16 ms·

The Curse of Smart People (2014)

246 points by luu 10y ago

Animats 10y ago
The author may have been headed somewhere with that idea, but he didn't get there.
- barrkel 10y ago
  I think there was a germ of a theory why companies full of smart people do dumb things, or are sometimes evil, or something like that; but it didn't get that explicit because it might criticise the employer too directly.
  - Profan 10y ago
    Tentative new title: "The Curse of Stifled People" Well, maybe that sounds a bit mean, but the constant fear of saying something wrong about one's employer (past or present) is a bit sad sometimes.
- untilHellbanned 10y ago
  Oh the irony of poorly articulating one's smartness. This is smart in the "excellent sheep" Deresiewiczian sense (1). That's what goog/face/harvard is a safe harbor for. Oh and smart people don't sit around thinking about who's smart. That's just some garden variety vestigial junior Olympiad wannabe BS in action. https://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/08/24/books/review/excellent-sheep-by-william-deresiewicz.html https://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/08/24/books/review/excellent...
BrailleHunting 10y ago
Perhaps "smart" is too un-nuanced by conflating the real performance of many types of intelligence areas (social, emotional, political, spatial, logical, etc.) into a singular narrow attribution based on brief interactions? (Also yet another example highlighting where language constrains thinking.) And therefore the overvaluing of maximizing possession of one strength at the detriment of avoiding complementary strengths in other areas? Effectively, a personality monoculture where greater personality diversity would likely have tangible benefits (leadership, sales, marketing, strategy, design, etc.)
- moxious 10y ago
  Smart is a hard thing to talk about. Like the concept of "quality". There are hundreds of different kinds, and I can't really describe it, but you and I both know it when we see it. I can forgive them for being overly broad with "smart". You're also right that it's not one thing, but it's just hard to talk about, because it's like a wet bar of soap.
  - throwaway91111 10y ago
    The human brain is insanely good at consistent dimensional reduction. Our conscious interactions struggle with the same task; it's Herculean to approach general purpose ordering in many-dimensional situations.
- ThrustVectoring 10y ago
  IMO "smart" is more of a social role than anything else. There's a specific sort of behavior that you have to do in order for people to think that you're "smart". Like, take George W. Bush for example - he's about two standard deviations above average in intelligence, but his public-facing persona lines up much better with "regular guy" and so people misunderestimate him. You can find similar examples from all sorts of public figures - when you dig into them, there's way more there than their persona suggests. Kanye West, Lady Gaga, Marilyn Manson, Dolph Lundgren, and more.
234dd57d2c8dba 10y ago
Here's a summary for why smart people are "cursed": If you are two or 3 standard deviations about the mean, you'll quickly realize society is optimized and caters to the average intelligence. You'll find it very boring and frustrating having to deal with rules and decisions that do not make sense. You must continually push yourself to stay entertained and meet like-minded people otherwise you'll get very depressed that everything is meaningless. -t. "smart" person
- bitexploder 10y ago
  This almost seems like a cliche or a troll. I think smarts also lead people to miss the world around them and trivialize anything that isnt a "challenge". To some very smart people I know -- chill out and laern to enjoy the absurdity and mundane as well as the challenge. Be bored once in a while. Know satisfaction in the simple.
  - jakobegger 10y ago
    To me that doesn't sound like the curse of the "smart" people, it sounds more like the curse of the arrogant people. Smart people understand that there is a reason that pointless / absurd rules are there. Usually the reason is not that everyone else is too stupid. The problem is usually that people have conflicting interests, and there just isn't a simple solution.
    - wolfgke 10y ago
      > Smart people understand that there is a reason that pointless / absurd rules are there. Understanding that there is a reason (which is often that it was made as a political compromise in a distant past) does not imply that one tolerates/accepts it. As I hinted understanding the reason can also mean that one gets a much deeper hate for the rules.
      - mr_luc 10y ago
        And that can be the case just as much even if there is no simple win-win solution to the problem. One can hate the rules -- for their injustice, ineffectiveness, abstract immorality, etc -- and at the same time realize that the rules are an inevitable result of the complex system we inhabit. As a student of history and humanity and a free moral agent, you can recognize the reality we live in, acknowledge that it contains many no-win situations, and still hate the status quo even if you don't have a solution for how to fix it, because it deserves to be hated.
WalterBright 10y ago
> very easy to describe all your successes (project not canceled) in terms of your team's greatness, and all your failures (project canceled) in terms of other people's capriciousness. I see this belief in probably about 80% of people I encounter, and it has little correlation with how smart one is. I like to hang out with people who take responsibility for their failures rather than complaining about how circumstance, "The Man", or other people have it in for them. Such people are far more interesting. Unsurprisingly, they're also far more successful.
- Nition 10y ago
  It's the same kind of thing as how when you accidentally cut someone off while driving it's because they were in your blindspot and you're having a bad day and it's the first time that's ever happened etc etc... and when someone else cuts you off they're an idiot who shouldn't be on the road and they probably always drive badly.
  - 0xcde4c3db 10y ago
    This is called the fundamental attribution error [1]. I thought it was a well-established phenomenon, but apparently its validity is contested. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
  - brokenmachine 10y ago
    I feel like I get cut off sometimes multiple times per journey, while I only cut off somebody perhaps once a month, if even that often. Everyone else is a terrible driver!
- Swizec 10y ago
  I like to put it and think of it this way: Other people aren't for or against you, they're for themselves. Focus on those whose goals align with your goals. Then help them.
  - Spooky23 10y ago
yakult 10y ago
My pet theory: much of 'gut feelings' and intuition boils down to having our internal black box predict the behavior of other people. When you are 'average', this often simplifies to reasoning about what you would do in the same circumstances, which is relatively easy. If you are 3 standard deviations out, you'll have to compensate that consciously, which is inaccurate and difficult and slow. This is like how UI designers have difficulty to discern which parts of their UI are hard to use, while the end user could do so effortlessly. Smart people end up having to run SmartPerson + NormalPersonVM(pre-alpha) in parallel. Normal people just run NormalPerson natively. Then they complain about bugs and slowness ('smart people are out of touch with reality!', etc.)
- jstewartmobile 10y ago
  The few people I know to be whole-enchilada smart know ordinary people better than ordinary people know themselves. I think parent's pet theory only applies to a subspecies of google-smart.
- yyhhsj0521 10y ago
  Agree. One of my friends is pretty smart (at least, above above-average) and works in the tech industry. When he was young he had to "simulate" his emotions to "look like a normal person." He had to think what normal people would feel under his situation and tried to feel that way (or tried to make himself looked feeling that way in front of people). For example, he thinks that crying on funerals is illogical, because the dead are dead already, nothing can bring them back and the dead would surely rather see people they love live happily instead of in sorrow. But no. Until he escaped from the environment he was born he had to live like a normal person, and tried to cry on funerals.
