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Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

Something I've noticed now that we're all communicating online in written form: a lack of people saying "I don't know"

It seems that everybody knows everything. Whatever the issue, a little bit of Googling and suddenly you know all there is to know. Even more wondrous, no matter what position you take on anything, some more search engine Kung Fu and you can find a hundred people willing to support you with arguments, surveys, facts -- whatever you need.

Everybody knows everything. It's quite amazing. And then when you take a tech team into an unknown domain, suddenly they find it very difficult to open up, admit ignorance, and reason about things.

I am reminded of some startup book or blog I read years ago. It was talking about the relationship between intelligence and startup success. The author said that there was a correlation. It was an inverse correlation. The more you have been rewarded in life for being smart and knowing everything, the more you felt intelligent, the less chance you had of making a startup work. You just weren't able to admit all the things you didn't know.

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Why would I jump into a thread, on any site, just to say I don't know? There are thousands of threads just on HN that I just let scroll by without participating because I don't know enough to add to the discussion. Explicitly calling out my lack of knowledge on every thread would serve no purpose to anybody.

Online written communications will never follow the same patterns as direct communication, and that is a good thing.

Excluding reddit

The problem isn't people not admitting ignorance online. The problem is that the internet might be the cause of people not admitting ignorance in real life.

As a person who basically made it through college without internet, I can tell you that I had just as much trouble admitting I was wrong when I didn't have access to the internet, perhaps more because I was younger and more hotheaded.

I've sometimes had the problem as well. Usually because my self esteem had been based heavily on believing that I'm really smart.

Don't blame yourself. Go read argument culture. Everything is positioned as a debate rather then a discussion ; take an opposing side and it's about winning not understanding. As an example If you've caught yourself ever leveraging syntax in a discussion to derail someone's ideas

I've always hated debate because of that and could never understand why it was valued. It is always about winning and never about getting to the bottom of what could be the truth.

Unfortunately, I find this to be a similar case with office/workplace politics pretty often as well.

That's a great point.

Even the very word discussion comes from late Middle English (in the sense ‘dispel, disperse’, also ‘examine by argument’): from Latin discuss- ‘dashed to pieces’, later ‘investigated’, from the verb discutere, from dis- ‘apart’ + quatere ‘shake’.

We generally don't do a very good job of talking about things in way that brings those things, or us each other, closer together.

Can you elaborate on “leveraging syntax”? Like commenting on the structure of their argument?

I think the author is talking about making bad-faith but very defensible interpretations. You can accomplish that by purposely taking hyperbole too literally, or by intentionally overlooking that a statement was meant as a metaphor. (Just a couple of examples.)

Very often, English-language experts can appear to defeat subject-matter experts in debates. When this happens it's usually because of footwork on the "language layer."

Thank you. That makes a lot of sense.

It sounds like you had equated being smart with knowing things.

My self esteem has also been heavily based on believing that I'm really smart, but I never had a problem admitting I didn't know something. "Smart" to me means my ability to learn, problem solve, and make connections.

One of the most significant factors in my success to date has been my almost eager willingness to admit my lack of knowledge, and to ask others to share their knowledge.

How else are you going to learn new things?

Not everyone gets there in one step. A lot of people have the problem described by the parent because they don't have these insights yet.

You reminded me of this comment (www.reddit.com/r/getdisciplined/comments/19qonw/any_advice_on_how_to_get_remotivated_for_studying/c8qia6b) on reddit. I wish I'd have read that sooner.

After relating an anecdote, that comment mentions Carol Dweck's work on growth mindset: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck "In a fixed mindset students believe their basic abilities, their intelligence, their talents, are just fixed traits. They have a certain amount and that's that, and then their goal becomes to look smart all the time and never look dumb. In a growth mindset students understand that their talents and abilities can be developed through effort, good teaching and persistence. They don't necessarily think everyone's the same or anyone can be Einstein, but they believe everyone can get smarter if they work at it.[3] This is important because (1) individuals with a "growth" theory are more likely to continue working hard despite setbacks and (2) individuals' theories of intelligence can be affected by subtle environmental cues. For example, children given praise such as "good job, you're very smart" are much more likely to develop a fixed mindset, whereas if given compliments like "good job, you worked very hard" they are likely to develop a growth mindset. In other words, it is possible to encourage students, for example, to persist despite failure by encouraging them to think about learning in a certain way."

