If you look closely enough, nobody really knows exactly what they're doing.
When you realize this, you're no longer blinded by the thought that you or other people know everything about something.
Then you also realize that all the stuff that is created by people isn't necessarily how it should be, it's just the outcome of the circumstances that the people were in.
With this realization you allow yourself to think more creatively (outside the box) about things.
However, the author and me don't have any idea what we're doing so I wouldn't take his or my story too seriously.
>Nobody knows what they’re doing; ignorance fuels creativity; complex systems are built iteratively. Those are the ideas I want you to remember.
Really liked this piece and wanted to add something to it that I hope resonates with HN. I have myself run across all of this, particularly the complexity part, and have heard anecdotal evidence from others that I know, that when one finishes a function or a library of moderate complexity, and you step back from it for a while, and you come back to it, it looks really impressive. It's now no longer something that can be grokked at a glance. It looks complicated, with all kinds of persnickety details. You remember the "why" of certain unintuitive parts - evidence of problems you ran into and had to solve. The code is the product of many hours of iteration - and the code expanded, contracted, and settled into the shape it's currently in - a shape which, if presented to your earlier self, you would say "I created that? Gosh, it looks like something a professional programmer might have made." (or it might look like a horrendous hacky mess, of course.)
I have done projects that seemed small, and then by the end they were enormous, but I knew them intimately.
But when I start a project with the idea of it being that big in my head from the start, I'll get stressed and psych myself out, sometimes from doing it at all.
There's something to be said for ignoring the forest for planting the tree, to turn a proverb on it's head.
In one sense the author is right. In another sense, saying "I have no idea what I'm doing" is a status play. Those a bit down on the totem pole don't have the luxury of publicly questioning their own competence.
That's sometimes true, but it's nice to hear someone with status admit they're not an infallible paragon. There's value in that, especially for those lower on the pole who stew in their own minds with assumptions about how everyone else is x amount smarter and more competent, however true that may be.
Hmm. I don't agree. Is it better to publicly represent that you are the smartest guy in the room and make the people lower on the totem pole feel bad? Maybe it would be nice if the normal way of things changed so that you didn't have to pretend in this way (never admitting vulnerability) just because you felt your position was insecure.
I know TDD has been discussed to death. However, I disagree completely with TDD encouraging creativity and material exploration. In my opinion, small, iterative increments are much more useful. Creating a test puts a tight box around how you assume (without any experimentation) an interface should work. As opposed to a tiny iteration to learn about how it could work. Then writing a test after for that tiny bit. Finally, moving on and refactoring with the test in hand.
Writing the test is the experiment, in your example. You're playing with how it is going to be used and interacted without worrying about the details/implementation. You'll take care of that later.
I don't see how you can experiment with functionality by writing tests at all. Tests are basically just pseudocode. It's writing the requirement/interface before figuring out what is possible.
For example. I was recently trying to figure out how to make an autocomplete list faster, as the database was too slow. I already had a functional test taking in search parameters and returning results. But there would be no way to write a test for the actual implementation of the indexed/faster search classes until I figured out a real approach. In the beginning, I had no idea if this would require a separate daemon process to do indexing, or if it could index realtime, or caching, or memoization, or where it might need to keep an index once created. These are just a couple of the unknowns. Once I figured out a workable concept, I wrote tests for those classes and functions. Then I refactored multiple times, altering the tests accordingly.
Your functional test was a test that allowed you to experiment. You designed the parameters and then altered the variables involved under the conditions of those tests.
You probably even "called your shot" and make guesses about what would be successful before you even approached the problem.
Then you wrote a test and saw whether your guess was right or not. If not, then you misunderstood something and you dug deeper.
Indeed. Working on something for a long time but claiming you have no idea what you're doing is an easy way of not appearing egomaniacal or vain. Especially in our field, when people can be such pompous dickheads.
