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Comment by thundergolfer | Hacker News Reader

I'd venture that the "guys ... operating at a completely different level" likely gained their intuitive understanding of math and physics from earlier educational training (formal or informal).

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.

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> I'd venture that the "guys ... operating at a completely different level" likely gained their intuitive understanding of math and physics from earlier educational training (formal or informal).

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.

I don’t think most people disagree there’s a difference in how brains start - I think people disagree about the size of the difference and the importance. The brain seems far more plastic than the rest of the body in terms of potential.

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.

> gained their intuitive understanding ... from earlier educational training ...

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.

> The number of tasks in our culture that require someone who was born with off-the-charts talent is small indeed.

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.

Yes, people do tend to think that differences like these are environmental (such as formal training early from early on), likely because their moral system insists on it. We like to believe meritocracy is a fair system driven primarily by your own decisions. But if you don't come by your merits with hard work, meritocracy stops sounding like a just way of deciding who gets to have a good life and who doesn't. It's clear to me as the nose on my face that education is a small piece of the merit puzzle. Not nothing, but it can be rectified, unlike the situation where you are lacking the brainpower.

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.

The entire modern dialectic around intelligence is emotionally driven. Dumb/unsuccessful people want to believe that smart/successful people just got an unfair leg up in life. And smart/successful people want to believe that anyone can achieve what they did if society helped them enough. We don't want to accept that some people are born with what it takes to become elite and some are born without it and will never have it.

But the fact that most people aren't geniuses shows that being a genius doesn't confer that much of an evolutionary advantage. In fact it might even be evolutionarily negative - in general, more years of academic education correlates with having fewer children.

Not to brag (is it even possible to brag through an anonymous throwaway account?), but throughout my schooling I skipped or skimmed most readings and avoided doing the homework, or copied it off my more diligent classmates. But I still got perfect grades in high school and graduate school, outperforming classmates who worked much harder. In undergrad, I had mediocre grades only because I just didn't do the homework and often turned in term projects many days late, but based on test performances, would have also had near perfect grades. I have a bad work ethic which holds me back in other ways, but I'm still near the top of my field for my age bracket. If I hear something once, I understand it and remember it for life. I don't mean memorizing lists; I mean learning how something works and why and how to apply that knowledge.

So despite your clearly large intellect, it seems like you didn't understand the English verb "to brag."

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.

If this isn’t to brag, then what is it for?

(not gp) To show that intuitive math understanding is a thing.

Doesn’t really seem to settle things. Comment explained that people learn math from somewhere. Reply described someone learning math in school, quickly and with low effort.

Learning math elsewhere implies someone is smarter due to nurture. This dude experience implies raw intelligence (nature)

There’s no description of his life from age 0 to 5 (incredibly formative nurturing years) and almost none before high school.

To prove a point that some people are just smarter than others? A useful anecdote

> If I hear something once, I understand it and remember it for life

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.)

> Not to brag, but

> brags

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