Tangentially, I've been applying something similar, but actually thinking of it as the privilege of high status.
As a very senior member of my team, which has a lot of new college grads, I've been asking the "dumb" questions, the "irritating" questions, intentionally speaking up what I believe others may be thingking, specifically because I figure I can afford the social (career) hit.
Yes - I'm a senior member of my team too (to the extent that I've previously been the team lead of similar teams) and it's so freeing to be able to:
1. Give plenty of credit to the juniors when they do good work, even if they were reliant on support, with no need to take credit myself
2. Give up some time working on my own objectives to coach the juniors, even though there's no cost code to book the time to and nobody asks me to do it
3. Easily say, with zero guilt: "no sorry that can't be done in 2 weeks, that's a 6 week job" or "sure I can do my part of this job but I'm going to need you to commit XYZ other resources if you want it to be a success"
4. Interpret the rules in the way I think is best for the organisation, not trying to please the person with the most pedantic interpretation
5. I can produce convincing explanations of how my work performance is delivering value to the organisation (whereas juniors can sometimes work their arse off and get no recognition for it)
I'm also a middle aged white man which seems to confer a lot of unearned trust, but combined with my professional experience I seriously think I have it easier than the juniors in so many ways, and it's my responsibility to give back a bit.
> Give plenty of credit to the juniors when they do good work, even if they were reliant on support, with no need to take credit myself
This is one of the most effective ways to lead because it builds goodwill and trust on the team. It also takes almost nothing away from you because as the senior/leader you will get default credit for most everything. It's always odd to me more people don't realize this.
I want to agree but I’ve observed a contrary pattern a few times: when higher levels of management don’t get this principle, and are themselves poor leaders and role models, they can take this at face value and believe that the juniors get all the credit and local leadership is contributing nothing.
Soft skills need to be valued from above in order to be workable strategies in the trenches. And often / usually that’s how it works.. but not always.
Having been there, it’s a lose lose situation, where you will constantly be berated for either not mentoring enough or not contributing enough, and it’s better to move on than play the shifting winds.
Even more so: as a senior, if you don't give extensive credit to the juniors, people will assume that you have some reasons to be insecure. So it's worse for your status.
Never be afraid to ask stupid questions. As someone who spent years doing penetration testing, I can assure you that when stupid questions don’t have an obvious answer, someone isn’t thinking properly.
Also never be afraid to question people who answer quickly. We spend way too much effort training smart people to answer quickly rather than deeply, and there’s almost always a tradeoff between the two.
Unfortunately that's the kind of black-and-white advice that seldom applies in the real world. Would you want to see your surgeon asking stupid questions? The pilot of the flight you're on?
You wouldn't, because part of your psychological comfort depends on your perception that people like this -- people whose decisions really matter -- actually know what they're doing.
ETA: By "stupid questions", I don't mean "basic but obviously important questions". I mean questions that reveal that you don't know something that other people expect you to know, that signal to them (rightly or wrongly) that they may have overestimated you.
Surgeons mark where on the body they're operating. This didn't used to be a standard practice.
Asking "Did I mess up my left and right?" or "Is this the right patient?" feels like a stupid question to ask. I'd certainly rather they ask those questions before operating on me! But turns out it's very hard to get them to do that, so we do surgical site marking instead.
I've been struggling to explain the principle behind the "stupid questions" and your example illustrates the point perfectly. Thank you. I'll be shamelessly stealing this point from now on :)
> By "stupid questions", I don't mean "basic but obviously important questions". I mean questions that reveal that you don't know something that other people expect you to know, that signal to them (rightly or wrongly) that they may have overestimated you.
Ok but you didn’t bring up the phrase “stupid questions” so it’s less about how you define it, and more about a best effort interpretation of how it was originally meant.
I think the person who initially did bring up the phrase must have meant it the way I did, because if they didn't -- if in fact all they meant by it was "basic but obviously important questions" -- then there would be no reason for them to bring it up at all, since 100% of people already agree that you should never be afraid to ask basic but obviously important questions.
I don't think that's true. A lot of people are afraid to ask basic questions that everyone would think are important because they'd feel stupid asking them.
The thing is that in many a case those basic questions have not all actually been asked and answered because everyone involved thought the same: it's stupidly simple, I better not ask for fear of being marked dumb.
I get the feeling that it's because of fear of being marked dumb by people like you actually.
But then it often turns out that one of those stupid questions has not been answered sufficiently or people were thinking of completely different answers to the question. So it was a good thing that someone brought it up.
And if the question did already get taken into account and people did have the same answer(s) in mind then if a senior person asked, it will probably just be taken as "this guy knows his stuff and is just dotting Is and crossing Ts" VS a junior "asking dumb questions that everyone should know the answer to, duh!"
All I'm actually arguing for is exercising judgement in deciding whether to ask something that might be considered "a stupid question", rather than following black-and-white advice to always ask it anyway. All I'm arguing is that there exists a question that is too stupid to to be worth the reputational damage of asking.
> I get the feeling that it's because of fear of being marked dumb by people like you actually.
I make positive and negative judgements about people based on things they do, which is an imperfect heuristic but the best one available and much better than nothing. So do you.
I’ve had multiple times in my career when people got mad at me for asking basic but obviously important questions. Things like:
* What invariants does this complex transformation preserve? What guarantees does it make about the output? (Come on, we all have a general idea, SpicyLemonZest should read the code if he wants all the details.)
* What’s the latency impact of adding this step? (It can’t be big enough to matter, stop trying to block my project!)
* Why did the last release advance to production when it wasn’t passing tests? (How dare you, our team works so hard, it says right here in our release manual that those test failures count as passing.)
These are good counterexamples to my "100% of people" claim as they illustrate something I hadn't taken into account in my answer: That a basic but obviously important question could have negative implications about other people. I agree that it's certainly not always the case that those people are OK with such questions.
When I wrote my comment, I didn't have such questions in mind. I wish I'd written it to exclude such questions, because I think they're not central to the issue here, which is whether or not asking questions that have negative implications about one's own ability is always a good idea.
And this is why it's very important, in the case of a junior engineer, to use your "I'm just starting here" privilege to ask those stupid questions. Or you can be a very senior engineer who has an established reputation, and can get away with asking what sound like "stupid" questions just because people assume you know what you're doing.
We have an expectation that "smart people" should be able to quickly fill in gaps in lightly-explained systems.
Sometimes this is good: when you're teaching people a new concept it's great if they can grasp it quickly and approximately. When you're describing the design of a complex system, you absolutely do not want people to make incorrect assumptions about the parts you're skipping over.
The worst example I've seen was learning that the security of an industrial control platform came down to the fact that the management software wasn't installed by default. The designers had assumed that "knowledge of a software library" was a valid access control mechanism. As the cherry on top, another engineer chimed in that the software was actually installed on the system anyway, just in a different location. It took a pile of incredibly "stupid" questions to surface this knowledge.
I absolutely would want someone who's becoming a surgeon or pilot to ask the "stupid questions." This discussion is about growth and change over time as a person.
> This discussion is about growth and change over time as a person.
Is it? Because the original statement used the word "never" and didn't mention growth and change over time as qualifiers.
The more one attempts to qualify -- that is, restrict the scope of -- the advice, the more one tacitly admits the point I'm trying to make, which FTR is: This advice is not always good advice.
Mostly I agree, but I think this statement carries with it an oversimplification of the world.
In practice, some of what it takes to do a given thing comes from thing-specific information (which is appropriate to ask questions about), and some comes from a background of experience in doing/studying other similar things (formally or informally). For complicated tasks it basically has to be this way, because there just isn't time to train a person up from scratch for each task -- a random person off the street could not perform surgery merely by first asking a sufficient number of questions about exactly how to do it. People find "stupid questions" alarming because they reveal holes in this important second category, and make people wonder what else important might be missing.
You could make the argument that it's better for society if everyone asks whatever "stupid" question comes to mind, because then incompetent people and charlatans will be quickly exposed and the harm they would do minimised. But it's not good for the charlatan!
I don't side with actual charlatans, of course, but most of the time I do side with people of imperfect competence, because that's most of us. Competence is improved by practice, and most tasks are low-stakes. If a person is already near the threshold of being perceived as unacceptably incompetent by others, and can discover the information they need via other means than by asking "stupid questions", that may well be the best way for everyone.
That's not to say that I advocate never asking stupid questions. In fact I would encourage people to lean more in that direction as a default setting -- they are the fastest way to get the necessary information. They just have a cost that it would be naive to ignore. It's a judgement call, is all I'm saying.
> I can assure you that when stupid questions don’t have an obvious answer, someone isn’t thinking properly.
Once you start asking stupid questions on the regular it's quite an interesting experience how often you can ask "stupid" questions to rooms full of senior engineers and sort of get back confused silence. In my experience there's a lot of really important but "stupid" questions that often just gets half-ignored because imagination and prioritization is hard.
I love and struggle with the second point. It's taken me half my career to realize that people would very much prefer the complete and right answer slowly or later than the '90% sure' answer right now. Being quick doesn't make you look smart
I disagree. Asking stupid questions, even if in good faith, can be mean being banned from communities or losing participation privileges. Such as mathoverflow or stackexhcange.
StackExchange is a massive, global forum which has to react defensively in order to maintain its high-quality knowledgebase against spammers, scammers, and the same questions being posed 10^N times.
The context here is about knowledge dissemination in local teams, groups, or organizations. Completely separate category, levels of trust, motivations, incentives, etc.
In my experience this usually doesn’t turn into a career hit, but a career boon. I’ve been doing this since I was a junior, now I’m a staff engineer, and admittedly I am biased toward myself, but my career growth has been robust and among both my current t team and my professional network I feel I command a fair amount of respect and approachability because of this practice, which always pays off in the long run
I've had a similar experience with doing this overall in terms of career impact. It hasn't consistently worked for me, though. It really depends on the team.
The main issue I've run into happens when a person's reply to my stupid question doesn't make sense to me. If I continue asking follow up questions in order to understand better they sometimes get angry. But if I stop asking questions when I start to detect anger then I am left feeling confused about how the system works. Either way I'm left with a negative emotional impression of the person's caliber. Which isn't great for me cohering with the team.
I imagine that you've also run into this problem. How do you think about it?
Yes, though that is what I am getting at. It displays good leadership characteristics and reflects positively upon a person who acts this way, having the confidence to ask questions that others don’t or won’t. It’s a positive thing
I would go even further and call it the responsibility of high status to ask such questions.
As a high status person, you have an outsized influence on culture whether you like it or not, and an environment in which this kind of question can be asked ultimately leads to better outcomes.
I used to be the one that in big meetings would ask the 'dumb' questions a lot of people undoubtedly had in their mind, but wouldn't dare to pose. I didn't care that some people would find the question stupid, since it would make other people happy for not having to speak up themselves while still getting the info they needed. It would as well make some people happy for establishing a slightly higher place in the pecking order. At least i would gain some karma and maybe even some admiration.
Over the years I did this less and nowadays I mostly only speak when asked so in rather big meetings.
How did this come to be? I found that people who feel that they belong in the higher ranks of the social pecking order sometimes don't like this behavior and actively try to make you look bad. As I'm quite sensitive and am generally a people pleaser who thrives on getting external validation (I'm working on it...), it did not feel good and I feel it wasn't worth the trouble...
Yes this is probably the best thing about feeling senior enough and maybe the best measure of seniority. If you dare ask stupid questions you aren't stupid.
But then there are likely also situations when you feel that you ask a bunch of stupid questions but are faced with blank stares because people doesn't understand the context enough for those questions either or they are struggling enough with other problems to even entertain that kind of question.
It can kind of lead to a similar situation to when the math professor at uni jokingly asks a "trivial" math question in front of his students. It's trivial only once you have worked that kind of problem a 1000 times.
Absolutely. As I get more and more senior, I found myself prefacing a lot of questions with "let me ask some stupid questions" to ask some broad questions or context of the meeting. It can be something seemingly obvious, what's important is it somehow breaks the barrier for others to ask questions. I used to say "I'm going to play my 'new guy' card one more time" when I'm new at a company, but this seems to work more generically, and tends to work in the team's benefit.
