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Ow. That's pretty painful. Let me explain. You claim that 99.99% of the population is really dumb. You use Wolfram as an example of someone in the 0.01% who squ
by qwertyuiop924 10y ago
Ow. That's pretty painful. Let me explain. You claim that 99.99% of the population is really dumb. You use Wolfram as an example of someone in the 0.01% who squandered their talent. This shows that being in 0.01% percent won't necessarily give you a strong advantage, and the advantages you get are easy to squander.
You than say:
>It turns out that human nature is such that being really smart doesn't give you a high probability of being right about things, especially when the truth is not favorable to you, just a slightly better one.
So if being smart won't help you much with being right about things, and there are other skills that can better help you be right about things (there are), than optimizing for intelligence isn't a reasonable goal, because there are other abilities you can optimize for which would give you a greater advantage.
What did I miss?
- kragen 10y agoThere are situations in which being smart is necessary but not sufficient to be right about something, and there are things other than being right about things that being smart enables you to do. Some of them, like cleverly rationalizing your errors, are counterproductive, but others, like coming up with good scientific hypotheses to test, are not. But I wasn't really talking about your own intelligence at all. I was talking about how your judgment of someone's credibility should depend on their intelligence. My apologies for hurting your feelings with my crappy comment.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoThanks for clarifying. And no, you didn't really hurt my feelings that much :-). If my feelings were so easily hurt, I'd have stopped commenting years ago. As it stands, my comments aren't always smart (in retrospect, some of them are downright idiotic), but I do my best.