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Comment by reducesuffering | Hacker News Reader

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I refrain from quoting pg nowadays but he used to be worth reading, here's an article from that period which is of some interest: http://paulgraham.com/founders.html

No words on low IQ but absolutely nothing about being a genius.

Also, a paragraph which may point at mild psychopathy as a good trait to have. Which is absolutely in line with top leadership.

GP said:

> intelligence is negatively correlated with success in business

Has anyone ever seen a negative correlation on a graph? It implies the most successful businessman are practically the dumbest people to exist. It's an extremely foolish, incorrect assertion. GP and downvoters must be amazing at business.

And yet the richest person in the world is the exact person to pay double the value for a shitty social media company by making an inane comment on their platform AFTER the SEC already warned him that, after the first time he made an inane comment on that platform that was substantially relevant to public markets, he would be forced to follow through.

Yeah I'm not convinced there is any connection between intelligence and business acumen.

Then you would agree with the whole premise of my thread, that

> In fact intelligence is negatively correlated with success in business.

is BS if you're "not convinced there is any connection between intelligence and business acumen."

Your theory is that Elon Musk is unintelligent? That's a pretty wild take.

Have you seen his unedited press releases? He isn’t that bright.

In the last couple of months I’ve seen him absolutely destroy a BBC journalist in an off-the-cuff battle of wits. Is luck the only reason you’re not richer than him?

Luck is great for modeling capitalism, actually.

Elon… is not that smart. Take the “hyperloop” for example, invented in the 1800’s, IIRC. When I considered it in the 90’s as a thought experiment, I quickly realized how dumb it would be. The earth moves, all the time. The pressure wave of a failure somewhere in the system would literally kill everyone on board. If any parts were above ground, a simple sniper bullet from several miles away could kill hundreds of people. I was a teenager, simply writing a report for school. In my report, I quickly (within hours of discovering the idea) realized the expenses and risks of maintaining such a thing would quickly overwhelm any benefits. Yet this “novel idea” a random billionaire came up with is somehow different? I don’t think so.

I could go on with dozens or potentially hundreds of examples where it’s clear he didn’t apply any critical thought at all.

Just to be clear, I’m not saying he is dumb. He just doesn’t think things through before saying them out loud. I think the majority of normal people do this. In other words, I think he’s a normal person who got lucky, and works hard to keep what he has. Just like everyone else. However, we live in a world that idolizes lucky people…

Mild psychopathy == dysfunction when it comes to organizing compromises or large scale transition away from local optima. There is a reason why democracy gives the people a large reset button, to flush the leaders aggregating at the top and all the floatsome that went along with it.

This, but not sarcastic.

You must be great at business

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