581–590 of 811 posts
You can train yourself to invoke it when the feeling comes up, if you didn’t have the chance to preload it before the interaction.
I think the only requirement for it to work though is that the intentions behind your questions are whole.
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One of the best people I've ever worked with used this approach. "I'm going to ask stupid questions now." and "Just so I'm understanding the problem, ." were two phrases she used all the time . I am surprised at how difficult it has been to emulate her technique. Feeling comfortable asking the obvious questions is one half of the battle, but the other, more difficult half, is knowing what obvious questions to ask. Mo…
Whenever new people join the team, I always say, "Please ask stupid questions. I mean questions so stupid that you might think we would question why we hired you, because you think we think you should already know. Ask those types of really stupid basic questions. It will educated you, make us think, and I'm certain at least one other person already on the team doesn't know either."
At my work, there's a bad combo of senior folks who whip off vague instructions in a single sentence, and junior folks who are afraid to ask questions. I'm in the middle, and I try hard to demonstrate that it's fine to badger the senior folks with questions, and to check in with them constantly. The senior folks like it because it gives them confidence that you're working it out. But some of our straight outta school colleagues just don't do this ("Gotcha. Sounds good!" is a very common email reply from them) and it leads to confusion down the road. After giving them the "ask questions" talk two times, I usually give up on them.
Also, in my position, I often have to review and edit reports that are largely written by electrical engineers and architects, and they all probably think I'm super dumb. I read the reports as the target audience (often non-subject matter experts), and so my comments are things like, "What do you mean by this [basic EE concept]?" I don't preface it with, "I know what this means, but the client might not, please elaborate..."
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I think a couple cities did that, and quickly back-tracked because crime shot up.
Which cities?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9625629/REFUND-poli...
When I turned 40 about 10+x years ago, I started wearing garish colors and weird jewelry, and styling my hair differently every few months. I'm talking mullets, or perms, with yellow blazers, leather bracers with gems, purple pants, rings on all fingers, red shoes, bright green shirts with zebra stripes... I rotate everything routinely.
Now people expect I'm going to say weird things and look at me suspiciously.
Random people start friendly conversations, local people I see when I walk to the store tell me the look forward to seeing me.
It's called not giving a fuck and it feels fantastic...
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One reason for the framing (when used by a senior person or someone in authority) is to give permission to more junior people who may be holding back on their own questions because they are afraid of looking bad.
It can easily backfire. Some one who has an urgent but basic question might refrain from speaking up if, beforehand, a senior prefaces their pointed probing question with "this is a stupid question...". It's better to just kick things off with naive questions or even use a bit of humor to disarm people, so they don't feel like they have to be "advanced" all the time.
The point is not that anyone with the same question should feel stupid; it's that I don't care if anyone thinks I am.
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I am really curious what his end goal here was. Apple's boxes are all very small — in what situation would a few centimeters in box size outweigh all other considerations?
I assume it has to do with sneaking the machine in and out of a place. The other alternative is something to do with storage. Maybe it's a backup machine they want hidden somewhere in case the feds seize all his electronics. That last one makes the most sense, and explains why he didn't divulge it. That way, when the author is raided, they aren't going to ask, "hey, where's that computer that, comes in the smallest b…
Your ideas would then spread more.
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I frankly had the same impression. It felt it was less about the willingness to look to stupid, but rather the stupidity of people who surrounded him and their inability to see this individual's brilliance. Perhaps this is an unkind reading, but particularly the laptop scenario felt telling that this person might feel above explaining why they might prefer a laptop which comes in a smaller box. On the surface that is…
Yeah, this looks like a typical case of the "XY problem" where it's really hard to tell if the person making the request is framing that request wrongly/with unnecessary constraints to satisfy what they actually want.
...come to think of it, maybe one of the grandmas was a CPU designer all a long!!
Can I ask a stupid question? Who is Dan Luu and why does he keep appearing here? The content hasn’t been amazing. It’s not amazing here either. The blog doesn’t have an about me page as far as I can tell. Google says Dan is a systems engineer at Nvidia. Edit: Found the About page https://danluu.com/about It's at the bottom of articles, but not accessible on the home page. If this were an actual technical topic, I'd b…
In this case, the post leans more heavily on personal anecdotes than survey data, so I can see why people are finding it a bit grating. And that mcguffin about laptop boxes isn't helping =)
I'm not sure why he's been posting more frequently lately. Usually I'd expect 1 a month.