Why most smart people are better at solving other people’s problems… | Hacker News Reader

Why most smart people are better at solving other people’s problems…

rajeshsetty.com

37 pointsadammichaelc55 comments

I hate to make a meta comment and I'm not trying to slander the author at all, but dang dude, we got it all here: newsletter signup on site entry, press relations button, request for speaking, ebooks. I almost expected a free chance to win an iPod somewhere while I was reading.

I found the material lacking in quality, but it had its moments. My biggest impression was just being overwhelmed with the way the blog was integrated. Hats off.

Point noted. None of the items you mentioned ( newsletter sign up, eBooks ) are required to access the content on the blog. In fact, none of the eBooks require you to enter an email address.

I am sad to see that you focused on these things rather than 1500 other articles on the blog.

C'est la vie :)

Trying to stay positive, I think you should use the newsletter popup on something like the 3rd or 4th visit. By that time, users have read some of your material and could form an opinion about subscribing to a newsletter.

From my personal perspective, if you punch me in the nose with a sign-up form the first time I visit, not only am I going to dismiss it without any consideration at all, I am going to be suspicious of the subsequent material you present. Changing the timing of this popup could help you a bunch, I think.

Exactly my thoughts. This post will generate a decent amount of visitors from HN. The vast majority of these visitors including myself will be first-timers to your site and unable to tell whether they are interested in subscribing to your newsletter in the first place.

If I have not seen your site, I will not subscribe to your newsletter. If I have read through n items on your website, chances are good I might be interested in your newsletter offer, though.

Point noted and thank you.

Thanks for the great feedback here. Noted it and will act on it. Unfortunately I can't do that until Monday as the person who can fix it won't be available until then :(

The popup/overlay that tells me I'm a new user to this blog was keeping me from reading the content, so I just closed the tab.

The popup was not a gatekeeper and you can easily switch that off without signing up to the newsletter.

Having said that, I have made a note of the feedback on the popup and will take action to fix that.

Thanks.

The popup was not a gatekeeper and you can easily switch that off without signing up to the newsletter.

It may not have been a physical gatekeeper, but things that overlay the main content while I'm reading them (even if it was meant to show quickly, before I started reading and was delayed because of download or javascript execution times) communicates that the author/maintainer of the website considers their content to be less important than whatever the overlay's content is. I don't have time for this, the internet is quite vast. There are a bunch of other hacker news entries to review.

The only advantage you have now is that I don't even remember the name of the site that I so quickly closed due to annoyance, and my browser is now flagged as having visited it previously, so if I happen across it again, I presumably won't get a popup/overlay telling me I'm a new visitor.

I'm not sure why a new visitor needs to be told that they are a new visitor.

Your argument is so right that it would be foolish to argue against it. You make a very good point and I will discuss this with my team to get this fixed. THANKS.

I did find many articles with original content on your site. But the density is less, you are perhaps focusing on the article count? Maybe bringing the count to say 100 but with the same content will save peoples time trying to wade thru the site. And this can only increase traffic to the site.

As per your own theory smart people cannot solve their own problems, so instead of taking the "C'est la vie" stance, try "I see, let me see what I can do about it" attitude.

Thanks for the comments. The "C'est la vie" comment was specifically about another comment which focussed on things totally outside the article - like newsletter sign up etc.

I will definitely think about your comment and discuss it with my mentors. There are people who I take advise when it comes to these aspects ( blogging, writing ).

Thanks for the advice in any case.

The content of the article was ok. One opinion in an ocean full of them. The pop-up even before I've even read a single line is just so glaringly ill-timed that it kinda ruins the whole experience before the actual experience. IMHO.

Thanks for the note. Will get the popup fixed soon.

The popup saying "you're new" is in practice equivalent to saying "go away".

Thanks for all the feedback about the popup. Will get that fixed right away. I am not tech-savvy enough to fix it myself so it has to be on Monday :(

Cheers.

Come on guys, give me a break. It was a welcome note which said, what can be found on the website.

I agree if you would have said, it is not required for the people who are visiting it for the first time as you don't know the quality of content provided. But definitely it dint say or meant "go away".

Of course it didn't. But it has the same effect.

My biggest problem is that I have a small screen and the tweet button blocks the left side of the content the whole way down. Really annoying.

What browser are you using? I checked it with Safari, Firefox and Chrome on a Mac and the tweetboard plugin was working fine. Please let me know.