> the internet might be the cause of people not admitting ignorance in real life.

I remember the good old days, before the internet, when people would always admit their ignorance in real life and the Dunning–Kruger effect didn't exist.

It is absurd how people actually do this all the time in Amazon product questions. Will it work with my Samsung phone? "I don't know." Does it come with batteries? "I think it did."

My personal favourite is "I bought this three years ago and don't have it anymore. I don't remember."

I always find it sort of charming and refreshing when people respond as if it was a face-to-face conversation

I'm guessing that's because Amazon sends out emails explicitly asking people to answer questions on their past purchases. And for some reason, this makes some subset of people feel obligated to reply even though it makes no sense.

I think you're right. That sounds exactly like something amazon would do and how people would respond. I must have turned those emails off, which makes seeing the answers utterly stupefying.

Amazon sent me questions about a product I gave a one star review to. I really should have sent it back.

Their system isn’t too bright.

To give customers the benefit of the doubt: Some may know exactly what's going on, and enjoy making Amazon look stupid by posting those replies.

That reply doesn’t suit your handle at all ;)

It's because Amazon emails everyone (who bought that product) every time someone asks a question. The subject is "John Doe: Can you answer this question about ...". I've had this email a few times. Some people (I'm guessing old/non-tech savvy) assume someone has asked them directly, and so feel the need to reply.

That makes sense. The answers I refer to read just like a slightly annoyed text message reply to a family member who should know better than to ask.

I doubt gp is encouraging people to jump into threads to say they don't know something. I imagine the insight is that online communication lends itself too well to an unfavorable s/n, one that militates against reasoned discussion.

Of course one shouldn't jump into a thread to say "I don't know", but if someone receives a response to a statement they made in a thread that points out a fact or point of view they hadn't considered, they should be willing to admit that they didn't know that, they were wrong, or that they realize they need to think more deeply about the topic.

I agree that there is no value of saying "I don't know" in general. But sometime people would say "I don't know" as an emphasis on his "understanding" that there are something deeper than the current common understanding, and that is reasonable.

There should be more eagerness to identify when problems and issues are more difficult and less well understood, as well as the nature of this difficulty/complexity -- even in online discussions. That is a valuable contribution.

Well, I too jump into threads where I think I know some part of what's being discussed.

But I'll often bookend a comment like that with points about what I don't know. And here, there are points I think someone might know - frame those as questions. But also there are point I doubt either myself or the person I'm replying to knows, frame those as problems of knowledge, statistics and so-forth.

Obviously, I think I know a general framework, that our beliefs are areas of semi-certainty bordered by heuristics, myth, ignorance and lack of awareness. But this is a belief that will often about what I or we, don't know.

> The more you have been rewarded in life for being smart and knowing everything, the more you felt intelligent, the less chance you had of making a startup work. You just weren't able to admit all the things you didn't know.

I think there's something to this, but I want to present an alternative, which is that the more I know, the more I know what I don't know. And with regards to startups and business, the effect of this that I can observe is one of paralysis. I am scared to death of committing to any idea because I can see right away many of the unknowns, and I fear the unknown unknowns. After some education, I have enough history of thinking I know something and then discovering that I basically know nothing, that I am scared to ever say, well THIS is the idea that is going to work out, I'll put all my money and effort for the next 10 years into THIS because I am sure. Sadly, the more I know, the less sure I am about anything, and it makes me unwilling to take risks. Not just business -- even deciding what to study next, what jobs to apply to, or what side project to begin -- every time I start something that seems simple enough, it takes about 5 minutes to realize I have no idea what I'm doing and have to evaluate whether it's worth pouring more time into. Result: things don't get done. Because there is no done. I do learn a lot however. But for what? Personal growth I guess. But I have no idea what to do with it. I really envy those people who are able to decide they are going to solve a specific problem, that it's worth it to do so, and are able to see it through to the end, instead of learning everything they can about it, getting bored, and moving on, which seems to be my pattern. In the end, for me, it is the learning that is motivating, not the goal, and that has terrible consequences for what you describe. Perhaps "successful at startups" is not the only metric, but at least for that metric, it is maybe not good to take the "I'm going to learn everything about this before actually doing anything" approach.

