[deleted]
Willingness to look stupid
661–670 of 811 posts
Re: Willingness to look stupid
#662huh. i just realized a lot of people probably think i'm stupid.
Re: Willingness to look stupid
#663The first step to knowing is acknowledging not knowing.
Re: Willingness to look stupid
#664Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm going to guess it's about luggage size restrictions for (air) travel.
Presumably you would throw the box away before air travel, and according to the article box size != laptop size.
TSA might not ask you to turn on an unopened laptop, perhaps; but it had to do with the CPU above all else, I don't understand it but I don't understand half the stuff on that website. Still like reading it, though.
Re: Willingness to look stupid
#665Earlier quoted context omitted.
VP in my org does this, and it really disarms the room. She’s big on that exact phrase of “this could be a really stupid question, but…” She’s also really good about making sure other people are rewarded for doing the same by reassuring someone asking what might be a dumb question as, “that’s a a great question and I’m sure others were wondering the same…” before responding. Great leadership, IMO.
An EVP of Ops of a fortune 500 did this to an entire room of functional experts. We were there to discuss a technical implementation. She kicked it off by saying "Let me start by asking a simple question, why do we do this function?" I am now considered a domain expert. I love this question. It surprises me at how few people start with the why, or even can articulate the why. The room of experts, were assembled to ro…
sometimes I go straight into technicalities for the sake of time (to colleagues at the same level) and wonder if they actually understood what i said.
I like it when they ask basic questions. at least then I can then explain the basics to them without having to feel like I'm patronizing.
Re: Willingness to look stupid
#666You need innner confidence in your intelligence to be able to bear outer stupidity.
I think that's why many comedians are extraordinarily smart. Not because comedy requires intellugence, but because it requires looking stupid.
Re: Willingness to look stupid
#667This 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…
Probably because of status loss. Do they acknowledge your perceptiveness, intelligence and intellectual honesty after you demonstrate it each time? It would undermine their own status.
Re: Willingness to look stupid
#668This 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 me all the time haha sometimes I really am just "stupid" and the only one in the room without a clue, but many many times my stupidity has revealed no one really has any idea what they or the others are talking about.
I'm grateful to my parents or whatever it was that enabled me to not take myself too seriously and not care too much about people thinking I'm stupid, even at work, and even though it may cost me dearly in terms of career progression. (because I do think not all but many people who get ahead do so by very successfully avoiding being perceived as stupid, even if they are)
Re: Willingness to look stupid
#669In my experience, there is a slight nuance in the frame here. It isn't just that Mr. Luu is "willing to look stupid", it is that he has confidence that his decision making process will on average turn out better decisions than the go-to default strategy that most people employ ("copy the crowd"). Most people, if they rely on their own research and decision making, will do poorly. And even moderately clever people gen…
> Most people, if they rely on their own research and decision making, will do poorly. That's an interesting assertion. I would have guessed the opposite is true.
Have you never seen a restaurant location that is always changing owners, names, etc? Or downtowns of smaller cities where there's tons of empty shops? Cheesegraters.com ?
People are hilariously bad at induction, deduction, and making decisions based on their own research.
We're biased because we're already on the internet, on this site, and nothing is on fire in our vicinity.
Re: Willingness to look stupid
#670Earlier quoted context omitted.
An EVP of Ops of a fortune 500 did this to an entire room of functional experts. We were there to discuss a technical implementation. She kicked it off by saying "Let me start by asking a simple question, why do we do this function?" I am now considered a domain expert. I love this question. It surprises me at how few people start with the why, or even can articulate the why. The room of experts, were assembled to ro…
There is an interrogation technique called Five Whys. I believe it was created by S. Toyoda, and was and very is effective in root cause analysis. The basic idea was to ask a question and follow up with "Why?" until an answer contained an alterable behavior... that answer would usually come with the fifth why. Once in a while I use it in a business meetings, and as long as the person who is being questioned doesn't g…
5 Whys is great for getting depth into one causal subtree, but based on a paper I once read, answers can lack breadth when there is more than one cause (which is often the case). It said that "Why" is often best answered with a directed acyclic graph of causal relationships.
(Though when I tried to use a causal DAG for root cause analysis of an incident at my current company, I was told that I was wasting time and no one cares. But I thought the data I found was pretty interesting and worth exploring.)