Hacker News Reader

> My life is a fucking hell, and I also spend a lot of time contemplating suicide.

I do this also.

A little unsolicited advice. I know it's a throwaway, so i don't know if you'll see it. but here it is.

Maybe you want to go skydiving, or visit petra, or build a farnsworth fusor. You're going to have really bad days or maybe years. I know it sounds hollow, and in the middle of those bad times it's a pretty flimsy support. But please consider promising yourself to follow through on one dream before you follow through on a plan.

Make sure you're really done. Make sure there's nothing in the whole world that's interesting that you want to learn about. Because, when you follow through, you're really done.

It's ok to ruin your health and credit rating to do something crazy if you're on the way out anyway. Jump out of the plane. Travel the world. Build the machine. It's your life, and you should live it as you see fit. But that extra bonus time in life can be pretty nice. Please please try everything out before you decide you're done.

I have known/worked with a few people who, in confidence, expressed something similar to what you just said, about having to "dumb everything down" for everyone around them.

They were bright, of course, I wouldn't quibble with that, but they were also really lousy communicators. It wasn't so much that everyone around them was just a dum-dum, but that they weren't very good at explaining things. They seemed to misattribute those folks not understanding them to people being dumb, not their inability to express ideas.

Sometimes that is certainly part of it. Do you go out of your way to explain calculus or particle physics to children?

Or do you simply not bother?

When a person has spent their entire life trying to communicate whatever they were excited about to people who are only interested in the fad du jour, they don't develop the skills to communicate well once they do find people bright enough to understand.

For example, go walk around MIT, Harvey Mudd, or Cal Poly and see how poorly freshmen do with their initial social gatherings.

You personally are probably extremely smart (this is HN after all, where I seek refuge from the total fucking paste eaters of the world) - but that just means that you were dealing with someone who had never had an opportunity to learn those communication skills. Unlike you, presumably.

I agree with you that those who don't talk on topics outside of pop culture and other shallow topics fail to develop the skills to listen to and understand deeper speech.

But also those who spend too much time thinking to themselves without taking the time to slow down and verbalize those thoughts to others form thought patterns that make no sense to anyone except that person. I think it is a common trait of high IQ people to be able to think far, far faster than your own internal verbal monologue can follow. When I'm solving a computer problem in my mind I'm not thinking in an inner monologue voice. My thought process is bouncing through voiceless mental shortcuts (macros if you will) that only make sense to me, and any attempt to keep up with a verbal explanation just wouldn't work. Other people don't have the same macros you have in your head.

But when in a work setting I am pairing with a fellow engineer (one of the duties of my team lead role) rather than just working alone I am force to slow down and verbalize my thoughts so they can follow and understand. This can be very annoying on a surface level, but also enlightening for my own self. When I look at a problem and within seconds know the answer there are two things I could do: just tell them how to fix it, or slow down and force myself to explain in more detail to fix it and how I came to that conclusion. The latter approach is not a chore for me, but a puzzle actually, and I get a great feeling of accomplishment from being able to verbalize and explain my inner thought process to someone who isn't in my own head.

"Cal Poly " - as a Cal Poly alum this wasn't really my experience. Of course, with thousands of people in the incoming class, experiences will vary. Most of my social connections were through choir.

I imagine he meant Cal Tech.

His comment specifically said "Cal Poly".

Can be true but not the whole explanation. I have been told both that I am really good at explaining stuff to kids, and also that they aren't interested in hearing about some math puzzler I've been working on.

Having an extraordinary amount of intelligence in a world full of people who don't can be extremely challenging and distressing. I'd even go so far as to call it a disability. It's very hard to understand where people are coming from, it's hard to phrase things in a way that makes you relatable and understood. It complicates a lot of things if you haven't made a deliberate effort to practice fitting in.

It's especially difficult if you have people expecting you to succeed, to make astronomical amounts of money or get perfect grades, or whatever, while you don't feel motivated to achieve these sorts of things.

It was difficult for me being isolated intellectually, that there wasn't many I could talk to about Complicated Things. A grade school math teacher is not prepared for this sort of thing. At least today there's ways of getting in touch with actual experts in the field and digging deeper into topics that used to be completely off limits.

I've learned to zen out, that it's not imperative to be productive all the time, that not every "cycle" is wasted if not doing important stuff. A little meditation to calm the avalanche of mental activity can be profoundly helpful.

I'm not exceptionally bright but I have an excellent memory and an endless fascination with..well everything.

So I've read books on dozens of random topics, I've learnt to keep my mouth shut, people don't like that I know all that stuff they see it as threatening to their own self-worth.

My previous GF was a physio and mentioned she was writing a training course on compartment syndrome, she was astounded that I knew what that was and responded with "Why would you need to know about that you just program computers?" as though there was something intrinsically wrong with been interested in things, we broke up soon after because "We are too different in outlook" which was fine.

Current GF is a Hungarian (I mention this because she has commented several times that there is a fundamental cultural difference in how my culture (England) and hers approach education) with two degrees and working on her third in shipping, she has pretty much exactly the same outlook on life as me and her pile of books next to the bed is as varied as mine, She also knows way more about lots of things than me which is frigging awesome.

