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Originally Posted by Triumph36
this. i'm reminded of david sklansky's gem of a quote from a. alvarez's 'the biggest game in town', he said this in 1980:
"I [can't work in business because I] was always being told what to do by incompetent people, and I hated it. The world is full of idiots, and I can't handle it."
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Originally Posted by Phone Booth
LOL - this is the business equivalent of "I need to move up to where my raise get respected." It's quite hilarious he doesn't see the irony here. The business world being full of idiots makes being successful in business harder in the exact same sense that a poker game being full of idiots makes making money in the game harder.
Btw, to add to the theme here, the reason that many of you thought this was a good quote - without an obvious cognitive block, it should be immediately obvious how ridiculous that quote is - is closely related to the reason most people have a hard time understanding why going for it here isn't obviously a bad idea and most fans are constantly criticizing decisions they don't understand. You instantly bought it on an emotional level and what agrees with you emotionally is rarely examined critically.
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Originally Posted by Riverman
btw, the mentality that leads the masses to such nonsense in this instance (listening to conventional wisdom, refusal to re-examine positions based on evidence) is the same mentality that leads people to have such horrible political beliefs.
I would argue that this is the same mentality that leads people to have any political beliefs at all. To blame others for their own misfortune and emotional baggage. Refusal to re-examine their own positions is just a side effect of not wanting to understand things that may question this fundamental basis. Show me anyone who can state their political beliefs in a way that doesn't correspond to blaming others for their own problems and I'll show a saint.
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Originally Posted by suzzer99
Phone Booth : Business & Investing
pvn : Politics
GREEEEAR: SE
This is close, but not quite - I use more words, fewer posts, provide less humor and incite more anger.
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Originally Posted by Triumph36
wow phone booth, way to interpret the quote terribly. the part i omitted was that sklansky claimed that other considerations - namely how much people like you - play far too much into the business world.
There's almost no other consideration than applying your intelligence towards solving problems that need to be solved. The better your cognitive skills and the better you understand the game relative to others the better you do. How much people like you in a business sense is a largely function of your usefulness to others. Some part of this you can't change, others you can. That David Sklansky wasn't able to figure out a way to be liked by important people in business has very little to do with people in business being dumb.
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that was sklansky's whole point - that being evaluated by idiots who respect different ideas of what makes someone a good actuary is far from ideal.
Again, this is just a long-winded way of saying that it would be easier to play poker against better players. He's blaming his inability to succeed in business on other people's lack of intelligence. Why does he think he'd fare any better with smarter people? He's still facing the same problem of having to charm all these other people and here, everyone else is even better at it. Or does he think that intelligence has nothing to do with figuring out others' subconscious, emotional needs and devising ways to cater to them? Some people - especially successful people - spend most of their cognitive resources doing precisely this, consciously or not. Does he think that just being himself would work better only if other people were smarter? His lack of social skills would be even more obviously exposed.
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whether or not the system can be figured out in the same fashion as poker isn't up for debate, and not at all what sklansky is talking about.
It can't be figured out in the same fashion - it's a lot more complicated.
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the rest of your post is panglossian drivel - this sort of evaluation is precisely the sort of thing that most people are terrible at doing. people are universally bad at thinking that good decisions can lead to bad outcomes. they're bad at it because it goes against the way we experience the world.
So do you think that on the whole, twoplustwo posters who found this minor flaw in the way others think make great life decisions, relative to successful businessmen?
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Originally Posted by TomCollins
Although it may be contrary to popular opinion, Politics Forum has way more critical thinkers than the general population, even very smart people, by a long shot.
You're confusing "can see normal people can't, but I can" with critical thinking. It doesn't mean much if they also miss things normal people see. You're just expressing this in-group dynamic - also prevalent in this entire thread - where a group of people as a whole overrate one another, because there are things that are more obvious to this group than those outside. You can pick almost any random social group and there would be things that its members understand better than the average person. This doesn't say much about critical thinking ability or anything at all unless you have a good way to measure this group's collective deficiencies which none of them sees. I mean, seriously, I'm sure somewhere on the internet there's a forum for autistic people and I'm sure they'd talk about stuff they see that neurotypicals can't. Pick any group - some minor religious group, those who share any particular sexual deviation, those who share a particular mental or physical disability, etc, etc - and there's something that they understand better than the average person.
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Those who actually stick around are the ones who have had to actually come up with arguments for their positions, and are capable of being swayed through reason. The nature of 2+2 is it tends to attract people who take a more methodical and logical approach and tend to be much more open-minded to very unconventional conclusions.
Really? I thought it attracted socially unconventional people from various walks of life who also happen to be interested in playing poker. Other than quantitative leanings of many posters leading to mathematical errors of at the level of high school algebra being shouted down more easily, thus being somewhat less common and posters here generally being bookish (it is a publisher's site, and one that publishes somewhat denser poker books than the norm). I think people here also way underestimate the general population because of this in-group dynamic; and also because serious posters on internet forums tend to think that what others post on this forum and others on the internet (generally drivel) is representative of the average person's cognitive capacity. Just think about what sorts of people do post in really bad internet forums, what sort of people post the most and what sort of mindset they have when they do.
It's possible that I'm overestimating the average person, but I find that otherwise intellectually unremarkable people have tremendous cognitive capacity when they are properly motivated and guided.
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Now, once they have used logic and reason to reach those conclusions, they may be difficult to shake. Of course, the are going to be idiots everywhere.
I don't follow how their conclusions have anything to do with logic and reason.
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But even without knowing any of those test results, the people in question are some of the smartest people I've met. It's just they are missing a component that allows them to deviate from "expert" opinion, even when presented with overwhelming logic. Call it Maxrakerism.
This is completely wrong. Talk to everyone from drunks at the bar, grocery store clerks, politics forums posters, businessmen, academics, etc - there's practically no one in this world who's biased towards not wanting to deviate from "expert" opinion, when it comes to things that we think we understand. Individual human minds are simply not built that way - we're positively delighted anytime we can figure out a way to feel superior to the experts, those in authority positions, etc. In fact, at least part of your friend's emotional hangup in this case is the delight in finding that the expert (Belichick) here was wrong in a way that he understands. This entire episode is about this - people wanting to feel superior to Belichick, others wanting to feel superior to those other people, etc, etc.
