[HN Gopher] Beyond Smart
___________________________________________________________________
Beyond Smart
Author : razin
Score : 331 points
Date : 2021-10-21 17:04 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (paulgraham.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (paulgraham.com)
| bencollier49 wrote:
| For anyone who's familiar with the roll of British entrepreneurs
| who did terribly at school and yet built massive companies, this
| post isn't some sort of massive reveal.
|
| Is this something more common in the UK than the US? If so, why?
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Honestly, I am generally a big fan of pg, and many/most of his
| points I agree with. But every time he puts out a new blog post I
| feel like I'm now reflexively starting with an eye roll: "OK,
| what quality _that pg has in spades_ has he decided to laud now
| as the one thing that 's super important for success, happiness
| and societal progress?"
|
| It's not that I really disagree with him that much, but for a man
| who is obviously very smart, and who can come up with lots of new
| ideas, I find his blog posts shockingly lacking in introspection.
| It's basically all the qualities that are needed to build a
| startup are _the most important_ qualities for society at large.
| What I _never_ see is thought processes along the lines of "Gee,
| how can my world view be colored by my unique experiences, and
| how might I think differently if I had a different upbringing or
| experiences contrary to the ones that actually occurred?"
|
| As another commenter mentioned, so many of pg's posts seem so
| concerned with "sorting" people: you're smart or not, you've got
| lots of new ideas or you don't. And it's not hard to surmise why
| he has this worldview: literally his whole job is to sort through
| people pitching to find the winners from the losers.
|
| But I wish he would just step back once and think a little more
| broadly about some contrarian ideas that don't just totally
| support his vision of success in the world.
| throwaway2474 wrote:
| Writing a piece called "Beyond Smart" where you literally
| equate yourself with Einstein in the first paragraph is a
| special level of arrogance. His essays used to quirky,
| interesting and surprising. They have increasingly become
| predictable rants about how he's uniquely great, and
| (ironically) contain less and less actual new ideas.
| defen wrote:
| > Writing a piece called "Beyond Smart" where you literally
| equate yourself with Einstein in the first paragraph is a
| special level of arrogance.
|
| He didn't equate himself with Einstein, in either the first
| paragraph or the rest of the essay. Furthermore, I
| interpreted the "Beyond" in the title in the sense of
| Nietzsche's "Beyond Good and Evil" - "Beyond Smart" doesn't
| mean "extra-super-duper smart, above and beyond smart". It
| means, we cannot ascribe such things to a simplistic concept
| of "smart", such as the kind that would be measured on IQ
| tests.
| evgen wrote:
| I am assuming either you are joking or you are failing to
| see the ham-handed self-congratulation pg gives himself
| through this entire piece of shit.
|
| Paragraph 1: Einstein was smart, but he also had 'new
| ideas'
|
| Paragraphs 2-15 : Reasons why I am smart and also have new
| ideas and you should remember to think of me like the
| Einstein of VCs. Just in case you missed this repeated
| point I am going to title this little think-piece 'Beyond
| Smart.'
|
| I would trot out metaphors about Fonzie and water skis, but
| when it comes to pg that ship sailed years ago.
| philosopher1234 wrote:
| Whats the use in this comment? Is the earth flat because I
| can't see all the way around it? Can't we tolerate a little
| bit of interpretation, and not require that we only take
| texts literally? And, why the double standard? You
| interpreted OPs comment, so why can't he interpret PGs?
| sbt wrote:
| PGs personality has been great for attracting the kind of
| college graduate clientele YCombinator has catered to.
| shoto_io wrote:
| I agree with you wholeheartedly. A perfect human through this
| lens is
|
| - smart
|
| - hard working
|
| - has many ideas
|
| - wants to change the world
|
| - gives back
|
| Right?
|
| What I don't understand: why do you wish _him_ to step back and
| reflect?
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > What I don't understand: why do you wish him to step back
| and reflect?
|
| Because I used to look forward to his essays. I found them
| interesting, insightful and witty. Now I just find them
| predictable and self-serving. I'm probably just feeling
| disillusioned with someone I greatly admired, that's all, and
| I'm wishing I could feel about that person the way I used to
| feel.
| [deleted]
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Could you quote a specific sentence that supports any of your
| claims here?
|
| > I grew up thinking that being smart was the thing most to be
| desired. Perhaps you did too. But I bet it's not what you
| really want. Imagine you had a choice between being really
| smart but discovering nothing new, and being less smart but
| discovering lots of new ideas. Surely you'd take the latter. I
| would.
|
| This seems like the closest thing. But it's perfectly fine to
| mention one's own childhood experiences.
|
| You might want to read http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html,
| since it sounds like you don't actually disagree with him on
| anything. Which is to say, your reply is a DH2 at best.
|
| Wouldn't it be better to comment on the actual essay rather
| than its author? It'd probably be more interesting.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Let's take a look at pg's most recent essays:
|
| 1. This one, which is basically saying one of the most
| important things for society is coming up with new ideas. Not
| hard to see why someone who built his life around startups
| would think this.
|
| 2. "Weird Languages", touting the benefits of Lisp among
| others. Kinda feel like "nuff said" on this one.
|
| 3. "How to work hard", which I read basically as an overview
| of "how to work like you're running a startup".
|
| 4. "A project of one's own". How you should work toward your
| own goals, instead of someone else's.
|
| Again, I don't really disagree with pg's essays, I just no
| longer find them interesting because I think they are now
| utterly predictable at this point.
|
| I'll give you a concrete example: while I was definitely a
| tech and startup fan boy through the early 00s, I definitely
| have some amount of disillusionment around the whole startup
| ecosystem, and its effects on society. I _never_ hear pg talk
| about really any of the downsides or regrets about the
| startup ecosystem that he helped unleash.
|
| If I already know pretty much exactly what someone is going
| to say (and nearly all of it is self-serving), I'm not going
| to be that interested in listening.
| lpa22 wrote:
| I think PG has definitely made the move at this point in
| his career from the previously more niche (interesting)
| insight years ago => mainstream (less interesting, more
| predictable) insight lately. It likely won't interest you
| and a non-negligible portion of the HN crowd at this point.
| But for the rest of society, he is still interesting and he
| is growing his following.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| > This one, which is basically saying one of the most
| important things for society is coming up with new ideas.
| Not hard to see why someone who built his life around
| startups would think this.
|
| > If I already know pretty much exactly what someone is
| going to say (and nearly all of it is self-serving), I'm
| not going to be that interested in listening.
|
| These seem to be your central points. Firstly, you're
| correct: the essay says that new ideas are one of the most
| important things for a society:
|
| > There are more subtle reasons too, which persist long
| into adulthood. Intelligence wins in conversation, and thus
| becomes the basis of the dominance hierarchy. Plus having
| new ideas is such a new thing historically, and even now
| done by so few people, that society hasn't yet assimilated
| the fact that this is the actual destination, and
| intelligence merely a means to an end.
|
| ...
|
| > So what are the other ingredients in having new ideas?
| The fact that I can even ask this question proves the point
| I raised earlier -- that society hasn't assimilated the
| fact that it's this and not intelligence that matters.
| Otherwise we'd all know the answers to such a fundamental
| question.
|
| But is this mistaken?
|
| When choosing where to send your kids to school, would you
| rather send them to a school that believes strongly in
| their own ideas, or one that embraces more recent ideas?
|
| My parents sent me to a small religious school. Personally,
| I would've been happier somewhere else.
|
| But as you say, you don't disagree with the essay. Your
| central point is in your last sentence:
|
| > If I already know pretty much exactly what someone is
| going to say (and nearly all of it is self-serving)...
|
| You're saying that pg essays are no longer surprising to
| you. But I don't think you knew what it was going to say
| before you read it; you read it, and then said, "This isn't
| surprising."
|
| Personally, I found it surprising that society could place
| so much emphasis on intelligence, if it's true that new
| ideas matter more.
|
| You could try to argue that new ideas don't matter as much
| as intelligence, or that something else matters even more.
| It would be interesting if you were correct, since that
| would refute the essay's central point. But you haven't
| done any of that; your comment can be summed up as "I think
| pg sucks," because you're not making any concrete claims.
| philosopher1234 wrote:
| Your comment reads as defensive, and as though you are
| intentionally missing the point. The point is: PG appears
| to be a dishonest writer. He is not writing with the
| evenhanded pursuit of truth in mind, but with a very
| particular, convenient (self-serving) truth to support.
| He seems to consistently ignore any strain of thought (of
| which there are many, see: the entire humanities) which
| would generate a more nuanced view.
|
| GP is saying PG is probably wrong, and probably
| misleading many people. This is useful, even if its not
| the same as saying "here is proof he is wrong".
|
| Nevertheless, to indulge you, I will say: PG is wrong.
| There is more to life and contributing to society than
| just coming up with new important ideas. Yes new
| important ideas can lead to more food, more materials, or
| even in some cases (though certainly not in PGs case)
| deeper relationships. But there are many meanings to
| life, and not all of them start with increasing
| productivity.
|
| PG's new ideas aren't going to raise a kid. They're not
| going to save any souls, or save a relationship on its
| last legs. They're also not going to plant any crops, or
| build any houses.
|
| They are useful, but they are not everything, or even the
| most important thing. In fact, they're a luxury. They're
| one of the least important things in my life.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| > GP is saying PG is probably wrong, and probably
| misleading many people. This is useful, even if its not
| the same as saying "here is proof he is wrong".
|
| It sounds like we'll have to agree to disagree.
|
| > PG's new ideas aren't going to raise a kid. They're not
| going to save any souls, or save a relationship on its
| last legs. They're also not going to plant any crops, or
| build any houses.
|
| I'd be surprised if YC's investment portfolio didn't
| include both farming and construction startups. But I
| haven't looked.
|
| (Although this isn't raising a kid, Legacy helps people
| have them: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/legacy
| which happens to be quite relevant for my life.)
|
| Of course there's more to life. But that's true about any
| idea you could talk about. Why talk about anything at
| all, if there might be more to life? (I recently tried to
| face this question:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28866558 ... Some of
| the replies were very good.)
|
| You've made a very concrete claim here: "PG appears to be
| a dishonest writer," and then showed no evidence of
| dishonesty.
| andkon wrote:
| It's not just that he has to sort winners from the losers. It's
| that he has to be the first most important seeming VC in their
| minds. And he accomplishes that with these blog posts. That,
| and by using these posts to posit that people like him really
| are the best, he has a big hand in getting people to self-sort
| into venture-seeking types in the first place.
|
| If you think of his posts as self-serving, that's true. But
| they're also propaganda meant to influence what we think of as
| being a worthy pursuit, and meant to define who should pursue
| such things. The more people believe his worldview - one where
| smarts dominate and make one powerful - then the more status he
| has, and the more easily he can do his job. People come to him
| whereas before he would've had to go to them!
|
| I think he really believes what he writes. And I think it is
| true that smarts as defined by him are helpful to the kinds of
| entrepreneurs who see themselves in pg - like, the people he
| describes really are a type of person, and they should lean on
| their strengths. But I think it's not at all clear that pg-
| measured smarts matter more than other qualities for
| entrepreneurship, or that people like him are remotely close to
| the best sort of startup founder.
|
| Maybe he's just found a way to seem high status to a subset of
| a population, and his success flows from that: he gets his pick
| of that subset, even though it is a tiny chunk of the world.
| Sure, he gets notoriety and status in a big chunk in status-
| seeking coders! But that needn't mean that he's actually
| cracked the code on entrepreneurialism. He has ABSOLUTELY
| cracked the code on how to speak to young men who feel like
| they can use what they're good at to achieve power and status.
|
| Here's a scary thought: it's possible that by so completely
| dominating the conversation about what a startup founder should
| be, and by making the ideal startup founder seem like a
| reflection of his image, he's caused far greater numbers of
| more capable entrepreneurs to self-select out of
| entrepreneurial pursuits, because they aren't pg-like enough.
| Not saying that's true, or provable (though I have many many
| anecdotes that lead me to feel something's going on there).
| Just that it's important to consider that in making a
| hagiographic ideal the epitome of a startup founder, that
| you're necessarily excluding so so many other people for
| reasons that boil down to... pg got there first.
|
| HN likes to point out just-so stories, and I think the stories
| he tells us are that. When we read posts like this and they
| seem to speak spookily clearly to something in us, it's
| probably because he's doing fanservice to people who serve to
| give him a tremendous amount of influence and power by
| believing him when he says we're special.
| mmaunder wrote:
| Such a great read. I thought Paul's most profound insight was
| right at the end where he mentions a connection between writing
| and discovering new ideas. I've found this personally to be true.
| I was blogging heavily from 2005 until 2010 and it led to me
| launching a string of products, getting funding for one of them,
| failing and continuing to launch until we succeeded
| spectacularly. Writing, I have found, enables my creative and
| analytical thought process. I've found that it serves as a kind
| of personal strategic planning process that educates the
| intuitive mind, and which results in insights over the proceeding
| days and weeks, which leads to more writing, and an iterative and
| exponential process.
| achenet wrote:
| DaVinci kept a journal.
|
| There may indeed be something about expressing one's thoughts,
| especially in writing, that enables them to get better.
| throwaway879080 wrote:
| I'd add _systematic_ exploration of new ideas, one good example
| is Thomas Edison with his "idea factory".
|
| Masayoshi Son used to set aside some time during his week where
| he would "summon" invention, quite literally, until having a
| "hit" that actually worked and became his first business
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sa2_VBu0d7k&t=470s
| Tycho wrote:
| Maybe it's to do with luck. As in, smart people will encounter
| problems and work on them and solve them, and the smartest ones
| will solve them faster and solve more problems, but the search
| space of problems is vast and only in retrospect do we know which
| ones were of crucial importance. Therefore the Einstein is more
| likely to be not-the-smartest, and the smartest is unlikely to be
| the Einstein (though _more_ likely than any other individual).
|
| A way to test this would be to check how many of the most
| important breakthroughs were things that were considered vital in
| advance and had everyone trying to solve them. Like will the next
| Einstein be the person who solves fusion, or something else
| entirely?
|
| Another dimension is practical experimentation. Were the Wright
| brothers geniuses? I think it's more that the hands-on approach
| yields much faster innovation than the dry theorising.
| 123pie123 wrote:
| what is Intelligence?
|
| from wikipedia... "Intelligence has been defined in many ways:
| the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-
| awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning,
| creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving. "
|
| I'm sure Einstein had most of these abilities in abundance
|
| I know a lot of people who would consider themselves as smart and
| they lack a _lot_ the above skills
| webmaven wrote:
| There is reasonable evidence that Einstein was _not_
| particularly gifted in the areas of self-awareness or emotional
| knowledge.
| 123pie123 wrote:
| I didn't know that
|
| I think he had abstraction, logic, understanding, learning,
| reasoning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving
| pinned down,
|
| I doubt the ability of planning would have mattered too much
|
| the key areas that I would personally say are important are
| logic, abstraction, critical thinking, problem solving and
| creativity the rest are important and can seriously help but
| are nice to haves
| nabla9 wrote:
| The consensus among top physicists during the 'heroic era' was
| that Von Neumann was the smartest among them, higher IQ than
| Einstein's, but Einstein had something else.
|
| Eugene P. Wigner:
|
| > I have known a great many intelligent people in my life. I knew
| Planck, von Laue and Heisenberg. Paul Dirac was my brother in
| law; Leo Szilard and Edward Teller have been among my closest
| friends; and Albert Einstein was a good friend, too. But none of
| them had a mind as quick and acute as Jansci [John] von Neumann.
