Thursday, April 30, 2009

Smart vs Stupid

From Time magazine, see this article.  


An attempt either to lower expectations for Obama so that he has a greater chance of succeeding, or another way of playing into the Republicans' asinine game of "who has the worse ideas".  But the feeling I get from the article is more of an excuse for the Bush Administration - its ok that we appointed under-qualified people to important positions!

The fact that having a Nobel Prize winning scientist is treated as a rare treat instead of standard practice is disgusting.  Plus, his examples of "smart people behaving badly" completely miss the point.

"After researching more than 750 major business failures in great depth, we came to the conclusion that humans are wired for poor decision-making," says Chunka Mui, co-author of Billion-Dollar Lessons. "Ego, sunk costs, emotions, self-interest, etc. lead to blind spots. The not- so-intelligent have the same issues, it's just that the stakes are lower."

The question being.... What happens when you raise the stakes for a not-so-intelligent person? Utter catastrophe, maybe?

No comments:

Post a Comment