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Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time (2014)

theguardian.com

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Re: Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time (2014)

#81

Post by bksenior »

nharada wrote: post #19
bksenior wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leeches used to be common medical training, Penicillin was literally created by a pro who went against his training. Training is often helpful for pattern mataching, but make no mistakes, your doctor can kill you and your teachers can mislead. Everyone is faking it.

There's a difference between "faking it" and "trying your best but making mistakes". Trained pilots still crash airplanes, but I'm not getting on a plane flown by some random passenger.

You're confused. Faking it is still doing your best to meet your own knowledge and standards. No one is going and just trying to fuck it up.

Re: Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time (2014)

#82

Post by toomanybeersies »

B0btheBuilder wrote: post #38
davnicwil wrote: post #26

I'm always really impressed by young people, early in their careers or without any career experience at all, who intuit this and are confident in their convictions and get stuff done despite their inexperience. When I was young I was convinced that life beyond academia in all fields would be this super serious, mega competitive space where most everyone has everything figured out. That everyone who was there, in any…

Zuckerberg's mom's a psychiatrist and his dad's a dentist. His dad taught him BASIC programming as a kid and then hired a software engineer as his tutor. Gates' dad's a prominent lawyer and his mom was a prominent businesswoman on the board of directors on several different organizations. Not only did Gates learn programming as a kid, but Microsoft only got on IBM computers because his mom knew IBM executives. When y…

> When you come from privilege, it's much easier to have confidence that things will work out.

This is something that I discovered myself recently. A year ago I quit my job and moved to Australia with practically zero savings. It was a risky move, but I knew that at the end of the day if it all went wrong and I couldn't find a job and ran out of money, I'd be able to just fly back home and stay at my parents' house while I sorted my life out.

Not everybody gets this privilege. A lot of my friends are estranged from their parents, or their parents couldn't afford to put a roof over their head while they sort their life out.

I can afford to take risks, knowing that I have a safety net. I'm not going to end up homeless if a business idea fails or I get made redundant.

I had a decidedly middle class upbringing, but with that I had a lot of opportunities growing up that many people don't get. I have parents that have encouraged me and supported me in my endeavours and have generally been accepting of my (often poor) lifestyle choices.

Re: Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time (2014)

#83

Post by eigenvector »

znpy wrote: post #51
B0btheBuilder wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zuckerberg's mom's a psychiatrist and his dad's a dentist. His dad taught him BASIC programming as a kid and then hired a software engineer as his tutor. Gates' dad's a prominent lawyer and his mom was a prominent businesswoman on the board of directors on several different organizations. Not only did Gates learn programming as a kid, but Microsoft only got on IBM computers because his mom knew IBM executives. When y…

This, so much. Not to undermine their success, but people tend to skip where their success come from, besides brightness. I mean, you can be as bright as possible, but of course if your parents are the first one investing on you (investing cash, I mean) then everything it's a lot easier. This happens at various levels of course. I recently had a conversation with an ex-colleague that had just left the company and was…

I often read and post on a personal finance forum. I'm always surprised by how many posts go something like this:

"Just finished university, $100k to invest, what should I do?"

Wait, how does someone who just finished university have $100,000 in the bank? That's a milestone I proudly hit after several years in the workforce with a good job and living very frugally.

Of course, it's people whose parents paid 100% of their expenses (tuition and living) through university, so every penny they earned from internships, co-ops or scholarships went straight into the bank.

Now ask yourself how much easier it is to start a risky company when the first thing greeting you after finishing school is a 6-figure bank balance not $1000+/month of loan repayments.

Re: Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time (2014)

#84

Post by e17a »

N. N. Taleb has been harping away at this for ages now. Here are some great quotes:

> Electricians, barbers, gardeners, surgeons, tango dancers, are experts. Not economists.

