I got part way through and quit. I appreciate the author's perspective, but I'm kind of tired of people so adamantly avoiding empathy. It's easy to say someone is acting stupidly; it's much harder to put yourself in their shoes and understand why they might be acting that way.
I dunno, maybe there is some wisdom I missed because I didn't finish it.
Agree. Moreover, I don't agree with the author that some people are just stupid and that's it. Especially, with the surgeon example. I really don't think a surgeon can be stupid per se. That should be very rate occurrence. More like people do stupid things all the time. Including author, who is too smug, which I also consider stupid.
This is the problem with redefining commonly used terms like stupid. We tend to view it as lacking intelligence, and intelligence we often define as something like IQ, but the author explicitly rejects that and makes it about destructive (to themselves and others) behavior.
The doctors were likely not stupid according to the standard definition, but were harmful towards both their patients and themselves, thus stupid according to the new definition.
If the article didn't bother bringing up intelligence at all and instead focused on destructive behaviors, it would have made more sense.
We have many words. Foolishness and stupidity are common companions, but one does not require the other. Intelligent people behave foolishly all the time.
The distinction is one of a failure of either imagination or effort. We have other words like ignorance, incompetence, impairment, and none of these require a lack of cognitive ability, though the latter implies diminished capacity.
Bombast, however, typically seeks to oversimplify for the sake of provocation.
Good point. Interesting that he claims all groups of people contain a certain percentage of "Morons" but then he says he only surrounds himself with brilliant people, which, by definition, makes him the moron.
The "smugness" of the author is what made me close the tab 3 sections in. And totally agree, some of the smartest people I know are also the most aloof.
There is no wisdom, it's supposed to be a rant. I don't think empathy applies to this kind of wide-ranged broad-stroked text. If he was attacking someone specifically and there was some side to the situation that he was willingly ignoring I might agree with you, but I think in this specific case (i.e. just a brain dump) this is interesting; you either identify with it or you don't, and both reactions are just as valid.
I for example identified completely, and enjoyed the text. You might be thinking now "oh ok, another asshole to go with the first one", but let me try to justify my view. I believe that the stupid people he describes are not "accidentally" stupid, or simply people who don't know better. These are people who are willingly, intentionally stepping on other people's toes as a way of life. Some people are just like that: they don't see it as a fundamental, basic tenet of social life to respect others, solve problems through dialog and --- yes --- have empathy towards them. Some people think that bothering and pushing themselves (and their views) against others is their god-given right; as if manipulating those around you (in all the possible meanings of manipulation) is not only a valid attitude but possibly the only way to achieve anything. I don't feel bad to discriminate against such people. Actually, I think it's unfair and disrespectful to bundle them together with those who are honestly ignorant or dumb, who can't really help but do stupid things because they don't know better. If we can't have honest conversations about this, i.e. about the differentiation between these two groups, all we are doing is validating and reinforcing the behavior of the first group (by not holding them accountable).
I agree that there are people in the world who regularly trample on common notions of ethics and morals. It is really sad and frustrating that such people exist. I still find empathy to be a better reaction than blame and contempt. It is foundational to the way I choose to live my life. And with this response, I'm pushing my values on you in a way which is probably immoral! The author suggests that this "Brotherhood of Morons" is a recurring theme in their writing. The recurring theme is my writing is a simple mantra which I find brings me peace: we are all just humans doing our best in a difficult world.
Sorry for several edits, I got a bit worked up. :)
Your parent is singling out a group that absolutely are NOT doing their best, not in a unobtrusive way anyway.
Your empathy is cute but does not align with reality and, if anything else, betrays how privileged your life is that you can afford it.
Case in point: I live in 5 minutes walking distance from a major road artery in the capital city I inhabit. I have saved both and my wife's lives by not trusting the green light and looking both directions, twice now, because my life experience has unequivocally proved to me that in fact everyone is not doing their best at all. They are a-holes who want to get back home as quickly as they can after work and it does not even cross their minds that they can forever destroy a family while doing so. I watched interviews after such... specimens (I am being very generous here)... are caught in (or after) the act. Of course they cry and exclaim how their life is over if they get indicted etc. etc., but they never thought about it beforehand. Classic.
