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Willingness to look stupid

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Re: Willingness to look stupid

#121

Post by CM30 »

Gonna be a bit controversial here, and say that sometimes the opposite can happen. That someone becoming successful can give them the confidence to share ideas they wouldn't have shared otherwise, and give ideas that people would have otherwise written off as 'ridiculous' a level of extra credibility in the process.

And that can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, a lot of ideas put forward by successful companies and business people (like many from Apple or Google or Nintendo or whatever else) would never get off the ground if put forward by a random individual or company, and that risk taking gets us results that make the world better off.

At the same time though, there are a lot of successful people and companies that get hung up on 'bad' ideas that should have been shot down earlier. Like ex Nobel Prize winners that get into psudeoscience or grand overarching theories of everything, popular artists and creators that get away with shaky writing and uninteresting story concepts (George Lucas and the Star Wars prequels, JK Rowling after Harry Potter, etc) or any number of celebrities and politicians completely detached from reality.

So, there is a flipside to the article. Yeah, success can make you less likely to try stupid things because of your ego, but it can equally make you more likely to try them since your status gives you extra credibility and there's often no one there to tell you no.

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#122

Post by vincnetas »

miroljub wrote: post #91
21asdffdsa12 wrote: post #78

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…

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.

Reputation. Its a good concept. We might need to bring it back and not externalise it to linked-in blindly. Honour is also nice to have.

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#123

Post by plewd »

socalgal2 wrote: post #76

I'm not sure this is the same thing but I waffle between wanting to not look stupid and also not wanting others to think I'm not trying hard enough. Let's say there is something I need to do at work. I could read docs in the company internal site. I could read the code. Maybe the thing I need to do is figure out why a test is failing. It's possible it's failing because there's a bug in the code. It's possible it's fa…

As an intern I feel the same everyday. It feels more natural to me to just keep digging into the codebase until I figure something out instead of asking for help.

Part of it is what you mentioned, as well as the fact that I sometimes feel bad for "wasting" a much more productive engineer's time.

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#125

Post by chris_money202 »

iamflimflam1 wrote: post #100
eucyclos wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also the fact that there's a lot less social pressure for young people not to look stupid. If you're the senior subject matter expert and get a question you can't answer, people still expect you to make an educated guess. The junior guy they expect to ask someone.

The sign of true subject matter expert is someone who has the confidence to say when they don’t know the answer.

Sounds more like the sign of just a humble, honest person

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#126

Post by bonoboTP »

iamflimflam1 wrote: post #100
eucyclos wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also the fact that there's a lot less social pressure for young people not to look stupid. If you're the senior subject matter expert and get a question you can't answer, people still expect you to make an educated guess. The junior guy they expect to ask someone.

The sign of true subject matter expert is someone who has the confidence to say when they don’t know the answer.

Yes, but that better not be all the time, and around basic questions.

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#127

Post by tamimio »

> Overshare, but look stupid

I am definitely positioning myself in this category, even here in HN discussions, I prefer to do so rather than overthinking and undersharing. The reason was because few years ago I had an interview, and the company saw my portfolio and the work I did and they were overhyped about having me, they gave me 5 stars service to get me to the company HQ for the interview, but in real life I am too humble and not much of an over seller of myself, so the bar they had about me was waaay higher than how I was IRL, and got rejected haha, it was brutal rejection because I really wanted to work there and they evaluated me based on the few hours interaction rather than what I am able to do. Since then I try to keep the bar low early on and take it from there.

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#128

Post by chris_money202 »

There’s different levels to stupidity as well, coming up with a “bad” idea, writing a very brief prototype of it, and presenting it to a senior for feedback is one level that is typically harmless. Coming up with a “bad” idea, going skunkworks on it and when you think you have something demoing it to many seniors and managers and showing them you’ve been working out of scope for a month on a bad side project that doesn’t work while the rest of the team is burdened in tasks is another much higher level

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#129

Post by mvrckhckr »

21asdffdsa12 wrote: post #78

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 find that restrictions not only don't kill creative work, they enable it. Measuring anything makes you consider constraints, which helps foster better creativity - at least for me, and I see the same in others as well.

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#130

Post by austin-cheney »

21asdffdsa12 wrote: post #78

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…

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 contribute to the degree of disclosure, not creativity. In low trust social environments creative people remain equally creative but either do not openly expose their creative output or do so secretly for subversive purposes.

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