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Comment by seiji | Hacker News Reader

This paragraph sounds like classic Wolfram/Kurzweil egotism: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/magazine/the-professor-the...

Personality is a vector. Just because you are really high up on technical smarts means nothing in regard to the rest of you. We could simplify it down to a minimal [technical-smarts world] vector where at an extreme end you could have [100 0] being "brilliant, but forgot to wear pants to work today" to [0 100] being "the friendliest, most amazing person you'll ever meet, but they can't work a toaster." Few people are a Feynman. Most of us manage to be midline boring enough we wouldn't make interesting NYT articles.

But, more interestingly, never underestimate the ability of a smart person to seem dumber than they are for their own benefit. We honestly can't tell if he's a rube, a conman, or a mark.

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Having read the whole story, I can't help but think that he knew he was transporting drugs, but was duped into thinking he was doing it for the real Milani. Like all the best movie cons, you make the mark believe they're on the inside, but they're really not.

Getting back to the egotism: This is speculation, but I think his thought process on the drug smuggling probably went like this: "I'm so much smarter than everyone else I've ever met, of COURSE I will get away with it, especially with my airtight excuse if I am caught." This kind of reminds me of Hans Reiser, whose egotism and belief in his own superiority was also his downfall.

"I'm so much smarter than everyone else I've ever met, of COURSE I will get away with it"

Sometimes this happens. See: Facebook y Google.

>I'm so much smarter than everyone else I've ever met

People that seem to think this never seem to consider a simple explanation: Perhaps they just haven't met very smart people yet.

Seems unlikely, unless very smart people spend their time in nonobvious places.

(FWIW I went to quite possibly the best university in the world, and while my jobs since then have all been programming I've seen a wide variety of industries - and in one case, dealt with clients from many more. Apart from anything else, sheer sample size suggests I should've met at least a few of the very smart people by now. (That said I have met at least four people who were definitely smarter than me, and several more who might have been, which possibly doesn't put me in the category you're describing))

The world is a big place. Your admission that you have met people smarter than yourself may well put you in a different category.

The people I talk of are the people that seem to honestly think they are the smartest people in the world/their industry. Unless they have occasion to interact with people on the level of Nobel laureates routinely, I suspect their sample may not include 'very smart people' (and I don't mean 'very smart', I mean VERY smart, i.e. I am not saying the people they have met have been dull, just that they may not be in the upper echelons of intelligence).

Also, people's self-ranking of their own traits (especially something that is somewhat ill-defined, like intelligence) is notoriously less than objective.

Just know that for some of the people you have met and consider yourself clearly smarter than, they may have the the opposite view and believe it just as assuredly as you.

How do you dissociate the contributions of knowledge, motivation, and experience from intelligence?

You come off as young and naive.

Examples: The idea of there being an isolatable thing called "smart," and moreover that you could assess it (in relation to your own, even), and that it would admit a total ordering even if you could. Also, the idea that there might be a "best university in the world" -- across students and areas of study.

This is a thing that I have observed people with limited life experience do. Like myself, some years ago.

Sheer sample size is relevant if people were distributed randomly. This is obviously not the case - people have a lot of choice as to people they meet, encounters they participate in, etc. and smart people probably have even more choice since if they didn't want to meet somebody - say, for some reason, they'd hate to meet students eager to meet smart people - they would easily find a way out of it, being smart. So your encounters or lack of those with them are not random and sample size does not matter that much.

I think you don't really know what you're talking about. Sample size? What about sample quality?

People are generally - very generally - good at what they enjoy doing, because it sets up a virtuous circle: they do it because they enjoy it, and they enjoy the feeling of competence from it. And after having achieved this competence, they can start to tell whether other people might be better at it than them.

The mistake is to egotistically think that what ever "it" is, is the only metric that matters. There are lots of "its", and while there is usually some correlation, more than one dimension is needed to explain the hidden model.

The "smartest" person in the world might be a baker or mechanic or farmer. They may be smart enough to see that analytical prowess on its own isn't particularly impressive, especially when combined with social deficits; that the best one can hope for, in the end, is that the work of one's life is its own reward.

So much of "smarts" is just used for peacocking, jockeying for social status, in whatever pyramid we've embedded ourselves into. And we can hardly help it; we're genetically programmed to do it. Some are more aware of the trap we're in than others; but we all play along to some degree, because the penalties for refusing to play are severe. I suspect the smartest people are those who've found a way out of the trap, the hedonic treadmill, without being kicked out of the game.

