I assume I’m below average (2010)
sive.rs
sive.rs
I vastly overestimated the impact of the former until university. Engineering classes kicked everyone's asses. Everyone was equally smart, but some people studied harder than others.
On the other hand, I know I am well above average at certain things because I've been doing them for many years. I have an above average interest in those things, and put an above average effort into learning them.
This is also true for other people. My dad is an average dad, until you ask him about cars or motorbikes. I knew he liked cars, but I didn't get to appreciate the breadth and depth of his knowledge until I started wrenching on vehicles. He spared me the details out of politeness, because I wasn't into cars. Now, he doesn't spare me, and it turns out he's a mechanical grandwizard. It was right under my nose this whole time.
I suspect most people are like that. They are average, except at one or two things. We tend to judge others based on the one or two things we value, and fail to appreciate them for what they're good at.
I dislike the "genius" and "gifted" labels because in the long run they're excuses why you're not one. "It's ok that he got a better salary - he's a genius!". With a "nature" argument, you don't have to think about the "nurture" argument - your actual skill. Then you can give up without being ashamed.
99% of the people you'll actually meet are averages with interests and luck to manifest their skills in the right way. And on the other hand, I've attended local Mensa chapter meetings to see first-hand that "geniuses" can in 99% of cases be just ordinary people with some special interests on which they may or may not capitalize.
So - always value contextual knowledge, skill and effort, and encourage yourself and other people to develop. Because otherwise you just like to play the lottery and complain how the numbers are too random to your liking.
What you should not associate with your salary is your own sense of worth or success, because there you're on mentally unstable grounds.
But in my original response I just gave a random example, and you're right that we should not expand the discussion in that direction.
Can you create an exaggerated perception of your skill in others? To what degree does your skill have latent demand vs effective demand? To what degree has your skill been monopsonized? To what degree does your skill apply to solving problems that are currently externalized?
Some simple examples: An amazing social worker could change the lives of dozens if not hundreds of people, however, since those people are broke & homeless, her target demographic is unable to compensate her for what she does (latent demand), and her salary is very meagre and state subsidized. An expert in environmental restoration could save a strip mining conglomerate millions of dollars while improving the health of hundreds of thousands of people in communities downriver, however because that conglomerate chooses to externalize those costs onto those communities, that environmental expert also ends up recieving a meagre state subsidized salary.
Your salary is simply the amount of money you have convinced a company to pay you. You could waste 3 years making 100k a year only to deliver a failed project that resulted in 0 revenue.
I think you took it to mean actual calculated dollar-value driven-by-the-eng worth. Even thinking about that, your example is wrong because it ignores expected value (EV) of a project which takes into account risk. For example, if your theoretical project has a 10% chance of generating $5mm/yr and a 90% of completely failing, the EV of the project is $500k/yr - so it's totally worth it to pay an eng $100k/yr to work on it, even if it fails.
Sure you can redefine "worth" to include scheming and taking undue credit and deflecting blame, but it's a stretch.
You must interpret "worth" in a tautological manner if you consider the toxic persons behavior valuable. It's an organizational pathology. Just because it happens doesn't mean it's good or teaches us we need to re-evaluate what we consider value.
Cancer can displace useful cells and kill the organism. It doesn't mean that "well in the end it was for the better anyway since cancer cells are more worthy since they ended up winning". That's twisted logic. Also note that megacorp won't die so easily and the effect of one such person may not show up visibly until after they've voluntarily left for a better job to another place to repeat the cycle.
1. that someone with what would be considered a morally/ethically negative skill would inevitably damage an organisation, or that an organisation would not want someone with that particular skill.
2. that the cancer analogy is at all useful. A company or org is not a body (it is a legal entity with a specific purpose), and a person with what I've called morally negative skills is not a cancer cell (they are a thinking person with actual goals that may align and actual skills that may be required).
I can pull out innumerable examples from politics or business here. Take the current US incumbent. Or, as I'm from the UK, the current prime minister, or his home secretary. Of course, to an observer who feels they are a cancer (I do!) they are what you describe. And they will always force other people out who would seem to have [call them] positive skills that would make them better suited [from my viewpoint], sure. But none of that means they aren't skilled, or that they do not have (fairly obvious, as I think about it) "worth"
No, it's not.
Under ideal market conditions, the price of any good (including labor) is exactly equal to its value to the marginal purchaser (and, also, to the marginal seller.)
Human on Human interactions, which are required for the majority of employment, employ game theory to ensure that your pay is below your value. When talking about labor groups/unions you can approach an ideal scenario. Even those will have variation that are manipulated by human to human interaction.
There are no "ideal market conditions". The real conditions are such that, statistically, you will be underpaid in comparison to your value within a company. Sometimes you get lucky and drop into an upside down position, which is overpaid, but that's the best wage slaves can hope for.
Sure.
But now we're talking about “in practice” not “by definition”.
I do not use the "ideal market conditions" theory to describe what happens in practice, because it has little utility (except in predicting some very constrained trends).
If people got paid their actual worth to the company there probably wouldn't be much profit to go around at the end.
All of these add a lot of noise, but there's still an underlying signal there. It's kind of like BMI; at an individual level, it may be highly misleading due to the variance, but at a population level, it's fairly insightful.
I think that's strong. It will generally reflect perceived value, which is often caused by skill level and worth-based factors.
'genius' is just a particular configuration out of millions or billions in which a brain can form. Brain's real estate is malleable like a city's. So, no reason why one cannot configure it to one's liking. Now, the procedure to do so might not be as easy.
I also think that there is not much difference between an alcoholic (any addiction for that matter) and a workaholic genius. The reason is that both do not know what drives them.
I have hit this wall and have sometimes wished I was less intelligent but more diligent. I would be healthier and wealthier for sure.
To any intelligent but lazy young man reading this, don’t delay improving your diligence. Seek counseling and coaching if you can. Don’t let your good grades, impressed teachers and peers, and fancy college acceptances convince you otherwise.
