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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.'."
Tom Smykowski: It's a "Jump to Conclusions Mat". You see, you have this mat, with different CONCLUSIONS written on it that you could JUMP TO.
Michael Bolton: That is the worst idea I've ever heard.
Samir: Yes, this is horrible, this idea.
Ego.
I knew a guy that programmed a music "jukebox" ... didn't have the heart to tell him that at most parties I went to the people just had a winamp and a folder open.
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?
Why smart people defend bad ideas
By Scott Berkun, April 2005
We all know someone that's intelligent, but who occasionally defends obviously bad ideas. Why does this happen? How can smart people take up positions that defy any reasonable logic? Having spent many years working with smart people I've catalogued many of the ways this happens, and I have advice on what to do about it. I feel qualified to write this essay as I'm a recovering smart person myself and I've defended several very bad ideas. So if nothing else this essay serves as a kind of personal therapy session. However, I fully suspect you'll get more than just entertainment value (Look, Scott is stupider than we thought!) out of what I have to say on this topic.
Success at defending bad ideas
The monty python argument sketchI'm not proud to admit that I have a degree in Logic and Computation from Carnegie Mellon University. Majoring in logic is not the kind of thing that makes people want to talk to you at parties, or read your essays. But one thing I did learn after years of studying advanced logic theory is that proficiency in argument can easily be used to overpower others, even when you are dead wrong. If you learn a few tricks of logic and debate, you can refute the obvious, and defend the ridiculous. If the people you're arguing with aren't as comfortable in the tactics of argument, or aren't as arrogant as you are, they may even give in and agree with you.
The problem with smart people is that they like to be right and sometimes will defend ideas to the death rather than admit they're wrong. This is bad. Worse, if they got away with it when they were young (say, because they were smarter than their parents, their friends, and their parent's friends) they've probably built an ego around being right, and will therefore defend their perfect record of invented righteousness to the death. Smart people often fall into the trap of preferring to be right even if it's based in delusion, or results in them, or their loved ones, becoming miserable. (Somewhere in your town there is a row of graves at the cemetery, called smartypants lane, filled with people who were buried at poorly attended funerals, whose headstones say Well, at least I was right.)
Until they come face to face with someone who is tenacious enough to dissect their logic, and resilient enough to endure the thinly veiled intellectual abuse they dish out during debate (e.g. You don't really think that do you? or Well if you knew the rule/law/corollary you wouldn't say such things), they're never forced to question their ability to defend bad ideas. Opportunities for this are rare: a new boss, a new co-worker, a new spouse. But if their obsessive-ness about being right is strong enough, they'll reject those people out of hand before they question their own biases and self-manipulations. It can be easier for smart people who have a habit of defending bad ideas to change jobs, spouses, or cities rather than honestly examine what is at the core of their psyche (and often, their misery).
Short of obtaining a degree in logic, or studying the nuances of debate, remember this one simple rule for defusing those who are skilled at defending bad ideas: Simply because they cannot be proven wrong, does not make them right. Most of the tricks of logic and debate refute questions and attacks, but fail to establish any true justification for a given idea.
For example, just because you can't prove that I'm not the king of France reincarnated doesn't make it so. So when someone tells you "My plan A is the best because no one has explained how it will fail" know that there is a logical gap in this argument. Simply because no one has described how it will fail, doesn't necessarily make it the best plan. It's possible than plans B, C, D and E all have the same quality, or that the reason no one has described how A will fail is that no one has had more than 30 seconds to scrutinize the plan. As we'll discuss later, diffusing bad thinking requires someone (probab
Slashdot
This is another way of starting a sig with this and ending it with that.
Like that time everyone wanted to give a multi-billion dollar corporation hundreds of millions of dollars to make another season of a mediocre TV show. That was a great idea, wasn't it?
Oh, and then there was the tens of thousands of dallars they gave to that guy who ran a copyright-material-file-trading-site. That turned out smashingly well.
