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Why People Dislike Really Smart Leaders

scientificamerican.com

301–310 of 336 posts

Re: Why People Dislike Really Smart Leaders

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. https://img.4plebs.org/boards/pol/image/1429/19/142919512461... The late 1970s were when neoliberal economic fundamentalism took over public policy. The graph shows the effect on equality.

I don't see this as evidence that economists => inequality. Even if we accept the notion that economists are directly responsible for growing inequality, it's worth remembering that there are disagreements within their ranks. I would argue this is when most economists lost influence in Washington, while a few like Art Laffer gained massive influence. The New Deal era prior to this was largely motivated by the work of…

>I don't see this as evidence that economists => inequality. Even if we accept the notion that economists are directly responsible for growing inequality, it's worth remembering that there are disagreements within their ranks.

It's not "economists => inequality" it's neoliberal economists (almost all of them today) => inequality"

Re: Why People Dislike Really Smart Leaders

#302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. I would speculate the high average IQ is a more significant factor.

Any source for "high average IQ"?

It's a reference to the notion that Ashkenazi Jews have an average IQ of something like 105, so have more 140+ IQs, and as such they are disproportionately represented in Nobel Prize winnings in the 20thC. Etc etc. I won't source for them (theres a Wiki article) since I think most of the variance can be accounted for by culture.

Re: Why People Dislike Really Smart Leaders

#303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on what’s wrong with his comment? The Peter principle looks like it has some legs (after a couple minutes of searching), and the analogy sounds reasonable to me.

Sure. Just heads up, I won't comment on the Peter principal, as I view both the definition of leadership and the complexities surrounding it far too complex to sum up in a simple parable, though I'm sure anyone with real world experience thinks it has some legs. Paragraph 2, about the person being promoted until failure, I can't gleam any explanatory content from, myself. Then there's this sentence: "If P and Q are q…

You forget that "then a leader with higher P is expected to have a lower Q." is conditional on "being a leader". This is Berkson's paradox.

Re: Why People Dislike Really Smart Leaders

#304
post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lot of black and white, 1+1=2 type statements here. Politics is about dealing with uncertainity and ambiguity. The real world is full of it. If your parents can't stand each other but tomorrow you get cancer and this dsyfunctional unit has to deal politics applies. Good politics makes things better. Writing down on a piece of paper - these truths are self evident that all men are created equal does not make it so in…

This isn't about the ambiguity. That's something else. This is about, for example, ethanol subsidies. Basically everyone who doesn't receive them thinks they're dumb. It takes more than a gallon of petroleum to produce a gallon of ethanol, it diverts productive farmland from food which makes food cost more for the poor (and everyone), it's an inefficient use of tax dollars, etc. Yet we continue to have ethanol subsid…

Of course it is ambiguous. You and the corn farmers both can make a case. I wasn't making a point about how lovable politics is, but why it's needed to the misguided character above who has reached a conclusion that "smashing" the system helps. The system is all that keeps you and the corn farmers from picking up a gun and removing ambiguity.

Re: Why People Dislike Really Smart Leaders

#305

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if you have the monitoring in place, and you have done proper canarying, friday evenings are not terrible

Of course. You're more than welcome to risk your own weekend over trivialities. The rest of us only ask that you please keep us out of your plans.

You never were. And there was a reason for that. Maybe you are not the person to put his 150% on the line when needed. It is ok. You do not have to be. Then you get paid accordingly.

You also didnt ask what could prompt before weekend pushes. It could be money, reputation or or compliance. Certain projects are out of your control and you have to implement in weeks notice, or have a deadline imposed by laws. Some are losing revenue so each day you do not release you are bleeding money.

So please, by all means, take your weekend off, while i plan for worst cases and make it so that friday releases are "trivial and safe" to deploy. I do not have to use it, but if i do, i do not need you around, it will be mostly automated anyway.

Re: Why People Dislike Really Smart Leaders

#306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you have the monitoring in place, and you have done proper canarying, friday evenings are not terrible

and if you have someone else on call, Friday evenings are perfectly fine :p

If and when this happens, the pusher person usually is the oncall.

