Why I Say Dumb Shit

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I say a lot of stupid things. Some examples:

• I told an English professor (in London, no less) that Lil Wayne was a better linguist than Shakespeare.
• I've said that C is an uninteresting language and no longer relevant.
• I told Obama's former Economic Advisor that I thought most of Economics was made up.

You might roll your eyes and say,"You don't know what you are talking about. You are young and näive."

You would be correct, and that's exactly the point.

The truth is, learning how to learn is the hardest part of acquiring knowledge. Learning takes courage, to admit what you don't know; it takes paranoia, to question the wisdom of those who tell you what they know; it takes persistence in the face of the impossibley formidable weight of the amassed brilliance of those who came before you. Most of all, it takes a brash foolishness to believe that you could ever add anything of worth on top of said brilliance.

Far too often, I have seen peers cowed in the face of brilliance and, as such, failed to leave with any useful knowledge. Honestly, I wasn't entirely sure if sending checks to Americans during the recession was a good idea. But I bet that if I told Christina Romer that the economics taught in our ivory tower ignored fundamental tenets of human psychology, she'd have a profoundly interesting answer. She laughed...then tore me to pieces.

Those 90 seconds taught me more about economics than two semesters of lecture, problem sets, and pretty graphs.

When I was in high school and wanted to be a writer ( classic ), I resolved to finish Fahrenheit 451. It was the only book I had started and could not finish, mostly becase the thought of such a society scared the shit out of me. I came along this quote, which I've held dear ever since:

You're afraid of making mistakes. Don't be. Mistakes can be profited by. Man, when I was young I shoved my ignorance in people's faces. They beat me with sticks. By the time I was forty my blunt instrument had been honed to a fine cutting point for me. If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn.

You can learn a lot of things by shutting up and scribbling notes at lectures by smart people. You can read their writing and bask in the glow of their brilliance. You can ponder and pontificate for hours, days, months about the depths of their knowledge.

Or decree that The Tallest Man on Earth is the next Dylan; say that Ayn Rand is the logical end of philosophical reason; tell me Facebook is guaranteed to be dead in the next year. Then listen.

As a 90% philosophy major from a small liberal arts college, trust me that there is no better way to find out what you should believe.

Or, better yet, don't.

in the face of the impossibley

I think you meant "impossibly" here.

The following is my opinion, and from personal experience only. Maybe I am wrong, but this is what I gathered over the years:

Being naive and saying things rashly without solid, scientific backing is a normal thing. It means you are learning the hard way, and learning things in an un-scientific way, or informal way.

In college / school / work / The Internet, we are trained to be as scientific about things as possible, because it looks like we worked hard at getting an answer. i.e - We put thought and effort into our question.

Sadly, people ask questions indirectly, or subconsciously. So casually saying:

"C is an uninteresting language and no longer relevant."

Is really you trying to understand programming more, even though it seems like a statement.

I am basking in the brilliance of this post.

To build on top of what you're saying, @tyre ...

Even if you reach the brilliance of your peers, and you attain their level ---

There will always be somebody else better than you. I know this from personal experience.

I am going to speak about this topic in regard to the coding scene on Github:

Take for example hacking/coding/dev. When I first started, I had my role models. Expert coders / dev rockstars / whatever.

Then when you reach their skill level, some new guy arrives on the scene and blows everyone away.

This happens a lot on The Internet, aswell as in real life. But this competition can also be a good thing. It fosters innovation, because who can tell when you supersede your contemporaries and blow their minds too.

I've seen it happen. Little johnny unpopular can skyrocket on Github very quickly, and be respected by his role models, overnight. This is the beauty of the social web.