4 ms·

The Curse of Smart People

260 points by kposehn 12y ago

alexvr 12y ago
I can relate to the author. Therefore, I am a smart person.
DanielBMarkham 12y ago
My day job is working with programmers to find better ways of doing things. As part of that, I share with them things that folks have found make their lives better in 70-95% of the time. Not all the time, but most of the time. You would think this would be easy, but it is not. Instead of accepting the heuristics I'm sharing, many programmers want to argue about whether something "works" or not. They want a logical, rigid proof of why it works. They have tons of objections as to why it wouldn't work. They have anecdotes about other people who tried the same thing and it didn't work (Remember, I'm sharing things that mostly work, not Newtonian Laws) Anything at all besides actually trying it out to see for themselves! Smart people, indeed all humans, reason emotionally and then use logic to justify reasons for their conclusions. People who aren't so smart are used to demurring to others for answers -- a priest, a counselor, a politician, a teacher. After all, they've learned they're not so smart. Society has told them that folks in authority are there for good reason. People who are smart will also demur -- but to somebody who already agrees with them. And the internet is full of authority figures taking every position imaginable. I really love working with extremely smart people, but you don't ever want to get in an argument with them. It's not good for either of you. They'll be able to convince themselves -- and you -- of just about anything they want. It's truly a terrible thing to be super smart, have blind spots, and be completely in the dark about it. EDIT: And to the other commenter's point, this is not about arrogance. Even nice, humble people do this. This is about smarts -- the ability to use resources and solve problems creatively. When you put that to work to justify something (or avoid something, as in this article), it's amazing the things you can come up with. Even if you're the most humble person in the world.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  > They want a logical, rigid proof of why it works. They have tons of objections as to why it wouldn't work. They have anecdotes about other people who tried the same thing and it didn't work (Remember, I'm sharing things that mostly work, not Newtonian Laws) Anything at all besides actually trying it out to see for themselves! The problem with "actually trying it out" is that it's extremely costly. They might be afraid to risk wasting two weeks on something that ultimately didn't bring any benefit. That's understandable. Part of this is also because a lot of "better ways of doing things" probably actually don't work. People think they do, but that's because of a mix of popularity, good marketing, just-so stories and the fact that it's often incredibly hard to measure actual impact of such changes on work performance. Add to the last point that majority of people seem to not understand data, statistics, and that 86% of population believes any number they read on the Internet. So I completely understand that they ask for "logical, rigid proof of why it works" - because most likely it doesn't, otherwise you could provide a reason why it does.
lightyrs 12y ago
tldr; Imposter syndrome is not the problem — it's the cure. I loved this article. Thanks for posting.
- ggambetta 12y ago
  You make it sound like it's good - it isn't. It's not something you enjoy, it's something you suffer. I'm trying to get out of that particular tar pit right now.
  - lightyrs 12y ago
    Cures are often unenjoyable — it doesn't make them less effective. Think of chemotherapy for example.
  - Mz 12y ago
    The real cure for Imposter Syndrome is objective, hard data concerning a) something real world that you are trying to accomplish and b) your actual relative ability compared to some social norm that matters for the ability being measured. The issue with Imposter Syndrome is that "social proof" is often not very good proof. There are forms of social proof which can be valuable but they are also often painful (a al Bill Gates quote about "your unhappiest customers" being your best source of learning). But a lot of that "rah rah, we think you are awesome and will thus kiss your butt and not give you meaningful feedback" stuff is something to very much worry about.
treme 12y ago
"you can probably figure it out if you bing around a bit.." I can't tell if this really happened or the person was pseudo-cheating because he worked for MS.
- lionheart 12y ago
  He works for Google, I believe.
  - somerandomness 12y ago
    It is obviously Google.
    - nandemo 12y ago
      I could tell it was Google after reading this: > A suprisingly large fraction of the smartest programmers in the world do work here. In very large quantities. In fact, quantities so large that I wouldn't have thought that so many really smart people existed or could be centralized in one place, but trust me, they do and they can. There are certainly other places with lots of smart programmers, but it seems every time I read something self-congratulatory like this, it's Google.
      - cscurmudgeon 12y ago
        I agree. How do you know someone is a Googler? They will tell you how their entire company is the most smartest in the entire multiverse. If you are so smart why are twiddling around bits in gmail for breadcrumbs when you could have started your own company or gotten into academia?
        robrenaud 12y ago
        I am not sure if breadcrumbs means low compensation, but the comp at Google (especially for people succeeding) is high and low risk. If you just want to write software (as opposed to run a business), being an engineer at Google is really nice. You get a ton of resources, work on projects that have millions of users, etc. Don't get me wrong, entrepreneurs are awesome. But it's a much, much broader skill set than what is required to be a successful software engineer. As for academia, my personal problem with it is that it's too focused on elegant/complicated/clever solutions to problems that don't really exist. And the compensation is terrible.
ameister14 12y ago
This doesn't seem to be the curse of smart people. Many bureaucrats don't care if a project succeeds, instead focusing on whether or not it is approved and who's name is attached. That isn't because they are smart. It's because their environment rewards this behavior. People can rationalize anything. It has nothing to do with intelligence, merely experience and current environment (which is most of what's written in the article).
- XorNot 12y ago
  Most bureaucrats are smart. Most politicians are smart. When you lament why the people in charge seem so dumb, its probably worth reflecting that they're still in charge. They understand something you don't.
  - nitrogen 12y ago
    It seems highly likely to me that power brokering (i.e. social intelligence) and analytical intelligence are orthogonal skills (and not the only orthogonal axes on which one may be "smart"). "Smart" is inadequate as an adjective, because it leads people to say things like, "If you're so smart, why aren't you the boss/senator/president?" If we separate these forms of intelligence in our daily conversations, we might make it easier for the oft-exploited analytically intelligent to appreciate and take advantage of social intelligence, and gain more recognition from those who have social but not analytical intelligence.
    - a3voices 12y ago
      > "If you're so smart, why aren't you the boss/senator/president?" I think it mainly has to do with comfort. Most people don't want to step outside of their comfort zone to pursue political power. There's too much risk and not enough to gain from the time commitment.
      - nitrogen 12y ago
        Speaking as someone who helped with someone's unsuccessful political campaign, it takes a lot more than just discomfort to be successful in politics. I think the "just don't feel like it, but if I did, I could win" excuse for avoiding politics is like the "I could probably get in, but I don't want to be a member" excuse for avoiding Mensa. Both things are probably harder than they seem (though I only have experience with one).
wallflower 12y ago
Not just impostor syndrome, but the willingness to see what is actually there. I think this is why art (particularly drawing classes) can be so hard for most people starting out at a later age. One of my teachers would constantly say 'don't draw an eye - draw what you see'. While well baked into our "memory" and knowledge sphere, our mental model of what is an eye or a human head isn't actually what is there. See also "Gorillas in our midst: sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events" http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~cfc/Simons1999.pdf http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~cfc/Simons1999.pdf
- lsdafjklsd 12y ago
  I was always amazed at how many people would paint the eyes on a portrait with white, when the eyes are one of the darkest areas on the face.
  - judk 12y ago
    Do you draw severely jaundiced people? A human eyeball is white, outside the iris.
    - frogpelt 12y ago
      The color is white. The shading is usually not.
    - SoftwareMaven 12y ago
      Take a photograph, properly color correct it, and see what color the "white" actually is. It will vary a lot, depending on the color of light falling on the eye, and be tinged by the blood vessels in the eye. What it won't be is #ffffff.
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
      - ZoF 12y ago
        I think he/she took offense to the "darkest part of the face" portion of the comment; which is clearly false for the majority of the earth's population, particularly since no one draws the iris white so the original comment was clearly referencing the "white" portion of the eye.
raving-richard 12y ago
Bah. I raided an Egyptian tomb, and ever since I've been followed around by smart people. They talk complex philosophy, discuss string theory, rave about Haskel, and talk about some the boast some French fella or another wrote in some book (in the margins I think). It's really annoying. Now that's a curse. This article is just about how smart people have issues just like everyone else. Gee. Edit: Ooh, some of "smart" people can't take a joke.
- saraid216 12y ago
  It's standard practice to downvote jokes. Thank you for letting me know it was one. I wouldn't have realized I needed to downvote this.
  - raving-richard 12y ago
    Could you explain why it is standard practice to downvote jokes? I don't get it. If it's funny, then people might want to read it. Over on /. a lot of the best comments are modded funny.
    - vacri 12y ago
      It's tradition on HN, in an attempt to lower the chaff and keep things on-topic. It used to be that any attempt at humour would get you canned, but now it seems the pendulum has swung to 'if there's no other content in the comment'. The same goes for comments about people not being able to handle things like in your edit - they don't really contribute anything. Snark is frowned upon.
      - philh 12y ago
        I don't think pure jokes automatically get downvoted, if they're funny enough, though I have no recent examples in mind. But this particular example is more condescending than funny.
    - Confusion 12y ago
      Jokes beget worse jokes beget bad jokes, until the majority of the comments consists of people trying to be funny and it's hard to judge insightful comments. That's my major gripe with /. and Reddit.
fortuitous 12y ago
I am guilty of imposter syndrome, however I recently heard myself speak about a subject I care a lot about. And I giggled because I actually sound smart. That was a revelation, although I am still not convinced.
a8da6b0c91d 12y ago
High IQ people have the "clever silly" problem. "... an increasing relative level of IQ brings with it a tendency differentially to over-use general intelligence in problem-solving, and to over-ride those instinctive and spontaneous forms of evolved behaviour which could be termed common sense. Preferential use of abstract analysis is often useful when dealing with the many evolutionary novelties to be found in modernizing societies; but is not usually useful for dealing with social and psychological problems for which humans have evolved ‘domain-specific’ adaptive behaviours. ... when it comes to solving social problems, the most intelligent people are more likely than those of average intelligence to have novel but silly ideas" http://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.com/2009/11/clever-sillies-why-high-iq-lack-common.html http://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.com/2009/11/clever-sillies...
- Xcelerate 12y ago
  Haha, this is great. I'm not claiming to have a high IQ; however, the article you linked resonates a lot with me. In my previous relationship, I had a difficult time figuring out if what my (ex)-girlfriend said corresponded with what she actually meant, and I often thought she was playing "mind games" of some sort with me. So I began recording the intervals of time between our text messages and plotting them to search for discrepancies in our texting patterns. Lately, I've also been putting on different personas at parties I attend (I'm a grad student) and taking notes on the varying responses I get to each type of personality. I'm attempting to optimize charisma with this data, but I'm not having a lot of success yet. People always say to "be yourself", but if that was the case I simply wouldn't interact with others at all, so I have to develop some kind of personality to use. I was telling my sister about these types of social experiments, and she told me that overanalyzing everything to a fault produces the opposite result of what I'm trying to achieve. So far, she seem to have a point, because I still have difficulty deciphering how most people interact socially with each other. (I hope none of my friends know my HN username...)
