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We Are All Confident Idiots

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Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#91

Post by mironathetin »

mathgenius wrote: post #71

It astounds me how many people will just make shit up rather than profess their ignorance. I'm not even sure if they are even aware of their lack of knowledge, it is as if they discovered this lump of meat in their skull that emits random verbiage and they assume this must be truth. Like a little tv in their head, power up and go. So the next time someone says to you they don't know something, watch out, this person…

"It astounds me how many people will just make shit … "

I am not astonished at all. In a professional environment your social status is higher, if you just talk, independent of your status of knowledge. There is always plenty of time later to correct for mistakes. (You know these guys, who magically have a different recollection of what they said yesterday) You certainly remain on top of discussions. Just think about the bad impression it makes in a meeting, if you repeatedly say: I don't know.

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#92

Post by vectorpush »

innguest wrote: post #87
byEngineer wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The FED artificially kept low interest rates since 2001 till 2008. All that money had to go somewhere. It went to housing. Cause and effect, plain and simple. The same currently nobody seems to understand that we have even lower interest rates today. From 2008 till 2014. And all this money goes to (primarily) US Treasuries. US Treasuries are currently the most expensive in its 300 year history. Mortgage APR fixed for…

Glad to see someone here that understands what is going on. Did you really move out of the US because of the coming crisis? I'm really curious about this. I understand there will be riots and it will be unstable for a while but how much chaos are you expecting?

The smug, self-certain, self-congratulatory attitude seems ironic in the context of the posted article.

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#93

Post by nkozyra »

mironathetin wrote: post #91
mathgenius wrote: post #71

It astounds me how many people will just make shit up rather than profess their ignorance. I'm not even sure if they are even aware of their lack of knowledge, it is as if they discovered this lump of meat in their skull that emits random verbiage and they assume this must be truth. Like a little tv in their head, power up and go. So the next time someone says to you they don't know something, watch out, this person…

"It astounds me how many people will just make shit … " I am not astonished at all. In a professional environment your social status is higher, if you just talk, independent of your status of knowledge. There is always plenty of time later to correct for mistakes. (You know these guys, who magically have a different recollection of what they said yesterday) You certainly remain on top of discussions. Just think about…

Is this even necessarily a bad thing?

Aside from the cover-your-ass aspect of it, I find this tends to spark healthy debate, even if someone's ego gets bruised in the mean time.

The time it's bad is when nobody knows and just goes along with the blowhard.

I've worked really hard in the past few years to say "I don't know" even when I'm supposed to project expertise. I haven't encountered any real resistance to it, though doing the opposite does inspire confidence, particularly when you're trying to sell a product or service.

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#94

Post by Bahamut »

This is anecdotal, but as far as I have seen in the Marine Corps, there is a bit of knowledge that is passed down that confidence makes you right, and that you need to be absolutely confident if you make an observation that goes against what a higher up is doing.

Of course this is bad logic (and likely part of why Marines get a bad rep for often being stupid), but there is a bit of wisdom in there - confidence makes things more likely to happen your way, and people also like confidence more than uncertainty. For the Marine Corps, such a bad adage is useful since uncertainty is bad, and it often is better to choose an action, even if sub-optimal, than do nothing at all.

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#95

Post by [deleted] »

nkozyra wrote: post #93
mironathetin wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It astounds me how many people will just make shit … " I am not astonished at all. In a professional environment your social status is higher, if you just talk, independent of your status of knowledge. There is always plenty of time later to correct for mistakes. (You know these guys, who magically have a different recollection of what they said yesterday) You certainly remain on top of discussions. Just think about…

Is this even necessarily a bad thing? Aside from the cover-your-ass aspect of it, I find this tends to spark healthy debate, even if someone's ego gets bruised in the mean time. The time it's bad is when nobody knows and just goes along with the blowhard. I've worked really hard in the past few years to say "I don't know" even when I'm supposed to project expertise. I haven't encountered any real resistance to it, th…

[deleted]

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#96

Post by jessejhernandez »

mathgenius wrote: post #71

It astounds me how many people will just make shit up rather than profess their ignorance. I'm not even sure if they are even aware of their lack of knowledge, it is as if they discovered this lump of meat in their skull that emits random verbiage and they assume this must be truth. Like a little tv in their head, power up and go. So the next time someone says to you they don't know something, watch out, this person…

Yeah it is fascinating how people refuse to acknoweledge ignorance. Personally I view ignorance in a positive connotation because it promotes growth and learning which are vital assets to prevent stagnation and allow innovation to emerge.

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#97

Post by byEngineer »

gone35 wrote: post #74
byEngineer wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The FED artificially kept low interest rates since 2001 till 2008. All that money had to go somewhere. It went to housing. Cause and effect, plain and simple. The same currently nobody seems to understand that we have even lower interest rates today. From 2008 till 2014. And all this money goes to (primarily) US Treasuries. US Treasuries are currently the most expensive in its 300 year history. Mortgage APR fixed for…

Ok, this is interesting. From the article: "For individuals, the trick is to be your own devil's advocate: to think through how your favored conclusions might be misguided; to ask yourself how you might be wrong, or how things might turn out differently from what you expect . It helps to try practicing what the psychologist Charles Lord calls 'considering the opposite.' To do this, I often imagine myself in a future…

Yes, certainly. Many things can go differently. For one the US President, Obama, might go there on TV and tell: "My fellow Americans. Starting tomorrow we are raising taxes by 10-25%. We cut social security. We cut military. We cut across the board. Why? Because the Chinese demand their money!"

