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Something I've noticed now that we're all communicating online in written form: a lack of people saying "I don't know" It seems that everybody knows everything

Something I've noticed now that we're all communicating online in written form: a lack of people saying "I don't know" It seems that everybody knows everything. Whatever the issue, a little bit of Googling and suddenly you know all there is to know. Even more wondrous, no matter what position you take on anything, some more search engine Kung Fu and you can find a hundred people willing to support you with arguments, surveys, facts -- whatever you need. Everybody knows everything. It's quite amazing. And then when you take a tech team into an unknown domain, suddenly they find it very difficult to open up, admit ignorance, and reason about things. I am reminded of some startup book or blog I read years ago. It was talking about the relationship between intelligence and startup success. The author said that there was a correlation. It was an inverse correlation. The more you have been rewarded in life for being smart and knowing everything, the more you felt intelligent, the less chance you had of making a startup work. You just weren't able to admit all the things you didn't know.

mjburgess 9y ago
Well. People still don't know, but now they have enough information to seem as-if they do. Understanding is not a matter of a google. It's a decade of relevant experience. You might beat the PhD to the factoid phrase, but when you come to employ the fact in the relevant problem you won't even know where to begin or even what it really meant. People aren't exercising their ability to distinguish parroting from understanding, as-if intellectual work is just different forms of trivial pursuit.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- sorokod 9y ago
  In the same spirit there is the cheapening of the concept of "research". Often the statement "I did some research" means that some googling has occurred.
  - alextheparrot 9y ago
    I feel it is less directly cheapening all research and more bifurcating the term between engaged and unengaged audiences. The audience must decide when searching becomes researching, which I doubt is the second time you are feeling lucky. If I google, find a primary source with reasonable data, and form an argument based on that, then I’ve done research. It was simply easier based on the Internet, but the research is not proof-of-work - a well-supported conclusion is just that no matter the effort. On the other hand, I google, copy and paste the first link and parrot what it said - then I have indeed cheapened it. I’ve skipped the evaluation step of researching, wherein I convince myself of the “facts” of the past and I’ve also failed to extend any new thoughts as we’ve just parroted the argument. My main point being, to a critical reader only “bad” research is cheap. It is also the duty of the audience, just as much the researcher, to evaluate what they read critically and respond with skepticism.
    - sorokod 9y ago
      I accept that to research doesn't have a binary quality and the amount of effort can vary. Nevertheless I encounter research close to the second meaning you mentioned frequently.
      - ci5er 9y ago
        > Nevertheless I encounter research close to the second meaning you mentioned frequently. Would you mind sharing the context? I work in a field where the PR machine of my target "research" jumps ahead of the methodological reports. Then those reports are often vague (length limits?) about the details of their methodology. That makes me not trust much that I find - but I've got to have something - so I end up doing some sort of meta-analysis. It's time-consuming, exausting and frustrating - and has confidence-bars that might as well be non-existent - but without doing the on-the-ground fundamental-study - it's what I've got. For example - I just spent 60 hours over the last 4 days trying to triangulate a "probably correct-ish" value and range for a variable from a heck-of-a-lot of studies that didn't use the same methodology. Would that count as research in your book, or not?
- grigjd3 9y ago
  One thing a PhD taught me was how thoroughly limited my expertise is.
netgusto 9y ago
Maybe it's just an impression based on the fact that people who do not know do not care to write it. I don't know :)
- dsr_ 9y ago
  Yes, and also consider the relationship between knowing an answer, being confident in your knowledge, and having the time to explain details or find sources. People (who are intellectually honest) say "I don't know" when a question is specifically addressed to them, and so they feel a responsibility to give an answer. They don't respond at all when they don't know the answer and they haven't been addressed... except if they are motivated by curiosity and wish to indicate that they, too, are interested in the answer. Incidentally, the mistake of assuming that everything on the Net is addressed to you is a common failing among people who have little experience. It happens on Facebook all the time...
pbhjpbhj 9y ago
Reminds me of the recent results in education where those told how bright they are then go on to do worse in tests.
Hendrikto 9y ago
To me being able to admit you don‘t know something is part of being intelligent. You need to be intelligent enough to reach the conclusion that you do not know everything.
codingdave 9y ago
