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Comment by nh23423fefe | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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

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.

>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.

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.

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..."

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

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...

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