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Be Kind

briangilham.com

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Re: Be Kind

#381

Post by dclowd9901 »

overgard wrote: post #181
scraft wrote: post #109

Nice little read. There is that little answer in the back of my head of: "It is a good question why I caused this problem. It is weird to think there is a competent company that has been around for so many years, yet they have no procedures in place to stop this from happening. You would think that any changes that could cause downtime on a clients website would go through an automatic test suite and only after passi…

Think of what you're saying on a meta-level here. You would basically be telling this guy, "I fucked up, but I'm blaming you for treating me like an adult instead of a child. You screwed up by giving me enough autonomy that I could make a mistake." That might not exactly be a smart career move.. On a more personal level, if someone shows you kindness in the face of a mistake, the last thing you want to do is throw it…

Why not both? Of course you can accept responsibility for this mistake but then suggest creating a testing suite to run commits through before making them live?

Re: Be Kind

#382

Post by dclowd9901 »

overgard wrote: post #181
scraft wrote: post #109

Nice little read. There is that little answer in the back of my head of: "It is a good question why I caused this problem. It is weird to think there is a competent company that has been around for so many years, yet they have no procedures in place to stop this from happening. You would think that any changes that could cause downtime on a clients website would go through an automatic test suite and only after passi…

Think of what you're saying on a meta-level here. You would basically be telling this guy, "I fucked up, but I'm blaming you for treating me like an adult instead of a child. You screwed up by giving me enough autonomy that I could make a mistake." That might not exactly be a smart career move.. On a more personal level, if someone shows you kindness in the face of a mistake, the last thing you want to do is throw it…

Why not both? Of course you can accept responsibility for this mistake but then suggest creating a testing suite to run commits through before making them live?

Re: Be Kind

#383

Post by coldtea »

rexpop wrote: post #167
coldtea wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was giving a different twist to the story to point that things can (and do) go differently to the rosy picture painted in it ("oh, you did a mistake once == you'll never make it again"). That's why in the except I kept, I didn't keep any reference to Bob Hoover. It's about the idea in the story, not some particular pilot.

What did you learn?

That people need things spelt out for them even if the meaning is obvious?

Re: Be Kind

#384

Post by coldtea »

rexpop wrote: post #165
coldtea wrote: post #91

> That’s why I want to make sure that you’re the only one to refuel my plane tomorrow. I won’t let anyone else on the field touch it. ...he said, before his final fatal flight. Apparently some people DO do the same mistake twice. ([Edit] to avoid confusion: My addition is about giving a different twist to the story, to show that it's not a given that people who made a mistake will not be prone to repeat it. Some peop…

Maybe tell a true story that helps your point, rather than a blatantly fictitious one. I could tell a story about purple moon dragons, but it wouldn't "show" anything.

>Maybe tell a true story that helps your point, rather than a blatantly fictitious one.

The point wasn't to give a true example, it was to add a twist to the ending of the story told by the parent to make those reading it fathom an alternative way things could have gone that goes contrary to its message.

>I could tell a story about purple moon dragons, but it wouldn't "show" anything.

Why not? That's what allegories, parables, zen koans, fables and 200 other forms of fictional stories used in making a point do.

Re: Be Kind

#385

Post by dahart »

ninjakeyboard wrote: post #313

As software engineers: As beginners, we're over-confident in our ability, even if we actually suck and make lots of mistakes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect The opposite seems to become true - experienced engineers (who have learned from their mistakes) seem to be extra paranoid. I've seen also older engineers that seem to be confident still, talk a bit game, but they just never learned.…

Fun fact: Dunning & Kruger measured perceived vs actual performance on very simple, and somewhat subjective tasks. Ability to recognize humor was one of them.

It's strangely difficult to find this important piece of the methodology. Wikipedia's article doesn't even mention it, and this context is fairly critical to understanding the effect.

I think you're right that some amount of inexperience and youth makes the kids overconfident, but what has been demonstrated is that the task difficulty is a large determinant in how good people are at estimating their own abilities, and Dunning Kruger only applies to easy tasks [1]. For very difficult tasks, the Dunning-Kruger effect actually reverses and becomes Imposter Syndrome [1][2]. Software engineering may fall into the latter category -- something that is difficult enough that, statistically, on average, beginners are actually pretty good at knowing they can't do it.

[1] http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-k... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome

Re: Be Kind

#386

Post by labster »

nostrademons wrote: post #363
ninjakeyboard wrote: post #313

As software engineers: As beginners, we're over-confident in our ability, even if we actually suck and make lots of mistakes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect The opposite seems to become true - experienced engineers (who have learned from their mistakes) seem to be extra paranoid. I've seen also older engineers that seem to be confident still, talk a bit game, but they just never learned.…

Overconfidence is a huge benefit in playing the political game - getting people to take you seriously, managing up, interfacing with the outside world. Like it or not, humans are primed to respond to confidence; for most people, listing the dozen ways a system may fail signals that you shouldn't use the system, while for engineers, it signals that these are a dozen things to be fixed. The trick - when getting to high…

Right, this is really a tricky game. I help run a nonprofit wiki farm, so a lot of our business is out in the open. We lost one of our clients because they were hanging out in the IRC while we were discussing the cost of an upgrade and the technical issues facing it, as the exit question revealed that they thought we were running out of money.

