27 ms·

Your high IQ will kill your startup

384 points by niyazpk 17y ago

icono 17y ago
“Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” - Thomas Edison
- philwelch 17y ago
  “If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor.” --Nikola Tesla
coryl 17y ago
That Israeli soldier had balls to take on a guy with a knife. I thought it was kinda funny and ironic that he used that situation as an analogy for intelligence. The intelligent thing to do would have been to hand over the money and NOT risk being sliced open lol.
- AngryParsley 17y ago
  It probably depends on the culture. IIRC in the US you only have a 20% chance of being seriously injured if you cooperate with a robber. I wouldn't be surprised if the odds were different in other countries.
  - encoderer 17y ago
    Even if it's 50%... that's the risk.. what's the reward? Saving whatever cash you have on you? He could've taken those odds and handed over the money. And then, if the assailant attacked, he could've sparred with him as he did. This is a silly point to argue, though, because i'd be surprised if the story wasn't tweaked--even just a little--to the authors purposes.
    - ErrantX 17y ago
      What if the odd's of disarming the guy are 95%?
      - yummyfajitas 17y ago
        P( fight | takes wallet ) = 50%. P( no injury | fight ) = 95%. P( injury | hand over wallet ) = P(injury | fight) P(fight | hand over wallet) = 0.05 x 0.5 = 0.025 So P(no injury | hand over wallet) = 97.5%.
        ErrantX 17y ago
        good point :) However it makes a slight assumption that you still have 95% chance of winning if you hand over the wallet and are then attacked. This is probably not the case as the attacker gains a reasonable advantage by being first (maybe only 2 or 3% in this case) I also assumed the 50% was referring to the percentage chance of being actually harmed rather than having to fight. In which case your stats do break down.
    - dmm 17y ago
      > what's the reward? Living life as something other than a coward.
      - daleharvey 17y ago
        while I dont know what I would do in this situation, I know I wouldnt ever call someone who handed money over to someone who threatened them with a knife a "coward"
        dmm 17y ago
        I agree with you. I'm not calling anyone a coward, but I would certainly feel like one after being robbed. It's a very intrusive, violating event.
      - coryl 17y ago
  - tjic 17y ago
    FBI crime studies show that, no matter how the attacker is armed, your are LESS likely to be harmed if you fight back.
    - tome 17y ago
      I find this very interesting. Could you please cite a reference?
      - mos1 17y ago
        Criminology by Larry J. Siegel disagrees, asserting that while it decreases your chance of being robbed, it increases your chances of being injured or killed. edit: Zimring and Zuehl's study shows that robberies with "active noncooperation" (refusal to hand over money, attempt to flee, resistence with force) had a death rate fourteen higher than those where the victims cooperated, and that victims who simply denied having money (but did not otherwise resist) had a death rate twice as high as those who cooperate.
        GFischer 17y ago
        I found your quote, said book is on Google Books: http://books.google.com.uy/books?id=9nH0kSUMwGIC&lpg=PA306&ots=6gBiJu1Sq7&dq=Criminology%20by%20Larry%20J.%20Siegel%20fighting%20back&hl=en&pg=PA80#v=onepage&q=fight&f=false http://books.google.com.uy/books?id=9nH0kSUMwGIC&lpg=PA3... However, in the same paragraph it cites Gary Kleck on the use of guns, and it says that potential victims should be encouraged to fight back, and that resistance with a gun is significantly better than the other forms of resistance (and a conclusion that it is better to fight than to flee). It's a surprising conclusion for me (I'm mostly anti-guns, though I'd prefer some other option like, say, tasers, to be available for self-defense)
        mos1 17y ago
        Kleck's advice is for rape victims, not robbery victims. The first citations I can find in google scholar indicate that the odds of being killed during/after rape is roughly two orders of magnitude higher than the odds of being killed during/after a "cooperative" robbery, thus the differing calculus.
- ErrantX 17y ago
  > The intelligent thing to do would have been to hand over the money and NOT risk being sliced open lol. Not for the Israeli soldier. Consider: he must have been confident in his ability to disarm the guy (based on his assessment that he did not know how to handle the knife). The other option of co-operation gives control to the thief, that's not a good thing if you can avoid it.
  - coryl 17y ago
    All the training in the world still doesn't make it a smart decision. You only have to make a mistake once, or be a split second slow, to pay the ultimate price. Consider the thief's motivator is obviously money. Once he has it, anything else is just extra work for him (assuming mental stability). In that case, then the Israeli soldier has no choice but to engage.
    - ErrantX 17y ago
      > You only have to make a mistake once, or be a split second slow, to pay the ultimate price. The difference in skill is so important though. My best mate is into Aikido - some of the masters he's trained with wouldn't flinch if threatened with a gun. It's no threat to them. There is the famous story of the Aikido founder who claimed to be able to dodge bullets - and did so, once dodging an entire firing squad. One of his students invited a game hunter to come and try hit him: the master accepted the challenge and stood opposite the hunter. Hunter stands there holding rifle, swings it up to shoot and the Master dives to the ground shouting "stop stop". When they asked him why he'd given up he said: "that man does not aim" He'd met his match and bowed out. The same lesson applies. The smart move may be to hand over the money - but if you assess the smarter move is to disarm him then you should do so. Also; waiting for an attack or more stress is the worst thing to do. If you have the element of surprise it is a big advantage. > Consider the thief's motivator is obviously money. Often this is not the case - especially in South America. If your mugger has a gun your probably dead. A knife? Depends where you are. > You only have to make a mistake once, or be a split second slow, to pay the ultimate price. Again: if your confident and the odds stack up just go for it. Disarming a knife holder is pretty easy and unless they are really good with it then your unlikely to get badly hurt if your on the offensive.
- xcombinator 17y ago
  Yeah, the intelligent thing is to surrender and give more power and money to the robber. If people with weapons assault you in Somalia, give them millions of dollars and make it stronger, so they can kill more and assault more people. If someone kidnaps someone of your family, give all the money you earned all your life to them, so they can buy more weapons, and kidnap more people, and make society better. Your ego will boost as you acknowledge that you are not able to fight against other men under any circumstances, that you could always surrender and let them sodomize you if necessary.
  - coryl 17y ago