The marketing-stuff-that-you-think-is-lame aside, I'd be interested to hear which parts of the article were lacking in quality. Do you disagree with some of the content? If so based on your previous HN comments I'd love to hear your thoughts so we can start a discussion. Or did you not like the writing style, and are simply pointing at that and saying, "You suck" but using bigger words?

The whole premise of the article is false dilemma. It's asking why "smart people" haven't solved "their own problems" when by definition "their own problems" are whatever problems they haven't solved.

While what you say is true of the article, I have noticed that mistakes seem easier to find when someone else is making them.

Part of the reason for that isn't just your outsider perspective. Part of it is that you don't have any obligation to verify your diagnosis. A lot of "mistakes" you see people making probably aren't actually mistakes, a lot of things they are doing right are equally also not doing it right.

Without getting into specifics, how many people would look at, say, a government following $YOUR_PREFERRED_ECONOMIC_SYSTEM and call it a long series of "mistakes"? But of course you know that $YPES is not a long series of mistakes, it's the way any right-thinking person knows it should be done. In fact they are making a mistake for preferring some other system over yours!.... or are they?

It's very easy to inaccurately diagnose problems and prescribe solutions, but it doesn't mean much without validation.

You definitely bring up a very good point. I should phrase it properly. Yes, their own problems are problems they haven't solved - when in fact, they could have solved them. If their "unsolved problems" were brought to them by someone else, they would have had a solution very quickly.

That is precisely the reason to have mentors and personal advisors.

My $.02

That's an interesting semantic exercise, but I think you're missing the point. I've observed the phenomenon that the author discusses.

An example that I've observed, which doesn't quite fall in line with where the author went with it, but is interesting nonetheless, is when I get stuck solving a programming problem. When I'm showing others how to solve a problem of similar complexity, I seem to have more of my mind free to step through the pieces of the puzzle and can see solutions more clearly. It's like when I'm not using energy working on the problem and don't have any direct connection to it emotionally or otherwise, I can solve it more easily.

Another example of something in the same ballpark is a couple years ago I had errors on my credit report so I went to clear them up. I had to jump through a series of hoops to make that happen, and the whole process seemed like a big headache. It also was difficult to get the motivation to do it initially, even though I knew I needed to and understood the basic steps required. Fast-forward to a few months ago, and I had a friend that needed to dispute items on her credit report. I didn't dread jumping in to solve the problem, and even offered to help her fix it right then. Even though it was the same problem, the same complexity, and a similar time commitment, I had zero emotional attachment to the problem, and so I quickly dissected it into a step a, step b, step c process and got it done.

The author is begging the question, rather than creating a false dilemma.

Begging the question: the premise assumes the conclusion, e.g., "that's illegal because it's against the law".

False dilemma: you present two possible options as the only options, when in fact there are other alternatives, e.g., "either you're with me or against me"

The article never states these are the only two options. I don't know why that conclusion is being drawn. But everyone has a right to their opinion so I can't stop people from making their own assumptions :)

I agreed with you up until the "I found the material lacking in quality". Not all "smart people" are alike, and you may be one of the fortunate ones to not have the problems that he describes. Specifically, from what I've read of your previous posts, you seem like a practical person.

That said, the tweet thing on the left side was annoying enough that it warranted firing up the javascript debugger to make it go away.

I am looking at the tweet thing (tweetboard) to see how to eliminate this completely.

Cheers.

The headline is a nice use of language to make an almost-truism seem like an insight. Good fodder for the cold reader: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_reading

IE; Everyone is "better at solving other people's problems", since everyone is bad at solving their own problems. And they're bad at solving their own problems ... because they have them. Neither the observer nor the person himself/herself is likely to notice the problems they don't have, because they're good at solving. Uh, plus its easy to think your solution to someone else's problem is good since you don't have to put it into practice. And the headline mentions smart people, so I'm sure they're talk about you.

The problems referred in the article are those problems that people should have or could have solved but have not solved them. I thought it was obvious but it looks like I have to explicitly state it. Will make a note for next time.

Even so, the same logic applies, see Xenophanes comment.

I read the comment by Xenophanes and we are talking about different things. So we can agree to disagree here :)

It's an odd format - the results of author pontification presented as "mini-research".

I found little to no hard data, little to no justification for the conclusions reached, and as a bonus, this was one of those rare cases when you can correctly say that the author was begging the question.

Also, dilemma is not what author thinks it means.

OK the term "mini-research" refers to research done in less than six weeks and the method used was a series of interviews. I am not selling the research data only presenting the conclusions from the research.

