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Willingness to look stupid

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Re: Willingness to look stupid

#231

Post by socalgal2 »

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…

Let me add a nuance to this after seeing the replies. I've got 40years of experience. I'm not an intern. I still feel this. Just because I could write Linux, Photoshop, or Unreal Engine from scratch doesn't mean I know my particular company's massive infrastructure or their million file code base.

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#232

Post by MoltenMan »

While I don't necessarily disagree with this, I also wonder how much his 'data' about Nobel Prize winners and Institute of Princeton grads actually holds up vs how much of it is just very expected regression to the mean. He talks about Shannon; at some point Shannon was always going to have his last great idea. Given that the idea that made him famous was his greatest, you wouldn't expect many other ideas like that just from normal variation.

Essentially, if you take scientific ideas, including Nobel Prize ideas, and put them all on a bell curve of how difficult it is to find them, you wouldn't expect the same person to have multiple ideas all the way on the right, even if they are very above average.

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#233

Post by im3w1l »

jayd16 wrote: post #218
c22 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's not done for acclaim then why is it usually someone's handle?

In this context, bathroom stall graffiti would be lewd limericks and the like. Tagging is different. But also it's just a joke.

I think the joke claimed to make a real point, and it's totally fair to critize that point.

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#234

Post by lutusp »

It's true that a Nobel prize can blunt a scientist's productivity, but for balance, the kind of extraordinary result that merits a Nobel might also not be replicable in one scientist's career, regardless of how the world reacts to it.

We would need to compare career trajectories of productive scientists who did, and didn't, receive that class of recognition, see whether this disruption changed a person's ability to function.

But if a Nobel prematurely blunts a person's productivity, that might sometimes turn out to be a good thing. Consider António Egas Moniz, whose career seems to have withered after his 1949 Nobel. Such a shame, really -- Moniz invented the Lobotomy, eventually applied to roughly 40,000 unruly, hard-to-manage mental patients, many of whom became quite docile, assuming they lived through the procedure.

Without Moniz' Nobel, who knows what might have happened? What might Moniz have created, had the world not thanked him so profusely for his breakthrough procedure?

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#235

Post by thwarted »

mapontosevenths wrote: post #155
vincnetas wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have often thought that there should be a public ledger of some sort for people (powered by vouching), and then immediately forseen the negative externalities and abandoned that idea. Reputation is as harmful as it is good. Anyone who survived being unpopular in high school, or seen the dummies that can be elected in democracies, should be able to explain how. No, it is better to judge works by their merits than it…

Popularity and reputation are not the exact same thing. Reputation is about trust and predictability, while popularity is about awareness of the person and/or their reputation.

But your points largely stands. However, reputation is one of many tools that can be used to assess the worthiness of giving some work attention, but should be given a relatively low weight compared to other tools. Giving reputation a low, but non-zero weight allows bad actors to be rightfully put in their place and allows someone the ability and chance to "clean up" their reputation with effort.

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#236

Post by peacebeard »

im3w1l wrote: post #233
jayd16 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this context, bathroom stall graffiti would be lewd limericks and the like. Tagging is different. But also it's just a joke.

I think the joke claimed to make a real point, and it's totally fair to critize that point.

We're going to have to collect data on the ratio of bathroom graffiti between tags and limericks. Anecdotally, where I live a it's mostly silly goosery.

Just to be totally clear, here is an example. Please cover up my user name for an authentic experience.

A dozen, a gross, and a score, Plus three times the square root of four, Divided by seven, Plus five times eleven, Is nine squared, and not a bit more.

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#238

Post by esafak »

alwa wrote: post #17

If you haven’t had the pleasure of Los Angeles public-access television’s Let’s Paint TV… https://www.letspainttv.com/ Or, to save your eyes, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let's_Paint_TV For more than 20 years, Mr. Let’s Paint TV (artist John Kilduff) has encouraged viewers to “EMBRACE FAILARE”—charitably put, to pass through the valley of incompetence as it’s the only path to the slopes of mastery. Just do the thing…

He should have co-hosted with Max Headroom.

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#239

Post by r_lee »

gzread wrote: post #225
r_lee wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 powe…

you can always buy a BT receiver and get the best audio quality/flexibility while mostly retaining the convenience

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#240

Post by myrak »

derangedHorse wrote: post #227
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 creat…

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