gendered so it’s not as easy or successful for everyone, unfortunately. (Adding) I mean not easy personality wise due o their background, OR not easy because people more often treat them as stupid given an excuse because of who they are or what they look like.
"looking stupid" seems like a poor abstraction for two other things: 1) failing to come to terms with your own insufficiency, and 2) being willing to do things that others are not doing. I think separating them out helps us realize they are separate skills, and this way, those of us who are not naturally talented at them are more likely to pick them up.
Another helpful thing would have been examples. What were the stupid questions he was asking in college?
Reminds me of Josh Waitzkin's concept of "investment in loss". Such a great and rewarding approach if you are able to suspend your ego and practice it.
These are good points in the article; two other areas I'm willing to look stupid are:
- asking a store employee where to find specific items (quicker than most men)
- communicating in simple (almost childlike), direct rhetoric. As I get into more intellectual circles, I've found that my reputation does take a hit, but I still think the mental throughput/accuracy of expressing ideas simply is worth the reputational hit
The problem is that there is really a stupid question, people often can’t tell since they are a bit clueless to begin with. Example is if you are a newly hired subject matter expert(Security for example) and you question something like what is a buffer overflow in a meeting, that could mess you up. It’s a extreme example, but anywhere in between, it could be hard to tell if this is the one question that could undo me.
One of the most memorable experiences of my post-doc was working with the venerable Joachim Cuntz. It was often amusing to attend talks with him as he'd usually blast the speaker with a barrage of seemingly rudimentary questions.
This trait is shared among almost all of the mathematicians I've respected deeply and it's always astounding how the most trivial lines of questioning can lead to deep, profound realizations.
This is my not-so-secret weapon and I highly recommend it.
I spent some years at a FAANG, some of them in management, and it was shocking how many meetings could be unlocked by one person willing to risk sounding stupid.
I was also shocked by how many people would approach me after to say they were wondering the same things.
The flip side to this, was that I would also occasionally step on someone's favorite baby, which they usually didn't like much.
Learning something and pretending like you know it already are two goals that are very at odds with each other.
It's one of the things I felt got better when going from high school to university - in high school I felt like I needed to do both to get good grades (because of how much of your grade came from the teacher's impression of you) whereas in uni, I didn't have to bother and could just focus on learning.
> I think that being willing to say things that I know have a good chance of causing people to think I'm stupid is a deeply ingrained enough habit that it's not worth changing just for interviews and I can't think of another context where the cost is nearly as high as it is in interviews.
Unwillingness to adapt to circumstances maybe isn't stupidity, but it's definitely self-limiting.
This ties closely to plausible deniability. I seriously think this field is under developed and more people need to learn from an early age how the most plausible sounding explanation is not always, and maybe in certain fields even often, not the right answer. It's easy for engineers to intuitively grasp this since we see so many oddball failure modes in software development.
> In particular, it's often the case that there's a seemingly obvious but actually incorrect reason something is true, a slightly less obvious reason the thing seems untrue, and then a subtle and complex reason that the thing is actually true
It would be fun to have a list of these ideas. Anyone have any examples beyond the footnote in the article? (why wider tires have better grip)
I've experienced it many times how intimidating it can be to ask about things in a new workplace that seem to be commonplace there. Especially in the US, where abbreviations are used for a ridiculous number of things. You just can't break through this barrier if you don't ask what people mean, and it gets worse over time if you avoid it for fear of seeming dumb.
I have to remind myself of this all the time. The older I get the worse I am about asking questions on topics I don't know. "Ugh I should know that by now", is a pretty common thought that goes through my head. Definitely trying to unlearn this habit by being willing to jump in Discord groups and asking dumb questions. Never a bad experience so far!
In grad school, there was a certain well-known, extremely-senior-in-the-field professor who would show up to seminars and ask pointedly basic and naive-sounding questions (some might call them stupid). A lot of these questions were actually somewhat penetrating, and had an occasionally entertaining effect on the speaker. I learned much from this professor.
