I think if you're truly (1) confident about your knowledge or mastery of a particular topic and (2) actually are knowledgeable, you don't have trouble admitting things you don't know.
Here's what I really hate though. When you are around multiple people who are the type to claim knowledge about things they truly have no idea about.
For example in social situations or work situations and you have multiple of these types around. When a conversation comes up and the knowledge of the people involved is put to the test. Maybe your boss is asking who knows how to perform a certain task, or who has experience with certain hardware or software, etc. Or maybe a friend is asking what is the best TV they should buy, etc. There's the people who claim to know about topics XYZ when they really don't, and you, naturally, admit that you don't know. But you might still be the most knowledgeable person about the general topic, and best candidate to offer advice or take on said task. Doesn't matter, you get labeled as the uninformed person while the "idiot" who claims to know everything about XYZ appears to be knowledgable expert. And worst case scenario is when your boss, co-workers, friends, etc. are dumb enough not to catch it.
> if you're truly (1) confident about your knowledge or mastery of a particular topic and (2) actually are knowledgeable, you don't have trouble admitting things you don't know.
Absolutely on point. I started my engineering career at 19 years of age because I was so deeply involved with my love for building computers (as in, from raw chips) that I could show the VP of Engineering at this one company that I was good hire. I ended-up working there for ten years. Everyone else in the department was at least ten years older than me. One of the first things that was driven into my head by the "elders" was:
Always admit what you don't know. It's the only way you will learn anything new.
To this day I always appreciate people who are relaxed and clear about what they don't know (or are not sure about). I know I can have conversations with them. These people don't tend to get defensive and are not insecure at all.
The other side of your statement is that, in some circles, if you assert what you do know you are instantly labelled "arrogant". If you categorically know something I have no problem if you make sure I understand that to be the case. That's just the way the cookie crumbles.
> I think if you're truly (1) confident about your knowledge or mastery of a particular topic and (2) actually are knowledgeable, you don't have trouble admitting things you don't know.
I don't think that's true in practice. For proof, just watch any academic debate, ever.
George Carlin said it best: 'And it doesn't take you very long to spot one of them does it? Take you about eight seconds. You'll be listening to some guy... you say... "this guy is fucking stupid!" Then... then there are some people, they're not stupid... they're full of shit. Huh? That doesn't take very long to spot either, does it? Take you about the same amount of time. You'll be listening to some guy... and saying, "well, he's fairly intelligent... ahh, he's full of shit!"'
It astounds me how many people will just make shit up rather than profess their ignorance. I'm not even sure if they are even aware of their lack of knowledge, it is as if they discovered this lump of meat in their skull that emits random verbiage and they assume this must be truth. Like a little tv in their head, power up and go.
So the next time someone says to you they don't know something, watch out, this person is probably a genius!
Everyone is guilty of this. You, me, and everyone else on earth. Ignorance of your own ignorance is what buoys overconfidence in the first place.
From the article:
"The American author and aphorist William Feather once wrote that being educated means “being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don’t.” As it turns out, this simple ideal is extremely hard to achieve. Although what we know is often perceptible to us, even the broad outlines of what we don’t know are all too often completely invisible. To a great degree, we fail to recognize the frequency and scope of our ignorance."
"It astounds me how many people will just make shit … "
I am not astonished at all.
In a professional environment your social status is higher, if you just talk, independent of your status of knowledge. There is always plenty of time later to correct for mistakes. (You know these guys, who magically have a different recollection of what they said yesterday) You certainly remain on top of discussions. Just think about the bad impression it makes in a meeting, if you repeatedly say: I don't know.
In most common, trivial real life situations, you have an advantage if you keep spewing forth nonsense and adjust for mistakes as you go along and keep pushing forward semi-blindly - compared to being forever hesitant in search for perfect truth.
The "confident idiot" basically applies a Monte Carlo search over the range of possibilities, and may eventually fall onto a good-enough solution.
I suspect that's the explanation for the D-K effect. If that's the case, then the "idiot" actually uses a pretty sophisticated overall strategy that works well in a fluid world (so not so much an idiot actually).
> It astounds me how many people will just make shit up rather than profess their ignorance.
