[alexandrerond]

Totally.

There's distance between:

"people think I'm stupid because I'm not scared to show that I don't know about something"

and some of the examples which are more along the lines of

"people think I'm stupid because I act as a self-entitled genius who provides little context or reasoning behind choices and expect everyone to line up behind with no question"

What is the Apple store employee supposed to do to not make someone feel stupid when they ask for the smallest box? What are the chances they're not a clueless customer in need of help and have solid reasons behind?

The boss raises an eyebrow when someome proposes to skip half of the test suite? Means a lack of trust.

The insurance dealer does his job and tries to get a higher premium? Not surprised.

There's quite a bit of narcissism here: "They though I'm stupid but I'm not", " I was right in the end". It's actually arguing how everyone else is dumber in the end.

A more sincere approach would have been to explain how he realized how stupid he actually was and how not being defensive about it helped. But perhaps the author knows better after all.

[soneca]

Yes, he clearly states he thought that the student group that thought he was stupid were stupid. And later that the only people that would think his test thing was stupid would be the incompetent ones.

So his thesis is also that stupid people assume that intelligent people are stupid. He considers himself more intelligent than those people.

I wonder if he would be as willing to look stupid in front of people that he considers as intelligent as him.

It sounded to me like he was saying: I am willing to look stupid to people that I consider inferior (dumber than me).

[pksebben]

I read this more as: "stupid is an important step in the process of fostering smart". It's someone's unwillingness to look dumb that stalls them at the gate.

I think this is the impetus behind the whole 'crawl, walk, run' thing. If you're always hot to trot and pushing an image of "I know everything already and I don't need to ask basic questions", you're never going to build the foundations of understanding necessary to construct more complex understandings.

[Ensorceled]

> The insurance dealer does his job and tries to get a higher premium? Not surprised.

This is actually an example of where the author IS stupid. You will often be found "at fault" in cases where you are not actually at fault (the other driver lies better than your truth) and there are many cases (at least in Ontario) where you are legislatively at fault even if you did nothing out of the ordinary (making a left turn while overtaking traffic attempts to pass rather than yield). That the broker was trying to protect them from this isn't even a conflict of interest for the broker.

I wonder how many insurance brokers encounter the "I'm such an amazing driver, I don't really need insurance." macho man ... I'm presuming the broker, at least initially, assumed the author was one of "those drivers" and not "stupid".

[Zarel]

I don't think it's about who's at fault, it's about what risks you're willing to tolerate.

Insurance is always a trade-off of EV for tail risk. In exchange for losing money on average (the insurance company has to earn money somehow, after all), you're protected from the worst case scenario. You can think of it like, yourself from parallel universe where you don't get into a crash, pays yourself in the parallel universe where you do get into a crash. And the insurance company skims a little off the top as payment for the service of sending money across parallel universes.

But if you can afford to just eat the cost of a crash, you don't need to pay the insurance company for that service. And maybe you can eat the costs of some crashes but not others: If you crash into a rich guy's car, maybe you can't afford those costs, but damage to your own car is capped at the price of your own car. So that's all Dan's doing: insuring the costs he can't pay (damage to others) but not the ones he can (damage to his own car).

The math isn't affected by his chances of being found at fault, or how good of a driver he is, at all.

[tux3]

In defense of the author, maybe they have a dashcam and that's what increases their confidence.

But that's where I see a problem: this (or another reasonable thing) is not something that would take long to explain.

Looking stupid is a failure of communication. You're right, but you failed to give enough rope for others to follow, and that wastes everyone's time.

The improvement I'd suggest is to dig into why someome thinks you look stupid. You could think "they must be stupid", but that, in itself, is an overly simplistic and inefficient model.

[pja]

I think you’ve got that backwards - he wanted to only buy coverage for damage he did to other vehicles / people & not to cover his own vehicle.

However, sometimes, for some drivers, fully comprehensive insurance can be cheaper than 3rd party only for arcane internal insurance risk-accounting reasons. So by not letting his agent even look at the whole market he was cutting himself off from the possibility of cheaper insurance.

[jldugger]

> You will often be found "at fault" in cases where you are not actually at fault (the other driver lies better than your truth) and there are many cases

As I understand it, Dan wants to skip on collision / comprehensive, not liability. I can imagine a number of scenarios in which you might not want to bother insuring an asset, even as you insure yourself for damage to others you might be at fault for.