And-- umm--- hrm.
{pause}
UTF-8: There and Back Again
Insert GOP/DNC joke here.
Prof. Farnsworth - "Oh a lesson in not changing history from Mr I'm-My-Own-Grandpa!"
a lot of it has to do with ego, and a lot of it has to do with committing to something and saying "this is what we are going with"
some people invest a lot of time into ideas and when they see their ideas threatened, they throw up the defense like no other. it transends programming all the way up to world politics.
i am guilty of it, but i have gotten better at admiting my mistakes and using it as something to build upon. it takes a lot to realize when you are at fault and you fucked up.
IMO people that can do ANYTHING are likely
an INTP http://www.intp.org/intprofile.html personality type. This would explain why they don't always produce much. Merely proving to themselves that they CAN do it is quite enough.
- Difficult conversations, a book about confronting people in tough situations.
- The argument clinic, Monty Python (If you've never seen it, watch it before reading this script. It's in the 3rd season, disc 9 of the boxed set). Also see the splunge scene in episode 6.
- Games people play, Eric Byrne. A book on transactional analyis: a model for why people behave as they do in certain situations.
- The informed argument, Robert Miller. Textbook style coverage of both proper and unfair argument tactics.
- With good reason, Morris Engel. a short summary of common logic manipulations, explained with a sense of humor (over a dozen cartoons).
- Why smart people can be so stupid, Salon.com
Best. Citation. Ever.
It's simple. Everyone can have dumb ideas. It's our god given right. And if you think that you are going to pry them from our cold dead fingers, you have another think coming. We can come up with all the bad ideas that we want, and we STILL have more good ideas than the less fortunate. So I say LEAVE US ALONE!
considered smart?
Probably because they did well in school. But school (at least in the US) wasn't designed to teach people to think, but to teach them to memorize facts and follow directions.
There are lots of very capable coders out there who make excelent code for other techies, but for this very reason the UI often sucks. The individualism and "if you don't like it, fix the code yourself" attitude of many open source projects means that people who aren't code junkies, but are excelent at understanding what a user might want get excluded from the process far too often.
Michael Shermer wrote in his book "Why people believe weird things" that smart people believe stupid things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-intelligent reasons. It comes down to intellectual attribution bias and confirmation bias
You're describing somebody who is so afraid of making a bad decision, they can't make any. TFA describes pretty much the opposite problem: being unfraid to risk a bad decision, but never being able to admit that it was bad.
When someone, or a team, puts so much hard work into something pride prevents one from stepping back to say "Wow. That's really messed up. We need to abandon/start over/find a new job"...leadership is lacking. It doesn't necessarily mean that every project needs a dictator. Sometimes a person will step up and provide direction before disappearing into the masses. Sometimes natural chaos works, sometimes a king is sorely lacking. Direction should never be taked for granted, however.
What I've often seen is that really smart people can end up being really stupid because they have not yet run into that challenge that really tests them, so they don't have the experience of having to do real intellectual work. I remember a friend in high school who sailed through everything and got a near perfect score on the SAT only to crash and burn, flunking everything his first year. He'd gotten by his entire life on quick thinking, and had never had to do any real intellectual heavy lifting and when confronted with the need, he simply did not have an practice.
This is not to say all really smart people do this. But it is a danger among the smart who never really made themselves work.
The cake is a pie
is when people who are very intelligent compared to the rest of the public think they know it all. I think there is probably nothing worse than arguing with someone who thinks that because they are brilliant in one area that they are now all of a sudden uniquely qualified to render an opinion in all areas.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
I think the issue at hand is that many people confuse leadership ability with skill. Being a good programmer doesn't necessarily make you a good project manager, nor is the best manager also the best coder. It's sometimes the case, and certainly some very skilled people successfully rise into management because their skill translates into seeing the big picture and hence being a good manager.
