15 ms·

The world is run by people no smarter than you

219 points by swyx 4y ago

fullshark 4y ago
The layoffs I'm not sure they were really mistakes, just business as usual. The issue is they may have permanently shattered the reality distortion around the tech industry that inspired so many to pursue careers within it: the idea that tech is not traditional business. However is this really an issue? Some VCs and C-suite members actually are cheering this on, because they think tech companies have grown too bloated and laborers unproductive, and think some fear needs to be instilled. IDK TBD, but mature companies are mature and run this way even if they aren't yet public.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  With layoffs there is also question was the hiring the mistake. Which I might consider at some level for it to be. At least some part of the hired cohort.
- P_I_Staker 4y ago
  Yeah theoretically this isn't a bad thing for "the machine". They sucked in a tremendous amount of talent with their net, and will theoretically be able to throw back many of the undesirable fish. And yes, the powers that be have been desperate to make a statement since they lost a tiny amount of power.
PaulHoule 4y ago
"Smart" can mean different things. "Wise", "Clever", "Foolish" and many other adjectives apply. Mark Zuckerberg has a high IQ, I won't doubt that. I also don't doubt his conviction that VR will change the world. It's possible he's right about that. I suspect he's going to experience anguish if some other company becomes the leader in VR. It might be his hill to die on, but it might not be his destiny to succeed at it. I think he's in a situation like somebody who abandons their lover to chase a doomed infatuation.
- 7speter 4y ago
  Nobody is too smart to be inflicted with blinding hubris. On the flip side, maybe Zuckerberg is playimg a really long game and sees something the rest of us don’t.
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    Being too early can be as bad as being late. Another problem with VR is a question of scale. Zuckerberg seems to be counting on VR being a substitute for social media, Zoom, video games as know it, etc. The problem might be you can spend all day reading, typing on a computer, scrolling on a phone, on zoom calls, watching TV. It seems you can't do that in VR. VR might be a high intensity activity that you can do a little bit every day that may never take a significant bite out of the status quo, even if VR is successful on its own terms.
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  > Mark Zuckerberg has a high IQ I don't doubt it either; he's not dim. But "IQ" means something very specific; roughly, arithmetical ability, spatial reasoning, and lingusitic reasoning. Most importantly, IQ doesn't include judgement. Leading a nation requires judgement, more than cleverness. You can hire people to provide you with cleverness. The reason the "buck stops" with you, is because people have assessed you to have good judgement. Take Liz Truss, the UK's last Prime Minister (I assume there's been no change while I'm typing). Apparently she's very clever; maybe too clever to take advice. At any rate, her judgement is shit.
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    Exactly. "Clever" is not necessarily meant as a compliment: https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/clever https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/clever
  - nradov 4y ago
    My favorite example of this is Donald Rumsfeld. Based on his writings, he was probably one of the smartest people who ever worked in government. But as Defense Secretary before and during the Iraq war he made catastrophically bad decisions which are still impacting our national security today. Beyond a certain minimal level, IQ is meaningless for making good decisions.
nh23423fefe 4y ago
Seems like the failure was imagining that smart people don't make mistakes. Smart people make tons of mistakes and they are confident in their ability to correct and improve. They aren't fragile and afraid to be wrong in public because they know saying 'I don't know' isn't a death sentence. Regular people generally just sit in one place improving nothing, learning nothing, changing little year over year. Terrified of being "caught out as an imposter" whatever that means. The difference isn't smart/not smart. It's movement vs stationary.
- adoxyz 4y ago
  I think it's also a difference in opportunity. When you have money/capital/connections, you can be wrong, and wrong often, and take risks. When you're living paycheck to paycheck, you can make an occasional mistake and be fine, but you're likely to be much more risk-averse. It's easy to make movements when the outcome could only benefit you.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    If you're in America, you've got no such excuses. You're not going to die if your business fails. There are tons of businesses you can start with zero capital.
    - tablespoon 4y ago
      >> When you're living paycheck to paycheck, you can make an occasional mistake and be fine, but you're likely to be much more risk-averse. > If you're in America, you've got no such excuses. You're not going to die if your business fails. There are tons of businesses you can start with zero capital. You talk like people don't have dependents or opportunity costs. If everyone living paycheck-to-paycheck followed your advice, I'm sure you'd have a lot of parents explaining to their kids that they're going to have to live out of the car for awhile, because some rando on the internet said they had nothing to lose.
      - WalterBright 4y ago
swader999 4y ago
This is why I have extra food on hand.
machina_ex_deus 4y ago
It took the Fed a full year of inflation being over the target to raise rates. If you look at the code of the climate models responsible for the decision making of trillions of dollars, you'll find old fortran code with many obvious inaccuracies on the order of magnitude of the things it's supposed to measure, and you'll find they all copy code from each other and reach diverging results.
- sgt101 4y ago
  uhm, no, no you won't. Climate models are very conservative in terms of the coding and approaches, but the old Fortran is used because 100's of eyes have picked over it for problems and it's as accurate as it possibly can be.
  - machina_ex_deus 4y ago
    Have you actually looked at it before you replied, or are you just assuming it? Fortran is terrible for the scale of those projects, and it shows. I can give you concrete examples straight from GitHub. Accuracy isn't relative it's absolute. You're not comparing accuracy to other models, you compare it vs reality. It is a known fact the results of different climate models diverge. There's ongoing research as to why this is happening, lookup CMIP6. Many models also required flux adjustment to stay stable over many years of simulation (although at least that problem is improving). It's really hard to test these models on the scale of the effects climate change.
    - sgt101 4y ago
      You will learn that when things that have been worked on by 100's of smart people look strange there is usually a reason why. This stuff is very hard, contributions before criticism.
      - machina_ex_deus 4y ago
        You still didn't answer me whether you've thoroughly reviewed their code before dismissing my comments. Did you? You can approach it as an insider researcher "on their side" and try to correct it, but the problem is just so big you're not going to get flawless models without time, and they have already shrugged serious problems in the past with "flux adjustment". You'll get endless errata and retractions but you'll never get a narrative shift. Or you can try to approach it from the outside like countless scientists have done and get called oil companies shill, climate denier and what not. The academic "climate" around it is very "hot". So eventually you just go and forget it and do something productive with your life instead of literally fighting windmills. (And I did mean literally as a joke about renewable energy).
boringg 4y ago
I think the more apt way would be: The world is run by people how are by and large more motivated by power and self interest and that doesn't always correlate with very high levels of intelligence.
- astrea 4y ago
  This (and the article) have, coincidentally, been my latest fixation. I'm theoretically no dumber than any headline-making character these days, but they 1. Have connections and chance opportunities that have not fallen into my lap that have into theirs and 2. I don't have this insatiable appetite for power or money. Perhaps it's my depression or lack of confidence, but simply collecting my developer salary and spending my remaining time on my hobbies/relationships is enough for me and I have no desire (or energy, frankly) to pursue greatness.
  - dpkirchner 4y ago
    They also have the resources to delegate substantial work to others. I often wonder how much more productive or happy I'd be if I had a "chief of staff" that ensures less interesting things get delegated to the right people.
    - dv35z 4y ago
      If you’re interested in going further on this train of thought- check out virtual assistants on UpWork or Fiverr. You can find great ones for $20-40/hr. Or if you prefer a full-time person (40hr/week), you can hire a great one at $1-2k a month. This person can organize your emails, calendar, manage projects, edit videos, and so on.
  - boringg 4y ago
    My counter is why would you want to pursue such a life? And you should re-evaluate what you deem as greatness. I don't believe most of the people who fall into these power categories as great even if people occasionally herald them (or business publications do). There are many ways to greatness and most of them do not have public accolades attached to them.
aschearer 4y ago
OK, if the people running the show are no better than "you" than does that imply merit doesn't rise to the top? If we aren't in a meritocracy, what does that mean for wealth distribution?
- tiborsaas 4y ago
  Merit doesn't guarantee anything. You also need to do things in the right order in the right time and the right place, a decent amount of luck would also come handy.
  - aschearer 4y ago
    The only gaurantees in life are death and taxes. But supposedly cream rises to the top. Get my drift?
    - IndigoIncognito 4y ago
      Ever heard of tax evasion?
    - nigerianbrince 4y ago
      Yeeah https://youtube.com/shorts/FCD_Xq4ebyw?feature=share https://youtube.com/shorts/FCD_Xq4ebyw?feature=share
    - HardlyCurious 4y ago
