“I’m not that smart”
seths.blog
seths.blog
And you would not have been doing me any favors by trying to convince me that I could have had a meaningful career pursuing theoretical physics research, something I'd never realistically achieve.
But this is really besides the point, because Seth says:
> The number of tasks in our culture that require someone who was born with off-the-charts talent is small indeed.
I think we can carve off advanced theoretical physics and pure mathematics as a tiny field where the 1/50,000 'genius' people are needed, and that leaves basically all the rest of society.
I was mainly talking about physics to color my opinion with my personal experience. The truth is, I know I'm smarter than most people, and I am fairly certain that intelligence is actually a significant hurdle that keeps people from being competent at my job. I disagree with the content of the article. Plenty of people are not smart enough to fill roles we need or to hold down a job that pays well.
I would say this in response, what you describe: being good at middle and high and able to get perfect grades there, isn't particularly impressive. Most good students can excel in high school. You note that things got harder for you in college, this is more normal, "smart kids" usually get found out in college when the work becomes harder. I'm not sure if you went on to postgrad education but I'd hazard a guess that if you went on to do a PhD you would have had a big shock.
My point is this, being able to "ace" teenager level work isn't actually all that big of a deal. I went to a private all-boys school where there were many, many boys who aced every piece of homework and tests they took. It didn't mean they were super special, that's just what you get when schools select for the brightest kids. Now, if they went straight from school and then aced their PhD in a year, that would actually be unusual.
Must be nice to have that kind of recall at the age of 100.
That being said, some people (John Von Neumann) seem to have had fantastic visual and textual recall.
A number of artists (Kim Jung Gi) and musicians (Mozart) seem to have developed remarkable visual and auditory memories.
And many children or fans who were nothing special in school can easily name every Pokémon, or tell you the stats and history of every member of a sports league, or recite the Star Wars saga line for line.
(And chickens, flightless though they may be, still possess the spatial brain of a migratory bird and can memorize (and peck) 300 random locations in their cage space - or on a piano - in order. They're also much better than rats (or humans?) at mazes.)
> brags
I wonder if at one point or likely one age you will never be able to gain an intuitive grasp on some subjects.
I think not only of subjects like higher-level math and physics, but also language skills, like chinese or japanese for a lifelong western speaker.
on the other hand, I wonder if some subjects might be easier without baggage, like having a lifetime of newtonian physics, then learning relativity or quantum physics.
Surely it's a combination of nurture AND nature. It's likely some people are just born smarter than others, much like people are born with the "right stuff" to go further in athletic pursuits. Just like athletic training would play a part in the end result combined with natural athletic potential. It seems crazy to me that people would think that every brain starts as a blank slate, with the same potential, with the end result being purely due to education.
I know that people are worried that even admitting it is a possibility immediately invites ideas of eugenics/racism, but surely we can entertain this idea without the discussion devolving into us goosestepping into oblivion.
Someone being born with the genetic code to be 6’8” is gonna have an entirely different experience playing basketball than someone who is born with 5’8” code assuming equal effort put into training. We see this huge gap in professional sports because those advantages make it incredibly obvious - same as many other physical feats. People train incredibly hard but can’t win something due to an arbitrary constraint.
The issue with mental stuff is that it’s basically down to niche tricks to make one stand out now. Yes - some people are born with an incredible(y useless) ability to calculate multiplying numbers quickly. Meanwhile - there’s folks who learn how to do something similar using a finger counting method… and then the rest of us just type it into a computer for basically no effort. Same with other things like memory and what not. (Which is easily defeated by typing something into Google)
For most people and most positions in the world - these abnormal features are mostly irrelevant. The rest of things is down to ability to grind, experience, and not being too narrow in thought.
On the other hand, if you're really smart you are probably capable of getting away by doing less at work and enjoying many more different aspects of life VS concentrating only on your job.
When you go to a famous university, you meet plateau people. That mildly smart kid who was top two or three in his class of a few dozen, is generally interested in intellectual stuff, and wants to learn more. Those kids set the tone and the pace.
The uber smart are among the plateau, but super rare. They generally have to deal with the ordinarily intelligent, and are restricted by the culture set by the majority.
My thought is that most of us can climb the plateau, but you need something special to be a peak.
I agree that Seth's view is too simplistic. Sure, it's socially difficult to accept that for some people it will be pretty much impossible to succeed at intellectual tasks are relatively easy for others. But that's what the intelligence research shows.
It's pretty hard to even imagine how life would be in the bottom 10th percentile of the IQ distribution. For example, good look trying to get into the US army.
