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Let this be a lesson to all: intelligence does not in any way correlate with self awareness. It's likely that 'smart' people are just as likely to be unaware of

Let this be a lesson to all: intelligence does not in any way correlate with self awareness. It's likely that 'smart' people are just as likely to be unaware of their own follies or inabilities, I would argue, maybe more so as a lot of smart people tend to be 'inwardly focused' and less concerned about their direct environment. This kind of thing happens all the time among Exec. level, but normally we'd expect it from Ford CEO, not Google types. It may be an odd sign of industry maturity. That said, we shouldn't discount how often this kind of stuff actually does work. Watching the crowd at the Oracle conf. eat up Larry Ellison's huffery as through he was some kind of market visionary was the lesson at the other end of the spectrum, and it's that 'If you're rich and stand on stage and say something that 'sounds credible', a lot of people with just believe it'. Of course there's more to it than that. But this one is Comedy Gold. It might be a sign that Susan does not have a fully trusted team around her ... I would beg my boss in stark words to not do something so ridiculous to themselves.

itronitron 6y ago
It also indicates to me that the leadership at Alphabet is totally out to lunch. I would have thought they had the sense to stop this but apparently not.
- dehrmann 6y ago
  You mean the leadership that put Google cofounder Sergey Brin's sister-in-law in charge of Youtube?
  - thu2111 6y ago
    And not only sister in law. Executive leader of that highly successful project, Google Video, which ended with Wojcicki being so beaten that she had to tell Google management to buy her only competitor for over a billion dollars.
    - biofox 6y ago
      I recall Google Video being the better platform when it was first released. Had a clear interface, integrated with google search, and better performance. I have no idea how Google failed to gain the lead.
      - thu2111 6y ago
        Some engineers wrote a couple of insightful internal post-mortems about Google Video after the YouTube acquisition. It's telling, I think, that the deep analysis of what went wrong came from front-line engineers rather than the executives you'd be expecting to produce it as part of their job. I read them many years ago so what follows might be a bit garbled by time and bad memory, but the gist of it went like this: 1. YouTube bet on user generated content. One of Wojcicki's primary decisions was to focus on commercial high-end content by trying to cut deals with firms like Disney. 2. YouTube bet on Flash Video. Google Video used a VLC-based browser plugin that never worked as well and didn't have as much distribution. This was partly driven by the first decision, because Flash didn't support the video DRM that movie houses wanted, and was optimised for small low bandwidth, "postage stamp" sized video instead of high-def full screen that commercial content wanted. YouTube had no formal strategy around commercial content beyond turning a blind eye towards the piracy on their platform, that let them outsource their video tech to Macromedia, who were quite good at it. 3. YouTube bet on social. They had comments, thumbs up, thumbs down, channels and other social features when Google Video was still a search engine badly welded to a video store. Google didn't "get" social at that time and GV/Wojcicki saw it as a net negative anyway because does Disney really want their premium content to be shown next to a bunch of inane comments from anonymous trolls? 4. YouTube was implemented in Python. Google Video was implemented in C++. Python allowed the YT guys to iterate way faster and throw features out the door way faster, at a cost in performance and reliability. But a social website doesn't really need much reliability and whilst the performance costs were killing them, Google bailed them out after the purchase by rewriting and porting large parts of their stack to their in house tech. I think those were the main problems identified in the post-mortems. What's interesting is that of course the general themes here are identical to what is causing YouTube problems now. Wojcicki was obsessed with professional/authoritative content. It killed Google Video then because there was a competitor who bet on the little guy, but now she controls that competitor she's doing it all over again. YT is actively suppressing the little guys in favour of big media, they've added a video store, their recommendations aren't social anymore but rather just promoting whatever political elites are saying today, she's removing other social features like downvotes, etc etc. She never learned anything from her prior failure, and why would she? When Vic G failed at Google+ he was immediately fired, but Wojcicki cannot be penalised for failure. Whether that's due to her familial connections, her gender or what is hard to say, but the contrast between her and what happened to other execs that failed to beat their competition is hard not to notice.
cryptica 6y ago
I would even make the case that self-awareness and success may be inversely correlated in fact. I've heard many people say similar things over the years... Why is that? Is it some kind of kin selection? Is this total lack of self-awareness a requirement for getting into positions of power? It's so obvious, I even wonder if they're just pretending to be hypocrites? It seems so simple and obvious, how can they not see the logical contradiction? Are most of our leaders complete nutjobs? Maybe humanity is a hierarchy with all the nutjobs at the top, mirroring back their insanity inside their filter bubbles; not realizing that their lives have nothing to do with reality.
