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Comment by carleverett | Hacker News Reader

This is the best article I've ever read of the subject of how you can improve intelligence: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/you-can-incr...

Kind of like how people have to be reminded that the best way to lose weight is to diet and exercise, the real answer for intelligence is challenging yourself frequently and putting yourself in uncomfortable situations that you need to think your way through.

At the end of the article there's a beautiful definition:

"Intelligence isn’t just about how many levels of math courses you’ve taken, how fast you can solve an algorithm, or how many vocabulary words you know that are over 6 characters. It’s about being able to approach a new problem, recognize its important components, and solve it—then take that knowledge gained and put it towards solving the next, more complex problem. It’s about innovation and imagination, and about being able to put that to use to make the world a better place. This is the kind of intelligence that is valuable, and this is the type of intelligence we should be striving for and encouraging."

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I love reading about Feynman. How he would put himself in these novel situations and get completely absorbed. He learned how to play an instrument in Brazil and joined a Carnival school and wound up dressing up, and competing. He learned how to draw and managed to have art exhibits and sell his art. He'd go to dive bars and just wait for something interesting to happen.

He wouldn't just learn something new. He'd learn it and then navigate in its world.

It's not him but I still love this article about his thought process:

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ericlippert/2011/02/14/what...

Who's that Feynman? He sounds interesting

Richard Feynman. Here's a video about who he is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIJw3OLB9sI

And the wiki article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman

There are lots of videos of his lectures and interviews on youtube. You should check 'em out.

I'm not sure any introduction to Feynman can be complete without this letter he wrote to his wife: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/02/i-love-my-wife-my-wife-...

(Warning: you may end up with something, ahem, in your eye...)

Thank you for this. I've never seen it before.

I'm curious about how the letter was found after his death. Who decided to make it public? I'm glad I had the opportunity to read it, but I doubt it was ever intended to be released to the world.

oh man, the postscript. :(

I've read that letter at least ten times. The last five or so times, I've patted myself on the back for not crying, until I get to the postscript and then... off I go again.

Thanks for looking after the ten thousand.

https://xkcd.com/1053/

Oh, I had googled him but didn't expect to be this guy. He actually did a lot of accomplishments. Definitely not a wasted life.

Here's the book I'm reading about him. Great read! https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003V1WXKU/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...

--and BY him. Great read.

Does he have a twitter?

Surely you're joking?

I am serious - and don't call me Shirley.

EDIT: It's Friday. Voted down for one of the greatests movie quotes of all time?

https://youtu.be/ixljWVyPby0?t=62

Hacker news is not reddit, and conversation is supposed to stay on topic and not be interrupted by memes.

Get off my lawn!

"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character is an edited collection of reminiscences by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surely_You%27re_Joking,_Mr._Fe...!

There is a twitter. He's not very active these days though https://twitter.com/richardfeynman

Surely you must be joking?

surely you both read the book

He died in 1988 at the young age of 69. He will be missed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman

He passed away a few decades ago, but was important in building the Connection Machine[1], and had an astute analysis of computer addiction[2].

One of the really impressive and astounding contributions of his, despite have no formal training on computer engineering:

Heavily edited excerpt:

"The router of the Connection Machine was the part of the hardware that allowed the processors to communicate. It was a complicated device; by comparison, the processors themselves were simple. Connecting a separate communication wire between each pair of processors was impractical since a million processors would require $10^{12]$ wires. Instead, we planned to connect the processors in a 20-dimensional hypercube so that each processor would only need to talk to 20 others directly. Because many processors had to communicate simultaneously, many messages would contend for the same wires. The router's job was to find a free path through this 20-dimensional traffic jam or, if it couldn't, to hold onto the message in a buffer until a path became free. Our question to Richard Feynman was whether we had allowed enough buffers for the router to operate efficiently.

"Richard began studying the router circuit diagrams as if they were objects of nature. He was willing to listen to explanations of how and why things worked, but fundamentally he preferred to figure out everything himself by simulating the action of each of the circuits with pencil and paper.

"By the end of that summer of 1983, Richard had completed his analysis of the behavior of the router, and much to our surprise and amusement, he presented his answer in the form of a set of partial differential equations. To a physicist this may seem natural, but to a computer designer, treating a set of boolean circuits as a continuous, differentiable system is a bit strange.

"Our discrete analysis said we needed seven buffers per chip; Feynman's equations suggested that we only needed five. We decided to play it safe and ignore Feynman.

