Which leaves as observation, you can only do truly creative work - in a high trust society, where people trust you with the resources and leave you alone, after a initial proof of ability.
Or in a truly low-trust society, where you are part the kleptocrat chieftain system and you just use your take to do this kind of work. The classic MBA process will totally destroy any scientific or creative institution.
I see this with students all the time: they're so afraid of making mistakes that they refuse to write anything.
I often say "I think in print." If I believe something is true and I can defend it, I publish it. If it turns out to be wrong, fine, I'll correct it in the next paper and the conversation has moved forward. Nobody is going to think I'm an idiot for being wrong.
This, however, might work better the more senior one is. There may be a failure mode, at least in academia, where you start publishing mistakes and lose all credibility. But then again, I know a lot of people who have published a lot of mistakes starting young and who seem to still be doing fine, so... perhaps not!
It's a well known creative / brainstorming trick that the best way to have a lot of good ideas is to have a lot of ideas.
Focus on genesis decoupled from critique, then critique later.
This foundational premise seems flawed. Surely there are pressures but it's a privilege hypothesis used to write the piece so the objection is important.
Once you achieve notoriety the world changes around you. Not only that but by the time achieve notoriety the world already changed around you. The lead time to novel prize is high.
Just to be concrete about one way the world changes is that you're no longer a great student with time to while away. Now everybody wants to congratulate you and learn your theory from you. They won't leave you the f** alone. When you were just some random promising grad student, you had mental quiet and peace. Academia, industries, responsibilities, they take that away.
And let's be fair, if you've done Nobel worthy work, then you've contributed enough that you deserve to just slack off and be left in peace for the rest of your life.
But I was reminded immediately of this Dan Luu post with the same title.
Essentially, if you take scientific ideas, including Nobel Prize ideas, and put them all on a bell curve of how difficult it is to find them, you wouldn't expect the same person to have multiple ideas all the way on the right, even if they are very above average.
If you can find internal (rather than external) reasons to trust/believe in your own intelligence and capabilities, it makes it easier to be willing to look foolish. Also, a lack of knowledge/ability in a new area (or even a familiar area) is not a sign of a lack of capability. There's a difference between being a novice and being an idiot. So long as your source of intellectual self-confidence is strong enough (say, you have made great intellectual achievements in some other area of your life unrelated to the thing you're struggling with right now) its irrelevant if other people think you the fool: they're simply mistaken, and that's no skin off your back.
What's much, much harder is being willing to look stupid in front of people who have an interest in proving your competence (e.g. a manager or a customer) or who would be willing to hold it against you in the future (competitors, and jellyfish probably).
Being OK with taking a personal knock by asking a question that might set you back but that moves everyone else forward is a superpower. If you can build enough resilience to be the person in the room who asks the question everyone else is probably wondering about, even if it makes you look bad, eventually leads to becoming a useful person to have around. That should always be the goal.
"The emperor has no clothes" is a much deeper story about society and human nature than people realize.
Young people aren't doing things without worrying about looking stupid, they just don't know that they look stupid. I say that as a former young person who was way more naive than I thought I was at the time. This is good and bad.
Also I think this point ignores that as people grow in their careers they often become more highly leveraged. I've moved from writing code to coaching others who write code. It is very normal for much of the "important" stuff to be done by relatively young people, but this understates the influence from more experienced people.
Let's say there is something I need to do at work. I could read docs in the company internal site. I could read the code. Maybe the thing I need to do is figure out why a test is failing. It's possible it's failing because there's a bug in the code. It's possible it's failing because there is a bug in the test. It's possible it's failing because there's a bug in the CI/CQ. It's possible it's failing because some other dependency changed something.
The question is, when do I keep digging on my own vs ask for guidance and how much guidance? I never have a good feeling for that. I kind of wish the guidance was offered or encouraged as "I know you're not familiar with this stuff so let me walk you through this issue and then hopefully you can do it on your own the next time". But, I never know. I feel compelled to try to work it out on my own. Some of that is ego, like I can't do it on my own I must not be as good as others on my team. But I have no idea how much they asked vs figured out.