      How random do you think outcomes are? Is a minority from a ghetto just lucky if they get admitted to Harvard? When we see a stereotypical white guy get admitted to Harvard, we would assume they are privileged. Are the people who break out of overty doing it on their own, ala boot straps style, or are they the product of an unlikely serious of events which gave them the edge they needed?
- nautilius 4y ago
  Wealth distribution in particular can be accurately modeled by purely random coin flips on who gets more and who loses: E.g. https://chancyislands.org/CIChance.html https://chancyislands.org/CIChance.html Absolutely no meritocracy required.
hintymad 4y ago
People make mistakes. I'd rather ask a different question: what are the greatest decisions these people have made and the great things they build that I can't do, with or without luck? Then, there seems to be quite a few.
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  Napoleon, at (e.g.) Borodino. (Whatever happened to him?) I'm struggling to think of great decisions that didn't amount to standing on the shoulders of giants.
ignoramous 4y ago
> PS: If you are starting something new, you also have the benefit of a lot of recently freed-up Coinbase/Twitter/Shopify/Stripe/Meta employees with a lot of severance nothing to lose That's not so smart is it? Hiring folks on sky high salaries. If you are a startup, the last thing you need is uncompromising engs from BigTech imposing themselves on your org. Make sure to beat it out of them or better yet, pursue those who have the potential to grow as the startup scales, and/or those who come on board with a more grounded set of expectations. Especially, if you're aiming longer term.
- tjpnz 4y ago
  I think it was Einstein who said that you can't solve the world's problems by using the same thinking that created them.
  - eouwt 4y ago
    I think it was Einstein who said "I probably didn't say this"
  - disgruntledphd2 4y ago
    It was Jung, I believe.
labrador 4y ago
"True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country." - Kurt Vonnegut
- gsatic 4y ago
  - mannykannot 4y ago
    The quote is not premised on, and nor does it imply, the notions you object to. As for ants, they are not a great model for human societies, even if it sometimes seems so.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    Who are you quoting?
    - hxugufjfjf 4y ago
      What do you mean? They do not appear to be quoting anyone.
  - labrador 4y ago
    > Vonnegut is highly over rated This is great because it conjurs up for me an image of you as a world-weary 17 year old smoking his first cigarette after getting a high grade on his French literature test while thinking about whether he should go to Brown or Harvard or maybe just drop out altogether
    - thanatos519 4y ago
      How very Salinger!
      - labrador 4y ago
        17 year old Bill Gates' favorite author!
SevenNation 4y ago
> It’s hard to know what to take from that; Steve Jobs was clearly a very smart man, without a lot of empathy for lesser beings. So is he saying “Everything was made up by people no smarter than Steve Jobs”, or does he actually mean it that the average world/company/industry leader really is no smarter than you? He's saying that the average "you" is no smarter than the average person. > And then I take a look at the clown show that has been tech in the past few weeks... All of these example trace their roots to extreme market distortions bought about by a massive direct injection of money into an economy that had partially shut down during the pandemic. The normal pricing signals were suppressed for the last two years. The underlying mistake made in the biggest of the cited examples was to believe the distorted marketplace pricing signals. The mistake made in the lesser cited examples was that getting rich from the deluge of fake money serves as proof of skill in other areas. The process of normalization is now underway, and will continue for some time. If those examples in the article make you go "huh," just wait for what's in store as the receding tide reveals all of those bare bottoms and inflated senses of superiority.
rags2riches 4y ago
"Do you not know, my son, with how very little wisdom the world is governed?" Written by Axel Oxenstierna, Lord High Chancellor of Sweden, to his son, a delegate to the negotiations that would lead to the Peace of Westphalia, who worried about his ability to hold his own amidst experienced and eminent statesmen and diplomats. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axel_Oxenstierna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axel_Oxenstierna
- ddhhyy 4y ago
  Written in 1648, which gives you a sense for how long this has been the case.
- tootie 4y ago
  This is almost exactly what I tell my younger folks who are concerned they're not authoritative enough to share an opinion or lead a project. I cured my Imposter Syndrome not by gaining confidence but realizing that everyone else was just guessing too. My guesses were at least as good as theirs.
  - 6510 4y ago
    My version was more general: I'm in a race with people convinced they cant win. After that realization even a tiny amount of effort put me miles ahead. Again and again I found situations screaming: This is where others would give up. You shouldn't be satisfied with guesses as good as the self proclaimed imposters. Your effort should further convince them they are!
- toxik 4y ago
  Be that as it may, the point in our bureaucracies is precisely to make sure that the decisions we make are based on what we learned over the years and not what some “10x” SWE is throwing a hissy fit about in the daily standup.
  - sam0x17 4y ago
    but if he's a 10x then his 5 years of experience is actually 50 years!!! :O
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jjk166 4y ago
No one holds power by accident. While some people may initially rise purely by chance, there are countless people actively trying to take their place, and thus the ability to remain in that desirable position implies sufficient competence to fend off all challengers. Obviously victory won't necessarily go to the smartest, there are many other important qualities like charisma and risk tolerance that tip the scales, but those in power still need to be smart enough to use their other skills and connections to overcome smarter competitors. If you see a grand master with a long history of success make what appears to you to be a blunder, perhaps they are indeed off their game, but it is wise to look to see how it may be a gambit.
- rdtwo 4y ago
  They have skills to rise to the top for sure. The problem is those may not be the same skills you would need to govern effectively. Donald Trump is my favorite recent example of that but there are many others
  - denton-scratch 4y ago
    Trump's a sobering case, isn't he? He's a multiple bankrupt. He has a talent for destruction. It seems to me that he lacks insight; he seems to be a loudmouthed blowhard, just like many people I've met that aren't well-educated, and aren't property magnates. I don't really get how he got people to vote for him; I suspect it's that he appealed specifically to an anti-intellectual constituency - the same constituency that rejected Al Gore for being too intellectual. That is: being clever seems to be unhelpful, if you want to get ahead in US politics.
    - adolph 4y ago
      > I don't really get how he got people to vote for him; I suspect it's that he appealled specifically to an anti-intellectual constituency - the same constituency that rejected Al Gore for being too intellectual. Since it was the same constituency (in the margin) that voted Obama and Trump in, maybe the question is how Obama appealed to that "anti-intellectual" group more successfully than the succeeding candidate.
Proven 4y ago
tablespoon 4y ago
I hate articles that use Steve Jobs as some kind of guru, he was a lucky, successful asshole, but I guess that's charisma for you. > When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and you’re life is just to live your life inside the world. > Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money. > That’s a very limited life. > Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. I wonder what bit of 60s counterculture that attitude was directly lifted from. While the people that came before weren't any smarter than you; it's important to remember that they had, collectively, more experience in more areas than you could ever dream of having. That doesn't mean they got everything right, but it does mean if you just take the quote to heart you'll probably end up more like a bull in a China shop than some sage-like innovator. But it is nice idea to remember, so you can mentally knock down people like Jobs, who want to portray themselves as sage-like innovators, a peg.
- gizajob 4y ago
  It's a very zen-inspired take on the world, and I've heard actual gurus give much less useful and down-to-earth advice than Steve here.
- sys_64738 4y ago
  > I hate articles that use Steve Jobs as some kind of guru, he was a lucky, successful asshole, but I guess that's charisma for you. He was lucky an awful lot then.
  - aierou 4y ago
    I would estimate maybe 1 in ~7 billion odds (statistical liberties taken)
    - WalterBright 4y ago
      Jobs was highly successful 3 times (Apple I, Pixar, and his return to Apple). Once could be luck, twice is highly unlikely to be luck, and 3 times? fuggeddabootit
TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
Clearly not true in physics and engineering. How many people can honestly they're as smart as Maxwell, Einstein, Von Neumann, or even "minor" players like John Bardeen and Bill Shockley? More believable about business and public morality of all sorts (including economics), all of which can be swamps of reality-denying utter stupidity. The opposite of stupid isn't smart. The opposite of stupid is true, accurate, and realistic.
- raziel2701 4y ago
  People like those you listed rarely run the world.
- LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
  The people in physics and engineering don't govern.
- tsunamifury 4y ago
  I think you should read up on some of these men’s thoughts on things other than physics and reconsider your point.
- seydor 4y ago
  Maxwell Einstein and Von neumann never took public office, and even avoided public policy positions
  - none_to_remain 4y ago
    Very smart of them
- lapetitejort 4y ago
  For every Einstein, there are hundreds or thousands of physicists who are actively exploring the big theories, and actually using them. How many physicists are working in and around CERN? A small fraction will earn any public recognition, yet all of them are furthering physics. That's just the physicists, never mind the engineers, material scientists, construction workers, managers, payroll accountants, etc, who are needed to run the place. Are they as "smart" as Einstein? Maybe. Some might be smarter. There are only so many big ideas to discover. Every other genius has to contend with exploring those ideas.
