So, walking aboard a frigate with sort of an academic's self-awareness and certainty that the world is an uncertain place, I had to lead a division of sailors who would do things that just left me dumbfounded. "Why would you attempt to drive through the closed base gate?" "Why would you test the 440V circuit with your fingers?" "Why would you go in the engine room without hearing protection?" "Do you realize you installed all the valves backward?" "Where did you meet this woman? No, she can't come on the ship!"

Then you have to get these folks to do work. They're not lazy, but trying motivate them with the bigger picture could be challenging. Metaphor came to hand more and more. And you sort of settle in. You're not intellectually challenged, and repetition and comfort bring confidence, which makes charismatic patterns of speech easier.

When I went to grad school, I found myself using these same patterns of speech to get things done. And I still do. It's always poor form to toot your own horn, but the last few years, I have to say, I've realized more and more, having a hard science degree and early leadership experience are an extremely valuable combination. I have no idea how I'd be doing what I do now without that.

Why did sailors try to drive through the closed base gate and test 440V circuits with their fingers?

Because we worked for the whole week on it and now want that other people can see it on their weekend. Since we are so proud of our work and trust in its quality, we are willing to do an extra shift on the weekend, should problems occur.

The experience which gave me perspective was on a project at my previous job. I worked together with another highly passionate engineer and we made amazing progress over the course of a very short time.

The day before the demonstration of our results to our bosses, meant to serve as evaluation and retrospective for this project, we had reached all goals and the simulation was really robust and stable. However, when I came to work on the day itself, I found my colleague sitting at his desk, looking very tired. He'd been working through the night to get all the extra bells and whistles implemented. The demonstration was a disaster. Nothing worked, everything crashed. A lot of people were upset.

Simile. Or analogy, perhaps.

... Is that kind of pedantic correction a sign of unlikable intelligence? :P

If you work weekends then by all means push on Friday evening. However, don't push anything the before your next vacations.

:p

I dont do friday releases often, but if it comes to it, it is no brainer. I approach it pragmatically, and this helps people.

[0] https://youtu.be/-iClXrd50Z8 the helpful “ding” is the best part. At any rate, imagine take that on your arms or face.

Metaphors: they're cooked up in the moment.

My father told me that con men preferred to go after smart people, like doctors. The reason is that smart people thought they were too smart to get conned, and hence were more gullible.

He was also an economist, and told me that there wasn't an economist born who could stand the idea that the economy would run better (i.e. free market) without their "help".

And I've noticed many smart leaders who thought they were much smarter than they actually were, and didn't need to listen to others' advice, leading to some very poor decisions.

2. people tend to call decisions poor because they result in perceived bad outcomes (from the perspective of the person making the judgment), without considering the range of all possible outcomes (the number of which is bigger than our brains can cope with). if most outcomes would have been "bad" ones, then the decision made might have been the best one possible without necessarily leading to a "good" outcome. (many such misperceptions and misattributions are possible when judging decisions in hindsight)

we like to tell ourelves stories that put us at the top of the heap (or similarly put others "below" us), regardless of the truthiness of those stories.

As if boom and bust business cycles aren't a thing in free markets. Or monopolies. Or monetary policy. Or externalized costs. Or tragedy of the commons.

That's just run of the mill anti-intellectualism.

Monetary policy is one that is more up for debate - it seems reasonable that it can have a positive effect on gdp, but something has decoupled GDP from measures that actually effect people. I think that something is monetary policy, and note in passing that GDP was, prior to 1970, a much better proxy for energy/capita than it is now [1].

I watch the US economy with curiosity and note, for example, that core inflation, the central plank of US monetary policy, excludes basically anything I spend money on.

[1] EDIT: https://wilcoxen.maxwell.insightworks.com/pages/804.html

https://img.4plebs.org/boards/pol/image/1429/19/142919512461...

The late 1970s were when neoliberal economic fundamentalism took over public policy.

The graph shows the effect on equality.

I would argue this is when most economists lost influence in Washington, while a few like Art Laffer gained massive influence. The New Deal era prior to this was largely motivated by the work of noted economist John Maynard Keynes. Although the causality is debated, the New Deal was followed by recovery and economic growth. Economists gained influence in the public sphere because of the effectiveness, real or imagined, or "Keynesian" economic policy. These folks had lost sway in Washington by the early 70s due to the stagflation crisis[1] and the collapse of the "New Deal coalition" after the tumultuous 1968 presidential election.

The late 1970s was dominated by the ideas of economists like Art Laffer, who took an uncontroversial economic idea "tax revenue is maximized at some point between 0% and 100%" and turned it into "the tax revenue maximizing rate must be lower than our current rate" without presenting sufficient evidence for his claim. This was a convenient for some in Washington who already believed this to be true, and thus the "Laffer curve" was born. The following era of deregulation and lower taxes on the wealthy likely played a large role in increasing income inequality.

[1] The causes of stagflation are still debated, but I am convinced this was directly caused by the OPEC oil cartel using it's market power to quickly inflate the price of oil by 400%, creating a massive supply shock that started the stagflation spiral.

It's not "economists => inequality" it's neoliberal economists (almost all of them today) => inequality"

As for your last paragraph, which things in the personal consumption expenditures (PCE) index don’t you buy? I just just read though the list of items in the PCE, and it seems like stuff we all buy.

https://www.bea.gov/about/pdf/1106_ACM_PCE.pdf

Also, I’m not clear on how this is much different from what economists attempt to do: create models and test them with data.

