7 ms·

The Dumber Side of Smart People

98 points by freediver 3y ago

deterministic 3y ago
I believe that intelligence is not the same as being smart. Intelligence (what we measure with IQ tests) is basically just a measurement of your ability to think abstractly. And yes being able to think abstractly is an excellent skill to have! Especially when working in math/physics/engineering/programming. However the world is full of high IQ people who make non-smart decisions every single day.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
countWSS 3y ago
Inspiration, brainstorming and exploratory finding are often lacking in very competitive environment where "trying things out" is too costly or cumbersome(like e.g. testing in large-scale), which favors analytical exploration of pre-existing processes and staying within the current paradigm: e.g. micro-optimization of current process/algorithm/system.
- pineaux 3y ago
  What kind of companies or money making endeavours would allow for such exploratory behavior?
  - 0xEF 3y ago
    You have me curious, since that's a company I'd consider working for. My current position could be describe as an "R&D service tech" where I am fixing custom machinery, some of which I have never seen before I arrive onsite, other than drawings or schematics. My dream would be to work with a firm that has a cohesive R&D department that get the resources it needs to function well.
  - DinaCoder99 3y ago
    This is often cited as a reason why Amazon is such a hostile work environment, for instance. It's not clear if this actually produces the desired results, though.
advael 3y ago
When I talk to scientists and engineers and just generally people who value improving their accuracy and reasoning ability in some capacity, I share with them the assumptions that I think can be fairly called the intellectual norms of academia, which are that strong, vague, and unqualified statements not backed by a lot of evidence are likely to be nonsense and people who make a lot of them are unserious. People can admit they don't know things, express uncertainty, make guesses, make assumptions, or have gut feelings, but it is important that these are qualified and labeled as such, and failure to do so lowers your status in this context However, most people who make hiring decisions outside of academia (and increasingly many inside it) are part of a different culture which assigns status based on the confidence a person projects and their ability to inspire other people to feel strongly about things they say. While there are also people of the former culture making hiring decisions in sufficiently technical fields, it's hard to avoid the pressures of this second culture. Also, the pressure on knowledge workers is the same as that on workers of any kind: While there are a few stray independently wealthy people or even quasi-independent rags-to-riches successes in the world, by the numbers most people have to dance for their dinner, so they have to either become conversant in this culture of confidence or find people they trust to navigate it for them I actually don't think the second culture has no value. It's a lot more powerful in building organizations and gaining buy-in from lots of people. I also don't think the first culture completely avoids the failure modes mentioned in this article. Obviously people with what I've called academic norms definitely fall into this article's discussed pattern of trusting people based on their credentials and disproportionately Think They Are Very Smart That said, since people fluent in the second culture tend to rise to the top of organizations, people in the first culture increasingly need to signal confidence even when it's inappropriate to justify their existence as they move into a professional sphere, which again most people don't really have the option to opt out of
- deterministic 3y ago
  I agree with you in principle but the reality is that most Universities and research organisations are extremely political. If you challenge the beliefs of the scientists in charge, your funding and support will often be cut. The history of “Nutritional science” is a great example of how bad it can get when money and politics overrules basic science.
bluetomcat 3y ago
Any knowledge about "society" is very context- and time-sensitive. The trap for "smart" people is that they abstractly apply rigorous explanatory models to human-made institutions and enterprises. It skews their social understanding and navigation abilities. They often become overly hooked on formalisms like behavioural economics, cognitive psychology, evolutionism or the geopolitical power struggles. It suppresses their reasoning ability in a local, context-sensitive manner. What's the alternative? Develop social intuitions. Observe your local surrounding environment and the people around you. Try to listen to their personal stories. Tell them yours. Then you can probably figure out what's valuable for them, what drives them every day. Applying that knowledge in the economic realm might change the world for the better.
- advael 3y ago