    Yeah, the intelligent thing is to surrender and give more power and money to the robber. How are you giving power to a robber? If people with weapons assault you in Somalia, give them millions of dollars and make it stronger, so they can kill more and assault more people. If people with weapons assault you, your dead. I'm not sure why you're trying to link this situation to the political one in Somalia, they're quite different. If someone kidnaps someone of your family, give all the money you earned all your life to them, so they can buy more weapons, and kidnap more people, and make society better. Tough talk, lets see what you'd do if your family got kidnapped for ransom.
    - Daniel_Newby 17y ago
      "How are you giving power to a robber?" By rewarding them with confidence and money, two of the most powerful factors in behavioral conditioning. "I'm not sure why you're trying to link this situation to the political one in Somalia, they're quite different." They are the same. Coastal Somalia's de facto government is barbarian raiders, funded entirely by people who choose to pay millions for appeasement but not one penny for defense. Hopefully the problem can be solved by arming the merchant fleets with modern weapons (now being tried), otherwise the standard solution will be needed: plow the coastal towns under as fertilizer.
      - coryl 17y ago
        Well organized, well armed Somali pirates hijacking commercial vessels does not equal a guy with a knife robbing you. Did you know the pirates actually have a code of ethics (ironic as that may sound)? Why have they never raped or killed any of their hostages? Because all they want is money. Pay up, and the hostages get let go. Thats how their operation works. Don't even try to compare that to a back alley robbery.
- kls 17y ago
  I disagree with you assessment, the individual could have intelligently reasoned that disarming the man would make him think twice before confronting another individual. If more individuals took that tack robbers would give more though to what used to be an easy crime. No to mention in certain parts of South America the punishment for robbery can be as sever as murder so if you are going to do it you might as well not leave witnesses. There are a lot of variables that go into the decision to fight and making the decision to do so does not necessarily mean that you have made a foolish or less intelligent choice.
  - euroclydon 17y ago
    Solzhenitsyn discusses this attitude extensively in The Gulag Archipelago, both from the perspective of standing up to government thugs that come in the middle of the night to arrest dissidents and when he notes the irony of how military officers recently pulled from the front lines were cowed by common criminals in jail.
    - dgordon 17y ago
      I'm reading The Gulag Archipelago now -- I'm around 530 pages in, so I just read the part about the common criminals beating up and robbing the political prisoners. It undoubtedly helped the thieves a lot that the political prisoners wouldn't stand up for each other, but if for some reason one did stand up to a criminal, his friends would take revenge later. The criminals were effectively united; the political prisoners could not have been more divided. It's a heavy book, both in weight (1800 pages) and ideas, but everyone should read it.
  - coryl 17y ago
    Its nice to think that people factor benevolent principles into situations like this. However, when people fight back under high stress situations like a robbery, it is probable that the moment is not about defending society; its about survival. Statistics say if you cooperate, you're less likely to be harmed. If you decide to push a physical confrontation, then you're more likely to be harmed. If you measure the cost/benefit ratio to each action, its a no brainer.
- endtime 17y ago
  You completely missed the point. The soldier was using the knife as an analogy for intelligence, not his dodging/punching. The robber had the knife, which gave him a false sense of superiority, but he didn't know how to use the knife, so he ended up losing the fight.
nanijoe 17y ago
"People who are born intelligent"....now that's a whole different debate
- greyman 17y ago
  Yes, that would make it a better title. But the article is surprisingly spot on.
wheels 17y ago
The title is just flame-bait. The message is: (a) being lazy will kill your startup, (b) smart people are lazy. But, well, all you really need to kill a startup is (a), and we already knew that. The next possible conclusion is that maybe smart people underestimate the challenge of starting a startup, but I think everybody does. What's more critical is how people react when they realize they're in over their heads.
- ochiba 17y ago
  I agree with you to some extent, though I see the post in a different light given this (loosely) related discussion from a few days ago: ...parents that say to a successful child, "Wow, you're so smart" undermine that child's ability to muscle through tougher challenges later on in life. These kids believe they are intrinsically better than their peers, so they don't keep putting effort into themselves. Eventually they encounter a challenge that exceeds their initial abilities and they give up since they don't understand their performance is in their control, not baked into their God-given make-up. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1139309 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1139309
  - arethuza 17y ago
    I think the mistake that some parents may make is failing to establish that simply being smart isn't good enough you actually have to do something useful with that intelligence to be rewarded in one way or another.
- maxklein 17y ago
  My original article was 6 pages long, this is an abridged version. So I was not able to convey all the concepts I would have liked to as clearly as possible. That said, let me throw myself into the fray. It's not about "being lazy". I know people who come in by 7:30 and leave by 9pm. They are not lazy. They work really hard. But they will never be CEO of the company. It's about challenging yourself. Becoming better. Training. When you can do stuff good, then you have to find stuff you can't do as well that is even harder. If I am a Django programmer, after 6 months the challenge in Django is minimal. I can work 10 hours a day on Django and it's not really a challenge anymore. So it's not about laziness really. It's about not being complacent in your current abilities.
brlewis 17y ago
Summary: People who breeze through school but are not hungry for knowledge are less likely to succeed than those who struggle but have that hunger.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
NIL8 17y ago
Well said. A very motivating speech to those of us without the advantages.
nazgulnarsil 17y ago
people often come out of school thinking that life will apportion its challenges to meet their skill level. after all, that's the sort of designed environment they've been in since they were 5. intelligent people get caught in the trap of relative comparison: thinking that they're awesome simply because they were better than their immediate peers. this is one of the big benefits of going to a "good" school. not that you're receiving a qualitatively better education, but because you're thrown together with some of the best and brightest. this resets your scale at a much higher level. of course the most successful people tend to put in a supreme effort constantly without reference to any artificial scales.