I'm not the smartest person I know, but I used to think that you could be. Nobody is, for it's a heterogenous cloud of expertises. I spent a lot of time studying, mostly at Oxford and USC ie smart places, and my impression is that hardly any of my colleagues were a patch in overall brightness on many of those whom I have met in the past few years in the Bay Area. However, criteria for smarts are also exceedingly heterogeneous, and you need to have breadth, experience and wisdom to see those smarts. And acknowledge your own weaknesses that you can work on them to be a more sophistimacated [sic] human. I now know so many more smart people than I did, but it may be that I've a. trained myself in humility and b. actually found smart people so I can learn from them, and thus provide more value myself from my strengths. This then underlines my argument as it means I probably did underestimate some of my Oxford compadres in my youth.

So, beware those claiming to be smart. Mostly, as most who've encountered Wolfram, Kurzweil and their ilk know, have a big chunk of smarts missing. empathetic and listening skills, huge in other kinds of pattern matching, which we haven't been able to code yet. I have a recent acquaintance who's like that too. Brilliant coder, engineer and hosts a History Channel TV show on inventions, but his ego is so set on his and his friends' brilliance that he misses the point.

Focusing on the processing and analytic skills is a blindness to the other equally important parts of a well-adapted and responsive psyche. That you have amazing memory, analytic and processing skills is truly wonderful, but A. it's not a moral plus, it's just a rare thing you have, like skills at piano or football, whcih can be trained, but mostly inherited too and B. if you rely on that alone you're neglecting a lot of other stuff.

To borrow from a US Supreme Court Justice's famous phrase regarding obscenity, I know smart when I see it.

I too went to a reputedly top tier universtity (because I didn't want to go college and applied only there, but my father had the last laugh when I was accepted) and there were plenty of students born rich with the best educations from pre-school on, but there were also plenty who qualified on merit; that is, they proved to be especially smart/successful in some field or generally/measurably smart enough to meet admissions standards.

But I found the same old curve fell into place: some folks could cut it, some couldn't.

But here's how I came to measure 'smart' as in WICKED smart: the guy who majored in physics, published short stories in national magazines, taught himself guitar for kicks while getting stoned, learned Italian in a month to qualify for a semester abroad, could dunk a basketball and play a pretty fair game of tennis, was at once personable but didn't suffer fools, yet still wanted to do more. (Not to offend, but after geting through machine language he confessed that computer courses seemed to be 'technical training' and something he could pick up later if need be.)

Oh, and he got laid. A lot.

So, while numerous comments here have objected to the subjective, narrow idea of smartness, I must disagree that it is only in the eye beholder, and only a self-comparison.

It could also be that people who are smart (or not) in one area simply fail to notice or recognize other smart people.

I agree. When we got to the sms records part I was getting ready for the corruption angle wondering whether they were fabricated. However, there was absolutely no indication that the he even questioned their authenticity... instead he goes on to make some incredulous story to explain them... Clearly he thinks he's much smarter than anyone else in the room.

This is the origin of "you can't con an honest man." I was a victim of a very weird kind of con once, and I'm not ashamed to admit that my ego played a huge role in getting me to fall for it. Con men play to the mark's ego because because it works!

(Luckily in my case I escaped with little loss, and didn't end up in an Argentine jail.)

> you can't con an honest man.

Unfortunately it's not true. There are a number of cons that apply towards people wanting to do the right thing (and usually mixing a bit of greed in as well), to make the pull twice as hard to resist.

Check out the Glim-dropper scam[1]. I've heard it described in multiple variations (diamond ring at a gas station, wallet on the street, etc). Importantly, the mark is both making money, and providing help to someone who needs it.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_confidence_tricks

But in this scenario, an honest person would tell the finder about the reward and give him the contact info. It only works if the shopkeeper gets greedy and keeps the reward a secret.

And then the finder miraculously has to be somewhere soon, or is traveling on their way somewhere else, and would happily give up a portion of the reward if they could just be allowed to leave...

At that point, the less greedy the mark, the more they lose.

The Glim-dropper scam involves the mark trying make money by inserting oneself as an intermediary who provides no benefit, concealing his true intentions. Outside of HN, that is considered dishonesty.

I don't think it's quite as simple as that, and that you're ignoring all the possible ways it could play out. I saw it explained and performed once on a program where it was a lost wallet of some sort, and if/when the mark did not offer to insert themselves into the transaction, the person who "found" that wallet would explain that they needed to be somewhere soon, but aren't greedy, and would happily split the reward so they don't miss their meeting.

In this case, the mark is helping not only the person who lost the wallet, but also the finder by allowing them to gain some reward money while not actually having to return the found item.

