The world is run by people no smarter than you | Hacker News Reader

The world is run by people no smarter than you

swyx.io

219 pointsswyx252 comments

"Do you not know, my son, with how very little wisdom the world is governed?"

Written by Axel Oxenstierna, Lord High Chancellor of Sweden, to his son, a delegate to the negotiations that would lead to the Peace of Westphalia, who worried about his ability to hold his own amidst experienced and eminent statesmen and diplomats.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axel_Oxenstierna

Written in 1648, which gives you a sense for how long this has been the case.

This is almost exactly what I tell my younger folks who are concerned they're not authoritative enough to share an opinion or lead a project. I cured my Imposter Syndrome not by gaining confidence but realizing that everyone else was just guessing too. My guesses were at least as good as theirs.

My version was more general: I'm in a race with people convinced they cant win.

After that realization even a tiny amount of effort put me miles ahead. Again and again I found situations screaming: This is where others would give up.

You shouldn't be satisfied with guesses as good as the self proclaimed imposters. Your effort should further convince them they are!

Be that as it may, the point in our bureaucracies is precisely to make sure that the decisions we make are based on what we learned over the years and not what some “10x” SWE is throwing a hissy fit about in the daily standup.

but if he's a 10x then his 5 years of experience is actually 50 years!!! :O

Yeah jumping ship to a new company every 2 years is really valuable.

And they master the code at the new company in a few days!

Considering that's how people tend to get raises... he might be very smart for doing that!

2.5 years was the industry average like 5 years ago. Probably shorter now

Why do we keep getting subjected to rent control, then, which never works?

Because it actually often works and there has been research that has found benefits. The question is whether or not the benefits are worth the drawbacks and that's highly sensitive to your actual objectives, to the local conditions, and extremely sensitive to the details of how your rent control is implemented.

For example, it is an empirical fact that rent control greatly decreases the number of people that leave a city, which especially for poorer people means that they get to keep an invaluable support network.

At the same time, there have been publications that straight up found that rent control did not reduce housing stock meaningfully and yet reduced rents.

So the assertion that it "never works" cannot be supported by the evidence because we have evidence of cases and dimensions in which it definitely worked. And that is part of the reason why some of us are subjected to rent control.

I find that this post https://jwmason.org/slackwire/considerations-on-rent-control... is a good start, the video by Unlearning Economics on the subject is also pretty good, which IIRC also touches on the issue that in the rent control debate an increase in the exact same metrics (for example, mobility) is interpreted by some as good and by others as bad.

I think there is a solid case to be made that when used carefully rent control can be a good tool to use in keeping housing costs under control, though of course if used as the only tool then things are likely to end up disastrously.

> there have been publications that straight up found that rent control did not reduce housing stock meaningfully

Really? Would you build an apt building that rent control ensured would be a poor investment? How do you measure investors being reluctant to build more housing in a rent controlled area?

Rent control is good for the few people who get a below market rate. It's bad for everyone else, including those who can't find a place to rent because of it.

Rent control generally only controls increases, not absolute prices, and is relaxed for newer constructions, so developers care less. At the same time, it may reduce the cost of land zoned for high density housing if locative uses are judged to be less profitable, thereby reaching and equilibrium. It also often lowers market rent for everyone, when implemented correctly.

We can measure this reluctance by looking at construction rates and general supply in similar groups of cities or neighborhoods with or without rent control, of course controlling for other variables. This has been done in multiple studies, which are listed in the link I provided.

A recent video on co-op and social housing, that makes simlar points, with the somewhat clickbaity title of:

The Non-capitalist Solution to the Housing Crisis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKudSeqHSJk

The video seems to switch to "non-market" as a description.

You don’t need the tools at all. If everyone is at (roughly) the same level of decision making ability as the post implies then it follows that disallowing certain decisions (like the price of rent) will always be suboptimal.

This is just pure and simple logic.

What ‘successes’ rent control had are hyped to an abnormal extent, since obviously those with rent controlled apartments are most keen on keeping them, and often they are not the ‘poor’. Again the poor are used here as an excuse for upper middle class bad behavior, locking people out of the city.

Turnover in a city is a good thing btw, not a bad one. But cities do seem to design themselves on keeping people out.

This is not true. Rational actors acting in their own self interest does not always approach a global optimum. An external actor limiting choices can trivially lead to better outcomes, the prisoner's dilemma being an obvious example. The tragedy of the commons is another, where the government historically either intervened to maintain good behaviour, or intervened to enclose the commons, in either case limiting the options of rational players.

Turnover in a city can be argued to be good or bad. Turnover across a city is more clearly bad, but as a said it's still arguable. In any case, I believe you're not making a great case as your basic argument that limiting choices of rational actors can never lead to better outcomes is incorrect, and I think it would be a good idea to read/watch the material I linked or referred to in order to get a better idea of what I'm arguing and so you can directly try to refute the rebuttals of points I'm going to be making. It's going to be faster than relitigating most of this conversation up until that point.

Please demonstrate that it "never" works.

Can't prove a negative. But you can show a counterexample.

What is your definition of rent control working? There are some studies showing that rent control does work to minimise displacement of tenants [1] and that tenants seek more repairs [2], even more of lower income classes.

If you define as achieving market efficiency, maybe that's not the objective.

It's like unionising, it may make companies less market-efficient by giving more power and control to the workers. Rent control affects landlords by giving more power to tenants.

Building more houses, etc., is an orthogonal issue to rent control.

[1] http://www.socsci.uci.edu/~jkbrueck/course%20readings/gyourk...

[2] https://www.policylink.org/sites/default/files/RentControlMy...

What about the non-tenants who now cannot find a place to rent, because it's less profitable to build more apartments?

You could always [raise taxes and] subsidize apartment-building... the G.I. bill would like a word.

Government does plenty of things that are unprofitable for the benefit of all.

Switzerland has a pretty good policy for rent control and tenant housing [1].

This kind of policy needs to be a multipronged approach in policy to provide both new construction and long-term leases (usually 20 years).

[1] https://housingpolicytoolkit.oecd.org/www/CountryFiches/hous...

Rent control can, and sometimes does work. However, it has faltered in recent years, in large part because property management companies are using software to aid in pricing rents as high as the market can bear (to the heavy detriment of tenants), and are willing to evict and retain an unconscionable amount of empty units if overall profits rise, even at the cost of human suffering, rather than keep tenants around.

The latest "Behind the Bastards" podcast "Part One: Why is the Rent So Damn High?" explores some of this, if you have the time and inclination to listen.

> Rent control can, and sometimes does work

Only if you ignore the secondary effects, which are legion.

> retain an unconscionable amount of empty units

A secondary effect of rent control

There are thousands of empty units around without rent control. People cannot afford rent in them.

"Secondary effects" - please educate us on what they are, and their magnitude.

There are 48.5 million rental units in the US. A few thousand empty ones is miniscule.

I guess to put a finer point on it: this isn't exclusively a market problem, and it's incorrect to reduce/redirect all forms of market manipulation down to 'rent control'.

Certainly rent control distorts the market unnaturally, but it does so in favor of tenants and human rights, and proportionally speaking, I don't think it's the biggest distortion by a long shot. The much larger distortion causing the market problems is the optimization of rent prices at the expense of human rights.

If the market is to be distorted, I personally would pick the one that prioritizes continuity of housing over the one that maximizes rent income over total units rented.

I wouldn’t go so strong as this.

The civil service is mostly designed to provide some level of basic stability and functioning so that no matter what flavor of the month politician gets elected you still get your trash picked up, and other services. (If politicians directly target something, though, all bets are off.)

Thank you for translating the analogy.

This may have been more true during the times of nobility. With modern democracies and market economies, we at least try to have some form of meritocracy. Obviously, we fall short in a lot of ways, but the goal is to bring to best to the fore.