  - politician 12y ago
    Consider that you might be using the wrong hemisphere of your brain to analyze these situations and that chemically nullifying this tendency of one hemisphere to dominate your reasoning may improve your results. For example, consider the experiment where you get blindingly drunk and see how you react physically (calibration). Then, tone it down a few drinks and see how you react socially. Give someone else the keys to your car first. Alternatively, observe how you breath through your nose. It's known that the nostril through which you breath is related to which nervous system is active (you have two: sympathetic and parasympathetic, and they are related to increased blood flow in the right and left brain). Observe how you react socially when different hemispheres are active. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2923709 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2923709
dosh 12y ago
Being a parent to two kids, I can definitely see the 'evolution of rationalization' taking place as kids grow older. Your child will feel angry about certain events, or about other people and so forth for whatever the reasons, but usually, it's simply because they are hungry or feeling tired. What's interesting is when you observe how they are trying to find out reasons why they are upset, when basically, it's their instinct/emotion that caused them to get upset. So you will notice the lack of consistency or relevance of their evidence in backing up their argument. But this changes gradually as they grow older. They become more logical and more consistent. I think this is what most adult, or smart individuals learn to do as well. It amazes me everyday to find myself rationalizing so many things and at the same time, persuading others using the same logic, when the other part of my brain secretly acknowledge/recognize that I'm making it sound all logical and trying to get others approval for my own sense of security.
- chipsy 12y ago
  It is my own recognition that I will not be correct or make right decisions that leads me towards faith in long-term knowledge building: on any given day I will most likely make a bad decision, but in the aggregate of many days, like any other practiced skill, I will be able to recognize mistakes, correct course, and develop a way to "practice out" or "systematize out" a bad habit. And so I study history...
- Confusion 12y ago
  Your observation of kids blaming events or people for their 'bad' feeling, when they are actually hungry or tired is spot on. However this kind of causal relationship exists in far more subtle and extensive ways and stays operational all your life! Examples from research: judges give harsher sentences right before lunch vs. right after lunch. You are less willing to help others when you are cold. The list goes on and on. Your kids becoming 'more logical and more consistent' is only them becoming so good at rationalizing and explaining their rationalization that you believe them. In fact it is still being hungry that made them lash out.
  - mercer 12y ago
notastartup 12y ago
I've worked with lot of engineers with the described "logic bubble", often coming off as an asperger or rude. It's rampant. Engineers just don't know how to admit ambiguity, everything is solvable with logic, and this rubs off as arrogance. Like the author I also experienced early on in life that the real world is much more unpredictable. Day trading, reading books have opened my eyes quite a bit. Also starting my own business selling my own software has really enforced the view that the only certainty is uncertainty. Such a beautifully written article. I'd put this right up there with Dr. Nassim Taleb's article on smart people or experts with no respect for fallibility of the human condition, or the innate limitation as humans, the absolute guarantee to incorrectly perceive our point in time, space, and make poor decisions and walk off with a large check because of a certain pecking order in society that awards chutzpah or blind confidence in one's own ability or a groups ability. It probably comes from the evolutionary practice of hunters and gatherers.
- watwut 12y ago
  Funny ... I had the same impression of some managers. Simply could not accept that certain things are unpredictable. The other thing is that there are places where ambiguity is wrong e.g., documentation. Which was hard to accept for some managers and analysts. I can not write ambiguous code, it ends up doing either one thing or another. Notice the some in my sentences. I managed not to offend whole profession of people.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
stretchwithme 12y ago
They're also better able to avoid backing the wrong horse to begin with and better at rethinking and cleaning up after their mistaken rationalizations.
- corpselord420 12y ago
  you're confusing being smart with being wise, but it's not a surprise that this sentiment is in the thread. classing people as 'smart' is so narrow and limiting that it's totally meaningless but the nerds love nothing more than arbitrary categorization
hamburglar 12y ago
This is an interesting angle on something I've noticed, and perhaps a better explanation of it, but I'll put my observation in the ring in case it offers any other insights: Smart people can end up developing faulty world views because they are good at arguing, and every time they win an argument, they convince themselves more and more of the infallibility of their world view, when in fact all that happened was they encountered yet another person who couldn't spot the flaw in it. An example of this is extreme libertarianism. For a long time, I had convinced myself that it was totally sound because if I argued politics with most people I knew, I could shut them down with logic and "prove" my case. The logic and robot-like consistency of it just reassured me that I was unassailably correct. It took me getting to the point where I realized that I didn't truly believe some of my own arguments, despite the fact that I had successfully made them countless times, to snap out of it and realize that my views, as rigidly consistent as they were, were probably disastrous from a public policy standpoint. I rationalized a position to others, which ultimately rationalized it to me as well. Don't do that.
- lotharbot 12y ago
  > "I didn't truly believe some of my own arguments" One of my core philosophies of argument is that I always argue honestly. That is, I give my real reasons for believing things (as well as I understand them) even if I know of other arguments that sound persuasive but that I don't believe as strongly. I find this means I lose arguments slightly more often (which is a good thing; I end up changing my mind), but I also win handily quite a bit more often. I see far fewer stalemated arguments, and far fewer arguments that devolve into quoting my side's famous thinkers at people who quote their side's famous thinkers back. It was difficult at first, but with practice it's become fairly easy.
- SilasX 12y ago
  I think the problem is that you never encountered anyone who actually understood the best reasons for the policies you opposed, or even had a model (however ad hoc) in which the relevant benefits could be expressed. I see that kind of thing all the time: I heard bad arguments against the minimum wage for years before I was even aware of a purported disemployment effect. Ditto for the relationship between traditional morality and STD/population growth concerns. I don't think you can blame yourself for that. To the extent that an idea makes sense, there should be someone that appreciates it, and can convey its logic. To the extent that your acquaintances were not those people (and did not subject their beliefs to the same checks you did), neither did they have any business being more confident than you in their views. Sure, your ideas may have been disastrous as policy, but how could you have known that? You can't update on evidence you haven't gotten -- let alone evidence which resists revelation by interested adversaries!
walterbell 12y ago
Is someone "smart" if they cannot explain how they arrived at the correct/optimal answer?
tensor 12y ago
The author seems to attack logical and rational thinking a lot, however, their argument is not convincing. "But I think Impostor Syndrome is valuable. The people with Impostor Syndrome are the people who aren't sure that a logical proof of their smartness is sufficient. They're looking around them and finding something wrong, an intuitive sense that around here, logic does not always agree with reality, and the obviously right solution does not lead to obviously happy customers, and it's unsettling because maybe smartness isn't enough, and maybe if we don't feel like we know what we're doing, it's because we don't." Most importantly, consider the quote "logic does not always agree with reality". Logic neither agrees nor disagrees with reality. Logic itself is flawless, but the assumptions you put into it can be wrong. The problem is not with thinking logically, thinking logically is good. Rather, it's an issue with holding incorrect assumptions. Leaving aside the problem of defining smart, the claim, then, is that the smarter you are, the more false assumptions you hold. That's quite a bold claim. It needs a lot more evidence than personal anecdote for me to accept.
- shenberg 12y ago
  Logic is very much flawed in the sense that you can't necessarily model reality using logic, and good paradoxes point out examples (for example look at the torturous "solutions" to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox ).
- lhnz 12y ago
  There is no quote that "the smarter you are, the more false assumptions you have". I can't even find the words false or assumption in the article. You are strawmanning or reading incorrectly. This is what he says: > Here's the problem. Logic is a pretty powerful > tool, but it only works if you give it good input. > As the famous computer science maxim says, > "garbage in, garbage out." If you know all the > constraints and weights - with perfect precision > - then you can use logic to find the perfect > answer. But when you don't, which is always, > there's a pretty good chance your logic will lead > you very, very far astray. My personal experience in life has been that this is the case. No matter how much I have studied, it's not possible to logic your way out of insufficient or misperceived data which in most domains other than programming is the rule. I've also experienced the same over-confidence of logical thinkers kept in bubbles - they adjust to the quantity and correctness of data they have in one part of their life and then use logic and cognitive biases to rationalise the outcomes they have in life.
ScottBurson 12y ago
I think one could be more direct about it: the curse of smart people is arrogance. Always allow the possibility that you could be wrong.
- 90hourweek 12y ago
  But neither this, nor what the author is talking about is "the curse of smart people". Conspiracy theorists, evolution deniers, religious fundamentalists, alien abductees and so on are examples of people getting together, and successfully rationalizing their belief in some quite twisted ideas. We don't call such groups "smart people", typically. They're not necessarily stupid either. They're just people. So it's just the "curse" of being a human, I guess. Whether we use our mind superpowers for good, or in order to fool ourselves and the people around us is completely independent of one's smartness, and has more to do with wisdom. Many people believe that if you can wrap a convincing narrative around a set of selected facts, the narrative must be truth itself. Stories posing as insight are all around you. Experience leads to wisdom, and wisdom teaches us to be more open-minded and less sure in the stories we hear or tell ourselves.
  - JulianMorrison 12y ago
    The curse, specifically, is that the smart people make their mistaken theories sound good, build them up to the point that it's hard to break them without being equally smart AND also primed to look for subtle glitches in reasoning or technique.
    - PavlovsCat 12y ago
      To me, intelligence is like a fast truck with a lot of cargo space: you can use it to help other people move into a nicer home, you can use it to make great trips, you can run it into a wall and kill yourself much better than you could with a slower truck, and you can load it up with children and drive off a bridge. Intelligence is to stupidity what a power tool is to a screwdriver, you can do more powerful good and bad things with it, but the fact that it's more powerful says nothing about how it will be used. Sadly.
wfbarks 12y ago
hubris develops because you don't get the humility of failure. Great article!
zw123456 12y ago
A person who I very much respect once told me there are two kinds of people in the world, stupid and aware of it and stupid and unaware of it. The implication is that everyone is stupid on some level, meaning there is always someone smarter than you and there are always things you do not know or have not yet learned. People who are aware of that are wise. Wisdom and intelligence are not the same thing. I think that is sort of the key meaning of the post, and if one can learn that at an early age as the author did, then they learned it earlier than I did.