Now of course donations in the past few months have been roughly double our expenses -- information which is also public. But it's very hard to project confidence during a problem solving session, because it gets in the way of actual problem solving.

I wish I knew where the balance point for secretiveness and openness was for public organizations. But given that all of the candidates for U.S. President seem to be at a bad place, I'm starting to wonder if a perfect balance point even exists.

Re: Be Kind

#387

Post by hilop »

dahart wrote: post #385
ninjakeyboard wrote: post #313

As software engineers: As beginners, we're over-confident in our ability, even if we actually suck and make lots of mistakes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect The opposite seems to become true - experienced engineers (who have learned from their mistakes) seem to be extra paranoid. I've seen also older engineers that seem to be confident still, talk a bit game, but they just never learned.…

Fun fact: Dunning & Kruger measured perceived vs actual performance on very simple, and somewhat subjective tasks. Ability to recognize humor was one of them. It's strangely difficult to find this important piece of the methodology. Wikipedia's article doesn't even mention it, and this context is fairly critical to understanding the effect. I think you're right that some amount of inexperience and youth makes the kid…

What do you mean "reversed"? DK says that both low and high skilled people estimate themselves as close to average, due to the obvious bias in one's available data

Re: Be Kind

#388

Post by hilop »

dahart wrote: post #385
ninjakeyboard wrote: post #313

As software engineers: As beginners, we're over-confident in our ability, even if we actually suck and make lots of mistakes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect The opposite seems to become true - experienced engineers (who have learned from their mistakes) seem to be extra paranoid. I've seen also older engineers that seem to be confident still, talk a bit game, but they just never learned.…

Fun fact: Dunning & Kruger measured perceived vs actual performance on very simple, and somewhat subjective tasks. Ability to recognize humor was one of them. It's strangely difficult to find this important piece of the methodology. Wikipedia's article doesn't even mention it, and this context is fairly critical to understanding the effect. I think you're right that some amount of inexperience and youth makes the kid…

What do you mean "reversed"? DK says that both low and high skilled people estimate themselves as close to average, due to the obvious bias in one's available data

Re: Be Kind

#389

Post by dahart »

hilop wrote: post #387
dahart wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun fact: Dunning & Kruger measured perceived vs actual performance on very simple, and somewhat subjective tasks. Ability to recognize humor was one of them. It's strangely difficult to find this important piece of the methodology. Wikipedia's article doesn't even mention it, and this context is fairly critical to understanding the effect. I think you're right that some amount of inexperience and youth makes the kid…

What do you mean "reversed"? DK says that both low and high skilled people estimate themselves as close to average, due to the obvious bias in one's available data

I mean that for difficult tasks, people who are unskilled rate themselves as unskilled, and people that are skilled rate themselves as skilled.

"Our studies replicate, eliminate, or reverse the association between task performance and judgment accuracy reported by Kruger and Dunning (1999) as a function of task difficulty. On easy tasks, where there is a positive bias, the best performers are also the most accurate in estimating their standing, but on difficult tasks, where there is a negative bias, the worst performers are the most accurate. This pattern is consistent with a combination of noisy estimates and overall bias, with no need to invoke differences in metacognitive abilities. In this regard, our findings support Krueger and Mueller’s (2002) reinterpretation of Kruger and Dunning’s (1999) findings. An association between task-related skills and metacognitive insight may indeed exist, and later we offer some suggestions for ways to test for it. However, our analyses indicate that the primary drivers of errors in judging relative standing are general inaccuracy and overall biases tied to task difficulty. Thus, it is important to know more about those sources of error in order to better understand and ameliorate them."

Burson KA, Larrick RP, & Klayman J (2006). Skilled or unskilled, but still unaware of it: how perceptions of difficulty drive miscalibration in relative comparisons. Journal of personality and social psychology, 90 (1), 60-77 PMID: 16448310

Re: Be Kind

#390

Post by hilop »

eppeltert wrote: post #286
Arjuna wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was not familiar with this story; that prompted me to research it. I found it interesting that this aviation incident had a positive outcome, in the form of safety innovations: the Hoover Nozzle and the Hoover Ring. Wikipedia states: "A perhaps-undesired recognition is the Hoover Nozzle used on jet fuel pumps. The Hoover Nozzle is designed with a flattened bell shape. The Hoover Nozzle cannot be inserted in the fil…

In general, this design principle is known as poka yoke: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poka-yoke

And the problem it solves is Murphy's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy%27s_law
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