It's already a static site, but being on the HN front page is really hammering my tiny VPS's network & IO; there are a lot of large images and videos in the post. Guess I should set up a CDN.
He remarks in the talk about Lamarck having an incorrect theory of "inheritance of acquired characteristics." From what I understand, recent experiments have actually given some evidence to his theory. I can't remember the particular studies though.
Epigenetics gives credence to the environment having impact across generations. It doesn't really vindicate Lamarck, there are just some quiet echos of his ideas there.
"If you only take one thing away from this talk, make it this: beavers are idiots. They have no idea why they’re building these huge structures; they just blindly do it."
I can understand the author's use of the Beaver analogy but it may not be the right analogy.
Beavers build these dams to keep the water level at a certain height. This not only offers protection from predators but also makes it easy to access food.
Go further - the beaver doesn't know that its building a dam. It just builds because it feels compelled to. Then when the dam is done (the beaver triggers on the sound of water falling and stops when the sound is gone) the beaver reaps some benefit.
Over millions of years, beavers that behaved like this prospered. The beaver doesn't know why or even think about it. No more than you think about your particular cell enzyme reactions.
They'll also abandon perfectly good dams just to move up stream and build another. They're some of the most environmentally destructive critters on earth; like most creatures if allowed to thrive they'll just keep devouring every tree and damming every river until they starve and die off, only beavers can wind up taking whole ecosystems with them.
Those sneaky bastards, I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that they've also been dumping gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year while no one was looking :)
Depends on your point of view. North America used to be a festering swamp of mosquito-ridden beaver ponds. Built over millions of years. That WAS the ecology. The landscape we see today is unnatural and temporary.
We reformed this continent to suit ourselves. Most attempts to protect some bit of land and trees in the name of preservation is ... shortsighted at the least.
I don't think the beaver did itself in? It was us (or the Iroquois Confederacy anyway) that hunted them to near extinction. They got along for 10 million years just fine the way they were.
>They're some of the most environmentally destructive critters on earth.
That's rich, coming from a human.
Also, from Wikipedia: "the beaver have transformed Alhambra Creek from a trickle into multiple dams and beaver ponds, which in turn, led to the return of steelhead and North American river otter in 2008, and mink in 2009.[43][44]"
This is also how I see a lot of human behavior. We do things for emotional need or feel compelled to do them, then later justify them logically. I dislike the modern idea that humans are somehow fundamentally different than animals, from a cognition standpoint. It just seems overly self-serving.
Go further. All things behave this way. You were compelled to comment given your current circumstance, your particular makeup of cells and electricity sitting in your chair typing, blah blah blah. The beaver knows it's building a dam insasmuch as anyone else knows what they are doing.
GP can reason about what he's doing. He knows that he's commenting on HN. He can come up with a plausible reason why (recreation, perhaps). In a more interesting scenario, say building a dam, GP would cut down logs with the express intention of building a dam to make a pond.
The beaver doesn't know what it's doing, literally. It can't tell you why, it doesn't have a greater plan of building a dam, etc.
You're really talking about motivation, and I'll agree that the motivation is roughly the same for GP and the beaver--some mix of chemicals in their respective brains influencing behavior.
>The beaver doesn't know what it's doing, literally. It can't tell you why,
That's because beavers don't speak English.
> it doesn't have a greater plan of building a dam, etc.
Just because you've never seen beavers with little tiny HP calculators poring over pages of drawings and equations does not mean that beavers are mindlessly purposelessly building the dams. You think they just throw stick and through some coincidence, a beaver lodge appears? That's crazy. Beavers build those dams with the intent that it will protect them from predators; they intend to dam up creeks in order to submerge the eventual entrance to their lodge. It is deliberate.
All animals that build shelters do it 'by accident' if that means through compulsive behaviors that end up with a meaningful construction. Termites. Ants. Birds. Gophers. Beavers.
