candybar

As a casual poker player, I find this line of reasoning specious. Sports betting, blackjack and even roulette with a biased wheel are all games of skill by this definition. Poker games are designed specifically to appeal to our gambling instinct so that better players can play the house while worse players gamble away their chips. It's true that from the perspective of the best players, it's not truly gambling, but they are not the ones gambling laws are written to protect. This isn't too different from a casino owner saying - I'm not gambling, I make money every day. You may not be gambling but your customers are. The same is true of poker - even if you're not gambling, your opponents are.

Edit: Will downvoters explain their reasoning? Btw, someone else said something about how poker is a game of luck at low skill level and game of chance at high skill level but that's not really how it works. Poker is a game of skill if you're playing against bad players because the game is consistently beatable with sufficient skills. The better and more sound your opponents become, not just relative to you but on an absolute basis, the more important the role of luck becomes.

For those who are calling the actions of the US "hypocritical" and others who are indiscriminately defending the US by saying "but we didn't do this and that" - don't forget to distinguish between individuals and countries.

Those who are doing this in China are most likely not doing this for China - they are taking advantage of state resources to benefit themselves and their cronies. As much as they are stealing from the US, they are stealing from their own citizens. This is good old-fashioned corruption.

The loop of corruption tends to be more subtle and longer in the US, but it's also most likely the case many people who are engaged in espionage, corporate or otherwise, are out for themselves and using the information, expenditures, etc, to directly or indirectly benefit themselves.

Random people from China and France and the US arguing among themselves pretending that the enemy is definitely the spying apparatus in the other country and not their own and so on is kind of missing the point and worse, doing exactly what the perpetrators want us to be doing. The discord between nations, manufactured or not, is their raison d'etre - it's what keeps them funded.

With that said, holding specific individuals responsible and make their lives difficult is sounds pretty good to me. I wish this happened more often, for US officials abusing their authority as well as foreign officials.

Edit: The point isn't that these people aren't employed by the Chinese government, but that the end goal is almost certainly private gains. China isn't some single unified entity where all government employees are working tirelessly for "China" or in this case, to benefit corporate titans who are much richer than they are - economic espionage on behalf of specific private sector entities is almost certainly about some quid pro quo by which government employees are monetizing their official capacity.

Original sources:

http://www.census.gov/ces/dataproducts/datasets/lbd.html

http://www.census.gov/ces/dataproducts/bds/overview.html

Methodology:

http://www.census.gov/ces/pdf/CES-WP-02-17.pdf

Looking more carefully, I think the numbers tell a completely different story - this is not about the decline in entrepreneurship, but more about the rise of contingent workers and one-person businesses. Their definition of firm is a business that has paid employees and not all contingent workers count under that definition because they are often independent contractors or employees of a third party agency. The broader availability of all kinds of services from legal to insurance to accounting to technology to logistics to HR/staffing also allows 1-person businesses to handle more than they ever have, while potential legal and regulatory concerns have raised the cost of hiring the first employee. This is not about consolidation but bifurcation.

This is Microsoft realizing that Windows desktop monopoly, while mighty, doesn't necessarily translate to other markets, especially cloud services, all that well because the monopoly is based on compatibility and compatibility means leaving those holes that allow for third-parties to hijack the platform to deliver their services. Also in a world that kept needing new desktop operating systems, OS monopoly was far more valuable than app monopoly but in a world where a 10-year old operating system is hard to kill, app monopoly is more important, because OS has already been commoditized.

In this sense, their Office monopoly, which is not as reliant on third-party add-ins or platform openness, and is far more based on product superiority, is more important for them to preserve. Office gives them a strong chance at dominance in business cloud services. Since they are far ahead of competitors at this point, they want to win it as quickly as possible before competitors catch up. This has nothing to do with Microsoft conceding anything - it's simply that Office is far too important to be tied to Windows.

The problem I'm seeing with this whole unification of design across a whole system including hardware and software is that designing a proper UI for software is orders of magnitude more complex than designing UI for hardware. Not only is software far more complex than typical end-user hardware from a functionality standpoint, it's far more malleable, indefinitely extensible and has to work with third-party components over which it has little control. Also, because it takes far longer to learn how to use software, simply being good isn't enough - it has to work within the constraints of people's expectations, far more than a piece of hardware has to.