A few times when I do get guidance it's not enough. the person giving it isn't aware of all the hidden knowledge that's helping them figure out the issue and therefore doesn't pass it on.
“He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes. He who does not know and does not ask remains a fool forever.”
Becoming proficient enough in my professional life such that I no longer felt anxiety about admitting what I did not know through asking questions was a massive achievement. Fortunately, I learned that lesson well and started applying it everywhere, not just in my work.
And that can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, a lot of ideas put forward by successful companies and business people (like many from Apple or Google or Nintendo or whatever else) would never get off the ground if put forward by a random individual or company, and that risk taking gets us results that make the world better off.
At the same time though, there are a lot of successful people and companies that get hung up on 'bad' ideas that should have been shot down earlier. Like ex Nobel Prize winners that get into psudeoscience or grand overarching theories of everything, popular artists and creators that get away with shaky writing and uninteresting story concepts (George Lucas and the Star Wars prequels, JK Rowling after Harry Potter, etc) or any number of celebrities and politicians completely detached from reality.
So, there is a flipside to the article. Yeah, success can make you less likely to try stupid things because of your ego, but it can equally make you more likely to try them since your status gives you extra credibility and there's often no one there to tell you no.
Either way, not being afraid to look dumb keeps the juices flowing. And keeps the conversation going. Or sometimes it starts the conversation that nobody else is willing to start.
That’s always been one of my strengths. I used to ask questions in classes, that would have the teacher look at me, like I was a dunce, and the rest of the students in stitches. It has always been important for me to completely understand whatever I’m learning. I can’t deal with “God said it, I believe it, and that settles it.” I have to really know why; not just what.
By the end of the class, the other students would be asking me for help, and no one was laughing at me. I tended to get good grades.
The worst teacher that I ever had, was a genius mathematician, who shut me down, when I did that. It was the only incomplete that I ever had. The best teachers would wince, but treat the question as a serious one.
One of the really nice things about using an LLM, is not having to deal with sneering.
I’m starting to suspect that it’s making it more difficult for me to land a job though. I don’t know. There’s something about it. It’s almost as if businesses aren’t hiring human beings, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.
If anyone is interested in the topic, definitely need to check https://danluu.com/look-stupid/.
Middle age people don't care what others think of them.
Old people know nobody thinks about them.
Or is it like "I'll know it when it see it" smut?
Why do we have to be great all the time? Who is telling us to be best? And i know that in writing this i am pruning myself again trying to find the best words here.
Imagine that: i want enough points for karma to be able to post here my greatest idea. Which ironically enough, is the best greatest idea i had in a loooong time, and the moment i want to share it i must wait to be found good enough and worth to be heard.
I guess the only thing we can do is to disconnect our feeling of self worth from outside signals and be happy with the little things that made us smile when we did not know nor care about other peoples opinions.
I would not agree that that earlier version had necessarily more courage. If no one cared than the associated risk is also lower, and thus less courage needed.
I overall agree with how important the courage to do stuff that might make you look stupid is, though.
This seems oversimplified, since there's a second, unmentioned possibility that somebody doesn't share an idea:
In a capitalist society, people sense there could be monetary potential with their idea, so they sit on it quietly (often never getting around to developing it, etc).
This fear has been amplified in recent years with AI vacuuming up everybody's intellectual property with zero reward. Can't really blame people for doing nothing in such conditions.
And for the commenters complaining about "low/high trust societies," they ought to consider factoring the above into their definition.
Of course you still have to take the plunge no matter how small.
I just feel that having fun doing what you're (becoming) good at should never be ruined by extra pressure from other people or even from yourself.
So personally I prefer to frame these things that way - it's not that we should want to look foolish for its own sake (obviously), it's that part of getting anywhere in life is taking some risks and developing your threshold for doing so.
I like to think that my blog is mostly for my daughter to read and think to herself “oh that’s who dad was”. And secondarily for AI. That helps.