I’m happy to be corrected on this, but ‘inflation’ in the US is usually the CPI-U series; less Food and Energy when the Federal Reserve sets monetary policy; not the PCE with which I am unfamiliar. I got weights from [1], which suggest 25% weighting to a theoretical owners rent component which in reality I don’t pay because I don’t have a mortgage. Obviously the index can't apply to everyone, happens not to apply to me. I would love to see a comparison of CPI weights vs average expenditure, which might make me feel a lot better, but I don't know where to find that info.

As for elaborating on the monetary policy part, I broadly subscribe to the idea that a 10% increase in the amount money should link to a comparable reduction in the value of a unit of currency. That is basically using a personal inflation rate that is the rate of increase in the M2.

The core inflation rate is <3%, the inflation rate that I expect is 5%. This means either I am wrong (popular view) or that the inflation rate is measuring something that isn't very interesting. I favour 2 with the caveat of accepting inflation in asset prices as inflation which seems to be the big break with mainstream thought.

The big downside of this is all the usual stats become questionable – particularly ‘real GDP growth’, which I mentally downgrade by 2%. A lot of monetarist inflation types end up looking to measures like energy/capita, which is theoretically a measure of real wealth that can be used without relying on understanding inflation calculations. I like that measure for my own reasons.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/cpi/tables/relative-importance/home.htm

I didn't know what 'core inflation' meant so had to look at the wikipedia page. Assuming that wikipedia is correct, it looks like the fed has used PCE since 2000. Apparently, CPI is mainly used for social security benefits. CPI weighs 'shelter' costs as 40% of total whereas PCE weighs it at 18%. To test out their values, I viewed the 2016 value for DC (where I have a home and mortgage), and it looked relatively accurate. However, my mortgage for that property is less than 18% of my total expenses.

I'm kind of ignorant about monetary policy, so had to google some things. But, I don't follow your statement about the relationship between M2 and inflation. Are you saying that M2 should be directly related to inflation? I would expect that M2 would only have a moderate influence over inflation because prices are based on supply and demand, not how much money there is.

For instance, let's say this year there are 200 coins distributed evenly to 10 people. You produce 10 widgets, and each of the 10 people are willing to pay 10. You make the exchange and get 100 coins, and they're left with 10 each.

The next year someone new shows up and has 20 coins making the total money supply 220. You produce another 10 widgets, but only the new guy wants a widget (the others already have one). He is not willing to pay 10 coins, but you and him agree that he can pay 1 coin. Money supply went up, but prices went down. Then the following year, all 11 people want widgets, but you're way more efficient and are now producing 20. I'd expect prices to stay less than 10 but probably higher than 1 even though the money supply didn't change.

I'm probably wrong about all of this stuff, of course. But, either way, it seems complex and data intensive enough to require a specialist.

However, your 200 coins scenario is not very agreeable to me:

1) Minor point, there is an assumption of over capacity where the widget producer could presumably produce 9 spare widgets most years.

2) More subtle point, widgets require raw resources to produce. Ignoring the machine to make the widget, the actual widget is presumably made of stuff or in the case of a service, the cost is the stuff required to maintain the servicer's lifestyle. Your scenario has quietly assumed that there are sufficient resources for our purposes. I see the question on monetary policy as being ‘does this assist in the efficient allocation of resources’. I do accept that as correct, I don’t accept it as fundamentally relevant to what I think is important, because it hasn’t made reference to the resources used to produce the widgets (ie, what was the opportunity cost) and hence begs my question. The mechanics of the situation aren’t just the feelings of how much people want to pay, they are linked to resource availability vs willingness of market participants to work for what they want. It has made me understand why I thought inflation was irrelevant to my circumstances.

4) If a rational actor appears with excess currency and doesn't want to compete with other consumers for presently available resources, then they aren’t going to sit there cheerfully with 19 currency in their pocket. If they aren’t going to buy current resources, they will buy control of future resources. Otherwise it raises the question of to what end did they accept the new currency and why is it being created?

I'm going to have to stop there because my complaints need rebuilding, but I think I'll end up finding out what the name for asset-price inflation and properly learn about the velocity of money, but is since it isn't expressed in inflation then it must be competing for future resources which I expect to turn up in asset prices. If that formulation survives scrutiny, then something really interesting must be afoot to do with how future claims on resources will be settled.

Thanks again for your interest, this has been a very illuminating conversation for me that has reduced my ignorance of economics substantially and will improve my arguments in the future.

You think those concepts came out of democracy popping a macroeconomics book out of a vote?

The Fed lowers the interest rate because they have an incentive for the economy to perform well, because they want to look good (Alan Greenspan admitted he kept interest rates lower longer than he thought necessary because he wanted to retire on a high economy). This makes money cheap, so to speak, which creates incentive for everyone to borrow. Individually, this makes sense, but together, this ends in 2009-style.

On top of that, many monopolies are created via regulations and laws.

The fact that you're not even able to discuss these concepts or to realize that economists are incentivized to believe exactly the opposite of what I've said, because they financially benefit as central planners, mean that you are anti-intellectual, not the OP.

I happen to be reading "A History of The World Economy", by James Foreman-Pack. It contradicts you at every turn (Chapter 6 esp) and notes there was a time when the U.S. was the odd man out, lacking a national bank and suffered more severe downturns than other nations, amongst other things.

Friedman's "Monetary History of the United States" pg 9-10

There is no stock of money. There are only political decisions, assorted client and patron relationships, and national and international conflicts among interest groups that define social goals and resource distribution.

Money is political power counted on imaginary tally sticks. Volume fluctuations are irrelevant. What matters is what people do, for whom, to what end, using what resources.

