Competent Elites are More Alive | Hacker News Reader

Competent Elites are More Alive

overcomingbias.com

45 pointsgaika31 comments

An intermediate stratum, above the ordinary scientist but below the ordinary CEO, is that of, say, partners at a non-big-name venture capital firm. The way their aura feels to me, is that they can hold up one end of an interesting conversation, but they don't sound very original, and they don't sparkle with extra life force.

Unadulterated pap. No, seriously..."strata"..."aura"..."feels"..."interesting conversation"..."life force". It's like Oprah trying to differentiate the class system within modern business.

To add: above the ordinary scientist but below the ordinary CEO.... ...?

Maybe it's true, maybe not, but the one thing I remember (though not the reference) is reading that a study had found no statistical correlation between executive pay and the performance of the company. So my impression was that at least at the highest levels of compensation, executive pay is being set by other mechanisms, ie everyone bidding for the same people.

Btw, blogging about worrying about whether you are as smart as famously smart people seems self-absorbed and insecure to me... What do I get out of reading that?

"I'm not going to take sides on whether today's executives are overpaid, but those executive titles occupied by actual executives, are not being paid for nothing. Someone who can be an executive at all, even a below-average executive, is a rare find."

He's not arguing about compensation. From what I gathered, he's calling to attention his perception of how this self-admitted biased group of people at a conference seem to have something 'different' about them from a random person picked from the population.

The best he can describe the common difference is what he calls "functioning with recourse". It's like the same unnamed quality of a startup founder, only best described as "quiet confidence".

Everyone is bidding for the same people, because apparently, there is only a small number of people that can take huge responsibilities (like running a company) without someone correcting/covering for them. Even the advice of other smart people can only be taken with a grain of salt, since it might not apply to you. So these two combined make it a difficult job that's easy to fail at, and once fail, a big hoopla is made about it. I'm not sure a lot of people want this sort of job, much less is willing to do it.

oops. I meant "functioning without recourse"

I might actually expect an inverse correlation between executive pay and company performance. The reason is that high executive pay seems to be linked to broken oversight by the owners and directors. I'd expect companies where the owners are not in charge to do worse, as the management pillages the company for short term profits.

High management pay might also be a symptom of a company doing well and the management being well compensated for it.

There is a correlation though between stock price and how "good" the place is to work. http://www.greatplacetowork.com/great/graphs.php

I know stock price isn't a perfect measurement, especially in the short term, but it's still interesting.

The quality needed to operate without a manager above you is not competence.

It's courage.

Nicely put :)

But competence is needed to be good at it.

And I'd say courage has a lot to do with a sense of aliveness, besides just intelligence. I've met a number of pretty dead seeming very intelligent people.

Should be retitled "Giddy Journalist Fascinated by Evening With the Wealthy".

Did no one tell him about the E in the punch?

Worth pointing out: He's not a journalist

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

He is definitely a journalist, especially in the original sense, publishing his thoughts with considerable regularity on his blog. And he's quite good at it.

You need merely have flipped to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Eliezer_Yudkowsky to encounter discussion of Yudkowsky's qualifications and the Wikipedia post in general.

If he says he's an AI researcher then I accept that. But he's also a journalist, a good one, and that's the face that I see presented most.

Well, he seems to be most notable for explaining AI concepts in understandable language. Following the links, I found a glossy website [http://www.singinst.org/], but not too many scientific results.

IMHO AI is not going to happen by blogging or talking about it.

Or: "Now Inside the Tent, Pissing Out".

At least he's honest about the context-mutable and flimsy nature of his bearing. Most people are like this; of course, they hate "corporate executives" because nearly everyone does, but given a chance to spend an evening with a Fortune 500 CEO, wouldn't even think about turning it down.

http://paulgraham.com/boss.html - PG on the same topic

The OP speculates that few people are capable of 'functioning without recourse', and that those who do so can make it at the executive level, and so seem more alive.

