My variation on this theme has been "Willingness to be Curious".
Willingness to look stupid
541–550 of 811 posts
Re: Willingness to look stupid
#542Earlier quoted context omitted.
Poor communication does not imply everyone involved is incompetent idiots. It's unfortunate, and important to address, but if you quit any project every time there is inadequate communication, you'll never get anything done. Assumptions are inevitable. They get harder to question the longer they go unquestioned. Newcomers to a group can see them better. Perhaps cutting people some slack and helping them work better b…
If you want to cut people slack, go cut them slack. Here's a question: look around you, you think cutting slack is what's needed? If you think so, alright then. I don't.
I work with good people, and when they screw up, I cut them some slack.
Everyone sometimes screws up. Some more than others. Some distractingly so, and some so often that it's not worth continuing the relationship. But the mere fact that someone at some point screws up does not make them irredeemable. So, yes, I think cutting people slack is important.
This is totally orthogonal to being qualified for a job, or being good, or any other attributes people have that puts them out of their depth. If you work with a bunch of unqualified poseurs, then sure, slack isn't what's missing, and you should quit. But if you find yourself in that situation very often, I'd be asking different questions...
Re: Willingness to look stupid
#543Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 don't like to say "I'm going to ask a stupid question". First of all, it feels disingenuous to me, people who say that never actually think that their questions will be stupid. And the second reason is that I think I might even convince myself that my questions are stupid... I know it sounds silly to some but little things like how you talk about yourself (and your questions) is important. I often ask these "stupid…
> people who say that never actually think that their questions will be stupid
I use it all the time. Oftentimes they are stupid questions. Sometimes they're not, but generally that's when I'm not sure if it's a stupid question or not. And that's okay—the point is, it's fine to ask stupid questions.
Re: Willingness to look stupid
#544Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> The insurance dealer does his job and tries to get a higher premium? Not surprised. This is actually an example of where the author IS stupid. You will often be found "at fault" in cases where you are not actually at fault (the other driver lies better than your truth) and there are many cases (at least in Ontario) where you are legislatively at fault even if you did nothing out of the ordinary (making a left turn…
I don't think it's about who's at fault, it's about what risks you're willing to tolerate.
Insurance is always a trade-off of EV for tail risk. In exchange for losing money on average (the insurance company has to earn money somehow, after all), you're protected from the worst case scenario. You can think of it like, yourself from parallel universe where you don't get into a crash, pays yourself in the parallel universe where you do get into a crash. And the insurance company skims a little off the top as payment for the service of sending money across parallel universes.
But if you can afford to just eat the cost of a crash, you don't need to pay the insurance company for that service. And maybe you can eat the costs of some crashes but not others: If you crash into a rich guy's car, maybe you can't afford those costs, but damage to your own car is capped at the price of your own car. So that's all Dan's doing: insuring the costs he can't pay (damage to others) but not the ones he can (damage to his own car).
The math isn't affected by his chances of being found at fault, or how good of a driver he is, at all.
Re: Willingness to look stupid
#545Author's site could do with this small css change to make the articles more readable on larger screens:
body {
max-width: 80ch;
margin: auto;
}Re: Willingness to look stupid
#546At the risk of looking stupid, how would mentioning that he designs CPUs establish any kind of authority?
Re: Willingness to look stupid
#547Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are not taking on more liability. The insurance company now has no responsibility to repair the insured vehicle so they have less responsibility. I suspect Collision insurance is very profitable compared to liability.
pja made the claim that in some instances, collision/comprehensive + liability can be cheaper than just liability alone. I expressed surprise that collision/comprehensive + liability can be cheaper than just liability alone, since, on the face of it, the insurance company seems exposed to more losses due to possibly having to pay the insured for their car damages. In my comment, I wrote liability referring to the ins…
Possibly willing to buy collision is a proxy for a generally prudent driver.
Also, skipping collision happens most often when driving a really cheap car, which can be a marker for a bad driver.
Actuaries actually have numbers for this things, but I am just speculating.
Re: Willingness to look stupid
#548Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 don't like to say "I'm going to ask a stupid question". First of all, it feels disingenuous to me, people who say that never actually think that their questions will be stupid. And the second reason is that I think I might even convince myself that my questions are stupid... I know it sounds silly to some but little things like how you talk about yourself (and your questions) is important. I often ask these "stupid…
Yeah, I like this tactic, but I don't think phrasing it with the word "stupid" is helpful.
I prefer to say things like "I'm not fully up to speed on this, so let's go back to basics/fundamentals for a moment", or "sometimes we're so focused on the details that we can't see the wood for the trees - let's take a step back and just run through it at a high level again".
Re: Willingness to look stupid
#549Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 don't like to say "I'm going to ask a stupid question". First of all, it feels disingenuous to me, people who say that never actually think that their questions will be stupid. And the second reason is that I think I might even convince myself that my questions are stupid... I know it sounds silly to some but little things like how you talk about yourself (and your questions) is important. I often ask these "stupid…
Yeah, to pretend to be "stupid" and basically dismiss your own question is kind of cloying or may be seen as disingenuous or even passive aggressive.
Folks who are good at communicating can always keep everyone feeling engaged and comfortable, while still getting to nitty-gritty WITHOUT resorting to saying stuff like "... this is stupid question, but...".
Re: Willingness to look stupid
#550Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that this is unfair to the poor Apple Store employee. There is no reason to not state the motivation, why you ask for the smallest box. Other than that, I also try to employ the naive question and to some people these might sound stupid. But they are really useful because they can clear up lots of implicit implications and misunderstandings.
Did the Apple store employee ask why he wanted a computer that comes in the smallest box, or did he just assume the customer is stupid or ignorant? He doesn’t say either way, but most people will make an assumption instead of asking. The downside to this approach in retail is that it invites a long story…
Oh, yes, I also know a lot of people who don't try to find out and understand the motivation behind a request and instead just jump to conclusions.