What possible evidence do you have to support this? Why is it crazy to think that the beaver builds a dam because it wants a place to live? Why wouldn't the beaver choose to cut down logs with the intention of using them to build a dam? After all, this is what we observe the beaver doing. Of course since we cannot inhabit the mind of the beaver we cannot know for certain whether the beaver is a thinking being or a blind automaton, but since we consider ourselves thinking beings and the beaver's brain is not wholly unlike our own, why don't we give the beaver some benefit of the doubt? Most of us extend this courtesy to other humans...
Beavers are best known for their dam-building. They maintain their pond-habitat by reacting quickly to the sound of running water, and damming it up with tree branches and mud. Early ecologists believed that this dam-building was an amazing feat of architectural planning, indicative of the beaver's high intellect. This theory was tested when a recording of running water was played in a field near a beaver pond. Despite the fact that it was on dry land, the beaver covered the tape player with branches and mud.
-- Richard P.B. (1983). "Mechanisms and adaptation in the constructive behaviour of the beaver (C. fiber L.)". Acta Zoologica Fennica 174: 105–108.
What does that really prove? Beavers have no knowledge of tape players. If you took that same tape player to the local police precinct and instead of a babbling brook, you played the sound of gunfire; there's a fair chance the policemen will return your gunfire with real gunfire. Does that make them no smarter than a beaver? Even if they are no smarter than beavers, is it really an irrational behavior?
>as soon as they had comfortably bestowed Sandy and me on our horse, I lit my pipe. When the first blast of smoke shot out through the bars of my helmet, all those people broke for the woods, and Sandy went over backwards and struck the ground with a dull thud. They thought I was one of those fire-belching dragons they had heard so much about from knights and other professional liars. I had infinite trouble to persuade those people to venture back within explaining distance. Then I told them that this was only a bit of enchantment which would work harm to none but my enemies. And I promised, with my hand on my heart, that if all who felt no enmity toward me would come forward and pass before me they should see that only those who remained behind would be struck dead. The procession moved with a good deal of promptness. There were no casualties to report, for nobody had curiosity enough to remain behind to see what would happen. --Mark Twain, A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR'S COURT
Is verbally relating the reason why one does something a prerequisite to conscious thought? Dams don't get built by beavers all over the world by sheer random chance - there's obviously some deliberate intention there. Its also possible they observe and learn this process from their family members:
"When young are born, they spend their first month in the lodge and their mother is the primary caretaker while their father maintains the territory. In the time after they leave the lodge for the first time, yearlings will help their parents build food caches in the fall and repair dams and lodges." (Source: Wikipedia)
Can we say compulsion is completely different from intent though? Or are we just arguing over semantics? Can we place an arbitrary intelligence threshold on when compulsion can be inferred as intent?
For instance, most spiders build webs, and it would seem they do it by no other mechanism than pure genetic instinct. However, there don't seem to be any external 'cues' as to when the web is finished (in contrast to the water falling cue we assume beavers use). The spider builds the web until it's done building the web. Did the spider intend to build a web, or was it compelled to?
>All things behave this way. You were compelled to comment given your current circumstance, your particular makeup of cells and electricity sitting in your chair typing
This is an interesting comment I think, because if you take it far enough it ends up having implications for free will.
Consider the exercise described in this excerpt from a Sam Harris lecture on free will. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-Xp7mvOcVM (only 14m long and quite fascinating). I'll briefly describe the gist of it for non-video folks.
Exercise: Think of any city in the world. That's it, just think of the name of a city. No limits or restrictions, any city from any country in the world, just pick one.
Having chosen one, consider WHY you chose the city you did. It might seem like your choice was utterly uncompelled by external factors; you specifically made a reasoned choice, or you engaged your whims, or you just went with the first one that popped into your mind, or whatever. In any case, the city you ultimately chose was completely up to your own free will. Right?
