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Data: fat; small; tall

    fat:   "tall is Life"
    small: "tall is Death"
    tall:  "tall is Dungeon"

Reasoning: tall is Life, Death or Dungeon. He can't be Life, because if he was, he would have said he was. So he's Death or Dungeon.

Now, one of the other two must be Life (because tall isn't), and so one of them must be telling the truth about tall. He's called Death and Life, so he must be one of them. We know he can't be Life, so tall is definitely Death.

Whoever called him Death was telling the truth, and must be Life. Only small called him Death, so small is Life. (edit I should have said: Life must be telling the truth about him, so if only one of them does that, that one is Life).

And the remaining guy - fat - must be the remaining knight - Dungeon. Dungeon can lie or truth, so it doesn't matter what he said (in fact, he was lying: he said tall was Life, when tall was Death). It only mattered what he said so we could distinguish between him and small.

    fat   is Dungeon
    small is Life
    tall  is Death

Took about a minute. I had to draw a diagram to track the details - my evolution includes pen and paper. :-P

So the first guy can't be telling the truth, because the third guy gives a different answer and the Life gives the truth. So he's dungeon or death. Second guy might be telling the truth, since the Death would lie. Or the THIRD knight might be telling the truth if he IS dungeon.

If the second guy is lying, that means we know the two liars and the third must be Life. But he says he isn't. Therefore, the second knight is Life, the third is Dungeon, and the first is Death.

But solving a puzzle isn't genius. It's logic. Some people spend much more time with logic than others: programmers have lots of games like these. The Blue Eyes puzzle comes to mind as a particularly hard one. Similarly, the more people program, the more they learn mental shortcuts that let them be more productive. Time fixes everything, and the best attribute to fix things is passion. You've got that. You just need to make sure to unfailingly look for whatever your goal is, and to learn everything you need to pursue it. Remember: there's more to building something than programming.

There is more to genius than passion. I have experienced so many situations where I truly believed the equivalent of "0 is equal to 1". When someone points out why this cannot be the case, I usually sit in stunned silence while I review my reasoning. When I find the flaw, it seems inane that I could have missed it.

Let me try to prove this from a different direction. You've probably heard of Henry Molaison, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HM_(patient) ... His hippocampus was surgically removed, rendering him unable to form new memories. Do you truly believe it would have been possible for him to build Quake 3 just because he was overwhelmingly passionate about doing so?

You know the line about genius being perspiration? That one's very much true. That's why context matters so much.

So I solved that puzzle quick-ish. But then, as a kid I played logic games to pass time. Other kids would play sports, and I'd pore through books of puzzles and solve them. So suddenly I'm able to do that. But it means that now, as a freshman at the gym, I'm operating as a near-pathetic level. For Christmas I got two 30-pound weights because that's a level that's easy for bench and hard for curls. But compared to my roommate? That's nothing. He does 50s for light workout. It's because he's spent much more time doing that than me.

There are always impediments. The best trick is to figure out how best to work around them and do what you want anyway. Figure out where you best fit in to the process of creation. Look at the top Apple team. Steve Jobs and Tim Cook and Jony Ive - the three I know of best - are quite different people. Jobs is hotheaded. Cook is known for incredible stamina but he's not a design guy. Ive is all design, nothing else. They're very different people who excel at doing a few things very well, and they work together to create their brilliant products.

That was an interesting way of sidestepping the question. If someone is born retarded, could they become a Steve Jobs just because they really wanted to and worked real hard at it?

Most likely not. No. There is always a problem with mental limitation.

However, that rarely matters as much as it's emphasized. The more you focus on something, the more brilliant your end results will seem.

Right. So we've established that there is a baseline for becoming a genius. You are either born with it, or you aren't.

Next question: how do you determine whether you're born with it? At what point does your demonstrated ineptitude force you to admit that you are incapable of realizing your goals?

("you" doesn't refer to you specifically, obviously. I just talk in the active voice.)

There's no point. You'll never know until after it's already happened.

However, if you give up, you'll never know if you could have been. The struggle is what makes it so hard, but it's what makes it worth it in the end.

True. But if you lie to yourself, then you may waste your life and alienate those you love in the process.

Not all of the YC startups that failed have failed just because the founders stopped working on them, I'd imagine. At what point should you let failure overwhelm you?

That's the separating question, then: to you, is it worth all that? It is for me.

I'd bet that most of the failing YC founders learned important lessons from their failures. Nobody succeeds every time.

Sure, it's worth all that. I'd trade both arms for Newton's brain. (I could always learn to write with my feet.)

The problem is, it is not at all a foregone conclusion that you will become one of the greats just because you throw most of your life at it. Should a retard give up on his life's goals sooner, later, or ever?

The latter is what I meant. I think most people would trade everything to be one of the greats. But is it worth it for the shot at being one of them? I'd say absolutely.

