Don't discount the creativity, intelligence, and dedication it takes to create something like this. Chances are you actually can't, even if you did make it a priority.
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.
If you're on this website and your day job is programming, your expected IQ is already way north of 100.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Here is a much better summary of the argument:
https://aiimpacts.org/is-the-range-of-human-intelligence-sma...
Seems like begging the question.
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.
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.
In this sentence, the first 'you' is a different person/reality than the second 'you'. Our priorities are integral to our identity.