Why some smart people are reluctant to share? | Hacker News Reader

Why some smart people are reluctant to share?

lifebeyondcode.com

88 pointsnishantmodak49 comments

Without making any claims on my level of "smartness", I will say that I tend to shut down pretty quickly when it becomes apparent that the person I'm "sharing" with is really just more interested in me doing his job for him.

Here's a very good example of sharing-while-teaching.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/774316/python-difflib-hig...

The answer points the way but requires comprehension of the already-illustrated points to successfully complete the solution.

If every programming question was answered like this there would be a lot more competent programmers out there.

Yes, when I was young and just starting out, the older DBAs and SAs often seemed reluctant to help out the developers or the users with ad-hoc requests. The DBAs in particular would just run a script they were given and send the dev the output, even if that output was just an error. I thought this was a bit poor, aren't we all on the same team? But, when I started to help people I soon found the truth. Either you were like that, or you spent the whole time debugging other people's stuff, doing work they couldn't be bothered to do, you'd spend ages working on a report or a feature and then the person who wanted it would say, oh, sorry, I don't need that anymore.

It's human nature. Something that is given freely has no value. Now I only trade time and knowledge with equals.

I've found that how you ask makes a big difference in how likely you are to get an answer. For example:

1.) On a mailing list, listing things you've already tried and other resources you've already read makes people more inclined to answer you. It shows that you're serious about solving the problem and just need a little help to get there, and keeps them from having to play 20 questions with what you already know.

2.) If you're asking a coworker to do something, ask if you can watch. They'll figure that you'll be able to do it yourself next time.

3.) In all cases, fundamental questions seem to be more useful than specific questions. "Where's that log data kept? How do I get access to it? What format is it in?" is more useful than "Can you look up who was scraping our server at 10:40 PM yesterday for me?", because the former lets you solve a whole class of problems by yourself, while the latter just takes care of the immediate need.

nostrademons suggestions are a great way to mark yourself as someone trying both to improve and not waste another's time.

I had blogged about how to ask an expert for help in http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2007/12/12/how-to-ask-an-expert... and suggested a couple more depending upon context. Robert Kelley in "How to Be a Star at Work" had these broader for novices in a new environment:

o Build your network before you need it, if possible.

o Be very mindful of people’s time and don’t waste it.

o Give careful thought to how you phrase your request or question.

o Summarize your attempts to solve the problem or find the information you as asking for help with.

o Verbally thank and follow up in writing, publicly credit.

At my level, I'm as happy to help as can be; if a developer (that I know) needs some data from Prod or some performance tuning help, I'll just do it, if I have a problem with some of my own PL/SQL he'll help me. Everyone involved in this cosy arrangement (including me obv) knows not to abuse it. An outsider or a newcomer gets a chance to demonstrate their own value to the network (or the clique if you prefer) and if they don't, then they need to go through "official channels" for anything they want. And that can take days or weeks for the simplest thing... :-)

I always try to ask questions in terms of outcomes, and I ask people to do the same when they come to me. Describe the result you want to achieve, and I'll tell you the best way to get there. Asking too specific a question could just send you further down a blind alley...

"Now I only trade time and knowledge with equals."

If someone is clearly trying to improve themselves it never hurts to spend a few minutes helping them. Also, does this rule out asking folks who are smarter or more knowledgeable for help?

If I am expert in subject A and know nothing about B, and someone else knows B and needs A, then we're in business. Even if they know C (heh), maybe I will need that in the future, we're still equals.

I've never encountered someone who had the right attitude and not had something to trade.

Your argument might come across a little selfish, but I wholeheartedly agree with you.

I've found that there are an enormous number of people out there who are really just looking for the quick fix and want it cheap (aka free). You'll invest and start explaining something to them and once they realize you're trying to show them how to do it themselves and that you aren't going to just do it for them, they quickly lose interest.

If they instead place some sort of value on the knowledge they want from you, and realize it isn't free (I.e. it will at least take some time and energy for them to apply), the more receptive they are.

That's true . . . but it's also true that if you want to have more equals to trade with, one good way to do that is to mentor younger employees, and that requires sharing time and knowledge with people who are not yet equals.