- jollybean 6y ago
  It's probably a lop sided u-shape. Most people lacking in self-awareness are either really smart or true outcasts, with 'high conscientious + good communicators' occupying most middle management ... but it does take a kind of hubris sometimes to overlook one's faults, even worse, to completely ignore them otherwise. Without being controversial I see hints of this in Jobs, Ellison, Trump, Musk, Page, Zuck etc. (again I'm not condemning here, if any one of us put our thoughts online consistently there'd be a few we would seriously regret).
pulse7 6y ago
"It might be a sign that Susan does not have a fully trusted team around her ..." => It might be a sign that team around her is afraid to tell her how ridiculous this is... Maybe they made good proposals in the past and where turned down and they now don't want to make good suggestions again...
- slickrick216 6y ago
  It might be worse. They could actually believe they are promoting freedom of expression by silencing people. Pushed straight past delusion into faith.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- waterhouse 6y ago
  I'm currently tickling my brain with the hypothesis that this is a next-level move by her team, to get her to publicly "emphasize the importance of free speech and the role that YouTube plays in protecting it", so that it will become more inconvenient for her (or for the rest of Youtube) to do more things that interfere with free speech. Analogize this to publicly praising a corrupt general for doing or planning something good that he hasn't actually been doing. It's difficult for him to turn down the praise ("No, I seriously haven't done anything to deserve this"), and meanwhile it focuses eyes on him and pressures him to actually do the thing. I read about the tactic in a fictional book once, I'm sure it works. :-)
  - cbozeman 6y ago
    Well that won't work... former President Barack Obama received the Nobel Peace prize but he went on to involve the United States in additional foreign wars and went ham with drone strikes.
    - DSingularity 6y ago
      Perfect example. He also took programs to the next level — eg first president to authorize the US to assassinate its own citizens!
Grustaf 6y ago
I think it says much more about how they see the consumers. They're probably counting on 99% of people not noticing the absurdity of it, or the irony in boasting about your industrial scale censorship when accepting your free speech award.
- belval 6y ago
  Yeah but even then I feel it shows they do not understand their audience. Hating on Javascript/consoles/Windows/OS X is something we nerds do. Free speech on YouTube is something I've seen discussed in friends groups that I would consider "normal people".
- SiVal 6y ago
  They are counting on people not noticing the absurdity, because they don't notice it themselves. They live in an ideological bubble where those who are True Believers prosper and heretics are punished, so even those who disagree have to go along and hope they aren't discovered. Or they have to leave. So no one inside will be heard to disagree. So anyone on the outside who disagrees with what we all agree is true is spreading "misinformation", according to everyone on the inside who feels able to speak freely. Surely it is no impediment to the free expression of truth to ban lies, right? Right! Does anyone here disagree? No? Of course not. Only a nazi would object to preventing the spreading of lies. So in the Puritan Village, the ministers give themselves freedom of religion awards for their contributions to freeing the True Religion from all impediments to its universal imposition.
  - Grustaf 6y ago
    True, that’s probably part of it!
- geoduck14 6y ago
  To be fair, I wouldn't have noticed the award if it wasn't for HN
paganel 6y ago
> It's likely that 'smart' people are just as likely to be unaware of their own follies or inabilities, Just look at the recent debacle with the proposed (and now thankfully failed) football SuperLeague in Europe, you have 12 billionaire owners thinking that they could go ahead with killing the spirit of the game that is ingrained in the social fabric of the continent just like that, almost by fiat.
zouhair 6y ago
"Smart" and "educated" people are the easiest to fool[0]. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbwWL5ezA4g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbwWL5ezA4g
- slig 6y ago
  That explains so much.
- ttt0 6y ago
  “Why you fool, it's the educated reader who CAN be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don't need reconditioning. They're all right already. They'll believe anything.” ― C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength
  - willis936 6y ago
    A fun hypothetical, but how smart do you think the average Q anon believer is? Reality isn’t as nice on the ears as the fantasy of a poet is.
    - pitay 6y ago
      Q anon believers are at most are a tiny proportion of who is described by that. Judging an entire population by the worst few of them that you can think of, is questionable. Also, you don't really know the distribution of where these 'believers' came from.
    - ttt0 6y ago