But not all really skilled people see the big picture, and that's when ego kicks in. They can't stand taking orders from somebody less skilled than them. People complain about pointy-headed PHB's with no skills getting paid more that them, but the reality is that having 20 coders is a waste if they lack direction, and ideally, that's what the PHB is there for.
Whether the PHB is actually effective is another story. Leadership is a nebulous thing and much harder to quantify and identify than skill - hence the embarrasing examples that slip through the cracks.
The problem with smart people is that they like to be right and sometimes will defend ideas to the death rather than admit they're wrong.
I've known smart people like that.
And fantastically dumb people like that.
I've had someone argue that the queen of England isn't rich, and get this, when I explained that she's the biggest land owner in the U.K. and she made about 27 million a year last time I checked, he argued that she isn't rich because when she dies someone else will inherit her money (unlike Bill Gates, who'll bring it with him to the afterlife?).
Smart people just defend their insanity with more flair.
You can't take the sky from me...
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.
Hmm, so that explains why the (extremely successful) head of the NBA is an overweight Jewish lawyer?
Skill doesn't automatically translate into leadership. It helps, but it isn't necessary.
I look at it a kinda like this:
:P).
i zed.jpg (love those Maine coons).
The brain works on weighted probability. These weights change and readjust as we take in information. Taking some liberties with this idea, it seems like a good as time as ever to plug a section of my undergraduate paper: "An Observational Analysis of Machine Cognizance". (Disclaimer: I said undergraduate, haha
Imagine that human memory works on a sliding scale, one of infinitely negative and infinitely positive collections of like objects. These upper and lower bounds are set by the experiences of the individuals.
Let's say you have two cats. Cat one is newborn kitten, while cat two is http://www.isfullofcrap.com/albums/Cats/buddha2.s
By looking at that image, you have just redefined your own maximum in relation to the object "cat".
The more cats you look at, the more they all begin to look the same and you begin to tune out any old cat that may cross your path. But you'll always remember that big fat cat as the biggest you've ever seen (the maximum values, which can change) and newborn as the smallest cat you've ever seen (the minimum), while the "middle ground" deteriorates under the weight of the average cat. The more cats you see, the less you remember. Not only that, but cats they may appear big to other people, begin to seem normal to you. You've just seen to many damn cats to care anymore (call it desensitizing the mind, or information overload if you will). But you always remember the biggest and smallest. The best and worst.
Couldn't this just be like the fattest cat scenario? These people have taken in so much that only things on the extreme end of the scale seem to have any relevance, while the rest just seems to be repetitive and mundane?
In order to hypothesize we simplify. Using the idea of Occam's Razor we make a number of assumptions and the assumptions we make have a number of presuppositons attached to them. This is how we hypothesize in order to predict and once our predictions are shown to be correct we theorize. Gregory Bateson investigated these ideas in his book Mind and Nature. Smart people should defend dumb/wrong ideas, if they are concerned about falsification as the leading idea in the progress of scince, because the smarter the person the more likely the argument will be logical and the more logical the argument the more able we are to potentially falsify or verify it.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
Every organization with a sufficent number of tech geeks (approximately three, in my experience) has one obnoxious asshole who is constantly throwing out awful ideas and defending them vehemently. If you haven't, you either work alone, or you are the obnoxious asshole.
Nowhere in the article does he suggest that deferring to your manager is always the right course, and, in fact, we have this:
So, you know. RTFA, and all.
What he's saying:
As a condition of being smart, defending ideas is a natural skill. Sometimes that skill takes precedent over rational thought and smart people will focus so much on being right that they will forget to think rationally.
There, I just saved you 10 minutes of reading.
Where's my check?
The Internet is generally stupid
Thomas Edison was violently opposed to AC
With all the stupid comments coming from AC's, I strongly agree with him.
Oh, wait...
Lots of ideas become 'good' or 'bad' only with hindsight. (E.g., pet rocks, E-books...) And, 'smart' doesn't always mean 'prescient' ...or 'lucky'...