Well, we can quickly begin to narrow down the field of possible choices. For one, it's clear that nobody who did the above exercise thought of a city that they'd never heard of. So for each person, the city they chose necessarily came from the set of cities they'd actually heard of. And even then, some filtering or selection "algorithm" is clearly happening behind the scenes, because there exist cities you've heard of, but which didn't happen to occur to you at all just now.
So some cities would seem to have a higher or lower chance of coming to mind than others, based on factors unique to the individual. For example, a city someone just mentioned 5 minutes ago and you're now thinking of, a city that's been featuring in the news lately, or the cities you've personally lived in, or you made a memorable trip to once, or which are culturally fascinating to you, etc etc.
And then consider the actual process that occurred in your head when you started to choose your city. In general, thoughts and ideas largely just kinda "occur" to you, by some process that's not under your conscious control. So in starting to think of a city, the names of some cities just started popping into your head. But what was controlling which cities were popping into your mind, and which weren't? Obviously you can't have consciously controlled this brainstorming process, because this would require you to have thought of the city before you thought of it.
So you wanted to think of a city, and your brain just started conjuring them into your conscious mind somehow. Since you didn't consciously supervise which cities were popping to mind and which weren't, it's as if your brain is doing something like accessing your memories, experiences, prejudices, preferences, etc; and bringing cities into your mind by some automatic process that's not consciously available to you.
But, what determines the list of cities that someone has heard of in their lifetime, and which have therefore made it into the brain to be available for this exercise? Well, many things that were never under your control to begin with. An obvious example: many people end up living much of their lives in the same city they were born. Which means at least one city is in your brain merely because your parents happened to give birth/raise you there, and the thought of moving away never occurred to you (or it did, but you stayed anyway). You don't choose where you were born.
And as you say, everything works like this. So perhaps you thought of Rome because you had Italian food for lunch yesterday, therefore biasing yourself towards thinking of it. But then why did you make that particular lunch choice? Perhaps a coworker made the lunch decision that day, meaning the reason Rome just occurred to you was because of a decision your coworker made. Where's the free will in that? Or perhaps you did decide lunch on your own that day. How did you go about this? Obviously by wanting to think of lunch options, and your brain started popping ideas into your head somehow....
>Beavers build these dams to keep the water level at a certain height.
My friend, I think you are implying intention where there is none. It's true that the effect of beaver dam-building is advantageous, but there was never any deliberation about it on the beavers part. It's a curious case of effort without decision. One can easily think of a situation where a beaver might actually do better to not build a dam - but a beaver will try to build one anyway. It's just what he does.
Do humans eat to keep from starving? Do we have sex to have babies? Do we love our babies so that they don't die? I don't think so. We do these things because it's built into us to do them, just like the beaver.
>but there was never any deliberation about it on the beavers part.
How do you know that?
>One can easily think of a situation where a beaver might actually do better to not build a dam - but a beaver will try to build one anyway. It's just what he does.
A beaver is not an NPC in a video game. It has actual intelligence. Maybe not much, but more than can be modeled in such a trivial way. And humans for our part are quite often found behaving irrationally and against our better interests.
>Do humans eat to keep from starving?
We eat because we're hungry, we farm to keep from starving. Why did we launch a man to visit the moon? Is the fact that the beavers haven't sent their own delegation to the moon evidence of their inferiority? Maybe they just prefer non-interventionist foreign policy.
It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much-the wheel, New York, wars and so on whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man for precisely the same reasons. (23.1)
> One can easily think of a situation where a beaver might actually do better to not build a dam - but a beaver will try to build one anyway.
The real question is if the beaver realizes this. I can think of situations where humans have done things that I believe it would have been better for them not to do based on my own information which may be different from theirs.
Sex seems a lot more simple than building a dam though. I mean, how does the Beaver even know this kind of stuff? Is it in its genetic material, or is it taught by its parents?