  The value of illegible intuition is inherently somewhat illegible itself, but also hard to overstate
- ruszki 3y ago
  There are global and generic formalisms which seems to be true, like that the well known far right tactics seems to work way better now everywhere. Chavez was the only one in far right politics in the past 30 years who did something really genuine, everybody else just copied that. They copied the formalism which was written down by academics.
sam_lowry_ 3y ago
This summarizes my encounters with 0.1 programmers. Others call them 10x programmers, but I disagree ;-) Here's a story from the field https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38802996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38802996
quickthrower2 3y ago
Quite the strawman! If you can’t say “that is too complex”, “I don’t know” or give nuanced answers then… you probably aren’t smart. That said I am moving the goalposts. I would like to see evidence that people getting hard degrees are like this. Plenty of un book smart people think they know it all too, see Reddit comments for plenty of examples.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Anotheroneagain 3y ago
I don't think you can be too smart for your own good, but there might be a confusion about what "smart" means. Most people get the difference between intelligence, and knowledge, but there is something in between: technique. And this is the part that confuses most people - it seems kind of like intelligence, but really it's more like knowledge. You may know a technique, you may be able to use it, and still have no idea why it works, why it's used, and where it's no longer applicable.
globular-toast 3y ago
Unfortunately, this too will be taken too far. Like the "fake it till you make it" thing. Yes, sometimes it's OK to say "I don't know". But sometimes it's really not. All people, smart or not, start off in a state of "I don't know". But if it's your job to know then you need to put in the work to make sure you know, or at least know as much as you can. Someone saying "I don't know" doesn't mean they are dumb or smart, it could just mean they are lazy. On number 2 I just disagree with the definition of smart. A smart person knows when to listen to someone and when not. Should you ignore people with less experience? Of course not. Should you listen to everyone? Of course not! Smart people definitely suffer from being human, like everyone else, and can become emotionally attached to their ideas etc. I don't think this is a "smart person" trait. But, even so, it is often a very good idea to not buckle to the pressure of fashion and short-term trends. For every story of someone refusing to adapt there is one of someone who was right all along but it took a while for the world to realise.
- api 3y ago
  "I don't know, yet. Hold on." That's what I look for when I interview people. Definitely not "I know" when they don't, or "I don't know" and a shrug.
  - time-less-ness 3y ago
    I would fail your interview. I assume interviews are for what I do/don't know. So I honestly say what I don't know, and would not offer to find out. Not right then anyway. Unless you make it very clear at the outset of the interview that this is exploratory and we will be working with network connectivity and full access to the world's knowledge. I have sent followups to interviewers on problems that were interesting or deep, but those conversations never turned into anything.
    - api 3y ago
      I'm not looking for someone who can autodidact something on a whiteboard during an interview. That'd be kind of silly unless it's something very small. It's more of an attitude, a desire and willingness and ability to learn stuff you don't know yet or try new things.
RandomLensman 3y ago
The market for narratives about what happened or will happen is much bigger than the market for "it's just noise/don't know" - so people cater to that market. That does not mean, however, that they - or even their customers - don't understand what is being sold. The market for narratives is also bigger than the market for noisy predictions, which in turn feeds the supply for narratives.
jamesredd 3y ago
"Most people will die after three days without water." This is false.
rixrax 3y ago
The trouble with the very smart people is that even when wrong, they can come up with very elaborate and convincing reasoning why they in fact are not in the wrong, and indeed convince themselves (and then others in the process) that what they are preaching indeed is the correct solution or answer to a problem.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >they can come up with very elaborate and convincing reasoning why they in fact are not in the wrong Like Elon?
  - time-less-ness 3y ago
    The guy who is landing rocket boosters?
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      No, the guy who kept saying you should buy the Model 3 because it will get level 5 FSD around the corner, and you'll be able to use it as a robotaxi and the car will pay for itself. The guy who said "fuck advertisers" in public even though his X business depended on them.