In an alleged democracy what should matter is economic enfranchisement - which in practice means creating fluid and porous social castes and interest groups, and inventing interesting goals with intelligence, realism, and effectiveness.

Booms and busts are caused by aimless short-term accumulation, which is a form of unintelligent goal setting. Whether tally sticks are referenced to lumps of shiny metal or numbers derived by fiat is wholly irrelevant if the only goal is to acquire as many sticks as possible, and nothing else matters.

No period (before 1914) is given by Friedman. This matters because, as my source is careful to say, a remarkably rigid system of international currency exchange rates had been formed before the WWI. This wasn't an accomplishment of the U.S., nor was it entirely safe, wise, or productive.

Of course, rather by definition, if multiple currencies are all convertible to gold (as they were pre-1914) they rise and fall in exact sync with each other with every whim of the gold market, every gold discovery, etc - until one falls off the cliff and has to renounce conversion - but that hardly means no whiplash!! In fact it means countries are less insulated from each other's economic troubles, more of a monoculture than a robust ecosystem - and, as stated, every country's economy is whipped about by anything that changes how easy it is to get gold out of the ground or increases or decreases consumption of it, including fashion and improvements in dental technology. Also, even the severest depression won't be reflected in the exchange rates. And it was those downturns, that were the topic.

Stable exchange rates have a trade-off; and they certainly don't prove economic stability or the absence of downturns at all. It's more like watching a team of acrobatic aircraft: they all maintain their wingtip distance strictly, and that's fine: but if one plane goes into the ground, they all do. Being in close formation isn't a proof you're not headed for a mountain or the ground; because it's not the kind of stability that has anything to do with that most important risk. Ditto rigid exchange rates.

What changed in 1914 was war. There was no intellectual decision that gold convertibility was unfashionable - war breeds inflation, necessity made conversion a hindrance to the war efforts. That international confusion (and therefore the resultant fluctuations in currency exchange rates worldwide) wasn't created by the American decision to have a central bank, for goodness sake. If anything the arrow of causation went the other way.

If Milton finds it hard to believe that the war-to-end-all-wars might have caused a wee bit of currency turbulence, so it had to be the U.S. finally creating a Federal Banking Institution that did that all over the world, he's rather isolated in that position. But of course, he's slyly leaving that leap into the abyss for the reader to make.

> and has to renounce conversion

This problem only happens in a fiat money system. It notably happened in 1930 in the US.

Nixon renounced conversion to go to a fiat system. That's what renouncing conversion means, to abandon conversion, leaving only the fiat. You are agreeing strenuously.

And again, all this a whole other topic than whether downturns were more or less frequent: which was where I started.

> exchange rates of currency

That was not the topic, the topic was instability in the money supply.

> Nixon

The US official exchange rate was a fiction from 1930-Nixon, because it was illegal to hold gold as a monetary instrument. Nixon simply did away with the fiction.

Now you want to change the topic away from EITHER economic stability OR exchange rate stability? To money supply stability, a whole other topic? Yikes.

Nixon - cavilling. Choose any illustration and the logic and semantics of "fiat" remain. Once again, you're off on a new topic, a new distraction. Not only is that not logical, it's not civil, either.

There are laissez faire arguments to counter every example you provided, but calling monetary policy laissez faire is oxymoronic or, if you prefer, anti-intellectual.

Respectfully, you just dismissed an entire school of economic thought out of hand.

Being politically savvy/expedient is as much about knowing how to get along with people as it is getting what you want.

There is a reason for that.

Politics is basically the process of pasting kludges together until the net result is something that no powerful group hates enough to be willing to smash it all to smithereens with a sledgehammer.

But if you objectively look at any of the kludges individually, or even the overall result after a few years, it's a horrific mess. A horrific mess at a Nash equilibrium. So as soon as you start picking apart any subsection of the omnishambles, everything falls out of balance and someone starts screaming for you to stop.

And it is a horrific mess that should be smashed to smithereens with a sledgehammer every few years, but the only way to do that is to wipe the slate clean and start over from scratch with multilateral negotiations between two hundred separate parties. Which is a ton of work that nobody wants to do when they can get away with kicking the can down the road for another year.

So anybody who tries to smash up any part of the mess has to fight everyone who would rather keep the status quo than do the work to fix it right now.

Writing down on a piece of paper - these truths are self evident that all men are created equal does not make it so in the real world. That's an example of ambiguity. There is no question of smashing things up and hitting a reset button when dealing with ambiguity. Here too good politics applies cause everyone in the room knows the statement is false but good politics can bring everyone into the room and keep them there and make them decide they are going to change the "truth".

Young people like you, aren't exposed to ambiguity or expected to solve ambiguities, cause you have enough on your plate accumulating knowledge about all the unambiguous stuff. It is easy for a young person to get it into his head, that all problems are pointless to work on if the text book is only filled with ambiguous problems. Which is why students textbooks aren't filled with them. The flip side is some students get it into their heads that all problems are unambiguous. They are the ones that misunderstand politics. Leave alone what good politics can do.

This is about, for example, ethanol subsidies. Basically everyone who doesn't receive them thinks they're dumb. It takes more than a gallon of petroleum to produce a gallon of ethanol, it diverts productive farmland from food which makes food cost more for the poor (and everyone), it's an inefficient use of tax dollars, etc.

Yet we continue to have ethanol subsidies, because it gets politicians from districts full of corn farmers to vote for the bill even when the bill contains a bunch of differently-toxic nonsense for other interests in different districts.