Evolution almost guarantees this. It's a valid strategy right up until modern times:
1. The world's not sophisticated enough to expose your fucktardedness.
2. You can still milk some status and social credit from it, if used in moderation.
3. Most of the time you being wrong doesn't matter (even today).
It's only in the age of Wikipedia (or large 20th century libraries) that the circumstances have changed.
The lies/bullshit aren't the worst of it though: with the correct mental habits those are exposed and discarded quickly. It's that people like it so much that it seems to be their primary intellectual tool. The people who do this cannot seem to help themselves, and they're so loud and many that even if you're disinclined to be this way they can overwhelm any correction mechanism.
> ike a little tv in their head, power up and go.
This is insightful. There does seem to be such a mental faculty. But whether it's responsible for the bullshit phenomenon isn't very clear to me.
> So the next time someone says to you they don't know something, watch out, this person is probably a genius!
The trouble is being a genius is a valuable status in many societies. So if one of the idiots learns that parroting "I don't know" in any of a few hundred variations, soon many are doing so (when convenient).
One gets the impression that everyone is dumb, and that we're all just bouncing around repeating minimally plausible bullshit.
I'm very fond of a book called The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind by Julian Jaynes, which proffers a difficult-to-falsify but still compelling conjecture of why this should be. As you'd expect from such an ambitious title it requires an awful lot of handwaving, and accordingly it is viewed as heretodoxy in academic circles.
Yeah it is fascinating how people refuse to acknoweledge ignorance. Personally I view ignorance in a positive connotation because it promotes growth and learning which are vital assets to prevent stagnation and allow innovation to emerge.
[...]The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool[...]
I try to keep that quote in mind at all times. I believe it holds a great deal of wisdom, especially for me. For I am loud and opinionated. But I still fail when I need it most, at times when I am surrounded by (people who IMHO are extreme) idiots.
This is known as the Dunning-Kruger effect[1], the cognitive bias that unskilled individuals overestimate their ability and skilled individuals underestimate it.
"The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias manifesting in two principal ways: unskilled individuals tend to suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than is accurate, while highly skilled individuals tend to rate their ability lower than is accurate. In unskilled individuals, this bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude. Skilled individuals tend to underestimate their relative competence, erroneously assuming that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others."
I usually accredit the evolution attribution problem to the phrase "survival of the fittest". It's a catchy line, it implies that the better you are the more likely you are to survive, which is kinda true, but leads to the mistaken agency issue. It has the additional benefit of aligning with the ethic of hard work (ie. do better to survive) that we also try to teach kids, which I think is one of the reasons it persists as a meme.
The problem is that "death of the weakest" is a much better way of describing it - although possibly not so PC to teach in the classroom. The reason why people think Cheetahs evolved to be fast is because they equate it with the ethic of hard work, rather than the real reason - slow cheetahs don't eat and therefore die before breeding, fast cheetahs eat and get to breed.
Without meaning to start yet another internet debate/flamewar about evolution, I often wonder whether the strong protestant work ethic in the US is also the reason why evolution is so poorly understood there. Because "death to the weakest" involves no agency, no self-improvement or hard work.
EDIT: Just to avoid to confusion (as there seems to be some!), I'm not talking about the mechanism of evolution, purely the actual phrase "survival" and what it means to people when it's mentioned, the implication of agency that goes along with the word.
No, the correct way to phrase it is "survival of the fit". It's very common for limiting factors (water, calories, vitamins, etc) to have a plateau. In the range from starvation to 'enough', more ability to find food is an advantage. In the range from 'enough' to 'excess', there's no payoff. So what evolution creates is a population of surviving individuals who are each 'enough' on all their success parameters, but who embody a diverse range of ways to be 'fit'. This diversity then allows the species to handle change that leaves part of the population 'unfit'.
Very rarely, is there an absolute competition where the 'fittest' survive. That would actually drag down evolution - it would create genetic bottlenecks.
