December 1st, 2010
In Philosophy
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If you enjoy this article, see the other most popular articles
If you enjoy this article, see the other most popular articles
Smart people prefer being smart versus having social skills
(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.
Thus, you see highly intelligent people do what I now term “defecting by accident” – meaning, in the process of trying to have a discussion, they insult, belittle, or offend their conversational partner. They commit obvious, blatant social faux pases,not as a conscious decision of the tradeoffs, but by accident because they don’t know better.
Sometimes defecting is the right course of action. Sometimes you need to break from whoever you’re negotiating with, insist that things are done your way, even at their expense, and take the consequences that may arise from that.
But it’s rarely something you should do by accident.
I’ll give specific, clear examples in a moment, but before I do so, let’s look at a general example of how this can happen.
If you’re at a meeting and someone gives a presentation and asks if anyone has questions, and you ask point-blank, “But we don’t have the budget or skills to do that, how would we overcome that?” – then, that seems like a highly reasonable question. It’s probably very intelligent.
What normal people would consider, though, is how this affects the perception of everyone in the room. To put it bluntly -it makes the presenter look very bad.
That’s okay, if you decide that that’s an acceptable part of what you’re doing. But you now have someone who is likely to actively work to undermine you going forwards. A minor enemy. Just because you asked a question casually without thinking about it.
Post external references
- 1
http://lesswrong.com/lw/372/defecting_by_accident_a_flaw_common_to_analytical/
February 8, 2022 9:33 am
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