Seeing bad movies only encourages them. Watch responsibly
That's a lousy example. Didn't he fight to promote DC because he held the patent on DC current and NOT on AC current? It had nothing to do with being a bad idea, it had to do with Edison wanting to cash in on his invention.
--
RumorsDaily
Any really intelligent person will weigh all sides of an issue before making a decision.
The great ones are the ones that select the facet that is the least known, but has no good reason to be unknown; and they make it very well known - either just because, or because they can.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
The essay's title is probably derived from Paul Graham's essay Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas. Recommended read by the way, that man has insight.
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
Well, that explains Daikatana
- "When you want something with all your heart, the entire universe conspires to give it to you" -Paulo Coelho
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.
There are lots of very capable coders out there who make excelent code for other techies, but for this very reason the UI often sucks.
I write apps for techies and I write apps for non-techies. The UIs and requirements are very different. Apps written for techies and accepted by techies is not proprly judged by non-techies, and vica versa. The arrogance is found in the people in both camps who insist that UI should fit their camp when it was written for the other camp.
If I write an app for techies and they like it, there is nothing "wrong" with it. Often, "techie" interfaces are aimed at functionality, not "point click drool". Thus any remarks about it being ugly are simply irrelevant.
The individualism and "if you don't like it, fix the code yourself" attitude of many open source projects means that people who aren't code junkies, but are excelent at understanding what a user might want get excluded from the process far too often.
And if they aren't the "target market" of the code author(s) that is just fine. Quite frankly much of the apps I write are not intended for end-user non-technical people and I don't care if they don't like it. Nor should I. Making it pretty will NOT enhance my market in the slightest, it will only pollute it. The same goes for end-user non-technical apps I write.
And finally, there is the "you get what you pay for" comment. Most open soruce apps are done for free. As such, Joe EndUser has no right to be "included" in the process.
Now to tie it all up with the favorite computer analogy: cars. GM (for example) sells cars. They sell cars for the enduser, and cars for the techie. Most people are familiar with the first category. But they also sell race-only versions of some of their cars, such as the C5R or upcoming C6R. The general public has zero input into these models, as it should be. Other companies also make race cars. These are oriented around a specific purpose.
The Mosler for example is a race-oriented car. Sure you can drive it on the street (and end user could buy and drive one), but it is aimed at being a performance auto for the track. It is the "code written by geeks for geeks" side.
Then you have the minivans and sedans, for example. They are built for the general consumer (the end user w/o technical skills). Sure a racer can drive one, even adapt it for racing (tens of thousands of Americans do this every year), but as a racer their input is not part of the design process or feature list. Witness the near-universal elimination of options like radio-delete and ac-delete.
IMO, nearly all these rants about ugly yet functional interfaces versus pretty but reduced functionality but pretty shiney interface fall under the categories above. Everybody wants a hand-built Ferrari for the price of a 10 year old wrecked and stripped Geo Metro. And they blame the "industry" for them not getting it.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
Geeks can get infatuated with an idea that seems good, ignoring other good ideas that conflict with it. We used to call this "the tyranny of the single idea" - especially ideas that seem so good that they're treated as a "magic bullet", or (from a perhaps gentler folk era) a "panacea". This seems to be an variant of the Usenet wisdom immortalized in /usr/bin/fortune as "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail".
--
make install -not war
Are the Chinese dumb? No. The average score of a Chinese on a calculus/trigonometry test is significantly above average, outscoring the nearest American.
That is because they actually use that stuff over there. We don't make physical stuff anymore, and thus don't deal with geometry etc. as much. We make junk bonds and bad movies, and you don't need trig for that.
Table-ized A.I.
Maybe... they aren't all that smart. Now, to answer the question why does society recognize absolute cretins as people of respectable intelligence?
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.
