On The Reflexivity Of Calling Things Stupid which may also apply to this post

Understanding that something is wrong is nowhere near as useful as understanding why it is wrong. Knowing that your program crashes might be a necessary step to tracking down the bug that is causing the crash, but it definitely isn’t a sufficient one.

Calling something stupid is like saying it’s wrong, but with an added emotional valence. Not only is it wrong, it’s so wrong that anyone who thought it was right is kind of worthless. Calling something stupid isn’t usually so extreme, of course, but it’s usually at least pointed in that direction. It’s a dismissal that is primarily there to make the person saying it feel superior with the side effect of cutting off thought. It’s wrong, but it isn’t worth deeply understanding why. Why waste your time pondering a thought that only stupid people would think, after all?

If anyone should be viscerally aware just how wrong we often are, it is programmers. Every time we think our program will run without errors but it crashes, every time we think it should compile but it doesn’t, every time we think we’ll get back the right answer, but it’s wrong, there is further, undeniable evidence that we simply weren’t as right as we thought we were.

In order to fix our errors, we need to not only understand that they are there, but how to fix them. While we may occasionally get frustrated with our machines, we can’t afford to think of them as stupid entities causing us problems, or we’ll never actually fix the things that are actually our fault.

I’ve found, more and more, that when something is wrong, it is useful to explain why you think it is wrong. Over the course of explaining, sometimes you confirm that it was in fact wrong. Sometimes you realize it was actually correct. Sometimes you realize that there was a good reason for people to think it, even if it wasn’t quite right.

I can’t really think of a situation where it is more useful to think of an idea as stupid rather than wrong for specific reasons. I would go so far as to say that calling things stupid out of habit is not very bright, but who knows, maybe that’s just me being a little bit stupid.