Willingness to look stupid

It is sort of funny to think of Nobel prize level work in relation to blogposting. A couple of examples that don't conform: Marie Curie won another prize. Josephson in general (check him out). Feynman did greatly contribute to other fields after his prize. You can find as many counterexamples as examples if you dig a bit. I've witnessed a few times that looking like an idiot is the least of their concern.

Lliora 6 hours ago||

The most valuable debugging skill I learned in 15 years: asking "dumb" questions out loud. Last month I spent 3 hours chasing a race condition that disappeared the moment I explained the code to a junior dev who asked "why are we using a global here?" The willingness to look stupid just saved us from shipping a critical bug.

MoltenMan 3 hours ago||

While I don't necessarily disagree with this, I also wonder how much his 'data' about Nobel Prize winners and Institute of Princeton grads actually holds up vs how much of it is just very expected regression to the mean. He talks about Shannon; at some point Shannon was always going to have his last great idea. Given that the idea that made him famous was his greatest, you wouldn't expect many other ideas like that just from normal variation.

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.

SoftTalker 5 hours ago||

I see it as more of a function of age/experience.

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.

mygooch 4 hours ago|

People in their 20s care way too much about reputation and ego - as did I when I was in my 20s. So much that it's paralyzing. It will prevent them from saying or doing the things they really need to say and do.

kalimatas 8 hours ago||

On top of fear of looking stupid, my bigger concern is lack of novelty in my work. Seems like any idea I have for a blog post or book, or any photo I'm planning has already been explored in depths by someone else. I know the joy is in the process mostly, not the result. But doing something while knowing it is certainly not original make it really hard.

t43562 7 hours ago||

It probably has. It's super difficult to be truly unique in a world where billions have learned to read and write. It doesn't matter however. The people who see your work haven't seen/read everything out there. You can be unique for them.

Lalabadie 7 hours ago||

You shouldn't disregard that even when you have the same intent as someone else, you work your way to get there, and that's usually more than enough to build a distinction.

grvdrm 8 hours ago||

Looks like a fresh take on the topic.

But I was reminded immediately of this Dan Luu post with the same title.

https://danluu.com/look-stupid/

CM30 10 hours ago||

Gonna be a bit controversial here, and say that sometimes the opposite can happen. That someone becoming successful can give them the confidence to share ideas they wouldn't have shared otherwise, and give ideas that people would have otherwise written off as 'ridiculous' a level of extra credibility in the process.

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.

tyleo 3 hours ago||

I have a principle similar to this. The First Idiot Principle: never be afraid to be the first idiot in the room. Usually others have the same reservations you do about sharing.

If you want to hear more I wrote a small post.

https://www.tyleo.com/blog/the-first-idiot-principle

mygooch 2 hours ago|

I have no problem being the first, it's that I'm also the ~3rd, ~9th, ~24th and then they realize, wait, he's not a creative genius at all, we hired a total fucking retard!

Just when they give up on you hit em with a masterpiece.

You can roil economies by acting like this.

geocrasher 14 hours ago|

I've never been afraid to share bad ideas because the best way to get to a good one is to go through the bad ones. Sometimes my bad ideas will spark a good idea from somebody else or sometimes it even turns out that my bad idea isn't bad at all and people like it and we end up adopting it.

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.

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