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We Are All Confident Idiots

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Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#131

Post by robomartin »

leeber wrote: post #119

I think if you're truly (1) confident about your knowledge or mastery of a particular topic and (2) actually are knowledgeable, you don't have trouble admitting things you don't know. Here's what I really hate though. When you are around multiple people who are the type to claim knowledge about things they truly have no idea about. For example in social situations or work situations and you have multiple of these typ…

> if you're truly (1) confident about your knowledge or mastery of a particular topic and (2) actually are knowledgeable, you don't have trouble admitting things you don't know.

Absolutely on point. I started my engineering career at 19 years of age because I was so deeply involved with my love for building computers (as in, from raw chips) that I could show the VP of Engineering at this one company that I was good hire. I ended-up working there for ten years. Everyone else in the department was at least ten years older than me. One of the first things that was driven into my head by the "elders" was:

Always admit what you don't know. It's the only way you will learn anything new.

To this day I always appreciate people who are relaxed and clear about what they don't know (or are not sure about). I know I can have conversations with them. These people don't tend to get defensive and are not insecure at all.

The other side of your statement is that, in some circles, if you assert what you do know you are instantly labelled "arrogant". If you categorically know something I have no problem if you make sure I understand that to be the case. That's just the way the cookie crumbles.

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#132

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

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 up rather than profess their ignorance.

Evolution almost guarantees this. It's a valid strategy right up until modern times:

1. The world's not sophisticated enough to expose your fucktardedness. 2. You can still milk some status and social credit from it, if used in moderation. 3. Most of the time you being wrong doesn't matter (even today).

It's only in the age of Wikipedia (or large 20th century libraries) that the circumstances have changed.

The lies/bullshit aren't the worst of it though: with the correct mental habits those are exposed and discarded quickly. It's that people like it so much that it seems to be their primary intellectual tool. The people who do this cannot seem to help themselves, and they're so loud and many that even if you're disinclined to be this way they can overwhelm any correction mechanism.

> ike a little tv in their head, power up and go.

This is insightful. There does seem to be such a mental faculty. But whether it's responsible for the bullshit phenomenon isn't very clear to me.

> So the next time someone says to you they don't know something, watch out, this person is probably a genius!

The trouble is being a genius is a valuable status in many societies. So if one of the idiots learns that parroting "I don't know" in any of a few hundred variations, soon many are doing so (when convenient).

One gets the impression that everyone is dumb, and that we're all just bouncing around repeating minimally plausible bullshit.

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#133

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #16

"Because it’s so easy to judge the idiocy of others, it may be sorely tempting to think this doesn’t apply to you. But the problem of unrecognized ignorance is one that visits us all." This means YOU, person who thinks you see through it all. You don't. This applies to you too.

I know intellectually it must apply to me as well...

But it's an interesting illusion. I think that philosophically the correct lesson here is that being (slightly?!?) aware of your own mind doesn't actually give you super powers... you can't change it. (Or, at least, you can't change it by shallow awareness... it would require true efforts.)

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#134

Post by jameshart »

wglb wrote: post #107

Very well written article. Very amusing commentary threads. But let me suggest something that I have tried. In one of my most intense coding periods in my career, I kept a log of the bugs that I created and had to fix. My bug rate declined measurably. (This is one of the old notebooks that i dearly wish I kept--was left at that job when I moved on.) There is a relevant quote that I can't locate from someone famous wh…

A coaching tip I always give to developers: you don't know enough about a topic if you can only think of one way to solve a problem. If you only know one way to do it, how do you know it's not the worst one?

Take the time to sit back and enumerate a few ways of solving the problem and figure out which one's best in this situation. Why are you rejecting those other solutions? Are you sure those reasons are sound? Are you sure they don't apply equally to the solution you've selected?

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#135

Post by ScottBurson »

"Master, what is knowledge?"

"When you know a thing, to know that you know it, and when you do not know a thing, to know that you do not know it -- this is knowledge."

I don't remember where I read that, but I like it.

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#137

Post by nwatson »

I'm probably too late with this comment ... but if the diameter of the tube is significantly larger than the diameter of the ball, and the initial velocity of the ball is large enough, then the trajectory of the ball as it leaves the "curved tube" won't necessarily correlate well with the straightforward textbook answer you'd expect to see. Perhaps the original context for the question made this a bit more clear, but as presented in the article, the "real world" might intervene.

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#138

Post by ppereira »

ScottBurson wrote: post #135

"Master, what is knowledge?" "When you know a thing, to know that you know it, and when you do not know a thing, to know that you do not know it -- this is knowledge." I don't remember where I read that, but I like it.

Analects of Confucius, Book II, Chapter XVII.

https://archive.org/stream/analectsofconfuc00confrich#page/1...

Re: We Are All Confident Idiots

#140

Post by thedufer »

byEngineer wrote: post #97
gone35 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ra…

> Some things, like 600% debt to GDP ratio that currently the US has are just facts of life.

That's...not true. I don't know where you're getting your information, but the ratio is about 106%. They're both in the range of $17 trillion.

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