Evolution doesn't have anything to do with strength or weakness, it's about fitting the current environment. Sometimes smaller organisms are more likely to survive because it's easier for them to hide from predators. Sometimes the most important thing is coloration that allows an organism to blend in to the background. Some of the most successful organisms in history (ie, pigeons) aren't particularly strong or "not weak", they were just the best suited to survive in the world that they lived in.
Philosophers like to attach social messages to evolution, but one of the real lessons is "Adapt to your environment". It's not about working hard, or not being the weakest, it's about being the right organism for the moment. In the evolutionary environment of human society it's not being the smartest or working the hardest, it's being in the right place at the right time.
As all of the other discussion here sort of reveals if you read it right, part of the problem is that the phrase "Survival of the fittest" is tautological. It might as well be "Survival of the survivaliest"; those who have the most "surviving" capabilities survive. On its own, that's meaningless, and indeed, it is often treated as a slogan more than science.
You had to add in genes for this to make any sense, an idea that we so thoroughly take for granted now that we can miss it entirely. Unless the organism has some intrinsic characteristics that contribute to its survival, and there's some sort of variation in the resulting children as it passes on the intrinsic characteristics somehow, you don't have anything like evolution. Then you get a non-tautological theory of how things can trend towards increased "survivalness", as you can demonstrate how constantly producing organisms with a spread of "survivalness" and lopping off the bottom can produce changes over time.
"Death of the weakest" leads to a better understanding of evolution. However, fitness (or its antipode, weakness) is usually measured with average reproductive rate. Averages can be misleading.
Better yet, think of evolution as the loss of strategies that go extinct. Strategies with a low risk of extinction are favored. Importantly, strategies with a high average reproductive rate can sometimes be very risky. Therefore, sometimes the "fittest" strategies are evolutionarily unfavorable, and consequently the "weakest" strategies survive.
There's also a matter of motivation. "Survival of the fittest" comes along with the connotation that it's better to aim for the top [let's say 10]% in order to continue to exist. "Death to the weakest" heeds a similar connotation meaning rise above the bottom [let's stick with 10]%. So, just don't slack as terribly as the very worst slackers in your group and you'll do just fine.
All in all, that's not necessarily false, just not a great motivator. I know quite a few people who get by on bare-minimum without completely giving up and they lead very happy lives. It took me a long time in my own life and perspective to appreciate theirs.
"An ignorant mind is precisely not a spotless, empty vessel, but one that’s filled with the clutter of irrelevant or misleading life experiences, theories, facts, intuitions, strategies, algorithms, heuristics, metaphors, and hunches that regrettably have the look and feel of useful and accurate knowledge. "
Yes, and an informed mind is the same, only all the junk is "lined" up to agree with whatever the prevailing wisdom is.
People don't operate on facts. They operate on feelings, flimsly allegories, metaphors, and half-baked truths. This isn't a bug; it's a feature. It allows us to walk into a room we've never visited before, use a chair, and order from a menu without having to spend time verifying a lot of details. The brain is emotional and always wildly guessing and generalizing about things, no matter who we are or what we do.
People wonder why prejudice and stereotyping hasn't gone away in society. Well heck, it's never going away until you replace people with robots. I was attacked by a clown as a kid, I hate and fear clowns. You saw your mom shrink from a tall person, you are afraid of tall people. That's how the brain works, and it's how we're able to function.
At best we learn to deliberately struggle with this. It's never going to go away -- at least while we're still human.
Very well written article. Very amusing commentary threads.
But let me suggest something that I have tried. In one of my most intense coding periods in my career, I kept a log of the bugs that I created and had to fix. My bug rate declined measurably. (This is one of the old notebooks that i dearly wish I kept--was left at that job when I moved on.)
There is a relevant quote that I can't locate from someone famous who said that he would keep a list of his mistakes in his wallet and refer to it from time to time. A boss of mine who was adventurous about experimenting with new technology said "I don't know very much about it, but I do know 50 ways that wont't work". This has led me to asking someone who claims to be an expert "Tell me three (or five) things that won't work" in their field of expertise.
The advice from the article For individuals, the trick is to be your own devil’s advocate: to think through how your favored conclusions might be misguided; to ask yourself how you might be wrong, or how things might turn out differently from what you expect seems spot on.
