
Competent Elites are More Alive - gaika
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/09/stratified-by-c.html
======
mynameishere
_An intermediate stratum, above the ordinary scientist but below the ordinary
CEO, is that of, say, partners at a non-big-name venture capital firm. The way
their aura feels to me, is that they can hold up one end of an interesting
conversation, but they don't sound very original, and they don't sparkle with
extra life force._

Unadulterated pap. No, seriously..."strata"..."aura"..."feels"..."interesting
conversation"..."life force". It's like Oprah trying to differentiate the
class system within modern business.

~~~
aswanson
To add: _above the ordinary scientist but below the ordinary CEO...._ ...?

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lutorm
Maybe it's true, maybe not, but the one thing I remember (though not the
reference) is reading that a study had found no statistical correlation
between executive pay and the performance of the company. So my impression was
that at least at the highest levels of compensation, executive pay is being
set by other mechanisms, ie everyone bidding for the same people.

Btw, blogging about worrying about whether you are as smart as famously smart
people seems self-absorbed and insecure to me... What do I get out of reading
that?

~~~
iamwil
"I'm not going to take sides on whether today's executives are overpaid, but
those executive titles occupied by actual executives, are not being paid for
nothing. Someone who can be an executive at all, even a below-average
executive, is a rare find."

He's not arguing about compensation. From what I gathered, he's calling to
attention his perception of how this self-admitted biased group of people at a
conference seem to have something 'different' about them from a random person
picked from the population.

The best he can describe the common difference is what he calls "functioning
with recourse". It's like the same unnamed quality of a startup founder, only
best described as "quiet confidence".

Everyone is bidding for the same people, because apparently, there is only a
small number of people that can take huge responsibilities (like running a
company) without someone correcting/covering for them. Even the advice of
other smart people can only be taken with a grain of salt, since it might not
apply to you. So these two combined make it a difficult job that's easy to
fail at, and once fail, a big hoopla is made about it. I'm not sure a lot of
people want this sort of job, much less is willing to do it.

~~~
iamwil
oops. I meant "functioning without recourse"

------
13ren
The quality needed to operate without a manager above you is not competence.

It's _courage_.

~~~
yters
And I'd say courage has a lot to do with a sense of aliveness, besides just
intelligence. I've met a number of pretty dead seeming very intelligent
people.

------
giardini
Should be retitled "Giddy Journalist Fascinated by Evening With the Wealthy".

Did no one tell him about the E in the punch?

~~~
fizx
Worth pointing out: He's not a journalist

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliezer_Yudkowsky>

~~~
giardini
He is definitely a journalist, especially in the original sense, publishing
his thoughts with considerable regularity on his blog. And he's quite good at
it.

You need merely have flipped to
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Eliezer_Yudkowsky> to encounter discussion
of Yudkowsky's qualifications and the Wikipedia post in general.

If he says he's an AI researcher then I accept that. But he's also a
journalist, a good one, and that's the face that I see presented most.

------
gaika
<http://paulgraham.com/boss.html> \- PG on the same topic

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DaniFong
The OP speculates that few people are capable of 'functioning without
recourse', and that those who do so can make it at the executive level, and so
seem more alive.

There's an alternative pathway. Perhaps, put in a position of responsibility,
which most people in modern society seem to have managed to avoid, the
situation draws liveliness and performance out of you? PG seems to have
witnessed that transformation. I would guess that it's a greater effect than
selection.

<http://paulgraham.com/boss.html>

------
Alex3917
Most people who go to Davos are pretty mellow. It seems like if your looking
for high energy people who are intelligent and plucky, your local YPO chapter
is indeed probably the peak of the curve.

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jhancock
Other research, which I can't dig up at the moment, tells us that wealthier
people are happier. So other things being equal, having more money than you
can possibly spend should take a few worries off. Not sure this required a
research grant to figure out, but ok.

So, I guess the only real add this post provides is that some wealthy people
are happier and also some of them are smart and interesting. ok. I've met
Steve Jurvetson before and also found him to be smart and interesting. I just
didn't blog about it ;).

~~~
lutorm
Funny, I remember hearing that research showed exactly the opposite, ie people
in remote villages in New Guinea rated their happiness substantially the same
as those in developed countries. But like you, I don't have the sources
either. ;-)

You might be right, though, that _relative_ wealth influences happiness. In
other words, you don't want to be the poorest person in your community, even
if objectively you are wealthier than those in other communitites.

~~~
yummyfajitas
It's difficult to tell how much of this is a calibration effect. The
fundamental problem is measurement, which is usually some variant of:

"On a scale of 1-10, how happy are you?"

I have no clue what the difference between 3, 5 and 7 is. Neither do villagers
in New Guinea. So I (and I suspect most people) look around me, assume the
typical person is a 5, then rate myself accordingly (I don't have a Wii,
therefore I'm a 4). You are really measuring a weird combination of happiness,
and what the typical person thinks a "6 out of 10" actually means.

Basically, most happiness research is BS.

------
MaysonL
This seems to be essentially the same observation that Paul Graham made in his
essay comparing founder hackers to employee hackers.
<http://paulgraham.com/boss.html>

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steveplace
What a coincidence! I'm competent and elite, and I feel pretty alive. This
article just reinforces with what I've known all my life.

------
rw
How does this compare to the concept of "self-actualization"? Is this more
cocky/elitist?

------
time_management
Yawn. So the OP writes a long post in order to show us that, based on an
_extremely_ biased sample, not everyone at the top of society is a blithering
idiot.

If he really thinks there's "cream at the top", he should try hanging around
real estate moguls and health insurance executives. That'll bring him back to
the reality wherein shit, in fact, floats. VCs and hedge fund managers are
nothing special compared to serious tech entrepreneurs and hackers, but
compared to business executives as a whole, they're 99th-percentile, easily.

In any case, I think the reason the world is fucked up has more to do with
ill-intended competent people than stupid, incompetent people. The Bushes and
Palins may be genuinely stupid, but behind them are Cheneys, Roves, Romneys
and Erik Princes-- thoroughly intelligent and competent, and even more
thoroughly evil. The failure of U.S. society, for example, is not the result
of error or entropy, but of plunder and malevolence. To blame it on "idiots in
suits" is to inaccurate, in any case; the "suits" who excel in mainstream
corporate America are neither intellectual nor curious people, but they have a
fierce political/sycophantic intelligence that very few people can match.

~~~
maxklein
What's wrong with U.S society? The richest country in the world, one of the
best educated, diverse, peaceful, law abiding, willing to vote ethnic
minorities to the highest office?

Stop whining, the U.S may have some scratches, but by most yardsticks, it's
one of the greatest countries in the world.

~~~
osipov
>richest country in the world

To be more precise, a country with the most rich people in the world.
Furthermore, it is a country that is quickly growing rich less relative to
other countries.

>one of the best educated

Not even close. The general population in US is poorly educated relative to
other countries. This has been repeatedly shown in many international
competitions.

>peaceful

really? Are you forgetting Iraq, Afghanistan, or even perhaps Oklahoma
bombing?

>law abiding

This is is actually true, especially considering the how religious most of the
US population is.

>willing to vote ethnic minorities to the highest office

Lets wait until this one actually happens

~~~
steveplace
One nitpick on the "peaceful" part. Foreign peace, nowhere close. But on the
domestic side we've seen a steady decline of violent crimes for the past 15
years.

