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Or to think intelligence in one domain transfers to another. There’s a long history of Nobel prize winners having stupid ideas outside the domain where they did
by audunw 3y ago
Or to think intelligence in one domain transfers to another. There’s a long history of Nobel prize winners having stupid ideas outside the domain where they did the work for which they’re celebrated.
It’s silly to think that Elon isnt incredibly talented and smart in some ways. That doesn’t mean he’s universally talented and smart.
- hourago 3y ago> It’s silly to think that Elon isnt incredibly talented and smart in some ways. EVERYBODY is "incredibly talented and smart in some ways".
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- monkeywork 3y agosadly no they aren't... thus the word "incredibly" -> "to a great degree; extremely or unusually." Most people are average, many are below average.
- pessimizer 3y agoThe average person knows orders of magnitude more about many subjects than you do. Average doesn't mean that you're half-good at everything.
- lesuorac 3y agoSure but that's just a singular person out of billions. The remaining what 4 billion people that are below the average person can easily be worse at everything then the 4 billion above the average person.
- notsound 3y agoCould you elaborate on this statement? Approximately how many people do you think fit into this "worse at everything" category?
- lyu07282 3y agoliberals talking about billionaires always gives me a brain aneurysm, but regardless I'd just like to point out that whatever talent and intelligence Musk possesses in your minds, is very inconsequential in comparison to his families wealth through ownership of an emerald mine in apartheid South Africa.
- tome 3y agoSomewhat ironic, since the mine was in Zambia.
- reaperman 3y agoThis falls under the "curse of dimensionality"[0]. There are so many tasks/patterns/parts of life that humans can develop specialized skills in that most humans (nearly every human?) are exceptional at something. It might be "identifying the best cardboard scraps and arranging it to make a bed on the sidewalk which is optimally comfortable", or "knowing how to make one specific family member smile" but it'll be something. If you were to enumerate every skill that improves the life of at least one human, there are probably more than 10 billion such skills which require complex analysis, deep experience, and aptitude to execute at a high level. That's enough for everyone to have something they're "best" at. One of my favorite quotes is: "If you judge a dolphin by its ability to fly, you are the idiot." If you're speaking of "generalized intelligence", i.e. some metric which collapses the dimensionality to just a few axes, then obviously you start seeing a more classic distribution where many people are "dumber" than you. But you'd still lack many, many life skills necessary to comfortably take over their life were you to magically swap places with them. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_dimensionality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_dimensionality
- b112 3y agoare exceptional at something Not even remotely true. At best, most humans are good at something. Not exceptional. That's massively rare.
- jcranmer 3y agoGiven the curse of dimensionality, I actually think most humans could be exceptional at something--just that something might be incredibly specific, like "washing dishes while hopping on one foot and having fifteen people tickle you with feathers."
- b112 3y agoYou're just wrapping hope and "everyone's special!" in a ball of fluffy, warm "lookit this!" I'm sorry, but most people have nothing, even the tiniest exceptional thing, about them. There's no latent kingfu master, hidden in pandas.
- bombolo 3y agoWell the lobotomy and several nobel price for peace winners prove that nobel prize winners have stupid ideas also within their domain.
- honzabe 3y agoI think being smart is more of a state of a person than a property of a person, kind of like health. Genetics plays a role in it (you can be born unhealthy) but so does the environment. I think extreme success in the modern world creates a very unhealthy environment for the state of your smartness. After all, if I am to believe what Mercier and Sperber are saying in "The Enigma of Reason", reasoning evolved not as a tool to find the truth and make good decisions but as a social tool - to convince others to cooperate with you, to justify your actions in front of the others, to secure your social status. If your cultish following showers you with cheers no matter what you say or do (especially if you label your critics by that label that your followers hate - woke, ideological, racist, censors, or whatever), how can you not lose contact with reality? That is the simplified version of my explanation for the phenomenon of previously really successful people saying and doing borderline insane stuff. I could name 10 famous people in the last 3 years that IMO fit that pattern.
- nborwankar 3y ago“Everyone is ignorant but in different things” Feynman.