If You're So Smart, Why Are You So Poor? | Hacker News Reader

If You're So Smart, Why Are You So Poor?

terminaldrift.substack.com

38 pointspaulpauper28 comments

I've seen people I work with become rich, and what I noticed about some of them is that they don't care about being 'nice', they are happy to treat everyone like they owe them something. Being nasty in business works, better and for far longer than it should. I always felt that if I was to succeed or fail, It will be on my own terms and my own thoughts about how to operate ethically, so I became my own boss. 15 years or so later I'm not rich by SV standards, but I did manage to buy a house as a 35yo millenial near the peak of the market off the back of doing what I thought was right. And I'm proud of that. I don't know if I'd call myself smart, but I would suggest that intelligent people are aware of what being ruthless in the pursuit of money will do to those around them, and many will choose not to abuse their intelligence knowing that it would hurt others. Or at least I'd like to think so.

Yeah, this is why "If you're so smart, why aren't you happy?" version of this sentence is a million times better. It should also trigger a healthier type of introspection.

"I have seen something further under the sun, that the swift do not always win the race, nor do the mighty win the battle, nor do the wise always have the food, nor do the intelligent always have the riches, nor do those with knowledge always have success, because time and unexpected events overtake them all." From Ecclesiastes 9:11, which came to mind immediately when reading this.

The book itself has more than a few apt / sobering observations like this, concluding at 12:13, somewhat abruptly after a sort of 'case study' on the futility of life without God.

Having just taken an IQ test out of curiosity, they strike me as testing very little beyond the ability to pattern recognise and extrapolate.

Having pattern recognised and extrapolated to my perception of the wealth-happiness curve, it seems that when your wants are met by your current wage, wanting more money is paradoxical -- it requires either time or stress that take away from the many other richnesses of life.

A little ambition (and savings) is good -- you can't recline too far back into the comfort zone -- but wealth never struck me as a particularly important measure of a person.

IQ is a very poor measure of intelligence (which is just speed), above 83.

Those that are above 83 will perform better than anyone under that number regardless of training. The military has quite a lot of research on this.

That's about all its useful for.

Could you please expand on that ? I haven't found any sources, the only thing that pops up is a bullshit claim by Jordan peterson, that has been debunked as, at best, an oversimplification.

There is nothing more for me to expand on. If you want to do the research some of the starting sources are below.

Peterson has spoken alot on IQ and made several claims about IQ, you'll need to be specific about which claim you mean. Discarding everything the man says is just throwing the baby out with the bathwater, a fallacy/flawed logic.

Here are the sources:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210426091730/https://www.theba... - Covers the required AFQT scores, Army being 31.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/after-service/201801...

https://web.archive.org/web/20200425230037/https://www.rand....

I don't know about "83" (the number I always see is 100), but: IQ tests are less discriminating at the high end, and test-retest reliability drops at the high end (the "high end" of an IQ test might just be testing grit or fatigue). I think it's widely understood that IQ is unreliably ordinal as scores increase.

You definitely don't need to dip into the Peterson Cinematic Universe to look this up!

Not OP but Nassim Taleb was written a lot about basically this

I ask myself this question on a regular basis. I feel a type of way when I see people who I don't consider to be as smart as me being richer than me. The smartest people I know aren't even the richest. It's as though there's an inverse correlation. Lol.

https://www.rxjourney.net/trapped-in-the-matrix

It’s who you know that matters, not what you know.

But what you know can make you know who matters

Here's a number that should make you vomit: IQ explains about 21% of income variation. That's it. Four fifths of why someone makes bank has nothing to do with their brain. Nobel economist James Heckman ran the numbers harder and found IQ accounts for 1-2% of income variance when you factor in everything else. One to two percent. Your SAT score is basically a rounding error on your paycheck.

he's ignoring individual preferences. In the context of a career setting, making a lot of money is conditional on passing the screening and interviews, which are indirectly IQ filters. So people who are smart and whose preferences are aligned towards wealth accumulation are at an advantage. You don't get into Jane Street unless you're smart.

Alexander and Diogenes. Lots of people just want to make enough to get on with their lives and don't consider wealth or fame a goal.

I was hoping this would end on a lighter note which gives some credit (praise?) to those who don't strive for wealth/ money. Alas, this is not the case. Or did I misinterpret what the author is trying to say? Edit: just read another comment which validates what I was thinking: > This wasn't worth reading. It is basically a giant wall of text, potentially AI generated, drawing comparisons that aren't important nor do they get to the call to action.

“He's an F1 engine in a shopping cart.”

This one gave me a proper chuckle

In my experience it’s also a question of focus and basic goal setting. What you care about, balanced against everything else in your world.

"William James Sidis whos IQ was somewhere between 250 and 300."

