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Comment by rubyn00bie | Hacker News Reader

> There are super smart people I respect but they accept bad behavior as a form of pragmatism. Like they’ll excuse patent trolls because they’re just working a legal angle and trying to make money like everyone else.

They are not smart. Just stop telling yourself this about those people and stop respecting them. Stop it.

They're unbelievably ignorant and likely hide that ignorance under the guise of expertise in an unrelated field literally filling your life and others with bullshit. Stop calling fuckos like the ones at Labrador "smart." Stop calling anyone who thinks they're smart "smart."

Call them "fuckos," because that's what they are...

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Yeah - I wouldn't have said it so strongly but I fundamentally agree that we shouldn't excuse beliefs based on perceptions of people's intelligence. If their claim is incorrect the claim is what stands on it's own, it doesn't matter who said it. The reason that experience and intelligence matter is because they allow people putting forward those claims to make stronger arguments or know what arguments to make/experiments to run to validate the claim. Intelligence and experience can hell you make better claims, but claims shouldn't be given any more weight or validity because they come from someone with experience or a high score in some (probably somewhat arbitrary and highly subjective) score of experience - that's the core principle of meritocracy in my opinion.

> They are not smart. Just stop telling yourself this about those people and stop respecting them. Stop it.

They can be smart, they can also lack empathy and be smart. Both can be true at the same time. Intelligence isn't an indicator of empathy.

But empathy can be an indicator of intelligence. If your definition of intelligence is based on ability to answer very limited questions on an IQ test, your definition is flawed. True intelligence comes from being able to reason about incredibly complex systems. This is the type of reasoning that leads you to believe that socialism is not antithetical to capitalism.

They are smart. Street-smart.

They are not wise.

Where money can be made, money will be made. I had a colleague that was proudly saying "if it was legalsto sell heroin to kids I would be setting camp outside schools making a million per day". In my question "and what about the dead kids?" His answer always was "not my problem, if there is no law for this or that then I'm in it"

Unfortunately there are too many assholes out there.

They are intelligent, with the ethics of a rock, and this is the outcome when these two are combined.

>They are not smart. Just stop telling yourself this about those people and stop respecting them. Stop it.

lol is this the "any alien civilization far in advance of us will be peaceful" assumption? there are hordes of very very smart people (by any metric - iq, success, wealth) that either lack empathy or are straight up antipathetic. how about we stop valorizing smart people and start valorizing empathetic people instead?

It's a systemic problem with capitalism and markets.

Any system based on brutal winner-takes-all competition and monopolistic domination is unable to deal intelligently or rationally with a significant external challenge.

Gameify certain activities by all means, but everyone needs to get real about the incredible fragility and poor long-term survival prospects of a system that thinks of mutual aid and cooperation as weaknesses that can be exploited.

> Stop calling anyone who thinks their smart "smart.”

they’re

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