Patterns in failure:

You’ve spent all day trying to make a new python library work for your project. The documentation sucks, but you’ve made headway. It took you three tries to get the data formats right, each time changing your mental model of what the library’s helper functions expect until you made it work. By the end of the day, the project isn’t over, but at least you’re better able to predict how the library functions behave, and now you can apply it fluently to do what you need.

Then you head to a meetup after work. It’s full of new people, and most of them are idiots. You know it’s true, because every time they try to contribute to whatever conversation is going on, there’s something they’ve gotten wrong, and you can see clear as day that their suggestions just don’t make sense. After all, you know the right answers, and they clearly don’t.

It happens all the time. It’s not always at a meetup—sometimes it’s with family, sometimes it’s with friends—but every time, the pattern is the same: someone else says something dumb, or reacts to something in a weird way and you hear that voice in the back of your head.

“What an idiot.”

Somehow, this pattern ends up happening in spades with technical people. The same skills of forming hypotheses and adjusting one’s axiom’s when the world doesn’t act the way you expect vanish into thin air when the object under consideration is a person instead of of a programming library. And it’s tragic.

No one tries to sound like an idiot. No one tries to say or do the wrong things. And no one wants to espouse wrong answers. Much more likely, instead, is that they’ve got different experience, evidence, and incentives than you, so when you see someone acting in a way that doesn’t make sense, and you hear your inner voice calling them an idiot, it’s important to take a step back and correct it:

“Instead of thinking them an idiot, what must be true about their inner state to make their current behavior make sense?”

And, of course,

“What might be incorrect about my own beliefs and understandings that, if changed, would make their current behavior make sense?”