| I have often remarked this in the presence of those men and no
| one ever disputed me. [...] But Einstein's understanding was
| deeper even than von Neumann's. His mind was both more
| penetrating and more original than von Neumann's. And that is a
| very remarkable statement. Einstein took an extraordinary
| pleasure in invention. Two of his greatest inventions are the
| Special and General Theories of Relativity; and for all of
| Jansci's brilliance, he never produced anything as original.
| NumberCruncher wrote:
| Small remark: I think you have a typo there. Jancsi = Johnny in
| Hungarian.
| carapace wrote:
| You get new ideas from that place in Schenectady.
|
| Seriously though, the best and simplest way to get new ideas is
| with hypnosis. Go into trance and give yourself a post-hypnotic
| suggestion to come up with new ideas.
| [deleted]
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >why do so many smart people fail to discover anything new?
|
| Given his background as a venture capitalist not a surprising
| question but much of the implicit premise of the piece is that
| novelty is somehow superior to maintaining things that exist,
| which isn't that obvious.
|
| doing 'new' things is fine but the world to a large degree runs
| on maintaining and very marginally improving what we have or just
| fixing things in very small ways that would probably not pass his
| excitement test.
|
| Before someone like Einstein can come along and dig up some
| paradigm changing idea it often takes decades of work to refine
| something to the point where some individual can come along and
| discover what's wrong with it. Even within an individual life
| like Einstein's that is the kind of work he did most of the time.
| novelty is the exception, a world of novelty after novelty
| without long periods of ordinary work during which people refine
| is hard to imagine.
|
| So just like 80% of Einstein's life was probably doing normal
| maths, 80% of people are probably going to do normal things,
| there's nothing wrong with it. It's like the popular analogy of a
| handful of astronauts standing on the backs of hundreds of
| people. Every single one of them does a necessary job, and a lot
| of smart people will do work that in the world of Paul Graham is
| somehow considered unglamorous.
| [deleted]
| david927 wrote:
| I always thought of IQ tests as the artistic equivalent of "how
| well can you draw a line?" You need a good foundation for
| artistic expression but many, many people have that and still
| don't create art worth remembering.
|
| Intelligence (the capacity to process) combined with knowledge
| can give you that strong intellectual foundation -- but that's
| all it is.
|
| Alan Kay was wrong; a change of perspective is not worth 80 IQ
| points. The opposite is true. A decent IQ gives you the chance to
| have a change of perspective.
| criddell wrote:
| Are there any standard measures of creativity?
| david927 wrote:
| No. It's qualitative not quantitative. You measure
| quantities; you can only measure aspects of qualities (and
| that's not advised as it's incredibly dangerous).
|
| But as Paul says here, creativity is probably not the best
| word. I would describe it as "understanding".
| jleyank wrote:
| I only skimmed the discussion and original post, but "training"
| didn't jump out at me from either. One can distinguish "ideas":
| neat new apps for iOS that will make money, or, say, string
| theory or quantum chromodynamics.
|
| The first requires people to pay attention to how people are
| using their phones and, probably, how business operates. But
| then, Angry Birds was probably a hack-inspired project so maybe
| luck's a component as well. The others require a whole lot of
| background in math, physics, a sense of what is beautiful in
| these disciplines and some idea of how the current models work.
| Way more effort, and not really subject to a hack attack.
|
| Both are facilitated by intelligence, opportunity, etc. But I
| wonder whether people are interested in or appreciate the amount
| of spade work involved for some areas. If you want to work hard
| AND make some bucks, work on material science (catalyst design,
| high-temp superconductors) or try to understand the human immune
| system and how it could be modulated.
|
| Lots of coding in there, and the winners are heroes who will be
| feted worldwide. Oh, I'll throw in another one... A critical
| skill in Pharma is, to be blunt, patent breaking. If one can
| determine that two molecules are sufficiently different to be
| outside a patent but sufficiently similar (biochemically and
| physicochemically) to be active at the same target in the same
| strength or better... I should point out that modern drugs can
| make several Billion a quarter once on the market.
| hidden-spyder wrote:
| Why is Firefox's Reader View not available for posts on PG's
| _seemingly minimal_ site?
|
| Also, with my minimal knowledge of programming, I have no idea
| what's going on with that website's HTML markup. There's also a
| document type not mentioned error so that might be what's causing
| this.
|
| I wonder why @pg doesn't change this? I presume it'll only stand
| to benefit him with a higher SEO ranking.
| zethus wrote:
| I can't imagine pg being too concerned with SEO. I don't think
| he's necessarily marketing his essays for discoverability nor
| do his essays bring in direct income aside from enhancing YC's
| already established credibility.
| lexicality wrote:
| > Also, with my minimal knowledge of programming, I have no
| idea what's going on with that website's HTML markup.
|
| It's what we in the business call "old"
|
| That's just how we made websites before CSS was a thing. It
| still works, it's just horribly user unfriendly. Presumably
| Paul either doesn't care or likes the retro look.
| kens wrote:
| Hamming (of Hamming codes) has a famous Bell Labs talk "You and
| Your Research", describing how to have a large impact. It covers
| a lot of the same ground, but in more detail:
|
| https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
|
| A few points from it:
|
| You've got to work on important problems.
|
| How about having lots of `brains?' It sounds good. But great work
| is something else than mere brains.
|
| The people who do great work with less ability but who are
| committed to it, get more done that those who have great skill
| and dabble in it.
|
| The prepared mind sooner or later finds something important and
| does it. So yes, it is luck. The particular thing you do is luck,
| but that you do something is not.
|
| One of the characteristics you see, and many people have it
| including great scientists, is that usually when they were young
| they had independent thoughts and had the courage to pursue them.
| justin66 wrote:
| One of the relatively younger Bell Labs guys who experienced
| Hamming (in my memory it was either Ken Thompson or Kernighan)
| described in a public talk the way Hamming would approach young
| scientists and engineers in the cafeteria and harangue them if
| he deemed their current area of research non-world shaking, and
| therefore unworthy of their attention. It was a hilarious story
| because Hamming was described after a brief pause as a
| "curmudgeon" but one got the distinct impression Hamming's
| younger associates had other, more colorful words to describe
| him.
| fossuser wrote:
| His book The Art of Doing Science and Engineering goes into
| some of this (and is just generally great):
| https://press.stripe.com/the-art-of-doing-science-and-engine...
| not-elite wrote:
| Hamming is great in general. Some years ago, I picked up a
| copy of "Numerical Methods for Scientists and Engineers" for
| like $2 at a used book store. I had no idea who Hamming was,
| but it was cheap so I bought it.
|
| After the first chapter I thought, "this guy is pretty sharp
| let's see what else he's written." That is when I found "You
| and Your Research".
| bambax wrote:
| Of course. PG's kind of obsessed by this and even republished
| the talk on his own website, for some reason:
|
| http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html
| dang wrote:
| Lots of past threads, most recently
|
| _You and Your Research (1986)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28322153 - Aug 2021 (35
| comments)
|
| with links to the rest here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28323486
| d--b wrote:
| The whole article reads bizarre to me. It's like pg believes
| there is some kind of generic smartness metric that characterizes
| people, and so you're either smart, very smart or not smart at
| all.
|
| But people can be smart at things and terrible at others. And
| it's not that smart people are terrible at things because they
| aren't curious about them, it's just that some tasks require
| different mindsets. Like I feel generally fairly smart in
| engineering, but I just can't seem to learn chess at all.
|
| Generating new ideas is an entirely different skill. You can't
| balance having ideas and being smart. You should try and have
| both, and no, one is not more important than the other.
|
| I mean the whole article feels like the stupid questions we'd ask
| ourselves when we were kids: would you rather have a 9-meter arm,
| or a boneless leg?
| Osiris wrote:
| I haven't read it but "smart" isn't some universal trait. One
| can be "smart" in one area and really dumb in another. I don't
| understand how someone can be a good chef. You can be great at
| that, intuitively using the chemistry of it while failing even
| the most basic chemistry class.
|
| I guess I should read the article.
| fullshark wrote:
| Reads to me like a VC frustrated by the lack of investment
| opportunities he's been presented lately.
| pedrosorio wrote:
| > Like I feel generally fairly smart in engineering, but I just
| can't seem to learn chess at all.
|
| This seems like binary thinking. Can't learn chess over what
| period of time, with what resources and for what definition of
| "learning chess"?
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| I did not see the word "imagination" mentioned in that article.
| It seems like a glaring omission given the topic. "How can
| imagination be cultivated?" would be an important question in
| that context. It could include things like letting kids (and
| adults) have more unstructured time, etc. We've largely
| banished boredom from the world now that we're constantly
| connected to the internet via our smartphones, but boredom
| could also be important for imagination. In my experience a lot
| of my best ideas came not with hard focus ("working hard") on a
| problem but while I was on a walk in nature not particularly
| focused on anything.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Pithy Einstein quotes likely fail to capture the full picture
| of what Einstein did and should not be used as a basis for
| casually dismissing attempts to have meatier discussions.
| reikonomusha wrote:
| I don't think he's lost much in the article by not descending
| into the rabbit-hole of developing a nuanced view of what
| "smart" means. I think it's a word used frequently enough in
| common language that the reader can do justice in interpreting
| it correctly and in good faith. Same goes for other, equally
| generic terms like, "she really has it all together" or "he's a
| pretty sharp guy". These aren't vacuous, meaningless
| statements, despite the lack of precision in their meaning.
| d--b wrote:
| Fair enough, I probably didn't express myself well.
|
| It's just that the article re-plays the old "intelligence vs
| creativity" debate, and is full of naive statements about it.
| And you kind of want to answer: "you know, I think it's a
| little more complicated"
| darawk wrote:
| > The whole article reads bizarre to me. It's like pg believes
| there is some kind of generic smartness metric that
| characterizes people, and so you're either smart, very smart or
| not smart at all.
|
| General intelligence is absolutely a real thing:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)
|
| Yes it's true that some people are good at some things and bad
| at others. That does not mean there isn't a general underlying
| "cognitive ability" factor.
| jkaplan wrote:
| > That does not mean there isn't a general underlying
| "cognitive ability" factor.
|
| Careful. "g" is a statistical regularity, not proof of a
| generalized "underlying cognitive ability."
|
| From the same Wikipedia article:
|
| >It is a variable that summarizes positive correlations among
| different cognitive tasks
|
| >Yet, there is no consensus as to what causes the positive
| correlations between tests
|
| This whole subject is a scientific, statistical, and ethical
| can of worms (as pg alludes to in the essay), and this isn't
| the place to get into it... I just want to flag that it's a
| bit more complicated/controversial than it might sound at
| first.
| darawk wrote:
| > Careful. "g" is a statistical regularity, not proof of a
| generalized "underlying cognitive ability."
|
| I mean, the statistical regularity in question is the mean
| of all other cognitive abilities correlating. I'm not sure
| how else you'd define "underlying cognitive ability" than
| "the correlated first principal component of other,
| specific cognitive abilities".
| tshaddox wrote:
| I also haven't seen any explanations for why positive
| correlation between any particular set of tests leads to
| the conclusion that this is truly a _general_ cognitive
| ability. If you test people on the ability to play the
| piano, organ, and harpsichord, and find positive
| correlation between competency in all of them, you wouldn't
| conclude that this demonstrates _general_ cognitive
| ability. You'd just conclude that those musical instruments
| are similar. Likewise, choosing a bunch of tests from, say,
| all the common areas of study in Western schools, doesn't
| automatically say anything about the entire range of
| cognitive abilities.
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| New ideas - are created by recombination and filtering. Your
| subconscious generates new recombination, the wider the scope
| and stranger the combinations - the higher the chances of a
| miss, but also of discovering a "pass" to a new field. Now
| these re-combinations are filtered, again first subconsciously.
|
| If you murdered your childish, playful self in your late youth
| or give too much about societys evaluation of what society can
| not even evaluate your idea might never creep into your aware
| consciousness.
|
| Now for the ugly part. Some of us are, by curse or luck,
| predisposed to have a more flexible brain when it comes to
| recombinating ideas, persons, circumstances.
|
| My basic assumption always was, that it is a useful side-effect
| of watchfulness aka the guardian role aka looking for danger in
| noise.
|
| This of course can go horribly wrong. A creatives world is just
| one frail filter function working away from, writing game of
| thrones too living in game of thrones in your living room. I
| really would love to see the statistics here, to test this.
|
| Any center of creativity should be surrounded by camps of
| relatives were the filter functions went haywire.
|
| Now for the final touch. There is no recipe. No "cook" this
| algorithm, dance this dance through your brain and you will
| turn more creative. If asked for it- the brain will fantasize
| and invent those recipes. Which will be nice to read, but
| worthless when attempting to reproduce. The closest one would
| get is to reproduce the education that shaped shapeable brains
| into extraordinary creative people.
|
| And if all this works out, you are still just somebody with a
| (good) idea. Ideas are plenty in the sea and having good ideas
| does not equal the ability to execute on it.
|
| I would love to have a 9 meter arm made from boneless legs.
| Thanks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Robotic_Arm
| godot wrote:
| Hmm, it seems like the article has addressed most of your
| points directly.
|
| > It's like pg believes there is some kind of generic smartness
| metric that characterizes people, and so you're either smart,
| very smart or not smart at all.
|
| > But people can be smart at things and terrible at others. And
| it's not that smart people are terrible at things because they
| aren't curious about them, it's just that some tasks require
| different mindsets. Like I feel generally fairly smart in
| engineering, but I just can't seem to learn chess at all.
|
| He addressed this specific point in the "if
| intelligence/smartness is all that matters" scenario:
|
| "If intelligence is what matters, and also mostly inborn, the
| natural consequence is a sort of Brave New World fatalism. The
| best you can do is figure out what sort of work you have an
| "aptitude" for, so that whatever intelligence you were born
| with will at least be put to the best use, and then work as
| hard as you can at it."
|
| He is acknowledging that different people have good
| intelligence in different things (like engineering vs chess in
| your example). But he is saying this really shouldn't be the
| focus at all, because intelligence isn't truly what matters.
|
| > Generating new ideas is an entirely different skill.
|
| It is and he spent most of the article saying that skill can be
| cultivated (and isn't necessarily about intelligence).
|
| > You should try and have both, and no, one is not more
| important than the other.
|
| He also stated this as well at the introduction and this was
| pretty much the point of the essay.
|
| > I mean the whole article feels like the stupid questions we'd
| ask ourselves when we were kids: would you rather have a
| 9-meter arm, or a boneless leg?
|
| Not sure I get it or how the essay feels like that question. He
| isn't saying you can only have one (intelligence) or the other
| (skill to generate new ideas). He said it's ideal to have both.
| mcguire wrote:
| Are new ideas inherently good?
| spyckie2 wrote:
| Some ways new ideas form:
|
| 1. Noticing hundreds, thousands, of details and how they fit
| together into a larger whole.
|
| - Example: When someone is so deep into an industry they
| understand every role, action, problem, and solution, and the
| shortcomings, and use that information to spot out the most
| important problems and tie them together into a new business
| idea.
|
| 2. Having an intuition of how something should be, and digging
| out that intuition through the act of creation.
|
| - Example: Artwork that is trying fully express the most ideal
| form of beauty, nature, violence, grandness, etc.
|
| 3. Noticing "bugs" / paradoxes in real life - things that don't
| make sense - and having the curiosity to debug it.
|
| - Example: Einstein realizing a paradox - "If I pursue a beam of
| light with the velocity c (velocity of light in a vacuum), I
| should observe such a beam of light as an electromagnetic field
| at rest though spatially oscillating."
| giantg2 wrote:
| Being smart and having new ideas isn't that great either. You
| still need people to believe in the idea and/or resources to
| pursue it.
