> it relieves you of ever having to feel "smart" because you're always one saying the dumbest things, it's just that no one else was daring to say them

It’s actually had the opposite effect for me, of making everyone think I’m smarter.

It turns out that a lot of the time when nobody was mentioning the “obvious” solution or how we would avoid the “obvious” problem, it wasn’t because I was too dumb or inexperienced to know the implicit answer… but because actually nobody else in the room found those obvious. They’d not noticed at all.

You have to be careful with this, though. Nobody in management wants to hear why their process for collecting and/or analyzing “metrics” is flawed and renders the whole thing totally meaningless in ways that a slightly-bright high schooler who halfway paid attention is their science classes should be able to spot—in fact, the point was only to pretend to be “data driven”, not to do passable science (that’s way too expensive, companies are interested in doing it approximately never), in practically every case. All that stuff’s fake, and everyone’s just pretending it’s not, so pointing it out is gauche. Just nod along and don’t mention the blatant confounders that plausibly allow that the real trend line goes the other way. Or that to get a useful dataset they’ll need minimum two years of gathering data to even begin to draw conclusions… and we have not been collecting those data, so the timer starts now at best. Nobody cares, you’ve missed the point, which has nothing to do with actually learning things to guide decisions.