These people don't deserve empathy. They deserve a lifetime ban to operate any machine more complex than a coffee maker. They belong on the fields or the mines. We definitely need more labor there and they forfeit their place in civilization by proving that they are unable to be trusted with something trivial, something that you and I can deal with while being sleep-deprived and dead-tired. Honestly, how difficult it is to operate a car and follow the rules? I had a friend driving instructor when I was 17 and he told me he'd give me a license any day after I drove him around the town 4-5 times. I am not bragging; I am actually saying that no, driving a car and following rules is so easy that I am convinced that I can train a macaque to do it well (and there are videos of monkeys driving golf carts pretty well out there, by the way).
Looking after your own arse is a better reaction so I'll disagree with your blanket empathy stance.
One important thing I think many miss about this discussion is that we’re not advocating some kind of asshole witch hunt, or new laws for banning assholes to concentration camps or anything. It’s just that IMHO content like this article is important because it’s inherently human; it’s a person ranting and letting the steam off. He is an individual who has made a decision to stay away from people who don’t make him feel good. Reasoning about things like this and making such decisions (and sharing them with those around you) are precisely what makes us human (at least in a free society).
We should treasure subjective but honest content like this even if we don’t agree completely with it. Considering that most of what we see published online nowadays is targeted optimized content to make you feel or do something specific, and considering the future we’re heading towards, where much (maybe most?) of the content will be AI-generated , I treasure this very much.
I never said I wanted to censor the author, just that I was personally tired of people with this kind of "me vs the world" view of humanity. I agree subjective expression and free speech are fundamental to healthy existence.
> It's easy to say someone is acting stupidly; it's much harder to put yourself in their shoes and understand why they might be acting that way.
This statement presupposes that there is a reason.
Many people simply act completely irrationally, so the only "reason" for their actions that one can come up with is the overly reductive "well, their neurons fired in such a way that resulted in them doing <whatever>".
I suspect avoiding generalities would assist discourse, so here's a concrete example to analyze: consider a senior (maybe even staff level) software developer, trying to write a loop. He writes a bunch of code, runs it (via tests, or executing the software itself), and finds that it doesn't work. So now he he changes the "<" to "<=". Still doesn't work. Now he changes that to ">". Still doesn't work. Now he changes that to ">=". Still doesn't work. Now he thinks "prime numbers are sometimes important, hm...", so he rounds the end of the range to the nearest prime number. Still doesn't work. Now he increments by two, instead of one. Still doesn't work. On a whim, now he changes the numeric type from an integer to a float, though he (of course) couldn't explain why that would change anything (all other things being equal in this scenario, it wouldn't). It still doesn't work. Etc, etc, etc. This sort of pattern continues for the next couple hours until the code happens to work for the scenarios tested (though is still incorrect and will eventually fail in production).
What is the "reason" for this behavior? Or, more importantly, why would someone regularly engage in such behavior? Why, as opposed to reasoning about the code, instead spend hours being superstitious, cargo culting, guess-and-checking, etc? Why never once consider pre-/post-conditions, loop invariants, sketch out a small informal proof by induction, etc?
Yes, some instances of bad decision making are due to unfortunate circumstances (stress, mental health, etc). But there are times where people simply demonstrate that they are, putting it kindly, not competent. That doesn't make them any less deserving of love and care, but they are still (with no negative sentiment or judgement intended) incompetent.
I totally agree incompetence exists in the world, and totally agree it can be frustrating to observe or deal with. If the article had been titled "Brotherhood of Incompetence" I might have reacted differently.
Even so, I find the author's stance to be off-putting. They write
> The first kind reads about "stupid people" and laughs.
And then go on to suggest that this is the "wrong" reaction, that stupid behavior is an insidious societal ill that should be treated with grave seriousness (obviously I'm exaggerating the author's words a bit). I find that laughing about circumstances which are both 1) outside your control, and 2) annoying is a much better response than stewing in my negative emotions and blaming the world for being incompetent. Better for my personal health, and better for those around me in that I'm not so bitter and unpleasant.