Now, there's certainly commonality between the two but if you were to exaggerate the difference, hardware UI design is like writing a sonnet. The medium is constraining but the compromises you have to make with other people are minimal - if you write a great sonnet, the chance is that people will like it. Software UI design is more like writing a constitution - it's about compromises. You have to weigh the needs of present users against those of future users, usability of old applications against new applications, properly balance the opinions and ideas of a whole bunch of people involved in design and implementation of various features, not to mention third-party developers. No matter what you do, there will be a huge number of inconsistencies, a lot of people will hate it and many others will worship and faithfully copy your mistakes, in a way that makes correcting your mistakes difficult.

Edit: Btw, when I say hardware UI, I actually mean the hardware as seen and directly manipulated by the user without software as the intermediary. If by hardware, we mean software interface to the hardware, the above points also apply to hardware, though hardware is still considerably simpler and the work is done almost entirely at the component level that has nothing to do with Jony Ive. At the whole system level, which is where Jony Ive comes in, hardware UI design is inherently simple. Simple doesn't mean easy - it just means you're judged by different standards.

The line of reasoning you've taken seems reasonable, but I don't think it works. So let's step back a little and take on an even more fundamental moralistic argument. The workers of the companies whose shares hedge fund managers trade may say, wait a minute, we're doing all the work and there's somebody out there creating models of our work in some dinky little spreadsheet and making more money than all of us by trading units of our work! From some moral standpoint, they are not really wrong - hedge fund managers are disproportionately well-compensated and they don't directly add value.

But what happens when you stop hedge fund managers (or really any informed traders) from arbitraging based on whatever research and analysis they do? Prices get out of line. And if prices get out of line or disappear, transactions either go away or are made on uneconomic terms. That's the problem with getting rid of hedge fund managers. This is why financial speculation is tolerated.

Now how does HFT affect this equation? Well, it's quite simple - they accelerate the social benefits of the actions of hedge fund managers while reducing their profits. When you're looking purely at the interaction between HFT and hedge funds, it seems like hedge funds are doing all the hard work and HFT is taking a cut for no reason. But when you realize that the product sold by these hedge fund managers to the rest of the society is better prices, HFT is bargaining with the hedge fund managers on behalf of the broader society and delivering the product quicker and cheaper.

The key to understanding this is that while the social value of hedge fund managers comes from efficient markets they help create, they themselves don't want efficient markets because they can't get paid as well in efficient markets. What HFT does is it brings about efficient prices a little quicker than they would otherwise.

Edit: The above does not preclude the possibility that HFT is harmful, but it limits the possibility largely to a world where hedge fund managers as a group are too poorly paid to be properly incentivized to do their work well. I don't think anyone's gonna go there.

Edit2: Another way to think about this is that hedge fund managers expressing outrage are trying to have it both ways - they want to get paid for their work but don't want to move prices in the process, even though price movements are their only contribution to society. And don't forget their access to liquidity comes from noise-traders who are willing to accept prices as they exist and HFT helps even the playing field between noise-traders and informed-traders, allowing the former to trade in sufficient volume to keep the spreads low.

But for the most part, it's not the buy-side complaining about HFT, because there have always been gate keepers and paying them has always been part of the game. Almost all actual complaints about HFT seem to come from people whose work is being replaced by HFT - the old school line-jumpers whose art no longer seems to translate to the brave new world.

It's certainly a hoop if you're already employed and have a multitude of options that I would presume the best and the brightest all do. It can come across as nonsense because if I'm good and know I'm good, I'd expect any potential employers to be able to recognize that easily without a trial period. And it certainly reflects a fear of commitment, warranted or not. I'm not sure why any in-demand developer would subject himself to that kind of trial period - not only is it against the terms of most employement agreements, it represents disproportionate commitment to a single job lead, which may be better spent on interviewing and receiving other offers. You, as an employer, are not special and the best and the brighest recognize that.

I don't think it works well as a filter either - a technical interview can easily assess capabilities and while you're right that it cannot accurately assess work ethic or motivation, a trial period cannot either! A desperate candidate during a trial period is generally going to behave very differently than he would a year down the road when he feels bored and the job is secure in his mind. Is it a better filter in a vacuum? If you start with the same sample of candidates, all of whom had to go through whatever process you devise, would a trial period make it easier for you to find the best candidates? Of course. But having such a process significantly skews your candidate pool to the desperate. That's not necessarily a wrong approach to recruiting, but it has nothing to do with hiring the best and the brightest. In addition, unless you're extremely careful, you'll be mostly judging candidates based on their familiarity with your technology stack and workflow, as opposed to long-term potential because that's what short-term productivity depends upon.

