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Comment by abxyz | Hacker News Reader

A lot of (talented people in a field) are idiots / irrational in other parts of their life. A very talented engineer with options may buy in to Elon’s public vision (which sounds good on the surface) and may be completely incapable of recognizing when someone is betraying their vision. Very smart people get caught up in nonsense all the time.

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I find while this is true, those talented people aren't very good at the long game, or building things in a sustainable way.

Like most of the "brilliant" people I know that fit the profile you're describing, the usually build product in the same way they maintain relationships, chaotic.

If you consider actual intelligent people, this isn't true. Intelligence is about dealing with information and interpreting it in correct ways - what domain that information comes from, whether politics, social issues, or coding or engineering, is irrelevant.

Most people really just DGAF about politics in US. The (few) smart people working for Elon are those who are really into whatever technology and just like to play with toys while getting paid. I used to work with such a dude a few jobs back in my aerospace days, guy was multi talented across both software and hardware, and could easily be making bank at Apple Amazon Google in one of their edge programs, but was content with getting paid like 80k a year in 2010s in a fairly high CoL area with an hour commute all because he got to play with a rather big UAV.

Ah the “no true Scotsman” of intelligence.

There's a difference between being well read and being able to do something with what you've read. I would argue a far more useful and pragmatic definition of intelligence is one that focuses on, given the same information, a more intelligent person can achieve more with that information. In such a scenario, doing nothing if the information is bad is obviously more than what is achieved by acting on it. The idea, I guess, is that intelligence is about how you wield information, not what information you have. Being able to swim long distances unassisted is fairly called having high endurance. Doing so with all manner of aids, assistance, and pre-planned routes, is less impressive. So in a space of information, intelligence is like strength, or endurance. It allows one to defend, to change, to build, to create, especially in areas where others might be limited.

So this is in no way a `no true Scotsman` fallacy. Being able to be well read is a product of having intelligent people in your society, people who make hard things accessible, make it learnable, but it does not itself make you intelligent.

Surprisingly, to me anyway, is that Elon has a larger negative popularity in the US than Netanyahu. Even people who aren't politically aware think he's a jerk.

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