Hacker News Reader

Comment by paulpauper | Hacker News Reader

91. don't buy XRP

but in seriousness,

I think it is easier to apply these rules to people you know than strangers. Look how often people lose patience with each other online.

>85. Cultivate compassion for those less intelligent than you. Many people, through no fault of their own, can’t handle forms, scammers, or complex situations. Be kind to them because the world is not.

Interestingly, being smart does not protect one from scams. Look at all the smart people who got duped by Madoff. Smart people are just as inclined to believe BS as less intelligent people are , if the BS is dressed up in such a way to appeal to smart people. If anything, being dumb helps, because scams typically require forms and complex schemes, such as investment schemes.

View on HN

> Look how often people lose patience with each other online.

I think this is largely an issue of scale.

Say you are driving on a single-lane, one-way road, which ends at a T intersection with a stop sign. The other road is also 1-way, 1-lane, and does not have a stop sign. It has a traffic light around 20 car lengths after your road. You are waiting for a chance to turn in; the other road has a fair amount of traffic, but moving slowly since the light was red. A car stops (or moves very slowly) to make room for you to cut in, and waves you on. Very nice for you, and the cars behind you are not inconvenienced much.

In my experience, this kind of thing happens relatively frequently in rural areas, and quite the opposite in cities. For myself, that's largely because in the city there's always a car looking to get in, and if I stopped for them all, I'd never get anywhere.

In person, I am quite patient. Online, still relatively patient I guess, but less so, especially with strangers. There's just so many people who I could be talking to, that if I gave everyone I talked to the same attention that I do irl, I wouldn't have time to do anything else! My impatience translates more into "ghosting" a conversation if the other person isn't getting my point, vs snapping at them, but it's the same cause.

Sometimes I write long (as in time to compose) comments like this one, but that's partially for myself, to verify that my thoughts are logically consistent.

Interesting bit about the cars in the city. I've always let 1 or 2 cars in, but cut it off after that for the reason you mention.

My experience differs with the cars. During my life I have moved from very rural area to always denser places. The denser it gets the more helpful the other drivers are. Dunno why this happens.

IMO New York drivers are the least agreeable and a diverse sprawlscape like LA has all kinds, depending on the neighborhood (looking at you Glendale) so neither stereotype align with reality.

I suspect what the GP thinks of as rural is more exurban or even suburban, though IME they're often just as bad. Rural is when you see a handful of cars on an hour long drive so opinions will vary wildly

I’ve grown up driving in east coast cities and I will say that there is a lot of honking and anger and cutting off of people, but drivers in general are very spatially aware and there are unwritten rules about how to cut in/merge etc. so I’ve never taken any of it personally. It’s all part of the theater. Oddly I feel less comfortable in other regions out west where speeds are higher and people are sticklers for “rules of the road” (IMO feel like “right of way” casts a cloak of invincibility around them). I feel that those drivers don’t see driving for the complex, multi-person game it is and don’t play their part in the game. It’s like their playing in single player mode. I can see though if you’re unfamiliar with either perspective the other seems foreign and wrong. But then again I’m biased (just casting a different perspective on angry NYC/Boston/NE-US drivers)...

Agree on both counts.

> I think it is easier to apply these rules to people you know than strangers. Look how often people lose patience with each other online.

Your reply in particular, though also many of the bullet points themselves to an extent, feels like the Sermon on the Mount — no wonder Charlie Stross keeps comparing [Less Wrong, Rationalist philosophy, the Singularity] to Christian theology.

> Smart people are just as inclined to believe BS as less intelligent people are , if the BS is dressed up in such a way to appeal to smart people.

Indeed. When the Sequences talks of rationality still being rationality even when it’s wearing a clown suit and makeup, it drew my attention to the inverse case of intellectual fraud still being intellectual fraud when it’s dressing itself up like One Of Us.

It's not just about being smart/dumb, it's also about being trusting and agreeable. I think falling prey to the occasional (hopefully not life-destroying) deception is part of the cost of being an easy to work with and trusting person. There are people who will take advantage of you, but most won't. On the balance, this leads to better relationships and a better life. OTOH you can be cynical and questioning of every persons' motives, and that can make many normal interactions exhausting, at work and in social contexts. It can add an edge to you that most people do not like.

The ideal would be to have perfect, instant judgement of character, knowing when to be open or closed with people in various contexts. That's the hardest of all, and comes from having great parents/mentors and making lots of mistakes.

The thing is that you can differentiate between contexts. No?

At work I'm learning to trust more and be kinder. I actually have colleagues today that are smart and seem to be kind too. Not always the case though before. Most people have been rather dumb so far. And I'm not particularly bright if you ask me.