But avoid ADHD drugs. They will wreck your body, make you numb, and sap your enthusiasm for life.
My buddies kid actually took the advice to heart and has been getting A's and B's in college still which is good to see. I wish someone would have given me that advice and saved me an extra semester.
They’re also excuses when you are one. “Genius here, don’t need to cook or clean.” They’re a point of failure whichever side of the fence is greener.
I only have one, but have interacted with many, but I think your dad's special there. Most dads don't spare you.
It's something I've been thinking a lot about since having kids, and who I will be to them when we're peers.
By your comment I learned from the Wrestler, but more importantly the Ku Klux Klan reference and meaning. Thanks for laying out a bread crumb to follow for new insights.
Did you know Grand Wizzard Theodore invented the disc scratch? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Wizzard_Theodore
My late father had an incredible penchant for mechanical watches. Whether wristwatch, pocket watch, wall clock or alarm clock. Even large church clocks fascinated him immensely. It was the artistry of the mechanics that made his heart beat faster.
I could not understand this for a long time. Could not understand why one spends several thousand euros on watchmaking seminars to learn the craft as a hobby.
At some point I learned that as a child he wanted to become a watchmaker, but this did not work out and so he had to take another profession (which he nevertheless loved very much). Only late he has fulfilled his childhood dream.
And actually, it is only today, after he has passed away and I have occupied myself with the watches he had collected in the course of his life, that I can really begin to appreciate the little bits of knowledge he gave me every now and then.
Today, I wear few watches myself. They are the ones that were especially precious to him. And I appreciate them very much. Both in their external and mechanical aesthetics.
It doesn't 'beat' smarts, it's just different.
What most people call being 'smart' means you're a fast learner and/or are good at abstract thinking.
Of course someone with experience knows how to do something better than you if you have no experience, but if you're left to figure things out for yourself you might work out a more efficient way to do things faster than the experienced person did.
If you're doing a repetitive task, being smart isn't that important and so experience usually trumps being smart. If you're doing a dynamic task where you face new problems, then pure repetition doesn't help as much because each problem is different.
The very definition of being good at a thing means, being able to that specific thing well. You could learn something fast, but really getting at good that will demand tons of practice before it begins to appear as sleight of hand.
>>If you're doing a dynamic task where you face new problems, then pure repetition doesn't help as much because each problem is different.
Each heart surgery is different, yet in many ways similar. Practice matters a lot in these cases. Your initial enthusiasm might not even matter in these cases.
I never discounted practice, and yes to be "really good" (Whatever your definition of that is) at something takes a lot of practice regardless of how smart you are.
I also specifically said _pure_ repetition because I know that repetition is important for all skills, but for more complex skills you need to synthesize your past experience and extrapolate to future experiences (I.e abstract thinking). This is a lot more involved than pure repetition.
If you are careful there are a certain things you can chose be good at that will help you on the longer run. Stuff like personal finance, retirement planning, health etc.
Good news is you can be good at nearly anything by spending some time getting a little better every day. But you have to keep that going for a few years before you notice some thing phenomenal coming out of it. Unless you are very at the precipice of death, pretty much any body has a chance of being good at anything.
It is wishful thinking to believe that most people are average but this is not the case. There are more people on the right and left side of a bell curve than in the center.
When you account for all bins most people ARE not average though the "average" represents the biggest bin. (It also depends on how big you make your bins but in general if you make your bins a reasonable resolution more people live to the side of the average than in the center)
What this means is that there are people all over the spectrum, tons of people who are bad, and tons of people who excel and are better.
It is convenient to think otherwise but it does not mesh with reality. There are people who are better than you in all things just through sheer talent and there are people who are worse than you in all things also because of sheer talent.
Your uni anecdotal example also is biased. It also depends on the university you attend. Universities filter off of cognitive ability through grades and testing. Students within the same university are more or less roughly equivalent in ability due to going through the same filtering to attend the same university.
There is, however, a very evident difference in skill between students who go to different universities. If you ever transferred from a lower tier university to a higher one, you can feel this difference anecdotally. The difference in ability between students on average in say Stanford is markedly different then those in a community college.
That's almost tautology they way you worded it. Statistics has a term to describe "left and right", it is called standard deviation, and one standard deviation covers ~70% of the sample population.
What is true is that half of any population is below average by whatever metric you choose to apply. (EDIT: for normal/Gaussian distributions)
Not exactly, this is sort of true in practice but not true logically. Imagine a population of [1, 100, 100, 100] or a population of [1,1,1,1,999999]. Two examples where the population that is below average exceeds half the population and is below half the population.
But this is just semantics. If the population follows a bell curve and at high resolution standard deviations, what you said is generally true.
That's the old joke, "If Jeff Bezos walks into a dinner party, suddenly everyone is on average a billionaire!"
Which used to be "Bill Gates", and before that "Warren Buffet". I wonder who will be the next person to fill in this joke. :)
There is a value in "seeing the good in others". But we tend not to see it unless it benefits us.
I also think the effort to see it - mostly time and patience - is less forthcoming nowadays. Whether it is the rush of life. Or disposable society meaning craft/repair skills are less valued so it isn't worth the time to get to know "elderly appliance repair person". Or the polarisation of debate and views of people.
But yeah, I try to hold that every stranger has some cool/good/great thing that I can't compete with. There are a zillion things in the world.
The chances that MY one or two cool things overlap with theirs is minimal. But their cool thing - whatever it is - is still cool.
Daniel Kahneman, who won a Nobel prize for studying these types of cognitive biases, has a really good explanation for this. The human mind has a strong tendency to invisibly substitute hard questions for easy ones. When faced with a difficult question like "what are this company's future prospects?", we tend to subconsciously answer an easier question like "do the founders of this company appear competent and confident?"
