You Don't Need to Be Brilliant to Do Brilliant Work
sandymaguire.me
sandymaguire.me
> Then learning the answer revealed that it's actually something that can be fixed --- as is always the case with these things if you think about them enough.
The author focuses on the consequent, thinking long and hard about something, but misses the antecedent, acquiring a deep understanding of a problem area.
I'd say the antecedent is as important as the consequent, if not more important. If you went to grad school you likely knew tons of brilliant people who worked long and hard on important and difficult problems and got nowhere. What they were missing was not some secret effortsauce, but that they picked a problem on which they didn't have an opening or insight into, so all their hard work was them spinning their wheels while standing still.
One thing I tell my students now is that they should always pick problems where they have something everybody else working in the same area doesn't. Like if you want to do formal verification but your background is years spent in industry as a kernel developer, you should avoid the temptation to chase the latest fad (e.g., adversarial machine learning or Spectre/Meltdown), and instead pick a poorly understood and validated module in the kernel and try to find out what you can do to make that module more secure.
He also adds that it easier to do this (combining two or more skills) than it is to be the very best at one thing e.g. an NBA player--it is actually easier, statistically, to become a billionaire than it is to become an NBA player.
There are more than 2,000 billionaires worldwide but only about 480 NBA players (32 teams with roughly 15 people on the roster). And if you think about it, becoming a billionaire usually involves multiple skills (good at programming + business, bill gates. Good at research/analysis + cultivating a rare temperament that allows you to act on the insights produced by the research even when everyone around you is losing their shirt, Warren Buffett etc, etc).
Being an NBA player requires one skill at a minimum. Being tall!
That's not really true. Once you are billionaire you can stay a billionaire for decades. Meanwhile most NBA players don't have long careers, many stay in the league only for a few years. I'd expect that over 10-20 years there have been more NBA players than billionaires.
Being an nba player involves luck and hard work and a high spacial iq.
Anyone could become a billiarie with luck (powerball lottery in one extreme). Only 100,000 people in the world would even have a chance to compete to be an nba player.
Most billionaires were born in top 0.01 percentile of their respective population pool. And had to be lucky and smart amongst other traits.
Muggsy would disagree ;)
Heck, most people understand very little about the myriad of everyday systems that keep them alive. Forget engines, computers or say, type theory. Most literally don’t know where their water comes from (to any level deeper than “it comes in a pipe”) or where their poo goes - and collectively that’s ok because the benefit of society is that this stuff gets taken care of for us.
I think looking up now and then, scratching the surface of our own ignorance, can help specialists build empathy when communicating with others outside their field.
That often took away time I 'should' have spent directly researching problem areas applicable to my day job. It finally led me to separating with a company I had been with for 8 years and had a lot of close relationships with.
But what it did was put me on a path to actually use that store of knowledge. Now I'm a Network/Enterprise Architect and a key cog for my current CTO. I wasn't being used optimally previously but I also didn't make sure I was in the correct position that those skills/tendencies could be recognized and not be a hindrance. So much in life is in the framing of things- control that story, and your success is much more likely.
I've had a few situations where people thought I had years of experience with some technology, framework, or programming language when actually I just picked it up last week. One situation in particular, I had a buddy who was using WordPress as the basis of a pretty profitable affiliate site business he was running until he ended up running into some issues that involved needing to make some pretty significant modifications to WordPress itself. He offered to get me in on his affiliate business if I could solve his problem for him. To make a long story short, though I had never even looked at PHP or WordPress before this, within 4 days of using spaced repetition to learn PHP and the intricacies of the WP framework, I was fluently writing plugins that handily solved his problem and a whole lot more and never had to open the reference books again as the whole thing was committed to memory. Not tooting my horn just giving an example of how what ESR was talking about above can be actualized.
Have you written about this in any detail somewhere? Or do you have links to resources you used to help learn how to do this?
the trick is to convince yourself not to care about the immediate utility of what you’re learning. And store pointers to data, it’s lighter weight.
It's real similar to just doing your normal software job, but in this case it's just for fun!
The greater the effort spent on something by someone, greater is the probability of a favourable outcome to them. But it is still a probability and not a certainty because of variables involved.
If two people seem similar in every way, but Person 1 has demonstrated that they achieve greater probability of success compared to Person 2 given comparable time investments, then you'd probably want to hire Person 1. Real life is never this cut and dried, but the principle holds.
But there's plenty of occasions where judgements is a waste of time, like at the personal level expressed in the OP article. OP does agree that the activity is result from the ego, I don't think he/she did enough to explore the ego resulting in injustice to the colleague as whole in the article.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1zDuOPkMSw&list=PL2FF649D0C...