And you don't need 100% of the votes to pass, you only need 51%. So all you have to do is construct a bill that allows 51% of the districts to steal resources from the other 49% in various ways like that, and it passes. Which is why everyone hates politics.

But those bills are precarious, because it doesn't pay to have 75% of the vote. An excess 25% would require you to give things to people using resources you could have kept for your existing coalition.

Only that means you can't afford to lose too many of your votes when someone starts to make a stink about a specific inefficient program that was shoring those votes up. If the ethanol subsidies were removed from the bill, you would be short on votes.

Which turns honest outsiders just trying to make a positive impact into political enemies, because they're threatening to dismantle your majority coalition.

And the same dynamic plays out in any system based on majority voting.

Ethanol subsidies aren't ambiguous. Nobody seriously disagrees on what they are. People disagree on whether we should have them.

And there are issues where that kind of disagreement is purely subjective, like abortion. Purely a disagreement about principles rather than facts.

But there are also your Bridge to Nowhere type deals, like ethanol subsidies, that are contrary to objective fact. The bill is sold under a particular justification (e.g. reduce dependence on petroleum) and it factually does not do that. There is no principle to disagree about, it's objectively just pork, and the "facts" used by the proponents are lies.

The thing where lobbyists pretend there are zero objective things just because there are non-zero non-objective things is merely a dishonest tactic they use to paper over the unjustifiability of their preferred pork.

> The system is all that keeps you and the corn farmers from picking up a gun and removing ambiguity.

There is a difference between specific rules and the concept of having rules. Basically nobody is in favor of total anarchy or removing foundational rules like the illegality of murder.

But when your tax code is more than a thousand pages, it's past time to throw it out and start over.

Hum... Have you ever seen negotiations between hundreds of different parties? They way to do that is getting enough force to change an incentive, and changing it; then going after enough force to change another one, and changing it. Let the people fight over the new incentive far from you.

All three movies are now on Netflix.

Politics is not so much about politicising ethics or your workplace. It's the nuances about creating a positive work environment, finding compromise in decisions, creating common ground and finding a balance between honesty and caring for others.

The nuance is there but it's entirely in the grey. It's not black and white.

There's a quote from Russell Brand that comes to mind who from what I recall, was quoting his own father:

"A man that says a space is a spade is fit only to wield one"

So beeing savvy/expedient is not a problem.

Another reason for going after high-status professionals (proxy for 'smart') is that they may be less likely to use violence as a method for dispute resolution?

Also, if they have to maintain a reputation of savviness, they may be less encline to make it public knowledge that they got swindled by pressing charges.

Also, disposable income...

And similarly, I think there's a good argument for wanting leaders with lower Openness than is commonly found among those with very high IQ. Obviously you want your leaders to consider new ideas, but you definitely do not want them to get carried away by any pipe dream that comes across their desk. Instead, you want their opinions to be pretty well fixed. That way, if you figure out that their values are aligned with yours, you can rely on them to stay true.

This doesn't make a lot of sense. Most cons like the various Nigerian money scams and pyramid scams are designed to only get responses from less intelligent people.

They aren't talking about something like Bank of America overcharging you on mortgage interest every month for years. That's not the kind of con you can do without a lot of cooperation, teamwork, and setup. It's more about the one-time scores.

At the core of every con is a kernel of dishonesty, as the bait. Even something as simple as the Nigerian 419 or Spanish Prisoner has the implication that the advance fee supplied by the mark will be used to pay bribes. That means the mark is willing to be dishonest. The hook is set by revealing an opportunity for the mark to cheat the con artist to screw them out of some money. The million dollars will be transferred into your account, in your name, and we will ask you nicely to please, please give it to us, minus a reasonable fee.

You go after the person smart enough to realize that they could just keep all that money, but not smart enough to realize there was never any money to keep. You go after the person who thinks they are smart enough to scam the con artist, and also dishonest enough to try. It might be because actively trying to scam someone turns off your own defenses against getting scammed.

When you pay a bribe, you actively fuel the system of corruption that makes them necessary. If you are doing it as a last gasp to escape that system, that is a different matter entirely from doing it to buy in to that system.

The 419 scam lays it out there. You're going to be paying bribes into a corrupt system to take possession of some money that is not yours, but it doesn't belong to anyone in particular, so there is no victim, and therefore not stealing, per se. It's mostly harmless, and just a little bit crooked, so why not just wire all your savings to Lagos in $1000 chunks and get rich quickly and easily?

Being just a bit crooked is essential for discouraging the mark from getting help from a friend or talking to the cops. If they speak of it to anyone else, that person will then know they are at least a bit sleazy, and possibly criminal. It's the same tactic used by criminal predators to silence their victims. Human trafficking, for instance: "You're here illegally, so if you talk to the cops, you'll be jailed and deported, and then you'll have to pay off your debt by farming beets in hardscrabble for the rest of your life."

"The group consisted of middle class professionals; it has been estimated that a quarter were nurses and other medical personnel "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Family_(Australian_New_Age...

I've heard that EST and Scientology and similar go hard after dentists.

There's a difference between smart people who are leaders and smart leaders. A smart leader should know how to hire smarter people and extract good advice/insight from those people.

If there is one thing that I'm happy about with Ben Carson, it's that he proved that doctors are not generally smart.

They are highly practiced and highly skilled--like a professional athlete. "Smart", however, is only in their narrow field.

What exactly are you saying? Economists tend to lean somewhat libertarian, though like any field, there are a range of political opinions.

