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Willingness to look stupid

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Re: Willingness to look stupid

#781

Post by makeset »

sharkweek wrote: post #370
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…

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.

Yes, thank you, this is very important. Whenever someone says they might be asking a stupid question, I make sure to interrupt and remind that there are no stupid questions, only stupid people asking questions.

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#783

Post by mmarq »

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…

This is feasible as long as your expertise is recognised in the organisation or you are in a position of power or your organisation is open to this kind of behaviour (quite often it isn’t the case). A junior asking this kind of questions in the wrong organisation may help fixing the problem at hand, assuming they are taken seriously, but they are likely to hinder their career progress if they repeat this behaviour too often. In many many many organisations looking smart is way more important than being smart.

(I’m not saying it’s a good thing)

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#784

Post by kristofferc »

Zarel wrote: post #544
Ensorceled wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 unive…

It's my understanding that most insurance companies earn most of their money by investing their float, not by paying out less than they bring in from customers.

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#785

Post by focus2020 »

dkdbejwi383 wrote: post #176
barrenko wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it arrogant?

"People think I'm stupid but it is actually they who are stupid and unable to comprehend my genius intellect"

Probably this is true but how to say this without being judged as arrogant.

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#786

Post by halotrope »

Joe Rogan seemed to have exploited this concept to great success. He does not seem to have any more than very superficial or anecdotal knowledge about most topics, just vaguely remembers some bits. Always needs to have things explained from the very start and listens with an open mouth. In the and he is always amazed by what he has learned. Might be common in interview settings but seems to be extraordinarily effective for these long-form podcasts. I remember he got called out for being actually very smart by Jordan Peterson once.

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#787

Post by blitzar »

Ensorceled wrote: post #247
alexandrerond wrote: post #166

Earlier 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…

As with all voluntary insurance, Its the price, stupid.

$100k for coverage on your car? No thanks. $1? Sure. $1 but covers litterally nothing and has a million dollar excess? No thanks.

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#788

Post by blitzar »

dangerface wrote: post #318
twobitshifter wrote: post #269

Earlier 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…

> no one wants to explain themselves to a stranger we will never meet again

So you walk into the Apple store, walk up to an employee and when confronted with the question "How can I help you today?" what do you do?

Telling them "I would like X", seems like an unneccesary level of "explaining yourself". They should just know and understand exactly what you want from non verbal signals?

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#789

Post by sswastioyono18 »

lowercased wrote: post #738
TimTheTinker wrote: post #670

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Similar here. Was pumped in an RCA with "why?" multiple times. The 'root cause' was I fucked up and missed something. But that was because "prod was broken right then, fix ASAP!" and no one else understands the problem, and we're understaffed, and people 'reviewed' the code without understanding what it was doing (or why) and one 'fix' led to another problem, and that 'fix' led to a third, and trying to explain this…

In a japanese company that I worked at previously, answering RCA must be clear and in detail way. I got used to it so when I explain something to people, I want them to NOT ask any further question again because I compiled all the information they needed, including prevention. Their next response should be "got it understood" or clarifying their action. Other than that, I think I failed to explain things in a very basic way

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#790

Post by ryantgtg »

Tabular-Iceberg wrote: post #711
ryantgtg wrote: post #625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So far it completely depends on the person. But you’re right that it might not be the best technique. I understand the hesitancy to ask questions after a certain amount of time has passed. I work as a consultant and our time has to be billed to projects. The onboarding stinks, so the new hires often have no concept of billability/utilization nor project budgets. So I’m trying to drill in those concepts, too. One of t…

> The onboarding stinks, so the new hires often have no concept of billability/utilization nor project budgets. As an aside, do you think there is a business opportunity in teaching companies better onboarding? Growing headcount seems like an afterthought most places, and it’s a colossal waste. The worst example I’ve seen is one company hiring some very expensive onshore consultants to build the basic structure of th…

The company I work for has 60k employees. I think during the pandemic - which started before I joined - we let go of a ton of office managers and the in-house IT team. So now there is one office manager for each local office, and she had no capacity or skill to answer my semi-technical questions when I joined (“how does the software licensing work?” etc).

So, maybe. It’s risky, like you’ve demonstrated.

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