Why would I jump into a thread, on any site, just to say I don't know? There are thousands of threads just on HN that I just let scroll by without participating because I don't know enough to add to the discussion. Explicitly calling out my lack of knowledge on every thread would serve no purpose to anybody. Online written communications will never follow the same patterns as direct communication, and that is a good thing.
- thathappened 9y ago
  Excluding reddit
- barry0079 9y ago
  The problem isn't people not admitting ignorance online. The problem is that the internet might be the cause of people not admitting ignorance in real life.
  - grigjd3 9y ago
    As a person who basically made it through college without internet, I can tell you that I had just as much trouble admitting I was wrong when I didn't have access to the internet, perhaps more because I was younger and more hotheaded.
    - DoofusOfDeath 9y ago
      I've sometimes had the problem as well. Usually because my self esteem had been based heavily on believing that I'm really smart.
      - cecilpl2 9y ago
        It sounds like you had equated being smart with knowing things. My self esteem has also been heavily based on believing that I'm really smart, but I never had a problem admitting I didn't know something. "Smart" to me means my ability to learn, problem solve, and make connections. One of the most significant factors in my success to date has been my almost eager willingness to admit my lack of knowledge, and to ask others to share their knowledge. How else are you going to learn new things?
k__ 9y ago
I think we have two problems at the moment. 1. Being right doesn't mean being smart. I met many people in my life that were smart or dumb, but their success had nothing to do with this. You can do the right things by accident. 2. Being rich often removes the need of being smart to varying degrees. People want to help you getting richer if they get a piece of the pie.
- cdancette 9y ago
  While you can certainly become rich by accident, usually what we call "accident" are quite rare. Are you saying dumb people getting rich are rare by calling it an accident ? I think we would need more study to establish if there is a correlation or not, looking just at the people you met is not enough.
  - k__ 9y ago
    Is it? Who could qualify this? I mean, you found a company, talk to the right people and get rich. If you just happen to find the wrong people, you won't get rich. Sure, you could say the sales people were skilled and found these people, but how often is this really true and how often do you just luck out by finding the right number on some obscure website?
- mhb 9y ago
  Competent Elites - The World is Stratified by Genuine Competence https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16186279 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16186279
  - k__ 9y ago
    lol, this guy is simply too much.
    - dwaltrip 9y ago
      Eliezer Yudkowsky is quite smart with some deep understandings of the world (along with some less good ideas), as best I can tell. I've definitely learned interesting things or been sent down interesting paths from articles of his that I've read. However, he would be served very well to work on eliminating the moderate pomposity that permeates much of his writing. He is also overly verbose sometimes. Fixing those two issues would reduce a lot of the beef he gets, I think.
stult 9y ago
I would be interested to see the evidence for that inverse correlation. I remember seeing a study not so long ago which implied that higher intelligence individuals made poor managers. As did lower intelligence people. There's a sweet spot somewhere a little above average where you're smart enough to do the job but not so smart that you can't relate to employees and customers. I would not be surprised to see the same phenomenon in start ups, though admittedly I don't know if that study was especially reliable given the modern state of the social sciences. My instinct is to question the causality anyway, because I think you highlight a strong candidate for the actual, underlying limitation on intelligent leaders: humility. My hypothesis would be that the negative leadership performance is actually a proxy measure of humility, which on average is lower with higher intelligence, likely because of the praise effect you describe. Because I don't think it makes sense that intelligent leaders are less able to question their frame of thought or significant details supporting it. Or rather less capable in carrying out the actual cognitive task of self-questioning. Quite the opposite, because general intelligence is a measure of the correlation between performance on all cognitive tasks, so it's practically tautological that higher IQ individuals would be stronger within that cognitive domain. Which makes me think it must be their willingness or propensity to engage in the process of self-questioning. To bring it back around to the OP, details matter, but the process for selecting relevant and filtering out irrelevant details matters most. Humility may be one way to enhance that process. Though maybe there is also a limit. Too much questioning prevents the establishment of a stable, actionable consensus. An inability to shut out irrelevant stimuli is disabling to individuals and organizations. Like Funes the Memorious, you get lost in minutiae. I don't know where the ideal balance lies, but I wish I was better at finding it in practice.
- RMGgondella 9y ago
