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Why Smart People Defend Bad Ideas
CHESTER COPPERPOT writes "Scott Berkun writes an interesting essay on 'Why smart people defend bad ideas'. He states a number of interesting highlights on smart people and dumb ideas. From the article: 'In the software industry, the common example of thinking at the wrong level is a team of rock star programmers who can make anything, but don't really know what to make: so they tend to build whatever things come to mind, never stopping to find someone who might not be adept at writing code, but can see where the value of their programming skills would be best applied.'."
There are a lot of people who can literally do ANYTHING, and partly because of this they end up doing NOTHING. Kind of like a horse caught between two bales of hay.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
I quite deliberately confront people with, and defend, astonishingly bad ideas. (For example: "If the US government really wants to save as many lives as possible, they should give everybody two weeks' notice and then drop a nuclear bomb in the center of Jerusalem. This would destroy the largest cause of Israeli-Palestinian violence.") I do this not because I actually believe such things, but because I want to find people who are willing to contradict me and justify their positions.
Sadly, the vast majority of people either disagree without justification, or (even more worryingly) agree without justification -- which just demonstrates how unwilling most sheep^Wpeople are to engage in thought and/or debate.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
...because people are not rational. We are sometimes temporarily capable of rationality, but the other 99% of the time we're ruled by subconscious forces. We arrogantly think in terms of making intelligent choices, but modern brain science is showing that decisions are an illusion, that there is only behavior, and that our behavior is out of our conscious control.
So smart-schmart. Intelligence has nothing to do with it.
You think he did a good job with it? Don't get me wrong - I've been impressed with Carmack as a programmer ever since I was a teenager - but if you follow his weblog, Armadillo Aerospace has been one disaster after another. Even after all this time, he still can't decide on what propellants to use, and he's repeated almost every mistake in the books as far as rocket design goes.
He seems to be finally getting back on track, and I'm not sure I'd call the project a "bad idea" (if it's fun, how is it any worse of an idea than, say, buying a big mansion or other waste of money?). But it hasn't really been much of a success, as far as rocketry programs go - even SpaceDev's relatively weak hybrid engine would classify as a leap forward in comparison to what Carmack has accomplished.
All we want to do is eat your brains.
Because the majority of the executives and Members of the Board do not capable of identifying what needs to be done or the person who can accomplish it.
If they cannot define the criteria (other than "turn the company around") how will they be able to find a person who can successfully implement those criteria?
Instead, they go with "rock star" CEO's.
Here's a quick example. Get 100 pennies. Toss them in the air. Take out the "bad" pennies that came up tails. You should have about 50 left.
Do it again. You should have about 25 "performing" pennies.
Again, now you have weeded out the dead wood and you're left with a dozen or "successful" pennies.
Again, now you have the half dozen or so "highly successful" pennies.
Once more and you have the few "rock star" pennies. These are the pennies you pay millions of dollars to turn your company around. These are the pennies that don't make mistakes. These are the pennies that understand management and the market.
And hiring CEO's is even worse than that. At least with the pennies, they only had a couple of factors influencing them. Companies have all kinds of influences from overseas competition to economic depression to lawsuits and so forth.
If a CEO makes a decision, and the company increases in value, how do you know that it was anything other than mere luck?
Maybe his decision was extremely stupid and a thousand other decisions would have increased the company's value even more.
Which is why one of the first actions of the new CEO is usually to secure the golden parachutes for himself and other execs.
Low self esteem which is a long-term estimation of self and high ego which is a transitory and ephemeral estimation. You can't replace the former with the latter any more than you can replace a proper diet with nothing but Cheetos and Ding Dongs no matter how much some try. And you can't invent the former simply with empty exercises. You have to examine yourself, be honest in both directions good and bad, and accept the outcome and the options for change as needed and commit to those changes or at least the endless path to the unattainable goals.
But the usual response is the "sour grapes" one instead. These geniuses feel the world doesn't like them and regard them highly enough. They hate the world for that. They begin to respond accordingly with a haughty sneering disregard for others' accomplishments and abilities outside of their fold. Non-geeks are "lusers" and worse.
Admit they are wrong? Fark no. That would be embracing the death of their artificial self they've made of ego straw. They can't face and embrace true emptiness that comes with the finality of true understanding and acceptance. They can't because of fear. Non-geeks may be right that they deserve derision and scorn. Non-geeks may be right that technical smarts aren't as good as hot social skills. Non-geeks may be right and they may be... wrong. And if the geek is wrong, then he isn't smart. And if he isn't at least smart, then he has nothing else and consequently would be... nothing.
