Why are entrepreneurs less glib in party conversations? Because they are doers and less of talkers. That’s how I interpret the impromptu and thought provoking post of one of my favorite author, Nassim Taleb on his Facebook wall.
I believe that education is mostly what make individuals more polished dinner partners. The British government documents, as early as fifty years ago, present another aim for education than the one we have today: raising values, making good citizens, and “the intrinsic value of learning”, not economic growth.
Likewise in ancient times, learning was for learning’s sake, to make someone a good person, worthy talking to; it was not for the vulgar aim to enhance the stock of gold in the city’s coffers. I will say it bluntly: entrepreneurs, particularly those in technical jobs are not necessarily the best people to have dinner with —the better at they are doing, the worst they tend to be (with some exceptions, of course).
I recall a heuristic I used in my previous profession when hiring people (called in Fooled by Randomness “separate those who when they go to a museum look at the Cézanne on the wall from those who focus on the contents of the trash can”): the more interesting their conversation, the more cultured they were, the more we are trapped at thinking that they are effective at what they were doing (something psychologists call the halo effect, the mistake in thinking that skills in, say, skiing translate into skills in managing a pottery workshop or a bank department). Clearly, it is unrigorous to judge the skills at doing from the skills at the talking (the same conflation of event and exposure, or knowing with doing, or, more mathematically, mistaking the x for f(x)), good traders can be totally incomprehensible —they do not put much energy in turning their insights and internal coherence into elegant style.
Entrepreneurs are selected to be just doers, not thinkers, and doers do, don’t talk, and it would be unfair, wrong, and downright insulting to measure them at the talk department. The same with artisans: the quality lies in their product, not their conversation —in fact they can easily have false beliefs that lead them to make better products, so what? But we should avoid the mental leap of going from the idea that making people interesting dinner partners to the notion that it creates economics growth, or that we should increase the stock of bureaucrats for that. Bureaucrats on the other hand, because of the lack of objective metric of success and absence of market forces, are selected on “hallo effects” of shallow looks and elegance —just say that a dinner with empty suits working for the World Bank would be more interesting than one with some of Fat Tony’s cousins.
The prolific Mr. Taleb seems to be distinguishing substance from form where he opines that measuring people by their social skills can be misleading or deceiving.
Doers (entrepreneurs, particularly technical entrepreneurs) may not be socially impressive but play a more prominent role in the economy. The tradeoff for the entrepreneurs: scarce time (and resources) are devoted to delivering the satisfaction of the consumers or clients than to spend unproductive time at social affairs. (though, we can’t generalize this, as some entrepreneurs can be sleek conversationalists and not all glib talkers are unproductive)
This is especially true compared to “halo effects” projected by bureaucrats and politicians who use emotionally driven rhetorical abstractions to gain sympathy and approbation of the unenlightened and of the boobus voters. Yet ironically these political agents lives off from the blood of their hosts—the entrepreneurs.
Also this quote may reflect on Mr. Taleb’s personal circumstance as a mathematician-philosopher. Perhaps if I read Mr. Taleb right, then I would share his frustrations: Talkers (like celebrity guru and insider Mr. Nouriel Roubini) get the chicks! [But that represents a choice: perhaps one needs to balance between social life and delivering value to clients/consumer.]
To summarize: in parties or in social gathering, what you see or hear isn’t what you get (in most instances).
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