All that said, I love your closing line
> That doesn't make them any less deserving of love and care, but they are still (with no negative sentiment or judgement intended) incompetent.
This aligns very much with my personal perspective.
Being a bit more empathic to the author, the frustration expressed is understandable and it's VERY HARD to put yourself in Ben Shapiro's shoes, even if it is for the greater goal of being able to call him stupid without being considered "apathetic".
> "The remainder are simply stupid. This is approximately the composition of the organization writ large. The number of people at this organization who dislike their job, their stakeholders, and their salary but don't leave even though they no longer have the energy to work is astonishing, and that alone is enough to constitute stupidity as per Cipolla's definition."
Because, apparently, a person cannot be burned out and at the same time still need food, a home, or whatever they needs a salary for, not to mention they might be on temporary visas and cannot risk being unemployed or any of the other billions of totally sensible reasons keeping them from leaving their jobs.
So to answer your "maybe"... nope, no empathy, no wisdom.
Well then we should further separate the stupids: (1) those who are not actively malicious because they are burned out or even with awful health conditions and cannot bring themselves to be more productive and benevolent but still need the paycheck and (2) the a-hole MBAs or careerists who simply use the company as a trampoline to a better paycheck somewhere else and to tell with the consequences if they set back 1000+ families' financial well-being.
>Then there is the third kind of person who, upon reading anything like the quote above, immediately insists that the complainant must secretly be the insufferable one, because actually smart people don't experience frustration for reasons unknown. The implication is that they're the smart ones because they live in a world where the ultimate marker of intelligence is not the ability to discern sound action from unsound, but instead a grotesque meta-intelligence which manifests as the inexplicable belief that no action is ever deserving of contempt, and any deviation from this belief is a humility problem. Their judgement usually comes with a vomitous attempt at a cutting remark which, coming from individuals best described as a sentient LinkedIn posts, invariably morphs into the flaccid "you aren't as smart as you think you are" or "you sound insufferable".
>I just wanted to take a moment to tell the third group to go fuck themselves.
> What Taleb calls the Intellectual Yet Idiot (IYI) - someone who has the mannerisms and interests of a superficially intelligent person but who nonetheless is unable to self-reflect or deal with nuance, such as the Harvard-educated Ben Shapiro.
I worked in Harvard Square for 5 years (dead center, across the street from Curious George, between the Greenhouse and the Coop), and it was always my assertion that Harvard is full of Well-Educated Idiots.
I never studied computer science, I can't code a graph path-finding algorithm out of memory and yet I've been told by many former colleagues that I am one of the best programmers they ever met.
Which is quite hilarious because I still think I am quite bad, to this day, after 22 years of career. And no this is not humble-bragging, more like to outline how different our perspectives on ourselves can be from the perception of everyone else.
But this approach, I think, is what is keeping me intellectually honest. I am self-indulgent for like 2-3 days a year and the rest of the time I always think I have to learn yet another thing, and to practice it well.
> I know many of you love this guy, and think he's a genius. I can assure you, none among you, are as impressed with his intelligence as he is. This guy is just insufferable. I've actually never witnessed a marriage of incompetence and confidence so fully and grotesquely consummated in the mind of a person with a public platform.
> This is the most arrogant person I have ever had the misfortune of meeting. When you meet him you quickly discover that he radiates a sense of grievance from his pores in a way that few people do. It's kind of like a preternatural force of negative charisma.
> He is a child in a man's body. And the mismatch between his estimation of himself and the quality of his utterances is so complete and so mortifying to witness in person that you just find you're jumping out of your skin.
I love Taleb's writing (Black Swan was an important book) and observations (Power law distributions are the world globalization trends towards) but truth be told he does come off as a bit of an ass. I mean, he really just had the key observation and then somehow wrote a few thousand pages around it and more or less got lucky with a trade once.
> but truth be told he does come off as a bit of an ass.
Being able to look past that is what constitutes one of the meanings of the expression "going out of your comfort zone" which is basically how you learn new things.
