But isn't the fact of being smart and working at a big company selecting for exactly this trait?
The Curse of Smart People (2014)
111–120 of 166 posts
Re: The Curse of Smart People (2014)
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agree. One of my friends is pretty smart (at least, above above-average) and works in the tech industry. When he was young he had to "simulate" his emotions to "look like a normal person." He had to think what normal people would feel under his situation and tried to feel that way (or tried to make himself looked feeling that way in front of people). For example, he thinks that crying on funerals is illogical, becaus…
Inability to understand emotions is not the same thing as being smart. It is possible to be smart and not to understand them, but plenty of smart people do get why people cry at funeral. Also, majority of people who attend funerals don't cry and even more don't cry publicly. It is highly inappropriate to laugh or look happy, but if he was trying to simulate cry, then his idea of funerals was not based on reality nor…
I agree. Feynman was incredibly intelligent, musically inclined, and charmingly social. Anyone who feels out of touch with (perceived inferior) normal people due to being too smart is creating a hierarchy of people which places them just one step off the bottom. At the same time they present as if their position is the top step on the ladder.
People pigeonhole themselves into categories based on RPG mechanics. In their head, they're at Intelligence 10 so that must mean that they had to sacrifice Charisma. The real world doesn't have game balance. People will turn out to be smart and funny and kind and good looking. To make it worse, these will correlate.
And besides, the idea of intelligence resulting in damaged social skills is odd. Being able to generalise and make inductive conclusions is an important skill that is substantially helped by being intelligent. Making social decisions the long way (thinking through them) is inefficient. An intelligent person who's doing that is just poorly using their time.
Re: The Curse of Smart People (2014)
#113Earlier 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 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.
I honestly don't even know what to say... 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.
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Re: The Curse of Smart People (2014)
#114Earlier 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 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.
I honestly don't even know what to say... 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.
> Sorry, but you must be living quite a privileged, or sheltered life if you believe these things.
Wrong.
Re: The Curse of Smart People (2014)
#115I strongly believe that we should not easily segregate people into a smart kind and a not-so-smart kind. Intelligence comes in many ways and the genetics and upbringing of a person will make their intelligence manifest in different ways.
Someone being good at something, does not automatically equate to a high level of intelligence or smartness but rather a high degree of familiarity with the topic. Familiarity can be acquired either through a lot of practice or from a predisposition to understand quickly, which is intelligence or smartness.
However, what can be said is that a person who is good at almost everything, necessarily has to be smart because there wouldn't be any time to practice everything in depth. Conversely, I'd never call a person smart who's good at one thing but doesn't understand anything else.
The author says that smart, successful people are cursed with over-confidence due to them knowing one thing very well. But how can you call a person smart if they do not even possess the ability to properly self-reflect. Is that not the one thing that should define smartness?
Rationalizing things away, ignoring signs that interfere with one's world-view, and being over-confident are all traits of not-so-smart people. Just because you know how to code, does not mean you are smart.
I'd say the result of this anecdote should've been that it turns out that people can be good at their jobs and be idiots at the same time.
Re: The Curse of Smart People (2014)
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agree. One of my friends is pretty smart (at least, above above-average) and works in the tech industry. When he was young he had to "simulate" his emotions to "look like a normal person." He had to think what normal people would feel under his situation and tried to feel that way (or tried to make himself looked feeling that way in front of people). For example, he thinks that crying on funerals is illogical, becaus…
Not to diagnose your friend, but more as a general note: that kind of perspective sounds (from my admittedly unqualified perspective) much more typical of people on the autism spectrum or certain other non-neurotypicals than it does of "smart people" in general. It might be worth noting that there's some (mostly-anecdotal) indications that tech, particularly programming itself, may have higher incidence of people on…
> Not to diagnose your friend
Then please don't.
Re: The Curse of Smart People (2014)
#117I am fascinated by the number of comments made by people who actually think they're so smart, it's the society (made of billions of people) that's dumb. 1 Mind > 7.5B Minds ? I tend to think these companies don't hire smart people. They hire psychologically deviant people who will both comply without a problem, and who will do mean things to others because they have a superiority complex... a little like german engin…
Intelligence, Nazi references, and our lack of proper definitions aside, societies were formed to cater to the lowest common denominator. That doesn't mean that the construct itself is "dumb" - whatever that may mean for a concept. It just means that not everyone can be happy with how it works, all the time.
Re: The Curse of Smart People (2014)
#118I like how everyone has a different opinion about how a smart person has to be, but in most cases people are referring to certain traits that do not correlate with intelligence (and frequently could indicate deviation in either direction), and that's plausible since intelligence is such an abstract notion. For instance, recognising patterns, and acting on those patterns are two different things. One might notice that…
A worldview is like a sampled model of an ultrafilter which is in reality more like a leaky sieve
Re: The Curse of Smart People (2014)
#119Outside of software, my favorite example of this principle is Donald Rumsfeld. He's clearly one of the most brilliant people to have ever worked in government, and yet through overconfidence he contributed to the worst foreign policy blunders in modern US history and got thousands of people killed. So it seems that being smart doesn't necessarily help with making good decisions, especially in complex situations with…
I'm not saying I'm skeptical, but I am saying I want to learn more about Rumseld's brilliance.
Re: The Curse of Smart People (2014)
#120> Working at a large, successful company lets you keep your isolation. If you choose, you can just ignore all the inconvenient facts about the world. Is this why social justice extremism is so popular in Silicon Valley? I mean, social justice is critical to a well-functioning and fair society, but the brand of it that SV folks tend to sell is fairly detached from the realities of living in a human civilization.
What do you mean by this?
As well-off as people are, they tend to view problems they don't face as solved. Therefore they turn their attention to what _they_ view as a problem. In a very crude example, the Bay Area people don't care about the wars in the Middle East - they're not a problem as far as they're concerned. Their exclusion from places they want to work and the climbing housing prices though, yuck.