The app for independent voices
Scott Alexander’s recent obituary for Scott Adams (no relation) asks a pretty keen implicit question:
“Adams’ comics were about the nerd experience. About being cleverer than everyone else, not just in the sense of being high IQ, but in the sense of being the only sane man in a crazy world where everyone else spends their days listening to overpaid consultants drone on about mission statements instead of doing anything useful. There’s an arc in Dilbert where the boss disappears for a few weeks and the engineers get to manage their own time. Productivity shoots up. Morale soars. They invent warp drives and time machines. Then the boss returns, and they’re back to being chronically behind schedule and over budget. This is the nerd outlook in a nutshell: if I ran the circus, there’d be some changes around here.
Yet the other half of the nerd experience is: for some reason this never works. Dilbert and his brilliant co-workers are stuck watching from their cubicles while their idiot boss racks in bonuses and accolades. If humor, like religion, is an opiate of the masses, then Adams is masterfully unsubtle about what type of wound his art is trying to numb.“
Many people have puzzled over this. A common response is that “you aren’t as smart as you think you are.” Another common response is “intelligence isn’t very important.” I’m sure both responses have their place, but I have what I believe is a more interesting model that captures an underrated/underdiscussed part of society better.
So here’s my (partial) explanation for why many nerds aren't as successful as they think they deserve:
The tl;dr is that complexity of society requires many people and skillsets (cognitive and otherwise) to manage that complexity, and a lot of wealth is generated by people who are good at this. Coordination problems are real problems and the default for complex societies. The Dilbert model of society is implicitly one where engineers and hard/technical labor are the only value-generating functions and everything else is a tax on productivity, and people only believe otherwise because they've been tricked/hypnotized by glitzy but useless status contests and social skills. That model is very wrong, especially during the times when Dilbert was most active.
To some degree modern technology obscures some of this effect since information technology can partially supplant the role of (eg) middle management and other coordination work that has historically been done by skilled humans.
I wrote about it in more detail here:
