Willingness to look stupid
sharif.io
sharif.io
Which leaves as observation, you can only do truly creative work - in a high trust society, where people trust you with the resources and leave you alone, after a initial proof of ability.
Or in a truly low-trust society, where you are part the kleptocrat chieftain system and you just use your take to do this kind of work. The classic MBA process will totally destroy any scientific or creative institution.
With the decline of trust, I fear we as a civilization are going into a long period of stagnation or even regression. Unfortunately, at this point there's no socially acceptable way to reverse the trend of trust destruction.
PS: I'm not talking about fake "honor" based power systems.
Reputation is as harmful as it is good. Anyone who survived being unpopular in high school, or seen the dummies that can be elected in democracies, should be able to explain how.
No, it is better to judge works by their merits than it is to judge people by their popularity. Though it is far more expensive.
But your points largely stands. However, reputation is one of many tools that can be used to assess the worthiness of giving some work attention, but should be given a relatively low weight compared to other tools. Giving reputation a low, but non-zero weight allows bad actors to be rightfully put in their place and allows someone the ability and chance to "clean up" their reputation with effort.
My core idea (back in the early 00's when I cam up with it originally) was to identify a small cadre of trustworthy individuals in various sectors - lets say finance, computing, healthcare, etc (but more granular) and give them high trust (maybe a manual score of 10). Then let who they score, and who those people score "trickle down" as it does in Googles page rank. It was a variation on what Google later called trust rank, I suppose.
It would have either failed to launch completely or turned into a dystopian nightmare akin to China's Social Credit System. It may have even turned out worse than China's system because the goals of finance do not always align with the goals of humanity.
A more modern implementation could be built on the block chain and be made very profitable... while it crushes us all.
The fact that wars tend to result in extremely quick innovation cycles (both out of fear of losing and from usual bureaucracy being shoved away) is quite nasty ethically, but cannot be wished away.
Neither Ukraine nor Russia are high-trust societies, but they have done more drone development in four years than the entire world together in forty.
The class that brought most of the innovations, citizens of Rome or Athens, a privileged ruling class, had a strong in-group honor system. The rest of the society was not so, but they were so divided that those other parts didn't even count.
Meanwhile, Early Modern Italy (Renaissance) was notoriously treacherous and, at the same time, very mentally productive.
When I skim across societies and ages, that correlation does not seem to be there.
I'd also offer that there's no difference between "truly creative work" and "truly creative and profitable work" but we often see the two as separate because we only have convenient access to one or the other.
5% of people create 90% of the crime. Double 5% to 10% and you double the crime. Make it 50% and and you 10x the crime.
You still have 50% of non-criminals but society with 50% criminals has way more crime than society with 5% criminals.
You might say high-crime society is much worse than low-crime society even though they both have individuals that are criminals and non-criminals.
Replace "crime" with "trust" and you understand high-trust vs. low-trust society. They both have individuals with various levels of trust, but emergent behavior driven by statistics creates a very different society.
> there's no difference between "truly creative work" and "truly creative and profitable work"
To state the obvious, the difference is "profit".
Also I don't see you're bringing the "true scottsman" judgement here. What's the difference between "creative" and "truly creative" work. Who gets to decide what is "truly creative" vs. merely "creative".
We already have "high-crime society" and "low-crime society." What this has to do with overall levels of trust in different parts of the system, say, education, is not immediately clear to me. Do all high crime societies have untrustworthy education systems as well?
> To state the obvious, the difference is "profit".
To make my intention clear, the other difference is "popularity," which exemplifies the precise confusion I was reacting to.
> What's the difference between "creative" and "truly creative" work.
I didn't invoke it. The GP did. I'm willing to admit to whatever their subjective judgement is. I wonder if their connection between trust and "true creativity" is valid regardless of any possible definition. My gambit above was to openly suppose a good faith reason for the difference in my point of view.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/12/01/where-mos...
I don't know of any real-world society that would be very high-trust in one regard (say, keeping their doors unlocked), but very low-trust in another (say, routinely poisoning their spices with lead to make them look more appealing - yes, this happens [0]).
[0] https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/11/02/how-to-stop-tur...
I think there must be a better label for the process that is destroying scientific and creative institutions.
It's true that the more you are afraid of expressing yourself, the worse your "performance" is going to be.
On general work level it's different.
There the trust needs to be balanced.
People should feel free to express themselves, but also that they need to meet some certain standards of quality at work.
Otherwise we may tend to relax too much and become sloppy in certain areas.
I don’t know about “high trust”, but I can say with confidence that the “make more mistakes” thesis misses a critical point: evolutionary winnowing isn’t so great if you’re one of the thousands of “adjacent” organisms that didn’t survive. Which, statistically, you will be. And the people who are trusted with resources and squander them without results will be less trusted in the future [1].
Point being, mistakes always have a cost, and while it can be smart to try to minimize that cost in certain scenarios (amateur painting), it can be a terrible idea in other contexts (open-heart surgery). Pick your optimization algorithm wisely.
What you’re characterizing as “low trust” is, in most cases, a system that isn’t trying to optimize for creativity, and that’s fine. You don’t want your bank to be “creative” with accounting, for example.
[1] Sort of. Unfortunately, humans gonna monkey, and the high-status monkeys get a lot of unfair credit for past successes, to the point of completely disregarding the true quality of their current work. So you see people who have lost literally billions of dollars in comically incompetent entrepreneurial disasters, only to be able to run out a year later and raise hundreds of millions more for a random idea.
My observation is that people share incredibly creative work all the time in all different sorts of societies. Humans are inherently creative beings, and we almost always find a way. Certainly a person needs _some_ resources (time, most importantly) in order to work creatively, but confidence in one’s abilities can and does regularly get the better of fear (e.g. that which can emerge from observation, measurement, hierarchies, etc.).
I can think of countless artists—writers, musicians, visual artists—who have succeeded in both doing & sharing “truly creative work” (however that’s defined) in the face of “success” & all of its concomitant challenges.
Fear of observation is highly correlated with neuroticism. Creativity, on the other hand, is a component of openness which is highly correlated with intelligence. The most creative people are those who measure both high intelligence and low neuroticism, which simultaneously are the people least concerned by impacts of increased observation.
Furthermore, high trust social environments only contribute to the degree of disclosure, not creativity. In low trust social environments creative people remain equally creative but either do not openly expose their creative output or do so secretly for subversive purposes.
In my experience that isn't the complete picture. I have met highly creative people who are extremely (unhealthy so) concerned with what others think, yet go their own path anyways. It is true that creative people often tend to do things in a way that appears as if it is outside of the frame of normal parameters. But this isn't so simple either, because maybe it is context dependent. A punk musician may live in disregard of the aesthetical conventions of society, but they also may have a traded canon of styles and works their own subculture. So maybe that punk doesn't care what society thinks about them, but they may care about what other punks think.
My experience with hundreds of art students is that there is no correlation between how independent someone works and how creative their output is. There are many ways of producing interesting ideas and the lone (usually: male) genius being the only true way is by this point a well-refuted idea.
I was also once an art student myself. Creativity extends far beyond individual contributions, which becomes evident in resource and personnel management. Creativity is highly correlated to openness, as is intelligence, and is least restricted by those who are most eager to exercise decisions and try new things without fear of consequence, whether real or perceived.
https://historycollection.com/16-examples-of-the-madness-of-... https://www.science.org/content/article/origin-darwins-anxie...
Can't vouch for the accuracy of these descriptions but they don't suggest lack of neuroticism however brought on. Bodily dysfunction of whatever kind can be causative of course.
I never claimed otherwise. You have invented your own strawman to attack.
To restate your argument: openness is correlated to creativity (not controversial) and being neurotic dampens that because you care a lot what people think (no evidence).
There is no correlation between neuroticism and creativity. Neuroticism doesn't effect openness so it makes no sense. Either your argument is that neuroticism influences openness and that influences creativity or your argument is I just think neuroticism makes you less creative because I just think so. You might as well not even mention the Big 5 because it doesn't effect your last point.
In order to better understand what neuroticism really is and how it really works I suggest reading about the amygdala, gaba, fear impressions, and looping. The less a person is so restricted the more free they are to universally experiment, consider alternatives, and act. That is generally how people perceive creativity.
Lots of amazing artists, creators and researchers are obviously highly neurotic.
Firstly, in the Big five model, which you seem to be referencing, openness and neuroticism are separate factors- Low neuroticism isn't correlated with high openness. Yes, since neuroticism is a negative trait, one would expect people low in neuroticism to do better than people who are high in neuroticism. This does not equate to "the most creative people" though.
Secondly, I'd push back that people low in neuroticism would be "least concerned by" surveillance. While strictly technically true, that's not a helpful framing, as it seemingly implies surveillance would have a negligible negative impact for people low in neuroticism. If that's what you're implying, I'd like to see references.
I'm not able to comment at all on the conclusing about "degree of disclosure" being moderated by trust level in social environment, especially how "creative people remain equally creative but do not openly expose their creative output". If true, this implies that trust in society doesn't impact primary (unshared) creative output at all- that's a very strong claim in my opinion. I'd very much like references on this.
I never claimed this and I have no idea why you would think I did.
What I do know is that nearly 1 in 3 JavaScript developers, based upon large anonymous polls, self identify as autistic. If that is representative of software employment as a whole then software employment is full of self-indulgent and highly neurotic people at levels far exceeding the outside population. Everybody wants to think they are more awesome, creative, and highly intelligent compared to everybody else, but that is numerically irrational.
Low neurotic people are generally less scared of just about everything including third party observation. Less fear and less anxiety is the very definition of low neuroticism.
You did claim this.
> self identify as autistic. (...) then software employment is full of self-indulgent and highly neurotic people
This is hateful and wrong. Autistic people aren't necessarily self indulgent, and not self evidently neurotic, though it happens to be the case that autistic people have a higher incidence of neuroticism, which is partially due to people describing them, for example, as "self indulgent".
You've shifted your claims, you're not supporting your claims by either argument or reference, and you've added hateful rhetoric. This is very regrettable.
And yes, many autistic people, though not all, are exceptionally self-indulgent, which just literally means self-preference. Its a problem of less developed introspection which parallels a less developed interpretation of social intelligence.
I have not shifted my claims. I originally said people with fear of observation, a trait of high neuroticism, is a major constraint of many things including creativity. I also said creativity is an aspect of high openness, which is closely correlated to high intelligence. I never said neuroticism is in any correlated, either positively or negatively, to either openness or intelligence. I think you have trouble with bias, as in you want statements to imply something not stated.
That's why many universities declare in their charter that research doesn't have to be practical. The practicality of RSA asymmetric encryption only became practical with the advent of the internet ;)
No, universities do that because it's limiting to only focus on practical science, not because scientists are afraid to fail. Theoretical breakthroughs often find their use in practice with time.
Fear of failure is because we only put money on success, so researchers' livelihood, dignity and prestige depend on their research bearing fruit.
This has just as much chilling effect. At the very least it's gatekeeping.
But actually I don't think pressure and tracking are inextricably linked. The culture of experimentation is what is important. You can have metrics that can guide you with the understanding that they should not be prescriptive.
Just to be totally clear, here is an example. Please cover up my user name for an authentic experience.
A dozen, a gross, and a score, Plus three times the square root of four, Divided by seven, Plus five times eleven, Is nine squared, and not a bit more.
He who writes on bathroom walls
rolls their shit in little balls.
He who reads these lines of whit
eats these little balls of shit.No, not really. Broadly, it's not "measurements, metrics and surveillance" that kill creativity, it's the inability to make reasonable thresholds for failure. If the threshold is too low, one might never be able to get the critical mass of resources they need to achieve their task. If it's set too high, people will milk resources even when they have no creativity left to give to an unsolved problem.
Or, to save your eyes, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let's_Paint_TV
For more than 20 years, Mr. Let’s Paint TV (artist John Kilduff) has encouraged viewers to “EMBRACE FAILARE”—charitably put, to pass through the valley of incompetence as it’s the only path to the slopes of mastery. Just do the thing.
I couldn’t agree more with that impulse and TFA’s: the common trait that cuts across all the most impressive people I know—from artists to businesspeople to scientists to engineers to even leaders-of-organizations—is a cheerful unselfconsciousness, a humility, a willful simplicity—a willingness to put it out there while it’s raw and stupid and unformed, and hone it through practice with the people around them.
A taste:
Instructions unclear. Have pushed secrets to github. When will slope to mastery commence?
Impostor Syndrome (noun), pathologic avoidance of identifying mediocrity in oneself, e.g. "I'm not mediocre, I just have impostor syndrome!"
It has a great story (allegory) about a pottery class, which was shared here in the past. Six sentences. Worth a read:
Young people aren't doing things without worrying about looking stupid, they just don't know that they look stupid. I say that as a former young person who was way more naive than I thought I was at the time. This is good and bad.
Also I think this point ignores that as people grow in their careers they often become more highly leveraged. I've moved from writing code to coaching others who write code. It is very normal for much of the "important" stuff to be done by relatively young people, but this understates the influence from more experienced people.
input(“ask me any question”)
print(“I don’t know”)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Anonymous_-_Diogenes...
Real subject matter experts are generally very clear about where their expertise ends. Less experienced people, not so much.
Also also they tend to be less financially "tethered" for want of a better word - mortgages, families, children, etc. - which makes it easier for them to be risky (consciously or not) about what/who/where they work on/with.
Probably not likely to be jumping from your stable 9/5 to a startup when you've got your semi-detached with 4 kids.
That alone would save so much trouble. We, particularly bad workplaces, have a real fear of not knowing so much so that being confidently wrong is a better position in the whole game.
If you can find internal (rather than external) reasons to trust/believe in your own intelligence and capabilities, it makes it easier to be willing to look foolish. Also, a lack of knowledge/ability in a new area (or even a familiar area) is not a sign of a lack of capability. There's a difference between being a novice and being an idiot. So long as your source of intellectual self-confidence is strong enough (say, you have made great intellectual achievements in some other area of your life unrelated to the thing you're struggling with right now) its irrelevant if other people think you the fool: they're simply mistaken, and that's no skin off your back.
(posted many times, this has biggest comment section)
What's much, much harder is being willing to look stupid in front of people who have an interest in proving your competence (e.g. a manager or a customer) or who would be willing to hold it against you in the future (competitors, and jellyfish probably).
Being OK with taking a personal knock by asking a question that might set you back but that moves everyone else forward is a superpower. If you can build enough resilience to be the person in the room who asks the question everyone else is probably wondering about, even if it makes you look bad, eventually leads to becoming a useful person to have around. That should always be the goal.
Let's say there is something I need to do at work. I could read docs in the company internal site. I could read the code. Maybe the thing I need to do is figure out why a test is failing. It's possible it's failing because there's a bug in the code. It's possible it's failing because there is a bug in the test. It's possible it's failing because there's a bug in the CI/CQ. It's possible it's failing because some other dependency changed something.
The question is, when do I keep digging on my own vs ask for guidance and how much guidance? I never have a good feeling for that. I kind of wish the guidance was offered or encouraged as "I know you're not familiar with this stuff so let me walk you through this issue and then hopefully you can do it on your own the next time". But, I never know. I feel compelled to try to work it out on my own. Some of that is ego, like I can't do it on my own I must not be as good as others on my team. But I have no idea how much they asked vs figured out.
A few times when I do get guidance it's not enough. the person giving it isn't aware of all the hidden knowledge that's helping them figure out the issue and therefore doesn't pass it on.
Part of it is what you mentioned, as well as the fact that I sometimes feel bad for "wasting" a much more productive engineer's time.
Also interns can differ a lot. They can need different levels of guidance and can come with widely different levels of prior experience, even in unrelated debugging and troubleshooting like fixing network ports for LAN gaming or whatever kids these days might be doing. Setting up VPN to evade geoblocking or whatever. Others may have no idea what to even do. And those who can do it may take widely different time.
I think an internship is, in fact, a good place to learn these meta-lessons too. You ask for some guidance, then you see it was maybe too much. Another time you don't and spend a lot of time, and have your supervising engineer say "oh I could have told you XYZ very quickly", then you update and recalibrate. There is no single short message that can convey this. That's why experience is valuable.
For an intern or new grad whose information gathering skills likely have gaps they don't even know about, I'll tell them to come check with me if they're completely blocked and haven't made progress for an hour, as it's frequently a small pointer or hint from me that can get them back on track. As they get more more knowledge about the systems and experience unblocking themselves, this grows to half a day, a day, and more from there.
The same applies even for experienced engineers who are new to the team, though the timeboxes grow much faster. There will always be little things to learn, and there's no point burning a day of chasing threads if it's some quirk in the system you just happen to not be aware of.
"The emperor has no clothes" is a much deeper story about society and human nature than people realize.
Clearly not true, lots of original things that instead looks like "Ah yeah, obviously, duh!" once they're public, rather than looking stupid. Browsers/WWW, the iPhone and putting wheels on suitcases are things that come into mind that the amount of people thought "looked stupid" was very low, and they became very popular relatively quickly.
So what in your mind has ever been "truly original" then that someone couldn't argue is just "incremental improvements" instead?
> People shill Apple products even when they suck.
I agree, but don't think I'm doing so myself here.
Creativity at the deepest level is seeing the cultural slope you're doing gradient descent on, and taking a hard left through the trees to a hidden slope that's way better rather than the one you were on.
I like Van Gogh as an example because of how hard he failed and the cultural U-turn, but hostility towards things that challenge the entrenched paradigm is a common response. Maybe Einstein and relativity is a more relevant example for you. People didn't read it at first and nod their heads, thinking to themselves "yes, of course!"
like, it was such a joke at first but then it just became the "new normal"
I'd understand if your phone lacks a headphone jack, though.
They would be like Sir, Hey put that huge dick away you're scaring people
There would be a different lesson, is all I'm saying
And that can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, a lot of ideas put forward by successful companies and business people (like many from Apple or Google or Nintendo or whatever else) would never get off the ground if put forward by a random individual or company, and that risk taking gets us results that make the world better off.
At the same time though, there are a lot of successful people and companies that get hung up on 'bad' ideas that should have been shot down earlier. Like ex Nobel Prize winners that get into psudeoscience or grand overarching theories of everything, popular artists and creators that get away with shaky writing and uninteresting story concepts (George Lucas and the Star Wars prequels, JK Rowling after Harry Potter, etc) or any number of celebrities and politicians completely detached from reality.
So, there is a flipside to the article. Yeah, success can make you less likely to try stupid things because of your ego, but it can equally make you more likely to try them since your status gives you extra credibility and there's often no one there to tell you no.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47324054
https://medium.com/@acidflask/this-guys-arrogance-takes-your...
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/E...
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD638...
https://www.cs.umd.edu/~gasarch/BLOGPAPERS/social.pdf
https://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2021/06/i-went-to-d...
https://6826.csail.mit.edu/2020/papers/noproof.pdf
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9948767
Now I have no illusions about who looked stupid and who were stupid. It really doesn’t matter.
The jury is still out.
Could you expand on what you mean?
The reality is different.
I see this with students all the time: they're so afraid of making mistakes that they refuse to write anything.
I often say "I think in print." If I believe something is true and I can defend it, I publish it. If it turns out to be wrong, fine, I'll correct it in the next paper and the conversation has moved forward. Nobody is going to think I'm an idiot for being wrong.
This, however, might work better the more senior one is. There may be a failure mode, at least in academia, where you start publishing mistakes and lose all credibility. But then again, I know a lot of people who have published a lot of mistakes starting young and who seem to still be doing fine, so... perhaps not!
Ira Glass has a nice quote which is worth printing out and hanging on your wall
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work.
Or if you're into design thinking, the Cult-of-Done[1] was a decade ago.
[1] - https://medium.com/@bre/the-cult-of-done-manifesto-724ca1c2f...
Either way, not being afraid to look dumb keeps the juices flowing. And keeps the conversation going. Or sometimes it starts the conversation that nobody else is willing to start.
But I was reminded immediately of this Dan Luu post with the same title.
Once you have a mortgage, a reputation to maintain, an image of competence to uphold at work, you pretty much can't afford to look stupid in my opinion.
The power of saying, "I don't know, but I will find out" is underestimated.
I've observed this behavior at work. It doesn't present itself only as not sharing. People with recognition and political leverage can share wrong ideas confidently, and others will naturally follow them. If they're challenged on that idea, and even presented evidence that it's wrong, they often push back and double down on it, or don't acknowledge the correction at all.
I think this is more detrimental to the team and organization than the fear of sharing the wrong idea. For some reason, some senior people will do anything to avoid losing face in public, yet they still seek recognition for their work.
On the other hand, it is a real pleasure to work with senior people who can acknowledge their mistakes, are willing to learn from them, and course correct if needed. It shows maturity and humility, and sets a good example for others, which is exactly what good leaders should do.
That’s always been one of my strengths. I used to ask questions in classes, that would have the teacher look at me, like I was a dunce, and the rest of the students in stitches. It has always been important for me to completely understand whatever I’m learning. I can’t deal with “God said it, I believe it, and that settles it.” I have to really know why; not just what.
By the end of the class, the other students would be asking me for help, and no one was laughing at me. I tended to get good grades.
The worst teacher that I ever had, was a genius mathematician, who shut me down, when I did that. It was the only incomplete that I ever had. The best teachers would wince, but treat the question as a serious one.
One of the really nice things about using an LLM, is not having to deal with sneering.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2014/10/20/169899/isaac-asi...
Neutral drift is perhaps the most important part of evolution. It's how you preserve diversity over time and avoid getting stuck in holes in the fitness landscape.
If we only ever made steps that improved performance we'd inevitably see premature convergence. The neutral drift can overpower progress toward a global minimum, but it's a lot better to be going in circles than to not be moving at all. Diversity collapse is the worst thing that can happen to an evolutionary algorithm. You must reject superior solutions with some probability in order to make it to the next step. You can always change your selection pressure. You can't fix information that doesn't exist anymore.
Assuming there’s no Deity or similar outside power seeding the initial system with information that can only be lost and never gained, then any information in the evolutionary system got there by some process that happened once, and presumably can happen again and fix (rediscover) the lost information?
Essentially, if you take scientific ideas, including Nobel Prize ideas, and put them all on a bell curve of how difficult it is to find them, you wouldn't expect the same person to have multiple ideas all the way on the right, even if they are very above average.
I suppose the corporate culture thinking is exactly opposite to this with metrics like efficiency, productivity etc. You cannot afford to try a lot and look stupider.
I was on an interview panel for a role and a guy lost out on the role because about 18 months prior, he had asked too many questions one time and because of that the PM thought he struggled to grasp concepts.
One meeting did in his promo.
Although true, I feel it's worth adding here that the problem is that PM. While looking stupid by asking questions can "do you in" when working with incompetent managers like that, I'd argue that most managers will look at results -- and asking dumb questions can lead to much better results compared to just staying quiet and hoping for the best.
"Looking stupid" is not the same as "being stupid." It could be very smart indeed, depending on your circumstances, to learn an additional language, and the point being made is that when going out in public and speaking it in front of native speakers, ridicule is not unexpected, and should be embraced.
"Good morning. Tickets destination Grossetto, please. Two adults, one child. Six years. Yes, return. Card acceptable? Thank you."
Whey you are young and inexperienced, you don't know enough to know somethig is a "bad" idea.
When you are older and experienced, you've seen a lot of bad ideas and you worry about it because you don't want to look bad among your peers.
When you are much older, you don't give a shit. You know that none of it really matters and when you are dead nobody is going to be talking about all the bad ideas you had.
“Looking stupid” has an obvious downside. Just restate it as “proven incompetent.” If you are proven incompetent within your social group, you lose your power. Loss of power has terrible consequences! Duh!
When someone blames fragile ego, which is equivalent to saying “fear of losing self-respect” but ignores “being ostracized from access to resources and influence by people you depend upon and respect” I might conclude that I should ignore what that person thinks, because maybe they have a thinking impairment. (See how that works?)
Young people are not trying things because they are fearless, nor do they have bullet-proof egos, they are trying things because they really are stupid (in a gentle manner of speaking). They don’t know as much as they will know. Also, they know they have no social status and they must take risks to prove themselves.
Finally, they do it because they have nothing else to do and nothing else to protect.
We would need to compare career trajectories of productive scientists who did, and didn't, receive that class of recognition, see whether this disruption changed a person's ability to function.
But if a Nobel prematurely blunts a person's productivity, that might sometimes turn out to be a good thing. Consider António Egas Moniz, whose career seems to have withered after his 1949 Nobel. Such a shame, really -- Moniz invented the Lobotomy, eventually applied to roughly 40,000 unruly, hard-to-manage mental patients, many of whom became quite docile, assuming they lived through the procedure.
Without Moniz' Nobel, who knows what might have happened? What might Moniz have created, had the world not thanked him so profusely for his breakthrough procedure?
Why do we have to be great all the time? Who is telling us to be best? And i know that in writing this i am pruning myself again trying to find the best words here.
Imagine that: i want enough points for karma to be able to post here my greatest idea. Which ironically enough, is the best greatest idea i had in a loooong time, and the moment i want to share it i must wait to be found good enough and worth to be heard.
I guess the only thing we can do is to disconnect our feeling of self worth from outside signals and be happy with the little things that made us smile when we did not know nor care about other peoples opinions.
I’m starting to suspect that it’s making it more difficult for me to land a job though. I don’t know. There’s something about it. It’s almost as if businesses aren’t hiring human beings, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.
This foundational premise seems flawed. Surely there are pressures but it's a privilege hypothesis used to write the piece so the objection is important.
Once you achieve notoriety the world changes around you. Not only that but by the time achieve notoriety the world already changed around you. The lead time to novel prize is high.
Just to be concrete about one way the world changes is that you're no longer a great student with time to while away. Now everybody wants to congratulate you and learn your theory from you. They won't leave you the f** alone. When you were just some random promising grad student, you had mental quiet and peace. Academia, industries, responsibilities, they take that away.
And let's be fair, if you've done Nobel worthy work, then you've contributed enough that you deserve to just slack off and be left in peace for the rest of your life.
- Could be the opposite, the fact that a lot of what is AI-generated is well polished, at least on a surface - your raw input is distinguishable as a human and rated higher by yourself or others
- Could be the motivation to try to keep internet human-made even if it seems like a lost fight
- Could be the fact that people overall take less effort to write things as you can always polish it up with AI - some decide not to do that and still post it - you feel safer doing the same
Middle age people don't care what others think of them.
Old people know nobody thinks about them.
I am definitely positioning myself in this category, even here in HN discussions, I prefer to do so rather than overthinking and undersharing. The reason was because few years ago I had an interview, and the company saw my portfolio and the work I did and they were overhyped about having me, they gave me 5 stars service to get me to the company HQ for the interview, but in real life I am too humble and not much of an over seller of myself, so the bar they had about me was waaay higher than how I was IRL, and got rejected haha, it was brutal rejection because I really wanted to work there and they evaluated me based on the few hours interaction rather than what I am able to do. Since then I try to keep the bar low early on and take it from there.
I like to think that my blog is mostly for my daughter to read and think to herself “oh that’s who dad was”. And secondarily for AI. That helps.
That is as true of literature as of science. It is not just some curse, but rather because they tend to get recognised after their peak anyway.
I disagree with this, at least in how it regards ego as pointless.
Humans are tuned to win a delicate social competition by becoming popular and therefore having a bunch of kids with other popular (and therefore reproductively successful) people. The most plausible explanation is that our ancestors have been through millions of years of evolutionary selection to try to become the most popular in a social group by taking risks, but then cease all risk-taking and guard their position after they get there.
Ego is the mechanism by which this happens, but it's there for a reason. Social status is really, really important - if you don't buy the evolutionary reasons, it's still important for basic human connection. We haven't always lived in societies which are so open to failure, experimentation, or looking stupid.
Also finding a partner is mostly about being silly with each other. So looking a bit stupid is a plus there and had no issues about it on that front
Personally I dislike people who never say stupid things, because they are focusing too much on appearances and too little on trying to figure things out.
The story does not appear to define smart as "not looking stupid", rather something more towards "mastered the creative process".
There is only so much time in the day. An hour spent in interaction where you might look stupid is an hour not spent directly working on your craft. The most plausible explanation is that those who don't want to look stupid turn towards becoming smart as the escape. As in, a tendency to use time spent alone locked up in a room learning how to use a new tool instead of galavanting at an art show is what makes them become smart.
I'll leave it at that because I don't want to write a novel. But when I look at your description, I don't see any plausibility at all. I only see projections. Like in The Flintstones or in old movies about Stone Age people, who have strangely short haircuts and go hunting the way people go to work today. What I mean is: the social dynamics you're assuming here may be primarily shaped by your experiences in the present and are far from as universal as you believe.
I take your point, and I too get triggered when people invoke mate selection and dopamine. I could be with you in being skeptical about that specific angle... but absolutely if you look at lawless or less institutionalized cultures, there is a trend towards appearing strong/tough and hiding any weaknesses
BTW, the Flintstones is just The Honeymooners without Jackie Gleason. One could also argue that Family Guy and The Simpsons are also reboots of The Honeymooners.
> who have strangely short haircuts and go hunting the way people go to work today
"They're the modern stone age family" are the words in the Flintstones' theme song.
You can’t hide your limitations anyway. I know people who have a hard time thinking logically and critically. They often do and say things that strike me as rather thoughtless or impulsive. They often think and speak in clichés, relying more on emotion than facts, mostly opportunistically, and never in a complex way. I don’t think such people are capable of reflecting on their own limitations. And I suspect that my own limitations are just as transparent to a superior intellect. Assuming that the inductive step I'm using here is even valid.
That’s why I don’t get this perspective. It sounds as if using more foreign words or wearing a button-down shirt or something like that would somehow hide stupidity. But that’s not the case. To pick up on your quote again: For me, it’s more of a red flag when I notice that someone is making a special effort to come across as smarter than they actually are. To a certain extent, we’re all stupid. We should use the resources we have to get along together in life and in the world, instead of engaging in a dick-measuring contest.
Bullying, in the workplace and outside it, is a real-life example of the consequences of looking stupid if you don't have supportive people around you. Workplace bullying is a real phenomenon and surprisingly prevalent[0], even though it's never happened to me.
Do you agree that someone experiencing workplace bullying would be worried about looking stupid? And do you think that someone who wasn't directly affected by it might still change their behaviour to avoid it?
[0] See e.g. https://www.safeworkaustralia.gov.au/system/files/documents/...