      For sure, the world is much more complicated and the inability to read between the lines and not taking everything at face value certainly isn't limited to "educated people". But there is a lot of truth to this quote nonetheless. For what it's worth, all of those wacky theories about Q-anon or even flat earth don't beat the fact that people somehow managed to subvert and obscure the fundamental truth about nature that's shared between every living being, reproduction, and made educated people believe that biological sex is simply irrelevant or not even a valid concept. Covid's another thing, I get that there are wacky theories about that too, but there are many pretentious, insufferable people who are acting like they're better than everyone else, because they blindly believe any propaganda about it that's pushed by the "official sources".
austincheney 6y ago
> but normally we'd expect it from Ford CEO, not Google types. Why? How do you see a distinction there?
- IG_Semmelweiss 6y ago
  Not parent but would assume that "google types" are more likely engineers first, with the assumption that those types are likely likely to have spatial / problem solvin awareness. Contrast Vs traditional traditional CEOs more likely to be hired on the basis of their network and charistma vs actual engineering chops?
  - thu2111 6y ago
    Wojcicki is not an engineer. Her background is marketing.
  - quanto 6y ago
    Even if the Google types have better spatial/technical problem solving skills, how does that translate to self-awareness?
  - resfirestar 6y ago
    Susan Wojcicki started out as a marketing manager, not an engineer. By contrast Mary Barra, the CEO of GM, started out as an assembly line worker and moved up through engineering positions into management. I think people have some pretty backwards assumptions about tech vs traditional industry.
- ARandomerDude 6y ago
  Ford = internal combustion = bad people. Google = San Francisco = good people. It's just SV patting itself on the back for being woke and more virtuous than you.
- quanto 6y ago
  The Hacker News crowd (mostly the Google types) endorsing the statement implying the Google types are somehow superior to the Ford types itself shows the lack of self-awareness for the Google types.
bobthechef 6y ago
"Smart" is not "wise" (or virtuous). We should emphasize the value of the later.
briantakita 6y ago
Nowdays, if somebody wins an award, they are the exact opposite. We live is opposite world now.
- tonyjstark 6y ago
  I have something that I call 'Potato-Law' for this. It's like how the potatoes in discounters always say 'premium quality' or 'premium potatoes' but if they are, they wouldn't be so cheap or you couldn't buy them at the discounter. OTOH, if you go to a specialty goods shop, they don't write premium on their products. So if something has to be labeled on how good it is, it's probably not.
  - durnygbur 6y ago
    Right in the crotch. I recently put small bag of potatoes in the shopping cart and only back home and from the price on the receipt I learned they are "premium potatoes". So pissed off.
truth_ 6y ago
"Smart" and "intelligent" people are just people born in relative financial ease with enough time to focus on studies and very likely with parents in academia or similar fields who made their children aware of the inner workings of the fields. Physics PhD people are not people fallen from skies with a little extra brain. They just got the time, opportunity, and tips to be there. Same goes for other "smart" people. There are, of course, exceptions like von Neuman, Turing, Feynman, Einstein, etc. But these people are exceptions. Perceptions abourt other people in those fields should not be formed with the image of these guys. Source: very first hand experiences.
- open0 6y ago
  100% true, these people are not smart at all. They are parasites and criminals that are destroying society and they must be stopped. Youtube manipulates what people see all over the world and most of it is pure trash.
- dash2 6y ago
  That's not what the science says: https://www.nature.com/articles/mp2017121 https://www.nature.com/articles/mp2017121
  - truth_ 6y ago
    The abstract mentions people with 170 average IQ. Hawking had 169 IIRC. Physics PhDs are averagely on the range 130~145. That's much lower than people on the study. IQ is not taken seriously as a measure of intelligence or success anymore. And people can be trained to score high on IQ tests. On the debate of Nature vs. Nurture, I do not think that inherent intelligence viz. good genes do not play a role. But I tend to belive that nurture has a larger to play.
maybelsyrup 6y ago
This one of the better comments I've seen on this website. I actually copy-and-pasted it into my notes file. Kudos
toomanybeersies 6y ago
> It's likely that 'smart' people are just as likely to be unaware of their own follies or inabilities We have a word for that: Hubris
JCDenton2052 6y ago
If you were willing to speak truth to power like that, you would not be in her team in the first place.
rpastuszak 6y ago
(1) YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki Gets 'Freedom Expression' Award (2) Sponsored by YouTube More people will hear about the first part of that sentence so I guess it's still somewhat advantageous to them?
xxs 6y ago
The part it was 'posted'/awarded on the day a famous Austrian painter (who would have not approved of Photoshop) was born, makes it even better.
SuoDuanDao 6y ago
As I like to summarise it, 'the smarter someone is, the dumber beliefs they can rationalise'. Combine that observation with the Flynn effect and it explains why common sense is never as common as it used to be... Maybe Google's best bet at this point is to hire people with a wide diversity of IQ scores.
- uvnq 6y ago
  I wish I could save this comment somehow. That quote seems extremely useful
  - SuoDuanDao 6y ago
    Thank you for that compliment! You actually can save it, if you click a comment's time stamp you can then click 'favourite' and it'll show up on a list in your profile.
    - uvnq 6y ago
      Oh neat, thanks! Saved.