There are risky risks, and there are affordable risks. One of the risky risks -- at main job, I am also very reluctant to commit to any new projects without emphasizing that I can not guarantee result but only effort up front first. Luckily, I often get managers to acknowledge my emphases on the effort part, which somehow reduces the risk of unknown unknowns. But I also had many occasions that I succeeded to convince managers or coworkers to alter their ambition with my emphases. In other word, my job has some room for risks and my finance has some room for risk of jobs, I guess I am lucky.

Now once the risk reduced to affordable level, my curiosity often takes over and I often gets excited to explore my unknowns.

It is sad that for some people that all they see is unaffordable risks and they have suppressed and forgotten their curiosity -- the source of life's excitement.

It definitely seems to me like older entrepreneurs concentrate on either providing a service to established industry or on craftsmanship, selling a luxury good to a slightly older crowd.

They are over “you can be anything you want to, Billy” and they have justifiable fears.

But if you ran your own deli for years and ended up building your own bagel slicing machine because nobody else had one or they mangled too many bagels, why not sleep in a little in the morning and sell bagel machines instead? You know your customer because you were your first customer. You can just ask the deli owner in your head what they would like.

Well. People still don't know, but now they have enough information to seem as-if they do.

Understanding is not a matter of a google. It's a decade of relevant experience.

You might beat the PhD to the factoid phrase, but when you come to employ the fact in the relevant problem you won't even know where to begin or even what it really meant.

People aren't exercising their ability to distinguish parroting from understanding, as-if intellectual work is just different forms of trivial pursuit.

In the same spirit there is the cheapening of the concept of "research". Often the statement "I did some research" means that some googling has occurred.

I feel it is less directly cheapening all research and more bifurcating the term between engaged and unengaged audiences. The audience must decide when searching becomes researching, which I doubt is the second time you are feeling lucky.

If I google, find a primary source with reasonable data, and form an argument based on that, then I’ve done research. It was simply easier based on the Internet, but the research is not proof-of-work - a well-supported conclusion is just that no matter the effort.

On the other hand, I google, copy and paste the first link and parrot what it said - then I have indeed cheapened it. I’ve skipped the evaluation step of researching, wherein I convince myself of the “facts” of the past and I’ve also failed to extend any new thoughts as we’ve just parroted the argument.

My main point being, to a critical reader only “bad” research is cheap. It is also the duty of the audience, just as much the researcher, to evaluate what they read critically and respond with skepticism.

I accept that to research doesn't have a binary quality and the amount of effort can vary. Nevertheless I encounter research close to the second meaning you mentioned frequently.

> Nevertheless I encounter research close to the second meaning you mentioned frequently.

Would you mind sharing the context?

I work in a field where the PR machine of my target "research" jumps ahead of the methodological reports. Then those reports are often vague (length limits?) about the details of their methodology. That makes me not trust much that I find - but I've got to have something - so I end up doing some sort of meta-analysis. It's time-consuming, exausting and frustrating - and has confidence-bars that might as well be non-existent - but without doing the on-the-ground fundamental-study - it's what I've got. For example - I just spent 60 hours over the last 4 days trying to triangulate a "probably correct-ish" value and range for a variable from a heck-of-a-lot of studies that didn't use the same methodology. Would that count as research in your book, or not?

One thing a PhD taught me was how thoroughly limited my expertise is.

There's a language that has citations built into statements of fact or belief; you modify statements based on how you came to know them. If someone asks, "Where is Alice?", your answer of "Alice is fishing" would be phrased differently depending on whether he told you he was going fishing, or whether Bob told you he saw her fishing, or whether you saw her fishing.

There's nothing like that online, so any given advice or answer in a comment could be coming from someone with 20 years of experience, or from someone who googled the exact thing you already did, and copied the first answer they saw on StackOverflow.

Something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime?

I think I think I was likely thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Pomo_language was what I had in mind.

I think you think you think you might have been thinking of eastern pomo language was what you might have been thinking of

Are you thinking of Ithkuil?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil

I think I was likely thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Pomo_language

I would be interested to see the evidence for that inverse correlation. I remember seeing a study not so long ago which implied that higher intelligence individuals made poor managers. As did lower intelligence people. There's a sweet spot somewhere a little above average where you're smart enough to do the job but not so smart that you can't relate to employees and customers. I would not be surprised to see the same phenomenon in start ups, though admittedly I don't know if that study was especially reliable given the modern state of the social sciences.

My instinct is to question the causality anyway, because I think you highlight a strong candidate for the actual, underlying limitation on intelligent leaders: humility. My hypothesis would be that the negative leadership performance is actually a proxy measure of humility, which on average is lower with higher intelligence, likely because of the praise effect you describe.