People's ability to get "in the zone" depends on if the level of presentation fits them. I remember in AP Chemistry, some kids just thrived on the rote memorization nature of the whole course. They did great. Some of us found it nonsensical that we had to memorize so much without explanation but we still managed to push through and get good grades. The people who did better weren't "smarter," they just never cared to ask any bigger questions about the material. I'm sure that lack of curiosity helped them to succeed in standard careers.
A person who was "smart enough" to do cutting edge theoretical research might get lucky and have a personality that fits with having a more standard life. Someone who isn't "smart enough" might be very interested in certain problems and push through to finding the answers. Someone who is "smart enough" to do that and doesn't like bureaucracy might drop out of grad school, or even undergrad.
Not with that mindset, no ;)
I suck at anything beyond basis probability theory math-wise, but I don’t believe it’s anything to do with inherent ability (or at least not mostly). Math is just boring.
Hmm, though, I guess you can call that inherent. And I certainly wouldn’t achieve anything if someone tried to get me to do research on it.
You're generalizing your circumstances.
I felt much the same way in secondary school. I thought that there were people that were naturally gifted in things like math and the sciences, while I was somewhat gifted in things like English and subjects that required writing skills. Even the kids that were jocks and stoners could be amazing at math and science, subjects I loved, but was just not fit for.
Welp, it turned out that I just wasn't part of the cheating ring.
My teachers were so lazy that they never changed a single test or homework assignment and a lot of the kids found out; I was not one of them. The subjects with definitive answers thus gave my cheating fellows a corpus of perfect grades and I was forced to compete with the answer key. Subjects where any iota of reading or comprehension was required, they then had to rely on past examples of good grades, giving the rest of us a small chance.
Still, when I got to uni, I also was wowed by the intellect of certain people in the physics departments. There truly are some people that make me feel like a peanut. It's just not the dumb jocks that I knew to be dumb jocks but had to gaslight myself into thinking were actually good at math.
You know the smart ones when you see them.
In high school everyone either struggles with geometry or algebra, while finding the other relatively accessible. College magnifies this effect.
I intensely struggled with calculus, far and away my hardest subject. Friends those raw intelligence was similar to my own found calculus to be laughably easy - I complained about how poorly our textbook explained new concepts, and my friends praised exactly the traits I criticized.
I also found that some people had to learn computer science bottom-up, while others (like myself) had to learn top-down. Some friends couldn't get comfortable with high-level concepts until they understood how every piece worked, down to the metal, while I couldn't wrap my head around the low-level concepts until I understood how they fit into the big picture of problem solving.
I've seen this pattern repeat again and again during and after college. And it doesn't help that the people who like teaching abstract subjects are the people who never found those subjects a struggle.
But this is simply a dimension of intelligence. All of our cognitive abilities are.
What I'm trying to say is that people who are considered smart in the traditional sense won't always be good at math (or any other specific subject). The difference is something more nuanced than "I'd be good at math if I was smarter".
When I actually had a programming problem I was interested in solving, I did great. I discovered many years later that what caused my early failure was mostly me being a bad student. I didn’t do the reading, I didn’t do the homework, I did the labs when I could make sense of them. The trouble was, I didn’t realize that was the problem. In my defense, the class was a weed out class, and made a lot of assumptions about what you knew going in. But ultimately I wasn’t really prepared for school, and didn’t really understand how coursework and personal effort contributed to success in that space.
I guess what I’m saying is, don’t write someone off as not willing to do the work. They may not know that they can do the work.
> When I actually had a programming problem I was interested in solving, I did great.
If you're interested in actually doing something with the knowledge you're trying to attain, you'll likely work far harder to attain it. I suspect a large percentage of developers probably got into the field as kids because they wanted to do things like create a website about a topic they were interested in or create mods for the game they were playing at the moment. That end goal probably drove them far more than any course or professor ever could.
And I suspect that's one reason there's a divide between those that seem to 'get' it in school and uni and those that don't; the former are okay just learning/working for the sake of it, whereas the latter are like "why are we doing this? How is this going to help me?"
Yes, there are absolutely limits on your physical development that you are born with. You won't run 100m under 10s if you're a woman, and you're much more likely if you have recent roots in certain countries. You won't get to play professional basketball unless you're quite a lot taller than average. If you're going to win Mr Olympia, you need to possess the kind of body that can be turned into a hunk of muscle.
But you can do better than most people at almost everything by practicing. You can cut your 100m time just by losing the gut. You can practice throwing the ball in the hoop by yourself. You can lift weights and you'll get more muscular.