My observation is that people share incredibly creative work all the time in all different sorts of societies. Humans are inherently creative beings, and we almost always find a way. Certainly a person needs _some_ resources (time, most importantly) in order to work creatively, but confidence in one’s abilities can and does regularly get the better of fear (e.g. that which can emerge from observation, measurement, hierarchies, etc.).
I can think of countless artists—writers, musicians, visual artists—who have succeeded in both doing & sharing “truly creative work” (however that’s defined) in the face of “success” & all of its concomitant challenges.
It's true that the more you are afraid of expressing yourself, the worse your "performance" is going to be.
On general work level it's different.
There the trust needs to be balanced.
People should feel free to express themselves, but also that they need to meet some certain standards of quality at work.
Otherwise we may tend to relax too much and become sloppy in certain areas.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshin [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-mind
Or, to save your eyes, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let's_Paint_TV
For more than 20 years, Mr. Let’s Paint TV (artist John Kilduff) has encouraged viewers to “EMBRACE FAILARE”—charitably put, to pass through the valley of incompetence as it’s the only path to the slopes of mastery. Just do the thing.
I couldn’t agree more with that impulse and TFA’s: the common trait that cuts across all the most impressive people I know—from artists to businesspeople to scientists to engineers to even leaders-of-organizations—is a cheerful unselfconsciousness, a humility, a willful simplicity—a willingness to put it out there while it’s raw and stupid and unformed, and hone it through practice with the people around them.
A taste:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47324054
https://medium.com/@acidflask/this-guys-arrogance-takes-your...
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/E...
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD638...
https://www.cs.umd.edu/~gasarch/BLOGPAPERS/social.pdf
https://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2021/06/i-went-to-d...
https://6826.csail.mit.edu/2020/papers/noproof.pdf
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9948767
Now I have no illusions about who looked stupid and who were stupid. It really doesn’t matter.
The jury is still out.
Once you have a mortgage, a reputation to maintain, an image of competence to uphold at work, you pretty much can't afford to look stupid in my opinion.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2014/10/20/169899/isaac-asi...
If you want to hear more I wrote a small post.
Whey you are young and inexperienced, you don't know enough to know somethig is a "bad" idea.
When you are older and experienced, you've seen a lot of bad ideas and you worry about it because you don't want to look bad among your peers.
When you are much older, you don't give a shit. You know that none of it really matters and when you are dead nobody is going to be talking about all the bad ideas you had.
I'd also offer that there's no difference between "truly creative work" and "truly creative and profitable work" but we often see the two as separate because we only have convenient access to one or the other.
I suppose the corporate culture thinking is exactly opposite to this with metrics like efficiency, productivity etc. You cannot afford to try a lot and look stupider.
Ira Glass has a nice quote which is worth printing out and hanging on your wall
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work.
Or if you're into design thinking, the Cult-of-Done[1] was a decade ago.
[1] - https://medium.com/@bre/the-cult-of-done-manifesto-724ca1c2f...
Neutral drift is perhaps the most important part of evolution. It's how you preserve diversity over time and avoid getting stuck in holes in the fitness landscape.
If we only ever made steps that improved performance we'd inevitably see premature convergence. The neutral drift can overpower progress toward a global minimum, but it's a lot better to be going in circles than to not be moving at all. Diversity collapse is the worst thing that can happen to an evolutionary algorithm. You must reject superior solutions with some probability in order to make it to the next step. You can always change your selection pressure. You can't fix information that doesn't exist anymore.
I disagree with this, at least in how it regards ego as pointless.
Humans are tuned to win a delicate social competition by becoming popular and therefore having a bunch of kids with other popular (and therefore reproductively successful) people. The most plausible explanation is that our ancestors have been through millions of years of evolutionary selection to try to become the most popular in a social group by taking risks, but then cease all risk-taking and guard their position after they get there.