This is anecdotal, but as far as I have seen in the Marine Corps, there is a bit of knowledge that is passed down that confidence makes you right, and that you need to be absolutely confident if you make an observation that goes against what a higher up is doing.
Of course this is bad logic (and likely part of why Marines get a bad rep for often being stupid), but there is a bit of wisdom in there - confidence makes things more likely to happen your way, and people also like confidence more than uncertainty. For the Marine Corps, such a bad adage is useful since uncertainty is bad, and it often is better to choose an action, even if sub-optimal, than do nothing at all.
Projecting confidence is an invaluable skill to have when you're trying to get people to charge up a heavily defended hill or take a building by force.
Anything else, not so much. I've witnessed many Marines try and fail to do something complex with ultimate confidence that brute force would solve the problem. The dedication is admirable but the range of situations in which it's sufficient for success is small.
In many non-military cases, doing nothing is a completely viable option that should always be considered. I'd venture to say that the most successful person is good at recognizing what deserves a Marine-level amount of effort and what can slide.
> This is anecdotal, but as far as I have seen in the Marine Corps, there is a bit of knowledge that is passed down that confidence makes you right
Real life situations are usually a bit squishy. They're often not set in stone, like pure logic is. If that's the case, being confident actually creates your own reality, by molding the existing one into a different shape.
So yes, in real life confidence works pretty well.
I imagine confidence & morale can, in their line of work, tip the scales and make something impossible, eminently possible.
The small troupe of British soldiers who recently repelled a militant attack with only bayonets comes to mind. Outnumbered, outgunned, the subject of an ambush, it seems to me that a combination of resolve and confidence was the deciding factor.
The FED artificially kept low interest rates since 2001 till 2008. All that money had to go somewhere. It went to housing. Cause and effect, plain and simple. The same currently nobody seems to understand that we have even lower interest rates today. From 2008 till 2014. And all this money goes to (primarily) US Treasuries. US Treasuries are currently the most expensive in its 300 year history. Mortgage APR fixed for 30 years at 4%. For 15 years at 3.5%. When the real inflation rate felt by consumers is at about 10%. Why nobody sees that? People don't like to think. They prefer imaginary fantasies where everything is just fine to brutal reality of the unproductive economy running from a bubble to bubble sponsored only by the USD being reserve currency of the world.
Once the US Treasuries bubble bursts, the same moment, the bubble in the US Dollar and America will burst too.
We're living in the final stages of the final bubble, mother of all bubbles in the mankind history. So we have house prices in bubble territory, car loans in bubble territory, Wall Street in bubble territory, VCs/startup scene in bubble territory. Enjoy the ride! But you don't want to be there for the bubble burst of the world reserve currency. I'm already on the other side of the pond.
> some familiarity with concepts that are entirely made up, such as the plates of parallax, ultra-lipid, and cholarine. In one study, roughly 90 percent claimed some knowledge of at least one of the nine fictitious concepts
Is it possible that this is at least partly down to the phrase "some knowledge"? Knowing what parallax or lipids are might be seen as having some knowledge of the concept.
In holland, a DJ called Giel Beelen has/had a part of his show called "Gaat ie mee of zegt ie nee.": "Will he join or will he say no."
He asked a national politician about terrorist Jael Jablabla (http://nos.nl/op3/artikel/359078-pvdakamerlid-leerdam-stopt-...), about a non-existing band and about the coma of Sharon... The politician bluffed his way through, claiming he knew more about Jablabla than the DJ... and ended his career shortly afterwards.
We had a similar thing in the UK with a famous satirist called Chris Morris who convinced a wide array of celebrities, including politicians, to say all sorts of idiotic things in a series of spoof documentaries about things like drugs and, most controversially, pedophilia. For example, he got one of the UK's most famous DJs to say that pedophiles have more genes in common with crabs than other human beings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEolSjlcqng .. in this case, the facts were fed to the celebs rather than them making them up though.
"Because it’s so easy to judge the idiocy of others, it may be sorely tempting to think this doesn’t apply to you. But the problem of unrecognized ignorance is one that visits us all."
This means YOU, person who thinks you see through it all.
I know intellectually it must apply to me as well...