John von Neumann who I am sure you would agree was far smarter than you coped with dealing with the dum-dums around him. He was in general loved by everyone who knew him (from all backgrounds) and regarded as the life of the party. He appeared to work on being loved as a problem to get him the resources he needed to do what he wanted to do (he managed to convince the IAS to let him build a computer on campus after all).

One fun thing that's an endless and pleasurable time sink for people who like to learn things is reading and analyzing medical studies. Just go to pubmed.com and look up anything. If you don't understand a word, just look it up on Wikipedia, and just keep going. There are millions of papers to read and you can follow those rabbit holes around forever. It's endless entertainment and fun trivia. You shouldn't bother your doctor with it as it's like talking about digital compression technology with the cable tv installer, but it's a huge corpus of very interesting knowledge nonetheless.

> You shouldn't bother your doctor with it as it's like talking about digital compression technology with the cable tv installer

You might need to find a new doctor. The good ones that I know, including one of my parents, read medical papers all the time to stay up to date on studies which are obviously relevant to their job. There are numerous inventions that have come about because of inventive strategies applied by doctors. Maybe this doesn't apply to all doctors, but the ones I have interacted with (in the US) are quite intelligent.

I really don't know what kind of doctor is more common, because I avoid them. But the last time I went to a primary care doc, he googled my symptoms and read excerpts from a Wikipedia article. He diagnosed me with what I'd already internet-diagnosed myself with, and added no additional value. That experience didn't improve my opinion of doctors.

My experience has usually been with specialists, so that may explain some of the difference.

Have you considered undiagnised ADHD as a possible factor? Intelligent kids with the inattentive type can get overlooked because the only measures schools care about is not disrupting things and good grades.

I tried modadinil a couple times (it's very easy to get online) and realized my reaction to it was not like others told be about, there was no high or buzz, but I was suddenly very aware of the world around me and it was easy to funnel attention and interest exclusively into one thing at a time and the results of doing so was amazing. Adderall is even better to me, and somehow even socializing becomes more appealing and interesting after taking it. You'll still be smart as hell, but it's different. worth experimenting if you're stuck, assuming the risk of harm can be minimized sufficiently (ie, you don't have a heart condition or seizure disorder)

Honest question: if you're so smart, why not make a few tens of millions, then fill your day with whatever suits you, instead of making enough to get by and contemplating suicide?

I'm sure some people do that. That's business acumen, however, not my personal forte.

Not many brilliant people ever become rich. To become rich takes not just cleverness or even genius, but the ability to convince others to invest in it and not simply fuck you over.

For myself, I'm just not interested in inventions. I'm far more interested in math and geology, so I spend most of my free time just being amazed by the earth. I'm no better at inventing a million dollar idea than the next guy. Probably worse, since I have literally spent hours investigating the wear patterns and flaking on a rock outcropping and considering the forces involved in it.

I didn't mean inventions, necessarily, just a high-paying job where you can retire early, certainly programming is like that today for a brilliant and even a somewhat less than brilliant person. I'd expect that if you loathe spending time on things you aren't inherently interested in, you might be willing to suffer through a few years of that to then never have to do it again. (This is how I thought about things at age 15, at any rate, and I'm pretty sure my intelligence wasn't nearly high enough relatively to how unimpressive my people skills were.)

Because none of the "highly intelligent" skills pays that well. This is sad but true.

> I'm far more interested in math and geology...

Uh, normie here, so the following question likely has an obvious answer, but it sounds like you are bored not because of a lack of interesting problems, but a lack of capability to tackle interesting problems in your preferred problem domains. To my knowledge, we don't really empirically know what the earth is composed of beneath the crust. Could there be open problems that might happily engage you in the area of determining/cataloging the math behind using say, neutrino interactions with various types of geologic matter to put in the theoretical foundations to an empirical experiment to establish what we really are standing on top of? If not neutrinos, then perhaps you could work on other ways we might be able to harness what we know of particle physics to interact with the matter beneath our feet?

As beautifully weird and wonderful as the universe is, and as fractally complex as it reveals itself the more we look into it, I can't even imagine having the intellectual firepower you have and being bored. I'm constantly frustrated that I'm not smarter, and unable to absorb new material faster than I currently able; I could literally access and integrate new material like Data in Star Trek and still not be satisfied, because there simply isn't enough time to enjoy it all.

Interested in mathematics and geology, so you say? Behold, I am the polypontian, and spin links 'twixt diverse nodes not my own:

http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2014/02/torusearth.html

Perhaps this Anders would be interested to discuss the particular brand of paint you enjoy watching dry [0].

[0] Which if one has any fascination at all with viscous fluids or amorphous solids, one really must try sometime.

Wow, I love the randomness of coincidences like this.

I got to know Anders over 20 years ago, he was clearly crazy intelligent, and great fun, because he would always go off in funny what-if scenarios. Checking his blog confirms that he's still doing exactly this, and still thinking very hard about it. :-)

You sound ADHD symptomatic, it might be worth looking into that. That includes both regularly doing three things at once and occasionally focusing on inappropriate things for hours.

Satoshi did it with some mild social engineering, a mailing list, and C.

I have the same issue in terms of needing to split my attention. I always have multiple computers or at least screens up doing multiple things and then at least listening to a few things in the background. It's very frustrating when I can't do that.

Any other coping mechanisms you use besides split attention?