I've seen people I work with become rich, and what I noticed about some of them is that they don't care about being 'nice', they are happy to treat everyone like they owe them something. Being nasty in business works, better and for far longer than it should. I always felt that if I was to succeed or fail, It will be on my own terms and my own thoughts about how to operate ethically, so I became my own boss. 15 years or so later I'm not rich by SV standards, but I did manage to buy a house as a 35yo millenial near the peak of the market off the back of doing what I thought was right. And I'm proud of that. I don't know if I'd call myself smart, but I would suggest that intelligent people are aware of what being ruthless in the pursuit of money will do to those around them, and many will choose not to abuse their intelligence knowing that it would hurt others. Or at least I'd like to think so.
chistev · 4h ago
I ask myself this question on a regular basis. I feel a type of way when I see people who I don't consider to be as smart as me being richer than me. The smartest people I know aren't even the richest. It's as though there's an inverse correlation. Lol.
Having just taken an IQ test out of curiosity, they strike me as testing very little beyond the ability to pattern recognise and extrapolate.
Having pattern recognised and extrapolated to my perception of the wealth-happiness curve, it seems that when your wants are met by your current wage, wanting more money is paradoxical -- it requires either time or stress that take away from the many other richnesses of life.
A little ambition (and savings) is good -- you can't recline too far back into the comfort zone -- but wealth never struck me as a particularly important measure of a person.
oh_fiddlesticks · 3h ago
"I have seen something further under the sun, that the swift do not always win the race, nor do the mighty win the battle, nor do the wise always have the food, nor do the intelligent always have the riches, nor do those with knowledge always have success, because time and unexpected events overtake them all."
From Ecclesiastes 9:11, which came to mind immediately when reading this.
The book itself has more than a few apt / sobering observations like this, concluding at 12:13, somewhat abruptly after a sort of 'case study' on the futility of life without God.
ameliaquining · 2h ago
"William James Sidis whos IQ was somewhere between 250 and 300."
Wikipedia: "According to Sperling, Sidis's sister Helena told him that an unnamed examiner had estimated Sidis's intelligence in this range, but no documentation has ever been found to support this claim. Modern psychologists and historians of intelligence testing have noted several problems with such extreme IQ estimates: IQ tests in the early 1900s were not standardized or reliable enough to produce meaningful scores above 200. The concept of IQ as measured by modern tests did not exist during Sidis's childhood. Extreme scores often result from extrapolation errors rather than actual measurement. Contemporary accounts focused on Sidis's specific abilities rather than general intelligence measures."
This level of sloppiness about a simple fact-checkable claim means I can't trust the article about anything else. (To say nothing of the claims that aren't quantified at all.)
Also, I feel that it's a bit misleading not to mention that Sidis was "estranged from everyone" in large part because he was a socialist during the First Red Scare.
yahoozoo · 2h ago
^^^ Found one of the people the article is about ^^^
bix6 · 4h ago
“He's an F1 engine in a shopping cart.”
This one gave me a proper chuckle
h_tbob · 3h ago
Jesus said "sell your possessions, give to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven".
I didn't read the whole article, but it's a great question.
On my religious journey, I have read things like this:
"You cannot serve God and money".
Ultimately, the smartest people, if they are Christian, will actually get rid of their money.
I asked God about it and he told me this:
"There's not enough money for everyone. A truly good person lets everybody else have the money, and just lives on charity".
It shocked me, but Jesus told me this:
"You can get more done without money than with it".
He pointed out the queen of england will never know her true friends, as everybody acts like it.
But if you are poor, you have that knowledge, and can thus live a healthier life.
Ultimately money is based of terror. It is literally based on the terror that if you counterfeit it you go to jail.
So I think that good people would not want to use a medium that requires terror to function.
This may sound crazy, but I think, as a programmer, it is the truth!
But maybe I'm wrong?
interstice · 2h ago
> Ultimately money is based of terror. It is literally based on the terror that if you counterfeit it you go to jail.
The logic here seems flawed. This could be said of anything to do with obeying laws. Don’t I put my seatbelt on out of the terror that if I don’t I could go to jail? Therefore seatbelts require terror to function?
interstice · 2h ago
> "There's not enough money for everyone. A truly good person lets everybody else have the money, and just lives on charity"
This also seems dangerously flawed. Money is a social construct, there could easily be enough for everyone if production > people’s needs. Some of this stuff strikes me as the result of ancient class wars.
paulpauper · 3h ago
Here's a number that should make you vomit: IQ explains about 21% of income variation. That's it. Four fifths of why someone makes bank has nothing to do with their brain. Nobel economist James Heckman ran the numbers harder and found IQ accounts for 1-2% of income variance when you factor in everything else. One to two percent. Your SAT score is basically a rounding error on your paycheck.
he's ignoring individual preferences. In the context of a career setting, making a lot of money is conditional on passing the screening and interviews, which are indirectly IQ filters. So people who are smart and whose preferences are aligned towards wealth accumulation are at an advantage. You don't get into Jane Street unless you're smart.
https://www.rxjourney.net/trapped-in-the-matrix
Having pattern recognised and extrapolated to my perception of the wealth-happiness curve, it seems that when your wants are met by your current wage, wanting more money is paradoxical -- it requires either time or stress that take away from the many other richnesses of life.
A little ambition (and savings) is good -- you can't recline too far back into the comfort zone -- but wealth never struck me as a particularly important measure of a person.
The book itself has more than a few apt / sobering observations like this, concluding at 12:13, somewhat abruptly after a sort of 'case study' on the futility of life without God.
Wikipedia: "According to Sperling, Sidis's sister Helena told him that an unnamed examiner had estimated Sidis's intelligence in this range, but no documentation has ever been found to support this claim. Modern psychologists and historians of intelligence testing have noted several problems with such extreme IQ estimates: IQ tests in the early 1900s were not standardized or reliable enough to produce meaningful scores above 200. The concept of IQ as measured by modern tests did not exist during Sidis's childhood. Extreme scores often result from extrapolation errors rather than actual measurement. Contemporary accounts focused on Sidis's specific abilities rather than general intelligence measures."
This level of sloppiness about a simple fact-checkable claim means I can't trust the article about anything else. (To say nothing of the claims that aren't quantified at all.)
Also, I feel that it's a bit misleading not to mention that Sidis was "estranged from everyone" in large part because he was a socialist during the First Red Scare.
This one gave me a proper chuckle
I didn't read the whole article, but it's a great question.
On my religious journey, I have read things like this:
"You cannot serve God and money".
Ultimately, the smartest people, if they are Christian, will actually get rid of their money.
I asked God about it and he told me this:
"There's not enough money for everyone. A truly good person lets everybody else have the money, and just lives on charity".
It shocked me, but Jesus told me this:
"You can get more done without money than with it".
He pointed out the queen of england will never know her true friends, as everybody acts like it.
But if you are poor, you have that knowledge, and can thus live a healthier life.
Ultimately money is based of terror. It is literally based on the terror that if you counterfeit it you go to jail.
So I think that good people would not want to use a medium that requires terror to function.
This may sound crazy, but I think, as a programmer, it is the truth!
But maybe I'm wrong?
he's ignoring individual preferences. In the context of a career setting, making a lot of money is conditional on passing the screening and interviews, which are indirectly IQ filters. So people who are smart and whose preferences are aligned towards wealth accumulation are at an advantage. You don't get into Jane Street unless you're smart.