In this case the mark has real reasons the could expect some financial gain: 1) There is an actual task to be accomplished, they must be intermediary for this item and deliver it to the recipient. 2) The recipient may very well be believed to be unavailable for some period, and the mark may feel that the financial loss constitutes during this period is non-zero. 3) There's risk involved, as they must put out some of teir own money for the transaction to take place, even if there is expected return. There will likely be a risk/reward ratio that makes sense internally.

To me that very clearly makes it possibe that the mark is honest and non-greedy and will get taken by the con.

Indeed, the more honest and generous the mark is, the more money the con makes.

In the Glim scam, the target wants to get money he doesn't earn (neither by honest work nor by actually finding the supposed lost item) and profit by concealing information that is not supposed to be concealed (i.e. the contact info of the supposed one-eyed man). If he acted honestly, he'd say "oh, lucky you, you're getting a grand, here's the phone number!" and his loss would be $0.

I think the honesty in here implies you wouldn't act greedily.

You're right. The "fake donation" scam is one example. As is the "long lost grandkid, who needs to pay his medical bills". But ... most scams do prey on greed - people assume that it's something illegal, but that it's not themselves getting ripped off by it.

Do you really think a personality vector (space) basis is close to two-dimensional, or was that a drastically simplified example? I don't think [IQ EQ] comes close to accurately describing personality.

Plenty of people who have poor inter-personal skills and "emotional intelligence" would still not be caught dead transporting someone else's luggage in that situation.

Oh, not at all. I didn't want to clutter things with a detailed dozen to hundred dimensional example.

A good intro to various (small, 7 to 10 dimensional) standard bases of personality descriptors is Making Sense of People: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0050JKCI6

Plus, some of the attributes depend on the person observing. People have widely varying likability based on who they are around. (e.g. "knows how to comfort me when I'm sad" or "quality of goodnight hug" or "their voice makes me want to tape their mouth shut and throw them in an active volcano")

Actually, Feynman might not be the best scientist role model to hold up for all-around common sense and decent behavior, particularly where relationships with women are concerned.

He's a great counter-example to stereotype of the absent-minded or socially awkward genius. He was the rare combination of genius level scientist with powerful personal charisma.

Were women unhappy with him?

Oh yes! One of the anecdotes I remember from James Gleick’s _Genius_ was that one of Feynman’s ex-girlfriends kidnapped some memento of his nobel prize to get him to apologize (sorry, a bit hazy on the details, it’s been more than 15 years since I read that).

It's a bit complicated. From a talk by Danny Hillis [1]:

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The charming side of Richard helped people forgive him for his uncharming characteristics. For example, in many ways Richard was a sexist. Whenever it came time for his daily bowl of soup he would look around for the nearest "girl" and ask if she would fetch it to him. It did not matter if she was the cook, an engineer, or the president of the company. I once asked a female engineer who had just been a victim of this if it bothered her. "Yes, it really annoys me," she said. "On the other hand, he is the only one who ever explained quantum mechanics to me as if I could understand it." That was the essence of Richard's charm.

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[1] http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine...

It wasn't his natural trait, his line with women was something he learned young. He was doing this entirely consciously.

http://www.roberttwigger.com/journal/2010/9/16/richard-feynm...

Maybe he does not want to end up in the position Bill Nye was in: http://www.tmz.com/2012/02/27/bill-nye-girlfriend-stalker-bl...

He was getting paid well as a professor with an endowed chair at a major research university. He has no motive to smuggle drugs. He was the victim here.

He was obsessed with marrying this woman, and if he thought smuggling drugs for her would win her over, that seems like motive to me.

There's some aspect of his personal finances that's been glossed over here... it's pretty clear that despite decades of income he didn't have much in the way of assets to use to pay for his defense. (One would think you'd sell anything you own if it means avoiding a prolonged stay in a South American jail.) Maybe it was the divorce, or something else, but he doesn't seem to have a great financial situation.

Another possibility is that he was looking for some FU money? He felt very highly of himself, perhaps he felt he was being held back and wanted a bit more freedom. Pure speculation of course.

Definitely possible. I was just replying to the suggestion that he had "no motive" to smuggle drugs. $400K (and tax-free) is a lot of motive, even if you have substantial savings. Martha Stewart was worth millions and ended up in jail over what, $250K?

That's like saying millionaire could not possibly commit fraud - he already has a million! Madoff's case provides ample proof to the contrary, to say nothing of other people operating the finance industry.

> He has no motive to smuggle drugs.

Because .. he already had a job? A whole lot of crime is committed for reasons other than financial.

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