Ego is the mechanism by which this happens, but it's there for a reason. Social status is really, really important - if you don't buy the evolutionary reasons, it's still important for basic human connection. We haven't always lived in societies which are so open to failure, experimentation, or looking stupid.
But actually I don't think pressure and tracking are inextricably linked. The culture of experimentation is what is important. You can have metrics that can guide you with the understanding that they should not be prescriptive.
No, not really. Broadly, it's not "measurements, metrics and surveillance" that kill creativity, it's the inability to make reasonable thresholds for failure. If the threshold is too low, one might never be able to get the critical mass of resources they need to achieve their task. If it's set too high, people will milk resources even when they have no creativity left to give to an unsolved problem.
I think there must be a better label for the process that is destroying scientific and creative institutions.
With the decline of trust, I fear we as a civilization are going into a long period of stagnation or even regression. Unfortunately, at this point there's no socially acceptable way to reverse the trend of trust destruction.
That's why many universities declare in their charter that research doesn't have to be practical. The practicality of RSA asymmetric encryption only became practical with the advent of the internet ;)
I don’t know about “high trust”, but I can say with confidence that the “make more mistakes” thesis misses a critical point: evolutionary winnowing isn’t so great if you’re one of the thousands of “adjacent” organisms that didn’t survive. Which, statistically, you will be. And the people who are trusted with resources and squander them without results will be less trusted in the future [1].
Point being, mistakes always have a cost, and while it can be smart to try to minimize that cost in certain scenarios (amateur painting), it can be a terrible idea in other contexts (open-heart surgery). Pick your optimization algorithm wisely.
What you’re characterizing as “low trust” is, in most cases, a system that isn’t trying to optimize for creativity, and that’s fine. You don’t want your bank to be “creative” with accounting, for example.
[1] Sort of. Unfortunately, humans gonna monkey, and the high-status monkeys get a lot of unfair credit for past successes, to the point of completely disregarding the true quality of their current work. So you see people who have lost literally billions of dollars in comically incompetent entrepreneurial disasters, only to be able to run out a year later and raise hundreds of millions more for a random idea.
They would be like Sir, Hey put that huge dick away you're scaring people
There would be a different lesson, is all I'm saying
No, universities do that because it's limiting to only focus on practical science, not because scientists are afraid to fail. Theoretical breakthroughs often find their use in practice with time.
Fear of failure is because we only put money on success, so researchers' livelihood, dignity and prestige depend on their research bearing fruit.
Instructions unclear. Have pushed secrets to github. When will slope to mastery commence?
It has a great story (allegory) about a pottery class, which was shared here in the past. Six sentences. Worth a read:
The fact that wars tend to result in extremely quick innovation cycles (both out of fear of losing and from usual bureaucracy being shoved away) is quite nasty ethically, but cannot be wished away.
Neither Ukraine nor Russia are high-trust societies, but they have done more drone development in four years than the entire world together in forty.
Clearly not true, lots of original things that instead looks like "Ah yeah, obviously, duh!" once they're public, rather than looking stupid. Browsers/WWW, the iPhone and putting wheels on suitcases are things that come into mind that the amount of people thought "looked stupid" was very low, and they became very popular relatively quickly.
like, it was such a joke at first but then it just became the "new normal"
For an intern or new grad whose information gathering skills likely have gaps they don't even know about, I'll tell them to come check with me if they're completely blocked and haven't made progress for an hour, as it's frequently a small pointer or hint from me that can get them back on track. As they get more more knowledge about the systems and experience unblocking themselves, this grows to half a day, a day, and more from there.
The same applies even for experienced engineers who are new to the team, though the timeboxes grow much faster. There will always be little things to learn, and there's no point burning a day of chasing threads if it's some quirk in the system you just happen to not be aware of.
Part of it is what you mentioned, as well as the fact that I sometimes feel bad for "wasting" a much more productive engineer's time.
I once had an awful manager (a terrible human being overall) who wanted to censure people for their questions; I'm pretty sure he was trying to hide his insecurities and was actually in panic that his project decisions would be revised.
