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I don't think so. A single super smart person has a far far bigger impact on society than billions of hard working people. Our society would still be surviving

I don't think so. A single super smart person has a far far bigger impact on society than billions of hard working people. Our society would still be surviving by hunting if it wasn't for the smart people. Seriously, I never thought that I would read something like this on HN...

lucio 9y ago
It's not that simple. You can be super smart and (by that reason) choose to retire from society, or worst. The unabomber had a high IQ, for example. High IQ PLUS hard work (Conscientiousness, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qH9-xsuPiUk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qH9-xsuPiUk) is what can make a big difference in the world.
nnq 9y ago
> Our society would still be surviving by hunting if it wasn't for the smart people. Yeah, except that the guy who "was smart enough to think about agriculture but not hard working enough to practically invent it" didn't help much towards moving away from hunting to something better. Probably people like him only got others killed in various direct or indirect ways. Also, "recruiting others to implement your ideas" is also really hard work: you're not going to convince others to do what you thought with just a few smart sounding remarks, and if they'd be smart enough to understand you arguments and explanations, they would have invented the new thing themselves. So being witty out of the question, argumenting and explaining out of the question, the smart guy who invented agriculture probably had to work his ass off until he proved others he can do at least as well as by spending the same amount of time hunting! Ergo our society would still be surviving by hunting if it wasn't for the hard working people! (And yeah, if enough people work hard, some of them would also happen to be smart since IQ is mostly randomly distributed.) Seriously, get your shit together and work your ass off if you want your smarts to have a non-negative impact on anything (including on yourself). EDIT+: Also, you picked a very ironically unfortunate example: in general, hunting can actually require much higher intelligence than doing basic agriculture in many cases (although inventing agriculture from scratch is a different thing).

lucio 9y ago

It's not that simple. You can be super smart and (by that reason) choose to retire from society, or worst. The unabomber had a high IQ, for example. High IQ PLUS hard work (Conscientiousness, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qH9-xsuPiUk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qH9-xsuPiUk) is what can make a big difference in the world.

nnq 9y ago

> Our society would still be surviving by hunting if it wasn't for the smart people. Yeah, except that the guy who "was smart enough to think about agriculture but not hard working enough to practically invent it" didn't help much towards moving away from hunting to something better. Probably people like him only got others killed in various direct or indirect ways. Also, "recruiting others to implement your ideas" is also really hard work: you're not going to convince others to do what you thought with just a few smart sounding remarks, and if they'd be smart enough to understand you arguments and explanations, they would have invented the new thing themselves. So being witty out of the question, argumenting and explaining out of the question, the smart guy who invented agriculture probably had to work his ass off until he proved others he can do at least as well as by spending the same amount of time hunting! Ergo our society would still be surviving by hunting if it wasn't for the hard working people! (And yeah, if enough people work hard, some of them would also happen to be smart since IQ is mostly randomly distributed.) Seriously, get your shit together and work your ass off if you want your smarts to have a non-negative impact on anything (including on yourself). EDIT+: Also, you picked a very ironically unfortunate example: in general, hunting can actually require much higher intelligence than doing basic agriculture in many cases (although inventing agriculture from scratch is a different thing).