itronitron 6y ago

It also indicates to me that the leadership at Alphabet is totally out to lunch. I would have thought they had the sense to stop this but apparently not.

dehrmann 6y ago
You mean the leadership that put Google cofounder Sergey Brin's sister-in-law in charge of Youtube?
- thu2111 6y ago
  And not only sister in law. Executive leader of that highly successful project, Google Video, which ended with Wojcicki being so beaten that she had to tell Google management to buy her only competitor for over a billion dollars.
  - biofox 6y ago
    I recall Google Video being the better platform when it was first released. Had a clear interface, integrated with google search, and better performance. I have no idea how Google failed to gain the lead.
    - thu2111 6y ago
      Some engineers wrote a couple of insightful internal post-mortems about Google Video after the YouTube acquisition. It's telling, I think, that the deep analysis of what went wrong came from front-line engineers rather than the executives you'd be expecting to produce it as part of their job. I read them many years ago so what follows might be a bit garbled by time and bad memory, but the gist of it went like this: 1. YouTube bet on user generated content. One of Wojcicki's primary decisions was to focus on commercial high-end content by trying to cut deals with firms like Disney. 2. YouTube bet on Flash Video. Google Video used a VLC-based browser plugin that never worked as well and didn't have as much distribution. This was partly driven by the first decision, because Flash didn't support the video DRM that movie houses wanted, and was optimised for small low bandwidth, "postage stamp" sized video instead of high-def full screen that commercial content wanted. YouTube had no formal strategy around commercial content beyond turning a blind eye towards the piracy on their platform, that let them outsource their video tech to Macromedia, who were quite good at it. 3. YouTube bet on social. They had comments, thumbs up, thumbs down, channels and other social features when Google Video was still a search engine badly welded to a video store. Google didn't "get" social at that time and GV/Wojcicki saw it as a net negative anyway because does Disney really want their premium content to be shown next to a bunch of inane comments from anonymous trolls? 4. YouTube was implemented in Python. Google Video was implemented in C++. Python allowed the YT guys to iterate way faster and throw features out the door way faster, at a cost in performance and reliability. But a social website doesn't really need much reliability and whilst the performance costs were killing them, Google bailed them out after the purchase by rewriting and porting large parts of their stack to their in house tech. I think those were the main problems identified in the post-mortems. What's interesting is that of course the general themes here are identical to what is causing YouTube problems now. Wojcicki was obsessed with professional/authoritative content. It killed Google Video then because there was a competitor who bet on the little guy, but now she controls that competitor she's doing it all over again. YT is actively suppressing the little guys in favour of big media, they've added a video store, their recommendations aren't social anymore but rather just promoting whatever political elites are saying today, she's removing other social features like downvotes, etc etc. She never learned anything from her prior failure, and why would she? When Vic G failed at Google+ he was immediately fired, but Wojcicki cannot be penalised for failure. Whether that's due to her familial connections, her gender or what is hard to say, but the contrast between her and what happened to other execs that failed to beat their competition is hard not to notice.

cryptica 6y ago

I would even make the case that self-awareness and success may be inversely correlated in fact. I've heard many people say similar things over the years... Why is that? Is it some kind of kin selection? Is this total lack of self-awareness a requirement for getting into positions of power? It's so obvious, I even wonder if they're just pretending to be hypocrites? It seems so simple and obvious, how can they not see the logical contradiction? Are most of our leaders complete nutjobs? Maybe humanity is a hierarchy with all the nutjobs at the top, mirroring back their insanity inside their filter bubbles; not realizing that their lives have nothing to do with reality.

jollybean 6y ago
It's probably a lop sided u-shape. Most people lacking in self-awareness are either really smart or true outcasts, with 'high conscientious + good communicators' occupying most middle management ... but it does take a kind of hubris sometimes to overlook one's faults, even worse, to completely ignore them otherwise. Without being controversial I see hints of this in Jobs, Ellison, Trump, Musk, Page, Zuck etc. (again I'm not condemning here, if any one of us put our thoughts online consistently there'd be a few we would seriously regret).

