Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

Answering the title only, so forgive me:

> How smart do you have to be to get a degree?

Not especially, what you have to be is hardworking and committed. You don't even need to show significant improvement; just an understanding of the subject material.

Of course this gets less true as you go up the degrees. (Batchelors requiring a broad rote understanding, Masters requiring a more detailed understanding and PhD requiring some sort of novelty that pushes the field forward).

However there's a saying: "Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard".

I have lived this.

My sister is not smart. That may seem unkind but she would be one of the first to admit this. Things do not come to her easily, she has a hard time recognising patterns and lacks a certain level of "common sense". She is extremely motivated though. Thorough and hardworking.

I have had the fortune of being quite gifted, I test well and have a great propensity to solve novel puzzles. I, however, procrastinate and am easily distractible.

She has a degree, I do not.

Intelligence had nothing to do with it. Being hardworking did.

Throwaway: I have a PhD in CS, and I wouldn't describe myself as very intelligent. Maybe slightly above average. I am constantly amazed at how quickly others in my team can understand extremely complex mathematical problems in a few seconds. I would need at least an hour of quiet thinking, and I struggled a lot with the mathematical aspects of my PhD. But I did work my ass off for 5 years (mostly out of curiosity, though, there was no family pressure, my father is a builder and my mother worked in a supermarket).

Something I noticed: extremely smart people have a tendency to see a problem and quickly sketch the solution in their head, or sketch a proof that the problem cannot be solved. Their overwhelming life experience is that they are always the most intelligent person in the room and that their intuition is always right, and so they quickly mark this problem as "done" / "boring" / "unsolvable". In contrast, people with curiosity but less intellectual confidence tend to experiment with ideas to see if they would work / why they wouldn't work / if they work to a certain degree. I certainly do, and everything I have ever written a paper about, including my dissertation, was discovered during such experiments. If anything, I have a PhD in intellectual naivety.

I know of several extremely smart people in PhD programs who have not produced anything interesting in years, because they shrug off every problem as trivial, see paper writing as below their dignity, and keep themselves busy with teaching. They seem to wait to be automatically rewarded for their intelligence. After all, that is exactly what happened to them in school, and during their Bachelor/Master studies.

My sister is a public prosecutor. She's of maybe average intelligence, but she did study for five (or seven?) years, ten hours a day, seven days a week, to pass the test. This was on top of already having graduated from law school.

Curiosity and perseverance are probably different traits than intelligence. It'd be nice to know if these can be learned, or whether one is born with them.

Perseverance can be trained. In fact, I think that's probably the only way to get it.

As for curiosity, I don't think I've ever met a child who wasn't born with it. The goal there might have to be to avoid anything that would cause a child to unlearn it.

Too much curiosity can be dangerous. As I child, I constantly opened electrical devices to see how they worked internally, resulting in several 230 V shocks (the notion of alternating current instantly made sense to me in 8th grade, because you feel the line frequency as an extreme vibration in the hand when you get shocked). My wife stuck a plastic toy into an outlet as a child to see if plastic really was a bad conductor. The toy had some glitter paint on it, and apparently, that paint was a good conductor.

Your insight into what's going on in a head like mine is spot on, and I have wished for a long time that my parents would (ever) have made an effort to put me in rooms where I wasn't the "smartest" person there. When I was young, I was often the least experienced, but throughout school even, it was obvious to me and usually to them that I was smarter than my teachers.

It sounds like a humble brag but it's not. It's more like a cautionary tale. Smart children need the experience of having to work to understand things, of knowing there are things other people know or that humanity in general could know, but not instantaneously.

Intelligence could be a powerful tool, but there are precious few people teaching children (or, heck, adults for that matter! I would pay serious money for a remedial "how to work hard for things and make incremental progress" classes as an adult!) who have it how to use it.

Why not consider non-intellectual work? Woodworking is a humbling and gratifying experience when it comes to "working harder for things and making incremental progress".

I am like you. I've met many people like the one's you've described. The world needs both types of people.

Armchair anecdote: I have a high IQ, and I fall into that same trap when it comes to game development. It's something I dabble in, and every game idea I come up with that I can reasonably actually complete feels like it's far too simple.

But I look at the market and there are tons of games that are that simple that have actually sold copies, so I should just do one of them and get started. But something in me refuses to put effort into those ideas. There's always something else I'd rather do, for whatever reason.

I wouldn't say we wait to be "automatically rewarded for our intelligence", but I would say we foolish wait for the thing that's "worthy" of our intelligence, when we really should just get something done.

