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

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

#51

Post by abalashov » Sat, Jul 05, 2014, 5:44 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…

Agreed. However, in a day and age where (in the Western world, anyway) women no longer need men overtly for financial support, social recognition as mating currency is just that--social recognition. It can be, and very often is, orthogonal to wealth. Witness all the young women in love with crappy DJs, self-styled pseudo-unemployed hipsters, no-name sidewalk band heroes, stoners, and a variety of Bohemians that a conservative dad would call losers or starving artists--er, artistes.

Financial and career success is definitely one way to up your mate value, though it has more resonance once women get out of their twenties. It's not the only way. When you're young, particularly, it may not even be the best way. Vide all the fairly intelligent guys with steady, well-paying jobs (very much so, by the standards of median American household income) that nobody pays attention to, really. The broke dudes that know how to put out their plumage and leverage some other, more conspicuous cultural archetype get much more play.

I'm not a washed-up, embittered MRA or PUA guy, btw. Just playing Devil's Advocate. :-)

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

#52

Post by mtdewcmu » Sat, Jul 05, 2014, 5:51 AM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #32

One of the things a good University program does is take someone to past the limits of their natural intelligence. Running into the wall is one of the rites of passage of figuring out how to work. For me it was electromagnetic field theory, that crap kicked my butt! But getting through the class on additional study and work was pretty important for me.

And, years later, slowly but surely, you've managed to rack up a breathtaking point-score in your HN karma account. That electromagnetic field theory work must have instilled you with tremendous karma. :)

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

#53

Post by mtdewcmu » Sat, Jul 05, 2014, 6:00 AM UTC

andrewflnr wrote: post #46

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.

The point had to do with knives, not ladders. If you have a knife and you're well-trained in knife skills, and your adversaries are all armed only with ladders, you are easily going to win that fight. I think that's the point he was trying to make.

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

#54

Post by tluyben2 » Sat, Jul 05, 2014, 6:03 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.

Yes, but fighting your whole life to get rich at stuff that sucks is not worth it. Yes, it sucks to have your cat die, it sucks more to have you die wishing you did something more interesting than sit in board meetings and think about gathering mo money most of your waking life. There is a balance and that balance is not as hard as 'getting rich'; you don't need to 'get rich' to make your life not suck and get your cat treated, drive a nice car, have a pool you never use, a sauna which has cobwebs etc; that's all very doable without getting rich. And your life might not suck very early on that way instead of when you made it. I'm not sure how old you are but on HN there is a kind of altered reality where people get rich when they are young; this is not normal; most rich people got rich > 50. If you have had 'a sucky life' because of that till then you have been very much wasting your life.

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

#55

Post by tluyben2 » Sat, Jul 05, 2014, 6:08 AM UTC

cryptophile wrote: post #47

selmnoo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Furth…

A guy who is (outwardly) self confident will get women (or guys for that matter) no matter what. Ugly, poor, anti-social, doesn't matter. Sure, if you want to have a large amount of one-night-stands with 'just 18s' in clubs expensive clothes and a fat wallet help next to that confidence, but we were talking about love here.

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

#56

Post by tluyben2 » Sat, Jul 05, 2014, 6:12 AM UTC

kghose wrote: post #26

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…

To this I would add: do work that pleases you, not work that leads to something you think will please you. I was first introduced to this from one of the Indic texts - perhaps one of the Vedas - where people are told to do work and not worry about it's reward. This is a good way to protect yourself from the folly that the parent poster describes.

People (including in this thread) always tell us that you cannot do that; you need to make it first and then you can pick what you like. Of course this is bullshit, but it's persistent bullshit, obviously told by people who had that experience themselves and want other people to have that too so they can feel better about themselves.

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

#57

Post by mtdewcmu » Sat, Jul 05, 2014, 6:23 AM UTC

michaelochurch wrote: post #25

At first (before I RTFA) I was going to come here to disagree vehemently. There are severe founder-quality issues right now and a lot of that has to do with low-IQ people who failed out of banking or management consulting getting funded, while actually smart people with less social polish get fuck-all. 140+ IQ doesn't mean much, but I'd fund a 140+ over a well-connected douchebag any day of the year. The problem is t…

That's an astute misreading of the article, but here's my take: the writer clearly must have been successful in his startup, otherwise he wouldn't feel qualified to speak on what counts for success in starting companies. Once you're successful, you have the best of all worlds: you can act as if you had no intellectual advantage, and had to get where you are solely through pluck and hard work. Then you can look down your nose at both groups: the intellectual guys with lousy jobs and the dim-witted stuffed shirts. No one will doubt that you are not both smarter than the geeks and better at decision-making than the decision guys, because the fact remains, you beat the odds and created a successful startup, and you're still rich. So, I think that's the lesson. You can be really smart, or really hard working, but odds are that you don't have your own company and you're not rich, so either way you don't know shit.

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

#58

Post by cgriswald » Sat, Jul 05, 2014, 6:42 AM UTC

andrewflnr wrote: post #43

selmnoo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Money can't by love, and if it could, it would not be the kind of love anyone wants. But money does provide greater opportunities for finding love; although it is saddle with the burden of also having to separate out the women who "love" instead of love.

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

#59

Post by slavik81 » Sat, Jul 05, 2014, 7:07 AM UTC

mtdewcmu wrote: post #49

selmnoo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 s…

For the curious, this is the Matthew Effect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect

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

#60

Post by b1daly » Sat, Jul 05, 2014, 7:29 AM UTC

Hey, since no one else is bringing up the "citation please" criticism of the post, I will. Sorry, but it's just a dumb thesis, asserted in utter confidence. The evidence to support it would be something along the lines of an inverse relationship between a measurable aspect of intelligence and a measurable aspect of startup or other life failure.

Intuitively, I highly doubt such a relationship exists.

Otherwise, the article is basically making the observation that being "successful" in business is generally hard.

But it's the internet, you can say whatever you want!