You are Probably Mis-Diagnosing People as Stupid
jasoncrawford.org
jasoncrawford.org
I completely disagreed with him on all fronts. However, I'm not sure that he was stupid. The impression I got was that he was working with a completely different set of axioms than I was.
At some level, you can't ask why any more. There has to be some sort of core base to your beliefs. My core belief is in things like science and math. His core belief was in the concrete word for word truth in the bible. Intelligence didn't really play into it.
When you think something is stupid, a lot of times it has to be with the core assumptions that underly their beliefs. Unearthing and understanding these beliefs and agreeing to disagree is very important.
I got him through his topology qual so he could get a masters. (He went on to get a PhD in math.) He introduced me to Linux. On the whole I think I got the better long-term bargain.
One interesting question you can ask each other is "What would it take to change your mind?". In a certain sense--which may remind you of Karl Popper, the weaker the conditions you can offer on which you'd change your mind, the stronger your standpoint is.
Of course asking this question can be quite uncomfortable for yourself. For example, I like to think of atheism as the reasonable person's natural point of view. But I could not offer good conditions that would make me change my mind. Because I suspect I'd rather doubt my sanity than accept sensations that would be incompatible with no-gods.
Intelligence plays a key role in that, that core belief didn't get there by accident and an intelligent mind would not allow such a stunningly ignorant belief like that to take hold. You can't believe the earth is a few thousand years old and also claim to be intelligent. You might be intelligent about other things but in this you'd have to be willfully ignorant to not know how wrong that is.
A truly intelligent mind re-examines any belief that is called into question with reasonable evidence. Sticking to your beliefs against all evidence to the contrary is stupid, and it makes you stupid.
I'm not sure about that. Maybe a scientific (ie. exploratory) mind would do that. However you're assuming that ignorance is any axioms except science axioms (which at their time are facts that will time they may change, ie. the more recent Global Warming). Same applies to the evidence reexamining.
An analogy: if you know by experience (a lot of trial-error) that if you touch the red button, you will seriously hurt yourself, would you push it again to re-examine your previous knowledge? I think the same dogma applies to (blind) beliefs if you were not allowed to explore in the "exploratory age".
EDIT: Trial-error of beliefs cannot be based on factual experience, since they can't exist (eg. is there a God? Does the Heaven exist?).
Yes, and it is foolish to hold beliefs that cannot be tested or validated in some way. Believing in that for which there is not or cannot be evidence is ignorant.
Maybe I'm naive, but I cannot fathom how someone could -really- believe the world was N thousand years old (when there are trees 5000 years old!), and not as an elaborate way to defend their faith.
In this context I think "believe" means "hope" -- "I hope the world is 6000 years old, because I need to reinforce my axiom of literal biblical truth" vs. "I believe the world is 6000 years old, and would bet money the radioactive dating on this piece of rock will say so (or that this tree will have no more than 6000 rings)."
The separate question is what you call someone who easily believes / defends ideas which are easily disproven -- if not stupid, then gullible? Naive?
The evidence you are giving (basically carbon dating) is widely disbelieved by creationists: http://www.google.com/search?q=carbon+dating+false
Basically they find themselves enough problems with the theory of carbon dating that it lets them keep an internally consistent model (eg, "yes, I am a rational person, but all those scientist using carbon dating didn't take into account the effect changes in the earths magnetic field have on Carbon 14 production" http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/nab/does-c14-dispro...)
Yes, you can disprove this too. But soon you are requiring such a level of knowledge that you and the other person are just quoting random sources from the Internet.
Sure, your sources may be real peer-reviewed journals and theirs may be blogs, but then you'll have to prove your sources are better than theirs (which isn't easy, given the amount of valid criticism peer-reviewed journals get). Soon the argument will come down to authority on the internet you'll end up arguing that Perelman's (Fields medal winning) non-peer reviewed solution to the Poincaré conjecture is okay, but other crazy theories in the same pre-print archive are not okay because umm.. they just aren't.
I agree they are gullible. But I don't think proving it is as easy as you may think.
Or they might just start a peer-reviewed journal to point at. This one's been around for a while. http://creation.com/periodicals#journal_of_creation There's even a pretty sophisticated cosmological model that tries to fix some of the timescale issues. http://www.icr.org/article/seven-years-starlight-time/ This kind of thing makes the argument even harder.
As an exercise: Try to convince me that the Earth isn't flat.
We are probably not misdiagnosing them as stupid.
There are a lot of things I don't know and some things I am very new to. If I were to sit down with Brian cox and argue about the nuances of quantum physics I will come off as someone who is Quantum Physics illiterate, not stupid.
To some people the internet is new, mysterious and complicated like quantum physics, simply because they are not very familiar with it or interested in the technical aspects of the internet doesn't make them stupid.
Anyway, acting stupid is as bad as being stupid. Worse, even.