Just to answer your question: it's in its genetic material. It really is fascinating; it can even make evolutionary sense to think of the dam as an extension of the beaver's physical body, in as much a beaver's dams are "built by" its genes just like the cells of its body are. Google "extended phenotype" if you'd like more detail.
I put a ball in your hands. How do you get the idea to throw it? Who is giving it to you? Your logic work that way, through countless genetic iterations.
Now, the fun part, is that dogs, through similar genetic iterations, have evolved to love catching said ball and bringing it back to us.
This was an interesting talk. I admit I was easily hooked due to my own circumstances and experiences. I often feel like I don't know what I'm doing.
Shoshin was a great lesson for me. When I was training in martial arts I was told that shoshin was akin to fashioning one's self after an empty vessel. If the vessel is full then it cannot receive any more water. I took it to mean that one must periodically empty their minds of preconceived notions and ideas and be receptive to new ones when seeking new knowledge.
It has also taught me that I have a hard time appreciating what I am capable of and what I do know. I may fight feelings of inadequacy but I must remind myself that my bar is much higher today than it was when I started out. It is good to not feel like you know what you are doing all of the time. It's an opportunity to learn and fill yourself with new knowledge. As long as I know what I don't know I feel that I can find it out and fill the gaps.
I think what makes it difficult is the amount of competition there is these days and how high we have raised the bar. Capital and growth demand experience and knowledge but we need to take time for development too. You may want to hire the best but maybe you need to take some time to help people develop into the best they can be? But we should all take time to be thankful for what we have done and are able to do. It's easy to forget how painful it all once was.
A talk worth watching, in my opinion, if you've ever been concerned about feeling like you don't know what you'd doing.
Was really sad to hear this: "You don’t really make any money by writing a book, but O’Reilly did send me a nice hat"
How poorly does O'Reilly pay their authors? A book the size of most of their tomes, and at the prices they charge, should be a 5-figure advance in any other part of the industry.
This is true, but it's important to bear in mind that a relatively high-prestige publisher like O'Reilly can make or break someone's reputation as a high-price consultant. O'Reilly realizes this, and pays their authors relatively poorly.
If you want to make significant money as a tech book author, I'm guessing you have to do what Brennan Dunn does, and self-publish your book and market it yourself. I'm guessing that after you've published an O'Reilly book, you could make a pretty nice sum if you do this on your next book.
FWIW I got a $6000 advance for the book. I earn a 10% royalty on sales which varies a lot but is around a couple hundred bucks a month on average. So not bad, but since it took me a year to write I don't think it's ever going to recoup minimum wage for that period.
No complaints though! O'Reilly is a brilliant publisher and I never had any expectation of making money from it. It was just a thrill to be able to get the bloody thing off my chest at last.
Curious about this too. I wonder if he means that you don't really make any money compared to the opportunity cost of all the hours you spend on it, or if you really don't make any money in an absolute sense. Unfortunately, I suspect it's actually the latter due to the relatively tiny size of the target market for such books.
That's right. I wrote some computer books some years back, and the royalties were somewhere around 10% of the wholesale cost of the book. So a book with a $40 shelf price might have a $20 wholesale price... and with only about 6000 copies as a typical print run, I didn't make much at all.
And also bear in mind that an advance is just that: it comes off the royalties, so you may not end up making any money for quite a while.
I am suspicious of the imposter syndrome self-diagnosis. It permits you to explain away your problems and possible deficiencies without being confronted with the often not so nice reality. As the author rightly says, it is not a solution. To anyone diagnosing himself with the imposter syndrome, I would say: great, so now that you know, you don't have it anymore.
This sort of post seems to do well on HN, so to offer a bit of criticism I'd like to posit that often they seem to be a thin veneer over humble bragging.
e.g. I don't know what I'm doing, but then neither does anyone else but I am stating it so therefore I'm actually better than them and I have impostor syndrome so that actually makes me better at what I do than you, and everyone who says they know what they're doing suffers from the Dunning–Kruger effect, etc.