MrDynamite 17y ago
Ofer was a trained Isreli soldier dodging the knife of some local 2-bit thief...probably child's play for him. Though I think he reached a bit with the whole knife-intelligence analogy, I get what he was saying.
Concours 17y ago
generally , peoples who fight to get everything done in life are more successfull than the rest, they learn really early, that life's hard, and you have to fight for everything, so meeting difficulties is just an everyday business, at the other side, peoples who always have access to everything will struggle when the first problems show up, and they just tend to give up.
napierzaza 17y ago
This is going to stay popular for a while... "I have a high IQ" click
- pw0ncakes 17y ago
  Also, it gives people behind computers the opportunity to opine on the intricacies of knife fights.
  - MrHyde 17y ago
    > Rules? In a knife fight? No rules.
    - jurjenh 17y ago
      Rule 1. Avoid the sharp edge...
      - Periodic 17y ago
        Rule 0. Bring a gun and friends. A friend of mine shared a bit of wisdom with me: "In a knife fight, everyone bleeds." I wonder how that could be applied to this metaphor.
        modoc 17y ago
        Only if your opponent is evenly matched with you. Generally knife fights are like sword fights, being more skilled usually means a very short fight.
        X-Istence 17y ago
        No matter who is better skilled if you go into any knife fight, where you or your attacker has a knife and you are not prepared to bleed you are wrong.
        viraptor 17y ago
nkohari 17y ago
I agreed with this, but then I thought of the scene in Indiana Jones with the sword expert... Seriously though, while I think the metaphor is a little weak, the article makes some good points.
- keefe 17y ago
  It fits nicely thinking of that scene as well. Every now and then an Einstein shows up and breaks the regular rules.
araneae 17y ago
It's true that currently, some intelligent people can fail to develop a work ethic because they've found things easy. However, this is not an inherent problem of intelligence; this is an inherent problem with one-size-fits-all schooling. They found things easy because the difficulty level of their challenges were well below them, but that's hypothetically easy to fix; you make their challenges a little above their current level. Practically, though, it's more of problem.
- mattmcknight 17y ago
  Seems like a good problem for a more software oriented learning approach. I remember daydreaming in class wishing I could just go through the book myself and be finished with a grade in a few weeks. I did get this experience in math for a while when I was living in Texas. You didn't have to take any topic upon which you could pass a pretest, and then you got to take a test on a topic as soon as you were ready for it. I was able to zip through multiple grades until I reached some material where I needed instruction. Of course, once I moved up to the next school, I was back in the standard classes, daydreaming.
  - araneae 17y ago
    Was it a public school? That sounds awesome.
Sukotto 17y ago
For me, this is the money quote as I pasted it into my fortune file I knew there were a lot of other people as intelligent as I was, and who had all [the same] advantages [as me]. The only way to be successful then would be to gain a slight advantage over them - I had to work and train harder than they did, I had to get to know more people than they did, I had to learn more about more things that they did. We started off equals, but at some point all the effort I put in started to pay off, and where they stopped improving themselves, I continued, and I got better and better. Where they were afraid to try new things because they would fail, I tried and I got better and knew more, till I was good enough for the job I hold now. I recently figured out that compounding interest works for personal development and business just as well as it works for money.
RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
From Hamming's "You and Your Research": You observe that most great scientists have tremendous drive. I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode's office and said, ``How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?'' He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, "You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years." I simply slunk out of the office! What Bode was saying was this: "Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest." Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. I don't want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime. I took Bode's remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my time for some years trying to work a bit harder and I found, in fact, I could get more work done. I don't like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes; I needed to study. You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. There's no question about this. The entire essay is well worth reading and makes many excellent points. It's been mentioned many times here on HN, and is one of the essays on PG's site: http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=229067 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=229067 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=852405 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=852405 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=915515 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=915515 http://searchyc.com/you+and+your+research+hamming?sort=by_date http://searchyc.com/you+and+your+research+hamming?sort=by_da... Unsurprisingly, it's all over the 'net: http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22You+and+your+research%22+Hamming http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22You+and+your+research%22...
- dschoon 17y ago
  Related, I think, to OP's point: Smart People Can Rationalize Anything: http://habitatchronicles.com/2006/12/smart-people-can-rationalize-anything/ http://habitatchronicles.com/2006/12/smart-people-can-ration...
alexro 17y ago
Intelligence is hardly a knife. One can put a knife aside and try training without it to better improve the "other" skills, same is not true for intelligence. And also, isn't true intelligent people are more inclined to self-improving? I think that declining your experiences is NOT intelligence.
- nagrom 17y ago
  I disagree that you cannot put intelligence (which in this context means mathematics and language skills, hence 'IQ') aside and practice other skills. Developing a sense of empathy and charm can have almost nothing to do with how intelligent you are. Selling a product has almost nothing to do with this version of 'intelligence'. And building a decent level of physical fitness, learning a musical instrument, learning a trade or craft such as carpentry or painting a picture have almost nothing to do with intelligence as defined here. Lots of mathematicians, scientists and academics are hard-working, 'intelligent' people who are completely underdeveloped otherwise - there's an argument for saying that I am one... - so I think that this analogy holds better than you give it credit. I can't help but think that you are using the word 'intelligence' in a different manner to that intended by the post. The trait that you are talking about, applying your intelligence to as many situations as you can, is closer to wisdom, I feel.