But it's an interesting illusion. I think that philosophically the correct lesson here is that being (slightly?!?) aware of your own mind doesn't actually give you super powers... you can't change it. (Or, at least, you can't change it by shallow awareness... it would require true efforts.)
>whether his appearance as a judge on America’s Got Talent would damage his legacy. “No,” said one woman to this last question. “It will make him even more popular.”
Will. As in, this person was not bluffing. They were not talking about a previously aired nonexistent show. They were speculating on a possible future. It doesn't matter if the questioner is trying to lie.
(The 'lie' isn't even something that's disprovable, as a plausible future event.)
Disclaimer: only talking about the quote in the article, if there was more context it shouldn't have been cut
'would' is ambiguous because the author is describing something in the past. For example, you would write 'would' regardless of whether the original question was "Ma'am, do you think Clinton's appearance yesterday on America's Got Talent will damage his legacy?" or if the question had actually been "Miss, do you think Clinton accepting his recent invitation to appear on AGT would damage his legacy?" But either way, the question is false...
I'm pretty sure that for the Kimmel segments, they ask the interviewees different questions and later edit in a different question that makes the original answer seem funny.
In the curved-tube image, clearly the ball will exit with a clockwise spinning, because it'll be rolling on the external wall of the tube (based on the "Newtonian principle" of inertia). I'll bet if you try it as a experiment (inside the atmosphere) the ball will follow "C"... Am I a confident idiot?
That's a standard fallacy I often run into: over estimating second order effects. Yes, unless the ball is perfectly smooth or in a vacuum you will get slight curvature. But it would be so slight that it would look like B.
I'm probably too late with this comment ... but if the diameter of the tube is significantly larger than the diameter of the ball, and the initial velocity of the ball is large enough, then the trajectory of the ball as it leaves the "curved tube" won't necessarily correlate well with the straightforward textbook answer you'd expect to see. Perhaps the original context for the question made this a bit more clear, but as presented in the article, the "real world" might intervene.
One extreme is confident idiot. The other is the ever doubting fool. I keep thinking there is a happier middle ground - I know some things and I can't know some others. I will do my best with what I know.
From personal experience #1 obviously leads to certain failures (unfortunate one if you are even a little wise and honest - you saw this coming and still decided to be a cocky idiot). #2 you lose out on motivation, don't get the credit you deserve and get more stressed than necessary.
The happier middle ground works for me - actually look at everything, find out what you know, what you need to know and equally importantly what you are just not going to know. Then work a plan on the strengths of what you know.
That's work though - heh! The extremes are just easier to acquire :)
I wonder where those of us who tend to self depreciating humor, who also in turn confess to not knowing much while being told we get things done, fall. I know some of what I am totally clueless about but revel in being told when I am factually wrong in something I thought otherwise. However there are areas where I just refuse to understand and worse I think I know what some of those are and still won't correct it.
I don't really mind people not realizing they are idiots, if they could at least stop trying to be in power and stop ruling over others. Most of our leaders/rulers are complete idiots without realizing it, that's the worse problem on this planet; if you try to convince them of their ignorance, they react with power, insolvable..
[+] [-] leeber|11 years ago|reply
Here's what I really hate though. When you are around multiple people who are the type to claim knowledge about things they truly have no idea about.
For example in social situations or work situations and you have multiple of these types around. When a conversation comes up and the knowledge of the people involved is put to the test. Maybe your boss is asking who knows how to perform a certain task, or who has experience with certain hardware or software, etc. Or maybe a friend is asking what is the best TV they should buy, etc. There's the people who claim to know about topics XYZ when they really don't, and you, naturally, admit that you don't know. But you might still be the most knowledgeable person about the general topic, and best candidate to offer advice or take on said task. Doesn't matter, you get labeled as the uninformed person while the "idiot" who claims to know everything about XYZ appears to be knowledgable expert. And worst case scenario is when your boss, co-workers, friends, etc. are dumb enough not to catch it.
