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Comment by spookthesunset | Hacker News Reader

> If you're intellectually gifted (many programmers are)

Lets not jerk each other off too hard, eh? Just like everybody in life, in any trade or profession, most programmers are just average people like everybody else. They just happened to luck out and be good at a talent that pays well.

Odds are incredibly high you aren't any smarter than somebody who paints houses for a living, fills your prescription, or plays football for the NFL. We are all just people trying to make a living -- don't ever forget that.

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Accountants, pharmacists and programmers are smart. They have to be to do their job. Decorators, sports people and drivers for example can be smart but it is not required to do their job. I agree we should all respect each others talents and abilities that go beyond adding up numbers and thinking in symbols since these are boring talents anyway but let's not stretch the truth and say that everyone is equally 'smart'.

You may be using "smarter" to mean something different than IQ, but if you mean IQ then you're wrong. Different professions have different distributions of IQ, and programmers are among the professions with the highest average IQ. They definitely skew higher than house painters.

https://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/Occupations.aspx

Programmers may not be wiser, kinder, or better than anyone else, but on average they are a bit smarter.

If you genuinely believe programmers have a higher iq than normal, dunning kruger would like to have a word with you.

To many engineers are way to convinced that the fact they know any kind of engineering makes them automatically smart at everything outside of their narrow domain of expertise (eg: programming).

Unfortunate use of “to” or the “Krugered” programmers might have listened

Err, this is weird.

Programming is correlated with higher IQ.

IQ is correlated with spatial reasoning and the kinds of multi-step puzzle solving that is often needed in programming.

I don't know why you find this so surprising or offensive. It's simply that the IQ tests the kinds of things that often make good programmers.

IQ isn't the only thing correlated with programming ability, and people with high IQ are often extremely dumb in many areas.

(I don't have a particularly high IQ)

He said programmers are likely smart, not others dumb. Jeez what's with everyone picking imaginary Internet fights everywhere

There is a reason why a cashier works for minimum wage.

A few days ago I went to a grocery store to buy sparkling water. I got 16 small bottles and arranged them as a 4 by 4 grid before cashier, so she wouldn't need to spend time counting them and delaying the line. It took her over 10 seconds to count the bottles: apparently, she didn't recognize the pattern and counted them by groups of 3-4 bottles covering the counted ones with her hands to simplify the process. Programmers don't even need to multiply 4x4, they just see the answer. This scene hints that the cashier's analytical skills are next to none and this alone explains why she is a cashier.

Another example. There is a curious simple test to check your working memory capacity. Imagine a 3x3 grid and draw there words oil/gas/dry. Now read all the words that you see on the grid. Not all people have visual imaginations: some operate with graph-like structures and represent the grid as a set of logical statements: row1 is gas, row2 is oil, row3 is dry. This is fine as long as they do it efficiently. Most people in this task will resort to the snail analytical approach and will be thinking like: cell 2-1 is A, so cell next to the right is 2-2 belongs to word 2 which is oil and thus the second letter is I, so our current sequence is AI. Obviously it will take them ages to enumerate all the words this way. High level programmers can keep the entire grid in memory, either as an image or in symbolic form, and thus can enumerate words quickly. Why does this example matter? Programmers have to keep many objects and connections between them in memory.

If everybody had these raw cognitive skills, programmers would get the standard minimum wage. Same for accountants, lawyers, bankers.

>This scene hints that the cashier's analytical skills are >next to none and this alone explains why she is a cashier.

Her numerical analytics skills perhaps, but she might be great at something else. Maybe she is a poet, or a musician, or great at handling 5 kids, or something else that you are terrible at.

Just something that doesn't pay well, so she has to be a cashier.

This is kind of a form of Moravec's paradox: we assume what is easy for us must be easy for others, and what is hard for us must be also hard for others too.

I can't find the reference right now, but this was a famous problem in early testing of monkey's intelligence. They showed the monkey's pictures of humans and they couldn't distinguish them, so it was assumed they were fairly dumb. But then eventually someone figured out they were much better at distinguishing pictures of other monkeys.

Of course it's still possible that the cashier is not good at anything, but in my experience that's very rare. Most people have some skills.

Eh. Poetry and handling kids is orthogonal to intelligence.

Intelligence is a very narrow and specific skill of discerning the real. It allows us to predict things. Coincidentally, it allows to make money and thus is well paid. It's ok if others disagree with me.

My two examples above are meant to hint that intelligence consists of two distinct skills: ability to keep a still detailed image in your mind (the 3x3 grid example) and ability to analyze this still image (the counting bottles example). The latter builds on the former because if the image is blurry in your mind, there is nothing to analyze (you can't see words in the 3x3 grid if it keeps floating away). We can go further and divide the two skills into say 10 distinct levels of mastery, define their characteristics, but the point remains the same: it's a steep ladder that has to be climbed if one wants to get this skill.

Poetry, music and handling kids are different skills and are of no help in climbing the ladder of intelligence. No, I agree that compassion and other skills can be as useful as intelligence, but they are different skills and have to be mastered separately.

Just my 2c.

Handling kids maybe but poetry and music are only orthogonal to intelligence at ameteur level. Professional poets and musicians tend to be highly intelligent even by your definition.

Do you spend much time parenting?