  - alexro 17y ago
    Mybe your right. To me intelligence is how one processes information, definitely not how she cracks on problems (this is "smartness"). True intelligence in my view is when one pays attention to what the world tells her and reacts accordingly. It can finally lead to wisdom, probably the absolute intelligence.
keefe 17y ago
To extend the metaphor, you must also keep the knife sharp. It's not enough to just practice and work hard and be intelligent. We must also be insightful into our own lives as humans. At least in my life, my emotional and physical state impact my productivity more than anything else. Sometimes you will see a very dedicated, intelligent person flame out or they get into personal drama and cannot focus like they used to. For me, the answer is to workout 5 days a week and make time for family and women.
dimas 17y ago
I do not see a correlation of level of intelligence and ability to work hard, especially it cannot be said of verse correlation. I do not believe that Intelligence cases man to be lazy and less prepared for challenges. On the contrary, intelligence helps man to cope with challenges and problems if he chooses to do so and has a strong character and mostly important desire and ambitions. Intelligence helps dealing with challenges efficiently and successfully.
pedalpete 17y ago
I disagree that this is about IQ or intelligence. A truly intelligent person understands how little they actually know. It is only those who think they are intelligent who have they ego to think that things will always come easy.
- iBercovich 17y ago
  "A truly intelligent person understands how little they actually know" This is one of those statements that really bother me, almost as much as someone telling me I need to prove the non-existence of God if I want to be an atheist. Yes, intelligent people should have a good understanding of how big and complex the universe is and how little they know compared to the total amount of knowledge available. And given that they are aware of such, it wouldn't make sense for them to walk around claiming they are a big deal. However, people do not always act rationally, even geniuses. There is no negative-correlation between claiming to be smart and being smart, in spite of the obvious contradiction. Claiming to be smart and being cocky about it, it's just a personality trait. Think about this: you IQ is defined and practically unchangeable by the time you are a young teenager, but your personality continues to develop for many more years after that. So there is no way your personality can affect whether you are smart or not. Just a thought though.
  - dgordon 17y ago
    "Think about this: you IQ is defined and practically unchangeable by the time you are a young teenager, but your personality continues to develop for many more years after that. So there is no way your personality can affect whether you are smart or not." I don't know whether the two claims you made are true (the one about IQ may be, the personality one probably is) but "there is no way your personality can affect whether you are smart or not" doesn't follow. It's possible that your personality may often continue to develop after your IQ is mostly set, but only in a highly restricted way dictated by what your personality was before. In fact this seems to me likely to be a common outcome.
Groxx 17y ago
To extend it to a number of recent articles about kids (summarized): -------------------- Kids who were told "you must be smart" when they succeeded were less likely to take on harder tasks later because they might fail, and seem stupid. Kids who were told "you must have worked hard" when they succeeded tackled harder problems later and ended up learning better, because they perceived greater reward for doing better, not looking better. -------------------- If you're smart, but you don't do anything you can fail at, you won't learn. Try. Fail. Try again.
char 17y ago
This is definitely me, though I'm sure I'm not the only one. My laziness didn't come from simply being intelligent, but from everyone always telling me how smart I was. As a result, I was terrified to fail and disappoint. Straight A's were effortless, but I never tried anything 'risky'. This all changed when I started doing start-ups. I learned to fail many, many times, but instead of quitting, I just kept trying again and again. I actually kicked my 20-something year old habit of being lazy, because the reward that comes with doing all the hard work is much greater than the fear of failure.
agbell 17y ago
[Smart people] focus on things they can't fail on, and ignore the other important things.
btilly 17y ago
This was said much better by ESR in The Curse of the Gifted. Yeah, I don't like ESR that much, but this time he actually said something insightful. See http://www.vanadac.com/~dajhorn/novelties/ESR%20-%20Curse%20Of%20The%20Gifted.html http://www.vanadac.com/~dajhorn/novelties/ESR%20-%20Curse%20... for details.
maxer 17y ago
smart people never start startups... due to the fact that they will rationalise the risk as being too great
- johnrob 17y ago
  I wouldn't say never, but I think there are times when ignorance can make you stay the course while rationality would have you quit.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
theBobMcCormick 17y ago
Sigh... this is why including an interesting and memorable anecdote often isn't a good idea. The OP has an interesting article about the relative power of innate gifts (intelligence in this case) vs hard work and effort. It's one of the major focuses of Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers, and certainly a worth topic of discussion on HN... But all anyone seems to want to talk about is the damn knife fight story. Sigh.....
patrickk 17y ago
Nice analogy. I think this is why Steve Blank talk so much about founders 'getting out of the building'. The first instinct of a highly intelligent tech nerd when faced with the challenges of a startup is to bury their head in code and not engage directly with the customer at all, i.e. focus solely on improving the product and not testing if there is a market for the product in the first place: http://startup-marketing.com/the-startup-pyramid/ http://startup-marketing.com/the-startup-pyramid/ Fortunately, Steve Blank has designed his 'Customer Development' roadmap to mitigate against this. For a brief, free synopsis, see: http://www.socrated.com/courses/4?home=1 http://www.socrated.com/courses/4?home=1 This was posted on HN recently enough, and it's brilliant. It sums up the entire Customer Devlopment roadmap quite nicely. I'd still recommend buying the book too though, also excellent.
brandnewlow 17y ago
Or your startup will help you learn how to work hard. I've failed at least 8 times by my count with mine. I'm getting better at this with each time.
sireat 17y ago
Maybe 15 years ago I was watching a knife defense course, the only thing I remember from that course: "Respect the knife" it seemed hilarious at the time, yet at the same time very apt.