This is an interesting theory. But I tend to be of the school that thinks that there are two kinds of smart people: people that think they are smart and aren't, and people who are smart (but tend to not think so).

The former are usually a result of the Dunning–Kruger effect. In my experience these people think that being smart (competent) makes them special and gives them a kind of power. Thus they don't want to diminish their own power by yielding some of it to other people. The funny thing is that they usually don't actually know anything anyways.

The later are usually a result of what I like to think of as the Socrates effect "I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing." They believe that what they know isn't worth much because they realize that what they know is a single drop in the ocean of knowledge. They tend not to want to share because they might be embarrassed by the pittance of their knowledge -- even if it's worth quite a bit.

I've found ultimately that sharers of knowledge have overcome their own egos and have dealt with the fear that drives both motivations. In either case they usually expect some kind of reciprocity and openness (but it's not required).

The second kind of reasoning is inline with PG's statement about hackers:

I've found that people who are great at something are not so much convinced of their own greatness as mystified at why everyone else seems so incompetent.

From: Great Hackers, http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html

'If I have seen further than others, it's because I am surrounded by dwarfs.' -- attributed to Murray Gell-Mann

(I generally prefer Newton's version, and I'll aspire to be so humble until my achievements better his.)

Did you know that Newton's version was written to a dwarf (Robert Hooke) who had accused Newton of taking his ideas?

It is ironic that this pointed insult has become seen as a sign of his intellectual generosity.

Interesting. That prompted me to look at the online references

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hooke

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton#Fame

and learn about the personality disputes among scientists of that era.

>But I tend to be of the school that thinks that there are two kinds of smart people: people that think they are smart and aren't, and people who are smart

I think that's a very strange school of reasonning, and it appears to be very common too. For me it doesn't reflect in real world at all.

Of course you can come across some people who think they are smart and are not, but there is also plenty of people (and i tend to consider myself that way) that know they're smart, but also know that some people are smarter, and that they shouldn't infer they're the smartest people in their entourage, because that's detrimental to them.

Plenty of the people i see and appreciate around me are like that, and most people who are really smart know they are.i really think this way of reasonning around the Socrates mantra is a false dichotomy.

However, i think you have a point, but i'm not sure smart people don't share because they don't know they're smart, but much more because they realize the amount of contributions around them that are way more clever and usefull than what they could do, and are consequently affraid to contribute their own piece.

I think this observation is very true with respect to sharing with the internet at large. It's easy to dismiss some new (personal) discovery as unremarkable or obvious -- but, there are probably people out there who would find a write-up of that discovery interesting. This is probably especially true about more domain-specific bits of knowledge.

In that case, I don't think not sharing is an intentional choice to withhold or hoard information. The individual simply didn't realize there was any demand for that information. Or, perhaps there wasn't enough value in that information because anyone with an interest would make the same discovery on their own easily enough.

It doesn't mean that the same individual wouldn't share that info with someone who asked directly about the subject.

I find this true not on the Internet more often. For example, one of my friends asked me to describe what I was working on and how it worked. I was perfectly willing to get him up to speed -- until I realized what I was stepping into. My current project was designing and implementing a hardware virtualization support layer. One of the reasons why I was so reluctant to help him was I realized exactly what kind of "background information" (as the article says) I was using in the project.

First, I would have to teach him how virtualization and virtual machine monitors work. But before that, I would have to teach him how modern operating systems work. Well, before that I would have to teach how modern hardware works. Even if we get through all that I'd still have to teach him IA32e assembler and POSIX standard C (he only knew C++). After realizing that, I told him I'd help if he took a couple more courses and later decided he still wanted to know. In this case I would have to say that I did intentionally withhold information, but only because I didn't want to give an incomplete picture.

P.S. You stole my username ;)

I've also found that once a person has attained a certain amount of knowledge, sharing it with others becomes an awful lot like telling them that they're wrong. People don't like to hear that they are wrong about things. Sometimes people just don't want to know what they don't know. Its just easier that way.

Sharing can be hard, socially risky work. It often requires a great deal of tact, even when the knowledge is asked for.

