Willingness to look stupid • Hacker News Board

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#611

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o » Thu, Oct 21, 2021, 10:27 PM UTC

serial_dev wrote: post #442

mywittyname wrote: post #360

Earlier 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…

> ...it feels disingenuous to me, people who say that never actually think that their questions will be stupid.

I ask questions that have a decent chance of making me look stupid all the time. Even when the rational part of my brain says "if you have this question, it's likely that other people do too," there's a big part of me that worries, "nah, I'm the odd one out here."

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#612

Post by Wowfunhappy » Thu, Oct 21, 2021, 10:29 PM UTC

serial_dev wrote: post #442

mywittyname wrote: post #360

Earlier 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…

> First of all, it feels disingenuous to me, people who say that never actually think that their questions will be stupid.

No, I often legitimately think that my question might (!) be stupid, because I'm aware that I'm coming into the discussion with less domain knowledge and experience than the other people in the room. I still think it's good for everyone (ie, not just me) to explain. (Sometimes it's clear that everything is just out of my league, in which case I shut up and let the meeting go on.)

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#613

Post by splatzone » Thu, Oct 21, 2021, 10:35 PM UTC

NoRagrets wrote: post #397

mywittyname wrote: post #360

Earlier 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…

Reminds me of something from decades ago in India, there was only television channel and it was state run. Early evenings were dedicated to rural areas and farmers there. Most of them were illiterate and did not understand what plant scientists or professors were talking about re inputs or seeds or Tractors etc needed to modernize Ag. So the format would be an interview in the middle of a coconut grove or a farm. The…

This is brilliant. I sometimes produce educational videos to teach kids programming. A recurring challenge we have is pitching the information at a level that’s interesting but not confusing for beginners and kids who are less literate. This format I’d like to try out

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#614

Post by baby » Thu, Oct 21, 2021, 10:38 PM UTC

I have thousands of these stories. The only reason why I understand so many things today is because I dare asking stupid questions, and I do it a lot.

During my master, one of the students laughed out loud after I asked a question during class. I told him "there are no stupid questions" and he replied "your question was stupid though". Guess who ended up with the better job.

In my previous job some guy berated me publicly (on slack) for asking too many questions.

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#615

Post by davidw » Thu, Oct 21, 2021, 10:38 PM UTC

at_a_remove wrote: post #507

I preface mine with "In the words of the great philosopher Yankovic, I am going to dare to be stupid ..." Partially, because in IT -- seemingly more than in other industries -- variations of the phrase "Why haven't you just ..." arise, "just" being that magical simplifier which compacts all complexity into a single and obvious step, and often come with some measure of "why haven't the boffin pressed the button, I tol…

I was hoping someone would reference that song.

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#616

Post by hypertexthero » Thu, Oct 21, 2021, 10:44 PM UTC

HeckFeck wrote: post #101

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…

This reminds me of the simple brilliance of Socrates. He began from the premise that he knew nothing, and would ask all manner of simple questions building on top of the previous answers. It wasn't long before he uncovered how little everyone else actually knew, but what separated Socrates was his honesty: he knew nothing and admitted it. Naturally, the established powers and polite society didn't find this to their…

I recently learned that there were two other maxims inscribed after the famous “Know thyself” at Delphi:

“Nothing to excess”, and “Certainty brings insanity”.

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

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#617

Post by mattmanser » Thu, Oct 21, 2021, 10:48 PM UTC

GordonS wrote: post #548

serial_dev wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

That just sounds like corpratese though, the stupid question is much better in my opinion.

With yours it's to easy for someone to switch off and not hear what you said because they think you're talking bullshit.

In two sentences you managed to cram in 5 idioms/phrases that are basically corporate babble.

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#618

Post by PostThisTooFast » Thu, Oct 21, 2021, 10:50 PM UTC

dinkleberg wrote: post #379

mywittyname wrote: post #360

Earlier 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…

One thing you learn in sales is the value of open-ended questions. Until you consciously look at it, it's hard to realize how bad the questions we tend to ask are. Yes/no questions are the worst. But even questions like "What did you do?" aren't great because the answers can often be rather short. A better question is often posed like "Tell me about X" or "Describe how you did Y". Of course this isn't universally tru…

"Is Jira replete with nonsensical statuses, tedious UI, and obscure query architecture?"

Yes.

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#619

Post by sbierwagen » Thu, Oct 21, 2021, 10:50 PM UTC

Ensorceled wrote: post #326

tremon wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to guess it's about luggage size restrictions for (air) travel.

We keep coming back around to why didn't the author say: "I want the one in the smallest box for " Instead of providing no reason and being smug in their assumption that they are both very clever and the barely over minimum wage employee assumes they are "stupid".

It's also funny that he didn't even put it in the post. I'm not sure it's because of length restrictions, since the post is 4,495 words long. Maybe he wanted to keep under 4,500.

Also perplexing: footnote 2 mentions the car tire paradox. (Traction is determined by weight and coefficient of traction, and those two things only. So why do high performance cars have wider tires, which shouldn't make a difference? Because softer and stickier tires are mechanically weaker and tolerate heat less well, so you need to spread the force out over a larger area.) But it doesn't actually mention the answer besides noting many other people are wrong, and also is separately incorrect and says contact area doesn't change based on tire width?

Like, there's no clever counterintuitive Boyle's law/hydraulics effect where at the same air pressure a tire twice as big deforms half as much or whatever. Just the very obvious intuitive case that wider tires have bigger contact patches, which you can calculate yourself by plugging numbers into this tire calculator: http://bndtechsource.ucoz.com/index/tire_data_calculator/0-2... and the BMW i3 electric car has a crazy thin tire to have a smaller contact patch and less rolling resistance: https://www.bmwblog.com/2015/04/24/bmw-i3s-tires-more-import...

And the css thing... notoriously, everything on danluu.com has been completely unstyled for years. So every time one of his posts is on HN, someone comments about the unreadably wide lines, which could be fixed with a single `body{max-width:600px}` CSS rule.

But the reason everything is unstyled is because Dan installed octopress seven years ago, which had a braindead default theme that used custom fonts for everything, causing a glacial 15 second time to first paint: https://danluu.com/octopress-speedup/ Irritated, Dan ripped out all the CSS entirely, and the site loads in a flash. But now he has a trapped prior,[1] and any time someone says "CSS" to him he thinks, "ugh, that awful garbage which ruined my site" and refuses to touch it.

1: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/trapped-priors-as-a-ba...

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#620

Post by simonw » Thu, Oct 21, 2021, 10:53 PM UTC

andrewla wrote: post #338

This 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…

A lesson I've learned over time is that it's incredibly common for people within a company to have very different mental models of what different terms mean - especially if they work in different teams or departments, but sometimes even people the same team.

My favourite examples are things like "what is a user?" - the marketing department may be counting leads generated, engineers are thinking about records in a database table, some other team may think of users as company or group accounts.

This holds true for all kinds of other things too. You might have a project called "the login optimization project" and find that some people think it's about page load performance while others think it's about increased conversions.

For this reason, I'm always ready to ask the stupid questions.