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Comment by untilHellbanned | Hacker News Reader

Why do people always mention that someone is smart? It's a non-informative sentence. How many times do you hear that someone is dumb?

I'll take my community college educated mother over this "child prodigy" on the vast majority of subjects, so he must not be that great.

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On the contrary, 99.99% of the population is really dumb. (I'd like to think I'm part of the other 0.01%, but the low prior probability of that situation suggests that I don't have enough evidence to justify that conclusion.) Wolfram is not part of that 99.99%. He's part of the 0.01%. But he's squandered his talent on self-indulgent and self-destructive projects instead of contributing to the intellectual and cultural advancement of humanity.

It turns out that human nature is such that being really smart doesn't give you a high probability of being right about things, especially when the truth is not favorable to you, just a slightly better one.

You missed my point. If he is smart and yet not right as you say, doesn't that make him dumb?

Arrogance makes smart people idiots.

In short, high amounts of intelligence, while comparatively rare, is not necessarily a trait you should optimize for.

I feel that your attempt at summarizing my comment falls far short of the mark in many ways; not only was that not the entire meaning of my comment, it is not only its main point, and in fact it is not even among the things my comment said. In fact, it is mysterious to me how you could read that into what I wrote, to the point that it tempts me to question your sanity.

Ow. That's pretty painful. Let me explain. You claim that 99.99% of the population is really dumb. You use Wolfram as an example of someone in the 0.01% who squandered their talent. This shows that being in 0.01% percent won't necessarily give you a strong advantage, and the advantages you get are easy to squander.

You than say:

>It turns out that human nature is such that being really smart doesn't give you a high probability of being right about things, especially when the truth is not favorable to you, just a slightly better one.

So if being smart won't help you much with being right about things, and there are other skills that can better help you be right about things (there are), than optimizing for intelligence isn't a reasonable goal, because there are other abilities you can optimize for which would give you a greater advantage.

What did I miss?

There are situations in which being smart is necessary but not sufficient to be right about something, and there are things other than being right about things that being smart enables you to do. Some of them, like cleverly rationalizing your errors, are counterproductive, but others, like coming up with good scientific hypotheses to test, are not.

But I wasn't really talking about your own intelligence at all. I was talking about how your judgment of someone's credibility should depend on their intelligence.

My apologies for hurting your feelings with my crappy comment.

Thanks for clarifying.

And no, you didn't really hurt my feelings that much :-). If my feelings were so easily hurt, I'd have stopped commenting years ago. As it stands, my comments aren't always smart (in retrospect, some of them are downright idiotic), but I do my best.

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