Comment by k__
8 years ago
I think we have two problems at the moment.
1. Being right doesn't mean being smart. I met many people in my life that were smart or dumb, but their success had nothing to do with this. You can do the right things by accident.
2. Being rich often removes the need of being smart to varying degrees. People want to help you getting richer if they get a piece of the pie.
Competent Elites - The World is Stratified by Genuine Competence
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16186279
lol, this guy is simply too much.
Eliezer Yudkowsky is quite smart with some deep understandings of the world (along with some less good ideas), as best I can tell. I've definitely learned interesting things or been sent down interesting paths from articles of his that I've read.
However, he would be served very well to work on eliminating the moderate pomposity that permeates much of his writing. He is also overly verbose sometimes. Fixing those two issues would reduce a lot of the beef he gets, I think.
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Science is frequently about explaining phenomenon that people stumbled on by trail and error.
(I think I see scientists forget this too often. There are things that are true that we don’t know. Being true and being sure are different things and you should respect people who are going to show you true things otherwise you will never learn.)
While you can certainly become rich by accident, usually what we call "accident" are quite rare. Are you saying dumb people getting rich are rare by calling it an accident ? I think we would need more study to establish if there is a correlation or not, looking just at the people you met is not enough.
Is it?
Who could qualify this?
I mean, you found a company, talk to the right people and get rich.
If you just happen to find the wrong people, you won't get rich.
Sure, you could say the sales people were skilled and found these people, but how often is this really true and how often do you just luck out by finding the right number on some obscure website?