"The decision to ignore Feynman's analysis was made in September, but by next spring we were up against a wall. The chips that we had designed were slightly too big to manufacture and the only way to solve the problem was to cut the number of buffers per chip back to five. Since Feynman's equations claimed we could do this safely, his unconventional methods of analysis started looking better and better to us. We decided to go ahead and make the chips with the smaller number of buffers.

"Fortunately, he was right. When we put together the chips the machine worked. The first program run on the machine in April of 1985 was Conway's game of Life."

1.http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine...

2.https://benjaminjcousins.wordpress.com/2014/04/01/richard-fe...

I never thought of Feynman in this way. At first those quotes on his view of router mechanics seems average at best, but the Danny Hills followups were really interesting and give me new light on Feynman's quotes. Thanks!

I learned a lot from his lectures even though I didn't go to Cal Tech (only UC Berkeley, but his lectures where still available).

EDIT: I've written Conway's Game of Life in at least 20 languages by now (including oddities like PostScript and C++ templates). I find it an excellent way to view a machine,

I'll also add to your comment that the Learning How to Learn course on Coursera is helpful regarding the concept of challenging yourself, as you can enhance your ability to take on challenging topics in a way that is sustainable and truly productive. For example, the idea of working on a problem eight hours a day straight seems efficient, but it's actually better to take breaks and let your mind wander and make neural connections in the background while you exercise or sleep.

And instead of perhaps trying to solve a hard challenge at once in a day, such as learning something very complex, it's helpful to comprehend parts of it and spread it out over a course of a week, not unlike how it's better to learn an instrument by practicing a little bit everyday instead of cramming it into one day a week.

Furthermore, instead of just jumping for a quick answer (e.g. StackOverflow, forums, answers sheet), it's helpful to try to solve it on your own even if it takes a much longer time. There's a big difference between 'knowing' something because you saw the solution and reverse engineered the method, vs. coming up with it yourself.

Some of this might be stupidly obvious but it's nice to know there is science/other anecdotes behind it.

That course is something I wish I had known decades ago before I went to University and in the workplace.

The hypothesis that one's progress is directly proportional to the amount of pain experienced is actually a rather strange one and tends to be an expression of the just-world hypothesis, in which I absolutely do not believe.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but the linked article doesn't really seem to present evidence for its claims, either.

The article brings up children, who are already known to have very variable IQ compared to the IQ of adults. From what I've seen, the evidence for IQ as such not being very fluid is more solid than for it being fluid. At the very least, the statement that anyone can increase their IQ would sound really strange in light of current research.

Furthermore, raising the IQ of disadvantaged children and then saying that means IQ is like the analogy in another comment where being able to take a broken car from 0 MPH to 100 MPH by fixing it implies you'd be able to take a Honda and make it run 100 MPH faster. It doesn't work that way. Consider that the average person gets no such help. The more intelligent ones often get negative help.

IQ, though, is not necessarily the same as intelligence, or even the ability to learn new information. I don't disagree with the advice the article suggests, and I think it has a high chance of raising one's intelligence, I'm just not sure if it would raise one's IQ. Given that we don't really know the relationship between IQ, g, and "intelligence" yet, even that claim is definitely suspect. There's nothing obvious about it, unless you sign up for the pain == progress hypothesis, which is the just-world hypothesis.

The greater danger is that we have convinced quite a few people that intelligence == IQ and not being able to raise one means you can't raise the other. I'm pretty sure my IQ hasn't risen one point for the past 6 years but I definitely feel more intelligent per the definition in the italicized paragraph.

And I think the point of brain exercises was specifically to raise the raw processing power of the brain without information aids, i.e., IQ.

The problem with the authors principles is that they are based on a study[0] that has failed to replicate and was faulty to begin with[1].

[0] Susanne M. Jaeggi, M. B. (2008). Improving Fluid intelligence With Training on Working Memory. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0801268105

[1] Courtesy of it_learnses: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brain-training-do...

I'm trying to address the issue without relying on how well given studies replicated, since that's a bit of a minefield in general. A lot of the principles in the parent are much older than the studies. While it would be really great to have solid studies that would confirm one or the other position, it doesn't seem like they exist, so I'm addressing it on a more philosophical level.

If the study result cannot be replicated then the "principles" you refer to are nothing more than superstitions and you can "address them on philosophical level" all you want, that won't make them any more true.