|
| I have various ideas and I'm not even that smart. They wont go
| anywhere because I dont have the time or money to pursue them.
| Plus, it's hard to come up with something truly new. Even if the
| item doesn't exist, it's probably patented (ran into that
| recently).
|
| "So what are the other ingredients in having new ideas?"
|
| The willingness to think about how and why things work or are
| broken, coupled with sufficient cross-domain knowledge to
| synthesize new ideas.
| nazgulnarsil wrote:
| Was a pretty big deal to stumble across the idea that the
| machinery that generates insights could be trained back on itself
| to improve at gaining insights. You may have heard of it under
| the moniker of insight practice. :p
| handrous wrote:
| Being even a little clever--and that's the best I can claim--is
| living life on easy mode. It's so great. Once I realized that the
| other people in the room weren't not-saying the obvious thing
| because they'd already dismissed it for some reason I couldn't
| see, but because it _wasn 't obvious_ to them, it was like I
| unlocked a superpower. God, it's so wonderful. I half-ass my way
| through everything and get well-rewarded for it. Praise, money,
| recommendations. There is _no_ chance I could do that without
| this (again, quite mild, I cannot emphasize enough that I 'm _not
| even all that smart_ ) gift, the credit for which mostly goes to
| sheer chance and lucky circumstances.
|
| > I grew up thinking that being smart was the thing most to be
| desired. Perhaps you did too. But I bet it's not what you really
| want. Imagine you had a choice between being really smart but
| discovering nothing new, and being less smart but discovering
| lots of new ideas. Surely you'd take the latter.
|
| Shit no, because the whole rest of the time I'm not coming up
| with those handful of new ideas, I'm less-smart. Reading is
| harder. Math is harder. Learning anything new is harder.
| Following complex conversations is harder. Picking out subtext,
| allusions, et c., in all media, is harder. Keeping up with, let
| alone constructively challenging, my smarter-than-me kids is
| harder. I'd hesitate to take that deal _even if_ the ideas
| themselves made me rich enough I wouldn 't need to work again. I
| might take it, but I'd have to give it a good think. It'd
| radically change the entire way I relate to the world.
| erulabs wrote:
| I feel similarly having grown up near a computer when I was
| young. I can't imagine had I grown up busy farming and raising
| siblings and then children in my 20s I would have been able to
| accomplish anything at all. Or the fact that I got a rare fever
| from a tick as a child only a few years after an antidote was
| invented. The _vast_ majority of the pi-chart other than
| intelligence is _luck_.
| [deleted]
| diskzero wrote:
| Don't underestimate ones ability to adapt and change their
| circumstances. I am a sample size of one, but I grew up busy
| farming and raising siblings. It is true that I was exposed
| to computers in the 80s, but didn't own one. In my mid-
| twenties I was able to re-orient my life, fail and succeed at
| startups, work at Be, Eazel, Apple, Amazon and more.
|
| I have spent the last couple of years teaching adults whose
| backgrounds are filled with shocking adversity to think like
| programmers, build new careers and improve their lives. I am
| constantly amazed.
|
| Modern medicine is miraculous. There is no doubt a vast
| amount of human potential has been saved from oblivion.
| winternett wrote:
| The kids I grew up with in High School that attended the
| "Gifted And Talented" courses didn't really end up topping
| the gene pool after I met them at our 20 year reunion. The
| girl from our year book voted "most likely to succeed", did
| not meet her goals of being president, and probably may never
| do so... She actually had some rough life experiences like me
| too since then... I no longer have childhood goals of
| exceptionalism as a desire, nor the right social and
| political positioning for the role, not the right contacts or
| money. I just want to be happy and live on a tropical beach
| with a good wife and good kids without money problems to be
| honest.
|
| Exceptionalism in this world is indeed luck, especially when
| you consider that there are almost 7 billion other people on
| this planet besides us, and limited world resources to share
| amongst us all...
|
| To think that any one individual reached a point of higher
| talent or intelligence than everyone else is a total
| consumerism-driven lie. Movies and TV create celebrities
| because it drives profit and merchandise, not because they
| really feel the actors they back are unique and worthy. We
| find out often the people branded as "exceptional" suffer
| greatly for it very often because they gain popularity and
| consequently can't live up to the standards portrayed of
| them.
|
| The biggest lie we can tell ourselves is that we're
| exceptional beyond everyone or anyone else, physically,
| spiritually, mentally, or in any other way. Somehow there's
| an ever present ideal pushed by Gyms, Churches,
| Psychologists, News Media, TV, and Movies that exceptionalism
| can exist, but it's simply not sustainable for any
| individual, and there's a pile of discarded celebrities down
| the hill by the river in Hollywood to prove it...
|
| Once we're humble in life, and we realize that opportunity,
| paying attention, learning things, proper positioning, luck,
| and circumstance are what grant us the most potential for
| success -- It's the actions that we take to seize
| opportunities, THOSE ACTIONS WE TAKE are what set us apart
| from others who may be hesitant, not ready for, and/or
| unaware of and to the present opportunity.
|
| When we reach points of success, it's important to remind
| ourselves of others and their situations and to not look down
| upon them, and to help others to succeed as much as possible
| in order to not feel isolated in ego and self praise.
|
| I may sound like the Dali Lama here, but fighting against our
| own internal ego in a world like this one is a constant
| battle, so I work hard every day to keep everything in this
| kind of context in my own life, and I'm not perfect just like
| everyone else. Whenever I'm driving my car out in public
| though, everyone's a "frickin' idiot", that will never
| change... :P
| solveit wrote:
| I mean, intelligence is also luck. And (as much as people
| hate this), so is conscientiousness. At some point we have to
| acknowledge that dividing things into luck and not-luck is
| incoherent, and that we should use more useful axes.
| fossuser wrote:
| We're competing with each other via billions of years of
| selection - there are major advantages if you're smart (and
| if you're pretty). You can also add the quality PG is
| talking about here which requires some amount of smartness
| as a prereq (curiosity?). I'm not sure how much it can
| really be cultivated above baseline, but it'd be
| interesting to know more. I'd guess there are some
| strategies, but a lot may still be tied to your inborn
| stats.
|
| I'd argue we should strive for a society where the
| suffering you're exposed to if you're unlucky enough to be
| in the bottom quartile is bounded, while still allowing for
| the top to be unbounded in pushing humanity forward.
| Accepting there's natural variance here is part of that.
|
| We're not all the same, things aren't fair. We shouldn't
| ignore that or pretend otherwise, but we also shouldn't
| think that means those dealt a bad genetic hand need to be
| totally screwed in our society (imo) and it doesn't mean
| you need to handicap the outliers on the other side in some
| Bergeron like pursuit of 'fairness' [0].
|
| [0]: http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html
|
| Also related on the prettiness bit, this short story is
| good: https://waldyrious.neocities.org/ted_chiang/liking-
| what-you-...
| whimsicalism wrote:
| In our current context, selectively there are
| disadvantages if you are smart.
| atq2119 wrote:
| > I'd argue we should strive for a society where the
| suffering you're exposed to if you're unlucky enough to
| be in the bottom quartile is bounded, while still
| allowing for the top to be unbounded in pushing humanity
| forward.
|
| FWIW, being unbounded in pushing humanity forward is
| different from being unbounded in pushing your individual
| wealth up, so those aren't really two sides of the same
| topic.
|
| Or perhaps you really meant something different from what
| you wrote, because what you really meant doesn't sound so
| nice.
|
| I'll second the recommendation of the Ted Chiang short
| story, it's well worth a read.
| apineda wrote:
| If the upperbound is unlimited doesn't the lower bound
| essentially converge to zero? Imagine the upper strata
| (literally and figuratively) in flying cars and flying
| restaurants. The simple farm house would now seem like a
| desolate situation. Or would it?
| fossuser wrote:
| On the spectrum of possible intelligence human variance
| is small so in practice this isn't really an issue.
|
| Though what you're touching on is why misaligned AGI is
| an e-risk.
| cm2012 wrote:
| I think it should be split into two graphs, practical and
| moral.
|
| Practically, we all have to pretend we have free will. Hard
| work, diligence and deferment of the present for the future
| should be encouraged.
|
| Morally, we shouldn't judge people who struggle with the
| above. "There but for the grace of god go I", etc etc.
| Society should try to be kind to all, resources permitting.
| handrous wrote:
| > "There but for the grace of god go I"
|
| I _love_ this sentiment, and it 's one of a few I try to
| keep at the ready. I think it's underrated, as simple
| lanes to guide one's thinking go. I'm all-around much
| better, including more content, FWIW, when successfully
| holding that lane in-place.
|
| I mean, yeah, it's basically just one of the key
| heuristics of practicing Stoicism, plus a hundred other
| practical ethical frameworks and religions, but I think
| the particular framing & phrasing is especially apt.
| diskzero wrote:
| Kindness does indeed seem to be lacking. I constantly
| remind myself that all work is noble and aspire to extend
| empathy, compassion and sympathy to others.
| achenet wrote:
| Thank you for doing that.
|
| I try to do the same. :)
| mikewave wrote:
| > I can't imagine had I grown up busy farming and raising
| siblings and then children in my 20s I would have been able
| to accomplish anything at all.
|
| This really depends how you frame 'accomplishment', which is
| very much up to you. I think that successfully raising
| children who can successfully raise children is in and of
| itself an accomplishment; forming a family and keeping it
| intact through your inevitable troubles, working the land and
| producing enough excess food to earn everything else you
| need... our culture would be better if we actually viewed
| such people as 'accomplished' instead of pretending that
| being a C-suite officer of some SaaS b2b griftware is
| inherently of more value to anyone, anywhere.
| tibbar wrote:
| > Shit no, because the whole rest of the time I'm not coming up
| with those handful of new ideas, I'm less-smart.
|
| For better or worse, I am such a person: good at generating
| ideas and product vision, merely competent at technical
| execution. Put another way, my verbal iq and empathy (if that
| can be measured) are much stronger than my analytical iq, as
| confirmed by essentially every standardized test I've ever
| taken. As a result, I function and process information
| differently than a lot of my engineer peers. Some things are
| obviously harder for me, which can be painful and embarrassing,
| but as a rule I'm involved in lots of interesting discussions
| and design sessions and tend to be a de facto product manager.
| It's just different, a trade off in mental styles.
| admissionsguy wrote:
| > Being even a little clever--and that's the best I can claim--
| is living life on easy mode.
|
| Doesn't even compare to being tall and good looking.
| 5faulker wrote:
| I'm not sure how smart you are, but there's a lot of wisdom in
| what you said. Smart is multi-dimensional for me anyway.
| handrous wrote:
| > Smart is multi-dimensional for me anyway.
|
| Strongly agreed about "smart" not being just one thing.
| Somewhere there's someone who's normal at the things I'm good
| at, and excellent at the things I'm so-so or bad at (there
| are _several_ of those), and they 're probably glad they get
| to "play" life on easy mode, too. Somewhere there's someone
| who's as good as both of us at _all_ those things, and they
| probably own an island and have a private jet and don 't
| think it was particularly challenging to get to that position
| in life. Maybe--if there's, in fact, exactly one thing
| they're bad at--they even wonder why other people don't do
| it.
| cm2012 wrote:
| My sister and I were just talking about this. We'd been coming
| to realize independently how much faster we think than average
| people. We didn't realize it growing up, since we went to
| gifted schools our whole lives (public schools we tested into,
| not private) and everybody was bright there. Living life
| outside of the gifted bubble has given us perspective on how
| lucky we were to born this way.
| [deleted]
| psysharp wrote:
| Why do you think thinking fast is more important than
| thinking slowly?
| outworlder wrote:
| > Why do you think thinking fast is more important than
| thinking slowly?
|
| I would say _that_ should be the definition of intelligence
| (as in, how 'smart' one is). If it takes someone a day to
| understand something, and it takes someone else 5 minutes
| to do the same, it's not just a matter of time spent. It
| completely shapes _how_ one thinks and how deep you can go
| in any given subject. There's only so much brainpower we
| can expend before getting tired and 'restarting' tasks is
| not easy.
|
| Let's say if you are listening to a discussion with a topic
| you aren't very familiar with, but your peers are extremely
| familiar with. You'll see that the way the conversation
| flows is very different. They will rapid fire, exchange
| incomplete sentences (because the other person has inferred
| the rest) and overall have a much more rich and complex
| conversation. You'll be thinking about the next chess move,
| they will be thinking 10 steps ahead.
|
| Then you'll say: "that's a bad example, this is about
| knowledge, not intelligence, they are doing it faster
| because they know more about the subject". Yes. I'll argue
| that a meaningful 'intelligence' delta doesn't really exist
| among healthy humans. It's all about how many patterns you
| have been exposed to. When we try to measure intelligence,
| we end up measuring knowledge, every single time.
|
| Take the Mensa tests. Someone who went to good schools and
| did mentally challenging things will have most likely
| encountered similar questions before. Not exactly the same
| questions, but adapting something you have seen before to a
| new situation is much easier than doing this for the first
| time.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| why is the mensa test timed?
| psysharp wrote:
| Good question, maybe because time is tangible and
| measurable? I don't know
| cm2012 wrote:
| It makes life easier. E.G.
|
| - Someone is explaining a concept.
|
| - We get it in a few seconds, can come up connections, next
| steps, implications, etc.
|
| - Other people need to have it explained longer, or miss
| the main point, or don't see how it connects to other
| pertinent things.
|
| You can see how that would make life easier, and make you
| more effective at a variety of real time tasks.
| psysharp wrote:
| If you had the choice understand the concept 10 times
| slower but in the end would come up with twice the amount
| of connections, would you consider it as something
| valuable?
|
| Yes I see how it would make life easier, but is that
| really a meaningful goal?
|
| And how do we know that the reasons behind that it makes
| life easier isn't just a bias society has towards its own
| traits? - E.g life is easier for right handed people
| aswell.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I think the extent to which this actually occurs is
| overstated in discussions of intelligence because it
| makes people feel better, but maybe I'm just an asshole.
| cm2012 wrote:
| We agree in part, I don't think its morally better to
| think faster. Just that it makes life easier/makes it
| easier to achieve life outcomes you want.
| Jensson wrote:
| > If you had the choice understand the concept 10 times
| slower but in the end would come up with twice the amount
| of connections, would you consider it as something
| valuable?
|
| But then they aren't just thinking slower, they are doing
| more processing. It isn't just "slow vs fast', it is
| "more processing vs less processing". Similarly if two
| people eat hamburgers as fast, but one of them eat twice
| as many hamburgers and therefore takes twice the time, it
| doesn't make him a "slow eater" it just means he eats a
| lot per meal.
| psysharp wrote:
| Absolutely.
|
| Then the question becomes: when is something fully
| processed - and to which degree is a person inclined to
| explore the depths of a concept?
|
| What is the limit that decides when depth is no longer
| valuable?
| Jensson wrote:
| But that is a different question.
| agustif wrote:
| Yup, but this always made school so fucking boring for
| me. Get it the 5 first minutes the teacher explains,
| spend 55 other minutes wandering in your mind about other
| stuff while the teacher proceeds to drill it into your
| peers memory repeating it ad-nauseaum until they sing it
| like fucking gospel.
|
| That's the education I experienced at least, maybe
| someone else had better luck, but once you've to slowdown
| to the slowest of 30, and you're the fastest, things get
| pretty slow.
