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Why People Dislike Really Smart Leaders

scientificamerican.com

321–330 of 336 posts

Re: Why People Dislike Really Smart Leaders

#321

May be related to this. I have the feeling that white rural Americans dislike "smart" people more than they dislike immigrants, blacks, city slickers and even billionaires.

No one I met in Appalachia or other parts of rural America was remotely mean to me when I was biking across the country after college.

Re: Why People Dislike Really Smart Leaders

#322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If P and Q are independently randomly distributed, you can't tell anything about Q from the value of P.

... unless the sample being examined was selected for being above average in at least one of P or Q. In such a sample, P and Q will be anti-correlated. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson's_paradox

Ok, that actually makes sense. If they are truly independent, they will be unrelated. However since P+Q=LeadershipScore, and all LeadershipScore are about the same, then a high P indicates a Low Q. The connection between the two only exists because of that third piece of information, LeadershipScore, being held constant. The only part I disagree with is that LeadershipScore will be roughly the same in reality, I think a quick glance at the world's leaders shows some are clearly better in most ways than others.

Re: Why People Dislike Really Smart Leaders

#323
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you believe this you will always get a technocrat with a great resume who has spent years enforcing the status quo, and, once elected, will do nothing to change it. If you want anything to be better you need to move away from gatekeeping "qualifications" because they are always bestowed upon proponents of business as usual by proponents of business as usual. What does "smart" mean? They went to Harvard and are the…

> For a leader, you want a strong vision for the future, passion, a very strong will, charisma. Europe was plagued with many of this style of "leader" between the 1920's and 1940's and tens of millions of people died for it.

Oh yes I agree strong leaders like I've described with the power to change society can be bad. Change is not always good. But a qualified technocrat will not ever change anything much, for better or for worse. Why change a system that worked perfectly for you? That you thrived in? Where you can do a bunch of spreadsheets in your off time comparing private insurance plans and cleverly pick the best one for you and save money, and if you screw up, your child's hospital visit isn't covered and you are instantly homeless! How fun! If you want change, don't pick the Harvard valedictorian "wonk".

They will suggest policies like: what if instead of feeding the hungry we define a specific income bracket adjusted dynamically to the purchasing power parity of... and in the first three words you've already lost 99% of the population who thinks it's unnecessarily complicated because it is: they're turning a moral issue into a technical one because they've been trained to do technical analysis and to not see things in moral terms, rather, to shift numbers around in spreadsheets. They are wholly incapable of stepping back and recognizing that the spreadsheet itself is wrong, not technically wrong, but morally wrong: that simpler is better, that universal programs (like roads, NHS) are better than means-tested ones, that these things which are simple moral imperatives should be able to be explained simply.

Re: Why People Dislike Really Smart Leaders

#324
post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

monitoring only helps detecting a problem. and even with canarying there could still be a bad thing in production. it happened everywhere, even the big ones had akward problems. it's human to make errors, so if you do not have luck such a problem could occur on friday evening/night.

There is no doubt, but you see, there are legitimate reasons to do it.

yeah well I always do releases on friday and we have monitoring/canary. but sometimes a minor/major bug slips trough, but our customers only work from monday-friday and so it's not that big of a deal. and it barly happens and after that we add a regression test so that at least the same error won't happen again. funnily most errors on our codebase happened in client side or sanitazion problems. and the client side errors go away once we added all the types to typescript (we converted js to typescript and added any, so we still need to "correct" like 40% of our code base)

Re: Why People Dislike Really Smart Leaders

#325
post #312
post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First I’ll address inflation measures as they apply to me, then I’ll just air some fringe views that hopefully you will enjoy reading. EDIT And thirdly I'll extensively change what was written because I'm pretty sure it misrepresented the monetarist theory of inflation. I’m happy to be corrected on this, but ‘inflation’ in the US is usually the CPI-U series; less Food and Energy when the Federal Reserve sets monetary…

Thanks for the reply. I didn't know what 'core inflation' meant so had to look at the wikipedia page. Assuming that wikipedia is correct, it looks like the fed has used PCE since 2000. Apparently, CPI is mainly used for social security benefits. CPI weighs 'shelter' costs as 40% of total whereas PCE weighs it at 18%. To test out their values, I viewed the 2016 value for DC (where I have a home and mortgage), and it l…

Bah, you're very convincing, I'm going to have to go away and reformulate what I'm upset about. I can see that I've been using the wrong terms for everything. I save a lot of money, and I can't construct a big-picture argument that satisfies me of how 5% increases in the money base aren't really bad for someone and I want to know who (I still think it is savers, but no longer have an argument for that). That being said, I now see that any issues I come up with fall completely outside GDP and inflation.

However, your 200 coins scenario is not very agreeable to me:

1) Minor point, there is an assumption of over capacity where the widget producer could presumably produce 9 spare widgets most years.

2) More subtle point, widgets require raw resources to produce. Ignoring the machine to make the widget, the actual widget is presumably made of stuff or in the case of a service, the cost is the stuff required to maintain the servicer's lifestyle. Your scenario has quietly assumed that there are sufficient resources for our purposes. I see the question on monetary policy as being ‘does this assist in the efficient allocation of resources’. I do accept that as correct, I don’t accept it as fundamentally relevant to what I think is important, because it hasn’t made reference to the resources used to produce the widgets (ie, what was the opportunity cost) and hence begs my question. The mechanics of the situation aren’t just the feelings of how much people want to pay, they are linked to resource availability vs willingness of market participants to work for what they want. It has made me understand why I thought inflation was irrelevant to my circumstances.

