Sometimes I feel like i'm an untalented, unproductive waste of oxygen.
Then I see a post like this and know for sure that I am.
Then I see a post like this and know for sure that I am.
I program, rock climb, ride bikes, and write. For any given one of those I can easily find 10,000 people who are more accomplished than I am and often at a younger age. I accept that I will never be that good at any of them, not because I can't be, but because I don't want to invest that much of myself into one of them. There's nothing wrong with that.
This is a story we stop telling kids around the end of high school. We tell this story because, as a child, being told you’re dumb can stunt intellectual growth, or being told you’re not physically capable can stop kids from forming a habit of exercising.
You must be living on a different planet from me. I can kind of see how someone might be tempted to just say “you know what, you’re right” and let you keep on thinking that, though.
Situation: “We have a broken company. Let’s hire one of these superhumans to fix everything.” Reality: the person hired is the same as everyone else, so they can’t apply their superhuman strength to fix the situation. Lesson: People are more similar than they seem.
Situation: Complex project seems to be so involved and difficult that it must have been done by someone possessing powers on a different plane than the rest of us. Reality: The creator spent a very long time learning about the concepts and technologies, then spent a shorter, but still long, time building the project. Lesson: Even those who accomplished great things did not do so effortlessly, and not overnight either. Unlike a god, they did not download the “desire to build great things” program and simply execute it.
Judgment of the claim: this appearance of higher kindedness is (mostly) an illusion. Most people are largely the same.
In your first example, the superhuman cannot fix everything because he has to work with other average humans, who drag him down.
In the second case, since he is not forced to work in a team, his superior skills are shown in the result.
It's not, what you have. It's what you do with it. I struggle with some things my parents find easy, vice versa, most of the 95%ile that I know have various mental health problems or other hidden disabilities that make daily life difficult -- especially achieving something like this.
And Feynman went far with being just an ordinary person supposedly slightly lower on the bell curve.
The only thing that actually tangibly matters is dedication and sweat, and how much time and effort you're willing to put in to something.
Of course, that's not to outright say that an IQ test or however you want to measure cognitive "capital"* isn't valuable in some aspect -- it does measure something, after all. Less fighter pilots died in training once they started selecting using early IQ tests (Source is a psych book from the 80s I skimmed a few years back :P). But that's an extreme case. For projects like this, for most of the things you will ever, ever want to do, it outright does not matter and the emphasis on it in programming and "intellectual circles" (on the internet, I don't think anyone in real life actually gives a shit outside of college admissions) is massively overblown.
* - I'm phrasing this in capitalist terms explicitly because "cognitive capital" is an explicitly western construct that to be honest seems to be more detrimental than it has been positive. Also, outright racist in the historical use and implementation.
"Feynman was universally regarded as one of the fastest-thinking and most creative theorists in his generation. Yet, it has been reported-including by Feynman himself-that he only obtained a score of 125 on a school IQ test.
I suspect that this test emphasized verbal, as opposed to mathematical, ability. Feynman received the highest score in the country by a large margin on the notoriously difficult Putnam mathematics competition exam, although he joined the MIT team on short notice and did not prepare for the test. He also reportedly had the highest scores on record on the math/physics graduate admission exams at Princeton.
It seems quite possible to me that Feynman's cognitive abilities might have been a bit lopsided — his vocabulary and verbal ability were well above average, but perhaps not as great as his mathematical abilities."
Anyone can botch a test. You can't fake winning the Putnam.
He was a very smart man. Also very sociable, a man of the people. I think Feynman demurring about his 125 IQ test was a way of presenting himself as relatable. He could have easily done the opposite by slamming home the point that he aced the Putnam and intimating that he was one of the most intelligent men alive, but he was smart not to.
This may be a selection effect. Perhaps the members of the 95%ile who are successful don't have the bandwidth left to join MENSA and see no value in doing so.
As a personal anecdote from ~15 years ago, which was the last time I affiliated with anybody who talked openly about being in MENSA, their activities there frankly sounded a bit like a self-therapy group which turned me off from even attempting to join.
That doesn't matter for the purposes of this discussion: It still shows that there's room for a lot of non-over-achievement in those top five IQ percentiles.
Here is a much better summary of the argument:
https://aiimpacts.org/is-the-range-of-human-intelligence-sma...