I have an account on reddit that leans into extremes, specifically to collect the ad hominem attacks, while wading into benign topics people won’t talk about but would like consensus on
because they are afraid the benign topic will cause them to get ad hominem attacked or generally vilified
most people’s reddit profiles are their whole identity and they try to stay in moderate “polite company” at the expense of remaining ignorant
Indeed. As a senior, I found out that at the last 'retrospective' I was one the only ones who had anything on 'needs improvement' 'saying what I believe others might be thinking' - and during anonymous voting my items did get most of the votes.
I wish more people were like you. I can't speak to the past but it seems all anyone in high status positions wants to do is be "guilded" and left alone.
I have understood that the vast majority of people are simply not interested in having conversations, their goal is to perform social dance that scores them social points.
Sufficient status entirely changes how the act of asking dumb questions is perceived by others. A person with a small title is seen as asking dumb questions because they are dumb. A person with a big title asks dumb questions because they are smart. Of course it's not just title but also age, gender, race, appearance, etc.
Over the past few years, I've managed to convince (and occasionally demonstrate) to my kids that "you'll be bad at anything new" and that they only way to get better is practice.
As a result, when other kids have made fun of them for failing, they rebut with "I've never done this before! I'll get better!" which is awesome.. being able to handle failure, acknowledge it as failure, and then figure out how to get better.
If you can get and hold onto that mindset, it's kinda awesome.
If it turns into treating it as a “should” then my experience is yes, definitely, that’s a death knell for basically anything. Without the “should” it continues to be fun. The trick is threading that needle.
It is said that God wrote the entire language for to use in a book and that we shall model ourselves off of it. Once it was done, God turns his back on the book and Satan sneaked in and added two words - "Should" and "Aught".
I disagree. Innate talent / affinity and transferable experience exist. I agree with "10% inspiration and 90% perspiration"; however, given equal effort, people with innate talent are going to win over people with no or less talent by a wide margin. This applies to everything. Gym / sports performance, muscle growth, work that needs IQ, work that needs EQ, life events that need resilience, general happiness, everything. Genetics is hugely definitive.
And I'm convinced some people bounce back more easily after a failure because failure is genuinely less hurtful for them. They don't need to "hold onto that mindset"; they just have it.
> I disagree. Innate talent / affinity and transferable experience exist. I agree with "10% inspiration and 90% perspiration"; however, given equal effort, people with innate talent are going to win over people with no or less talent by a wide margin.
I think you are misreading the person you're replying to.
They aren't saying "everybody can be equally good at everything with practice."
They're saying "don't quit just because you aren't great on day 1."
First time playing basketball even if you've played soccer a ton and have good general athletic ability? Don't expect to hold your own if joining a game being played by people who play every week.
First time doing woodworking even if you have an electrical engineering background and the methodicalness is not foreign to you? Don't expect your first table to be stunning. Still gonna be bad at it compared to people with more practice!
Honestly, if you think you're great at something the first time you try it, you probably just don't know what being great at it actually looks like. (It could even be "similar result, but better in some hidden ways, and done in 1/10th the time.")
But if you believe that you'll get better at it with practice, you'll keep doing it.
If you believe "guess I just don't have innate ability here" you'll give up and never get good.
> I think you are misreading the person you're replying to. [...] They're saying "don't quit just because you aren't great on day 1."
That's not what they're saying. They literally wrote, "you'll be bad at anything new". That's what I disagreed with. There are people who are great at something new (for them), and catch up with (and surpass) old-timers incredibly quickly. And their learning experience -- not that it doesn't take effort -- is generally enjoyable, exactly because they succeed from very early on. I've witnessed this with at least two colleagues. Entered completely new fields (one of them repeatedly), and in a few weeks, surpassed old-timers in those fields. These are the guys who tend to be promoted to senior principal or distinguished software engineers.
> First time playing basketball even if you've played soccer a ton and have good general athletic ability? Don't expect to hold your own if joining a game being played by people who play every week.
Do expect to mostly catch up with them in 1-2 months! (In my high school class, the soccer team was effectively identical to the basketball team.)
> and done in 1/10th the time
I agree with this; yes. But my point is that, for some people, approaching such a short completion time, with comparable results, is a relatively fast, and enjoyable, process. They don't plateau as early, and don't struggle from the beginning.
> If you believe "guess I just don't have innate ability here" you'll give up and never get good.
Correct, but it doesn't imply that "giving your all" does make you good (at an absolute scale). You will no doubt improve relative to your earlier self, but those advances may not qualify as "competitive", more globally speaking. Giving up (after serious work) may be objectively valid. For some people, persevering is the challenge (= lack of willpower, persistence); for others, accepting failure / mediocrity, and -- possibly -- finding something better, is the challenge.
Hah, I wrote almost the same thing in a sibling reply with one difference, plateauing for the hit-the-ground-runners may come earlier than the first-learn-how-to-walkers.
People exist that pick up that chisel / basketball / soldering iron and do something really impressive with it after being shown 0..2 times. They might have horrible technique, not know the little tricks and shortcuts, plateau quickly etc., but their experience of doing the thing is not a series of failures until they get reasonably OK at it, rather increasing levels of wins.
Those people are still growing the limit of their ability just like you. They're just trying things slightly under their current limit* instead of slightly over.
"Cate Hall is Astera's CEO. She's a former Supreme Court attorney and the ex-No. 1 female poker player in the world."
This article is countersignaling. It also happens to be directionally correct.
There is absolutely nothing low status about being present-day Cate Hall. But present-day Cate Hall probably tried and pushed through a lot of really tough stuff in part because yesteryear Cate Hall had this mindset. It so happened that she also had the talent to actually end up in impressive places.
The real lesson one should probably take from a person like this is that learning to eyeball your own strengths and weaknesses before you start down the long path of honing them is really important. If you are low status now but you have reason to believe you will become much higher status in the future by persevering, then persevere. If not...
She’s a VC-backed founder who went to Yale, and her very first job was at Goldman. What she’s describing in the article is not “low status” because she hadn’t experienced that. But the feeling she describes reveals what she thinks “low status” is - embarrassment.
It was "[dead]" or "[flagged]" ? If it was the first it was automatic and probably caused by previous comments, not by this one. New accounts (green name) can be auto-flagged quite fast if they have downvotes or reports on multiple comments.
Getting into Yale is indeed pretty good prima facie evidence that you have what it takes to be high status in the future, in quite a few domains. Persevering is great advice for most people along most trajectories who get into Yale.
Getting into Yale directly confers high status, and it is fairly well gated by other status-related tests: honors classes and private schools nudge you to learn the kind of thinking that does well on the SAT, not the kind of thinking that keeps you out of danger, as well as pushing you to AP exam prep classes; and access to extracurricular activities is gated both implicitly (by school choice) and explicitly by disciplinary measures for low-status behaviors. Rednecks like JD Vance are a tiny minority of the Yale entering class, and lower-status groups like illegal immigrants are as far as I know completely absent.
Also, I think the idea that there is something that it takes to be high status is incorrect. Social status is its own phenomenon with its own rules, and sometimes it's pretty random: you get a good job against the odds, or a good spouse, or you narrowly escape a disabling accident. You could argue that "what it takes" in such cases is luck, but graduating from Yale doesn't indicate that you will be lucky in the future, only of things that have happened before that.
>the idea that there is something that it takes to be high status is incorrect
>Getting into Yale directly confers high status
Don't these two ideas contradict one another? It sure sounds like we have at least one known pathway to becoming high status, and that is getting into Yale.
No, "something that it takes to be high status" would be some characteristic (in this context, one that is stable over time) that was necessary for high status, while something that "directly confers high status" is something that is sufficient for high status. It's entirely possible for something to be sufficient and nothing to be necessary. You're making the basic logical error of confusing ∀ with ∃.
Consider the set S of all properties which confer high status. "Got into Yale" is something we have assumed is in S, so S is nonempty. 'I have at least one property in S' seems like it would be a fine candidate for the necessary characteristic you're after, and it's not vacuous either, it can actually be achieved in reality. Therefore there is something that it takes to be high status, in your words.
That doesn't follow; you're just making the same logic error more verbose, perhaps in hopes that if the argument is so hard to understand that it has no obvious flaws, people will mistake it for an argument that obviously has no flaws.
I genuinely do not see it. If you have a collection of all sufficient properties for Q, you can construct Q's necessary property by just rolling them all up into a big or-statement. "You are high status if you get into Yale or have a lot of money or are really funny or ...", like that.
Again my specific claim here is merely that such a statement exists, nontrivially, for this kind of problem. Not even that we can write it down in full or whatever. I don't see why that's illegal.
For the specific question, I gave some examples upthread: for example, there isn't something that "it takes" to marry a spouse who confers high status on you, except for luck later in life, which Yale's admissions office can't predict and thus can't use as an admission criterion. There are persistent attributes that improve your chances of marrying well and staying married—pre-existing high status, conventional attractiveness, health, intelligence, sanity, etc.—but none of them are either necessary or sufficient.
If we're talking about the abstract problem in classical propositional logic, there's no requirement in classical logic that a proposition Q be true for some external reason. It can just be true. Causality is outside the scope of propositional logic.
It's true that, in classical propositional logic, there is necessarily a proposition that is necessary for Q's truth, that is, a proposition that Q implies. There are infinitely many of them, in fact. Q implies Q, for example. It also implies Q or not Q, because in classical propositional logic, any proposition implies all tautologies. You can't list them all, and it wouldn't help.
If you have some finite list of atomic propositions to try to compose your set S from, there is no guarantee that listing all of the sufficient conditions from that list (other than Q itself) will give you an S whose disjunction is a necessary condition. A simple model of this is P = no, Q = yes, S = {P}.
From my research the whole Alvea thing was an Effective Alturism cooked up project that only lasted 3 years and made no money, and then now they are at Astera which seems to be some rich persons plaground where they throw money at researchers to do “stuff”. What that stuff is, I don’t know.
The real moral of this story is you should get rich eccentric friends from the Ivy League elite who throw money at you to do AGI. Like you really think this company of like 40 people is going to crack AGI?
Man I should cross the moat and get some rich friends.
Well yeah , being high status does not always mean you actually contribute a lot of value to society. And being medium status does not mean your value is mediocre - take a nurse or a kindergarten teacher - their value is substantial but the status they get is mediocre at best.
So if you get a feeling the "game" is somewhat rigged and twisted, perhaps the feeling is correct...
"Alvea started in late 2021 as a moonshot to rapidly develop and deploy a room temperature-stable DNA vaccine candidate against the Omicron wave of COVID-19, and we soon became the fastest startup to take a new drug from founding to a Phase 1 clinical trial. However, we decided to discontinue our lead candidate during the follow-up period of the trial as the case for large-scale impact weakened amidst the evolving pandemic landscape."
To be honest Alvea doesn't sound like a crazy idea on paper. Reducing lead times on new drugs is a really good idea that seems like it is bottlenecked more by bureaucratic concerns.
A company which focused on that as its sole mission could be really profitable, if they could sell their professional services to a group that already had plenty of in house expertise on actually creating the drugs. My very low resolution guess is that they slipped up when they actually tried to make the drug themselves. That may have been a requirement to get funding from the US government at the time, I don't know.
These thing aren't talked about much. But think the proper way to discuss is that "social status" exists among groups of rough peers and "social position" better describes someone's privileges of wealth, education and employment relative to society as a whole.
Just as an example, a whole lot of dysfunctional dynamics happening lately seem to involve billionaires jockeying for status with other billionaires.
Edit: I'd recommend Paul Fussel's book Class since it involves discussion of these two dynamics.
Talented people don't have to go through as much embarrassment as others because they learn faster than normal & will impress through that, even if they're worse at what they're doing. Also, once you are truly good at something, it's easier to be bad at something else. But not disagreeing with her.
Thanks for pointing out that it is counter signalling, but I would also say that it is good advice regardless. It's like an efficient highway - the road is straight and unadorned because looking "scientific" and sensible is how you convince government and the public it is a good idea. The fact that being efficient is also a net good is almost a side effect but still not to be ignored!