> The Black Swan explains the domain-dependence of expertise: why the electrician, dentist, are experts, while the journalist, State Department bureaucrat, and macroeconomist are not. Since then, there has been a global movement against the pseudo-expert, the serial incompetence of a certain class of babbling and pompous operatives across bureaucrato-academic professions. Which leads to the question: who is the real expert? Who decides on who is and who is not expert? Where is the metaexpert? Time it is. Or, rather, Lindy.

Re: Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time (2014)

#85

Post by jameslk »

cafebabbe wrote: post #56
jameslk wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I'm also confused by this article (opinion piece?) and the comments here (also mostly opinions). I'm pretty sure I'm not just winging it when I do my job. But I guess we don't really have a formal definition of "winging it" to have a meaningful conversation about what that is exactly.

Aha, but, to paraphrase the internet-favorite Dunning-Kruger effect, thinking you're not winging it is the most severe way of winging it :)

I know you're probably just kidding, but I'm going to be pedantic anyway and link you to this: http://danluu.com/dunning-kruger/

Re: Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time (2014)

#86

Post by pdonis »

cafebabbe wrote: post #56
jameslk wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I'm also confused by this article (opinion piece?) and the comments here (also mostly opinions). I'm pretty sure I'm not just winging it when I do my job. But I guess we don't really have a formal definition of "winging it" to have a meaningful conversation about what that is exactly.

Aha, but, to paraphrase the internet-favorite Dunning-Kruger effect, thinking you're not winging it is the most severe way of winging it :)

> thinking you're not winging it is the most severe way of winging it

Only if you either have no objective feedback on your actual performance, or you ignore such feedback when you get it.

Re: Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time (2014)

#87

Post by gammateam »

znpy wrote: post #51
B0btheBuilder wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zuckerberg's mom's a psychiatrist and his dad's a dentist. His dad taught him BASIC programming as a kid and then hired a software engineer as his tutor. Gates' dad's a prominent lawyer and his mom was a prominent businesswoman on the board of directors on several different organizations. Not only did Gates learn programming as a kid, but Microsoft only got on IBM computers because his mom knew IBM executives. When y…

This, so much. Not to undermine their success, but people tend to skip where their success come from, besides brightness. I mean, you can be as bright as possible, but of course if your parents are the first one investing on you (investing cash, I mean) then everything it's a lot easier. This happens at various levels of course. I recently had a conversation with an ex-colleague that had just left the company and was…

Just respect people who played the cards they were dealt

Who applied themselves

For every entrepreneur that had a shortcut, there are 1,000s of trust fund kids that vegetate

Its not about your struggle, keep applying yourself

The society benefits

Re: Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time (2014)

#88

Post by hyperpallium »

davnicwil wrote: post #26

I'm always really impressed by young people, early in their careers or without any career experience at all, who intuit this and are confident in their convictions and get stuff done despite their inexperience. When I was young I was convinced that life beyond academia in all fields would be this super serious, mega competitive space where most everyone has everything figured out. That everyone who was there, in any…

There are always arrogant egomaniacs who think they know everything and can do better (aka teenagers).

Society benedits from having these people around, for when conditions change, and traditional ways don't work any more.

So the extraordinary thing was extraordinary times.

(Other questions: why them and not some other teenager? And how did they transition to conventional business, structure, funding, regulations?)

Re: Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time (2014)

#89

Post by hylianwarrior »

pdonis wrote: post #35

So the evidence this article is based on is...a Reddit thread? Excuse me? Somebody is certainly winging it without knowing what they're doing.

I like to imagine that someday, somehow this HN thread will be referenced in an article somewhere. The irony would be satisfying.

Re: Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time (2014)

#90

Post by yarrel »

The first time someone told something me this they felt they were being helpful and reassuring. Why did everyone else know what to do and I didn't? Oh don't worry, nobody does.

Nope. That's not helpful.

If there's no rulebook I can learn then that makes it worse not better. Lacking an innate ability is not an improvement on lacking some learnable knowledge.

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