A Computer Scientist Who Parlays Failures into Breakthroughs | Hacker News Reader

A Computer Scientist Who Parlays Failures into Breakthroughs

quantamagazine.org

74 pointsBrajeshwar9 comments

Spielman was my favorite CS professor as an undergrad! Glad to see his work getting some recognition.

Funny anecdote — Spielman was awful at spelling. Every time he went to the board it was 50/50 on whether he’d spell all the terms right. He told us the first day of class that in middle school, he had tested in the bottom 9th percentile of all students in Pennsylvania in spelling. Apparently his brain was just wired differently.

Just a form of dyslexia maybe?

Why can't the man just be bad at spelling?

Because it'd be totally weird for someone with otherwise high intelligence to "just be bad" at something basically everyone else with normal+ intelligence is good at. Like, you wouldn't expect there to be an explanation? What does "just" even mean here?

He can, but if we ask why and we find out it's for the same reason a bunch of other people are bad at spelling and the common name is 'dyslexia' then maybe that's a good word to explain why he's bad at spelling?

Being naturally bad at something isn't magic, there is a reason and mechanism

Same as being naturally good at something, there is a mechanism

Graduating at the top of your class in any primary or secondary schooling is hardly going to impress me. Some of the dumbest people I know had the best grades and some deceptively intelligent people had the worst grades. I still remember in HS some straight-A girl asking me if 23 was a good ASVAB score. Maybe if you're school is infamously conceptive, I'd think different, but I'm more interested in what someone does outside grades. Meanwhile, I knew a guy that would always come to school high as shit, acted like a class clown and had the worst grades, but was surpsingly smart. If you were to look at this guy, you'd probably assume he had no real options for a future, but I was talking to him once and discovered he was a game developer in his free time and had made some petty neat games.

“For most of the problems that I’ve solved, I can identify the moment and tell the story about the moment where a certain solution came into my mind,” Spielman said. “But that’s just because I’ve spent an absurd amount of hours working on them.”

I feel the same way, if I've ever come up with impressive results in my work it's only after I've spent absurd amount of hours on the problem.

I feel like a fraud until suddenly it all comes together. Like an idiot savant, because the results, often the best amongst my peers, are beyond my normal intelligence. Is that common?

> “But that’s just because I’ve spent an absurd amount of hours working on them.”

Uh, yeah? That's how you solve absurdly hard problems. Did he expect to solve real problems, that many people spent their entire lives working on, in a trivial amount of time?

This reminds me of an epiphany I had back in highschool where I was thinking "I must be dumb because I have to try REALLY HARD to get the top mark in a science or maths test." Then it hit me that hey, everyone else taking the test is a person too and they're all trying really hard as well, so if I didn't have to try hard that would be weird.

> Like an idiot savant, because the results, often the best amongst my peers, are beyond my normal intelligence. Is that common?

Seems pretty normal to me, those flashes of insight (or gut feeling around the edge of insight) can be few and far between. You only have to have an insight once, though, if you can then understand and communicate it.

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