This article is countersignaling. It also happens to be directionally correct.
As far as I can tell, you jargony phrase means that this is something like the humble part of "humble bragging". I'd disagree, I think the article gives honest good advice, an honest "meta-analysis" of social status and jumping into new things. It's "actionable", something you can do.
I would add that its advice for the sort of person who is normally always thinking about and fairly competent with social status and is held back from new skills by this. I personally was never too worried about social status and have learned massive new things by just being willing to try them but wound-up bitten by my ignoring of status. My advice for my younger me is to be strategic about publicly ignoring status but keep going into private.
Also statements like "she succeeded 'cause she was tough" are meaningless as advice or actionable/verifiable statements. Maybe she succeeded 'cause she had a bunch of strategies like the one she outlines, maybe she succeeded 'cause of good luck, maybe she succeed by family positions, maybe "luck", "toughness" or "mojo" did it.
>statements like "she succeeded 'cause she was tough" are meaningless as advice or actionable/verifiable statements
The action you are supposed to take from this is to figure out whether you're tough, and if you find out you're not, to give up and go to something else you're better suited for. This seems like exceptionally actionable advice - just not advice that strokes anyone's ego.
I will give you an example. When I was 17 I spent exactly one day as a door to door canvasser for an environmental charity. I got dropped off into a neighborhood I had never seen before, told to walk up to people's doors and beg them for money for something I was pretty sure wasn't particularly effective at solving anything important, and then do this about a hundred times.
Door #1 gave me one dollar. Door #2 let me call my parents in tears to come pick me up. Whatever
Unusual characteristic that particular job needed, I did not have it. I do not have it to this day.
Related: During solo travelling whenever a thought crosses my mind to do something and my instinctual internal response is discomfort, I try to make myself do it - even if I feel awkward inserting myself or going back.
I've had so many awesome conversations with random interesting people every day during my trips thanks to this. I've gone places I'd otherwise not experience, all for the sake of exciting adventure and pushing my own bounds. The confidence that comes from this is significant.
Also, as a former remote software engineer of 3 years, it has been so energizing to socialize with people again. Best upper that there is.
There's a LOT here. I feel this applies to a lot of decisions.
For instance, if you want to make a product that requires a database and you like building database stuff, do the database stuff last. Do what is difficult first - fail fast.
The easy or default route will always be well known to someone.
Solo travelling was how I formed one of my most salient memories of the "moat of low status", to wit: going to Japan in 2011. Japan is an advanced G7 country, but unlike most of the rest, very few people there speak or understand English. So I was put in the position of having to get by with my shitty Japanese, or attempt to communicate even more futilely with the locals in English and seem like an even bigger, more clueless asshole. I think I gained more levels of Japanese in those two weeks than I did in two years of university education.
My lifetime best command of Italian was when I lost the keys to my apartment and had to ask around if anyone has seen them.
At that point I was already living part time in Italy for over two years, but since I was working remotely for a company in my country, I hardly had an opportunity to learn the language.
Fortunately Italians appreciate people attempting to speak their language.
Overall I like this framing. But I wanted to comment on this
> In poker, it’s possible to improve via theoretical learning.... But you really can’t become a successful player without playing a lot of hands with and in front of other players, many of whom will be better than you.
This is an interesting example because poker is a game that has existed for many years, and for most of those years everyone learned by doing and was terrible at it.
People who excel at things have typically done more theoretical learning than the average person. Doing is necessary, but it's rarely the main way you learn something.
Either you have a mentor who has already absorbed theory and transmits it to you in digested form, or you have to learn the theory yourself.
But most people get the balance between theory and doing wrong, and most people err on the side of doing because theory is harder and less instantly rewarding.
I think one aspect of this is that learning from doing often involves more than just doing. It involves paying attention to what you're doing, and what other people are doing, and then reviewing that. This doesn't necessarily have to be "theoretical" learning, but it's deliberate or explicit study as opposed to just hoping to get better by osmosis. It's easy to do something a lot and not learn from it.
Very similar to the concept of the dip, explained in the book The Dip by Seth Godin
I asked Google to briefly summarize the concept:
> The Dip: It's a term Godin uses to describe the unavoidable and challenging period that occurs after the initial excitement of starting a new project, skill, or career, and before achieving success or mastery. This is the time when things get difficult, frustrating, and many people are tempted to quit
> Embracing the Dip: Instead of being discouraged by The Dip, Godin suggests that dips can be opportunities. They serve as a natural filter, separating those with the determination to persevere from those who are not truly committed. By pushing through the Dip, you can emerge stronger and potentially achieve greater rewards
Well, no. Depends on the person. For some people and for some new undertakings, especially if those people know themselves well already, they can hit the ground running. I've seen it.
I grew up in Scotland in the 90s, the high school I went to was ill equipped to deal with someone as wide as I am on the spectrums. I was put into the "retarded children" programs. I think this resulted in me always "knowing" I was the dumbest person in the room, and eventually as a survival mechanism I learned to, well... not care. All through college, my 20s and 30s, I always felt like the dumbest person in the room, but I didn't really care I just felt super happy to be in the rooms, and so I said whatever I wanted and asked whatever I wanted. Now that I'm older, I realize what a blessing this ended up being because I've always ended up in rooms full of incredibly brilliant people having decent amounts of money thrown my way to be in them.
There's some survivorship bias here. You often just end up looking like an idiot or being really bad at something. I agree that embarrassment shouldn't be a barrier but one should be aware of the flip side. "Putting yourself out there" mostly results in humiliation and rejection. Focusing on being thick skinned and resilient is maybe more important than imagining you just need to get over embarrassment.
If you try new things, you may go bankrupt, get laughed at or be humiliated in a much worse way, be regularly rejected or talked down to, etc. It's not just about being brave for a minute. And in the end you might never make it.
I agree but I think many of us are paralyzed even in the face of tiny risks or even imaginary ones.
I have an idea for a 20 hour solo software project and besides the usual resistance of sitting there and getting it done, one of the barriers is the thought "what if people don't use it much" or what if "my wife doesn't get what I did it" and stuff like that. These are quite paralyzing feelings that are not really rational, I stand to gain more than I stand to lose by doing this project, and yet my mind has settled on the risk being about as high as the reward.
You could say this is just me but I think many many people are like that.
I genuinely needed this piece today, specifically. Thanks for sharing it.
I've been trying to live more authentically in general these past few years, making tiny little inroads one step at a time towards being someone I've consciously chosen, rather than merely exist in a safe form that doesn't risk alienating others (or rather, in a form I don't perceive to alienate others - obviously I am not a mindreader). Think classic tech neutral outfits (jeans and neutral shirts, neutral shoes, neutral socks, the sole piece of color being the Pride band of my Apple Watch). OCD hurts the process of trying to live authentically, because it's doing its damndest to ensure I never encounter harm.
So last night, after coming down from some flower and watching the evening roll in, I decided to put on an outfit I'd put together. All sorts of bright colors: neon green and black sneakers, bright pink shirt, sapphire blue denim jean shorts, bleached white socks - and went for a walk. OCD was INCREDIBLY self-conscious that I would stand out (duh), court the wrong sort of attention, or somehow find myself in trouble...for wearing things I see everyone else wear without any issue whatsoever.
The moat is real, and the mind wants to build barriers to minimize perceived harms; for neurodivergent folks, it can be downright crippling. Wallflowering at parties, never gambling on colors or bold styles, never taking on new challenges for risk of failure. It results in a life so boring, sterile, and uninteresting - to yourself, and to others.
So...yeah. I got nothing to add other than my personal nuggets of experience. Really glad this piece came past on HN today, I think a lot of folks are going to enjoy its message.
I learned in a class on design that you should work with what you already know.
If you don't know about colors, then do it in grey scale, if you don't know about that, do it in black and white.
The best ideas come from working with constraints.
While highly skilled designers/musicians/developers/writers/etc. do this despite being able to work outside of the constraints, a beginner can do it too. Sure, they can't choose the constraints as freely as a pro, but they can make work with what they got and it can lead to interesting results.
This is also a good way to approach new things without embarrassing yourself, as you don't try to impress with skills you don't mastered 100% yet.
This is true for emotions: feelings people often find uncomfortable (sadness, loneliness, fear) don’t have to make you miserable. You can just feel those feelings in your body, pay attention to what they’re asking you to pay attention to, and feel deeply okay about it all.
The same is true for physical sensations. Pain is loud so it’s really good at drawing our attention, but there’s a difference between noticing you’re hurt and getting upset about being hurt.
I flipped my bike a couple months ago and scraped myself up incredibly badly, but there wasn’t a ton of suffering involved.
The massive adrenaline shot left me shaking, I felt overwhelmed and like I wanted to cry, and the pain was very loud. But I laid on the ground for fifteen or twenty minutes and then walked the fifteen minutes back home. I wouldn’t call it fun, but it was totally okay.
(Nick Cammarata has a good Buddhist take on this: suffering is a specific fast, grabby movement you do in your mind called “tanha” and if you pay attention you can learn to do it less.)
One thing that helps with this: getting old. You just stop worrying about what other people think of you. All the drama and gossip and cliquish behavior just gets so boring.
Why do you think old fat guys walk around naked in the locker room at the gym? They've certainly got nothing to show off, but they don't give a shit.
Yes. And this is very helpful. If you are young and you suck at something, more people will give you the benefit of the youth and envision you may improve. If you're old and you suck at something, many will think you're just old, and you just suck. "Don't hurt yourself!" So yes, not giving a shit is a very good way to make progress.
Whenever someone does “statusy” things I just know how it feels like having done it before so I just move on and don’t participate in that theater anymore.
We live in a society in which older people(or men, at least) get some degree of implicit status and respect - which is probably why our governments are all getontocracies.
Sometime around mid-30s I stopped caring about what people think about me and it had a great effect on my mental well being. I reconnected with age old Lindy wisdom and started reading classics that helped me with my midlife crisis. Not giving a fuck surprisingly opens up lots of doors.
Status games and tech-bro style hustle culture only leads to burnout.
It is a pretty good article, but it slightly misunderstands status. Being the first person on the dance floor is closer to a high status move, because it is taking a leardership position and suggesting what the group should do next. People avoid doing that because they want to copy someone of a higher status than themselves, not because they fear low status. The mechanism nature uses to implement that low status behaviour is nervousness which is often described as a fear of "standing out", "looking silly" or similar terms, but those are low status concerns. High status people don't really suffer from looking silly, they define what looking silly is by being what they don't do.
I don't know. There's nothing high status about being the only person on the dance floor for 3 songs in a row.
> High status people don't really suffer from looking silly, they define what looking silly is by being what they don't do.
I also don't know about this. Certain high status people are obsessively concerned with whether they look silly. They used to routinely fight to the death over it.
I've been reading the Book of the Courtier this week, and it's clear that even back in the 16th century high status people were very concerned about whether they looked silly, or even whether their dances looked silly.
> I've been reading the Book of the Courtier this week, and it's clear that even back in the 16th century high status people were very concerned about whether they looked silly, or even whether their dances looked silly.
In the context of the situation the people worrying probably weren't the highest status person in the room though. In a room full of princes one of them is going to be feeling pressure because they are low status relative to their peers. That is what instincts key off, not absolute numbers of people that a body can't immediately detect.
> There's nothing high status about being the only person on the dance floor for 3 songs in a row.
Simon Sinek says we admire leaders because they take risks on behalf of the tribe. They'll start dancing first knowing they're risking looking silly if nobody joins them. Its impressive because the risk might not pay off.
Being the only person on the dance floor for 3 songs in a row is an interesting move. I think there is something high status about it - in that you're clearly showing that you aren't insecure about how you're seen. I think its polarising. Either it'll make people think a lot less of you, or more of you. Someone who's generally high status will often gain status by doing things like that. And someone who's low status will lose status over it.
People will either say "What an idiot, didn't he realise how goofy he looked?" or they'll say "Oh did you see what Jeff did to get the dance party started? We would never have gotten out there without him. I could never do that!".
