Hacker News Reader

Comment by jhamburger | Hacker News Reader

To this day, when I see phrases like, "intellectual horsepower", I cringe. We "smarties" aren't that much smarter than most other people, if we are at all.

I don't think this is true at all. People who are average intelligence or below can be very successful but have no chance of succeeding in high level intellectual pursuits. People who are smart don't understand this, because to them learning anything is just a matter of effort.

I think there is truth in what you are saying, because at a certain level of intelligence, hard work and attitude become more of a bottleneck than ability. This is supported by facts as well, studies have found that success increases by IQ score, but levels off or drops at a certain point where brainpower is more of a handicap to mental health than a benefit.

View on HN

I don't think IQ has much to do with success. I've met a lot of brilliant people who can't finish projects, speak up, know when to back down, etc. I think success is more about discipline, moral courage, and hard work than it is about how smart you are.

I think at the upper levels of intelligence, you are talking about the engineering limits of the brain as a physical thinking machine. Everything is working as well as it can; in this case, I suspect the difference between the top 100th percentile and the top 10th is not all that great. That's not to say there isn't a competitive advantage, just that it levels off, like it does in athletics.

What if the reason people are 'smart' is because of the way their brain has organized itself over the years in response to learning so much? Then it isn't that dumb people are dumb, just behind.

That isn't reality. The genetic factors of intelligence are well documented. I could have played basketball six hours a day, every day for the last 25 years, and I'd be really really good. But I wouldn't be as good as Lebron James was when he was 12 years old.

You'd probably be better than most other basketball players.

If you want to be the best in the world, it's true that factors outside of your control come into play. If you can "settle" for being in the top 10, top 100, or top 1000, instead of #1, you probably don't need much besides a lot of well-directed effort.

In my experience.

Well if he's 5'9 he's not gonna make even the top 1000.

I am going to guess you have not heard of dunk contest winning NBA players Spud Webb (5'7) or Nate Robinson (5 '9) then.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1pykLK_CUs

There's a guy who went to my college, Jared Jordan- Fairly nondescript athlete, 6'2 slow white guy. Basketball is basically his life, worked his ass off more than anyone and studied the game to the point where he knows it more than the coaches do. He was drafted in the 2nd round of the NBA draft a few years ago, never made any teams' roster. All the scouts said the same thing- absolutely no upside. Now he's playing in Europe. That is about the ceiling of what you can do without being 'gifted'.

This recent submission and its discussion is relevant to your claim, "General factor of intelligence g, a Statistical Myth": http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2210147

I disagree with your claim about Lebron James, but I don't think there's enough data for an evidence-based debate. I do think, however, that people want to believe that others who operate at the genius level in various activities have genetic gifts. It gives us an excuse for why we don't.

What I find odd is that most people want to believe everyone is born equal. They want to believe this so badly they ignore any evidence to the contrary. For example, I can eat anything and won't gain weight, yet someone else is morbidly obese on the same diet. I can glance at something once and memorize it easily whereas else may have to spend hours and hours. We are not born equal, BUT we can improve ourselves.

I sincerely doubt that you are skinny on a diet that would make someone else morbidly obese [1]. What I think is more likely is that you eat as much as you want and are skinny. You're just lucky that, either through nature or nurture, what you want to eat, and the amount you want to eat, balances out with what your body needs.

I agree that there are going to be variations in inherent intelligence, body composition, or even ability to play basketball. I just don't think it's as extreme as some people do, nor do I think it's enough to be the sole enabler of people who operate at the genius level in activities.

[1] Assuming they don't have a hormonal problem, which are known to cause people on reasonable diets to become obese.

This is backed up by medical knowledge. It has been repeatedly shown that metabolism varies very little between people when corrected for body mass. What does vary considerably is appetite, and this is the major contributor to body weight.

Do not say 'backed up by medical knowledge' unless you plan on citing sources.

I don't have much time right now, but I did find a good starting point: http://www.ajcn.org/content/53/6/1561S.abstract "In this regard, the proneness to store energy primarily as fat or as lean tissue is a major determinant of the response to a caloric surplus."

Also: http://www.nature.com/oby/journal/v8/n7/abs/oby200063a.html Talks about insulin secretion being different between races even after accounting for other factors.

gasp we all aren't created equal! We all don't have the same benefits. Some people are born disadvantaged and must work for things!

