Willingness to look stupid

> 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.

Why wouldn't this apply to other areas.

"Dare to be Stupid" - Weird Al Yankowich https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMhwddNQSWQ

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.

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.