Imposter Delusion

[ajschumacher]

• Vonnegut stupid quote: "Psychology:(103.) Unk, the big trouble with dumb bastards is that they are too dumb to believe there is such a thing as being smart." (from Kurt Vonnegut's "The Sirens of Titan") This is ruder than I remembered it... Not sure it makes sense to include.
• That Russia misinformation post... This was a post about how misinformation isn't so much about getting you to believe a specific thing, but to believe everybody's lying: it isn't that communism doesn't work and capitalism does, it's that nothing works and everybody is doing crummy... Having a hard time finding that post... This is kind of related: https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html ("Firehose of Falsehood") (Plaintive request on Twitter)
• StackOverflow: people write the answers; it isn't the case that all software engineering is copying and pasting from SO
• Not Capgras delusion but maybe worth a reference... as if all the smart people have been replaced by idiots?
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4ZGkEzn9PE Ryan George's "If Adulthood Had A Job Orientation Day" has some quotes around some naive ideas

See also #174

[ajschumacher]

"If the Coastal Republic had believed in the existence of virtue, it could at least have aspired to hypocrisy." (page 144, Diamond Age)

[ajschumacher]

What learnable things are substantial/meaningful, and which are purely social/cultural shibboleths?

In Pygmalion / My Fair Lady, the focus is on teaching to act like a "high society" person - it isn't on learning skills in the practical/engineering sense.

Some part of coding bootcamps focus on the "act like" parts, or at least some aspects could be considered such... What was that interview? Yeah: https://www.thepullrequest.com/p/the-american-dream-as-a-service

"The hiring process is not just a filter for skills, it's also a filter for class."

[ajschumacher]

"invert a binary tree" gets used as an example of a thing that is a bad hiring filter

• https://hn.algolia.com/?q=invert+a+binary+tree
• https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768

But inverting a binary tree is really not hard... It's essentially a fizzbuzz question. Why do people gripe about it so much?

Every hiring question that somebody thinks is hard is a fizzbuzz question to somebody else.

[ajschumacher]

but, don't forget about: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/stephanie-espy_why-you-feel-like-an-impostor-at-work-and-activity-6792398629794648064-WQTm/ (emphasis on feeling like an imposter because you aren't the same race, etc., of others in the workplace...)

[ajschumacher]

compare also: not being afraid to do things even though others are much much better at them, as in the Shake It Off video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfWlot6h_JM

[ajschumacher]

when the people who are supposed to know really aren't so good...

"They [a group of citizen scientists] also dove into the politics of government research, familiarizing themselves with how funding was structured and how the drug trials were conducted. The disorganization they discovered alarmed them. “It sort of felt like reaching the Wizard of Oz,” said one activist named Mark Harrington. “You’ve gotten to the center of the whole system and there’s just this schmuck behind a curtain.”" (page 212, The Scout Mindset)

Cites How to Survive a Plague.

[ajschumacher]

Dunning–Kruger effect?

[ajschumacher]

"ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"

Darwin in The Descent of Man, 1871

[ajschumacher]

"The philosopher Bertrand Russell pointed out, "in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt"." (page 62, Didau, What if everything you knew about education was wrong?)

The citation is Russell's "The Triumph of Stupidity", which is quite a bit earlier than Dunning–Kruger.