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Hacker News Hacker NewsWhich 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.
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:
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.
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.
"The emperor has no clothes" is a much deeper story about society and human nature than people realize.
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 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!
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
But I was reminded immediately of this Dan Luu post with the same title.
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.
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.
If you want to hear more I wrote a small post.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2014/10/20/169899/isaac-asi...
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.
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.
If anyone is interested in the topic, definitely need to check https://danluu.com/look-stupid/.
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.
Middle age people don't care what others think of them.
Old people know nobody thinks about them.
Or is it like "I'll know it when it see it" smut?
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.
Of course you still have to take the plunge no matter how small.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshin [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-mind
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.
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.
It's a superpower.
Look like an idiot and you'll learn the fastest!
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".
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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...)
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.
“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.
It tells me immediately up front if they’re a retard in competition with me or a retard I can work with.
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.
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.