Its actually pretty amusing to watch the "cognitive dissonance" on the other persons face when they clearly labelled you "stupid" but your solution to problem the problem at hand is clear/concise/defined. They eventually learn to fear you :(. Ah humanity!
Willingness to look stupid
491–500 of 811 posts
Re: Willingness to look stupid
#492This has happened to me frequently at my current company. I get pulled into a meeting about something that I have no context on because it touches my area of expertise, and the discussions have apparently been stalling out. I brace myself to be the idiot. I'm going to waste everyone's time asking questions that everyone knows the answer to, and I just got looped in, so everyone's going to feel like they need to walk…
This is a useful skill to employ, though at the same time the frequent need of it is a sign of a dysfunctional system. Not always, but a lot of the time, I think. For one, many of these issues would be avoided if, for example, engineers were included in meetings with decision makers and designers during early phases of development, rather than introduce engineers to effectively tell them what to do now that all the d…
You call it dysfunctional but I think it's just a communication technique to accelerate learning, like the author describes, that can be used in a plethora of situations and not just business meetings.
Re: Willingness to look stupid
#493After a terrible breakup years ago I took a trapeze class. Before we got up on the trapeze bar, I spent most of the class telling everyone how bad I was going to be at it. When I got home I lay in bed confused. Why did I do that? This article is spot on. I was afraid of being seen to be bad at something. Have you noticed? We spend almost our entire adult lives doing things we’re good at. Anything we do that we’re bad…
Can you tell me more about how you are learning to draw?
Re: Willingness to look stupid
#494I think that sometimes "willingness to look stupid" can simply be a function of your power situation. When I was a respected Principal Engineer, secure in my position, I was willing to look stupid. When I was in a contract-to-hire position, where I had spent months looking for a job and where I was constantly judged and I thought I might be let go at any moment, I was not willing to look stupid. When I was a long-tim…
The author mentions this as the biggest drawback, understandably so - if getting a job depends on knowledge and confidence, which it usually does, you really need to be careful with how you come off
Re: Willingness to look stupid
#495Earlier quoted context omitted.
In would say it goes even further than humblebragging, and ventures into narcissism and an inability to handle criticism, explain oneself, or accept help. 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 un…
> explain oneself I hate this, the idea that I should have to explain myself to a random stranger in a shop as if they are entitled to know anything about me. I buy a lot of sweets on Friday for the weekend and regularly the clerk behind the till will make a comment, "Thats a lot of chocolate! Who is going to eat all that! You must be having a party whats the occasion?". In front of a line of customers who are eager…
You don't have to, and I personally also find small-talk with strangers rather tedious, but in the specific cases brought up by the author, it sounded like he would've saved himself time by just briefly explaining his reasoning. Which also would've had the nice side-effect of treating his interlocutors as rational human beings worthy of a measure of respect.
Re: Willingness to look stupid
#496This has happened to me frequently at my current company. I get pulled into a meeting about something that I have no context on because it touches my area of expertise, and the discussions have apparently been stalling out. I brace myself to be the idiot. I'm going to waste everyone's time asking questions that everyone knows the answer to, and I just got looped in, so everyone's going to feel like they need to walk…
> That there are fundamental misunderstandings and misconceptions about existing systems. This is debugging 101. You have assumptions about how a system works, but the output isn't matching those assumptions. You walk backwards over your assumptions and test them to see if they are true. Eventually you get to the precise place where your assumption is wildly different than the output, and there is your bug. The more…
Yep, eventually you're asking things like, "does the variable called 'username' contain the username?" Not too long ago I found that 'username', in fact, did not contain the username.
Re: Willingness to look stupid
#497This has happened to me frequently at my current company. I get pulled into a meeting about something that I have no context on because it touches my area of expertise, and the discussions have apparently been stalling out. I brace myself to be the idiot. I'm going to waste everyone's time asking questions that everyone knows the answer to, and I just got looped in, so everyone's going to feel like they need to walk…
One of the best people I've ever worked with used this approach. "I'm going to ask stupid questions now." and "Just so I'm understanding the problem, ." were two phrases she used all the time . I am surprised at how difficult it has been to emulate her technique. Feeling comfortable asking the obvious questions is one half of the battle, but the other, more difficult half, is knowing what obvious questions to ask. Mo…
I've stolen a similar technique from one of my favorite coworkers ever, which is to preface my questions but "This might be a silly question, but...".
I like this because I feel like it kind of de-stigmatizes asking "obvious" questions. If you acknowledge that the the question might be redundant, but ask it anyway, I think it makes the dialog more approachable.
Re: Willingness to look stupid
#498I had this happen to me at a company recently. They were initially impressed with my linux knowledge and how I could port many of the processes they were previously confined to windows with. However, they had an unusual server setup, and when I asked a few very basic questions about it they totally reversed their opinion of me.
When my ability to actually implement functionality was incommensurate with their perception of my level of understanding, they would still privilege their perception as colored by me asking very basic questions (which despite appearances can often yield surprisingly useful/surprising information).
Despite being aware of what was 'going on', and generally having high confidence, this still impacts my self perception on some level. I find when I optimize for being perceived as intelligent instead of actually trying to understand things effectively I get much better reviews. It's difficult to know which is appropriate if you want to advance your career.
Re: Willingness to look stupid
#499This has happened to me frequently at my current company. I get pulled into a meeting about something that I have no context on because it touches my area of expertise, and the discussions have apparently been stalling out. I brace myself to be the idiot. I'm going to waste everyone's time asking questions that everyone knows the answer to, and I just got looped in, so everyone's going to feel like they need to walk…
Imagine your comment being made in a meeting I got pulled into.
I brace myself. I'm going to waste your time. This is super obvious.
Here it goes: so uh, why do you continue to work with incompetent idiots instead of finding a workplace where people know what they are talking about instead?
Re: Willingness to look stupid
#500Earlier quoted context omitted.
The explanation I saw was that people who buy comprehensive insurance are by and large regarded as lower risk than 3rd party only buyers & sometimes that weighting can tip the balance to make comprehensive cheaper than 3rd party, if the insurer thinks you’re otherwise a low risk buyer. All insurers have to go on to gauge your risk are the signals available to them & the type of insurance you’re buying is a signal. Wh…
Interesting, I had not thought of that. I have been purchasing auto insurance for over 10 years, and I get prices every couple years. I always buy extremely high liability only insurance because I can easily afford to replace my car if anything should happen to it. I have always found liability only insurance to be much cheaper than comprehensive and collision and liability insurance. It would greatly surprise me if…
Yes, on the other hand if you own a $5k car then the insurer’s liability is much smaller & there are plenty of older cars on the road driven by older, safer drivers that fit into that category.
This was regarded as a weird corner case even then & was mostly just used as an example of why you should try tweaking various features of the insurance you were after, because the price could sometimes change in ways that might seem counter-intuitive.