Possible? Of course! Probable? Your call.

Inflating the monetary base is actually doing the same, but without the need to raise taxes ex explicite. Everything gets more expensive year to year: tuition, insurance, services, etc. That's your hidden tax - inflation. We are paying off the Chinese by returning them money that's less valuable that the money we borrowed from them.

Some things, like 600% debt to GDP ratio that currently the US has are just facts of life. Can I imagine reality without them? Sure! The media is full of them from CNBC to Bloomberg News. Why you insist on me providing you scenarios? Ask them if they can imagine bubble in Treasuries! They certainly couldn't see one in housing or the .com one even though they both were straight in their faces. They laughed off anyone talking about bubbles then. The same now they lough into faces of Peter Schiff, Marc Faber, Jim Rogers, Kyle Bass, and others when they talk about bubble in the US Treasuries. In other words, you are asking wrong person to do the reality check. I'm the reality check to the mainstream camp blind to the obvious. 600% debt to gdp.

Can FED raise the interest rates to stop all the bubbles in their tracks? Sure they can! They need to be cautious though. Because at interest rates at 7%, the US Government will be spending over 50% of the annual budget just to pay interest on the debt we have. Can we imagine the FED going to raise the rates to 20% as Volcker did in the early 1980s? Sure, but then well over 100% of the state income from taxes would need to be paid on the interest alone! This is how much we owe. Can I imagine reality where this is not true? Sure, but why would I ever do that? Why to imagine world where mistakes aren't happening when they are right in our faces?

I'm not saying we don't have options. I'm just saying that taking into the account the dirty politics, we can't have the President have speech like that, can we?

Another solution: war. In the state of war we don't repay. That's the rule ages old.

So, yes there are plenty of scenarios: from bankruptcy, theory hyperinflation, ending on WW3.

There is no positive outcome from debt to GDP ratio at 600%. Sorry.

One could argue that we will just have "lost decades" as Japanese did. That the process will take forever and we will slowly decline and the rest of the world will follow suite. Might be that it will take 30 years. The thing is that looking at Russia, China, ISIS, I don't think they will just let us decline.

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#98

Post by brazzy »

tokenadult wrote: post #73

This article is very worth a thorough top-to-bottom read. I especially like a paragraph from farther down in the article where the author brings up an issue that often comes up here on Hacker News: "According to Pauline Kim, a professor at Washington University Law School, people tend to make inferences about the law based on what they know about more informal social norms. This frequently leads them to misunderstand…

Not at all limited to law - accepting facts/stories/statements that fit one's worldview or even just seem interesting or important, and passing them on without ever checking or even doubting their correctness is a mistake that I see very frequently (and occasionally in myself despite conscious efforts to avoid it).

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#99

Post by sakri »

brazzy wrote: post #98
tokenadult wrote: post #73

This article is very worth a thorough top-to-bottom read. I especially like a paragraph from farther down in the article where the author brings up an issue that often comes up here on Hacker News: "According to Pauline Kim, a professor at Washington University Law School, people tend to make inferences about the law based on what they know about more informal social norms. This frequently leads them to misunderstand…

Not at all limited to law - accepting facts/stories/statements that fit one's worldview or even just seem interesting or important, and passing them on without ever checking or even doubting their correctness is a mistake that I see very frequently (and occasionally in myself despite conscious efforts to avoid it).

I see this with developers:

The young gun who assumes he understands architectural concepts without reading up on them, and re-invents the wheel (often producing a wheel that's tough to turn).

Then there's the cocky senior who doesn't need the latest and greatest because he already "knows" they do the same thing as his solution from 15 years ago (and when he's fired he can't find work because he's a dinosaur).

I know, I've been guilty of both :D

Edit : Come to think of it, the worst offenders are buzzword spewing managers and sales guys. "Oh the Cloud? Our product can mesh your business objectives with transparent synergies through the Cloud! Trust me, I'm an expert! Ah-hah-hah-haa"

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#100

Post by jerf »

adwf wrote: post #39

I usually accredit the evolution attribution problem to the phrase "survival of the fittest". It's a catchy line, it implies that the better you are the more likely you are to survive, which is kinda true, but leads to the mistaken agency issue. It has the additional benefit of aligning with the ethic of hard work (ie. do better to survive) that we also try to teach kids, which I think is one of the reasons it persis…

As all of the other discussion here sort of reveals if you read it right, part of the problem is that the phrase "Survival of the fittest" is tautological. It might as well be "Survival of the survivaliest"; those who have the most "surviving" capabilities survive. On its own, that's meaningless, and indeed, it is often treated as a slogan more than science.

You had to add in genes for this to make any sense, an idea that we so thoroughly take for granted now that we can miss it entirely. Unless the organism has some intrinsic characteristics that contribute to its survival, and there's some sort of variation in the resulting children as it passes on the intrinsic characteristics somehow, you don't have anything like evolution. Then you get a non-tautological theory of how things can trend towards increased "survivalness", as you can demonstrate how constantly producing organisms with a spread of "survivalness" and lopping off the bottom can produce changes over time.

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