21–30 of 273 posts
If you haven’t had the pleasure of Los Angeles public-access television’s Let’s Paint TV… https://www.letspainttv.com/ Or, to save your eyes, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let's_Paint_TV For more than 20 years, Mr. Let’s Paint TV (artist John Kilduff) has encouraged viewers to “EMBRACE FAILARE”—charitably put, to pass through the valley of incompetence as it’s the only path to the slopes of mastery. Just do the thing…
A willingness to look stupid is a core requirement for learning languages. I look stupid everyday.
I actually don't like this statement. I'd rephrase it because trying to speak in a language doesn't make you look stupid, or at least it shouldn't. Saying "I look stupid everyday" just reinforces that there is something inherently stupid about not knowing a language and trying to learn it. If anything trying to learn a language when it's not a requirement for something, is really anything but stupid.
"Looking stupid" is not the same as "being stupid." It could be very smart indeed, depending on your circumstances, to learn an additional language, and the point being made is that when going out in public and speaking it in front of native speakers, ridicule is not unexpected, and should be embraced.
Bears look smart, bulls do things
Let's see a bull open a very complicated garbage dumpster in a national park. Maybe bears are actually smart and not just looking smart? > Said one park ranger, "There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists."
I found it gets easier as you get older. Somehow I care much less what others think
A willingness to look stupid is a core requirement for learning languages. I look stupid everyday.
I actually don't like this statement. I'd rephrase it because trying to speak in a language doesn't make you look stupid, or at least it shouldn't. Saying "I look stupid everyday" just reinforces that there is something inherently stupid about not knowing a language and trying to learn it. If anything trying to learn a language when it's not a requirement for something, is really anything but stupid.
Caring if you get downvoted makes your posts dull.
Measured. If what you are saying is being downvoted this group might not be ready for it. Saying something like Claude is over rated as a general llm because of loftly guardrails will get downvotes today but seen as insightful down the road. You can be too early or late. Take Tailwinds. Is it loved or hated now? We went through different phases.
I disagree with this, at least in how it regards ego as pointless.
Humans are tuned to win a delicate social competition by becoming popular and therefore having a bunch of kids with other popular (and therefore reproductively successful) people. The most plausible explanation is that our ancestors have been through millions of years of evolutionary selection to try to become the most popular in a social group by taking risks, but then cease all risk-taking and guard their position after they get there.
Ego is the mechanism by which this happens, but it's there for a reason. Social status is really, really important - if you don't buy the evolutionary reasons, it's still important for basic human connection. We haven't always lived in societies which are so open to failure, experimentation, or looking stupid.
> The writing isn’t the problem. The problem is that when I’m done, I look at what I just wrote and think this is definitely not good enough to publish. Ira Glass has a nice quote which is worth printing out and hanging on your wall Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first coup…
I'm human so I'm certainly not immune to social anxiety or embarrassment from looking stupid, but I have been trying to do a manual override that for the last year.
Something it took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize is that the first draft of nearly everything I do is bad. The first draft of my code is usually bad, the first draft of an essay I write is usually bad, the first version of something I draw is usually bad. If I don't allow myself to look stupid, even if only for the first draft of something, then I'll never accomplish anything. Doing something crappy is a means to doing something not-crappy.
I don't think I'm alone with this. There appears to be some ambiguity on who actually first said this, but there's an adage of "There's no great writing, only good rewriting".