Two words: Liz Truss

Liz Truss fall the victim of higher level party struggle and intrigue, not because she was dumb.

I'm interested why you say this. The perception in the UK is absolutely that she was not up the job and was removed for that reason.

Well, you never get that high in politics if you don't have some traits for that, or you are pushed there by others on purpose. Either way it means she fell victim to intrigue - by getting ousted from PM position or by being installed there on the first place.

All it proves is that she was good at climbing the greasy pole. She was and remains as thick as two short planks.

Her ideas weren't necessarily bad, or her logic flawed, but her execution was bloody terrible.

Growth is exactly what the UK economy needs and she recognised that. Now all we're going to get is austerity, higher taxes and misery under Rishi

In Obama's memoirs he talks about this. How when he was a community level, then city, then state, then federal level politician how he kept expecting the quality of people/decisions to improve in the big leagues, but that instead it was the same (poor quality) at each level.

Is "A Promised Land" a good read? I've had bad experiences in the past reading books by politicians.

The Peter Principle applies to government, too.

I think what's often behind the Peter Principal is the temperament and skills to gain/hold a job are often/usually not the same skills needed to do the job. And often there is conflict and tension between the two.

It's interesting to compare/contrast that, with thoughts like these: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CKpByWmsZ8WmpHtYa/competent-...

I think both authors can be correct, and both sets of experiences are valid. But I think it's a sign that politics selects for political-competency, which has nearly nothing to do with general intelligence or other forms of competency/expertise.

When listening to podcasts where EU politicians are interviewed it seems like this is less of a problem there. EU politics have a high impact but a low "fame" aspect. Maybe the people that care about impact and not about fame are higher quality politicians?

I'm surprised by this comment. As an outsider (from Australia) but someone who follows European politics pretty closely, the quality of European politicians is noticeably low. Not that I would say Australian politicians are better, but I'm simply surprised that any European thinks that there is a higher standard in Europe.

I don't know a lot of them, there are quite many. I believe at least Frans Timmermans, Mohammed Chahim,Diederik Samsom and Bas Eickhout are very capable and have a high opinion of EU politicians.

This sounds logical and hopeful, but even a casual survey of the current lot of political leaders on all sides is very disappointing. Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, George Bush, Barak Obama, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, and even the once heralded Bernie Sanders (just to name a few) have turned out to be massive failures and disappointments.

Are there political leaders you feel were not disappointing?

Very few come to mind actually. I’ll mention a few and accept the resulting criticism ;)

2016 version of Bernie Sanders; Jimmy Carter; Dennis Kucinich; and almost any politician willing to stand up against needless wars, as avoiding war is a top priority for me.

Well, I don't know that it's much of a criticism, but I do note which way all those people lean politically. Mostly I just think that the modern world is ungovernable, but then again, I'm not really the optimistic type.

What way do you think they lean politically? Many of them would no longer be considered modern Democrats. For example, 2016 Bernie was for strong borders, avoiding unnecessary war, and breaking away from trade agreements that were unfavorable to American workers. Modern Bernie votes to fund a war in Ukraine and no longer cares about securing the border. The Democratic party of today is socially far more left, but their foreign policy, free speech stances, and economic agenda resembles the old (pre-Trump grenade) Republican party. Weird times.

What terrifies me is what happens after a truly competent leader leaves.

A competent system would be preferable.

We haven't had an honest president since Carter, and we haven't had a good president since Eisenhower. The math and process of our U.S. electoral system guarantees poor results.

I wonder if they're reputations would have stood up to the media scrutiny of today.

Probably they actually would. But neither of them would get their party's nominations today.

I read one of Eisenhower’s biographies and he actually had some problems with the press especially thanks to Montgomery. At the same time, he was also one of the first US presidents to recognise that news can be leveraged to spread your message. Unlike earlier presidents, Eisenhower actually cooperated with the press and gave them news directly. That together with him winning a major war for America makes me suspect that his reputation would have also stood up with the media scrutiny of today. Assuming that there even is more scrutiny today? Maybe because there are more journalists nowadays so yes it could be

You think Obama was dishonest?

Yes, definitely. I was infuriated by many of W's policies regarding war and domestic spying, and Obama said he would stop those abuses, but instead continued on as was, or worse.

I think generals have an important advantage in honesty. No matter how political an officer's life is, it pales in comparison to the amount of lies needed to be a career politician.

Grant was also known for his unlacquered honesty. And for his desire to serve the nation. Whereas Lincoln changed opinions when favorable to him and was happy to suspend rule of law for the same reason.

> massive failures and disappointments.

Compared to whom and what?

What was the standard to which you decided they should be measured against that led to your conclusion?

> we at least try to have some form of meritocracy

lolol

I always preach for "lies we can believe in!", this one would have been nice if it worked.

With modern democracies, we have people gaining power who are the most willing to do whatever it takes to acquire it.

In Athens, they selected by random lot. A much better system.

> In Athens, they selected by random lot. A much better system.

IIRC, an important corollary to that was they designed their official positions so literally anyone could do the job. That would also have certain benefits regarding oversight, because with simple jobs anyone can check if they're being done correctly (without corruption or incompetence being hidden behind jargon).

The impossible puzzle is that our most competent men have so many ties to so many businesses that a career in politics becomes impossible.

I think it’s pretty safe to assume this quote is apocryphal, but it’s a good quote nonetheless. Swedish historian Dick Harrison wrote about it briefly here: https://www.svd.se/a/a23oL/vem-myntade-uttrycket-an-nescis

"True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country."

- Kurt Vonnegut

Seems like the failure was imagining that smart people don't make mistakes. Smart people make tons of mistakes and they are confident in their ability to correct and improve. They aren't fragile and afraid to be wrong in public because they know saying 'I don't know' isn't a death sentence.

Regular people generally just sit in one place improving nothing, learning nothing, changing little year over year. Terrified of being "caught out as an imposter" whatever that means.

The difference isn't smart/not smart. It's movement vs stationary.

I think it's also a difference in opportunity. When you have money/capital/connections, you can be wrong, and wrong often, and take risks.

When you're living paycheck to paycheck, you can make an occasional mistake and be fine, but you're likely to be much more risk-averse.

It's easy to make movements when the outcome could only benefit you.

If you're in America, you've got no such excuses. You're not going to die if your business fails. There are tons of businesses you can start with zero capital.

>> When you're living paycheck to paycheck, you can make an occasional mistake and be fine, but you're likely to be much more risk-averse.

> If you're in America, you've got no such excuses. You're not going to die if your business fails. There are tons of businesses you can start with zero capital.

You talk like people don't have dependents or opportunity costs. If everyone living paycheck-to-paycheck followed your advice, I'm sure you'd have a lot of parents explaining to their kids that they're going to have to live out of the car for awhile, because some rando on the internet said they had nothing to lose.

If you keep looking for excuses not to try, you'll find plenty.

Many people have sunk their last savings into businesses that failed. The few remaining successes are small, especially these days.

Most people never try. People who never try have a 100% rate of failure.

> Most people never try. People who never try have a 100% rate of failure.

What an astoundingly ignorant and out of touch thing to say. It's completely irrational for most people to buy a long shot chance at wealth with a much, much greater chance of winding up worse off and in poverty (or deeper in it).

Also, what you said is an excellent sales pitch for a scam real estate investment system.

> What an astoundingly ignorant and out of touch thing to say.

False. Both sentences are true.

> what you said is an excellent sales pitch for a scam real estate investment system.

"X people say Y so Y is false" is fallacious.

>> What an astoundingly ignorant and out of touch thing to say.

> False.

No.

> Both sentences are true.

So? A set of true statements can be misleading and out of touch, for instance, through omission of other important truths. In this case, the omission is that "trying" has a cost and the outcome can be negative. If you're wealthy, those negatives can often be easily shrugged off; if you're not, the expected outcome of "trying" can make the attempt irrational.

