This is in fact quite the opposite of a stupid position - which would handle the issue of being faced with a challenging problem with either militant ignorance "i don't know and I don't care" or uninformed arrogance "This? of course I know : <insert wrong answer here>"
For a job, tests are fine; you want to know if someone has a basic foundation of ability before they cut into you. But that's different from actual education, the kind that people go through for the first decades of their lives. That should be about something deeper than reliably scoring 90% on mindnumbing series of tests. Like critical thinking and self-directed learning.
I seem to remember that he was particularly delighted when, although he had no programming experience, someone explained how Unix fork() works!
[no criticism of either sex intended. i simply read the article, then thought "i wonder if the author was male and the other person female?", went back, checked...]
maybe men feel as bad, but don't say.
This is not ignorance, sometimes you simply cannot weave the threads of knowledge you have to reach a pattern. Of course if you have more threads, your job becomes easier; and at some low level of knowledge you will have nothing interesting to ask, but this is not the major difficulty in completing a Ph.D. thesis, at least in my experience (which is in physics/astronomy).
This is what the author is talking about, it is not "knowledge" that is lacking, at least not knowledge in the sense that something you can learn from a book. It is the quality that is mentioned in an essay by pg: http://www.paulgraham.com/wisdom.html
I would not call this problem ignorance. Even though stupidity is kinda harsh, it captures the feeling well.
you can argue all you like that the author should use another word. but what you have to get over when you're doing research is exactly that feeling. the feeling that people are trying to hide from by playing with words.
not sure i am making my point well - what i am trying to say is that the people who are complaining about the term "stupid" are not helping anyone. they're just exhibiting the same instinctive reaction that you feel in research. whatever name you give it, you feel the same.
So much mileage, in fact, that your non-analytic faculties atrophy from disuse.
However, I think his point would be a lot clearer if he would stop using "stupidity" when he means "ignorance".