      - DonsDiscountGas 3y ago
        It's the same person you're talking about, he's done both of those things. He seems to be doing fine for himself. Which suggests that he's not falling victim to his own intelligence as described in the article, but rather just lying.
    - shagymoe 3y ago
      Way to completely discount the thousands of smart people who actually made it happen.
swader999 3y ago
I've seen the "too smart" get crippled by analysis paralysis, while the B student will optimistically plunder on to some degree of success.
- reportgunner 3y ago
  Is a person who is aware of analysis paralysis smarter or dumber than the person who is a victim to analysis paralysis ? I would argue that the person is not truly smart if they get analysis paralysis.
- giovannibonetti 3y ago
  I think a lot of analysis paralysis is actually lack of leadership in disguise. Like when two engineers have different ideas about how to do something, the manager doesn't have an opinion, and doesn't want to get involved, so they let the engineers make the decision, as long as they find a consensus somehow. If neither part is ready to give up, this can take a while.
bazil376 3y ago
Certain sentences are so well-crafted they give me joy. This one is a gem: >I often wonder how many tens of billions of dollars have been paid to management consultants to solve problems that low-wage line workers had solutions for, only because a guy in a suit has a hard time taking a guy with dirty fingernails seriously.
- betaby 3y ago
  In software industry we have the same: people who buy software and people who use that software are not the same group. People who use software are not consulted most of the time.
  - knallfrosch 3y ago
    We've got a 15 year old software on our hand. You think they ever brought on a UX person to talk to a customer? Any software developer (we're currently a team of 5) ever met any customer (5,000) using the software? No. It'd be so easy for the whole team to meet customers. But management 3 levels up decides on colors and wordings.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- hef19898 3y ago
  +1! Just as a side note: Listen to the blue collar line workers, and empowering and enabling them, to find and implement solutions is the main thing people fail to understand about the Toyota Production System.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- DonsDiscountGas 3y ago
  If you've got 1,000 employees and 1 of them has a good, workable, and practical solution, and the other 999 have terrible expensive unworkable "solutions" then there's a technical sense in which this sentence is true but sorting out the good from the bad is still a hard problem which requires some work.
steveBK123 3y ago
Morgan Housel is a good read in terms of personal finance / behavioral finance kind of stuff. Being inside the industry, I can say this is a very accurate observation: > If asked, “Why did the stock market fall 0.23% last week?” an average person will shrug their shoulders and walk away. A very smart person will show you their yield-curve model and valuation analysis and tell you whether the performance will continue. Who do you think is more likely to be stricken by overconfidence? Remember this anytime you watch CNBC & the like.. they can describe in hindsight the WHAT, but the WHY is generally made up on the fly. A classic smart sounding but meaningless joke answer to the above question is "More sellers than buyers". A lot of financial media is basically this.
- corford 3y ago
  In a similar vein, Gary Stevenson (UK economist & trader) also does an excellent job of confirming (and explaining) this. He has a new book out, the Trading Game that's well worth a read (excerpt here: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/london-finance-the-trading-game-gary-stevenson-excerpt.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/london-finance-the-t...)
  - steveBK123 3y ago
    Already at top of my reading list, good call!
- mo_42 3y ago
  > Remember this anytime you watch CNBC & the like.. they can describe in hindsight the WHAT, but the WHY is generally made up on the fly. A classic smart sounding but meaningless joke answer to the above question is "More sellers than buyers". A lot of financial media is basically this. There's a much broader topic behind this called Rationalization [1]. I won't forget the sentence by a professor of psychology that said: People are not rational. They are rationalizing. For me, it took a while to sink in but now I do not focus too much on explanations anymore as these are anyways afterthoughts of intransparent internal processes. However, I pay more attention to how people act. Interestingly, all this is also some kind of rationalization that my mind made up. But how can I be in control of the inner workings of my brain anyways... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalization_(psychology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalization_(psychology)
villmann 3y ago
Speaking for the very smart people, I must say that this article is full of useless stereotypes. Most of us frequenting the smart-people-club are open, contemplating, and humble.
