If Sometimes a Wanderer...

When I express any shred of doubt about whether I deserve or am qualified for something, people often try to reassure me that I am just experiencing impostor syndrome. About 10% of the time, it’s true. Amelia Greenhall’s excellent piece, however, has inspired me to clear up a big misconception about what is happening the other 90% of the time.

While there are a few situations that make me feel insecure, I am, for the most part, an excellent judge of what I’m capable of. Expressing a reasonable amount of doubt and concern about a situation that is slightly outside my comfort zone is normal, responsible behavior. Understanding my limits and being willing to acknowledge them is, in fact, one of my strengths. I don’t think it should be pathologized alongside the very real problem of “impostor syndrome”.

In fact, it is the opposite behavior—the belief that you can do anything, including things you are blatantly not qualified for or straight up lying about—should be pathologized. It has many names (Dunning-Krueger, illusory superiority), but I suggest we call it blowhard syndrome as a neat parallel. Blowhard syndrome is all around us, but I have a special fondness in my heart for the example my friend Nicole has taxidermied on her Twitter profile.

Just to be clear, I’m not mad at anyone who has tried to reassure me by telling me I have impostor syndrome, and I recognize it as a real problem that lots of talented people struggle with. But I am furious at a world in which women and POC are being told to be as self-confident as a group of mostly white dudes who are basically delusional megalomaniacs. We’re great the way we are, level-headed self-assessments and all. Stop rewarding them for being jackasses.

Yup.

GitHub. You can just say GitHub.

(And also a lot of other tooling, but GitHub is probably one of the most impactful ones because code review.)

We filed our opposition to CTIA’s petition asking the Supreme Court to review the 9th Circuit’s conclusion that there is absolutely nothing wrong with Berkeley’s health and safety warning about cell phones. Here’s a clue to why no court in this FOUR YEAR litigation has yet to agree with CTIA — it’s effectively the same warning that the FCC requires manufacturers to include in every cell phone manual, just applied to retailers, not manufacturers, and no one, ever, has challenged that “compelled speech” by the FCC, including CTIA. You can read the opposition here.

But here’s a pro-tip for anyone trying to understand what this case is about. The issue before the Court has nothing — let me repeat, NOTHING — to do with whether cell phones cause cancer or any other harm to individuals. The issue — and really, the only issue — is whether a local jurisdiction must survive intermediate First Amendment scrutiny before it may require a health and safety warning. 

That sounds a bit law-geek-like, but it is critically important. This is a classic example of what Elena Kagan was describing when she charged conservatives with “weaponizing” the First Amendment. Because the single and most obvious consequence of such a NEW rule would be exactly what conservatives want here — the end of the practical ability for local jurisdictions to regulate through mandatory warnings. This is, as we’ve said from the start of this case, the ghost of Lochner in the guise of the First Amendment. 

You may not like safety warnings. I share a skeptical view about the utility of many of them. But never in the Supreme Court’s history has it applied intermediate First Amendment review to a mandatory health and safety warning. That’s why, in the last case where conservatives were trying to weaponize the First Amendment in this way, Justice Thomas wrote that the Court did  “not question the legality of health and safety warnings long considered permissible.” National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra, 138 S. Ct. 2361, 2376 (2018). Yet here is the CTIA asking the Court to create a new First Amendment barrier to something “long considered permissible.”