This, not arrogance, is the main reason why so many rate themselves as above average at common tasks. Truly ranking yourself is pretty cognitively difficult. You have to construct a mental model of the full range of driving ability in the population, then place yourself in it. So almost everybody substitutes the much easier question "am I good driver?" instead of "am I an above average driver?". And the reality is most driver, even those slightly below average are basically good drivers.
In other skills though, where most people perceive themselves as not good, the effect is flipped. For example well over 50% of people will rate themselves as below average when you ask them about their ability to strike up a conversation with strangers.
I'm a great driver. I make a mistake maybe once a year (and I apologize for it by waving my hand). Whereas every day on my commute to work, I see a bad driver doing something dangerous. Guess what, I drive by more than 365 cars on my commute, so my stats are actually no better than everyone else. But it feels like it.
And no shade intended by that. We might all have made an error like this.
That you know of. How many mistakes do you suppose you make that you aren't aware of? Or maybe not even a real mistake, but a perceived "mistake" as seen by the other driver?
I suspect the latter happens far more often than real mistakes, due to information asymmetry - I know exactly what I am doing and intend to do, while I can only guess and infer what you're doing, beyond the very meager data provided by brake lights and turn signals. If your real behavior differs from my expectation, I call you a bad driver who made a mistake, while you really did nothing wrong.
It's completely wrong to attribute to this to something other than cognitive bias. It's totally cognitive bias although arrogance is too strong of a word.
You can see the dissonance in psychological experiments where people rate each other AND themselves. People who rate you will rate you significantly lower than what you rate yourself. This phenomenon appears consistently across multitudes of psychological experiments and is very very repeatable. This happens in experiments where the questions posed are quantitative but not Binary like you arbitrarily constructed in your examples. For example rate this persons programming skills from 1 - 10 is a typical question arising from this experiment.
You also mentioned how difficult it is to rate yourself. Difficulty is irrelevant in the experiments above as all the humans participating in the experiment will be rating the same thing (yourself) making the difficulty not a factor in the rating as it is the same for all people doing the rating.
I would say that your post itself is an example of this cognitive bias, you literally pulled that "binary question" logic out of thin air. Where is your experimental evidence? What made you place this logic above other forms of equally valid logic but counter to your point? Likely you have a subconscious agenda and your reasoning you presented could represent an arbitrarily constructed scaffold of logic to prop up a world view that makes sense to your cognitive bias. Surely if what I said was true you would never know it and likely you will be pulling more logic out of thin air to deconstruct what I said.
That being said there exists a spectrum of people in the world. The article points out that roughly 90% of people will rate themselves higher than what they actually are. What about the remaining 10% What does psychology say about people who don't lie to themselves?
Experiments have found that people who lie to themselves are experimentally more happier and more successful overall than people who don't, in fact many people who can't lie to themselves actually fit the diagnoses of being clinically depressed.
It is not a case of arrogance, I agree with this, it is more of a case of the fact that we lie to ourselves to be happy.
(Arrogance is a negative word that delivers the wrong connotation, but the most accurate way to put it, is people are arrogant because they need to lie to themselves in order to be happy).
> And the reality is most driver, even those slightly below average are basically good drivers.
Made me laugh out loud. Not even necessarily because it isn't true (though I'd tend to disagree), but just because I'm the kind of person who constantly complains about shit drivers.
Thanks for the laugh, lol.
What's the relevance here, exactly?
To me this is really a point about just how good the interface of wheel/pedals is, that any moron off the street can be taught to drive in a matter of hours.
Yes, any moron can learn the basics of driving in a couple of hours but they’re far from average or good drivers, it takes a bit more than that to become an average driver and there are still some factors at play which might influence that: spatial ability, reflexes, attention span, how one handles stressful situations. But a moron can be a good driver without being smart about other things or having a good education
Let's say someone X cannot understand much mathematics -- then, if someone else, person Q, solves a quadratic equation, and person F solves, say, Fermat's Last Theorem, then, it's not easy for X to know that F is extraordinarily talented (right?) whilst Q is more likely an ordinary person. Because to X both problems are equally hard -- namely impossibly hard.
Instead, like @dcolkitt indicated, X will look at how Q and F dress (better looking = better at mathematics), and which one has the most self confident voice?
(However in things like sports, when one clearly sees who, say, is the fastest runner, then it's simpler of course.)
So yes having a successful career (i.e. an above average career) in a field might only mean that one is above average at having a successful career. A pretty circular conclusion.
You are correct that many of the senior people (i.e. professors) are not very involved technically and often do overestimate their own technical contributions ("I gave the postdoc the idea to use that instrument, try that trick"), however many of them did start out as very technically and scientifically talented people.
The problem is that the way academic funding is structured really pushes academics into a path were they are unable to do any more direct technical and academic work.
I would estimate that unless they move into primarily administrative&teaching work, professors spend about 30% of their time applying for funding, and they don't do that just to build empires or stroke their ego. If you stop and get to a period of a 1-2 years without funding, it's incredibly difficult to ever get funding again, because when your applications get assessed you get judged on your track record (previous publications) and often reviewers want to see some preliminary results to show your proposal is feasible (the irony is that on the other hand proposals should be "high-risk, high-gain". I'm not kidding, I've had proposal reviews were I was criticised by one reviewer that there was not enough preliminary work to show the project is feasible, and another reviewer said that my I essentially had already done everything on the project and so there was not gain left).
The result is that when you start a project you already need to write your next proposal, leaving you no time to actually do technical work.
From now on, I say "means" means "means in ordinary language" and if you use "mean" to mean "means in jargon" you're wrong and I will get mad at you online.
[1] Saying this as someone who’s neurodivergent, took to overly specific language as a way to understand the world at a young age, learned that people find it irritating to be corrected when you can infer their meaning in context, and grew to share that annoyance. Also saying this as a hobbyist linguistics nerd fully on the descriptivist side of the fence.
They separate for a while and when they reunite and compare notes he gets mad "You lost $200 gambling!!"
she replies, "Yeah, but last year you lost $3000!"
"Yeah, but the difference is, I know how to gamble!"