stephc_int13 4y ago
One big, directly related mistake, in my opinion is the strongly held idea that some people are geniuses, and that general intelligence is a thing. The more I look into it, the more I see that some people are experts, even genius-level experts, sometimes in several fields, but this level of expertise is a weak predictor of their competence in different fields. A second big problem is that some people are experts at manipulating masses and at building hype, it can be dangerous because there is a strong compounding effect with hype. (Aka snowballing)
- laci37 4y ago
  Everyone is subject to the Dunning-Kruger effect. IMO intelligence is more about how quickly can you adapt to a new field. Everyone will have stupid moments if they are thrown in the deep waters of an unfamiliar field.
  - stephc_int13 4y ago
    Agreed, to some extent. The idea that some people are genuinely extremely talented and could be successful at anything is, in my opinion, unproven and dubious. I think that human intellectual potential is highly adaptable, but we tend to ignore/undervalue the full path that led someone to excellence in a field. Also, we tend to rely a lot on weak heuristics to evaluate one's intellect. The strongest one (but still weak) is language abilities. The weakest and dangerous one is wealth/status.
TheRealPomax 4y ago
Frankly, that last paragraph is the most important one. If you were on the fence about actually starting that start-up, this is your golden opportunity.
DoneWithAllThat 4y ago
A lot of hubris in this thread. My experience has been the opposite of what honestly sounds like a lot of sour grapes thinking here: when I’ve met hugely successful leaders I was taken aback at how much more intelligent they were than me. Their ability to contextualize questions and problems, to motivate others, to find a path through challenges when it seems like there’s none to be found, and to offer advice and guidance to peers and reports was incredible to witness. Even the bullshitters were bulls hitting on top of a staggering level of intellectual ability.
- seydor 4y ago
  And a lot of people have the opposite experiences. Power puts a halo around people sometimes
- jmeister 4y ago
  A classic: >These people of the Power Elite were visibly much smarter than average mortals. In conversation they spoke quickly, sensibly, and by and large intelligently. When talk turned to deep and difficult topics, they understood faster, made fewer mistakes, were readier to adopt others' suggestions. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CKpByWmsZ8WmpHtYa/competent-elites https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CKpByWmsZ8WmpHtYa/competent-...
seydor 4y ago
in relation to twitter, the juvenile messages exchanged between Musk and former twitter CEO are also revealing https://fortune.com/2022/09/30/elon-musk-friendly-text-messages-twitter-ceo-parag-agrawal-court-trial/ https://fortune.com/2022/09/30/elon-musk-friendly-text-messa...
dandanua 4y ago
They are definitely smarter in the ability of gaining power over other people.
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  You don't need to be smart to do that; big muscles and a baseball bat helps, though.
pcl 4y ago
I recently read Our Man about Richard Holbrooke, and man, this notion really came across loud and clear. (Also, it was a good read!) https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/215731/our-man-by-george-packer/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/215731/our-man-by-g...
JohnDoe124 4y ago
> Elon adding, and then removing, a second verified checkmark to replace the one he devalued, something any B2C product expert would know is a terrible idea Elon proposing a $20/month price for Twitter Blue, and then immediately dropping to $8 at the first celebrity pushback, something any pricing expert would know is a terrible idea Elon (or his EA?) personally reinterviewing engineers at Twitter and telling them to print out code and then changing his mind, something any engineering manager would know is a terrible idea I'm sure Elon knows how stupid these are, it's a publicity stunt
- phpnode 4y ago
  never attribute to wisdom that which is adequately explained by stupidity
  - adolph 4y ago
    never attribute to 3 dimensional chess what could be explained by one dimensional
omgomgomgomg 4y ago
I was always wondering. Ant politician cannot make everyone happy. The brightest do not go into politics, the morally cleanest do not go there either. So what is left? The power hungry and greedy, not sure if any party is better or worse. I cannot think of one government that is perceived as great by the populace and foreigners on a wide scale. Same for the powerful insurances, tech companies, banks, the leaders arent the best, the whole and lack of better competition makes them strong.
- mch82 4y ago
  This is not true. Why do you think this? Edit: It’s very possible I’m understanding what you’re trying to say.
  - omgomgomgomg 4y ago
    I mean, if you look at scientists, theyre all top of their field, they are there for the sake of science. Now look at Boebert and similar, it is safe to say they would never be great scientists. Of course, this is not universally true, but there is an undeniable tendency.
denton-scratch 4y ago
I simply don't believe there are people who are super-clever. I don't believe in "geniuses". I believe there are people that are cleverer than me, and they can leave me mystified about how they worked out X. But that mystification doesn't require them to have a multiple of my smarts; it only requires them to have 10% more smarts than me. In popular discourse, for example, Einstein is commonly credited as having been a genius. I'm not a physicist; but my understanding is that Einstein's SR and GR were essentially natural conclusions to draw from Maxwell's and Lagrange's equations. IOW, if Einstein had remained a patent reviewer, someone else would have produced those theories. The same belief extends to "great men" of history; I think they emerge from the sea that they swim in, they do not command the tides. So I think that if Hitler had been killed in the WW1 trenches, some other authoritarian would have come along to unite the German people (perhaps not as bad as Hitler; perhaps worse).
ltbarcly3 4y ago
I think the true statement would be 'The People who run the World are not uncommonly intelligent'. They almost all probably have IQs in the 120 to 135 range. That's not that smart, you can round up dozens of people smarter than that at most colleges. However, even at the low end of 120 that's still almost 91% percentile, which makes the statement 'The World Is Run by People No Smarter Than You' only true for like 9% of people. I agree with the sentiment but lots of people would not be in the same position as the people who 'run the world' even with equally good luck, because they would not have been able to understand the situations they found themselves in well enough to make decisions that were in their own interest.
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  You are equating IQ with intelligence and "smartness".
  - ltbarcly3 4y ago
    Whatever problem(s) you might have with it, IQ is the thing we can measure that is best correlated to what you would describe as 'intelligence' or 'smartness'.
amadeuspagel 4y ago
> Zuck spending $4b/quarter on the Metaverse entirely unproven, something any lean startup VC would know is a terrible idea I'm skeptical of the Metaverse, but everything is unproven until someone proves it. Does every lean startup VC know what the future of computing looks like? If they don't, I have no idea how they would know that the Metaverse is a terrible idea.
- tootie 4y ago
  Most startups don't get a $10B leash. You need to gain some amount of traction and revenue to get investment. And not just money, they are spending credibility. No one would be paying any attention to this if Zuck weren't pushing so hard.
- Kiro 4y ago
  I thought that was the whole point of the article, that "any X would know" is actually just "any [person not smarter than you] would know".
  - amadeuspagel 4y ago
    No one knows what the future of computing looks like. Again, I'm skeptical of VR and the metaverse. But I don't know.
- dylan604 4y ago
  >I have no idea how they would know that the Metaverse is a terrible idea You look at the track record of the people building the new thing to see what their other creations will be like. If you've seen a Picasso, Pollock, Dali, Rembrandt, you know what their other works will be like. If you see a thing created by Zuck, you know what it will be like in the same manner. Also, have you seen the demos? ZZZZZZ
  - amadeuspagel 4y ago
    So the metaverse is going to have 2 billion users as well, like Zuck's first creation?
mch82 4y ago
The world is run by people. Those people are no smarter than you (person reading this comment right now). I believe this personally and I’m confident Steve Jobs meant this literally. The reason I’m confident is Jobs said this in 1994, when the conventional wisdom was that both he and Apple had failed. Toy Story wouldn’t be released until the next year. iPhone (the device that convinced people Apple was right about Human Centered Design) was 13 years away. NeXT was failing. Here is the link to the original video posted by the Santa Clara Historical Society. https://youtu.be/kYfNvmF0Bqw https://youtu.be/kYfNvmF0Bqw Edit: fix video link
Gasp0de 4y ago
The thought that politicians are not smarter than me is so scary to me. I don't fully understand so many things (globalization is absurdly complicated), but at least I don't have to make decisions that will affect millions of people.
- RajT88 4y ago
  I don't think anyone really fully understands the global economy. A friend of mine who is a financial engineer by trade (has designed the algos for HFT, works at Blackrock, etc.), explained a few basic principles to me: 1. All models are wrong; some are useful. A good way of making predictions is to average together the most successful models. 2. Economic systems are run by humans, who are constantly trying to game the system to their advantage. As greater capabilities for measuring and understanding the system are developed, the dynamics of the system are changed by those capabilities, thus changing the understanding of those metrics in the first place, and on and on, forever. 3. The way markets react to developments in technology is of course why you can't trust anyone who is promising huge investment returns based on "backtesting". Nobody can predict the future, because the way the market reacts to changes is constantly evolving. At best, we can understand the dynamics of the global or local economies at a given point in time. Even that is extremely difficult.