There was this one guy, he had a gun and he'd hunt with it. One day, another guy came along and they started hunting together. Eventually, the guy with the gun shared the gun with the other guy who then shot the gun owner and took all the food.

I don't think that your parable of the gun is quite analogous to sharing knowledge. Most knowledge is not zero-sum, and sharing the `background' thinking helps the sharer and the sharee both. At best, your analogy would have to be modified such that the gun was somehow replicated, giving them the ability to have a duel at least.

Once this guy, he made a bow and used it to hunt. Then one day, this other guy was like wow, can i use that? So he was like, sure, go ahead.

The new guy was even better at first than the guy who made the bow he practiced all day and night. He dreamed about bow hunting day and night. He shot trees and flowers and deer when people got hungry.

So then, he took the bow back to the builder and said, I'm a real good shot with this bow, let me show you, toss this ball of dirt up in the air. The builder giggled and tossed it as far and as high as he could and the new guy takes out the arrow and before it hits the ground -- he shoots it!

Chuck this rock and I'll show you how to do it. See how it goes uuuuppp and then down? The arrow does that too. If there's wind, you must account for it. Arch your back like the wind blows.

Come with me the bow builder says and I will show you how I make the bow.

Jobs when he visted PARC.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nK7TQVFSA1Y#t=0m57s

"Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra"

I saw a quote somewhere that read, "A knowledge economy is a secret society." Ideally knowledge isn't zero-sum. In practice, knowledge is power, and power is zero-sum.

There are two types of power: ability to do things and control over people. The latter is zero-sum, but the former is not. Knowledge always increases the ability to do things, but (depending on who has it) may increase or decrease control over others.

You should hope that your students surpass you, because that way there's someone who owes you a favor and knows something you should learn.

Assuming your students are good people, of course.

Why some smart people are reluctant to share? [...] Note: This is about smart people who are not sharing enough. So please don’t generalize this about all smart people.

Easy! Smart people who do not share are not sharing enough by definition.

Asking this question is a good place to start, but the answer goes way beyond mere reluctance. I would say that many people are very intelligent in ways that outstrip their ability to communicate this knowledge effectively. Natural written languages are very blunt instruments in contrast to the highly-involved abstract concepts that our brains are capable of 'discovering'. Some things are very difficult to explain effectively and take much patience, forethought, style, and lengthy prose. Fewer are talented in this area, or you might say that certain skill sets intersect less frequently. (Talented writers and talented mathmeticians/scientists). Even great professors often struggle with explaining things in layman's terms.

Take the English laguage, for example. Very flexible, but still feeble at tranferring highly abstract concepts. It wasn't designed/evolved for this purpose, so this is not surprising. Talented writers can get quite far on the abstraction scale, before text becomes a verbose and confusing mess, but there must exist a potential space for a future spoken/written language to be created, better suited for explaining abstractions, somewhere between the current common natural languages and terse mathematical notation (which itself requires much textual explanation).

I see your point and I'll add to it. Along with difficulty in producing an explanation, there is difficulty in allowing the other person time to understand. -> This requires patience, and a lot of people I consider smart have very little patience, which makes it hard for them to explain things and often times I will see them stop explaining something to someone, or simple not starting the explanation because they view it is a lost cause.

Yes, imagine being so intelligent that after 5 seconds of interaction with someone, you will mentally accurately predict a 6.8 percent chance (+/- 2) that they will eventually pick up on what you are explaining at all. So, now after 10 times with a 5 percenter, you one day realize there was less than half a chance all along, and get into a severe lonely depression and eventually end up writing highly obscure technical books that the sensationalistic bloggers will never read, leading them to blog about 'all those selfish and silent smart people.'

I think the author is confused between knowledge and wisdom. I dont make any claims that i am smart but say if it takes me certain degree of effort and time to attain level-4 expertise. Imparting this level-4 expertice to a person who is at level-0 makes no sense to me.

The level-0 person should go through all the intermidiate levels to make the things that appear obvious to me, also appear seemless to him/her. Gaining level-4 expertise will lead them to a mechanical process of understanding. This is where we cross the line between wisdom and knowledge.

