But it’s not perfect. Smart people have a problem, especially (although not only) when you put them in large groups. That problem is an ability to convincingly rationalize nearly anything.

Everybody rationalizes. We all want the world to be a particular way, and we all make mistakes, and we all want to be successful, and we all want to feel good about ourselves.

We all make decisions for emotional or intuitive reasons instead of rational ones. Some of us admit that. Some of us think using our emotions is better than being rational all the time. Some of us don’t.

Smart people, computer types anyway, tend to come down on the side of people who don’t like emotions. Programmers, who do logic for a living.

Here’s the problem. Logic is a pretty powerful tool, but it only works if you give it good input. As the famous computer science maxim says, “garbage in, garbage out.” If you know all the constraints and weights - with perfect precision - then you can use logic to find the perfect answer. But when you don’t, which is always, there’s a pretty good chance your logic will lead you very, very far astray.

Most people find this out pretty early on in life, because their logic is imperfect and fails them often. But really, really smart computer geek types may not ever find it out. They start off living in a bubble, they isolate themselves because socializing is unpleasant, and, if they get a good job straight out of school, they may never need to leave that bubble. To such people, it may appear that logic actually works, and that they are themselves logical creatures.

I guess I was lucky. I accidentally co-founded what turned into a pretty successful startup while still in school. Since I was co-running a company, I found out pretty fast that I was wrong about things and that the world didn’t work as expected most of the time. This was a pretty unpleasant discovery, but I’m very glad I found it out earlier in life instead of later, because I might have wasted even more time otherwise.