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Willingness to look stupid

danluu.com

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Re: Willingness to look stupid

#201

Post by agumonkey »

HeckFeck wrote: post #187
agumonkey wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

social reflexes and egos are immense streams of hurdles in the way of knowing i like the term abandonment these days, drop your assumptions, drop your habits and try to see things as they are

It sounds simple but it really isn't. 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.

of course it's not a thing for daily activities, more about ability to accept it when you face big questions

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#202

Post by Zababa »

alexandrerond wrote: post #166
pydry wrote: post #55

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 roundabo…

Totally. There's distance between: "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 mak…

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.

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#203

Post by medstrom »

dangerface wrote: post #127
lukeholder wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but if that is true, why cause so much trouble and just said why you want the smallest box.

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.

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.

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#204

Post by watwut »

medstrom wrote: post #167
dotancohen wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 c…

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.

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.

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#205

Post by Zababa »

WA wrote: post #175
frumiousirc wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ok, if we want to have a meta discussion, let me ask two stupid questions: Why did OP not tell the store clerk why a small box mattered? Why did OP not tell the reader why he didn't tell the clerk?

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.

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#206

Post by jacobolus »

fjfaase wrote: post #190
jacobolus wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For me, it had been too long. 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, ...

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.

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#207

Post by gruturo »

medstrom wrote: post #167
dotancohen wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 c…

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.

It was as true 2500 years ago as it is today.

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#208

Post by Zababa »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #121
lolc wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

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…

> 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.

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#209

Post by medstrom »

josh2600 wrote: post #163
dusted wrote: post #50

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…

Confucius says there are 3 ways to gain wisdom: Imitation, which is easiest. Meditation, which is noblest. Experience, which is bitterest. 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.

For the unaware:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#210

Post by ctvo »

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.

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