> People will either say "What an idiot, didn't he realise how goofy he looked?" or they'll say "Oh did you see what Jeff did to get the dance party started? We would never have gotten out there without him. I could never do that!".
the obvious difference even right in that sentence is that whether that person actually successfully led or miserably failed
I'd say dancing alone while everyone else watches can be a high status thing. Think Tom Cruise in tropic thunder, he was the only one dancing was he low status?
When I think of status the way Keith Johnstone describes it in "Impro", being the first one out on the dancefloor is a completely neutral action.
_How_ you do it, and your own physical reaction to those around you while doing it, will reveal whether you're acting from a place of high or low status.
That only works if the person is already seen as high status—ie, if the other people at the dance are already primed to look at them going out on the dance floor and say "oh, they're dancing; that means it's time to dance."
If the person going out on the dance floor is an unknown, then going out there is a status risk. If it pays off, they can become seen as high status: a trailblazer, a trendsetter. If it doesn't, they become (at least for the time being) low status: pathetic, cringe.
Having visible confidence and charisma can help make the gamble more likely to pay off, but it's not a guarantee.
I mean sure. There is a pretty substantial risk that low-status people will be perceived as low status if they do something where success relies on their status being high. I like to offer advice - low status people probably shouldn't be engaging in status-proving activities if that worries them. They're making a play for higher status; that might not work.
In a situation where someone's status is not already known by a majority of people present, engaging in activities that rely on high status are a risk.
No one's status is inherent. It's a purely social construct—and it can vary depending on what group you're with!
If you look at, say, a black person in the mid-20th century, they might be very high status among other black people, but if they go among white people they will be seen as low status.
Leave your own community, go among people who don't know you (assuming there's nothing immediately visible about you that communicates status to them, as above), and whatever status you had before is only as relevant as you make it.
No, it gets it just right. The implicit assumption in this example is that the first person on the dance floor is _not_ quickly joined by hundreds of other people but continues to be awkwardly by themselves for a while, possibly then embarrassing themself by completely failing to attract anyone.
What a miserable world people commenting here seem to live in where going out to dance is a sort of status challenging activity?! When I was younger and frequented dance floors, everyone immediately started dancing as soon as the music started playing, wasn’t that the point of being there?? Never even occurred to me to fear being the only one dancing. And if did happen I would be wondering what kind of people come here and just stands there.
It is super important to have “no asshole zones”. We can joke about “safe space” like “South Park” did but at least not having your work shredded to parts with snarky comments goes far.
I started posting on LinkedIn this year. I was afraid all the time there will be assholes coming out of woods to just say “you’re an idiot take this post down” - it happened once in 6 months so not bad. Other asshole was reposting my stuff picking on the details basically making content out of me.
Blocking was effective and shadow banning is great as those most likely moved on not even knowing I blocked them.
It's the typical advice coming from high status people. Reminds me of rich people glorifying minimalism because they can buy stuff whenever they need it and throw it away after.
What is truly low status though ? I'd say it is quite rare. Most people are average. Truly low status I guess would be to be homeless or be so disfigured you cannot find a mate - something of that sort.
I think many average or even above average people who are not low status want to have more status and that's their real issue - the unmet desire for more power, not being actually low status.
>It implies a defensive structure. I.e the advantage I get out of low status.
OP is using the term moat in the standard way, actually. Something you have to cross to get to the reward (skill at a particular thing), that most people won't pay the cost for (being temporarily bad at something and low status). It stops most people from even trying to compete.
Quote from the article:
"It’s called a moat because it’s an effective bar to getting where you’re trying to go, and operates much like a moat in the business sense — as a barrier to entry that keeps people on the inside (who are already good at something) safe from competition from the horde of people on the outside (who could be)."
Being low status can be psychologically protective in some ways. One can opt into being low status as a defense mechanism, "I'm afraid of genuine failure, but by choosing artificial failure from the start, I can avoid the emotional pain of genuine failure."
It comes down to pride and an insecure or poorly formed conscience.
Obviously, you are going to be bad at something when you begin. What did you expect? Know it, accept it, and don’t pretend otherwise. Who expects a beginner to be good? And why are you afraid of someone, I don’t know, laughing at you or being condescending? What kind of prick would do that unless they were envious of your courage or insecure in their own abilities?
The fact is that many people spend their entire lives putting up appearances, and with time, it becomes harder and harder for them to do anything about it, because the whole facade of false identity would have to crumble. They live is a state of fear of being outed and shamed. This is a recipe for mental illness.
This matter situation reminds me of the parable about the Emperor’s new clothes. The boy’s potency comes from stating the obvious. You find something similar in professional life: the person who is like that boy in a room full of posers and blowhards is a threat to pretense, because he states the obvious. In that way, he is more in touch with reality, even if it is at such a basic level. This is a great catalyst for change in an organization, if the insecure and prideful don’t dig in their heels.
The truth will set you free, and where there is good will, there is no fear. And learn to endure suffering.
People have always asked me: Why don’t you have a big house or <status-symbol-x> or <status-symbol-y>?
My response is always: Because I could use that capital to try something new. Granted, there were a few times I wish I had the house because of the market bumps but stocks have made up for it.
People are scared of failing, scared of losing the precarious position they have built up over the years. The housing market has made that 10x worse with the prices but humans need to try different things, learn different things. You can’t just do one thing for 70 years. My father had 4 careers, 3 wives, 5 children throughout his lifetime. 2 degrees. I’ve had 1 wife, 1 child, 1 career, 1 degree, because the world is 100x more expensive now. This is what prohibits us from finding our ikigai.
A caveat that practice itself without reflection or deliberation does not necessarily lead to better outcomes. The author gives the example of poker, but a frequent poker player without knowledge of theory and without sufficient skepticism of optimality can easily learn suboptimal strategy.
Similarly, learning a sport (which must be done by practice and alongside conditioning towards the sport) without a good coach is risky with respect to safety and with respect to failing to learn the right thing.
I know a lot of people as described in this post, but it's never been an issue for me. I'm much more concerned about earning status, then embarrassing myself. I remember when I first started BJJ I was getting crushed, but it was still fun. But once I had been doing it for a year getting submitted stung bad because I should have known better. In the end I think the advice about accepting embarrassment is still good, because if you're pushing yourself and trying to perform at a high level you will never stop failing and embarrassing yourself.
I started the piano when I was 32. I'm not particularly good at it, I'll never play anything complex, but I love playing and I do my best. My teacher forced me to play in public at some point, and that was probably one of the best things he did, to get me past the point of caring.
That made me realize: no-one cares. You're the center of your life, and it's very important that you succeed, but the very few people who care about you (and whom you should care about) will have the patience, empathy, and admiration for you to be in that "moat", everyone else won't give a shit. If you fuck up, they'll forget about you in a minute. Try to remember about someone trying to do something you like but badly? You can't.
Whenever I see a public piano I seat at it. Sometimes it's just shit and I'm the only one happy I can press keys. Sometimes I manage to play a piece, and a random couple of people are happy about it.
This is a great article, follow its advice. The definition of low status is only the one you set for yourself. Push the shame and embrace it. No one cares anyways
Great article. I’ve come to see that feeling embarrassed can actually be a kind of luxury. When I’m around people with disabilities—many of whom might simply hope to reach a point where embarrassment is even possible—it reminds me how much we take that experience for granted. In that light, embarrassment itself can feel like a privilege. It calls to mind 2 Corinthians 12:9: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”
Sure. Maybe feeling embarrassed is a sign that our pride sometimes carries more weight than it should. It’s easy to forget that many people—especially those who are disadvantaged or disabled—might not even have the opportunity to feel embarrassed in the same way. Perhaps it’s a gentle reminder to let go a little of our need to protect our self-image.
A few extra tricks that worked for me (you can alternate depending on what fits best in the moment):
- Embrace the role of imposter. Instead of whining about imposter syndrome, accept a-priori that you are an imposter. The game is to survive as long as possible as an imposter in a world full of naturals. You lose not when you are made out, but when you give up.
- Embrace being a useless git. You're an idiot, you have no talent whatsoever, you don't have the skill yet, and there's no hope you'll ever acquire it. So, no pressure, you're only playing. Anything beyond failing completely is a bonus.
- Commit to "open to goal". You are starting today and you'll go on for as long as it takes. Possibly until you die. There's no deadline and no expected speed. You're just being stubborn and refuse to stop trying even in the face of evidence that you have no chance.
- Be delusional about "the hack". You are special and you've discovered a hack that makes it easier and faster for you to acquire the new skill and apply it successfully than it is for most people. All you have to do is go through the motions, "the hack" will take care of things.
- Fight injustice. You are _entitled_ to have this skill and the success it affords people, it is your god-given, inalienable right. But the world / family / society / boss / ex / whatever screwed you and you've been deprived of what's rightfully yours. Fuck them, you are now on a quest to acquire by brute force what you deserve.
You have "social anxiety." You are not in a "moat of low status." The status is purely in your own mind and not something calculated and assigned to you by the world.
Another CEO flying at 30,000' missing the forest for the trees.
I agree. I used to live high class. Then the Mafia came at me. I learned to lay low and appreciate poverty. Also, my ex and I bought a house, but then a richer man came and she kicked me out on Valentine's day. Now I despise wealth and luxury and now date only women at the flea market, cashiers and walmart stockers. Highly recommend. The devil wears Prada.
Tangentially, I've been applying something similar, but actually thinking of it as the privilege of high status.
As a very senior member of my team, which has a lot of new college grads, I've been asking the "dumb" questions, the "irritating" questions, intentionally speaking up what I believe others may be thingking, specifically because I figure I can afford the social (career) hit.
Yes - I'm a senior member of my team too (to the extent that I've previously been the team lead of similar teams) and it's so freeing to be able to:
1. Give plenty of credit to the juniors when they do good work, even if they were reliant on support, with no need to take credit myself
2. Give up some time working on my own objectives to coach the juniors, even though there's no cost code to book the time to and nobody asks me to do it
3. Easily say, with zero guilt: "no sorry that can't be done in 2 weeks, that's a 6 week job" or "sure I can do my part of this job but I'm going to need you to commit XYZ other resources if you want it to be a success"
4. Interpret the rules in the way I think is best for the organisation, not trying to please the person with the most pedantic interpretation
5. I can produce convincing explanations of how my work performance is delivering value to the organisation (whereas juniors can sometimes work their arse off and get no recognition for it)
I'm also a middle aged white man which seems to confer a lot of unearned trust, but combined with my professional experience I seriously think I have it easier than the juniors in so many ways, and it's my responsibility to give back a bit.
> Give plenty of credit to the juniors when they do good work, even if they were reliant on support, with no need to take credit myself
This is one of the most effective ways to lead because it builds goodwill and trust on the team. It also takes almost nothing away from you because as the senior/leader you will get default credit for most everything. It's always odd to me more people don't realize this.
I want to agree but I’ve observed a contrary pattern a few times: when higher levels of management don’t get this principle, and are themselves poor leaders and role models, they can take this at face value and believe that the juniors get all the credit and local leadership is contributing nothing.
Soft skills need to be valued from above in order to be workable strategies in the trenches. And often / usually that’s how it works.. but not always.
Having been there, it’s a lose lose situation, where you will constantly be berated for either not mentoring enough or not contributing enough, and it’s better to move on than play the shifting winds.
Even more so: as a senior, if you don't give extensive credit to the juniors, people will assume that you have some reasons to be insecure. So it's worse for your status.
You might need to a new username, you are the good guy.
I thought this was social competence.
yes, and we all need a good reminder every once in a while of how we can act with humility and integrity!
Never be afraid to ask stupid questions. As someone who spent years doing penetration testing, I can assure you that when stupid questions don’t have an obvious answer, someone isn’t thinking properly.
Also never be afraid to question people who answer quickly. We spend way too much effort training smart people to answer quickly rather than deeply, and there’s almost always a tradeoff between the two.
> Never be afraid to ask stupid questions.
Unfortunately that's the kind of black-and-white advice that seldom applies in the real world. Would you want to see your surgeon asking stupid questions? The pilot of the flight you're on?