> "X people say Y so Y is false" is fallacious.

You misunderstand. It pointing out the flaw in the pitch, because it can so often be used to sell lies.

I've met plenty of small business owners who started with essentially zero money or connections. It doesn't take much to start a landscaping service, just an old pickup truck and a few tools. Those people had nothing to start with so they had nothing to lose, which makes the concept of being risk-averse kind of meaningless.

No, you met the successful business owners who could afford to live on nothing for a while.

> Seems like the failure was imagining that smart people don't make mistakes. Smart people make tons of mistakes and they are confident in their ability to correct and improve. They aren't fragile and afraid to be wrong in public because they know saying 'I don't know' isn't a death sentence.

You're creating connections that don't exist between unrelated things. "Smart people" don't all have the personality traits, attitudes, and beleifs that you're attributing to them. I'd say "smart" and the things you describe are actually completely orthogonal.

they aren't the same, but they sure aren't orthogonal. truly high intelligence and problem solving grit are without a doubt correlated. And at least to me, problem solving grit by its nature requires movement rather than stationary

>truly high intelligence and problem solving grit are without a doubt correlated

As both a former teacher and current parent, i can say for certain that this is not true.

Repeated success in life is correlated with both those things, but they are not naturally correlated with one another.

There are a lot of very smart people who dropped out of the race. Being smart can mean you don't need to learn grit, and maybe you never do; maybe the first hard thing comes, and you do something easier instead.

There are also plenty of diligent hard workers who never amount to much more than a small business. Hard work isn't worth much on its own.

Your claim is the smart people aren't fragile? Some are. Many smart people also don't like to admit they don't know.

But you are smart so you will argue "No true smart person..."

You're defining "smart" as some grab bag of traits that you deem virtuous. But if we use the common connotation of smart (ie. raw cognitive ability), and decouple it from wisdom, judgement, EQ, charisma, independence, self-awareness, then what you are saying is nonsense.

Dumb people don't feel imposter syndrome more than smart people. Ambition is not limited to the smart. And if anything I would say being high percentile IQ can work against your ability to learn from others because you're used to being the smartest person in the room.

Remember, the universe is big and chaotic, intelligence only enables a limited amount of optimization, and the difference between a "dumb" person and a "smart" person is insignificant next to our evolved social capabilities that allowed us to specialize and create huge civilizations with strong safety and wellbeing guarantees. Every "self-made" millionaire and billionaire on the planet would be nothing without those base traits of the populace.

Winners are simply people who don't let their doubts, insecurities, angst, and worries about what other people think get in their way.

It's not that they don't have such thoughts. They just override them.

> Smart people make tons of mistakes and they are confident in their ability to correct and improve. They aren't fragile and afraid to be wrong in public because they know saying 'I don't know' isn't a death sentence.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people wrongly overestimate their knowledge or ability in a specific area. This tends to occur because a lack of self-awareness prevents them from accurately assessing their own skills.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/dunning-kruger-eff...

As far as political classes is concerned, sitting around doing nothing would be an improvement.

That may be true, but don't underestimate the value of subject matter expertise. This is an issue I see a lot - smart people thinking they have expertise and downplaying the expertise and experience of others.

You want people with expertise and experience making your most important decisions.

Everyone, everywhere, knows something that you don’t. The more we can lean into this and share context and curiosity instead of judgment, the better we will all be. That said, I realize it’s simple to understand this, but not easy to implement, which is unfortunate.

Are you talking about engineers and programmers?

They're the people I'm most familiar with, though they're not the only ones who do it. It seems to be a trait of really smart people in general - including me. I try to be on my guard to know when I've left my wheelhouse but I still sometimes fall victim to believing I have expertise that I don't.

Its a pattern that I see in people of all stripes. One of the most pervasive is the tendency of those with no political background to harshly assess political decisions.

I think the more apt way would be:

The world is run by people how are by and large more motivated by power and self interest and that doesn't always correlate with very high levels of intelligence.

This (and the article) have, coincidentally, been my latest fixation. I'm theoretically no dumber than any headline-making character these days, but they 1. Have connections and chance opportunities that have not fallen into my lap that have into theirs and 2. I don't have this insatiable appetite for power or money. Perhaps it's my depression or lack of confidence, but simply collecting my developer salary and spending my remaining time on my hobbies/relationships is enough for me and I have no desire (or energy, frankly) to pursue greatness.

They also have the resources to delegate substantial work to others. I often wonder how much more productive or happy I'd be if I had a "chief of staff" that ensures less interesting things get delegated to the right people.

If you’re interested in going further on this train of thought- check out virtual assistants on UpWork or Fiverr. You can find great ones for $20-40/hr. Or if you prefer a full-time person (40hr/week), you can hire a great one at $1-2k a month. This person can organize your emails, calendar, manage projects, edit videos, and so on.

My counter is why would you want to pursue such a life? And you should re-evaluate what you deem as greatness. I don't believe most of the people who fall into these power categories as great even if people occasionally herald them (or business publications do).

There are many ways to greatness and most of them do not have public accolades attached to them.

Even more apt is that , at least in the west, the world is run by people who make a good impression on cam

Like Mark Zuckerberg, for example.

Lol.

A lot of hubris in this thread. My experience has been the opposite of what honestly sounds like a lot of sour grapes thinking here: when I’ve met hugely successful leaders I was taken aback at how much more intelligent they were than me. Their ability to contextualize questions and problems, to motivate others, to find a path through challenges when it seems like there’s none to be found, and to offer advice and guidance to peers and reports was incredible to witness. Even the bullshitters were bulls hitting on top of a staggering level of intellectual ability.

And a lot of people have the opposite experiences. Power puts a halo around people sometimes

A classic:

>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.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CKpByWmsZ8WmpHtYa/competent-...

"Smart" can mean different things. "Wise", "Clever", "Foolish" and many other adjectives apply.

Mark Zuckerberg has a high IQ, I won't doubt that. I also don't doubt his conviction that VR will change the world. It's possible he's right about that. I suspect he's going to experience anguish if some other company becomes the leader in VR. It might be his hill to die on, but it might not be his destiny to succeed at it. I think he's in a situation like somebody who abandons their lover to chase a doomed infatuation.

Nobody is too smart to be inflicted with blinding hubris. On the flip side, maybe Zuckerberg is playimg a really long game and sees something the rest of us don’t.

Being too early can be as bad as being late.

Another problem with VR is a question of scale. Zuckerberg seems to be counting on VR being a substitute for social media, Zoom, video games as know it, etc.

The problem might be you can spend all day reading, typing on a computer, scrolling on a phone, on zoom calls, watching TV. It seems you can't do that in VR. VR might be a high intensity activity that you can do a little bit every day that may never take a significant bite out of the status quo, even if VR is successful on its own terms.

> Mark Zuckerberg has a high IQ

I don't doubt it either; he's not dim. But "IQ" means something very specific; roughly, arithmetical ability, spatial reasoning, and lingusitic reasoning. Most importantly, IQ doesn't include judgement. Leading a nation requires judgement, more than cleverness. You can hire people to provide you with cleverness. The reason the "buck stops" with you, is because people have assessed you to have good judgement.

Take Liz Truss, the UK's last Prime Minister (I assume there's been no change while I'm typing). Apparently she's very clever; maybe too clever to take advice. At any rate, her judgement is shit.

Exactly. "Clever" is not necessarily meant as a compliment:

https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/clever

My favorite example of this is Donald Rumsfeld. Based on his writings, he was probably one of the smartest people who ever worked in government. But as Defense Secretary before and during the Iraq war he made catastrophically bad decisions which are still impacting our national security today.

Beyond a certain minimal level, IQ is meaningless for making good decisions.