That's impossible, because if the right answer is to leave the market alone then economists can help gather the political will to stay the visible hand - and if the right answer is to change things then the right person to have decide what to do is someone that has thought deeply about it, by definition making them an economist.

This stood out to me. I would be interested to hear the thoughts of HN readers on this.

He also has a political sleight-of-hand that I don't think has ever been matched. Every time a key policy decision is being debated, the news channels are focused on Trump's latest gaffe rather than the decisions being made in Washington.

Appeal to emotion to get results, not reason.

If anyone is exercising political sleight of hand I'd say it's the legislators and executive staff who are getting in all their unpopular actions while the getting is good, like a looter in a riot. Trump doesn't have to be politically savvy or even aware of what they're doing for that to happen.

...until it's a flame war between two nuclear powers with unstable leaders.

It's worth mentioning that while he's always been rich, Trump spent a significant portion of his youth around construction sites, so he has adopted a lot of low class blue collar behavior.

Obama spoke like a college professor because he knew his audience would respect that kind of person.

Trump speaks like a "straight talker" because he knows his audience respects that kind of person.

Ironically, that's what makes 'explain like I'm 5' so useful - it takes away the assumptions people have in their heads and forces them to use simple language and explain things from first principles.

It's quite powerful really. Richard Feynman was famous for being to explain physics in a way a layman could understand. Neil deGrasse Tyson does the same and people love it.

Agreed. And the Challenger O-ring demonstration was a beautiful example of metaphor even if it wasn't correct. (Morton-Thiokol engineers had evidence that the O-rings didn't seal even at 75F and had been trying to stop launches PERIOD).

However, Feynman was also famous for "proof by intimidation" if you caught him out on something he didn't understand.

If instead you mean to use more common words and to make concepts relatable to everyday life - that usually works out pretty well in my experience. It's not an easy thing to do either for the "smart" leader.

I went and read some Obama speeches back in my university days. Some of them were quite well thought out, but they mostly got zero press coverage. And that's at the presidential level.

My takeaway is if you want people to remember an experience positively, what matters is a high peak of pleasure, and to have a good end.

These are places where clever metaphors can help.

A person is promoted until failure. All else being equal, if two people are leaders, leader A will be on average as good as leader B. If one were significantly better, they would be promoted to the next level - eg a retired philanthropist billionaire or enlightened monk or what have you.

If P and Q are qualities correlated with leadership, if P and Q are independently randomly distributed, then a leader with higher P is expected to have a lower Q.

An analogy: farmers who grew 2 truck loads of bananas meet up to compare farms. On average the farms are 4 square miles. If farmer Joe tells you his farm is half a mile wide, you might guess it is 8 miles high, because the area is expected to be average. There was no causation at work — having a half mile wide plot did not cause the plot to be 8 miles tall.

Why should we assume that there is a causal link between high iq and being disliked, when it could be chalked up to correlation between factors of an equivalence relation? High iq allows non-charasmatics to function higher than they normally would, just as charisma may make up for a lack of brains.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson's_paradox

I find that part of the argument statistically sound.

Paragraph 2, about the person being promoted until failure, I can't gleam any explanatory content from, myself. Then there's this sentence:

"If P and Q are qualities correlated with leadership, if P and Q are independently randomly distributed, then a leader with higher P is expected to have a lower Q."

This is false. You don't have variables that are simultaneously independent and let you say something about one based on the other. Its like saying "there is and is not a relationship between P and Q". Leaving aside the additional gymnastics and problems of having both correlate with leadership...

I could go into a discussion about expected values, averages, etc, but I can't tell what farmer banana P's and Q's have to do with the price of fish or peter's principal, so I don't think the language in the original is well specified enough for there to be much benefit to doing so...

P + Q = L (leadership score)

For a group of candidates with equal L, a higher P does indicate lower Q.

[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-relational/

https://keithhennessey.com/2013/04/24/smarter/

Part of the reason he is blamed for stupid decisions is that he never sloughed off responsibility. (Unlike some certain other recent presidents and president wanna-bes)

Trump is narcissistic, insecure, mean, ignorant and has no honor, but dumb he ain't. Underestimating the guy is unwise.

I think you're attributing to intelligence what can easily be explained by money. Give me a few billion and a decade to turn my name into a brand then it will be a fair comparison.

I would point to the incredible power struggle in the white house as a product of the undue behind-the-scenes influence.

I like that you are one of the few people who seem to pick that up. The setup is almost the same for Russian political establishment, and as you see it worked with devastating efficiency.

I think you mean rich—from below market returns on inherited wealth—and well-connected (as a result of the former) and a celebrity (largely also a result of the first item, combined with America’s idolization of wealth, both recently and more particularly in the 1980s when he established his celebrity status.)

Intelligence means achieving your goals on purpose. It is something that can be taught and reproduced in others. You can't just wait for entropy to spontaneously arrange for your success and claim to be a genius, even if it works the one time you try it.

I'm not defending his ideology, but its important to understand the rational reasons behind his decisions if we want to prevent another global catastrophe. Even without Hitler its still likely Germany would have instigated fighting at some point.

Another way of looking at it is that the fighting resulted because France and the allies didn't crack down on Germany when they failed to meet the terms of their surrender.

Personally, I feel that your view (and the conventional view) is more correct, but it's interesting to think about the converse. I mean, we've still got troops in Germany today, right? What if that's the key? It wasn't about economically rebuilding them, but what if, instead the war didn't flare up again simply because the occupation never ended?