ankaAr 4y ago
Yes, come to Argentina..., you will face that is run by people that is not even as stupid as your dog.
lamontcg 4y ago
Flip side of the problem is that all those failed ideas and failed businesses out there were from people as smart as you are. You're probably not going to get lucky and hit the jackpot on whatever idea you have or on whatever startup that you attach yourself to.
coding123 4y ago
Steve Jobs would never say he's better than others. But mark my words here, people with real higher IQ actually do know they are smarter and make better decisions than others. They actually can't stand being around dumb people. There's only one major problem: with intelligence often comes OCD, autism, spectrum stuff. The brain is lit up all over the place, but often comes with a lot of things that makes life worse. You're actually much much better off being a bit idiotic in this world.
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  > But mark my words here, people with real higher IQ actually do know they are smarter and make better decisions than others. How would you know this? Are you referring to yourself? I'm with Socrates: the mark of knowledge is that you know how little you know.
  - coding123 4y ago
    Know people like this. I'm an idiot myself.
taylodl 4y ago
That may be true, but don't underestimate the value of subject matter expertise. This is an issue I see a lot - smart people thinking they have expertise and downplaying the expertise and experience of others. You want people with expertise and experience making your most important decisions.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jonwest 4y ago
  Everyone, everywhere, knows something that you don’t. The more we can lean into this and share context and curiosity instead of judgment, the better we will all be. That said, I realize it’s simple to understand this, but not easy to implement, which is unfortunate.
- goethes_kind 4y ago
  Are you talking about engineers and programmers?
  - taylodl 4y ago
    They're the people I'm most familiar with, though they're not the only ones who do it. It seems to be a trait of really smart people in general - including me. I try to be on my guard to know when I've left my wheelhouse but I still sometimes fall victim to believing I have expertise that I don't.
  - _ea1k 4y ago
    Its a pattern that I see in people of all stripes. One of the most pervasive is the tendency of those with no political background to harshly assess political decisions.
BiteCode_dev 4y ago
One of my current client is a big institution whose decisions affect the life of probably 700+ millions people a year. A lot of critical processes are just excel sheets that people open and run once in a while, maybe copy / paste or click a button in there, then close. Some processes are automatized, but there is no way to check if the result is good. Best you can do is to have a human look at the numbers and say "LGTM" with some confident face and call it a day. Said client handle billions of euros every year for other entities. They basically influence the entire world economy on a daily basis. Now, get audited from top to bottom, from internal and external teams, and all audits pass eventually. I met mostly good people there that take their job seriously. But still, every time I dive deeper into their rabbit whole, I just can't believe what humanity stands on.
- acid__ 4y ago
  Once upon a time, all of that would have been managed on just pen and paper, calculated by humans instead of machines!
  - BiteCode_dev 4y ago
    There was one French artist that made a comic with 2 characters once, saying: - computers are amazing, they can calculate 20 millions operation every second, with only one mistake every 10 million of operations - 2 mistakes a second, you call that progress? Today, the fun part is, the human unreliability is now a small part of a big automated chain that have large, numerous and instant results. So if the excel file is not opened, and the calculations updated but the human, the rest of the system will work with stale values. And who knows what it will do to the cascade of events handling the billions of euros? In fact, my client has a failsafe for that: a designated chain of people that are supposed to take over if one cannot do their task, for each critical task.
tb_technical 4y ago
It's run by people no smarter than you, with rules enforced by mentally domesticated highschool graduates with pistols.
blurbleblurble 4y ago
People get power because they scrap for it not because they somehow deserve it
jamesgreenleaf 4y ago
> Elon proposing a $20/month price for Twitter Blue, and then immediately dropping to $8 at the first celebrity pushback, something any pricing expert would know is a terrible idea Wasn't that a good idea though? Everyone heard the price was going to be $20, so now $8 doesn't seem so bad. Wouldn't a pricing expert refer to that as anchoring?
SergeAx 4y ago
The examples in the article are deceptive and kinda strawman-ish. Zuck and Elon are definitely smarter than me, although I think that I am smarter than average person. The problem with their terrible decisions is their self-perception, when they attribute their huge success with their smartness. "I am successful, therefore I know better". This is just plain wrong.
- armatav 4y ago
  Unfortunately for that line of thinking, rewarding demonstrable success is quite literally the definition of meritocracy.
- SergeAx 4y ago
  Also, terrible mistakes are mostly rooted in a big risk taking. And for already successful people it is mandatory to take more and more risk to achieve something beyond they already have, because with small risk the reward is small too.
thanatos519 4y ago
Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others. — Edward Abbey
- phonescreen_man 4y ago
  Here here
- dennis_jeeves1 4y ago
  Seconded, and along same lines is capitalism ( as opposed to socialism)
jancsika 4y ago
Are we sure there isn't a dark forest thingy going on here? Benjamin: You work in TV? Mimi: No, but I watch a lot. Benjamin: Of course you do. You're creative. Noah: She came up with the name Noah's Arcade. Mimi: I just opened my mouth and out it came. Noah: You're a lucky man, Mr Vanderhoff. - from Wayne's World, 1992 ** Mr. and Mrs. Vanderhoff were none the wiser. Even Cassandra didn't catch on until the end of the movie when she felt the similarity between Benjamin's unsolicited shoulder rub and the sensation of a literal snake slithering on her skin. In conclusion, humans can be sneaky creatures. Especially smart ones. Edit: clarification
omgomgomgomg 4y ago
Another question is, what takes the smartest mind? Software engineers? Medical doctors? HFT? Someone like Zuckerberg? Some senator anywhere in the world? Very hard to compare unless you have worked with all of them. I frankly do not know, but I have severe doubts that its politicians. Trump ran the worlds superpower and its still standing. His casinos did not all survive. Makes me think.
ExMachina73 4y ago
It seems to me the great differentiator is risk-taker vs. risk-averse, not so much "smarts." The examples given in this article, Elon and Zuck have both been wildly successful at some endeavors(Tesla,SpaceX,Facebook) and have failed spectacularly at others (Twitter, Meta-verse) But they both are risk-takers. And on a long enough time-line even seemingly successful "masters of the universe" will fail at some point in their careers. What one then hopes is that you collect enough wisdom on your journey to make fewer mistakes as you go.
- beeboop 4y ago
  lol at calling twitter a failure after one week
t0bia_s 4y ago
The world is run by people richer than you. /fixed
mharig 4y ago
The selection process is plain stupid. First, the candidades must have the will to power. They must lick the asses of the alphas to be promoted. They must make many promises to get help. They must hinder the others to be promoted. They must lie to the people to get elected. So you have predominantly power-mad, spineless, corrupt, intrigant, dishonest assholes on top. The state of the world reflects that exactly. The bureaucracies too.
scmitton 4y ago
I think a lot of people look at the world and think that the people that designed it were executing a well laid out plan, or before they executed anything they had to have deep understanding of theory. What Jobs was saying though I think, was that the world around us is full of inventions that didn't come about that way, but came about through tinkering and being curious. Anyone can tinker and be curious, that doesn't take any credentials. As for the author's comments on today's leading entrepreneurs, everyone's biased to think they'd make the right decision in hindsight. Good decisions today don't look at all the same as after they've been validated.
kkfx 4y ago
A corollary: since "the world is run by people no smarter than you" then it's a good idea to be: - diversified :: so errors and horrors by a country/cohort of people can be a lesson for others without hitting anybody at once; - not centralized :: as above, so a "chief" who happen to be an i*iot would cause issues to a small cohort of people, but not to all at once. Now try imaging: all Roomba and Amazon Ring IN THE WORLD goes TFU due to a centralized system mishap https://eminetra.com.au/people-cant-vacuum-or-use-their-doorbell-because-amazons-cloud-servers-are-down/ https://eminetra.com.au/people-cant-vacuum-or-use-their-door... or the famous https://youtu.be/JqoGJPMD3Ws https://youtu.be/JqoGJPMD3Ws or also https://arstechnica.com/?p=1848769 https://arstechnica.com/?p=1848769 and countless others. ALL such "issues" are SPOF by their own "modern" design. Perhaps it's a good idea re-evaluating such way of doing anything from just-in-time productions to home food stock in the freezer to car's spare wheel instead of crappy ideas to spare a kg.
jimcavel888 4y ago
dennis_jeeves1 4y ago
Lots of wisdom in this thread, much more than I usually see, i.e a lot of people who are aware of history and very aware of varied human nature. Question to the those people: why wouldn't you want to put your contact information ( or even a few webpages) so that other similar minded people can get in touch with you? Certainly if you have that kind of wisdom, you will be intellectually isolated. ( Or perhaps you are happy with the status quo?)
- AstralStorm 4y ago
  First of all, nobody wants to solicit advice or especially be given unsolicited advice. Second, if you happen to become known, your contact data is a risk - even existential. Finally the movers and shakers prefer loyal friend and income to good advice and empathy. Talk is cheap, action is hard and expensive.
  - dennis_jeeves1 4y ago
    Me: Totally confused, lol. (ok second point is understandable, but surely one can have multiple email addresses)