It may not apply to you in particular, but one other thing that would make me worry about a trial period is that it's indicative of two other personal flaws on the part of the hiring manager - he may be 1) indecisive and 2) technically incompetent. The indecisiveness part is obvious - not only is not being able to hire without a trial period a mark of indecisiveness by itself, it's also a hedge against future indecisiveness in getting rid of employees that don't work out. I also find that technically competent people can judge competence in others very well, very quickly. They aren't always right and there are qualities that only manifest over a longer period of time, but those qualities can't be judged in a few days of work.

Paul Graham's advice to investors is apt here:

http://paulgraham.com/angelinvesting.html

"How do you be a good angel investor? The first thing you need is to be decisive. When we talk to founders about good and bad investors, one of the ways we describe the good ones is to say "he writes checks." That doesn't mean the investor says yes to everyone. Far from it. It means he makes up his mind quickly, and follows through. You may be thinking, how hard could that be? You'll see when you try it. It follows from the nature of angel investing that the decisions are hard. You have to guess early, at the stage when the most promising ideas still seem counterintuitive, because if they were obviously good, VCs would already have funded them."

Stringing people along while not being able to make up their mind is what mediocre investors and VCs do - without seeing good evidence to the contrary, I'd guess that this applies to employers as well.

Edit: in case my point wasn't clear, I'm not saying the approach is wrong or doesn't work or anything along those lines, merely that it's not how you hire the best and the brightest. Now, it's possible he meant "the best and the brightest" in the cliched way where everyone thinks they hire the best and the brightest, in which case it's fine. But in a literal sense, if your organization needs the best and the brightest, you won't get it following those suggestions.

Edit2: the point of pg's advice isn't that being decisive somehow is correlated with risk-taking and thus higher returns. The point is that being indecisive doesn't lead to significantly better decisions and if you can't make decisions quickly, you won't get the very best deals. If you're known to be indecisive or advertise this up front, no one who can get other investors will come to you. This is absolutely the case for talent.

Cultural fit is not a good reason either. If you can't judge whether someone fits in during the interview, you're probably not going to figure that out during the trial period during which you have a desperate person desperately trying to fit in. What's worse, this very mindset of "let's hire people who fit in" leads to the worst culture. If culture matters to you, hire people who are different.

And yes, finding good engineers, regardless of cultural fit, is by far the hardest problem. If you're optimizing for cultural fit and you're not Google/Facebook-type talent magnet, you're not even in the competition for the best talent. This may be fine if your bar is low - and let's face it, almost everyone's is - but again we're no longer talking about the best and the brightest.

The average-median thing seems to be just a mistake by whoever wrote that summary. If you look at the full report, this is what they have:

"Workers in the New York City tech ecosystem earn 49% more than the average City-wide hourly wage. The hourly wage for the tech ecosystem is $39.50, while the average City-wide wage is $26.50."

Your other points are valid, of course.

Edit: this is the full report and is quite a bit more informative than the summary: http://www.hraadvisors.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/NYC_Te...

Edit2: no longer completely sure what they are talking about:

"As of 2013, the average New York City median hourly wage was $26.50. Tech ecosystem jobs pay above the City-wide average. In fact, tech ecosystem workers are paid 49% more than the City-wide average of $26.50. In comparison to this average, tech workers in tech firms earn 75% more, tech workers in non-tech firms earn 51% more, and non-tech workers in tech firms earn 25% more."

I suspect their "average" "median" income is median income by job category averaged together. With that said, it looks like they arrived at the tech average wage in a similar fashion.

I think the causation is at least partially the other way around - people you choose to spend time with reflect who you are.

When you try to game the correlation by forming friendships aspirationally, this largely breaks down. It's much more important to come to terms with who you are than to try to become more like someone else. When you're trying to be X, you're not X, you're just someone who's trying to be X.

You're usually not party to a non-solicitation agreement in which others are not allowed to solicit you. If you as an individual contractor sign such an agreement with your client, your client's employees whom you're not allowed to solicit were not party to the agreement.