"I barely swerved when I got distracted by my child"
vs
"That asshole almost ran me off the road. On purpose!"
In the end, I did not acquire a significant amount of merit or status related to those capacities I heard people tell me.
Rating oneself, evaluating oneself, comparing oneself to others is NEVER healthy. The universe doesn't care, society doesn't care, your relatives don't really care, it will not make you happier, and generally it won't make the world a better place.
It's important to have humility, and avoid the reflexes of constantly having the thought of "what rank am I, do I reach my objectives, am I doing my part". It matters to do self introspection but it's not healthy to be afraid of natural selection because it leads to a social darwinist mindset, "eat or be eaten", which will always generate anxiety and fear. Civilized brains are able to focus on cooperation, not domination.
Humans exited the food chain, so there's no need to act like animals in the wild.
An old one I had heard (and am probably mis-remembering):
"Life is not a True/False exam, it's not multiple choice, or short answer, or even an essay. Heck, in the end, it's only self-graded, and only if you feel like the bother."
In this way, we rate each other about how they affect our lives. This is important because the feedback generated is used to improve things. However, it should not be a terminal rating and re-evaluation should always be possible unless you commit very serious crimes.
This doesn't have to be a crushing discovery. There's plenty you can do to improve and there also luck involved. It makes sense to go out there and shuffle your cards, generate opportunities improve compared to your past self etc.
But it's undeniable that there are differences in attractiveness and personality that won't go away. You can try to live in some Disney world where everyone can become a top hero but it's not possible. Not every employee can become a manager and the a CEO. Not every man can date the women that they personally find the most attractive (taken as a "whole package", not just in physical attractiveness). Not everyone can get the best paying jobs.
It's better to come to terms with this so it's not a scary thing any more.
Motivational books won't tell you this, and nobody wants to be a mood killer to say it. Especially in outwardly positive cultures like America.
You need to know where you are compared to your peers, and assess if you made progress. Sure tracking your progress compared to your past self is also crucial, perhaps more important day to day, but unless you understand where you are among your peers, you will misunderstand things and have wrong expectations.
We are humans but also animals and are subconsciously aware of who is "above and below" us. We interact with them differently, our posture changes, our tone of voice changes, our hormones change depending on how we compare to our surrounding people.
This assessment can also be off in various ways for various reasons like conscious or unconscious manipulation/persuation from others, depression etc.
In general, I think it would be better to assume that you're not more intelligent than the person you are speaking to (at least on a particular subject) and that you may not be the smartest person in the room. That's not to say you are below average, but that there is still something you can learn from at least one person in your company.
It’s tough when you’re insecure because your primary mental fortification is an inflated ego. Just get used to (practicing) inflating and deflating the ego (ideally just keeping it half filled with air) so you literally are not a zero-self-esteem mess out there in the world.
If you have no practice with this, every time life gives you an opportunity or challenge, you’ll make judgement mistakes.
That's one possibility. The other is that you're delusional about your own abilities. There is a skill in being able to tell the difference between these two.
You can do that without deluding yourself into thinking you're smarter than you actually are, in fact it probably puts (the very likely) failure into a much healthier context.
Someone who is average can do exceptional things depending on the circumstances, and that is also really another point, not overplaying your own role in your success will make you pay attention to the people and the circumstance you rely on, and the huge role luck plays.
There is no need to perceive oneself as exceptional to take risk, that's just a broken celebrity culture. What I'm saying is, be Samwise, basically.
Warning: Please don't apply this to _other_ people who say they need help with something. If someone comes to you with a problem they say that they are stuck on and can't figure out, please don't respond solely by giving them encouragement to just keep plugging along. Either encourage them to find someone else with time to listen or give your time to listen.
1. It feels incredibly _isolating_ to be told something like, "Thats just imposter syndrome. I'm sure you'll figure it out."
2. It is much harder to focus and succeed when you're trying to push yourself down a path you think is probably fruitless.
3. It is much harder to solve problems when you don't have a sounding board. When you can have conversational space to teach someone else about the problem space, paths open up.
> no absolute truth here
Correct, which is why listening is important.
It is how to know the experience _of the person you encouraged_.
This is actually the big one. Validation that they are making progress allows people to go back to banging on a problem.
If one of my senior engineers claims to be stuck on some technical problems and comes to me asking for extra technical advice, we're probably going to spend some time digging at things. That's the realm of sounding board.
However, I may have given an assignment to an intern specifically so that they will go learn something that I think they need to learn by working it out. If they come to me, I'll give them some limited advice, validate their progress to this point, but I'm probably going to send them back and tell them to bang their head on it some more. One of the lessons junior engineers need to learn is "Sometimes the senior guys don't actually know the answer and part of your work is actually figuring it out."
And sometimes the task really is just a slog. Too many junior engineers think everything can be made "easy and quick" like a textbook question. However, if someone is slogging via brute force and comes to me I'll look at it and say something like: "Yup, you seem to be going the right way. And it looks like you're about 10% done. Keep going."
The validation that they're not going down a blind path is the most important thing.
100% agreed on this.
I just think we should be doing more to put 'how and when to start a sounding-board conversation' in the toolbox of Junior Engineers.
> "Yup, you seem to be going the right way. And it looks like you're about 10% done. Keep going."
Agreed.
On top of that: "Here are signs of progress to look for" or "Here are ways to detect signs of progress".
"Describe me what you did."
Which allows one to judge whether they are truly stuck or just need to plug at it some more... not to mention all those times when they realize the mistake they made while explaining the problem to you !
I love to help people. I esp. appreciate the ones that up front tell me what they already did and tried. I had a great colleague once - I loved to help her, because I always knew that she came to me, when she was truly stuck and did not know what to do after trying everything that she could think of.
And she was able to succinctly tell what she did so that I was able to narrow down potential causes/solutions quite efficiently.