Hitler did not valued life and got used to violence in WWI. That has nothing to do with intelligence either. Both stupid and smart people can grow to not value life and be ruthless and confident and power hungry and taking too much risk.

I would not learn from Hitler, because his idea of sucess involves imperialistic war and multiple genocides. And his ideology praised ruthlessness as a virtue. Has nothing to do with whether he had speeking skill or not, whether he could paint well or not.

Just because he was bad guy does not mean we have to go all emotional and pretend he had IQ 75. That just allowing emotions to win over what and why happened.

He puts himself in trouble all the time via tweets. That's pretty dumb in my book.

> Underestimating the guy is unwise

I agree with that. Underestimating someone with as little honor and ethics as Trump is dangerous.

It is more a question of whether the right people want you to.

Here is one guy who was "saying the same exact thing about Trump before he took office" and is still very sure it is the case: http://blog.dilbert.com/2018/01/18/fake-news-awards-persuasi...

Unlikely.

Don't be so sure. First, he outsmarted both political parties to become the most powerful man in the world. And in his first year as president, he's been far more effective at getting things done than most. The fact that some people dislike the things he's getting done doesn't take anything away from that.

You say this as we're on the brink of a government shutdown (a government controlled entirely by the President's party), which has been exacerbated by the President. The Senate Majority Leader (again, of the President's own party) said just yesterday the President is the primary impediment to keeping the government open, because no one knows what exactly he will sign, since he changes his mind by the hour.

Not quite. They cannot easily get by a filibuster.

Citation (other than him or his spokespersons) needed.

http://blog.dilbert.com/2017/11/13/president-trumps-2017-rep...

What’s BS about them?

As for "government waste", arguably he's wasting far, far, far more with his golf trips than any that he "saved". And many of those "savings" came at the expense of social programs that, without, will likely end up costing us more.

The travel ban is a giant example of his racism that I guess you could put on his accomplishments, if only to show how brazenly racist he would be in office. Even then, it's initial rollout was a complete and utter disaster, and it was prevented by injunction several times.

Trump has NOT defeated ISIS. Not even close.

Throwing gasoline on an already fiery situation in the Middle East is NOT an accomplishment.

Dooming the US to irrelevance by being the one first world nation to not participate in the Paris Climate Accords, thus ceding our position as leader of the world, is also NOT an accomplishment.

> If the recent book is to be believed at all

It isn't to be believed, literally at all.

http://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/367902-dont-believe-m...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2018/01/03/mi...

Yeah, no thanks. I'll believe 100% of the book before I believe 0.01% of what Gorka spouts.

GWB started as a young, affluent and connected person who didn't have to exhort himself intellectually and he continued that way. Him being dummy was him being ignorant and never developing required skills.

Both of them continued studying. Kerry received J.D, passed bar exam and worked as a prosecutor. GWB received MBA from HBS.

People are so beholden to the idea that he was an idiot that almost no amount of evidence will change that.

The Iraq war was architected by Cheney / Rumsfeld, Bush playing an incidental part at best. The invasion of Afghanistan demonstrated a studied lack of historical knowledge and the failure points of previous attempted invasions. Charitably, he does get credit for kickstarting the drone program which gave the US a credible (if ethically suspect) deterrent to terrorist organizations. However BO gets deserves more credit for deploying both the physical and legal apparatus to make routine drone strikes, particularly in places like Pakistan, a reality.

As for the economy, the tax cuts were a core Republican party agenda item since Reagan. Bush did not drive that, Congress did. Privatization of Social Security? Failed. Immigration? Same. Foreign policy? Besides alienating allies via needless wars, nothing noteworthy.

That leaves two things, foreign aid and No Child Left Behind. The former was a legitimate accomplishment and for that GWB should get credit. The latter had mixed results.

Then again an above average presidency does not a supposedly smart President make.

> Related: 'George W. Bush is smarter than you'.

While it may be in vogue to flaunt intelligence in certain professional circles, many, including Bill Gates define "smart" as "an elusive concept. There’s a certain sharpness, an ability to absorb new facts. To walk into a situation, have something explained to you and immediately say, 'Well, what about this?' To ask an insightful question. To absorb it in real time. A capacity to remember. To relate to domains that may not seem connected at first. A certain creativity that allows people to be effective."

https://www.thejournal.ie/bill-gates-top-quotes-690230-Dec20...

According to many intelligence officials and former advisors, Bush perfectly fits Bill Gates definition of being incredibly intelligent. The reality is, just because a leader hasn't convinced you of their abilities, that in no way detracts from them.

They feel I lack empathy, but empathy is why I do it.

And when someone likes me, I know they know we know what's up. That's also why I do it.

I find those who work hard to be liked creepy. I also find managers and supervisors who are paid to be your friend disingenuous. And I'm not going to butter someone up before I tell them they made a mistake. The last thing I want is to spoil them or keep them in a bubble. But I'll also tell them to focus on the problem, and not themselves. Don't be part of the problem.

Being liked is work in business. In our private lives it's personal preference, but you can also choose your friends. Professionally, it's a strategic decision, because it will inevitably involve people you may struggle to like personally.

The prevalent anti-intellectualism does intellects injustice more than anything else. Many would rather be spoiled than informed. They'd rather protect their ego than gain competence. They'd rather be forgiven than corrected for their mistakes. And they'd rather be paid for being who they are, than be told they need to work or put in the work.

No one is paid for being who they are, not even celebrities. We're all being paid for our work. Our image is part of our work, even for non-celebrities.

Anti-intellectualism is also at the root of anti-professionalism. And it's a huge issue in America.