Seems like begging the question.
If you're on this website and your day job is programming, your expected IQ is already way north of 100.
I wouldn't call athletes "physically superior" either. That kind of supremacist talk is looked askance upon, for good reason.
But they're definitely faster/more coordinated/stronger than average, pretty much by definition. They can be proud of that.
Computer programmers are also smarter than average. If they weren't, they wouldn't stick around. It's not physics or higher maths; I figure anyone above the 80th percentile can do a good job of it, and some people in 60-80th can get the hang if it, but will probably never be great.
That's just the way it is. Phrasing it as being intellectually superior to the rest of humanity, that's just your hangup.
Speaking from the point of view of someone who spent 8 years in school learning computer science, then the next 15+ practicing it:
I cannot create an RTS game engine in C. Not in a million years.
It's all good and well to be encouraging, but this is literally our field. If we can't identify our own short comings accurately (after for some people is decades of experience), then we are probably less capable than we think instead of more.
Given enough time I can copy other peoples implementations, but its extremely mechanistic to the point where you can't say that I actually 'wrote' it or learned anything. And it would be questionable if all the functionality would fit together as a succinctly as the posters.
I hope you don't think that is goal post moving, but if I do something mathematical in order to get it correct I have to sacrifice everything else: speed of production, efficiency of the end-product, readability of the code, etc. Compared to my output in logic problems or HCI, you'd think two entirely different people were involved and one was significantly smarter.
It's a failing (of the sort where asked "What is your biggest weakness?" at an interview, I can always answer immediately this), but it's what allows me to be impressed with work like an entire RTS game engine in C in just 3 years as a passion project.
Most of the people on the street? Yes. Most of the people in a history book or at the top of their fields? Not remotely. The author of this is in the second category.
They mostly got there through the trick of being a good leader and then getting assigned all the credit for their group's work in the history book.
> "There's a tendency among the press to attribute the creation of a game to a single person," says Warren Spector, creator of Thief and Deus Ex.
Stage magicians can spend years conceiving, preparing and rehearsing a "trick". But on stage, when the audience experiences the illusion ... it is magic.
Similar to some workplaces stuff. There can be many man hours of time spent propping up repositories, testing, debugging, logging etc etc capabilities in general.
And when the shit hits the fan and the capability solves the problem ... magic.
Then the audience says "Thanks for solving the problem 10x Dev."
I see what you did there.
I don't think this is true. People vary wildly in how long it takes them to learn and understand concepts. Some people are better at this and so they achieve more with the same amount of time devoted to a particular endeavour. We can be honest about this without feeling worthless. I could devote my entire life to mathematics and I wouldn't become Euler.
Thankfully people vary just as wildly in their affinity for things and that's why we see impressive projects like this. But I aqree with your general premise that seeing other people's endeavours and achievements shouldn't make you feel depressed about how you spend your life.
In this sentence, the first 'you' is a different person/reality than the second 'you'. Our priorities are integral to our identity.
So what difference does it make if you can't be? Realistically speaking, the very best pour both their soul and their genes into an endeavor, and most people literally can't match them even if they tried.
1. The author didn't write this overnight. The oldest commits go back to Oct. 2017, three and a half years ago. Imagine what you could accomplish if you worked on something for three and a half years.
2. There are many things we can do with our time, and ultimately we do them all to be happy. Don't measure your own worth by how much product you leave behind. Measure it instead by how happy you are today. Most likely the OP wrote this code because working on it made them happy, and that's great. For many of us, though, the activities that make us happy don't have biproducts. But that doesn't detract from how happy those activities make us. Value the things that you do because they make you happy, not because they appear impressive when held against some external grading scheme.
Edit: list formatting
One problem is making assumptions that the author is trying to prove something by a clear display of superiority. The code itself is of a high quality, from what other people are saying. But it's probably only because so much effort was put in for three years on it.
Also, I have to wonder how many other doors the author left closed because he spent so much time on this project. Was there anything else of a similar impact that he contributed to for all those years? And what of the other things he may have passed up?
Some projects will consume you. They will be the tantalizing activity pulling you away from Friday night dinner parties with people you don't understand and other miscellaneous outings that are comparatively less interesting. You constantly think you're leaving something unsaid or undone away from a keyboard. In some cases you feel obligated to continue for no reason other than having already come so close to accomplishing the thing, sunk costs and all.