  - benaiah 10y ago
    Not to diagnose your friend, but more as a general note: that kind of perspective sounds (from my admittedly unqualified perspective) much more typical of people on the autism spectrum or certain other non-neurotypicals than it does of "smart people" in general. It might be worth noting that there's some (mostly-anecdotal) indications that tech, particularly programming itself, may have higher incidence of people on the spectrum than other fields.
tabeth 10y ago
I wonder how much human potential we're wasting by putting "smart people" on a pedestal instead of having higher and better utilization of regular people. Regular people are far more capable than working at McDonalds, Walmart, Amazon, or whatever wage slave job BigCo is offering. It's pretty hard to prove, but I bet that we're barely even at 1% utilization of humanity's potential, given our technology and population.
- sqeaky 10y ago
  Doesn't putting smart people on pedestal's, like in charge a the design of tool, enable them to make things that can be part of the workflow of regular people?
- czep 10y ago
  Imagine if the world's nail salon workers could spend their time curing cancer, fighting hunger or homelessness instead of the useless primping of rich people's hands and feet. If we only had an economic system to allow everyone to reach their fullest potential despite circumstances of birth, and social priorities where personal vanity was not placed above the good of humanity. In 500 years time maybe we'll get there.
  - wolfgke 10y ago
    > Imagine if the world's nail salon workers could spend their time curing cancer, fighting hunger or homelessness instead of the useless primping of rich people's hands and feet. The nail salon workers could use their free time for this purpose if they wanted. They (perhaps with some rare exceptions) don't do it. On the other hand: The fact that someone is willing to give money to the nail salon workers for getting hands/feet pimped shows that someone values this kind of work.
    - rickycook 10y ago
      well, i think the point is two-fold. first, that it can be more difficult for people to get an education (and in many cases, a professional job) depending on their background and thus have a much higher barrier to "cure cancer" type work. simply saying that they could is all well and good, but it ignores some harsh realities of life. second, the fact that people value something does not necessarily make it important. so what if someone values their nails being done? who does it benefit? capital is a distribution of resources in order to maximise output. some of that output is chaff, but i'd argue that less chaff and more useful product is better for a society to prosper.
stianstr 10y ago
Very true. I use to say that I'm too smart to be confident :-P
arjie 10y ago
Author takes issue with the following attitude in a certain way. > Smart people, computer types anyway, tend to come down on the side of people who don't like emotions. Programmers, who do logic for a living. There's another way to take issue with that, though. In _The Righteous Mind_, Jonathan Haidt argues that emotion-processing is critical to decision making (and that we use emotion-processing to guide reason), citing some work that people with damaged emotion processing suffer analysis paralysis on simple tasks. It's an interesting idea. Of course, emotion processing etc. is also the stuff that causes us to have a negative emotional reaction on seeing weird code. The rest of the book argues as to how we form moral opinions, but that part was interesting without the stuff about morality.
- throwaway91111 10y ago
  I wonder if you can overcome that type of decision paralysis with an RNG. Paralysis may mean stalemate; an emotional response wouldn't be meaningful in goal terms (though the side effects of emotional satisfaction may be very meaningful).
- bootload 10y ago
  " In _The Righteous Mind_, Jonathan Haidt argues that emotion-processing is critical to decision making (and that we use emotion-processing to guide reason), citing some work that people with damaged emotion processing suffer analysis paralysis on simple tasks." The balance between logic, emotion and decisiveness is a theme explored in Star Trek S1E16, "The Galileo Seven" [0], [1] Spock taking command and following ^flawlewss logic^ almost gets them marooned and killed. I have a theory smart people who assume a rigid logical mindset make the worst leaders. Reference [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Galileo_Seven https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Galileo_Seven [1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708465/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708465/
jstewartmobile 10y ago
My experience has been that most "smart" people are actually high-functioning autistic savants. I mean, if they were actually +2 std deviations above on the whole enchilada, their lives wouldn't be such a mess. You can make a lot of money and still be a hot mess. Look at celebrities. Alpha nerds are just a variation on the theme.
- rak00n 10y ago
  I don't disagree with you. But celebrities have a far wider audience. Your rockstar programmer doesn't have that. A lot of social problems disappear when you're accepted as a famous accomplished person. So a celebrity can be weird and not face the same social isolation.
  - jstewartmobile 10y ago
    As an alpha-nerd, social isolation is just a symptom. The pathology is that we started with a weak arm and a strong arm, and most of our parents and teachers downplayed the importance of the weak arm while encouraging us to work the absolute shit out of the strong one. Then they send us out into the world looking like teenagers who just discovered xtube. The world can smell weakness and throws loads of curve-balls at the weak arm, and most of us never notice because we're still too obsessed with the other arm.
  - _null 10y ago
    Technical skills have higher economic value but lower social status than skills in the arts. An eccentric painter or musician achieves a level of cachet that an eccentric programmer doesn't. Dysfunction has a certain glamour if you have artistic talent; there's no such thing as a tortured engineer.
- InclinedPlane 10y ago
  I think that might be colored by the "culture" of tech workers where you happen to be, that has certainly not been my experience. The smart folks I've met in tech, including the outright geniuses, have been almost universally well-rounded with a strong set of "soft skills" and typically a widely varied set of interests outside of their work specialty. Indeed, I'd describe them as "fully fleshed out human beings", perhaps more so than the average human being in fact. The number of "smart tech workers" I've come across who I would describe as "high-functioning autistic savants" I could count on the fingers of one hand, and even then that description would be a decidedly uncharitable characterization for them.
tempestn 10y ago
The lesser known Curse of Smart People, but one that follows directly from this this article, involves hours spent reading about wifi routers and signal processing.
bootload 10y ago