Frankly, I have no idea how to explain it in words, but when you’re in a setting where everyone knows they’re good at their own thing, but also know the others are also exceptional at their thing, this game goes away. Like it actually becomes the opposite. Everyone calls themselves stupid, become more cordial, and things get fun. Trying to not to look stupid signals negative status, or whatever you call it.
It’s very funny to write this out, because I’ve never thought about it on purpose. Everything has just felt natural at the time of the event.
You dont want to do dumb things that might get you in jail and have rveryone shun you.
But should u be so afraid of brusing your ego that you shy away from: starting a business (if u have the financial means), asking someone out, publishing something in public, etc
Sometimes evolution overshoots, esp when our environment changes
In my case, and I suppose this holds true for others, too, the "fiercest" competition is with one's inner-self or, at the very most, with past/dead/way-out-of-line-of-sight "competitors" that have nothing to do with current society and its recognition. I know that this "competing against one-self" sounds trite, but, again, this is how things are for some of us.
Of course you still have to take the plunge no matter how small.
It's a well known creative / brainstorming trick that the best way to have a lot of good ideas is to have a lot of ideas.
Focus on genesis decoupled from critique, then critique later.
So personally I prefer to frame these things that way - it's not that we should want to look foolish for its own sake (obviously), it's that part of getting anywhere in life is taking some risks and developing your threshold for doing so.
I would not agree that that earlier version had necessarily more courage. If no one cared than the associated risk is also lower, and thus less courage needed.
I overall agree with how important the courage to do stuff that might make you look stupid is, though.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshin [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-mind
“He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes. He who does not know and does not ask remains a fool forever.”
Becoming proficient enough in my professional life such that I no longer felt anxiety about admitting what I did not know through asking questions was a massive achievement. Fortunately, I learned that lesson well and started applying it everywhere, not just in my work.
I once had an awful manager (a terrible human being overall) who wanted to censure people for their questions; I'm pretty sure he was trying to hide his insecurities and was actually in panic that his project decisions would be revised.
So I really don't want that kind of environment where I work.
PS. And that is the exact phrase I often use.
If you want to hear more I wrote a small post.
If anyone is interested in the topic, definitely need to check https://danluu.com/look-stupid/.
It also makes me think of certain people that attain the level of fame where everything they do is praised, whether it is objectively good or not.
Or is it like "I'll know it when it see it" smut?
Before LLMs I would never think that what I have to say is valuable in any way. Now I realize my every comment, my every human input to the global internet and society is infinitely more valuable than ai slop.
This has really given me a jolt I needed and confidence to freely voice anything anywhere knowing that I make a difference against the flood of auto generated soulless garbage.
Flaws in human writing aren’t an issue, they are the very feature I look for. These exaggerations, hyperboles, emotions. It’s all unmistakably human.
Even 4chan is an oasis of humanity in that way. Indeed it is bristling with genuine creativity despite its sole ingredient is 100% human flaws. No preservatives, no artificial sweeteners.
Holy shit I really wrote it quite fun, I encourage everyone to do the same have some fun writing because each one of us is now highly valued artist in a flood of ai slop literally no matter what you type I want to read your flawed shit.
I'm human so I'm certainly not immune to social anxiety or embarrassment from looking stupid, but I have been trying to do a manual override that for the last year.
Something it took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize is that the first draft of nearly everything I do is bad. The first draft of my code is usually bad, the first draft of an essay I write is usually bad, the first version of something I draw is usually bad. If I don't allow myself to look stupid, even if only for the first draft of something, then I'll never accomplish anything. Doing something crappy is a means to doing something not-crappy.
I don't think I'm alone with this. There appears to be some ambiguity on who actually first said this, but there's an adage of "There's no great writing, only good rewriting".
This seems oversimplified, since there's a second, unmentioned possibility that somebody doesn't share an idea:
In a capitalist society, people sense there could be monetary potential with their idea, so they sit on it quietly (often never getting around to developing it, etc).
This fear has been amplified in recent years with AI vacuuming up everybody's intellectual property with zero reward. Can't really blame people for doing nothing in such conditions.
And for the commenters complaining about "low/high trust societies," they ought to consider factoring the above into their definition.
It's a superpower.
Look like an idiot and you'll learn the fastest!
I just feel that having fun doing what you're (becoming) good at should never be ruined by extra pressure from other people or even from yourself.
However had, at any level, people may look stupid for doing something that was not clever. I don't think even very smart people are 100% of the time very clever.
Being able to think this (and really feel it) was a big step for me. I think objectively I was always quite smart and also highly educated but I still felt like an imposter. It's nice when you finally feel that trust in yourself. And indeed I probably sometimes look stupid, but I think I often come back quickly in smart ways afterwards anyway, so I don't care so much about it.
Saying something like Claude is over rated as a general llm because of loftly guardrails will get downvotes today but seen as insightful down the road. You can be too early or late.
Take Tailwinds. Is it loved or hated now? We went through different phases.
The worst ones are the teams where members treat everyone as stupid
The absolute best will generate a creative discussion around a “stupid” question.
The absolute worst will deliberately mislead collegues to make them look stupid.
"Loosening up" is a way to describe this skill.