  It's kind of the Peter Principle: You rise to your own level of incompetence. Hopefully, you don't get boosted past that level. Then you can instruct and manage the next down level. You make an excellent point about filtering out the irrelevant. The wood is brown, for example, is irrelevant to building a proper staircase. The angle of decline is highly relevant. But, with regard to leadership, the Peter Principle (identified by Laurence J. Peter and published in 1969) is in inverse correlation to performance, I believe. Particularly if performance is tied to being able to communicate with the success of the high performer at that level, because they might not have met their own level of the Peter Principle. And, after communicating, one must be able to act. If a person has reached their Peter Principle level, they will be incompetent at the task -- which is why so many managers are hated.
pavel_lishin 9y ago
There's a language that has citations built into statements of fact or belief; you modify statements based on how you came to know them. If someone asks, "Where is Alice?", your answer of "Alice is fishing" would be phrased differently depending on whether he told you he was going fishing, or whether Bob told you he saw her fishing, or whether you saw her fishing. There's nothing like that online, so any given advice or answer in a comment could be coming from someone with 20 years of experience, or from someone who googled the exact thing you already did, and copied the first answer they saw on StackOverflow.
- ansgri 9y ago
  Something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime?
  - pavel_lishin 9y ago
    I think I think I was likely thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Pomo_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Pomo_language was what I had in mind.
    - anchpop 9y ago
      I think you think you think you might have been thinking of eastern pomo language was what you might have been thinking of
- kleer001 9y ago
  Are you thinking of Ithkuil? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil
  - pavel_lishin 9y ago
    I think I was likely thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Pomo_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Pomo_language
CoolGuySteve 9y ago
Sometimes in the hnews comments I'll ask a question and normally the answers I get back are pretty good even though my comment is rarely popular. Most recently I asked about some subtlety in the Meltdown vulnerability. It would be cool in addition to "comments", there was a Q&A section. I find I mostly click on the comments to get a more nuanced understanding of an article only to find a 20-commeny deep flame war about something unrelated.
- hzhou321 9y ago
  Crowd sentiment is very important (to many circumstances and understanding), so reading the 20-comment deep flame war is useful too. You just need make sure to read it from outside but not into it.
radarsat1 9y ago
> The more you have been rewarded in life for being smart and knowing everything, the more you felt intelligent, the less chance you had of making a startup work. You just weren't able to admit all the things you didn't know. I think there's something to this, but I want to present an alternative, which is that the more I know, the more I know what I don't know. And with regards to startups and business, the effect of this that I can observe is one of paralysis. I am scared to death of committing to any idea because I can see right away many of the unknowns, and I fear the unknown unknowns. After some education, I have enough history of thinking I know something and then discovering that I basically know nothing, that I am scared to ever say, well THIS is the idea that is going to work out, I'll put all my money and effort for the next 10 years into THIS because I am sure. Sadly, the more I know, the less sure I am about anything, and it makes me unwilling to take risks. Not just business -- even deciding what to study next, what jobs to apply to, or what side project to begin -- every time I start something that seems simple enough, it takes about 5 minutes to realize I have no idea what I'm doing and have to evaluate whether it's worth pouring more time into. Result: things don't get done. Because there is no done. I do learn a lot however. But for what? Personal growth I guess. But I have no idea what to do with it. I really envy those people who are able to decide they are going to solve a specific problem, that it's worth it to do so, and are able to see it through to the end, instead of learning everything they can about it, getting bored, and moving on, which seems to be my pattern. In the end, for me, it is the learning that is motivating, not the goal, and that has terrible consequences for what you describe. Perhaps "successful at startups" is not the only metric, but at least for that metric, it is maybe not good to take the "I'm going to learn everything about this before actually doing anything" approach.
- hzhou321 9y ago
  There are risky risks, and there are affordable risks. One of the risky risks -- at main job, I am also very reluctant to commit to any new projects without emphasizing that I can not guarantee result but only effort up front first. Luckily, I often get managers to acknowledge my emphases on the effort part, which somehow reduces the risk of unknown unknowns. But I also had many occasions that I succeeded to convince managers or coworkers to alter their ambition with my emphases. In other word, my job has some room for risks and my finance has some room for risk of jobs, I guess I am lucky. Now once the risk reduced to affordable level, my curiosity often takes over and I often gets excited to explore my unknowns. It is sad that for some people that all they see is unaffordable risks and they have suppressed and forgotten their curiosity -- the source of life's excitement.