219 points by swyx 4y ago

The layoffs I'm not sure they were really mistakes, just business as usual. The issue is they may have permanently shattered the reality distortion around the tech industry that inspired so many to pursue careers within it: the idea that tech is not traditional business. However is this really an issue? Some VCs and C-suite members actually are cheering this on, because they think tech companies have grown too bloated and laborers unproductive, and think some fear needs to be instilled. IDK TBD, but mature companies are mature and run this way even if they aren't yet public.

Ekaros 4y ago
With layoffs there is also question was the hiring the mistake. Which I might consider at some level for it to be. At least some part of the hired cohort.
P_I_Staker 4y ago
Yeah theoretically this isn't a bad thing for "the machine". They sucked in a tremendous amount of talent with their net, and will theoretically be able to throw back many of the undesirable fish. And yes, the powers that be have been desperate to make a statement since they lost a tiny amount of power.

PaulHoule 4y ago

"Smart" can mean different things. "Wise", "Clever", "Foolish" and many other adjectives apply. Mark Zuckerberg has a high IQ, I won't doubt that. I also don't doubt his conviction that VR will change the world. It's possible he's right about that. I suspect he's going to experience anguish if some other company becomes the leader in VR. It might be his hill to die on, but it might not be his destiny to succeed at it. I think he's in a situation like somebody who abandons their lover to chase a doomed infatuation.

7speter 4y ago
Nobody is too smart to be inflicted with blinding hubris. On the flip side, maybe Zuckerberg is playimg a really long game and sees something the rest of us don’t.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  Being too early can be as bad as being late. Another problem with VR is a question of scale. Zuckerberg seems to be counting on VR being a substitute for social media, Zoom, video games as know it, etc. The problem might be you can spend all day reading, typing on a computer, scrolling on a phone, on zoom calls, watching TV. It seems you can't do that in VR. VR might be a high intensity activity that you can do a little bit every day that may never take a significant bite out of the status quo, even if VR is successful on its own terms.
denton-scratch 4y ago
> Mark Zuckerberg has a high IQ I don't doubt it either; he's not dim. But "IQ" means something very specific; roughly, arithmetical ability, spatial reasoning, and lingusitic reasoning. Most importantly, IQ doesn't include judgement. Leading a nation requires judgement, more than cleverness. You can hire people to provide you with cleverness. The reason the "buck stops" with you, is because people have assessed you to have good judgement. Take Liz Truss, the UK's last Prime Minister (I assume there's been no change while I'm typing). Apparently she's very clever; maybe too clever to take advice. At any rate, her judgement is shit.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  Exactly. "Clever" is not necessarily meant as a compliment: https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/clever https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/clever
- nradov 4y ago
  My favorite example of this is Donald Rumsfeld. Based on his writings, he was probably one of the smartest people who ever worked in government. But as Defense Secretary before and during the Iraq war he made catastrophically bad decisions which are still impacting our national security today. Beyond a certain minimal level, IQ is meaningless for making good decisions.

nh23423fefe 4y ago

Seems like the failure was imagining that smart people don't make mistakes. Smart people make tons of mistakes and they are confident in their ability to correct and improve. They aren't fragile and afraid to be wrong in public because they know saying 'I don't know' isn't a death sentence. Regular people generally just sit in one place improving nothing, learning nothing, changing little year over year. Terrified of being "caught out as an imposter" whatever that means. The difference isn't smart/not smart. It's movement vs stationary.

adoxyz 4y ago
I think it's also a difference in opportunity. When you have money/capital/connections, you can be wrong, and wrong often, and take risks. When you're living paycheck to paycheck, you can make an occasional mistake and be fine, but you're likely to be much more risk-averse. It's easy to make movements when the outcome could only benefit you.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  If you're in America, you've got no such excuses. You're not going to die if your business fails. There are tons of businesses you can start with zero capital.
  - tablespoon 4y ago
    >> When you're living paycheck to paycheck, you can make an occasional mistake and be fine, but you're likely to be much more risk-averse. > If you're in America, you've got no such excuses. You're not going to die if your business fails. There are tons of businesses you can start with zero capital. You talk like people don't have dependents or opportunity costs. If everyone living paycheck-to-paycheck followed your advice, I'm sure you'd have a lot of parents explaining to their kids that they're going to have to live out of the car for awhile, because some rando on the internet said they had nothing to lose.
    - WalterBright 4y ago

swader999 4y ago

This is why I have extra food on hand.

machina_ex_deus 4y ago

It took the Fed a full year of inflation being over the target to raise rates. If you look at the code of the climate models responsible for the decision making of trillions of dollars, you'll find old fortran code with many obvious inaccuracies on the order of magnitude of the things it's supposed to measure, and you'll find they all copy code from each other and reach diverging results.

sgt101 4y ago
uhm, no, no you won't. Climate models are very conservative in terms of the coding and approaches, but the old Fortran is used because 100's of eyes have picked over it for problems and it's as accurate as it possibly can be.
- machina_ex_deus 4y ago
  Have you actually looked at it before you replied, or are you just assuming it? Fortran is terrible for the scale of those projects, and it shows. I can give you concrete examples straight from GitHub. Accuracy isn't relative it's absolute. You're not comparing accuracy to other models, you compare it vs reality. It is a known fact the results of different climate models diverge. There's ongoing research as to why this is happening, lookup CMIP6. Many models also required flux adjustment to stay stable over many years of simulation (although at least that problem is improving). It's really hard to test these models on the scale of the effects climate change.
  - sgt101 4y ago
    You will learn that when things that have been worked on by 100's of smart people look strange there is usually a reason why. This stuff is very hard, contributions before criticism.
    - machina_ex_deus 4y ago
      You still didn't answer me whether you've thoroughly reviewed their code before dismissing my comments. Did you? You can approach it as an insider researcher "on their side" and try to correct it, but the problem is just so big you're not going to get flawless models without time, and they have already shrugged serious problems in the past with "flux adjustment". You'll get endless errata and retractions but you'll never get a narrative shift. Or you can try to approach it from the outside like countless scientists have done and get called oil companies shill, climate denier and what not. The academic "climate" around it is very "hot". So eventually you just go and forget it and do something productive with your life instead of literally fighting windmills. (And I did mean literally as a joke about renewable energy).

boringg 4y ago

I think the more apt way would be: The world is run by people how are by and large more motivated by power and self interest and that doesn't always correlate with very high levels of intelligence.

astrea 4y ago
This (and the article) have, coincidentally, been my latest fixation. I'm theoretically no dumber than any headline-making character these days, but they 1. Have connections and chance opportunities that have not fallen into my lap that have into theirs and 2. I don't have this insatiable appetite for power or money. Perhaps it's my depression or lack of confidence, but simply collecting my developer salary and spending my remaining time on my hobbies/relationships is enough for me and I have no desire (or energy, frankly) to pursue greatness.
- dpkirchner 4y ago
  They also have the resources to delegate substantial work to others. I often wonder how much more productive or happy I'd be if I had a "chief of staff" that ensures less interesting things get delegated to the right people.
  - dv35z 4y ago
    If you’re interested in going further on this train of thought- check out virtual assistants on UpWork or Fiverr. You can find great ones for $20-40/hr. Or if you prefer a full-time person (40hr/week), you can hire a great one at $1-2k a month. This person can organize your emails, calendar, manage projects, edit videos, and so on.
- boringg 4y ago
  My counter is why would you want to pursue such a life? And you should re-evaluate what you deem as greatness. I don't believe most of the people who fall into these power categories as great even if people occasionally herald them (or business publications do). There are many ways to greatness and most of them do not have public accolades attached to them.

aschearer 4y ago

OK, if the people running the show are no better than "you" than does that imply merit doesn't rise to the top? If we aren't in a meritocracy, what does that mean for wealth distribution?

tiborsaas 4y ago
Merit doesn't guarantee anything. You also need to do things in the right order in the right time and the right place, a decent amount of luck would also come handy.
- aschearer 4y ago
  The only gaurantees in life are death and taxes. But supposedly cream rises to the top. Get my drift?
  - IndigoIncognito 4y ago
    Ever heard of tax evasion?
  - nigerianbrince 4y ago
    Yeeah https://youtube.com/shorts/FCD_Xq4ebyw?feature=share https://youtube.com/shorts/FCD_Xq4ebyw?feature=share
  - HardlyCurious 4y ago
    How random do you think outcomes are? Is a minority from a ghetto just lucky if they get admitted to Harvard? When we see a stereotypical white guy get admitted to Harvard, we would assume they are privileged. Are the people who break out of overty doing it on their own, ala boot straps style, or are they the product of an unlikely serious of events which gave them the edge they needed?
nautilius 4y ago
Wealth distribution in particular can be accurately modeled by purely random coin flips on who gets more and who loses: E.g. https://chancyislands.org/CIChance.html https://chancyislands.org/CIChance.html Absolutely no meritocracy required.

