The Curse of Smart People (2014)
apenwarr.ca
The Curse of Smart People (2014)
1–10 of 166 posts
Re: The Curse of Smart People (2014)
#2The author may have been headed somewhere with that idea, but he didn't get there.
Re: The Curse of Smart People (2014)
#3Perhaps "smart" is too un-nuanced by conflating the real performance of many types of intelligence areas (social, emotional, political, spatial, logical, etc.) into a singular narrow attribution based on brief interactions? (Also yet another example highlighting where language constrains thinking.) And therefore the overvaluing of maximizing possession of one strength at the detriment of avoiding complementary strengths in other areas? Effectively, a personality monoculture where greater personality diversity would likely have tangible benefits (leadership, sales, marketing, strategy, design, etc.)
Re: The Curse of Smart People (2014)
#4Here's a summary for why smart people are "cursed":
If you are two or 3 standard deviations about the mean, you'll quickly realize society is optimized and caters to the average intelligence. You'll find it very boring and frustrating having to deal with rules and decisions that do not make sense. You must continually push yourself to stay entertained and meet like-minded people otherwise you'll get very depressed that everything is meaningless.
-t. "smart" person
Re: The Curse of Smart People (2014)
#5> very easy to describe all your successes (project not canceled) in terms of your team's greatness, and all your failures (project canceled) in terms of other people's capriciousness.
I see this belief in probably about 80% of people I encounter, and it has little correlation with how smart one is.
I like to hang out with people who take responsibility for their failures rather than complaining about how circumstance, "The Man", or other people have it in for them. Such people are far more interesting. Unsurprisingly, they're also far more successful.
Re: The Curse of Smart People (2014)
#6The author may have been headed somewhere with that idea, but he didn't get there.
I think there was a germ of a theory why companies full of smart people do dumb things, or are sometimes evil, or something like that; but it didn't get that explicit because it might criticise the employer too directly.
Re: The Curse of Smart People (2014)
#7My pet theory: much of 'gut feelings' and intuition boils down to having our internal black box predict the behavior of other people. When you are 'average', this often simplifies to reasoning about what you would do in the same circumstances, which is relatively easy. If you are 3 standard deviations out, you'll have to compensate that consciously, which is inaccurate and difficult and slow. This is like how UI designers have difficulty to discern which parts of their UI are hard to use, while the end user could do so effortlessly.
Smart people end up having to run SmartPerson + NormalPersonVM(pre-alpha) in parallel. Normal people just run NormalPerson natively. Then they complain about bugs and slowness ('smart people are out of touch with reality!', etc.)
Re: The Curse of Smart People (2014)
#8> very easy to describe all your successes (project not canceled) in terms of your team's greatness, and all your failures (project canceled) in terms of other people's capriciousness. I see this belief in probably about 80% of people I encounter, and it has little correlation with how smart one is. I like to hang out with people who take responsibility for their failures rather than complaining about how circumstanc…
It's the same kind of thing as how when you accidentally cut someone off while driving it's because they were in your blindspot and you're having a bad day and it's the first time that's ever happened etc etc... and when someone else cuts you off they're an idiot who shouldn't be on the road and they probably always drive badly.
Re: The Curse of Smart People (2014)
#9I wonder how much human potential we're wasting by putting "smart people" on a pedestal instead of having higher and better utilization of regular people. Regular people are far more capable than working at McDonalds, Walmart, Amazon, or whatever wage slave job BigCo is offering.
It's pretty hard to prove, but I bet that we're barely even at 1% utilization of humanity's potential, given our technology and population.
Re: The Curse of Smart People (2014)
#10I wonder how much human potential we're wasting by putting "smart people" on a pedestal instead of having higher and better utilization of regular people. Regular people are far more capable than working at McDonalds, Walmart, Amazon, or whatever wage slave job BigCo is offering. It's pretty hard to prove, but I bet that we're barely even at 1% utilization of humanity's potential, given our technology and population.
Doesn't putting smart people on pedestal's, like in charge a the design of tool, enable them to make things that can be part of the workflow of regular people?