lost_name 9y ago
> It seems that everybody knows everything. I think about this from time to time -- how people build up this sense of personality related to a forum or site. I think what tends to happen for an individual is that when you're talking to millions of people you don't have the perspective on who says what anymore, it becomes "twitter thinks" or "reddit says" instead of "these 10 people." I think the reason everybody knows everything is that because we don't look at the individuals when we talk in a forum like this. There are always going to be some 'famous' people whose names pop up over and over, but as general responses you don't really know what a person thinks about something. We internalize a consensus of opinions and then it becomes just "well, HN said this." This is most apparent when the forum contradicts itself. If there isn't another way to denote the opinions (like a sub-forum) then you start seeing comments like "everyone was against it yesterday and now everyone is in favor?" when in reality it's unlikely to be the same people responding anyway.
hypertexthero 9y ago
“Certainty is a closing of the mind. To create something new you must have doubt.” —Milton Glaser
reificator 9y ago
In one on one or small group conversations, I say I don't know all the time. In one to many conversations like a thread on Hacker News, why would I say "I don't know" unless I'm specifically addressed or have a side point to make? It's noise, and doesn't help anyone.
BeetleB 9y ago
I don't know if the inverse correlation exists, but I doubt the explanation provided (that smart people often do not know or won't admit what they don't know). Coming from academic circles, we consider such people as the "mildly" smart. As in, being uninformed is OK (you know you are uninformed). Being only a little informed is dangerous (you don't know what you don't know). And the most informed are OK too (they know quite well the limits of their knowledge). The smart people you are talking about do not usually survive academia. In my own personal experience, I find the false confidence to be quite orthogonal to intelligence. I see plenty of low intelligence folks have the same problem, and plenty of high intelligence folks have it, and do not see a clear relation where one is more prone to it than the other. More like: You are humble and always doubt yourself (which is the academic's concept of "smart" - continually trying to tear down your own theories), or you are arrogant and do not. Intelligence is unrelated.
bluetwo 9y ago
Even better, everyone thinks they know the right solution to a problem by reading a headline about it.
RMGgondella 9y ago
I think that you identify Mr. Salviatier's main thesis: That knowing or not knowing are equally invalid until observation has been done. Of course, it's said the the very act of observation exerts change on the observed, but that's neither here nor there. So, when I take tech teams into uncharted waters, the first thing we do is observe. Otherwise we create "ivory tower solutions" better suited to ourselves than actual users. And, yes. Your're right. If you're supposed to be the "expert founder" then "I don't know" is not, generally in your vocabulary. However, I do suspect this is a male problem, more so, than female. Having said that, in this great time of social upheaval, vis a vis gender, perhaps it's a great time to learn from our sisters!
Nokinside 9y ago
Very good point and observation. I have observed the same but I have observed the exact opposite in academia and academically oriented corporate R&D in complex technical fields. People with academic background can surprisingly humble intellectually. They may be arrogant when defending their point of view, but if they come up with a new thing they don't know about, they admit it even if it's common thing. By constantly asking simple questions every time they can't follow up something they are able to learn constantly.
lkrubner 9y ago
That is absolutely true and you said it very well. And, after a lifetime of being praised for one's intelligence and creativity, when people first begin to realize that things are going badly, they can fall apart in some shocking and ugly ways. Hopefully a relevant quote: "Emotions can hinder or uplift. We might hope that those in leadership positions possess strength and resilience, but vanity and fragile egos have sabotaged many of the businesses that I’ve worked with. Defeat is always a possibility, and not everyone finds healthy ways to deal with the stress. Each person matters. Established firms will have a bureaucracy that can ensure some stability, even when an eccentric individual is in a leadership position, but when a company consists of just two or three people, and one of them reacts neurotically to challenges, the company is doomed." http://www.smashcompany.com/business/how-to-destroy-a-tech-startup-in-three-easy-steps-the-intro http://www.smashcompany.com/business/how-to-destroy-a-tech-s...
ouid 9y ago
the confidence with which you are speculating right now is, at the very least, ironic.
latexr 9y ago
Looks like you’re describing the Fixed (as opposed to Growth) Mindset: https://youtu.be/Yl9TVbAal5s https://youtu.be/Yl9TVbAal5s She also has a book, which I would recommend skipping. It adds nothing that isn’t covered in the video.

