How many rabbit holes have I been down, and would I prefer discovering more of them or following one to its end?
The Curse of Smart People (2014)
121–130 of 166 posts
Re: The Curse of Smart People (2014)
#122"What I have learned, working here, is that smart, successful people are cursed. The curse is confidence." Things to remember when smart people appear confident: - the correlation between confidence and ability to actually "do" something can be low - smart people can live in their heads - smart people can overestimate their expertise in areas they may be familiar or ignorant of, equally - street smarts can kick smart…
None of the things you write about apply only to "smart, successful people". Your whole example hinges not on the hikers being stupid or smart or successful or failures, but unprepared and improperly guided. We could spread the blame for that all around and outside your group of hikers.
Then again, nothing the article writes about is exclusive to "smart, successful people", so all in all, what exactly are we talking about?
Re: The Curse of Smart People (2014)
#123Being "smart" is not easy. From conflicts with others because of Dunning-Kruger effect [1], because your own ego (no matter how "smart" you think you are, you're not that "smart" in the whole "smartness spectrum"), etc. So in the end, most "smart" people learn to deal with his own ego, idiots, and just try to be nice, because life is very short for fussing and fighting [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
Re: The Curse of Smart People (2014)
#124My 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…
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…
> For example, he thinks that crying on funerals is illogical, because the dead are dead already, nothing can bring them back and the dead would surely rather see people they love live happily instead of in sorrow. But no. Until he escaped from the environment he was born he had to live like a normal person, and tried to cry on funerals.
No, the more I think about it, the more I think your friend is really missing something. Funerals aren't about crying because the dead could be in pain or suffering. It's crying about the absence and the hole they leave in our life. (that and emotional contagion, which is a regular psychological effect in such gatherings)
The fact he concluded he had to cry on funerals just goes to show his line of reasoning clearly lacks logic and experience to fuel it (teenage angst ?).
Now of course it depends on the culture you are raised in (see old italy black dressed old women at funerals for instance) and the violence attached to behaving outside the norm.
Re: The Curse of Smart People (2014)
#125My 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…
> Smart people end up having to run SmartPerson + NormalPersonVM(pre-alpha) in parallel.
This sounds a lot like autism spectrum disorder. Only some smart people work this way; for others, the social mechanisms are intact and operate normally (and sometimes very efficiently). For anecdotal evidence and some insights, see Eric Raymond's blog post[1].
Re: The Curse of Smart People (2014)
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
His friend might not be on the autism spectrum, and it would be blatantly irresponsible to claim he was based on such limited evidence with no qualifications - which is why I didn't.
Rather, I stated that that kind of mindset is usually more common in individuals on the spectrum. It is, in fact, one of its most common and defining features - even if, on its own, it's not sufficient for a diagnosis. It's relevant to the discussion, even if it's not relevant to his friend in particular.
What further qualification could I have added to make myself clearer? I definitely don't want to be encouraging lazy net-diagnoses, as they're harmful to the people who have such disorders, so I'm genuinely curious how you would rather I have phrased this.
Re: The Curse of Smart People (2014)
#127I 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…
"1 Mind > 7.5B Minds ?"
In some cases, yes. 7.5B people didn't discover relativity or invent the airplane. Some few specific people did.
"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 engineers during WWII ;)"
Maybe you're just trolling. But do you have any possible reason to think this is true? It certainly doesn't seem like it based on any experience I've ever had, that's for sure.
Re: The Curse of Smart People (2014)
#128> 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…
This is an inversion of cause an effect. 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…
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.
I think you severely overestimate the average persons understanding of how gambling works.
Re: The Curse of Smart People (2014)
#129I 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.
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.
Rich peoples hand and feet!? Do you have any idea how much a manicure costs? I just searched online for a place near me that does one and it's 27 USD. Is someone who can afford 27 USD for something that isn't food or shelter rich to you?
Do you think a high percentage of people who work at Nail salons are capable of contributing something significant to the frontiers of medical science? Or was that whole sentence just supposed to be a humorous line in a parody version of John Lennons "imagine" you're coming up with? Because if it was, it's gone completely over my head.
Maybe in 500 years people will stop trying to peddle a utopian "system" that has shown time and time again to impoverish people, retard the progress of entire nations, and - in many cases - kill millions.
Re: The Curse of Smart People (2014)
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Not to diagnose your friend Then please don't.
His friend might not be on the autism spectrum, and it would be blatantly irresponsible to claim he was based on such limited evidence with no qualifications - which is why I didn't. Rather, I stated that that kind of mindset is usually more common in individuals on the spectrum. It is, in fact, one of its most common and defining features - even if, on its own, it's not sufficient for a diagnosis. It's relevant to t…
You could not have qualified that statement more. It's just hard to communicate ideas because the response prediction engine we build in our minds operates with a high degree of uncertainty.