"What I have learned, working here, is that smart, successful people are cursed. The curse is confidence." Things to remember when smart people appear confident: - the correlation between confidence and ability to actually "do" something can be low - smart people can live in their heads - smart people can overestimate their expertise in areas they may be familiar or ignorant of, equally - street smarts can kick smart, smarts arse A quick question I ask is, "Have you done this before?". I use this question to determine perceived verses actual smartness. Here's an example of why you need to do this. Back in '10 I went on a 220km hike from 200 meters above sea level to 2,228 (about 7300ft). [0] I was with a mixed group of people, fit, smart and motivated. On the last day, mid point to the final destination, we took a photo at the summit of the highest point in Australia. Lots of smart people in that photo, PhDs, Masters students etc. By the end of the day, one suffered frost bite, three got lost and of the finishers who covered the entire distance, maybe 20% came away without some sort of injury. Why? "Have you done this before?" A lot of smart people ^thought^ running and riding then walking 30+Km/day was easy. A lot didn't think going into an alpine area in early autumn would be cold. The PhD with blue lips who I marched off the coldest place in Australia wore jeans and jumper, had taken a 600ml container of water and no food. [1] The three who sparked a search, decided to take break in a hut, but not inform anybody. [2] Now nobody really got hurt or lost. But they could have, had luck not been on their side. Smartness breeds a certain type of arrogance that left unchecked, can get you into trouble quickly. Time and time again I remind myself, depending on the circumstances, "street smarts" whip "smart smarts'" arse. Reference [0] @samh, "Australian Economist who lost bet will walk from Parliament to Mount Kosciousko" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1126054 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1126054 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1126078 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1126078 [1] At the top the wind was 50km/hr and in fog. https://flickr.com/photos/bootload/4603144874/in/album-72157623796441755 https://flickr.com/photos/bootload/4603144874/in/album-72157... [2] Tail-end charlie (me) also missed checking inside the hut. https://flickr.com/photos/bootload/4797709801/in/album-72157623796441755/ https://flickr.com/photos/bootload/4797709801/in/album-72157... [3] https://flickr.com/photos/bootload/sets/72157624081287855 https://flickr.com/photos/bootload/sets/72157624081287855 [4] https://flickr.com/photos/bootload/sets/72157624081287855 https://flickr.com/photos/bootload/sets/72157624081287855
- 10y ago
camdenlock 10y ago
> Working at a large, successful company lets you keep your isolation. If you choose, you can just ignore all the inconvenient facts about the world. Is this why social justice extremism is so popular in Silicon Valley? I mean, social justice is critical to a well-functioning and fair society, but the brand of it that SV folks tend to sell is fairly detached from the realities of living in a human civilization.
- kmicklas 10y ago
  What do you mean by this?
  - mfukar 10y ago
    As well-off as people are, they tend to view problems they don't face as solved. Therefore they turn their attention to what _they_ view as a problem. In a very crude example, the Bay Area people don't care about the wars in the Middle East - they're not a problem as far as they're concerned. Their exclusion from places they want to work and the climbing housing prices though, yuck.
bambax 10y ago
Based on this article, the curse of "smart" people appears to be lack of self-awareness.
espeed 10y ago
Hubris born of success (overconfidence, arrogance) is "stage 1" in How the Mighty Fall by Jim Collins: https://charlierose.com/videos/12443 https://charlierose.com/videos/12443 Humility (know you don't know, always be asking questions), a focus on the greater good (is it about you or something greater than you?), and having a "growth mindset" are part of the antidote: https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/01/29/carol-dweck-mindset/ https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/01/29/carol-dweck-mindset...
nerdlogic 10y ago
I like how everyone has a different opinion about how a smart person has to be, but in most cases people are referring to certain traits that do not correlate with intelligence (and frequently could indicate deviation in either direction), and that's plausible since intelligence is such an abstract notion. For instance, recognising patterns, and acting on those patterns are two different things. One might notice that acting on the patterns can bring him success/economical safety and what he considers joy or effortlessly having goods. But the other one can make a step further and consider that in the steady state he will not be any happier. If both happen to make this logical step, they might have to make a decision based on their preferences, which is highly subjective. For me, intelligence is not comparable. To be more honest, I think there is only a partial order, and for that, I'm not sure.
- pizza 10y ago
  A worldview is like a sampled model of an ultrafilter which is in reality more like a leaky sieve
dschuetz 10y ago
Reading the article, I wasn't sure which ones were the smart people there: those who are confident that they are smart, hence successful, or those who constantly question their smarts, but are successful nonetheless?
soufron 10y ago
LOL. What you call "intelligence" is simply being a prick :)
soufron 10y ago
I am fascinated by the number of comments made by people who actually think they're so smart, it's the society (made of billions of people) that's dumb. 1 Mind > 7.5B Minds ? I tend to think these companies don't hire smart people. They hire psychologically deviant people who will both comply without a problem, and who will do mean things to others because they have a superiority complex... a little like german engineers during WWII ;)
- InclinedPlane 10y ago
  I've worked at several such companies, and they honestly do have a ton of incredibly incredibly smart people working there. However, it takes a lot more than simply smooshing a bunch of incredibly smart people together to produce greatness. It takes good leadership, good judgment, good planning, and so on and so on. Unfortunately, at many of those same places, crammed full of smart people, a lot of those other elements are missing. Management tends to be mediocre at best. Planning tends to be about the same. Corporate culture tends to be oppressive. And so on. All of these things cut down the effectiveness of smart people, and the end result is often a lot of mediocre products with only a few flashes of brilliance here and there. The core problem is that once you scale beyond a single person working alone the mechanisms and nature of cooperation between individuals starts to dominate the end result as much as individual capability does. And while smart people might help offset poor corporate structure, policies, and management, it's only marginally effective. P.S. Also, sometimes insisting on hiring exclusively very smart tech workers can be a coping mechanism for institutional failures (and thus somewhat of a red flag). It's more or less a truism that corporate culture and corporate managerial processes are more or less unaccountable, not at all introspective, heavily resistant to criticism, and even more resistant to change. But if your management chain and corporate culture is so incredibly screwed up that it becomes a drag on effectiveness and productivity how do you cope with that? And the easiest answer is actually a somewhat surprising one. You hire the absolute best people you possibly can. Not to make changes or make things better, oh no. But rather to squeeze the most out of the system as it stands. Smart, hyper-competent people can succeed even in the face of tremendous challenges. Including terrible internal tools (a common problem everywhere), terrible processes (also common), terrible management (ubiquitous), and terrible leadership (also ubiquitous). A workplace filled with smart people isn't necessarily a good sign. It could mean it's a horribly dysfunctional place that only works because all of the individual cogs in the machine are the best they could possibly be.
soufron 10y ago
I also tend to think you DONT need 5 days of interview to detect that someone is smart... ;)
InclinedPlane 10y ago
