41–50 of 166 posts
The author may have been headed somewhere with that idea, but he didn't get there.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/08/24/books/review/excellent...
My 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 desi…
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well, i think the point is two-fold. first, that it can be more difficult for people to get an education (and in many cases, a professional job) depending on their background and thus have a much higher barrier to "cure cancer" type work. simply saying that they could is all well and good, but it ignores some harsh realities of life. second, the fact that people value something does not necessarily make it important.…
> second, the fact that people value something does not necessarily make it important. so what if someone values their nails being done? who does it benefit? capital is a distribution of resources in order to maximise output. some of that output is chaff, but i'd argue that less chaff and more useful product is better for a society to prosper. Markets form a democracy: Everybody can vote with their wallet what they w…
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Imagine if the world's nail salon workers could spend their time curing cancer, fighting hunger or homelessness instead of the useless primping of rich people's hands and feet. If we only had an economic system to allow everyone to reach their fullest potential despite circumstances of birth, and social priorities where personal vanity was not placed above the good of humanity. In 500 years time maybe we'll get there…
> Imagine if the world's nail salon workers could spend their time curing cancer, fighting hunger or homelessness instead of the useless primping of rich people's hands and feet. The nail salon workers could use their free time for this purpose if they wanted. They (perhaps with some rare exceptions) don't do it. On the other hand: The fact that someone is willing to give money to the nail salon workers for getting h…
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Homeless people can go to Harvard [1]
This guy build a hotel for $9000 [2]
People familiar with statistics can consistently win the lottery [3]
"Anyone can do it, why can't you?" /s
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liz_Murray
[2] https://www.littlethings.com/9000-dream-home/
[3] http://www.businessinsider.com/4-time-lottery-winner-not-exa...
* There are thousands if not millions of examples like this. Pointing to exceptions has never been a good argument. People who work in nail salons generally have a socioeconomic background that doesn't give them the privilege to be "wasting" time curing cancer. Suggesting that they can, or even should be doing this is insulting, at best.
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well, i think the point is two-fold. first, that it can be more difficult for people to get an education (and in many cases, a professional job) depending on their background and thus have a much higher barrier to "cure cancer" type work. simply saying that they could is all well and good, but it ignores some harsh realities of life. second, the fact that people value something does not necessarily make it important.…
> second, the fact that people value something does not necessarily make it important. so what if someone values their nails being done? who does it benefit? capital is a distribution of resources in order to maximise output. some of that output is chaff, but i'd argue that less chaff and more useful product is better for a society to prosper. Markets form a democracy: Everybody can vote with their wallet what they w…
Here'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 th…
As a smart person, I see things a different way. There are certain hobbies that are only appeal to smart people, like pure math. But there are a lot of things that appeal to a broad range of people, like sport, arts, music and literature. I think it's very good to get involved in these things because they bring balance and a way to related to other people. In fact I created a "no programming related hobbies" rule for…
> 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…
Successful people are emotionally invested in the idea that there is a strong correlation between personal behaviours and outcomes - On the other hand, unsuccessful people are more likely to believe that there is little correlation between the two; that it's mostly random and that skill only plays a tiny role.
Successful people will often try to argue that unsuccessful people who believe in luck don't succeed because their feeling of helplessness inhibits their actions (e.g. makes them lazy). From my personal experience, I think that this is not the case at all - In fact, I know many serial-failures who keep working very hard and are extremely driven in sprite of the terrible odds (and their keen awareness/first-hand-experience of those odds)... In fact, I find that serial-failures tend to work harder and smarter (have better critical thinking skills) than people who were successful at some point in the past (probably because unsuccessful people are more hungry for achievements and because they are more likely to identify and acknowledge flaws in their own plans).
Humans are hard-wired to gamble and accept terrible odds. People know that it's almost impossible to win the lottery and yet so many of them keep buying tickets every week - Terrible odds don't inhibit behaviour; especially if the media keeps priming us with the idea that we have full control over our destiny... That's pretty much the basis for all the superhero movies which are so popular these days.
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> second, the fact that people value something does not necessarily make it important. so what if someone values their nails being done? who does it benefit? capital is a distribution of resources in order to maximise output. some of that output is chaff, but i'd argue that less chaff and more useful product is better for a society to prosper. Markets form a democracy: Everybody can vote with their wallet what they w…
Perhaps if everyone started from the same point this would be true. However, not only has everyone not started from the same point, there are forces -- those who already have money -- who are spending money in an effort to brainwash those who do not into doing things that benefit them indirectly.
By deciding to have children or not (and if yes: how many?), parents vote about the distribution of the startup positions for the next generation.
EDIT: In other words: Poor people should rather be angry about their parents than about the system.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Imagine if the world's nail salon workers could spend their time curing cancer, fighting hunger or homelessness instead of the useless primping of rich people's hands and feet. The nail salon workers could use their free time for this purpose if they wanted. They (perhaps with some rare exceptions) don't do it. On the other hand: The fact that someone is willing to give money to the nail salon workers for getting h…
well, i think the point is two-fold. first, that it can be more difficult for people to get an education (and in many cases, a professional job) depending on their background and thus have a much higher barrier to "cure cancer" type work. simply saying that they could is all well and good, but it ignores some harsh realities of life. second, the fact that people value something does not necessarily make it important.…
I think that is precisely what makes it important. As long as as individuals in a society have freedom of choice, the only way to approximate some objective measure of importance is by looking what they value in aggregate.
The things I think are important and the things you think are important are probably different. So who's right? From a practical standpoint, what makes a difference is what people think is important. As the other commenter mentioned, in capitalist society people clearly demonstrate what they think is important by spending their money.
If people chose to spend their money getting their nails done, then they do think that it's important. If enough people think it's important then it becomes so, and no-one can really tell them otherwise. This is the case as long as people have freedom to chose how they make money and how they spend it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps if everyone started from the same point this would be true. However, not only has everyone not started from the same point, there are forces -- those who already have money -- who are spending money in an effort to brainwash those who do not into doing things that benefit them indirectly.
> Perhaps if everyone started from the same point this would be true. However, not only has everyone not started from the same point By deciding to have children or not (and if yes: how many?), parents vote about the distribution of the startup positions for the next generation. EDIT: In other words: Poor people should rather be angry about their parents than about the system.
1. "Parents vote about the distribution of the startup positions for the next generation." What?
2. "Poor people should rather be angry about their parents than about the system." Are you serious? What good is that going to do?
Sorry, but you must be living quite a privileged, or sheltered life if you believe these things.