It's More Important to Be Kind Than Clever • Hacker News Board

Re: It's More Important to Be Kind Than Clever

#41

Post by talkingquickly » Fri, Aug 31, 2012, 8:13 PM UTC

If kindness is taken to mean always doing what will make someone feel good in the short term then I'd agree with you but I'm not sure this is usually what is meant by kind.

In my view doing something which causes someone discomfort in order to improve there long term quality of life is in itself kind. Conversely satisfying someone's short term desires in the knowledge that it will probably have a bad effect on them in the long run would - I think - be categorised by most people as unkind.

Re: It's More Important to Be Kind Than Clever

#42

Post by Spearchucker » Fri, Aug 31, 2012, 8:16 PM UTC

Never say never, as the cliche goes. The example you give is an extreme that's difficult to argue with. And yet I find it difficult to agree with you. Hey, I can go so far as giving another example - Chris Barnard was accused of butchering and killing many a guinea pig before he pulled off a successful heart transplant. And yet I'd dislike myself a little more than I'm comfortable with if I applied "never" to truly random acts of kindness.

Re: It's More Important to Be Kind Than Clever

#43

Post by the1 » Fri, Aug 31, 2012, 8:21 PM UTC

you can be kind and administer broccoli to your children crying for candy.

you can be kind and shortsighted. you can be cruel and shortsighted. Not sure why you're mixing things up. For yolo?

Re: It's More Important to Be Kind Than Clever

#44

Post by joelmichael » Fri, Aug 31, 2012, 8:34 PM UTC

If someone's child has just died, is it more important that you be kind to them or that you be clever?

Re: It's More Important to Be Kind Than Clever

#45

Post by nollidge » Fri, Aug 31, 2012, 8:44 PM UTC

I don't see what your anecdote has to do with kindness. Presumably both Guttmann and his colleagues were all kind enough to want to reduce suffering; Guttmann just happened to be more correct about how to do so. Neither approach was more or less kind than the other, but one was more effective.

Re: It's More Important to Be Kind Than Clever

#46

Post by columbo » Fri, Aug 31, 2012, 8:50 PM UTC

The problem with single words is it is very easy to lost on the definitions. Kindness, cleverness... what does that mean?

Here's how I would have worded it. Given a company of a 100 people working on the same product, which do you think would have a higher chance of being successful:

1) Everyone has a varying degree of intelligence but all of them shared the same (positive) moral compass

2) Everyone shares the same (high) intelligence but a varying moral compass

Re: It's More Important to Be Kind Than Clever

#47

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Aug 31, 2012, 8:51 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: It's More Important to Be Kind Than Clever

#48

Post by scotttobejoking » Fri, Aug 31, 2012, 8:58 PM UTC

Citing one example of where cleverness was more effective than kindness falls far short of proving the statement that it is never more important to be kind than clever; you might want to tone down its sensationalist tone. A single counterexample will refute it :-)

To say that "Kindness nothing but a particular sort of shortsightedness" falls into the same problems of provability. Kindness is a great many things more than a particular sort of shortsightedness.

The idea you put forward seems to imply that basic human emotions are unreliable all the time, in all places - when in fact they work great at most times and in most places.

Kindness is not independent of cleverness, or of morality, or of decency. The common senses of the words do bleed together.

For example, were Dr Ludwig Guttmann to accidentally cause the deaths of fifty patients, his colleague might comment, "Dear Doctor, that was not frightfully clever of you," and he would say that because the Doctor had done something monstrously unkind towards them and their families.

The colleague uses (in part) his emotional faculties to determine that killing people is bad, and he uses (in part) his analytical faculties to determine ways to avoid killing people. But it's useless to try and rigidly separate the sets of faculties because they live in the same brain; there's no context where they can be exercised completely in separate.

Re: It's More Important to Be Kind Than Clever

#49

Post by ajross » Fri, Aug 31, 2012, 9:21 PM UTC

Additionally: I don't see what the anecdote has to do with the linked article, which was about marketing and customer relations. No one sane is saying that the world would be better off with no clever people, or that it's somehow a choice. The point was simply that for a business with customers, merely "executing well" doesn't work as well as being genuinely nice to your customers.

Then jdietrich turned the whole thing into a giant strawman about an obscure doctor using a different interpretation of "kind".

Re: It's More Important to Be Kind Than Clever

#50

Post by mcantelon » Fri, Aug 31, 2012, 10:00 PM UTC

There are likely "nice" people out there with irrational aversions to Western medicine as well.