Hacker News Reader

Comment by drummojg | Hacker News Reader

I would never drag pico. I wrote software that's been packaged in Linux distros in pico. And I lost the urge to be The Smartest Guy In The [Room/Mailing List/Forum] a long, long time ago.

View on HN

what's really the point in being the smartest person in the room? you'll never learn anything!

sometimes humans do irrational things / have illogical behaviour just to glorify their own ego. it happens also to the very best sometimes

Yep, whenever you find yourself being the smartest person in the room, you need to find yourself a smarter room.

Or just learn how to teach.

> Or just learn how to teach.

Most people don't want to learn (in particular not learn sufficiently hard to really improve).

Motivating students to want to learn isn't rocket science, just a rare skill to see.

If it is not rocket science, how does it work?

You have to get them excited about the subject. Do something cool with it. Of course, you have to be well-versed enough in the subject to be able to do that for the uninitiated. But if you're always the smartest person in the room and you're not motivated or in the position to be constantly finding a newer crowd, then this resolves down to meeting the folks you're with where they're at, then pushing the conversation into deeper grounds. If you're really that much smarter than them, this should be easy, if not, maybe you might have something to learn from them after all.

Or you could just, yannow, give up on the intellectual rat race. It's pretty exhausting, and winning at it isn't all it's cracked up to be.

True, many a junior dev I've had to work with was convinced they're the smartest person in the room, good at what they do but so full of themselves they're unable to adapt, acquire new knowledge or consider new paradigms.

Learning requires some amount of humbleness, to accept you don't know everything.

Not only that, but you constantly feel like Idiocracy is playing out in real time, and that everyone else around you is closer to monkeys than a rational empathetic human... it's exhausting, lonely and debilitating. Then you realize there are people much smarter than you, and you wonder how they must feel.

Reminds me of that House MD episode where the delivery driver was a secret genius who was abusing DXM to dumb himself down just to feel happy.

"For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief."

I used pico or nano as my everyday unix coding editor for something like fifteen years, starting in the late '90s. It was just fine. I couldn't stand vi and didn't see the point of emacs; I type faster than I think, so I never found that text-editing was enough of a bottleneck to make sophisticated automation worth the effort.

I only stopped using pico/nano after writing my own editor, which blatantly stole pico's interface design.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com