mjburgess 9y ago

Well. People still don't know, but now they have enough information to seem as-if they do. Understanding is not a matter of a google. It's a decade of relevant experience. You might beat the PhD to the factoid phrase, but when you come to employ the fact in the relevant problem you won't even know where to begin or even what it really meant. People aren't exercising their ability to distinguish parroting from understanding, as-if intellectual work is just different forms of trivial pursuit.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
sorokod 9y ago
In the same spirit there is the cheapening of the concept of "research". Often the statement "I did some research" means that some googling has occurred.
- alextheparrot 9y ago
  I feel it is less directly cheapening all research and more bifurcating the term between engaged and unengaged audiences. The audience must decide when searching becomes researching, which I doubt is the second time you are feeling lucky. If I google, find a primary source with reasonable data, and form an argument based on that, then I’ve done research. It was simply easier based on the Internet, but the research is not proof-of-work - a well-supported conclusion is just that no matter the effort. On the other hand, I google, copy and paste the first link and parrot what it said - then I have indeed cheapened it. I’ve skipped the evaluation step of researching, wherein I convince myself of the “facts” of the past and I’ve also failed to extend any new thoughts as we’ve just parroted the argument. My main point being, to a critical reader only “bad” research is cheap. It is also the duty of the audience, just as much the researcher, to evaluate what they read critically and respond with skepticism.
  - sorokod 9y ago
    I accept that to research doesn't have a binary quality and the amount of effort can vary. Nevertheless I encounter research close to the second meaning you mentioned frequently.
    - ci5er 9y ago
      > Nevertheless I encounter research close to the second meaning you mentioned frequently. Would you mind sharing the context? I work in a field where the PR machine of my target "research" jumps ahead of the methodological reports. Then those reports are often vague (length limits?) about the details of their methodology. That makes me not trust much that I find - but I've got to have something - so I end up doing some sort of meta-analysis. It's time-consuming, exausting and frustrating - and has confidence-bars that might as well be non-existent - but without doing the on-the-ground fundamental-study - it's what I've got. For example - I just spent 60 hours over the last 4 days trying to triangulate a "probably correct-ish" value and range for a variable from a heck-of-a-lot of studies that didn't use the same methodology. Would that count as research in your book, or not?
grigjd3 9y ago
One thing a PhD taught me was how thoroughly limited my expertise is.

netgusto 9y ago

Maybe it's just an impression based on the fact that people who do not know do not care to write it. I don't know :)

dsr_ 9y ago
Yes, and also consider the relationship between knowing an answer, being confident in your knowledge, and having the time to explain details or find sources. People (who are intellectually honest) say "I don't know" when a question is specifically addressed to them, and so they feel a responsibility to give an answer. They don't respond at all when they don't know the answer and they haven't been addressed... except if they are motivated by curiosity and wish to indicate that they, too, are interested in the answer. Incidentally, the mistake of assuming that everything on the Net is addressed to you is a common failing among people who have little experience. It happens on Facebook all the time...

pbhjpbhj 9y ago

Reminds me of the recent results in education where those told how bright they are then go on to do worse in tests.