- WalterBright 12y ago
  Wisdom is the combination of intelligence and knowledge.
  - vinceguidry 12y ago
    This isn't true unless you redefine one of the two comprising traits. You could make a good case for saying that wisdom is intelligence plus experience, but to me that too misses a certain essential element of wisdom. I don't think you can 'buy' wisdom, you either have the capacity to get it or you don't. I was recently at my dad's retirement ceremony, 30 years in the Marine Corps. One of his good buddies was there, a similarly seasoned leatherneck, let's call him Tom. I have a habit of addressing people I don't know well with 'mister'. This time he asked me to call him 'Tom', with the explanation that 'you're probably more grown up than I am, anyway'. It was a joke, but the kind that makes your heart go out to him. He'd had a successful career, but his personal life was always a mess. He was in a particularly reflective mood that day as he spoke at the ceremony, and I learned a lot about the many mistakes he'd made and all the things my dad did to help him out. This was a fairly intelligent man, my dad didn't make friends that weren't intelligent, and also very knowledgable, something you can't build a 30 year career in the Corps without, they'd kick out out at 20. He was definitely experienced. But he wasn't particularly wise, or rather, wisdom was particularly hard-won for him. He was one of those people who was just really hard-headed about certain things. Had he been wiser, he would have been able to let go of perceived slights and been easier with his family and spent more and better time with them. He would have picked better women to get involved with. Now he's got a relationship that works, and it's about time. Wisdom is the thing that lets you see the essential quality that makes the important things in life important. Wisdom makes life less complicated and more pleasant. Intelligence tends to complicate things, and knowledge and experience move in one direction. Wisdom and experience makes you more perceptive, knowledge and intelligence by themselves don't.
a3voices 12y ago
The most useful logic is that which predicts reality. Smart people are best at this. So I disagree with the author.
- politician 12y ago
  Realistic people are best at predicting reality, by definition. Street smarts -- realism -- belongs to those who have deep domain expertise rather than pure raw IQ. Anyway, logic itself, as a system of reasoning, is known to be <strike>inconsistent</strike> incomplete (Godel, etc).
  - quatrevingts 12y ago
    Incomplete, not inconsistent; i.e., not everything that is true is provable.
    - politician 12y ago
      Thanks, fixed.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    But using logic is a trait of a dumb person anyways, the world is much better model probability theory which is designed to deal with uncertain, incomplete and incorrect data. It's basically what your brain does and what "street smarts" is, albeit the brain uses so many cognitive shortcuts and heuristics to avoid computing things.
WalterSear 12y ago
I don't think that smart people are any more prone to rationalization than others - the author just hasn't spent any time with them.
StandardFuture 12y ago
'Smart People' certainly seems like an ego-stroking classification we enjoy being placed under (especially here on Hacker News). I also have trouble seeing how impostor syndrome is viewed as something wrong. I always thought it was just the new buzzword replacement for the age-old concept of humility. >Smart people have a problem ... That problem is an ability to convincingly rationalize nearly anything. My apologies to all us 'Smart People' but this can be attributed to 'People' in general. When we want to believe something, we will seek out objects, arguments, 'evidence', etc. that support that belief. If we find enough pieces (that also seem to complement each other) we will be satisfied. Maybe 'Smart' just means 'more-equipped' (with ideas, studies, etc.) to rationalize something (more quickly or more 'effectively'). Which also makes me wonder if we are just equating 'Smart' (as a classification) to people who have a relatively wider knowledge/experience base to pull from relative to someone else? How else could we 'rationalize' something new other than using/rehashing ideas we have come across already? >But I think Impostor Syndrome is valuable I agree. Humility is extremely valuable. It is especially valuable when solving problems, which is what most 'smart people' do, isn't it?
bbllee 12y ago
Reminds me of 'What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought,' the most interesting cognitive science book I've read. http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Tests-Miss-Psychology/dp/0300164629 http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Tests-Miss-Psycholog... In short, rationality is not the same thing as intelligence and general intelligence does not correlate with rational behavior nearly as well as we might like it to. Individuals with high intelligence can and do put their mental endowments to work to argue for mistaken ideas and execute irrational plans. I'm now thinking of an intelligent individual who made a small misstatement in conversation, then, when challenged on that point, proceeded to explain why he was not mistaken for several minutes... then finally wised up and admitted that his original statement was wrong.
kmtrowbr 12y ago
As I have grown (just a little) older, one of the best lessons I have learned is just about the limitations of intelligence, of rationality, even, of language. We are intelligent animals. However, we are more animal, than we are intelligent. And that's not even necessarily a bad thing. I grew a lot when I realized that 'being intelligent' is not the only important way to be a good person.
javert 12y ago
Aw man. Imposter Syndrome x1000. Can I put that on my resume? Is that now considered a good thing? :)
eng_monkey 12y ago
Wow, that was arrogant.
nileshtrivedi 12y ago
> Smart people have a problem... an ability to convincingly rationalize nearly anything. This has a simple solution really. They should be actively trying to prove their assumptions false. Rationalize that their premises are wrong until compelled with extraordinary evidence. Be a contrarian. It will also help if all the smart people in the group have a diversity of beliefs so that everybody gets his assumptions cross-examined.
- saraid216 12y ago
  And if you fail to prove your assumptions false, it's only because you haven't tried hard enough.
  - Mikushi 12y ago
    Or because they are right.
    - saraid216 12y ago
      That's possible, but given that it is one possibility out of a nigh infinite possibilities that they are wrong, what's the probability that they're right?
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
mililani 12y ago
I thought this was going to be about existentialism and depression.
atmosx 12y ago
I'm very sceptical when reading quotes like "smart people [...]" because IMHO it's extremely complicated to define smart. That said, I believe the following statement is 100% wrong: > "Smart people have a problem, especially (although not only) when you put them in large groups. That problem is an ability to convincingly rationalize nearly anything." Rationalizing is not something smart people do. IMHO it's more of a cultural thing in large scale. Take a north European (or American, must have to do with the weather) and you'll get a huge % of the population rationalizing things, instead of being emotional like the south Europeans/American. I understand that most HN readers are programmers with strong mathematical background but try to picture this: Ghandi didn't knew any math compared to Godel, Einstein or Von Neumann. Ghandi achieved a gunless revolution by convincing poorly educated people to follow his lead. To me this is EXTREMELY hard to do. Nearly impossible. Ghandi was a social genius. Can we say that he wasn't smart because an average mathematician would probably had more analytical thinking when talking about algorithms? The author (and not only the author) confuses the analytical/non-emotional thinking that he does with smartness. I believe that's a bold mistake. ps. Of course there are situation where school teachers think of introvert children as not that smart. This thing plays out both-ways unfortunately.
- seizethecheese 12y ago
  Nobody would assume Ghandi was dumb because he didn't know algorithms, how absurd. More intelligent people absolutely are more adept at rationalization if they have that particular difficulty.
  - shadowfox 12y ago
    It also helps that Gandhi was highly educated (for his time), was a lawyer and quite a good writer, orator and politician. Not exactly the characteristic of an unsmart person.
- dsuth 12y ago
  Convincing poorly educated people of something is not hard to do. A large part (or side-effect sadly) of education is critical thinking skills. Lack of education leads to easy followers; something that has been preyed upon numerous times throughout history.
deleted 12y ago
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akuma73 12y ago
I think a lot of the discussion here assumes that smart people are unable to make proper decisions under uncertainty. That has not been my experience. I've found that truly smart people are able to discern when there is uncertainty and apply the proper analysis using probabilities. They're also able to sanitize the inputs to avoid the garbage-in, garbage-out problem. Perhaps the "smart" people he is referencing are not so smart?
qwerta 12y ago
Smart people I know also have a critical thinking. They verify their ideas and learn from their mistakes. What author describes seems more like management issue.
fsloth 12y ago
Respectfully, I think this is the main contribution of the referred post: "Working at a large, successful company lets you keep your isolation. If you choose, you can just ignore all the inconvenient facts about the world." Having an established revenue stream for an organization is a superpower which let's an organization absorb ridiculous amounts of bad management, poor decision making, lackadaisical execution and so on. Compared to a startup or small company - Good bye scrawny Bruce Banner, hello Hulk. See that bus coming? Who cares, now you can take it, no need to do anything smart about it. People moving to large established organizations should be keenly aware of this. Having an established product and maintaining that product might sometimes seem like an odd side-effect to large areas of an organization of all the other busywork done at siloed "scientifically" managed organizations.
whybroke 12y ago
The author anecdotaly notices a great many work place fallacies such as "confirmation bias", "the bandwagon effect" etc. Then, seemingly unaware of these separate categories, lumps them together and ascribes that lump as an innate characteristic of "smart" people. Obviously an organization that succumbs to these fallacies is going to have trouble. Obviously adding "unsmart" people to the mix will only exacerbate it. But that's not really surprising. What's interesting is a trend, of which this article is an example, to ascribe the problems of the alleged meritocracy (which are real) not to the system itself but instead to clear reasoned well informed thinking. It's possible that this strange dislike of reason is triggered by pseudo-intellectuals on the far right cloaking themselves in the language of rationality to argue against global warming, minimum wages, the cigaret-cancer link etc. But I'd like to see more conjecture/evidence about what's causing it.
mazsa 12y ago
FYI: http://amexrap.org/fal/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/i-f0026d2c4414eeb4960eae9202eeb8dd-krugeranddunningfig2.jpg http://amexrap.org/fal/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/i-f0026d2c... (Source: http://www.physics.uofl.edu/williger/unskilled_and_unaware_1999.pdf http://www.physics.uofl.edu/williger/unskilled_and_unaware_1... )
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chondos 12y ago
>Smart people have a problem, especially (although not only) when you put them in large groups. That problem is an ability to convincingly rationalize nearly anything. This applies to anyone and everyone about 2 yrs old+. He thinks average and dumb people don't do this? They do it and their reasons don't even have to be half intelligible or make sense logically.
michaelfeathers 12y ago
Smart. "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." - Indigo Montoya
- crgt 12y ago
  http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inigo_Montoya http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inigo_Montoya
luikore 12y ago
The curse of smart people: they look smart but not really smart to realise that they are not smart enough.
teddyh 12y ago
From The Jargon File, Appendix B, “A Portrait of J. Random Hacker”, section “Politics”¹: […] Hackers are far more likely than most non-hackers to […] entertain peculiar or idiosyncratic political ideas and actually try to live by them day-to-day. 1) http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/politics.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/politics.html
rsp1984 12y ago
I agree with the author by 100%. What a beautiful article. The experiences described almost perfectly match my own experiences at Google and they were one of the reasons I left. (I assume the author is talking about Google here) If there's one thing to add it would be that: Some smart people (especially the insecure kind) prefer pre-chewed answers by supposedly smarter or more senior people over their own scrutiny if the two disagree. I have seen this countless times. In fact I have met surprisingly few people at Google that have actually displayed critical and unbiased thinking when it came to the project they worked on or Google in general. This made the whole workplace feel a bit cult-like.
