What Stupid Things Do Smart People Do? | Hacker News Reader

What Stupid Things Do Smart People Do?

quora.com

25 pointsjoelrunyon21 comments

The top rated post has some good points, but this is just plain wrong:

"Using terrible tools, and taking pride in their awfulness - Especially common with programmers, who take pride in using programming languages and text editors that have been designed by programmers, not updated since the 1970s, and never touched by anyone with a modicum of design sense. "

Comments:

* Since when is being "designed by programmers" a negative thing? Best tools are built to scratch an itch.

* "Not updated since the 1970s", I hope he isn't talking about emacs, C, UNIX and (many different) Lisps

I'm most productive with Linux, emacs, slime and a either an ML dialect or Lisp (I also love C greatly). All of these have their roots in 60s, 70s and sometimes earlier but have been updated recently (that's where there's "C99"). I don't know anybody running SysV and using Bill Joy's original ex, or original teco emacs. Seems like the post is just flame-bait against hackers who use tools they love and are productive with.

The part about Apple products is the same as well: I like my Macbook Pro laptops and I like the idea of iTunes (but I find Amazon MP3 to be a better implementation). However, for many of their other products hackers simply aren't the target audience: am I being "stupid" by not using an iP(phone|pad|pod) when it just doesn't do what I like?

I think the bigger point here is "taking pride in working long, rather than working smart." Putting in long hours and working inefficiently rather than working quickly.

They forgot one thing. Smart people can sometimes get lost in their own heads and the world passes them by. Look at Einstein. He spent the last half of his career trying in vain to solve the unified field equation theory. During that time the string theory was beginning to take hold but he couldn't see it. I don't know if it's hubris or simple ignorance that causes it but that is the biggest thing that smart people do that regular people would consider stupid.

That isn't a smart-people thing - it's a all-people thing.

I think it's more the things the cause people to succeed in one way force them to fail in another. If Einstein was equipped to with the attributes that would've made him "see" string theory, he likely wouldn't have necessarily been equipped with the attributes that would've lead to the general theory of relativity.

Einstein himself even said (although it's laughably inaccurate) that he wasn't smarter than anyone else, he just stuck with problems longer than other people.

I agree. People of the future who are truly going to change the world as we know it have insights and points of view that would not really make sense to us people of today. Some times today's crack-pots are tomorrow's visionaries.

Hmm...I may be about to verify the fifth point of the original article, but Einstein died in 1955 and string theory didn't at all start to take hold in the physics community until the 1980s. It's true that he perhaps ignored developments in QFT and QCD, but string theory was a long way off.

Keep in mind that 40 years on, it's still not clear that string theory has any value as a scientific theory.

/s/string theory/quantum mechanics/g

Einstein had a difficult time accepting parts of quantum theory, but I don't think you can say "the world passed him by". He was generating fruitful scientific ideas well into his 60s, if not until his death 1955 at age 76 (and some would argue, as would I, that his contributions to ethics and political thought much later in his life were as important as much of his science).

For example, in response to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, Einstein, Boris Pololsky, and Nathan Rosen devised troubling thought experiments into the late 1930s (the "EPR paradox"), which, while surprisingly not coincident with experiment, led to such famous results as Bell's Theorem...called by some among the most profound ideas in science.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bells_theorem

I don't believe many of Einstein's biographers accused him of hubris...or of simple ignorance.

I don't know that regular people would consider someone not figuring out string theory "stupid." Sure, I can watch a 2 minute YouTube video on it - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_B0Kaf7xYMk - but, that doesn't mean I consider anyone that doesn't "get it" immediately stupid.

That line of thinking seems very...well...stupid.

Argue well past any chance of persuasion is one I see people fall into too often. There is value in moving on when you can not convince. But as the author points out:

They also believe that they can change other people's minds through argument and facts, ignoring how emotional and irrational people actually are when it comes to making decisions or adopting beliefs.

Agreed with everything he said except the terrible tools item. Sounded like he's referring to things like Unix, vi, emacs, terminal/shell, etc. If so, he's wrong and has it backwards. Folks use them precisely because they are so powerful and flexible, and yet can be both very simple or as complex as needed to fit the problem. Where he sees a complicated tool a good engineer sees a complex problem space and then appreciates a tool which lets him solve it efficiently.

>Using terrible tools, and taking pride in their awfulness - Especially common with programmers, who take pride in using programming languages and text editors that have been designed by programmers, not updated since the 1970s, and never touched by anyone with a modicum of design sense.

I'm learning emacs at the moment. Tell me I'm not wasting my time. Should I just give in and buy TextMate like every other programmer that works on a Mac seems to?

I use emacs and vi every day.

There's no better python environment than a properly-configured emacs.

(I use TextMate, too, but only when I'm doing something disgusting like Rails.)

You're not. A lot of good programmers use Emacs or Vi on Mac.

If you download and build emacs from source, you can give it a cocoa interface that, I feel, is much better (for its minimalism) than aquamacs.

How-To:

  $ tar xzf emacs-23.2.tar.gz
  $ ./configure --with-ns
  $ make
  $ sudo make install

  [command] + [space] // Spotlight
  Emacs

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsForMacOS

'port install emacs23-app' works well

No need to use Aquamacs. The great advantage to using regular GNU Emacs is that I can keep the same config on Linux as on OS X with a couple of cond/if expressions e.g.,:

  (if (eq window-system 'ns)
    (setq default-frame-alist '((width . 132)
                                (height . 60)))
  (menu-bar-mode nil))

Just because a lot of people use it (and are emotionally attached to the editor just like the article said) doesn't mean it's a good choice to learn.

If you have time and will to learn Emacs and customize it to your own liking, do so. But there are more efficient editors with shorter learning curves out there which do a lot of those things out of the box.

This seems more like a list of things that obsessive, insecure, narrow-minded people do.

I was going to say, seems more like a list of things that introverted people do. Either way (obsessive/introverted), I wouldn't define it as "smart".

Doing stupid things is a basic part of the human condition. You may do more of them if you're stupid, but you still do plenty of them when you're smart, too.

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