- reportgunner 3y ago
  Yeah, the article is talking about smart people but truly smart people realize all of these issues and therefore the article in reality talks about those who seem or believe they are smart even though they really are not.
- parpfish 3y ago
  The article less about “smart people” and more about “arrogant people”
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
pards 3y ago
> The biggest risk to an evolving system is that you become bogged down by experts from a world that no longer exists. I see that a lot at large financial institutions. Their architecture teams are often comprised of lifers that have never worked in a different industry, or for a different employer. They're experts in how the bank does things, not how the rest of the tech world does things now, and innovation gets stifled.
honeybadger1 3y ago
A truly fantastic read for me as it relates to my week over week woes working for a software company that is striving to be the top in it's industry and eventually purchased. Being involved in leadership here, I see the anecdotes being sold down about criticisms or decisions being made by truly remarkable 'uncredentialed' people and hear things from the old blood like: "Well, bob such and such thinks a lot of things, but he really doesn't have that much experience or understand the code base or customer needs" or "He's obnoxious and do we really think he knows what X customer wants, get Suzy on it from leadership to show the powerpoint on what we are planning, Bob isn't good at selling the vision". It ends up 6 months later that we end up messing up that feature and Bob ends up being the one right all along and we are doing it anyway and the original feature or design was just from the leaders own head, entirely missing the mark.
cod1r 3y ago
if there's one thing I've learned from these "smart" and "dumb" conversations, is that you can't really generalize a person. "Smart" and "dumb" are just lazy evaluations.
brvsft 3y ago
I’m incensed reading this article, early on. First, that Robin Williams anecdote. It’s absurd. If it’s even true, a macroeconomics class isn’t necessarily difficult nor do they always ask difficult questions. It’s more likely, “What happens to the price when demand goes up and supply remains the same?” Next, > If asked, “Why did the stock market fall 0.23% last week?” an average person will shrug their shoulders and walk away. A very smart person will show you their yield-curve model and valuation analysis and tell you whether the performance will continue. This is patently false. Some smart people might do this. Many will behave in the same manner as the average person. Smart does not mean a person feels the need to have a correct answer for every question and to convey the confidence of always being correct. I know the article might arrive at this point, but lying about reality before getting there is a nonstarter. So this is where I stop reading.
DonsDiscountGas 3y ago
>It’s amazing what happens when you become open to the best ideas, rather than the most credentialed voices. Is it though? For starters, you're going to have to listen to a lot of terrible ideas, which is time-consuming even if ideas are easy to evaluate (like jokes). If we're talking business strategy or science or technology, ideas can be very difficult/expensive/time-consuming to evaluate, credentials serve as a useful filtering step[0]. Next time the author has a health problem I suspect they'll go to a credentialed doctor rather than polling random people on the street. I agree that smart people can be overconfident, so it's good to have some humility, but it's also good to try to spend time effectively. And dumb people are perfectly capable of being overconfident as well, it's not like this is a problem unique to smart people. Ignorance can breed overconfidence just as much as knowledge; it's easy to "solve" a problem when you don't actually understand why it's difficult in the first place and your solution never gets tested against reality. [0] The extent that this is true is also a way to judge the credentialing system. Most areas have informal "credentials" based on experience/reputation, eg Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David are considered authorities on comedy and it's not because they have PhDs.
NohatCoder 3y ago
This seems to be about people who think they are smarter than they are. There are dumb and smart people alike who fall in this category, but also plenty who do know their own limits.
antisthenes 3y ago
Pretty disappointing non-article. TL;R Smart people have some biases and flaws too.
Balgair 3y ago
Good article, but I can't help but see that the author is conflating smartness and research-acumen/ivory-tower-living. Being in academia != intelligence. In most of my experiences in the Ivory Tower, the smartest people tended to leave after a short while. Modern US based academia 'hires' on intelligence and 'promotes' based on blind loyalty to the system, boiling off anyone with dignity, honor, or self-respect.

