7 ms·

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.
  - mreiland 12y ago
    As someone who secretly fears they suffer from exactly what the blog author stated, I can tell you unequivocally that your interpretation is not what I fear.
onion2k 12y ago
Smart people actively seek evidence that they are wrong - finding evidence that you're right doesn't prove anything. A single piece of evidence that you're wrong shows everything.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- dasil003 12y ago
  That's sort of a no true scotsman argument. People can have astonishing amounts of brainpower and still do very little critical thinking on their own beliefs or others' arguments they disagree with.
  - leoc 12y ago
    Case in point: Isaac Newton falsifying experimental evidence in order to defend his ideas on optics. (See chapter 3 of Plastic Fantastic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/9780230224674 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/9780230224... .)
  - dredmorbius 12y ago
    The point isn't about what all smart people do or don't do. It's the power of counterevidence. There was a great Veritasium video on this while back. The schtick was that Derek Muller was posing a puzzle to people as a series of numbers. They had to figure out the rule governing the series by proposing their own series. The point was that finding other sequences with matched the rule didn't do much. Finding a sequence which failed the rule, that is, one that disproved what they thought the rule was, was much more informative. If you've got lots of brainpower but never push the envelope of your beliefs, that brainpower's not going to be of much use actually expanding your understanding. Which is why really smart people try to break things: software, hardware, systems of understanding. By pushing them beyond what they feel their limits are and seeing what happens.
    - jerf 12y ago
parasight 12y ago
I'd never consider an arrogant person smart. Arrogance leads to ignorance.
- philh 12y ago
  Then you'd judge some smart people as not-smart, possibly to your detriment. Ignorance is not opposed to intelligence. Arrogance is a flaw that can reduce the benefits of being smart, but it doesn't make someone not-smart. (Unless you're using 'smart' differently to the conventional meaning, which is an unhelpful thing to do.)
  - mercer 12y ago
    Plus, I've noticed that with some people, their great knowledge and/or intelligence concerning a particular issue, combined with confidence (and maybe a dash of social 'deafness'), can come across as arrogance. Sometimes it took a while to figure out that they were open to correction, and hella smart. I would've missed out on their insight had I applied a heuristic as simple as "arrogant people aren't smart".
- dbecker 12y ago
  Then many of the top researchers in the world (even including nobel prize winners) do not meet your definition of smart.
- gutnor 12y ago
  You need a certain level of arrogance to think that you are right despite everybody thinking you are wrong. If you are threading new ground, you need it to succeed. For example, all those startup creators are arrogant. They think their ideas will succeed despite knowing that they have 99% chance of not succeeding. Your reaction is an irritating trait of our western societies. Almost all our hero figures, all our geniuses, are arrogant assholes. Almost everything on TV is about a guy winning against all odds, our business geniuses had all crazy business plan, ... Yet, we despise the same people if their plan does not succeed. Take a guy like Zuckerberg. Drop out of school to build your startup with borderline illegal business tactic, that's genius. Do the same and fail and you are an obvious loser that deserved what he got and should be happy not to be in jail. This mixed signal the society is sending is annoying.
sumedh 12y ago
LTCM learnt this lesson the hard way.
kesor 12y ago
People who are never wrong are not smart, they are "smartass". Same goes for people who "know it all". Being successfully smart means you recognize you don't know everything, but you also recognize you know quite a lot. And for things that you do know you are always looking for why these might be debunked. And for things you do not know, you know you can learn and become pretty confident you know them very quickly, to grasp concepts somewhat faster than other people.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
ap22213 12y ago
If one has been labeled 'smart' at one point or another (maybe when very young), one may also begin to identify with that label. The label becomes the identity. And, at that point, it becomes quite difficult to accept 'being wrong' because it's an attack on one's identity and reputation. This seems to have become worse in the Internet-age, where a lot of 'smart' people have had their reputations branded into the permanent record. So much arrogance, rudeness, vitriol, etc. in order to 'win' at being 'smart'. Ironically, I have recently discovered that it's often easier to channel Socrates and just act stupid. It's way too hard to be smart, these days. And, given that there's so much new shit to learn, who really wants to be?
- billmalarky 12y ago
  Additionally, once branded "smart," people (young especially) want to avoid looking "stupid" so much that they shy away from learning new things in order to not look incompetant/inexperienced. Edit: What does the term "channel Socrates" mean?
  - eivarv 12y ago
    In reply to your edit: I think ap22213 is referring to applying the Socratic method[1], although it might be a more obscure reference that goes over my head, as I am not well-read on Socrates. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_method
    - billmalarky 12y ago
      I've heard the term before so it stood out. I guess it just means to ask a lot of questions.
      - pdonis 12y ago
        The Socratic method means something more specific than that. Socrates' basic MO was as follows: (1) Find a thesis that the person you're talking to appears to believe, and get him to commit to it. (2) Get the person to accept a few apparently innocuous assumptions. (3) Get the person to realize, by repeated questions and answers, that the apparently innocuous assumptions lead to conclusions that contradict the thesis the person originally committed to. This could be construed as "acting stupid" to start with, but if you're successful with the method, it will be obvious by the end that you are smarter than the person you're talking to. Which can be frustrating for that person, and since Socrates apparently did it to a lot of people, they eventually got fed up, as ap22213 says.
anthony_barker 12y ago
Not smart enough - "ipse se nihil scire id unum sciat" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_that_I_know_nothing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_that_I_know_nothing

