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by lamontcg
1214 days ago
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As a cave/tech diver I've noticed that intellectuals are often have some of the hardest times in training due to overthinking. They'll tend to focus on trying to perfect the little details in training and miss the big picture and failed to K.I.S.S. and argue about theory and resist accepting simple rules. I used to really like watching Deadliest Catch because I grew up in Kodiak and that's a good example of an environment where an intellectual would generally fail pretty badly. You don't need to be particularly clever, you need to understand what is going to kill you (ropes in particular) and to never pick up your feet. It is an environment where you need to be smart enough to follow the rules, and just "dumb" enough not to argue and question them. Embracing shutting up and being dumb is something that intellectuals generally resist identifying as a virtue. [ And I'd argue that the infestation of contrarianism-for-contrarianisms-sake that infects HN is a larger symptom of that psychological bias -- so many people doing so much work convincing themselves that they're very clever by rejecting all conventional wisdom ] |
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It's part of why I tend to prefer learning new things alone. I know I'm going to take a long time, and I know I'm going to do a ton of dumb, small, incremental testing to build my foundation.
But I don't think it's necessarily overthinking. Maybe for the immediate context, but not for any context. I know just "doing what I'm told" will likely work 99% of the time. What I'm interested in is why does it work, how do I raise my confidence for the remaining 1%, and making sure I understand the underlying mechanics of things so I can make good judgement calls when situations arise.