98 points by freediver 3y ago

I believe that intelligence is not the same as being smart. Intelligence (what we measure with IQ tests) is basically just a measurement of your ability to think abstractly. And yes being able to think abstractly is an excellent skill to have! Especially when working in math/physics/engineering/programming. However the world is full of high IQ people who make non-smart decisions every single day.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

countWSS 3y ago

Inspiration, brainstorming and exploratory finding are often lacking in very competitive environment where "trying things out" is too costly or cumbersome(like e.g. testing in large-scale), which favors analytical exploration of pre-existing processes and staying within the current paradigm: e.g. micro-optimization of current process/algorithm/system.

pineaux 3y ago
What kind of companies or money making endeavours would allow for such exploratory behavior?
- 0xEF 3y ago
  You have me curious, since that's a company I'd consider working for. My current position could be describe as an "R&D service tech" where I am fixing custom machinery, some of which I have never seen before I arrive onsite, other than drawings or schematics. My dream would be to work with a firm that has a cohesive R&D department that get the resources it needs to function well.
- DinaCoder99 3y ago
  This is often cited as a reason why Amazon is such a hostile work environment, for instance. It's not clear if this actually produces the desired results, though.

advael 3y ago

When I talk to scientists and engineers and just generally people who value improving their accuracy and reasoning ability in some capacity, I share with them the assumptions that I think can be fairly called the intellectual norms of academia, which are that strong, vague, and unqualified statements not backed by a lot of evidence are likely to be nonsense and people who make a lot of them are unserious. People can admit they don't know things, express uncertainty, make guesses, make assumptions, or have gut feelings, but it is important that these are qualified and labeled as such, and failure to do so lowers your status in this context However, most people who make hiring decisions outside of academia (and increasingly many inside it) are part of a different culture which assigns status based on the confidence a person projects and their ability to inspire other people to feel strongly about things they say. While there are also people of the former culture making hiring decisions in sufficiently technical fields, it's hard to avoid the pressures of this second culture. Also, the pressure on knowledge workers is the same as that on workers of any kind: While there are a few stray independently wealthy people or even quasi-independent rags-to-riches successes in the world, by the numbers most people have to dance for their dinner, so they have to either become conversant in this culture of confidence or find people they trust to navigate it for them I actually don't think the second culture has no value. It's a lot more powerful in building organizations and gaining buy-in from lots of people. I also don't think the first culture completely avoids the failure modes mentioned in this article. Obviously people with what I've called academic norms definitely fall into this article's discussed pattern of trusting people based on their credentials and disproportionately Think They Are Very Smart That said, since people fluent in the second culture tend to rise to the top of organizations, people in the first culture increasingly need to signal confidence even when it's inappropriate to justify their existence as they move into a professional sphere, which again most people don't really have the option to opt out of

deterministic 3y ago
I agree with you in principle but the reality is that most Universities and research organisations are extremely political. If you challenge the beliefs of the scientists in charge, your funding and support will often be cut. The history of “Nutritional science” is a great example of how bad it can get when money and politics overrules basic science.

bluetomcat 3y ago

Any knowledge about "society" is very context- and time-sensitive. The trap for "smart" people is that they abstractly apply rigorous explanatory models to human-made institutions and enterprises. It skews their social understanding and navigation abilities. They often become overly hooked on formalisms like behavioural economics, cognitive psychology, evolutionism or the geopolitical power struggles. It suppresses their reasoning ability in a local, context-sensitive manner. What's the alternative? Develop social intuitions. Observe your local surrounding environment and the people around you. Try to listen to their personal stories. Tell them yours. Then you can probably figure out what's valuable for them, what drives them every day. Applying that knowledge in the economic realm might change the world for the better.