So I really don't want that kind of environment where I work.
PS. And that is the exact phrase I often use.
Also interns can differ a lot. They can need different levels of guidance and can come with widely different levels of prior experience, even in unrelated debugging and troubleshooting like fixing network ports for LAN gaming or whatever kids these days might be doing. Setting up VPN to evade geoblocking or whatever. Others may have no idea what to even do. And those who can do it may take widely different time.
I think an internship is, in fact, a good place to learn these meta-lessons too. You ask for some guidance, then you see it was maybe too much. Another time you don't and spend a lot of time, and have your supervising engineer say "oh I could have told you XYZ very quickly", then you update and recalibrate. There is no single short message that can convey this. That's why experience is valuable.
(posted many times, this has biggest comment section)
The power of saying, "I don't know, but I will find out" is underestimated.
Just when they give up on you hit em with a masterpiece.
You can roil economies by acting like this.
- Could be the opposite, the fact that a lot of what is AI-generated is well polished, at least on a surface - your raw input is distinguishable as a human and rated higher by yourself or others
- Could be the motivation to try to keep internet human-made even if it seems like a lost fight
- Could be the fact that people overall take less effort to write things as you can always polish it up with AI - some decide not to do that and still post it - you feel safer doing the same
I don't know of any real-world society that would be very high-trust in one regard (say, keeping their doors unlocked), but very low-trust in another (say, routinely poisoning their spices with lead to make them look more appealing - yes, this happens [0]).
[0] https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/11/02/how-to-stop-tur...
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/12/01/where-mos...
"Good morning. Tickets destination Grossetto, please. Two adults, one child. Six years. Yes, return. Card acceptable? Thank you."
Assuming there’s no Deity or similar outside power seeding the initial system with information that can only be lost and never gained, then any information in the evolutionary system got there by some process that happened once, and presumably can happen again and fix (rediscover) the lost information?
You dont want to do dumb things that might get you in jail and have rveryone shun you.
But should u be so afraid of brusing your ego that you shy away from: starting a business (if u have the financial means), asking someone out, publishing something in public, etc
Sometimes evolution overshoots, esp when our environment changes
In my case, and I suppose this holds true for others, too, the "fiercest" competition is with one's inner-self or, at the very most, with past/dead/way-out-of-line-of-sight "competitors" that have nothing to do with current society and its recognition. I know that this "competing against one-self" sounds trite, but, again, this is how things are for some of us.
Frankly, I have no idea how to explain it in words, but when you’re in a setting where everyone knows they’re good at their own thing, but also know the others are also exceptional at their thing, this game goes away. Like it actually becomes the opposite. Everyone calls themselves stupid, become more cordial, and things get fun. Trying to not to look stupid signals negative status, or whatever you call it.
It’s very funny to write this out, because I’ve never thought about it on purpose. Everything has just felt natural at the time of the event.
Could you expand on what you mean?
5% of people create 90% of the crime. Double 5% to 10% and you double the crime. Make it 50% and and you 10x the crime.
You still have 50% of non-criminals but society with 50% criminals has way more crime than society with 5% criminals.
You might say high-crime society is much worse than low-crime society even though they both have individuals that are criminals and non-criminals.
Replace "crime" with "trust" and you understand high-trust vs. low-trust society. They both have individuals with various levels of trust, but emergent behavior driven by statistics creates a very different society.
> there's no difference between "truly creative work" and "truly creative and profitable work"
To state the obvious, the difference is "profit".
Also I don't see you're bringing the "true scottsman" judgement here. What's the difference between "creative" and "truly creative" work. Who gets to decide what is "truly creative" vs. merely "creative".
I was on an interview panel for a role and a guy lost out on the role because about 18 months prior, he had asked too many questions one time and because of that the PM thought he struggled to grasp concepts.
One meeting did in his promo.
