Comments on: What Are People Interested In? What Do They Know?

By: Karl Hallowell

Karl Hallowell — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 12:05:50 +0000

A related problem is the tendency to think of humans as “irrational” and then stop thinking further. For example, the so-called “Hanlon’s Razor”, “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.” Further, stupidity is often described as a force of nature, like hurricanes or gravity. The problem is that you still don’t have insight into why the behavior occured.

As I see it, there is a great irony here. One of the few times, you should legimately anthromorphize something (namely treat a phenomenon as if it were a human being) yet we treat human beings as if they were black boxes which spits out random but “stupid” decisions.

By: MikeD

MikeD — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 17:29:04 +0000

Do “smart people” simply have a large working knowledgebase or are they able to quickly and correctly assess a situation from limited available information?
Does having access to Google make me smart? Does knowing how to _best use_ google make me smart? Having a larger working set of information is valuable only if there are efficient ways to integrate new information.
With a select number of generally applicable axioms, I can contribute reasonably well in basic knowledge use and will typically keep up to a medium difficulty level on a range of topics that I otherwise know nothing about. I don’t know if that makes me smart per-se, but it does lend to being a smart ass quite often.

By: Tony

Tony — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 15:52:54 +0000

Actually, in the video I was impressed by how polite the ‘dumb’ Americans were. You wouldn’t get that kind of response on a British street I can tell you