marks comments on High Status and Stupidity: Why? - Less Wrong

34 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 January 2010 04:36PM

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Comment author: marks 12 January 2010 05:42:45PM 11 points [-]

From: You and Your Research

When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did Shannon in. After information theory, what do you do for an encore? The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn't the way things go. So that is another reason why you find that when you get early recognition it seems to sterilize you.

Here is another mechanism by which status could make you "stupid", although I'm interpreting stupid in a different sense: as in making one less productive than one otherwise might. Although, I think the critique could be more general.

Its generally only worth talking about things that we can make progress in understanding so if you have an inflated sense of what you can accomplish then you might try to think about and discuss things that you cannot advance. So you end up wasting your mental efforts more and you fall behind on other areas that would have been a better use of your talents.