Yes, that was humorously ironic, considering the subject. On second thought, maybe it was very clever. Berkun perhaps put that there as a test (to be graded by feedback) to see if the reader had really comprehended what he was saying by modeling for a moment that which he was condemning (smart people defending bad ideas). I wonder if anybody else caught that.
That Edison was a real bastard. Did you hear about how he electrocuted an elephant to death with AC in order to show how dangerous AC is?
Most of the time the point is just "fun". We don't do this to serve you, we do it for our own enjoyment. However, sometimes the point is "to get stuff done". In which case we do just enough to the job done and then we put up what we've got so others don't have to start from scratch. If you need more than my bare minimum then I expect you to code what you need, not come whining back to me that I didn't do what you need. The alternative is to start from scratch, so I think you should consider yourself lucky that I went to the bother of putting my stuff out there (and it is a bother).
Ultimately, if you can't take open source and tailor it to your own needs then you need to either put up or shut up. Either put up code or cash to get it to do what you want or shut up and use what you've been given.
On the other hand, if you've already paid someone for some open source software feel free to bitch and moan to that person as much as you like. Feel free to tell everyone that person didn't supply you what you paid them to supply you.
How we know is more important than what we know.
In my younger years, I took this to mean "Do everything, because you can". Now that I'm in college, that entire lesson was bunk, and now I'm stuck with a bunch of what I'd consider useless knowledge.
[...] something a lot of us are blessed/cursed with [...]
The problem with it is futility [...]
Sadly, I don't see an easy solution.
In art, it's known as the "white page syndrome".
You have a clean, white canvas, on it your talents enable you to paint anything. So you sit there, awash in the mental miasma of the endless possibilities assailing you.
The way I deal with it is to stop thinking and draw a random line, then based on what this restricts the possibilities to, I can build around it.
And the use I found for my "useless" knowledge is to wait for the conditions under which it will become usefull.
Maybe you'll be at a job interview and you'll have knowledge of something the interviewer is passionate about: Bang, you have the edge, you get chosen over the other equally qualified applicants.
My knowledge of all-around trivia actually became usefull when I was employed in a company that did some localisation work, it wasn't what I did there, but whenever the translators were faced with a subject they were unfamiliar with, they came to me. The kids in highschool were hostile to me for being a know-it-all, but at that job it made me quite popular.
Off course, I still feel this... lassitude, sometimes. I haven't found an easy solution, but since in a hundred years' time we'll all be dead, we might as well be ourselves while we can : )
You can't take the sky from me...
Smart people defend bad ideas...
because there is a difference between knowledge and wisdom.
In part the article talks about how to handle yourself in a conversation with a someone who is wrong but (successfully) verbally agressive. This reminds me of a great book called _The Gentle Art of Verbal Self Defense_ [insert your own Amazon affiliate link here...] which discusses all kinds of conversation techniques for dealing with people who have mastered various annoying habits that seem to keep you from making your point. And if you don't think you need this book to help yourself then you should read it to learn about all the unfair, annoying and childish ways you can dominate a conversation. Just in case...
Damn it, the average score of average American's taking Calculus exams score is mean. We need to do something about it so at least half of those taking the test will score above the median.
Edison had the chance (repeatedly) to hire Tesla and keep him. Westinghouse ended up hiring him instead. Edison had chances to work with Westinghouse and many others in ways that could have been very profitable, but insisted on being a solo star ticket at practically all costs. Edison chose repeatedly to spend lots of money on patent litigation, demonstrations for the public, and other fluff to try and prove his points (electrocuting elephants isn't cheap!).
Who is John Cabal?
Slashdot should change it's slogan from "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters" to "Slashdot: smart people defending bad ideas". Never before have I seen a more apropos description of this very sight than the article linked herein.
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one " -Albert Einstein
Or what about how he screwed Tesla over?
Edison: I'll pay you $50,000 if you redesign and improve this generator design.
....some time later....
Tesla: Sure, no problem.
Tesla: Done. Now wheres my money?
