The most valuable debugging skill I learned in 15 years: asking "dumb" questions out loud. Last month I spent 3 hours chasing a race condition that disappeared the moment I explained the code to a junior dev who asked "why are we using a global here?" The willingness to look stupid just saved us from shipping a critical bug.
Willingness to look stupid
191–200 of 273 posts
Re: Willingness to look stupid
#192It’s not only a moat but a filter.
It tells me immediately up front if they’re a retard in competition with me or a retard I can work with.
Re: Willingness to look stupid
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
I teach at an art university for 8 years now. I would highly doubt that: The most creative people are those who measure both high intelligence and low neuroticism . In my experience that isn't the complete picture. I have met highly creative people who are extremely (unhealthy so) concerned with what others think, yet go their own path anyways. It is true that creative people often tend to do things in a way that app…
I did not base my comment on personal observations. It comes straight from psychology and the big 5. I was also once an art student myself. Creativity extends far beyond individual contributions, which becomes evident in resource and personnel management. Creativity is highly correlated to openness, as is intelligence, and is least restricted by those who are most eager to exercise decisions and try new things withou…
Openness is on the closed minded-openness axis. Neuroticism is on the neurotic-stable axis. These are independent things. You can be highly open-minded and highly neurotic. I’d seriously question your understanding of the Big 5.
Re: Willingness to look stupid
#194The best teams are the ones where “stupid” questions are always alowed.
The worst ones are the teams where members treat everyone as stupid
The absolute best will generate a creative discussion around a “stupid” question.
The absolute worst will deliberately mislead collegues to make them look stupid.
Re: Willingness to look stupid
#195This posts observation have interesting side-effects. Measurements, metrics and surveillance kill creative work. And hierarchies and the fear of embarrassment do too. So, the more you try to force "excellence" into existence via external pressures and resource tracking, the more it disappears. Which leaves as observation, you can only do truly creative work - in a high trust society, where people trust you with the r…
Leadership requires hourly updates all the way down to me so I barely get anything done
I always wonder how they justify stuff like that. What's the cost of producing those updates (including the opportunity cost of not doing something else) vs the value of the report?
Re: Willingness to look stupid
#196Queue obligatory Weird Al: https://youtu.be/SMhwddNQSWQ 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…
It's "Cue", rather than "Queue".
You are right. My comprehension of words isn’t always the best :)
Re: Willingness to look stupid
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
> “EMBRACE FAILARE”—charitably put, to pass through the valley of incompetence as it’s the only path to the slopes of mastery Instructions unclear. Have pushed secrets to github. When will slope to mastery commence?
Once you realize your mistake, and only do it once or twice more times in your life, often when stressed or some other external stressor causes you to not follow your hunch.
See also:
Impostor Syndrome (noun), pathologic avoidance of identifying mediocrity in oneself, e.g. "I'm not mediocre, I just have impostor syndrome!"
Re: Willingness to look stupid
#198When I seen the title I thought it's https://danluu.com/look-stupid/.
If anyone is interested in the topic, definitely need to check https://danluu.com/look-stupid/.
Re: Willingness to look stupid
#199This posts observation have interesting side-effects. Measurements, metrics and surveillance kill creative work. And hierarchies and the fear of embarrassment do too. So, the more you try to force "excellence" into existence via external pressures and resource tracking, the more it disappears. Which leaves as observation, you can only do truly creative work - in a high trust society, where people trust you with the r…
That isn’t really correct. Fear of observation is highly correlated with neuroticism. Creativity, on the other hand, is a component of openness which is highly correlated with intelligence. The most creative people are those who measure both high intelligence and low neuroticism, which simultaneously are the people least concerned by impacts of increased observation. Furthermore, high trust social environments only c…
This feels like it's conflating a couple of different things.
Firstly, in the Big five model, which you seem to be referencing, openness and neuroticism are separate factors- Low neuroticism isn't correlated with high openness. Yes, since neuroticism is a negative trait, one would expect people low in neuroticism to do better than people who are high in neuroticism. This does not equate to "the most creative people" though.
Secondly, I'd push back that people low in neuroticism would be "least concerned by" surveillance. While strictly technically true, that's not a helpful framing, as it seemingly implies surveillance would have a negligible negative impact for people low in neuroticism. If that's what you're implying, I'd like to see references.
I'm not able to comment at all on the conclusing about "degree of disclosure" being moderated by trust level in social environment, especially how "creative people remain equally creative but do not openly expose their creative output". If true, this implies that trust in society doesn't impact primary (unshared) creative output at all- that's a very strong claim in my opinion. I'd very much like references on this.
Re: Willingness to look stupid
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Those things are all incremental improvements based on existing patterns that people were familiar with So what in your mind has ever been "truly original" then that someone couldn't argue is just "incremental improvements" instead? > People shill Apple products even when they suck. I agree, but don't think I'm doing so myself here.
Look at Vincent Van Gogh's art. He didn't sell shit except to his own brother in life, people hated it. Fast forward to now and his art is among the most valuable in the world, and people consider him one of the greatest geniuses of all time.
How is one person's art not just incremental improvement on other's art? I expected some actually insightful answer, not just "Person Bs media creation was better than Person's A media", does that really count as "truly original" in your mind here? Yet browsers/WWW was just an incremental improvement? I'm sorry but I'm really confused now, sounds like we're really talking past each other here.