E.O. Wilson on Introversion, the Limits of IQ, and Where Ideas Come From

The problem with that paragraph is it’s vague and non-commital, like a horoscope. We can fill in the blanks to make that description fit people who we already think are intelligent, innovative, etc. As a template, it lacks precision because it’s hard to falsify, like when you survey people to see if they’re “more creative or more logical.”

As a counterpoint, I also happen to know people who have done “important new things” and they mostly don’t match that description. One of the most brilliant people I’ve known seemed almost born to lead. He didn’t particularly excel at sports, but he enjoyed playing and watching them, and was on teams in high school and college. I wouldn’t describe him as a “dreamer” or as unfocused; in all things he seemed relentlessly focused. His opinion on authority is probably lukewarm, but not negative.

I think that paragraph presents a false dichotomy - even of the people I’ve known who more closely match some of the other qualities, I wouldn’t describe any of them as lacking in focus nor action. It’s easy to come up with examples of famous innovators matching either description, and it’s probably easy to slip into disagreement about things like, “well what does not inclined to focus mean?” In short, it’s underspecified, and people can read into it what appeals to them.

I think the problem is one of breadth v depth. If you specialize too much, then its probable that you will fail to reuse knowledge from different fields. If you focus on breadth too much, then you will not have enough deep knowledge to build something of high quality.

I would characterize people who are described by your quote as people who prefer breadth of knowledge over depth. This is a good quality to have in order to avoid tunnel vision. The downside (as you mentioned) is that it takes more willpower to maintain prolonged focus on an objective.

I believe that I tend to fall in this category of people and its annoying when society demands to see immediate, obvious results. Small, incremental progress is less risky but it seems(to me) that the rewards are also minimized. Its difficult to judge whether the 'dreaming' one is doing will realize as concrete, positive changes.

Someone who is hungry to realize her dream will self reflect and make appropriate changes in habit to build the dream.

Someone who dreams and fails to map reality to said dreams will not.

At least my life experience. Just hard to do the former. Took a military career to be able to do the former as it takes so much discipline.

Its hard

"But the chief penalty is to be governed by someone worse if a man will not himself hold office and rule. It is from fear of this, as it appears to me, that the better sort hold office when they do, and then they go to it not in the expectation of enjoyment nor as to a good thing, but as to a necessary evil and because they are unable to turn it over to better men than themselves." - Plato, Republic, Book 1, section 347c

Speaking for myself, with limited experience, the best scientists don't make good managers or leaders, but the universities are looking for managers or leaders, not scientists.

The best scientists probably won't be recognized during their lifetimes. The scientists you do recognize while they're alive, are probably not the best at "science".

I can't be sure about the first quote - 120 could be called the high end of average - but holy crap, the second quote describes me almost perfectly, word for word!

The reason I didn't became a scientist is that it SUCKS being a scientist in Poland. Last time I checked the best Polish university is outside the top 400 universities of the world. It's the last foothold of feudalism in my country. The academic environment is dominated by middle aged and senior men who are only concerned about keeping what they have. In many other ways, Poland has an innovation problem.

That, and childhood traumas I don't want to bother you with. When you get a bachelor's degree in CS, but you only have so-so grades and it took you 5 years instead of 3, it's hard to impress anyone in academia.

So I became a programmer. It was hard getting used to doing stuff initially, but I learned to enjoy it. However, I'm quickly bored by repetitive tasks and programming languages worse than Python. I seem to love learning new programming paradigms, libraries, programming languages even if they're difficult (I wrote a Rust program).

I like programming, but I'm not super excited by it. I wonder if you could suggest me some other career I can pursue if I don't have success as a programmer? I thought about an investigative journalist, but few people value good journalism around here.

There are not enough geniuses for the top universities to be filled with them. As someone who went to a “top” university (but not as top as those you mentioned) I think only a small percentage of students are really blindingly bright. Most are just significantly above average, get their work done, have at least adequate social skills, and come from wealthy families that pushed them towards selective universities. From there most students fall into “buckets” such as being an athlete, coming from a specific high school with highly wealthy students, playing a certain instrument, etc. Only a small portion get in from pure brains

IITs don't really 'look' for any traits with the exception of the ability to crack the entrance examination. For undergrad, there isn't even an interview.

IITs don't even have an interview, they chose people based on test,for which dubious sweatshop like coaching centres have become an industry by themselves.

They are looking for future high earners who will pad the endowment. Inventors are often not the highest earners. Tesla died broke.

The article is talking about our image of "successful" not "smart".

We can mean many things by lazy. One meaning is actively avoiding work, and another is not being disciplined.

I knew quite a few of my classmates at MIT who never learned to focus and direct their energies. Even advanced/AP/IB classes in high school didn't require them to focus for very long at a time. It's not that they disliked work, it was that they had never before practiced focusing for very long. Also, being obviously smart, teachers and administrators had always made exceptions for them.

