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gwern comments on Rationality Quotes September 2011 - Less Wrong
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And many of his other simplifications were complete successes and why he died a universally-beloved & beatified billionaire.
Seems like a bit of an exaggeration. Almost universally respected, sure.
Yep. Respected and admired at a distance, certainly. But a lot of people who knew him personally tend to describe him as a manipulative jerk.
Which has little to do with how he & his simplifications were remembered by scores of millions of Americans. Don't you remember when he died, all the news coverage and blog posts and comments? It made me sick.
Meh, I thought of him as a brilliant but heavy-handed and condescending jerk long before I heard of his health problems. I refused to help my family and friends with iTunes (bad for my blood pressure) and anything Mac. My line was: if it "just works" for you, great, if not, you are SOL. Your iPod does not sync? Sorry, I don't want to hear about any device that does not allow straight file copying.
Heh. I have been known to engage in "What do you mean you are having problems? <blink> That's impossible, there's the Apple guarantee It Just Works (tm) (r) <blink> <blink>" :-D
Actually, no, I don't remember because I didn't read them. I'm particular about the the kind of pollution I allow to contaminate my mind :-)
Anyway, we seem to agree. One of the interesting things about Jobs was the distance between his private self and his public mask and public image.
I am too, but I pay attention to media coverage to understand what the general population thinks so I don't get too trapped in my high-tech high-IQ bubble and wind up saying deeply wrong things like private_messaging's claim that "Jobs's one-button mice failed so ordinary people really are smart!"
Yeah, that's so totally what I claimed. Not. My point is that a lot of people overestimate how much smarter they are than ordinary people, and so they think ordinary people a lot dumber than ordinary people really are.
Also, the networks operate under the assumption that less intelligent people are more influenced by advertising, and therefore, the content is not even geared at the average joe, but at the below-average joe.
Free free to elaborate how your one-button mouse example and all Jobs's other successes match what you are claiming here about Jobs being a person who underestimated ordinary people's intelligence. (If Jobs went broke underestimating ordinary people's intelligence, then may heaven send me a comparable bankruptcy as soon as possible.)
"No one in this world, so far as I know-and I have searched the record for years, and employed agents to help me-has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people." -- H.L.Mencken
I think this is happening with Hollywood, but that would be a longer story.
I think there's a great many apes that under-estimated the intelligence of a tiger or a bear, and haven't contributed to our gene pool. There's also all those wars where underestimations of the intelligence of enemy masses cost someone great deal of money and, at times, their own life.
The original quote itself is a fairly good example - he assumes that the networks produce something which is exactly what people want, whereas the networks should, ideally, produce something which the people most influenced by the advertising want; a different, less intelligent demographic. If he was speaking truth in the quote, he had to have underestimated intelligence of the average people.
Secondarily, if you want to instead argue from the success, you need to outline how and why underestimation of intelligence would be inconsistent with the success. Clearly, all around more complicated user interfaces also enjoyed huge success. I even give an explanation in my comment - people also tend to massively over-estimate the willingness of users to waste cognitive effort on their creations.
As for what lessons we can learn from it, it is perhaps that underestimating the intelligence is relatively safe for a business, albeit many failed startups began from a failure to properly explore the reasons why an apparent opportunity exists, instead explaining it with the general stupidity of others.
edit: also, you could likewise wish for a comparable bankruptcy to some highly successful but rather overcomplicated operating system.
Why's that? Why aren't the networks making most profit by appealing to as many people as possible because that increase in revenue outweighs the additional advertising price increase made possible by narrowly appealing to the stupidest demographic? And why might the stupidest demographic be the most profitable, as opposed to advertising to the smartest and richest demographics? 1% of a million loaves is a lot better than 100% of one hundred loaves.
So you're making at least two highly questionable economics arguments here, neither of which I accept.
Apple's success is, from the original Mac on, frequently attributed to simplification and improving UIs. How is this not consistent with correctly estimating the intelligence of people to be low?
You're absolutely right about this part. And this pervasive overestimation is one of the reasons that 'worse is better' and Engelbart died not a billionaire, and Engelbart's beloved tiling window managers & chording keyboards are unfamiliar even to uber-geeks like us, and why so many brilliant techies watch other people make fortunes off their work. Because, among their other faults, they vastly overestimate how capable ordinary people and users are of using their products.
If one deliberately attempts to underestimate the intelligence of users, one may make less of a mistake than usual.
I'd be astonished if resistance to advertising increases linearly or better with IQ once you control for viewing time. Marketing's basically applied cognitive science, and one of the major lessons of the heuristics-and-biases field is that it's really hard to outsmart our biases.