hintymad 4y ago

People make mistakes. I'd rather ask a different question: what are the greatest decisions these people have made and the great things they build that I can't do, with or without luck? Then, there seems to be quite a few.

denton-scratch 4y ago
Napoleon, at (e.g.) Borodino. (Whatever happened to him?) I'm struggling to think of great decisions that didn't amount to standing on the shoulders of giants.

ignoramous 4y ago

> PS: If you are starting something new, you also have the benefit of a lot of recently freed-up Coinbase/Twitter/Shopify/Stripe/Meta employees with a lot of severance nothing to lose That's not so smart is it? Hiring folks on sky high salaries. If you are a startup, the last thing you need is uncompromising engs from BigTech imposing themselves on your org. Make sure to beat it out of them or better yet, pursue those who have the potential to grow as the startup scales, and/or those who come on board with a more grounded set of expectations. Especially, if you're aiming longer term.

tjpnz 4y ago
I think it was Einstein who said that you can't solve the world's problems by using the same thinking that created them.
- eouwt 4y ago
  I think it was Einstein who said "I probably didn't say this"
- disgruntledphd2 4y ago
  It was Jung, I believe.

labrador 4y ago

"True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country." - Kurt Vonnegut

gsatic 4y ago
- mannykannot 4y ago
  The quote is not premised on, and nor does it imply, the notions you object to. As for ants, they are not a great model for human societies, even if it sometimes seems so.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  Who are you quoting?
  - hxugufjfjf 4y ago
    What do you mean? They do not appear to be quoting anyone.
- labrador 4y ago
  > Vonnegut is highly over rated This is great because it conjurs up for me an image of you as a world-weary 17 year old smoking his first cigarette after getting a high grade on his French literature test while thinking about whether he should go to Brown or Harvard or maybe just drop out altogether
  - thanatos519 4y ago
    How very Salinger!
    - labrador 4y ago
      17 year old Bill Gates' favorite author!

SevenNation 4y ago

> It’s hard to know what to take from that; Steve Jobs was clearly a very smart man, without a lot of empathy for lesser beings. So is he saying “Everything was made up by people no smarter than Steve Jobs”, or does he actually mean it that the average world/company/industry leader really is no smarter than you? He's saying that the average "you" is no smarter than the average person. > And then I take a look at the clown show that has been tech in the past few weeks... All of these example trace their roots to extreme market distortions bought about by a massive direct injection of money into an economy that had partially shut down during the pandemic. The normal pricing signals were suppressed for the last two years. The underlying mistake made in the biggest of the cited examples was to believe the distorted marketplace pricing signals. The mistake made in the lesser cited examples was that getting rich from the deluge of fake money serves as proof of skill in other areas. The process of normalization is now underway, and will continue for some time. If those examples in the article make you go "huh," just wait for what's in store as the receding tide reveals all of those bare bottoms and inflated senses of superiority.

rags2riches 4y ago

"Do you not know, my son, with how very little wisdom the world is governed?" Written by Axel Oxenstierna, Lord High Chancellor of Sweden, to his son, a delegate to the negotiations that would lead to the Peace of Westphalia, who worried about his ability to hold his own amidst experienced and eminent statesmen and diplomats. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axel_Oxenstierna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axel_Oxenstierna

ddhhyy 4y ago
Written in 1648, which gives you a sense for how long this has been the case.
tootie 4y ago
This is almost exactly what I tell my younger folks who are concerned they're not authoritative enough to share an opinion or lead a project. I cured my Imposter Syndrome not by gaining confidence but realizing that everyone else was just guessing too. My guesses were at least as good as theirs.
- 6510 4y ago
  My version was more general: I'm in a race with people convinced they cant win. After that realization even a tiny amount of effort put me miles ahead. Again and again I found situations screaming: This is where others would give up. You shouldn't be satisfied with guesses as good as the self proclaimed imposters. Your effort should further convince them they are!
toxik 4y ago
Be that as it may, the point in our bureaucracies is precisely to make sure that the decisions we make are based on what we learned over the years and not what some “10x” SWE is throwing a hissy fit about in the daily standup.
- sam0x17 4y ago
  but if he's a 10x then his 5 years of experience is actually 50 years!!! :O

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jjk166 4y ago

No one holds power by accident. While some people may initially rise purely by chance, there are countless people actively trying to take their place, and thus the ability to remain in that desirable position implies sufficient competence to fend off all challengers. Obviously victory won't necessarily go to the smartest, there are many other important qualities like charisma and risk tolerance that tip the scales, but those in power still need to be smart enough to use their other skills and connections to overcome smarter competitors. If you see a grand master with a long history of success make what appears to you to be a blunder, perhaps they are indeed off their game, but it is wise to look to see how it may be a gambit.

rdtwo 4y ago
They have skills to rise to the top for sure. The problem is those may not be the same skills you would need to govern effectively. Donald Trump is my favorite recent example of that but there are many others
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  Trump's a sobering case, isn't he? He's a multiple bankrupt. He has a talent for destruction. It seems to me that he lacks insight; he seems to be a loudmouthed blowhard, just like many people I've met that aren't well-educated, and aren't property magnates. I don't really get how he got people to vote for him; I suspect it's that he appealed specifically to an anti-intellectual constituency - the same constituency that rejected Al Gore for being too intellectual. That is: being clever seems to be unhelpful, if you want to get ahead in US politics.
  - adolph 4y ago
    > I don't really get how he got people to vote for him; I suspect it's that he appealled specifically to an anti-intellectual constituency - the same constituency that rejected Al Gore for being too intellectual. Since it was the same constituency (in the margin) that voted Obama and Trump in, maybe the question is how Obama appealed to that "anti-intellectual" group more successfully than the succeeding candidate.

Proven 4y ago

tablespoon 4y ago

I hate articles that use Steve Jobs as some kind of guru, he was a lucky, successful asshole, but I guess that's charisma for you. > When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and you’re life is just to live your life inside the world. > Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money. > That’s a very limited life. > Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. I wonder what bit of 60s counterculture that attitude was directly lifted from. While the people that came before weren't any smarter than you; it's important to remember that they had, collectively, more experience in more areas than you could ever dream of having. That doesn't mean they got everything right, but it does mean if you just take the quote to heart you'll probably end up more like a bull in a China shop than some sage-like innovator. But it is nice idea to remember, so you can mentally knock down people like Jobs, who want to portray themselves as sage-like innovators, a peg.

gizajob 4y ago
It's a very zen-inspired take on the world, and I've heard actual gurus give much less useful and down-to-earth advice than Steve here.
sys_64738 4y ago
> I hate articles that use Steve Jobs as some kind of guru, he was a lucky, successful asshole, but I guess that's charisma for you. He was lucky an awful lot then.
- aierou 4y ago
  I would estimate maybe 1 in ~7 billion odds (statistical liberties taken)
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    Jobs was highly successful 3 times (Apple I, Pixar, and his return to Apple). Once could be luck, twice is highly unlikely to be luck, and 3 times? fuggeddabootit

TheOtherHobbes 4y ago

Clearly not true in physics and engineering. How many people can honestly they're as smart as Maxwell, Einstein, Von Neumann, or even "minor" players like John Bardeen and Bill Shockley? More believable about business and public morality of all sorts (including economics), all of which can be swamps of reality-denying utter stupidity. The opposite of stupid isn't smart. The opposite of stupid is true, accurate, and realistic.

raziel2701 4y ago
People like those you listed rarely run the world.
LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
The people in physics and engineering don't govern.
tsunamifury 4y ago
I think you should read up on some of these men’s thoughts on things other than physics and reconsider your point.
seydor 4y ago
Maxwell Einstein and Von neumann never took public office, and even avoided public policy positions
- none_to_remain 4y ago
  Very smart of them
lapetitejort 4y ago
For every Einstein, there are hundreds or thousands of physicists who are actively exploring the big theories, and actually using them. How many physicists are working in and around CERN? A small fraction will earn any public recognition, yet all of them are furthering physics. That's just the physicists, never mind the engineers, material scientists, construction workers, managers, payroll accountants, etc, who are needed to run the place. Are they as "smart" as Einstein? Maybe. Some might be smarter. There are only so many big ideas to discover. Every other genius has to contend with exploring those ideas.

stephc_int13 4y ago

One big, directly related mistake, in my opinion is the strongly held idea that some people are geniuses, and that general intelligence is a thing. The more I look into it, the more I see that some people are experts, even genius-level experts, sometimes in several fields, but this level of expertise is a weak predictor of their competence in different fields. A second big problem is that some people are experts at manipulating masses and at building hype, it can be dangerous because there is a strong compounding effect with hype. (Aka snowballing)

laci37 4y ago
Everyone is subject to the Dunning-Kruger effect. IMO intelligence is more about how quickly can you adapt to a new field. Everyone will have stupid moments if they are thrown in the deep waters of an unfamiliar field.
- stephc_int13 4y ago
  Agreed, to some extent. The idea that some people are genuinely extremely talented and could be successful at anything is, in my opinion, unproven and dubious. I think that human intellectual potential is highly adaptable, but we tend to ignore/undervalue the full path that led someone to excellence in a field. Also, we tend to rely a lot on weak heuristics to evaluate one's intellect. The strongest one (but still weak) is language abilities. The weakest and dangerous one is wealth/status.