My old room mate was a regional US chess champion and widely regarded as one of the smartest in our MIT peer group. He really enjoyed difficult problems, but lacked the ability to steer his intellect. When he was in high school in Atlanta, there was a school program where the government would pay the AP exam fees for any student who signed up, as long as they didn't sign up for two exams that were concurrently administered. There was no requirement that the student take the corresponding course. Partly to demonstrate the wastefulness of the program, my old room mate got a schedule, signed up for all of the exams corresponding to his classes, and also filled in his schedule with as many exams as possible. When the administration discovered his little demonstration, they called him in and told him that he would be actually taking all of the exams, and there would be stern consequences if he didn't pass all of them. I think the threat was to bill his parents for the exam fees for intentionally wasting school resources. They told his teachers what was going on and that he was to be excused from normal classroom activities in order to sit in the corner of the classroom and study from a textbook for a different subject. He passed a full slate of exams, most without benefit of instruction, and most with background distraction of an unrelated class going on in the background while he studied.

He wouldn't have been able to do this if he were merely adverse to work or unable to focus. However, the motivation to focus was externally applied. At least until his early 30s, he never gained the ability to will himself to focus, and he never got an undergraduate degree.

Speaking as someone who has definitely had lazy tendencies in the past and did very well before college while doing almost nothing, this does feel very fitting to my personal history.

Although I would argue that the failure is one of the educational system - not that I try to avoid taking responsibility, but children in this context are the innocent participants in a system set up for them by adults. Innocent as in that they don't know any better until they're older.

The problem is one of understimulation. I do actually like to work hard, and always have. But for topics that bore me, where I don't see the point, why would I invest more than the minimum amount of effort to pass the grade, so that I can focus on things that I do care about? Of course I realise now that I was pubescent ignoramus, but you can't expect a teenager to realise that. That's the responsibility of the adults around them. Again, that is what I mean with teenage innocence.

Also, I remember one time another very bright classmate in middle school told me "being gifted is a mental illness of the parents". I don't know if he came up with that or if he stole it from somewhere, but it always stuck with me: a lot of kids (mostly guys, I suspect) who think they're oh so smart are really pampered by their parents - for one, it made me realise my mom praised my abilities way too much (luckily early enough to realise she was wrong quite often).

I can't find the article right now, but later I read somewhere that praising children for being gifted - "wow, you must be really smart to get this!" - discourages them from practising hard. Praising them for their accomplishments - "wow, you must have worked really hard to solve this!" - does the opposite.

I wonder about this, in that it's a common trope, yet it does not really seem affirmed by evidence. In seeking evidence, there's of course a major problem of bias - yet presumably we'd expect some significant number of these lazy geniuses to achieve and garner some place in history yet they are conspicuously absent. When we think of individuals of substantial intellect there often tends to be an associated abnormally obsessive work ethic. Elon Musk is the typical example today who needs no further elaboration, but he's far from unique in this. Consider autodidacts such as Srinivasa Ramnujan - he not only greatly expanded mathematics but 'reinvented the wheel' in vast chunks of the field before he died... at the age of 32.

Maybe the best example is Einstein, if only because he's been falsely spun as this sort of trope. I'm not sure where the myth of Einstein doing poorly at math at an early age came from, but it's fake. Instead of just being whimsical and bored, he sought out a challenge when his assigned courses were unable to provide that. A quote from Einstein when asked of this rumor is, "I never failed in mathematics. Before I was fifteen, I had mastered differential and integral calculus." And his notes and works were prolific driven by another incredible work ethic.

I think the wandering mind is certainly fair, but that wandering is often directed towards finding challenges to which an unprecedented level of energy is put forward, often for years or decades at a time, to great achievement.

It's called the curse of the talented, and every intelligent person suffers from it. For me the realization came pretty late, although I already stopped getting top math grades in my 8th year of school, despite an earlier 2nd place in a school wide math contest.

The 2007 HN link about Inverse Power of Praise was the eye-opener for me. a.k.a. "How not to talk to your kids" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6999481

The takedown is "praise for effort, not for intelligence". Because intelligence is perceived as something you can't change.

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Our university programming teacher liked to say a good programer should be lazy, because then he will think how to do the job with least effort. How to apply the least amount of force and still get the job done.

I don't know. Lazy is a pretty good description, but then it's also a combination of not knowing how to study, and not understanding that studying is a skill, something you have to do. Just suddenly finding that you don't immediately understand something, and having nowhere to go to remedy it.

I am the same. It seems like when your body doesn't have to spend energy/overhead on keeping your temperature up it can make it all available to your brain.

When looking at one tail of a distribution, a somewhat-logarithmic view can often make sense. The 90th percentile of a normal distribution lies almost as close to the mean as it does to the 99th percentile.

See also, the UK definition of “middle class” (which isn’t entirely about income, but certainly doesn’t mean “close to median wage”).

Do you mean conscientiousness?

Hey, at least the author didn't misspell the first word in the title of their thesis: https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/handle/10822/52804... , http://www.cddc.vt.edu/feminism/Birke.html

Strangely enough, which I didn't know when first writing this post, is that my aunt knows this lady as they overlapped during their tenure as professors at the university of warwick

You haven't heard of sociobology? It's the study of social interaction patterns among oboe players.

I would like to make a tribology joke here, but I can't because it's from the Greek τρίβω, tribo, "I rub".

Spell-checkers are a huge distracting pain. My first official act on any kind of text-producing equipment is to turn the damned things off.

For typos and suchlike, I know I ought to run them manually before going public with anything - HN comments included - but usually I either forget or can't be bothered, because I know the real errors will drown in a sea of red underlining - me using strange words or simply writing in another language than the checker is set up to expect.