I think there's a very big difference between asking simple questions (especially when gaining an understanding of a situation) and asking actually stupid questions (unrelated to the topic or questions that have already been answered). This article is claiming the former as the latter and saying "Even when I'm stupid I'm so smart"
An important factor here is that sometimes when people ask stupid questions they just haven’t done the homework. “Instead of doing a Google search let me blast an email to everyone at work.” It’s useful to give an indicator that you are asking at a deeper level. For example, briefly mention some of what you have found and why it is unsatisfactory.
I too look stupid, but not in "so ahead of everyone I look stupid" way, or in a Socratic ironic way, just stupid. It does mean I can ask dumb questions and keep up with what's happening, or propose dumb ideas and sometimes they stick, but I think I'd prefer to not look, and consequently be treated like, I'm stupid.
By assuming a question is stupid, you throw yourself into a situation where you decide if you should risk reputation by asking, or by keeping your perceived reputation by not talking. Assumption upon assumptions, ultimately pointless waste of opportunities to move yourself or others forward who has the same questions and afraid to ask.
People also think I'm stupid. I am, but people think I'm stupid too.
The secret is that we're all dumb as bricks - most of us just dont act like it, and so they go on being a brick. Those of us who are self aware and unashamed can be slightly less stupid on a good day. That's about all we can hope for, but it's worth it imo.
One side benefit of being willing to say "I don't know" and to ask embarrassing questions, when one is in a position of being a supposed expert, is that this kind of humility lends you credibility when you do claim to know something.
(I'm talking about experts with/for whom I've worked, to be clear, not myself.)
True story:. I'm a techie and a nerd and I've always been near the top of my class. One of the things that I enjoy is it really dry humor. And one of the ways I can get a laugh out of people is by stating something that is obvious as though I just figured it out. Or intentionally making massive understatements. Like if I just broke my arm and I would say something like, "I have found that breaking your arm is unpleasant."
When you say it around people who are generally quick witted, it takes a second for them to grok what you're saying and then they figure out that you're cracking a joke and then they smile, usually laugh.
But years ago I found myself working as an aircraft mechanic. And my cohorts whom I rode around with were very blue collar in language and culture, and several of them had been chosen as "mechanic" because they hadn't performed that well on an aptitude test.
So one day I made one of my famous observe-the-obvious funny statements, and one member of the group whom I'm pretty sure was one of the low aptitude scorers, looked at me with obvious disgust and said, "You must be one of the dumbest people I've ever met."
He didn't understand why I started howling with laughter.
Kahneman's Thinking fast and thinking slow explains all of this. The fast-thinking part of our brain (the sub-conscious) tells us the "obvious" answer all the time. And it is WRONG. It's only by asking "stupid" questions that we start to engage our slow-thinking conscious brain and find out the truth.
Awesome. A friend I was on a same team, told me once that its always good to show up a bit slow witted to your opponent. I've had no issues in adjusting to that.
Not stating that I'm anything of a genius BUT that it makes life a lot easier when you lose the excuse to pretend smart and can be actually yourself.
For somebody who doesn't mind looking stupid, there is a glaring lack of examples of when you actually were stupid.
This seems like a really long example of a typical narcissistic interview answer to "what is your biggest weakness?", of "people think I look stupid but actually I'm really really smart".
If there's one thing I learned in my time on this earth it's that there are very few stupid people. If my first impression is that the person is "stupid", I usually find that it's just a matter of really listening to the them and to what they have to say with an open mind and an open heart.
Yes and no. Yes there are very few stupid "people", but there are stupid reactions and actions. The reason isn't that the people are stupid, it's often that they are busy with other things.
It's amazing to me how conservative people are with their mental energy. Many people hate to think. Not because they can't! Just because they would rather not. I'm not sure why.
At my company I'd say "ignorance is my superpower." It would usually get a laugh but people seemed to appreciate the mindset of intellectual humility.
Asking childish "why?" questions is often very illuminating, although if it causes you to stumble into some aspect of incompetent leadership then be warned.
