[tpeo]

There's a difference between "thinking for yourself" and "uncritically discouting past work". And that's the difference between asking yourself whether power poses really work and and coming in kicking doors, yelling that psychology is bullshit. First one is engaging in very much reasonable level of critical thought, whereas the second is just thinking "Dunning-Kruger is okay, when I do it".

On a side note, I don't quite get what Elon Musk has to do with this. Isn't hea millionaire paying big bucks for expert engineering talent to put his rockets up in the air?

[arvinjoar]

I'm not saying Psychology is bullshit, why would you frame what I said as such? I think it's in general super interesting. I'm just saying that you can gain a lot more from it by evaluating things critically than you can from swallowing anything and everything that's in vogue uncritically because some authority figure tells you it's the Truth.

Also, to nitpick, Dunning-Kruger is certainly ok when the top performers do it, if you care to look at the actual graph[1].

Elon Musk is very much involved in the engineering of his projects, he's not a Steve Jobs-style CEO. As tomp pointed out[2], Elon was willing to look at things outside of his area of expertise, and guess what, he actually managed to learn quite a lot about those things.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/bJXQWRY.jpg

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12814851

[tpeo]

I mentioned power poses and psychology because it occurred to me as an example since you happened to mention psychology. I don't personally have any knowledge regarding your attitudes towards psychology nor did I intend to frame what you said in any way.

Prior findings must be indeed critically evaluated. That's not the issue. The issue is refusing to even acknowledge them or to acknowledge current field wisdom due to some unwarranted sense of superiority. Taking the dangerous and daring approach to crossing expertise fields instead of being careful is fine, of course. Everyone is free to do whatever they want! But if the daring do fail, they will look like complete asses. They had been given plenty of warning before hand.

And, this is the key and the real reason why I'm saying all this, the daring will fail more often than the careful. The most frequent reason why people try to enter a new field is because they think they might have some superior insight on the matter, whereas the development of each field is chiefly constrained by the amount of data available to it. Ideas are never in short supply relative to data. This isn't to say that outsiders can't make meaningful contributions, or that cross-field collaboration is useless, far from it. But that there isn't much that can done beyond what's warranted by the data.

I'll pass up the opportunity to talk about Musk, because I don't feel I'm qualified to do it.

But as for your nitpick: I don't see why top performers incorrectly gauging their own ability would be "okay". They would pass up great opportunities because they perceive their ability to be lower than what it actually is, and they might experience unwarranted anxiety and feelings of inadequacy (something like an impostor syndrome) if they incorrectly perceive their ability to be lower that that of their peers. There are many ways in which this might not be "okay".

[leshow]

I think you have an imaginary view of what Musks thinking process is like. The reality is he pays top dollar for experts in every field on his interest or that will advance some other goal of his.