> Zuck spending $4b/quarter on the Metaverse entirely unproven, something any lean startup VC would know is a terrible idea

I'm skeptical of the Metaverse, but everything is unproven until someone proves it. Does every lean startup VC know what the future of computing looks like? If they don't, I have no idea how they would know that the Metaverse is a terrible idea.

>I have no idea how they would know that the Metaverse is a terrible idea

You look at the track record of the people building the new thing to see what their other creations will be like. If you've seen a Picasso, Pollock, Dali, Rembrandt, you know what their other works will be like. If you see a thing created by Zuck, you know what it will be like in the same manner. Also, have you seen the demos? ZZZZZZ

So the metaverse is going to have 2 billion users as well, like Zuck's first creation?

The key to that users number is how many new users are being added, how many of those users are active, and how many are bots.

From my read of the social interwebs, the growth rate with the newer generations is not impressive and the number of people drastically reducing their use is not getting smaller

The "metaverse" is not inherently a terrible idea. A Metaverse that is brought to us by FaceCrook is inherently a terrible idea. Why?

Well, if we look to the Crossing the Chasm model, it suggests that any truly novel tech requires a cadre of eager early adopters. These early adopters are tech aficionados. What percentage of techies despise FB? I'd guess an extreme majority. Even those VR lusting techies who do buy a meta product hold their nose while they do it.

> What percentage of techies despise FB?

I have no idea, but I'd caution you against extrapolating from this forum and people you know. Maybe you live in a bubble. (We all do.) Facebook and WhatsApp have two billion users. Many of those are probably techies.

I thought that was the whole point of the article, that "any X would know" is actually just "any [person not smarter than you] would know".

No one knows what the future of computing looks like. Again, I'm skeptical of VR and the metaverse. But I don't know.

> I have no idea how they would know that the Metaverse is a terrible idea.

Metaverses are a great idea. We've had metaverses for decades. A metaverse is just a virtual location where pseudonymous users can interact in a persistent space. Even HN is a metaverse.

What we don't need is an all-encompassing VR metaverse. And no, I'm not saying that VR is useless. VR will find its place. It's in Zuck's own interest to try to conflate "VR" and "metaverse" together into "capital-M Metaverse", in a vain attempt to frame himself as the visionary Tim Berners-Lee of the century while simultaneously capturing all the value of VR gaming via Facebook's walled gardens. Don't fall for it.

Interesting definition, but I think most people talking about virtual reality or the metaverse mean something like a 3D space that people move around in with avatars, and that seems to be what meta is working on, and what most people, including me, are skeptical of.

> something like a 3D space that people move around in with avatars

Once again, we have those metaverses: MMOs. Anyone suggesting that every MMO of the future must be first-person, merely to reap the benefits of being in VR, will first need to explain why fewer than 100% of the video games of the past 20 years have been first-person. VR just isn't a fit for enormous categories of experiences.

Most startups don't get a $10B leash. You need to gain some amount of traction and revenue to get investment. And not just money, they are spending credibility. No one would be paying any attention to this if Zuck weren't pushing so hard.

> Elon proposing a $20/month price for Twitter Blue, and then immediately dropping to $8 at the first celebrity pushback, something any pricing expert would know is a terrible idea

Wasn't that a good idea though? Everyone heard the price was going to be $20, so now $8 doesn't seem so bad. Wouldn't a pricing expert refer to that as anchoring?

I hate articles that use Steve Jobs as some kind of guru, he was a lucky, successful asshole, but I guess that's charisma for you.

> When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and you’re life is just to live your life inside the world.

> Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money.

> That’s a very limited life.

> Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.

I wonder what bit of 60s counterculture that attitude was directly lifted from.

While the people that came before weren't any smarter than you; it's important to remember that they had, collectively, more experience in more areas than you could ever dream of having. That doesn't mean they got everything right, but it does mean if you just take the quote to heart you'll probably end up more like a bull in a China shop than some sage-like innovator.

But it is nice idea to remember, so you can mentally knock down people like Jobs, who want to portray themselves as sage-like innovators, a peg.

It's a very zen-inspired take on the world, and I've heard actual gurus give much less useful and down-to-earth advice than Steve here.

> I hate articles that use Steve Jobs as some kind of guru, he was a lucky, successful asshole, but I guess that's charisma for you.

He was lucky an awful lot then.

I would estimate maybe 1 in ~7 billion odds

(statistical liberties taken)

Jobs was highly successful 3 times (Apple I, Pixar, and his return to Apple). Once could be luck, twice is highly unlikely to be luck, and 3 times? fuggeddabootit

The sequence of events are linked. NeXT was hugely successful as it became the foundation of OS X and without it he'd never have returned. The individual product lines were a multiple amounts of luck too (Mac, iPod, iPhone, etc).

> The sequence of events are linked

Not really. Look at Jobs' second coming to Apple. He replaced a sequence of CEOs that all failed to turn Apple around. Jobs turned a near-bankrupt company into the biggest company in the world, with the same crew and technology of the near-bankrupt company.

Pixar enormous success was Jobs' doing. Nobody else believed in Pixar.

NeXT was a failure, but Jobs found a way to salvage it.

> NeXT was a failure, but Jobs found a way to salvage it.

He sold that failure for $429m.

NeXT only sold 50,000 computers, which is considered a failure.

Likely the $400m was really to buy Jobs.

> Jobs was highly successful 3 times (Apple I, Pixar, and his return to Apple). Once could be luck, twice is highly unlikely to be luck, and 3 times? fuggeddabootit

So someone who flips a coin an gets heads 10 times in row isn't lucky, they must be good at flipping coins? Jobs certainly had certain talents, but luck was definitely the bigger contributor to his successes. However, lots of people lose sight of that, and almost join a cargo cult centered on him.

The odds are zero for even one head if you never flip a coin.

> The odds are zero for even one head if you never flip a coin.

And that proves what, exactly? If lotto tickets were free, I'd buy a billion.

But why would you buy them if they were free? Steve Jobs would have just taken the entire lot.

Jobs has his share of failure too, but his initial success allowed him a serious financial and PR buffer.

If he failed early, then nobody would know of it or him.

What about Elon Musk then? Paypal, Tesla, then SpaceX

He was tossed from X.com then because he tried to turn the company into vehicle for his ego.

Tesla was made by two other guys, Musk contributed PR, marketing and government money.

SpaceX is a lot of public money.

If Musk is good at anything, it is taking other people's money and building a cult of personality.

> If Musk is good at anything, it is taking other people's money and building a cult of personality.

That doesn't sound too hard. Why is Elon the only one good at it?!

I like to think of Steve Jobs as one of the greatest adoption success stories.

https://www.theladders.com/career-advice/this-is-what-steve-...

When he talks about his father, there was a moment where he realized he was smarter and at the time I found it to be an asshole move (I can’t find the quote and story anymore).

But looking back I think he was truly honoring his adoptive parents in his own brusque way.

In anycase: Someone “less intelligent” (Paul Jobs) indirectly had a major impact on company values and world impact.

> While the people that came before weren't any smarter than you; it's important to remember that they had, collectively, more experience in more areas than you could ever dream of having.

People don't sum that way. It's more important to remember that they had, individually, a bit less, a bit more, or about the same experience in a few less, a few more, or about the same number of areas as you do, and that the collective experience you yourself have to draw on is vastly larger than theirs was.

> he was a lucky, successful asshole

I know contemporaries of Jobs that had every opportunity he had, and failed to notice those opportunities.

I'm one of them. It was obvious in retrospect. I missed it, and many, many people I know were blind as a bat.

There wasn't any particular magic in the hardware or software of the Apple I at the time. Yes, Woz did a great job doing it with fewer chips. But that was not key to its success.

