Comment by hgytr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hgytr | Hacker News Reader

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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".

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