The Dumber Side of Smart People

However, most people who make hiring decisions outside of academia (and increasingly many inside it) are part of a different culture which assigns status based on the confidence a person projects and their ability to inspire other people to feel strongly about things they say. While there are also people of the former culture making hiring decisions in sufficiently technical fields, it's hard to avoid the pressures of this second culture.

Also, the pressure on knowledge workers is the same as that on workers of any kind: While there are a few stray independently wealthy people or even quasi-independent rags-to-riches successes in the world, by the numbers most people have to dance for their dinner, so they have to either become conversant in this culture of confidence or find people they trust to navigate it for them

I actually don't think the second culture has no value. It's a lot more powerful in building organizations and gaining buy-in from lots of people. I also don't think the first culture completely avoids the failure modes mentioned in this article. Obviously people with what I've called academic norms definitely fall into this article's discussed pattern of trusting people based on their credentials and disproportionately Think They Are Very Smart

That said, since people fluent in the second culture tend to rise to the top of organizations, people in the first culture increasingly need to signal confidence even when it's inappropriate to justify their existence as they move into a professional sphere, which again most people don't really have the option to opt out of

>I often wonder how many tens of billions of dollars have been paid to management consultants to solve problems that low-wage line workers had solutions for, only because a guy in a suit has a hard time taking a guy with dirty fingernails seriously.

Being inside the industry, I can say this is a very accurate observation:

> If asked, “Why did the stock market fall 0.23% last week?” an average person will shrug their shoulders and walk away. A very smart person will show you their yield-curve model and valuation analysis and tell you whether the performance will continue. Who do you think is more likely to be stricken by overconfidence?

Remember this anytime you watch CNBC & the like.. they can describe in hindsight the WHAT, but the WHY is generally made up on the fly. A classic smart sounding but meaningless joke answer to the above question is "More sellers than buyers". A lot of financial media is basically this.

What's the alternative? Develop social intuitions. Observe your local surrounding environment and the people around you. Try to listen to their personal stories. Tell them yours. Then you can probably figure out what's valuable for them, what drives them every day. Applying that knowledge in the economic realm might change the world for the better.

Yes, sometimes it's OK to say "I don't know". But sometimes it's really not. All people, smart or not, start off in a state of "I don't know". But if it's your job to know then you need to put in the work to make sure you know, or at least know as much as you can. Someone saying "I don't know" doesn't mean they are dumb or smart, it could just mean they are lazy.

On number 2 I just disagree with the definition of smart. A smart person knows when to listen to someone and when not. Should you ignore people with less experience? Of course not. Should you listen to everyone? Of course not!

Smart people definitely suffer from being human, like everyone else, and can become emotionally attached to their ideas etc. I don't think this is a "smart person" trait. But, even so, it is often a very good idea to not buckle to the pressure of fashion and short-term trends. For every story of someone refusing to adapt there is one of someone who was right all along but it took a while for the world to realise.

The market for narratives is also bigger than the market for noisy predictions, which in turn feeds the supply for narratives.

Is it though? For starters, you're going to have to listen to a lot of terrible ideas, which is time-consuming even if ideas are easy to evaluate (like jokes). If we're talking business strategy or science or technology, ideas can be very difficult/expensive/time-consuming to evaluate, credentials serve as a useful filtering step[0]. Next time the author has a health problem I suspect they'll go to a credentialed doctor rather than polling random people on the street.

I agree that smart people can be overconfident, so it's good to have some humility, but it's also good to try to spend time effectively. And dumb people are perfectly capable of being overconfident as well, it's not like this is a problem unique to smart people. Ignorance can breed overconfidence just as much as knowledge; it's easy to "solve" a problem when you don't actually understand why it's difficult in the first place and your solution never gets tested against reality.

[0] The extent that this is true is also a way to judge the credentialing system. Most areas have informal "credentials" based on experience/reputation, eg Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David are considered authorities on comedy and it's not because they have PhDs.

Most people get the difference between intelligence, and knowledge, but there is something in between: technique. And this is the part that confuses most people - it seems kind of like intelligence, but really it's more like knowledge. You may know a technique, you may be able to use it, and still have no idea why it works, why it's used, and where it's no longer applicable.

Being in academia != intelligence. In most of my experiences in the Ivory Tower, the smartest people tended to leave after a short while. Modern US based academia 'hires' on intelligence and 'promotes' based on blind loyalty to the system, boiling off anyone with dignity, honor, or self-respect.

I see that a lot at large financial institutions. Their architecture teams are often comprised of lifers that have never worked in a different industry, or for a different employer. They're experts in how the bank does things, not how the rest of the tech world does things now, and innovation gets stifled.

"Well, bob such and such thinks a lot of things, but he really doesn't have that much experience or understand the code base or customer needs"

or

"He's obnoxious and do we really think he knows what X customer wants, get Suzy on it from leadership to show the powerpoint on what we are planning, Bob isn't good at selling the vision".

It ends up 6 months later that we end up messing up that feature and Bob ends up being the one right all along and we are doing it anyway and the original feature or design was just from the leaders own head, entirely missing the mark.

Here's a story from the field https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38802996

First, that Robin Williams anecdote. It’s absurd. If it’s even true, a macroeconomics class isn’t necessarily difficult nor do they always ask difficult questions. It’s more likely, “What happens to the price when demand goes up and supply remains the same?”

Next,

> If asked, “Why did the stock market fall 0.23% last week?” an average person will shrug their shoulders and walk away. A very smart person will show you their yield-curve model and valuation analysis and tell you whether the performance will continue.

This is patently false. Some smart people might do this. Many will behave in the same manner as the average person. Smart does not mean a person feels the need to have a correct answer for every question and to convey the confidence of always being correct. I know the article might arrive at this point, but lying about reality before getting there is a nonstarter. So this is where I stop reading.

I would like to see evidence that people getting hard degrees are like this. Plenty of un book smart people think they know it all too, see Reddit comments for plenty of examples.

This is false.

TL;R Smart people have some biases and flaws too.