Not to mention: as you go for it, you find better and better people along the way.

I guess the difficult work could be delegated to geniuses who want to work with you, while you complete the work within your means.

It's hard not to be devilishly jealous of their towering talent, though. Also, I'd imagine it would be extremely hard to earn their respect, so it they would be hard or impossible to find, or to keep.

You bring up a really interesting point. To me, doing the work myself matters more than realizing the vision. I never knew that about myself before, so thank you.

I just wanted to reply to this to see how far to the right the text would go.

How hard have you worked on the fundamentals in the areas you want to master? Newton slaved for years in deliberate practice to connect the neurons you admire so much. Many people who think they are doomed to mediocrity in fact are not. What exactly are your goals, where are you now and what are your habits? Maybe you are too stupid to achieve your dreams, but more often I think people are too lazy.

How disciplined are you? Everyone values genius, welcome to the crowd. It is a convenient excuse to obsess on others' talent as if genes and childhood were all that separated you from them. You appear to be focusing too much on outcome rather than on the hard work necessary to achieve it. Skills always look natural from the outside! But ask the honest, reflective people you admire and they'll tell you: they worked their butts off on fundamentals. Psst: fundamentals are open to you too.

Don't obsess over shortcuts. I would love to see you explain to a person with no arms how you'd gladly cut yours off for slightly better gray matter.

Practice with intense effort. If forum composition and wordsmithing is a challenge, discipline your technique by journaling stream-of-consciousness. To improve your memory treat it like a muscle: high reps, low weight at first.

How is your health? Do you exercise, eat right, avoid alcohol, have a positive attitude and sleep well? These are simple but powerful levers.

Talent is overrated. Upgrade your attitude not your physical brain, silly. :)

I sense a leap here. Are you saying that you have to be a genius to make your startup succeed? If so, you are wrong.

"At what point does your demonstrated ineptitude force you to admit that you are incapable of realizing your goals?"

I'm not really sure that intelligence matters as much as people think it does. K.A. Ericsson is a psychologist who studies expert performance, and he's clearly shown that a high iq is not required to become an expert in something. What is required is 1000's of hours of deliberate practice. So basically when you see overnight successes, you're really missing the hard work that got them there. Everyone needs to put in the effort.

And besides research is coming out that really supports the idea that intelligence can be raised. There is some evidence that practicing the Dual-n-back test will raise your fluid iq. And the test isn't domain specific. http://cognitivefun.net/test/5 is a good site for the test.The community there is also really good.

I prefer giving out puzzles with multiple correct answers. I notice three kind of people. 1. the person who laboriously searches for and finds one correct answer. 2. the person who finds the correct answer and notes possible permutations. 3. the person who finds an algorithm that yields all correct answers.

Which one is the best programming candidate? :)

That's a good metaphor for looking at intellect. You might be extremely good at #1, you might be able to solve a puzzle in a flash. And that's working intelligence. But somebody else who's spent some time deciding that figuring out an algorithm would help can do much more using less. That's a better application of intellect overall.

Have you tried drugs? Go to a shrink and convince him you have ADD (and who knows--maybe you do). All drugs for ADD are amphetamines, so it may take a fair bit of convincing before you get a prescription.

Not much finesse in that (possible) solution to your problem, but it sounds like you don't have many options.

All drugs for ADD are amphetamines

I don't think Methylphenidate is an amphetamine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ritalin

Yeah, my bad. Still, isn't Adderall prescribed for ADD almost exclusively these days?

I don't have numbers to back up my assertion, but I would guess Concerta (12 hour extended release ritalin) is the most widely prescribed. And a ritalin formulation would almost always be prescribed before moving onto Adderall. There is also Strattera, which is a non-stimulant ADHD medication that doesn't really work but sometimes parents ask for it so doctors try it.

Strattera basically acts on the norepinephrine system (like Reboxetine) as an antidepressant, doesn't it? If that's the case, I would think it would be effective for a good share of the inattentive-ADD (i.e. non-hyperactive) cases.

I don't know about the market shares, but, given that there seems to be many different types of methylphenidate for sale, I would assume that the market share for methylphenidate is non-trivial.

Small is life, tall is death, and fat is dungeon? About 10 minutes, but I did have to write it down

Yes.

I solved it quickly.

My brain basically broke it down like this: 1. Anyone saying someone else is the knight of life must be either the dungeon or the death. i. If the person he said is the knight of life, calls himself the knight of life then things get complicated... ii. Luckily the person that was called the knight of life, in fact called himself dungeon, which means that neither could be the knight of life. 2. Since the knight of life is the small, believe what he says. The tall = death. 3. This leaves only the Fat to be paired with the dungeon.

Fun puzzle.

Haha, I only just noticed, that the answer could have some kind of bizzare double meaning.

I don't see it.