> Imagine a 3x3 grid and draw there words oil/gas/dry. Now read all the words that you see on the grid.

I can't do this for shit and I'm a genius.

I bet you can still enumerate them though through a different method.

Walking home that day I was obsessed with this. I guess I did okay. Found at least one five-letter word ("grail", I remember). I can't see all the letters at the same time, so I feel like I'm cheating when I do it.

On the other hand even when I think of a three letter word I don't see the letters, I just kind of know what they are.

It took me about five minutes to even understand the task. I first pictured a 3x3 grid with a word in each box. I thought I was supposed to populate the boxes with any word from the list -- oil, gas, or dry -- and then read them back.

I guess I'm living proof that not all programmers are smart.

I can see the paper title now: "The correlation between IQ and scores and the table top game boggle".

What absolute nonsense. Interestingly you refute the idea that intelligence determines someone’s “worth,” yet from the start you read that into the original comment even though the commenter said nothing to suggest that viewpoint.

Your second paragraph is wholly unrelated since the OC isnt saying that every programmer is smarter than everyone else. And your first is trite humanist garbage.

“Just happened to luck out and be good at a talent that pays well”

And, coincidentally, that “talent” (abstract thinking, clarity and extended focus of thought) “””happen””” to be highly correlated with higher IQ.

Still rats in the race, just rats with a slightly higher score on a particular dimension.

It's not nonsense. I can't stand people who post crap like "OMG I can program so I have to have a higher than average IQ". And then they link to articles that support their little circle jerk. No. Sorry. You don't. You are average. I'm average. We are all average. Just 'cause you can code doesn't mean you are suddenly god's gift to intelligence. You aren't. Really. Sorry. You are just as stupid as everybody else.

John von Neumann. Dude is a genius. Einstein. Also. you? me? sorry. Doesn't matter if you can code. People can paint cars way better than you. They can make a perfect french fry. They can inspect a clogged sewer line way better than you. They know just the best ways to start an IV. Who is more intelligent?

Just because you can do $PROFESSION doesn't make you above average in intelligence. Period. Full stop. To think any other way (and for somebody to post a link to some BS article supporting their assertion) is completely absolutely 100% arrogant BS. Get off your high horse people.

You're stunning me here. It's like you're objecting to someone saying gymnasts are coordinated or air traffic controllers can handle a lot of stress. Intelligence is a core qualification for programming, like height for basketball. You can't say "I play basketball, so I'm taller than others", but you can say "We're all basketball players, so we're likely taller than most". We're _selected_ for intelligence.

Citing Kathy Sierra’s book, Badass (pp 91–92)

> Evidence has been mounting for decades that for most non-sport domains and for most people,“natural talent” is not an absolute requirement for reaching high levels of expertise.

> Other than the sports that depend on specific physical prerequisites, few domains have hard genetic limits for expertise.There is a way in which natural ability might contribute to high expertise in non-athletic domains, but it’s not domain-specific “natural” gifts... it’s a natural ability for focused practice.

…

> Even at the very top levels in most non-sport domains, there’s little evidence that “natural talent” is a hard requirement. But where it might exist, it’s most likely to show up at the beginning of the curve and the very very very top.

That may be an inspiring book, but if you're interested in what's actually known about talent, success, and the limits on our ability to measure and predict such things, then you should look elsewhere.

(Ask yourself how well the writer could explain monty hall, or regression to the mean, or what's wrong with p-values, to get an idea whether they can possibly have a handle on the material.)

One Muggsy Bogues proves natural height is not an absolute requirement for playing in the NBA, but does not prove that basketball players are not taller than average.

Evidence has been mounting for decades that for most non-sport domains and for most people,“natural talent” is not an absolute requirement for reaching high levels of expertise.

This is probably true for programming too.

But just because something isn't necessary it doesn't imply there is a correlation.

>It's like you're objecting to someone saying gymnasts are coordinated or air traffic controllers can handle a lot of stress.

It's the causation that's interesting, though: do gymnasts become coordinated through practice, or do the most coordinated people go into gymnastics? I think the OP is arguing the former, and I think I agree. In that case, programming is not unique re: intelligence.

> Just because you can do $PROFESSION doesn't make you above average in intelligence.

That was never claimed but a different claim:

FACT: The groups of people that work in certain professions definitely have _average_ differences in IQ if we can accept that IQ exists.

That is NOT to say that any individual mathematician can say that he or she is more intelligent that the rest of the population.

Understand the difference.

>Interestingly you refute the idea that intelligence determines someone’s “worth,”

Well, this is true: intelligence does _not_ determine someone's worth.

Ultimately how intelligent you are is irrelevant providing that you _can_ provide value.

>Still rats in the race, just rats with a slightly higher score on a particular dimension.

Yes, but surrounded by other rats with a slightly higher score on a particular dimension.

But anyone can still learn how to do it: abstract reasoning us not reserved for the "intelligent", it's open to anyone who is of average intelligence at least.

abstract reasoning us not reserved for the "intelligent", it's open to anyone who is of average intelligence at least.

Interestingly this implies that the average programmer does have higher than average intelligence (as measured by IQ scores).

The reasoning goes like this:

- At least average intelligence is required for abstract reasoning (and programming) - This means the the distribution of intelligence for programmers has a minimum around that of the average value - This means that the mean and median must both be above average.

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