> PS: If you are starting something new, you also have the benefit of a lot of recently freed-up Coinbase/Twitter/Shopify/Stripe/Meta employees with a lot of severance nothing to lose

That's not so smart is it? Hiring folks on sky high salaries. If you are a startup, the last thing you need is uncompromising engs from BigTech imposing themselves on your org. Make sure to beat it out of them or better yet, pursue those who have the potential to grow as the startup scales, and/or those who come on board with a more grounded set of expectations. Especially, if you're aiming longer term.

I think it was Einstein who said that you can't solve the world's problems by using the same thinking that created them.

I think it was Einstein who said "I probably didn't say this"

It was Jung, I believe.

One big, directly related mistake, in my opinion is the strongly held idea that some people are geniuses, and that general intelligence is a thing.

The more I look into it, the more I see that some people are experts, even genius-level experts, sometimes in several fields, but this level of expertise is a weak predictor of their competence in different fields.

A second big problem is that some people are experts at manipulating masses and at building hype, it can be dangerous because there is a strong compounding effect with hype. (Aka snowballing)

Everyone is subject to the Dunning-Kruger effect. IMO intelligence is more about how quickly can you adapt to a new field. Everyone will have stupid moments if they are thrown in the deep waters of an unfamiliar field.

Agreed, to some extent.

The idea that some people are genuinely extremely talented and could be successful at anything is, in my opinion, unproven and dubious.

I think that human intellectual potential is highly adaptable, but we tend to ignore/undervalue the full path that led someone to excellence in a field.

Also, we tend to rely a lot on weak heuristics to evaluate one's intellect.

The strongest one (but still weak) is language abilities. The weakest and dangerous one is wealth/status.

I think the true statement would be 'The People who run the World are not uncommonly intelligent'. They almost all probably have IQs in the 120 to 135 range. That's not that smart, you can round up dozens of people smarter than that at most colleges. However, even at the low end of 120 that's still almost 91% percentile, which makes the statement 'The World Is Run by People No Smarter Than You' only true for like 9% of people.

I agree with the sentiment but lots of people would not be in the same position as the people who 'run the world' even with equally good luck, because they would not have been able to understand the situations they found themselves in well enough to make decisions that were in their own interest.

You are equating IQ with intelligence and "smartness".

Whatever problem(s) you might have with it, IQ is the thing we can measure that is best correlated to what you would describe as 'intelligence' or 'smartness'.

Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others. — Edward Abbey

Here here

Seconded, and along same lines is capitalism ( as opposed to socialism)

The world is run by people. Those people are no smarter than you (person reading this comment right now).

I believe this personally and I’m confident Steve Jobs meant this literally. The reason I’m confident is Jobs said this in 1994, when the conventional wisdom was that both he and Apple had failed. Toy Story wouldn’t be released until the next year. iPhone (the device that convinced people Apple was right about Human Centered Design) was 13 years away. NeXT was failing.

Here is the link to the original video posted by the Santa Clara Historical Society. https://youtu.be/kYfNvmF0Bqw

Edit: fix video link

The layoffs I'm not sure they were really mistakes, just business as usual. The issue is they may have permanently shattered the reality distortion around the tech industry that inspired so many to pursue careers within it: the idea that tech is not traditional business.

However is this really an issue? Some VCs and C-suite members actually are cheering this on, because they think tech companies have grown too bloated and laborers unproductive, and think some fear needs to be instilled. IDK TBD, but mature companies are mature and run this way even if they aren't yet public.

With layoffs there is also question was the hiring the mistake. Which I might consider at some level for it to be. At least some part of the hired cohort.

Yeah theoretically this isn't a bad thing for "the machine". They sucked in a tremendous amount of talent with their net, and will theoretically be able to throw back many of the undesirable fish.

And yes, the powers that be have been desperate to make a statement since they lost a tiny amount of power.

Clearly not true in physics and engineering. How many people can honestly they're as smart as Maxwell, Einstein, Von Neumann, or even "minor" players like John Bardeen and Bill Shockley?

More believable about business and public morality of all sorts (including economics), all of which can be swamps of reality-denying utter stupidity.

The opposite of stupid isn't smart. The opposite of stupid is true, accurate, and realistic.

People like those you listed rarely run the world.

The people in physics and engineering don't govern.

I think you should read up on some of these men’s thoughts on things other than physics and reconsider your point.

Maxwell Einstein and Von neumann never took public office, and even avoided public policy positions

Very smart of them

For every Einstein, there are hundreds or thousands of physicists who are actively exploring the big theories, and actually using them. How many physicists are working in and around CERN? A small fraction will earn any public recognition, yet all of them are furthering physics. That's just the physicists, never mind the engineers, material scientists, construction workers, managers, payroll accountants, etc, who are needed to run the place. Are they as "smart" as Einstein? Maybe. Some might be smarter. There are only so many big ideas to discover. Every other genius has to contend with exploring those ideas.

> Clearly not true in physics and engineering. How many people can honestly they're as smart as Maxwell, Einstein, Von Neumann, or even "minor" players like John Bardeen and Bill Shockley?

Clearly? Physics is littered with people playing the publish or die game.

How many interesting (and feasible, non-crackpot) ideas are being drowned out because it’s not the mainstream?

Sabine Hossenfelder weighed in this problem recently.

Recently? That's been her main hobby-horse for years.

Don't get me wrong; I'm a big admirer of hers.

Perhaps weighed-in again recently would be more accurate.

Well, as a good example... Shockley, as brilliant of a physicist he was, was an ardent racist and proponent of eugenics.[0] He was cruel towards his children and wife, and ended up dying alone.

If that doesn't show that people can be exceptional in one portion of their life, while horribly lacking in others... I don't know what does.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley#:~:text=Views...

One of my current client is a big institution whose decisions affect the life of probably 700+ millions people a year.

A lot of critical processes are just excel sheets that people open and run once in a while, maybe copy / paste or click a button in there, then close.

Some processes are automatized, but there is no way to check if the result is good. Best you can do is to have a human look at the numbers and say "LGTM" with some confident face and call it a day.

Said client handle billions of euros every year for other entities. They basically influence the entire world economy on a daily basis.

Now, get audited from top to bottom, from internal and external teams, and all audits pass eventually. I met mostly good people there that take their job seriously. But still, every time I dive deeper into their rabbit whole, I just can't believe what humanity stands on.

Once upon a time, all of that would have been managed on just pen and paper, calculated by humans instead of machines!

There was one French artist that made a comic with 2 characters once, saying:

- computers are amazing, they can calculate 20 millions operation every second, with only one mistake every 10 million of operations

- 2 mistakes a second, you call that progress?

Today, the fun part is, the human unreliability is now a small part of a big automated chain that have large, numerous and instant results. So if the excel file is not opened, and the calculations updated but the human, the rest of the system will work with stale values. And who knows what it will do to the cascade of events handling the billions of euros?

In fact, my client has a failsafe for that: a designated chain of people that are supposed to take over if one cannot do their task, for each critical task.

No one holds power by accident. While some people may initially rise purely by chance, there are countless people actively trying to take their place, and thus the ability to remain in that desirable position implies sufficient competence to fend off all challengers. Obviously victory won't necessarily go to the smartest, there are many other important qualities like charisma and risk tolerance that tip the scales, but those in power still need to be smart enough to use their other skills and connections to overcome smarter competitors. If you see a grand master with a long history of success make what appears to you to be a blunder, perhaps they are indeed off their game, but it is wise to look to see how it may be a gambit.

They have skills to rise to the top for sure. The problem is those may not be the same skills you would need to govern effectively.

Donald Trump is my favorite recent example of that but there are many others

Trump's a sobering case, isn't he?

He's a multiple bankrupt. He has a talent for destruction. It seems to me that he lacks insight; he seems to be a loudmouthed blowhard, just like many people I've met that aren't well-educated, and aren't property magnates.

I don't really get how he got people to vote for him; I suspect it's that he appealed specifically to an anti-intellectual constituency - the same constituency that rejected Al Gore for being too intellectual.

