It’s crazy how people often confuse unnecessary complexity with being smart. One of my filters when interviewing engineering candidates is to see whether their line of thinking is simple, clear & logical. Tendency towards complexity is a major red flag. Bad hire 100% of the time. https://twitter.com/YangVentures/status/1029986875992358912 …
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The thing about this rule is that it‘s not as intuitive as you might think. The said bad candidate was able to fool a couple of other senior engineers - people whose opinions I highly respect. “Hey his incomplete solutions seem complex but it *sounds* like he has good reasons.”
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If even domain experts can be fooled by false competency / intelligence, you have to wonder, what hope do we have for domains way outside of our circle of competence? This question bothers me all the time.
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I've since observed this phenomenon many times in real life. It's very easy to be duped into believing that someone knows what they are doing, just because they use fancy jargons, or show confidence. Our primitive brain employs poor filtering mechanisms & often works against us.
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So until our brain is augmented with AI to filter BS, this heuristic works pretty well: avoiding complexity like a plague. If the person uses fancy terms & can’t explain things in simple terms, chances are he is full of shit. Walk away.
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As for Vitalik's long-ass thread. Here is my attempt at simplifying it. Good thing is he shows his fundamental flaw in thinking early on (tweets 9-11). The rest is just lipstick on a pig.
https://twitter.com/hugohanoi/status/1029919205859020800 …Show this thread -
P.S.: Apparently this phenomenon is called the "Sokal hoax". h/t
@realLudvigArthttps://twitter.com/realLudvigArt/status/1029998367839944705 …Show this thread -
P.S. #2: I would gladly take someone who might be slow in thinking (nothing wrong with that, although interviewing environment is not suited for slow thinkers) but show clarity & strong logic, over someone who thinks quickly, talks a lot, but has convoluted reasoning. Every day.
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End of conversation
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair … This is all I can think of while I was reading through it.
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being smart or good at a technical field doesn't mean being good at explaining their own idea! those skills are completely different.
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