Like your sibling commenter, I distill wisdom and experience any chance I get. If I find myself being irritated by somebody, my first reaction is to ask myself why. If the reason is emotional I almost always dismiss it.
The problem is that we select for high fidelity parrots and virtue signaling monkeys in admissions, rather than providing a support structure for people who want to create or discover things.
>and it was always my assertion that Harvard is full of Well-Educated Idiots.
I grew up surrounded by Ivy leaguers. You could tell who came from money, and who made it on their own merit. Some of the wealthiest people I've ever met growing up were lower/middle class kids with tremendous academic intelligence AND street-smarts who made it to the ivies on their own merit and excelled from there. Some of the dumbest of that Ivy cohort were kids of exorbitantly wealthy, and due to their social class and connections, were pretty much promised a spot at one of the top schools. They aren't dumb in the sense that they are truly brainless...quite the opposite - they were good academically and often quite book-smart, but lacked every real-world marker of human intelligence; and would be the last person you'd want to hire or work with.
Harvard, Penn, Yale, etc... are places where the smart poor or smart middle class go to rub elbows with (and get jobs working for the parents of) wealthy idiots.
It is often very hard to identify the best course of action. But in any large enough group, you can in short order identify the Oracle of Wrong, who has a complementary skill. For the most difficult choices, where you honestly cannot decide, you may simply look to the local Oracle of Wrong, and do the opposite of what they advocate. This yields well above average results.
Oracles of Wrong will have above-average intelligence, but estimate it higher than that. Some decades of observation suggest they most usually come from a life of privilege, where no personal choice has caused them substantial difficulty or distress.
Do not neglect that you may be the Oracle of Wrong in the group.
I remember at the beginning of the Ukraine war, that the Ukrainians were very hopeful to win it, as the Russian military leadership was taking completely stupid decisions one after another. And they still are doing very stupid things, but they are not losing, at that's because the steady work of a large group of determined people, even of stupid people, even with a lot of mistakes, usually ends up with greater success than what a few genius can achieve on their own. This is why most religions favor the weak and the 'idiots', and why wise people remind smart people to not insult idiots, because at the end of the day they do most of the work and make most things happen
There's a lot of truth in this, but I struggle with the conclusion of "avoid stupid (destructive) people at all costs."
While I don't doubt this is best for personal satisfaction and sanity, it feels lacking in compassion.
An example: I have teenage children, and they have some friends in school who fit the stupid description from the article (destructive behaviors). They grew up in unstable homes and didn't have good relationships / behaviors to learn from.
My kids recognize their friends' poor decision making, and are sometimes dumbfounded by their behavior. It gives my kids a realistic view into the lives of others. Also, even destructive people aren't destructive all the time (at least at that point cutting ties is the obvious choice).
It would be easier, and perhaps safer, to push my children to not associate with them - is that really the best policy?
I'd say definitely yes, it would be better if they did not associate, but I'm not sure if you pushing or not will work. So maybe you pushing will actually make them get even closer to the undesirable friends. But you could maybe talk to them and try to show them that it is not a good idea. Observing other persons' behaviors and reasoning about them being good or bad is not the same as associating with them. You can observe and learn; you don't need to necessarily bring them into your home or have them around you all the time. Not everyone deserves empathy, that is absurd and it's actually inhuman; if you believe that you yourself has the duty to show empathy to everyone, regardless of whatever they do, you are assuming an unrealistic responsibility on your back and setting yourself up for failure, confusion, and constant disappointment. As a human being, and individual, and a small cog on the big social system, you have not only the right but maybe the duty (?) to reason about other people's behaviors, make conclusions and take decisions that are at your reach, as an individual human being (and not above).
I come from a poor family from a weird small town in the middle of a poor country hundreds of kilometers away from any kind of interesting or relevant cultural/social center. I made it out and ended up in quite a nice place (at an international level) and I believe that it was in a big part due to me being very selective about the people I decided to be around with. That may sound elitist, but it's not at all; I made these decisions on my own, I chose those who did me good and those who didn't. By pushing the harmful people away from me I think I had much more space on my mind and my time to spend on things that rewarded me best. Whenever I get in touch with the guys who stayed behind that belief just intensifies. Everyone who is around you affects you, invariably, so it's up to you to manage that, nobody else.
