Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Willingness to look stupid

sharif.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 273 posts

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#211

Post by miroljub »

inglor_cz wrote: post #204
miroljub wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nicely put. That's why most of the innovation over the centuries came from the high trust style societies. With the decline of trust, I fear we as a civilization are going into a long period of stagnation or even regression. Unfortunately, at this point there's no socially acceptable way to reverse the trend of trust destruction.

I am not sure whether we can call Ancient Athens or Early Modern Italy "high trust". Both were pretty warlike, though - another source of innovations. The fact that wars tend to result in extremely quick innovation cycles (both out of fear of losing and from usual bureaucracy being shoved away) is quite nasty ethically, but cannot be wished away. Neither Ukraine nor Russia are high-trust societies, but they have done…

> I am not sure whether we can call Ancient Athens or Early Modern Italy "high trust". Both were pretty warlike, though - another source of innovations.

The class that brought most of the innovations, citizens of Rome or Athens, a privileged ruling class, had a strong in-group honor system. The rest of the society was not so, but they were so divided that those other parts didn't even count.

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#212

Post by CuriouslyC »

embedding-shape wrote: post #200
CuriouslyC wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Browsers are just better gopher. If the WWW hadn't existed, we'd have xGopher 8.0 NG and our user experience would be mostly the same. Evolutionary pressures drive convergent evolution to stable solutions. We're on a technological gradient, and these things are incremental jumps driven by common human need (otherwise they wouldn't gain traction).

Creativity at the deepest level is seeing the cultural slope you're doing gradient descent on, and taking a hard left through the trees to a hidden slope that's way better rather than the one you were on.

I like Van Gogh as an example because of how hard he failed and the cultural U-turn, but hostility towards things that challenge the entrenched paradigm is a common response. Maybe Einstein and relativity is a more relevant example for you. People didn't read it at first and nod their heads, thinking to themselves "yes, of course!"

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#213

Post by swed420 »

> There might be a good reason why smart people want to avoid looking stupid. I’ve spent a long time thinking about what this reason could be. The only plausible explanation is that our egos are fragile, and by not sharing any work at all, we never have to risk our egos being damaged. If we never share anything, then nothing bad can ever happen to us. But the flip side to protecting our egos is that we never end up making anything worthwhile.

This seems oversimplified, since there's a second, unmentioned possibility that somebody doesn't share an idea:

In a capitalist society, people sense there could be monetary potential with their idea, so they sit on it quietly (often never getting around to developing it, etc).

This fear has been amplified in recent years with AI vacuuming up everybody's intellectual property with zero reward. Can't really blame people for doing nothing in such conditions.

And for the commenters complaining about "low/high trust societies," they ought to consider factoring the above into their definition.

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#214

Post by CuriouslyC »

taintlord wrote: post #209
CuriouslyC wrote: post #170

Plot twist: anything original will look stupid, until some cultural event makes the original thing the new "way," then all the small minds will act like that was the only way the thing should have been done all along. "The emperor has no clothes" is a much deeper story about society and human nature than people realize.

What if the emperor had no clothes but he has a monster cock swanging left to right dickslapping the citizens as he walks by They would be like Sir, Hey put that huge dick away you're scaring people There would be a different lesson, is all I'm saying

I'm pretty sure this comment is going to get flagged, but I hope not because it's really funny.

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#215

Post by cushychicken »

A few weeks ago my friend Aadil and I were at Whole Foods buying a birthday cake for a friend. We wanted to write something clever on the cake but couldn’t really think of anything. We stood around thinking for a few minutes before Aadil said "Let's just say a bunch of bad ideas out loud so we can get to the good ones." And it worked!

It's a well known creative / brainstorming trick that the best way to have a lot of good ideas is to have a lot of ideas.

Focus on genesis decoupled from critique, then critique later.

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#216

Post by digitalsushi »

c22 wrote: post #208
jayd16 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Graffiti on a bathroom stall is the purest form of art as it is not done for acclaim or monetary reward ... as the joke goes. But actually I don't think pressure and tracking are inextricably linked. The culture of experimentation is what is important. You can have metrics that can guide you with the understanding that they should not be prescriptive.

If it's not done for acclaim then why is it usually someone's handle?

it's like bragging you're Spartacus

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#218

Post by jayd16 »

c22 wrote: post #208
jayd16 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Graffiti on a bathroom stall is the purest form of art as it is not done for acclaim or monetary reward ... as the joke goes. But actually I don't think pressure and tracking are inextricably linked. The culture of experimentation is what is important. You can have metrics that can guide you with the understanding that they should not be prescriptive.

If it's not done for acclaim then why is it usually someone's handle?

In this context, bathroom stall graffiti would be lewd limericks and the like. Tagging is different. But also it's just a joke.

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#219

Post by keithxm23 »

"The biggest things in life have been achieved by people who, at the start, we would have judged crazy. And yet if they had not had these crazy ideas the world would have been more stupid." - Arsène Wenger

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#220

Post by SoftTalker »

I see it as more of a function of age/experience.

Whey you are young and inexperienced, you don't know enough to know somethig is a "bad" idea.

When you are older and experienced, you've seen a lot of bad ideas and you worry about it because you don't want to look bad among your peers.

When you are much older, you don't give a shit. You know that none of it really matters and when you are dead nobody is going to be talking about all the bad ideas you had.

Post reply on HN