| handrous wrote:
| This messed me up so bad when I finally hit material I
| needed to work at _even a little_. Years and years and
| years of getting things instantly, with no effort
| whatsoever. Lecturing about the same thing again for the
| fifth day in a row, but I had it the first day? Cool, I
| 'll draw cartoons and still answer any questions you ask
| me. Hand me a test? No problem. A-grade work in 5
| minutes, read my book for the remainder of the hour. My
| stupid kid brain (this was... age 13 or so? Maybe 14?)
| was _sure_ something horrible had happened to me over the
| Summer and I was now an idiot, when that stopped being
| how things worked. I wouldn 't be surprised if I could
| have been diagnosed with actual depression, from then
| through my early 20s, mostly due to that and the follow-
| on effects.
|
| I've since learned this is a super-common experience for
| gifted kids and one of the things really good gifted
| programs focus early on mitigating. I gather kids smarter
| than I was may still experience something similar, but
| not until they burn out _hard_ and very suddenly, around
| Sophomore or Junior year of a challenging degree program.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| Perhaps we should question the assumption that some people
| are conciously thinking at all.
|
| Being bored out of my mind in grade school and unable to read
| anything else during that time just led to a lot of day
| dreaming and not "productive" or directed thinking. What do
| people bored out their minds at work/life think about?
| bloodyplonker22 wrote:
| They think about the short term, an end result rather than
| how to get there. That's one constant that will persist
| through time with "less than smart" people.
| handrous wrote:
| > What do people bored out their minds at work/life think
| about?
|
| Host: What's the most complex thing you do in your kitchen?
|
| David Mitchel: _thinks for a fraction of a second_ Worry
| about death.
| cosentiyes wrote:
| > > Surely you'd take the latter.
|
| > Shit no, because the whole rest of the time I'm not coming up
| with those handful of new ideas, I'm less-smart.
|
| For lack of a better metric, how many IQ points would you be
| willing to trade per new idea? It feels likely that
| environmental factors and luck have a much higher impact on
| happiness and other outcomes for individuals within whatever
| defines the "high intelligence" or "slightly gifted range". I'd
| probably make the "less smart" trade for 1-2 novel/high quality
| ideas since you're basically guaranteeing one or two high
| rolls. I doubt a 1-2% bump in intelligence would outweigh the
| benefits.
|
| I'm making lots of assumptions here around being able to
| successfully act on new ideas and that intelligence has
| marginal gains once you're locked into above-average-but-not-
| top quantiles.
| handrous wrote:
| > For lack of a better metric, how many IQ points would you
| be willing to trade per new idea? It feels likely that
| environmental factors and luck have a much higher impact on
| happiness and other outcomes for individuals within whatever
| defines the "high intelligence" or "slightly gifted range".
| I'd probably make the "less smart" trade for 1-2 novel/high
| quality ideas since you're basically guaranteeing one or two
| high rolls. I doubt a 1-2% bump in intelligence would
| outweigh the benefits.
|
| For one that'd make me at least somewhat rich? Maybe one or
| two. But I have a feeling I'd end up regretting even that,
| worrying "would I have gotten this idea I'm not getting, if I
| hadn't made that trade?", or if a loss of interest in
| something is because I'm now slightly dumber, or whatever,
| every day, for the entire rest of my life. Aging-related
| brain changes are already terrifying, without helping them
| along.
| WFHRenaissance wrote:
| > sheer chance and lucky circumstances.
|
| LOL, dualism moment. There is no "you" outside of your genetics
| and the socialization you experienced. There is definitely some
| luck involved, but also you're the product of a lot more work
| and planning than you give yourself credit for.
| wlg wrote:
| Dualism is a theory in philosophy of mind, not in personal
| identity. It doesn't have any opinion about who "you" are, so
| it doesn't have any opinion on the counterfactual "But for
| luck, I could have been less smart."
|
| It sounds like what you really mean is something like a
| psychological continuity (identity is having psychological
| continuity) or animalist (identity is being the same human
| animal) view, which are both consistent with some mental
| characteristics (like intelligence) being accidental to who
| we are.
| cm2012 wrote:
| The propensity to work hard and be good at planning is just
| as heritable as IQ. The extent to which you can defer current
| pleasure for future gain is basically established by the time
| you're 6 years old, so reaping the benefits of it as an adult
| is luck.
|
| In another way, yes hard work and good planning is vital to
| success. But you shouldn't pat yourself on the back too hard
| for it, and you shouldn't think of yourself morally better
| than anyone else for it.
|
| (This isn't sour grapes from me. I'm successful and worked
| incredibly hard for years without much money.)
| mywittyname wrote:
| > you're the product of a lot more work and planning than you
| give yourself credit for.
|
| Some people are lucky enough to have parents/family that
| handle this planning for us at young ages, knowing we will
| benefit in the future.
| ogre_magi wrote:
| Do you think you were "lucky" not to be a mosquito?
|
| Do you think you were "lucky" not to be a 100kg mass of
| disconnected plasma inside the sun?
|
| This doesn't make any sense. There are different processes
| in our universe that produce different things, from plasma
| to rocks to mosquitos to unsuccessful people to successful
| people.
|
| These processes are different, and their outputs are not
| fungible. There's no luck. There's no sense in which "you"
| could have been anything except what you are.
| exolymph wrote:
| That's the luck, happening to be who you are. Other
| people happen to be who they are, and that's their luck.
|
| Luck = fate
| ahevia wrote:
| I mean. When folks use the term luck they often just use
| to express gratitude. Whether that's to the void or to
| their god.
|
| It's weird to point out the usage here. Sure someone can
| say "I'm grateful the insane probabilities of every small
| detail that led to today collapsed on me living a good
| life", but it's easier to just say "I'm so lucky".
|
| > There's no sense in which "you" could have been
| anything except what you are.
|
| Perhaps yea, this feels tangential to the argument there
| is no free will and the universe is 100% deterministic.
| Maybe I'm reading too much into your comment, but for my
| lived experience. It certainly doesn't feel that I was
| 100% destined to end up here. Im sure others feel the
| same way that their circumstances were never
| predetermined.
| Jensson wrote:
| That isn't how people usually view luck. If someone says
| "My success was all luck!", people wouldn't assume that
| this guy was lucky to be born smart and hard working and
| therefore worked his ass off to achieve his results with
| no particularly lucky event happening past his birth. No,
| they'd assume something like, the guy next to him at a
| buss stop happened to be this rich businessman and just
| happened to need something right now, and then that lead
| to more similar events and now he is the CEO of a big
| multi national corporation.
| cm2012 wrote:
| Its not how people usually perceive luck, but its a more
| accurate way of perceiving luck IMO.
| ogre_magi wrote:
| Reading this comment was really important to me.
|
| I encounter this "luck" argument that implies dualism, of a
| self separate from biology and life experience that could
| have somehow existed in a different body, all the time.
|
| And until I read this comment I felt like I was the only
| person who found that idea specious.
| SquishyPanda23 wrote:
| > Being even a little clever--and that's the best I can claim--
| is living life on easy mode
|
| That is probably true about being a little clever, but being
| really smart is not easy in the general case. Really smart
| people often share few ideas and interests with others and
| spend much of their lives lonely and misunderstood.
| cm2012 wrote:
| Nonetheless, IQ correlates to life outcomes like income
| really well. Averages are by no means destiny, but on average
| IQ makes life easier.
| dagw wrote:
| There are several studies that show that IQ correlates with
| income, at least at the extremes. However the studies I've
| seen found no correlations between IQ and overall happiness
| or contentment with how their life turned out.
| SquishyPanda23 wrote:
| Yes, that's true. If you project down to a linear
| relationship, more IQ is associated with more income.
|
| Most of the data you see on that stop around an IQ of 125,
| which is about the average IQ of a PhD in the US.
|
| But there's also a lot of research on people with very high
| iq and the links with depression, anxiety, loneliness etc.
|
| If you want the easiest life possible, I don't think you
| want to maximize IQ. I think you want to go high enough
| that you're eligible for the high paying jobs, but not so
| smart that you feel like the other people in those jobs are
| idiots.
| outworlder wrote:
| > Being even a little clever--and that's the best I can claim--
| is living life on easy mode. It's so great. Once I realized
| that the other people in the room weren't not-saying the
| obvious thing because they'd already dismissed it for some
| reason I couldn't see, but because it wasn't obvious to them,
| it was like I unlocked a superpower.
|
| The thing is - I don't agree with Paul Graham at all. Sure,
| there might be a genetic component to being 'smart', but I
| doubt it means that people are just born with a better "CPU".
| Maybe they are 0.1% better overall.
|
| Rather, I don't think we can properly control
| variables(ethically). If your parents are 'smart', they will do
| 'smart' things. They will give you the attention you need. They
| will give you a balanced diet. They will buy you books. They
| will teach you difficult concepts. You'll see them studying or
| otherwise getting invested in their careers and, as kids, we
| mimic what you see. Over time, you develop 'smart' habits, and
| you exercise your brain.
|
| You'll also accumulate all sorts of 'patterns', that let you
| quickly see those things that aren't 'obvious' to everyone
| else. They are obvious to you, probably because you have seen
| something similar before, even in a different context. The more
| 'patterns' you have, the quicker you can spot them, and you can
| tie things together faster if you are not focusing on learning
| entirely new things at the same time.
|
| Even if you had nothing of the sort growing up, by just trying
| to engage your brain while doing most of your tasks, you are
| far ahead of most people. What people tend to do is, whenever
| they find something that worked, even if only once, they will
| stick with that solution, for every situation. They don't
| normally ask themselves if the resolution is still appropriate
| for the situation in hand. Keep this as a background process,
| and you do have a superpower.
| Retric wrote:
| Your proposing a testable hypotheses which has been disproven
| through studies of the adopted and especially twins.
| Intelligence and genetics are strongly linked, most obviously
| via negatives like Down syndrome but that's far from the only
| influence.
|
| One of many examples: https://resources.corwin.com/sites/defa
| ult/files/handout_18....
| manquer wrote:
| I would say I have the opposite experience on being only a bit
| clever.
|
| Being not smart at all usually also means you are ignorant to
| what you don't know, that life has its merits, Repetitive jobs
| don't bore you, and happiness comes from simpler joys in life.
| I wouldn't mind living that way at all.
|
| Being very smart means none of the stuff you mention is hard.
| Math comes naturally, Crazy smart people need to put no effort
| to understand complex topics, while their happiness is
| typically in esoteric goals or breakthrough research, most
| people don't understand anything of what they do, so either
| society is sympathetic to challenges or oblivious to what they
| do. Financially/Socially once they have a safe academic job,
| the difference of success/failure is not visible to most
| regular people, even if they win a field's medal or Noble prize
| most people hardly understand it.
|
| Being a bit clever is the worst of the lot, you understand
| enough to know how much you don't really know. Constantly you
| are making decisions basis what you know is poor understanding.
| Math, subtext, knowledge is all hard, but doesn't look so hard
| you will completely give up or blissfully don't know it exists.
|
| Social peer groups keep missing that intelligence can be pretty
| scaled, we can perceive that someone is smarter than us but not
| by how much. Everyone one assumes there is just one level above
| them, equivalent to crazy smart. We are therefore accorded with
| the praise, money and recommendations and also
| _responsibilities_ of being perceived crazy smart.
|
| I would happily trade to being exactly perceived as I am or
| less and forgo all the money and praise if I didn't also be
| saddled with expectations of coming up with solutions all the
| time.
| Aperocky wrote:
| > Repetitive jobs don't bore you, and happiness comes from
| simpler joys in life. I wouldn't mind living that way at all.
|
| As much as I sometime would want to be the cat that I owned,
| I enjoy much more about actually understanding the world
| around me (physically).
|
| Still bound to flesh and dopamine for happiness, but it's
| about the best deal we have on Earth right now.
| hans1729 wrote:
| >Being not smart at all usually also means you are ignorant
| to what you don't know, that life has its merits, Repetitive
| jobs don't bore you, and happiness comes from simpler joys in
| life. I wouldn't mind living that way at all.
|
| You're mixing up all kinds of unrelated things here. As does
| PG. Whats smartness? Going by Joscha Bach, it's the ability
| to reach your goals, as opposed to intelligence, your ability
| to make models. Wether repetitive work bores you isn't a
| matter of intelligence or smartness, however it does
| correlate significantly with cognitive functions (Jung).
|
| The then following paragraph seems projective to me,
| generalizations are just all over the place; thats just not
| how it works, neither from a neuro- nor from a psychological
| perspective. It doesn't matter wether you're intellectual
| middle or high brow, you will always be an idiot because
| you'll always be residing in a brain, being bound to its
| constraints of focus and attention. the notion of absolute
| intelligence that you imply when relating to "being a bit
| clever is the worst of the lot" seems off to me.
|
| >I would happily trade to being exactly perceived as I am or
| less and forgo all the money and praise if I didn't also be
| saddled with expectations of coming up with solutions all the
| time.
|
| You're contradicting yourself: first you say that the general
| population doesn't get what being smart implies, and then you
| say that the general population expects you to deliver on
| what being smart implies
|
| Sorry if this came off hostile, it wasn't meant so in any
| way. I just can't relate to these absolute notions and would
| strongly suggest you to read into psychology and neuroscience
| mach1ne wrote:
| You lost me at the last sentence. (Jk, actually at Joscha
| Bach). The thing is, there is no consensus on what
| intelligence or smartness or any concept adjacent is. The
| layman notion is indeed wrong. But reading psychology and
| neuroscience will only put you deeper into this misery, as
| the theories proposed have shaky foundations and contradict
| each other.
|
| I guess that the brain being a complex system there might
| not be one or multiple attributes of intelligence; just
| different behaviours.
| breck wrote:
| > I guess that the brain being a complex system there
| might not be one or multiple attributes of intelligence;
| just different behaviours
|
| I just ordered "Society of Mind" by Minsky. I spent some
| time this year working on multi agent simulations, then
| started wondering about the individual as really an
| apartment building of agents, and then started looking
| for the prior art, and found that book. This will
| probably be a dead end like so many before but that's the
| current thread I'm on in my understanding of the complex
| system that is the brain.
| manquer wrote:
| I don't think anything you said is hostile. Perhaps I
| should have redrafted it better given that nature of of
| topic, I should have expected to be misunderstood a bit.
|
| ---
|
| Firstly _Caveat Lector_ : Yes generalization is a natural
| hazard of this topic and I am guilty as everyone else on
| this thread, we(and PG) are drawing conclusions basis
| anecdotal personal experiences and generalizing that
| obviously may not hold. Perhaps I should have called out
| explicitly, I assumed that is already implicitly clear in
| this topic. Everything I say[1] in this kind of topic is
| almost always a opinion or a best a theory.
|
| ----
|
| The scale to me[2]: Not being smart[3] means everyone
| assumes you are their level or below them. A "little bit
| smart" means when some(many) people assume you know better
| than them. Crazy smart is people I cannot understand and
| are way smarter than I am.
|
| I am not saying general population, I am saying it is
| difficult to comprehend how much smarter[2] _anyone_ else
| for any person independent of their own personal levels
| that is by kind of basic limitation of not being as smart
| as them, if you could understand the gap you would probably
| as smart as well. It doesn 't matter if the first person is
| super smart already and other person is even smarter. This
| has an effect that people inherently under or
| overestimate[4] what the other person is capable of, that
| is what am alluding to.
|
| I don't have a knowledge on neuroscience to comment on
| that, however I absolutely do not have any interest in
| reading anymore psychology or debate with amateurs /
| professionals on it, my experience[5] interacting with the
| field : it is filled with pseudo-science (Yes including big
| names like Jung), every conventional term has _always_ has
| different professional meaning which layman are expected to
| know fluently to discuss anything related, evidence
| /studies for many widely held theories is usually small
| sampled studies and typically math is at best basic linear
| regression models conflating correlation and causation .