Even if you somehow forced everyone to be part of the agreement, it's irrelevant - whether Apple's and Google's employment contracts had language that forced the employees to agree to what's going on here is not exactly relevant consideration.

Edit: part of the irony of this whole "non-solicitation agreements are illegal" chorus is that I think most people complaining probably have signed such agreements in the past as they are quite routine. Granted, most of the time, it's just handed to us and we have to sign or gtfo.

I think people are overreacting in the sense that non-solicitation agreements are not illegal per se and exist almost everywhere - tons of corporate partnership/vendor/contractor/etc agreements include such language because sometimes it's difficult for companies to work together closely in good faith without such agreement in place.

The main reason that the agreement is deemed illegal here is that they were made with a specific intent to manipulate the market at large and because they are deemed to have kind of market power, being a cartel of large employers. Also, the nature of the agreement is far too broad and the companies involved is far too numerous for them to argue in good faith that their intent was much more narrow.

I completely agree that they overstepped and should be held liable, but some of the outrage seems misguided. The HR executive involved, for instance, may or may not be in position to know that the policy is part of an illegal scheme and the fired employee certainly was not. Also, unless you're one of the star programmers who were highly in demand, it's quite unlikely that your salary was all that depressed over this. If anything, the impact may have been slightly positive for average employees - at a lot of places, superstars aren't necessarily substitutes for average employees, but rather complements and lowering prices of superstars can boost rather than depress wages of average employees:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html

On the whole, this is kind of the replay of the Microsoft anti-trust trials. Bundling web browsers with operating systems is not illegal - the illegal part was the context in which such action occurred. It was seen as an abuse of market power. Sports leagues openly collude on this kind of stuff without most people caring at all or pointing fingers at those involved. Government can have strong interest in such matters in the interest of encouraging a healthier market - though political and career motivations of lawyers/prosecutors involved also play a large part - but to seeing this as a clear morality play is not wise.

Edit: actually this covers the legal issues better:

http://www.mondaq.com/unitedstates/x/258600/Antitrust+Compet...

Assuming the article is correct, having a general agreement without any specific, legitimate purpose is illegal, but on a limited basic it can be legal. Still it seems far-fetched to assume that the HR executive in question had to know that such an illegal agreement existed, because for all he knows, a much more limited, legal contract could have existed due to their partnership and Google may have had a broader policy to ensure easy compliance. We now know that that's not the case, but I don't know why we can assume that the HR executive necessarily was aware of all this.

Isn't the whole point of saying bitcoin is not currency, but property, that you're not allowed to do this kind of accounting? I'm pretty sure if I buy and sell the same stock throughout the year, I can't simply account for it using the stock's average for the year.

No, if they take a loss on the bitcoin when they sell it, they can deduct that loss from their income.

On a completely unrelated note, does anyone else find media sites remapping left/right arrow keys to mean "move to previous/next article" completely annoying?

One big problem here is that his resume looks great to technical people, but is mostly incomprehensible to non-technical people. My experience is that technical managers are more biased towards younger people than non-technical managers because that's how they, as managers, add most value and can get credit for work done. Older, more experienced engineers are more likely to threaten their authority and less likely to fit into their vision of how development ought to be done or value their advice or mentorship.

On the other hand, non-technical managers, have much more of a need for experienced leads they can trust that can manage the technical aspects and offer advice so that they don't appear clueless to the rank & file and management. Non-technical managers are also unlikely to be able to have the ability to sort through resumes of inexperienced college graduates and distinguish between good programmers and bad programmers.

Furthermore, at most non-software companies is that the further you go in your career, the less likely that you will report to a technical manager because experienced technical people are expected to able to deliver business value directly, without having to go through a chain of technical management. All of this means the older and more experienced you get, the more your resume has to make sense to non-technical people. This is doubly true if you're not a technical specialist that can solve difficult problems other technical people encounter.

As it stands, the resume looks like an extrapolation of the kind of stuff that people like to see when they hire a junior programmer out of school or otherwise young programmers. This is why a lot of people here have a visceral positive reaction. It looks good, but it's gone too far and it's a bit out of character. We like to see hardcore technical stuff in young people's resumes to distinguish contenders from pretenders but people who are hiring older engineers usually don't care about that. It's also clear that he qualifies as a specialist in some of the things he's done, but we don't know what they are, because they are lost in the noise of everything he's ever done.