Intelligence is no different. If you're going to be a research mathematician, it's going to be incredibly tough competing with the smartest kids in your generation. But if you just want to appreciate quantum physics or complex numbers, it's actually quite low hanging fruit that you will figure out if you want to. Most people do not figure out complex numbers despite it being taught at every high school.
The thing with intelligence, and I suppose we mean the mathematical kind, is it's invisible until you interact with people. If you're very weak or fat there's reasons to do something about it. If you just don't know how vector calculus works, chances are you won't get outed.
Our culture in the West also has a static view of intelligence, the opposite of Dweck's growth mindset, which really harms everyone who should be encouraged to practice getting smarter. The loss of not stopping people without world class brains from pursuing math professorships is greatly outweighed by the loss of everyday people not improving strengthening their thinking skills.
If measured as IQ, the variance tends to be around 5 points on most tests.
So if you've led a non ideal lifestyle in the past, you might be able to increase your intelligence by making less mistakes, relative to your current abilities.
The static hypothesis seems to rely on common sense rather than hard evidence. It's rare for somebody who seems dull to become a genius all of a sudden. And when it does happen it's easy to assume they seemed dull rather than actually were.
There is no disconnect between intelligence being simple yet hard to improve. Losing weight is very simple. But it's hard. Obesity is only slightly less heritable than IQ (both highly heritable), yet we know for a fact it's 100% controllable by the individual (unless one is strongly against the notion of free will).
Free will has nothing to do with not being able to do something because physical constraints are placed on a person. e.g. A person in a wheel chair does not have more or less free will then someone who can walk. Even though the latter clearly has more freedom in a certain sense.
Alternatively, one could claim many simply don't want to lose weight. Then it should be fair game to claim many don't want to improve their intelligence.
Dual n back studies are a good starting point. Could go through gwern's article [0]. Which I very much disagree with, but it does cover a lot of research. He essentially concludes the active placebo studies that produce as many gains as dnb prove dnb doesn't work. But without ground truth there's no way to know these active placebo gains are fake. Many of these active placebos are other cognitive training methods, it's perfectly plausible they may not be placebos at all. IMO we can only conclude that if dnb does work it isn't uniquely great.
Another thing to remember - if we want to determine if it is possible to improve intelligence we should care about maximum gains not average gains. Again, without ground truth, one cannot simply claim big gainers are meaningless outliers that can be discounted. There may not be anything producing 2 SD on average (though plenty showing much more than the 3 points you mention), but many such improvements have been recorded.
Imagine weight was something we couldn't observe or understand. Based on statistical science, many may similarly conclude it is impossible to change it.
That's way too much black and white thinking. It's pretty safe to say most obese people would like to lose weight. They just don't want to sacrifice the things they are doing, either consciously or subconsciously. This is orthogonal to free will. What you are talking about is the whether the conscious mind can win over the subconscious mind. That's called discipline. Not free will.
All the time, there were people around me who were significantly smarter than me, grokking things easily, learning faster, remembering better. Ie my roommate during whole campus was a guy who passed whole high school without the need to study at home, he just remembered it all and did homework just before the classes. there were tons of guys like him. I had to study every day, not too much but consistently. He didn't perform much better than me re grades on university, but he didn't have to work as much.
But here lies the rub - I could easily surpass people like him, even better ones, by just putting in enough time and learn things. In many topics that didn't interest people like him, I was much better. Much smarter folks than me were fired from university since at some point stuff became too hard to just visit seminars and they completely lacked the habit to spent time to learn hard stuff, even by far the smartest guy in whole 120-member class had to put in significant time to learn it for exams to pass.
I kept working on myself, learned various languages (ie right now battling with french), re-discovered topics that forceful learning in high school made me resent (geography, history, biology, physics) and discovered stuff on my own by backpacking around the world (more history and how everything interacted, cultures, food, appreciation of people sometimes vilified back home like Muslims) and just generally stepping far away of my comfort zone for decade and a half, right after finishing university. Now when I look back (and/or meet some of them), I am much more whole and experienced person, when we meet and their kids come and show me some backward place on globe I tell them some stories I've experienced in that region and a bit about their culture and history (don't want to sound condescending, I love them, and my roommate remained my good friend and has very senior management position).
I completed backwardish unknown university and for last decade work among graduates form best European universities. There is very little difference amongst us.
Its truly what IIRC Chaplin said - success is 10% talent and 90% hard work.
Consequently, I'm basically a failure as far as career goes. A lot of dumb people have much easier and more luxurious lives than I do, because they just get to doing the thing without ever worrying or caring if the thing is worth doing in the first place. This used to bug me, but it no longer does.