I worked at Microsoft too, in one of the best divisions full of the smartest developers in the world. I worked with some truly amazing individuals, some outright geniuses in their field, in fact. Some of the lessons I learned from my coworkers while I was there I still carry with me and value very heavily. But I wouldn't say I was awed as the author was. Nor was it my experience that there was a distinct lack of clueless people. I interacted with a number of folks that didn't have what I would consider a full toolkit of talent, skills, experience, and judgment (maybe my standards are higher than the author's, I don't know). I'd say the problems that exist in that environment and in that group of people (and other similar groups at dev shops all around the world) go well beyond the ability to rationalize anything. The biggest problem I've experienced consistently, everywhere, is a lack of caring about the right things. A lot of engineers live in a little fantasy bubble divorced from the real world. Separated from the consequences of their actions, separated from a connection with the actual practical use of their product by real humans. They too often don't have an understanding of how what they're working on fits into the "real world" and instead just enjoy twiddling the knobs and levers behind the scenes because that's a fun hobby for them. A big problem I've seen consistently is the willingness to accept the status quo regardless of the way it is because it "works". And this is one case where being "smart" and capable can actually be a detriment. Being smart and capable means that you can take an incredibly broken tool or process and still make productive use out of it. And to some extent there's a pride or a bravado that comes from doing so (relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/378/ https://xkcd.com/378/). But that sort of thing is self-defeating. It doesn't matter that you can get by with horrible internal tools, because in reality existing in that state destroys an enormous amount of productivity. Programmers too easily fall into the trap of thinking that the hard way is the better way, and you see this in code too where devs think they're smart by writing complicated "sophisticated" code for no good reason when plain old run of the mill highly readable code would be vastly preferred. As the author touches on the curse of excessive confidence is also a big problem. You see a lot of developers who fall into the know-it-all trap and think that because they completed a challenging degree program, work in a highly paid highly impactful field, and have some degree of expertise in some tiny corner of that field that somehow that makes them einsteins or something. The reality is that no matter how much you as an individual can possibly know your ignorance will always outweigh your knowledge by huge orders of magnitude, even within a given field. A big problem this causes is developers not realizing their limitations in certain areas and just papering over those problems, perhaps even thinking that they are fundamental to the discipline or the field in general. I've seen countless examples of systems put together by very smart very competent devs who had some significant gap in their overall skillset and instead of seeking outside help or advice or taking the time to learn something new they instead just came up with some horrible hack rooted in stuff they were comfortable with but applied in a totally inappropriate manner. And those hacks are often so deep into the system that it takes a ton of work to refactor them out and away, on top of all the problems caused by the system being fundamentally flawed in design. Whereas spending just a few days or a week of time learning something new could have resulted in a much more robust system from the outset, if they'd simply have checked their confidence a bit.
watwut 10y ago
It sounds to me a bit that the company had a culture where premium is given on looking smart - so people took great efforts to look smart. Which lead to rationalizations and inability to admit mistakes (I can not just say that I made decision cause I did not knew better, I have to find smart sounding reasons). Any positions higher then junior programmer needs to make intuitive decisions. Everything above junior programmer position deals with uncertainties - whether it is prioritization, organizational decision (who to hire, what position to put new person in), architectural decisions when working with new technology and so on and so forth. You make a lot of value judgement. If everyone is pretending all those decisions were logical, then there is collective denial going on. That is not the same thing as everyone being smarter then all other companies around. Tl;dr: A lot of rationalization going on is not consequence of everyone being smart, it is flag of workplace where people cant afford to talk honestly about mistakes and decisions.
nradov 10y ago
Outside of software, my favorite example of this principle is Donald Rumsfeld. He's clearly one of the most brilliant people to have ever worked in government, and yet through overconfidence he contributed to the worst foreign policy blunders in modern US history and got thousands of people killed. So it seems that being smart doesn't necessarily help with making good decisions, especially in complex situations with incomplete data.
- pizza 10y ago
  I'm not saying I'm skeptical, but I am saying I want to learn more about Rumseld's brilliance.
deleted 10y ago
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norswap 10y ago
But isn't the fact of being smart and working at a big company selecting for exactly this trait?
QuantumRoar 10y ago
I strongly believe that we should not easily segregate people into a smart kind and a not-so-smart kind. Intelligence comes in many ways and the genetics and upbringing of a person will make their intelligence manifest in different ways. Someone being good at something, does not automatically equate to a high level of intelligence or smartness but rather a high degree of familiarity with the topic. Familiarity can be acquired either through a lot of practice or from a predisposition to understand quickly, which is intelligence or smartness. However, what can be said is that a person who is good at almost everything, necessarily has to be smart because there wouldn't be any time to practice everything in depth. Conversely, I'd never call a person smart who's good at one thing but doesn't understand anything else. The author says that smart, successful people are cursed with over-confidence due to them knowing one thing very well. But how can you call a person smart if they do not even possess the ability to properly self-reflect. Is that not the one thing that should define smartness? Rationalizing things away, ignoring signs that interfere with one's world-view, and being over-confident are all traits of not-so-smart people. Just because you know how to code, does not mean you are smart. I'd say the result of this anecdote should've been that it turns out that people can be good at their jobs and be idiots at the same time.
- ihaveahadron 10y ago
  It's just a mediocre intelligence guy complaining about all the stuff he doesn't understand.
- kristianc 10y ago
  > The author says that smart, successful people are cursed with over-confidence due to them knowing one thing very well. But how can you call a person smart if they do not even possess the ability to properly self-reflect. Is that not the one thing that should define smartness? I've more often heard the opposite stated, that people who are smart have a tendency to see multiple sides of every issue and struggle to come to decisions, whereas people who are less smart are more prone to see complex things in black and white. If only we had a readily available example of that phenomenon...
  - 10y ago
pizza 10y ago
How many rabbit holes have I been down, and would I prefer discovering more of them or following one to its end?
faragon 10y ago
Being "smart" is not easy. From conflicts with others because of Dunning-Kruger effect [1], because your own ego (no matter how "smart" you think you are, you're not that "smart" in the whole "smartness spectrum"), etc. So in the end, most "smart" people learn to deal with his own ego, idiots, and just try to be nice, because life is very short for fussing and fighting [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qyclqo_AV2M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qyclqo_AV2M
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unstatusthequo 10y ago
"bing around a bit..." Lol is that really a thing?
redant 10y ago
The author and some comments tend to confuse skills, success, and intelligence. I think the author describes successful and skillful software engineers who are far from being highly intelligent. It just happened that their skills of constructing program is highly valuable in the current market conditions. Which feeds their arrogance and leads to all kinds of ugly consequences. The hardware engineers of the 20-th century had the same issues. The main hero of the movie Falling Down is an excellent example of such guy.