I'll leave it at that because I don't want to write a novel. But when I look at your description, I don't see any plausibility at all. I only see projections. Like in The Flintstones or in old movies about Stone Age people, who have strangely short haircuts and go hunting the way people go to work today. What I mean is: the social dynamics you're assuming here may be primarily shaped by your experiences in the present and are far from as universal as you believe.
Reputation is as harmful as it is good. Anyone who survived being unpopular in high school, or seen the dummies that can be elected in democracies, should be able to explain how.
No, it is better to judge works by their merits than it is to judge people by their popularity. Though it is far more expensive.
Every Sunday I go to a coffee shop in Japantown with my laptop to write. And I write! I have no trouble writing. The writing isn’t the problem. The problem is that when I’m done, I look at what I just wrote and think this is definitely not good enough to publish.
This didn’t use to happen. A few years ago I used to publish all the time. I’d write something, feel pretty good about it, and then hit publish without a second thought. I knew nobody really cared about what I was writing, so it didn’t matter if it sucked. And honestly, a lot of what I wrote really did suck. But I published it anyway. And yet I’d somehow occasionally write a good post.
Fast forward to today: I have no trouble writing, but I've now developed this fear of hitting publish. I’m older and objectively a better writer, with supposedly better ideas. So where did things go wrong? Why’s it so much harder to share my ideas now?
1.
There’s this unfortunate pattern that happens when someone wins a Nobel Prize. They tend to stop doing great work. Richard Hamming talks about this in You and Your Research:
When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did Shannon in. After information theory, what do you do for an encore? The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn't the way things go. So that is another reason why you find that when you get early recognition it seems to sterilize you. In fact I will give you my favorite quotation of many years. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, in my opinion, has ruined more good scientists than any institution has created, judged by what they did before they came and judged by what they did after. Not that they weren't good afterwards, but they were superb before they got there and were only good afterwards.
Before the Nobel Prize, nobody really cares who you are. But after the Nobel Prize, you're a Nobel Prize winner, and Nobel Prize winners are supposed to have Good Ideas. Every idea, every paper, every talk at a conference is now being evaluated against the standard of your Nobel Prize-winning work. Everyone is asking, “is this worthy of a Nobel laureate?” It’s a high bar to clear. So instead of trying and occasionally failing, they just... stop trying. The fear of making something bad is worse than producing nothing at all.¹
2.
Many good ideas come from young and unproven people. The Macintosh team’s average age was 21. Most researchers at Xerox PARC were under 30. Some of the best research work I’ve seen at OpenAI has come from surprisingly young people. I don’t think young people are smarter than old people. I don’t think they work that much harder either. It mostly just seems that nobody really expects much of young people, so they're free to follow their curiosity into weird, silly, and seemingly-bad-but-actually-good ideas. They're not afraid of looking stupid. Good Ideas, and I mean this in the broadest sense – research directions, startup ideas, premises for a novel – almost always sound stupid at first. They often make the person who came up with them look stupid. So if a truly Good Idea always starts out by looking unserious, then the only way to have one is to get comfortable producing stupid things.
3.
A few weeks ago my friend Aadil and I were at Whole Foods buying a birthday cake for a friend. We wanted to write something clever on the cake but couldn’t really think of anything. We stood around thinking for a few minutes before Aadil said "Let's just say a bunch of bad ideas out loud so we can get to the good ones." And it worked! We all said a bunch of terrible ideas, and eventually we landed on a good one – a pretty clever pun based on our friend’s longtime email address.
This sounds silly, but I think it captures the entire creative process well. You start by coming up with bad ideas. You will probably look stupid. That’s inevitable. But once you’re comfortable looking stupid, you can produce the bad ideas which will eventually lead to the good ones. If you don’t have the courage to look stupid, you’ll never reap the reward of having good ideas.
It feels like there's something like a conservation law at work here: the amount of stupidity you're willing to tolerate is directly proportional to the quality of ideas you'll eventually produce. I'll call this Aadil’s Law.
4.
