Discussion

Willingness to look stupid is a genuine moat in creative work

ljlolel: AI has no ego

dworks: A willingness to look stupid is a core requirement for learning languages. I look stupid everyday.

FreePalestine1: I actually don't like this statement. I'd rephrase it because trying to speak in a language doesn't make you look stupid, or at least it shouldn't. Saying "I look stupid everyday" just reinforces that there is something inherently stupid about not knowing a language and trying to learn it. If anything trying to learn a language when it's not a requirement for something, is really anything but stupid.

yen223: Bears look smart, bulls do things

emil-lp: I would think that bears are much smarter than bulls?

hyperhello: Caring if you get downvoted makes your posts dull.

bolangi: Definitely needed to succeed in theater and take risks in life.

stefap2: I found it gets easier as you get older. Somehow I care much less what others think

MinimalAction: 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.

throwawaysleep: Efficiency, metrics, and willingness to look stupid works when nobody has much future power over you. If you can just refresh to a new pool, that is fine but if it is the same pool, it has consequences.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.

alwa: If you haven’t had the pleasure of Los Angeles public-access television’s Let’s Paint TV…https://www.letspainttv.com/Or, to save your eyes, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let's_Paint_TVFor 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.A taste:https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PvbL_5rH1QQ

danpalmer: > 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.

ronjakoi: Are you sure?

reverius42: Let's see a bull open a very complicated garbage dumpster in a national park. Maybe bears are actually smart and not just looking smart?> Said one park ranger, "There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists."

gopalv: > 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 wallNobody 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...

nomel: When I was younger, I was so embarrassed to ask a question that I thought everyone else in the room obviously knew, since they weren't asking about it.Now I realize there's a near certain chance that I'm not the only one.And, being much more on the presenting side now, there's NOTHING more disheartening that going through some presentation or explanation without any questions, because you know you've failed to communicate anything, at that point.

saulpw: I think they are probably referring to marketplace bears and bulls.

zephen: I think the phrasing is fine. It's self-aware. It acknowledges that stupidity, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder."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.

byproxy: goddam, that's beautiful. thanks for sharing!

ipaddr: Measured. If what you are saying is being downvoted this group might not be ready for 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.

zoklet-enjoyer: I'm a nearly 40 year old man and I skip through the halls at work most days. It's something I've been doing for a long time because it's fun, it's faster than walking, and it looks silly. It seems to help some people loosen up when they see their colleague skipping down the hall and I think that helps team morale.

rvrs: Whether you like it or not you will look stupid to native speakers. It's a subconscious bias

tayo42: Idk if that's universal, when I run into people who struggle with English or just don't know it my first thought has never been this is a stupid person.

tombert: Queue obligatory Weird Al: https://youtu.be/SMhwddNQSWQI'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".

randallsquared: That's the exact opposite of OP's issue, right? He was producing, and it was good, but somewhere along the way he developed good taste (or some facsimile). Ira is claiming that people who are creative beginners start with good taste, which doesn't seem to be the case for a lot of us.

strken: > There might be a good reason why smart people want to avoid looking stupid ... The only plausible explanation is that our egos are fragileI 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.

paulluuk: > 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.

cjlm: See also: https://danluu.com/look-stupid/

arjie: 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.

helloplanets: This is also what's called the beginner's mind, Shoshin. [0] One of the core concepts of Zen Buddhism. Tangentially related would be the concept of no-mind, Mushin. [1][0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshin [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-mind

polywanna: This is such a wildly incel-like reply. I disagree 100%. This social competition you speak of is something insecure people have manufactured. It exists only for the people who think it exists. People don’t want to look stupid because they usually have a need for intellectual validation developed in pre teen years. My god free yourself from this false belief that everything is a social competition, you don’t need to stress yourself out.

rapnie: Can we ascribe it all to ego, I wonder, or is it just one of several mechanics at play, albeit an important one. A Dutch saying is that there's a lid for every pot ("op elk potje past een dekseltje") i.e. that the most unlikely people still manage to find a partner and form a family. That very clumsy person who stutters, and is perceived by an ego-driven person as "a loser" still finds someone who thinks they are adorable and attractive.