246 points by luu 10y ago

Animats 10y ago

The author may have been headed somewhere with that idea, but he didn't get there.

barrkel 10y ago
I think there was a germ of a theory why companies full of smart people do dumb things, or are sometimes evil, or something like that; but it didn't get that explicit because it might criticise the employer too directly.
- Profan 10y ago
  Tentative new title: "The Curse of Stifled People" Well, maybe that sounds a bit mean, but the constant fear of saying something wrong about one's employer (past or present) is a bit sad sometimes.
untilHellbanned 10y ago
Oh the irony of poorly articulating one's smartness. This is smart in the "excellent sheep" Deresiewiczian sense (1). That's what goog/face/harvard is a safe harbor for. Oh and smart people don't sit around thinking about who's smart. That's just some garden variety vestigial junior Olympiad wannabe BS in action. https://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/08/24/books/review/excellent-sheep-by-william-deresiewicz.html https://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/08/24/books/review/excellent...

BrailleHunting 10y ago

Perhaps "smart" is too un-nuanced by conflating the real performance of many types of intelligence areas (social, emotional, political, spatial, logical, etc.) into a singular narrow attribution based on brief interactions? (Also yet another example highlighting where language constrains thinking.) And therefore the overvaluing of maximizing possession of one strength at the detriment of avoiding complementary strengths in other areas? Effectively, a personality monoculture where greater personality diversity would likely have tangible benefits (leadership, sales, marketing, strategy, design, etc.)

moxious 10y ago
Smart is a hard thing to talk about. Like the concept of "quality". There are hundreds of different kinds, and I can't really describe it, but you and I both know it when we see it. I can forgive them for being overly broad with "smart". You're also right that it's not one thing, but it's just hard to talk about, because it's like a wet bar of soap.
- throwaway91111 10y ago
  The human brain is insanely good at consistent dimensional reduction. Our conscious interactions struggle with the same task; it's Herculean to approach general purpose ordering in many-dimensional situations.
ThrustVectoring 10y ago
IMO "smart" is more of a social role than anything else. There's a specific sort of behavior that you have to do in order for people to think that you're "smart". Like, take George W. Bush for example - he's about two standard deviations above average in intelligence, but his public-facing persona lines up much better with "regular guy" and so people misunderestimate him. You can find similar examples from all sorts of public figures - when you dig into them, there's way more there than their persona suggests. Kanye West, Lady Gaga, Marilyn Manson, Dolph Lundgren, and more.

234dd57d2c8dba 10y ago

Here's a summary for why smart people are "cursed": If you are two or 3 standard deviations about the mean, you'll quickly realize society is optimized and caters to the average intelligence. You'll find it very boring and frustrating having to deal with rules and decisions that do not make sense. You must continually push yourself to stay entertained and meet like-minded people otherwise you'll get very depressed that everything is meaningless. -t. "smart" person

bitexploder 10y ago
This almost seems like a cliche or a troll. I think smarts also lead people to miss the world around them and trivialize anything that isnt a "challenge". To some very smart people I know -- chill out and laern to enjoy the absurdity and mundane as well as the challenge. Be bored once in a while. Know satisfaction in the simple.
- jakobegger 10y ago
  To me that doesn't sound like the curse of the "smart" people, it sounds more like the curse of the arrogant people. Smart people understand that there is a reason that pointless / absurd rules are there. Usually the reason is not that everyone else is too stupid. The problem is usually that people have conflicting interests, and there just isn't a simple solution.
  - wolfgke 10y ago
    > Smart people understand that there is a reason that pointless / absurd rules are there. Understanding that there is a reason (which is often that it was made as a political compromise in a distant past) does not imply that one tolerates/accepts it. As I hinted understanding the reason can also mean that one gets a much deeper hate for the rules.
    - mr_luc 10y ago
      And that can be the case just as much even if there is no simple win-win solution to the problem. One can hate the rules -- for their injustice, ineffectiveness, abstract immorality, etc -- and at the same time realize that the rules are an inevitable result of the complex system we inhabit. As a student of history and humanity and a free moral agent, you can recognize the reality we live in, acknowledge that it contains many no-win situations, and still hate the status quo even if you don't have a solution for how to fix it, because it deserves to be hated.

WalterBright 10y ago

> very easy to describe all your successes (project not canceled) in terms of your team's greatness, and all your failures (project canceled) in terms of other people's capriciousness. I see this belief in probably about 80% of people I encounter, and it has little correlation with how smart one is. I like to hang out with people who take responsibility for their failures rather than complaining about how circumstance, "The Man", or other people have it in for them. Such people are far more interesting. Unsurprisingly, they're also far more successful.

Nition 10y ago
It's the same kind of thing as how when you accidentally cut someone off while driving it's because they were in your blindspot and you're having a bad day and it's the first time that's ever happened etc etc... and when someone else cuts you off they're an idiot who shouldn't be on the road and they probably always drive badly.
- 0xcde4c3db 10y ago
  This is called the fundamental attribution error [1]. I thought it was a well-established phenomenon, but apparently its validity is contested. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
- brokenmachine 10y ago
  I feel like I get cut off sometimes multiple times per journey, while I only cut off somebody perhaps once a month, if even that often. Everyone else is a terrible driver!
Swizec 10y ago
I like to put it and think of it this way: Other people aren't for or against you, they're for themselves. Focus on those whose goals align with your goals. Then help them.
- Spooky23 10y ago

yakult 10y ago

My pet theory: much of 'gut feelings' and intuition boils down to having our internal black box predict the behavior of other people. When you are 'average', this often simplifies to reasoning about what you would do in the same circumstances, which is relatively easy. If you are 3 standard deviations out, you'll have to compensate that consciously, which is inaccurate and difficult and slow. This is like how UI designers have difficulty to discern which parts of their UI are hard to use, while the end user could do so effortlessly. Smart people end up having to run SmartPerson + NormalPersonVM(pre-alpha) in parallel. Normal people just run NormalPerson natively. Then they complain about bugs and slowness ('smart people are out of touch with reality!', etc.)