TheRealPomax 4y ago

Frankly, that last paragraph is the most important one. If you were on the fence about actually starting that start-up, this is your golden opportunity.

DoneWithAllThat 4y ago

A lot of hubris in this thread. My experience has been the opposite of what honestly sounds like a lot of sour grapes thinking here: when I’ve met hugely successful leaders I was taken aback at how much more intelligent they were than me. Their ability to contextualize questions and problems, to motivate others, to find a path through challenges when it seems like there’s none to be found, and to offer advice and guidance to peers and reports was incredible to witness. Even the bullshitters were bulls hitting on top of a staggering level of intellectual ability.

seydor 4y ago
And a lot of people have the opposite experiences. Power puts a halo around people sometimes
jmeister 4y ago
A classic: >These people of the Power Elite were visibly much smarter than average mortals. In conversation they spoke quickly, sensibly, and by and large intelligently. When talk turned to deep and difficult topics, they understood faster, made fewer mistakes, were readier to adopt others' suggestions. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CKpByWmsZ8WmpHtYa/competent-elites https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CKpByWmsZ8WmpHtYa/competent-...

seydor 4y ago

in relation to twitter, the juvenile messages exchanged between Musk and former twitter CEO are also revealing https://fortune.com/2022/09/30/elon-musk-friendly-text-messages-twitter-ceo-parag-agrawal-court-trial/ https://fortune.com/2022/09/30/elon-musk-friendly-text-messa...

dandanua 4y ago

They are definitely smarter in the ability of gaining power over other people.

denton-scratch 4y ago
You don't need to be smart to do that; big muscles and a baseball bat helps, though.

pcl 4y ago

I recently read Our Man about Richard Holbrooke, and man, this notion really came across loud and clear. (Also, it was a good read!) https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/215731/our-man-by-george-packer/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/215731/our-man-by-g...

JohnDoe124 4y ago

> Elon adding, and then removing, a second verified checkmark to replace the one he devalued, something any B2C product expert would know is a terrible idea Elon proposing a $20/month price for Twitter Blue, and then immediately dropping to $8 at the first celebrity pushback, something any pricing expert would know is a terrible idea Elon (or his EA?) personally reinterviewing engineers at Twitter and telling them to print out code and then changing his mind, something any engineering manager would know is a terrible idea I'm sure Elon knows how stupid these are, it's a publicity stunt

phpnode 4y ago
never attribute to wisdom that which is adequately explained by stupidity
- adolph 4y ago
  never attribute to 3 dimensional chess what could be explained by one dimensional

omgomgomgomg 4y ago

I was always wondering. Ant politician cannot make everyone happy. The brightest do not go into politics, the morally cleanest do not go there either. So what is left? The power hungry and greedy, not sure if any party is better or worse. I cannot think of one government that is perceived as great by the populace and foreigners on a wide scale. Same for the powerful insurances, tech companies, banks, the leaders arent the best, the whole and lack of better competition makes them strong.

mch82 4y ago
This is not true. Why do you think this? Edit: It’s very possible I’m understanding what you’re trying to say.
- omgomgomgomg 4y ago
  I mean, if you look at scientists, theyre all top of their field, they are there for the sake of science. Now look at Boebert and similar, it is safe to say they would never be great scientists. Of course, this is not universally true, but there is an undeniable tendency.

denton-scratch 4y ago

I simply don't believe there are people who are super-clever. I don't believe in "geniuses". I believe there are people that are cleverer than me, and they can leave me mystified about how they worked out X. But that mystification doesn't require them to have a multiple of my smarts; it only requires them to have 10% more smarts than me. In popular discourse, for example, Einstein is commonly credited as having been a genius. I'm not a physicist; but my understanding is that Einstein's SR and GR were essentially natural conclusions to draw from Maxwell's and Lagrange's equations. IOW, if Einstein had remained a patent reviewer, someone else would have produced those theories. The same belief extends to "great men" of history; I think they emerge from the sea that they swim in, they do not command the tides. So I think that if Hitler had been killed in the WW1 trenches, some other authoritarian would have come along to unite the German people (perhaps not as bad as Hitler; perhaps worse).

ltbarcly3 4y ago

I think the true statement would be 'The People who run the World are not uncommonly intelligent'. They almost all probably have IQs in the 120 to 135 range. That's not that smart, you can round up dozens of people smarter than that at most colleges. However, even at the low end of 120 that's still almost 91% percentile, which makes the statement 'The World Is Run by People No Smarter Than You' only true for like 9% of people. I agree with the sentiment but lots of people would not be in the same position as the people who 'run the world' even with equally good luck, because they would not have been able to understand the situations they found themselves in well enough to make decisions that were in their own interest.

denton-scratch 4y ago
You are equating IQ with intelligence and "smartness".
- ltbarcly3 4y ago
  Whatever problem(s) you might have with it, IQ is the thing we can measure that is best correlated to what you would describe as 'intelligence' or 'smartness'.

amadeuspagel 4y ago

> Zuck spending $4b/quarter on the Metaverse entirely unproven, something any lean startup VC would know is a terrible idea I'm skeptical of the Metaverse, but everything is unproven until someone proves it. Does every lean startup VC know what the future of computing looks like? If they don't, I have no idea how they would know that the Metaverse is a terrible idea.

tootie 4y ago
Most startups don't get a $10B leash. You need to gain some amount of traction and revenue to get investment. And not just money, they are spending credibility. No one would be paying any attention to this if Zuck weren't pushing so hard.
Kiro 4y ago
I thought that was the whole point of the article, that "any X would know" is actually just "any [person not smarter than you] would know".
- amadeuspagel 4y ago
  No one knows what the future of computing looks like. Again, I'm skeptical of VR and the metaverse. But I don't know.
dylan604 4y ago
>I have no idea how they would know that the Metaverse is a terrible idea You look at the track record of the people building the new thing to see what their other creations will be like. If you've seen a Picasso, Pollock, Dali, Rembrandt, you know what their other works will be like. If you see a thing created by Zuck, you know what it will be like in the same manner. Also, have you seen the demos? ZZZZZZ
- amadeuspagel 4y ago
  So the metaverse is going to have 2 billion users as well, like Zuck's first creation?

mch82 4y ago

The world is run by people. Those people are no smarter than you (person reading this comment right now). I believe this personally and I’m confident Steve Jobs meant this literally. The reason I’m confident is Jobs said this in 1994, when the conventional wisdom was that both he and Apple had failed. Toy Story wouldn’t be released until the next year. iPhone (the device that convinced people Apple was right about Human Centered Design) was 13 years away. NeXT was failing. Here is the link to the original video posted by the Santa Clara Historical Society. https://youtu.be/kYfNvmF0Bqw https://youtu.be/kYfNvmF0Bqw Edit: fix video link

Gasp0de 4y ago

The thought that politicians are not smarter than me is so scary to me. I don't fully understand so many things (globalization is absurdly complicated), but at least I don't have to make decisions that will affect millions of people.