AngularJS is not a server-side framework and therefore it is agnostic on that question. You can do it however you like and you can even create directives that keep the client model synchronized with server-side, but it doesn't come out of the box.

Ok just tried the add-in in Excel 2007, some comments:

1) Everything's really slow. Installation's very, very slow and not responsive and the add-in seems to add considerably to Excel start up time.

2) No ribbon, just three buttons on Add-Ins tab, it looks a bit unprofessional.

3) It doesn't really work - when I click on "Show sheet" it sends the browser to some local file slate.html in temp directory, which seems to have just:

Need Help?

+

-

Double click to show full tree again.

There are no formulae on this sheet to display

Contact support@slateforexcel.com for support queries or feedback.

Loading...

Where's the stuff I saw in the video? Was that Mac-only?

4) I'd look into using Excel-DNA/NetOffice instead of VSTO, which requires a runtime. That makes it easier for business units to subscribe directly without going through the IT and the whole procurement process, etc.

This is great work, but I think for most heavy, advanced Excel users, the visualization is much harder to understand and navigate than the actual spreadsheet. And that's for fairly simple examples you have in videos and demos - real world finance models are orders of magnitude more complex and this visualization will have to go on for pages, entirely out of the visual context in which cells are placed.

Trying to visualize an entire sheet is fairly silly as a paradigm, because the only sheets that are easy to visualize this way are too simple for this to be useful. And Excel is a heavily visual environment already, where the visualization is controlled by the user. Context-sensitive visualization that fits within the workflow would seem to be much better. As it stands, this is optimized for technical people who don't really use Excel enough to be good at it, yet have to debug simple workbooks authored by others. I don't think that's a big enough market.

This seems like a good balancing act. The levers of power are already available for crooks trying to prop up billion dollar empires. Why shouldn't they be available for those who are trying to expose the crooks and take them down?

This is what I mean - your baseline assumption here is that African Americans as a whole are dependent on government help and expanding social safety net is about keeping African Americans dependent on government help. This exact attitude you have - association of black with dependence on government help - is what has been used in American politics to mobilize those who benefit from government programs to vote for politicians who oppose those programs. They feel that they are not "freeloaders" or relying on government help because they don't fit the stereotype. This is one answer to GP's question as to how freeloaders and government workers can spew such vehement rhetoric against freeloaders and government workers.

And this isn't some theoretical thing - this has been a conscious strategy

From:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy

Questioner: But the fact is, isn't it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps?

Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."

Add this to the fact that we have a black president named Barrack Hussein Obama, you can see why and how the very people who had no problem with their own government jobs and Bush's profligate spending are suddenly upset with freeloaders and government spending problems.

This is amazing! Scala right now doesn't really have a good story in terms of user-facing apps - it's not impossible to piggy back on Swing and Android, but that's about it for now. Definitely looking forward to seeing this mature!

As for the haters, there's no real reason at this stage to worry about "why would you use this for that" - people said the same thing about Java server-side (it's slow and on servers, cross-platform doesn't matter), Javascript server-side (it's single-threaded and clunky and people only use it because they are forced to), C# for iOS development (but it's from Microsoft), etc, etc.

This isn't everything, but racism is a significant part of what's motivating the economic right:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics

Obviously, a lot of people are caught up in the bubble without being racist or even being aware of the implicit racism of those around them, but much of the motivation behind the right's demonizing rhetoric against the freeloaders seems rooted in race.

Edit: also, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_queen

Aside from where the startup is, it is also hugely dependent on who that first engineering hire is. If it's a junior developer with a lot of potential but not much experience that they are taking a chance on because one or more of the founders are quite advanced technically themselves and are willing to mentor, train, etc, even 1% is quite generous. If the hire is either on par with the founders in terms of technical skills and experience or even the sole technical employee expected to be lead the effort and eventually build the team, even 5% can be considered quite low, depending on what the founders bring to the table.

The worth people are talking about here is, for the most part, the market rate. If you don't own the business, your labor is fungible and the revenue you bring is not separable from the rest of the company, your worth based on revenue criteria like the one you mention is irrelevant and impossible to calculate, because part of the input is the system you're placed into and its cost is the profit deliverable to the owners. In general, the market does a better job of attributing how much of the profit is due to the capital, the system, the management, etc and how much is your contribution than any sort of ad-hoc, I produced X type of analysis.