Re: Why People Dislike Really Smart Leaders

#307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trump's skillset is that of a reality TV star. He knows what to say and how to say it to engage people in drama. His presidency has been a continuation of this. It freaks out the intelligentsia because it seems insane to them that a person in such a high place of power could get involved in things like Twitter flame wars. That's low class/blue collar behavior that is totally foreign to their own culture. That is why…

> Twitter flame wars ... does not represent a genuine threat ...until it's a flame war between two nuclear powers with unstable leaders.

Your depiction of Trump as unstable is exactly this cultural bias I'm referring to. He doesn't exhibit the upper class white culture behaviors you're willing to accept in a president, so he seems unstable.

It's worth mentioning that while he's always been rich, Trump spent a significant portion of his youth around construction sites, so he has adopted a lot of low class blue collar behavior.

Re: Why People Dislike Really Smart Leaders

#308
post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I paused to consider my next words, someone would start talking into my silence and then accuse me of interrupting them when I tried to continue. I eventually realized that I wasn't bad at speaking; I just had a different style. Some people are more agile in conversation, because they do not think about what they want to say before activating their mouth-parts to make the noises. They jump right in, by using…

>Whenever I paused to consider my next words, someone would start talking into my silence and then accuse me of interrupting them when I tried to continue. I've made the same experiece, but then some introspection lead me to find that I do the same thing. Sometimes what somebody tells you is just so boring. There's no point to their story, no suspense, no drame, no humor. Then your thoughts trail off, boom, you get s…

I already know that nobody cares what I have to say. I still want to say it.

In theory, my thoughts are just as worthy and as interesting as my conversational partner, so I need to at least pretend to pay attention when they speak if I want them to pretend to be interested in my words. If their story is painfully boring, you power through it and use that experience to make your own story less pointless and meandering.

I don't really want to know about how D is dating M with the fuzzy caterpillar eyebrows and the Stephen King teeth, and how V refuses to be in another one of D's weddings, and can't D just collinearize anatidi without continually leaning on someone that clearly isn't quite that interested, but there it is. Now I get to talk about that thing that happened today that was funny at the time, but is only slightly amusing in retrospect.

Some people don't ever stop to hear you, much less listen. There's no point in saying anything to them. You might as well draw a stick figure in chalk on a brick wall and talk to it--or write it up and post it to an Internet forum where nobody really knows or cares who you are. ...Twitter, obviously.

Re: Why People Dislike Really Smart Leaders

#309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any source for "high average IQ"?

It's a reference to the notion that Ashkenazi Jews have an average IQ of something like 105, so have more 140+ IQs, and as such they are disproportionately represented in Nobel Prize winnings in the 20thC. Etc etc. I won't source for them (theres a Wiki article) since I think most of the variance can be accounted for by culture.

Thx

Re: Why People Dislike Really Smart Leaders

#310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They say you can't cheat an honest man. Why is that? Clearly, a lot of mostly honest folks do get conned sometimes. They aren't talking about something like Bank of America overcharging you on mortgage interest every month for years. That's not the kind of con you can do without a lot of cooperation, teamwork, and setup. It's more about the one-time scores. At the core of every con is a kernel of dishonesty, as the b…

Bribes aren't de facto dishonest — their existence is, but using the only system available to e.g. get out of Germany isn't — and the type of person who falls for Nigerian 419 scams likely doesn't think the whole thing through.

I think they are. They are more dishonest than paying kidnap ransom, in any case.

When you pay a bribe, you actively fuel the system of corruption that makes them necessary. If you are doing it as a last gasp to escape that system, that is a different matter entirely from doing it to buy in to that system.

The 419 scam lays it out there. You're going to be paying bribes into a corrupt system to take possession of some money that is not yours, but it doesn't belong to anyone in particular, so there is no victim, and therefore not stealing, per se. It's mostly harmless, and just a little bit crooked, so why not just wire all your savings to Lagos in $1000 chunks and get rich quickly and easily?

Being just a bit crooked is essential for discouraging the mark from getting help from a friend or talking to the cops. If they speak of it to anyone else, that person will then know they are at least a bit sleazy, and possibly criminal. It's the same tactic used by criminal predators to silence their victims. Human trafficking, for instance: "You're here illegally, so if you talk to the cops, you'll be jailed and deported, and then you'll have to pay off your debt by farming beets in hardscrabble for the rest of your life."

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