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One of the things I liked when I was a student at Caltech is that (1) most people recognized they were surrounded by people at least as smart as they were, (2) most people knew that even the most brilliant people occasionally make mistakes (often even elementary mistakes), and (3) most realized that someone calling your idea "stupid" doesn't mean they were calling you stupid--they would freely admit that they too occasionally offered stupid ideas.

When you had a stupid idea someone would tell you, without a lot of tiptoeing around or trying to work in some praise too to balance things out. Just say it and we move on.

This would have been a quite plausible conversation at Caltech:

tzs: we should try X.

someone: that's a stupid approach. It can't work.

tzs: [thinks about it a moment] Yeah, you're right. Never mind.

Also plausible would have been a conversation that starts with the same first two sentences but ends like this:

tzs: no it is not.

Someone: [thinks about it a moment] Oh...yeah X should work. Let's try it.
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Someone on HN