There's an alternative pathway. Perhaps, put in a position of responsibility, which most people in modern society seem to have managed to avoid, the situation draws liveliness and performance out of you? PG seems to have witnessed that transformation. I would guess that it's a greater effect than selection.

http://paulgraham.com/boss.html

Most people who go to Davos are pretty mellow. It seems like if your looking for high energy people who are intelligent and plucky, your local YPO chapter is indeed probably the peak of the curve.

Other research, which I can't dig up at the moment, tells us that wealthier people are happier. So other things being equal, having more money than you can possibly spend should take a few worries off. Not sure this required a research grant to figure out, but ok.

So, I guess the only real add this post provides is that some wealthy people are happier and also some of them are smart and interesting. ok. I've met Steve Jurvetson before and also found him to be smart and interesting. I just didn't blog about it ;).

Funny, I remember hearing that research showed exactly the opposite, ie people in remote villages in New Guinea rated their happiness substantially the same as those in developed countries. But like you, I don't have the sources either. ;-)

You might be right, though, that relative wealth influences happiness. In other words, you don't want to be the poorest person in your community, even if objectively you are wealthier than those in other communitites.

It's difficult to tell how much of this is a calibration effect. The fundamental problem is measurement, which is usually some variant of:

"On a scale of 1-10, how happy are you?"

I have no clue what the difference between 3, 5 and 7 is. Neither do villagers in New Guinea. So I (and I suspect most people) look around me, assume the typical person is a 5, then rate myself accordingly (I don't have a Wii, therefore I'm a 4). You are really measuring a weird combination of happiness, and what the typical person thinks a "6 out of 10" actually means.

Basically, most happiness research is BS.

This seems to be essentially the same observation that Paul Graham made in his essay comparing founder hackers to employee hackers. http://paulgraham.com/boss.html

What a coincidence! I'm competent and elite, and I feel pretty alive. This article just reinforces with what I've known all my life.

How does this compare to the concept of "self-actualization"? Is this more cocky/elitist?

Yawn. So the OP writes a long post in order to show us that, based on an extremely biased sample, not everyone at the top of society is a blithering idiot.

If he really thinks there's "cream at the top", he should try hanging around real estate moguls and health insurance executives. That'll bring him back to the reality wherein shit, in fact, floats. VCs and hedge fund managers are nothing special compared to serious tech entrepreneurs and hackers, but compared to business executives as a whole, they're 99th-percentile, easily.

In any case, I think the reason the world is fucked up has more to do with ill-intended competent people than stupid, incompetent people. The Bushes and Palins may be genuinely stupid, but behind them are Cheneys, Roves, Romneys and Erik Princes-- thoroughly intelligent and competent, and even more thoroughly evil. The failure of U.S. society, for example, is not the result of error or entropy, but of plunder and malevolence. To blame it on "idiots in suits" is to inaccurate, in any case; the "suits" who excel in mainstream corporate America are neither intellectual nor curious people, but they have a fierce political/sycophantic intelligence that very few people can match.

What's wrong with U.S society? The richest country in the world, one of the best educated, diverse, peaceful, law abiding, willing to vote ethnic minorities to the highest office?

Stop whining, the U.S may have some scratches, but by most yardsticks, it's one of the greatest countries in the world.

>richest country in the world

To be more precise, a country with the most rich people in the world. Furthermore, it is a country that is quickly growing rich less relative to other countries.

>one of the best educated

Not even close. The general population in US is poorly educated relative to other countries. This has been repeatedly shown in many international competitions.

>peaceful

really? Are you forgetting Iraq, Afghanistan, or even perhaps Oklahoma bombing?

>law abiding

This is is actually true, especially considering the how religious most of the US population is.

>willing to vote ethnic minorities to the highest office

Lets wait until this one actually happens

One nitpick on the "peaceful" part. Foreign peace, nowhere close. But on the domestic side we've seen a steady decline of violent crimes for the past 15 years.

Just look at our healthcare system. That alone stops any discussion of whether or not American society works. Europe successfully implemented universal healthcare decades ago.

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