And to the comment a few levels up, my ~3,500kcal diet would make some people obese even after accounting for my activity levels! 1 kcal for you is not the same as 1 kcal for me, bodies differ in conversion, storage, and utilization.

I have a hard time understanding why people don't like admitting that just as we differ on the outside (beauty, fitness) we are also different on the inside (metabolism, disease susceptibility)

I have a hard time understanding why people don't like admitting that just as we differ on the outside (beauty, fitness) we are also different on the inside (metabolism, disease susceptibility)

I can only speak for myself, but "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" sums it up pretty well for me.

Beautiful to whom?

Fit for what?

Susceptible to which diseases? Concrete example: Carrying a gene for sickle-cell disease is obviously bad... unless you want some resistance to malaria. So which is it now, good or bad?

Of course people are different, and that's awesome. But the idea that you can give people "scores" on a bunch of axes like the ones above, and then figure out who is "better" or "worse" seems to me naive at best.

it is awesome that people differ. Everyone has advantages and disadvantages but people aren't equal. Some people will have lots of advantages with minimal disadvantages, and yet others will have the opposite. I don't understand why people like to deny this.

It's not so very hard to understand. Historically people used (and still use) 'differences' as a reason to enslave, murder and other wise subjugate tens of millions of other humans.

So there is a backlash against that. Thankfully. And along the way, in the push back, facts may get lost. Fact's that really, in the context of war, were not helpful.

And now humanity's leading edge seems to be becoming comfortable with that fact we are all different and actually kind of the same and are accommodating of wonderful multiplicity.

Whilst watching the shadow aspects of our egos, in case they come out to grandstand.

> We are not born equal, BUT we can improve ourselves.

Why would you think we're equally able to improve ourselves, either?

Why is it so easy to accept that pretty much everything in our bodies is genetic but not intelligence? I don't see why it would be any different. We already know that the brain is not just one big 'computing mass' but instead consists of many thousands of extremely specialized systems interconnected in a genetically-determined way shaped over thousands of years of evolution. If some of these systems are missing or not connected properly because of some genetic alteration it causes a wide spectrum of effects in our mental development. We know depression has a genetic element. We know downs syndrome is genetic. We know that identical twins separated from birth are remarkably similar, not just in how they look but also in how they act, how they see the world, what kind interests they have and so on.

It's naive to think everyone is born equal that way.

Nowhere did I say "equal." I think there is a distribution, but I don't think the distribution is extreme for those who don't have a disability such as mental retardation. As such, while I think inherent intelligence is a factor in people's successes, I don't think it's the dominant factor.

Everyone isn't born equal, but everything we have doesn't solely come from genetics. Nurture plays a huge role in our development. Saying Natalie Portman is successful solely because of her DNA is wholly disrespectful to her hard work. She didn't get best actress and a masters degree by just slumming it because her genes did all the work.

It's naive and ignorant to ignore nurture in the debate. A lack of Vitamin D or cholesterol can inhibit myelin growth, which notably in the womb causes a miscarriage or still-birth/brain dead baby. It's reasonable to assume that a lack of Vitamin D or cholesterol in a child's formative years is going to cause severe developmental problems.

Natalie Portman has a degree and an oscar for one simple thing: She works hard.

If she didn't work hard she might be a recognizable actress, but she'd be like a huge number of university enrollees in that they never get any degree.

Genetics is a firm foundation, bad genetics can cause lots of problems. But only work is going to build a house, and only hard work is going to build you a mansion.

If she didn't have the right genes to go with her hard work she wouldn't get anywhere either.

She'd have probably got somewhere average. Similarly if she had all the right genes and none of the hard work she'd have got somewhere average again. However, there's people who work way too hard to succeed and totally burn out.

We have nature, nurture and random chance that create all of us. I wouldn't have said "life's too short" and moved country if I hadn't read a single book (The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin) that I have no clue how it came to be in my possession.

My entire life is based on seemingly random chances. I met my wife via friends of friends of friends whom I originally met in a chat room. I got my dog (Dachshund x Jack Russell) by going to the SPCA when they were flooded with Labrador crosses and they had no terriers up for adoption, but she was getting taken out for a walk at that very moment.

Our entire lives are quantified by our reaction to random chance. I had less odds of being where I am today than I have of winning the lottery, but why do the events of my life occur so but my lottery ticket is always going to be a dud for the rest of my life.

It's the mixture of our nature and nurture that define who we are, by how we react to random occurrences. What random shit defined your life so far?

