Written by Axel Oxenstierna, Lord High Chancellor of Sweden, to his son, a delegate to the negotiations that would lead to the Peace of Westphalia, who worried about his ability to hold his own amidst experienced and eminent statesmen and diplomats.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axel_Oxenstierna

- Kurt Vonnegut

Regular people generally just sit in one place improving nothing, learning nothing, changing little year over year. Terrified of being "caught out as an imposter" whatever that means.

The difference isn't smart/not smart. It's movement vs stationary.

You want people with expertise and experience making your most important decisions.

The world is run by people how are by and large more motivated by power and self interest and that doesn't always correlate with very high levels of intelligence.

Mark Zuckerberg has a high IQ, I won't doubt that. I also don't doubt his conviction that VR will change the world. It's possible he's right about that. I suspect he's going to experience anguish if some other company becomes the leader in VR. It might be his hill to die on, but it might not be his destiny to succeed at it. I think he's in a situation like somebody who abandons their lover to chase a doomed infatuation.

I'm skeptical of the Metaverse, but everything is unproven until someone proves it. Does every lean startup VC know what the future of computing looks like? If they don't, I have no idea how they would know that the Metaverse is a terrible idea.

Wasn't that a good idea though? Everyone heard the price was going to be $20, so now $8 doesn't seem so bad. Wouldn't a pricing expert refer to that as anchoring?

> When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and you’re life is just to live your life inside the world.

> Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money.

> That’s a very limited life.

> Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.

I wonder what bit of 60s counterculture that attitude was directly lifted from.

While the people that came before weren't any smarter than you; it's important to remember that they had, collectively, more experience in more areas than you could ever dream of having. That doesn't mean they got everything right, but it does mean if you just take the quote to heart you'll probably end up more like a bull in a China shop than some sage-like innovator.

But it is nice idea to remember, so you can mentally knock down people like Jobs, who want to portray themselves as sage-like innovators, a peg.

That's not so smart is it? Hiring folks on sky high salaries. If you are a startup, the last thing you need is uncompromising engs from BigTech imposing themselves on your org. Make sure to beat it out of them or better yet, pursue those who have the potential to grow as the startup scales, and/or those who come on board with a more grounded set of expectations. Especially, if you're aiming longer term.

The more I look into it, the more I see that some people are experts, even genius-level experts, sometimes in several fields, but this level of expertise is a weak predictor of their competence in different fields.

A second big problem is that some people are experts at manipulating masses and at building hype, it can be dangerous because there is a strong compounding effect with hype. (Aka snowballing)

I agree with the sentiment but lots of people would not be in the same position as the people who 'run the world' even with equally good luck, because they would not have been able to understand the situations they found themselves in well enough to make decisions that were in their own interest.

I believe this personally and I’m confident Steve Jobs meant this literally. The reason I’m confident is Jobs said this in 1994, when the conventional wisdom was that both he and Apple had failed. Toy Story wouldn’t be released until the next year. iPhone (the device that convinced people Apple was right about Human Centered Design) was 13 years away. NeXT was failing.

Here is the link to the original video posted by the Santa Clara Historical Society. https://youtu.be/kYfNvmF0Bqw

Edit: fix video link

However is this really an issue? Some VCs and C-suite members actually are cheering this on, because they think tech companies have grown too bloated and laborers unproductive, and think some fear needs to be instilled. IDK TBD, but mature companies are mature and run this way even if they aren't yet public.

More believable about business and public morality of all sorts (including economics), all of which can be swamps of reality-denying utter stupidity.

The opposite of stupid isn't smart. The opposite of stupid is true, accurate, and realistic.

A lot of critical processes are just excel sheets that people open and run once in a while, maybe copy / paste or click a button in there, then close.

Some processes are automatized, but there is no way to check if the result is good. Best you can do is to have a human look at the numbers and say "LGTM" with some confident face and call it a day.

Said client handle billions of euros every year for other entities. They basically influence the entire world economy on a daily basis.

Now, get audited from top to bottom, from internal and external teams, and all audits pass eventually. I met mostly good people there that take their job seriously. But still, every time I dive deeper into their rabbit whole, I just can't believe what humanity stands on.

- diversified :: so errors and horrors by a country/cohort of people can be a lesson for others without hitting anybody at once;

- not centralized :: as above, so a "chief" who happen to be an i*iot would cause issues to a small cohort of people, but not to all at once.