Also, the expert person more often than not is left with a feeling of being used by someone who attained somthing without any hard work. Things get complicated from here. My approach is to let the level-0 person give clues about reaching level-1 and make ways for the person to progress without complete reliance on me. Some kind of mentoring.

Many smart people are too busy doing other things to spend time cultivating a blog or writing articles. Sharing with your coworkers when the job calls for it is of immediate utility, and a very different beast than putting your thoughts onto the internet at large.

I don't share my knowledge by answering to questions.

I use my knowledge to support the other guy to find the same answers if he is willing to do work. I just give him more momentum -- provided he already has some -- and guide gently to the right direction.

It's my experience that smart people are eager to share whenever the situation isn't detrimental to them. They know the difference between zero sum and non-zero sum outcomes and behave accordingly. They are happy to share when they have reason to believe it is to their advantage and they're just as quick to avoid fools and scammers.

Perhaps when Mr. Setty encounters smart people unwilling to share with him, he should take the opportunity to work on his own packaging skills. I think he may learn that it's rarely easy to make things easy (even for a smart person).

There are also limits to what anyone can describe of their expertise.

See the very important essay on describing expertise :: http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~hdreyfus/html/paper_socrat...

At competent level ::

"There are just too many situations differing from each other in subtle, nuanced ways. More, in fact, than can be named or precisely defined, so no one can prepare for the learner a list of what to do in each possible situation."

Though the two points are reasons for someone to not share, the other reason could very well be that a person is an introvert by nature.

Another article linked by Rajesh (Marshall Goldsmith on Empowering Others) raises another possible reason: "one of the problems with smart people is their need to add a 'lot of value' to the other party." So, someone may think of sharing something but might think it is not ready yet and keep trying to increase the value of.

To me, that's not a problem. I truly believe you should be the signal, not the noise, so if you're not adding value, what are you doing? Obviously you can take it too far, but I really don't think this happens all that often, compared to the plethora of people sharing far too early.

I wonder whether really good startup advice is advice that can only be used a few times. For example, a publicity stunt to market a product will probably only work a few times.

If this is the case, one can understand why people are reluctant to share in this context.

This is somewhat similar to "curse of knowledge" principle described in the idea stickiness theory book "Made to stick".

Although it's probably one of the symptoms, it's not the most important one.

They don't share because of their EGOS.

Maybe. Or maybe it's because of this:

"Smart people want to give their best and as they learn more, they learn that they need to learn a lot more before they start sharing."

I'd be reluctant to share what I know about, say, website security, because I have this dim awareness that there are probably lots of things I'm missing, and anything I post would be flamed to death.

Maybe that's because this is "the knowledge at my current level" that I'm not ready to share yet.

Or maybe it's because, although I seem to be effective, I secretly fear that I'm incompetent.

"Better to stay silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt."

One reason to share: all that juicy knowledge in your brain will otherwise be gone when you die.

Knowledge is not a token which can be given away at a whim. It is impossible to communicate anything profound. If you would like to be smarter, read philosophy and drop acid.

I'm a self-interested creature. I tend to stop sharing with the Internet when my expertise gets far enough to the right of the mean that the information flow becomes unidirectional, or near unidirectional.

I doubt I'm alone in that.

I don't mind if the information flow becomes unidirectional for a reasonable amount of time. I usually go by the duration it takes for me to fill in the background information for the underlying idea. When the value of expressing the idea exceeds the time I'm willing to spend on explaining background information, I usually do not share.

In my experience sharing helps me understand whether I am going in the right direction and avoid tunnel vision.

If you're able to get such feedback, then the communication is not yet unidirectional.

Of all the true geniuses I have met none are "on the internet", or if they are, are passive observers. They tend to be too busy doing amazing things than writing about it. I have no doubt that each would be a "superstar blogger" if they so decided to, but I highly doubt it's ever going to happen.

In private, they share in confidence with people they trust and organizations that they work with who treat such knowledge as competitive advantage.

The thing is, once you are at the top of your field, what incentive is there to share if you are still making personal breakthroughs on a regular basis? I don't see any.

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