[JJMcJ]

Here in the US, and I assume in Canada as well, there are two main kinds of car insurance:

Liability - that pays for damages/injuries to others

Collision/Comprehensive - that pays for damage to your car

It sounds like the author wanted Liability but didn't want to pay for Collision. If you have significant assets and/or a cheap car, it may be to your advantage not to get the collision. Except he didn't use the customary terms but described them rather elliptically.

In fact, take the money you save on Collision and get more Liability is not a bad idea.

[the__alchemist]

I don't think that's what the author was getting at here - a compelling reason is that the value of the payout to fix your own car x the probability of it happening is lower than the total premium extra. Eg the "Insurance is only worth it for things you can't afford" mentality.

This also checks with the OP in this subthread: The insurance seller will always push for more coverage for self-interested reasons.

[bittercynic]

It may be an unusual preference, but I don't think there's anything wrong with it. Maybe he drives an inexpensive car and can afford to repair/replace it himself, so he doesn't want to pay the premium to insure against that risk.

[blitzar]

As with all voluntary insurance, Its the price, stupid.

$100k for coverage on your car? No thanks. $1? Sure. $1 but covers litterally nothing and has a million dollar excess? No thanks.

[jaclaz]

I had exactly the same impressions as you, and initially I thought that it was my non-native English interpretation (I felt sort of stupid), happy to know I am not the only one considering those examples (more-than-a-little) self-entitling the author as the ultimate genius on earth.

It seems to me like he puts some intentionality in attempting to look stupid and a sort of satisfaction when this happens.

[ghufran_syed]

“What is the Apple store employee supposed to do to not make someone feel stupid when they ask for the smallest box?”

Maybe ask the customer, “can I ask why you would like the one with the smallest box?” instead of making assumptions? Although note that this might also be classified as a question where the person asking is admitting they don’t understand why someone would want this aka “looking dumb” in the wording from the article

[stavros]

I don't understand why he was asking for the smallest box, though? Isn't that an inefficient proxy? Wouldn't asking to see the computers have been more accurate?

[Zababa]

On the other hand, he doesn't spend much time talking about the case that could have him die or the one that could have him go blind. If something like that happened to me, I would probably have a position like the author. There are also a few cases (COVID, air filtration) where people disagreeing with him had relatively serious health consequences.

[chefandy]

While this guy is clearly smart, and willingness to ask simple questions is a worthy quality that many people possess, this is an article about what happens when decent intelligence and a good instinct is accompanied by narcissism and delusions of grandeur. Being right about something feels even better if other people thought you were wrong about it.

With his COVID action— people disagreeing with him, at first, wasn't what had serious health consequences. He said he started wearing N95s several days before the initial r0 estimate was even published, and that he based his opinion on SARS-CoV-1 data which many relevant experts didn't think was applicable. There's a reason they didn't jump to the same conclusions he did, and that reason is why they're experts. He essentially won a bet talks about it like he figured out how to beat poker.

And if he recieved a torrent of negative feedback for his penchant for air filtering in 2012, that says a lot more about his friends and family than his very not radical adoption of home air filters less than 10 years ago? The whole sick building/mold aversion/exhaust fumes/smoke/spent cooking fuel/etc realm of AQ concerns has been a publicly accepted health concern waaaaaaaaaaaaaay longer than 2012. Sharper Image was making a mint off of their Ionic Breeze air purifier at least a decade before that.

Like I said, he's obviously a smart guy, but this whole 'they all laughed at me and look at me now!' narrative is just not that impressive.

[balsam]

Agreed—- it somehow ties into the opposite of the ability to fake sincerity: the inability to show sincerity. I am still traumatized by the times the second case happened. The times when people dismissed me because they thought (perhaps rightly?) that I was acting like a self entitled genius.. (and I am inferring, because why would normal intelligent adults say such things??)

Another perhaps relevant thought, which is perhaps crass: If PG or Alan Kay ever claim that they are willing to look stupid, I feel like people would not believe them. On the other hand if Feynman does it, people would feel the sincerity. (At least the version of Feynman Feynman marketed, not the Feynman who couldnt suffer Gellman)

Another thought: maybe its better to be willing to look immature.

[rdiddly]

Good points, to which I'll add, how the heck is he surrounded by so many people who a) give a shit at all, and b) are so willing to let him know they think he's stupid? No one cares or dares in my case. Maybe it's my "tall privilege" again?