Good lord, I hope I never work with this person. It’s true that some people produce more output than others, but shitting all over under-performers just discourages and humiliates them. Absolute garbage human being behavior. The mature, productive move is to try to help. If you truly cannot level someone up you may need to make a difficult decision, but that doesn’t at all mean you need to be a huge dick.
The Brotherhood of Morons
31–40 of 77 posts
Re: The Brotherhood of Morons
#32> What Taleb calls the Intellectual Yet Idiot (IYI) - someone who has the mannerisms and interests of a superficially intelligent person but who nonetheless is unable to self-reflect or deal with nuance, such as the Harvard-educated Ben Shapiro. I worked in Harvard Square for 5 years (dead center, across the street from Curious George, between the Greenhouse and the Coop), and it was always my assertion that Harvard…
The problem is that we select for high fidelity parrots and virtue signaling monkeys in admissions, rather than providing a support structure for people who want to create or discover things.
Re: The Brotherhood of Morons
#33I couldn't get through the whole insufferable mess, but I'm going to argue with this point. > The first type, my favourite commenters, whose grim-faced no-nonsense corporate visages grace standups across the world. Thanks to their fearless leadership and keen business sense, I have it on good authority that all projects are scheduled to move from red status to green status despite all those risks unfortunately materi…
The author about a person claiming seriously that they drive better when they're drunk when coming back from a party :
> Then there is the third kind of person who, upon reading anything like the quote above, immediately insists that the complainant must secretly be the insufferable one, because actually smart people don't experience frustration for reasons unknown. The implication is that they're the smart ones because they live in a world where the ultimate marker of intelligence is not the ability to discern sound action from unsound, but instead a grotesque meta-intelligence which manifests as the inexplicable belief that no action is ever deserving of contempt, and any deviation from this belief is a humility problem. Their judgement usually comes with a vomitous attempt at a cutting remark which, coming from individuals best described as a sentient LinkedIn posts, invariably morphs into the flaccid "you aren't as smart as you think you are" or "you sound insufferable".
I personally love the D.F Wallace quote from "Is this water ?" and I generally don't get annoyed at people from underperforming at some task (minor driving/logical mistakes), I really try to take into account one's reality by having empathy.
But I don't think this contradictory with calling out stupidity when it could put you or other people in danger and I think the drink and drive situation imagined by the author is one. You don't need to condemn people to call out stupidity but you should call it out as such.
Re: The Brotherhood of Morons
#34I got part way through and quit. I appreciate the author's perspective, but I'm kind of tired of people so adamantly avoiding empathy. It's easy to say someone is acting stupidly; it's much harder to put yourself in their shoes and understand why they might be acting that way. I dunno, maybe there is some wisdom I missed because I didn't finish it.
> It's easy to say someone is acting stupidly; it's much harder to put yourself in their shoes and understand why they might be acting that way.
This statement presupposes that there is a reason.
Many people simply act completely irrationally, so the only "reason" for their actions that one can come up with is the overly reductive "well, their neurons fired in such a way that resulted in them doing ".
I suspect avoiding generalities would assist discourse, so here's a concrete example to analyze: consider a senior (maybe even staff level) software developer, trying to write a loop. He writes a bunch of code, runs it (via tests, or executing the software itself), and finds that it doesn't work. So now he he changes the "". Still doesn't work. Now he changes that to ">=". Still doesn't work. Now he thinks "prime numbers are sometimes important, hm...", so he rounds the end of the range to the nearest prime number. Still doesn't work. Now he increments by two, instead of one. Still doesn't work. On a whim, now he changes the numeric type from an integer to a float, though he (of course) couldn't explain why that would change anything (all other things being equal in this scenario, it wouldn't). It still doesn't work. Etc, etc, etc. This sort of pattern continues for the next couple hours until the code happens to work for the scenarios tested (though is still incorrect and will eventually fail in production).
What is the "reason" for this behavior? Or, more importantly, why would someone regularly engage in such behavior? Why, as opposed to reasoning about the code, instead spend hours being superstitious, cargo culting, guess-and-checking, etc? Why never once consider pre-/post-conditions, loop invariants, sketch out a small informal proof by induction, etc?
Yes, some instances of bad decision making are due to unfortunate circumstances (stress, mental health, etc). But there are times where people simply demonstrate that they are, putting it kindly, not competent. That doesn't make them any less deserving of love and care, but they are still (with no negative sentiment or judgement intended) incompetent.
Re: The Brotherhood of Morons
#35[dead]
Re: The Brotherhood of Morons
#36I got part way through and quit. I appreciate the author's perspective, but I'm kind of tired of people so adamantly avoiding empathy. It's easy to say someone is acting stupidly; it's much harder to put yourself in their shoes and understand why they might be acting that way. I dunno, maybe there is some wisdom I missed because I didn't finish it.
It's just an algorithm.
Re: The Brotherhood of Morons
#37> What Taleb calls the Intellectual Yet Idiot (IYI) - someone who has the mannerisms and interests of a superficially intelligent person but who nonetheless is unable to self-reflect or deal with nuance, such as the Harvard-educated Ben Shapiro. I worked in Harvard Square for 5 years (dead center, across the street from Curious George, between the Greenhouse and the Coop), and it was always my assertion that Harvard…
Taleb's modus operandi is to be condescending towards others, read his Twitter account.
Re: The Brotherhood of Morons
#38I got part way through and quit. I appreciate the author's perspective, but I'm kind of tired of people so adamantly avoiding empathy. It's easy to say someone is acting stupidly; it's much harder to put yourself in their shoes and understand why they might be acting that way. I dunno, maybe there is some wisdom I missed because I didn't finish it.
> It's easy to say someone is acting stupidly; it's much harder to put yourself in their shoes and understand why they might be acting that way. This statement presupposes that there is a reason. Many people simply act completely irrationally, so the only "reason" for their actions that one can come up with is the overly reductive "well, their neurons fired in such a way that resulted in them doing ". I suspect avoid…
Because the behavior "worked" (i.e., solved a sufficient number of problems) in the past? Maybe because it is easier than other approaches?
Re: The Brotherhood of Morons
#39I got part way through and quit. I appreciate the author's perspective, but I'm kind of tired of people so adamantly avoiding empathy. It's easy to say someone is acting stupidly; it's much harder to put yourself in their shoes and understand why they might be acting that way. I dunno, maybe there is some wisdom I missed because I didn't finish it.
Agree. Moreover, I don't agree with the author that some people are just stupid and that's it. Especially, with the surgeon example. I really don't think a surgeon can be stupid per se. That should be very rate occurrence. More like people do stupid things all the time. Including author, who is too smug, which I also consider stupid.
Good point. Interesting that he claims all groups of people contain a certain percentage of "Morons" but then he says he only surrounds himself with brilliant people, which, by definition, makes him the moron.
Re: The Brotherhood of Morons
#40I got part way through and quit. I appreciate the author's perspective, but I'm kind of tired of people so adamantly avoiding empathy. It's easy to say someone is acting stupidly; it's much harder to put yourself in their shoes and understand why they might be acting that way. I dunno, maybe there is some wisdom I missed because I didn't finish it.
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