|
| Psychology and Economics are two fields I consider a lot of
| waste of time trying to study for non professionals [6],
| Metaphysics or philosophy at least is fully abstract( like
| Math?), this mixing of reality with pretty weak science[7]
| makes a pretty bad combination. I understand that may makes
| me ignorant in some eyes. Sadly a lot of economic and
| workplace policy is determined by influential schools of
| thought in both fields, as everybody is affected by policy
| everyone has(should have) a opinion .
|
| ----
|
| P.S. I didn't intend come across as aggressive/harsh or
| snide, but trying to be specific can come across has not
| being polite and snide, I am not that a gifted a writer(and
| English is not my first language) to write the same intent
| and make it sound better, apologies if it did not come out
| well.
|
| ----
|
| [1] For that matter anyone else says including
| professionals, I can only claim for myself though.
|
| [2] This may not apply to others, I am not a professional
| to be able to generalize it, I am just sharing my anecdotal
| version.
|
| [3] Smart here and all other terms I am using is common
| sense definitions, kind of similar to "I will know it when
| I see it" obscenity definition by Potter in the Roth test.
| I don't have any expertise or interest in framing in formal
| narrow terms [4] In my experience
|
| [5] I can only talk about my personal experience, all of
| these are generalizations, am sure will have dozens of
| exceptions or completely opposite view points backed with
| solid evidence. It is statement of opinion not fact.
|
| [6] You( and the world) may a different opinion on this, I
| am not stating it as what everyone should also see it as,
| just how I see it, and I am fine not holding a consensus
| view
|
| [7] In my view
| mrkstu wrote:
| So much _this..._
|
| I'm one of eleven kids- I was the 'smart one' and what an
| absolute drag that title was and is. The title still sticks
| despite having a brother with multiple award winning plays,
| another brother being a successful serial entrepreneur, and
| sisters with published books.
|
| I've watched them succeed while I didn't finish college due
| to ADHD driving me to distraction. Luckily I have the
| computer skills requisite to be a successful network
| architect- but I'm quite aware I could have been a surgeon, a
| constitutional lawyer, a good to great political commentator
| or a quant if I had that next bit of mental concentration and
| memory.
|
| I'm very aware of that gap and it grinds in the gears pretty
| continually now that I'm older and firmly entrenched in a
| career- what a bit of ADHD meds at the right time in my life
| would have meant to allow that potential to be unlocked. To
| see those I was on the debate team with or in the same book
| clubs or Latin class being able to step up to the next level
| and build fairly continually rather than fighting against
| their mental shortcomings.
|
| But really, in the end, I still have that bit more access to
| curiosity and the deeper things that come with that
| curiosity- I was commenting to my daughters in the car the
| other day that the acceleration they felt in the car pushing
| them back in their seats was functionally equivalent to
| gravity. That they are constantly accelerating towards the
| earth, which is what keeps them connected to the ground. That
| kind of thinking, though in many ways generic and obvious, is
| probably not a thing any of my siblings would say and an
| important part of how I think and approach the world- and not
| something I would trade to step down into for a bit more
| oblivious contentment.
| handrous wrote:
| > I've watched them succeed while I didn't finish college
| due to ADHD driving me to distraction. Luckily I have the
| computer skills requisite to be a successful network
| architect- but I'm quite aware I could have been a surgeon,
| a constitutional lawyer, a good to great political
| commentator or a quant if I had that next bit of mental
| concentration and memory.
|
| Welcome to the party, pal :-)
|
| I still think it's a hell of a lot better than being _not
| smart_ and saddled with those problems, as guilty as I
| sometimes feel for not "living up to my potential". I'd
| probably be homeless or barely making ends meet while
| bouncing between minimum wage jobs, instead of living
| really well with shockingly little effort. My deficiencies
| are very frustrating and trigger lots of negative
| rumination when I think about what might have been if I'd
| had _just_ the right person take notice early on and
| intervene in _just_ the right ways--until I remind myself
| how much worse it could be, which is a whole damn lot
| worse.
|
| > I'm one of eleven kids- I was the 'smart one' and what an
| absolute drag that title was and is. The title still sticks
| despite having a brother with multiple award winning plays,
| another brother being a successful serial entrepreneur, and
| sisters with published books.
|
| Ah, a member of Salinger's Glass family, I see. ;-)
| clairity wrote:
| > "Reading is harder. Math is harder. Learning anything new is
| harder. Following complex conversations is harder. Picking out
| subtext, allusions, et c., in all media, is harder."
|
| smarts can't be summed up into a single all-encompassing
| quality that you have or you don't. you can be socially savvy
| and not be good at math, or great at basketball and be socially
| awkward. this is a 'not smart' observation that undermines your
| whole humble-brag.
| tfehring wrote:
| Sure, the skills the parent comment mentioned are all
| separate skills, but they're probably pretty strongly (and
| positively) correlated with each other and with traditional
| measures of intelligence like performance on IQ tests. It's
| accurate to say that intelligence isn't the only thing that
| matters, and probably accurate to say that society generally
| overstates its importance, but claiming that intelligence
| doesn't exist is a severe and inaccurate overcorrection.
| achenet wrote:
| "The g factor (also known as general intelligence, general
| mental ability or general intelligence factor) is a construct
| developed in psychometric investigations of cognitive
| abilities and human intelligence. It is a variable that
| summarizes positive correlations among different cognitive
| tasks, reflecting the fact that an individual's performance
| on one type of cognitive task tends to be comparable to that
| person's performance on other kinds of cognitive tasks. "
|
| from:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_%28psychometrics%29
| asdfman123 wrote:
| I truly excel at the first three things -- I get high test
| scores and can get good at a wide range of things without
| even trying -- but I struggle to follow conversations due to
| ADHD + shyness and it drives me crazy.
| reikonomusha wrote:
| I read your comment as "yes I prefer life to be easier and
| complacent over difficult and interesting." Is this too coarse
| of an interpretation? I seem to agree with pg: I'd _much_
| rather have good ideas and trouble "executing" because there
| are always smart people who can help me understand better, or
| execute better, or whatever; than being super smart and at the
| end of the day nothing to do with it.
|
| Reminds me of genius programmers, who can easily coast through
| interviews or jobs, but who've otherwise got nothing of their
| own to write or show of it. That's not _bad_ , it just means
| their smarts are in service to someone else's ideas--which is
| OK!
| gowld wrote:
| "there are always smart people who can help me understand
| better, or execute better,"
|
| Not if everyone becomes an Idea Person like pg proposes!
|
| There's more to "do" than just "discover new things". What's
| the point of discovering new things if we don't use them for
| anything?
| reikonomusha wrote:
| "Having ideas" isn't "being an idea person"--the latter I
| hear colloquially to mean "spitballs superficial proposals
| that other people sort through". I also don't think what
| you suggest is what pg suggests. Einstein had ideas, but he
| didn't just blather about them at a high level until some
| smart person did the "real" work.
|
| I also didn't mean to suggest I'd rather "just have ideas",
| I meant "I'd rather have ideas and a difficult time
| executing on them" as opposed to "being smart with no ideas
| at all."
| handrous wrote:
| I see it as a trade-off between "glory" and having an
| otherwise very nice life, as framed--trading "being smart"
| for "having some really good ideas", which is a rather odd
| trade, but I'm addressing the text in its own terms. Between
| "have some very good ideas" and "be even a _little_ smart the
| entire rest of the time ", if I can only choose one, yes, I'm
| strongly inclined to choose the latter.
|
| "Being smart" benefits me and shapes my very _identity_ by
| affecting my perceptions and experience of everything, every
| waking second; having some very good ideas might make me
| money and make me known as "the guy who came up with X, Y
| and Z". Having both would be great, obviously! But if PG's
| presenting some weird "pick one" choice between the two, then
| claiming it's _obvious_ which one a person would pick, yeah,
| I 'm leaning toward, "no, your assertion and assumptions on
| which you're couching this entire line of argument are far
| too broad, it's 'be smart' by a mile and I doubt I'm alone in
| that choice".
|
| It's Achilles' choice, as I see it (though, again, it's a
| _weird_ pair of things to ask people to choose between) and
| as much as I like reading about him, and as impressive as it
| is that we still know his name and what he did (taking the
| stories as true, and the character as real, for the sake of
| lending what he opted for the most possible appeal), thanks
| but no thanks.
| qqtt wrote:
| I find it interesting how people want to characterize your
| choice between "living easy" versus "living interesting".
| Or "living simple" versus "living complacent". There seems
| to be this tendency to inject some negative connotations
| into the approach of "living simple" such as "it's not
| interesting", "it's not difficult", "you aren't challenging
| yourself", "you are being lazy", "you are being
| complacent". There seems to be something innate in people
| that needs to attack this alternative approach to life.
|
| It seems to be going over peoples heads that being
| personally smarter has the potential to enrich your own
| life in ways that being rich/being the "idea guy" don't. If
| you "aren't smart", it doesn't matter how much immense
| wealth you have, your personal relationships will be
| affected in some pretty fundamental ways.
|
| I think there is a philosophy at the heart of Y Combinator
| and their philosophy that "ideas and execution are
| everything" - you need to start from a creative place and
| can fill in smart people as tools to enable your vision
| later. A corollary to this attitude is that they look for
| passionate younger people and foster an approach which is
| work very hard during your younger years building on your
| idea.
|
| I find it relevant to share the Parable of the Fisherman
| from the 4 day workweek:
|
| An American investment banker was taking a much-needed
| vacation in a small coastal Mexican village when a small
| boat with just one fisherman docked. The boat had several
| large, fresh fish in it.
|
| The investment banker was impressed by the quality of the
| fish and asked the Mexican how long it took to catch them.
| The Mexican replied, "Only a little while." The banker then
| asked why he didn't stay out longer and catch more fish?
| The Mexican fisherman replied he had enough to support his
| family's immediate needs.
|
| The American then asked, "But what do you do with the rest
| of your time?"
|
| The Mexican fisherman replied, "I sleep late, fish a
| little, play with my children, take siesta with my wife,
| stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and
| play guitar with my amigos: I have a full and busy life,
| senor."
|
| The investment banker scoffed, "I am an Ivy League MBA, and
| I could help you. You could spend more time fishing and
| with the proceeds buy a bigger boat, and with the proceeds
| from the bigger boat, you could buy several boats until
| eventually, you would have a whole fleet of fishing boats.
| Instead of selling your catch to the middleman you could
| sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own
| cannery. You could control the product, processing and
| distribution." Then he added, "Of course, you would need to
| leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico
| City where you would run your growing enterprise."
|
| The Mexican fisherman asked, "But senor, how long will this
| all take?"
|
| To which the American replied, "15-20 years."
|
| "But what then?" asked the Mexican.
|
| The American laughed and said, "That's the best part. When
| the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your
| company stock to the public and become very rich. You could
| make millions."
|
| "Millions, senor? Then what?"
|
| To which the investment banker replied, "Then you would
| retire. You could move to a small coastal fishing village
| where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your
| kids, take siesta with your wife, stroll to the village in
| the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar
| with your amigos."
| reikonomusha wrote:
| I think you're reading into the thoughts of others
| elsewhere too much. I don't think living a "simple life"
| or whatever is objected by anyone. I don't think "having
| ideas" is also some big stakes quality that totally
| upends someone's lifestyle. A lot of the most creative,
| interesting, and idea-ful people in history lived simple,
| modest lives. Many writers, painters, musicians,
| mathematicians, scientists, philosophers, etc. were well
| known for "schedules" that consisted of waking up late,
| having a nice meal, going for a walk, doing some creative
| stuff for a few hours, having a nice dinner, etc etc. A
| "simple" lifestyle is completely compatible with
| originality, productivity, creativity, and personal
| growth. Denying that would be a crime against yourself.
|
| Yes, I think in this forum, sometimes there are
| hyperbolic takes on working hard, grinding, etc., but I
| think that's an orthogonal concern about work, startups,
| and the like.
|
| These negative connotations that you mention come from
| obvious places. "I'm smart, life is easy, and I'd like to
| keep it that way." How is this not complacency? It's the
| epitome of self-satisfaction and a desire to remain
| static. What on earth grows, evolves, or improves without
| difficulty, self-imposed or otherwise? This angle works
| whether it be biological, social, intellectual, artistic,
| or technical. The very _nature_ of improvement
| _necessarily involves_ failure, and I contend a desire
| for comfort--especially that which is stood up from some
| natural intelligence--is equally a desire to not fail.
|
| Having ideas is one manifestation of an avenue for
| failure. Most ideas are bad and don't work. Again,
| "ideas" here transcend business proposals, as we might
| assume here on HN. For instance, I'm an amateur classical
| musician, and sometimes when I'm playing a piece, I will
| try different things not marked in the score. Maybe
| they'll be good, maybe not. But I'd rather _have ideas to
| try_ as a means to improve my musicianship (and perhaps
| even my own musical intelligence!) over simply _being
| smart_ by reciting a score as written with a bone-dry,
| scholarly performance. Of course, this means my life is
| now made a hair more difficult, because the effort I put
| into performing something may be for nought if my idea
| turns out to be botched. But that 's par for the course
| when you're doing something new that nobody else has done
| before. Are scholarly performances a bad thing? Not
| intrinsically, but I'd explicitly attach negative
| connotation to your musicianship if that's all you can
| do.
|
| If I'm honest, I really want to go a step further and
| link creativity, ideas, etc. to some philosophical notion
| of _being human_ , but it's certainly an argument beyond
| my caliber to make.
| qqtt wrote:
| > "I'm smart, life is easy, and I'd like to keep it that
| way." How is this not complacency?
|
| It's all about your perspective. "I have many ideas, I'm
| working hard to achieve them, and I'd like to keep it
| that way."
|
| This could also be construed as static, self-satisfied,
| and "complacent" in it's own way. Complacency is
| ultimately a negative and derogatory word - using it to
| characterize an approach you don't agree with seems
| disingenuous.
|
| You can lead a simple life and still be taking risks, and
| be comfortable with failure. There seems to be some hard
| intrinsic assumptions going on in this conversation that
| "having ideas and executing on them" is the only avenue
| in life worth pursuing, because failure, risk,
| fulfillment can't be defined along any other angles.
|
| As you say: a "simple" lifestyle is completely compatible
| with originality, productivity, creativity, and personal
| growth. Denying that would be a crime against yourself.
|
| You can lead a simple lifestyle, and still experiment
| with your passions. Creating new musical scores, taking
| risks, and putting yourself out in the world to fail -
| none of this is fundamentally incompatible with having a
| simple lifestyle.
|
| I feel like we are both orbiting the same point but
| viewing things from two different perspectives. It may be
| as simple as us not fully agreeing on what a "simple
| lifestyle" actually entails. In the context of the
| original post, it's a dichotomy between "having ideas"
| and "being smart". As the grandparent alluded too,
| "having ideas" becomes a function on how you can impose
| yourself upon the world to influence it, "being smart" is
| a function of how you personally experience the world. I
| think that is really the heart of it, and for some, your
| personal experience is paramount to your short time on
| this planet you get to experience being alive - and
| compromising that just to have more ideas just seems
| antithetical to the entire enjoyment of life.
| reikonomusha wrote:
| > It's all about your perspective. "I have many ideas,
| I'm working hard to achieve them, and I'd like to keep it
| that way."
|
| > This could also be construed as static, self-satisfied,
| and "complacent" in it's own way. Complacency is
| ultimately a negative and derogatory word - using it to
| characterize an approach you don't agree with seems
| disingenuous.