If that's not the case and your production is separable from the rest of the system, that does set a floor for your market rate because you can just do that on your own and keep the money instead.

Because they have to employ somebody at your position and it might as well be you. That they are indifferent between you and a market-rate replacement does not mean they don't benefit from having you in your position.

Say I'm in the market for a babysitter. If the market rate is, say, $18/hour, and I hire someone for $18/hour, I'm not abnormally benefiting from a low salary, yet I'm perfectly okay with that because I need a babysitter. The rate at which I no longer want to have a babysitter because the benefit they bring is cancelled out by their salary may be much higher than the market rate, because the market rate takes into account other potential babysitters.

In short, market rate is not the rate at which employers can no longer profitably hire, but simply an equilibrium price point that balances supply and demand. Assuming a reasonably well-run company, the price point at which they are better off not having you or anyone else in your position is much higher than your market price or worth.

Lots of people get paid way more than average software engineers in health care industry, which pays very well in general, so I don't think that's the problem. Your problem may be that you're trying to hire software engineers in support roles in academia, where pay is customarily low due to prestige. But while it's prestigious to be in research but it's not that prestigious to be a software engineer supporting research.

Most employees don't directly contribute to revenue and are largely replaceable. Assuming their position cannot be eliminated, that is, the decision to have that position in the first place is reasonable, they are worth approximately what their replacements would cost in salary and training. Thinking of your worth as being largely determined by what another company might pay for you (or a similar employee) is generally reasonable, unless you're directly responsible for some portion of the revenue in ways that are not replaceable, which is true of very few people.

If a company is losing money from employing an engineer at a below-market rate, that means the company likely has a bad business model, not that the engineer is paid more than they're worth. One's worth, at least in this context, is determined by the market, not a a particular company's inability to make use of a valuable resource.

And I'm not sure what this has to do with anything - within reason and all else equal, employees should go work in environments that maximize their value.

"A lesson I've learned, the hard way, many times, is that it's possible to appear intelligent when you aren't."

But why isn't this true of yourself? You've created this elaborate personal definition of intelligence, one that doesn't seem to have much correlation with anything positive that is objectively observable. And you do very well according to this definition, while others who think they are smart don't do quite as well. You don't see a problem here? It would be quite easy for anyone to come up with some vague definition of intelligence that they personally do well on.

At best, most personal definitions of intelligence held by the "gifted" tend to be extrapolated from attributes of children that are correlated with future success, especially in mentally demanding fields. We're interested in children's intelligence because it helps us project their future. But you're an adult, and not a particularly young one at that. There's no need to extrapolate. You are what you are. You're not judged by future potential, of which intelligence is one of many proxies. No serious scholar judges Nobel prize winning scientists by their high school test scores and no serious sports analyst judges professional athletes' careers by their pre-draft workouts. When you have the real thing, proxies become meaningless.

At worst, such definitions are carefully constructed to match the strengths and interests of the person doing the construction, while avoiding the weaknesses or conveniently treating them as positives. This is where all kinds of interesting inversions happen, for example, common proclamations like I'm depressed because I'm too smart or I can't succeed at that job because I'm too intelligent. Not that reversals never happen in isolated circumstances, but intelligence only has meaning because it measures mental performance potential. Whatever quality one may have, if it tends to result in negative mental outcomes, calling it intelligence renders the term meaningless.

I'm curious - you mentioned something about your wife being smarter. Does she suffer from all these problems you have due to being too smart? Does she share your disdain for those who aren't as smart?

Almost everyone is an outlier along some dimension and almost everyone has genius intellect if you measure their intelligence by what is important to them, but not to others. You can choose to interact with people based on what you have in common or you can choose to interact with people based on their relative shortcomings in the few things you're very good at. The latter approach, while quite tempting, often results in the kind of loneliness and isolation you talk about.

You wrote earlier:

"I've often found that groups proposing to be built of smart people are often as not built of over-opinionated pretentious people who've come to believe they are intelligent through one way or another. It's why I've avoided high-IQ societies and the like."

Why are their reasons for believing that they are special invalid, while yours are valid? I think they came to believe in their own high intelligence much the same way that you have. It validates something and fulfills some need. Grownups talking incessantly about their intelligence are like retired athletes who never made it in the pros talking about their stellar scouting reports placing them above those who had successful professional careers. If they didn't make it, the scouting reports were wrong. Don't assess yourself like society assesses children.