Slightly related video [0], specifically to I was shocked that somebody would deliberately do the wrong thing in order to reduce the odds of potentially looking stupid
This reminds me of the good old times when I had to actually talk to another person in order to get pizza and I sometimes wanted a lot of veggies on it but also meat so I just ordered a vegetarian pizza with meat on it and they always thought I was joking or being silly. Good thing I never let that stop me
Having this skill probably helps with all sorts of situations. For example, showing people an incomplete product either as potential users or investors. If you're afraid of looking stupid .. you will probably lack the courage to get your product out there even though it's not yet complete.
I find it to be productive sometimes to have the attitude of the brave soldier Švejk. "I report obediently that I've been officially declared to be an idiot, sir".
Most of the time it lowers expectations people have of me and relieves me from the worries about not being able to meet said expectations.
Sometimes I was even scolded for asking too much from other people that knew me on the basis that if I did it it did not look good, it would look like I blabla... all stupid things about how you look to others.
I never stopped doing it. I will never stop. I do not care. At the end, what I want, is to know new stuff.
After reading, I don't think the author is willing to look stupid, I think they don't care at all if they look stupid, an attribute that I still think is remarkable. I wish I had the self-confidence to not care so much about what others think. Something I'm still slowly working on.
> It's taken me up to six weeks to convince people that it's ok for them to ask questions and, until that happens, I have to constantly ask them how things are going to make sure they're not stuck.
I never considered that this might be common. I guess I shouldn’t take myself as an example.
It seems telling that this post has struck such a nerve within the HN community. I suggest there is a predominant hypersensitivity amongst this crowd to the perception of being "smart", "stupid", or perhaps even worst of all, "average."
I have this theory that there is an direct relationship between intellect and doing really stupid things. A genius will sometimes do the most idiotic things. Take comfort the next time you do something really dumb because it indicates you are generally very smart.
If I'm spending very much energy thinking how brilliant or stupid I look or feel, then I'm not focused on doing something fun or useful. We probably all have to put some amount of energy into image management to be part of society, but the less energy put into that the better. At least for me.
Majoring in math in college, I felt like this came up all of the time. Statistics is a prime example of a subject filled with subtle complexity and fairly wild/groundbreaking assumptions/insights that most people just accept as obvious fact for some reason
my greatest superpower is to sit in meetings and say "wait. I don't understand. Are you saying...." and "If that's true then doesn't it mean..." and leading the entire team to conclude that the consultants really are idiots.
When I was onboarding at Google in 2013, one of the things that they said was "don't be afraid to ask questions in a meeting. Chances are most other people have the same question, but are afraid to look dumb by asking it"
If you have ever read a supreme court transcript and thought "why did one of our justices ask this really obvious question", this is half of the reason.
The other half is ensuring that certain things get into the official judicial record.
This resonates because my entire professional persona is Career Idiot Asks Questions. It's worked out reasonably well and acted as a filter for professional situations where I definitely would have been very, very unhappy.
Making “asking stupid questions” socially acceptable can solve SO MANY issues. Being able to politely say what everyone is thinking and not keep things to blow later is also probably the way for world peace. (Or world war 3…)
Honesty and transparency aren't the same thing. Dan Luu has a non-transparent process, but that doesn't mean he wishes to deceive you. Most people aren't transparent.
"Discovery is the privilege of the child: the child who has no fear of being once again wrong, of looking like an idiot, of not being serious, of not doing things like everyone else." — Alexander Grothendieck
I think he also has a way of writing that makes him look like he doesn't know how to. Will look forward to that post. For now I'll just go back to the second or maybe third reading of his post.
Willing to look stupid == not caring what other people think of you.
Most humans spend terrible amount of time thinking what others think of you. It's normal, but and good to some extent.
I'd be nice if the author would provide some answers for the "stupid" questions that the readers will inevitably ask themselves when they read about laptops and the size of the boxes they come in. Or how else will they acquire a better understanding of the point the author is trying to make?