384 points by niyazpk 17y ago

icono 17y ago

“Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” - Thomas Edison

philwelch 17y ago
“If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor.” --Nikola Tesla

coryl 17y ago

That Israeli soldier had balls to take on a guy with a knife. I thought it was kinda funny and ironic that he used that situation as an analogy for intelligence. The intelligent thing to do would have been to hand over the money and NOT risk being sliced open lol.

AngryParsley 17y ago
It probably depends on the culture. IIRC in the US you only have a 20% chance of being seriously injured if you cooperate with a robber. I wouldn't be surprised if the odds were different in other countries.
- encoderer 17y ago
  Even if it's 50%... that's the risk.. what's the reward? Saving whatever cash you have on you? He could've taken those odds and handed over the money. And then, if the assailant attacked, he could've sparred with him as he did. This is a silly point to argue, though, because i'd be surprised if the story wasn't tweaked--even just a little--to the authors purposes.
  - ErrantX 17y ago
    What if the odd's of disarming the guy are 95%?
    - yummyfajitas 17y ago
      P( fight | takes wallet ) = 50%. P( no injury | fight ) = 95%. P( injury | hand over wallet ) = P(injury | fight) P(fight | hand over wallet) = 0.05 x 0.5 = 0.025 So P(no injury | hand over wallet) = 97.5%.
      - ErrantX 17y ago
        good point :) However it makes a slight assumption that you still have 95% chance of winning if you hand over the wallet and are then attacked. This is probably not the case as the attacker gains a reasonable advantage by being first (maybe only 2 or 3% in this case) I also assumed the 50% was referring to the percentage chance of being actually harmed rather than having to fight. In which case your stats do break down.
  - dmm 17y ago
    > what's the reward? Living life as something other than a coward.
    - daleharvey 17y ago
      while I dont know what I would do in this situation, I know I wouldnt ever call someone who handed money over to someone who threatened them with a knife a "coward"
      - dmm 17y ago
        I agree with you. I'm not calling anyone a coward, but I would certainly feel like one after being robbed. It's a very intrusive, violating event.
    - coryl 17y ago
- tjic 17y ago
  FBI crime studies show that, no matter how the attacker is armed, your are LESS likely to be harmed if you fight back.
  - tome 17y ago
    I find this very interesting. Could you please cite a reference?
    - mos1 17y ago
      Criminology by Larry J. Siegel disagrees, asserting that while it decreases your chance of being robbed, it increases your chances of being injured or killed. edit: Zimring and Zuehl's study shows that robberies with "active noncooperation" (refusal to hand over money, attempt to flee, resistence with force) had a death rate fourteen higher than those where the victims cooperated, and that victims who simply denied having money (but did not otherwise resist) had a death rate twice as high as those who cooperate.
      - GFischer 17y ago
        I found your quote, said book is on Google Books: http://books.google.com.uy/books?id=9nH0kSUMwGIC&lpg=PA306&ots=6gBiJu1Sq7&dq=Criminology%20by%20Larry%20J.%20Siegel%20fighting%20back&hl=en&pg=PA80#v=onepage&q=fight&f=false http://books.google.com.uy/books?id=9nH0kSUMwGIC&lpg=PA3... However, in the same paragraph it cites Gary Kleck on the use of guns, and it says that potential victims should be encouraged to fight back, and that resistance with a gun is significantly better than the other forms of resistance (and a conclusion that it is better to fight than to flee). It's a surprising conclusion for me (I'm mostly anti-guns, though I'd prefer some other option like, say, tasers, to be available for self-defense)
        mos1 17y ago
        Kleck's advice is for rape victims, not robbery victims. The first citations I can find in google scholar indicate that the odds of being killed during/after rape is roughly two orders of magnitude higher than the odds of being killed during/after a "cooperative" robbery, thus the differing calculus.
ErrantX 17y ago
> The intelligent thing to do would have been to hand over the money and NOT risk being sliced open lol. Not for the Israeli soldier. Consider: he must have been confident in his ability to disarm the guy (based on his assessment that he did not know how to handle the knife). The other option of co-operation gives control to the thief, that's not a good thing if you can avoid it.
- coryl 17y ago
  All the training in the world still doesn't make it a smart decision. You only have to make a mistake once, or be a split second slow, to pay the ultimate price. Consider the thief's motivator is obviously money. Once he has it, anything else is just extra work for him (assuming mental stability). In that case, then the Israeli soldier has no choice but to engage.
  - ErrantX 17y ago
    > You only have to make a mistake once, or be a split second slow, to pay the ultimate price. The difference in skill is so important though. My best mate is into Aikido - some of the masters he's trained with wouldn't flinch if threatened with a gun. It's no threat to them. There is the famous story of the Aikido founder who claimed to be able to dodge bullets - and did so, once dodging an entire firing squad. One of his students invited a game hunter to come and try hit him: the master accepted the challenge and stood opposite the hunter. Hunter stands there holding rifle, swings it up to shoot and the Master dives to the ground shouting "stop stop". When they asked him why he'd given up he said: "that man does not aim" He'd met his match and bowed out. The same lesson applies. The smart move may be to hand over the money - but if you assess the smarter move is to disarm him then you should do so. Also; waiting for an attack or more stress is the worst thing to do. If you have the element of surprise it is a big advantage. > Consider the thief's motivator is obviously money. Often this is not the case - especially in South America. If your mugger has a gun your probably dead. A knife? Depends where you are. > You only have to make a mistake once, or be a split second slow, to pay the ultimate price. Again: if your confident and the odds stack up just go for it. Disarming a knife holder is pretty easy and unless they are really good with it then your unlikely to get badly hurt if your on the offensive.
xcombinator 17y ago
Yeah, the intelligent thing is to surrender and give more power and money to the robber. If people with weapons assault you in Somalia, give them millions of dollars and make it stronger, so they can kill more and assault more people. If someone kidnaps someone of your family, give all the money you earned all your life to them, so they can buy more weapons, and kidnap more people, and make society better. Your ego will boost as you acknowledge that you are not able to fight against other men under any circumstances, that you could always surrender and let them sodomize you if necessary.
- coryl 17y ago
  Yeah, the intelligent thing is to surrender and give more power and money to the robber. How are you giving power to a robber? If people with weapons assault you in Somalia, give them millions of dollars and make it stronger, so they can kill more and assault more people. If people with weapons assault you, your dead. I'm not sure why you're trying to link this situation to the political one in Somalia, they're quite different. If someone kidnaps someone of your family, give all the money you earned all your life to them, so they can buy more weapons, and kidnap more people, and make society better. Tough talk, lets see what you'd do if your family got kidnapped for ransom.
  - Daniel_Newby 17y ago
    "How are you giving power to a robber?" By rewarding them with confidence and money, two of the most powerful factors in behavioral conditioning. "I'm not sure why you're trying to link this situation to the political one in Somalia, they're quite different." They are the same. Coastal Somalia's de facto government is barbarian raiders, funded entirely by people who choose to pay millions for appeasement but not one penny for defense. Hopefully the problem can be solved by arming the merchant fleets with modern weapons (now being tried), otherwise the standard solution will be needed: plow the coastal towns under as fertilizer.
    - coryl 17y ago
      Well organized, well armed Somali pirates hijacking commercial vessels does not equal a guy with a knife robbing you. Did you know the pirates actually have a code of ethics (ironic as that may sound)? Why have they never raped or killed any of their hostages? Because all they want is money. Pay up, and the hostages get let go. Thats how their operation works. Don't even try to compare that to a back alley robbery.
kls 17y ago
I disagree with you assessment, the individual could have intelligently reasoned that disarming the man would make him think twice before confronting another individual. If more individuals took that tack robbers would give more though to what used to be an easy crime. No to mention in certain parts of South America the punishment for robbery can be as sever as murder so if you are going to do it you might as well not leave witnesses. There are a lot of variables that go into the decision to fight and making the decision to do so does not necessarily mean that you have made a foolish or less intelligent choice.
- euroclydon 17y ago
  Solzhenitsyn discusses this attitude extensively in The Gulag Archipelago, both from the perspective of standing up to government thugs that come in the middle of the night to arrest dissidents and when he notes the irony of how military officers recently pulled from the front lines were cowed by common criminals in jail.
  - dgordon 17y ago
    I'm reading The Gulag Archipelago now -- I'm around 530 pages in, so I just read the part about the common criminals beating up and robbing the political prisoners. It undoubtedly helped the thieves a lot that the political prisoners wouldn't stand up for each other, but if for some reason one did stand up to a criminal, his friends would take revenge later. The criminals were effectively united; the political prisoners could not have been more divided. It's a heavy book, both in weight (1800 pages) and ideas, but everyone should read it.
- coryl 17y ago
  Its nice to think that people factor benevolent principles into situations like this. However, when people fight back under high stress situations like a robbery, it is probable that the moment is not about defending society; its about survival. Statistics say if you cooperate, you're less likely to be harmed. If you decide to push a physical confrontation, then you're more likely to be harmed. If you measure the cost/benefit ratio to each action, its a no brainer.
endtime 17y ago
You completely missed the point. The soldier was using the knife as an analogy for intelligence, not his dodging/punching. The robber had the knife, which gave him a false sense of superiority, but he didn't know how to use the knife, so he ended up losing the fight.