To take your chess analogy, if you concede at the start you're assuming the opponent will play perfectly and grind you until defeat. But mistakes are made and the balance shifts. In real life, opportunities are created just from starting something. You will learn even from the smallest task, and speaking about it to other people might open new paths for you.
Of course there is likely a genetic and/or physical component to intelligence, but the major aspect of being smart is about wealth and educational inequality.
No, this is flat out wrong. There has been so much research on this, and intelligence is both highly predictive of life outcomes (controlling for wealth) and extremely heritable. If you take the biological kids of smart people and raise them in poor households, they still turn out very smart, much smarter than the biological kids of dumb people who are raised in rich households.
But still with regression to the mean, no? The child of two great geniuses is likely to be a somewhat lesser genius. Above average, but below their parents. A few generations of such regression to the mean and there might not be that much extra intelligence in the descendants of great geniuses.
yeah, animal breeding and crop selection work, but it couldn't possibly work on humans
You are right that the field of genetics is of course applicable to humans, with a lot more muddiness when it comes to the ethics - not the point.
The term "eugenics" describes a certain philosophy/set of ethics which directly grew out of racist narratives at worst and some very loose interpretations of the scientific methods two hundred years ago at best. Furthermore it can argued that the "field" of eugenics never really attempted to shed this, even as of today. Thus, calling eugenics pseudo-scientific is considered fair game. At least that's my understanding.
>Early twin studies of adult individuals have found a heritability of IQ between 57% and 73%,[6] with some recent studies showing heritability for IQ as high as 80%.[7] IQ goes from being weakly correlated with genetics for children, to being strongly correlated with genetics for late teens and adults. The heritability of IQ increases with the child's age and reaches a plateau at 18–20 years old, continuing at that level well into adulthood. However, poor prenatal environment, malnutrition and disease are known to have lifelong deleterious effects.[8][9][10]
* The only relevant factor for predicting chess skill at any level seems to be hours spent on deliberate practice, see for example: https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.1106
* There is the decently famous Terman research (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Terman), who was convinced that he could predict future Nobel price winners, executives and wealthy people by IQ-testing them as a child. His approach basically did not work at all - to just name on aspect; he actually excluded two future Nobel-price winners from his group of future winners because their IQ was too low
* Students who are picked to fulfill minority quotas are just as likely to have successful law careers after graduating than their picked-by-intelligence colleagues (https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-4469.2000.tb00967.x)
I could name many more, but it is not my intention to win an argument by wall-of-text here, I am genuinely interested in sources pointing into a different direction. Thank you for your time!
This is wildly implausible, and indeed the paper makes no such claims.
It always surprises me when people don't do that kind of stuff; which happens surprisingly often IMO. People add stuff with the shittiest of APIs, without thinking more than a week ahead, or write documentation that barely even qualifies as English (from native or very proficient speakers).
As a result, people have often considered me "very smart". But I'm not. I'm not dumb either, but certainly not some sort of programming whizkid.
Point being: attitude counts for quite a bit.
I think everyone knows a few people who are not necessarily "dumb" in the sense that their brains aren't computing well enough, but are nonetheless "dumb" because of their attitude towards certain things. If you never take an interest in anything, or just always go for the simple explanations and solutions you will forever stay dumb, no matter how smart you are.
Innate ability and education also counts. I have no idea how much share each have, although lack of innate ability can certainly be a ceiling to what you can achieve, even with the best attitude. But as the post says: for most things that doesn't actually matter all that much.
But sometimes "the reading" means doing research during personal hours in order to solve work problems. And while the me of 20 years ago would have been perfectly fine doing work that I wasn't going to be compensated for, that shit doesn't fly with the me of today and if it got weeded entirely out of corporate culture, especially software development, we'd all be better off for it.
Raise your hand if you've never had any real formal workplace training in your supposed area of expertise.
Raise your hand if you've watched the same managers who can't find a budget for your personal training go to training seminars and / or conferences.
Raise your hand if your employer decides to adopt some new bit of technology that nobody on your team has familiarity with and then give an incredibly aggressive timeframe to integrate it into your current systems.
Most developers don't have enough hands to raise.
I don’t care enough to do the reading, to fail along the way, to show up, to make a promise, to learn as I go, to confront failure, to get better at the work.
All of that might be true.
But you’re almost certainly smart enough.
I don’t know if it will shift culture to reward and encourage effort, perseverance, grit, etc… over apparent “talent”, but it’s a step in the right direction.
I'm really on board with Woody Allen's line that 90% of life is showing up.
But the purpose of the author seems to be social rather than truth seeking. If people believe they are stupid and don’t try, it’s likely they are not succeeding at the level they possibly could.