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.
- mreiland 12y ago
  As someone who secretly fears they suffer from exactly what the blog author stated, I can tell you unequivocally that your interpretation is not what I fear.

onion2k 12y ago

Smart people actively seek evidence that they are wrong - finding evidence that you're right doesn't prove anything. A single piece of evidence that you're wrong shows everything.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
dasil003 12y ago
That's sort of a no true scotsman argument. People can have astonishing amounts of brainpower and still do very little critical thinking on their own beliefs or others' arguments they disagree with.
- leoc 12y ago
  Case in point: Isaac Newton falsifying experimental evidence in order to defend his ideas on optics. (See chapter 3 of Plastic Fantastic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/9780230224674 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/9780230224... .)
- dredmorbius 12y ago
  The point isn't about what all smart people do or don't do. It's the power of counterevidence. There was a great Veritasium video on this while back. The schtick was that Derek Muller was posing a puzzle to people as a series of numbers. They had to figure out the rule governing the series by proposing their own series. The point was that finding other sequences with matched the rule didn't do much. Finding a sequence which failed the rule, that is, one that disproved what they thought the rule was, was much more informative. If you've got lots of brainpower but never push the envelope of your beliefs, that brainpower's not going to be of much use actually expanding your understanding. Which is why really smart people try to break things: software, hardware, systems of understanding. By pushing them beyond what they feel their limits are and seeing what happens.
  - jerf 12y ago

parasight 12y ago

I'd never consider an arrogant person smart. Arrogance leads to ignorance.

philh 12y ago
Then you'd judge some smart people as not-smart, possibly to your detriment. Ignorance is not opposed to intelligence. Arrogance is a flaw that can reduce the benefits of being smart, but it doesn't make someone not-smart. (Unless you're using 'smart' differently to the conventional meaning, which is an unhelpful thing to do.)
- mercer 12y ago
  Plus, I've noticed that with some people, their great knowledge and/or intelligence concerning a particular issue, combined with confidence (and maybe a dash of social 'deafness'), can come across as arrogance. Sometimes it took a while to figure out that they were open to correction, and hella smart. I would've missed out on their insight had I applied a heuristic as simple as "arrogant people aren't smart".
dbecker 12y ago
Then many of the top researchers in the world (even including nobel prize winners) do not meet your definition of smart.
gutnor 12y ago
You need a certain level of arrogance to think that you are right despite everybody thinking you are wrong. If you are threading new ground, you need it to succeed. For example, all those startup creators are arrogant. They think their ideas will succeed despite knowing that they have 99% chance of not succeeding. Your reaction is an irritating trait of our western societies. Almost all our hero figures, all our geniuses, are arrogant assholes. Almost everything on TV is about a guy winning against all odds, our business geniuses had all crazy business plan, ... Yet, we despise the same people if their plan does not succeed. Take a guy like Zuckerberg. Drop out of school to build your startup with borderline illegal business tactic, that's genius. Do the same and fail and you are an obvious loser that deserved what he got and should be happy not to be in jail. This mixed signal the society is sending is annoying.

sumedh 12y ago

LTCM learnt this lesson the hard way.

kesor 12y ago

People who are never wrong are not smart, they are "smartass". Same goes for people who "know it all". Being successfully smart means you recognize you don't know everything, but you also recognize you know quite a lot. And for things that you do know you are always looking for why these might be debunked. And for things you do not know, you know you can learn and become pretty confident you know them very quickly, to grasp concepts somewhat faster than other people.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

ap22213 12y ago

If one has been labeled 'smart' at one point or another (maybe when very young), one may also begin to identify with that label. The label becomes the identity. And, at that point, it becomes quite difficult to accept 'being wrong' because it's an attack on one's identity and reputation. This seems to have become worse in the Internet-age, where a lot of 'smart' people have had their reputations branded into the permanent record. So much arrogance, rudeness, vitriol, etc. in order to 'win' at being 'smart'. Ironically, I have recently discovered that it's often easier to channel Socrates and just act stupid. It's way too hard to be smart, these days. And, given that there's so much new shit to learn, who really wants to be?

billmalarky 12y ago
Additionally, once branded "smart," people (young especially) want to avoid looking "stupid" so much that they shy away from learning new things in order to not look incompetant/inexperienced. Edit: What does the term "channel Socrates" mean?
- eivarv 12y ago
  In reply to your edit: I think ap22213 is referring to applying the Socratic method[1], although it might be a more obscure reference that goes over my head, as I am not well-read on Socrates. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_method
  - billmalarky 12y ago
    I've heard the term before so it stood out. I guess it just means to ask a lot of questions.
    - pdonis 12y ago
      The Socratic method means something more specific than that. Socrates' basic MO was as follows: (1) Find a thesis that the person you're talking to appears to believe, and get him to commit to it. (2) Get the person to accept a few apparently innocuous assumptions. (3) Get the person to realize, by repeated questions and answers, that the apparently innocuous assumptions lead to conclusions that contradict the thesis the person originally committed to. This could be construed as "acting stupid" to start with, but if you're successful with the method, it will be obvious by the end that you are smarter than the person you're talking to. Which can be frustrating for that person, and since Socrates apparently did it to a lot of people, they eventually got fed up, as ap22213 says.

anthony_barker 12y ago

Not smart enough - "ipse se nihil scire id unum sciat" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_that_I_know_nothing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_that_I_know_nothing