This has become a bit of a meme -- the whole "I'm better because I claim to be worse" bit.
So does this mean that we need to come full circle and become worse and being better due to claiming to feel worse?
I get where you are coming from, but I think the best point in this somewhat rambly essay is that it is fine to come out and talk about how to deal with these odd mental effects, especially when they are keeping us from getting work done.
> So does this mean that we need to come full circle and become worse and being better due to claiming to feel worse?
Usually when people begin kicking up a dust, the solution is to stop kicking– in this case I think that means to avoid making claims, and focus instead on doing great work!
"it is fine to come out and talk about how to deal with these odd mental effects"
When they are sincere, sure. But increasingly they are becoming like the thin girl forever talking about how she feels fat (or, I suppose, the not thin girl declaring that anyone thinner is anorexic). The Dunning–Kruger thing is referenced so frequently on here and other technology sites that it is like the attempt at a great equalizer: People aren't better than me, and the only way they can think they are is the Dunning–Kruger effect.
It is some sort of race to the bottom / lowest common denominator equalization thing. I'm not saying that the feeling of inadequacy at times isn't real, but it is becoming a badge and measure of superiority.
If I state that I feel lost sometimes or that I have impostor syndrome it doesn't in any way imply that I'm better. You're just attacking people for showing vulnerability.
>You're just attacking people for showing vulnerability.
These missives never simply say "sometimes I feel like an impostor". They invariably mention the whole Dunning-Kruger effect, and invariably claim that this self-doubt is because one has achieved such heights of knowledge that they've gained full awareness of all the things they don't know. It always turns this so-called vulnerability into some sort of heightened awareness.
I'm not "attacking" anyone in any case. I'm pointing out that this is a bit of a trend right now to show ones enlightenment by claiming one's vulnerability.
Or maybe your value/worth as a developer is measured by what you achieve/what you do, and not by constantly trying to jockey relative to everyone else? The constant procession of "PR for why I'm actually better than everyone else" thing is transparent, yet HN falls for it day after day.
Recently I found this note on my desk at home. It says “I HAVE NO IDEA
WHAT I’M DOING”. I don’t remember writing it, but it was in my house
on my desk in my handwriting, so I obviously did.
He might want to seek some psychiatric help if this persists.
So what did it mean? Was it a cry for help? A product idea? A topic
for a blog post? Or could it be an idea for a conference talk?
The card was a cry for help. This talk is a cry for attention.
I’ll begin by showing you some compelling evidence that I have no idea
what I’m doing.
Well, he definitely proved it with all the completely asinine comparisons in the rest of his talk, but this one is the best:
If you only take one thing away from this talk, make it this: beavers are
idiots. They have no idea why they’re building these huge structures; they just
blindly do it.
Really.
"One of the primary reasons beavers build dams is to surround their lodge with water for protection from predators." [...] "On land, the beaver's short legs and wide body made them slow and vulnerable to their enemies. However, unlike most of their historic predators, beavers are excellent swimmers. As a result beavers evolved to have a strong preference to remain in or very close to the safety of the water. The need for safety is the primary reason beavers build dams to create ponds." -- http://www.beaversolutions.com/about_beaver_biology.asp
Sounds like they have a pretty good idea why they build dams.
But enough about me. As you’ve seen, I frequently find myself in situations
where I don’t know what I’m doing, and I usually hit a brick wall and
feel disappointed. But it’s not just me! You have no idea what you’re doing
either.
Don't go projecting on us, buddy. Most people, when faced with a challenge they're not immediately sure how to solve, will go read a book, or take a class, or ask someone who does know what they're doing. Lying about being able to write a book when you have no idea how in order to make money is not "impostor syndrome", it's merely being an impostor.
Dunning-Kruger does not explain or justify a total lack of forethought.
All of these animals look remarkably like something in their environment,
but none of them has any meaningful understanding of why they look that way.