I went through gifted classes with kids who exemplified this thinking. Everything was about showing off their smarts. Making a calculator out of flashlight bulbs and switches. Creating new number and word games every single day. Designing new things and creating new programs and writing new reports every day. At all times, they had to be smarter. Any mistakes were not ignored as you ignore the dog barking outside while watching the football game. They were ignored in the style of a child covering their eyes with their hands and plugging their ears with their thumbs at night in the dark in fright desperately trying to ignore the things that go bump in the night.
Because if they were wrong, then they weren't as smart as all that, and if they weren't smart, then they had nothing and were nothing. This would be the same as accepting total psychic death. If you are nothing, then how can you be?
This is the mindset of most of the Linux world today. If they are wrong, then Microsoft by default is right and there is no other outcome. They cannot be wrong but learn and grow. They can't see that Windows is easier to install, configure, use, and support than any Unix variant for the average person and try to make Linux as easy. They can't backtrack and admit mistakes and leave it to others to fix their sloppy work on the theory that at least it is free. On this score, Microsoft is smart and sexy because they will after a while admit, say "we screwed up", and shrug and move on. The geek brigades besieging the MS world on the field outside never do.
Well as someone who went through gifted classes and was maxing out the scores on all the IQ tests they could throw at me in grade school, I can confidently say to them, you can be and in fact are more often than not wrong. And the courage and intelligence to admit this and learn from it is far greater an intellectual exercise than making X11 behave with a new video driver while using Vi on a Chinese keyboard when your first language is French.
I would further say to these people, let your fear go. You're wrong all the time starting with that you're wrong that being wrong means you're nothing. You are not secretly dumb because your intelligence is less than omniscience or because real world things trip you up as opposed to computer world things. And when you get older, you will get slower and you will seem less brilliant. If you insist on believing that your smarts are all you have, then when they are gone you truly will have nothing.
Stop the worrying. Save time. Embrace the death of yourself. Begin recompiling self version 2.0.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Rather Interesting...
http://www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html
This sentence contradicts itself - no actually it doesn't.
How many people have said, "We must believe in God, for if we do, and he does not exist, nothing happens. But if we do not believe in him, and he does exist, then we are doomed." But, it's fairly clear he does not exist.
First, I will say that I am not religious. If I had to ID myself, I'd say I'm a Protestant Christian, but the last time I went to church on a Sunday was probably 15 years ago.
But even as a Smart Person, I'm not sure how it's "fairly clear" that God does not exist. A lot of Smart People have, in fact, pretty successfully argued in favor of the existence of God.
One of my favorite arguments in favor of the existence of God is Thomas Aquinas' theory of the "prime mover". Thomas Aquinas was a "religious philosopher" who was actually banished from the Catholic church because of his efforts to prove the existence of God. In any religion, faith is paramount, so proof is neither necessary nor desired - if you need proof of God to believe in him (or her, or it), then you're sort of missing the whole point of religion in the first place. (Aquinas was later made a saint, despite his earlier banishment.)
Anyway, Aquinas posed five proofs in favor of the existence of God, some more convincing than others. The one that I recall as being most convincing, and the one that nobody has been able to refute to this day (because it is based on the laws of physics), is the theory of the prime mover.
Aquinas argued that for every movement or action, there must be a cause or impetus, something to turn potentiality into actuality. He used the example of wood, which at any time has the potential to be either hot or cold, but can only actually be one or the other at any given time (ok, feel free to bring up quantum mechanics, but the point is the Hitchhiker's Guide Improbability Drive does not really exist - things can't be everywhere and everything all the time). If a piece of wood is actually cold, it can potentially be made hot by fire, which will then make it actually hot but no longer actually cold. So anything can have two or more potential states, but only one actual state, and to change that actual state requires an external force.
He then argues that this cannot go on into infinity, for if it did, nothing could actually exist because there would be no prime mover to have set everything in motion. (He wrote this prior to our discovery of the "big bang"). Now we know that, in fact, it did not go on into infinity - there was a time when our universe did not exist, and scientists still do not completely understand how it was created. We know that there was a great buildup of energy and matter that exploded into what we now know of as our universe, but we do not know how or why that buildup occured, and likely never will because it would require peering back beyond the beginning of time.