Out of pragmatism, out of optimism, and out of empathy, I am sorry, but I choose to be unapologetically professional.

I am the apologetic asshole.

And that's what's up.

(didn't expect this comment to turn out this way, but I'm submitting it anyway)

Obama related well to one part of the country, and Trump related well to another part of the country.

Trump's case being more surprising since he's tries very hard to come off as a class traitor. ex. Notice his love of the peoples food (fast food)

For instance, if the president of the country is wealthy and associates almost exclusively with and identifies as a wealthy person, then that person might consider their primary goal as president to promote economic growth as measured by the stock market. Some less well-off constituents might rather the president focused on programs to improve access to food, health care, and education for the less well-off.

This isn't an either-or thing; a president could do both. However, if non-wealthy voters think the president doesn't understand their situation or have any policies in place to improve it, then to that voter is not likely to have a high opinion of that president.

Trump is no more a leader to you or me, than Brad Pitt. It's just some person on TV you never come in contact with.

A better question is why is there voting for a president, by people who don't understand anything about what it takes to be good at that job. Absolutely nothing for the vast majority.

For a leader, you want a strong vision for the future, passion, a very strong will, charisma. It's ridiculous that people obsess about "intelligence" or "qualifications" -- Obama was brilliant and supremely qualified, how did that work out for us? We picked a constitutional law scholar who continued and made permanent all the constitutional violations of the Bush admin. Friends with the very intelligent economic experts on Wall Street and able to recognize their expertise, he let them run his cabinet and bail themselves out and let them pillage our country's economy.

Would have worked better if the Republicans hadn't made it their singular goal to obstruct his presidency for 8 years.

Europe was plagued with many of this style of "leader" between the 1920's and 1940's and tens of millions of people died for it.

They will suggest policies like: what if instead of feeding the hungry we define a specific income bracket adjusted dynamically to the purchasing power parity of... and in the first three words you've already lost 99% of the population who thinks it's unnecessarily complicated because it is: they're turning a moral issue into a technical one because they've been trained to do technical analysis and to not see things in moral terms, rather, to shift numbers around in spreadsheets. They are wholly incapable of stepping back and recognizing that the spreadsheet itself is wrong, not technically wrong, but morally wrong: that simpler is better, that universal programs (like roads, NHS) are better than means-tested ones, that these things which are simple moral imperatives should be able to be explained simply.

Perhaps high IQ test results correlate with some negative trait that wasn't captured.

Perhaps it's unusually difficult for some reason to simultaneously be successful in business, well liked by employees, and really smart.

Perhaps the population of business leaders contains an abnormally high proportion of highly intelligent sociopaths.

Perhaps high IQ correlates with wealth, and employees tend to be resentful of business leaders who earn, say, 100x or 1000x what they earn.

Perhaps on average high IQ leaders were more likely to have goals that contradicted the goals of the workers (e.g. maximize profit at all costs vs. make this a great place to work).

There's a strong self-selection going on, at least in my company.

You can also search for social and emotional needs of the gifted for additional material. You could look up Beyond IQ as well.

That might be because having a high IQ causes people to perceive you as less effective.

It also might be because having really high IQ makes you more likely to be promoted, and is independent of other traits (like charisma or conscientiousness) which impact perception of effectiveness and therefore the population of people promoted without really high IQ tends to score higher on those other traits on average. Selection bias, in other words.

Based on the evidence presented, we just don’t know. Everyone arguing over why very high IQ “causes” the effect we are seeing might just be making stuff up, because we don’t know if there is a causal relationship at all.

The truth is, I was just trying to relate something I'd learned and thought was interesting and every time that happened I was kind of shocked and left wondering how they'd missed the gist of what I was talking about. My own mother did it. I finally stopped sharing things I thought they'd attack me for like that.

Then, in the 4th grade the city I went to school in had all the kids in the district take a test to measure intelligence, though they didn't tell us students that was what we were doing. About a month later my teacher asked my mother to meet her. She told my mom that I'd tested the 2nd highest in the district. She recommended that I be bumped up a couple grades so I could learn more. My mother told her "No. He'll be in the same grade as his older brother and that will cause problems at home." She also told the teacher that she didn't believe I was "that smart".

My teacher was shocked by that. She pulled me aside the next day and told me about the test, her conversation with my mother, and that she was sorry that she couldn't do more for me.

I'd never given a thought about me being "smarter" than anyone. I knew that school was easy for me as compared to some of the other kids that seemed to struggle but I figured they'd get the lessons soon enough. I never talked to anyone in my family about it. I knew they'd just humiliate me if I did.

A few years later I looked into IQ tests and saw the Bell Curve Graph and where I stood on it. Since then I've almost never, ever, mentioned it to anyone but a very few close friends who are no doubt in the same general area on that graph because the first few times I did I got hammered on hard.

Just a few years ago (50 years later) one of my cousins came to visit where I live now and I started talking about something I'd just read and they stopped me right in the middle of it and said "Why are you always trying to impress everyone by using big words." Brought me right back to when we were kids.

I've always known I couldn't be alone with these kinds of experiences, and this article confirms that, but it got me to thinking about how little this has has been discussed and how this kind of exposes that it's probably a far more pervasive problem than we know.

I do know that over the years I've pointed out why something wouldn't work as planned and been told I was wrong and then later proved right. More than a few times it was an expensive lesson to be learned for those who ignored me. And pretty much every time I was hated for pointing it out.

I've never given any thought to the problem or how to fix it but it would probably be interesting to attempt to measure the costs and ponder solutions to it.