You wouldn't, because part of your psychological comfort depends on your perception that people like this -- people whose decisions really matter -- actually know what they're doing.
ETA: By "stupid questions", I don't mean "basic but obviously important questions". I mean questions that reveal that you don't know something that other people expect you to know, that signal to them (rightly or wrongly) that they may have overestimated you.
Surgeons mark where on the body they're operating. This didn't used to be a standard practice.
Asking "Did I mess up my left and right?" or "Is this the right patient?" feels like a stupid question to ask. I'd certainly rather they ask those questions before operating on me! But turns out it's very hard to get them to do that, so we do surgical site marking instead.
I've been struggling to explain the principle behind the "stupid questions" and your example illustrates the point perfectly. Thank you. I'll be shamelessly stealing this point from now on :)
That's an excellent example.
> By "stupid questions", I don't mean "basic but obviously important questions". I mean questions that reveal that you don't know something that other people expect you to know, that signal to them (rightly or wrongly) that they may have overestimated you.
Ok but you didn’t bring up the phrase “stupid questions” so it’s less about how you define it, and more about a best effort interpretation of how it was originally meant.
I think the person who initially did bring up the phrase must have meant it the way I did, because if they didn't -- if in fact all they meant by it was "basic but obviously important questions" -- then there would be no reason for them to bring it up at all, since 100% of people already agree that you should never be afraid to ask basic but obviously important questions.
> since 100% of people already agree that you should never be afraid to ask basic but obviously important questions.
You don’t have a great mental model of how most people think
I don't think that's true. A lot of people are afraid to ask basic questions that everyone would think are important because they'd feel stupid asking them.
The thing is that in many a case those basic questions have not all actually been asked and answered because everyone involved thought the same: it's stupidly simple, I better not ask for fear of being marked dumb.
I get the feeling that it's because of fear of being marked dumb by people like you actually.
But then it often turns out that one of those stupid questions has not been answered sufficiently or people were thinking of completely different answers to the question. So it was a good thing that someone brought it up.
And if the question did already get taken into account and people did have the same answer(s) in mind then if a senior person asked, it will probably just be taken as "this guy knows his stuff and is just dotting Is and crossing Ts" VS a junior "asking dumb questions that everyone should know the answer to, duh!"
All I'm actually arguing for is exercising judgement in deciding whether to ask something that might be considered "a stupid question", rather than following black-and-white advice to always ask it anyway. All I'm arguing is that there exists a question that is too stupid to to be worth the reputational damage of asking.
> I get the feeling that it's because of fear of being marked dumb by people like you actually.
I make positive and negative judgements about people based on things they do, which is an imperfect heuristic but the best one available and much better than nothing. So do you.
That's fair and I read our parents' comment as using said judgement of course when asking said dumb questions.
The way I read your comment was that you categorically oppose asking "dumb questions" no matter what.
I’ve had multiple times in my career when people got mad at me for asking basic but obviously important questions. Things like:
* What invariants does this complex transformation preserve? What guarantees does it make about the output? (Come on, we all have a general idea, SpicyLemonZest should read the code if he wants all the details.)
* What’s the latency impact of adding this step? (It can’t be big enough to matter, stop trying to block my project!)
* Why did the last release advance to production when it wasn’t passing tests? (How dare you, our team works so hard, it says right here in our release manual that those test failures count as passing.)
These are good counterexamples to my "100% of people" claim as they illustrate something I hadn't taken into account in my answer: That a basic but obviously important question could have negative implications about other people. I agree that it's certainly not always the case that those people are OK with such questions.
When I wrote my comment, I didn't have such questions in mind. I wish I'd written it to exclude such questions, because I think they're not central to the issue here, which is whether or not asking questions that have negative implications about one's own ability is always a good idea.
And this is why it's very important, in the case of a junior engineer, to use your "I'm just starting here" privilege to ask those stupid questions. Or you can be a very senior engineer who has an established reputation, and can get away with asking what sound like "stupid" questions just because people assume you know what you're doing.
We have an expectation that "smart people" should be able to quickly fill in gaps in lightly-explained systems. Sometimes this is good: when you're teaching people a new concept it's great if they can grasp it quickly and approximately. When you're describing the design of a complex system, you absolutely do not want people to make incorrect assumptions about the parts you're skipping over.
The worst example I've seen was learning that the security of an industrial control platform came down to the fact that the management software wasn't installed by default. The designers had assumed that "knowledge of a software library" was a valid access control mechanism. As the cherry on top, another engineer chimed in that the software was actually installed on the system anyway, just in a different location. It took a pile of incredibly "stupid" questions to surface this knowledge.
Great point about "I'm just starting here" privilege, this is very real and useful.
I absolutely would want someone who's becoming a surgeon or pilot to ask the "stupid questions." This discussion is about growth and change over time as a person.
> This discussion is about growth and change over time as a person.
Is it? Because the original statement used the word "never" and didn't mention growth and change over time as qualifiers.
The more one attempts to qualify -- that is, restrict the scope of -- the advice, the more one tacitly admits the point I'm trying to make, which FTR is: This advice is not always good advice.
Stupid questions are far better than stupid mistakes due to not asking those questions.
Mostly I agree, but I think this statement carries with it an oversimplification of the world.
In practice, some of what it takes to do a given thing comes from thing-specific information (which is appropriate to ask questions about), and some comes from a background of experience in doing/studying other similar things (formally or informally). For complicated tasks it basically has to be this way, because there just isn't time to train a person up from scratch for each task -- a random person off the street could not perform surgery merely by first asking a sufficient number of questions about exactly how to do it. People find "stupid questions" alarming because they reveal holes in this important second category, and make people wonder what else important might be missing.
You could make the argument that it's better for society if everyone asks whatever "stupid" question comes to mind, because then incompetent people and charlatans will be quickly exposed and the harm they would do minimised. But it's not good for the charlatan!
I don't side with actual charlatans, of course, but most of the time I do side with people of imperfect competence, because that's most of us. Competence is improved by practice, and most tasks are low-stakes. If a person is already near the threshold of being perceived as unacceptably incompetent by others, and can discover the information they need via other means than by asking "stupid questions", that may well be the best way for everyone.
That's not to say that I advocate never asking stupid questions. In fact I would encourage people to lean more in that direction as a default setting -- they are the fastest way to get the necessary information. They just have a cost that it would be naive to ignore. It's a judgement call, is all I'm saying.
> I can assure you that when stupid questions don’t have an obvious answer, someone isn’t thinking properly.
Once you start asking stupid questions on the regular it's quite an interesting experience how often you can ask "stupid" questions to rooms full of senior engineers and sort of get back confused silence. In my experience there's a lot of really important but "stupid" questions that often just gets half-ignored because imagination and prioritization is hard.
I love and struggle with the second point. It's taken me half my career to realize that people would very much prefer the complete and right answer slowly or later than the '90% sure' answer right now. Being quick doesn't make you look smart
I disagree. Asking stupid questions, even if in good faith, can be mean being banned from communities or losing participation privileges. Such as mathoverflow or stackexhcange.
Category error.
StackExchange is a massive, global forum which has to react defensively in order to maintain its high-quality knowledgebase against spammers, scammers, and the same questions being posed 10^N times.
The context here is about knowledge dissemination in local teams, groups, or organizations. Completely separate category, levels of trust, motivations, incentives, etc.
In my experience this usually doesn’t turn into a career hit, but a career boon. I’ve been doing this since I was a junior, now I’m a staff engineer, and admittedly I am biased toward myself, but my career growth has been robust and among both my current t team and my professional network I feel I command a fair amount of respect and approachability because of this practice, which always pays off in the long run
I've had a similar experience with doing this overall in terms of career impact. It hasn't consistently worked for me, though. It really depends on the team.
The main issue I've run into happens when a person's reply to my stupid question doesn't make sense to me. If I continue asking follow up questions in order to understand better they sometimes get angry. But if I stop asking questions when I start to detect anger then I am left feeling confused about how the system works. Either way I'm left with a negative emotional impression of the person's caliber. Which isn't great for me cohering with the team.
I imagine that you've also run into this problem. How do you think about it?
There must be much more to it. Staff is a leadership role effectively, right?
Yes, though that is what I am getting at. It displays good leadership characteristics and reflects positively upon a person who acts this way, having the confidence to ask questions that others don’t or won’t. It’s a positive thing
I would go even further and call it the responsibility of high status to ask such questions.
As a high status person, you have an outsized influence on culture whether you like it or not, and an environment in which this kind of question can be asked ultimately leads to better outcomes.
I used to be the one that in big meetings would ask the 'dumb' questions a lot of people undoubtedly had in their mind, but wouldn't dare to pose. I didn't care that some people would find the question stupid, since it would make other people happy for not having to speak up themselves while still getting the info they needed. It would as well make some people happy for establishing a slightly higher place in the pecking order. At least i would gain some karma and maybe even some admiration.
Over the years I did this less and nowadays I mostly only speak when asked so in rather big meetings.
How did this come to be? I found that people who feel that they belong in the higher ranks of the social pecking order sometimes don't like this behavior and actively try to make you look bad. As I'm quite sensitive and am generally a people pleaser who thrives on getting external validation (I'm working on it...), it did not feel good and I feel it wasn't worth the trouble...
Yes this is probably the best thing about feeling senior enough and maybe the best measure of seniority. If you dare ask stupid questions you aren't stupid.
But then there are likely also situations when you feel that you ask a bunch of stupid questions but are faced with blank stares because people doesn't understand the context enough for those questions either or they are struggling enough with other problems to even entertain that kind of question.
It can kind of lead to a similar situation to when the math professor at uni jokingly asks a "trivial" math question in front of his students. It's trivial only once you have worked that kind of problem a 1000 times.
> If you dare ask stupid questions you aren't stupid.
I'm the exception to the rule, I always do this and I'm not senior. I make it clear too that I do this.
Ah, I just read the article. Yea, I'm not afraid of the moat of low status. I know what reward it brings, it's easy +EV.
Absolutely. As I get more and more senior, I found myself prefacing a lot of questions with "let me ask some stupid questions" to ask some broad questions or context of the meeting. It can be something seemingly obvious, what's important is it somehow breaks the barrier for others to ask questions. I used to say "I'm going to play my 'new guy' card one more time" when I'm new at a company, but this seems to work more generically, and tends to work in the team's benefit.
I have an account on reddit that leans into extremes, specifically to collect the ad hominem attacks, while wading into benign topics people won’t talk about but would like consensus on
because they are afraid the benign topic will cause them to get ad hominem attacked or generally vilified
most people’s reddit profiles are their whole identity and they try to stay in moderate “polite company” at the expense of remaining ignorant
Indeed. As a senior, I found out that at the last 'retrospective' I was one the only ones who had anything on 'needs improvement' 'saying what I believe others might be thinking' - and during anonymous voting my items did get most of the votes.
I wish more people were like you. I can't speak to the past but it seems all anyone in high status positions wants to do is be "guilded" and left alone.
I have understood that the vast majority of people are simply not interested in having conversations, their goal is to perform social dance that scores them social points.
Sufficient status entirely changes how the act of asking dumb questions is perceived by others. A person with a small title is seen as asking dumb questions because they are dumb. A person with a big title asks dumb questions because they are smart. Of course it's not just title but also age, gender, race, appearance, etc.
Good!
https://grugbrain.dev/#grug-on-fold
Good lessons.
Over the past few years, I've managed to convince (and occasionally demonstrate) to my kids that "you'll be bad at anything new" and that they only way to get better is practice.
As a result, when other kids have made fun of them for failing, they rebut with "I've never done this before! I'll get better!" which is awesome.. being able to handle failure, acknowledge it as failure, and then figure out how to get better.
If you can get and hold onto that mindset, it's kinda awesome.
"Sucking at something is the first step towards being kinda good at something." --- Jake the Dog
Counterpoint: you'll stop enjoying a new hobby, like learning to play the guitar, when you decide to get serious about it.
If it turns into treating it as a “should” then my experience is yes, definitely, that’s a death knell for basically anything. Without the “should” it continues to be fun. The trick is threading that needle.
