[borbulon]

> 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.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I had an art teacher that had a poster on his wall:

"An education is no substitute for intelligence."

Some of the smartest people that I've ever met, had little to no education.

[pdimitar]

[waves to say hi]

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.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I'm a high-school dropout. GED.

I have a couple of friends that are quite rich, and run a successful company. Both dropouts. I think that she never even got her GED.

[myth_drannon]

Taleb's modus operandi is to be condescending towards others, read his Twitter account.

[nemo44x]

Sam Harris isn't impressed with him:

> 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.

[angiosperm]

Sam Harris, you say.

[nemo44x]

Well yeah, there is that.

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.

[pdimitar]

> 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.

[angiosperm]

I take wisdom where I can find it, and leave the rest.

I wouldn't want as much attention on my flaws as his get.

[nemo44x]

> I take wisdom where I can find it, and leave the rest.

Good philosophy.

[CyberDildonics]

Hacker News: The Harvard of the internet.

[CuriouslyC]

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.

[pdimitar]

Well, that's because the previous generation are high fidelity parrots and virtue signalling monkeys so they perpetuate the cycle.

[twic]

My favourite definition of an intellectual: 'Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence'.

-- Arthur C. Clarke

[boxed]

Funny.. but that sounds like Taleb.

[NickC25]

>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.

[angiosperm]

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.