pulse7 6y ago

"It might be a sign that Susan does not have a fully trusted team around her ..." => It might be a sign that team around her is afraid to tell her how ridiculous this is... Maybe they made good proposals in the past and where turned down and they now don't want to make good suggestions again...

slickrick216 6y ago
It might be worse. They could actually believe they are promoting freedom of expression by silencing people. Pushed straight past delusion into faith.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
waterhouse 6y ago
I'm currently tickling my brain with the hypothesis that this is a next-level move by her team, to get her to publicly "emphasize the importance of free speech and the role that YouTube plays in protecting it", so that it will become more inconvenient for her (or for the rest of Youtube) to do more things that interfere with free speech. Analogize this to publicly praising a corrupt general for doing or planning something good that he hasn't actually been doing. It's difficult for him to turn down the praise ("No, I seriously haven't done anything to deserve this"), and meanwhile it focuses eyes on him and pressures him to actually do the thing. I read about the tactic in a fictional book once, I'm sure it works. :-)
- cbozeman 6y ago
  Well that won't work... former President Barack Obama received the Nobel Peace prize but he went on to involve the United States in additional foreign wars and went ham with drone strikes.
  - DSingularity 6y ago
    Perfect example. He also took programs to the next level — eg first president to authorize the US to assassinate its own citizens!

Grustaf 6y ago

I think it says much more about how they see the consumers. They're probably counting on 99% of people not noticing the absurdity of it, or the irony in boasting about your industrial scale censorship when accepting your free speech award.

belval 6y ago
Yeah but even then I feel it shows they do not understand their audience. Hating on Javascript/consoles/Windows/OS X is something we nerds do. Free speech on YouTube is something I've seen discussed in friends groups that I would consider "normal people".
SiVal 6y ago
They are counting on people not noticing the absurdity, because they don't notice it themselves. They live in an ideological bubble where those who are True Believers prosper and heretics are punished, so even those who disagree have to go along and hope they aren't discovered. Or they have to leave. So no one inside will be heard to disagree. So anyone on the outside who disagrees with what we all agree is true is spreading "misinformation", according to everyone on the inside who feels able to speak freely. Surely it is no impediment to the free expression of truth to ban lies, right? Right! Does anyone here disagree? No? Of course not. Only a nazi would object to preventing the spreading of lies. So in the Puritan Village, the ministers give themselves freedom of religion awards for their contributions to freeing the True Religion from all impediments to its universal imposition.
- Grustaf 6y ago
  True, that’s probably part of it!
geoduck14 6y ago
To be fair, I wouldn't have noticed the award if it wasn't for HN

paganel 6y ago

> It's likely that 'smart' people are just as likely to be unaware of their own follies or inabilities, Just look at the recent debacle with the proposed (and now thankfully failed) football SuperLeague in Europe, you have 12 billionaire owners thinking that they could go ahead with killing the spirit of the game that is ingrained in the social fabric of the continent just like that, almost by fiat.

zouhair 6y ago

"Smart" and "educated" people are the easiest to fool[0]. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbwWL5ezA4g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbwWL5ezA4g

slig 6y ago
That explains so much.
ttt0 6y ago
“Why you fool, it's the educated reader who CAN be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don't need reconditioning. They're all right already. They'll believe anything.” ― C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength
- willis936 6y ago
  A fun hypothetical, but how smart do you think the average Q anon believer is? Reality isn’t as nice on the ears as the fantasy of a poet is.
  - pitay 6y ago
    Q anon believers are at most are a tiny proportion of who is described by that. Judging an entire population by the worst few of them that you can think of, is questionable. Also, you don't really know the distribution of where these 'believers' came from.
  - ttt0 6y ago
    For sure, the world is much more complicated and the inability to read between the lines and not taking everything at face value certainly isn't limited to "educated people". But there is a lot of truth to this quote nonetheless. For what it's worth, all of those wacky theories about Q-anon or even flat earth don't beat the fact that people somehow managed to subvert and obscure the fundamental truth about nature that's shared between every living being, reproduction, and made educated people believe that biological sex is simply irrelevant or not even a valid concept. Covid's another thing, I get that there are wacky theories about that too, but there are many pretentious, insufferable people who are acting like they're better than everyone else, because they blindly believe any propaganda about it that's pushed by the "official sources".

austincheney 6y ago

> but normally we'd expect it from Ford CEO, not Google types. Why? How do you see a distinction there?