It is said that God wrote the entire language for to use in a book and that we shall model ourselves off of it. Once it was done, God turns his back on the book and Satan sneaked in and added two words - "Should" and "Aught".
In my experience this is more related to treating the hobby like a chore or job instead of doing it for the fun of it, even though you're bad at it.
I think the relationship is kinda the other way around - you'll feel like your hobby is "serious" when you stop having fun with it.
This hasnt my been my experience. I continue to love basketball despite being bad at it for years regardless of how much "serious" training I do.
Been writing code for 25 years, 15 professional. Still enjoy it just as much.
> you'll be bad at anything new
I disagree. Innate talent / affinity and transferable experience exist. I agree with "10% inspiration and 90% perspiration"; however, given equal effort, people with innate talent are going to win over people with no or less talent by a wide margin. This applies to everything. Gym / sports performance, muscle growth, work that needs IQ, work that needs EQ, life events that need resilience, general happiness, everything. Genetics is hugely definitive.
And I'm convinced some people bounce back more easily after a failure because failure is genuinely less hurtful for them. They don't need to "hold onto that mindset"; they just have it.
> I disagree. Innate talent / affinity and transferable experience exist. I agree with "10% inspiration and 90% perspiration"; however, given equal effort, people with innate talent are going to win over people with no or less talent by a wide margin.
I think you are misreading the person you're replying to.
They aren't saying "everybody can be equally good at everything with practice."
They're saying "don't quit just because you aren't great on day 1."
First time playing basketball even if you've played soccer a ton and have good general athletic ability? Don't expect to hold your own if joining a game being played by people who play every week.
First time doing woodworking even if you have an electrical engineering background and the methodicalness is not foreign to you? Don't expect your first table to be stunning. Still gonna be bad at it compared to people with more practice!
Honestly, if you think you're great at something the first time you try it, you probably just don't know what being great at it actually looks like. (It could even be "similar result, but better in some hidden ways, and done in 1/10th the time.")
But if you believe that you'll get better at it with practice, you'll keep doing it.
If you believe "guess I just don't have innate ability here" you'll give up and never get good.
> I think you are misreading the person you're replying to. [...] They're saying "don't quit just because you aren't great on day 1."
That's not what they're saying. They literally wrote, "you'll be bad at anything new". That's what I disagreed with. There are people who are great at something new (for them), and catch up with (and surpass) old-timers incredibly quickly. And their learning experience -- not that it doesn't take effort -- is generally enjoyable, exactly because they succeed from very early on. I've witnessed this with at least two colleagues. Entered completely new fields (one of them repeatedly), and in a few weeks, surpassed old-timers in those fields. These are the guys who tend to be promoted to senior principal or distinguished software engineers.
> First time playing basketball even if you've played soccer a ton and have good general athletic ability? Don't expect to hold your own if joining a game being played by people who play every week.
Do expect to mostly catch up with them in 1-2 months! (In my high school class, the soccer team was effectively identical to the basketball team.)
> and done in 1/10th the time
I agree with this; yes. But my point is that, for some people, approaching such a short completion time, with comparable results, is a relatively fast, and enjoyable, process. They don't plateau as early, and don't struggle from the beginning.
> If you believe "guess I just don't have innate ability here" you'll give up and never get good.
Correct, but it doesn't imply that "giving your all" does make you good (at an absolute scale). You will no doubt improve relative to your earlier self, but those advances may not qualify as "competitive", more globally speaking. Giving up (after serious work) may be objectively valid. For some people, persevering is the challenge (= lack of willpower, persistence); for others, accepting failure / mediocrity, and -- possibly -- finding something better, is the challenge.
Hah, I wrote almost the same thing in a sibling reply with one difference, plateauing for the hit-the-ground-runners may come earlier than the first-learn-how-to-walkers.
> Entered completely new fields
What fields, if I can ask?
People exist that pick up that chisel / basketball / soldering iron and do something really impressive with it after being shown 0..2 times. They might have horrible technique, not know the little tricks and shortcuts, plateau quickly etc., but their experience of doing the thing is not a series of failures until they get reasonably OK at it, rather increasing levels of wins.
Those people are still growing the limit of their ability just like you. They're just trying things slightly under their current limit* instead of slightly over.
* Not an electronics pun
Ya except people with innate talent are frequently lazy and take their talent for granted. You can often outwork these people and get better than them
I don't remember who said this but I really like this quote: "What would you do if you knew you would not fail?"
I would argue there is no way to make it that you do not fail in some way. ;)
> I would argue there is no way to make it that you do not fail in some way. ;)
True, but I think the quote was more about not worrying about the outcome just do what you really want to do.
Maybe: "What would you do if reasonably soon you would get really good at it"
instead?
win
Chapeau- i‘ll copy what you did here.
"Cate Hall is Astera's CEO. She's a former Supreme Court attorney and the ex-No. 1 female poker player in the world."
This article is countersignaling. It also happens to be directionally correct.
There is absolutely nothing low status about being present-day Cate Hall. But present-day Cate Hall probably tried and pushed through a lot of really tough stuff in part because yesteryear Cate Hall had this mindset. It so happened that she also had the talent to actually end up in impressive places.
The real lesson one should probably take from a person like this is that learning to eyeball your own strengths and weaknesses before you start down the long path of honing them is really important. If you are low status now but you have reason to believe you will become much higher status in the future by persevering, then persevere. If not...
She’s a VC-backed founder who went to Yale, and her very first job was at Goldman. What she’s describing in the article is not “low status” because she hadn’t experienced that. But the feeling she describes reveals what she thinks “low status” is - embarrassment.
It's relative, you can be low status in one group and high status in another and be the exact same person.
Sounds like from the online bullying she suffered from at Yale, she was low status there.
I’d like to understand the thinking of those who downvoted and flagged this comment.
It was "[dead]" or "[flagged]" ? If it was the first it was automatic and probably caused by previous comments, not by this one. New accounts (green name) can be auto-flagged quite fast if they have downvotes or reports on multiple comments.
At this point, I remember it as flagged. I'm reasonably confident that my memory is correct.
Getting into Yale is indeed pretty good prima facie evidence that you have what it takes to be high status in the future, in quite a few domains. Persevering is great advice for most people along most trajectories who get into Yale.
It's not just a question of potential.
Getting into Yale directly confers high status, and it is fairly well gated by other status-related tests: honors classes and private schools nudge you to learn the kind of thinking that does well on the SAT, not the kind of thinking that keeps you out of danger, as well as pushing you to AP exam prep classes; and access to extracurricular activities is gated both implicitly (by school choice) and explicitly by disciplinary measures for low-status behaviors. Rednecks like JD Vance are a tiny minority of the Yale entering class, and lower-status groups like illegal immigrants are as far as I know completely absent.
Also, I think the idea that there is something that it takes to be high status is incorrect. Social status is its own phenomenon with its own rules, and sometimes it's pretty random: you get a good job against the odds, or a good spouse, or you narrowly escape a disabling accident. You could argue that "what it takes" in such cases is luck, but graduating from Yale doesn't indicate that you will be lucky in the future, only of things that have happened before that.
>the idea that there is something that it takes to be high status is incorrect
>Getting into Yale directly confers high status
Don't these two ideas contradict one another? It sure sounds like we have at least one known pathway to becoming high status, and that is getting into Yale.
No, "something that it takes to be high status" would be some characteristic (in this context, one that is stable over time) that was necessary for high status, while something that "directly confers high status" is something that is sufficient for high status. It's entirely possible for something to be sufficient and nothing to be necessary. You're making the basic logical error of confusing ∀ with ∃.
Consider the set S of all properties which confer high status. "Got into Yale" is something we have assumed is in S, so S is nonempty. 'I have at least one property in S' seems like it would be a fine candidate for the necessary characteristic you're after, and it's not vacuous either, it can actually be achieved in reality. Therefore there is something that it takes to be high status, in your words.
That doesn't follow; you're just making the same logic error more verbose, perhaps in hopes that if the argument is so hard to understand that it has no obvious flaws, people will mistake it for an argument that obviously has no flaws.
I genuinely do not see it. If you have a collection of all sufficient properties for Q, you can construct Q's necessary property by just rolling them all up into a big or-statement. "You are high status if you get into Yale or have a lot of money or are really funny or ...", like that.
Again my specific claim here is merely that such a statement exists, nontrivially, for this kind of problem. Not even that we can write it down in full or whatever. I don't see why that's illegal.
For the specific question, I gave some examples upthread: for example, there isn't something that "it takes" to marry a spouse who confers high status on you, except for luck later in life, which Yale's admissions office can't predict and thus can't use as an admission criterion. There are persistent attributes that improve your chances of marrying well and staying married—pre-existing high status, conventional attractiveness, health, intelligence, sanity, etc.—but none of them are either necessary or sufficient.
If we're talking about the abstract problem in classical propositional logic, there's no requirement in classical logic that a proposition Q be true for some external reason. It can just be true. Causality is outside the scope of propositional logic.
It's true that, in classical propositional logic, there is necessarily a proposition that is necessary for Q's truth, that is, a proposition that Q implies. There are infinitely many of them, in fact. Q implies Q, for example. It also implies Q or not Q, because in classical propositional logic, any proposition implies all tautologies. You can't list them all, and it wouldn't help.
If you have some finite list of atomic propositions to try to compose your set S from, there is no guarantee that listing all of the sufficient conditions from that list (other than Q itself) will give you an S whose disjunction is a necessary condition. A simple model of this is P = no, Q = yes, S = {P}.
From my research the whole Alvea thing was an Effective Alturism cooked up project that only lasted 3 years and made no money, and then now they are at Astera which seems to be some rich persons plaground where they throw money at researchers to do “stuff”. What that stuff is, I don’t know.
The real moral of this story is you should get rich eccentric friends from the Ivy League elite who throw money at you to do AGI. Like you really think this company of like 40 people is going to crack AGI?
Man I should cross the moat and get some rich friends.
Well yeah , being high status does not always mean you actually contribute a lot of value to society. And being medium status does not mean your value is mediocre - take a nurse or a kindergarten teacher - their value is substantial but the status they get is mediocre at best. So if you get a feeling the "game" is somewhat rigged and twisted, perhaps the feeling is correct...
"Alvea started in late 2021 as a moonshot to rapidly develop and deploy a room temperature-stable DNA vaccine candidate against the Omicron wave of COVID-19, and we soon became the fastest startup to take a new drug from founding to a Phase 1 clinical trial. However, we decided to discontinue our lead candidate during the follow-up period of the trial as the case for large-scale impact weakened amidst the evolving pandemic landscape."
To be honest Alvea doesn't sound like a crazy idea on paper. Reducing lead times on new drugs is a really good idea that seems like it is bottlenecked more by bureaucratic concerns.
A company which focused on that as its sole mission could be really profitable, if they could sell their professional services to a group that already had plenty of in house expertise on actually creating the drugs. My very low resolution guess is that they slipped up when they actually tried to make the drug themselves. That may have been a requirement to get funding from the US government at the time, I don't know.
These thing aren't talked about much. But think the proper way to discuss is that "social status" exists among groups of rough peers and "social position" better describes someone's privileges of wealth, education and employment relative to society as a whole.
Just as an example, a whole lot of dysfunctional dynamics happening lately seem to involve billionaires jockeying for status with other billionaires.
Edit: I'd recommend Paul Fussel's book Class since it involves discussion of these two dynamics.
Be wary of imitating high status people who can afford to counter signal.
https://www.robkhenderson.com/p/the-perils-of-imitating-high...
Encouraging people to be low status in order to have high status is a genius way to create a new status game.
A: Actually, money isn't really important.
B: It must feel good to say so when you have the money.
A: It does.
(Quoting from memory, can't remember the movie.)
Talented people don't have to go through as much embarrassment as others because they learn faster than normal & will impress through that, even if they're worse at what they're doing. Also, once you are truly good at something, it's easier to be bad at something else. But not disagreeing with her.
Thanks for pointing out that it is counter signalling, but I would also say that it is good advice regardless. It's like an efficient highway - the road is straight and unadorned because looking "scientific" and sensible is how you convince government and the public it is a good idea. The fact that being efficient is also a net good is almost a side effect but still not to be ignored!
