Hacker News Reader

Comment by cevn | Hacker News Reader

Exactly, 'smartness' is meaningless. You can accomplish x task with y practice, applies to any task.

Except that smart people need less y to learn almost any x, which is part of what it means to be smart.

I would add that some of the stupidest things I've seen people do were actually done by people who were, by any objective measure, extremely smart - either from hubris or general otherworldliness....

Your anecdote doesn't really prove anything. "Intelligent" doesn't mean "free of character flaws" or "happy" or "wealthy".

Meanwhile, intelligence research continues to be one of the more fruitful (and reliable) fields of the social sciences

That's also a trainable skill, learning how to learn new concepts quickly. Here is where many people report LLMs like ChatGPT are a huge time-saving boost.

This might also be an either-or situation - i.e. some people specialize in the ability to quickly grasp a wide variety of knowledge at a relatively shallow level, others specialize in in-depth knowledge of a particular subject, and it's impossible to be really good at both.

> That's also a trainable skill, learning how to learn new concepts quickly

Maybe to a limited extent, but most of the difference is likely natural ability.

Smart is knowing botanically a tomato is a fruit.

Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad.

Smart is knowing that Frankenstein isn't the monster. Wisdom is knowing that Frankenstein is the monster.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com