Contrast that with another former colleague who when getting stuck alawys came to me first thing to ask me, if he could just ask a short question. Even in moments when I was clearly deep in concentration and clearly signaling that state. It was always urgent and he never put in any effort to solve the problem himself first.
"What" questions that calmly ask for a list are often really good because they are easy to answer if you know the information. And if someone doesn't know the answer, it prompts them into the good habits of:
1. Doing some work before interrupting someone with a question.
2. Writing down their steps as they do so.
Other good ones are: "What are some questions that come to mind" and "What are some paths forward that seem plausible?" to help those who are
1. At a crossroads.
2. Having trouble articulating that they are afraid of going down a rabbit hole.
I'm still looking for a good question for helping those who are totally lost without a mental model that lets them put words to the domain.
Regarding your points:
> "Thats just imposter syndrome. I'm sure you'll figure it
> out."
But they should be encouraged to at least try to find a solution (depending on the scenario). If it's simply "I do not know how to do X" and I ask "have you looked at Y", if the answer is no then this is something they should do. Maybe there is no solution there either, but it is something they should explore so we can have a discussion about that.
> It is much harder to focus and succeed when you're trying
> to push yourself down a path you think is probably
> fruitless.
Well, that is also where the maximum reward exists - when you think something is impossible and then you discover you are able to do it. If nothing else, you gain a better ability to judge what 'fruitless' looks like when considering problems.
> It is much harder to solve problems when you don't have a
> sounding board.
Sure, but it also robs you of a learning experience if you are always relying on other people to guide you through solving problems - and it can be exhausting for the person that has to guide you. So it should be something that is not used common place.
For example, you could ask "off the top of you head, do you know how to do X? If not I'll consult Y...". Maybe they have some pointers for solving X, but you're also saying that you're willing to investigate using method Y.
Ultimately, if you have little risk, you have little reward. You can easily setup a scenario where they try to solve their problem, but don't get stuck for too long. For example, send them off and check up on them half hour later: "any luck solving X yet?", "have you considered looking at Z?".
Another point to consider when you agree to always help somebody solve problems they make little to no effort to solve themselves is that they are robbed of the learning experience, they have a path where they never have to become self-dependent and you are distracted from some other task.
This is helpful, sometimes enormously so. It may be that the only way they could have heard of Y within 2 years of facing the problem is through conversation. But once they hear the name of Y, they have something to punch into google.
> they should be encouraged to at least try to find a solution
Note that having someone _assume_ you did not try after you've spent hours of effort is also quite isolating.
People who do not first try are indeed frustrating. There is a judgement for junior engineers to learn to exercise here.
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> it also robs you of a learning experience if you are always relying on other people to guide you through solving problems
Which is why this is a matter of judgement and balance, where extremes like "always" rarely apply.
> it can be exhausting for the person that has to guide you.
Very yes. This is why it's crucial to deny without justification some honest requests from those who need help.
1) So you do not exhaust yourself.
2) So that fear of exhausting yourself doesn't push you to assume a request for help is an excuse and treat another person as if they are lazy.
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> Well, that is also where the maximum reward exists - when you think something is impossible and then you discover you are able to do it.
1) If.
2) We should aim to recognise the difference between "impossible" and "unimaginably hard".
Impossible problems are a waste of time and we should not encourage people to solve them but instead to be skeptical of impossibility.
Landing a man on was impossible _until_ congress allocated money to have a lot more engineers collaborate. Then it was no longer impossible but did come with many easy, moderate, hard, and unimaginably hard problems.
3) Unimaginably hard problems don't just require focus. They also require de-focus to see odd connections. We should aim to help junior engineers recognise the difference so they wisely decide when to keep banging away and when to go for a random walk.
'Talent-
don't bother about whether or not you have it. Just assume that you do and then forget about it. talent is a word we use after someone has become accomplished. There is no way to detect it before the fact, or when someone is still grappling with the learning process. It is impossible to predict when or if mastery will click into place. Besides, the thing we label as talent is not a single ability. It is a complex mixture of motive, curiousity, receptivity, intelligence, sensitivity good teaching, perseverance, timing, sheer luck, and countless other things. If any part of it is genetic, God-given, the result of astrological fiddle-faddle, fate, or destiny, that part is not the sole determining factor, All the other ingredients must be present in the right combination- and no one knows the exact recipe. Therefore Dear Reader, don't waste time worrying about if you are talented- and don't blame any failures on the lack of it-that is really a cop out...'
- Alla Prima: Everything I Know About Painting, Richard Schmid
I can do both:
- assume that I am below average (don't underestimate others)
- assume that I have talent (don't underestimate yourself)
It feels like different modes of thinking for different situations.
Unfortunately, they found that it was the non-depressed individuals who had an inaccurate view of their abilities and station in life! The depressed individuals seemed to view themselves quite accurately. So apparently, a bias towards evaluating yourself more positively seemed to play a role in inculcating positive mental states.
He said that instead of the much touted self-esteem, he now thought that perhaps we should focus on control and self-discipline. Overall an interesting idea, I thought.
My plants can survive weeks and weeks without water and sometimes even sunlight. They don't look fancy and don't grow much but are sturdy and can bridge over gaps when I don't have the energy or mental space to care for them.
For example, a star athlete may have to retire because of injuries. He may become depressed and feel worthless because he can't do something that he loved. This view evaluates his entire life by one aspect and focuses on the negative.
Surely these individuals that the researchers studied have some good qualities?
The problem is that self-esteem can come from both true competence and false self-evaluation. If you've cultivated your ability to learn, if you believe based on prior history that you can master things over time, and and if you've developed the patience to give yourself time, you get a virtuous cycle, and self-esteem is one of the outcomes, imposter syndrome be damned. If you have a falsely confident sense of your own capabilities borne from not being able to truly assess yourself, self-esteem happens to be one of the results, but it's emotionally fragile.
I think control and self-discipline is a repeatable path to competence and self-esteem based on what you are actually capable of.
