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Willingness to look stupid
251–260 of 273 posts
Re: Willingness to look stupid
#252This 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 agree with your main points, but as I have both a BFA and an MBA I want to point out that the MBA focused very much on creating high-trust work environnments. I think there must be a better label for the process that is destroying scientific and creative institutions.
How do you know if someone has an MBA?
They’ll tell you.
Re: Willingness to look stupid
#253This 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 every…
I make it very clear to those around me that no question is too stupid to be asked and nobody is going to be reprimanded for asking basic questions.
I once had an awful manager (a terrible human being overall) who wanted to censure people for their questions; I'm pretty sure he was trying to hide his insecurities and was actually in panic that his project decisions would be revised.
So I really don't want that kind of environment where I work.
PS. And that is the exact phrase I often use.
Re: Willingness to look stupid
#254Earlier 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…
A public ledger is antithetical to "high trust" anyway. A high trust society is one where you give hitchhikers rides without questioning too much about their motivations. If you have to do a criminal background check — which is just another form of consulting a public ledger of reputations — before letting him in your car, you are by definition not trusting him.
Re: Willingness to look stupid
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Over half a century later it still rings clear as a bell ...
He who writes on bathroom walls
rolls their shit in little balls.
He who reads these lines of whit
eats these little balls of shit.Re: Willingness to look stupid
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
Openness is on the closed minded-openness axis. Neuroticism is on the neurotic-stable axis. These are independent things. You can be highly open-minded and highly neurotic. I’d seriously question your understanding of the Big 5.
> These are independent things. I never claimed otherwise. You have invented your own strawman to attack.
The logic in your OP is absolutely muddled. And it's evident I'm not the only one that followed your reasoning to you implying neuroticism is negatively correlated to creativity.
To restate your argument: openness is correlated to creativity (not controversial) and being neurotic dampens that because you care a lot what people think (no evidence).
There is no correlation between neuroticism and creativity. Neuroticism doesn't effect openness so it makes no sense. Either your argument is that neuroticism influences openness and that influences creativity or your argument is I just think neuroticism makes you less creative because I just think so. You might as well not even mention the Big 5 because it doesn't effect your last point.
Re: Willingness to look stupid
#257> Some of the best research ... has come from surprisingly young people. ... They're not afraid of looking stupid. Young people aren't doing things without worrying about looking stupid, they just don't know that they look stupid. I say that as a former young person who was way more naive than I thought I was at the time. This is good and bad. Also I think this point ignores that as people grow in their careers they…
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.
And people wonder why society failed to embed the idea of being a blessing to say "I don't know" in llms....
That alone would save so much trouble. We, particularly bad workplaces, have a real fear of not knowing so much so that being confidently wrong is a better position in the whole game.
Re: Willingness to look stupid
#258Willingness to look stupid and intellectual self-confidence are two sides of the same coin. If you can find internal (rather than external ) reasons to trust/believe in your own intelligence and capabilities, it makes it easier to be willing to look foolish. Also, a lack of knowledge/ability in a new area (or even a familiar area) is not a sign of a lack of capability. There's a difference between being a novice and…
Something I was told, very luckily I now believe, early in life is that for the most part we are all as smartish as each other, the only real difference is how much attention & time you're willing to pay to a particular thing(s). Yes, it's glib but I continue to believe it holds more truth than many of us would like to believe
Re: Willingness to look stupid
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Over half a century later it still rings clear as a bell ... He who writes on bathroom walls rolls their shit in little balls. He who reads these lines of whit eats these little balls of shit.
A little cynical of the arts isn't it.
Re: Willingness to look stupid
#260> 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?
The first law of thermodynamics has a pretty strong take on this one.