|
| This is a baffling. "Something that is always changing
| could be seen as not changing because it's never not
| changing." I'm having a hard time seeing that as a good-
| faith rebuttal.
|
| The rest, I'm mostly on-board with.
| qqtt wrote:
| > This is a baffling. "Something that is always changing
| could be seen as not changing because it's never not
| changing." I'm having a hard time seeing that as a good-
| faith rebuttal.
|
| I think we are talking in abstract platitudes to such an
| extent that the forest might get missing for the trees.
|
| In practical terms, a workaholic can fit the mold of "I
| have many ideas, I'm working hard to achieve them, and
| I'd like to keep it that way.". A workaholic can also
| have all the characteristics of a complacent individual -
| brimming with self-satisfaction, satisfied with their
| routine, self-smug attitude, no desire to change their
| ways.
|
| Ironically, a workaholic could justify such an attitude
| to themselves by calling other people complacent.
|
| And just for reference, the dictionary definition of the
| word complacent:
|
| complacent: marked by self-satisfaction especially when
| accompanied by unawareness of actual dangers or
| deficiencies
| panzagl wrote:
| It's like asking would you rather be a one-hit wonder punk
| band, or a world-class violinist.
| johnwheeler wrote:
| I like to use a car analogy.
|
| I think those with high IQs who don't accomplish much are like
| 2000-HP drag racers. Those things rip, but they don't necessarily
| get you anywhere useful.
|
| It's much better to be a Jeep.
| purple_ferret wrote:
| >Some would attribute the difference between intelligence and
| having new ideas to "creativity," but this doesn't seem a very
| useful term. As well as being pretty vague, it's shifted half a
| frame sideways from what we care about: it's neither separable
| from intelligence, nor responsible for all the difference between
| intelligence and having new ideas.
|
| I find this dismissiveness of creativity to be somewhat strange.
| It's by definition, what he should be looking for. I can't help
| but think he's got a paradigm in mind for finding 'new ideas' and
| feels like creativity is too outside the box for it.
| reikonomusha wrote:
| This might be a bit of a hot take, but I feel creativity is
| more about being "untethered" and about synthesis of different
| ideas, techniques, etc. in novel ways. Unfortunately, one can
| be as creative as can be and still never come up with something
| "good". (Who is to decide what's good? It's almost surely in
| large part a social or cultural thing, much like "genius" is.)
| I mentioned musicians elsewhere so I will again: A lot of
| creative musicians are great at noodling around, making neat
| new melodies, but aren't coming up with any coherent or
| consistent ideas that "lead" to anywhere. Creativity just seems
| like a "raw ingredient" for ideas in this view.
| ksec wrote:
| Modern Smart are so focused on their niche most people failed to
| see the big ( or even medium ) picture. Because they are more
| specialised than ever their world view are extremely distorted by
| their lens. Peter Thiel touched on this as most of the successful
| founders and entrepreneur tends to be something similar to
| polymath.
|
| Another thing is Wisdom. Which the older I get the more I think
| have little to no relationship to being "Smart". I also think
| there are certain relationship with Wisdom and polymath.
|
| This topic also echo an article earlier [1], where it is more
| important to be curious than being smart. ( I am glad this
| narrative has finally caught on. )
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28753560
| samuelfekete wrote:
| People are often prevented from going down a path to success
| because of the assumption that something is impossible, when if
| they would actually check they might find a solution that makes
| it possible.
|
| This is true in science, as in Einstein going down the path of
| considering time dilation, while others might have not even
| considered it worth another thought. But it's also true in
| general life. People who have a can-do attitude often end up
| achieving more simply because they've tried.
|
| Perhaps a way of learning how to do this is to sometimes stop and
| think which paths to success have been discarded as impossible,
| and then consider investigating if that assumption is true.
| avinassh wrote:
| > There are general techniques for having new ideas -- for
| example, for working on your own projects ...
|
| The project link is broken: http://paulgraham.com/projects.html
|
| anyone knows the actual link? Is it this one? -
| http://paulgraham.com/own.html
| jerrygoyal wrote:
| I believe smartness is rather contextual. For instance a person
| might be smart at a specific job like troubleshooting hardware
| but he'd not be so-smart in some other areas of life. Was
| Einstein smart in most areas of life? I highly doubt that. This
| (contextual) smartness is build-up with time. People who have
| screen-facing jobs tend to get smarter about gadgets/software.
| People whose jobs are dealing with other human beings gets
| smarter at soft skills like persuasion. It all boils down to
| giving enough time.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Some of the most successful people in the world are almost always
| wrong, know little. They just find what works and then do that.
| nayuki wrote:
| > Imagine you had a choice between being really smart but
| discovering nothing new, and being less smart but discovering
| lots of new ideas.
|
| I don't consider myself smart. I certainly don't claim to
| discover new ideas. But through my work of explaining and
| polishing existing ideas, it seems I found a niche and an
| audience.
| [deleted]
| aroundtown wrote:
| Like other PG posts, I feel like he misses the elephant in the
| room, opportunity. You can be intelligent or highly creative, but
| unless you have the opportunity to use your abilities in some
| fashion, neither will do you much good.
|
| Like so many others like him, they probably miss opportunity
| being such a big deal because it was so abundant for them. This
| is not to say they didn't also have to be intelligent and work
| hard to get where they are, but they also had to have things
| align for them in their life, that were outside their control, to
| get where they are.
| randcraw wrote:
| I think emphasizing opportunity is putting the cart before the
| horse. I believe opportunity follows from initiative,
| imagination, and boldly asking and exploring great questions.
|
| Game-changers like Einstein differ from other geniuses like
| Oppenheimer by asking imaginative questions and then
| independently exploring even when they lead to weird disruptive
| implications like warped space and time. Einstein never waited
| to be invited to the party. He created his own.
| aroundtown wrote:
| Without opportunity there is no cart, nor horse, nor road to
| travel on.
|
| Einstein was fortunate to be born into a family that was
| educated and well off enough to afford him to study. (Same
| with Oppenheimer and I'd reason most celebrated intellects)
| Had Einstein been born in the son of former slaves in the US
| South, he never would have been allowed to study math or
| physics, he likely wouldn't have been able to escape his
| situation as a farmer, and some other scientist would have
| had to figure out relativity. All of that is opportunity.
| [deleted]
| maest wrote:
| I can't remember where, but I've heard the mathematical research
| process being described as (paraphrasing):
|
| "Once in a while we get a giant that makes huge strides in many
| fields. What is left for the rest of us is to walk in their wake
| and clean up and tighten up the theory based on the ideas that
| they provided".
|
| Graham's point about how being intelligent and having new ideas
| are two different things is interesting, but I'm not convinced
| that one is better than the other. I'm not sure a world full of
| giants is better - you need people who spend time tightening and
| working on the existing theory as well.
| samhw wrote:
| I mean, better and worse doesn't really exist. They just _are_.
| Being smart has certain consequences, and being inventive has
| others. And what 's better for the world (for some definition
| of 'good') may not be what's better for the individual - just
| ask people who volunteer to pick up litter. Certainly it seems
| like being inventive is much more _profitable_ for the
| individual than being smart, but of course that 's not all that
| matters.
| Jensson wrote:
| The world has no lack of people tightening and working on
| existing theory, basically every knowledge worker taking a
| salary performs that role. So moving a few more of those to try
| to do new things wouldn't budge that huge micro optimization
| machine much at all.
| mmmmpancakes wrote:
| Moreover, ideas are worthless if you aren't smart and diligent
| enough to see them through. Emphasizing ideas, to me, feels
| like the wrong thing because this encourages, for most people,
| a lazy attitude where recognition is expected for having an
| idea (whereas recognition is only due for making something out
| of your idea). In the end, ideas are cheap. Every giant had
| both the idea (which may have been through luck and timing plus
| deep knowledge earned through hard work and persistence) plus
| those other abilities to make something out of it, without
| which they would not be giants.
| rguzman wrote:
| one of the things that helps generate new ideas that can be
| cultivated is the ability to be playful. once a given problem or
| subject is sufficiently loaded onto a brain, if that person can
| relax and have child-like naivete about poking and prodding,
| novel insight is usually not far.
|
| cultivating this ability is fairly well understood in a lot of
| domains, i think. two examples that are top-of-mind are improv
| and jazz.
| d_tr wrote:
| As Alan Kay likes to say, "a change in perspective is worth 80 IQ
| points".
| criddell wrote:
| Does he say in which direction?
| d_tr wrote:
| Could be up, could be down :)
| randcraw wrote:
| My guess: repeatedly zooming out and in again -- to look at
| the many parts of the whole to see how they all interconnect
| and interact to then wonder why and why not.
| david927 wrote:
| But this is wrong. The point of this essay is saying the
| opposite is true: A decent IQ gives you the chance to have a
| change of perspective.
|
| IQ is the artistic equivalent of "how well can you draw a
| line?" You need a good foundation for artistic expression but
| many, many people have that and still don't create art worth
| remembering.
|
| Intelligence (the capacity to process) combined with knowledge
| can give you that strong intellectual foundation -- but that's
| all it is. The rest is finding that change of perspective.
| d_tr wrote:
| I do not think there is any disagreement here. Your reply,
| the essay, as well as the quote I posted are all about this
| distance between being naturally intelligent and making
| something out of it.
| david927 wrote:
| There is a disagreement, though, because it's about which
| aspect takes precedence -- which has the most value.
|
| Imagine a test called Artistic Quotient which gives you a
| numeric value for how correctly you draw lines, circles,
| etc. An average artist might have an AQ of 100 and a very
| good artist an AQ of 120.
|
| Now, imagine looking at a Van Gogh and saying, that the
| artistic expression he achieved is worth 80 AQ points,
| putting him on the level of someone who can free hand a
| perfect circle! It would sound ridiculous, right? Who cares
| if you can free hand a perfect circle? What does that give
| you? What's the value of that?
|
| Instead you would tell an aspiring artist, get to an AQ 120
| or so as your foundation and then it's all about making
| something out of it.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| "The worlds smartest man means no more to me than the worlds
| smartest ant". Dr Manhattan
|
| I am not the smartest person in the room nor the least. But I
| know my smartness / IQ lies on a spectrum - just like my
| tolerance for cold or for oxygen etc.
|
| It's pretty easy to find places where my tolerance for cold is
| utterly exhausted, and there are situations where the same is for
| my IQ. And it's fairly easy to find animals or other organisms
| who can easily handle temperatures I cannot.
|
| I suspect in the big universe there are plenty of creatures whose
| intelligence and smartness extends out past the spectrum on which
| I, pg or Einstein sit.
|
| I would like to know the answers they have to these questions -
| and I wonder if I would ever understand them.
|
| One day we might meet such a species. Will we be happy as the
| pet?
| biswaroop wrote:
| It's worth repeating Mark Kac's famous quote:
|
| > _In science, as well as in other fields of human endeavor,
| there are two kinds of geniuses: the "ordinary" and the
| "magicians." An ordinary genius is a fellow that you and I would
| be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is
| no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what he
| has done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is
| different with the magicians. They are, to use mathematical
| jargon, in the orthogonal complement of where we are and the
| working of their minds is for all intents and purposes
| incomprehensible. Even after we understand what they have done,
| the process by which they have done it is completely dark. They
| seldom, if ever, have students because they cannot be emulated
| and it must be terribly frustrating for a brilliant young mind to
| cope with the mysterious ways in which the magician's mind works.
| Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest caliber. Hans Bethe,
| whom [Freeman] Dyson considers to be his teacher, is an "ordinary
| genius"._
|
| Einstein was unquestionably a magician. He had an incredible
| ability to come up with simple ideas, and follow the chain of
| logic wherever it leads, without prejudice against its outlandish
| conclusions. Those ideas appear as seeds of 'genius' to those
| studying his work. I'm not sure if it's 'smart', but it's
| definitely insightful. I've met clever people, but sometimes,
| they're not insightful. I've also met many insightful people who
| aren't clever in many ways. To quote Kac again:
|
| > _I am reminded of something Balthazaar van der Pol, a great
| Dutch scientist and engineer who was also a fine musician,
| remarked to me about the music of Bach. "It is great," he said,
| "because it is inevitable and yet surprising." I have often
| thought about this lovely epigram in connection with
| mathematics... The inevitability is, in many cases, provided by
| logic alone, but the element of surprise must come from an
| insight outside the rigid confines of logic._
| inetsee wrote:
| Years and years ago I read Einstein's biography (the one by
| Isaacson). One anecdote that remains bright in my memory after
| all these years is about Einstein and sailing. Einstein liked
| sailing, and because of where he was living he mostly did lake
| sailing. One thing about lake sailing is that you can often end
| up becalmed. What Einstein did was to take a notebook with him
| when he went sailing; a notebook with notes about what he was
| working on at the time. Whenever the wind died down he would take
| out his notebook and start working on his current research. When
| the wind picked up he would put his notebook away and resume
| sailing.
|
| There is no doubt that Einstein was brilliant. I believe he was
| as successful as he was because he was also exceptionally self
| disciplined.
| purple_ferret wrote:
| I read that too, and I got the impression being forced to work
| alone at the patent office was crucial for his 1905 Annus
| mirabilis papers. Lots of other great ideas (e.g. Mendel,
| Darwin) have come about from intellectual isolation.
|
| I wonder how Graham would respond to that given he's so
| intertwined in Silicon Valley.
| criddell wrote:
| Lots of great ideas have come out of university settings as
| well. I don't know if you can say anything in general about
| intellectual isolation.
| redshirtrob wrote:
| And Bill James did a lot of his Sabermetric writing while
| working night shifts as a security guard.[0]
|
| He's not Einstein, but he was way ahead of his time in a
| particular area and it's fair to say he's been hugely
| influential in the baseball community for nearly 40 years.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_James
| phonon wrote:
| > I believe he was as successful as he was because he was also
| exceptionally self disciplined.
|
| Well, that's one way to put it. These were the rules he wrote
| out for his wife. [0] You will make sure:
| - that my clothes and laundry are kept in good order; -
| that I will receive my three meals regularly in my room;
| - that my bedroom and study are kept neat, and especially that
| my desk is left for my use only. You will renounce
| all personal relations with me insofar as they are not
| completely necessary for social reasons. Specifically, You will
| forego: - my sitting at home with you; - my
| going out or travelling with you. You will
| obey the following points in your relations with me:
| - you will not expect any intimacy from me, nor will you
| reproach me in any way; - you will stop talking to me if I
| request it; - you will leave my bedroom or study
| immediately without protest if I request it. You
| will undertake not to belittle me in front of our children,
| either through words or behaviour.
|
| [0] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2133922/Was-
| Einst...
| beeboop wrote:
| Charitably, the context of the time, this sounds like a man
| with a broken marriage who wants to continue providing for
| his wife who likely didn't work and their children.
|
| I think asking to be left alone _in his private spaces_ , to
| not have drama, to do really basic chores like cooking and
| cleaning (in the context of the era) if you're not working or
| bringing in income seems really reasonable.
|
| He's a bigger man than me - I'd never live with an
| essentially ex wife.
| phonon wrote:
| I couldn't imagine writing something like that to someone
| who I shared a life with for over a decade, and the mother
| of my children. But maybe thing were different back then...
| [deleted]
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| I wouldn't call that _disciplined._ I would call that
| _pragmatic._
|
| He didn't like being bored. Working on his research while
| becalmed likely kept him from tearing his hair out while being
| productive.
|
| Win/win.
| cinjon wrote:
| This short essay is roughly a synospsis of the theme behind
| Asimov's short story The Profession.
| avip wrote:
| Which everybody should (must?) read. Seriously, should be a
| mandatory read in school curriculum, instead of "catcher in the
| rye" or some Scottish ballade [+].
|
| [+] not that there's something wrong with any of them
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| There's another step in this thinking of smart vs new ideas. You
| need smart + new ideas + execution/productivity.
|
| Einstein didn't just have new ideas. He also excelled at
| communicating those ideas.
