alt Hacker NewsWillingness to look stupid
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If you haven’t had the pleasure of Los Angeles public-access television’s Let’s Paint TV…
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:
> Some of the best research ... has come from surprisingly young people. ... They're not afraid of looking stupid.
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.
This was on a poster in my 8th grade English teacher’s class:
“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.
Successful professor with a very theoretical (as opposed to empirical) research trajectory here: this feels extremely accurate to me.
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!
Plot twist: anything original will look stupid, until some cultural event makes the original thing the new "way," then all the small minds will act like that was the only way the thing should have been done all along.
"The emperor has no clothes" is a much deeper story about society and human nature than people realize.
Willingness to look stupid and intellectual self-confidence are two sides of the same coin.
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.
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.
It's easy to look stupid with no one around (editing your own writing), or with someone you trust deeply (choosing what to put on a cake with a friend), or if you're a jellyfish apparently. Those are spaces with people, or jellyfish, who you trust.
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.
I'm not sure this is the same thing but I waffle between wanting to not look stupid and also not wanting others to think I'm not trying hard enough.
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.
> they just... stop trying
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.
The epiphany for me this week was a long list of rabbit holes from this long post:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Looks like a fresh take on the topic.
But I was reminded immediately of this Dan Luu post with the same title.
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.
A few weeks ago my friend Aadil and I were at Whole Foods buying a birthday cake for a friend. We wanted to write something clever on the cake but couldn’t really think of anything. We stood around thinking for a few minutes before Aadil said "Let's just say a bunch of bad ideas out loud so we can get to the good ones." And it worked!
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.
yep; happened to me, too;
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.
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.
> Just this: are you willing to look stupid today? That’s it. That’s all there is to it.
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.
> The writing isn’t the problem. The problem is that when I’m done, I look at what I just wrote and think this is definitely not good enough to publish.
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...
> The overwhelming majority of mutations end up being harmful or neutral. An exceedingly small fraction are beneficial.
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.
Good advice to the younger folks. You can afford to look stupid. So go ahead and do that thing you wanted to try. There's more acceptance because of your age. You're expected to fail in some ways.
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.
There’s different levels to stupidity as well, coming up with a “bad” idea, writing a very brief prototype of it, and presenting it to a senior for feedback is one level that is typically harmless. Coming up with a “bad” idea, going skunkworks on it and when you think you have something demoing it to many seniors and managers and showing them you’ve been working out of scope for a month on a bad side project that doesn’t work while the rest of the team is burdened in tasks is another much higher level
This reminded me of this essay by Isaac Asimov on creativity
https://www.technologyreview.com/2014/10/20/169899/isaac-asi...
I don’t mind looking stupid. It’s actually an important part of my identity - I lay my humanity bare. I am of flesh after all.
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.
When I seen the title I thought it's https://danluu.com/look-stupid/.
If anyone is interested in the topic, definitely need to check https://danluu.com/look-stupid/.
It's a numbers game in the end. Law of large numbers at play again. The noise drops with more tries.
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.
"The biggest things in life have been achieved by people who, at the start, we would have judged crazy. And yet if they had not had these crazy ideas the world would have been more stupid." - Arsène Wenger
I found it gets easier as you get older. Somehow I care much less what others think
A willingness to look stupid is a core requirement for learning languages. I look stupid everyday.
YES! happens to me all the time in things big and small. At work, at home, with the kids, my wife, and their birthday presents. I once talked to a somewhat famous writer who told me this very thing. He said his worst critic was his inner demon biting him at every thought, every phrase, questioning his wording, waiting for the greatest possible idea, discarding all that was not breathtaking enough.
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.
Young people care what others think of them.
Middle age people don't care what others think of them.
Old people know nobody thinks about them.
This reminds me of "McDonald's Theory": https://jonbell.medium.com/mcdonalds-theory-9216e1c9da7d
> There might be a good reason why smart people want to avoid looking stupid. I’ve spent a long time thinking about what this reason could be. The only plausible explanation is that our egos are fragile, and by not sharing any work at all, we never have to risk our egos being damaged. If we never share anything, then nothing bad can ever happen to us. But the flip side to protecting our egos is that we never end up making anything worthwhile.
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.
Yeah, I'm not sure if it's the prevalence of AI-generated text on the Internet now, but I feel more motivated to just... type stuff out and post it now without giving it too much thought (where previously I would overthink things.) Could be all the Claude Code prompting I've been doing too? Not sure.
The trouble is that no one has a cogent definition of creativity. Without that, how would you even know whether you are being creative or not?
Or is it like "I'll know it when it see it" smut?
I would have loved for the author to cover the 3rd category - people whose ego doesn't let them post anything even before they're known. Everyone in small towns and cities already feels "known" and exposed vs living in big cities like NYC.
I like this post, and reality is of course more nuanced. You can read it between the lines of this article as well: by taking smaller more frquent steps (posting more regularly in context of the article) you can recover faster and and try more ideas in a short amount of time. I guess this is also what a lot of modern development methodologies and start-up mentality rely on too, so I hardly think I'm sharing something new. Still, if you have the option to make your attempt smaller it's generally worth it.
Of course you still have to take the plunge no matter how small.
Realistically it’s just audience capture. Happens to everyone. Guy makes one hit tweet. He becomes that tweet guy. Always trying to recapture.
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.
> I keep thinking about the version of me from a few years ago. He was worse at almost everything. Worse writer, worse thinker, worse at making things. Nobody really knew him and nobody really cared what he had to say. And yet he had so much more courage.
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.
I don't think we ever escape the desire to avoid looking bad - we just recontextualize it. For instance the article is basically making a short vs long term argument - in the short term you might look foolish, but as a result you might produce something of value (which in the long term will make you look fantastic).
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.
> There might be a good reason why smart people want to avoid looking stupid ... The only plausible explanation is that our egos are fragile
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.
This is true. It's okay to overshare and look stupid.
I am immune to this as I will never be "great" at anything. I am average, and I am OK with that.
This posts observation have interesting side-effects. Measurements, metrics and surveillance kill creative work. And hierarchies and the fear of embarrassment do too. So, the more you try to force "excellence" into existence via external pressures and resource tracking, the more it disappears.
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.