jstewartmobile 10y ago
The few people I know to be whole-enchilada smart know ordinary people better than ordinary people know themselves. I think parent's pet theory only applies to a subspecies of google-smart.
yyhhsj0521 10y ago
Agree. One of my friends is pretty smart (at least, above above-average) and works in the tech industry. When he was young he had to "simulate" his emotions to "look like a normal person." He had to think what normal people would feel under his situation and tried to feel that way (or tried to make himself looked feeling that way in front of people). For example, he thinks that crying on funerals is illogical, because the dead are dead already, nothing can bring them back and the dead would surely rather see people they love live happily instead of in sorrow. But no. Until he escaped from the environment he was born he had to live like a normal person, and tried to cry on funerals.
- benaiah 10y ago
  Not to diagnose your friend, but more as a general note: that kind of perspective sounds (from my admittedly unqualified perspective) much more typical of people on the autism spectrum or certain other non-neurotypicals than it does of "smart people" in general. It might be worth noting that there's some (mostly-anecdotal) indications that tech, particularly programming itself, may have higher incidence of people on the spectrum than other fields.

tabeth 10y ago

I wonder how much human potential we're wasting by putting "smart people" on a pedestal instead of having higher and better utilization of regular people. Regular people are far more capable than working at McDonalds, Walmart, Amazon, or whatever wage slave job BigCo is offering. It's pretty hard to prove, but I bet that we're barely even at 1% utilization of humanity's potential, given our technology and population.

sqeaky 10y ago
Doesn't putting smart people on pedestal's, like in charge a the design of tool, enable them to make things that can be part of the workflow of regular people?
czep 10y ago
Imagine if the world's nail salon workers could spend their time curing cancer, fighting hunger or homelessness instead of the useless primping of rich people's hands and feet. If we only had an economic system to allow everyone to reach their fullest potential despite circumstances of birth, and social priorities where personal vanity was not placed above the good of humanity. In 500 years time maybe we'll get there.
- wolfgke 10y ago
  > Imagine if the world's nail salon workers could spend their time curing cancer, fighting hunger or homelessness instead of the useless primping of rich people's hands and feet. The nail salon workers could use their free time for this purpose if they wanted. They (perhaps with some rare exceptions) don't do it. On the other hand: The fact that someone is willing to give money to the nail salon workers for getting hands/feet pimped shows that someone values this kind of work.
  - rickycook 10y ago
    well, i think the point is two-fold. first, that it can be more difficult for people to get an education (and in many cases, a professional job) depending on their background and thus have a much higher barrier to "cure cancer" type work. simply saying that they could is all well and good, but it ignores some harsh realities of life. second, the fact that people value something does not necessarily make it important. so what if someone values their nails being done? who does it benefit? capital is a distribution of resources in order to maximise output. some of that output is chaff, but i'd argue that less chaff and more useful product is better for a society to prosper.

stianstr 10y ago

Very true. I use to say that I'm too smart to be confident :-P

arjie 10y ago

Author takes issue with the following attitude in a certain way. > Smart people, computer types anyway, tend to come down on the side of people who don't like emotions. Programmers, who do logic for a living. There's another way to take issue with that, though. In _The Righteous Mind_, Jonathan Haidt argues that emotion-processing is critical to decision making (and that we use emotion-processing to guide reason), citing some work that people with damaged emotion processing suffer analysis paralysis on simple tasks. It's an interesting idea. Of course, emotion processing etc. is also the stuff that causes us to have a negative emotional reaction on seeing weird code. The rest of the book argues as to how we form moral opinions, but that part was interesting without the stuff about morality.

throwaway91111 10y ago
I wonder if you can overcome that type of decision paralysis with an RNG. Paralysis may mean stalemate; an emotional response wouldn't be meaningful in goal terms (though the side effects of emotional satisfaction may be very meaningful).
bootload 10y ago
" In _The Righteous Mind_, Jonathan Haidt argues that emotion-processing is critical to decision making (and that we use emotion-processing to guide reason), citing some work that people with damaged emotion processing suffer analysis paralysis on simple tasks." The balance between logic, emotion and decisiveness is a theme explored in Star Trek S1E16, "The Galileo Seven" [0], [1] Spock taking command and following ^flawlewss logic^ almost gets them marooned and killed. I have a theory smart people who assume a rigid logical mindset make the worst leaders. Reference [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Galileo_Seven https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Galileo_Seven [1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708465/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708465/

jstewartmobile 10y ago

My experience has been that most "smart" people are actually high-functioning autistic savants. I mean, if they were actually +2 std deviations above on the whole enchilada, their lives wouldn't be such a mess. You can make a lot of money and still be a hot mess. Look at celebrities. Alpha nerds are just a variation on the theme.

rak00n 10y ago
I don't disagree with you. But celebrities have a far wider audience. Your rockstar programmer doesn't have that. A lot of social problems disappear when you're accepted as a famous accomplished person. So a celebrity can be weird and not face the same social isolation.
- jstewartmobile 10y ago
  As an alpha-nerd, social isolation is just a symptom. The pathology is that we started with a weak arm and a strong arm, and most of our parents and teachers downplayed the importance of the weak arm while encouraging us to work the absolute shit out of the strong one. Then they send us out into the world looking like teenagers who just discovered xtube. The world can smell weakness and throws loads of curve-balls at the weak arm, and most of us never notice because we're still too obsessed with the other arm.
- _null 10y ago
  Technical skills have higher economic value but lower social status than skills in the arts. An eccentric painter or musician achieves a level of cachet that an eccentric programmer doesn't. Dysfunction has a certain glamour if you have artistic talent; there's no such thing as a tortured engineer.
InclinedPlane 10y ago
I think that might be colored by the "culture" of tech workers where you happen to be, that has certainly not been my experience. The smart folks I've met in tech, including the outright geniuses, have been almost universally well-rounded with a strong set of "soft skills" and typically a widely varied set of interests outside of their work specialty. Indeed, I'd describe them as "fully fleshed out human beings", perhaps more so than the average human being in fact. The number of "smart tech workers" I've come across who I would describe as "high-functioning autistic savants" I could count on the fingers of one hand, and even then that description would be a decidedly uncharitable characterization for them.

tempestn 10y ago

The lesser known Curse of Smart People, but one that follows directly from this this article, involves hours spent reading about wifi routers and signal processing.