They don’t know what they’re imitating. The stick insect doesn’t know anything
about eucalyptus; that’s just what it looks like.
Says who? You, the expert? I'm pretty sure an animal who lives on a goddamn plant and looks just like it probably realizes that it's a plant, and that it looks similar, and that if it wants to eat, it should use that plant in order to hunt, so it can live.
An interviewer asked Richard Feynman to explain how magnetism works. He explained that it was a force that interacted with certain things. The interviewer asked, but why? Richard's answer was a long way of saying "just because, you moron."
You don't need to understand every layer of the onion. Every layer has another layer, and once you understand every single of them, and grok quantum physics and multiple dimensions and relativity and whatever else affects that onion's properties, that won't change that you need to cook that onion until it's soft before you add in meat to get the flavor out of it. If you know how to cook it, you know what you're doing.
It's not that the author has no idea what he's doing. He's just an idiot.
Not only have you missed the point of this author's talk, you've also missed the point of Feynman's answer, which served to demonstrate that the question being asked did not have a simple answer that could be succinctly constructed in a way that does the whole story justice. He wasn't saying 'don't try to understand magnets, just use them' he was saying 'I can't answer that question in a satisfactory way without first explaining all of Physics'
The author of this talk is not abnormal to do things without remembering them. I write things down all the time only to come across them a year later with no recollection.
It must be nice to be so self-assured of one's intellectual superiority though. Most of us have no idea what we're doing, after all.
The basic meaning of 'knowing what you are doing' is "to be aware of through observation, inquiry, or information of an action, the precise nature of which is often unspecified".
This is completely different than what the author (and other commenters) are suggesting, which is that one should have a completely in-depth understanding of all aspects of a given idea as far as human culture is capable of understanding.
If you are walking, you know what you are doing. If you are reading, you know what you are doing. If you're commenting on a web forum, you know what you are doing. You are not confused. You know what typing is. You know what the words you want to say are. You know what you intend to say. This is knowing. This is doing. That's it. That is it.
Most of us, except for maybe the mentally handicapped or the catatonic, know what we are doing. There is no big secret or mystery or hidden understanding. It is not correct to suggest that the majority of people do not comprehend the actions they take. Most people comprehend their actions, even if subconsciously in many cases.
If you watch the video, Feynman gets pissed off. He's not pissed off because he can't answer it, because he could just state "I would have to explain all of physics to you for you to be satisfied." He's pissed because this person doesn't even know what they're asking for.
This author doesn't know what he's talking about when he says he doesn't know what we're doing. But that has nothing to do at all with the rest of us.
The best comparison I can make is to say that most of us don't know why we do anything. There is seemingly no purpose to the universe, or why any of it does what it does. Yet there is completely obvious purpose to everything.
I drink because i'm thirsty. Why am I thirsty? Because my body needs to be hydrated. Why hydrated? Because it's made mostly of water. Why water? Continue that logic train until you run out of ways to explain why the universe exists. Nobody needs to know why the universe exists. But we do know when we're thirsty, and why we drink, which is what we're actually doing, so we do know what we're doing, and why.
We do know why we do things, and what we do. Anyone telling you different is selling something.
The author has projected knowledge onto individual beavers, which is...asinine, to use your word.
The beavers don't look around and think "man, my legs are too short for this location. I need a lodge, dam, and pond!" They just do it. They don't "have a pretty good idea why."
The species as a whole has a motivation (survival), but it's a motivation selected by evolution, not by thought on any level.
If you look closely enough, nobody really knows exactly what they're doing.
When you realize this, you're no longer blinded by the thought that you or other people know everything about something.
Then you also realize that all the stuff that is created by people isn't necessarily how it should be, it's just the outcome of the circumstances that the people were in.
With this realization you allow yourself to think more creatively (outside the box) about things.
However, the author and me don't have any idea what we're doing so I wouldn't take his or my story too seriously.