advael 3y ago
The value of illegible intuition is inherently somewhat illegible itself, but also hard to overstate
ruszki 3y ago
There are global and generic formalisms which seems to be true, like that the well known far right tactics seems to work way better now everywhere. Chavez was the only one in far right politics in the past 30 years who did something really genuine, everybody else just copied that. They copied the formalism which was written down by academics.

sam_lowry_ 3y ago

This summarizes my encounters with 0.1 programmers. Others call them 10x programmers, but I disagree ;-) Here's a story from the field https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38802996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38802996

quickthrower2 3y ago

Quite the strawman! If you can’t say “that is too complex”, “I don’t know” or give nuanced answers then… you probably aren’t smart. That said I am moving the goalposts. I would like to see evidence that people getting hard degrees are like this. Plenty of un book smart people think they know it all too, see Reddit comments for plenty of examples.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Anotheroneagain 3y ago

I don't think you can be too smart for your own good, but there might be a confusion about what "smart" means. Most people get the difference between intelligence, and knowledge, but there is something in between: technique. And this is the part that confuses most people - it seems kind of like intelligence, but really it's more like knowledge. You may know a technique, you may be able to use it, and still have no idea why it works, why it's used, and where it's no longer applicable.

globular-toast 3y ago

Unfortunately, this too will be taken too far. Like the "fake it till you make it" thing. Yes, sometimes it's OK to say "I don't know". But sometimes it's really not. All people, smart or not, start off in a state of "I don't know". But if it's your job to know then you need to put in the work to make sure you know, or at least know as much as you can. Someone saying "I don't know" doesn't mean they are dumb or smart, it could just mean they are lazy. On number 2 I just disagree with the definition of smart. A smart person knows when to listen to someone and when not. Should you ignore people with less experience? Of course not. Should you listen to everyone? Of course not! Smart people definitely suffer from being human, like everyone else, and can become emotionally attached to their ideas etc. I don't think this is a "smart person" trait. But, even so, it is often a very good idea to not buckle to the pressure of fashion and short-term trends. For every story of someone refusing to adapt there is one of someone who was right all along but it took a while for the world to realise.

api 3y ago
"I don't know, yet. Hold on." That's what I look for when I interview people. Definitely not "I know" when they don't, or "I don't know" and a shrug.
- time-less-ness 3y ago
  I would fail your interview. I assume interviews are for what I do/don't know. So I honestly say what I don't know, and would not offer to find out. Not right then anyway. Unless you make it very clear at the outset of the interview that this is exploratory and we will be working with network connectivity and full access to the world's knowledge. I have sent followups to interviewers on problems that were interesting or deep, but those conversations never turned into anything.
  - api 3y ago
    I'm not looking for someone who can autodidact something on a whiteboard during an interview. That'd be kind of silly unless it's something very small. It's more of an attitude, a desire and willingness and ability to learn stuff you don't know yet or try new things.

RandomLensman 3y ago

The market for narratives about what happened or will happen is much bigger than the market for "it's just noise/don't know" - so people cater to that market. That does not mean, however, that they - or even their customers - don't understand what is being sold. The market for narratives is also bigger than the market for noisy predictions, which in turn feeds the supply for narratives.

jamesredd 3y ago

"Most people will die after three days without water." This is false.

rixrax 3y ago

The trouble with the very smart people is that even when wrong, they can come up with very elaborate and convincing reasoning why they in fact are not in the wrong, and indeed convince themselves (and then others in the process) that what they are preaching indeed is the correct solution or answer to a problem.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>they can come up with very elaborate and convincing reasoning why they in fact are not in the wrong Like Elon?
- time-less-ness 3y ago
  The guy who is landing rocket boosters?
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    No, the guy who kept saying you should buy the Model 3 because it will get level 5 FSD around the corner, and you'll be able to use it as a robotaxi and the car will pay for itself. The guy who said "fuck advertisers" in public even though his X business depended on them.
    - DonsDiscountGas 3y ago
      It's the same person you're talking about, he's done both of those things. He seems to be doing fine for himself. Which suggests that he's not falling victim to his own intelligence as described in the article, but rather just lying.
  - shagymoe 3y ago
    Way to completely discount the thousands of smart people who actually made it happen.