Because I don't think it makes sense that intelligent leaders are less able to question their frame of thought or significant details supporting it. Or rather less capable in carrying out the actual cognitive task of self-questioning. Quite the opposite, because general intelligence is a measure of the correlation between performance on all cognitive tasks, so it's practically tautological that higher IQ individuals would be stronger within that cognitive domain. Which makes me think it must be their willingness or propensity to engage in the process of self-questioning.

To bring it back around to the OP, details matter, but the process for selecting relevant and filtering out irrelevant details matters most. Humility may be one way to enhance that process. Though maybe there is also a limit. Too much questioning prevents the establishment of a stable, actionable consensus. An inability to shut out irrelevant stimuli is disabling to individuals and organizations. Like Funes the Memorious, you get lost in minutiae.

I don't know where the ideal balance lies, but I wish I was better at finding it in practice.

It's kind of the Peter Principle: You rise to your own level of incompetence. Hopefully, you don't get boosted past that level. Then you can instruct and manage the next down level.

You make an excellent point about filtering out the irrelevant. The wood is brown, for example, is irrelevant to building a proper staircase. The angle of decline is highly relevant.

But, with regard to leadership, the Peter Principle (identified by Laurence J. Peter and published in 1969) is in inverse correlation to performance, I believe. Particularly if performance is tied to being able to communicate with the success of the high performer at that level, because they might not have met their own level of the Peter Principle.

And, after communicating, one must be able to act. If a person has reached their Peter Principle level, they will be incompetent at the task -- which is why so many managers are hated.

I think we have two problems at the moment.

1. Being right doesn't mean being smart. I met many people in my life that were smart or dumb, but their success had nothing to do with this. You can do the right things by accident.

2. Being rich often removes the need of being smart to varying degrees. People want to help you getting richer if they get a piece of the pie.

While you can certainly become rich by accident, usually what we call "accident" are quite rare. Are you saying dumb people getting rich are rare by calling it an accident ? I think we would need more study to establish if there is a correlation or not, looking just at the people you met is not enough.

Is it?

Who could qualify this?

I mean, you found a company, talk to the right people and get rich.

If you just happen to find the wrong people, you won't get rich.

Sure, you could say the sales people were skilled and found these people, but how often is this really true and how often do you just luck out by finding the right number on some obscure website?

Competent Elites - The World is Stratified by Genuine Competence

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16186279

lol, this guy is simply too much.

Eliezer Yudkowsky is quite smart with some deep understandings of the world (along with some less good ideas), as best I can tell. I've definitely learned interesting things or been sent down interesting paths from articles of his that I've read.

However, he would be served very well to work on eliminating the moderate pomposity that permeates much of his writing. He is also overly verbose sometimes. Fixing those two issues would reduce a lot of the beef he gets, I think.

It was my impression that he intentionally cultivates those aspects of his public persona. That is, if I can't deal with those particular points of personal obnoxiousness, I probably also won't hang credulously on his every word. In that case why would he want to interact with me at all? He's not the only person to employ this strategy. Personally I'm more willing to endure the idiosyncrasies of e.g. RMS.

Didn't he promise some AI stuff and never delivered?

You might try looking here: https://intelligence.org/all-publications/

Science is frequently about explaining phenomenon that people stumbled on by trail and error.

(I think I see scientists forget this too often. There are things that are true that we don’t know. Being true and being sure are different things and you should respect people who are going to show you true things otherwise you will never learn.)

Very good point and observation.

I have observed the same but I have observed the exact opposite in academia and academically oriented corporate R&D in complex technical fields.

People with academic background can surprisingly humble intellectually. They may be arrogant when defending their point of view, but if they come up with a new thing they don't know about, they admit it even if it's common thing. By constantly asking simple questions every time they can't follow up something they are able to learn constantly.

> It seems that everybody knows everything.

I think about this from time to time -- how people build up this sense of personality related to a forum or site. I think what tends to happen for an individual is that when you're talking to millions of people you don't have the perspective on who says what anymore, it becomes "twitter thinks" or "reddit says" instead of "these 10 people."

I think the reason everybody knows everything is that because we don't look at the individuals when we talk in a forum like this. There are always going to be some 'famous' people whose names pop up over and over, but as general responses you don't really know what a person thinks about something. We internalize a consensus of opinions and then it becomes just "well, HN said this."