This article is countersignaling. It also happens to be directionally correct.
As far as I can tell, you jargony phrase means that this is something like the humble part of "humble bragging". I'd disagree, I think the article gives honest good advice, an honest "meta-analysis" of social status and jumping into new things. It's "actionable", something you can do.
I would add that its advice for the sort of person who is normally always thinking about and fairly competent with social status and is held back from new skills by this. I personally was never too worried about social status and have learned massive new things by just being willing to try them but wound-up bitten by my ignoring of status. My advice for my younger me is to be strategic about publicly ignoring status but keep going into private.
Also statements like "she succeeded 'cause she was tough" are meaningless as advice or actionable/verifiable statements. Maybe she succeeded 'cause she had a bunch of strategies like the one she outlines, maybe she succeeded 'cause of good luck, maybe she succeed by family positions, maybe "luck", "toughness" or "mojo" did it.
>statements like "she succeeded 'cause she was tough" are meaningless as advice or actionable/verifiable statements
The action you are supposed to take from this is to figure out whether you're tough, and if you find out you're not, to give up and go to something else you're better suited for. This seems like exceptionally actionable advice - just not advice that strokes anyone's ego.
I will give you an example. When I was 17 I spent exactly one day as a door to door canvasser for an environmental charity. I got dropped off into a neighborhood I had never seen before, told to walk up to people's doors and beg them for money for something I was pretty sure wasn't particularly effective at solving anything important, and then do this about a hundred times.
Door #1 gave me one dollar. Door #2 let me call my parents in tears to come pick me up. Whatever Unusual characteristic that particular job needed, I did not have it. I do not have it to this day.
Related: During solo travelling whenever a thought crosses my mind to do something and my instinctual internal response is discomfort, I try to make myself do it - even if I feel awkward inserting myself or going back.
I've had so many awesome conversations with random interesting people every day during my trips thanks to this. I've gone places I'd otherwise not experience, all for the sake of exciting adventure and pushing my own bounds. The confidence that comes from this is significant.
Also, as a former remote software engineer of 3 years, it has been so energizing to socialize with people again. Best upper that there is.
There's a LOT here. I feel this applies to a lot of decisions.
For instance, if you want to make a product that requires a database and you like building database stuff, do the database stuff last. Do what is difficult first - fail fast.
The easy or default route will always be well known to someone.
Solo travelling was how I formed one of my most salient memories of the "moat of low status", to wit: going to Japan in 2011. Japan is an advanced G7 country, but unlike most of the rest, very few people there speak or understand English. So I was put in the position of having to get by with my shitty Japanese, or attempt to communicate even more futilely with the locals in English and seem like an even bigger, more clueless asshole. I think I gained more levels of Japanese in those two weeks than I did in two years of university education.
My lifetime best command of Italian was when I lost the keys to my apartment and had to ask around if anyone has seen them.
At that point I was already living part time in Italy for over two years, but since I was working remotely for a company in my country, I hardly had an opportunity to learn the language.
Fortunately Italians appreciate people attempting to speak their language.
Overall I like this framing. But I wanted to comment on this
> In poker, it’s possible to improve via theoretical learning.... But you really can’t become a successful player without playing a lot of hands with and in front of other players, many of whom will be better than you.
This is an interesting example because poker is a game that has existed for many years, and for most of those years everyone learned by doing and was terrible at it.
People who excel at things have typically done more theoretical learning than the average person. Doing is necessary, but it's rarely the main way you learn something.
Either you have a mentor who has already absorbed theory and transmits it to you in digested form, or you have to learn the theory yourself.
But most people get the balance between theory and doing wrong, and most people err on the side of doing because theory is harder and less instantly rewarding.
I think one aspect of this is that learning from doing often involves more than just doing. It involves paying attention to what you're doing, and what other people are doing, and then reviewing that. This doesn't necessarily have to be "theoretical" learning, but it's deliberate or explicit study as opposed to just hoping to get better by osmosis. It's easy to do something a lot and not learn from it.
Everyone on HN is an expert in poker.
well said
Very similar to the concept of the dip, explained in the book The Dip by Seth Godin
I asked Google to briefly summarize the concept:
> The Dip: It's a term Godin uses to describe the unavoidable and challenging period that occurs after the initial excitement of starting a new project, skill, or career, and before achieving success or mastery. This is the time when things get difficult, frustrating, and many people are tempted to quit
> Embracing the Dip: Instead of being discouraged by The Dip, Godin suggests that dips can be opportunities. They serve as a natural filter, separating those with the determination to persevere from those who are not truly committed. By pushing through the Dip, you can emerge stronger and potentially achieve greater rewards
> unavoidable
Well, no. Depends on the person. For some people and for some new undertakings, especially if those people know themselves well already, they can hit the ground running. I've seen it.
I grew up in Scotland in the 90s, the high school I went to was ill equipped to deal with someone as wide as I am on the spectrums. I was put into the "retarded children" programs. I think this resulted in me always "knowing" I was the dumbest person in the room, and eventually as a survival mechanism I learned to, well... not care. All through college, my 20s and 30s, I always felt like the dumbest person in the room, but I didn't really care I just felt super happy to be in the rooms, and so I said whatever I wanted and asked whatever I wanted. Now that I'm older, I realize what a blessing this ended up being because I've always ended up in rooms full of incredibly brilliant people having decent amounts of money thrown my way to be in them.
Low status isn't so bad.
There's some survivorship bias here. You often just end up looking like an idiot or being really bad at something. I agree that embarrassment shouldn't be a barrier but one should be aware of the flip side. "Putting yourself out there" mostly results in humiliation and rejection. Focusing on being thick skinned and resilient is maybe more important than imagining you just need to get over embarrassment.
If you try new things, you may go bankrupt, get laughed at or be humiliated in a much worse way, be regularly rejected or talked down to, etc. It's not just about being brave for a minute. And in the end you might never make it.
I agree but I think many of us are paralyzed even in the face of tiny risks or even imaginary ones. I have an idea for a 20 hour solo software project and besides the usual resistance of sitting there and getting it done, one of the barriers is the thought "what if people don't use it much" or what if "my wife doesn't get what I did it" and stuff like that. These are quite paralyzing feelings that are not really rational, I stand to gain more than I stand to lose by doing this project, and yet my mind has settled on the risk being about as high as the reward. You could say this is just me but I think many many people are like that.
I appreciate this. Risk is real! It's still worth taking risks, but the chance of failure is not imaginary.
I genuinely needed this piece today, specifically. Thanks for sharing it.
I've been trying to live more authentically in general these past few years, making tiny little inroads one step at a time towards being someone I've consciously chosen, rather than merely exist in a safe form that doesn't risk alienating others (or rather, in a form I don't perceive to alienate others - obviously I am not a mindreader). Think classic tech neutral outfits (jeans and neutral shirts, neutral shoes, neutral socks, the sole piece of color being the Pride band of my Apple Watch). OCD hurts the process of trying to live authentically, because it's doing its damndest to ensure I never encounter harm.
So last night, after coming down from some flower and watching the evening roll in, I decided to put on an outfit I'd put together. All sorts of bright colors: neon green and black sneakers, bright pink shirt, sapphire blue denim jean shorts, bleached white socks - and went for a walk. OCD was INCREDIBLY self-conscious that I would stand out (duh), court the wrong sort of attention, or somehow find myself in trouble...for wearing things I see everyone else wear without any issue whatsoever.
The moat is real, and the mind wants to build barriers to minimize perceived harms; for neurodivergent folks, it can be downright crippling. Wallflowering at parties, never gambling on colors or bold styles, never taking on new challenges for risk of failure. It results in a life so boring, sterile, and uninteresting - to yourself, and to others.
So...yeah. I got nothing to add other than my personal nuggets of experience. Really glad this piece came past on HN today, I think a lot of folks are going to enjoy its message.
I’m glad you’re happy.
I do wish we could stop saying “moat”.
Most of us aren’t living in ancient forts we need to protect.
As it pertains to this article, what we are desperately trying to protect is our fragile ego and avoiding embarrassment is the moat to do so.
"Moat" is a tinny word according to the Monty Python classification of words. Also uncomfortably close to "moist".
Moat.
> Most of us aren’t living in ancient forts we need to protect.
Speak for yourself!
raises draw bridge
Tangential related:
I learned in a class on design that you should work with what you already know.
If you don't know about colors, then do it in grey scale, if you don't know about that, do it in black and white.
The best ideas come from working with constraints.
While highly skilled designers/musicians/developers/writers/etc. do this despite being able to work outside of the constraints, a beginner can do it too. Sure, they can't choose the constraints as freely as a pro, but they can make work with what they got and it can lead to interesting results.
This is also a good way to approach new things without embarrassing yourself, as you don't try to impress with skills you don't mastered 100% yet.
In a similar vein, I’ve found helpful:
There’s a difference between pain and suffering.
This is true for emotions: feelings people often find uncomfortable (sadness, loneliness, fear) don’t have to make you miserable. You can just feel those feelings in your body, pay attention to what they’re asking you to pay attention to, and feel deeply okay about it all.
The same is true for physical sensations. Pain is loud so it’s really good at drawing our attention, but there’s a difference between noticing you’re hurt and getting upset about being hurt.
I flipped my bike a couple months ago and scraped myself up incredibly badly, but there wasn’t a ton of suffering involved.
The massive adrenaline shot left me shaking, I felt overwhelmed and like I wanted to cry, and the pain was very loud. But I laid on the ground for fifteen or twenty minutes and then walked the fifteen minutes back home. I wouldn’t call it fun, but it was totally okay.
(Nick Cammarata has a good Buddhist take on this: suffering is a specific fast, grabby movement you do in your mind called “tanha” and if you pay attention you can learn to do it less.)
One thing that helps with this: getting old. You just stop worrying about what other people think of you. All the drama and gossip and cliquish behavior just gets so boring.
Why do you think old fat guys walk around naked in the locker room at the gym? They've certainly got nothing to show off, but they don't give a shit.
Yes. And this is very helpful. If you are young and you suck at something, more people will give you the benefit of the youth and envision you may improve. If you're old and you suck at something, many will think you're just old, and you just suck. "Don't hurt yourself!" So yes, not giving a shit is a very good way to make progress.
For me this is it.
Whenever someone does “statusy” things I just know how it feels like having done it before so I just move on and don’t participate in that theater anymore.
Or maybe you just done need to.
We live in a society in which older people(or men, at least) get some degree of implicit status and respect - which is probably why our governments are all getontocracies.
It’s never been about gender, it’s only ever about money. You’ll blow your mind when you pull back a layer and realize this.
Or keep holding time against old men, up to you. ;)
Sometime around mid-30s I stopped caring about what people think about me and it had a great effect on my mental well being. I reconnected with age old Lindy wisdom and started reading classics that helped me with my midlife crisis. Not giving a fuck surprisingly opens up lots of doors.
Status games and tech-bro style hustle culture only leads to burnout.
They “let it all hang out” quite literally.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/let_it_all_hang_out
> (idiomatic) to relax and be carefree
> Synonym: let one's hair down
"Sexy indifference" is how I've heard it. Don't be a jerk about it, but also give off the DGAF vibe. It works.
Everything is a remix.
Previous art: “ Willingness to look stupid” by Dan Luu.
https://danluu.com/look-stupid/
Precious discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28942189
It is a pretty good article, but it slightly misunderstands status. Being the first person on the dance floor is closer to a high status move, because it is taking a leardership position and suggesting what the group should do next. People avoid doing that because they want to copy someone of a higher status than themselves, not because they fear low status. The mechanism nature uses to implement that low status behaviour is nervousness which is often described as a fear of "standing out", "looking silly" or similar terms, but those are low status concerns. High status people don't really suffer from looking silly, they define what looking silly is by being what they don't do.
I don't know. There's nothing high status about being the only person on the dance floor for 3 songs in a row.
> High status people don't really suffer from looking silly, they define what looking silly is by being what they don't do.
I also don't know about this. Certain high status people are obsessively concerned with whether they look silly. They used to routinely fight to the death over it.