The whole piece boils down to that. And it's very useful advice for arrogant computer dweebs. You can't just write people off like that successfully.
And you certainly can't do it because 100 out of N misdirected users of one of the most popular sites on the internet don't have the correct mental model for what's going on or complete confidence in that model.
But then, I guess we're back to the question of why they navigate to facebook via google....sigh.
I wanted to write a longer reply, but this article covers it pretty well: http://www.osnews.com/story/22884/The_Facebook_Login_Thing_B...
On a personal note: my mother in law used to only use browsers history (down arrow) to access her sites. Since she only uses about 10 sites this worked very well for her. One day, she was very upset, when my browsing on her computer "broke" her computer. She is not stupid, and once I showed her how to set up shortcuts on toolbar, her computer was "fixed".
Something else I often see, which I think has the same cause: people blindly clicking on the first item returned by a search, when the second or third result is clearly what they're looking for.
Probably a whole separate post in helping others see your point of view via questions rather than statements, so they learn your method and not just your conclusions.
I've found that once you understand, very, very rarely do you think they are stupid any more.
On a personal note, I must admit that the level of arrogance seen in IT is sometimes quite overwhelming. Just because someone can use a computer does not automatically make them smart; other people have other skills, amazing! ;)
As soon as I told him what my job he barely spoke about his own - it was just constant banal anecdotes about what I did, how bad he was with computers and how I must be amazing and...
On one level it attests to how important computers have become in our daily lives. Mostly it just makes me sad because, really, I'm just an IT guy!
I also can't stand it when somebody tells me they are just completely computer stupid. And that's before we've even said hello.
You think you're creating a UI that encourages learning by exploration, but a lot of your users are too terrified of their machine to dare click that button.
This is something we need to work with and educate users about - they're not stupid, they're overly cautious.
If at all I am available, she will ask help for the smallest stuff fearing she would break something.
Sometimes I think its not even about breaking anything, but more about not fancying herself to recover from "even more damage."
That's the beautiful thing about software - you can't physically destroy anything, such that it can't be moderately easily recreated.
I can't backup my car, so I'm extremely hesitant about messing about with the transmission or exhaust or what have you.
It's trivial to backup my computer and data, and just go for broke. Worst case, I'm out some time, but no real dollar cost.
Fear of computers is nothing compared to fear of mathematics.
Not to pick on the gender, but girls who came in almost always started the explanation of their problem with some variation "I have no idea what I'm doing with this thing" or "You must think I'm a total idiot, but..."
A lot of the time, problems were simple and I could show them how to fix it in a matter of minutes. All I could ever tell them was that if they played with computers for a living, they'd get the hang of it too.
Out of the two people she shares an office with she is definitely the most tech literate by far... People do undersell themselves.
... always starts off a request for tech support with
the words "tom, you're clever".
From my personal life, my wife couldn't care less about computers and probably would never watch a TED video, but her "people intelligence" is very high -- she can relate to many different kinds of people and wherever she goes she makes good friends and people around her hold her in high esteem.
Her dad is something of a bookworm who knows a little bit about everything and quite a bit about a couple of things. If he were younger (he's in his 70's) he'd probably get his news from HN. I've often wondered if his "intellectual intelligence" was transferred to her but in a different form... like she used it in a different way, in interacting with and reading people, instead of books.
Coders can often walk though large logic problems instantly, but IMO that's the same basic thing as an artist knowing which 12 lines capture the basic idea of a picture. Think of it like the brain missing the correct API's, you can fake it but it's slow and buggy. But, if you start to spend 10,000+ hours solving the same types of problems and you are going to create that foundation.
EX: Cab drivers develop much better spatial reasoning skills over time. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/677048.stm
Trying to explain that to a non-coder is not easy to do without appearing arrogant, and I think that is why people in IT can appear rude. How do you politely say, "Your mental representations are so messy and imprecise I'm having trouble categorizing what you need?"
You say: "OK, now that we've covered the standard flow, let's talk about the strange cases. What are the weird situations that come up once in a while?"
For many users, "ALWAYS" translates to "always, except for the oddball case", and "NEVER" translates to "not usually, but you never know."
That's why Requirements Analysis is as much about psychology and anthropology as it is about logic.
The number of real world problems where ALWAYS applies is vanishingly small. This is the reason that rule based artificial intelligence floundered. The answer to almost every interesting question is some variation of "sometimes", "often", "almost always", "except when", etc. This is why statistical techniques and machine learning have led to solutions to many problems where rule based AI was an abject failure.
http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_crea...
[Edit: in case that sounds obnoxious, I was aiming more for "frustrated"]
One thing that bothers me is when I raise an idea, "could we do this...." for example. And they say no, it is not possible.
My latest example was, asking if animated characters in a video could have automated lip-synching, based on a text file (this could massively cut production times for new videos). No, it's not possible, was the answer, and when I disagree, everyone in the room kinda looks at me like I'm the idiot. [Of course it can be done, there are lots of products that do just that...and btw, I am the client in this scenario.]