You are welcome to make your own conclusions of course :)

Then you should explain how you're drawing your conclusions.

What I'd like to see in the post (and is missing):

  - what motivated this "mini-research"
  - how you verified that the problem exists
  - how you got to the cause of this problem

Yes of course. Your questions are valid. I will add more context to it soon. For a quick summary:

a) Ongoing mini-research is part of my next book which will come out only next year or the year after. b) The intermediate findings are being written as short blog posts as people don't have time to read long ones. c) How I know the problem exists - it comes out during my interviews and discussions. The focus of the research is centered around smart people. I am not going to interview people with pre-conceived notions about certain problems existing or non-existing.

Having said that, your points are valid and I plan to include responses to that and more in the final version of the book. It is too much to add to the blog posts.

You don't always need hard data to prove a point. I could relate to this article from my personal experience. Smart people tend to be harsh on themselves and on their solutions.

The "most smart people" part could be revised to something else so it doesn't seem like the conclusion was from hard data.

Actually, you do need either hard data or some kind of logical argument to prove a point.

The author of this post makes an assertion (smart people can't solve their own problems), but never proves that assertion, nor does he give any reasoned argument as to why it may be true.

A better title for the post (though the author probably likes the current link-bait title) would be:

   "Why other people's problems may be easier to solve than your own"

According to your title, you are trying to say that, Every person can solve every other person's problem. But not his own problem. That may not be true and that is not what author is trying to say.

He is talking about the (smart) people who can solve other's problem. But not about all the people.

Thanks for the clarification. Looking at the discussion here itself is a validation for the article at some level. It is a simple article presenting conclusions from a series of interviews with reasonably smart people.

The conclusions are being over-analyzed which is the characteristic of very smart people. HN is a community of such smart people and I am not at all surprised that it is being over-analyzed here :)

Cheers.

Here what he says in the blog post, "It is one thing if they don’t have capacity to solve those problems – we are not talking about that category of people. We are talking about people who have demonstrated that they can solve those problems when they are presented by other people."

Suppose someone is good at solving a category of problems.

He will solve all his own problems in that category, and fewer outside it.

So of course, after he's spent a long time trying to solve his own problems, the remainder will be ones he's bad at.

But for other people, lots of their problems will be the kinds he's good at.

Another factor is that people literally aren't aware of their personal problems, only of some of distant consequences. If anything, smartness acts to cover up the evidence via rationalization.

Friends know about some of them, but they tend to discuss these only in one's absence ("the problem with X is that he is always [blank]", etc.)

Amen to that. Friends sometimes try to bring that up only to be shot down instantly with some smart rationalization. Thanks.

Reminds me of this article recently posted on HN:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/08/we-are-all-talk-ra...

He started off well but he didn't take his analysis far enough. It's not just a matter of being ignorant of constraints so that a problem appears easier to an outside smart observer. Many smart people I know are just better at restructuring themselves so that some problems no longer appear as problems or impinge enough on their thoughts to distract them from other tasks, i.e. they are in essence fooling themselves into believing the problem doesn't exist or they put enough stopgaps into place so that the problem doesn't interfere with their day to day activities enough to require a total solution. Another reason I think is that most smart people are better able to tolerate stress and general mental drain so to totally invest themselves into solving some problem they require a higher threshold of mental anguish or whatever it is that drives people to solve problems.

The article was written based on a series of interviews. Smart people don't fool themselves by ignoring the problem or acting as if the problem does not exist. Most people know that the problem exists but they also know all the other things around those problems ( constraints ) and it can get overwhelming to them. For instance, they will come up with a solution and at the same instant also see all the problems associated with that solution - the loop continues.

Then that's not being very smart is it? If your awareness is what causes distress then you are definitely doing it wrong and should switch up your mental model of what is an acceptable solution to some problem. Plus, I don't think I have ever heard of awareness among smart people leading to mental paralysis.

You could try that yourself by simply discussing a problem someone is facing. If they are stuck, ask them for a potential solution and see how quickly they will tear up that solution by over-analyzing the problems with the suggested solution.

My $.02 of course.

My theory: Ideas are easy, implementing is hard.

Being the sort of smart that can "solve" other people's problems only helps with the former. The latter is a totally different skillset, so when we actually have to do that part of the job, all of a sudden it seems much harder than it was just a second ago.

Yes "implementation" is hard work and that part adds to the complexity of solving one's problems. You cannot stop at advice but have to follow through with following that advice :)

Yeah, same with doctors being not allowed to treat their own relatives. Solving other people's ailments are easier.

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