101–110 of 273 posts
A willingness to look stupid is a core requirement for learning languages. I look stupid everyday.
"Good morning. Tickets destination Grossetto, please. Two adults, one child. Six years. Yes, return. Card acceptable? Thank you."
This 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…
I think there must be a better label for the process that is destroying scientific and creative institutions.
> There might be a good reason why smart people want to avoid looking stupid ... The only plausible explanation is that our egos are fragile 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 i…
In my case, and I suppose this holds true for others, too, the "fiercest" competition is with one's inner-self or, at the very most, with past/dead/way-out-of-line-of-sight "competitors" that have nothing to do with current society and its recognition. I know that this "competing against one-self" sounds trite, but, again, this is how things are for some of us.
This 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…
It's true that the more you are afraid of expressing yourself, the worse your "performance" is going to be.
On general work level it's different.
There the trust needs to be balanced.
People should feel free to express themselves, but also that they need to meet some certain standards of quality at work.
Otherwise we may tend to relax too much and become sloppy in certain areas.
Good advice to the younger folks. You can afford to look stupid. So go ahead and do that thing you wanted to try. There's more acceptance because of your age. You're expected to fail in some ways. Once you have a mortgage, a reputation to maintain, an image of competence to uphold at work, you pretty much can't afford to look stupid in my opinion.
The power of saying, "I don't know, but I will find out" is underestimated.
Neutral drift is perhaps the most important part of evolution. It's how you preserve diversity over time and avoid getting stuck in holes in the fitness landscape.
If we only ever made steps that improved performance we'd inevitably see premature convergence. The neutral drift can overpower progress toward a global minimum, but it's a lot better to be going in circles than to not be moving at all. Diversity collapse is the worst thing that can happen to an evolutionary algorithm. You must reject superior solutions with some probability in order to make it to the next step. You can always change your selection pressure. You can't fix information that doesn't exist anymore.
A willingness to look stupid is a core requirement for learning languages. I look stupid everyday.
This 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…
I've never understood the "high-strust/low-trust" social dichotomy. I've never processed "society" as a single entity, but a large system with many independent aspects, and my levels of trust vary wildly across them and over time. I'd also offer that there's no difference between "truly creative work" and "truly creative and profitable work" but we often see the two as separate because we only have convenient access…
5% of people create 90% of the crime. Double 5% to 10% and you double the crime. Make it 50% and and you 10x the crime.
You still have 50% of non-criminals but society with 50% criminals has way more crime than society with 5% criminals.
You might say high-crime society is much worse than low-crime society even though they both have individuals that are criminals and non-criminals.
Replace "crime" with "trust" and you understand high-trust vs. low-trust society. They both have individuals with various levels of trust, but emergent behavior driven by statistics creates a very different society.
> there's no difference between "truly creative work" and "truly creative and profitable work"
To state the obvious, the difference is "profit".
Also I don't see you're bringing the "true scottsman" judgement here. What's the difference between "creative" and "truly creative" work. Who gets to decide what is "truly creative" vs. merely "creative".
> There might be a good reason why smart people want to avoid looking stupid ... The only plausible explanation is that our egos are fragile 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 i…
Somehow, it always triggers my skepticism when supposedly sociobiological or evolutionary anthropological or evolutionary psychological arguments are brought up. My suspicion is that it is far too easy to simply pack in the story you want to have in there. I can think of dozens of objections to your description. For example, in small groups, the social game in terms of status may not be that complex, and the choice f…