bootload 10y ago

"What I have learned, working here, is that smart, successful people are cursed. The curse is confidence." Things to remember when smart people appear confident: - the correlation between confidence and ability to actually "do" something can be low - smart people can live in their heads - smart people can overestimate their expertise in areas they may be familiar or ignorant of, equally - street smarts can kick smart, smarts arse A quick question I ask is, "Have you done this before?". I use this question to determine perceived verses actual smartness. Here's an example of why you need to do this. Back in '10 I went on a 220km hike from 200 meters above sea level to 2,228 (about 7300ft). [0] I was with a mixed group of people, fit, smart and motivated. On the last day, mid point to the final destination, we took a photo at the summit of the highest point in Australia. Lots of smart people in that photo, PhDs, Masters students etc. By the end of the day, one suffered frost bite, three got lost and of the finishers who covered the entire distance, maybe 20% came away without some sort of injury. Why? "Have you done this before?" A lot of smart people ^thought^ running and riding then walking 30+Km/day was easy. A lot didn't think going into an alpine area in early autumn would be cold. The PhD with blue lips who I marched off the coldest place in Australia wore jeans and jumper, had taken a 600ml container of water and no food. [1] The three who sparked a search, decided to take break in a hut, but not inform anybody. [2] Now nobody really got hurt or lost. But they could have, had luck not been on their side. Smartness breeds a certain type of arrogance that left unchecked, can get you into trouble quickly. Time and time again I remind myself, depending on the circumstances, "street smarts" whip "smart smarts'" arse. Reference [0] @samh, "Australian Economist who lost bet will walk from Parliament to Mount Kosciousko" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1126054 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1126054 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1126078 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1126078 [1] At the top the wind was 50km/hr and in fog. https://flickr.com/photos/bootload/4603144874/in/album-72157623796441755 https://flickr.com/photos/bootload/4603144874/in/album-72157... [2] Tail-end charlie (me) also missed checking inside the hut. https://flickr.com/photos/bootload/4797709801/in/album-72157623796441755/ https://flickr.com/photos/bootload/4797709801/in/album-72157... [3] https://flickr.com/photos/bootload/sets/72157624081287855 https://flickr.com/photos/bootload/sets/72157624081287855 [4] https://flickr.com/photos/bootload/sets/72157624081287855 https://flickr.com/photos/bootload/sets/72157624081287855

10y ago

camdenlock 10y ago

> Working at a large, successful company lets you keep your isolation. If you choose, you can just ignore all the inconvenient facts about the world. Is this why social justice extremism is so popular in Silicon Valley? I mean, social justice is critical to a well-functioning and fair society, but the brand of it that SV folks tend to sell is fairly detached from the realities of living in a human civilization.

kmicklas 10y ago
What do you mean by this?
- mfukar 10y ago
  As well-off as people are, they tend to view problems they don't face as solved. Therefore they turn their attention to what _they_ view as a problem. In a very crude example, the Bay Area people don't care about the wars in the Middle East - they're not a problem as far as they're concerned. Their exclusion from places they want to work and the climbing housing prices though, yuck.

bambax 10y ago

Based on this article, the curse of "smart" people appears to be lack of self-awareness.

espeed 10y ago

Hubris born of success (overconfidence, arrogance) is "stage 1" in How the Mighty Fall by Jim Collins: https://charlierose.com/videos/12443 https://charlierose.com/videos/12443 Humility (know you don't know, always be asking questions), a focus on the greater good (is it about you or something greater than you?), and having a "growth mindset" are part of the antidote: https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/01/29/carol-dweck-mindset/ https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/01/29/carol-dweck-mindset...

nerdlogic 10y ago

I like how everyone has a different opinion about how a smart person has to be, but in most cases people are referring to certain traits that do not correlate with intelligence (and frequently could indicate deviation in either direction), and that's plausible since intelligence is such an abstract notion. For instance, recognising patterns, and acting on those patterns are two different things. One might notice that acting on the patterns can bring him success/economical safety and what he considers joy or effortlessly having goods. But the other one can make a step further and consider that in the steady state he will not be any happier. If both happen to make this logical step, they might have to make a decision based on their preferences, which is highly subjective. For me, intelligence is not comparable. To be more honest, I think there is only a partial order, and for that, I'm not sure.

pizza 10y ago
A worldview is like a sampled model of an ultrafilter which is in reality more like a leaky sieve

dschuetz 10y ago

Reading the article, I wasn't sure which ones were the smart people there: those who are confident that they are smart, hence successful, or those who constantly question their smarts, but are successful nonetheless?

soufron 10y ago

LOL. What you call "intelligence" is simply being a prick :)

soufron 10y ago

I am fascinated by the number of comments made by people who actually think they're so smart, it's the society (made of billions of people) that's dumb. 1 Mind > 7.5B Minds ? I tend to think these companies don't hire smart people. They hire psychologically deviant people who will both comply without a problem, and who will do mean things to others because they have a superiority complex... a little like german engineers during WWII ;)

InclinedPlane 10y ago
I've worked at several such companies, and they honestly do have a ton of incredibly incredibly smart people working there. However, it takes a lot more than simply smooshing a bunch of incredibly smart people together to produce greatness. It takes good leadership, good judgment, good planning, and so on and so on. Unfortunately, at many of those same places, crammed full of smart people, a lot of those other elements are missing. Management tends to be mediocre at best. Planning tends to be about the same. Corporate culture tends to be oppressive. And so on. All of these things cut down the effectiveness of smart people, and the end result is often a lot of mediocre products with only a few flashes of brilliance here and there. The core problem is that once you scale beyond a single person working alone the mechanisms and nature of cooperation between individuals starts to dominate the end result as much as individual capability does. And while smart people might help offset poor corporate structure, policies, and management, it's only marginally effective. P.S. Also, sometimes insisting on hiring exclusively very smart tech workers can be a coping mechanism for institutional failures (and thus somewhat of a red flag). It's more or less a truism that corporate culture and corporate managerial processes are more or less unaccountable, not at all introspective, heavily resistant to criticism, and even more resistant to change. But if your management chain and corporate culture is so incredibly screwed up that it becomes a drag on effectiveness and productivity how do you cope with that? And the easiest answer is actually a somewhat surprising one. You hire the absolute best people you possibly can. Not to make changes or make things better, oh no. But rather to squeeze the most out of the system as it stands. Smart, hyper-competent people can succeed even in the face of tremendous challenges. Including terrible internal tools (a common problem everywhere), terrible processes (also common), terrible management (ubiquitous), and terrible leadership (also ubiquitous). A workplace filled with smart people isn't necessarily a good sign. It could mean it's a horribly dysfunctional place that only works because all of the individual cogs in the machine are the best they could possibly be.

soufron 10y ago

I also tend to think you DONT need 5 days of interview to detect that someone is smart... ;)