Another example....we needed some customization in SharePoint, two specific requirements, that aren't provided out of the box. I went back to my desk, implemented demos for both in about 4 hours using jQuery. Did a demo at the next meeting....yes, that's nice, but jQuery isn't a standard here. So we turned to an outside consulting firm, and they implemented the easy feature using.....jQuery. (I don't think they knew how to do the other one, at least it hasn't gotten done).
So where I come from, the idea that you are surrounded by "idiots", which is a bit provocative, is often true. I don't pretend to be an expert in law, engineering, etc, but I constantly encounter experts in their field that behave as if they are experts outside their field.
I will always listen to the opposing side of my arguments and always consider that I may be wrong, but I rarely encounter someone I disagree with who is willing to debate the disagreement with an open mind, and consider that perhaps they may be incorrect.
How else should we consider these people?
What people forget is that, half the time, that ignorance is yours.
At a deeper level, it all comes down to being poor at evaluating the relative value of information sources, placing value in the judgment of people for social and political reasons rather than for their actual expertise in the subject matter. This inability to recognize expertise, easily vulnerable to misguiding, is the essence of idiocy.
It's people like this that bother me...I don't know what the proper term for them is.
"To know that you do not know is the beginning of wisdom."
In reality, we all have areas of strengths and areas of weakness. Some people are great conceptual thinkers, some are great communicators, some are brilliant at being detail oriented etc. When I meet somebody for the first time, I really try and find where they are strong & I am weak so that I can learn something from them. Over so many dimensions of human endeavor, there's usually at least one or two major areas in which I feel like I gained something from that encounter.
Once in a while, you genuinely will meet someone who has nothing to teach you and nothing you want to associate with them. In those cases, I just put up a wall, be pleasant and engineer to be away from that person as soon as possible.
But I pretty much approach everybody with an open mind and a humble heart and it's worked wonders for me.
Are they afraid of the conclusion?
Are environmental stresses degrading their judgment?
Are they intimidated by you?
consider these potential cognitive and psychological problems
They may have good judgment but poor communication skills.
They may have raw intelligence, but poor thinking habits—patterns of absorbing, processing, and filing information.
They may have general insecurities that make them afraid of looking stupid or give them a psychological need to win arguments.
They may have a problem with you personally.
This article isn't about how to work with "stupid" people, it's about how to pander like an asshole.
The best hope for humanity, in this regard, is to judge people on what they contribute or accomplish. This will probably never become a viable paradigm for most people, because it isn't inherently concrete; it's much harder to look at someone's entire life and judge their merit relative to someone else, rather than noting that a 3.5 GPA is higher than a 3.2 GPA. In fact, once you look at the big picture, it starts to become rather noticeable that judging people at all is, most of the time, a fruitless task.
That's why we're prepared to believe things about IQ that we'd never believe about processor or compiler benchmarks.
You're right, I think I was just letting my cynicism towards the United states bleed through with that comment.
>That's why we're prepared to believe things about IQ that we'd never believe about processor or compiler benchmarks.
That's a brilliant parallel, but also a stunningly-accurate one.
One day, I read a book on IQ and took the IQ tests in the back of the book. The description next to my score said something like "With this IQ, you can be anything you want to be". Regardless of the accuracy of the test or the description, I was inspired and have since gone on to do some great things.
Personally, I think this is a highly pertinent cognitive bias, so pervasive as to affect nearly every aspect of modern life. I think that our most able thinkers keep quiet for fear of being wrong, whilst the stupidest and least informed in our society shout from the rooftops in blissful ignorance. I think that between the natural effect of "the more you know, the more you realise you don't know" and the pervasive anti-intellectualism in our society, we are becoming dominated by the loud and inept.
In my work as a gambler, I rejoice in this bias, as it is what pays my bills - bad gamblers can't even conceive the idea that there might be skill involved. Unfortunately, I think it is fucking up society - while professional scientists are careful to speak precisely, avoid hyperbole and only make statements that are backed by strong evidence, their opponents feel free to rant and rave, to extrapolate one anecdote into compelling evidence, even to deny the possibility of objectivity.
I think that's a lot less generalizable than you suppose. For details, see
http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=97803001238...
Both behavioral economics and cognitive psychology show that most people overestimate their abilities most of the time.
Umm, no. They're almost always careful when speaking to cohorts about their field, but if either of those change, all bets are off.
And, they're often willing to let proxies rant, and often encourage it, to go beyond what they'll say, to maintain their plausible deniability.
Scientists are people too.
E.g. at university programming classes, some of the students are... crazy smart...
However, when I'm around people who don't share my interests, it can get tedious trying to explain things.
You can educate ignorance, you can't rewire stupidity.
Most people are pretty competent in breathing, they don't suffocate. Still half of them are below median in their breathing abilities.