Only a limited number of people can become a top investment banker, law partner, Fortune 500 CEO, humanities professor, or Jeopardy champion. Yet smart people let themselves be funneled into these fields and relentlessly compete with each other for limited slots.
This one is intriguing. If someone said to themselves early on, "I'm smart enough to be an investment banker, but I could probably make more money taking brains and ambition into plumbing supplies [1]", would they be likely to be right?
How would you identify fields where being smart would give you the best competitive advantage?
[1] Plumbing supplies was the first field that came to my mind when I was looking for something low status to compare to investment banking. This probably means that neither my pipes nor my theories will hold water.
I've often seen it said on Hacker News that programmers could clean up in many other occupations because writing programs would give them a huge advantage. And I believe Michael Vassar has said here that he thought a LWer could take over a random store in SF and likewise clean up.
(This makes some sense to me. Programmers have some good tools which don't see much use outside programming - source control comes to mind. Writers ought to use it, but don't. Architects are constantly modifying highly detailed plans, but apparently don't use real source control e...
On Quora: What are some stupid things smart people do? Examples of common types of stupidity that are typical of otherwise very smart people.
Lee Semel's answer in particular would make a great post here: a "to don't" list. You may wish to go through and identify the cognitive bias or biases each is an example of.