I've been reading the Book of the Courtier this week, and it's clear that even back in the 16th century high status people were very concerned about whether they looked silly, or even whether their dances looked silly.
> I've been reading the Book of the Courtier this week, and it's clear that even back in the 16th century high status people were very concerned about whether they looked silly, or even whether their dances looked silly.
In the context of the situation the people worrying probably weren't the highest status person in the room though. In a room full of princes one of them is going to be feeling pressure because they are low status relative to their peers. That is what instincts key off, not absolute numbers of people that a body can't immediately detect.
> There's nothing high status about being the only person on the dance floor for 3 songs in a row.
Simon Sinek says we admire leaders because they take risks on behalf of the tribe. They'll start dancing first knowing they're risking looking silly if nobody joins them. Its impressive because the risk might not pay off.
Being the only person on the dance floor for 3 songs in a row is an interesting move. I think there is something high status about it - in that you're clearly showing that you aren't insecure about how you're seen. I think its polarising. Either it'll make people think a lot less of you, or more of you. Someone who's generally high status will often gain status by doing things like that. And someone who's low status will lose status over it.
People will either say "What an idiot, didn't he realise how goofy he looked?" or they'll say "Oh did you see what Jeff did to get the dance party started? We would never have gotten out there without him. I could never do that!".
It really depends on context.
> People will either say "What an idiot, didn't he realise how goofy he looked?" or they'll say "Oh did you see what Jeff did to get the dance party started? We would never have gotten out there without him. I could never do that!".
the obvious difference even right in that sentence is that whether that person actually successfully led or miserably failed
the leader isn’t dancing because they want to dance, they are dancing because the people want to dance
I'd say dancing alone while everyone else watches can be a high status thing. Think Tom Cruise in tropic thunder, he was the only one dancing was he low status?
When I think of status the way Keith Johnstone describes it in "Impro", being the first one out on the dancefloor is a completely neutral action.
_How_ you do it, and your own physical reaction to those around you while doing it, will reveal whether you're acting from a place of high or low status.
That only works if the person is already seen as high status—ie, if the other people at the dance are already primed to look at them going out on the dance floor and say "oh, they're dancing; that means it's time to dance."
If the person going out on the dance floor is an unknown, then going out there is a status risk. If it pays off, they can become seen as high status: a trailblazer, a trendsetter. If it doesn't, they become (at least for the time being) low status: pathetic, cringe.
Having visible confidence and charisma can help make the gamble more likely to pay off, but it's not a guarantee.
I mean sure. There is a pretty substantial risk that low-status people will be perceived as low status if they do something where success relies on their status being high. I like to offer advice - low status people probably shouldn't be engaging in status-proving activities if that worries them. They're making a play for higher status; that might not work.
...I think you've missed my point.
In a situation where someone's status is not already known by a majority of people present, engaging in activities that rely on high status are a risk.
No one's status is inherent. It's a purely social construct—and it can vary depending on what group you're with!
If you look at, say, a black person in the mid-20th century, they might be very high status among other black people, but if they go among white people they will be seen as low status.
Leave your own community, go among people who don't know you (assuming there's nothing immediately visible about you that communicates status to them, as above), and whatever status you had before is only as relevant as you make it.
No, it gets it just right. The implicit assumption in this example is that the first person on the dance floor is _not_ quickly joined by hundreds of other people but continues to be awkwardly by themselves for a while, possibly then embarrassing themself by completely failing to attract anyone.
What a miserable world people commenting here seem to live in where going out to dance is a sort of status challenging activity?! When I was younger and frequented dance floors, everyone immediately started dancing as soon as the music started playing, wasn’t that the point of being there?? Never even occurred to me to fear being the only one dancing. And if did happen I would be wondering what kind of people come here and just stands there.
There are many events where dancing is not the main point of being there. Wedding receptions being an obvious one, but there are others as well.
It is super important to have “no asshole zones”. We can joke about “safe space” like “South Park” did but at least not having your work shredded to parts with snarky comments goes far.
I started posting on LinkedIn this year. I was afraid all the time there will be assholes coming out of woods to just say “you’re an idiot take this post down” - it happened once in 6 months so not bad. Other asshole was reposting my stuff picking on the details basically making content out of me.
Blocking was effective and shadow banning is great as those most likely moved on not even knowing I blocked them.
I would reconsider why you would want to post on LinkedIn in the first place.
There it is!
It's the typical advice coming from high status people. Reminds me of rich people glorifying minimalism because they can buy stuff whenever they need it and throw it away after.
Being truly low status isn't much fun.
> Being truly low status isn't much fun.
What is truly low status though ? I'd say it is quite rare. Most people are average. Truly low status I guess would be to be homeless or be so disfigured you cannot find a mate - something of that sort. I think many average or even above average people who are not low status want to have more status and that's their real issue - the unmet desire for more power, not being actually low status.
Love the concept but “the moat of low status” is a poor name.
It implies a defensive structure. I.e the advantage I get out of low status.
Op even refers to the concept of moats as used in business, but clumsily hand waves the concept to fit her own.
The cage of low status would be more apt
>It implies a defensive structure. I.e the advantage I get out of low status.
OP is using the term moat in the standard way, actually. Something you have to cross to get to the reward (skill at a particular thing), that most people won't pay the cost for (being temporarily bad at something and low status). It stops most people from even trying to compete.
Quote from the article:
"It’s called a moat because it’s an effective bar to getting where you’re trying to go, and operates much like a moat in the business sense — as a barrier to entry that keeps people on the inside (who are already good at something) safe from competition from the horde of people on the outside (who could be)."
Being low status can be psychologically protective in some ways. One can opt into being low status as a defense mechanism, "I'm afraid of genuine failure, but by choosing artificial failure from the start, I can avoid the emotional pain of genuine failure."
It comes down to pride and an insecure or poorly formed conscience.
Obviously, you are going to be bad at something when you begin. What did you expect? Know it, accept it, and don’t pretend otherwise. Who expects a beginner to be good? And why are you afraid of someone, I don’t know, laughing at you or being condescending? What kind of prick would do that unless they were envious of your courage or insecure in their own abilities?
The fact is that many people spend their entire lives putting up appearances, and with time, it becomes harder and harder for them to do anything about it, because the whole facade of false identity would have to crumble. They live is a state of fear of being outed and shamed. This is a recipe for mental illness.
This matter situation reminds me of the parable about the Emperor’s new clothes. The boy’s potency comes from stating the obvious. You find something similar in professional life: the person who is like that boy in a room full of posers and blowhards is a threat to pretense, because he states the obvious. In that way, he is more in touch with reality, even if it is at such a basic level. This is a great catalyst for change in an organization, if the insecure and prideful don’t dig in their heels.
The truth will set you free, and where there is good will, there is no fear. And learn to endure suffering.
I love this.
People have always asked me: Why don’t you have a big house or <status-symbol-x> or <status-symbol-y>?
My response is always: Because I could use that capital to try something new. Granted, there were a few times I wish I had the house because of the market bumps but stocks have made up for it.
People are scared of failing, scared of losing the precarious position they have built up over the years. The housing market has made that 10x worse with the prices but humans need to try different things, learn different things. You can’t just do one thing for 70 years. My father had 4 careers, 3 wives, 5 children throughout his lifetime. 2 degrees. I’ve had 1 wife, 1 child, 1 career, 1 degree, because the world is 100x more expensive now. This is what prohibits us from finding our ikigai.
A caveat that practice itself without reflection or deliberation does not necessarily lead to better outcomes. The author gives the example of poker, but a frequent poker player without knowledge of theory and without sufficient skepticism of optimality can easily learn suboptimal strategy.
Similarly, learning a sport (which must be done by practice and alongside conditioning towards the sport) without a good coach is risky with respect to safety and with respect to failing to learn the right thing.
I know a lot of people as described in this post, but it's never been an issue for me. I'm much more concerned about earning status, then embarrassing myself. I remember when I first started BJJ I was getting crushed, but it was still fun. But once I had been doing it for a year getting submitted stung bad because I should have known better. In the end I think the advice about accepting embarrassment is still good, because if you're pushing yourself and trying to perform at a high level you will never stop failing and embarrassing yourself.
The way I describe this idea is shamelessness is a super power
I started the piano when I was 32. I'm not particularly good at it, I'll never play anything complex, but I love playing and I do my best. My teacher forced me to play in public at some point, and that was probably one of the best things he did, to get me past the point of caring.
That made me realize: no-one cares. You're the center of your life, and it's very important that you succeed, but the very few people who care about you (and whom you should care about) will have the patience, empathy, and admiration for you to be in that "moat", everyone else won't give a shit. If you fuck up, they'll forget about you in a minute. Try to remember about someone trying to do something you like but badly? You can't.
Whenever I see a public piano I seat at it. Sometimes it's just shit and I'm the only one happy I can press keys. Sometimes I manage to play a piece, and a random couple of people are happy about it.
This is a great article, follow its advice. The definition of low status is only the one you set for yourself. Push the shame and embrace it. No one cares anyways
Great article. I’ve come to see that feeling embarrassed can actually be a kind of luxury. When I’m around people with disabilities—many of whom might simply hope to reach a point where embarrassment is even possible—it reminds me how much we take that experience for granted. In that light, embarrassment itself can feel like a privilege. It calls to mind 2 Corinthians 12:9: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”
I'm sorry but I don't quite get what you mean here. Could you maybe put it in simpler terms?
Sure. Maybe feeling embarrassed is a sign that our pride sometimes carries more weight than it should. It’s easy to forget that many people—especially those who are disadvantaged or disabled—might not even have the opportunity to feel embarrassed in the same way. Perhaps it’s a gentle reminder to let go a little of our need to protect our self-image.
A few extra tricks that worked for me (you can alternate depending on what fits best in the moment):
- Embrace the role of imposter. Instead of whining about imposter syndrome, accept a-priori that you are an imposter. The game is to survive as long as possible as an imposter in a world full of naturals. You lose not when you are made out, but when you give up.
- Embrace being a useless git. You're an idiot, you have no talent whatsoever, you don't have the skill yet, and there's no hope you'll ever acquire it. So, no pressure, you're only playing. Anything beyond failing completely is a bonus.
- Commit to "open to goal". You are starting today and you'll go on for as long as it takes. Possibly until you die. There's no deadline and no expected speed. You're just being stubborn and refuse to stop trying even in the face of evidence that you have no chance.
- Be delusional about "the hack". You are special and you've discovered a hack that makes it easier and faster for you to acquire the new skill and apply it successfully than it is for most people. All you have to do is go through the motions, "the hack" will take care of things.
- Fight injustice. You are _entitled_ to have this skill and the success it affords people, it is your god-given, inalienable right. But the world / family / society / boss / ex / whatever screwed you and you've been deprived of what's rightfully yours. Fuck them, you are now on a quest to acquire by brute force what you deserve.
A more feelings-ey take on the common "get comfortable being uncomfortable" type advice. I enjoyed the perspective shift.
the math version of this idea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41566446
I love the repeated phrase, '...and the world wouldn’t turn to ash.'
Based on her profile picture I find it extremely hard to believe anyone made fun of her appearance unless one is being compared to a super model.
The real moat of low status is something completely different.
It consists on punishing people with low status when they objectively succeed and doing so brutally if they excel.
This entire post sounds like the complaints of someone with extreme privilege that lived a completely sheltered life.
In fact, the title of this blog, "Useful fictions", plays exactly into that.
Scott Galloway talks about this same concept here
https://youtu.be/rKOx5qlLyaA
You have "social anxiety." You are not in a "moat of low status." The status is purely in your own mind and not something calculated and assigned to you by the world.
Another CEO flying at 30,000' missing the forest for the trees.
The moat is filled with people pointing at you and yelling 'Don't quit your day job'
I agree. I used to live high class. Then the Mafia came at me. I learned to lay low and appreciate poverty. Also, my ex and I bought a house, but then a richer man came and she kicked me out on Valentine's day. Now I despise wealth and luxury and now date only women at the flea market, cashiers and walmart stockers. Highly recommend. The devil wears Prada.
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