[hellothere1337]

Cargo culting is one of those mental models that appears everywhere once you learn about it. Similar to kayfabe in wrestling and politics. 99.9% of humanity basically is winging it daily (by copying the shallowest parts of whatever philosophy/ideology they espouse) pretending they know everything while the 0.01% is honest with themselves and thus are free to question and doubt their own ideas in order to improve them. This 0.1% is mostly invisible despite pushing humanity forward

[josephg]

I assume you place yourself in that 0.1%? Or was it 0.01%?

Personally, I think we're all winging it almost every moment of our lives. Relative to domain experts, I'm bad at almost everything I do. (Cooking, driving, talking, writing, planning, etc). I'm only really good at maybe 2 or 3 things.

I think we're all like this. And its fundamentally ok. Its how human brains are wired.

Sometimes I imagine dividing all my thoughts between things I've personally invented and things I've heard from others. Whats the ratio? I think at least 95% of my thoughts come from other people. Maybe 99%. Maybe more.

[bagacrap]

How could you even tell if you've personally invented something? You don't know what caused a thought to pop into your head. Heck I often forget things I've said, so I clearly forget things I've heard. I could be fully convinced an idea was my own and still be dead wrong.

Luckily you can build on the ideas of others without being a cargo cultist. Simply verify the sturdiness of the foundation before you go adding an extra wing to the house.

[hellothere1337]

Nah I'm pretty stupid and follow the herd, its the reason for my success too!

[karmakurtisaani]

Wait, did you just wing those percentages?

[tomcam]

76.7% of Hacker News readers believe so

[drewcoo]

23?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23_enigma