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.
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.
He confuses "focusing on being right above all else" with "signaling that you are always right." The two are completely different; the former is essential to rationality while the latter is merely obnoxious.
Sometimes I say to myself that I want to be right so badly that I'm even willing to change my mind to do it.
While this is a distinction that deserves to be made more, I don't think it's a valid criticism of the article in question. Here's the explanation given after the phrase "focusing on being right above all else":
Many smart people act as if being right trumps all else, and go around bluntly letting people know when they are wrong, as if this will somehow endear others to them. They also believe that they can change other people's minds through argument and facts, ignoring how emotional and irrational people actually are when it comes to making decisions or adopting beliefs.
You must be reading that paragraph very differently to me. The point he's making isn't about wanting to appear right at all. It's about the impression that some people give that being right is enough, and that diplomacy and the ability to present ones (correct) ideas are unimportant skills. There is nothing in that paragraph about how smart people behave on those occasions when they are not right.
The key phrase for me is this one:
bluntly letting people know when they are wrong, as if this will somehow endear others to them.
This sounds like it's definitely about signaling that you are right. The second sentence, though I do agree with it, doesn't seem like it's the main point of the paragraph because of the "also."
Like I said, you're reading that very differently to the way I read it. To me, it's about people not sugar-coating the truth, and not being diplomatic about the fact when they are right. In other words, it's all well and good knowing that, say, homeopathy is nonsense, but you don't get anywhere by insulting homeopaths (although it can be fun..)
the former is essential to rationality while the latter is merely obnoxious.
Your spouse insists X. You remember !X. What is the rational course of action?
(Hint: it does not involve scope neglect.)
I can (a) present my recollections and try to collaborate to find an agreement; (b) just nod and accept X as the agreed-upon finding; (c) insist that !X, using all the art of persuasion I possess; I will choose the course of action which I believe will lead to a better marital life (this includes long-term consequences and personal stress as factors). [Sidenote: I do have a preference for relationships in which (a) tends to be the best choice]
In any of these cases, I keep track of my own estimate of P(X), adjusting it as appropriate during and after the exchange, on the evidence provided by the spouse's testimony and behaviour.
You are confusing "being right" with "being believed to be right". Making the right calculations is always the correct course of action (tautology), but that doesn't imply that you should necessarily say them.
I can (a) present my recollections and try to collaborate to find an agreement; (b) just nod and accept X as the agreed-upon finding; (c) insist that !X, using all the art of persuasion I possess;
None of these things allow the possibility of not arguing while also not conceding.
I agree that in many cases we don't need to agree upon a finding at all, and in those cases I can accept X as one of several positions on an unresolved question. I consider that a special case of (b), but I can see believing otherwise.
It obviously depends on whether the expected utility of both people having the correct answer exceeds the disutility of spending the time and energy (physical and emotional) to locate/confirm it.
Your spouse insists X. You remember !X. What is the rational course of action?
If X matters, look for further evidence beyond your and your spouse's recollections, at least one of which is known to be wrong, but not which.
Um, what point were you making?
One way to view scope neglect is behaving deontologically instead of consequentially- "I will help birds" vs. "2000 birds will be helped." In this context, I bring it up because the behavior "focusing on being right above all else" is a deontological rule, which is unlikely to maximize your preferences.
The answer is, unless X is important enough to divorce them over, drop the issue or change your mind. The rule to focus on being right above all else is far too strong to be good advice.
I find it annoying when he generalizes insufficiently. Really, smart people follow the pack? Unlike all those average people I guess. Quick, let's invent some post-hoc explanations!
I mean, it's okay; it's hard to have too many "to don't lists." But the post-hoc explanations are fairly bad.
Also, following the pack is often a very smart thing to do. Or even better, figure out where the pack is going, and then run out in front of it.
Some smart people focus exclusively on their narrow area of interest and never realize that everything important in life is accomplished through other people.
Boo.
Ignoring effort and practice
I just got something about effort and practice that I hadn't grokked before.
The traditional mindset, the one most of us have grown up being told, is that practice is "hard" but slacking and trying to cope is "easy."
In fact, it's the other way around. Slacking is hard. Expecting yourself to perform well even when you're only putting in half the time investment is asking yourself to achieve an impossible task, and it's stressful as hell. It's like saying "I should be able to win this duel with one hand tied behind my back." Trying to do everything in half the time is an extra, unnecessary challenge. You're demanding much more efficient work of yourself -- possibly because you think you're "smart" and you "ought" to be able to do it.
By contrast, practice is easy. It's giving yourself the luxury of enough time to work at your own pace and take your time until you have mastery. It means you don't have to worry about hurrying up to finish so that you can get back to something else. It means you give yourself permission to be as dumb as you really are, instead of trying to keep up the facade that you're twice as smart as you are and you can finish in half the time.
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 etc.)
Economics tells us there is no free lunch. The occupations mentioned might seem like free lunches because they pay so much, millions & millions. So of course, the no-free-lunch comes into play with low probability of success. Most lawyers don't make millions, most would-be CEOs stagnate in The Office. The expected-utility is evened out that way. And worse, those are socially prestigious occupations, so one might expect an additional penalty via no-free-lunch in exchange for the prestige. (I think that may be one reason there are so many would-be lawyers.)
This would imply that other areas without prestige or high variance might have higher expected utilities because high IQ types shun them and ignore their comparative advantage in them. What areas are unprestigious and don't offer lottery tickets? Selling to small businesses seems like such an area. (Look at GroupOn. Why wasn't that already done in 2000?)