- zaphar 12y ago
  Your experience is directly contrary to my own :-) Of course I worked in the Chicago office so maybe it was due to being a remote office. But I and my colleagues regularly disagreed with senior people. Sometimes we were wrong and when we got more information realized it. Sometimes we were right and when we presented more information on the problem those senior people changed course. Both of us are working of purely subjective experiences though so neither one of us can really comment on Google as a whole.
chippy 12y ago
What the author describes is an US and in particular a Silicon Valley attribute. That of a concentration of smart technical people in their own bubble in a nice climate, outside of a wider community. It's self selection filtering, it's team belonging and humans in groups. It's earnestness, it's bright eyed optimism. It's not socially awareness, it's not a healthy cynicism. It's not cosmopolitan. It's isolation. It's why the largest pure technical efforts and successes come from SV and why more socially concious and digital humanities and world humanitarian technical efforts occur elsewhere in the world.
- _mulder_ 12y ago
  Isolated community bubbles are present in many industries with equally damaging effects. It's arrogance to assume it's just Tech because the 'unique selling point' of tech seems to be intelligence (ironically, probably the most common 'unique' selling point). Fashion, Film, Finance, Politics all have their own problems stemming from a self-selecting isolated elite.
  - danelectro 12y ago
    I look at it more like de-selecting the non-elite non-insiders.
circlefavshape 12y ago
"I have already proven to you, I make mistakes like the next man. In fact, being – forgive me – rather cleverer than most men, my mistakes tend to be correspondingly huger" - Albus Dumbledore
eivarv 12y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that both the author and a few of the commenters here suffer under the misapprehension that impostor syndrome is equivalent to a lack of confidence or arrogance, or to humility. As far as I understand the phenomenon it is rather an inability to internalize accomplishments, resulting in a skewed perception of one's own competence. Humility is, of course, important; but it is altogether something different from an irrational amount of self doubt, and impostor syndrome is thus clearly not valuable. Please excuse any errors in the text above, as english is not my first language.
- igravious 12y ago
  If English is not your first language God help the rest of us :) I think your observation and analysis is spot on. And I think I may add to your assessment with a couple of other points. 1) "Imposter Syndrome" is an 'in' phrase at the moment, its use as currency marks out the speaker as being part of an 'in' crowd. Similarly when people use the expressions "onboarding" or "I'll just leave this here" or "ping" or "tl;dr" or any of the countless other expressions that serve as social status plumage. 2) The entire article implies being the author is smart. Look at me, I'm smart -- this is an unwritten all-but-explicit large part of the message of this post. 3) This is the type of post that HNers lap up. It's hip, it's got the right bounce, it talks about trendy social phenomena, weaves a satisfyingly yummy narrative. You have to ask yourself why these types of posts get so many comments and upvotes.
  - eivarv 12y ago
    Thank you! I wholeheartedly agree with your points. How ironic it is then that the article lamenting the ability of "smart people" to "convincingly rationalize nearly anything" may, in a sense, itself be a rationalization of the author's own perceived smartness (as well as the smartness of those that might identify with him). This is, of course, not to say that there are no good points in the article itself - there certainly are.
  - mreiland 12y ago
    I honestly identified with it because it's been my observation that too many people decide on something and then rationalize it without considering their thought process for getting there. And I'm always secretly afraid that I do it more than I think I do. So when I see the blog author describe something so exactly close to how I feel about it, it's gratifying.
bogrollben 12y ago
Finally: an article that makes me glad I'm not smart.
PSeitz 12y ago
The curse of smart people is actually modesty, because they know how little they know. It's hard to be confident and sell stuff with modesty.
- _mulder_ 12y ago
  This does seem to make sense, the more aware of your environment you are (the more you know), the more modest you become when you realise you don't know it all. I hardly think modesty is a curse.
- 3minus1 12y ago
  I'm tired of this meme; it is way overstated. You could just as easily say "the curse of smart people is arrogance, because they know just how stupid the people around them are." I can assure you, I've known plenty of incredibly smart people who were quite arrogant.
  - dreamweapon 12y ago
    Depends how you define "smart" then. Viewed differently, nominal smarts + arrogance = lack of big-picture smarts = at the end of the day, just not all that smart.
    - mreiland 12y ago
      One of the absolute worst attributes of smart people is their willingness to argue over the semantics of a word rather than simply accept the overall premise being communicated by the other person.
      - dreamweapon 12y ago
        Except when, as in this case, the underlying semantic confusion of their premise (or how they articulated it) has a lot to do with why it was wrong in the first place.
soneca 12y ago
I didn't read this as a critique to the importance or relevance of logical thinking. Nor to smart people's arrogance. But as the dangers to rationalize as a tool for self-dellusion. Depending how do you feel, how your emotions are, you might want to protect yourself from changes, from disapointments, from "everything-is-wrong-start-all-over" situations. So when you are smart, in this definition, when you have highly developed rational thinking; then you use this to create a illusion that keep you in your comfort zone. Because you can rationalize pretty much everything that happens in the world. I would say this is not a "curse of smart people", just the particular tool these smart people, according to the author's definition, use to self-dellusion. Other people, with other intelectual resources, use their other resources to self-dellusion all the same. The point is, you have to try to find out when you are on a state of self-dellusion, whatever resource you use to prolong it. In other words, smart people may not be wise. Just as any other "kind" of people.
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coldtea 12y ago
>Answer: I think it's really true. A suprisingly large fraction of the smartest programmers in the world do* work here.* Not so sure about this. There are people that are smart for solving math problems and IQ style quizzes and such, and there are also people that are smart with language, patterns, empathy, creativity etc ("Emotional Intelligence" also doesn't cut it to describe this kind of smart completely). I've met several IQ 140+ people that are basically stupid in lots of ways and incompetent of doing anything with their lives, much less contribute to society. Some of them thrive only on some small niche areas (like chess or speaking many languages). I think there are smart programmers in both of the categories that I have described, and a process like Google's is mainly getting the first kind.
- dualogy 12y ago
  > a process like Google's is mainly getting the first kind They might have decided long ago that they largely need just the first kind but how are you going to communicate that sort of preference and why should you..
rasur 12y ago
Depending on which side of the pond you reside, one could be forgiven that this is an issue with the sartorial sensibilities of people, rather than how intelligent they are.
norswap 12y ago
Does someone know what company he's talking about?
- billmalarky 12y ago
  I was curious myself so I followed his advice and googled him. Turns out, he works for google. http://www.linkedin.com/in/apenwarr http://www.linkedin.com/in/apenwarr Which makes this line all the more hilarious. "But it's not really a secret; you can probably figure it out if you bing around a bit for my name."
  - LaikaF 12y ago
    I thought the bing was the hint and they worked at Microsoft.
    - spb 12y ago
      I thought that, too, but that didn't line up with the part about hiring smart people.
- thehal84 12y ago
  Google. I used to work with the author
dasmithii 12y ago
This reminds me a story of an old composer, John Cage. He's notorious for some really bizarre performance. For instance, he once sat for four minutes in front of an enormous crowd only to stand up and leave before making any sounds at all. This action, as he intended, took advantage of peoples' expectation to listen while in the concert hall. It built up a sense of anxiety, as he walked in, sat at the organ, and flipped pages atop the music stand. But then, suddenly, there was silence. And those with open ears were forced to hear minute sounds in the room, rather than the presupposed "music". On another occasion, he composed what ideally would cause expert musicians to sound amateurish - wretched, actually. But after many trials with different orchestral branches, he became overwhelmed with failure. These people, having been trained for excellence, literally could not play nonsense. Any sheet music you'd give them would result in reasonably coherent output. Like the smart people of this article, these musicians rationalized Cage's music, no matter how nonsensical. They could not play bad music.
- haberman 12y ago
  4'33" was a piece that Cage composed, but I'm not sure that he himself performed it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3
metacorrector 12y ago
good grief, yes, smart people can be arrogant, yes, smart people can be many other negative things. but my experience walking around the world is that most people are too stupid. Too stupid means, for instance, that they could never begin to fathom programming a computer in C or C++. So pursuing that narrow example (doesn't mean that you can't choose quantum physics instead, if you are distracted by that re-read what I said) and restricting ourselves to the population of people who can fathom programming in C and C++: again, my experience of them is that even they are mostly too stupid to do a good job of it, these are difficult and dangerous languages, and we as a society do not have enough people who can actually use them safely. So, from where I'm sitting, the arrogance of the world is not concentrated among the small numbers of truly exceptionally smart people, the arrogance is mostly found among all the other people--as we see in this discussion--who focus all their criticism on smart people. Yes, we smart people are arrogant, but we are not stupid, so shut up in order for you to get what you can from us, and do not wish that we could somehow be more like you because that would entail us being more stupid. Don't be insulted; just as I am not insulted that you can't see what I can see, I'm simply saying stop complaining about this, it goes with the territory. Do you complain that the brilliant brain surgeon who saved your life is also very arrogant, or do you kiss his ass for saving your life? Would you trade the pleasure of watching Michael Jordan play basketball away because you don't like the arrogant way he acts off court? No, you wouldn't. Yes, there can be super smart people who are also super humble, but so what? there can also be super smart people who are not humble, just as there can also be super humble people who are not very smart, and the worst of all, arrogance that is not accompanied by extreme skill, which is what I am complaining about. It is arrogant of all of you (no, not you personally, just look down the discussion) to all jump into the same discussion on the same side--ooh arrogance is bad--as if what you are saying is interesting. And this is not a topic of great interest to me, I'm simply trying to represent my side since I didn't see it represented anywhere else here.
- dreamweapon 12y ago
  Too stupid means, for instance, that they could never begin to fathom programming a computer in C or C++. It seems you're confusing "could never begin to fathom X" with "just not all that interested in X."
emerson_clarke 12y ago
This reminds me of a kind of intelligence scale ive seen before: First there are stupid people, and then there are stupid people who know they are stupid, then there are smart people who think they are smart, and finally there are smart people who know they are actually not that smart. Self awareness is the differentiating factor at every level. Intelligence comes in many forms; practical, creative, mathematical, logical, social, emotional, etc. As members of society we are more or less forced to specialise and must accept that being really good at something usually means we are terrible at something else. So if you are half as smart as you think you are, you will learn to recognise all the areas where you really are not, which vastly outnumber the ways in which you are. Which is a bit like saying: "I dont know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve." I for one am not that smart, im just a lot less stupid than most ;)