Hendrikto 9y ago

To me being able to admit you don‘t know something is part of being intelligent. You need to be intelligent enough to reach the conclusion that you do not know everything.

codingdave 9y ago

Why would I jump into a thread, on any site, just to say I don't know? There are thousands of threads just on HN that I just let scroll by without participating because I don't know enough to add to the discussion. Explicitly calling out my lack of knowledge on every thread would serve no purpose to anybody. Online written communications will never follow the same patterns as direct communication, and that is a good thing.

thathappened 9y ago
Excluding reddit
barry0079 9y ago
The problem isn't people not admitting ignorance online. The problem is that the internet might be the cause of people not admitting ignorance in real life.
- grigjd3 9y ago
  As a person who basically made it through college without internet, I can tell you that I had just as much trouble admitting I was wrong when I didn't have access to the internet, perhaps more because I was younger and more hotheaded.
  - DoofusOfDeath 9y ago
    I've sometimes had the problem as well. Usually because my self esteem had been based heavily on believing that I'm really smart.
    - cecilpl2 9y ago
      It sounds like you had equated being smart with knowing things. My self esteem has also been heavily based on believing that I'm really smart, but I never had a problem admitting I didn't know something. "Smart" to me means my ability to learn, problem solve, and make connections. One of the most significant factors in my success to date has been my almost eager willingness to admit my lack of knowledge, and to ask others to share their knowledge. How else are you going to learn new things?

k__ 9y ago

I think we have two problems at the moment. 1. Being right doesn't mean being smart. I met many people in my life that were smart or dumb, but their success had nothing to do with this. You can do the right things by accident. 2. Being rich often removes the need of being smart to varying degrees. People want to help you getting richer if they get a piece of the pie.

cdancette 9y ago
While you can certainly become rich by accident, usually what we call "accident" are quite rare. Are you saying dumb people getting rich are rare by calling it an accident ? I think we would need more study to establish if there is a correlation or not, looking just at the people you met is not enough.
- k__ 9y ago
  Is it? Who could qualify this? I mean, you found a company, talk to the right people and get rich. If you just happen to find the wrong people, you won't get rich. Sure, you could say the sales people were skilled and found these people, but how often is this really true and how often do you just luck out by finding the right number on some obscure website?
mhb 9y ago
Competent Elites - The World is Stratified by Genuine Competence https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16186279 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16186279
- k__ 9y ago
  lol, this guy is simply too much.
  - dwaltrip 9y ago
    Eliezer Yudkowsky is quite smart with some deep understandings of the world (along with some less good ideas), as best I can tell. I've definitely learned interesting things or been sent down interesting paths from articles of his that I've read. However, he would be served very well to work on eliminating the moderate pomposity that permeates much of his writing. He is also overly verbose sometimes. Fixing those two issues would reduce a lot of the beef he gets, I think.

stult 9y ago

I would be interested to see the evidence for that inverse correlation. I remember seeing a study not so long ago which implied that higher intelligence individuals made poor managers. As did lower intelligence people. There's a sweet spot somewhere a little above average where you're smart enough to do the job but not so smart that you can't relate to employees and customers. I would not be surprised to see the same phenomenon in start ups, though admittedly I don't know if that study was especially reliable given the modern state of the social sciences. My instinct is to question the causality anyway, because I think you highlight a strong candidate for the actual, underlying limitation on intelligent leaders: humility. My hypothesis would be that the negative leadership performance is actually a proxy measure of humility, which on average is lower with higher intelligence, likely because of the praise effect you describe. Because I don't think it makes sense that intelligent leaders are less able to question their frame of thought or significant details supporting it. Or rather less capable in carrying out the actual cognitive task of self-questioning. Quite the opposite, because general intelligence is a measure of the correlation between performance on all cognitive tasks, so it's practically tautological that higher IQ individuals would be stronger within that cognitive domain. Which makes me think it must be their willingness or propensity to engage in the process of self-questioning. To bring it back around to the OP, details matter, but the process for selecting relevant and filtering out irrelevant details matters most. Humility may be one way to enhance that process. Though maybe there is also a limit. Too much questioning prevents the establishment of a stable, actionable consensus. An inability to shut out irrelevant stimuli is disabling to individuals and organizations. Like Funes the Memorious, you get lost in minutiae. I don't know where the ideal balance lies, but I wish I was better at finding it in practice.

