Comment by bitwize

One of the strange things about being a very intelligent person is that you realize that these two statements can be true at the same time:

* a particular person is possessed of intelligence you respect, certainly not unintelligent compared to the norm and maybe have what is considered high intelligence

* that same person is way less intelligent than you, cannot do the same cognitive things that you do, and is prone to falling into traps that you have some resistance to

An example: there is a phenomenon called the "breakfast question", wherein people below a certain intelligence threshold, purportedly cannot reason about hypothetical scenarios that are not the case, and so cannot answer questions like "What would you do if you didn't have breakfast this morning?" But I'm not talking about that here. Rather, I have reason to believe that there is another, much higher intelligence threshold than the putative breakfast-question threshold—perhaps one standard dev above the mean or so—below which people are unable to reason about the phenomenon of exponential growth. One sign of being below such a threshold is that the person keeps getting entrapped in multilevel marketing schemes. They fizzled out of Herbalife, so they get into Vemma. Vemma doesn't work out for them, so they get into Aboa or whatever the next one is called. People who get involved in one, crash out, learn the dangers and never get involved in that shit again don't count; they're borderline cases at worst. It's the ones who are repeatedly burned that definitely do not have the cognitive chops to bellyfeel the way exponential growth works and realize that the whole business model is a scam. They keep sticking their leg in the bear trap because they don't know better; they can't know better.

I have friends and relatives like this. They're not stupid people. But the scam works because it's set up to operate on principles that are just beyond their physical capability to understand. There are probably scams that are hidden from my understanding for the same reason—perhaps certain highly sophisticated financial instruments. Or Anthropic's IPO (whoops did I just say that out loud).