Aquinas argued that the "prime mover" was God. There is no possible explanation for the creation of the universe that fits the laws of physics. This goes hand in hand with his third proof, that of "possibility and necessity", which states that if everything can either exist or not exist, then there must have been a time when nothing at all existed (we now know that this is, in fact, true). If nothing at all existed, it is impossible for anything to now exist, because nothing can cause its own existence. Therefore, he argued, only God could have caused our existence, ultimately.
So I don't think this is a case of smart people arguing in favor of bad ideas. It's one thing to be skeptical, but there are as many good theories in favor of God's existence as there are against, and nobody's ever going to have a "smoking gun" either way. (Aquinas was also not arguing in favor of a smiling, benevolent, grey-bearded God with a human-like personality - he was arguing in favor of some power beyond our understanding that displayed intelligence and was able to manipulate matter and energy as it saw fit from beyond the confines of our universe and our natural laws.)
In fact, I think your post is more an example of why it pays for smart people to be open-minded rather than simply skeptical all the time.
If I understand this "prime mover" idea, you're saying that every event has a cause, and that only God could have started the ball rolling by causing the first event.
If time is infinite, then there is no need for a first event. The Big Bang is not the beginning of the universe or the beginning of time. It is simply where our current theories come to a halt. The Big Bang theory was developed by tracing the trend of the expanding universe backwards through time. If one assumes that there were no changes in this trend, then we arrive at time in the finite past where every thing in the universe was at a single point. This point had infinite density and temperature.
Our current physical theories aren't capable of coping with infinite densities and temperatures. They produce a divide-by-zero error, a singularity. The Big Bang isn't the beginning of the universe, but rather the end of our theories.
There is one theory that the Big Bang was caused by our universe colliding with our universe. There was never a singularity, a point of infinite density and temperature. Instead, our two universes crumpled and only intersected at certain locations. At those intersections, the vacuum energies of the two universes combined, producing areas of very high, but not infinite, density and temperature.
The theory also states that this collision might not have been the first one. Or the last one.
Whether or not this theory is true doesn't matter. It is enough to know that it shows that time isn't neccessarily finite. If time stretches back infinitely into the past, there is no need for a first event.
Likewise, time might be finite but boundless, looped in on itself. The last effect becomes the first cause.
Lastly, if every event requires a cause, and God caused the first event, what caused God?
I don't think any assumption can be proven by reason alone, but only with evidence. We can't disprove the existence of God, but we haven't been able to prove His existence either. It is most difficult to prove a negative. But that's where Occam's Razor comes in. All things being equal, God is not the simplest explanation for the world we see around us. According to Occam's Razor, we should not assume that God exists, at least until more evidence comes in.
>He then argues that this cannot go on into infinity, for if it did,
/finite/, you need something to break the rules, which is what Aquinas does. And he does that with God.
>nothing could actually exist because there would be no prime
>mover to have set everything in motion.
No, you got it wrong. It cannot NOT go on into infinity. Going on forever quite easily solves the problem, because there's always something to act & cause the reaction.
If the Universe is
All of Aquinas's proofs boil down to that (well, that I remember, at least): he creates a situation that sounds logically impossible to resolve rationally, and thus creates the need to resort to an Actor who doesn't have to play by any rules. Problem solved. The Universe is allowed to exist again.
(oh, and another problem that no one ever seems to address: let's assume, for now, that his arguments are in fact logically sound. Irrefutably so. He never offers any argument to convince us that what he calls "God" is, in fact, anything at all like what we traditionally consider Him. The only requirement is that it doesn't obverve certain laws of physics or other rules of the Universe that we know. It could be a giant unicorn. Or an Infinite Improbability Drive. Or a peculiar, unknown class of matter, like dark matter, with properties that don't follow the laws of physics as we understand them.)
If you were actually familiar with Aquinas' writings, you'd know that Aquinas himself admitted that this was true. He never argued that one could deduct the existence of the Roman-Catholic God by reason alone. Central to Christianity is the act of revelation, God revealing Himself to us. /Roman-Catholic.
If time is infinite, then there is no need for a first event.
Actually, the idea of a "prime mover" is an older philosophic idea, the oldest recorded discussion being from Aristotle. Aristotle actually argues that time must be infinite in both directions, but this doesn't hamper the existence of a prime mover. In order to understand the prime mover, you have to understand Aristotle's ideas about "cause".
The prime mover is the formal cause of everything, but not the efficient cause of anything. In modern times, we've forgotten such distinctions and only talk about efficient causes.