260 points by kposehn 12y ago

I can relate to the author. Therefore, I am a smart person.

My day job is working with programmers to find better ways of doing things. As part of that, I share with them things that folks have found make their lives better in 70-95% of the time. Not all the time, but most of the time. You would think this would be easy, but it is not. Instead of accepting the heuristics I'm sharing, many programmers want to argue about whether something "works" or not. They want a logical, rigid proof of why it works. They have tons of objections as to why it wouldn't work. They have anecdotes about other people who tried the same thing and it didn't work (Remember, I'm sharing things that mostly work, not Newtonian Laws) Anything at all besides actually trying it out to see for themselves! Smart people, indeed all humans, reason emotionally and then use logic to justify reasons for their conclusions. People who aren't so smart are used to demurring to others for answers -- a priest, a counselor, a politician, a teacher. After all, they've learned they're not so smart. Society has told them that folks in authority are there for good reason. People who are smart will also demur -- but to somebody who already agrees with them. And the internet is full of authority figures taking every position imaginable. I really love working with extremely smart people, but you don't ever want to get in an argument with them. It's not good for either of you. They'll be able to convince themselves -- and you -- of just about anything they want. It's truly a terrible thing to be super smart, have blind spots, and be completely in the dark about it. EDIT: And to the other commenter's point, this is not about arrogance. Even nice, humble people do this. This is about smarts -- the ability to use resources and solve problems creatively. When you put that to work to justify something (or avoid something, as in this article), it's amazing the things you can come up with. Even if you're the most humble person in the world.

TeMPOraL 12y ago
> They want a logical, rigid proof of why it works. They have tons of objections as to why it wouldn't work. They have anecdotes about other people who tried the same thing and it didn't work (Remember, I'm sharing things that mostly work, not Newtonian Laws) Anything at all besides actually trying it out to see for themselves! The problem with "actually trying it out" is that it's extremely costly. They might be afraid to risk wasting two weeks on something that ultimately didn't bring any benefit. That's understandable. Part of this is also because a lot of "better ways of doing things" probably actually don't work. People think they do, but that's because of a mix of popularity, good marketing, just-so stories and the fact that it's often incredibly hard to measure actual impact of such changes on work performance. Add to the last point that majority of people seem to not understand data, statistics, and that 86% of population believes any number they read on the Internet. So I completely understand that they ask for "logical, rigid proof of why it works" - because most likely it doesn't, otherwise you could provide a reason why it does.

lightyrs 12y ago

tldr; Imposter syndrome is not the problem — it's the cure. I loved this article. Thanks for posting.

ggambetta 12y ago
You make it sound like it's good - it isn't. It's not something you enjoy, it's something you suffer. I'm trying to get out of that particular tar pit right now.
- lightyrs 12y ago
  Cures are often unenjoyable — it doesn't make them less effective. Think of chemotherapy for example.
- Mz 12y ago
  The real cure for Imposter Syndrome is objective, hard data concerning a) something real world that you are trying to accomplish and b) your actual relative ability compared to some social norm that matters for the ability being measured. The issue with Imposter Syndrome is that "social proof" is often not very good proof. There are forms of social proof which can be valuable but they are also often painful (a al Bill Gates quote about "your unhappiest customers" being your best source of learning). But a lot of that "rah rah, we think you are awesome and will thus kiss your butt and not give you meaningful feedback" stuff is something to very much worry about.

treme 12y ago

"you can probably figure it out if you bing around a bit.." I can't tell if this really happened or the person was pseudo-cheating because he worked for MS.

lionheart 12y ago
He works for Google, I believe.
- somerandomness 12y ago
  It is obviously Google.
  - nandemo 12y ago
    I could tell it was Google after reading this: > A suprisingly large fraction of the smartest programmers in the world do work here. In very large quantities. In fact, quantities so large that I wouldn't have thought that so many really smart people existed or could be centralized in one place, but trust me, they do and they can. There are certainly other places with lots of smart programmers, but it seems every time I read something self-congratulatory like this, it's Google.
    - cscurmudgeon 12y ago
      I agree. How do you know someone is a Googler? They will tell you how their entire company is the most smartest in the entire multiverse. If you are so smart why are twiddling around bits in gmail for breadcrumbs when you could have started your own company or gotten into academia?
      - robrenaud 12y ago
        I am not sure if breadcrumbs means low compensation, but the comp at Google (especially for people succeeding) is high and low risk. If you just want to write software (as opposed to run a business), being an engineer at Google is really nice. You get a ton of resources, work on projects that have millions of users, etc. Don't get me wrong, entrepreneurs are awesome. But it's a much, much broader skill set than what is required to be a successful software engineer. As for academia, my personal problem with it is that it's too focused on elegant/complicated/clever solutions to problems that don't really exist. And the compensation is terrible.

ameister14 12y ago

This doesn't seem to be the curse of smart people. Many bureaucrats don't care if a project succeeds, instead focusing on whether or not it is approved and who's name is attached. That isn't because they are smart. It's because their environment rewards this behavior. People can rationalize anything. It has nothing to do with intelligence, merely experience and current environment (which is most of what's written in the article).

XorNot 12y ago
Most bureaucrats are smart. Most politicians are smart. When you lament why the people in charge seem so dumb, its probably worth reflecting that they're still in charge. They understand something you don't.
- nitrogen 12y ago
  It seems highly likely to me that power brokering (i.e. social intelligence) and analytical intelligence are orthogonal skills (and not the only orthogonal axes on which one may be "smart"). "Smart" is inadequate as an adjective, because it leads people to say things like, "If you're so smart, why aren't you the boss/senator/president?" If we separate these forms of intelligence in our daily conversations, we might make it easier for the oft-exploited analytically intelligent to appreciate and take advantage of social intelligence, and gain more recognition from those who have social but not analytical intelligence.
  - a3voices 12y ago
    > "If you're so smart, why aren't you the boss/senator/president?" I think it mainly has to do with comfort. Most people don't want to step outside of their comfort zone to pursue political power. There's too much risk and not enough to gain from the time commitment.
    - nitrogen 12y ago
      Speaking as someone who helped with someone's unsuccessful political campaign, it takes a lot more than just discomfort to be successful in politics. I think the "just don't feel like it, but if I did, I could win" excuse for avoiding politics is like the "I could probably get in, but I don't want to be a member" excuse for avoiding Mensa. Both things are probably harder than they seem (though I only have experience with one).

wallflower 12y ago

Not just impostor syndrome, but the willingness to see what is actually there. I think this is why art (particularly drawing classes) can be so hard for most people starting out at a later age. One of my teachers would constantly say 'don't draw an eye - draw what you see'. While well baked into our "memory" and knowledge sphere, our mental model of what is an eye or a human head isn't actually what is there. See also "Gorillas in our midst: sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events" http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~cfc/Simons1999.pdf http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~cfc/Simons1999.pdf

lsdafjklsd 12y ago
I was always amazed at how many people would paint the eyes on a portrait with white, when the eyes are one of the darkest areas on the face.
- judk 12y ago
  Do you draw severely jaundiced people? A human eyeball is white, outside the iris.
  - frogpelt 12y ago
    The color is white. The shading is usually not.
  - SoftwareMaven 12y ago
    Take a photograph, properly color correct it, and see what color the "white" actually is. It will vary a lot, depending on the color of light falling on the eye, and be tinged by the blood vessels in the eye. What it won't be is #ffffff.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - ZoF 12y ago
      I think he/she took offense to the "darkest part of the face" portion of the comment; which is clearly false for the majority of the earth's population, particularly since no one draws the iris white so the original comment was clearly referencing the "white" portion of the eye.

raving-richard 12y ago

Bah. I raided an Egyptian tomb, and ever since I've been followed around by smart people. They talk complex philosophy, discuss string theory, rave about Haskel, and talk about some the boast some French fella or another wrote in some book (in the margins I think). It's really annoying. Now that's a curse. This article is just about how smart people have issues just like everyone else. Gee. Edit: Ooh, some of "smart" people can't take a joke.

saraid216 12y ago
It's standard practice to downvote jokes. Thank you for letting me know it was one. I wouldn't have realized I needed to downvote this.
- raving-richard 12y ago
  Could you explain why it is standard practice to downvote jokes? I don't get it. If it's funny, then people might want to read it. Over on /. a lot of the best comments are modded funny.
  - vacri 12y ago
    It's tradition on HN, in an attempt to lower the chaff and keep things on-topic. It used to be that any attempt at humour would get you canned, but now it seems the pendulum has swung to 'if there's no other content in the comment'. The same goes for comments about people not being able to handle things like in your edit - they don't really contribute anything. Snark is frowned upon.
    - philh 12y ago
      I don't think pure jokes automatically get downvoted, if they're funny enough, though I have no recent examples in mind. But this particular example is more condescending than funny.
  - Confusion 12y ago
    Jokes beget worse jokes beget bad jokes, until the majority of the comments consists of people trying to be funny and it's hard to judge insightful comments. That's my major gripe with /. and Reddit.

fortuitous 12y ago

I am guilty of imposter syndrome, however I recently heard myself speak about a subject I care a lot about. And I giggled because I actually sound smart. That was a revelation, although I am still not convinced.

a8da6b0c91d 12y ago

High IQ people have the "clever silly" problem. "... an increasing relative level of IQ brings with it a tendency differentially to over-use general intelligence in problem-solving, and to over-ride those instinctive and spontaneous forms of evolved behaviour which could be termed common sense. Preferential use of abstract analysis is often useful when dealing with the many evolutionary novelties to be found in modernizing societies; but is not usually useful for dealing with social and psychological problems for which humans have evolved ‘domain-specific’ adaptive behaviours. ... when it comes to solving social problems, the most intelligent people are more likely than those of average intelligence to have novel but silly ideas" http://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.com/2009/11/clever-sillies-why-high-iq-lack-common.html http://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.com/2009/11/clever-sillies...

