Willingness to look stupid

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.

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.

>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 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.

There is nothing like the joy that lights up the face of a bored Home Depot employee when you say "looking for ; it's for a kids costume". You can get several of them happily brainstorming alternatives and running around the store