I worked in Harvard Square for 5 years (dead center, across the street from Curious George, between the Greenhouse and the Coop), and it was always my assertion that Harvard is full of Well-Educated Idiots.
"An education is no substitute for intelligence."
Some of the smartest people that I've ever met, had little to no education.
I never studied computer science, I can't code a graph path-finding algorithm out of memory and yet I've been told by many former colleagues that I am one of the best programmers they ever met.
Which is quite hilarious because I still think I am quite bad, to this day, after 22 years of career. And no this is not humble-bragging, more like to outline how different our perspectives on ourselves can be from the perception of everyone else.
But this approach, I think, is what is keeping me intellectually honest. I am self-indulgent for like 2-3 days a year and the rest of the time I always think I have to learn yet another thing, and to practice it well.
I have a couple of friends that are quite rich, and run a successful company. Both dropouts. I think that she never even got her GED.
> I know many of you love this guy, and think he's a genius. I can assure you, none among you, are as impressed with his intelligence as he is. This guy is just insufferable. I've actually never witnessed a marriage of incompetence and confidence so fully and grotesquely consummated in the mind of a person with a public platform.
> This is the most arrogant person I have ever had the misfortune of meeting. When you meet him you quickly discover that he radiates a sense of grievance from his pores in a way that few people do. It's kind of like a preternatural force of negative charisma.
> He is a child in a man's body. And the mismatch between his estimation of himself and the quality of his utterances is so complete and so mortifying to witness in person that you just find you're jumping out of your skin.
I love Taleb's writing (Black Swan was an important book) and observations (Power law distributions are the world globalization trends towards) but truth be told he does come off as a bit of an ass. I mean, he really just had the key observation and then somehow wrote a few thousand pages around it and more or less got lucky with a trade once.
I wouldn't want as much attention on my flaws as his get.
Good philosophy.
Being able to look past that is what constitutes one of the meanings of the expression "going out of your comfort zone" which is basically how you learn new things.
Like your sibling commenter, I distill wisdom and experience any chance I get. If I find myself being irritated by somebody, my first reaction is to ask myself why. If the reason is emotional I almost always dismiss it.
-- Arthur C. Clarke
I grew up surrounded by Ivy leaguers. You could tell who came from money, and who made it on their own merit. Some of the wealthiest people I've ever met growing up were lower/middle class kids with tremendous academic intelligence AND street-smarts who made it to the ivies on their own merit and excelled from there. Some of the dumbest of that Ivy cohort were kids of exorbitantly wealthy, and due to their social class and connections, were pretty much promised a spot at one of the top schools. They aren't dumb in the sense that they are truly brainless...quite the opposite - they were good academically and often quite book-smart, but lacked every real-world marker of human intelligence; and would be the last person you'd want to hire or work with.
Harvard, Penn, Yale, etc... are places where the smart poor or smart middle class go to rub elbows with (and get jobs working for the parents of) wealthy idiots.
Oracles of Wrong will have above-average intelligence, but estimate it higher than that. Some decades of observation suggest they most usually come from a life of privilege, where no personal choice has caused them substantial difficulty or distress.
Do not neglect that you may be the Oracle of Wrong in the group.