Phenomenally Talented Assholes
Paul Graham: “Wise and smart are both ways of saying someone knows what to do. The difference is that wise means one has a high average outcome across all situations, and smart means one does spectacularly well in a few. That is, if you had a graph in which the x axis represented situations and the y axis the outcome, the graph of the wise person would be high overall, and the graph of the smart person would have high peaks. The distinction is similar to the rule that one should judge talent at its best and character at its worst. Except you judge intelligence at its best, and wisdom by its average.”
What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane.
Lauren Oyler: “I think a lot of people want to be able to easily classify you. So if I’m using the word prelapsarian and the phrase ‘that sucks’ in the same paragraph, or whatever—and saying ‘or whatever,’ in order to create the effect of conversational speech—they don’t know where to place me. Or they say I’m strategically developing a persona, because they think no one could possibly be like this, because they know only one kind of person and they think everyone is exactly like them.”