[+] [-] robomartin|11 years ago|reply
Absolutely on point. I started my engineering career at 19 years of age because I was so deeply involved with my love for building computers (as in, from raw chips) that I could show the VP of Engineering at this one company that I was good hire. I ended-up working there for ten years. Everyone else in the department was at least ten years older than me. One of the first things that was driven into my head by the "elders" was:
Always admit what you don't know. It's the only way you will learn anything new.
To this day I always appreciate people who are relaxed and clear about what they don't know (or are not sure about). I know I can have conversations with them. These people don't tend to get defensive and are not insecure at all.
The other side of your statement is that, in some circles, if you assert what you do know you are instantly labelled "arrogant". If you categorically know something I have no problem if you make sure I understand that to be the case. That's just the way the cookie crumbles.
[+] [-] Florin_Andrei|11 years ago|reply
I don't think that's true in practice. For proof, just watch any academic debate, ever.
[+] [-] ctchocula|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mathgenius|11 years ago|reply
So the next time someone says to you they don't know something, watch out, this person is probably a genius!
[+] [-] Bargs|11 years ago|reply
From the article:
"The American author and aphorist William Feather once wrote that being educated means “being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don’t.” As it turns out, this simple ideal is extremely hard to achieve. Although what we know is often perceptible to us, even the broad outlines of what we don’t know are all too often completely invisible. To a great degree, we fail to recognize the frequency and scope of our ignorance."
[+] [-] mironathetin|11 years ago|reply
I am not astonished at all. In a professional environment your social status is higher, if you just talk, independent of your status of knowledge. There is always plenty of time later to correct for mistakes. (You know these guys, who magically have a different recollection of what they said yesterday) You certainly remain on top of discussions. Just think about the bad impression it makes in a meeting, if you repeatedly say: I don't know.
[+] [-] Florin_Andrei|11 years ago|reply
The "confident idiot" basically applies a Monte Carlo search over the range of possibilities, and may eventually fall onto a good-enough solution.
I suspect that's the explanation for the D-K effect. If that's the case, then the "idiot" actually uses a pretty sophisticated overall strategy that works well in a fluid world (so not so much an idiot actually).
[+] [-] NoMoreNicksLeft|11 years ago|reply
Evolution almost guarantees this. It's a valid strategy right up until modern times:
1. The world's not sophisticated enough to expose your fucktardedness. 2. You can still milk some status and social credit from it, if used in moderation. 3. Most of the time you being wrong doesn't matter (even today).
It's only in the age of Wikipedia (or large 20th century libraries) that the circumstances have changed.
The lies/bullshit aren't the worst of it though: with the correct mental habits those are exposed and discarded quickly. It's that people like it so much that it seems to be their primary intellectual tool. The people who do this cannot seem to help themselves, and they're so loud and many that even if you're disinclined to be this way they can overwhelm any correction mechanism.
> ike a little tv in their head, power up and go.
This is insightful. There does seem to be such a mental faculty. But whether it's responsible for the bullshit phenomenon isn't very clear to me.
> So the next time someone says to you they don't know something, watch out, this person is probably a genius!
The trouble is being a genius is a valuable status in many societies. So if one of the idiots learns that parroting "I don't know" in any of a few hundred variations, soon many are doing so (when convenient).
One gets the impression that everyone is dumb, and that we're all just bouncing around repeating minimally plausible bullshit.
[+] [-] anigbrowl|11 years ago|reply
I'm very fond of a book called The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind by Julian Jaynes, which proffers a difficult-to-falsify but still compelling conjecture of why this should be. As you'd expect from such an ambitious title it requires an awful lot of handwaving, and accordingly it is viewed as heretodoxy in academic circles.
[+] [-] jessejhernandez|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atmosx|11 years ago|reply
Act 5, Scene 1:
[...]The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool[...]
I try to keep that quote in mind at all times. I believe it holds a great deal of wisdom, especially for me. For I am loud and opinionated. But I still fail when I need it most, at times when I am surrounded by (people who IMHO are extreme) idiots.
[+] [-] robert_tweed|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Swizec|11 years ago|reply
"The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias manifesting in two principal ways: unskilled individuals tend to suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than is accurate, while highly skilled individuals tend to rate their ability lower than is accurate. In unskilled individuals, this bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude. Skilled individuals tend to underestimate their relative competence, erroneously assuming that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others."