InclinedPlane 10y ago

I worked at Microsoft too, in one of the best divisions full of the smartest developers in the world. I worked with some truly amazing individuals, some outright geniuses in their field, in fact. Some of the lessons I learned from my coworkers while I was there I still carry with me and value very heavily. But I wouldn't say I was awed as the author was. Nor was it my experience that there was a distinct lack of clueless people. I interacted with a number of folks that didn't have what I would consider a full toolkit of talent, skills, experience, and judgment (maybe my standards are higher than the author's, I don't know). I'd say the problems that exist in that environment and in that group of people (and other similar groups at dev shops all around the world) go well beyond the ability to rationalize anything. The biggest problem I've experienced consistently, everywhere, is a lack of caring about the right things. A lot of engineers live in a little fantasy bubble divorced from the real world. Separated from the consequences of their actions, separated from a connection with the actual practical use of their product by real humans. They too often don't have an understanding of how what they're working on fits into the "real world" and instead just enjoy twiddling the knobs and levers behind the scenes because that's a fun hobby for them. A big problem I've seen consistently is the willingness to accept the status quo regardless of the way it is because it "works". And this is one case where being "smart" and capable can actually be a detriment. Being smart and capable means that you can take an incredibly broken tool or process and still make productive use out of it. And to some extent there's a pride or a bravado that comes from doing so (relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/378/ https://xkcd.com/378/). But that sort of thing is self-defeating. It doesn't matter that you can get by with horrible internal tools, because in reality existing in that state destroys an enormous amount of productivity. Programmers too easily fall into the trap of thinking that the hard way is the better way, and you see this in code too where devs think they're smart by writing complicated "sophisticated" code for no good reason when plain old run of the mill highly readable code would be vastly preferred. As the author touches on the curse of excessive confidence is also a big problem. You see a lot of developers who fall into the know-it-all trap and think that because they completed a challenging degree program, work in a highly paid highly impactful field, and have some degree of expertise in some tiny corner of that field that somehow that makes them einsteins or something. The reality is that no matter how much you as an individual can possibly know your ignorance will always outweigh your knowledge by huge orders of magnitude, even within a given field. A big problem this causes is developers not realizing their limitations in certain areas and just papering over those problems, perhaps even thinking that they are fundamental to the discipline or the field in general. I've seen countless examples of systems put together by very smart very competent devs who had some significant gap in their overall skillset and instead of seeking outside help or advice or taking the time to learn something new they instead just came up with some horrible hack rooted in stuff they were comfortable with but applied in a totally inappropriate manner. And those hacks are often so deep into the system that it takes a ton of work to refactor them out and away, on top of all the problems caused by the system being fundamentally flawed in design. Whereas spending just a few days or a week of time learning something new could have resulted in a much more robust system from the outset, if they'd simply have checked their confidence a bit.

watwut 10y ago

It sounds to me a bit that the company had a culture where premium is given on looking smart - so people took great efforts to look smart. Which lead to rationalizations and inability to admit mistakes (I can not just say that I made decision cause I did not knew better, I have to find smart sounding reasons). Any positions higher then junior programmer needs to make intuitive decisions. Everything above junior programmer position deals with uncertainties - whether it is prioritization, organizational decision (who to hire, what position to put new person in), architectural decisions when working with new technology and so on and so forth. You make a lot of value judgement. If everyone is pretending all those decisions were logical, then there is collective denial going on. That is not the same thing as everyone being smarter then all other companies around. Tl;dr: A lot of rationalization going on is not consequence of everyone being smart, it is flag of workplace where people cant afford to talk honestly about mistakes and decisions.

nradov 10y ago

Outside of software, my favorite example of this principle is Donald Rumsfeld. He's clearly one of the most brilliant people to have ever worked in government, and yet through overconfidence he contributed to the worst foreign policy blunders in modern US history and got thousands of people killed. So it seems that being smart doesn't necessarily help with making good decisions, especially in complex situations with incomplete data.

pizza 10y ago
I'm not saying I'm skeptical, but I am saying I want to learn more about Rumseld's brilliance.

deleted 10y ago

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norswap 10y ago

But isn't the fact of being smart and working at a big company selecting for exactly this trait?

QuantumRoar 10y ago

I strongly believe that we should not easily segregate people into a smart kind and a not-so-smart kind. Intelligence comes in many ways and the genetics and upbringing of a person will make their intelligence manifest in different ways. Someone being good at something, does not automatically equate to a high level of intelligence or smartness but rather a high degree of familiarity with the topic. Familiarity can be acquired either through a lot of practice or from a predisposition to understand quickly, which is intelligence or smartness. However, what can be said is that a person who is good at almost everything, necessarily has to be smart because there wouldn't be any time to practice everything in depth. Conversely, I'd never call a person smart who's good at one thing but doesn't understand anything else. The author says that smart, successful people are cursed with over-confidence due to them knowing one thing very well. But how can you call a person smart if they do not even possess the ability to properly self-reflect. Is that not the one thing that should define smartness? Rationalizing things away, ignoring signs that interfere with one's world-view, and being over-confident are all traits of not-so-smart people. Just because you know how to code, does not mean you are smart. I'd say the result of this anecdote should've been that it turns out that people can be good at their jobs and be idiots at the same time.

ihaveahadron 10y ago
It's just a mediocre intelligence guy complaining about all the stuff he doesn't understand.
kristianc 10y ago
> The author says that smart, successful people are cursed with over-confidence due to them knowing one thing very well. But how can you call a person smart if they do not even possess the ability to properly self-reflect. Is that not the one thing that should define smartness? I've more often heard the opposite stated, that people who are smart have a tendency to see multiple sides of every issue and struggle to come to decisions, whereas people who are less smart are more prone to see complex things in black and white. If only we had a readily available example of that phenomenon...
- 10y ago

pizza 10y ago

How many rabbit holes have I been down, and would I prefer discovering more of them or following one to its end?

faragon 10y ago

Being "smart" is not easy. From conflicts with others because of Dunning-Kruger effect [1], because your own ego (no matter how "smart" you think you are, you're not that "smart" in the whole "smartness spectrum"), etc. So in the end, most "smart" people learn to deal with his own ego, idiots, and just try to be nice, because life is very short for fussing and fighting [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qyclqo_AV2M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qyclqo_AV2M

deleted 10y ago

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unstatusthequo 10y ago

"bing around a bit..." Lol is that really a thing?

redant 10y ago

The author and some comments tend to confuse skills, success, and intelligence. I think the author describes successful and skillful software engineers who are far from being highly intelligent. It just happened that their skills of constructing program is highly valuable in the current market conditions. Which feeds their arrogance and leads to all kinds of ugly consequences. The hardware engineers of the 20-th century had the same issues. The main hero of the movie Falling Down is an excellent example of such guy.