Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by rf15 1 day ago
I feel like hearing this is dangerous in itself - even if you overestimate yourself, surely you yourself don't overestimate yourself as much as others?

Personally, I ran against a closed glass door yesterday. All I hope for is that I was entertaining to onlookers at least.

3 comments

Don’t be so hard on yourself; the poorly designed glass door did that for you already.
It's when you don't have the capacity to know how dumb you are that you overestimate yourself, and you overestimate yourself (and underestimate others) far more than those able to see how dumb you actually are. It's when you are smart that you overestimate others, and underestimate yourself.

There are limits to this, plainly Einstein didn't think some guy as dumb as a bag of rocks was as smart as he was.

Funny story about that - there's a hotel in Edinburgh originally built in the mid-1800s, which was gutted and renovated with a lot of facade retention and architectural salvage to keep the look of the place. The centrepiece was the ornate brass and mahogany revolving door.

But when it was finished people kept walking into it the wrong way and getting stuck, and no-one could figure out why.

Eventually they sussed it out - until the early 1900s, no-one standardised on which way revolving doors go. Now, of course, they turn anti-clockwise - you pass people going the opposite way on your left, don't you?

But this one was clockwise.

Yeah I would never have thought of that either.