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| My own personal example (let's assume I'm smart and have new
| ideas!)
|
| Because I was a part of an online community from the onset of
| the Internet age (1997) and also a consultant in Fortune 500
| businesses, I was always coming up with ideas.
|
| One particular idea I came up with in 2009 was essentially what
| Slack became five years later.
|
| I drew up the UI, pitched it to a bunch of people, INCLUDING
| MICROSOFT, and yet I was unable to convince anyone that it was
| a good idea. (Microsoft was so focused on SharePoint, that they
| never saw the potential).
|
| I did not know how to build my idea or execute the concept to
| prove it to others.
|
| So that third piece, execution, is just as critical.
| omalleyt wrote:
| Humans care about innate qualities such as intelligence because
| they are looking for mates, and want the best genes for their
| children.
|
| In this case, consider whether you would prefer to have children
| with a partner with a 150 IQ but who never develops a system to
| generate new ideas, or a partner with a 120 IQ who stumbles into
| a system / environment that allows them to generate new ideas.
|
| Who would you prefer? Hard mode: justify your choice without
| invalidating the premises by saying something like, "Well, if the
| first person was _really_ smarter, they would have developed such
| a system. "
|
| I speculate that most would prefer to have children with the
| first person, and then endeavor to teach their kids the second
| person's system.
| gowld wrote:
| Huh? For reproductive concerns, I'd rather marry someone who is
| an excellent parent, than someone who will make genius babies
| but ruin their development.
|
| And I'm not interested in find a mate who will adopt someone
| else's genius 23-chromosomes
| varjag wrote:
| While I've been underwhelmed by many PG's essays this one is
| remarkable. It takes on a subject that's beaten to death in
| debates and finds some fresh perspective.
| stupidcar wrote:
| If you asked people what was special about Einstein, most would
| say that he had important new ideas. Even the ones who tried to
| give you a more sophisticated-sounding answer would probably
| think this first. Till a few years ago I would have given the
| same answer myself. But that wasn't what was special about
| Einstein. What was special about him was that he was really
| smart. Having important new ideas was a necessary precondition
| for properly utilizing that intelligence, but the two are not
| identical.
|
| It may seem a hair-splitting distinction to point out that
| inspiration and its consequences are not identical, but it isn't.
| There's a big gap between them. Anyone who's spent time around
| crackpot scientific theorists knows how big. There are a lot of
| genuinely original people who don't achieve very much.
|
| And so on...
| jedberg wrote:
| This was fairly obvious to me as early as elementary school. Some
| kids would just get new concepts and then easily apply their new
| knowledge, and some worked really really hard and also got good
| grades. The hard workers were not as "smart" but made up for it
| with hard work, because in my mind, smart was always "the ability
| to learn something new and apply it quickly".
|
| The difference got more obvious with each level of school, and
| when I got to college, the difference was stark. There were
| definitely the "just smart" people and the "work really hard
| people".
|
| In my work life, it's nice to work with a mix of both. People who
| can take in new knowledge and generate new ideas, as well as
| people who just get it and work really hard. It's especially
| great when idea generators can communicate well and the hard
| workers can make it happen.
| drawkbox wrote:
| There are other aspects as well. Much of them have to do with
| managing the load up times of the mental model of the topic at
| hand, with focus, but also setting up/starting correctly.
|
| Quickness
|
| Some people pick up things very quickly, others take a while to
| pick them up. Neither is necessarily "smarter" because they
| might have different thresholds to what they consider "getting
| it". The depth that they pick some new thing and feel they "get
| it" might be different. Additionally, how well they grasp it
| might be different levels in terms of when they feel they fully
| grok it. Smart or skilled on something is holistic
| understanding, the speed isn't always as important but is
| definitely helpful. Like learning something with prototypes
| rather than a big sprawling project, the former will be faster.
|
| Longevity or Ability to Stick With It
|
| Another aspect is people that pick up skills and how much they
| want to use them. If you quickly get skills, that may also mean
| you get bored with the skills/knowledge quicker. The people
| that work harder at it or have a deeper threshold or attainment
| level of how they "get it", may work with that more because it
| took more effort to grasp or the more they iterate on it the
| more depth/detail/interest is found.
|
| Some people will be able to stick with something they get
| longer, others may want to move to the next thing. There are
| all sorts of variables with this: time, goal alignment, need,
| survival, effort, results, groups you are in like if it was for
| something personal or at work etc.
|
| Self Starter
|
| A key aspect to smartness is being a "self starter", one that
| looks into things driven by interest or potential need. The
| ability to just start playing and prototyping is a great skill
| to have.
|
| Ability to Finish
|
| On top of that, setting things up to easily ship is another way
| people can be professional. When you start a prototype but get
| the line to production setup early, the work you do will take
| less adjustments and make it easier to ship when needed. Right
| after a prototype I like to setup tools/games/apps all the way
| to the end on device, different platforms, different styles,
| basically two of everything so that issues you run into are
| already smoothed. This makes it easy to ship.
|
| Simple to Approach
|
| I like concepts that are simple to start, and potentially
| advanced long term to keep interest.
|
| Since I make games and tools I like the "easy to approach,
| difficult to master" aspect of things and try to create that in
| my productions. I like the game/tool to be a "friend" so you
| like using it and it isn't tasking. That is another aspect, how
| much effort is required.
|
| "If you can't explain something in simple terms, you don't
| understand it." -- Feynman
|
| Iteration, Practice and Deeper Dives
|
| Most highly skilled people are smart, of varying levels of
| speed, but the ultimate way to build skills is the repetition
| and iteration of consist creation/production and shipping. A
| deeper dive. The more detail and depth the better you can do it
| "simple". I usually judge people, at least in games, as what
| they have shipped. Sometimes I am amazed at how those people
| that produce come to the result, some get there fast and others
| are constantly re-learning, both have their benefits.
|
| A Beginners Mind
|
| A "beginners mind" or Shoshin [1] helps to refine that and keep
| things simple/approachable, which I think is the main goal of
| creation/production. I also believe the job of engineering is
| taking complex systems and making them simple, but still
| allowing the advanced users access to highly customize or use
| deeper features. This technique also makes it easy to come back
| to work on something years later that doesn't take a long time
| to load up the mental model.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshin
| allo37 wrote:
| > Imagine you had a choice between being really smart but
| discovering nothing new, and being less smart but discovering
| lots of new ideas. Surely you'd take the latter.
|
| Not sure if that Semmelweis guy would agree (had the idea that
| washing your hands between handling corpses and delivering babies
| is a good idea, everyone else at the time disagreed and he died
| in an asylum). Didn't Tesla also die penniless and alone?
|
| Maybe you'll be well remembered by history, but what a life! I
| wonder how many people had lots of new genius ideas but took the
| "safe" option...
| jt2190 wrote:
| > * obsessive interest > * independent-mindedness > * work on
| your own projects > * work hard
|
| So an anti-list might be:
|
| * allowing your interest to wander * believing everything you're
| told * work on other's people's stuff * work half-heartedly
| aardvarks wrote:
| Just having the good new ideas isn't really enough, though. You
| have to be really persistent about figuring out all the details
| and making them work. This is related to, but definitely not the
| same as, being fascinated/obsessed by the topic.
|
| Of course Einstein had great ideas. But he also spent many years
| working out the consequences of, eg, his first ideas about the
| fixed speed of light in vacuum and its consequences in physics,
| initially during downtime at his patent office job. Nearly all of
| the impact of the theory is in that working-out.
| kenjackson wrote:
| Plus one on this.
|
| Work ethic is super important. The ability to grind on your
| ideas. And I think having some extrovert nature really helps in
| getting your ideas out there.
|
| I was Paul's definition of smart, w/o good ideas. I loved to
| learn things. But I didn't really have the work ethic to build
| new things. I feel like I've done fine in life, but had you
| asked my middle school and high school teachers -- and even
| university... I've probably underperformed.
|
| In contrast my son is bright, but not the academic star I was.
| But he has crazy work ethic in ideas he cares about. I've
| really nurtured his work ethic and played down the "smart"
| academic angle. If wants to finish a personal project and not
| study for that French quiz -- I'm fine with that. He gets an
| A-/B+ for the year, rather than an A. So what. The passion he
| pours into his ideas though is great and I think will serve him
| better over the course of his life.
| P00RL3N0 wrote:
| The argument, at least to me, appears to lean heavily on a false
| dichotomy: You can either be smart, have good ideas, or some
| blend of the two. Yet he begins with a counter-example in the
| case of Einstein.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The argument, at least to me, appears to lean heavily on a
| false dichotomy: You can either be smart, have good ideas, or
| some blend of the two.
|
| That's not a dichotomy but a continuum, because of the third
| option.
| gitfan86 wrote:
| There are two types of people who have received 4.0 GPAs and very
| high SAT scores.
|
| 1. Geniuses. They can look at a calculus text book for 30 minutes
| and understand calculus and get an A on a calculus test.
|
| 2. Reasonably smart people who think that getting a 4.0 is very
| important, for whatever reason. So important that it becomes
| their identity. They spend every minute trying to get that 4.0.
|
| I was probably in middle school or high school when I realized
| that I'm not nearly as smart as #1, but just as smart as #2. It
| just isn't that hard to realize that the effort to outcome ratio
| isn't good on being a #2 type person. And more importantly, long
| term if you go down that path you will be working some shitty job
| making less 400k a year at 80/hours a week. Because your identity
| is being someone who is #1, even if #1 means billing the most
| hours doing tax accounting in the basement of some old building
| on a Friday night.
| potatoman22 wrote:
| There's those two types... And everyone in between
| wiremine wrote:
| Imagination and diversity of experience are some other factors.
| I.e., the ability to imagine new combinations of disparate ideas,
| gained through a variety of unique experiences.
|
| You could argue Einstein's imagination, coupled with his
| scientific intelligence, is what made him brilliant.
|
| But like others have said, the essay reads like there is a linear
| and narrow definition of "smart." But having followed pg on
| twitter, he seems to tend towards an Ayn Rand style worldview, so
| I guess I'm not surprised.
| asciimov wrote:
| New idea's are a dime a dozen. In fact a bigger problem for those
| that have new ideas is that someone else had that new idea first
| and did something about it.
| acmegeek wrote:
| Success in the way PG seems to be talking about is indeed about
| more than intelligence, it is also about experience, perspective,
| perception, ignorance, interest, imagination, and a bit of luck.
|
| I've thought a lot about this, and I would break them down as
| follows:
|
| 1. Intelligence is more of a raw ability to process and
| synthesize information, and everyone genetically predisposed to
| have a starting measure. As one experiences life, one's
| intelligence can be developed, expanded, and refined.
|
| 2. Experiences shape us whether we like it or not, but those who
| tend to me more successful than others, experiences tend to be
| opportunities to grow, recalibrate, review, shed, and otherwise
| change who they are in a way that would ensure a more effective
| outcome in a similar future experience.
|
| 3. Perspective and perception are tightly knit in that as we
| mature through life experiences, the size, detail, and depth of
| the world and reality continues to grow. Perspective in this
| sense is having an intentional awareness of how much there really
| is to know, and also, how much there is still left to discover.
| Perception is more of being able to intentionally focus on and
| recognize the breadth, depth, and detail of our perspective.
|
| 4. Ignorance is simply the missing pieces to what you know or
| understand, the limits to your knowledge of the world and how it
| works. Awareness of one's own ignorance affords the opportunity
| to actively manage it, to either take steps to fill in gaps, or
| just be content in not knowing.
|
| 5. Interest is more about what items or aspects within our
| perspective and perception do we have a persistent affinity for?
| These affinities can be cultivated, and effort sown into some
| will reap greater rewards than others.
|
| 6. Imagination is likely the most powerful, since this is the
| ability to create a perspective that is not necessarily reflected
| or even inspired by something you have perceived. Imagination is
| surely informed by all of the preceding, but this is where the
| true magic happens, where success can increase exponentially. The
| preceding provide the bounds, drive, attraction, references, and
| understanding that can spark and fuel new ideas and connections.
| It is within imagination that all the ideas that advance humanity
| are born and nurtured since anything new is necessarily first
| imagined in a mind.
|
| 7. And last is luck, which in a sense, especially in the context
| of success, is really just a culmination of all of the preceding.
| The luckiest successful people are those:
|
| - who have a baseline intelligence that they have actively
| developed,
|
| - who have taken advantage of and sought out experiences that
| yielded opportunity to grow,
|
| - who have intentionally broadened and deepened their
| perspectives while improving their ability to focus and perceive
| effectively to notice and seize opportunities,
|
| - who manage their ignorance such that it doesn't become an
| impediment or lasting liability,
|
| - who latch onto worthwhile or beneficial interests,
|
| - and lastly, who actively charge and exercise their imagination,
| always wondering how they could add to or improve their
| realities.
|
| So PG is right, it is a lot more than just being smart,
| intelligence is just one ingredient in the recipe for success.
|
| World-changing new ideas are a result of being actively aware of
| and engaged with reality while having and following through on
| the drive to push the boundaries of what is known, understood, or
| possible.
| cperciva wrote:
| To me, this is fundamentally the difference between science and
| engineering: Science involves discovering things which are new,
| while engineering takes those discoveries and makes them
| practically useful.
|
| In terms of my own work, tarsnap is absolutely a work of
| engineering -- I very deliberately _avoided_ doing anything new,
| instead using established and well-tested concepts. The exception
| to this is scrypt, which I designed -- and proved the security of
| -- because there was no existing password based key derivation
| function which met my standards for security. On that one
| occasion I crossed the line from engineering into science.
|
| Science is great, but there's nothing to be ashamed about in
| doing engineering work. The world needs good engineers who can
| take basic scientific discoveries and make useful products out of
| them!
| rossdavidh wrote:
| There is a lot of science which is "stamp collecting" or
| "puzzle solving", i.e. all the fiddly bits of fleshing out the
| new theory and its ramifications. There is also, in
| engineering, the occasional need to develop something really
| innovative and new.
|
| The thing is, no one outside of science notices all the non-
| discovery stuff, because it doesn't make it into the textbooks
| or histories of science. But, it's most of what goes on in
| science. Also, in engineering, much of the most innovative
| stuff requires too much prior knowledge to even understand what
| it is, so not many people find out about it.
| whiddershins wrote:
| To me, this is still very creative, just at a different layer
| of abstraction.
| hinkley wrote:
| Even commodity manufacturing is its own art because you have
| to make millions of something per day instead of tens of
| thousands. You have to take material in one side of the
| factory and spit it out the other as fast as you can. You've
| crossed the limits of being able to warehouse half completed
| bits because machine #17 has gone on the fritz again and
| nobody can finish product.
|
| So I need more reliable equipment and then I still need to
| make them at a lower price than the luxury model I'm copying.
|
| I don't think anyone who has entirely avoided skilled manual
| labor in their lives quite comprehends how big a difference
| there is being able to do something well, and being able to
| do it at scale. It's almost not the same problem domain.
| purple_ferret wrote:
| It gets deeper in science.
|
| There is the debate about pursuing everettian quantum mechanics
| vs traditional quantum mechanics
| gregwebs wrote:
| If I think of PG's accomplishments they could be characterized
| as "discovering things which are new" to him, but also
| characterized as taking ideas that were cutting edge, uncommon,
| or out of favor and bringing them to fruition (sounds more like
| engineering).