The fact that those things (like challenging yourself, seeking novelty, etc.) are often quoted in context of IQ increase just comes from observing the behaviour of highly intelligent people and then confusing the cause with effect.

Strongly agree. I identify very strongly with that quote. I'm a geographer with near-zero math or computer science education from university. I work as a software engineer, surrounded by brilliant engineers. I have what I describe as a "swiss cheese practical knowledge of software engineering." I pride myself on being very adaptable, able to understand the components of a problem and the ability to learn how to solve the problem. I also feel exceptionally good at communication and the social aspects of problem solving. I've been doing very well at my job.

But I think if I grew up being taught that intelligence != knowledge + trivia, I wouldn't have spent my earlier years fighting the impostor syndrome on a near daily basis.

That article contains no evidence you can raise intelligence, and also references the now discredited n-back brain training games.

Isn't that really a variation on being good at patterns you've encountered before?

Perhaps the only "real" secret to intelligence is avoiding malnutrition or any type of poisoning such as from lead.

I would pay money for a subscription service that would give me way to challenge myself every... month? (hopefully the system would tell me how long I should work on each new topic for).

Perhaps part of it is being creative enough to work that out?

Actually diet and exercise are pretty much completely ineffective at long term weight loss.

"Why can’t an average person make those kinds of gains as well? Or even more gains, considering they don’t have the additional challenge of an autism spectrum disorder?"

This betrays a complete lack of understanding of the body of knowledge around intellectual improvement. No one would say "we took this broken Honda and were able to get a 100% improvement in it's speed, and gas efficiency by just fixing the leaky gas hose, if we can make these kinds of gains with a broken car imagine what we do with a new Honda". This would of course be as silly.

Of course diet and exercise are effective for long term weight loss.

People stop dieting. That's the problem.

Calling a diet that people can't follow "effective" seems like a fine exaggeration to help maintain a nutritionist practice but impractical for any other purpose

That's like saying that quitting smoking is ineffective because many people can't follow through with it.

Limiting caloric intake (diet) below caloric output (exercise, etc) is the only effective way to lose weight, excluding literally cutting it off. Just because people struggle at doing so doesn't mean that it's not effective.

Depends on how you are measuring effectiveness. From the perspective of either sociology or public policy, calling a treatment that doesn't work effective makes no sense. It's like saying that the only reason we have problems is because people are not always completely rational and benevolent in every interaction. That may very well be true, but what use is that? I don't understand what purpose that kind of comment may serve outside of making the commenters feel better that they do not share the problem.

The issue with the human body is that psychological effects are actually physical effects and therefore entirely relevant. The human body is not a mere automobile into which you pour gas, you push a gas pedal, and it just goes. That's the entire problem. You can't even treat a cat like that, let alone a human.

The psychological consequences are part of the equation and disregarding them and trying to pretend they don't exist is essentially taking out all the complex variables out and solving a simple equation nobody cares about. Kind of like programming GPS using Newtonian physics and then being surprised it's off constantly. There are more complex laws at stake here and we don't understand them very well. Moralization is effectively a cop out. "They're too lazy, stupid, or otherwise inferior to me to do this theoretically simple thing" is the same as: "I have no idea what's going on."

Limiting caloric intake leads to weight loss. So why are people not limiting their calorie intake? Then consider what kind of people are more or less likely to limit their calorie intake. So on and so forth. The equation becomes a lot more complex and also a lot more interesting.

It all comes down to effective in theory vs effective in practice.

>effective in shitty theory

This is meta, but there really needs to be a better phrase for ideas/models that only seem good when ignoring important details. A good theory is also good in practice because it actually factors in the relevant details.

I have no particular problem with you clinging to a falsehood, but repeating it can't make it true. There is ample evidence that carbohydrate restriction is also effective at causing weight reduction, no matter how much people try to deny or ignore it.

Can you point to any evidence? AFAIK, low-carb diets mainly work by increasing satiety (i.e. indirectly limiting calories consumed).

Restricting carbohydrate intake let's you control blood sugar levels and insulin response to meals, which generally leads to weight loss in most people.

I get that the wiki article on low carb is rambling, but why HN :?

Lower insulin spike after a meal results in lower hunger pangs later on, i.e. less hunger and less calories consumed, leading to weight loss.

