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Comment by masto | Hacker News Reader

Some of this language: “a smart fifth grader would”, “a good student would”, stuck out to me. I have experienced people talking like this at work and I think it can be harmful. I watched a group humiliate one person by saying “how could you get a job here and not know that?” I also had a coworker once offer to help me solve a problem, during which they said something like “any competent engineer should be able to …” I had only been there a couple of weeks and it really undermined my confidence.

I don’t think recognizing a trick problem is necessarily about being good or smart. Is the author of the cited blog post dumber than a fifth grader?

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I really did appreciate the post, but I also felt weird about that language. Not offended or anything, but it stood out.

Not to detract from the nice explanation in that post, but I do think "smart" can be a bit of annoying term. It sort of implies an innate property. I'm pretty confident anyone can become really good at anything, given enough motivation and time. I'd prefer the term "experienced" or something to that effect.

> I'm pretty confident anyone can become really good at anything, given enough motivation and time.

And I'm pretty confident that some people can become really good at said thing faster, due to some form of innate talent. And as we all have finite time, that's a pretty important trait.

People, and their lives, are extremely high dimensionality objects, and most of those dimensions are essentially continuous. However, in terms of cognition, we are all quite close to one another along any given dimension. If we weren't, you'd really notice, like someone on the far end of "The Spectrum". However, small deltas in a high dimensionality space add up to a large vector length. Still, these are never so important as context: Where you grew up, whether you fell in love with someone early, whether you had access to the best schools for your target, etc. are much more important factors than the combinations of people's intrinsic features.

Perhaps the No true Scotsman fallacy?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

> I don’t think recognizing a trick problem is necessarily about being good or smart.

It goes a bit beyond that; this problem solving algorithm is pretty clearly unworkable. Even here where it can come to an answer in reasonable time it is questionable.

Any student that is happy to employ this algorithm is either extremely smart to the point where they can process a lot of arithmetic very quickly, or not very smart and setting themselves up for failure later on in life when the first guess at an answer doesn't work.

Ordinary garden-variety smart (as in, likely to be good at maths but not Euler or Gauss) should fail to answer this question on the basis that there is no technique beyond brute force, and brute force is impractical without a computer.

The author has the “problem” of knowing too much. I’ve seen this myself where presented with a Singapore Math problem solvable easily by a 3rd grader I reach for more complex algebra because “I know that’s what the problem really is” when there are much easier ways to solve that kind of problem visually.

>...and it really undermined my confidence

How is that a bad thing? I think the world needs less confidence in it right now, not more.

I think this approach is a bit backwards. The world needs more competence, and people should be encouraged to admit their gaps in knowledge and learn from others.

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