IG_Semmelweiss 6y ago
Not parent but would assume that "google types" are more likely engineers first, with the assumption that those types are likely likely to have spatial / problem solvin awareness. Contrast Vs traditional traditional CEOs more likely to be hired on the basis of their network and charistma vs actual engineering chops?
- thu2111 6y ago
  Wojcicki is not an engineer. Her background is marketing.
- quanto 6y ago
  Even if the Google types have better spatial/technical problem solving skills, how does that translate to self-awareness?
- resfirestar 6y ago
  Susan Wojcicki started out as a marketing manager, not an engineer. By contrast Mary Barra, the CEO of GM, started out as an assembly line worker and moved up through engineering positions into management. I think people have some pretty backwards assumptions about tech vs traditional industry.
ARandomerDude 6y ago
Ford = internal combustion = bad people. Google = San Francisco = good people. It's just SV patting itself on the back for being woke and more virtuous than you.
quanto 6y ago
The Hacker News crowd (mostly the Google types) endorsing the statement implying the Google types are somehow superior to the Ford types itself shows the lack of self-awareness for the Google types.

bobthechef 6y ago

"Smart" is not "wise" (or virtuous). We should emphasize the value of the later.

briantakita 6y ago

Nowdays, if somebody wins an award, they are the exact opposite. We live is opposite world now.

tonyjstark 6y ago
I have something that I call 'Potato-Law' for this. It's like how the potatoes in discounters always say 'premium quality' or 'premium potatoes' but if they are, they wouldn't be so cheap or you couldn't buy them at the discounter. OTOH, if you go to a specialty goods shop, they don't write premium on their products. So if something has to be labeled on how good it is, it's probably not.
- durnygbur 6y ago
  Right in the crotch. I recently put small bag of potatoes in the shopping cart and only back home and from the price on the receipt I learned they are "premium potatoes". So pissed off.

truth_ 6y ago

"Smart" and "intelligent" people are just people born in relative financial ease with enough time to focus on studies and very likely with parents in academia or similar fields who made their children aware of the inner workings of the fields. Physics PhD people are not people fallen from skies with a little extra brain. They just got the time, opportunity, and tips to be there. Same goes for other "smart" people. There are, of course, exceptions like von Neuman, Turing, Feynman, Einstein, etc. But these people are exceptions. Perceptions abourt other people in those fields should not be formed with the image of these guys. Source: very first hand experiences.

open0 6y ago
100% true, these people are not smart at all. They are parasites and criminals that are destroying society and they must be stopped. Youtube manipulates what people see all over the world and most of it is pure trash.
dash2 6y ago
That's not what the science says: https://www.nature.com/articles/mp2017121 https://www.nature.com/articles/mp2017121
- truth_ 6y ago
  The abstract mentions people with 170 average IQ. Hawking had 169 IIRC. Physics PhDs are averagely on the range 130~145. That's much lower than people on the study. IQ is not taken seriously as a measure of intelligence or success anymore. And people can be trained to score high on IQ tests. On the debate of Nature vs. Nurture, I do not think that inherent intelligence viz. good genes do not play a role. But I tend to belive that nurture has a larger to play.

maybelsyrup 6y ago

This one of the better comments I've seen on this website. I actually copy-and-pasted it into my notes file. Kudos

toomanybeersies 6y ago

> It's likely that 'smart' people are just as likely to be unaware of their own follies or inabilities We have a word for that: Hubris

JCDenton2052 6y ago

If you were willing to speak truth to power like that, you would not be in her team in the first place.

rpastuszak 6y ago

(1) YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki Gets 'Freedom Expression' Award (2) Sponsored by YouTube More people will hear about the first part of that sentence so I guess it's still somewhat advantageous to them?

xxs 6y ago

The part it was 'posted'/awarded on the day a famous Austrian painter (who would have not approved of Photoshop) was born, makes it even better.

SuoDuanDao 6y ago

As I like to summarise it, 'the smarter someone is, the dumber beliefs they can rationalise'. Combine that observation with the Flynn effect and it explains why common sense is never as common as it used to be... Maybe Google's best bet at this point is to hire people with a wide diversity of IQ scores.

uvnq 6y ago
I wish I could save this comment somehow. That quote seems extremely useful
- SuoDuanDao 6y ago
  Thank you for that compliment! You actually can save it, if you click a comment's time stamp you can then click 'favourite' and it'll show up on a list in your profile.
  - uvnq 6y ago
    Oh neat, thanks! Saved.