The problem is quitting smoking is not an intervention. You cannot push a button and cause someone to quit smoking. You can "Talk to someone about quitting smoking", or "Send them to quit smoking meetings" or "Give them nicorette". These things are interventions. Quitting smoking in an intermediate result that is linked to positive outcomes.

For simplicity's sake lets focus on bugs created when users fail to consider edge cases.

We could say 100% of these bugs are caused by people failing to consider edge cases, and if developers accurately considered all edge cases then we would have 0 bugs.

To then think that this problem is solved because we can tell a developer "consider all edge cases" even though it has 0 effect on the actual bug count caused by edge cases is absurd.

The only effective way for weight loss is making sure that one's caloric intake is less than the amount of calories they burn. And the only way of achieving that is diet and exercise.

Also comparing the human body/brain to a car/mechanical device would be incorrect and is probably an apple to oranges comparison.

Calories in - calories out is true, but it's hard to measure either with any much accuracy. You can get close with calories in, but measuring calories out isn't easy: There are charts for different activities, but our bodies are not perfect efficient machines that always use the same amount of energy for the same tasks.

Additionally, our bodies can make subtle changes in response to caloric intake: If you ingest fewer calories, you may fidget less, possibly lowering your caloric use more than you lowered your input.

>And the only way of achieving that is diet and exercise

Or increasing the metabolic rate. Or decreasing the calorie storage rate.

Doesn't increasing your metabolic rate require increasing your body temperature? This is something that has always puzzled me when I hear that some people have faster or slower metabolism than others.

Your metabolic rates at birth, adolescence, or your teen years are probably drastically different than your rate now if you're past 30. Is your average body temperature way less than 98.7 now?

Body volume scales roughly with the third power of height, while body surface scales roughly with the second power. Therefore, it is possible for the body temperature to stay constant if the basic metabolic rate (i.e., heat generation) per unit of volume decreases between birth and adulthood.

Besides, the human body has several ways of regulating core body temperature: sweating, restricting blood flow to extremities, goose bumbs, and putting on different clothes.

All good points. Do we have measured values for metabolic rate per unit volume as a function of age? This does seem plausible -- building a new body should take more stuff than maintaining an old body.

But I wonder if this translates into different adults saying that they have fast or slow metabolism as an explanation for their weight.

Perhaps I just don't understand what "metabolic rate" means. My body is a metabolic zero-sum game, unless I'm gaining or losing weight. What comes in as food goes out as heat or mechanical work. I suppose a higher heat output could be achieved at constant temperature by sweating more. A larger person (more skin) could of course generate more heat, but the energy has to come from eating more food or being less active.

Do you simply mean that I was gaining weight at birth, adolescence, and teen years? I could agree with that.

"What comes in as food goes out as heat or mechanical work." Or out as undigested food waste. Don't have an answer for you on metabolic rate, just adding the third way food calories can leave your body.

"The only effective way for weight loss is making sure that one's caloric intake is less than the amount of calories they burn."

This is probably true, but a better question is whether this is even important.

One guy said "it's a lot easier for a fat person to become fit than it is for a fat person to become thin."

Generally the press (and maybe scientists, though I'm not so sure about them) seem obsessed with thinness rather than health or fitness.

For people who disagree I would really love to see a study showing successful long term(3 years plus) weight loss( as an intervention 5% of people retain the weight loss but 95% fail). To my knowledge no studies exist, but I would love to revise my opinion

this article also references the Dual-N-Back study which suggested that it could be used to increase cognitive skill that was transferable. But that study was debunked. Here's a Scientific American article on that: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brain-training-do...

It there a term for this phenomenon, where a researcher publishes an extraordinary result, some how gets past peer review, and then avoids pursuing the research further, to avoid embarrassing themselves and losing the fame and credit? Often there is a bonus step where they create a company to commercialize a product based on the conclusions.

The scientific method.

I agree that according to the article you linked it seems that the Dual-N-Back game is no different than any other brain training game which seems to differ from the authors view on it.

However, I don't think that debunks the main points of the authors article (the last 3/4 of the article).

I think it does. If indeed Fluid Intelligence cannot be trained, then you could say that people who seek out Novelty, Challenges, etc. are actually the sort of people who have high intelligence, than the other way around. If these 5 principles he states actually did increase intelligence, then Lumosity would work for people as it exposes you to novel brain training games that are challenging.

Now that I reread the article I see that you are right. The authors whole argument depends on the Jaeggi study which has not been successfully replicated after multiple attempts.

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