Edison Haha! Gocha good!
Tesla: Nothing? Not even a bit of it?
Edison: I'm sorry you don't understand American humor.
Tesla was a far greater man, and has been robbed of his place in history and in the mind of the public.
--
Registered .sig quotient : 1337
Why Smart People Defend Bad Ideas
Because their parents, and/or religious leaders, tell them to.
*puts on asbestos suit*
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Maybe not, but it was *their* totalitarian theocratic regime.
Imagine how people would feel if the Chinese tried to overthrow the totalitarian theocratic regime in Saudi Arabia, or the United States...
The face of 'evil' is always the face of total need
Three words
"Pride of authorship"
give the USA back to the native Americans or go home and shut the fuck up.
When people learn new ways of doing things, they often forget or disregard other possible ways of doing things. Most people assume the new ways they learn are better, and they often are. However, it is a quite easy way to get a group of people in a rut, especially if they only work with each other and, shall we say, "don't get out much."
This happens in the musical world as well. As a composer, learning new rules and methods leads to writing that better follows and can more skillfully and effectively bend these rules. However, I've noticed that once I learn any given rule, I forever think in terms of that rule. If I ever want to ignore that rule, I am "actively" ignoring it. Once a new method is learned, methods that are oblivious to it vanish from one's repertoire, for better or worse.
I somehow thought this was relevant to the topic.
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
The writer is talking about poseurs and pseudo-intellectuals. You know - the ones you can't *avoid* hearing at parties... These people know that they are not *that* smart and try to protect their image of intelligence by defending every statement. While they believe that they have successfully pulled this off (as in the article...) what they have really done is convinced practically everyone around that they have no clue.
In contrast, the majority of *really* smart people don't really care if they're wrong occasionally since they *know* that they are smart and being wrong once in a while is no biggie and they'll learn something so that they will be right (again) the next time...
http://img210.echo.cx/my.php?image=steps9gg.png Sorry, it just sprung to mind.
To digress, I heard a truly bizarre story in college. I was taking "Mongols in History" (senior year and my requirements were fulfilled), and one of the students told us this:
This story is a totally uncorroborated rumor, but I think I believe it. It's genius in its own way-- brutal, effective, and discreet.
I'm probably too buried for anyone to read this, but if you do, has anyone else ever heard something similar?
Please, for the love of God, no more car analogies.
"The average score of a Chinese on a calculus/trigonometry test is significantly above average..."
Obviously the parent is not Chinese. Nah, just kidding. You could've said "...above the global average..." to make it clearer, though.
Consciousness is a myth. Trust me.
Take the Chinese for example. The majority of them insist that Tibet should be occupied by Chinese military forces.
That would probably be due to the fact that information is very strictly controlled in China. If the only source you have for information is the communist media, then the persecution of the Tibetans, the Uighurs, Falun Gong, and the Tienanmen Square Massacre will all seem like the enlightened policies of a benevolent state.
When I chat with Chinese people via the internet, they all know that they lost a relative or two during the 1960's, but they have no idea that Mao's "great leap forward" debacle killed something more than twenty million people.
Likewise, they have no idea that that little twerp of a Stalinist runt running North Korea let three million people starve to death so that his pride wouldn't be hurt by getting out of the way of the foreign aid that could have saved them.
Chinese people aren't stupid, by any means. Just observing the ingenuity with which they work around their totalitarian masters, making a living while paying lip-service to the memory of the man who killed around thirty million of them ("great leader", indeed!), will show you that they're remarkably resourceful.
What gives me great hope for China, is the way that the Chinese I speak with are so eager to find out what the thugs don't want them to know. Back when Deng ordered the slaughter in 1989, he had to bring in troops from far out in the country, who had no idea what was going on in Beijing, since the local garrison wouldn't have opened fire on unarmed protestors.
