Your high IQ might kill your startup (2010) • Hacker News Board

Re: Your high IQ might kill your startup (2010)

#41

Post by selmnoo » Sat, Jul 05, 2014, 5:02 AM UTC

bestdaytostart wrote: post #31

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being poor completely sucks. Watching your cat die from cancer that you can't afford to treat sucks. The point of getting rich is so that your life doesn't suck. Not to compare yourself to others. Getting rich is necessarily hard, otherwise everyone would be on the road to becoming rich. People are unlikely to get rich by doing work which satisfies. But if they make it, then at least life won't suck anymore.

Being poor does suck. However, being rich does not prevent your life from sucking. All the money in the world won't prevent you or a loved one from passing due to an untreatable illness. All the money in the world won't buy you friends or genuine respect. It can't buy you love (though it can buy you sex). Furthermore, you don't need to be rich to avoid the hardship of being poor, you just have to make a sufficient am…

> It can't buy you love

Not to be a smartass here, but that's probably false. Money buys you social recognition, something that is an important part of your mate valuation. Rich folks will generally have a better time finding 'love' than the poor. The richer you are, the better your chances, more or less.

Money really is very important in the modern day. I wish it weren't this way -- I don't want to be doing selfish things, but sadly this just is the way it is.

Re: Your high IQ might kill your startup (2010)

#42

Post by sergiotapia » Sat, Jul 05, 2014, 5:05 AM UTC

jordanthoms wrote: post #37

sergiotapia wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny because my dad's idea of success is owning a company and making a lot of money. I have different goals. I'd rather earn 80 a year and work 9-to-5 than slave away at work.

Or own a company / work harder and save the additional cash, then retire at 40?

Yep and your kids are teenagers and you missed their entire childhood because you were at the office. No thanks brah.

Re: Your high IQ might kill your startup (2010)

#43

Post by andrewflnr » Sat, Jul 05, 2014, 5:11 AM UTC

selmnoo wrote: post #41

bestdaytostart wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being poor does suck. However, being rich does not prevent your life from sucking. All the money in the world won't prevent you or a loved one from passing due to an untreatable illness. All the money in the world won't buy you friends or genuine respect. It can't buy you love (though it can buy you sex). Furthermore, you don't need to be rich to avoid the hardship of being poor, you just have to make a sufficient am…

> It can't buy you love Not to be a smartass here, but that's probably false. Money buys you social recognition, something that is an important part of your mate valuation. Rich folks will generally have a better time finding 'love' than the poor. The richer you are, the better your chances, more or less. Money really is very important in the modern day. I wish it weren't this way -- I don't want to be doing selfish…

Even you put 'love' in quotes :). We all know that money can buy social recognition. What's usually meant by "money can't buy love" is that the 'love' buyable with money is not really what you're looking for.

Re: Your high IQ might kill your startup (2010)

#44

Post by vinceguidry » Sat, Jul 05, 2014, 5:13 AM UTC

ilaksh wrote: post #27

ammon wrote: post #9

Choosing to fight a man with a knife who is trying to rob you is stupid and dangerous, regardless of your training. I'm not sure what this says about the thesis.

I think it suggests that a big part of success is luck. He was lucky that man didn't really know how to use the knife or intend to kill him with it. Anyway forget the mugging analogy because it is a stretch and distracts from useful information. First, people aren't so much smarter than others than they think. People who persevere are more likely to be "lucky", since they keep trying until they are "lucky". Another h…

If someone is mugging you with a knife, guaranteed he never took the time or the expense to learn how to properly use his weapon. Or he wouldn't have any need to mug someone.

Re: Your high IQ might kill your startup (2010)

#45

Post by mtdewcmu » Sat, Jul 05, 2014, 5:16 AM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #38

I took an important lesson from that article, completely unrelated to startups, when first reading it few years ago. > The man with the knife did not know how to use that knife. If he had been as trained in knife fighting as I was in hand combat, he would have been able to destroy me. But he had a tool that he felt gave him an advantage (...) You can have a false sense of confidence that because you possess a particu…

That reminds me of this slightly crazy guy I knew in college and roomed with senior year. He had been an RA, and "somehow," during some meeting, he managed to discharge part of a pepper spray canister, which led to the meeting having to be evacuated. I think it must have been accidental, precipitated -- obviously -- by playing with it at an utterly inappropriate time.

I don't take any life lesson from the article, which was vaguely glib and self-satisfied. Life is never fair; sometimes you have the knife and don't know how to use it; sometimes you work hard and lose the fight for not having a knife. What you want is to have both the knife, the right preparation, and the right opportunity to use it all at the same time. How do you go about setting all that up?

Re: Your high IQ might kill your startup (2010)

#46

Post by andrewflnr » Sat, Jul 05, 2014, 5:19 AM UTC

randallsquared wrote: post #11

I don't think the knife analogy is a great one. High IQ is more like having a ladder, in a world of cliffs. Someone can train themselves to jump higher than a ladder which is relatively short, but a ladder of two or three standard deviations is no longer in that range. If you have a tall ladder, try to focus your efforts higher.

I guess that works, but then the point of the article is that someone who doesn't have a ladder but trains to climb the cliff face will eventually beat someone who only knows how to use their ladder.

