61–70 of 77 posts
Misanthropic narcissism, the article. I'm smarter than everyone la la la la. What's the solution? Just sit around and bask in how smart you are while the hoards of depth-grovellers endlessly toil away for nuggets of neoplasmid. You are smart. We are dumb. I get it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well yeah, there is that. I love Taleb's writing (Black Swan was an important book) and observations (Power law distributions are the world globalization trends towards) but truth be told he does come off as a bit of an ass. I mean, he really just had the key observation and then somehow wrote a few thousand pages around it and more or less got lucky with a trade once.
I take wisdom where I can find it, and leave the rest. I wouldn't want as much attention on my flaws as his get.
Good philosophy.
0: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-accidentally-saved-half-a-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This is the problem with redefining commonly used terms like stupid. We tend to view it as lacking intelligence, and intelligence we often define as something like IQ, but the author explicitly rejects that and makes it about destructive (to themselves and others) behavior. The doctors were likely not stupid according to the standard definition, but were harmful towards both their patients and themselves, thus stupid…
Maybe like Eskimos have many words for snow, we need many words for stupid.
Or idiots should learn to use thesauruses. /s
Now to the outsider this may have looked like stupidity at the time, but it was actually banditry according to this analysis, since the IT manager was getting foreign golf vacations paid for entirely by the company selling in their half baked reporting system.
There's a lot of truth in this, but I struggle with the conclusion of "avoid stupid (destructive) people at all costs." While I don't doubt this is best for personal satisfaction and sanity, it feels lacking in compassion. An example: I have teenage children, and they have some friends in school who fit the stupid description from the article (destructive behaviors). They grew up in unstable homes and didn't have goo…
> It would be easier, and perhaps safer, to push my children to not associate with them - is that really the best policy? Yes, because a child's peers have more influence on their development than your parenting: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-scientific-funda... "Behavior geneticists contend that the rough rule of thumb when it comes to the determinants of child development is 50-0-50, that is, roughly…
I 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.
>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 just wanted to take a moment to tell the third group to go fuck themselves.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no wisdom, it's supposed to be a rant. I don't think empathy applies to this kind of wide-ranged broad-stroked text. If he was attacking someone specifically and there was some side to the situation that he was willingly ignoring I might agree with you, but I think in this specific case (i.e. just a brain dump) this is interesting; you either identify with it or you don't, and both reactions are just as vali…
I agree that there are people in the world who regularly trample on common notions of ethics and morals. It is really sad and frustrating that such people exist. I still find empathy to be a better reaction than blame and contempt. It is foundational to the way I choose to live my life. And with this response, I'm pushing my values on you in a way which is probably immoral! The author suggests that this "Brotherhood…
Your parent is singling out a group that absolutely are NOT doing their best, not in a unobtrusive way anyway.
Your empathy is cute but does not align with reality and, if anything else, betrays how privileged your life is that you can afford it.
Case in point: I live in 5 minutes walking distance from a major road artery in the capital city I inhabit. I have saved both and my wife's lives by not trusting the green light and looking both directions, twice now, because my life experience has unequivocally proved to me that in fact everyone is not doing their best at all. They are a-holes who want to get back home as quickly as they can after work and it does not even cross their minds that they can forever destroy a family while doing so. I watched interviews after such... specimens (I am being very generous here)... are caught in (or after) the act. Of course they cry and exclaim how their life is over if they get indicted etc. etc., but they never thought about it beforehand. Classic.
These people don't deserve empathy. They deserve a lifetime ban to operate any machine more complex than a coffee maker. They belong on the fields or the mines. We definitely need more labor there and they forfeit their place in civilization by proving that they are unable to be trusted with something trivial, something that you and I can deal with while being sleep-deprived and dead-tired. Honestly, how difficult it is to operate a car and follow the rules? I had a friend driving instructor when I was 17 and he told me he'd give me a license any day after I drove him around the town 4-5 times. I am not bragging; I am actually saying that no, driving a car and following rules is so easy that I am convinced that I can train a macaque to do it well (and there are videos of monkeys driving golf carts pretty well out there, by the way).
Looking after your own arse is a better reaction so I'll disagree with your blanket empathy stance.
I 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.
I quote: > "The remainder are simply stupid. This is approximately the composition of the organization writ large. The number of people at this organization who dislike their job, their stakeholders, and their salary but don't leave even though they no longer have the energy to work is astonishing, and that alone is enough to constitute stupidity as per Cipolla's definition." Because, apparently, a person cannot be b…
> 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…
I had an art teacher that had a poster on his wall: "An education is no substitute for intelligence." Some of the smartest people that I've ever met, had little to no education.
I never studied computer science, I can't code a graph path-finding algorithm out of memory and yet I've been told by many former colleagues that I am one of the best programmers they ever met.
Which is quite hilarious because I still think I am quite bad, to this day, after 22 years of career. And no this is not humble-bragging, more like to outline how different our perspectives on ourselves can be from the perception of everyone else.
But this approach, I think, is what is keeping me intellectually honest. I am self-indulgent for like 2-3 days a year and the rest of the time I always think I have to learn yet another thing, and to practice it well.