Now try imaging: all Roomba and Amazon Ring IN THE WORLD goes TFU due to a centralized system mishap https://eminetra.com.au/people-cant-vacuum-or-use-their-door... or the famous https://youtu.be/JqoGJPMD3Ws or also https://arstechnica.com/?p=1848769 and countless others.

ALL such "issues" are SPOF by their own "modern" design. Perhaps it's a good idea re-evaluating such way of doing anything from just-in-time productions to home food stock in the freezer to car's spare wheel instead of crappy ideas to spare a kg.

He's saying that the average "you" is no smarter than the average person.

> And then I take a look at the clown show that has been tech in the past few weeks...

All of these example trace their roots to extreme market distortions bought about by a massive direct injection of money into an economy that had partially shut down during the pandemic. The normal pricing signals were suppressed for the last two years.

The underlying mistake made in the biggest of the cited examples was to believe the distorted marketplace pricing signals.

The mistake made in the lesser cited examples was that getting rich from the deluge of fake money serves as proof of skill in other areas.

The process of normalization is now underway, and will continue for some time. If those examples in the article make you go "huh," just wait for what's in store as the receding tide reveals all of those bare bottoms and inflated senses of superiority.

Ant politician cannot make everyone happy.

The brightest do not go into politics, the morally cleanest do not go there either.

So what is left? The power hungry and greedy, not sure if any party is better or worse.

I cannot think of one government that is perceived as great by the populace and foreigners on a wide scale.

Same for the powerful insurances, tech companies, banks, the leaders arent the best, the whole and lack of better competition makes them strong.

Benjamin: You work in TV?

Mimi: No, but I watch a lot.

Benjamin: Of course you do. You're creative.

Noah: She came up with the name Noah's Arcade.

Mimi: I just opened my mouth and out it came.

Noah: You're a lucky man, Mr Vanderhoff.

- from Wayne's World, 1992

**

Mr. and Mrs. Vanderhoff were none the wiser. Even Cassandra didn't catch on until the end of the movie when she felt the similarity between Benjamin's unsolicited shoulder rub and the sensation of a literal snake slithering on her skin.

In conclusion, humans can be sneaky creatures. Especially smart ones.

Edit: clarification

There's only one major problem: with intelligence often comes OCD, autism, spectrum stuff. The brain is lit up all over the place, but often comes with a lot of things that makes life worse.

You're actually much much better off being a bit idiotic in this world.

Question to the those people: why wouldn't you want to put your contact information ( or even a few webpages) so that other similar minded people can get in touch with you? Certainly if you have that kind of wisdom, you will be intellectually isolated. ( Or perhaps you are happy with the status quo?)

(Also, it was a good read!)

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/215731/our-man-by-g...

I believe there are people that are cleverer than me, and they can leave me mystified about how they worked out X. But that mystification doesn't require them to have a multiple of my smarts; it only requires them to have 10% more smarts than me.

In popular discourse, for example, Einstein is commonly credited as having been a genius. I'm not a physicist; but my understanding is that Einstein's SR and GR were essentially natural conclusions to draw from Maxwell's and Lagrange's equations. IOW, if Einstein had remained a patent reviewer, someone else would have produced those theories.

The same belief extends to "great men" of history; I think they emerge from the sea that they swim in, they do not command the tides. So I think that if Hitler had been killed in the WW1 trenches, some other authoritarian would have come along to unite the German people (perhaps not as bad as Hitler; perhaps worse).

I'm sure Elon knows how stupid these are, it's a publicity stunt

First, the candidades must have the will to power. They must lick the asses of the alphas to be promoted. They must make many promises to get help. They must hinder the others to be promoted. They must lie to the people to get elected.

So you have predominantly power-mad, spineless, corrupt, intrigant, dishonest assholes on top. The state of the world reflects that exactly. The bureaucracies too.

Software engineers?

Medical doctors?

HFT?

Someone like Zuckerberg?

Some senator anywhere in the world?

Very hard to compare unless you have worked with all of them.

I frankly do not know, but I have severe doubts that its politicians.

Trump ran the worlds superpower and its still standing. His casinos did not all survive.

Makes me think.

If you look at the code of the climate models responsible for the decision making of trillions of dollars, you'll find old fortran code with many obvious inaccuracies on the order of magnitude of the things it's supposed to measure, and you'll find they all copy code from each other and reach diverging results.