RajT88 4y ago
I don't think anyone really fully understands the global economy. A friend of mine who is a financial engineer by trade (has designed the algos for HFT, works at Blackrock, etc.), explained a few basic principles to me: 1. All models are wrong; some are useful. A good way of making predictions is to average together the most successful models. 2. Economic systems are run by humans, who are constantly trying to game the system to their advantage. As greater capabilities for measuring and understanding the system are developed, the dynamics of the system are changed by those capabilities, thus changing the understanding of those metrics in the first place, and on and on, forever. 3. The way markets react to developments in technology is of course why you can't trust anyone who is promising huge investment returns based on "backtesting". Nobody can predict the future, because the way the market reacts to changes is constantly evolving. At best, we can understand the dynamics of the global or local economies at a given point in time. Even that is extremely difficult.

ankaAr 4y ago

Yes, come to Argentina..., you will face that is run by people that is not even as stupid as your dog.

lamontcg 4y ago

Flip side of the problem is that all those failed ideas and failed businesses out there were from people as smart as you are. You're probably not going to get lucky and hit the jackpot on whatever idea you have or on whatever startup that you attach yourself to.

coding123 4y ago

Steve Jobs would never say he's better than others. But mark my words here, people with real higher IQ actually do know they are smarter and make better decisions than others. They actually can't stand being around dumb people. There's only one major problem: with intelligence often comes OCD, autism, spectrum stuff. The brain is lit up all over the place, but often comes with a lot of things that makes life worse. You're actually much much better off being a bit idiotic in this world.

denton-scratch 4y ago
> But mark my words here, people with real higher IQ actually do know they are smarter and make better decisions than others. How would you know this? Are you referring to yourself? I'm with Socrates: the mark of knowledge is that you know how little you know.
- coding123 4y ago
  Know people like this. I'm an idiot myself.

taylodl 4y ago

That may be true, but don't underestimate the value of subject matter expertise. This is an issue I see a lot - smart people thinking they have expertise and downplaying the expertise and experience of others. You want people with expertise and experience making your most important decisions.

deleted 4y ago
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jonwest 4y ago
Everyone, everywhere, knows something that you don’t. The more we can lean into this and share context and curiosity instead of judgment, the better we will all be. That said, I realize it’s simple to understand this, but not easy to implement, which is unfortunate.
goethes_kind 4y ago
Are you talking about engineers and programmers?
- taylodl 4y ago
  They're the people I'm most familiar with, though they're not the only ones who do it. It seems to be a trait of really smart people in general - including me. I try to be on my guard to know when I've left my wheelhouse but I still sometimes fall victim to believing I have expertise that I don't.
- _ea1k 4y ago
  Its a pattern that I see in people of all stripes. One of the most pervasive is the tendency of those with no political background to harshly assess political decisions.

BiteCode_dev 4y ago

One of my current client is a big institution whose decisions affect the life of probably 700+ millions people a year. A lot of critical processes are just excel sheets that people open and run once in a while, maybe copy / paste or click a button in there, then close. Some processes are automatized, but there is no way to check if the result is good. Best you can do is to have a human look at the numbers and say "LGTM" with some confident face and call it a day. Said client handle billions of euros every year for other entities. They basically influence the entire world economy on a daily basis. Now, get audited from top to bottom, from internal and external teams, and all audits pass eventually. I met mostly good people there that take their job seriously. But still, every time I dive deeper into their rabbit whole, I just can't believe what humanity stands on.

acid__ 4y ago
Once upon a time, all of that would have been managed on just pen and paper, calculated by humans instead of machines!
- BiteCode_dev 4y ago
  There was one French artist that made a comic with 2 characters once, saying: - computers are amazing, they can calculate 20 millions operation every second, with only one mistake every 10 million of operations - 2 mistakes a second, you call that progress? Today, the fun part is, the human unreliability is now a small part of a big automated chain that have large, numerous and instant results. So if the excel file is not opened, and the calculations updated but the human, the rest of the system will work with stale values. And who knows what it will do to the cascade of events handling the billions of euros? In fact, my client has a failsafe for that: a designated chain of people that are supposed to take over if one cannot do their task, for each critical task.

tb_technical 4y ago

It's run by people no smarter than you, with rules enforced by mentally domesticated highschool graduates with pistols.

blurbleblurble 4y ago

People get power because they scrap for it not because they somehow deserve it

jamesgreenleaf 4y ago

> Elon proposing a $20/month price for Twitter Blue, and then immediately dropping to $8 at the first celebrity pushback, something any pricing expert would know is a terrible idea Wasn't that a good idea though? Everyone heard the price was going to be $20, so now $8 doesn't seem so bad. Wouldn't a pricing expert refer to that as anchoring?

SergeAx 4y ago

The examples in the article are deceptive and kinda strawman-ish. Zuck and Elon are definitely smarter than me, although I think that I am smarter than average person. The problem with their terrible decisions is their self-perception, when they attribute their huge success with their smartness. "I am successful, therefore I know better". This is just plain wrong.

armatav 4y ago
Unfortunately for that line of thinking, rewarding demonstrable success is quite literally the definition of meritocracy.
SergeAx 4y ago
Also, terrible mistakes are mostly rooted in a big risk taking. And for already successful people it is mandatory to take more and more risk to achieve something beyond they already have, because with small risk the reward is small too.

thanatos519 4y ago

Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others. — Edward Abbey

phonescreen_man 4y ago
Here here
dennis_jeeves1 4y ago
Seconded, and along same lines is capitalism ( as opposed to socialism)

jancsika 4y ago

Are we sure there isn't a dark forest thingy going on here? Benjamin: You work in TV? Mimi: No, but I watch a lot. Benjamin: Of course you do. You're creative. Noah: She came up with the name Noah's Arcade. Mimi: I just opened my mouth and out it came. Noah: You're a lucky man, Mr Vanderhoff. - from Wayne's World, 1992 ** Mr. and Mrs. Vanderhoff were none the wiser. Even Cassandra didn't catch on until the end of the movie when she felt the similarity between Benjamin's unsolicited shoulder rub and the sensation of a literal snake slithering on her skin. In conclusion, humans can be sneaky creatures. Especially smart ones. Edit: clarification

omgomgomgomg 4y ago

Another question is, what takes the smartest mind? Software engineers? Medical doctors? HFT? Someone like Zuckerberg? Some senator anywhere in the world? Very hard to compare unless you have worked with all of them. I frankly do not know, but I have severe doubts that its politicians. Trump ran the worlds superpower and its still standing. His casinos did not all survive. Makes me think.

ExMachina73 4y ago

It seems to me the great differentiator is risk-taker vs. risk-averse, not so much "smarts." The examples given in this article, Elon and Zuck have both been wildly successful at some endeavors(Tesla,SpaceX,Facebook) and have failed spectacularly at others (Twitter, Meta-verse) But they both are risk-takers. And on a long enough time-line even seemingly successful "masters of the universe" will fail at some point in their careers. What one then hopes is that you collect enough wisdom on your journey to make fewer mistakes as you go.

beeboop 4y ago
lol at calling twitter a failure after one week

t0bia_s 4y ago

The world is run by people richer than you. /fixed

mharig 4y ago

The selection process is plain stupid. First, the candidades must have the will to power. They must lick the asses of the alphas to be promoted. They must make many promises to get help. They must hinder the others to be promoted. They must lie to the people to get elected. So you have predominantly power-mad, spineless, corrupt, intrigant, dishonest assholes on top. The state of the world reflects that exactly. The bureaucracies too.

scmitton 4y ago

I think a lot of people look at the world and think that the people that designed it were executing a well laid out plan, or before they executed anything they had to have deep understanding of theory. What Jobs was saying though I think, was that the world around us is full of inventions that didn't come about that way, but came about through tinkering and being curious. Anyone can tinker and be curious, that doesn't take any credentials. As for the author's comments on today's leading entrepreneurs, everyone's biased to think they'd make the right decision in hindsight. Good decisions today don't look at all the same as after they've been validated.

kkfx 4y ago

A corollary: since "the world is run by people no smarter than you" then it's a good idea to be: - diversified :: so errors and horrors by a country/cohort of people can be a lesson for others without hitting anybody at once; - not centralized :: as above, so a "chief" who happen to be an i*iot would cause issues to a small cohort of people, but not to all at once. Now try imaging: all Roomba and Amazon Ring IN THE WORLD goes TFU due to a centralized system mishap https://eminetra.com.au/people-cant-vacuum-or-use-their-doorbell-because-amazons-cloud-servers-are-down/ https://eminetra.com.au/people-cant-vacuum-or-use-their-door... or the famous https://youtu.be/JqoGJPMD3Ws https://youtu.be/JqoGJPMD3Ws or also https://arstechnica.com/?p=1848769 https://arstechnica.com/?p=1848769 and countless others. ALL such "issues" are SPOF by their own "modern" design. Perhaps it's a good idea re-evaluating such way of doing anything from just-in-time productions to home food stock in the freezer to car's spare wheel instead of crappy ideas to spare a kg.

jimcavel888 4y ago

dennis_jeeves1 4y ago

Lots of wisdom in this thread, much more than I usually see, i.e a lot of people who are aware of history and very aware of varied human nature. Question to the those people: why wouldn't you want to put your contact information ( or even a few webpages) so that other similar minded people can get in touch with you? Certainly if you have that kind of wisdom, you will be intellectually isolated. ( Or perhaps you are happy with the status quo?)

AstralStorm 4y ago
First of all, nobody wants to solicit advice or especially be given unsolicited advice. Second, if you happen to become known, your contact data is a risk - even existential. Finally the movers and shakers prefer loyal friend and income to good advice and empathy. Talk is cheap, action is hard and expensive.
- dennis_jeeves1 4y ago
  Me: Totally confused, lol. (ok second point is understandable, but surely one can have multiple email addresses)