The top physicist in the world deeply knows that he is still learning, but he also knows that he's above average. There are plenty of ways people get feedback in life that tells them that they're above average. I think the real advice is to not assume you're better than someone just because you're above average at X. That person is probably above average at Y. Thankfully, most people who are above average already know this.
Essentially, I see it as a meta-indicator, a way of making decisions in situations where I don't have all of the information.
Another way to look at it would be through the lens of game theory. Game theory is absolutely a field of some consequence, and it's all about relative positioning of agents in a system and their likely intentions after factoring in the likely intentions of their peers.
In a word, you might describe this type of analysis as simply, "wisdom." I find it to be of particular value in entrepreneurship.
I think what everyone ought to do is only ever compare yourself to yourself. "Am I doing this better than the last time I did it? If not how can I do that?" It's a function that's always growing and the rate of growth is how much effort you put in. It's not bounded by the people you're comparing yourself to.
I can point out things I'm clearly above average at, and things I'm clearly below average at. I can also point out areas where I have no idea, like driving.
If I start assuming I'm below average as a baseline, when I wasn't assuming I was above average as a baseline, I'm pretty sure that will make me less accurate.
Thinking about things as just practice is good advice but I don't see how it has any connection at all to whether my skill level is above or below average.
The idea of playing mind games in order to act less self-important seems... kind of self-important. The context of it being sold as a new idea in a blog with the person's name at the top in capital letters doesn't help that perception. I think Socrates might have the jump on this guy's routine by a few years.
> It serves me well. I listen more. I ask a lot of questions. I’ve stopped thinking others are stupid. I assume most people are smarter than me.
> To assume you’re below average is to admit you’re still learning. You focus on what you need to improve, not your past accomplishments.
I dunno, I'm not convinced this is what "assuming you're below average" really looks like. At least not all of it.
When I think I'm below average I go along with decisions I disagree with; "that's not the strategy I'd go for but you're the person who actually knows our customers" or "that's not the architecture I'd implement but you have more experience with these things". When I think I'm above average, I'll push back harder. It would be nice to get everyone on the same page, ask questions until either I'm convinced or they are, but I don't think that's always realistic.
What does Derek do in situations like that?
Having valid concerns is orthogonal to whether someone is above or below average.
Depending how I read "go along", "disagree" and "addressed", I think this either doesn't help or is unrealistic.
Like... suppose I say "this plan will run into scaling issues at some point" and the other person can say "that's true, but we don't know if we'll get enough usage for that to be a problem and in the meantime it lets us iterate quickly". I agree with this, but I still think we should go with the more robust thing up-front. How do I proceed?
I could say that I'm not going to work on that plan until I'm convinced it's the best plan. But if everyone followed this advice, approximately nothing would ever get done. If you have a team implementing a feature or product, it's important that everyone is working in the same direction even if they don't all think it's the best direction to go. It's not realistic to expect unanimous agreement on what the best direction is, even if everyone sits down to discuss it calmly and sensibly for a few hours.
Or I could say that my concerns have been addressed, and I go ahead and work on this plan. But why this plan, and not the plan that I prefer? There's a risk that we just go with the plan proposed first, or by the person who's most stubborn about liking theirs, or drawn at random from a hat. That seems bad too.
I don't think there's a good way to proceed where I don't at least try to answer: which of us is more likely to have a good plan? And if I assume I'm below average when I'm not, I'm more likely to get the wrong answer to that question, and then bad decisions are more likely to get made.
> Having valid concerns is orthogonal to whether someone is above or below average.
The things that make me a better dev than I used to be, and a better dev than most people just starting out, certainly aren't orthogonal to my ability to have valid concerns and not-have invalid ones.
If you simply mean that above-average people can have invalid concerns, and below-average people can have valid ones, then I agree but I don't know why you bring it up. I don't think I suggested otherwise.
If we were aware of our mistakes, we wouldn't make most of them. So generally we will appear to be the only person doing nothing wrong in a sea of people who are constantly screwing up.
People who fight against that illusion be creating safeguards around themselves and testing things they think are obvious have a chance of outperforming.
Never underestimate the ability of someone to get amazing results simply by not making any obvious mistakes.
All that doesn't explain the cancer patients though.
There’s many axes to these graphs, and we constantly try to boil it down to simple 2-axis plots.
For example, there’s smart, then there’s driven. I have worked with many very intelligent folks that fall to pieces, when unpredictable things happen, or when presented with challenging conundrums.
I knew someone who was definitely not a gifted, intelligent person, and was quite aware of that. I won’t go into his story, but he had a lot of personal challenges that most folks would consider “showstoppers.” It would have been quite easy to throw in the towel, and give up on a future.
He did not. He worked hard, for many years, and refused to let the attacks and sneers stop him. He pursued education in the IT field, after his original vocation was eaten by new tech. He was the oldest (and, likely, most-tattooed) person in his classes.
He ended up working at one of the most prestigious labs in the world, and was obviously valued by his employers. He worked there for a decade, before his unexpected death, earlier this year.
If people here knew of the particular challenges this person faced (not my story to tell), I guarantee that mandibles would be hitting the floor.
He was definitely below average in many ways, but above average in other, very important, ways.
No matter how much we have on the ball, we all have weaknesses, which will never be addressed, if we refuse to see them, and we often have strengths that we may never know, until the fecal matter hits the air circulation device.
Assuming other people are idiots is never a good thing, even if it was true. I'd rather assume they have a bad day, or misunderstand what you mean because they dont have the same mental map unrolled in front of themselves as you have, and that can also be due to miscommunication.
Whether someone really is an idiot will come to light through repetition.
Working in a very free university/art school (without grades and with little pressure), I often see people who had good grades before completely fall apart when nobody tells them what to do and how to do it. Grades are nice and all, but don't take it for given that they correlate to actual performance. Additionally there are field where this is even truer: how do you grade art? Will a gallerist buy your art because you had good grades in art school? Will a festival screen your film because your professors gave you the best grade?