Road: I'll let the guy in. I know how to do zipper style traffic. If the next guy tries to take advantage I'll be sure to try as hard as I can not to let him in. Eff him! The guys that get real close on the highway even though I'm already going 10% over the speed limit? I'll make sure to drop to exactly the speed limit or on the highway Match the speed of the truck right next to me. Back the eff off dude! If he does I'll accelerate and get out of the way. Most don't get it even with gestures. The guy coming on with 30% over the speed limit from behind but I see them or they slow down and stay 3 car lengths behind? I'll make room as soon as I pass the other traffic and might even go 15% over the limit. I'm not unreasonable.

Companies? I'll expect you to be unreasonable. You have to prove to me that you're worth it. Sorry but too many bad apples. You don't deliver in the time you said you would and then you don't answer the phone or call me back? Sorry but I will not assume that you are just having a family situation and it's taking you a while due to that. I will assume that you're out to gouge your customers and try to use the get out of jail free card all the time. If you don't call me back the day you said you would I'll assume you're a scumbag trying to cheat me out of my money or you don't want my business.

I am not sure if that many smart people got duped by Madoff, surely not for significant %, of their net worth. It's just who the public considers smart often isn't that at all.

We had similar scandal in our country with tens of thousands of people being duped into buying some kind of gold secured deposits. We have heard how smart people like doctors, actors, lawyers invested significant % of their net worth on it. I see it differently. They are not smart. If you invest big % of your net worth into one thing, especially if that thing is not a huge publicly traded and regularly audited company/fund then you are not smart. If you're tempted to put a lot of money into some magic fund that trades gold you are just dumb.

Not putting all your eggs in one basket, especially if it sounds like some exclusive great opportunity isn't rocket science. It's just that vast majority of the population is clueless when it comes to thinking about money, probability and motivations of others.

I think the point about the compassion is great. Very small % of people can understand things like financial instruments, expected value or utility of money. We need a framework to protect less fortunate from scams because that's most people and no one wants the world where scammers reside at the top of the food chain.

Just wrt Madoff, a lot of people who were smart enough to make real money in their lives were taken by him. Some may not be too bright, but that would be a long tail and there were surely some at the other end of the curved too. I asked a bigwig at a legit hedge fund once how they never spotted that he was a fraud, and his answer was that they couldn't reproduce his returns, so they figured he was smarter than them.

It might have not been obvious it's a fraud but it was obvious not to put significant % of your net worth in his fund. It's basic risk management. Maybe I am biased coming from a gambling world where it's the very first lesson you get. Betting more than a few % of your net worth on one horse is just a judgement blunder.

A lot of smart people knew he had to be a kind of fraud, but they thought he was their fraud -- it was assumed he was making money through some kind of front running.

I've heard before that the smarter you are, the more naive you are. The way I think about it, the smarter you are the more often you are correct about something that no one else is, which causes you to rationally place your judgement above others, which causes you to believe a bunch of nonsense. When presented with counter-evidence, you are more likely to trust your own reasoning than to trust the evidence.

I was told long ago that con men like to target doctors, because doctors believe they are too smart to be scammed.

Rule number one, always find what people want and play on it.

Also they have lots of money.

money that they scammed from their poor patients

> I think it is easier to apply these rules to people you know than strangers.

This, and they're also easier to apply in person. It's a lot harder to be casually vicious to someone you're face to face with, for most people at least (although some are quite capable of such IRL).

> Look how often people lose patience with each other online.

Many of the most popular platforms implicitly or explicitly reward self-righteous moralizing, dog-piling, mean-spirited snark, glib context-insensitivity, baiting/provocation, appeals to emotion, etc.

People that lose patience online are mostly teenagers or young adults. I think boys even in their 20's have hard time to learn compassion.

Part about strangers is that it is far easier to unload on someone you will never meet again. When you know you will have to face that person the next day you have to have really good reason to lose your tamper. You don't have to understand compassion to understand consequences of talking foul things to your father.

Smart is so easy to bypass. Put anybody in à New place with high emotional incentives and all of their side knowledge will fade when facing the fairy tale.

I’ve heard a magician claim PhDs are much easier to fool than children. The former can apparently rationalize any (wrong) scenario

James Randi said that about scientists. He has demonstrated a matchbox trick that fooled some of them into believing a person had supernatural powers.

Maybe some scientists get frustrated if they don't understand the trick. There are so many things that children don't understand that tricks have less effects.

It's the problem of trust. Even the smartest people on the planet have the need to trust someone. Trust can be abused, of course.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com