4) If a rational actor appears with excess currency and doesn't want to compete with other consumers for presently available resources, then they aren’t going to sit there cheerfully with 19 currency in their pocket. If they aren’t going to buy current resources, they will buy control of future resources. Otherwise it raises the question of to what end did they accept the new currency and why is it being created?

I'm going to have to stop there because my complaints need rebuilding, but I think I'll end up finding out what the name for asset-price inflation and properly learn about the velocity of money, but is since it isn't expressed in inflation then it must be competing for future resources which I expect to turn up in asset prices. If that formulation survives scrutiny, then something really interesting must be afoot to do with how future claims on resources will be settled.

Thanks again for your interest, this has been a very illuminating conversation for me that has reduced my ignorance of economics substantially and will improve my arguments in the future.

Re: Why People Dislike Really Smart Leaders

#326
post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no doubt, but you see, there are legitimate reasons to do it.

yeah well I always do releases on friday and we have monitoring/canary. but sometimes a minor/major bug slips trough, but our customers only work from monday-friday and so it's not that big of a deal. and it barly happens and after that we add a regression test so that at least the same error won't happen again. funnily most errors on our codebase happened in client side or sanitazion problems. and the client side er…

[deleted]

Re: Why People Dislike Really Smart Leaders

#327
post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no doubt, but you see, there are legitimate reasons to do it.

yeah well I always do releases on friday and we have monitoring/canary. but sometimes a minor/major bug slips trough, but our customers only work from monday-friday and so it's not that big of a deal. and it barly happens and after that we add a regression test so that at least the same error won't happen again. funnily most errors on our codebase happened in client side or sanitazion problems. and the client side er…

That is kind of my point. I believe over time, the monitoring gets solid enough that you can do abrelease anytime. I heard often teams not wanting to do a release, but i try to go towards "i can measure a good amount of metrics and slices that are important and can measure their impact in a controlled manner" which helps for friday releases, or any other release for that matter.

I dont do friday releases often, but if it comes to it, it is no brainer. I approach it pragmatically, and this helps people.

Re: Why People Dislike Really Smart Leaders

#328
post #325
post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the reply. I didn't know what 'core inflation' meant so had to look at the wikipedia page. Assuming that wikipedia is correct, it looks like the fed has used PCE since 2000. Apparently, CPI is mainly used for social security benefits. CPI weighs 'shelter' costs as 40% of total whereas PCE weighs it at 18%. To test out their values, I viewed the 2016 value for DC (where I have a home and mortgage), and it l…

Bah, you're very convincing, I'm going to have to go away and reformulate what I'm upset about. I can see that I've been using the wrong terms for everything. I save a lot of money, and I can't construct a big-picture argument that satisfies me of how 5% increases in the money base aren't really bad for someone and I want to know who (I still think it is savers, but no longer have an argument for that). That being sa…

All very good points. I actually thought about your #2 and #4 after I posted. But, at that point I was already in route to the airport. Also, to be honest, I really wasn’t sure how to analyze it any further - pointing to my lack of knowledge. It seemed like a bit of rabbit hole and beyond me.

Re: Why People Dislike Really Smart Leaders

#329
post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For a leader, you want a strong vision for the future, passion, a very strong will, charisma. Europe was plagued with many of this style of "leader" between the 1920's and 1940's and tens of millions of people died for it.

Oh yes I agree strong leaders like I've described with the power to change society can be bad. Change is not always good. But a qualified technocrat will not ever change anything much, for better or for worse. Why change a system that worked perfectly for you? That you thrived in? Where you can do a bunch of spreadsheets in your off time comparing private insurance plans and cleverly pick the best one for you and sav…

Yeah, it's a good thing that the world isn't all that complicated and that all of our problems can be solved with simplistic, well-intended platitudes.

Re: Why People Dislike Really Smart Leaders

#330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a world-wide change in 1914 that blew apart the previous rigid system of currency exchange. The U.S. followed suit, but under any scheme at all the exchange rates of its currency would have been more unstable because the previous stability between all currencies was gone, whatever the U.S. chose. Nixon renounced conversion to go to a fiat system. That's what renouncing conversion means, to abandon conversio…

The world wide change in 1914 was going from the gold standard to a fiat money system. > exchange rates of currency That was not the topic, the topic was instability in the money supply. > Nixon The US official exchange rate was a fiction from 1930-Nixon, because it was illegal to hold gold as a monetary instrument. Nixon simply did away with the fiction.

NO. Just before the war, the war scare blew up the exchange system. It's in the book cited. History. Empiricism. Data.

Now you want to change the topic away from EITHER economic stability OR exchange rate stability? To money supply stability, a whole other topic? Yikes.

Nixon - cavilling. Choose any illustration and the logic and semantics of "fiat" remain. Once again, you're off on a new topic, a new distraction. Not only is that not logical, it's not civil, either.

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