Xcelerate 12y ago
Haha, this is great. I'm not claiming to have a high IQ; however, the article you linked resonates a lot with me. In my previous relationship, I had a difficult time figuring out if what my (ex)-girlfriend said corresponded with what she actually meant, and I often thought she was playing "mind games" of some sort with me. So I began recording the intervals of time between our text messages and plotting them to search for discrepancies in our texting patterns. Lately, I've also been putting on different personas at parties I attend (I'm a grad student) and taking notes on the varying responses I get to each type of personality. I'm attempting to optimize charisma with this data, but I'm not having a lot of success yet. People always say to "be yourself", but if that was the case I simply wouldn't interact with others at all, so I have to develop some kind of personality to use. I was telling my sister about these types of social experiments, and she told me that overanalyzing everything to a fault produces the opposite result of what I'm trying to achieve. So far, she seem to have a point, because I still have difficulty deciphering how most people interact socially with each other. (I hope none of my friends know my HN username...)
- politician 12y ago
  Consider that you might be using the wrong hemisphere of your brain to analyze these situations and that chemically nullifying this tendency of one hemisphere to dominate your reasoning may improve your results. For example, consider the experiment where you get blindingly drunk and see how you react physically (calibration). Then, tone it down a few drinks and see how you react socially. Give someone else the keys to your car first. Alternatively, observe how you breath through your nose. It's known that the nostril through which you breath is related to which nervous system is active (you have two: sympathetic and parasympathetic, and they are related to increased blood flow in the right and left brain). Observe how you react socially when different hemispheres are active. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2923709 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2923709

dosh 12y ago

Being a parent to two kids, I can definitely see the 'evolution of rationalization' taking place as kids grow older. Your child will feel angry about certain events, or about other people and so forth for whatever the reasons, but usually, it's simply because they are hungry or feeling tired. What's interesting is when you observe how they are trying to find out reasons why they are upset, when basically, it's their instinct/emotion that caused them to get upset. So you will notice the lack of consistency or relevance of their evidence in backing up their argument. But this changes gradually as they grow older. They become more logical and more consistent. I think this is what most adult, or smart individuals learn to do as well. It amazes me everyday to find myself rationalizing so many things and at the same time, persuading others using the same logic, when the other part of my brain secretly acknowledge/recognize that I'm making it sound all logical and trying to get others approval for my own sense of security.

chipsy 12y ago
It is my own recognition that I will not be correct or make right decisions that leads me towards faith in long-term knowledge building: on any given day I will most likely make a bad decision, but in the aggregate of many days, like any other practiced skill, I will be able to recognize mistakes, correct course, and develop a way to "practice out" or "systematize out" a bad habit. And so I study history...
Confusion 12y ago
Your observation of kids blaming events or people for their 'bad' feeling, when they are actually hungry or tired is spot on. However this kind of causal relationship exists in far more subtle and extensive ways and stays operational all your life! Examples from research: judges give harsher sentences right before lunch vs. right after lunch. You are less willing to help others when you are cold. The list goes on and on. Your kids becoming 'more logical and more consistent' is only them becoming so good at rationalizing and explaining their rationalization that you believe them. In fact it is still being hungry that made them lash out.
- mercer 12y ago

notastartup 12y ago

I've worked with lot of engineers with the described "logic bubble", often coming off as an asperger or rude. It's rampant. Engineers just don't know how to admit ambiguity, everything is solvable with logic, and this rubs off as arrogance. Like the author I also experienced early on in life that the real world is much more unpredictable. Day trading, reading books have opened my eyes quite a bit. Also starting my own business selling my own software has really enforced the view that the only certainty is uncertainty. Such a beautifully written article. I'd put this right up there with Dr. Nassim Taleb's article on smart people or experts with no respect for fallibility of the human condition, or the innate limitation as humans, the absolute guarantee to incorrectly perceive our point in time, space, and make poor decisions and walk off with a large check because of a certain pecking order in society that awards chutzpah or blind confidence in one's own ability or a groups ability. It probably comes from the evolutionary practice of hunters and gatherers.

watwut 12y ago
Funny ... I had the same impression of some managers. Simply could not accept that certain things are unpredictable. The other thing is that there are places where ambiguity is wrong e.g., documentation. Which was hard to accept for some managers and analysts. I can not write ambiguous code, it ends up doing either one thing or another. Notice the some in my sentences. I managed not to offend whole profession of people.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

stretchwithme 12y ago

They're also better able to avoid backing the wrong horse to begin with and better at rethinking and cleaning up after their mistaken rationalizations.

corpselord420 12y ago
you're confusing being smart with being wise, but it's not a surprise that this sentiment is in the thread. classing people as 'smart' is so narrow and limiting that it's totally meaningless but the nerds love nothing more than arbitrary categorization

hamburglar 12y ago

This is an interesting angle on something I've noticed, and perhaps a better explanation of it, but I'll put my observation in the ring in case it offers any other insights: Smart people can end up developing faulty world views because they are good at arguing, and every time they win an argument, they convince themselves more and more of the infallibility of their world view, when in fact all that happened was they encountered yet another person who couldn't spot the flaw in it. An example of this is extreme libertarianism. For a long time, I had convinced myself that it was totally sound because if I argued politics with most people I knew, I could shut them down with logic and "prove" my case. The logic and robot-like consistency of it just reassured me that I was unassailably correct. It took me getting to the point where I realized that I didn't truly believe some of my own arguments, despite the fact that I had successfully made them countless times, to snap out of it and realize that my views, as rigidly consistent as they were, were probably disastrous from a public policy standpoint. I rationalized a position to others, which ultimately rationalized it to me as well. Don't do that.

lotharbot 12y ago
> "I didn't truly believe some of my own arguments" One of my core philosophies of argument is that I always argue honestly. That is, I give my real reasons for believing things (as well as I understand them) even if I know of other arguments that sound persuasive but that I don't believe as strongly. I find this means I lose arguments slightly more often (which is a good thing; I end up changing my mind), but I also win handily quite a bit more often. I see far fewer stalemated arguments, and far fewer arguments that devolve into quoting my side's famous thinkers at people who quote their side's famous thinkers back. It was difficult at first, but with practice it's become fairly easy.
SilasX 12y ago
I think the problem is that you never encountered anyone who actually understood the best reasons for the policies you opposed, or even had a model (however ad hoc) in which the relevant benefits could be expressed. I see that kind of thing all the time: I heard bad arguments against the minimum wage for years before I was even aware of a purported disemployment effect. Ditto for the relationship between traditional morality and STD/population growth concerns. I don't think you can blame yourself for that. To the extent that an idea makes sense, there should be someone that appreciates it, and can convey its logic. To the extent that your acquaintances were not those people (and did not subject their beliefs to the same checks you did), neither did they have any business being more confident than you in their views. Sure, your ideas may have been disastrous as policy, but how could you have known that? You can't update on evidence you haven't gotten -- let alone evidence which resists revelation by interested adversaries!

walterbell 12y ago

Is someone "smart" if they cannot explain how they arrived at the correct/optimal answer?

tensor 12y ago

The author seems to attack logical and rational thinking a lot, however, their argument is not convincing. "But I think Impostor Syndrome is valuable. The people with Impostor Syndrome are the people who aren't sure that a logical proof of their smartness is sufficient. They're looking around them and finding something wrong, an intuitive sense that around here, logic does not always agree with reality, and the obviously right solution does not lead to obviously happy customers, and it's unsettling because maybe smartness isn't enough, and maybe if we don't feel like we know what we're doing, it's because we don't." Most importantly, consider the quote "logic does not always agree with reality". Logic neither agrees nor disagrees with reality. Logic itself is flawless, but the assumptions you put into it can be wrong. The problem is not with thinking logically, thinking logically is good. Rather, it's an issue with holding incorrect assumptions. Leaving aside the problem of defining smart, the claim, then, is that the smarter you are, the more false assumptions you hold. That's quite a bold claim. It needs a lot more evidence than personal anecdote for me to accept.

shenberg 12y ago
Logic is very much flawed in the sense that you can't necessarily model reality using logic, and good paradoxes point out examples (for example look at the torturous "solutions" to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox ).
lhnz 12y ago
There is no quote that "the smarter you are, the more false assumptions you have". I can't even find the words false or assumption in the article. You are strawmanning or reading incorrectly. This is what he says: > Here's the problem. Logic is a pretty powerful > tool, but it only works if you give it good input. > As the famous computer science maxim says, > "garbage in, garbage out." If you know all the > constraints and weights - with perfect precision > - then you can use logic to find the perfect > answer. But when you don't, which is always, > there's a pretty good chance your logic will lead > you very, very far astray. My personal experience in life has been that this is the case. No matter how much I have studied, it's not possible to logic your way out of insufficient or misperceived data which in most domains other than programming is the rule. I've also experienced the same over-confidence of logical thinkers kept in bubbles - they adjust to the quantity and correctness of data they have in one part of their life and then use logic and cognitive biases to rationalise the outcomes they have in life.

ScottBurson 12y ago

I think one could be more direct about it: the curse of smart people is arrogance. Always allow the possibility that you could be wrong.

90hourweek 12y ago
But neither this, nor what the author is talking about is "the curse of smart people". Conspiracy theorists, evolution deniers, religious fundamentalists, alien abductees and so on are examples of people getting together, and successfully rationalizing their belief in some quite twisted ideas. We don't call such groups "smart people", typically. They're not necessarily stupid either. They're just people. So it's just the "curse" of being a human, I guess. Whether we use our mind superpowers for good, or in order to fool ourselves and the people around us is completely independent of one's smartness, and has more to do with wisdom. Many people believe that if you can wrap a convincing narrative around a set of selected facts, the narrative must be truth itself. Stories posing as insight are all around you. Experience leads to wisdom, and wisdom teaches us to be more open-minded and less sure in the stories we hear or tell ourselves.
- JulianMorrison 12y ago
  The curse, specifically, is that the smart people make their mistaken theories sound good, build them up to the point that it's hard to break them without being equally smart AND also primed to look for subtle glitches in reasoning or technique.
  - PavlovsCat 12y ago
    To me, intelligence is like a fast truck with a lot of cargo space: you can use it to help other people move into a nicer home, you can use it to make great trips, you can run it into a wall and kill yourself much better than you could with a slower truck, and you can load it up with children and drive off a bridge. Intelligence is to stupidity what a power tool is to a screwdriver, you can do more powerful good and bad things with it, but the fact that it's more powerful says nothing about how it will be used. Sadly.

wfbarks 12y ago

hubris develops because you don't get the humility of failure. Great article!

zw123456 12y ago

A person who I very much respect once told me there are two kinds of people in the world, stupid and aware of it and stupid and unaware of it. The implication is that everyone is stupid on some level, meaning there is always someone smarter than you and there are always things you do not know or have not yet learned. People who are aware of that are wise. Wisdom and intelligence are not the same thing. I think that is sort of the key meaning of the post, and if one can learn that at an early age as the author did, then they learned it earlier than I did.