I have a similar issue, and discovered that in reality intelligence can help mask the significant downsides of ADHD.

People take this to mean ADHD is a signal of intelligence, but conversely it's that successful people with ADHD tend to be quite good at masking.

If I were in your shoes today I would seriously consider talking to a mental health professional, since self-diagnosis is no diagnosis and ultimately seeking help earlier for me would have significantly decreased the likelihood of burnout.

I’ll be honest I read their comment and thought “that sure sounds like ADHD to me”. But then again, it’s hard to say what you even do with a diagnosis, and I’m not sure I even recommend formalizing it.

For me, the stimulant prescription was a bad idea. Too much addictive/abuse potential. I know it’s not everyone’s experience, but to me it’s easier to just solve the day to day problems without labeling it as a disorder or bringing medication into the mix.

Medication is not necessarily the answer: In this we agree, formalising it helps because only when we understand do we have the language and tools to properly address the issue. In my case I was burning myself out because I was guilt-tripping on my “lazy” behaviours.

ADHD is definitely overmedicated in my opinion, however what you often find is that ADHD people (especially those good at masking) are self medicating with caffeine.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is the most likely outcome of a formal diagnosis. Theres no quick wins with that but its the more sustainable way for the majority of people.

I would say that I don't have trouble concentrating or getting things done, once I've decided to do them. I have trouble committing to something that I think is sub-optimal. Quite often this means that I don't do that thing until I figure out a better way, and then I'm usually very happy with the result, and I have plenty of concentration and drive for it.

For things that I'm not yet good at, though, that means that I'll basically stall forever rather than do something that's not good. And I know mentally that that's the wrong attitude, but I have a lot of hobbies already, so it's hard to commit time to something that I'll be bad at for a while when I could do something I'm good at.

It's both good and bad, because it means I spend a lot of time succeeding and (somewhat) limit my spending on new hobbies. But it also means I don't stretch my wings as much as I could. Jack of All Trades vs Master of One, and all that. I'm somewhere in the middle.

One of the reasons I refuse to get an IQ test is because I don't want to feel too dumb to attempt things or too smart to attempt things.

So, it turns out that IQ only kind of correlates with success and well-being, but conscientiousness very much correlates with success and well-being. I would recommend everyone look into this for themselves and draw their own conclusions (and I won't play some google results as pokemon cards here)

Conscientousness has also been known as "grit", and is basically what you describe in yourself. I've found it is far too easy to accept dismissive, haughty people as intelligent, when they might just be over-specialized in one particular game (classwork, debate, paper-writing, etc). Recognizing this has not done great things for my imposter syndrome (am I just being dismissive??), but it has helped me feel comfortable in big rooms of experienced smart people.

Exactly, just because someone "seems" confident and can grasp concepts quickly doesn't necessarily mean they can take an idea to the next level and play with it or develop it. Those people get more attention than they deserve.

I also have a Ph.D. and am dumb as rocks sometimes. Example: yesterday I spent several seconds trying to badge into the subway turnstile with my employee ID card, mystified why it wasn’t working.

Ph.D. selects for research ability, which either weakly correlates (or perhaps inversely correlates—who’d want a PhD anyway??) with common sense and street smarts.

I could have written this exact post. It contains every point I would have made, including "Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard" which was my mantra for a long time. As well as my sister not being 'smart' but very hard-working and doing infinitely better than me despite having much lower test scores.

The only thing that (eventually!) got me through my bachelors degree was thinking "If you just put one foot in front of the other, you'll get there eventually (assuming you are walking on a sphere and not perfectly along a meridian)".

People asked me if you needed to be smart to get my degree (one of the big-4 engineering degrees) ... I always said "No, just stubborn."

I’m pretty convinced that if you just show up to class, be nice to the prof, and do all of the assignments you’ll get a mercy C or D regardless of how you performed.

I’ve never tried this (finished with a 3.9) but observed my friends.

Some would do the above and miraculously pass courses they, according to exam scores, were certain to fail.

However, my friends who had poor exam score and spotty attendance never made it through. In fact, sometimes they were so convinced they’d fail that the dropped the course or no-showed the exam — so they did in fact fail.

Hard work, maybe — simply trying is easy. But more than that, persistence.

If you have a higher IQ it is going to be easier though in subjects like Math, CS, Physics etc. You still need to work. It may not be hard work though.

I think there’s also a willingness to jump through hoops required that some of the most intelligent people I have known have been too stubborn for.

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