

What Stupid Things Do Smart People Do? - joelrunyon
http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-stupid-things-smart-people-do

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strlen
The top rated post has some good points, but this is just plain wrong:

"Using terrible tools, and taking pride in their awfulness - Especially common
with programmers, who take pride in using programming languages and text
editors that have been designed by programmers, not updated since the 1970s,
and never touched by anyone with a modicum of design sense. "

Comments:

* Since when is being "designed by programmers" a negative thing? Best tools are built to scratch an itch.

* "Not updated since the 1970s", I hope he isn't talking about emacs, C, UNIX and (many different) Lisps

I'm most productive with Linux, emacs, slime and a either an ML dialect or
Lisp (I also love C greatly). All of these have their roots in 60s, 70s and
sometimes earlier but have been updated recently (that's where there's "C99").
I don't know anybody running SysV and using Bill Joy's original ex, or
original teco emacs. Seems like the post is just flame-bait against hackers
who use tools they love and are productive with.

The part about Apple products is the same as well: I like my Macbook Pro
laptops and I like the idea of iTunes (but I find Amazon MP3 to be a better
implementation). However, for many of their other products hackers simply
aren't the target audience: am I being "stupid" by not using an
iP(phone|pad|pod) when it just doesn't do what I like?

~~~
joelrunyon
I think the bigger point here is "taking pride in working long, rather than
working smart." Putting in long hours and working inefficiently rather than
working quickly.

------
daimyoyo
They forgot one thing. Smart people can sometimes get lost in their own heads
and the world passes them by. Look at Einstein. He spent the last half of his
career trying in vain to solve the unified field equation theory. During that
time the string theory was beginning to take hold but he couldn't see it. I
don't know if it's hubris or simple ignorance that causes it but that is the
biggest thing that smart people do that regular people would consider stupid.

~~~
wdewind
I think it's more the things the cause people to succeed in one way force them
to fail in another. If Einstein was equipped to with the attributes that
would've made him "see" string theory, he likely wouldn't have necessarily
been equipped with the attributes that would've lead to the general theory of
relativity.

Einstein himself even said (although it's laughably inaccurate) that he wasn't
smarter than anyone else, he just stuck with problems longer than other
people.

~~~
oliverdamian
I agree. People of the future who are truly going to change the world as we
know it have insights and points of view that would not really make sense to
us people of today. Some times today's crack-pots are tomorrow's visionaries.

------
brg
Argue well past any chance of persuasion is one I see people fall into too
often. There is value in moving on when you can not convince. But as the
author points out:

 _They also believe that they can change other people's minds through argument
and facts, ignoring how emotional and irrational people actually are when it
comes to making decisions or adopting beliefs._

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mkramlich
Agreed with everything he said except the terrible tools item. Sounded like
he's referring to things like Unix, vi, emacs, terminal/shell, etc. If so,
he's wrong and has it backwards. Folks use them precisely because they are so
powerful and flexible, and yet can be both very simple or as complex as needed
to fit the problem. Where he sees a complicated tool a good engineer sees a
complex problem space and then appreciates a tool which lets him solve it
efficiently.

------
brianwillis
>Using terrible tools, and taking pride in their awfulness - Especially common
with programmers, who take pride in using programming languages and text
editors that have been designed by programmers, not updated since the 1970s,
and never touched by anyone with a modicum of design sense.

I'm learning emacs at the moment. Tell me I'm not wasting my time. Should I
just give in and buy TextMate like every other programmer that works on a Mac
seems to?

~~~
Hates_
You're not. A lot of good programmers use Emacs or Vi on Mac.

~~~
alexgartrell
If you download and build emacs from source, you can give it a cocoa interface
that, I feel, is much better (for its minimalism) than aquamacs.

How-To:

    
    
      $ tar xzf emacs-23.2.tar.gz
      $ ./configure --with-ns
      $ make
      $ sudo make install
    
      [command] + [space] // Spotlight
      Emacs
    

<http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsForMacOS>

~~~
strlen
'port install emacs23-app' works well

No need to use Aquamacs. The great advantage to using regular GNU Emacs is
that I can keep the same config on Linux as on OS X with a couple of cond/if
expressions e.g.,:

    
    
      (if (eq window-system 'ns)
        (setq default-frame-alist '((width . 132)
                                    (height . 60)))
      (menu-bar-mode nil))

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georgieporgie
This seems more like a list of things that obsessive, insecure, narrow-minded
people do.

~~~
dj_axl
I was going to say, seems more like a list of things that introverted people
do. Either way (obsessive/introverted), I wouldn't define it as "smart".

------
Pooter
Doing stupid things is a basic part of the human condition. You may do more of
them if you're stupid, but you still do plenty of them when you're smart, too.