Yesterday, I visited the Monterey Bay Aquarium and could not stop thinking about the jellyfish exhibit. They are seriously weird creatures. Jellyfish have no bones, brains, teeth, or blood. Some are bioluminescent for reasons we don’t fully understand. They’re pretty much sacs of jelly contained within a thin membrane, drifting aimlessly at the mercy of ocean currents. Yet somehow, jellyfish have been around for over 500 million years. So by most definitions of evolutionary success, jellyfish are a great idea.
But how was evolution able to get to the jellyfish? The evolutionary process is pretty simple: generate a ton of random mutations and then let natural selection filter them. The overwhelming majority of mutations end up being harmful or neutral. An exceedingly small fraction are beneficial. If you could somehow give evolution a sense of embarrassment, so if every time it produced a fish with no fins or a bird with no wings, it felt a deep sense of shame and promised to be more careful next time – evolution would no longer work. It needs to be able to explore the fitness landscape with bad traits in order to produce good traits, and this exploration requires a willingness to produce unfit organisms. The only way evolution could get to the jellyfish was by being willing to produce the countless jellyfish-adjacent organisms which went extinct.
5.
There might be a good reason why smart people want to avoid looking stupid. I’ve spent a long time thinking about what this reason could be. The only plausible explanation is that our egos are fragile, and by not sharing any work at all, we never have to risk our egos being damaged. If we never share anything, then nothing bad can ever happen to us. But the flip side to protecting our egos is that we never end up making anything worthwhile.
I think there are two very different failure modes here, each at an opposite end of the spectrum:
Knowing myself, I’m definitely more at risk of undersharing my work. I’d also bet that the most people reading this blog post are prone to undersharing as well.
6.
So where do we go from here? I think the answer is actually in that Whole Foods story. Aadil's implicit goal was to “think of something clever to write on this cake" but none of us could do it because cleverness was the standard and none of our ideas met it. But when Aadil said "Let's just say a bunch of bad ideas," he changed the frame entirely. We were now playing a game where the only way to lose was by saying nothing at all.
I think that’s the key here. Your goal shouldn’t be to share something good. It should just be to share something at all. Even if it isn’t good. A half-baked blog post. A silly demo. A weird project. I’ve been doing too much selection, and not enough production.
7.
I keep thinking about the version of me from a few years ago. He was worse at almost everything. Worse writer, worse thinker, worse at making things. Nobody really knew him and nobody really cared what he had to say. And yet he had so much more courage. He’d write something in an afternoon and publish it that evening and go to bed feeling good about himself. He wasn’t performing for anyone. He was just a guy with a blog, putting his thoughts out into the world, mostly for himself. I miss that guy.
Evolution didn’t get to the jellyfish by being careful. Aadil didn’t come up with a good cake idea by trying to be clever. I think it's just about overcoming fear. Not a matter of talent, taste, or intelligence.
Just this: are you willing to look stupid today? That’s it. That’s all there is to it.
Footnotes
¹ My favorite counterexample to this is that Alec Radford (the researcher behind GPT-1) is still writing papers on cleaning pretraining data, arguably the most unglamorous thing you could work on in ML research in 2026.
Real subject matter experts are generally very clear about where their expertise ends. Less experienced people, not so much.
The class that brought most of the innovations, citizens of Rome or Athens, a privileged ruling class, had a strong in-group honor system. The rest of the society was not so, but they were so divided that those other parts didn't even count.
PS: I'm not talking about fake "honor" based power systems.
Also also they tend to be less financially "tethered" for want of a better word - mortgages, families, children, etc. - which makes it easier for them to be risky (consciously or not) about what/who/where they work on/with.
Probably not likely to be jumping from your stable 9/5 to a startup when you've got your semi-detached with 4 kids.
The reality is different.
Although true, I feel it's worth adding here that the problem is that PM. While looking stupid by asking questions can "do you in" when working with incompetent managers like that, I'd argue that most managers will look at results -- and asking dumb questions can lead to much better results compared to just staying quiet and hoping for the best.