nanijoe 17y ago

"People who are born intelligent"....now that's a whole different debate

greyman 17y ago
Yes, that would make it a better title. But the article is surprisingly spot on.

wheels 17y ago

The title is just flame-bait. The message is: (a) being lazy will kill your startup, (b) smart people are lazy. But, well, all you really need to kill a startup is (a), and we already knew that. The next possible conclusion is that maybe smart people underestimate the challenge of starting a startup, but I think everybody does. What's more critical is how people react when they realize they're in over their heads.

ochiba 17y ago
I agree with you to some extent, though I see the post in a different light given this (loosely) related discussion from a few days ago: ...parents that say to a successful child, "Wow, you're so smart" undermine that child's ability to muscle through tougher challenges later on in life. These kids believe they are intrinsically better than their peers, so they don't keep putting effort into themselves. Eventually they encounter a challenge that exceeds their initial abilities and they give up since they don't understand their performance is in their control, not baked into their God-given make-up. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1139309 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1139309
- arethuza 17y ago
  I think the mistake that some parents may make is failing to establish that simply being smart isn't good enough you actually have to do something useful with that intelligence to be rewarded in one way or another.
maxklein 17y ago
My original article was 6 pages long, this is an abridged version. So I was not able to convey all the concepts I would have liked to as clearly as possible. That said, let me throw myself into the fray. It's not about "being lazy". I know people who come in by 7:30 and leave by 9pm. They are not lazy. They work really hard. But they will never be CEO of the company. It's about challenging yourself. Becoming better. Training. When you can do stuff good, then you have to find stuff you can't do as well that is even harder. If I am a Django programmer, after 6 months the challenge in Django is minimal. I can work 10 hours a day on Django and it's not really a challenge anymore. So it's not about laziness really. It's about not being complacent in your current abilities.

brlewis 17y ago

Summary: People who breeze through school but are not hungry for knowledge are less likely to succeed than those who struggle but have that hunger.

deleted 17y ago

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NIL8 17y ago

Well said. A very motivating speech to those of us without the advantages.

nazgulnarsil 17y ago

people often come out of school thinking that life will apportion its challenges to meet their skill level. after all, that's the sort of designed environment they've been in since they were 5. intelligent people get caught in the trap of relative comparison: thinking that they're awesome simply because they were better than their immediate peers. this is one of the big benefits of going to a "good" school. not that you're receiving a qualitatively better education, but because you're thrown together with some of the best and brightest. this resets your scale at a much higher level. of course the most successful people tend to put in a supreme effort constantly without reference to any artificial scales.