Re: Your high IQ might kill your startup (2010)

#47

Post by cryptophile » Sat, Jul 05, 2014, 5:19 AM UTC

selmnoo wrote: post #41

bestdaytostart wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being poor does suck. However, being rich does not prevent your life from sucking. All the money in the world won't prevent you or a loved one from passing due to an untreatable illness. All the money in the world won't buy you friends or genuine respect. It can't buy you love (though it can buy you sex). Furthermore, you don't need to be rich to avoid the hardship of being poor, you just have to make a sufficient am…

> It can't buy you love Not to be a smartass here, but that's probably false. Money buys you social recognition, something that is an important part of your mate valuation. Rich folks will generally have a better time finding 'love' than the poor. The richer you are, the better your chances, more or less. Money really is very important in the modern day. I wish it weren't this way -- I don't want to be doing selfish…

It has always been like that. Women have never "fallen in love" with men who are not sufficiently socially successful. There is nothing new under the sun in that respect.

But then again, "socially successful" is a very relative thing. You will find that women "fall in love" with you all the time in third-world countries, even if you are only on unemployment benefits back home where women may snub you over that.

Furthermore, the appearance of success is probably much more important to women than any real success. The ability to pretend that they caught a fish who could have money, is often enough.

Re: Your high IQ might kill your startup (2010)

#48

Post by djokkataja » Sat, Jul 05, 2014, 5:22 AM UTC

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #29

conroe64 wrote: post #20

IMHO, to continually put "success" above everything else in your life and slave away towards that goal as the ultimate redemption in everything is a waste of your time and therefore your life. It can be such as easy sell, especially to people with low self-esteem... if only you were rich, had a great body, had success with the opposite sex, etc., etc. And always underlying it, but never spoken of, is the vain and sel…

Being poor completely sucks. Watching your cat die from cancer that you can't afford to treat sucks. The point of getting rich is so that your life doesn't suck. Not to compare yourself to others. Getting rich is necessarily hard, otherwise everyone would be on the road to becoming rich. People are unlikely to get rich by doing work which satisfies. But if they make it, then at least life won't suck anymore.

>The point of getting rich is so that your life doesn't suck. >Getting rich is necessarily hard, otherwise everyone would be on the road to becoming rich.

The logic doesn't follow here: having enough wealth to have a non-sucky life must be difficult enough to remain out of the reach of the majority of humanity? Why?

Let's take this to an extreme: all the wealthy people decide to employ robots for all of their needs to prevent their lives from sucking. All the poor people die because they can't afford food. Now the total population of the earth has a non-sucky life (except for the people who feel terrible about how they are responsible for the deaths of the 99%).

Some wealthy people see this coming and decide to make robots that provide for everyone's needs, regardless of how poor they are. Obviously we don't have an infinite supply of matter on this planet, so the robots have only one catch: if the robot provides for you, you have to consent to taking part of a population control plan (lowering the birth rate). Not popular, but preferable to a holocaust of the poor.

Either way, there's no reason that having enough wealth to avoid a sucky life is necessarily something that is restricted to a subset of the population, unless the definition of a sucky life is based on comparing your wealth to the wealth of others.

Re: Your high IQ might kill your startup (2010)

#49

Post by mtdewcmu » Sat, Jul 05, 2014, 5:30 AM UTC

selmnoo wrote: post #41

bestdaytostart wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being poor does suck. However, being rich does not prevent your life from sucking. All the money in the world won't prevent you or a loved one from passing due to an untreatable illness. All the money in the world won't buy you friends or genuine respect. It can't buy you love (though it can buy you sex). Furthermore, you don't need to be rich to avoid the hardship of being poor, you just have to make a sufficient am…

> It can't buy you love Not to be a smartass here, but that's probably false. Money buys you social recognition, something that is an important part of your mate valuation. Rich folks will generally have a better time finding 'love' than the poor. The richer you are, the better your chances, more or less. Money really is very important in the modern day. I wish it weren't this way -- I don't want to be doing selfish…

Unfortunately, despite not being rich, the poor don't have a monopoly on love. The way reality works is that, if you're able to make yourself rich, something obviously must be working out for you in your life. That thing that helped you get rich also tends to help you get love, and other things. If you're poor, your life plainly isn't working out too well, so you probably won't have success at love, either.

There's something called the Matthew Effect that isn't too well known, but it has a wikipedia page. Basically, things just get more unfair over time.

Re: Your high IQ might kill your startup (2010)

#50

Post by andrewflnr » Sat, Jul 05, 2014, 5:31 AM UTC

conroe64 wrote: post #20

IMHO, to continually put "success" above everything else in your life and slave away towards that goal as the ultimate redemption in everything is a waste of your time and therefore your life. It can be such as easy sell, especially to people with low self-esteem... if only you were rich, had a great body, had success with the opposite sex, etc., etc. And always underlying it, but never spoken of, is the vain and sel…

You can strip away the vaguely implied definition of "success" and replace it with arbitrary goal-attainment, and the central point still holds. Most of us have goals, so this is useful. Anyway, the word "startup" is right there in the title, so what were you expecting?