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
[+] [-] adwf|11 years ago|reply
The problem is that "death of the weakest" is a much better way of describing it - although possibly not so PC to teach in the classroom. The reason why people think Cheetahs evolved to be fast is because they equate it with the ethic of hard work, rather than the real reason - slow cheetahs don't eat and therefore die before breeding, fast cheetahs eat and get to breed.
Without meaning to start yet another internet debate/flamewar about evolution, I often wonder whether the strong protestant work ethic in the US is also the reason why evolution is so poorly understood there. Because "death to the weakest" involves no agency, no self-improvement or hard work.
EDIT: Just to avoid to confusion (as there seems to be some!), I'm not talking about the mechanism of evolution, purely the actual phrase "survival" and what it means to people when it's mentioned, the implication of agency that goes along with the word.
[+] [-] JulianMorrison|11 years ago|reply
Very rarely, is there an absolute competition where the 'fittest' survive. That would actually drag down evolution - it would create genetic bottlenecks.
[+] [-] karmacondon|11 years ago|reply
Philosophers like to attach social messages to evolution, but one of the real lessons is "Adapt to your environment". It's not about working hard, or not being the weakest, it's about being the right organism for the moment. In the evolutionary environment of human society it's not being the smartest or working the hardest, it's being in the right place at the right time.
[+] [-] jerf|11 years ago|reply
You had to add in genes for this to make any sense, an idea that we so thoroughly take for granted now that we can miss it entirely. Unless the organism has some intrinsic characteristics that contribute to its survival, and there's some sort of variation in the resulting children as it passes on the intrinsic characteristics somehow, you don't have anything like evolution. Then you get a non-tautological theory of how things can trend towards increased "survivalness", as you can demonstrate how constantly producing organisms with a spread of "survivalness" and lopping off the bottom can produce changes over time.
[+] [-] Real_S|11 years ago|reply
Better yet, think of evolution as the loss of strategies that go extinct. Strategies with a low risk of extinction are favored. Importantly, strategies with a high average reproductive rate can sometimes be very risky. Therefore, sometimes the "fittest" strategies are evolutionarily unfavorable, and consequently the "weakest" strategies survive.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8433879
[+] [-] ska|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] enobrev|11 years ago|reply
All in all, that's not necessarily false, just not a great motivator. I know quite a few people who get by on bare-minimum without completely giving up and they lead very happy lives. It took me a long time in my own life and perspective to appreciate theirs.
[+] [-] lucio|11 years ago|reply
"survival of the fittest" = "not survival of the not-fit"
And also "fit" it is not the same as "strong"
[+] [-] DanielBMarkham|11 years ago|reply
Yes, and an informed mind is the same, only all the junk is "lined" up to agree with whatever the prevailing wisdom is.
People don't operate on facts. They operate on feelings, flimsly allegories, metaphors, and half-baked truths. This isn't a bug; it's a feature. It allows us to walk into a room we've never visited before, use a chair, and order from a menu without having to spend time verifying a lot of details. The brain is emotional and always wildly guessing and generalizing about things, no matter who we are or what we do.
People wonder why prejudice and stereotyping hasn't gone away in society. Well heck, it's never going away until you replace people with robots. I was attacked by a clown as a kid, I hate and fear clowns. You saw your mom shrink from a tall person, you are afraid of tall people. That's how the brain works, and it's how we're able to function.
At best we learn to deliberately struggle with this. It's never going to go away -- at least while we're still human.
[+] [-] wglb|11 years ago|reply
But let me suggest something that I have tried. In one of my most intense coding periods in my career, I kept a log of the bugs that I created and had to fix. My bug rate declined measurably. (This is one of the old notebooks that i dearly wish I kept--was left at that job when I moved on.)
There is a relevant quote that I can't locate from someone famous who said that he would keep a list of his mistakes in his wallet and refer to it from time to time. A boss of mine who was adventurous about experimenting with new technology said "I don't know very much about it, but I do know 50 ways that wont't work". This has led me to asking someone who claims to be an expert "Tell me three (or five) things that won't work" in their field of expertise.