swader999 3y ago

I've seen the "too smart" get crippled by analysis paralysis, while the B student will optimistically plunder on to some degree of success.

reportgunner 3y ago
Is a person who is aware of analysis paralysis smarter or dumber than the person who is a victim to analysis paralysis ? I would argue that the person is not truly smart if they get analysis paralysis.
giovannibonetti 3y ago
I think a lot of analysis paralysis is actually lack of leadership in disguise. Like when two engineers have different ideas about how to do something, the manager doesn't have an opinion, and doesn't want to get involved, so they let the engineers make the decision, as long as they find a consensus somehow. If neither part is ready to give up, this can take a while.

bazil376 3y ago

Certain sentences are so well-crafted they give me joy. This one is a gem: >I often wonder how many tens of billions of dollars have been paid to management consultants to solve problems that low-wage line workers had solutions for, only because a guy in a suit has a hard time taking a guy with dirty fingernails seriously.

betaby 3y ago
In software industry we have the same: people who buy software and people who use that software are not the same group. People who use software are not consulted most of the time.
- knallfrosch 3y ago
  We've got a 15 year old software on our hand. You think they ever brought on a UX person to talk to a customer? Any software developer (we're currently a team of 5) ever met any customer (5,000) using the software? No. It'd be so easy for the whole team to meet customers. But management 3 levels up decides on colors and wordings.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
hef19898 3y ago
+1! Just as a side note: Listen to the blue collar line workers, and empowering and enabling them, to find and implement solutions is the main thing people fail to understand about the Toyota Production System.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
DonsDiscountGas 3y ago
If you've got 1,000 employees and 1 of them has a good, workable, and practical solution, and the other 999 have terrible expensive unworkable "solutions" then there's a technical sense in which this sentence is true but sorting out the good from the bad is still a hard problem which requires some work.

steveBK123 3y ago

Morgan Housel is a good read in terms of personal finance / behavioral finance kind of stuff. Being inside the industry, I can say this is a very accurate observation: > If asked, “Why did the stock market fall 0.23% last week?” an average person will shrug their shoulders and walk away. A very smart person will show you their yield-curve model and valuation analysis and tell you whether the performance will continue. Who do you think is more likely to be stricken by overconfidence? Remember this anytime you watch CNBC & the like.. they can describe in hindsight the WHAT, but the WHY is generally made up on the fly. A classic smart sounding but meaningless joke answer to the above question is "More sellers than buyers". A lot of financial media is basically this.

corford 3y ago
In a similar vein, Gary Stevenson (UK economist & trader) also does an excellent job of confirming (and explaining) this. He has a new book out, the Trading Game that's well worth a read (excerpt here: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/london-finance-the-trading-game-gary-stevenson-excerpt.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/london-finance-the-t...)
- steveBK123 3y ago
  Already at top of my reading list, good call!
mo_42 3y ago
> Remember this anytime you watch CNBC & the like.. they can describe in hindsight the WHAT, but the WHY is generally made up on the fly. A classic smart sounding but meaningless joke answer to the above question is "More sellers than buyers". A lot of financial media is basically this. There's a much broader topic behind this called Rationalization [1]. I won't forget the sentence by a professor of psychology that said: People are not rational. They are rationalizing. For me, it took a while to sink in but now I do not focus too much on explanations anymore as these are anyways afterthoughts of intransparent internal processes. However, I pay more attention to how people act. Interestingly, all this is also some kind of rationalization that my mind made up. But how can I be in control of the inner workings of my brain anyways... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalization_(psychology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalization_(psychology)

villmann 3y ago

Speaking for the very smart people, I must say that this article is full of useless stereotypes. Most of us frequenting the smart-people-club are open, contemplating, and humble.