Grades should be taken with a grain of salt unless you know the system within which they were created very well and what these grades indicate. I think actual projects and experiences are worth more. If you e.g. mixed the sound for 10 movies and there are more people asking you to do it for them (and they are willing to pay), this might be a good indicator that you actually know what you are doing.
Because of my passive attitude, everyone was getting promoted ahead of me at work and I was forced to code in a way that I knew was incorrect. Projects in my day job working in a bigger team moved at snails pace while my personal open source projects with only a couple of contributors progressed very quickly and the products were higher quality with fewer bugs (even though I had a lot less time to work on them).
Now I've become extremely confident (inwardly) but I still struggle to assert myself (outwardly) so my new approach is to steer people towards my ideas in a way that they think it was their own ideas. If only I could have more money, I could afford to be more outwardly confident and I wouldn't have to resort to such pathetic manipulations.
When you don't have money, people don't believe their own eyes when they see talent... People believe that money is a measurement of talent. It's even hard to believe your own talent. But beyond a certain point, after many years, you can't keep ignoring the results.
How would money make you more assertive? You can't buy assertiveness.
I have always struggle to evaluate myself and deal with the impostor syndrome because I tend to be a generalist dropped in team of specialist acting as a bridge. Am I less knowledgeable that those specialists in their field? Yes but they lack the skills to understand deeply each other and communicate clearly their needs. I was the average finally between them and nobody was doing the same kind of role around me to compare with.
Learning is a mindset that is not equivalent to how you can have self-assurance. It is the ability to keep an open mindset to enrich the set of ways to approach your field. If you restrain yourself to only one hammer, you would be above the average smashing all the nails of the world with it finally. You will just not learn anything after a time twisting your hammer to fit every nails.
No. It goes one way more than the other. Did you read the article? Statistics the author references show that people are more overconfident than underconfident.
Drivers who assume themselves to be bad drivers tend to drive very little or not at all and never improve. They are parallelized by fear, their assumption they cant do anything rubs on others who are in car with them who then start to give them advice - making situation worst.
I have seen that dynamic a lot of times, because in my country it is quite frequent with women drivers. Not most women or something, but there is certain kind of woman who assumes own incapability and it is self-fullfiling prophecy.
https://www.polygon.com/2014/10/28/7083373/look-at-this-char...
Most senior and mid-level engineers are well aware of this fact, but they avoid bringing it up due to workplace politics and how awkward it is. This leads junior engineers to think they are just learning what to do, while the truth is that they are learning what NOT to do as well.
But in most situations, very confident people do better then humble people of exact same capabilities. Especially in startups and such.
Compare the human brain to anything currently in existence, and it should begin to dawn on you that we basically carry around a low energy power efficient supercomputer inside our heads.
If the average is people I know it's a very different outcome though...
I believe we all have 100 points we divvy up into a few buckets (eg: logic, emotional, social, spiritual, etc). Some people might look down at people perceived as "less smart" - yet they might have huge skills in intuition, feeling, social constructs.
What would account for this tremendous fairness? A benevolent God, who plays RPGs in his spare time?
lol
Does anyone know which study this came from? I was trying to figure out exactly how the survey question was worded because this statistic seems somewhat amazing to me. The driving one I get because drivers are not being routinely graded, but students are.
I googled the phrase and I basically got related quotes, this article (from 2010), and a couple of studies that came after this article was posted, and they were mostly looking at gender differences in preceived intelligence and after a quick glance, didn't seem to support this statement.
What drove a sense of inferiority for me was somebody getting better grades with seemingly less effort.
Do you think it's so unfair that 90% of students would feel the same way? It's not impossible but personally, I would be surprised by that. Which is the point. Experiences vary dramatically, especially if we broaden the statement internationally, so knowing who was asked what is just as important as the claim.
I do agree the 90% claim seems dubious especially unsourced.
It's absolutely true that you might be wrong, and your decision making and behavior should take that into account, regardless of your abilities relative to others.
My general rule is to assume I'm missing something or could be wrong. For instance, I was skiing with my dad this February. He said he didn't have his milt-resort pass with him, but it sure looked to me like it was attached to his arm. So, I asked him if the thing on his arm could get him what he needed, instead of flat-out telling him he was wrong. For all I knew, it was some expired single-day pass from the previous season, but it could have been some kind of membership ID that was still useful in our situation. It turned out he had forgotten that his multi-resort pass was on his arm, but my response was less confrontational and more focused on cooperatively reaching the goal.
Seriously asking, after going through the post. There was a time I did fairly well but since more than a decade I have fallen behind my schoolmates.
Then a second complicating factor comes in: most people interpret egoic/social peril like physical peril. For most of human history being ostracized by the community meant death. So we are willing to believe whatever we can get away with in a social context ...but not more. And the winners of a social egoic competition benefit from this. Competitors self-limit.
There is an illusion that confidence confers skill when what is actually happening is that a diminished ego has impeded basic functioning, and artificial self-estimation counteracts that somewhat.
Even if you aren't in the top 10%, you may be able to solve the problem b/c the average person is impeded by an artificially diminished ego.
I was very stubborn about it too, and I remember talking about it with people whenever someone called me smart or something similar...
In my view, it is the first step towards Stoicism.
Its key finding is that, because excellence and motivation are mundane, they key challenge is "psychologically maintaining mundanity even at the height of complex challenges" that is, still tying your shoes well before your Olympics heat, and smiling confidently and talking coolly during the Cuban missile crisis.
So to me less about your self image and more about assuming the work itself requires no special talents to achieve; just good practices, practiced well.
I agree with the other comments here: assume nothing. Each person (and situation) is a case-by-case basis.
When you have talent, it is your duty and responsibility to hone it and care for it. You have a gift; to squander it in a misguided attempt at humility or fear of trying is the worst sin you could commit.
Stop listening to what other people have to say about where you should go and what you should do; their reasons are either selfish or fearful. Only you are sufficient judge of what is your true potential, and that only comes through the continuous experience of discovery and trying.