The advice from the article For individuals, the trick is to be your own devil’s advocate: to think through how your favored conclusions might be misguided; to ask yourself how you might be wrong, or how things might turn out differently from what you expect seems spot on.
[+] [-] Bahamut|11 years ago|reply
Of course this is bad logic (and likely part of why Marines get a bad rep for often being stupid), but there is a bit of wisdom in there - confidence makes things more likely to happen your way, and people also like confidence more than uncertainty. For the Marine Corps, such a bad adage is useful since uncertainty is bad, and it often is better to choose an action, even if sub-optimal, than do nothing at all.
[+] [-] drblast|11 years ago|reply
Anything else, not so much. I've witnessed many Marines try and fail to do something complex with ultimate confidence that brute force would solve the problem. The dedication is admirable but the range of situations in which it's sufficient for success is small.
In many non-military cases, doing nothing is a completely viable option that should always be considered. I'd venture to say that the most successful person is good at recognizing what deserves a Marine-level amount of effort and what can slide.
[+] [-] Florin_Andrei|11 years ago|reply
Real life situations are usually a bit squishy. They're often not set in stone, like pure logic is. If that's the case, being confident actually creates your own reality, by molding the existing one into a different shape.
So yes, in real life confidence works pretty well.
[+] [-] sliverstorm|11 years ago|reply
The small troupe of British soldiers who recently repelled a militant attack with only bayonets comes to mind. Outnumbered, outgunned, the subject of an ambush, it seems to me that a combination of resolve and confidence was the deciding factor.
[+] [-] marktangotango|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lucio|11 years ago|reply
Isn't he being prey of his own effect?
So the "epic housing bubble"(consecuence) was caused by "the machinations of financiers(cause 1) and the ignorance of consumers (cause 2)"
If this is true, why 2008? Clearly cause 1 & 2 were present waaay before 2008. So maybe the bubble have other causes?
[+] [-] byEngineer|11 years ago|reply
Once the US Treasuries bubble bursts, the same moment, the bubble in the US Dollar and America will burst too.
We're living in the final stages of the final bubble, mother of all bubbles in the mankind history. So we have house prices in bubble territory, car loans in bubble territory, Wall Street in bubble territory, VCs/startup scene in bubble territory. Enjoy the ride! But you don't want to be there for the bubble burst of the world reserve currency. I'm already on the other side of the pond.
[+] [-] prof_hobart|11 years ago|reply
Is it possible that this is at least partly down to the phrase "some knowledge"? Knowing what parallax or lipids are might be seen as having some knowledge of the concept.
[+] [-] teekert|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] petercooper|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] waterlesscloud|11 years ago|reply
This means YOU, person who thinks you see through it all.
You don't.
This applies to you too.
[+] [-] NoMoreNicksLeft|11 years ago|reply
But it's an interesting illusion. I think that philosophically the correct lesson here is that being (slightly?!?) aware of your own mind doesn't actually give you super powers... you can't change it. (Or, at least, you can't change it by shallow awareness... it would require true efforts.)
[+] [-] Dylan16807|11 years ago|reply
Will. As in, this person was not bluffing. They were not talking about a previously aired nonexistent show. They were speculating on a possible future. It doesn't matter if the questioner is trying to lie.
(The 'lie' isn't even something that's disprovable, as a plausible future event.)
Disclaimer: only talking about the quote in the article, if there was more context it shouldn't have been cut
[+] [-] gwern|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevinwang|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lucio|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spain|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nwatson|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blinkingled|11 years ago|reply
From personal experience #1 obviously leads to certain failures (unfortunate one if you are even a little wise and honest - you saw this coming and still decided to be a cocky idiot). #2 you lose out on motivation, don't get the credit you deserve and get more stressed than necessary.
The happier middle ground works for me - actually look at everything, find out what you know, what you need to know and equally importantly what you are just not going to know. Then work a plan on the strengths of what you know.
That's work though - heh! The extremes are just easier to acquire :)
[+] [-] androidb|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Shivetya|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknownBits|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dlss|11 years ago|reply
The article makes a lot more sense after watching it IMO.