Wikipedia: "According to Sperling, Sidis's sister Helena told him that an unnamed examiner had estimated Sidis's intelligence in this range, but no documentation has ever been found to support this claim. Modern psychologists and historians of intelligence testing have noted several problems with such extreme IQ estimates: IQ tests in the early 1900s were not standardized or reliable enough to produce meaningful scores above 200. The concept of IQ as measured by modern tests did not exist during Sidis's childhood. Extreme scores often result from extrapolation errors rather than actual measurement. Contemporary accounts focused on Sidis's specific abilities rather than general intelligence measures."

This level of sloppiness about a simple fact-checkable claim means I can't trust the article about anything else. (To say nothing of the claims that aren't quantified at all.)

Also, I feel that it's a bit misleading not to mention that Sidis was "estranged from everyone" in large part because he was a socialist during the First Red Scare.

Coming into the comments section after reading the article to find the prime example of the "smart" person is just so amusing to me.

^^^ Found one of the people the article is about ^^^

The author committed the modern offense of using "ask" as a noun.

i highly disrespect someone "making an ask" one asks a question, or makes a request.

whichever styleguide inspired such butchering of our fair tongue should crawl back under the rock it came from.

I’m not poor. But I also didn’t sacrifice my morals in order to be rich. (Ok granted I made some strategic decisions away from service to others and towards more money, so that was a compromise of sorts). But I also made a few decisions where I could have got rich(er) but didn’t because it was incompatible with who I want to be in the world. Got an offer to go work at Facebook before most people had heard of it. Turned it down because the product offered nothing of value to the world. (Even though I could see it was the next big thing)

It’s easy to get rich if you’re willing to screw a bunch of people to do it. A better question might be to ask someone like Bill Gates if you’re such a good person why weren’t you a good person when you were getting rich? He headed Microsoft when it was behaving like a big bully, crushing competition behaving badly, heck, they invented FUD. If he was any good he’d have been good along the way and he wouldn’t be as rich. (Probably still pretty rich though).

Warren Buffett is a great example. Pretty nice rich guy right? Got his start buying up American textile companies, wringing the last remaining value out of them, laying off the workers and selling off the assets. If he’s so great why is he responsible for destroying the livelihoods of tens of thousands of fellow Americans? Getting rich usually amounts to taking more than your fair share. (I had a ceo who got rich while screwing me out of my shares) If you realize that and care about doing the right thing you won’t do it.

If you’re so smart why hasn’t that occurred to you yet? Surely you realized in high school that career choices that benefit humanity don’t pay well? Surely you made a conscious choice at that time to either take care of yourself or take care of others. Surely you’ve seen opportunities for wealth at the cost of taking advantage of others and not taken them?

This wasn't worth reading. It is basically a giant wall of text, potentially AI generated, drawing comparisons that aren't important nor do they get to the call to action.

The simple fact is, the world we live in today is disadvantaged, and its been made that way by purposeful intent through money-printing, and it will continue to become worse until it can't function anymore; that's what history has to say on that. You have delusional people making choices that can't be undone for short-term profit, neglecting that when the value of money disappears, so does all that profit.

Merit doesn't really matter in such environments, and the market isn't a real market in such either. It lacks core requirements for price discovery, and adversarial independent decision-making (i.e. the major market players can't cooperate, but that is what they do when the money printer tells them do this or we'll call your loans due).

Non-reserve debt is money-printing. Lots of history that goes into where that ends (as a positive feedback system that runs away unable to stop itself until catastrophe).

Jesus said "sell your possessions, give to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven".

I didn't read the whole article, but it's a great question.

On my religious journey, I have read things like this:

"You cannot serve God and money".

Ultimately, the smartest people, if they are Christian, will actually get rid of their money.

I asked God about it and he told me this:

"There's not enough money for everyone. A truly good person lets everybody else have the money, and just lives on charity".

It shocked me, but Jesus told me this:

"You can get more done without money than with it".

He pointed out the queen of england will never know her true friends, as everybody acts like it.

But if you are poor, you have that knowledge, and can thus live a healthier life.

Ultimately money is based of terror. It is literally based on the terror that if you counterfeit it you go to jail.

So I think that good people would not want to use a medium that requires terror to function.

This may sound crazy, but I think, as a programmer, it is the truth!

But maybe I'm wrong?

> "There's not enough money for everyone. A truly good person lets everybody else have the money, and just lives on charity" This also seems dangerously flawed. Money is a social construct, there could easily be enough for everyone if production > people’s needs. Some of this stuff strikes me as the result of ancient class wars.

Money is not a social construct. You are thinking of fiat, or numbers in bank computers. That's not money, it's IOU's. A gold coin is money. It has real material value irrespective of social constructs.

> Ultimately money is based of terror. It is literally based on the terror that if you counterfeit it you go to jail. The logic here seems flawed. This could be said of anything to do with obeying laws. Don’t I put my seatbelt on out of the terror that if I don’t I could go to jail? Therefore seatbelts require terror to function?

AI generated.

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