Competent Elites (2008)
lesswrong.com
lesswrong.com
A research scientist spends years working away at incredibly difficult problems and if they're super smart, and quite lucky they might push their chosen area of research forwards significantly. But this focus is not going to make them interesting to make small-talk with, because to really understand the issues that they're interested in you'll need a huge amount of existing knowledge.
I think funnily enough, we've had a real piece of evidence about whether these CEOs and VCs really are galaxy-brain individuals. We got the release of the Musk texts for the Twitter deal. What did it show? These guys are mediocre. They're sycophantic, group-think bros who know that the primary way to play the game is to suck up to each other and never criticise.
If you're going to define intelligence as someone's ability to entertain you at a cocktail party then yes, slightly behind Paris Hilton, Jurvetson is your guy.
If you want interesting insights, you can go and listen to people like Scott Galloway, but he's not a genius, he's just a rich guy who has enough money to have a team researching stuff so that he can provide interesting insights. A resource a researcher neither has nor needs.
> "Even so, these people of the Power Elite were visibly much smarter than average mortals. In conversation they spoke quickly, sensibly, and by and large intelligently. When talk turned to deep and difficult topics, they understood faster, made fewer mistakes, were readier to adopt others' suggestions."
First, there's the issue of inherent bias to deal with. When one is entering a gathering of 'the power elite', one will tend to expect brilliance (if that's were one's biases lie, at least) and that will color one's perception of what's actually being said.
Putting that aside, if one sees an exceptional 15-min presentation at a power elite gathering, is that just some kind of natural phenomenon? Did that person just pop out of the womb spouting clear, well-organized thoughts to the world? No - it's a skill developed through practice.
This is really one of the most irritating things to encounter, the assumption that a person's skills are somehow innate and not the result of hours of hard work and concentrated effort. In almost all cases, an unprepared, unpracticed talk or presentation is a disaster, and the decision to 'wing it' is always a bad one. Similarly, someone who powers through difficult math and science courses in college is not 'naturally intelligent' - no, they're the ones who spend four hours a night solving problems and reading, while missing out on the fun social party scene.
So when people say "oh, you're just naturally gifted, and I can't keep up with you because of that", the best response is, "are you sure it's just not because your a bit lazy and not willing to put in the required hours of effort?"
[edit] P.S. for a nice short sci-fi send-up of 'power elite' worship, I recommend "Ironclads" by Adrian Tchaikovsky:
It's the same with physical talents, where I had a particularly vivid example. I golfed almost obsessively for about three years, and then introduced a friend to the game ... who beat me on the back nine of his first round.
Often, the people who do really well in the later courses will have adopted a learning strategy that's not about cramming, it's about note-taking and foundational learning, so then the later coursework becomes much easier for them, such that to someone who hasn't done that, these people seem to glide effortlessly through the work, while others have to put in hours and hours with apparently poorer results.
Some people learn that early on, others have to take their lumps and learn it later (I was in the latter category, but it was a lesson worth learning).
Another skill common among these types is salesmanship. The get paid to put on a good show and sell their product/company. You don't have to be smart to be effective at that, but you may have to be persuasive.
A lot of these people have speechwriters and ghostwriters too, so even what you hear or read from them are often not their own words or thoughts.
I will add one more point. Most people have simply never come into contact with truly elite people. Work at any large company and probably zero actual elites work there below the highest levels. VP at Google is not elite. This is where the confusion comes from
If anything this is a group of comparatively highly successful people and discussing nuances between their success. But statistically much of that is opportunity and luck.
Most "naturally talented" people are "simply" people allowed to reach full human potential due to circumstances of birth, where "less talented" people frequently could have reached similar potential, but for:
- lower socioeconomic status
- less- or un-educated parents who don't know what opportunities to put their children into for maximum growth
- parents who themselves experienced significant trauma as children and didn't have the opportunity to process it due to lack of money or access to mental healthcare, and then subsequently inflict similar trauma on their own children
The lower socioeconomic status one in particular contains a host of other potential potential-limiters:
- less money for healthy food (or enough food at all) means less growth potential and worse overall health for the rest of your life
- if your parents don't have money for the equipment, you likely won't be allowed to participate in sports (happened to my wife) which means your brain will miss critical early wiring opportunities with the sport-specific mechanical tasks, which will result in lower potential skill ceiling later in life
- no money for travel means less exposure to world cultures, and unless living a in large city less exposure to foreign languages, and exposure to foreign languages as an infant is critical for later foreign language success due to pruning of connections for unused phonemes during early development.
There are many, many more things that go into the development of "raw talent" I haven't even touched on beyond "just" parent socioeconomic status, like poor people being more likely to have to live near major roadways and its influence on the rate of asthma in children.
The takeaway here is that very often people with "raw talent" weren't born that way, they were simply allowed to grow.
If 2 equal bits of clay are made by two different potters, one who has experience and years of artistry behind their hands and the other is thrown together by a teenager who has no interest in even finishing the job, even though the starting materials were exactly the same the end result couldn't be any more different.
One becomes a glazed vase with intricate artwork that would stand in any museum, and the other becomes an unglazed ashtray for a parent that doesn't even smoke, destined to be thrown away or smashed in a fit of rage.
These people are definitely a cut above, but only because their families and social circles started with good clay and spent decades perfecting the vase.
