Willingness to look stupid • Hacker News Board

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#221

Post by mygooch » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 4:12 PM UTC

SoftTalker wrote: post #220

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 t…

People in their 20s care way too much about reputation and ego - as did I when I was in my 20s. So much that it's paralyzing. It will prevent them from saying or doing the things they really need to say and do.

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#222

Post by gzread » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 4:27 PM UTC

themafia wrote: post #117

kjksf wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that complicated: statistics matter. 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-…

> Replace "crime" with "trust" and you understand high-trust vs. low-trust society. We already have "high-crime society" and "low-crime society." What this has to do with overall levels of trust in different parts of the system, say, education, is not immediately clear to me. Do all high crime societies have untrustworthy education systems as well? > To state the obvious, the difference is "profit". To make my intent…

The point was that both crime and trust are aggregate statistics.

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#223

Post by paultopia » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 4:28 PM UTC

Successful professor with a very theoretical (as opposed to empirical) research trajectory here: this feels extremely accurate to me.

I see this with students all the time: they're so afraid of making mistakes that they refuse to write anything.

I often say "I think in print." If I believe something is true and I can defend it, I publish it. If it turns out to be wrong, fine, I'll correct it in the next paper and the conversation has moved forward. Nobody is going to think I'm an idiot for being wrong.

This, however, might work better the more senior one is. There may be a failure mode, at least in academia, where you start publishing mistakes and lose all credibility. But then again, I know a lot of people who have published a lot of mistakes starting young and who seem to still be doing fine, so... perhaps not!

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#224

Post by agcat » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 4:30 PM UTC

This is true. It's okay to overshare and look stupid.

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#225

Post by gzread » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 4:33 PM UTC

r_lee wrote: post #178

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.

I think the best example for this are the Airpods like, it was such a joke at first but then it just became the "new normal"

I got a pair of airpod clones on a whim (they were only $20 in the impulse buy section). Sure, they have less cable, but keeping them charged is very annoying, especially if wearing them for a long stretch of time. The charging contacts also tend to oxidize and not make good contact, but that's probably because they're a cheap clone. I find wired earphones are more convenient for long stretches because they draw power from my phone. I also know the wired earphones don't broadcast a tracking signal.

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#226

Post by jodrellblank » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 4:41 PM UTC

bob1029 wrote: post #107

> The overwhelming majority of mutations end up being harmful or neutral. An exceedingly small fraction are beneficial. 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…

> “You can't fix information that doesn't exist anymore.”

Assuming there’s no Deity or similar outside power seeding the initial system with information that can only be lost and never gained, then any information in the evolutionary system got there by some process that happened once, and presumably can happen again and fix (rediscover) the lost information?

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#227

Post by derangedHorse » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 4:49 PM UTC

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…

> Measurements, metrics and surveillance kill creative work

No, not really. Broadly, it's not "measurements, metrics and surveillance" that kill creativity, it's the inability to make reasonable thresholds for failure. If the threshold is too low, one might never be able to get the critical mass of resources they need to achieve their task. If it's set too high, people will milk resources even when they have no creativity left to give to an unsolved problem.

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#228

Post by OrderlyTiamat » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 4:50 PM UTC

austin-cheney wrote: post #210

OrderlyTiamat wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels like it's conflating a couple of different things. Firstly, in the Big five model, which you seem to be referencing, openness and neuroticism are separate factors- Low neuroticism isn't correlated with high openness. Yes, since neuroticism is a negative trait, one would expect people low in neuroticism to do better than people who are high in neuroticism. This does not equate to "the most creative people"…

> Low neuroticism isn't correlated with high openness. I never claimed this and I have no idea why you would think I did. What I do know is that nearly 1 in 3 JavaScript developers, based upon large anonymous polls, self identify as autistic. If that is representative of software employment as a whole then software employment is full of self-indulgent and highly neurotic people at levels far exceeding the outside pop…

> The most creative people are those who measure both high intelligence and low neuroticism

You did claim this.

> self identify as autistic. (...) then software employment is full of self-indulgent and highly neurotic people

This is hateful and wrong. Autistic people aren't necessarily self indulgent, and not self evidently neurotic, though it happens to be the case that autistic people have a higher incidence of neuroticism, which is partially due to people describing them, for example, as "self indulgent".

You've shifted your claims, you're not supporting your claims by either argument or reference, and you've added hateful rhetoric. This is very regrettable.

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#229

Post by grigri907 » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 5:04 PM UTC

themafia wrote: post #99

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'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…

I think you gotta define where you're drawing the box. Depending on the context, "society" might be your nation, your office, or just a 1:1 relationship with your coworker.

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#230

Post by cindyllm » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 5:11 PM UTC

austin-cheney wrote: post #210

OrderlyTiamat wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels like it's conflating a couple of different things. Firstly, in the Big five model, which you seem to be referencing, openness and neuroticism are separate factors- Low neuroticism isn't correlated with high openness. Yes, since neuroticism is a negative trait, one would expect people low in neuroticism to do better than people who are high in neuroticism. This does not equate to "the most creative people"…

> Low neuroticism isn't correlated with high openness. I never claimed this and I have no idea why you would think I did. What I do know is that nearly 1 in 3 JavaScript developers, based upon large anonymous polls, self identify as autistic. If that is representative of software employment as a whole then software employment is full of self-indulgent and highly neurotic people at levels far exceeding the outside pop…

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