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Comment by akoboldfrying | Hacker News Reader

I think the person who initially did bring up the phrase must have meant it the way I did, because if they didn't -- if in fact all they meant by it was "basic but obviously important questions" -- then there would be no reason for them to bring it up at all, since 100% of people already agree that you should never be afraid to ask basic but obviously important questions.

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> since 100% of people already agree that you should never be afraid to ask basic but obviously important questions.

You don’t have a great mental model of how most people think

I don't think that's true. A lot of people are afraid to ask basic questions that everyone would think are important because they'd feel stupid asking them.

The thing is that in many a case those basic questions have not all actually been asked and answered because everyone involved thought the same: it's stupidly simple, I better not ask for fear of being marked dumb.

I get the feeling that it's because of fear of being marked dumb by people like you actually.

But then it often turns out that one of those stupid questions has not been answered sufficiently or people were thinking of completely different answers to the question. So it was a good thing that someone brought it up.

And if the question did already get taken into account and people did have the same answer(s) in mind then if a senior person asked, it will probably just be taken as "this guy knows his stuff and is just dotting Is and crossing Ts" VS a junior "asking dumb questions that everyone should know the answer to, duh!"

All I'm actually arguing for is exercising judgement in deciding whether to ask something that might be considered "a stupid question", rather than following black-and-white advice to always ask it anyway. All I'm arguing is that there exists a question that is too stupid to to be worth the reputational damage of asking.

> I get the feeling that it's because of fear of being marked dumb by people like you actually.

I make positive and negative judgements about people based on things they do, which is an imperfect heuristic but the best one available and much better than nothing. So do you.

That's fair and I read our parents' comment as using said judgement of course when asking said dumb questions.

The way I read your comment was that you categorically oppose asking "dumb questions" no matter what.

I’ve had multiple times in my career when people got mad at me for asking basic but obviously important questions. Things like:

* What invariants does this complex transformation preserve? What guarantees does it make about the output? (Come on, we all have a general idea, SpicyLemonZest should read the code if he wants all the details.)

* What’s the latency impact of adding this step? (It can’t be big enough to matter, stop trying to block my project!)

* Why did the last release advance to production when it wasn’t passing tests? (How dare you, our team works so hard, it says right here in our release manual that those test failures count as passing.)

These are good counterexamples to my "100% of people" claim as they illustrate something I hadn't taken into account in my answer: That a basic but obviously important question could have negative implications about other people. I agree that it's certainly not always the case that those people are OK with such questions.

When I wrote my comment, I didn't have such questions in mind. I wish I'd written it to exclude such questions, because I think they're not central to the issue here, which is whether or not asking questions that have negative implications about one's own ability is always a good idea.

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