geocrasher: 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.

akhrail1996: The fear of looking stupid is basically a false positive machine. It optimizes so hard for not being wrong (type I error?) that it rejects way more ideas than it should. And most of the time the "that I'll look dumb" signal is just noise - nobody actually cares or even notices. You're always standing on the safe side of a threshold that's set way too conservatively.

mettamage: At work I dare to look stupid and in my friend group too. It hasn’t always led to a good outcome since people simply believe you’re actually stupid and the problem with that is that they don’t take you seriously enough. Now, you can say: their loss. But man, I need to eat. With friends, sure. At work? After years of looking stupid, I had enough of it.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

katzenversteher: That's super trippy but I like it.

ahf8Aithaex7Nai: Somehow, it always triggers my skepticism when supposedly sociobiological or evolutionary anthropological or evolutionary psychological arguments are brought up. My suspicion is that it is far too easy to simply pack in the story you want to have in there. I can think of dozens of objections to your description. For example, in small groups, the social game in terms of status may not be that complex, and the choice for pairings may be very limited.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.

PotatoShadow: This reminded me of this essay by Isaac Asimov on creativityhttps://www.technologyreview.com/2014/10/20/169899/isaac-asi...

Animats: Never make it to management that way. Other people have to do the failing.

abcde666777: 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.

krelian: Have you thought about why they developed a need for intellectual validation?

moss_dog: Fantastic, thanks for sharing! I hadn't heard of this before. Very entertaining video!

abcde666777: I think you're a little quick to hand wave the phenomenon away, as if it's purely a social construct that people care about how they appear to others.

bravura: You're both wrong in ironic ways.GP says don't care about X because it's a social phenomenon, but frequently this position is a form of social identification.You say: X might deeper than social, implying that social phenomena are not important. Thus agreeing with GP.[edit: my position is pragmatic: If there's a broad or important phenomenon, your position on it should be individualized to the value of the phenomenon itself, not based upon some theory-of-origin category assignment.]

tokioyoyo: Not sure if this is the right place to respond, but I’ve only seen this play in situations where people visibly want to look better than others, because they feel insecure about their status.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.

bhanuhai: Nice work

Lionga: AI also has no intelligence

imiric: Great article.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.

allie1: 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.

wcfrobert: 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.

Jensson: Trump and Elon still afford to look stupid, you can do it your whole life.

onion2k: 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.

shevy-java: A certain president?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.

9rx: The actual most plausible explanation becomes clear when you rearrange the words into the right order: "There might be a good reason why people who want to avoid looking stupid are smart ..." Forcing oneself to become smart is the only escape from looking stupid.

Jensson: "The people I think are smart are those that try to look smart", that is the most plausible. There are probably many smart people who aren't afraid of looking stupid that you think are stupid for that reason.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.

casualscience: Even in small groups, being respected and considered valuable is important? I'm not sure what you mean here.The mate selection stuff could be overblown, but absolutely if you look at lawless or less institutionalized cultures, there is a trend towards appearing strong/tough and hiding any weaknesses

Tazerenix: 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.

oldestofsports: Just a few sentences in and the author is already comparing himself to nobel prize winners. Love it! Nice article!

Razengan: Human society is too stifled by expectations of how every should behave, from the people who raise you and you grow up with and shows and movies, so much that we try to match that and be happy/sad/angry/prim/proper/etc. at times even when we don't really feel that way.

smackeyacky: Maybe not adorable and attractive, but just enough to settle for.

b3lvedere: I find it incredibly easy on people and processes my life does not depend on being the way it is. I find it incredibly annoying and unconfortable when around people and processes my life depends on.

eucyclos: There's also the fact that there's a lot less social pressure for young people not to look stupid. If you're the senior subject matter expert and get a question you can't answer, people still expect you to make an educated guess. The junior guy they expect to ask someone.

multidude: 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.

b3lvedere: There's a huge 'Emperor's New Clothes' vibe going on with those two.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_New_Clothes

eucyclos: Someone (supposedly) published da Vinci's to do list a while back, and from the snippets I read he seemed to spend most of his time talking to experts about subjects he didn't know much about. Pretty telling if true.

nickvec: 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.