I'm very sceptical when reading quotes like "smart people [...]" because IMHO it's extremely complicated to define smart. That said, I believe the following statement is 100% wrong:
> "Smart people have a problem, especially (although not only) when you put them in large groups. That problem is an ability to convincingly rationalize nearly anything."
Rationalizing is not something smart people do. IMHO it's more of a cultural thing in large scale. Take a north European (or American, must have to do with the weather) and you'll get a huge % of the population rationalizing things, instead of being emotional like the south Europeans/American.
I understand that most HN readers are programmers with strong mathematical background but try to picture this: Ghandi didn't knew any math compared to Godel, Einstein or Von Neumann. Ghandi achieved a gunless revolution by convincing poorly educated people to follow his lead. To me this is EXTREMELY hard to do. Nearly impossible. Ghandi was a social genius. Can we say that he wasn't smart because an average mathematician would probably had more analytical thinking when talking about algorithms?
The author (and not only the author) confuses the analytical/non-emotional thinking that he does with smartness. I believe that's a bold mistake.
ps. Of course there are situation where school teachers think of introvert children as not that smart. This thing plays out both-ways unfortunately.
Convincing poorly educated people of something is not hard to do. A large part (or side-effect sadly) of education is critical thinking skills. Lack of education leads to easy followers; something that has been preyed upon numerous times throughout history.
It also helps that Gandhi was highly educated (for his time), was a lawyer and quite a good writer, orator and politician. Not exactly the characteristic of an unsmart person.
> "Smart people have a problem, especially (although not only) when you put them in large groups. That problem is an ability to convincingly rationalize nearly anything."
Rationalizing is not something smart people do. IMHO it's more of a cultural thing in large scale. Take a north European (or American, must have to do with the weather) and you'll get a huge % of the population rationalizing things, instead of being emotional like the south Europeans/American.
I understand that most HN readers are programmers with strong mathematical background but try to picture this: Ghandi didn't knew any math compared to Godel, Einstein or Von Neumann. Ghandi achieved a gunless revolution by convincing poorly educated people to follow his lead. To me this is EXTREMELY hard to do. Nearly impossible. Ghandi was a social genius. Can we say that he wasn't smart because an average mathematician would probably had more analytical thinking when talking about algorithms?
The author (and not only the author) confuses the analytical/non-emotional thinking that he does with smartness. I believe that's a bold mistake.
ps. Of course there are situation where school teachers think of introvert children as not that smart. This thing plays out both-ways unfortunately.