Embracing dumbness

I know a woman who was a programmer in the 1960s. When people would ask her to do “women’s work” she just said “I don’t know how” and carried on writing software. Even when they asked her to type something for them (everyone could see that she could type).

Diego Gambetta has written about a similar phenomenon with the Italian mafia.

https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2009/08/26/criminal-inc...

Another thing to say about embracing "dumbness" is that, although hard for some experts, speaking in simple English makes them much more approachable. Many technical experts, like specialized programmers, or academics, will speak with so much jargon and context-specific language, that it becomes difficult to work with them.

It takes a bit of bravery to stop doing that, and there is a reputational cost sometimes, as the author says:

> For example, if you are in a professional environment and you are expected to have a certain level of expertise, pretending to be dumb might damage your credibility.

Still, it helps everyone in the end. You as the expert can connect with people outside your field better, and learn new things, others will have a good time working with you.

Just to be clear, here are two examples of the same statement:

> The process segfaulted after a race condition dead-locked threads on a mutex fread resource. Neither thread initialized a pointer to the read data buffer before use, so the pointer was garbage.

> Two parts of the program got stuck fighting over a file, so the program couldn't read it and failed.

Both statements might sound the same to a software engineer. Maybe the first one even sounds more informative and "better". But even to a computer-literate colleague, so long as they are not technical enough to code, the first could just as well be white noise. They wouldn't know what the issue is, how serious it is, how hard is it to fix, how much time it will take, what parts of the operating system or the computer were involved, is it something within the grasp of their engineer colleague or should third parties be involved, what is the damage that's done to a system running this code, and so on.

I've read a lot of academic papers filled with excessive jargon, too. Sometimes they write about the most mundane, day-to-day things, but it's difficult to make heads or tails of even just their abstracts. The purpose of an abstract is to tell an uninformed reader if the paper is relevant to them. If the average reader is expected to be informed about the paper's contents to the same extent as the author, what's the point of even publishing what everyone knows? The jargon-filled language can be self-defeating, and certainly often defeats the whole purpose of communication.

All advice comes with caveats. In this case, I think this sort of 'dumbness' only works for very intelligent people.

Most successes in life come down to lots of hard work and a few key decisions. Software is a great example of this - the quality of the software itself is usually not important. Great apps can be written to the highest standards known to the industry ... or they can be written as spaghetti code. Doesn't matter that much, although high standards are better. What matters a lot more is what the developers set out to build on day 1 and what they pivoted to building about 33% of the way through the build when they realised that they didn't have enough information on day 1. So most of the architectural decisions are important to the people involved from the perspective of how much spaghetti will get cooked, but few matter to the final success of a software package as a product.

Someone who can identify and excel in those key decision making moments can develop good day to day habits then just switch off until the time to strike arrives. Those who can't identify those windows to act have to work a bit harder.

Things in this story like not knowing how to use an ATM - makes a lot of sense to me. Being able to use an ATM may literally never be the difference between success and failure in life. But you need to be quite intelligent to be able to make that sort of distinction systematically without falling into helpless nihilism.

I like to call this being "dumb like a fox". I think it's fine for getting things accomplished outside of work. I've worked with people that have done this deliberately to get out of working and have had to pick up their slack.

"You have time to dedicate to other interesting things" really resonated with me. The older I get, the more value I place on my time. I like to say that "step 0 to knowing something is giving a sh*t, and I never made it past step 0".

I enjoyed this read. I do want to point out that the first example of a similar posts is a terrible one (willingness to look stupid by Dan Luu) and not in the spirit of the story being told. In that post, it's not actually any kind of willingness but more of a "you are all stupid and I cannot lower myself to explain so I will tolerate looking dumb", there's a pervasive arrogance being portrayed or justified as something else.

> The recommendation is to look dumb to avoid learning about something you are not interested in. It’s saying “I don’t care about this and I don’t want to care”.

Wish I could do this more often. Some of the most effective people I know at getting things done tend to do this instinctively a lot. It can definitely be annoying to be on the receiving end of it, but what a tremendously effective tool it can be

Lots of wisdom in this.

It's tiresome to be a know-it-all. I've had so much "free time" to randomly absorb trivia and surface-level study things that I have an opinion or factoid or anecdote about everything. But what do I stand for? Where does my expertise lie?

One of my neighbors was a Ph.D student, and I offered her some magazines, and she said she doesn't read anything outside her subject matter, which is plenty. And I knew a church lady who told me "I don't read any books other than the Bible." and I admired that sort of focus.

And independence begets loneliness. If I'm nitpicky and pedantic and I criticize how someone else does things, especially doing me a favor or a service, then I'll end up doing it myself, and that works for a while, until you forget how to ask for help, and nobody wants to help you anyway, and worse yet, nobody asks for your help either, and you haven't helped anyone out and so no mutual favors are owed.

Conversations with my parents can be frustrating, because I can be desperate for advice or direction, and I can even ask something that is exactly my father's area of expertise and experience, and they'll just say "we don't know" and it's just my cue to work it out for myself. I'm an adult now, I put on my big boy pants and deal with the real world. Mom and Dad embrace dumbness and continue their narrative of neighborhood gossip that dominates our phone calls.

Receiving no reply at work: indicates I asked in the wrong place. Coworkers know it's not their job to compose an elegant message with a helpful link to redirect me. Or, in a live interaction, "let me look into that [and get back to you]" is the classic way to shut down an inquiry that is not in their wheelhouse.

Having someone help you out, especially if it's a trivial thing, strengthens friendships and you bond over this common shared experience. Interdependence isn't weakness, it's being human.

If you're a man and try this, prepare to be accused of "weaponized incompetence".

There's another option, where you don't need to look dumb or trick people into doing things for you. Pay for it. It works surprisingly well.