MrDynamite 17y ago

Ofer was a trained Isreli soldier dodging the knife of some local 2-bit thief...probably child's play for him. Though I think he reached a bit with the whole knife-intelligence analogy, I get what he was saying.

Concours 17y ago

generally , peoples who fight to get everything done in life are more successfull than the rest, they learn really early, that life's hard, and you have to fight for everything, so meeting difficulties is just an everyday business, at the other side, peoples who always have access to everything will struggle when the first problems show up, and they just tend to give up.

napierzaza 17y ago

This is going to stay popular for a while... "I have a high IQ" click

pw0ncakes 17y ago
Also, it gives people behind computers the opportunity to opine on the intricacies of knife fights.
- MrHyde 17y ago
  > Rules? In a knife fight? No rules.
  - jurjenh 17y ago
    Rule 1. Avoid the sharp edge...
    - Periodic 17y ago
      Rule 0. Bring a gun and friends. A friend of mine shared a bit of wisdom with me: "In a knife fight, everyone bleeds." I wonder how that could be applied to this metaphor.
      - modoc 17y ago
        Only if your opponent is evenly matched with you. Generally knife fights are like sword fights, being more skilled usually means a very short fight.
        X-Istence 17y ago
        No matter who is better skilled if you go into any knife fight, where you or your attacker has a knife and you are not prepared to bleed you are wrong.
        viraptor 17y ago

nkohari 17y ago

I agreed with this, but then I thought of the scene in Indiana Jones with the sword expert... Seriously though, while I think the metaphor is a little weak, the article makes some good points.

keefe 17y ago
It fits nicely thinking of that scene as well. Every now and then an Einstein shows up and breaks the regular rules.

araneae 17y ago

It's true that currently, some intelligent people can fail to develop a work ethic because they've found things easy. However, this is not an inherent problem of intelligence; this is an inherent problem with one-size-fits-all schooling. They found things easy because the difficulty level of their challenges were well below them, but that's hypothetically easy to fix; you make their challenges a little above their current level. Practically, though, it's more of problem.

mattmcknight 17y ago
Seems like a good problem for a more software oriented learning approach. I remember daydreaming in class wishing I could just go through the book myself and be finished with a grade in a few weeks. I did get this experience in math for a while when I was living in Texas. You didn't have to take any topic upon which you could pass a pretest, and then you got to take a test on a topic as soon as you were ready for it. I was able to zip through multiple grades until I reached some material where I needed instruction. Of course, once I moved up to the next school, I was back in the standard classes, daydreaming.
- araneae 17y ago
  Was it a public school? That sounds awesome.

Sukotto 17y ago

For me, this is the money quote as I pasted it into my fortune file I knew there were a lot of other people as intelligent as I was, and who had all [the same] advantages [as me]. The only way to be successful then would be to gain a slight advantage over them - I had to work and train harder than they did, I had to get to know more people than they did, I had to learn more about more things that they did. We started off equals, but at some point all the effort I put in started to pay off, and where they stopped improving themselves, I continued, and I got better and better. Where they were afraid to try new things because they would fail, I tried and I got better and knew more, till I was good enough for the job I hold now. I recently figured out that compounding interest works for personal development and business just as well as it works for money.

RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago

From Hamming's "You and Your Research": You observe that most great scientists have tremendous drive. I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode's office and said, ``How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?'' He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, "You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years." I simply slunk out of the office! What Bode was saying was this: "Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest." Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. I don't want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime. I took Bode's remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my time for some years trying to work a bit harder and I found, in fact, I could get more work done. I don't like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes; I needed to study. You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. There's no question about this. The entire essay is well worth reading and makes many excellent points. It's been mentioned many times here on HN, and is one of the essays on PG's site: http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=229067 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=229067 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=852405 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=852405 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=915515 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=915515 http://searchyc.com/you+and+your+research+hamming?sort=by_date http://searchyc.com/you+and+your+research+hamming?sort=by_da... Unsurprisingly, it's all over the 'net: http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22You+and+your+research%22+Hamming http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22You+and+your+research%22...

dschoon 17y ago
Related, I think, to OP's point: Smart People Can Rationalize Anything: http://habitatchronicles.com/2006/12/smart-people-can-rationalize-anything/ http://habitatchronicles.com/2006/12/smart-people-can-ration...

alexro 17y ago

Intelligence is hardly a knife. One can put a knife aside and try training without it to better improve the "other" skills, same is not true for intelligence. And also, isn't true intelligent people are more inclined to self-improving? I think that declining your experiences is NOT intelligence.

nagrom 17y ago
I disagree that you cannot put intelligence (which in this context means mathematics and language skills, hence 'IQ') aside and practice other skills. Developing a sense of empathy and charm can have almost nothing to do with how intelligent you are. Selling a product has almost nothing to do with this version of 'intelligence'. And building a decent level of physical fitness, learning a musical instrument, learning a trade or craft such as carpentry or painting a picture have almost nothing to do with intelligence as defined here. Lots of mathematicians, scientists and academics are hard-working, 'intelligent' people who are completely underdeveloped otherwise - there's an argument for saying that I am one... - so I think that this analogy holds better than you give it credit. I can't help but think that you are using the word 'intelligence' in a different manner to that intended by the post. The trait that you are talking about, applying your intelligence to as many situations as you can, is closer to wisdom, I feel.
- alexro 17y ago
  Mybe your right. To me intelligence is how one processes information, definitely not how she cracks on problems (this is "smartness"). True intelligence in my view is when one pays attention to what the world tells her and reacts accordingly. It can finally lead to wisdom, probably the absolute intelligence.