WalterBright 12y ago
Wisdom is the combination of intelligence and knowledge.
- vinceguidry 12y ago
  This isn't true unless you redefine one of the two comprising traits. You could make a good case for saying that wisdom is intelligence plus experience, but to me that too misses a certain essential element of wisdom. I don't think you can 'buy' wisdom, you either have the capacity to get it or you don't. I was recently at my dad's retirement ceremony, 30 years in the Marine Corps. One of his good buddies was there, a similarly seasoned leatherneck, let's call him Tom. I have a habit of addressing people I don't know well with 'mister'. This time he asked me to call him 'Tom', with the explanation that 'you're probably more grown up than I am, anyway'. It was a joke, but the kind that makes your heart go out to him. He'd had a successful career, but his personal life was always a mess. He was in a particularly reflective mood that day as he spoke at the ceremony, and I learned a lot about the many mistakes he'd made and all the things my dad did to help him out. This was a fairly intelligent man, my dad didn't make friends that weren't intelligent, and also very knowledgable, something you can't build a 30 year career in the Corps without, they'd kick out out at 20. He was definitely experienced. But he wasn't particularly wise, or rather, wisdom was particularly hard-won for him. He was one of those people who was just really hard-headed about certain things. Had he been wiser, he would have been able to let go of perceived slights and been easier with his family and spent more and better time with them. He would have picked better women to get involved with. Now he's got a relationship that works, and it's about time. Wisdom is the thing that lets you see the essential quality that makes the important things in life important. Wisdom makes life less complicated and more pleasant. Intelligence tends to complicate things, and knowledge and experience move in one direction. Wisdom and experience makes you more perceptive, knowledge and intelligence by themselves don't.

a3voices 12y ago

The most useful logic is that which predicts reality. Smart people are best at this. So I disagree with the author.

politician 12y ago
Realistic people are best at predicting reality, by definition. Street smarts -- realism -- belongs to those who have deep domain expertise rather than pure raw IQ. Anyway, logic itself, as a system of reasoning, is known to be <strike>inconsistent</strike> incomplete (Godel, etc).
- quatrevingts 12y ago
  Incomplete, not inconsistent; i.e., not everything that is true is provable.
  - politician 12y ago
    Thanks, fixed.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  But using logic is a trait of a dumb person anyways, the world is much better model probability theory which is designed to deal with uncertain, incomplete and incorrect data. It's basically what your brain does and what "street smarts" is, albeit the brain uses so many cognitive shortcuts and heuristics to avoid computing things.

WalterSear 12y ago

I don't think that smart people are any more prone to rationalization than others - the author just hasn't spent any time with them.

StandardFuture 12y ago

'Smart People' certainly seems like an ego-stroking classification we enjoy being placed under (especially here on Hacker News). I also have trouble seeing how impostor syndrome is viewed as something wrong. I always thought it was just the new buzzword replacement for the age-old concept of humility. >Smart people have a problem ... That problem is an ability to convincingly rationalize nearly anything. My apologies to all us 'Smart People' but this can be attributed to 'People' in general. When we want to believe something, we will seek out objects, arguments, 'evidence', etc. that support that belief. If we find enough pieces (that also seem to complement each other) we will be satisfied. Maybe 'Smart' just means 'more-equipped' (with ideas, studies, etc.) to rationalize something (more quickly or more 'effectively'). Which also makes me wonder if we are just equating 'Smart' (as a classification) to people who have a relatively wider knowledge/experience base to pull from relative to someone else? How else could we 'rationalize' something new other than using/rehashing ideas we have come across already? >But I think Impostor Syndrome is valuable I agree. Humility is extremely valuable. It is especially valuable when solving problems, which is what most 'smart people' do, isn't it?

bbllee 12y ago

Reminds me of 'What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought,' the most interesting cognitive science book I've read. http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Tests-Miss-Psychology/dp/0300164629 http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Tests-Miss-Psycholog... In short, rationality is not the same thing as intelligence and general intelligence does not correlate with rational behavior nearly as well as we might like it to. Individuals with high intelligence can and do put their mental endowments to work to argue for mistaken ideas and execute irrational plans. I'm now thinking of an intelligent individual who made a small misstatement in conversation, then, when challenged on that point, proceeded to explain why he was not mistaken for several minutes... then finally wised up and admitted that his original statement was wrong.

kmtrowbr 12y ago

As I have grown (just a little) older, one of the best lessons I have learned is just about the limitations of intelligence, of rationality, even, of language. We are intelligent animals. However, we are more animal, than we are intelligent. And that's not even necessarily a bad thing. I grew a lot when I realized that 'being intelligent' is not the only important way to be a good person.

javert 12y ago

Aw man. Imposter Syndrome x1000. Can I put that on my resume? Is that now considered a good thing? :)

eng_monkey 12y ago

Wow, that was arrogant.

nileshtrivedi 12y ago

> Smart people have a problem... an ability to convincingly rationalize nearly anything. This has a simple solution really. They should be actively trying to prove their assumptions false. Rationalize that their premises are wrong until compelled with extraordinary evidence. Be a contrarian. It will also help if all the smart people in the group have a diversity of beliefs so that everybody gets his assumptions cross-examined.

saraid216 12y ago
And if you fail to prove your assumptions false, it's only because you haven't tried hard enough.
- Mikushi 12y ago
  Or because they are right.
  - saraid216 12y ago
    That's possible, but given that it is one possibility out of a nigh infinite possibilities that they are wrong, what's the probability that they're right?

deleted 12y ago

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mililani 12y ago

I thought this was going to be about existentialism and depression.

atmosx 12y ago

I'm very sceptical when reading quotes like "smart people [...]" because IMHO it's extremely complicated to define smart. That said, I believe the following statement is 100% wrong: > "Smart people have a problem, especially (although not only) when you put them in large groups. That problem is an ability to convincingly rationalize nearly anything." Rationalizing is not something smart people do. IMHO it's more of a cultural thing in large scale. Take a north European (or American, must have to do with the weather) and you'll get a huge % of the population rationalizing things, instead of being emotional like the south Europeans/American. I understand that most HN readers are programmers with strong mathematical background but try to picture this: Ghandi didn't knew any math compared to Godel, Einstein or Von Neumann. Ghandi achieved a gunless revolution by convincing poorly educated people to follow his lead. To me this is EXTREMELY hard to do. Nearly impossible. Ghandi was a social genius. Can we say that he wasn't smart because an average mathematician would probably had more analytical thinking when talking about algorithms? The author (and not only the author) confuses the analytical/non-emotional thinking that he does with smartness. I believe that's a bold mistake. ps. Of course there are situation where school teachers think of introvert children as not that smart. This thing plays out both-ways unfortunately.

seizethecheese 12y ago
Nobody would assume Ghandi was dumb because he didn't know algorithms, how absurd. More intelligent people absolutely are more adept at rationalization if they have that particular difficulty.
- shadowfox 12y ago
  It also helps that Gandhi was highly educated (for his time), was a lawyer and quite a good writer, orator and politician. Not exactly the characteristic of an unsmart person.
dsuth 12y ago
Convincing poorly educated people of something is not hard to do. A large part (or side-effect sadly) of education is critical thinking skills. Lack of education leads to easy followers; something that has been preyed upon numerous times throughout history.

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akuma73 12y ago

I think a lot of the discussion here assumes that smart people are unable to make proper decisions under uncertainty. That has not been my experience. I've found that truly smart people are able to discern when there is uncertainty and apply the proper analysis using probabilities. They're also able to sanitize the inputs to avoid the garbage-in, garbage-out problem. Perhaps the "smart" people he is referencing are not so smart?

qwerta 12y ago

Smart people I know also have a critical thinking. They verify their ideas and learn from their mistakes. What author describes seems more like management issue.

fsloth 12y ago

Respectfully, I think this is the main contribution of the referred post: "Working at a large, successful company lets you keep your isolation. If you choose, you can just ignore all the inconvenient facts about the world." Having an established revenue stream for an organization is a superpower which let's an organization absorb ridiculous amounts of bad management, poor decision making, lackadaisical execution and so on. Compared to a startup or small company - Good bye scrawny Bruce Banner, hello Hulk. See that bus coming? Who cares, now you can take it, no need to do anything smart about it. People moving to large established organizations should be keenly aware of this. Having an established product and maintaining that product might sometimes seem like an odd side-effect to large areas of an organization of all the other busywork done at siloed "scientifically" managed organizations.

whybroke 12y ago

The author anecdotaly notices a great many work place fallacies such as "confirmation bias", "the bandwagon effect" etc. Then, seemingly unaware of these separate categories, lumps them together and ascribes that lump as an innate characteristic of "smart" people. Obviously an organization that succumbs to these fallacies is going to have trouble. Obviously adding "unsmart" people to the mix will only exacerbate it. But that's not really surprising. What's interesting is a trend, of which this article is an example, to ascribe the problems of the alleged meritocracy (which are real) not to the system itself but instead to clear reasoned well informed thinking. It's possible that this strange dislike of reason is triggered by pseudo-intellectuals on the far right cloaking themselves in the language of rationality to argue against global warming, minimum wages, the cigaret-cancer link etc. But I'd like to see more conjecture/evidence about what's causing it.

mazsa 12y ago

FYI: http://amexrap.org/fal/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/i-f0026d2c4414eeb4960eae9202eeb8dd-krugeranddunningfig2.jpg http://amexrap.org/fal/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/i-f0026d2c... (Source: http://www.physics.uofl.edu/williger/unskilled_and_unaware_1999.pdf http://www.physics.uofl.edu/williger/unskilled_and_unaware_1... )

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chondos 12y ago

>Smart people have a problem, especially (although not only) when you put them in large groups. That problem is an ability to convincingly rationalize nearly anything. This applies to anyone and everyone about 2 yrs old+. He thinks average and dumb people don't do this? They do it and their reasons don't even have to be half intelligible or make sense logically.

michaelfeathers 12y ago

Smart. "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." - Indigo Montoya

crgt 12y ago
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inigo_Montoya http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inigo_Montoya

luikore 12y ago

The curse of smart people: they look smart but not really smart to realise that they are not smart enough.

teddyh 12y ago

From The Jargon File, Appendix B, “A Portrait of J. Random Hacker”, section “Politics”¹: […] Hackers are far more likely than most non-hackers to […] entertain peculiar or idiosyncratic political ideas and actually try to live by them day-to-day. 1) http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/politics.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/politics.html

rsp1984 12y ago

I agree with the author by 100%. What a beautiful article. The experiences described almost perfectly match my own experiences at Google and they were one of the reasons I left. (I assume the author is talking about Google here) If there's one thing to add it would be that: Some smart people (especially the insecure kind) prefer pre-chewed answers by supposedly smarter or more senior people over their own scrutiny if the two disagree. I have seen this countless times. In fact I have met surprisingly few people at Google that have actually displayed critical and unbiased thinking when it came to the project they worked on or Google in general. This made the whole workplace feel a bit cult-like.

zaphar 12y ago
Your experience is directly contrary to my own :-) Of course I worked in the Chicago office so maybe it was due to being a remote office. But I and my colleagues regularly disagreed with senior people. Sometimes we were wrong and when we got more information realized it. Sometimes we were right and when we presented more information on the problem those senior people changed course. Both of us are working of purely subjective experiences though so neither one of us can really comment on Google as a whole.

chippy 12y ago

What the author describes is an US and in particular a Silicon Valley attribute. That of a concentration of smart technical people in their own bubble in a nice climate, outside of a wider community. It's self selection filtering, it's team belonging and humans in groups. It's earnestness, it's bright eyed optimism. It's not socially awareness, it's not a healthy cynicism. It's not cosmopolitan. It's isolation. It's why the largest pure technical efforts and successes come from SV and why more socially concious and digital humanities and world humanitarian technical efforts occur elsewhere in the world.