Agree with questioning this. They are both brilliant, but that doesn't justify arrogance. IMHO, it detracts from his brilliance and clouds the clarity of his thoughts.
The premise of insurance is that you pay more on average over time but remove very expensive tail events. Basically you pay the insurance company to reduce your risk.
If you are wealthy enough (and mentally prepared) to absorb tail events without much negative effect on your life, it can be perfectly rational to not insure damage to your car.
In the context of the article, I imagine it's that some Kubernetes expert couldn't design and sell them an overcomplicated microservices-based solution which would basically only really be useful at Netflix-scale.
The best people who do this are those that ask stupid questions in a way that makes it seem like the question they’re asking is because the other person is stupid
> Covid: I took this seriously relatively early on and bought a half mask respirator on 2020-01-26 and was using N95s I'd already had on hand for the week before (IMO, the case that covid was airborne and that air filtration would help was very strong based on the existing literature on SARS contact tracing, filtration of viruses from air filters, and viral load)
I think this is remarkable, how common people with some level of scientific literacy were able to get this correct much better than the whole medical establishment.
> I think this is remarkable, how common people with some level of scientific literacy were able to get this correct much better than the whole medical establishment.
I don't think it's remarkable at all. Common people with some level of scientific literacy took basically all kind of stances about masks. Some of them had to be right in the end.
'The medical establishment' otoh had to come to one single common recommendation and as it's only one there's a chance of failure (there were, ofc. individual medical professional and scientists who got it right as well).
Yes, and because `the medical establishment` cannot risk that failure, they have to be much surer.
And they have to be able to communicate it in an effective way such that people believe it... AND can act on it. AND can act on it in a way that doesn't trigger panic or totally mess with supply chains needed to get proper equipment to front-line responders.
like Lawrence from azangru's quote above, the medical establishment needs to consider many more factors than 'common people' before making a public statement.
Another note to the same quote: for me it looks like classic half mask respirator is not that "good" against COVID, as it only filters on the intake, not the way, out. At least my cheap one does. Therefor, while it prevents you from getting it, it does not stop you from spreading it. Right?
Sure, that might very well be what you aim for, but from my understanding, FFP2 should prevent both, at least theoretically, since wearing them correctly is another point of failure.
The medical establishment knew N95s were critical from SARS and, at least in, North America had plenty of circumstantial evidence that COVID was, at least, somewhat reduced by masks; as did the author
Further, my former co-workers from my stint in HIV testing were ALL saying wear masks and don't count on a vaccine being available until 2021 at the very earliest. They all started self isolating very early.
The whole "medical establishment" DID know this.
This was a failure of leadership of the medical establishment to either listen to the rest of the medical establishment or to effectively push back on the political leadership.
i always start my questions with something like "maybe i'm being a bit thick but..." which works well because it signposts up front that you're not trying to be awkward or obstructive. Most of the time it turns out that a bunch of other people had the same questions but didn't want to appear stupid
Joe Rogan seemed to have exploited this concept to great success. He does not seem to have any more than very superficial or anecdotal knowledge about most topics, just vaguely remembers some bits. Always needs to have things explained from the very start and listens with an open mouth. In the and he is always amazed by what he has learned. Might be common in interview settings but seems to be extraordinarily effective for these long-form podcasts. I remember he got called out for being actually very smart by Jordan Peterson once.
> Friends have been chiding about this for years and strangers, dates, and acquaintances, will sometimes tell me, with varying levels of bluntness, that I'm being paranoid and stupid
There is way to much of this bullshit all over the place (e.g. PPE use) and I'm quick to judge people who do it, because I find it a truly moronic attitude.
I have also heard this. Even the other day I asked my own sister about data about her own profession. She genuinely thinks I am asking too much/bothering her so she just replies "just let it go" or "you think too much".
Well, if I think too much, probably I think more than you about your own profession, so, I do not want to say this, but you are not the best possible professional, because sometimes I had the feeling that she just follows the trend instead of getting genuine opinions about some of the topics in the discipline.