keefe 17y ago

To extend the metaphor, you must also keep the knife sharp. It's not enough to just practice and work hard and be intelligent. We must also be insightful into our own lives as humans. At least in my life, my emotional and physical state impact my productivity more than anything else. Sometimes you will see a very dedicated, intelligent person flame out or they get into personal drama and cannot focus like they used to. For me, the answer is to workout 5 days a week and make time for family and women.

dimas 17y ago

I do not see a correlation of level of intelligence and ability to work hard, especially it cannot be said of verse correlation. I do not believe that Intelligence cases man to be lazy and less prepared for challenges. On the contrary, intelligence helps man to cope with challenges and problems if he chooses to do so and has a strong character and mostly important desire and ambitions. Intelligence helps dealing with challenges efficiently and successfully.

pedalpete 17y ago

I disagree that this is about IQ or intelligence. A truly intelligent person understands how little they actually know. It is only those who think they are intelligent who have they ego to think that things will always come easy.

iBercovich 17y ago
"A truly intelligent person understands how little they actually know" This is one of those statements that really bother me, almost as much as someone telling me I need to prove the non-existence of God if I want to be an atheist. Yes, intelligent people should have a good understanding of how big and complex the universe is and how little they know compared to the total amount of knowledge available. And given that they are aware of such, it wouldn't make sense for them to walk around claiming they are a big deal. However, people do not always act rationally, even geniuses. There is no negative-correlation between claiming to be smart and being smart, in spite of the obvious contradiction. Claiming to be smart and being cocky about it, it's just a personality trait. Think about this: you IQ is defined and practically unchangeable by the time you are a young teenager, but your personality continues to develop for many more years after that. So there is no way your personality can affect whether you are smart or not. Just a thought though.
- dgordon 17y ago
  "Think about this: you IQ is defined and practically unchangeable by the time you are a young teenager, but your personality continues to develop for many more years after that. So there is no way your personality can affect whether you are smart or not." I don't know whether the two claims you made are true (the one about IQ may be, the personality one probably is) but "there is no way your personality can affect whether you are smart or not" doesn't follow. It's possible that your personality may often continue to develop after your IQ is mostly set, but only in a highly restricted way dictated by what your personality was before. In fact this seems to me likely to be a common outcome.

Groxx 17y ago

To extend it to a number of recent articles about kids (summarized): -------------------- Kids who were told "you must be smart" when they succeeded were less likely to take on harder tasks later because they might fail, and seem stupid. Kids who were told "you must have worked hard" when they succeeded tackled harder problems later and ended up learning better, because they perceived greater reward for doing better, not looking better. -------------------- If you're smart, but you don't do anything you can fail at, you won't learn. Try. Fail. Try again.

char 17y ago

This is definitely me, though I'm sure I'm not the only one. My laziness didn't come from simply being intelligent, but from everyone always telling me how smart I was. As a result, I was terrified to fail and disappoint. Straight A's were effortless, but I never tried anything 'risky'. This all changed when I started doing start-ups. I learned to fail many, many times, but instead of quitting, I just kept trying again and again. I actually kicked my 20-something year old habit of being lazy, because the reward that comes with doing all the hard work is much greater than the fear of failure.

agbell 17y ago

[Smart people] focus on things they can't fail on, and ignore the other important things.

btilly 17y ago

This was said much better by ESR in The Curse of the Gifted. Yeah, I don't like ESR that much, but this time he actually said something insightful. See http://www.vanadac.com/~dajhorn/novelties/ESR%20-%20Curse%20Of%20The%20Gifted.html http://www.vanadac.com/~dajhorn/novelties/ESR%20-%20Curse%20... for details.

maxer 17y ago

smart people never start startups... due to the fact that they will rationalise the risk as being too great

johnrob 17y ago
I wouldn't say never, but I think there are times when ignorance can make you stay the course while rationality would have you quit.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

theBobMcCormick 17y ago

Sigh... this is why including an interesting and memorable anecdote often isn't a good idea. The OP has an interesting article about the relative power of innate gifts (intelligence in this case) vs hard work and effort. It's one of the major focuses of Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers, and certainly a worth topic of discussion on HN... But all anyone seems to want to talk about is the damn knife fight story. Sigh.....

patrickk 17y ago

Nice analogy. I think this is why Steve Blank talk so much about founders 'getting out of the building'. The first instinct of a highly intelligent tech nerd when faced with the challenges of a startup is to bury their head in code and not engage directly with the customer at all, i.e. focus solely on improving the product and not testing if there is a market for the product in the first place: http://startup-marketing.com/the-startup-pyramid/ http://startup-marketing.com/the-startup-pyramid/ Fortunately, Steve Blank has designed his 'Customer Development' roadmap to mitigate against this. For a brief, free synopsis, see: http://www.socrated.com/courses/4?home=1 http://www.socrated.com/courses/4?home=1 This was posted on HN recently enough, and it's brilliant. It sums up the entire Customer Devlopment roadmap quite nicely. I'd still recommend buying the book too though, also excellent.

brandnewlow 17y ago

Or your startup will help you learn how to work hard. I've failed at least 8 times by my count with mine. I'm getting better at this with each time.

sireat 17y ago

Maybe 15 years ago I was watching a knife defense course, the only thing I remember from that course: "Respect the knife" it seemed hilarious at the time, yet at the same time very apt.