When I was growing up, my friends and I recognized something about different groups of people. If everyone in your friend group has been to jail, the chance of you going is higher than normal.
Pushing away everyone deemed to be stupid will be a lonely path, but it seems like there is some room in there to push some of those people away.
"Behavior geneticists contend that the rough rule of thumb when it comes to the determinants of child development is 50-0-50, that is, roughly 50% of the variance in personality, behavior, and other traits is heritable (influenced by genes), roughly 0% by the shared environment (what happens within the family and is experienced by all siblings), and roughly 50% by the nonshared environment (what happens inside and outside of the family, not shared by siblings)."
As an adult, you might be able to compartmentalize dysfunctional people and evaluate their behavior in a neutral manner. But children are not rational like adults. Their frontal cortex isn't fully developed until their mid-20s.
Good lord, I hope I never work with this person. It’s true that some people produce more output than others, but shitting all over under-performers just discourages and humiliates them. Absolute garbage human being behavior. The mature, productive move is to try to help. If you truly cannot level someone up you may need to make a difficult decision, but that doesn’t at all mean you need to be a huge dick.
I don't see author discouraging and humiliating anyone.. author's advice is pretty straightforward, and most of the text is justification of that action:
> I'll be making some moves to rectify this, even if it means having to spend more energy working elsewhere - the risk of a fool destroying our department's budget and putting me out of a job is too high
So they will be moving away from their department to some other one. Based on their other blog posts, I am sure they will say it all diplomatically and without burning any bridges, with some made-up reason about passion or self-improvement or company vision.
This seems to be better for everyone - author will be happier, department they left might be happier too.
(Trying to level-up everyone is a noble goal, but is a very hard work. Trying to level-up someone who does not want or can not level up, all while you have your own tasks to do, is even worse and can be extremely demotivating. I don't blame author on changing department instead.)
>The mature, productive move is to try to help. If you truly cannot level someone up you may need to make a difficult decision, but that doesn’t at all mean you need to be a huge dick.
I've been on the receiving end of this before. The problem is there are a lot of folks out there with tremendous subject matter intelligence, and often times they are pushed into management. A good amount of these folks don't really have the skills to deal with people as people, not as subordinates. They "teach" to the best of their ability, but this, sometimes, comes up short, and their way of dealing with the people they can't "teach" often involves making a tough decision. They don't think their way of doing things is dick-ish, and in my case, the person wasn't intentionally trying to be a dick, he just happened to act in a manner that made everyone think he was.
Human relationship dynamics are tricky, and doubly tricky in the working world. Everyone is different, and this can make things outright impossible when it comes to setting expectations and managing people in a uniform or case-by-case way.
Very ironic to read this... when Taleb is himself behaving more and more like an inhinged idiot - and no, I am not talking about his takes about the Middle-East, I am talking about his general behaviour and "reasoning"...
Yes people are stupid but many are stupid, smart, and clever all at different times and in different ways. To simplify that there is a class of stupid people responsible for everything wrong is to imply the inverse that there is a class of smart people that are responsible for everything right which is totally elitist and ridiculous
He’s clear enough what he’s talking about (and what the original book talks about), and that this isn’t about intelligence, but you couldn’t tell it from the bulk of comments as I write.
However, I would remind the reader of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's maxim, "The boundary between good and evil runs through every man's heart".
The time each of us spends stupid is identically that same sigma. Some are seen to keep to themselves better during such times, mostly through happenstance, though a few by bitter experience. It takes enormous effort to look back at your sigma time and reflect, which rarely returns better results than chagrin. Keeping consequential actions better confined to the >sigma times is the best we can hope for.
The author presupposes perfect knowledge. Take my precious role where the head of the IT department squandered a year's budget on some half baked reporting system cooked up by a big player in corporate data systems.