I like to look stupid too, it's just original if anything. For instance I named my HN clone Peaches 'n' Stink and everyone thinks it's just such a dumb name.
Nice piece but could the op please invest in formatting his articles? Surely a techie like you can spend an hour installing Wordpress and a nice theme.
As an engineer frequently working with high-voltage, in my world there is simply no such thing as a stupid question. I gently remind my technicians of such whenever they come to me with questions they feel are stupid.
Asking questions is really putting print statements(or functions) in ordinary, physical world. It's debugging yourself or your surroundings.
Asking questions is crucial when you're doing sports and trying to improve your personal best - for example pull ups or squats. Eventually a joint or tissue starts to hurt and you need to figure out why or you get an injury. Am I doing it too often? No warmup? Bad diet? Sleep? Does your joint rotate too much and in which axis?
And you will absolutely not get far in a puzzle game like Baba Is You if you're not good at asking questions. When I got stuck in that game, it was almost always due to a wrong assumption I made early on and failed to recognize. Solving the game is similar to tree traversal. If one approach doesn't work, and you don't have another idea, you need to re-examine your assumptions.
1. It is usually combinatorially impossible to answer all the questions when solving a problem - people just choose some random walk over the problem space and it doesn't always lead to ideal results.
2. It is socially unacceptable for "senior" people (who usually have better mental model of higher level concerns) not to project smug confidence in front of less "senior" people, so they pretend to know things they do not.
3. People have evolved to be lazy as fuck, so unless they absolutely must know something and can't do without it, they mostly won't even bother. Some won't bother even _if_ they can't do without.
I don't have solutions to #1 and #3, and I doubt #3 can even be solved at all. But I do have a solution for #2 - it's the Socratic method (or as they call it at Microsoft "precision questioning"). It lets you save face by asking pointed, outcome-oriented questions of someone who likely knows more about the problem, without necessarily making your own lack of knowledge obvious. Besides that it also surfaces the assumptions, some of which routinely turn out to be wrong, and it's the easiest method I know for getting people to change their mind on things, because they feel like they've arrived at the answers using "their own" thought process. It is difficult to master, so it too runs into #3, however, but I think all engineers, senior and junior would benefit from learning this. Another upside of learning it is it makes it harder for unscrupulous others to manipulate you maliciously via Socratic questioning, since you know what they're trying to do.
I sometime find myself deliberately avoiding looking stupid because it could possibly damage my career. And that's because the people who make decisions are not some divine being who see through you, they are just humans like the rest of us.
There’s a lot of value in this, and I try to do it at work. I’m confident enough in my abilities that I don’t mind asking questions when there’s something I don’t understand. And I find that people who won’t do that are insecure, and often for good reason.
But still… it can be taken too far. Just as a matter of being a person who can socialize normally, what’s wrong with spending a few seconds explaining yourself? “This is gonna sound silly, but I want the computer in the smallest box. Here’s why.” That kind of thing.
I don’t let my ego get in the way of learning new things. But I don’t go out of my way to sound like an eccentric weirdo either.
"Understanding is more important than memorization! Schools should teach the students how to understand, think, doubt, and question. They should be made open to imagination and creativity" --Feynman
> For example, if a date thinks I'm stupid because I ask them what a word means, so much so that they show it in their facial expression and/or tone of voice, I think it's pretty unlikely that we're compatible, so I view finding that out sooner rather than later as upside and not downside.
I brace myself to be the idiot. I'm going to waste everyone's time asking questions that everyone knows the answer to, and I just got looped in, so everyone's going to feel like they need to walk through all the super-obvious stuff to satisfy the one guy who didn't do his homework.
So I start asking questions, and slowly begin to realize that nobody in the room has any idea what they are talking about. That there are fundamental misunderstandings and misconceptions about existing systems. And, naturally, it turns out that the questions I have are questions that other people have.
This has happened to me so often now that you would think the sinking feeling I get before I brace myself to look stupid would go away, but it never does.