Nothing's wrong with winning like that - we seem to gravitate towards the behavior when there is social competition - but it just isn't the same as surviving. Someone can be brilliant, athletic, held in high esteem, and die young in a self-inflicted car crash. Personal survival is the ultimate filter but only manifests over the course of decades; someone at 20 "has potential" simply because they haven't been cut down yet. And each time a generational cohort narrows itself down a little, some of the people left over become winners by default, and consequently have more room to define what winning looks like based on their own experiences as survivors, which has upsides(raw experience) and also downsides(survivorship bias). I think that's a major differentiator in the young elite's success from that of older people with more modest backgrounds; the older cohort survived until opportunity appeared, the younger ones had a maximum of opportunities dangled near them from the beginning.
There's a definite limit to how much opportunity can go around at any given moment, and much of it is because of how society currently coordinates itself, not an intrinsic limit on our resources. But in terms of "sufficiently smart and motivated given the chance", it's mostly about that near-term readiness to step in and play a highly specific role that unlocks the access to resources, not their overall level of development as a human; being the best and being good enough are not that far apart. There are tons of people that sideline themselves from ambition because they'd just rather not.
And then, as I grew up, I realized many folks don't like admitting that someone else could be better in a general sense, maybe out of stubborn pride, or mistaken beliefs in literal equality of outcomes. Or maybe because they're afraid of putting in the effort to improve themselves, preferring the easy way out as a crab in the bucket.
In any case, it made me reflect on how many other 'obvious things that cannot be said' appear everywhere as one grows older.
Recognizing the fact that very above average people exist does not mean recognizing any group as the final arbiters of the human condition.
And that some people appear much smarter, more confident, charismatic, etc than others, in person, in conversation, even in debate.
They're not necessarily the same set of people though.
Now that I know a lot more of what I don't know, I'm kind of a schlub.
> Even so, these people of the Power Elite were visibly much smarter than average mortals. In conversation they spoke quickly, sensibly, and by and large intelligently. When talk turned to deep and difficult topics, they understood faster, made fewer mistakes, were readier to adopt others' suggestions.
> No, even worse than that, much worse than that: these CEOs and CTOs and hedge-fund traders, these folk of the mid-level power elite, seemed happier and more alive.
In my view, all this data is still consistent with being a generic suit, maybe under the “yuppie” subset
Appearing competent, engaged, happy, and intelligent is different from actually being. I’ve worked directly with executives (technical founders) who prides themselves on being able to dive in and diagnose issues, acting like they’re the best engineer in the room but only hiring people because they’re too busy doing executive things to continue building the product by themselves.
And you know what? Those people will seem really intelligent until you come in one day, learn that they pushed a change to prod at 2 am, and it caused a ton of damage because they know nothing about engineering practices, and then half the team wastes a week trying to fix things without hurting the executives’ ego.
1. I knew and know plenty of CEOs (some of them were my bosses at some point) and quite a few of them are...Not that impressive? I can think of at least a couple that we (the people under them in the corporate hierarchy) actually thought were idiots
2. As a developer turned founder...Being a CEO is a lot harder than I realized. The part about how not everyone can be an executive - even a bad executive - rings true to my subjective experience. I just don't think "lack of intelligence" is what's preventing a lot of people from being able to perform as executives.
What's so hard about it?
Another factor that was mentioned in the article:
Even the average manager can't function without a higher-level
manager above them. What is it that makes an executive? I don't
know, because I'm not a professional in this area. If I had to
take a guess, I would call it "functioning without recourse"
—living without any level above you to take over if you falter,
or even to tell you if you're getting it wrong. To just get it
done, even if the problem requires you to do something unusual,
without anyone being there to look over your work and pencil in
a few corrections.It's not like a typical CEO doesn't have teams of advisors and and a whole company, really, to rely on for expertise in whatever they're making a decision about. They also have peers, probably mentors and outside consultants/advisors too. They can read up on the problem, research it, and ask advice.. just like anyone else.
Sure, they have to ultimately make the decision (if we exclude the influence of the board), but I really don't get what's so hard about making a decision. Give me a few million dollars and I'll do that all day, no problem.
Some people just prefer to be given orders, others prefer to give orders.
The paycheck is typically much fatter and your prestige much bigger if you're one of the latter types, but that doesn't make you any smarter.
I have no teams of advisors and I can ask people for advice but I’m the one who will actually be impacted (possibly life changing impact) by which (often contradictory) advice i choose to take!
The hard part is not “making a decision” in that sense, anyone could flip a coin and “make a decision”. It’s living with the stress of constant decision making and you and a bunch of other people having to live with the results of your decisions (which can easily end up costing you and them their jobs).
- survivor bias
- successorship issues, especially regression to the mean
- the role of luck
- advantages from inherited wealth
- When it comes to the qualities mentioned - deep, quick, vibrant, etc. - I feel people overestimate how innate these qualities must be, versus learned or developed in an environment.
I'm sure it's far from the only way it happens, but I've noticed a type, and my suspicion is it's largely attributable to small-class discussion-heavy (possible because of the small class sizes) prep schools. I'm sure some of it's the quality of the material those schools are working with, if you will, but I think that kind of an education also tends to build exactly that kind of ability to seem commanding and sharp in social situations.
If this does become surprising, then the social system has become dysfunctional and needs some serious adjustment, as it likely no longer serves its purpose.
I wonder if the author meant the converse, that smart people seem to attract large amounts of money.