This is most apparent when the forum contradicts itself. If there isn't another way to denote the opinions (like a sub-forum) then you start seeing comments like "everyone was against it yesterday and now everyone is in favor?" when in reality it's unlikely to be the same people responding anyway.

To me being able to admit you don‘t know something is part of being intelligent. You need to be intelligent enough to reach the conclusion that you do not know everything.

I think that you identify Mr. Salviatier's main thesis: That knowing or not knowing are equally invalid until observation has been done. Of course, it's said the the very act of observation exerts change on the observed, but that's neither here nor there.

So, when I take tech teams into uncharted waters, the first thing we do is observe. Otherwise we create "ivory tower solutions" better suited to ourselves than actual users.

And, yes. Your're right. If you're supposed to be the "expert founder" then "I don't know" is not, generally in your vocabulary. However, I do suspect this is a male problem, more so, than female. Having said that, in this great time of social upheaval, vis a vis gender, perhaps it's a great time to learn from our sisters!

Sometimes in the hnews comments I'll ask a question and normally the answers I get back are pretty good even though my comment is rarely popular. Most recently I asked about some subtlety in the Meltdown vulnerability.

It would be cool in addition to "comments", there was a Q&A section. I find I mostly click on the comments to get a more nuanced understanding of an article only to find a 20-commeny deep flame war about something unrelated.

Crowd sentiment is very important (to many circumstances and understanding), so reading the 20-comment deep flame war is useful too. You just need make sure to read it from outside but not into it.

That is absolutely true and you said it very well. And, after a lifetime of being praised for one's intelligence and creativity, when people first begin to realize that things are going badly, they can fall apart in some shocking and ugly ways.

Hopefully a relevant quote:

"Emotions can hinder or uplift. We might hope that those in leadership positions possess strength and resilience, but vanity and fragile egos have sabotaged many of the businesses that I’ve worked with. Defeat is always a possibility, and not everyone finds healthy ways to deal with the stress. Each person matters. Established firms will have a bureaucracy that can ensure some stability, even when an eccentric individual is in a leadership position, but when a company consists of just two or three people, and one of them reacts neurotically to challenges, the company is doomed."

http://www.smashcompany.com/business/how-to-destroy-a-tech-s...

I don't know if the inverse correlation exists, but I doubt the explanation provided (that smart people often do not know or won't admit what they don't know).

Coming from academic circles, we consider such people as the "mildly" smart. As in, being uninformed is OK (you know you are uninformed). Being only a little informed is dangerous (you don't know what you don't know). And the most informed are OK too (they know quite well the limits of their knowledge). The smart people you are talking about do not usually survive academia.

In my own personal experience, I find the false confidence to be quite orthogonal to intelligence. I see plenty of low intelligence folks have the same problem, and plenty of high intelligence folks have it, and do not see a clear relation where one is more prone to it than the other. More like: You are humble and always doubt yourself (which is the academic's concept of "smart" - continually trying to tear down your own theories), or you are arrogant and do not. Intelligence is unrelated.

Maybe it's just an impression based on the fact that people who do not know do not care to write it. I don't know :)

Yes, and also consider the relationship between knowing an answer, being confident in your knowledge, and having the time to explain details or find sources.

People (who are intellectually honest) say "I don't know" when a question is specifically addressed to them, and so they feel a responsibility to give an answer. They don't respond at all when they don't know the answer and they haven't been addressed... except if they are motivated by curiosity and wish to indicate that they, too, are interested in the answer.

Incidentally, the mistake of assuming that everything on the Net is addressed to you is a common failing among people who have little experience. It happens on Facebook all the time...

Reminds me of the recent results in education where those told how bright they are then go on to do worse in tests.

In one on one or small group conversations, I say I don't know all the time.

In one to many conversations like a thread on Hacker News, why would I say "I don't know" unless I'm specifically addressed or have a side point to make? It's noise, and doesn't help anyone.

Looks like you’re describing the Fixed (as opposed to Growth) Mindset: https://youtu.be/Yl9TVbAal5s

She also has a book, which I would recommend skipping. It adds nothing that isn’t covered in the video.

“Certainty is a closing of the mind. To create something new you must have doubt.” —Milton Glaser

Even better, everyone thinks they know the right solution to a problem by reading a headline about it.

the confidence with which you are speculating right now is, at the very least, ironic.

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