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Willingness to look stupid

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Re: Willingness to look stupid

#681

Post by aoeusnth1 »

serial_dev wrote: post #442
mywittyname wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't like to say "I'm going to ask a stupid question". First of all, it feels disingenuous to me, people who say that never actually think that their questions will be stupid. And the second reason is that I think I might even convince myself that my questions are stupid... I know it sounds silly to some but little things like how you talk about yourself (and your questions) is important. I often ask these "stupid…

I prefer using “basic” over “stupid”. A basic question is literally about the basics or fundamentals, while a stupid question implies something is wrong with the asker to even need to pose it.

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#682

Post by robocat »

rlonn wrote: post #173

When I recognize fear of looking stupid prevents me from doing something I see it as a challenge to do it. This makes it easier to push through. Most of the time it was the right decision, but not always. When picking up my kid at kindergarten once, I got an urge to jump over the fence into the yard, rather than using the gate. Of course, a 49-year old doing that might look stupid to all the kids and staff present (l…

Kindy fences look so dystopian, like caged animals.

The sight of a young child holding the bars wistfully looking out at the inaccessible world beyond them is just painful.

Not that a moat or geofenced electroshock collars would be better.

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#684

Post by chefandy »

hnfong wrote: post #340
chefandy wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While this guy is clearly smart, and willingness to ask simple questions is a worthy quality that many people possess, this is an article about what happens when decent intelligence and a good instinct is accompanied by narcissism and delusions of grandeur. Being right about something feels even better if other people thought you were wrong about it. With his COVID action— people disagreeing with him, at first, wasn'…

I agree he's probably a self-entitled know-it-all, but I think at least his conclusion for COVID was spot on. By 2020-01-26 Wuhan (a major Chinese city) was already under lock down, so it was pretty clear CoVID19 was serious. I live in Asia, so I'm not in a position to understand the sentiment in (for example) the US, so the "let's wait until we have more data" attitude is really perplexing to me. Sure, there was no…

He said he was wearing N95 masks for a week before the 26th. Wuhan locked down on the 23rd.

Ebola was a large and growing problem in Africa in 2015 which covered a larger swath of the population, had nearly identical messaging from the Government, and would trigger a lockdown in Sierra Leone. Lots of folks regularly travel between the west coast of Africa and major American cities. I'd argue it would not have been prudent to start wearing Ebola PPE at that point, either. Of course, because it was Africa and not China, it only got marginal news coverage compared to the enormity of the problem on the ground, and much less traction on technology platforms because to this day, 25% of Sierra Leone's population has internet access. Epidemiologists were every bit as concerned about Ebola as they were about COVID before COVID's higher initial R0 number was released.

I'd like to hear the justification for not donning Ebola PPE given what was ostensibly a nearly identical situation that fortunately ended up being handled a whole lot better. Or maybe he did and he left that one off?

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#688

Post by trog »

guhsnamih wrote: post #687

> most small (by transaction volume) startups could get away with being on a managed platform like Heroku or Google App Engine. BTW what's wrong with this? Honest question!

> BTW what's wrong with this? Honest question!

In the context of the article, I imagine it's that some Kubernetes expert couldn't design and sell them an overcomplicated microservices-based solution which would basically only really be useful at Netflix-scale.

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#689

Post by pdonis »

wokwokwok wrote: post #384
btrask wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article does not undermine its own point. In fact, very, very few articles ever undermine their own point. In order to undermine your own point it means you've failed to construct a logical chain of thought. But that is what people do all the time in their daily lives. Maybe children would undermine their own points, or someone posting their first ill-thought comment on Facebook. But I think most people will lea…

You can construct an argument that we never landed on the moon if you cherry pick your data carefully. That’s the point being made here: not that his examples are wrong, that they are cherry picked to support his views. It may be superficially thought provoking, but it is not compelling as a logical argument. There are tangible downsides to ignoring expert advice; you are not a god. You cannot be an expert at everyth…

> ignoring the advice of an expert is not good.

If the person actually is an expert, yes. But actual experts, at least outside hard science domains where we can run controlled experiments to nail down theoretical models to the point where the actually do have high predictive accuracy, are much rarer than most people suppose.

For example, the author says he ignored his doctor's advice; but that only counts as ignoring the advice of an expert if his doctor actually was an expert. Most doctors aren't--in fact, one could argue that no doctors are, since nobody has a really good predictive model for medicine. Many doctors know more than at least a fair number of their patients do, but that's a much lower bar to clear than "actual expert". And given the current state of medicine and the availability of information online, it's pretty easy for a reasonably intelligent person to know more than any of their doctors do about their own particular condition--since they both are more interested in accurate information, and have more time to devote to finding it out.

Re: Willingness to look stupid

#690

Post by amusedcyclist »

joeberon wrote: post #295
dangerface wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Non technical people only have the patience to learn / listen to very basic concepts. What a stupidly arrogant comment. Have you not heard of philosophy, for example?

Yeah but we generally don't work with philosophers, we work with sales people and marketers. I respect their skill but they generally aren't the types to be interested in learning new things
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