RMGgondella 9y ago
It's kind of the Peter Principle: You rise to your own level of incompetence. Hopefully, you don't get boosted past that level. Then you can instruct and manage the next down level. You make an excellent point about filtering out the irrelevant. The wood is brown, for example, is irrelevant to building a proper staircase. The angle of decline is highly relevant. But, with regard to leadership, the Peter Principle (identified by Laurence J. Peter and published in 1969) is in inverse correlation to performance, I believe. Particularly if performance is tied to being able to communicate with the success of the high performer at that level, because they might not have met their own level of the Peter Principle. And, after communicating, one must be able to act. If a person has reached their Peter Principle level, they will be incompetent at the task -- which is why so many managers are hated.

pavel_lishin 9y ago

There's a language that has citations built into statements of fact or belief; you modify statements based on how you came to know them. If someone asks, "Where is Alice?", your answer of "Alice is fishing" would be phrased differently depending on whether he told you he was going fishing, or whether Bob told you he saw her fishing, or whether you saw her fishing. There's nothing like that online, so any given advice or answer in a comment could be coming from someone with 20 years of experience, or from someone who googled the exact thing you already did, and copied the first answer they saw on StackOverflow.

ansgri 9y ago
Something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime?
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  I think I think I was likely thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Pomo_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Pomo_language was what I had in mind.
  - anchpop 9y ago
    I think you think you think you might have been thinking of eastern pomo language was what you might have been thinking of
kleer001 9y ago
Are you thinking of Ithkuil? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  I think I was likely thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Pomo_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Pomo_language

CoolGuySteve 9y ago

Sometimes in the hnews comments I'll ask a question and normally the answers I get back are pretty good even though my comment is rarely popular. Most recently I asked about some subtlety in the Meltdown vulnerability. It would be cool in addition to "comments", there was a Q&A section. I find I mostly click on the comments to get a more nuanced understanding of an article only to find a 20-commeny deep flame war about something unrelated.

hzhou321 9y ago
Crowd sentiment is very important (to many circumstances and understanding), so reading the 20-comment deep flame war is useful too. You just need make sure to read it from outside but not into it.

radarsat1 9y ago

> The more you have been rewarded in life for being smart and knowing everything, the more you felt intelligent, the less chance you had of making a startup work. You just weren't able to admit all the things you didn't know. I think there's something to this, but I want to present an alternative, which is that the more I know, the more I know what I don't know. And with regards to startups and business, the effect of this that I can observe is one of paralysis. I am scared to death of committing to any idea because I can see right away many of the unknowns, and I fear the unknown unknowns. After some education, I have enough history of thinking I know something and then discovering that I basically know nothing, that I am scared to ever say, well THIS is the idea that is going to work out, I'll put all my money and effort for the next 10 years into THIS because I am sure. Sadly, the more I know, the less sure I am about anything, and it makes me unwilling to take risks. Not just business -- even deciding what to study next, what jobs to apply to, or what side project to begin -- every time I start something that seems simple enough, it takes about 5 minutes to realize I have no idea what I'm doing and have to evaluate whether it's worth pouring more time into. Result: things don't get done. Because there is no done. I do learn a lot however. But for what? Personal growth I guess. But I have no idea what to do with it. I really envy those people who are able to decide they are going to solve a specific problem, that it's worth it to do so, and are able to see it through to the end, instead of learning everything they can about it, getting bored, and moving on, which seems to be my pattern. In the end, for me, it is the learning that is motivating, not the goal, and that has terrible consequences for what you describe. Perhaps "successful at startups" is not the only metric, but at least for that metric, it is maybe not good to take the "I'm going to learn everything about this before actually doing anything" approach.

hzhou321 9y ago
There are risky risks, and there are affordable risks. One of the risky risks -- at main job, I am also very reluctant to commit to any new projects without emphasizing that I can not guarantee result but only effort up front first. Luckily, I often get managers to acknowledge my emphases on the effort part, which somehow reduces the risk of unknown unknowns. But I also had many occasions that I succeeded to convince managers or coworkers to alter their ambition with my emphases. In other word, my job has some room for risks and my finance has some room for risk of jobs, I guess I am lucky. Now once the risk reduced to affordable level, my curiosity often takes over and I often gets excited to explore my unknowns. It is sad that for some people that all they see is unaffordable risks and they have suppressed and forgotten their curiosity -- the source of life's excitement.