The commies will fall, and they will fall because internal communication is improving by leaps and bounds. One thing a totalitarian regime needs above all else to stay in power, is the ability to lie and effectively supress the truth. That ability is rapidly slipping away from the Chinese government, and sooner or later, they'll fall just like the Soviets. Once that happens, hold on to your hat, because China will accomplish some truly amazing things.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
And this is why Edward de Bono makes for interesting reading. I wont bother detailing his bio but point you to his website. de Bono spent the early part of his life working on the structure and self organisation of the brain.
He has spent considerable more time trying to get people to think better. For example in a thinking exercise he tries to explain why people (not just smart ones) argue incorrect results to problems through a simple example:
Good ideas flow from good thinking. Good thinking is (mostly) about changing perception not logic or argument.
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
This is utter utter crap. There are at least a hundred million roaming unemployed in China. Just think for a second : about half of the people employed by the state or state owned enterprises before Deng came to power have been sacked as these businesses became unprofitable.
"
The narrow official definition of unemployment leaves out millions of people who are out of work, by a common-sense definition. A good place to start is to ask who is out of work and needs a job but is not counted in the official unemployment figures. These are the main categories:
# Xia gang, or "off-post" workers, not registered as unemployed and still contractually tied to their work-units, possibly receiving short-term very limited benefits.
# Surplus, unpaid but not officially laid off workers at state-owned enterprises (SOEs), technically hired but economically expendable.
# Laid-off workers still contractually tied to their work units.
# Migrant agricultural and rural workers who move to cities, an estimated 94 million of them, or more.
# Surplus rural workers.
# Workers who disappear into the informal economy.
"
It is of course very difficult to get any sensible information out of China. The only people counted as unemployed are those who had a job in a city and lost it. That rate is about 10% of official urban workers, ie 30 million out of 300 million . The biggest portion left out are the roaming agricultural workers - at the very least a hundred million out of work due to cheap food imports from the US, Canada, the Ukraine etc.
YOU CAN'T TEACH INNOVATION IN SCHOOL....
Agreed. The reason our country tends to be innovative is referred to in the article. Innovation comes from diversity of source. Having a myriad of people from disparate backgrounds, all with prodigious problem solving abilities... something good will arise from that. You'll get strong ideas from people used to defending their positions and are thus resistant to peer pressure.
Taking that a step further, you need a leader who KNOWS when the killer idea has been hit upon.
Gonna reveal my geek roots for a minute: When I was a kid I read these cheesy books by a guy named Piers Anthony - called BIO OF A SPACE TYRANT. The guy's name was Hope Hubris and he rose from a small agricultural colony floating in the Jovian atmosphere to become the leader of the Jovian colonies. It was always pointed out in the books that Hope Hubris, in and of himself, was not particularly talented. He was never great at any one thing, other than at getting the best people united under one cause. For some reason, really smart and talented people put their faith in him to lead them, to champion their cause.
I've noticed that most people who are great at designing widgets have a noted inability to grasp the bigger picture. I think it's really true that for the most part, leaders and innovators can't be taught. They arise as a consequence of conditions.
I also agree with you in regards to test scores. Test scores don't measure the quality of our innovation... they measure the quality of our work force. That said, if the United States ceases to innovate, we become inherently disadvantaged because of the inferior workforce we produce because of our less regimented education system.
In regards to innovation, our society seeks to crush that too... through homogeniety (sp). Stifle immigration and champion media culture, and you have everyone thinking the same things... doing the same thing... being the same things. That again robs us of innovation. Somewhere, some really innovative person has just discovered video games, or MTV, and it's a wrap for that guy.
In other words, *and I can't believe that I'm saying this* some concepts of the traditionally republican ideal make sense. Free capitalism.... leave everyone to their own devices - make everyone hustle for everything that they have, and you have an efficient economy. This makes sense.
