

Ask HN: Does it feel good to be smart? - bwang29

Does being smart comes with bigger responsibility and do you feel stressful of being really smart (as a developer maybe)?<p>I've never understand enough math to play with hardcore computer science (although I've love to and I tried) and I assume people feel very happier when they're good at what they want to do.
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lutusp
> Does being smart comes with bigger responsibility and do you feel stressful
> of being really smart (as a developer maybe)?

Views differ. There are as many views on this topic as there are smart people.
John von Neumann took the position that being _in_ the world didn't
necessarily mean being _of_ the world:

"You don't have to be responsible for the world that you're in." -- Advice
given by von Neumann to Richard Feynman as quoted in "Los Alamos from Below"
in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985)

I happen to agree with that sentiment.

Also, when smart people decide to engage with the world's problems, they often
get it spectacularly wrong -- example Nobel Prizewinner Bill Shockley's
brainless campaign to make people aware of the imagined inferiority of black
people.

Albert Einstein famously turned down the presidency of Israel on the ground
that he didn't feel that he had a head for the world's problems. In my book,
that demonstrated his genius.

I think smart people don't necessarily know how to competently deal with
everyday problems, and very high skill in one area doesn't necessarily
translate to even average abilities in any other.

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Cardeck1
I totally agree with the last statement.And I (not so) often seen people that
have nothing to do with a domain yet they excelled in it.I had one marketing
guy who helped us with hardware design without having an engineering or any
technical degree whatsoever.He just knew how-what-where to do by looking at
it.Human mind is amazing.

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randomracker
I think that depends on your attitude toward it. People who are self-
consciously smart and think it's worth something are irritating, like
beautiful people who feel like they don't need to have a good personality. It
can develop into a complex if you are not careful to balance it with real
emotional intelligence, just like any unbalanced thing. (Unbalanced things are
unstable. Consider how many lottery winners lose all of their money. The money
is a new, unbalanced influence in their life. It hasn't always been there, so
it's not a balanced part of that life, and may just evaporate as things _do_
come back into balance.)

It's best to just forget about being smart, and assume you're smart enough to
do anything. The best way to be smart is just that it removes "I'm not smart
enough to do X" from the way you think. If it does anything else, it's
probably not good. It shouldn't make you think you don't have to try, it
shouldn't raise your expectations, only just take "I'm not smart enough" off
of the table. In fact, there's always someone smarter anyway. I find that,
while keeping any sense of self-congratulation in check, without developing a
superiority complex, I do need to keep in mind to a limited extent that I
actually _am_ smarter than a lot of people, so I do need to sometimes review
their decisions and that some of the rules really don't apply to me. It's a
fine line between that and hubris or narcissism, and it did take me sometime
to come to that balance, going through "I'm better" to "I'm no better" to
simply "I'm different, not really better or worse, but uniquely capable and in
a position where I'll have to keep in mind that sometimes I'm wrong, but
sometimes, the world is wrong." In the judicial system, you're judged by a
jury of your peers. But there is an added responsibility if you are without
peer. No one really has the insight to act as a check on your thinking, so you
can be alone the way a pilot can be in a cabin full of passengers. They're not
any less valuable than you, but they're really not in any position to review
your decisions.

It's hard to explain.

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chris_dcosta
Bit of an odd question this. First you ask (allegedly) smart people what it's
like to be smart followed by a point which tells us you do not consider
yourself smart enough to do something.

Looks to me like you have something on your mind, or that you are discovering
the moral responsibility that having a deeper insight might bring. When you
get to this level (not hard) it's an individual choice though. You can use it
for good, evil, or plain vanilla self-preservation.

Apart from "meds", I am not aware of any other way to improve your
intelligence in everyday life. Experience, learning and age support your
knowledge base directly - which in turn has the effect of making others
_think_ that you are intelligent - but those aspects don't necessarily mean
you are "smart". In fact you'd be hard pressed to find two people that agree
on what the definition of "being smart" is.

Smart can mean knowing when a fight is about to happen in a bar, and stepping
back, making sure you still have your drinks. Smart can mean knowing what's
wrong with a car motor just by listening to it. Smart can mean knowing when to
pass, and when to score yourself.

Smart rarely means sitting on your arse all night debugging the same piece of
code. That's when you start to imagine that a better person could have spotted
the bug right away, or that there are coders who can write bugless code. And
that's when the doubt creeps in.

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slaxman
> Does being smart comes with bigger responsibility and do you feel stressful
> of being really smart (as a developer maybe)?

Being smart increases others' expectations of you. They expect you to show
miracles from time to time. Of course that cannot happen all the time. It is
therefore necessary to develop an attitude such that others' perception does
not affect you. It's what I call "I don't care what the world thinks of me".
In my experience, in the absence of this attitude, smart guys can come under a
lot of stress and make bad decisions at difficult times. (May be someone out
here has a better way of dealing with it than mine??)

> I've never understand enough math to play with hardcore computer science
> (although I've love to and I tried) and I assume people feel very happier
> when they're good at what they want to do.

I believe two of your assumptions are wrong in the abvoe statement:

1\. You really don't need to know too much math to play around with computers.
When you come across a something that you don't understand you can always look
it up (all thanks to Wikipedia) and learn it.

2\. You become good at what you do by practicing repeatedly. Few are born with
talented. Most of people become good at that they do by practicing it. There's
nothing that can stop anyone becoming good at the skill they are interested in
other than themselves.

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orangethirty
I'm dumb as a bag of rocks. But I don't let that stop me from enjoying life. I
guess it's the same for smart people without any ineriority complex.

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MildlySerious
I don't know about being smart, because I can't compare myself to others. But
it sure feels good to be ever curious, learning and experimenting.

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meerita
I never arrive to such conclusions: "Oh, I'm smart". I'm unaware of this, even
I don't consider smart, I'm just consider curious enough.