That is: being clever seems to be unhelpful, if you want to get ahead in US politics.

> I don't really get how he got people to vote for him; I suspect it's that he appealled specifically to an anti-intellectual constituency - the same constituency that rejected Al Gore for being too intellectual.

Since it was the same constituency (in the margin) that voted Obama and Trump in, maybe the question is how Obama appealed to that "anti-intellectual" group more successfully than the succeeding candidate.

Trump (or someone Trump was smart enough to listen to) realized that the same strategies that work for celebrity PR also work for political PR. Dogma in political circles had long been that you want to try to piss off as few people as possible and be palatable to as wide an audience as possible. But in hollywood gossip you want to be constantly involved in some scandal or feud - it doesn't matter what absurd position you take, people will still join your side. It's the exact same mental pathway that makes people very invested in their local sports team - sure you've never met these people and victory has no practical value to you whatsoever, but they are your team, your tribe, so you care. Trump spent years using these tactics to maintain his standing as a C-tier celebrity and eventually applied them to politics where they worked spectacularly.

He plays the part of a buffoon, but if you pay attention to his oratory there are numerous clever strategies employed - he always focusses on one opponent at a time; he always gives his opponents simple, diminutive monikers that always use the first name which make him come off as simultaneously informal and superior; technical questions are met with machismo. In general all of his efforts work towards painting himself as an extremely confident individual who is stronger and more virile than his opponents and his policy positions are irrelevant. This might seem like a dumb strategy, but if you consider how a gorilla becomes leader of its troop, it does not make a well reasoned argument that it has the best policies and will improve the economy, it makes itself appear too formidable for any other contender to challenge. Our ape brains have evolved to join the side of the strongest and most virile alpha male. Trump's strategy exploits this pathway. That is not to say that he deliberately developed a strategy based on how apes compete for dominance, but rather he happened to adopt a strategy that just happened to be effective, and he executed it well.

Trump's apparent lack of intelligence also served him well as the political establishment not only did not understand how to counter his strategy, but didn't even recognize the strategy until it was too late. They played right into his hands, frequently lampooning his positions and thus inadvertently giving him a far bigger audience. They tried to paint him as divisive and brash, not realizing that's exactly what people wanted. They debated him with traditional political rhetoric which came off as impotent and disingenuous. They pounced on every scandal which desensitized people to outrage.

While I personally believe that Corey Lewandowski was the real brains behind the operation and as stated the other contenders made serious blunders, the fact that in a few years a man with the catchphrase "You're fired!" could completely submit half the country's political spectrum to his will and retain that influence after two impeachment attempts and a lost election indicates an exceptional ability to play the game.

Thanks for your long reply.

> clever strategies employed

Yes, I think he's a clever orator. I assume he gets talking-points from advisors; but he's winging it a lot of the time, and he gets away with it.

But he's not "clever" like someone who once finished reading a book. He brags that he doesn't read books, and I believe him. He has a famously short window of attention. Perhaps all of his 'stable genius' is focused on what matters; but what's that?

[Edit] The pub around the corner from me sells a draught ale called "Stable Genius".

It's called "clever but not smart". The problem being that in position of so much power, one needs both out in the long term everyone loses.

A brilliant explanation of my short comment. If I met you in real life I’d buy you a beer good sir.

>thus the ability to remain in that desirable position implies sufficient competence to fend off all challengers

In the modern world there are very few individual people with a lot of power. Power today is highly distributed among institutions and elites and managers and bureaucrats and so on. Just ask any recent US president when they ran headfirst into the machinery that is the entire government how that went. No deep state necessary, just sheer inertia of systems much larger than them.

What all the examples in the article should tell people isn't that powerful people are stupid or smart, it's that nobody's in charge any more. Elon failing to tame twitter, SBF going broke on crypto isn't about intelligence, it's about people trying to speculate on or control systems that are much too complex and autonomous to be ordered around by one guy.

But the fact remains that someone is president and gets all the prestige and other perks of that position, and there are lots of other people who would like to be in that position yet aren't. Running things has never meant absolute ability to control systems, it has always been a relative measure of position within the hierarchy compared to others.

Flip side of the problem is that all those failed ideas and failed businesses out there were from people as smart as you are. You're probably not going to get lucky and hit the jackpot on whatever idea you have or on whatever startup that you attach yourself to.

I think a lot of people look at the world and think that the people that designed it were executing a well laid out plan, or before they executed anything they had to have deep understanding of theory. What Jobs was saying though I think, was that the world around us is full of inventions that didn't come about that way, but came about through tinkering and being curious. Anyone can tinker and be curious, that doesn't take any credentials. As for the author's comments on today's leading entrepreneurs, everyone's biased to think they'd make the right decision in hindsight. Good decisions today don't look at all the same as after they've been validated.

OK, if the people running the show are no better than "you" than does that imply merit doesn't rise to the top? If we aren't in a meritocracy, what does that mean for wealth distribution?

Merit doesn't guarantee anything. You also need to do things in the right order in the right time and the right place, a decent amount of luck would also come handy.

The only gaurantees in life are death and taxes. But supposedly cream rises to the top. Get my drift?

Ever heard of tax evasion?

Yeeah https://youtube.com/shorts/FCD_Xq4ebyw?feature=share

How random do you think outcomes are?

Is a minority from a ghetto just lucky if they get admitted to Harvard? When we see a stereotypical white guy get admitted to Harvard, we would assume they are privileged. Are the people who break out of overty doing it on their own, ala boot straps style, or are they the product of an unlikely serious of events which gave them the edge they needed?

Wealth distribution in particular can be accurately modeled by purely random coin flips on who gets more and who loses: E.g. https://chancyislands.org/CIChance.html

Absolutely no meritocracy required.

A corollary: since "the world is run by people no smarter than you" then it's a good idea to be:

- diversified :: so errors and horrors by a country/cohort of people can be a lesson for others without hitting anybody at once;

- not centralized :: as above, so a "chief" who happen to be an i*iot would cause issues to a small cohort of people, but not to all at once.

Now try imaging: all Roomba and Amazon Ring IN THE WORLD goes TFU due to a centralized system mishap https://eminetra.com.au/people-cant-vacuum-or-use-their-door... or the famous https://youtu.be/JqoGJPMD3Ws or also https://arstechnica.com/?p=1848769 and countless others.

ALL such "issues" are SPOF by their own "modern" design. Perhaps it's a good idea re-evaluating such way of doing anything from just-in-time productions to home food stock in the freezer to car's spare wheel instead of crappy ideas to spare a kg.

> It’s hard to know what to take from that; Steve Jobs was clearly a very smart man, without a lot of empathy for lesser beings. So is he saying “Everything was made up by people no smarter than Steve Jobs”, or does he actually mean it that the average world/company/industry leader really is no smarter than you?

He's saying that the average "you" is no smarter than the average person.

> And then I take a look at the clown show that has been tech in the past few weeks...

All of these example trace their roots to extreme market distortions bought about by a massive direct injection of money into an economy that had partially shut down during the pandemic. The normal pricing signals were suppressed for the last two years.

The underlying mistake made in the biggest of the cited examples was to believe the distorted marketplace pricing signals.

The mistake made in the lesser cited examples was that getting rich from the deluge of fake money serves as proof of skill in other areas.

The process of normalization is now underway, and will continue for some time. If those examples in the article make you go "huh," just wait for what's in store as the receding tide reveals all of those bare bottoms and inflated senses of superiority.

I was always wondering.

Ant politician cannot make everyone happy.

The brightest do not go into politics, the morally cleanest do not go there either.

So what is left? The power hungry and greedy, not sure if any party is better or worse.

I cannot think of one government that is perceived as great by the populace and foreigners on a wide scale.

