Comments on: Smart people can rationalize anything

By: markselliott

markselliott — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 01:54:48 +0000

Professionalism breeds familiarity blindness. For instance, I have read Hamlet over 20 times and students who have read it for the first time are able to locate intricate patterns I had never considered. It all goes back to Socrates – “I know that I am intelligent, because I know that I know nothing.”

By: Will Sargent

Will Sargent — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 17:01:41 +0000

I’ve noticed this happening in several projects, mostly with Computer Science post-docs. I think that academic CS schools train people to look for the clever, theoretical solution, and not think about time and clarity as important factors. After all, you don’t get a PhD for doing something trivial.

Paraphrasing a previous poster, you can be very smart and still not be very wise.

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 27 May 2009 19:11:01 +0000

Very well written article. Thanks for that. I’ve often wondered if intelligence was like height or strength or speed or bone density, etc. etc. There are downsides to being too tall (blood pressure) or too strong (lots of muscle mass means you need more food to survive). We tend to think of intelligence as “more is better” but I wonder if there is an optimum amount of intelligence – there seems to be for the activity known as “money making”. Most really wealthy people I know have one thing in common; a real lust for money. Most really smart people I know have a lust for solving problems, not so much the money making. Smart people tend to dream of making millions doing something really, really clever, then focus on the clever thing and forget about the money.

By: joel garry

joel garry — Wed, 13 May 2009 21:00:45 +0000

“intellectual ballast” haha, that made my day.
In the early ’80s, I worked for a startup, which consisted of some very smart people who hadn’t finished college, and me, who had, who they needed do the actual design work. Of course, there was banter about this, and the fact every so often an MBA would come through trying to sell themselves, and just fail miserably, not seeing the trees for the forest. Anyways, the older fellow there owned several disparate successful businesses, and had various homespun favorite sayings, such as “if he’s so smart, why ain’t he rich?” To which one day I replied, “well, the richest guy in Japan is an economics professor.”
This was before the Japanese economy collapsed and went into deflation for a decade, negating all “japanese economic miracle” stories. Funnily enough, I read an article in some mass magazine that predicted it a few months before it happened, thought it made sense, and happened to mention it to my boss (not the startup mentioned earlier, which changed direction when they realized it’s easier for a startup to sell a specific tool than enterprise software), who had previously worked in the securities industry and wound up thinking I was some kind of genius. So he introduced me to my [now-]wife, who is scary smart supermom with a doctorate and a clinical practice and teaches grad students.
Rationality may be bounded, but stupidity isn’t. Genius comes from timing.
“intellectual ballast” what a great concept.

By: Alan Brown

Alan Brown — Wed, 13 May 2009 12:58:19 +0000

Smart people can rationalize anything really explains the choices of Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, Barack Obama, etc. This whole recession is the culmination of a perfect storm of smart people guided by really bad theory.

By: Jose

Jose — Tue, 12 May 2009 13:10:58 +0000

Hi,
I really liked this article. My own experience as a programmer and as a human being is that for some things I need to be stupid, really stupid, and that’s good!!
The good thing about being smart is being able to be smart and stupid. A stupid person can’t be smart.
If you need to kiss a woman,talk with her, you need to be like children, stupid, let it go, stop thinking. I had friends really really smart that have problems with that!!
I love theatre acting too and it has helped a lot in my live to change my personality. If I need to focus, I temporary change my personality, if I need perfectionism, I change my way of thinking, if I need a fast solution, the same thing applies.
Some parts of a program needs to be done fast, and some perfect, and some cheap, you know what you want to get, you change your mood accordly .
e.g I have done a program that recognizes handstrokes, some parts could be done with an easy algorithm, a function and ten lines of code, but I decided to spend a month doing it different and debugging. Now it goes a MILLION times faster. Takes a lot of work, but makes possible what before was impractical to do with a computer.
When I start selling it I thing is going to be the only one that really works.

By: nikolaus heger

nikolaus heger — Tue, 12 May 2009 12:32:29 +0000

Yes, I have seen all of these, I guess I was blessed with working in silicon valley which probably has a much higher average IQ than anywhere in the world. It’s the Mount Everest of IQ.
One of those smart people I worked with mentioned a quote by Albert Einstein to me once, and it’s worth keeping in mind at all times: Make it as simple as possible, but not simpler.
In software development, I think it’s best to be pragmatic, which is why I like the Pragmatic Programmers so much. Stupid coders will cause a huge mess because they pretty much make things that don’t work, and never were going to work. They are too naive. But you can also go too far in the other direction and over-engineer your solutions to the point of hopelessness. For me, my main principle is to avoid complexity. Complexity in the solution is usually a failure to find a simpler one.
The orthogonal storage is a good example of that, however, if you were really clever you’d have known that committing to the semantics of your objects is a huge mistake. Yeah I found this out the hard way too, using Java byte serialization. Maybe everyone needs to go through this once – it’s hard to foresee all the little and often extremely complex problems that can arise from that. Ever since then I have avoided Java object serialization like the plague.

By: cmpsycsetc

cmpsycsetc — Tue, 12 May 2009 09:01:18 +0000

Hi. I noticed Habitat and EC.
I played/experienced WA (DS) in 95′ and upwards.
I’d like to think I’m one of those smart people.
Any way back in? (on a professional level.)
e-mail me.

By: Joe Jordan

Joe Jordan — Tue, 12 May 2009 08:25:03 +0000

This is why working in a small company is great – you have very smart programmers doing strategy, management and sales, who are constantly telling you off for “being too clever” by going off and solving problems that don’t have useful practical outcomes. Smart strategic programmers (SSPs) overseeing slightly less smart technical programmers (SLSTPs) seems one workaround. And/or you could just verse your new smarties to constantly asses the usefulness/profitability of their own work.

By: dan_the_welder

dan_the_welder — Tue, 12 May 2009 07:41:40 +0000

Yeah,
I am not as smart as I wish/thought I was, but that’s OK, because I am a lot wiser than many smart people.
Where did the wisdom come from? I don’t really know but I frequently see it’s absence.
Humility is part of it, but even talking about it makes a claim of humility a hypocrisy.
A key component is taking the time to think about things in depth and a willingness to shred your own arguments (rationalizations) if they are weak.
I just accept that I am schizophrenic, that there are two minds at battle all the time. The ego and the skeptic.