reportgunner 3y ago
Yeah, the article is talking about smart people but truly smart people realize all of these issues and therefore the article in reality talks about those who seem or believe they are smart even though they really are not.
parpfish 3y ago
The article less about “smart people” and more about “arrogant people”
deleted 3y ago
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pards 3y ago

> The biggest risk to an evolving system is that you become bogged down by experts from a world that no longer exists. I see that a lot at large financial institutions. Their architecture teams are often comprised of lifers that have never worked in a different industry, or for a different employer. They're experts in how the bank does things, not how the rest of the tech world does things now, and innovation gets stifled.

honeybadger1 3y ago

A truly fantastic read for me as it relates to my week over week woes working for a software company that is striving to be the top in it's industry and eventually purchased. Being involved in leadership here, I see the anecdotes being sold down about criticisms or decisions being made by truly remarkable 'uncredentialed' people and hear things from the old blood like: "Well, bob such and such thinks a lot of things, but he really doesn't have that much experience or understand the code base or customer needs" or "He's obnoxious and do we really think he knows what X customer wants, get Suzy on it from leadership to show the powerpoint on what we are planning, Bob isn't good at selling the vision". It ends up 6 months later that we end up messing up that feature and Bob ends up being the one right all along and we are doing it anyway and the original feature or design was just from the leaders own head, entirely missing the mark.

cod1r 3y ago

if there's one thing I've learned from these "smart" and "dumb" conversations, is that you can't really generalize a person. "Smart" and "dumb" are just lazy evaluations.

brvsft 3y ago

I’m incensed reading this article, early on. First, that Robin Williams anecdote. It’s absurd. If it’s even true, a macroeconomics class isn’t necessarily difficult nor do they always ask difficult questions. It’s more likely, “What happens to the price when demand goes up and supply remains the same?” Next, > If asked, “Why did the stock market fall 0.23% last week?” an average person will shrug their shoulders and walk away. A very smart person will show you their yield-curve model and valuation analysis and tell you whether the performance will continue. This is patently false. Some smart people might do this. Many will behave in the same manner as the average person. Smart does not mean a person feels the need to have a correct answer for every question and to convey the confidence of always being correct. I know the article might arrive at this point, but lying about reality before getting there is a nonstarter. So this is where I stop reading.

DonsDiscountGas 3y ago

>It’s amazing what happens when you become open to the best ideas, rather than the most credentialed voices. Is it though? For starters, you're going to have to listen to a lot of terrible ideas, which is time-consuming even if ideas are easy to evaluate (like jokes). If we're talking business strategy or science or technology, ideas can be very difficult/expensive/time-consuming to evaluate, credentials serve as a useful filtering step[0]. Next time the author has a health problem I suspect they'll go to a credentialed doctor rather than polling random people on the street. I agree that smart people can be overconfident, so it's good to have some humility, but it's also good to try to spend time effectively. And dumb people are perfectly capable of being overconfident as well, it's not like this is a problem unique to smart people. Ignorance can breed overconfidence just as much as knowledge; it's easy to "solve" a problem when you don't actually understand why it's difficult in the first place and your solution never gets tested against reality. [0] The extent that this is true is also a way to judge the credentialing system. Most areas have informal "credentials" based on experience/reputation, eg Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David are considered authorities on comedy and it's not because they have PhDs.

NohatCoder 3y ago

This seems to be about people who think they are smarter than they are. There are dumb and smart people alike who fall in this category, but also plenty who do know their own limits.

antisthenes 3y ago

Pretty disappointing non-article. TL;R Smart people have some biases and flaws too.

Balgair 3y ago

Good article, but I can't help but see that the author is conflating smartness and research-acumen/ivory-tower-living. Being in academia != intelligence. In most of my experiences in the Ivory Tower, the smartest people tended to leave after a short while. Modern US based academia 'hires' on intelligence and 'promotes' based on blind loyalty to the system, boiling off anyone with dignity, honor, or self-respect.