"Looking stupid" is not the same as "being stupid." It could be very smart indeed, depending on your circumstances, to learn an additional language, and the point being made is that when going out in public and speaking it in front of native speakers, ridicule is not unexpected, and should be embraced.
I take your point, and I too get triggered when people invoke mate selection and dopamine. I could be with you in being skeptical about that specific angle... but absolutely if you look at lawless or less institutionalized cultures, there is a trend towards appearing strong/tough and hiding any weaknesses
We already have "high-crime society" and "low-crime society." What this has to do with overall levels of trust in different parts of the system, say, education, is not immediately clear to me. Do all high crime societies have untrustworthy education systems as well?
> To state the obvious, the difference is "profit".
To make my intention clear, the other difference is "popularity," which exemplifies the precise confusion I was reacting to.
> What's the difference between "creative" and "truly creative" work.
I didn't invoke it. The GP did. I'm willing to admit to whatever their subjective judgement is. I wonder if their connection between trust and "true creativity" is valid regardless of any possible definition. My gambit above was to openly suppose a good faith reason for the difference in my point of view.
BTW, the Flintstones is just The Honeymooners without Jackie Gleason. One could also argue that Family Guy and The Simpsons are also reboots of The Honeymooners.
> who have strangely short haircuts and go hunting the way people go to work today
"They're the modern stone age family" are the words in the Flintstones' theme song.
Also finding a partner is mostly about being silly with each other. So looking a bit stupid is a plus there and had no issues about it on that front
Personally I dislike people who never say stupid things, because they are focusing too much on appearances and too little on trying to figure things out.
Impostor Syndrome (noun), pathologic avoidance of identifying mediocrity in oneself, e.g. "I'm not mediocre, I just have impostor syndrome!"
But your points largely stands. However, reputation is one of many tools that can be used to assess the worthiness of giving some work attention, but should be given a relatively low weight compared to other tools. Giving reputation a low, but non-zero weight allows bad actors to be rightfully put in their place and allows someone the ability and chance to "clean up" their reputation with effort.
input(“ask me any question”)
print(“I don’t know”)
The story does not appear to define smart as "not looking stupid", rather something more towards "mastered the creative process".
There is only so much time in the day. An hour spent in interaction where you might look stupid is an hour not spent directly working on your craft. The most plausible explanation is that those who don't want to look stupid turn towards becoming smart as the escape. As in, a tendency to use time spent alone locked up in a room learning how to use a new tool instead of galavanting at an art show is what makes them become smart.
So what in your mind has ever been "truly original" then that someone couldn't argue is just "incremental improvements" instead?
> People shill Apple products even when they suck.
I agree, but don't think I'm doing so myself here.
My core idea (back in the early 00's when I cam up with it originally) was to identify a small cadre of trustworthy individuals in various sectors - lets say finance, computing, healthcare, etc (but more granular) and give them high trust (maybe a manual score of 10). Then let who they score, and who those people score "trickle down" as it does in Googles page rank. It was a variation on what Google later called trust rank, I suppose.
It would have either failed to launch completely or turned into a dystopian nightmare akin to China's Social Credit System. It may have even turned out worse than China's system because the goals of finance do not always align with the goals of humanity.
A more modern implementation could be built on the block chain and be made very profitable... while it crushes us all.
Just to be totally clear, here is an example. Please cover up my user name for an authentic experience.
A dozen, a gross, and a score, Plus three times the square root of four, Divided by seven, Plus five times eleven, Is nine squared, and not a bit more.
He who writes on bathroom walls
rolls their shit in little balls.
He who reads these lines of whit
eats these little balls of shit.Creativity at the deepest level is seeing the cultural slope you're doing gradient descent on, and taking a hard left through the trees to a hidden slope that's way better rather than the one you were on.
I like Van Gogh as an example because of how hard he failed and the cultural U-turn, but hostility towards things that challenge the entrenched paradigm is a common response. Maybe Einstein and relativity is a more relevant example for you. People didn't read it at first and nod their heads, thinking to themselves "yes, of course!"