Except, of course, that Hamming gives a few more practical pointers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3msMuwqp-o&list=PLctkxgWNSR...
Software engineers have an average IQ of 110ish so most HN readers are capable of doing almost any job. It's really about effort and things that are harder to measure like creativity
Do you have a source for this?
There are two way to get a Ph.D. - find a problem and solve it or find a solution method and come up with a problem that the method solves.
The second way is by far the easier.
Brains and behavior are absolutely, absurdly, ridiculously complicated, at every level from individual ion channels on up to neurons, circuits, brain regions, and even between people.
It's true that there's a lot of hype, both from well-meaning folks who are excited about their results and cynically manipulative people trying to boost up their careers. It's true that the incentive and career structures are falling apart. But it's certainly not true that the lack of progress is because the researchers are dummies...
True. I have no doubt that it takes extreme-outlier-level intellect to fully grasp the mechanics of neuroscience.
But do you really believe that's it's due simply to misaligned incentives that there has not been a major breakthrough in psychiatry for so long?
Any researcher who made a huge breakthrough would be hailed as hero and should be able to enjoy vast career benefits.
Here's an alternate hypothesis: the experts in the field are so fixated on the mechanics of neurological function, that they can't think laterally and/or holistically about the problems, which is why those problems have continued to go unsolved after decades of research.
The idiom "can't see the forest for the trees" comes to mind.
My own experience is that I spent several years experiencing a combination of symptoms that psychiatry would diagnose with terms like depression, anxiety/panic disorder, bipolar disorder, OCD and personality disorder (narcissistic etc).
The psychiatric profession considers most of these conditions to be incurable, and really only treatable with long-term medication.
I wasn't willing to accept this, so I did my own research and ended up undertaking a combination of subconscious trauma-healing practices, along with nutritional work, exercise (yoga etc) and detoxification of heavy metals and hormone-disruptors.
After about 7 years undertaking these treatments, my symptoms are nearly all gone. Some still linger, but my treatment continues, as does the steady improvement.
Where are the researchers in the field looking into this kind of stuff? It's not as if it's not talked about by prominent figures within the biomedical field. Bruce Lipton, Gabor Maté, Rupert Sheldrake and Stan Grof have been talking about this stuff for a long time, and the hypotheses and anecdotes are right there waiting to be researched.
Sure, one might look at the incentives and career paths that keep most researchers focused on drug discovery and nothing else.
But a key part of being a ”brilliant” person involves a willingness to break ranks with the mainstream and find new explanations and solutions for persistent old problems.
I'd have to agree with your parent commenter that there doesn't seem to have been much of that in recent memory, at least from the psychiatric side of neuroscience.
I honestly fear for the future of people like me.
It's not hard to get a perfect score in the quantitative section. You just need to be decent at math, and simply careful and tedious not to make mistakes. It's not hard to get in the 99 percentile of verbal either - just memorize a lot of words, practice, and learn some of the tricks (e.g. for analogy questions, you can eliminate 3 of the 5 choices even if you don't know the meaning of both words presented to you).
Now when they had the analytical section (different from the current one - they retired it in about 2004) - that was a bit more challenging. And that was the one that set people in top schools apart. Getting a near perfect score (770-800) in quantitative was the norm for people applying to any of the top 10 grad schools in technical fields. But the analytical section was tougher. I think Caltech had the highest median (about 780). The next highest was Wisconsin with 750. The next highest after that was 720, and the rest of the top 10 were in that vicinity.
But they scrapped that section - the only one that was a useful differentiator.
Anyway - bottom line is getting good grades in GRE in the old days (and I suspect today as well) is mostly an exercise in memorizing words, and learning test taking strategies - including simple things like if you have to solve an equation and have 5 choices for x - don't bother solving it - just plug each x in to the equation to see which one works.
Most people don't do this well because:
1. They cram - spend only 2 months preparing for it.
2. They don't spend time in figuring out efficient test taking strategies. Actually, they don't need time - they just need to read a few books on the topic!
I spent over a year preparing for it (only a few minutes a day, and with gaps of weeks at a time). It wasn't hard to get a perfect score in two of the categories and a 99 percentile in the third. And then when I went to grad school, I didn't perform better than those whose score was nowhere near as good.
https://hotelconcierge.tumblr.com/post/113360634364/the-stan...
So when someone says that people treat SAT scores as a proxy for an IQ test, they mean someone with a 1550 likely has a well-above average IQ, and a higher one than someone who got a 1250, who's still probably somewhat above average.
[0] https://www.khanacademy.org/about/blog/post/160451329150/stu...
Meaning, many innovations are the result of unexpected outcomes rather than a brilliant mind setting out to prove a specific result