> "I do know that over the years I've pointed out why something wouldn't work as planned and been told I was wrong and then later proved right. More than a few times it was an expensive lesson to be learned for those who ignored me. And pretty much every time I was hated for pointing it out."

The phrase "nobody knew" comes to mind, especially when used by person of authority to indicate why no preemptive action was taken before some accident/crime/disaster occurred. I mentally substitute one of the following phrases:

"significant barriers prevented the communication of obvious warning signs"

"fear of inconvenience and embarrassment prevented further consideration of the possibility"

"authorities were not able to be convinced in time"

Not living in the US: Where is the cultural problem in setting oneself apart intellectually from the peers?

Yeah, I had similar experiences. I read a lot of books and absorbed their vocabulary, and sometimes it would slip out. I would just say what's on my mind, and that's what other people do, right?

Then I would get into trouble also by pausing to weigh my words, people read too much into your pause before answering them.

Or I just wouldn't say much, because it leads to trouble. Then people decide you are stuck up and aloof.

It took years to present a more normal facade. Plus just moving on to people that weren't so judgmental.

And anyway, over time I have come to prize simple speech, simple explanations. Especially if the concepts are complicated and heavy.

I eventually realized that I wasn't bad at speaking; I just had a different style. Some people are more agile in conversation, because they do not think about what they want to say before activating their mouth-parts to make the noises. They jump right in, by using formulaic nulls to establish conversational priority, then fill in the content afterward. Then they hold priority with more nulls for as long as it takes to come up with more content.

I have never been able to bring myself to hold conversational priority by babbling nonsense, and I can't abide listening to a constant stream of nulls, trying to sift signal from noise, so I just don't talk to certain people. The best I can manage is gestural nulls.

It's one of the reasons why I prefer writing to speaking. I suspect I might be able to speak normally with Scandinavians, as I have heard they consider silences to be an essential part of conversation. Here in the US, I am continually frustrated by not being able to speak in paragraphs.

And that may be because most people do not think in paragraphs. A lot of them can't even manage whole sentences.

There's information in there, but that's purely optional.

You have built-up resentment towards others because you'd like to relate to them, but it hasn't worked out so far. That's not because they 'can't even manage whole sentences' - it's because you're weird :) That's not a bad thing, or a good thing, it's just the way it is.

You can continue existing in your bubble of negativity and resentment, or work towards finding ways to enjoy people's company, because frankly, if you didn't want it, you'd not feel any resentment in the first place. You'd happily sit alone in a room and do whatever 'smart' things that you do, and that wouldn't include posting on here.

> ENJOY VOGON POETRY

You grit your teeth, stiffen your upper lip, and discover that it's actually not all that bad. With a bit of drum machine, electric guitar, and some backup dancers, it might even pass as catchy pop song lyrics. Ford gapes at you in bewildered agony as Jeltz continues the reading.

I can't exactly blame myself for being weird. Which leaves me to blame everything-not-myself for being insufficiently respectful of weirdness in others.

I've made the same experiece, but then some introspection lead me to find that I do the same thing. Sometimes what somebody tells you is just so boring. There's no point to their story, no suspense, no drame, no humor. Then your thoughts trail off, boom, you get something interesting in your head. They make a lengthy pause, and you think "finally it's over", and then you interrupt them. They're like "I need to finish my story", they interrupt you back.

What I've learned, but still not completely internalized, is that you sometimes need to let go of your story. Your story isn't as interesting as you thought it would be. Maybe you're presenting it to the wrong audience. Whatever it is you need to let go of that story and continue with that conversation, instead of dwelling on the thought of getting your point across. Nobody cares.

In theory, my thoughts are just as worthy and as interesting as my conversational partner, so I need to at least pretend to pay attention when they speak if I want them to pretend to be interested in my words. If their story is painfully boring, you power through it and use that experience to make your own story less pointless and meandering.

I don't really want to know about how D is dating M with the fuzzy caterpillar eyebrows and the Stephen King teeth, and how V refuses to be in another one of D's weddings, and can't D just collinearize anatidi without continually leaning on someone that clearly isn't quite that interested, but there it is. Now I get to talk about that thing that happened today that was funny at the time, but is only slightly amusing in retrospect.

Some people don't ever stop to hear you, much less listen. There's no point in saying anything to them. You might as well draw a stick figure in chalk on a brick wall and talk to it--or write it up and post it to an Internet forum where nobody really knows or cares who you are. ...Twitter, obviously.

http://virtualwayfarer.com/nordic-conversations-are-differen...

discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8205907

Sometimes I'm communicating something quite precise and nuanced.

In those cases I may use big words because it is the right word to use.

English is my 2nd language as well, so if nothing else I think I would deserve some credit for having developed a good vocabulary.

It annoys me when people dismiss the precision in the language as "big words" or "trying to impress". It shows that they are not listening carefully enough, or that they have such a weak vocabulary that they are just overwhelmed by a few words they are not familiar with.

Context is also important. I rarely do that with basic day to day conversations. But hey if you throw some big complex question at me about a professional topic in a professional environment then don't expect a 1st-grader-friendly response.

I love older British children's literature because it doesn't do this at all- it expects the kids to learn new vocabulary along the way. Check out 'Peter Pan'- the verbiage is no different than if it was targeted to an older audience and the better for it.

But I think people who get angry about someone using big words tend to have quite a low bar for what is considered a big word.

If someone's verbiage goes over your head you ask them to define it for you.

Yes, but the simpler one isn't necessarily the one that pops up into your head. Always opting for the simpler word means a less natural dialog flow for some.