_mulder_ 12y ago
Isolated community bubbles are present in many industries with equally damaging effects. It's arrogance to assume it's just Tech because the 'unique selling point' of tech seems to be intelligence (ironically, probably the most common 'unique' selling point). Fashion, Film, Finance, Politics all have their own problems stemming from a self-selecting isolated elite.
- danelectro 12y ago
  I look at it more like de-selecting the non-elite non-insiders.

circlefavshape 12y ago

"I have already proven to you, I make mistakes like the next man. In fact, being – forgive me – rather cleverer than most men, my mistakes tend to be correspondingly huger" - Albus Dumbledore

eivarv 12y ago

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that both the author and a few of the commenters here suffer under the misapprehension that impostor syndrome is equivalent to a lack of confidence or arrogance, or to humility. As far as I understand the phenomenon it is rather an inability to internalize accomplishments, resulting in a skewed perception of one's own competence. Humility is, of course, important; but it is altogether something different from an irrational amount of self doubt, and impostor syndrome is thus clearly not valuable. Please excuse any errors in the text above, as english is not my first language.

igravious 12y ago
If English is not your first language God help the rest of us :) I think your observation and analysis is spot on. And I think I may add to your assessment with a couple of other points. 1) "Imposter Syndrome" is an 'in' phrase at the moment, its use as currency marks out the speaker as being part of an 'in' crowd. Similarly when people use the expressions "onboarding" or "I'll just leave this here" or "ping" or "tl;dr" or any of the countless other expressions that serve as social status plumage. 2) The entire article implies being the author is smart. Look at me, I'm smart -- this is an unwritten all-but-explicit large part of the message of this post. 3) This is the type of post that HNers lap up. It's hip, it's got the right bounce, it talks about trendy social phenomena, weaves a satisfyingly yummy narrative. You have to ask yourself why these types of posts get so many comments and upvotes.
- eivarv 12y ago
  Thank you! I wholeheartedly agree with your points. How ironic it is then that the article lamenting the ability of "smart people" to "convincingly rationalize nearly anything" may, in a sense, itself be a rationalization of the author's own perceived smartness (as well as the smartness of those that might identify with him). This is, of course, not to say that there are no good points in the article itself - there certainly are.
- mreiland 12y ago
  I honestly identified with it because it's been my observation that too many people decide on something and then rationalize it without considering their thought process for getting there. And I'm always secretly afraid that I do it more than I think I do. So when I see the blog author describe something so exactly close to how I feel about it, it's gratifying.

bogrollben 12y ago

Finally: an article that makes me glad I'm not smart.

PSeitz 12y ago

The curse of smart people is actually modesty, because they know how little they know. It's hard to be confident and sell stuff with modesty.

_mulder_ 12y ago
This does seem to make sense, the more aware of your environment you are (the more you know), the more modest you become when you realise you don't know it all. I hardly think modesty is a curse.
3minus1 12y ago
I'm tired of this meme; it is way overstated. You could just as easily say "the curse of smart people is arrogance, because they know just how stupid the people around them are." I can assure you, I've known plenty of incredibly smart people who were quite arrogant.
- dreamweapon 12y ago
  Depends how you define "smart" then. Viewed differently, nominal smarts + arrogance = lack of big-picture smarts = at the end of the day, just not all that smart.
  - mreiland 12y ago
    One of the absolute worst attributes of smart people is their willingness to argue over the semantics of a word rather than simply accept the overall premise being communicated by the other person.
    - dreamweapon 12y ago
      Except when, as in this case, the underlying semantic confusion of their premise (or how they articulated it) has a lot to do with why it was wrong in the first place.

soneca 12y ago

I didn't read this as a critique to the importance or relevance of logical thinking. Nor to smart people's arrogance. But as the dangers to rationalize as a tool for self-dellusion. Depending how do you feel, how your emotions are, you might want to protect yourself from changes, from disapointments, from "everything-is-wrong-start-all-over" situations. So when you are smart, in this definition, when you have highly developed rational thinking; then you use this to create a illusion that keep you in your comfort zone. Because you can rationalize pretty much everything that happens in the world. I would say this is not a "curse of smart people", just the particular tool these smart people, according to the author's definition, use to self-dellusion. Other people, with other intelectual resources, use their other resources to self-dellusion all the same. The point is, you have to try to find out when you are on a state of self-dellusion, whatever resource you use to prolong it. In other words, smart people may not be wise. Just as any other "kind" of people.

deleted 12y ago

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coldtea 12y ago

>Answer: I think it's really true. A suprisingly large fraction of the smartest programmers in the world do* work here.* Not so sure about this. There are people that are smart for solving math problems and IQ style quizzes and such, and there are also people that are smart with language, patterns, empathy, creativity etc ("Emotional Intelligence" also doesn't cut it to describe this kind of smart completely). I've met several IQ 140+ people that are basically stupid in lots of ways and incompetent of doing anything with their lives, much less contribute to society. Some of them thrive only on some small niche areas (like chess or speaking many languages). I think there are smart programmers in both of the categories that I have described, and a process like Google's is mainly getting the first kind.

dualogy 12y ago
> a process like Google's is mainly getting the first kind They might have decided long ago that they largely need just the first kind but how are you going to communicate that sort of preference and why should you..

rasur 12y ago

Depending on which side of the pond you reside, one could be forgiven that this is an issue with the sartorial sensibilities of people, rather than how intelligent they are.

norswap 12y ago

Does someone know what company he's talking about?

billmalarky 12y ago
I was curious myself so I followed his advice and googled him. Turns out, he works for google. http://www.linkedin.com/in/apenwarr http://www.linkedin.com/in/apenwarr Which makes this line all the more hilarious. "But it's not really a secret; you can probably figure it out if you bing around a bit for my name."
- LaikaF 12y ago
  I thought the bing was the hint and they worked at Microsoft.
  - spb 12y ago
    I thought that, too, but that didn't line up with the part about hiring smart people.
thehal84 12y ago
Google. I used to work with the author

dasmithii 12y ago

This reminds me a story of an old composer, John Cage. He's notorious for some really bizarre performance. For instance, he once sat for four minutes in front of an enormous crowd only to stand up and leave before making any sounds at all. This action, as he intended, took advantage of peoples' expectation to listen while in the concert hall. It built up a sense of anxiety, as he walked in, sat at the organ, and flipped pages atop the music stand. But then, suddenly, there was silence. And those with open ears were forced to hear minute sounds in the room, rather than the presupposed "music". On another occasion, he composed what ideally would cause expert musicians to sound amateurish - wretched, actually. But after many trials with different orchestral branches, he became overwhelmed with failure. These people, having been trained for excellence, literally could not play nonsense. Any sheet music you'd give them would result in reasonably coherent output. Like the smart people of this article, these musicians rationalized Cage's music, no matter how nonsensical. They could not play bad music.

haberman 12y ago
4'33" was a piece that Cage composed, but I'm not sure that he himself performed it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3

metacorrector 12y ago

good grief, yes, smart people can be arrogant, yes, smart people can be many other negative things. but my experience walking around the world is that most people are too stupid. Too stupid means, for instance, that they could never begin to fathom programming a computer in C or C++. So pursuing that narrow example (doesn't mean that you can't choose quantum physics instead, if you are distracted by that re-read what I said) and restricting ourselves to the population of people who can fathom programming in C and C++: again, my experience of them is that even they are mostly too stupid to do a good job of it, these are difficult and dangerous languages, and we as a society do not have enough people who can actually use them safely. So, from where I'm sitting, the arrogance of the world is not concentrated among the small numbers of truly exceptionally smart people, the arrogance is mostly found among all the other people--as we see in this discussion--who focus all their criticism on smart people. Yes, we smart people are arrogant, but we are not stupid, so shut up in order for you to get what you can from us, and do not wish that we could somehow be more like you because that would entail us being more stupid. Don't be insulted; just as I am not insulted that you can't see what I can see, I'm simply saying stop complaining about this, it goes with the territory. Do you complain that the brilliant brain surgeon who saved your life is also very arrogant, or do you kiss his ass for saving your life? Would you trade the pleasure of watching Michael Jordan play basketball away because you don't like the arrogant way he acts off court? No, you wouldn't. Yes, there can be super smart people who are also super humble, but so what? there can also be super smart people who are not humble, just as there can also be super humble people who are not very smart, and the worst of all, arrogance that is not accompanied by extreme skill, which is what I am complaining about. It is arrogant of all of you (no, not you personally, just look down the discussion) to all jump into the same discussion on the same side--ooh arrogance is bad--as if what you are saying is interesting. And this is not a topic of great interest to me, I'm simply trying to represent my side since I didn't see it represented anywhere else here.

dreamweapon 12y ago
Too stupid means, for instance, that they could never begin to fathom programming a computer in C or C++. It seems you're confusing "could never begin to fathom X" with "just not all that interested in X."

emerson_clarke 12y ago

This reminds me of a kind of intelligence scale ive seen before: First there are stupid people, and then there are stupid people who know they are stupid, then there are smart people who think they are smart, and finally there are smart people who know they are actually not that smart. Self awareness is the differentiating factor at every level. Intelligence comes in many forms; practical, creative, mathematical, logical, social, emotional, etc. As members of society we are more or less forced to specialise and must accept that being really good at something usually means we are terrible at something else. So if you are half as smart as you think you are, you will learn to recognise all the areas where you really are not, which vastly outnumber the ways in which you are. Which is a bit like saying: "I dont know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve." I for one am not that smart, im just a lot less stupid than most ;)