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Willingness to look stupid

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Re: Willingness to look stupid

#241

Post by erikerikson »

> they just... stop trying

This foundational premise seems flawed. Surely there are pressures but it's a privilege hypothesis used to write the piece so the objection is important.

Once you achieve notoriety the world changes around you. Not only that but by the time achieve notoriety the world already changed around you. The lead time to novel prize is high.

Just to be concrete about one way the world changes is that you're no longer a great student with time to while away. Now everybody wants to congratulate you and learn your theory from you. They won't leave you the f** alone. When you were just some random promising grad student, you had mental quiet and peace. Academia, industries, responsibilities, they take that away.

And let's be fair, if you've done Nobel worthy work, then you've contributed enough that you deserve to just slack off and be left in peace for the rest of your life.

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#242

Post by nlawalker »

onion2k wrote: post #59

It's easy to look stupid with no one around (editing your own writing), or with someone you trust deeply (choosing what to put on a cake with a friend), or if you're a jellyfish apparently. Those are spaces with people, or jellyfish, who you trust. What's much, much harder is being willing to look stupid in front of people who have an interest in proving your competence (e.g. a manager or a customer) or who would be…

Exactly, when your paycheck depends on you not being stupid, it takes some finesse, you can't just ask the silly questions and drop the mic.

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#244

Post by austin-cheney »

OrderlyTiamat wrote: post #228
austin-cheney wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 neu…

You need to get over yourself. Autism is a medical diagnosis. If things like medicine and psychology and not reading people's comments correctly makes you sad then it does not matter what the comments actually say.

And yes, many autistic people, though not all, are exceptionally self-indulgent, which just literally means self-preference. Its a problem of less developed introspection which parallels a less developed interpretation of social intelligence.

I have not shifted my claims. I originally said people with fear of observation, a trait of high neuroticism, is a major constraint of many things including creativity. I also said creativity is an aspect of high openness, which is closely correlated to high intelligence. I never said neuroticism is in any correlated, either positively or negatively, to either openness or intelligence. I think you have trouble with bias, as in you want statements to imply something not stated.

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#245

Post by lkm0 »

It is sort of funny to think of Nobel prize level work in relation to blogposting. A couple of examples that don't conform: Marie Curie won another prize. Josephson in general (check him out). Feynman did greatly contribute to other fields after his prize. You can find as many counterexamples as examples if you dig a bit. I've witnessed a few times that looking like an idiot is the least of their concern.

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#246

Post by mygooch »

tyleo wrote: post #237

I have a principle similar to this. The First Idiot Principle: never be afraid to be the first idiot in the room. Usually others have the same reservations you do about sharing. If you want to hear more I wrote a small post. https://www.tyleo.com/blog/the-first-idiot-principle

[dead]

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#248

Post by alwa »

xorcist wrote: post #135
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…

> “EMBRACE FAILARE”—charitably put, to pass through the valley of incompetence as it’s the only path to the slopes of mastery Instructions unclear. Have pushed secrets to github. When will slope to mastery commence?

Nobody said the valley was without fog

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#249

Post by alsetmusic »

This was on a poster in my 8th grade English teacher’s class:

“He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes. He who does not know and does not ask remains a fool forever.”

Becoming proficient enough in my professional life such that I no longer felt anxiety about admitting what I did not know through asking questions was a massive achievement. Fortunately, I learned that lesson well and started applying it everywhere, not just in my work.

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#250

Post by mapontosevenths »

thwarted wrote: post #235
mapontosevenths wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When I first considered this in the late 90's I was inspired by Google's Page Rank algorithm, and wanted something akin to that for humans in a social network.

My core idea (back in the early 00's when I cam up with it originally) was to identify a small cadre of trustworthy individuals in various sectors - lets say finance, computing, healthcare, etc (but more granular) and give them high trust (maybe a manual score of 10). Then let who they score, and who those people score "trickle down" as it does in Googles page rank. It was a variation on what Google later called trust rank, I suppose.

It would have either failed to launch completely or turned into a dystopian nightmare akin to China's Social Credit System. It may have even turned out worse than China's system because the goals of finance do not always align with the goals of humanity.

A more modern implementation could be built on the block chain and be made very profitable... while it crushes us all.

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