There's a fair bit of evidence that hard work is itself genetic, and the ability to focus attention and delay gratification is largely due to certain brain structures. Those brain structures can be affected by genetics, by environment (eg. fetal alcohol syndrome results in a marked loss of impulse control later), or by practice, but not everybody starts from the same point.

Anyway, your point gets into issues of free will and consciousness that philosophers have been debating for centuries. If everything has a cause, how can we say what we're actually responsible for, and how much is just a reaction to random chance? Perhaps consciousness is largely an illusion: the brain makes decisions based on firmly ingrained circuits that function at a subconscious level, and only later does that bubble up to the conscious level.

Even if not everyone starts at the same point that doesn't mean they will continue to stay ahead. People operate under the assumption of a constant veclocity in development. And that development is non-inertial (in the physics sense). The rate of development function could well be logistic or with an asymptote or some like - removing that insurmountable gap implicit in so many statements.

We may all end up near enough (for all practical purposes) at the same endpoint if we all worked hard and performed necessary rotations and frame changes given our situations. The brain is very malleable.

There is also the fact that people start at different places for different areas and that chooses where they end up specializing. And there is probably some self-fulfilling prophecy going on that trains people to avoid smarty pants subjects which are vital for developing rigorous thinking. why is it a matter of pride to be terrible at maths and technical subjects? or the fact of growing up with certain teachers and society all but directly informing you that certain races aren't up for certain more mathy subjects. I can certainly attest to that stuff messing up your ability to keep on when things get difficult.

First, not everything from our body genetic as you say, there is still much to learn there.

But more significantly, intelligence is a very fuzzy concept, much harder to describe and more so define than eye color or height. It is also as much of a cultural concept as things like beauty, charisma, etc... Which is also why it is a more touchy subject than eye color or height: it is much more related to one own ideology.

>Why is it so easy to accept that pretty much everything in our bodies is genetic but not intelligence?

Because intelligence is much less understood than most of the rest of our bodies. For example, there have been various discoveries that seem to indicate our language has an effect on what we can know and understand [1, 2, etc.]. Perhaps there are dramatic differences in what each of our brains are capable at the "hardware" level, but the "software" (language) dampens the effect.

[1] The Piraha can't learn numbers after a certain age because they have no words to describe them

[2] An article a few months back about deaf people growing up without any language ended up bringing out the fact that some asian languages have words to describe some aspect of color that westerners do not. Babies are able to see the difference but gradually lose the ability as they grow up with no way of expressing it.

How do you know that?

Another case in point: taxi drivers apparently have growing brain regions for geographic stuff (learning their city by heart). I guess you wouldn't expect most taxi drivers to have above average intelligence, but if you tested their geographic "senses", they might register as geniuses. But they also probably didn't become taxi drivers because of their talent - it developed by them being taxi drivers.

At the risk of both taking a cheap shot and perpetuating an industry stereotype, I haven't encountered too many geographically genius-level taxi drivers in my city.

I'm just happy if they have a GPS navigation system and can vaguely understand the directions issued from same.

You probably don't live in London, then:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicabs_of_the_United_Kingdom#...

When taxi drivers are required to demonstrate a deep knowledge of the geography of their area and are not allowed to rely on maps or GPS navigation systems in order to be certified, you end up with taxi drivers that are very good at navigating the city.

Now, you're adding a very strong element of filtering to the process, and you can't really make any statements about how big of a component of the ability to navigate is learned.

Supposedly most super successful sports stars weren't the best when they were 12 years old (or however young). Most of the ones that rose to the very top were average or above average early in their lives, but through an unusual amount of determination, focus, and time, they rose to the top.

Not a given. This will depend on how directed your training was and how good Lebron James was at 12 and how long he had been playing at that point. Getting good at something is like any other type of optimization, getting that final bit of performance takes an inordinate amount of work. [EDIT I took it upon myself to skim a bio. Sure Lebron had talent but he owes a lot to his coaches who took a special interest in him as a youth]

Most people can get within less than 2 seconds of Usain Bolt's best time. Going beyond that you run into a sheer cliff face. For athletes those fractions of a second is where biology starts to make a difference, the vast majority of differences in skill however, can be found in hard work.

Relevant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woOu_4l3lio

The purpose of treating everyone as if they had equal intelligence is not a rigorous scientific pursuit, it's about creating an environment most encouraging to learning and problem solving. Engineers are much more motivated to tackle hard problems and even work together if they believe that they can adapt to each others' differences.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com