lost_name 9y ago

> It seems that everybody knows everything. I think about this from time to time -- how people build up this sense of personality related to a forum or site. I think what tends to happen for an individual is that when you're talking to millions of people you don't have the perspective on who says what anymore, it becomes "twitter thinks" or "reddit says" instead of "these 10 people." I think the reason everybody knows everything is that because we don't look at the individuals when we talk in a forum like this. There are always going to be some 'famous' people whose names pop up over and over, but as general responses you don't really know what a person thinks about something. We internalize a consensus of opinions and then it becomes just "well, HN said this." This is most apparent when the forum contradicts itself. If there isn't another way to denote the opinions (like a sub-forum) then you start seeing comments like "everyone was against it yesterday and now everyone is in favor?" when in reality it's unlikely to be the same people responding anyway.

hypertexthero 9y ago

“Certainty is a closing of the mind. To create something new you must have doubt.” —Milton Glaser

reificator 9y ago

In one on one or small group conversations, I say I don't know all the time. In one to many conversations like a thread on Hacker News, why would I say "I don't know" unless I'm specifically addressed or have a side point to make? It's noise, and doesn't help anyone.

BeetleB 9y ago

I don't know if the inverse correlation exists, but I doubt the explanation provided (that smart people often do not know or won't admit what they don't know). Coming from academic circles, we consider such people as the "mildly" smart. As in, being uninformed is OK (you know you are uninformed). Being only a little informed is dangerous (you don't know what you don't know). And the most informed are OK too (they know quite well the limits of their knowledge). The smart people you are talking about do not usually survive academia. In my own personal experience, I find the false confidence to be quite orthogonal to intelligence. I see plenty of low intelligence folks have the same problem, and plenty of high intelligence folks have it, and do not see a clear relation where one is more prone to it than the other. More like: You are humble and always doubt yourself (which is the academic's concept of "smart" - continually trying to tear down your own theories), or you are arrogant and do not. Intelligence is unrelated.

bluetwo 9y ago

Even better, everyone thinks they know the right solution to a problem by reading a headline about it.

RMGgondella 9y ago

I think that you identify Mr. Salviatier's main thesis: That knowing or not knowing are equally invalid until observation has been done. Of course, it's said the the very act of observation exerts change on the observed, but that's neither here nor there. So, when I take tech teams into uncharted waters, the first thing we do is observe. Otherwise we create "ivory tower solutions" better suited to ourselves than actual users. And, yes. Your're right. If you're supposed to be the "expert founder" then "I don't know" is not, generally in your vocabulary. However, I do suspect this is a male problem, more so, than female. Having said that, in this great time of social upheaval, vis a vis gender, perhaps it's a great time to learn from our sisters!

Nokinside 9y ago

Very good point and observation. I have observed the same but I have observed the exact opposite in academia and academically oriented corporate R&D in complex technical fields. People with academic background can surprisingly humble intellectually. They may be arrogant when defending their point of view, but if they come up with a new thing they don't know about, they admit it even if it's common thing. By constantly asking simple questions every time they can't follow up something they are able to learn constantly.

lkrubner 9y ago

That is absolutely true and you said it very well. And, after a lifetime of being praised for one's intelligence and creativity, when people first begin to realize that things are going badly, they can fall apart in some shocking and ugly ways. Hopefully a relevant quote: "Emotions can hinder or uplift. We might hope that those in leadership positions possess strength and resilience, but vanity and fragile egos have sabotaged many of the businesses that I’ve worked with. Defeat is always a possibility, and not everyone finds healthy ways to deal with the stress. Each person matters. Established firms will have a bureaucracy that can ensure some stability, even when an eccentric individual is in a leadership position, but when a company consists of just two or three people, and one of them reacts neurotically to challenges, the company is doomed." http://www.smashcompany.com/business/how-to-destroy-a-tech-startup-in-three-easy-steps-the-intro http://www.smashcompany.com/business/how-to-destroy-a-tech-s...

ouid 9y ago

the confidence with which you are speculating right now is, at the very least, ironic.

latexr 9y ago

Looks like you’re describing the Fixed (as opposed to Growth) Mindset: https://youtu.be/Yl9TVbAal5s https://youtu.be/Yl9TVbAal5s She also has a book, which I would recommend skipping. It adds nothing that isn’t covered in the video.