Unfortunately, we live in a very decadent society. Everyone has too much (even "poor" people), and this makes for satisfied people. Satisfied people don't innovate. Therein lies the trouble, and why we have much to fear from countries like India and China (Africa is next - they also have a billion people, and AIDS is stabilizing. It actually is on the decline in urban centers. If they lose a quarter of their population, they still have 3/4 of a billion people rapidly migrating to urban centers and embracing education. On top of that, the African continent has a treasure trove of natural resources left untapped because of civil strife. China will always be hindered because it cannot power it's population. India will be hindered because most of its population practices a religion diametrically opposed to the ideals of capitalism. Africa can both power and feed itself, and is rapidly embracing Catholicism and Christianity). I'm rambling.
un burrito me trampeó.
To a great extent this issue reminds me of the observations made of those more and less likely to believe in the supernatural. Sceptics are likely to miss pattern that exists, and believers are likely to invent non-existent pattern (or so we believe). To spot counter-cultural pattern, then, is also to be more likely to invent pattern that isn't there.
The trouble being that there are many conclusions that the informed or observant can make that differ from "common sense", and the brain being what it is, we don't necessarily know the steps of how to get there. This doesn't make us wrong... or right; our perception is different.
I'll pick an example that generates more heat than light on slashdot: how do illegal downloads effect aggregate sales of music and movies? The common man is sure that IP infringement must lead to reduced sales, yet many slashdotters believe this not to be the case, and a few even believe the opposite.
What is the truth? The form of the question can affect the outcome. For example: restrict your study to (relatively poor) students, and you get the "common sense" result. Aggregate sales using a detailed and sophisticated economic analysis, and you get no effect. But maybe our intellect is misleading us: if we get goods for free, although it might shift our spending onto other music and movies, are we perhaps less motivated to work in the first place? with this larger frame of reference, it appears that the intelligent individual has quite possibly picked a convenient intermediate-sized frame of reference, when a frame of reference that was larger still would (perhaps) reveal 'theft' from the economy as a whole. This is a bit of a conconcted 'counter-example', though: our greed is such that we're likely to keep working to own more, regardless of how much we have.
What about software patents? Most of us here (myself included) are anti. Assuming (for the moment) that the 'anti' stance is right, why then do so many lawyers believe the converse? I doubt that it's wholly because of their self-interest (although that might bias them); it's because of a particular view of the business of business, of the value and importance of contract and of property, and of incentives and defined rights that meld, to the lawerly mind, with morality, and the natural way of things. To break with this, brings them to presuppose harm, and their experience with the concrete (case by case), rather than the systemic effects reinforces this way of thinking. Is the abstract argument really wrong? That it's harm to think of examples of avenues that will be impeded (they haven't been thought of yet!) doesn't make them any less real. Here, then, the emphasis upon concreteness is itself misleading.
Another example: minimum wages. I believe that one of my own JEs illustrates this well. I don't think that I (arguing for a minimum) argued at my best, and Red Warrior applied some experience, but neither of us "won", I feel. However, one thing's for sure; most of the pro-free-market intellectuals ignore the 'monopsony' effect of deliberately cartelising the labour force, so that the first level of abstraction is misleading as to the degree of the effect on unemployment. To some extent, then, here the 'simple' reaction that it redistributes wealth the the relatively poor has a lot of truth to it. The intellectual's love of pristine, perfect, simple systems can and does mislead. My stance might itself be flawed. The intellectual's stance often comes from a deeper analysis or intuition, and they could easily be at a loss to explain it. From this difficulty, it's difficult to decide which way is the truth. Not all difficulty is denial.
Wikileaks, no DNS
But if you do that in this context then you're falling to the "begging the question" fallacy (the "What created God" is relevant in terms of the Thomas Aquinas demonstration of the existence of God, explained in the GP's post).
If you state that God exists by definition, then you can't use their properties to demonstrate the existence of God. Either you accept (as you do) that God is a definition and not a proven fact, or you admit that Aquinas' logic is not sound because God fails to conform to the laws of physics (and thus a physical reasoning can't prove its existence).
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.