With some projects, hypothetically, if someone is to see me in a cafe with nothing better to do, I'm almost certainly going to wrap up my current conversation after a point and take out my laptop to continue working. That is how my life is structured with those projects. That is how they affect my actions day after day. It isn't necessarily a life of glory.
Working on projects and having the finished product in my hands is not what brings me happiness; it merely staves off misery. It fills a void in my life that was agonizing up to that point. My theory is that if your goal is to avoid misery and despair at any cost, and have the means to do so, you can be driven out of desperation to accomplish substantial things. Other people could see what I did and make their own guesses as to what it took. But really I was only trying to prevent myself from becoming undone. It was simply too irritating of a problem for me to leave alone. I'll probably never be able to fully explain why. It certainly wasn't because I was trying to prove something to other people.
But I'm only speaking from my personal experience. It's not like I actually understand why the author did what he did. People just don't seem to know at the moment, and maybe that's where the air of sadness over suddenly seeing this accomplishment come out of nowhere originates. There's nothing to counterbalance the impact of learning of its existence within a split second with what actually went on behind the scenes for many orders of magnitude longer.
Your post has a sad undertone, one that it feels like you are trying to apply to OP in order to justify not achieving the heights others have. Some people are insanely good at things. Most people are barely good at anything. Don't think of OP as a bastion of despair, reframe the project as an achievement and I believe you will feel better.
I'm not feeling less discouraged.
It's not that I worked on the wrong project, it's that most months I worked on no project.
I feel like that's pretty normal but it's still bad. I could be just as happy and make more nice things.
> It's not that I worked on the wrong project, it's that most months I worked on no project.
Will you start working on projects in future months?
It doesn't seem to be.
So if I take your advice and imagine what I could accomplish... that just makes the feelings of discouragement worse.
You listed two things to keep in mind. For me the first one actively makes the negative feelings worse and the second one doesn't really apply.
That's a good point, and I didn't take a healthy perspective on it. Imagining what we can accomplish in a long span of time can be distressing. The road ahead always appears longer than the road behind; that's why it's so easy to look at the accomplishments of others with awe and then look towards our own intentions and feel anxiety.
A better approach is to not imagine what we could accomplish in three and a half years, and instead just dedicate the next three and a half years to doing the things that make us happy and pleased with what we're building. Projecting our intentions can be daunting, but taking one day to do a bit of code or design is not a big step. And doing it again the next day is no bigger a step. Taking it each day at a time, and taking care to enjoy each of those days at a time, is key to keeping our motivations high. And then some day we look back and realize just how long we've been crafting our craft, and how far it's come. But it all starts with one day's work.
I mean this is definitely a piece of gem, but nothing is exactly high tech or hugely difficult. And if you don't think you can make it, you can lower the target and create a, say, a 2d rpg engine that emulates Ultima IV or Pool of Radiance, those pioneers of modern RPG. For art assets you can use free resources or purchase inexpensive ones.
I really think that's achievable for pretty much every programmer. After all in some universities they give you a similar task as a project for advanced game programming classes.
And then you go from there, polish the game and make it fun to play.
My takeaway is that the most difficult part of building something like this isn't the code, it's the life skill of sticking with it. I think that's both a more valuable and difficult skill to acquire.
2. Seek self-fulfillment and purpose in other aspects of your life. I am 100% sure the people around you - family, community, neighborhood, etc. - could use someone who devotes some time for doing good. Sure, it might not be what you had assumed you would gain fame and glory doing, but so what?
I'd be more specific but obviously I don't know anything about you or where you live or what you do.
Start doing things is easy, too.
Finishing stuff, is hard.
The trick is to gradually work your way up from small, completed projects. If you start big, you probably fail big.
The hard part is justifying the time spent on a project. You often start a project and feel like it's not the best use of your time. That you may be the only one to use the project or find value in the project and that's enough to kill motivation. Why start a business if the vast majority of businesses fail? Why start a business when there is already so much competition? Why write a novel when there is no hope of selling it? Then there are the "I'm too old for..." thoughts.
These thoughts eat away at people.
If someone pointed me to my purpose project and told me if I were to keep at it that I would find guaranteed success, then I would have an infinite well of energy at my disposal. But of course, no one is there to tell you that.