Economics tells us there is no free lunch.
Economics tells us lots of false things.
Most lawyers don't make millions
Whether someone will become a partner at biglaw and make millions per year is hard to predict, but it is fairly easy to predict who will get a permanent job as a biglaw associate making 500k per year. I'm not saying that this is a good job, but if you want such a job (and a chance at partner), it's pretty easy to predict before law school whether you can get it. The main point is which law school admits you. Whether you can get adequate grades and whether you can put in the hours on the job are two other factors. It's true that demand for these jobs makes it hard to get into top law schools, but if you don't get in, you should know you've lost without wasting tuition or 3 years.
But most law students make the simple error of not knowing that, of going to law schools that don't produce lawyers, or at least not lawyers that make more than they would having skipped law school. The kind of error economists refuse to believe in.
I've heard that a very high proportion of the economy is sales to businesses, but relatively few people who are thinking of starting a business think of anything but selling to consumers.
I'm guessing it's just that most people have little or no contact with selling to businesses, so it's a blind spot. There may also be an element of preferring to sell an obviously interesting product-- if you're selling to retail, you can still have that, but a lot of business-to-business products are infrastructure.
Thinking a little more, I think Joel Spolsky advocates selling to other businesses for much the same reason - they're fairly neglected and businesses are willing to pay a lot.
The first one seems like it could be equally well used as an example of not-smart people doing stupid things:
Ignoring the importance of design and style - When the iPod originally came out, technical people complained about its lack of features and perceived high price ("ooh, who cares about another MP3 player, I can go buy one at Best Buy for $50" http://forums.macrumors.com/show...). In the meantime, it was so cool and easy to use that normal people went out in droves to buy it.
Another example is his sneering at old-fashioned non-user-friendly software tools. It sounds like he's never had the experience of overcoming a really steep learning curve. (And what on Earth does he mean by "programming languages... not updated since the 1970s"? C?)
I agree with this. It's wrong to ignore the design and style when creating a product, but there's no rule saying one has to care about it when choosing what to buy.
It can't be a coincidence that this reads like a laundry list of stereotypically nerdy qualities.
If the answer to "What are your strengths?" and "What are your weaknesses?" aren't the same, you don't know yourself well enough.
Edit: this is what I get for underexplaining. The questions are usually opposed in contexts such as job interviews. This was a leap I made from a list of qualities being considered as weaknesses, which in other contexts are strengths.
I disagree. I know that I can't read emotions well at all. That's a weakness, not a strength. I also know that I'm good at explaining math. That's a strength. Each list has items that are not on the others. I'd be inclined to agree that for almost everyone a proper list of strengths should have overlap with a proper list of weaknesses but that's a much weaker claim.
I don't think I see what you were going for--in my reading it's one of those things that sounds wise briefly but doesn't hold up very well.
I think of the "smart people weakness" as potentially being"the same"--the things I might admit to in the sort of ridiculous job interview question where they ask your greatest weakness. They tie into an identity and a thinking style: "I'm a nerd, I want to do too much research and need to be better at identifying when what I have is good enough"; "I've been told all my life that great things are expected of me and I haven't taken as many risks as I should have because I wanted those paths to be open to me."; "I've always been so focused on my studies that I didn't have as full a personal life as I would have liked." (Equally-spun rephrasings available ad infinitum.) Geeks half-brag about this sort of thing--implying that the weaknesses were necessary tradeoffs for (or accompaniments to) the strengths, which should be obvious to and respected by all, naturally.
But not so much, for the weaknesses I have that I wouldn't consider to be mainly affecting smart people (among others, a tendency to self-sabotage, also overwhelming feelings of inefficacy and self-doubt--so yes, I'm just wonderful at those interview questions). I don't think they tie in very strongly to my identity, they're not complements to strengths, they reflect nearly nothing but negatively on me. I wouldn't consider them "the same" at all.
I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. I can't think of any sensible definitions of the words "strength" and "weakness" for which this statement even can be true.
They're being too literal. David_Gerard's comment is an aphorism that, like all good aphorisms, is easily expressed and contains a kernel of truth. Think of any personality descriptor: ambitious, introspective, thoughtful, analytic, romantic, idealistic - they are all both strengths in some situations and weaknesses in others.
That would make a bit more sense if it was "are the same". Otherwise that was a classic example of a completely wrong aphorism.
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 etc.)
Economics tells us there is no free lunch. The occupations mentioned might seem like free lunches because they pay so much, millions & millions. So of course, the no-free-lunch comes into play with low probability of success. Most lawyers don't make millions, most would-be CEOs stagnate in The Office. The expected-utility is evened out that way. And worse, those are socially prestigious occupations, so one might expect an additional penalty via no-free-lunch in exchange for the prestige. (I think that may be one reason there are so many would-be lawyers.)
This would imply that other areas without prestige or high variance might have higher expected utilities because high IQ types shun them and ignore their comparative advantage in them. What areas are unprestigious and don't offer lottery tickets? Selling to small businesses seems like such an area. (Look at GroupOn. Why wasn't that already done in 2000?)
Economics tells us lots of false things.
Whether someone will become a partner at biglaw and make millions per year is hard to predict, but it is fairly easy to predict who will get a permanent job as a biglaw associate making 500k per year. I'm not saying that this is a good job, but if you want such a job (and a chance at partner), it's pretty easy to predict before law school whether you can get it. The main point is which law school admits you. Whether you can get adequate ... (read more)