[nickolai]

In my limited experience with academia, I would argue this article is more about recognizing one's ignorance in front of a problem, which is indeed one of the most important attributes of a good scientist : "i dont know how to solve this problem, yet".

This is in fact quite the opposite of a stupid position - which would handle the issue of being faced with a challenging problem with either militant ignorance "i don't know and I don't care" or uninformed arrogance "This? of course I know : <insert wrong answer here>"

[rflrob]

Very true, but for the first 15 or so years of schooling, knowing the answer to a question is a sign that you aren't stupid, and so the inverse must be true: not knowing is a sign you are stupid. It takes a while to get out of this habit.

[calibraxis]

Yes, that's a huge problem with education — if it's geared towards scoring well on tests, and collaboration and research is often "cheating", then it promotes facile understanding.

For a job, tests are fine; you want to know if someone has a basic foundation of ability before they cut into you. But that's different from actual education, the kind that people go through for the first decades of their lives. That should be about something deeper than reliably scoring 90% on mindnumbing series of tests. Like critical thinking and self-directed learning.

[arethuza]

The Prof that I worked for when was in academia, who was really quite bright - his PhD was in non-linear control systems, had a wonderfully endearing habit of being quite open when he didn't understand something - he did this in way that made it obvious he was asking because he was generally genuinely interested in what people were telling him and wanted to make a decent effort to understand it.

I seem to remember that he was particularly delighted when, although he had no programming experience, someone explained how Unix fork() works!