It reminds me of a story from Richard Feynman. In his book, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, he recalls an art class when he was instructed to draw without looking at the paper. The first time he did it, his pencil broke at the very beginning and he had nothing but impressions in his paper.
The second time he did it, he was impressed with the results, noticing a “funny, semi-Picasso like strength” in his work.
He knew that it would be impossible to draw well without looking at the paper, so he didn’t consciously try. He writes, “I had thought that ‘loosen up’ meant ‘make sloppy drawings,’ but it really meant to relax and not worry about how the drawing is going to come out.”
Being allowed to fail is a condition for your mind to want to try new ideas. I elaborate on this here in my book, Creative Doing: https://www.holloway.com/g/creative-doing/sections/relinquis...
There is a lot I like about this post, including the author's intuition to invoke the jellyfish.
A lion’s mane jellyfish can release up to 45,000 eggs per day. The jellyfish’s strategy is to lay as many eggs as possible and leave them to fend for themselves. Most of these eggs don’t survive, probably fewer than 0.1%.
Compare this with an elephant, which can only give birth to one calf at a time. The elephant’s strategy is to dedicate its effort into raising a relatively small number of calves. Many of these calves survive to see adulthood. This approach might sound familiar because it’s how we raise our kids as well.
If you're feeling stuck, and unwilling to look stupid, maybe it's time to approach your creative ideas less like an elephant and more like a jellyfish. I write more about this here: https://herbertlui.net/the-jellyfish-knows-how-to-survive-un...
The advantage to writing a blog, nowadays, is because your writing will be so difficult hard to discover, you can put all your ideas out there—good and bad—and only become known for the good ones. (That's what I'm hoping to do!)
In other words, "Publish everything, promote selectively" (Elaborated on this here: https://herbertlui.net/publish-everything-promote-selectivel...)
> Said one park ranger, "There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists."
Bears are the same thing as bulls. Just the opposite.
You can look like a degenerate wallstreetbets gambler, being a bull, buying puts.
You can equally look like a degenerate wallstreetbets gambler, being a gay bear, shorting the stock.
The "beauty" of our modern stock market, is it provides both sides the avenue to lose stupid amounts of money.
The problem with this article is that you're telling yourself you're not afraid of stupidity, which in this case is synonymous to incompetence or uselessness, yet your endgoal betrays otherwise. You're presenting a bunch of ideas that are 'useless' hoping amongst them is one of more use, hoping it all ties together and produces a wonderful result, as you get to yell "eureka". You do not want to accept uselessness, but to set your expectations of yourself, that either you or another person or persons have imposed, lower, back to where they once were. Or even lower. The reason your or another's expectations of you have risen after becoming older, as many comments have also wrote, is because your effort is being externally recognized by others, either by a Nobel price or a promotion. Regardless, your issue is self-esteem related. To combat lower(ing) self-esteem or insecurity, (and even accept uselessness!), you must love yourself.
Now a question: have you ever loved someone you didn't know at all? I don't mean in the physical sort of attraction, I mean someone that you knew nothing about whatsoever, not even how they look or act. It's impossible, isn't it? It is those we know the best that we feel love for, is it not? Now consider what the opposite of insecurity is. Security in one’s abilities and self, knowledge of one's limits as well as one's capabilities, and an acceptance of who one is. The more one grows, the more they change, so it is possible to know oneself and then not, as it is also possible the view others have make one to muddle their own perception. You won't find confident people who aren't aware of their own abilities or cannot accurately access what tools they have at their disposal. Confidence in abilities one doesn't have is not confidence, but overconfidence, and overconfidence is false confidence, which is as maladaptive as insecurity. I'll focus on those with low self esteem, because you fall into that category; these people are aware of their shortcomings or their potential shortcomings, their 'uselessness', because the higher you are the easier it is to fall, perhaps even inflate how many shortcomings they have. When you accept your "uselessness" you may produce some bad ideas, a few good ones, but in the end the fact that you're ok with it it makes you feel less distress about yourself, does it not?
Tie these together; you cannot love someone you do not know, and people who love themselves know their limits and what they can achieve, to be insecure is to misjudge your achievements, so because of this I assume, could be wrong, you do not love yourself enough. And watch, I said "enough", because knowing oneself completely is impossible. Similar to how reaching the truth is impossible, but becoming less wrong isn't.
Now uselessness. No one likes being bad at something; even babies are afraid of failure. I do not remember my time as a baby, but I remember being frustrated when I couldn't do certain things, like reaching a high place, as a toddler. Perhaps one of the reasons babies cry is because they cannot move their legs by their will. "Uselessness" can be overcome, but sometimes one may be actually useless and never learn how to walk. Does it sting, being called useless? I don't mean it as an insult here. I am using the literal definition of the word; complete inability to do something, rather than partial/subpar. It stings because it has been instilled on one that incompetence is negative, and thus something that should not be a part of you, a flaw needing purification. But if incompetence didn't exist, neither would competence, similarly to how life wouldn't be valuable without death or happiness without sadness.
However I like the gist and the thought behind this article.
Overall, I think acceptance that one might be unable to do certain things, can make one's life easier. The bad ideas you produce are as much of a part of you as your good ones. And accepting both is crucial.
It tells me immediately up front if they’re a retard in competition with me or a retard I can work with.