Without making any claims on my level of "smartness", I will say that I tend to shut down pretty quickly when it becomes apparent that the person I'm "sharing" with is really just more interested in me doing his job for him.

This is an interesting theory. But I tend to be of the school that thinks that there are two kinds of smart people: people that think they are smart and aren't, and people who are smart (but tend to not think so).

The former are usually a result of the Dunning–Kruger effect. In my experience these people think that being smart (competent) makes them special and gives them a kind of power. Thus they don't want to diminish their own power by yielding some of it to other people. The funny thing is that they usually don't actually know anything anyways.

The later are usually a result of what I like to think of as the Socrates effect "I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing." They believe that what they know isn't worth much because they realize that what they know is a single drop in the ocean of knowledge. They tend not to want to share because they might be embarrassed by the pittance of their knowledge -- even if it's worth quite a bit.

I've found ultimately that sharers of knowledge have overcome their own egos and have dealt with the fear that drives both motivations. In either case they usually expect some kind of reciprocity and openness (but it's not required).

I think this observation is very true with respect to sharing with the internet at large. It's easy to dismiss some new (personal) discovery as unremarkable or obvious -- but, there are probably people out there who would find a write-up of that discovery interesting. This is probably especially true about more domain-specific bits of knowledge.

In that case, I don't think not sharing is an intentional choice to withhold or hoard information. The individual simply didn't realize there was any demand for that information. Or, perhaps there wasn't enough value in that information because anyone with an interest would make the same discovery on their own easily enough.

It doesn't mean that the same individual wouldn't share that info with someone who asked directly about the subject.

I've also found that once a person has attained a certain amount of knowledge, sharing it with others becomes an awful lot like telling them that they're wrong. People don't like to hear that they are wrong about things. Sometimes people just don't want to know what they don't know. Its just easier that way.

Sharing can be hard, socially risky work. It often requires a great deal of tact, even when the knowledge is asked for.

There was this one guy, he had a gun and he'd hunt with it. One day, another guy came along and they started hunting together. Eventually, the guy with the gun shared the gun with the other guy who then shot the gun owner and took all the food.

Why some smart people are reluctant to share? [...] Note: This is about smart people who are not sharing enough. So please don’t generalize this about all smart people.

Easy! Smart people who do not share are not sharing enough by definition.

Asking this question is a good place to start, but the answer goes way beyond mere reluctance. I would say that many people are very intelligent in ways that outstrip their ability to communicate this knowledge effectively. Natural written languages are very blunt instruments in contrast to the highly-involved abstract concepts that our brains are capable of 'discovering'. Some things are very difficult to explain effectively and take much patience, forethought, style, and lengthy prose. Fewer are talented in this area, or you might say that certain skill sets intersect less frequently. (Talented writers and talented mathmeticians/scientists). Even great professors often struggle with explaining things in layman's terms.

Take the English laguage, for example. Very flexible, but still feeble at tranferring highly abstract concepts. It wasn't designed/evolved for this purpose, so this is not surprising. Talented writers can get quite far on the abstraction scale, before text becomes a verbose and confusing mess, but there must exist a potential space for a future spoken/written language to be created, better suited for explaining abstractions, somewhere between the current common natural languages and terse mathematical notation (which itself requires much textual explanation).

I think the author is confused between knowledge and wisdom. I dont make any claims that i am smart but say if it takes me certain degree of effort and time to attain level-4 expertise. Imparting this level-4 expertice to a person who is at level-0 makes no sense to me.

The level-0 person should go through all the intermidiate levels to make the things that appear obvious to me, also appear seemless to him/her. Gaining level-4 expertise will lead them to a mechanical process of understanding. This is where we cross the line between wisdom and knowledge.

Also, the expert person more often than not is left with a feeling of being used by someone who attained somthing without any hard work. Things get complicated from here. My approach is to let the level-0 person give clues about reaching level-1 and make ways for the person to progress without complete reliance on me. Some kind of mentoring.

Many smart people are too busy doing other things to spend time cultivating a blog or writing articles. Sharing with your coworkers when the job calls for it is of immediate utility, and a very different beast than putting your thoughts onto the internet at large.

I don't share my knowledge by answering to questions.

I use my knowledge to support the other guy to find the same answers if he is willing to do work. I just give him more momentum -- provided he already has some -- and guide gently to the right direction.

It's my experience that smart people are eager to share whenever the situation isn't detrimental to them. They know the difference between zero sum and non-zero sum outcomes and behave accordingly. They are happy to share when they have reason to believe it is to their advantage and they're just as quick to avoid fools and scammers.

Perhaps when Mr. Setty encounters smart people unwilling to share with him, he should take the opportunity to work on his own packaging skills. I think he may learn that it's rarely easy to make things easy (even for a smart person).

There are also limits to what anyone can describe of their expertise.

See the very important essay on describing expertise :: http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~hdreyfus/html/paper_socrat...

At competent level ::

"There are just too many situations differing from each other in subtle, nuanced ways. More, in fact, than can be named or precisely defined, so no one can prepare for the learner a list of what to do in each possible situation."

Though the two points are reasons for someone to not share, the other reason could very well be that a person is an introvert by nature.

Another article linked by Rajesh (Marshall Goldsmith on Empowering Others) raises another possible reason: "one of the problems with smart people is their need to add a 'lot of value' to the other party." So, someone may think of sharing something but might think it is not ready yet and keep trying to increase the value of.

I wonder whether really good startup advice is advice that can only be used a few times. For example, a publicity stunt to market a product will probably only work a few times.

If this is the case, one can understand why people are reluctant to share in this context.

This is somewhat similar to "curse of knowledge" principle described in the idea stickiness theory book "Made to stick".

Although it's probably one of the symptoms, it's not the most important one.

They don't share because of their EGOS.

One reason to share: all that juicy knowledge in your brain will otherwise be gone when you die.

Knowledge is not a token which can be given away at a whim. It is impossible to communicate anything profound. If you would like to be smarter, read philosophy and drop acid.

I'm a self-interested creature. I tend to stop sharing with the Internet when my expertise gets far enough to the right of the mean that the information flow becomes unidirectional, or near unidirectional.

I doubt I'm alone in that.