Same for the powerful insurances, tech companies, banks, the leaders arent the best, the whole and lack of better competition makes them strong.

This is not true. Why do you think this?

Edit: It’s very possible I’m understanding what you’re trying to say.

I mean, if you look at scientists, theyre all top of their field, they are there for the sake of science.

Now look at Boebert and similar, it is safe to say they would never be great scientists.

Of course, this is not universally true, but there is an undeniable tendency.

The examples in the article are deceptive and kinda strawman-ish. Zuck and Elon are definitely smarter than me, although I think that I am smarter than average person. The problem with their terrible decisions is their self-perception, when they attribute their huge success with their smartness. "I am successful, therefore I know better". This is just plain wrong.

Unfortunately for that line of thinking, rewarding demonstrable success is quite literally the definition of meritocracy.

Also, terrible mistakes are mostly rooted in a big risk taking. And for already successful people it is mandatory to take more and more risk to achieve something beyond they already have, because with small risk the reward is small too.

The thought that politicians are not smarter than me is so scary to me. I don't fully understand so many things (globalization is absurdly complicated), but at least I don't have to make decisions that will affect millions of people.

I don't think anyone really fully understands the global economy.

A friend of mine who is a financial engineer by trade (has designed the algos for HFT, works at Blackrock, etc.), explained a few basic principles to me:

1. All models are wrong; some are useful. A good way of making predictions is to average together the most successful models. 2. Economic systems are run by humans, who are constantly trying to game the system to their advantage. As greater capabilities for measuring and understanding the system are developed, the dynamics of the system are changed by those capabilities, thus changing the understanding of those metrics in the first place, and on and on, forever. 3. The way markets react to developments in technology is of course why you can't trust anyone who is promising huge investment returns based on "backtesting". Nobody can predict the future, because the way the market reacts to changes is constantly evolving.

At best, we can understand the dynamics of the global or local economies at a given point in time. Even that is extremely difficult.

It seems to me the great differentiator is risk-taker vs. risk-averse, not so much "smarts." The examples given in this article, Elon and Zuck have both been wildly successful at some endeavors(Tesla,SpaceX,Facebook) and have failed spectacularly at others (Twitter, Meta-verse) But they both are risk-takers. And on a long enough time-line even seemingly successful "masters of the universe" will fail at some point in their careers. What one then hopes is that you collect enough wisdom on your journey to make fewer mistakes as you go.

lol at calling twitter a failure after one week

Are we sure there isn't a dark forest thingy going on here?

Benjamin: You work in TV?

Mimi: No, but I watch a lot.

Benjamin: Of course you do. You're creative.

Noah: She came up with the name Noah's Arcade.

Mimi: I just opened my mouth and out it came.

Noah: You're a lucky man, Mr Vanderhoff.

- from Wayne's World, 1992

Mr. and Mrs. Vanderhoff were none the wiser. Even Cassandra didn't catch on until the end of the movie when she felt the similarity between Benjamin's unsolicited shoulder rub and the sensation of a literal snake slithering on her skin.

In conclusion, humans can be sneaky creatures. Especially smart ones.

Edit: clarification

This is why I have extra food on hand.

Steve Jobs would never say he's better than others. But mark my words here, people with real higher IQ actually do know they are smarter and make better decisions than others. They actually can't stand being around dumb people.

There's only one major problem: with intelligence often comes OCD, autism, spectrum stuff. The brain is lit up all over the place, but often comes with a lot of things that makes life worse.

You're actually much much better off being a bit idiotic in this world.

> But mark my words here, people with real higher IQ actually do know they are smarter and make better decisions than others.

How would you know this? Are you referring to yourself?

I'm with Socrates: the mark of knowledge is that you know how little you know.

Know people like this. I'm an idiot myself.

Lots of wisdom in this thread, much more than I usually see, i.e a lot of people who are aware of history and very aware of varied human nature.

Question to the those people: why wouldn't you want to put your contact information ( or even a few webpages) so that other similar minded people can get in touch with you? Certainly if you have that kind of wisdom, you will be intellectually isolated. ( Or perhaps you are happy with the status quo?)

First of all, nobody wants to solicit advice or especially be given unsolicited advice.

Second, if you happen to become known, your contact data is a risk - even existential.

Finally the movers and shakers prefer loyal friend and income to good advice and empathy.

Talk is cheap, action is hard and expensive.

Me: Totally confused, lol.

(ok second point is understandable, but surely one can have multiple email addresses)

Frankly, that last paragraph is the most important one. If you were on the fence about actually starting that start-up, this is your golden opportunity.

in relation to twitter, the juvenile messages exchanged between Musk and former twitter CEO are also revealing https://fortune.com/2022/09/30/elon-musk-friendly-text-messa...

It's run by people no smarter than you, with rules enforced by mentally domesticated highschool graduates with pistols.

I recently read Our Man about Richard Holbrooke, and man, this notion really came across loud and clear.

(Also, it was a good read!)

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/215731/our-man-by-g...

People make mistakes. I'd rather ask a different question: what are the greatest decisions these people have made and the great things they build that I can't do, with or without luck? Then, there seems to be quite a few.

Napoleon, at (e.g.) Borodino. (Whatever happened to him?)

I'm struggling to think of great decisions that didn't amount to standing on the shoulders of giants.

People get power because they scrap for it not because they somehow deserve it

They are definitely smarter in the ability of gaining power over other people.

You don't need to be smart to do that; big muscles and a baseball bat helps, though.

I simply don't believe there are people who are super-clever. I don't believe in "geniuses".

I believe there are people that are cleverer than me, and they can leave me mystified about how they worked out X. But that mystification doesn't require them to have a multiple of my smarts; it only requires them to have 10% more smarts than me.

In popular discourse, for example, Einstein is commonly credited as having been a genius. I'm not a physicist; but my understanding is that Einstein's SR and GR were essentially natural conclusions to draw from Maxwell's and Lagrange's equations. IOW, if Einstein had remained a patent reviewer, someone else would have produced those theories.

The same belief extends to "great men" of history; I think they emerge from the sea that they swim in, they do not command the tides. So I think that if Hitler had been killed in the WW1 trenches, some other authoritarian would have come along to unite the German people (perhaps not as bad as Hitler; perhaps worse).

> Elon adding, and then removing, a second verified checkmark to replace the one he devalued, something any B2C product expert would know is a terrible idea Elon proposing a $20/month price for Twitter Blue, and then immediately dropping to $8 at the first celebrity pushback, something any pricing expert would know is a terrible idea Elon (or his EA?) personally reinterviewing engineers at Twitter and telling them to print out code and then changing his mind, something any engineering manager would know is a terrible idea

I'm sure Elon knows how stupid these are, it's a publicity stunt

never attribute to wisdom that which is adequately explained by stupidity

never attribute to 3 dimensional chess what could be explained by one dimensional

The selection process is plain stupid.

First, the candidades must have the will to power. They must lick the asses of the alphas to be promoted. They must make many promises to get help. They must hinder the others to be promoted. They must lie to the people to get elected.

So you have predominantly power-mad, spineless, corrupt, intrigant, dishonest assholes on top. The state of the world reflects that exactly. The bureaucracies too.

Yes, come to Argentina..., you will face that is run by people that is not even as stupid as your dog.

The world is run by people richer than you. /fixed

Another question is, what takes the smartest mind?

Software engineers?

Medical doctors?

HFT?

Someone like Zuckerberg?

Some senator anywhere in the world?

Very hard to compare unless you have worked with all of them.

I frankly do not know, but I have severe doubts that its politicians.

Trump ran the worlds superpower and its still standing. His casinos did not all survive.

Makes me think.

It took the Fed a full year of inflation being over the target to raise rates.

If you look at the code of the climate models responsible for the decision making of trillions of dollars, you'll find old fortran code with many obvious inaccuracies on the order of magnitude of the things it's supposed to measure, and you'll find they all copy code from each other and reach diverging results.

uhm, no, no you won't.

Climate models are very conservative in terms of the coding and approaches, but the old Fortran is used because 100's of eyes have picked over it for problems and it's as accurate as it possibly can be.

Have you actually looked at it before you replied, or are you just assuming it?

Fortran is terrible for the scale of those projects, and it shows.

I can give you concrete examples straight from GitHub. Accuracy isn't relative it's absolute. You're not comparing accuracy to other models, you compare it vs reality.

It is a known fact the results of different climate models diverge. There's ongoing research as to why this is happening, lookup CMIP6. Many models also required flux adjustment to stay stable over many years of simulation (although at least that problem is improving).

It's really hard to test these models on the scale of the effects climate change.

You will learn that when things that have been worked on by 100's of smart people look strange there is usually a reason why.

This stuff is very hard, contributions before criticism.

You still didn't answer me whether you've thoroughly reviewed their code before dismissing my comments. Did you?

You can approach it as an insider researcher "on their side" and try to correct it, but the problem is just so big you're not going to get flawless models without time, and they have already shrugged serious problems in the past with "flux adjustment". You'll get endless errata and retractions but you'll never get a narrative shift.

Or you can try to approach it from the outside like countless scientists have done and get called oil companies shill, climate denier and what not. The academic "climate" around it is very "hot".

So eventually you just go and forget it and do something productive with your life instead of literally fighting windmills. (And I did mean literally as a joke about renewable energy).

Even if your masked climate denial claims are true about climate models, the implication is that the confidence intervals are huge. That means while it could be better than expected, it could also be far worse than expected. That should give nobody comfort. The tail risk is too great to even risk finding out what will happen if we keep doing this crazy experiment with our atmosphere.

You know what's worse than climate change being real and doing nothing about it?

Climate change being real but getting the real reason wrong because of hubris, and doing measures that only harm and economy and makes us more fragile ahead of dealing with the crisis, and in the process destroying any public trust in science that will be required for dealing with the crisis.

Almost like doing lockdowns for coronavirus.

Temperature measurements and real world data and trends is not something I can deny. But there's important difference between climate change is from CO2 and greenhouse gas, to any other possible explanation.

Just like there's a difference between "inflation is transitory because of supply chain problems" to the dumpster fire we're having today.

I've had enough of this hubris. How is it that nobody is preparing for the impacts of climate change? How is everyone so confident that somehow whatever measures are done will be enough, and that everyone will actually implement them?

Adaptation is clearly the only viable solution because that's the only thing that's independent of the competence of things you don't control.

Let me push back on the notion that there are alternative explanations besides increased concentration of atmospheric CO2 and other greenhouse gases for the current rapid changes in climate. It's one thing to say that we should distrust the complicated models that try to simulate the entire Earth in sufficient detail to predict exactly what the temperature change will be and what the impacts will be in each region. That stuff is genuinely hard to predict and I won't be surprised if the models get lots of things wrong. But the basic mechanism by which higher CO2 concentrations enable to atmosphere to retain heat better is dead simple. Heat is lost from the ground and atmosphere by low frequency photons that radiate away into space. Many of the photons, especially those emitted from the ground and lower parts of the atmosphere will be scattered by gas molecules in the atmosphere, and CO2 is one of the gases that is particularly good at this. Scattering means that the photon's direction changes randomly, which means that there's a good chance that it will be redirected to be heading back down towards the ground, rather than out into space. So an increased number of scattering events improve heat retention. Adding more CO2 to the atmosphere increases the number of of scattering events and thus results in less heat being lost to space, which results in a higher average* temperature for the Earth. We can debate what the exact consequences of all this will be, but saying it isn't a result of humanity burning large quantities of fossil fuels is to me tantamount to an admission that you don't understand physics.

*(Technically, since thermal radiation goes as T^4 times emissivity and some other stuff, what I really mean is a higher value of T^4 averaged across the surface area of the Earth and weighted by emissivity. And even this is an oversimplification, since not only can heat be lost from the ground, but also the atmosphere iteself. But the basic picture of "planet gets warmer" is still correct.)

I really don't like the way the narrative is presented.

First of all, the radiation is thermal radiation. Air with CO2 at close temperature to the surface emitting thermal radiation has no bad effect whatsoever on how fast the energy radiates out.

Two things at the same temperature will always be at equilibrium, and the least thermal radiation you can emit is black body radiation like the surface. So the narrative of looking at it like it's radiation scattering might be true for high up in the atmosphere where the temperature difference from the surface is high - but very misleading and leads to bad intuition in low attitudes. CO2 also tends to stay in lower attitudes.

There are other effects from CO2 that also go the other way. CO2 has increased heat capacity, it's heavier than air, and it might have a cooling effect because it increases the effectiveness of convection.

What's the leading cause? By how much? I don't know. You need to do the calculation properly and find out. This is physics not humanistic subject. You don't judge with narratives. Narratives are misleading, calculations are what matters. If you bring your narrative to the calculation and the only effect of CO2 in your calculation is the radiation, that's even worse.

Thermodynamic systems also tend to reach equilibrium, so if you have errors in any parameters in the description of the system, your errornous system with the current state of the real system will be out of equilibrium in the errornous simulation. You should always expect simulations with imprecise data to be less stable than the real system itself.

It's settled, greenhouse gases, primarily CO2 but also water vapor, methane, and others, is causing warming. There isn't any uncertainty about this. Also, no, simulations are not always less stable than the real system.

Is it possible for you to link any of the climate models where you've observed this and point out some of the inaccuracies? (Or to link to an existing blog post or comment that does so?)

I'll post a single simple anecdote, but this is much much worse.

https://github.com/GEOS-ESM/GEOSgcm_GridComp/blob/develop/GE...

Line 87, you can see they copy physical constants from an old physics book and then later they commented out and used different constants. You can see that the difference is quite significant.

The cloud physics code there I saw in different models, with different "constants", with other comments also taken from physics books as old as the 1980s. Can look in general at the accuracy of physical constants used, some of them aren't constants at all (and depends on composition of air INCLUDING CO2, such as gas constants). There are also much more complex problems there that I can't explain over a single post.

This is extremely complex to evaluate the impact of everything going on there, and I can't make claims that it should go one way or the other, but the code quality and the testing done there are definitely not enough to reach the conclusions made and the trillions of dollars worth of decisions that followed.

Thanks for replying with details. The difference for liquid water is small, but for ice it looks like it's actually about 7%, which could be significant. Looks like what's going on is that the constants used are for different temperatures. The original constant was for ice at 0C, while the new constant is for ice at -15C. I'm guessing this is probably based on the thought that more ice on the planet is near -15C than is near 0C. Ideally for the best accuracy you'd compute the heat capacity using interpolation and a lookup table, but I can see how it would be a lot harder to enforce energy conservation that way. It would be interesting to see a sensitivity analysis on how these kinds of decisions affect the outcome of the simulation.

They have a real issue of choosing physical constants which aren't really constants, some models get it more right, others get it wrong and some are just unreadable so I couldn't get a conclusion.

There are also other issues, some code is clearly untestable, the whole thing is written in incoherent merged up pieces so you might be using different constants / calculations for the same grid location from different modules. NASA GISS code looks even worse, but I couldn't link to GitHub it's only available as tar gz download. They have even worst stuff there.

And remember the entire calculation is meant to measure the effect of changing CO2 which is only 0.0042% of the atmosphere. You need very high accuracy in everything in the first place to get the real effect rather than the model drifting into an alternative climate of imaginary world with different constants. And then remember that the real system is chaotic and the only signal that they claim to get is the average over many different simulations all drifting in average temperatures, over decades. The way the code is written there's just no way it's suitable for these kinds of predictions. And actually in most cases these models weren't built to predict climate over decades.

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