Ohh, please tell us more stories about Feynman!
This is not one I observed myself, but it circulated when I was around.
Feynman was sitting on the qualifying exam of a theoretical physics PhD candidate. If you have read Feynman you know he always realated theory to reality. So he asked this student "what is the wavelength of visible light?" The student said he had no idea. As is common in an exam like this, Feynman invited the student to consider what he knew about the real world and see if he could come up with something. The student suggested "the wavelength is 1 in normalized units" which is just pure BS anyway. Feyman asked the student to show him what he thought the wavelength might be by holding up his fingers. The student indicated with his thumb and forefinger about an inch apart.
Here's the punchline: Feynman says to the student and says "Do I look fuzzy to you?"
I found this hilariously funny when I first heard it, which was after I had been working on millimeter-wave quasioptical systems. I'll come back tomorrow and 'splain the punchline for those who don't care to learn quasioptics between now and then.
The wavelengths and frequencies of all the sections of the em waves were required knowledge in my high school physics course.
Besides, these days everyone has a laser, and you can remember its wavelength. (My green one is 531 nm.)
(If I do anything wrong here, please tell me. I don't know what I'm doing and would benefit from being told what I've got wrong, if anything. I've never made a top-level post here before.)
So, it seems like most people here are really smart. And a lot of us, I'm betting, will have been identified as smart when we were children, and gotten complimented on it a lot. And it's pretty common for that to really mess you up, and then you don't end up reaching your full potential. Admittedly, maybe only people who've gotten past all that read Less Wrong. Maybe I'm the exception. But somehow I doubt that very much.
So here's the only thing I can think of to say if this is your situation: ask stupid questions.
Seriously, even if it shows that you have no clue what was just said. (Especially if it shows that. You don't want to continue not understanding.) You can optimize for being smart, you can optimize for seeming smart, but sometimes you need to pick which one to optimize for. It may make you uncomfortable to admit to not knowing something. It may make you feel like the people around you will stop thinking you're all-knowing. But if you don't know how to ask stupid questions, and you just keep pretending to understand, you'll fall behind and eventually be outed as being really, really stupid, instead of just pretty normal. Which sounds worse?
Here, let me demonstrate: so, what tags go on this post and how would I know?
So, anyone else know of any similar things to do, to get back to optimizing for being smart instead of for seeming smart?