Now to the outsider this may have looked like stupidity at the time, but it was actually banditry according to this analysis, since the IT manager was getting foreign golf vacations paid for entirely by the company selling in their half baked reporting system.
Is this satire? I feel like I'm reading commentary from a strictly classical economist lamenting that our economy is worsened by all those pesky market participants that are ignorant of economic theory and therefore make irrational financial decisions.
Then there's this line:
> The implication is that [my critics are] the smart ones because they live in a world where the ultimate marker of intelligence is not the ability to discern sound action from unsound, but instead a grotesque meta-intelligence which manifests as the inexplicable belief that no action is ever deserving of contempt, and any deviation from this belief is a humility problem.
What about Chesterton's Fence? Or root-cause analysis? Those aren't just for code! Contempt is an ugly word, so the burden of proof should be pretty high. After all, we're trying to understand and fix and prevent "actions that harm everyone" and not just classify them, right?
What's the solution? Just sit around and bask in how smart you are while the hoards of depth-grovellers endlessly toil away for nuggets of neoplasmid. You are smart. We are dumb. I get it.
I couldn't get through the whole insufferable mess, but I'm going to argue with this point.
> The first type, my favourite commenters, whose grim-faced no-nonsense corporate visages grace standups across the world. Thanks to their fearless leadership and keen business sense, I have it on good authority that all projects are scheduled to move from red status to green status despite all those risks unfortunately materializing, which is no one's fault in particular. Despite the various challenges we have faced over the years and lack of forward progress, I think this retro is the one where things are going to change.
I have someone like this on my team, and let me tell you, I _adore_ this person. He is not an idiot. We tell him the unvarnished truth about what is going on, and he massages it into something that is closer to what upper management wants to hear. It actually takes a lot of intelligence to do this in such a way that it isn't blatantly dishonest and also doesn't get your project cancelled. Being brutally honest with upper management about the status of your project is a sure fire way to _lose your job_ at many companies. And by the way, the people he's reporting to are _also_ not idiots and realize that the message is being massaged and have to read between the lines and so on up the chain.
I'm going to close with this quote:
> But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.
> Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it.
I am pretty sure author is not thinking about teams talking to upper management, but rather upper management talking to teams, claiming the project will succeed while it is really on the failing track and needs urgent intervention.
I've seen this once in my career: one of the project directors claiming the certain project is fine in the face of opposite evidence, doing nothing while it went further and further off-track, until the customers (who have seen the status reports) asked for a deliverable and everything just collapsed. This was very amusing to see from the distance, but if I really cared about the project I would be very disheartened.
(But I would not call this director "moron" - they got their 7-figure salary for few years, and while they did lose their position, I am sure they will eventually find a new project to lead)
Re 2nd part of your message: 100% agree, never judge people by a single event, everyone has a bad day sometimes. However if that's your team-mate and you have a few month worth of experience working with them...
The author about a person claiming seriously that they drive better when they're drunk when coming back from a party :
> Then there is the third kind of person who, upon reading anything like the quote above, immediately insists that the complainant must secretly be the insufferable one, because actually smart people don't experience frustration for reasons unknown. The implication is that they're the smart ones because they live in a world where the ultimate marker of intelligence is not the ability to discern sound action from unsound, but instead a grotesque meta-intelligence which manifests as the inexplicable belief that no action is ever deserving of contempt, and any deviation from this belief is a humility problem. Their judgement usually comes with a vomitous attempt at a cutting remark which, coming from individuals best described as a sentient LinkedIn posts, invariably morphs into the flaccid "you aren't as smart as you think you are" or "you sound insufferable".
I personally love the D.F Wallace quote from "Is this water ?" and I generally don't get annoyed at people from underperforming at some task (minor driving/logical mistakes), I really try to take into account one's reality by having empathy.
But I don't think this contradictory with calling out stupidity when it could put you or other people in danger and I think the drink and drive situation imagined by the author is one.
You don't need to condemn people to call out stupidity but you should call it out as such.
I dunno, maybe there is some wisdom I missed because I didn't finish it.