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Comment by qpqpdbdbqpqp | Hacker News Reader

"The outcome of too much humility is that you end up listening to the counsel of some mediocre individual."

Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406)

Really bad advice. I have learned a lot from people way less experienced than me. Even if I usually know more than some individual I still find things that he may know and I do not.

Let's not talk about classifying an individual as "mediocre". It just seems the old "noble blood" fallacy as if some people is just "better" than others instead of everyone being being complex and with flaws.

Unfortunately this point of view do get to the extreme. "There's no such thing as a gifted child", for example, and schools for gifted children are downgraded or closed. Paths to early math education are closed, math curriculum downgraded.

Yes, it happens just now in America.

This terrified my wife and I so much that we packed and moved almost 1k miles away. My son was taking 8th grade classes in 7th grade. That was a fight in itself with the school system we moved away from. He’s now in 8th grade taking all high school AP/Honors classes. He’s set to graduate high school with his associates and if he keeps it up he’ll have a bachelors by 20. The old school system there was nothing of the sort in place and we’re not talking about a small town. We’re talking about a million plus population area.

We should be doing everything we can to embrace and encourage children to excel. Not reduce every student’s education down to bullshit.

Edit: We couldn’t afford to move but we HAD to. We sacrificed, we saved, we went without. It was rough and the living conditions weren’t the best to start but we were forced. We couldn’t sit idly by and watch our son become another statistic.

I know a handful of individuals who graduated from college at 20. All of them regret it. Starting their careers a few years early in no way made up for missed experiences or the social awkwardness of being significantly less mature than their ‘year’ peers.

If it’s about filling your sons need for intellectual stimulation there are many great online options (and books!).

This may be my own biases but pushing your offspring to skip a grade or take extra AP classes or graduate from college years early focuses too much on credentialism and external validation (particularly for you the parent) rather than helping the child build a rich, balanced life.

I've known a few well adjusted individuals who finished their education early.

You would tend not to notice except in conversation when you add things up and realise they are unusually accomplished.

Personally I think it's weird making people learn in lock step by age rather than allowing them to progress at their natural rate.

There are a few different underlying assumptions there when you think about it, eg that a) people of the same age have equal "maturity" b) socialising with people older than you is harmful (or less beneficial) compared to socialising with people the same age as you c) socialisation mainly happens in an institutional context d) the purpose of higher education is socialisation as much as learning.

Any or several of those ^ can be false for a particular student. Of course the institution and other students matter too in terms of outcome.

"Pushing" and validation chasing are bad tho, with you on that one.

the gist of the quote is lost in translation i guess. it's trying to convey that you should assert your knowledge, otherwise, you will get lectured by people with no idea what they are talking about. idiocracy, populism, praise of stupidity etc.

Very true. I try to stay humble but at work I definitely have lists of people I always listen to and a (longer) list of people I generally never listen to. Maybe they have a good thought from time to time but I don’t have enough time to listen to all bad ideas to maybe find the one good idea.

What if one of the people you never listen to comes up with a good idea?

The people you listen to is always right and the ones you don't listen to are always wrong?

Always be listening. But when seeking people out and prioritizing who to spend time with, consider their track record.

I sometimes feel bad to have a prejudice against some pople but realistically i don't have the time and energy to sift through a lot of bad ideas when I can talk to other people who usually have good ideas.

How do you know they're bad ideas if you have not even listened to them?

this is classic exploration-exploitation tradeoff, like a multiarmed bandit. The general gist of most multi-armed bandit strategies would agree to listen more and more to people with good ideas, and spend less and less time (approaching but never reaching zero time) listening to people whose ideas you do not find rewarding.

It has nothing to do with being humble though. Being humble is about being honest with yourself or others. Learning who to listen to and take advice from is a different problem.

That definition of humbleness seems more about sticking to your values and being transparent.

The "mediocre individual" (terminology from the quote above) might still have something valuable to share.

If you fight a drunk person throwing random punches, there might be still a probability to get knocked out because within that randomness there is a probability of a perfect punch.

Experts are often right but occasionally they can be wrong. Skilled competitors often win but occasionally they can lose, even to beginners.

Probably not as bad as the mediocre advice you’ll get from yourself as an arrogant narcissist anyway.

My point is that blind trust or distrust is bad. We should always listen to people with a healthy level of skepticism.

Experts can make mistakes just like non-experts can occasionally contribute at an expert level or prove an expert wrong.

Can you cite this quote in its original language? I'd be interested to read it. Google translate gives me: "نتيجة الكثير من التواضع هي أن ينتهي بك الأمر بالاستماع إلى مشورة شخص متوسط المستوى."

As long as you're not immediately acting on that counsel at worst all you've done is wasted time.

You have wasted time and mental energy you could have used on more productive things. Listening to bad ideas is exhausting.

But listening to someone mediocre doesn't guarantee they'll have bad ideas.

Humble until somebody else starts talking bullshit, I guess.

Islam is hardly the best place to go looking for advice. A mediocre person is not a dumb person and may well be proficient in certain views.

[Ibn Khaldun] widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest social scientists of the Middle Ages,[13] who made major contributions in the areas of historiography, sociology, economics, and demography.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Khaldun

… are unclear translations revealing biases?

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