Become your potential, because you're the only one who will ever care enough.
This advice will be downvoted to oblivion because very few people can understand it, but I implore you to at least TRY it, take a chance on yourself. SURVIVE and THRIVE!
And by the way, I’m curious who bestows this “duty” and “responsibility” to care and hone one’s “talents”? You obviously come off as thinking you have at least one...
Even worse, those statistics are basically about believing without evidence. Talents produce evidence when exercised (provided you're ready to recognize them). If something comes easier to you, you focus and push harder, seeing how far it can go. But you have to believe that you can or else you won't put your full weight behind it.
Man's greatest asset and his greatest enemy is his mindset.
The lucky talented just know in their bones that they are. For the rest, your mindset determines the success of your talents, and that mindset takes work to maintain.
People always told me: "You're so good at maths, you have to go into research. Your talent would be wasted as a middle school teacher." But then it turned out that I hated research. I work as a programmer now, a profession that I do enjoy, but it's so mundane. I wonder where I would have ended up if people hadn't discouraged me from becoming a teacher. I'm slightly jealous of people who get to work with curious kids every day.
My point is that you shouldn't sell yourself short by denying your talents entirely, as is being expressed in the post. Your talents are your edge, and an opportunity to make a difference (such as teaching in your case - talented teachers are the great amplifiers. They help the next generation discover and build upon their passions and talents, enriching us all). Talents in the right environments can foster passions.
But once again, people telling you what you should and should not do is a huge problem.
Though it reads negatively, it was among their top 5 contributions to my life I think. Now that I have kids in school and see what teachers have to do, it might be top 3.
>When you have talent, it is your duty and responsibility to hone it and care for it.
First of all there is the idea of a talent being a trait. It's not. It's merely acquired (through exposure aka experience). You have zero duty and responsibility to hone anything.
>You have a gift
Yeah, the gift of being human. The one thing that helps you more than anything else because being human lets you acquire everything else.
>to squander it in a misguided attempt at humility or fear of trying is the worst sin you could commit.
There is no such sin. Everything is wasted by default. The vast majority of animals never reach adulthood.
>Stop listening to what other people have to say about where you should go and what you should do; their reasons are either selfish or fearful. Only you are sufficient judge of what is your true potential, and that only comes through the continuous experience of discovery and trying.
That's an argument to stop listening to you because you are a burden to me. You will never give anything, you just take.
Your arguments boil down that every living thing starts at minus x and if you do (not try) your best and do everything perfectly you will merely arrive at 0.
It touches on something similar.
Maybe people who respond in those kind of polls are better than average or they want to be better than average.
There is a lot of people who don't care about polls and won't answer them.
(Note, this blog post was written in 2010.)
One danger with this approach is that you can easily spend too much time researching complete garbage like the latest Q Anon conspiracy theory, on the assumption that the people posting it have done more research and are smarter than you. See also anti-vax stuff, anti-mask stuff etc.
Eventually you need to decide that some people are just willfully ignorant and not very clever.
"Many people are so worried about looking good that they never do anything great... You destroy that paralysis when you think of yourself as just a student, and your current actions as just practice."
In a sense, reducing the stakes allows you to make progress without being overwhelmed by, "what if it doesn't work?"
And those that don't are silently shamed or shunned, looked down on by those who do (or say that they do; in practice / what I've seen is that that energy they have lasts for only a few years, after which they either settle down in family life, end up in burnout, or both).
It's a toxic culture, one that isn't actively pushed by any one individual or organization, but one that is prevalent and normalized throughout the industry.
The SF bubble is even worse, where you're considered cool if you do 24 hour hackathons, work nights, sleep in overpriced bunk beds in hacker homes so you can hop back on your tech five seconds after waking up.
Anyway sorry, I had a rant brewing, it's not specific to your comment. Speaking for yourself, while I will acknowledge I'm probably better at my job than a lot of people, I also suffer from impostor syndrome, from not being good, fast, ambitious, productive or smart enough. I've thankfully gotten out of a "rat race" organization (consultancy, yay) and I've settled down in a job where I have both responsibility, time and space to do my own thing, pick my own tools and tech.
In that job, I can decide on my own technology choices without having to compete with egos and trends. I can sit down and think about, write down the tech choices, instead of landing in an assignment where the decisions have already been made, or where they're made in a 15 minute meeting where the loudest or most impatient guy decides without any deliberation or paperwork.
I am a lot more confident that the software I write now will last for longer, whereas other jobs I've had, code I've written would likely go quickly to subsistence / maintenance mode, then a full rewrite by the next generation of energetic hipsters because the existing stuff is unsalvageable, because the previous generation of energetic hipsters got bored and the opportunity to start something new (which they prefer to do every 6-12 months).
I should probably write an angry rant blogpost about this, ironically.
> In that job, I can decide on my own technology choices without having to compete with egos and trends. I can sit down and think about, write down the tech choices, instead of landing in an assignment where the decisions have already been made, or where they're made in a 15 minute meeting where the loudest or most impatient guy decides without any deliberation or paperwork.
1000 thousand times this.
Would read that post btw.
This resonates very well with me. I've come to learn that waiting for the "perfect moment" or the "perfect project" is just an utopia. Fail fast is the way to go.
De La Soul -- The Grind Date
Reminds me of another great advice for group communication: Assume zero knowledge and infinite intelligence.
It is basically the same advice, just seen from the other direction, I think.
Derek Sivers is clearly above average, and if this is posted in good faith it is an uncharacteristic dip below his average posts.
You will end up working for peanuts and treated like a pawn while seeing the narcissistic wannabe getting payed with gold.
I'm not.
People choose metrices when they are describing themselves. So, if they think they are above average in certain metrices, they are probably right because they picked those metrices to value themsevles... and they chose to improve themselves in metrices that they value, based on their own value system.
When other people judge, they judge others based on the value system they judge themselves by.
So, it's others who are wrong. People have pretty good understanding of themselves.