|
| I don't think of the YC structure as discovering anything
| inherently new but taking an approach that was not being done
| in the VC industry and trying to scientifically iterate on it.
|
| Bayesian spam filtering seemed a discovery to him, but it
| wasn't for science: someone else had already published a paper
| even. However, the results of previous attempts weren't good
| enough until PG focused on the problem and used a large enough
| corpus of data.
| iamcurious wrote:
| I would enjoy reading more (with links!) about the spam
| filtering story.
| cperciva wrote:
| This is probably where you want to start:
| http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html
| agumonkey wrote:
| Are you still pursuing new discoveries ?
| erichocean wrote:
| [deleted]
| alecst wrote:
| What about general relativity.
| cperciva wrote:
| If an engineer designs a bridge and says "well, it seems to
| stay up, but I don't know why... go ask a scientist?" they'll
| lose their license pretty damn fast.
| mlboss wrote:
| I guess the first bridge builders never asked a scientist.
| Science of bridge building came much later then bridges.
| webmaven wrote:
| I think the point is that bridge building originated as a
| craft that was informed by a lot of examples that happened
| to survive (ie. survivorship bias) leading to rules of
| thumb and patterns that gradually yielded to scientific
| explanations (often driven by trying to understand _failed_
| bridges designed according to rules applied / patterns
| extended outside of the context where they were valid).
| goatlover wrote:
| Didn't Maxwell come before Tesla and Edison? The insights of
| Relativity and QM came before lasers, electron microscopes,
| quantum computing, etc.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _You have cause and effect exactly backwards._
|
| Not really. You just, correctly, described the relationship
| between science and engineering as a feedback loop. But that
| also means _there is no first and last_.
|
| A step in engineering reveals a problem that scientists can
| focus on. A scientific discovery makes new engineering
| possible. Progress of engineering enables building tools that
| make new kinds of observations possible, enabling scientific
| research that was previously not possible. Rinse, repeat.
| There's no separating one from another - they run in
| lockstep.
| nassimsoftware wrote:
| It seems to me that someone's ability to generate new ideas is at
| least in part driven by one's ability to make links between
| things that are not linked or very distantly so. It is at that
| intersection that novel ideas emerges.
|
| To make it more concrete here's an example of my own.
|
| I was playing the game Zelda Breath of The Wild and was in awe of
| the beautiful landscapes you could visit. However, I had already
| finished the game and did not want to have to fire up my Wii U
| every time just to see them.
|
| This is when a novel idea emerged. What if I made a Google Map's
| Street Viewer for Zelda Breath of The Wild.
|
| You can see here that I subsconsiously made a link between two
| very distant things a video game and Google Map's street view.
|
| You can try it out for yourself here :
| https://nassimsoftware.github.io/zeldabotwstreetview (Do not use
| it if you're using cellular data because the panoramas are quite
| heavy)
|
| The idea was well recieved and gathered the attention of many
| gaming journals just google zelda street view to see for
| yourself. Before making this project I also searched if someone
| had done the same but no one did. I therefore thought that I had
| something pretty novel so worth doing.
|
| While my idea isn't groundbreaking in terms of science it
| demonstrate well the characteristics of a novel idea. (The
| intersection of different domains that seems to most distant.)
|
| It seems that to be able to do those links you must have breadth
| of knowledge instead of depth however it's still a mystery how
| some people are able to do this more frequently then others.
|
| Also here's a free idea : Make the same thing I did with Zelda
| but for other open world games.
| hinkley wrote:
| That's really cool.
|
| I suspect there are a lot of us here in particular who have
| 'unpopular opinions' in this domain that are more difficult to
| just try out, because others have invested in the idea of
| different domains being special and thus not conducive to
| fusion as in your example, or borrowing ideas whole cloth.
|
| I have, for instance, some opinions on how skills from personal
| finance cross a whole host of problem domains. Some are
| obvious, but performance analysis is not typically one of them
| and people look at me like I have horns on my head when I bring
| it up. They have few complaints about the outcomes of me
| applying those theories, as long as they don't have to hear
| about them. So I mostly just don't ask permission, and save
| theory crafting for talk over beers when people start pulling
| out their crackpot ideas to keep the conversation flowing.
|
| It's really no wonder at all to me why so many of milestones in
| The Enlightenment started over coffee. Caffeine is not as good
| a social lubricant but it'll do in a pinch and has fewer
| negative side effects on cognition and - importantly - memory.
| Last night's epiphany is mostly inaccessible to the drunk.
| ItsMonkk wrote:
| I'd love to hear them if you've got them.
|
| The one I worked out was "Agile is just budgeting, but for
| time instead of money".
| Modernnomad84 wrote:
| Buried toward the end of the essay is a suggestion to become a
| better writer. Wondering if anyone has learned to become a better
| writer, and if so, what was your approach?
| motohagiography wrote:
| Editing.
| ligerzer0 wrote:
| Writing.
|
| There is no shortcut.
|
| Just like working out improves your range of movement and
| manipulating your own body and weights in space, writing does
| the same with ideas and expression.
| dgs_sgd wrote:
| Simply writing more will get you 99% of the way there.
| achenet wrote:
| And the final 1% comes from re-reading yourself.
| JayStavis wrote:
| PG making a case for the "idea guy"! It's interesting to see how
| often that trope is shot down in SV culture.
|
| I appreciate that he is qualifying or preconditioning the value
| of the idea guy as having intelligence along with other "mundane
| ingredients" like grit, sleep, stress, network, and passion. I
| very much agree with the approach and only wish for a framework
| to score these ingredients in the context of an entrepreneur's
| problem domain. I guess that's what VC's are supposed to do.
| [deleted]
| Alex3917 wrote:
| This piece seems to conflate being smart with being intelligent.
|
| Basically being smart means being well educated, whereas being
| intelligent means you have fast processing speed. Or maybe you
| have slightly different definitions, whatever, but either way
| it's confusing to see them being used as synonyms.
| sysadm1n wrote:
| I think being smart needs solid foundations in order to flourish.
| Paul mentions getting adequate sleep and avoiding certain
| stresses, which is a whole science to me.
|
| There is the old archetype of the 'unstable genius' or 'mad
| scientist' that although they are clever; fail to one day _make
| it_ and become the person known for $company or $product or
| $patent.
|
| There are many ingredients needed for the smart person to thrive.
| Personally I find essays about topics that concern me to be
| useful, as-well as cross-synaptic thinking otherwise known as
| 'creativity' or 'joining the dots'.
| [deleted]
| api wrote:
| There are a few things he didn't mention that I suspect are
| important: a variety of life experiences, exposure to more than
| one modality of thinking, and an opportunity to engage in
| autonomous unstructured play as a child. It's good at any age but
| is likely pivotal in childhood.
| reggieband wrote:
| I have been revisiting an idea I've had many times in my life
| that is tangential to Paul's "Smart" vs. "New idea"
| differentiation. That is the difference between
| "Knowledge/Intelligence" on one axis and
| "Experience/Understanding" on another. I feel our modern society,
| as obsessed as it is with science and logic, highly prioritizes
| the former and unduly devalues the latter. I've started to wonder
| what "Artificial Understanding" looks like and if there is some
| systematic way to describe it. I also loosely define "Wisdom" as
| a kind of dialectic synthesis that bridges intelligence and
| understanding (and thereby knowledge and experience). I believe
| Wisdom is the place where new ideas are bred.
|
| However, his essay struck a chord in me because it suggests a
| double edged sword. I'm ever-so-slightly above average
| intelligence. In almost every group I have ever been part of I
| sort near the top but rarely at the top. But I definitely have
| always demonstrated different thinking and often times new ideas.
| And I can report that not all new ideas are good ideas. This
| leads to quite a bit of insecurity/self-doubt. Sometimes I am
| literally a prophet that sees the future that no one else
| expected. Often I am completely off base. I have no repeatable
| means of discriminating between those cases.
|
| What I have learned, in those times I have acted as a
| leader/manager, is that I don't always go with the most
| logical/intellectual idea presented to me. I try to always take
| into account experience/understanding. That is doubly true when I
| evaluate my own new ideas. I should ask myself: Am I leaning too
| heavily on knowledge/intelligence in an area where I lack
| understanding/experience?
|
| Therefore I think Paul's stated trade-off of intelligence for new
| ideas is not strictly correct. I wonder if he would accept my
| knowledge/intelligence vs. experience/understanding description.
| If so, perhaps what he means to say is that for the generation of
| new ideas he might be willing to accept trading some innate
| capacity for intelligence for some innate capacity for
| understanding. In that way, perhaps one could increase the
| likelihood of synthesis between the two. Stated another way, it
| would be a sacrifice of intelligence to gain understanding with a
| goal to promote wisdom.
| whytaka wrote:
| Recently I've been a bit disillusioned as all the cleverness of
| my youth had gone wasted. Albeit the ideas were low hanging
| fruits but had I had the skills to implement them I think I would
| have been better off. Now that I do have the skills, they'd long
| been executed by others.
|
| Now the world has gotten a lot more sophisticated and I don't
| know what to sophisticate myself on. They all seem a bit boring
| or stupid on one hand, or another monumental climb where I'll
| have to start over from the beginning.
| alasano wrote:
| All monumental climbs start with a single step. It's easy to
| get lost thinking about what could have been or what will be
| and forget about what can be, right now at this very moment.
|
| It's not enjoyable to think about wasted opportunities in your
| past, so don't let your future self suffer the same fate.
|
| Do at least part of one of the ideas you find boring or stupid
| to get back into the mindset of being someone who is able to
| create. Armed with that, you'll spend less time thinking about
| whether you can do it and more time about what you want to do.
|
| Obviously for people who are depressed or suffer from ADHD you
| often can't "just do it" but in general I think it's worth
| trying to shift the way we think about the things we can
| accomplish.
| handrous wrote:
| A lot of the biggest Web-related tech money-makers and success
| stories are things it wouldn't have occurred to me to try,
| because I'd have assumed they were illegal or otherwise so
| awful that people'd tar and feather me if I proposed them.
| Sometimes, they were/are illegal, in fact, but it somehow
| worked out OK for the founders anyway (business might
| eventually fall apart, but who cares, they made millions, if
| not billions)
|
| Spying on what people do on web pages, down to their mouse
| movements, sometimes. Tracking all that _across sites_. Then
| using that to target ads at them.
|
| AirBnB and Uber... just, all of what they do.
|
| Crypto exchanges. It's crazy to me that these managed to go
| long enough to gain a toehold before facing any sort of banking
| or securities regulations.
|
| Addictive mechanics on social media and in pay-to-play games.
|
| Mint and other go-betweens with banks that just store and re-
| use credentials, including answers to "security questions".
| Seems like a really dangerous idea, probably involves
| encouraging a bunch of people to violate terms of service on a
| massive scale, and if you're presenting connections to banks
| that you _know_ have those terms, seems like you 'd be hella
| liable for that. And my god, if there's a breach that involves
| your systems and you've been hoovering up people's banking
| credentials? I'd fully expect to be facing extremely scary and
| probably-going-to-go-poorly-for-my-company lawsuits from a
| dozen enormous banks. How do these companies get _insured_ in
| any way whatsoever? I don 't get it. Inexplicably (to me),
| instead of crashing and burning and being laughed out of the
| room at any and all fundraising meetings, these made a few
| people very, very rich instead.
|
| And so on.
|
| Plenty of things not in those categories, of course. Stripe was
| a great idea, just a hard problem--I'd have had no clue how to
| seek terms from CC companies to get such a thing off the
| ground, to pick what's just step #1 of even _starting_ to try
| at that.
|
| Some are great ideas that I might have come up with, but I
| haven't a clue about how to even begin to fundraise (I'm not
| past barely-an-acquaintance territory with _any_ rich people,
| for even small values of "rich", so that doesn't help), and
| they're the kind of thing that pretty much requires a pile of
| cash to even make an attempt--actually, Stripe again seems like
| a good example. I couldn't feasibly have done even an MVP of
| that solo, or even with a very small team "in a garage"; the
| fundraising is another necessary hurdle to even credibly
| trying.
|
| Some stuff's smart people doing smart things that are
| eventually very lucrative. Those I (theoretically) could have
| done, I guess. Redis, for instance. Still, the _really_ big
| money seems to be in convincing people to finance things that
| feel like they ought to be illegal (and might actually be), and
| how that all works continues to elude me. How do you spot a law
| you can break long enough to get traction against the
| "dinosaurs" who are bound to follow the law, versus one that
| will land you on the losing end of a ruinous lawsuit and make
| your name mud, or in prison? _Do_ people actually know how to
| spot those, or are the successful ones just lucky? Is that in
| fact _almost all laws_ once you have some rich people backing
| you? I haven 't a clue.
|
| (Nb this is not intended as sour-grapes complaining, but rather
| an exploration of the ways in which "having an idea" is a
| really, really long way from even making a meaningful attempt
| at implementation for a variety of prominent tech products,
| including such hurdles as not understanding when doing illegal
| or horribly unethical stuff is actually a very good idea, if
| you're just trying to launch a product and get rich--these are
| _deficiencies_ in my understanding of the world, clearly)
| reikonomusha wrote:
| I feel pg's point is similar to musicians. As an example, Glenn
| Gould was a classical pianist and renowned Bach interpreter. He
| had awesome technical ability at the piano, and a fantastic
| memory. But _lots_ of incredible pianists have these abilities.
| Go to any university or observe any competition and you'll
| plainly see awesome talent. These qualities are analogous to
| "being smart".
|
| However, what set Gould apart from his colleagues was his
| innovative and iconoclastic interpretations of well-known works
| with "standard" prescriptions. He had fundamentally different,
| but wholly consistent, ideas about musical interpretation,
| recording technology, presentation of music to audiences, and so
| on. He's remembered as a pianist not because his fingers were
| quick and sensitive, but instead because he pushed boundaries in
| completely original ways.
|
| Leonard Bernstein--a noted conductor and pianist--quips about
| this when he conducted the Brahms Concerto in D minor, with Gould
| at the piano [1]. I recommend listening but I'll copy his words
| (from [2]) for posterity.
|
| > Don't be frightened. Mr. Gould is here. He will appear in a
| moment. I'm not, um, as you know, in the habit of speaking on any
| concert except the Thursday night previews, but a curious
| situation has arisen, which merits, I think, a word or two. You
| are about to hear a rather, shall we say, unorthodox performance
| of the Brahms D Minor Concerto, a performance distinctly
| different from any I've ever heard, or even dreamt of for that
| matter, in its remarkably broad tempi and its frequent departures
| from Brahms' dynamic indications. I cannot say I am in total
| agreement with Mr. Gould's conception and this raises the
| interesting question: "What am I doing conducting it?" I'm
| conducting it because Mr. Gould is so valid and serious an artist
| that I must take seriously anything he conceives in good faith
| and his conception is interesting enough so that I feel you
| should hear it, too.
|
| > But the age old question still remains: "In a concerto, who is
| the boss; the soloist or the conductor?" The answer is, of
| course, sometimes one, sometimes the other, depending on the
| people involved. But almost always, the two manage to get
| together by persuasion or charm or even threats to achieve a
| unified performance. I have only once before in my life had to
| submit to a soloist's wholly new and incompatible concept and
| that was the last time I accompanied Mr. Gould. (The audience
| roared with laughter at this.) But, but this time the
| discrepancies between our views are so great that I feel I must
| make this small disclaimer. Then why, to repeat the question, am
| I conducting it? Why do I not make a minor scandal -- get a
| substitute soloist, or let an assistant conduct? Because I am
| fascinated, glad to have the chance for a new look at this much-
| played work; Because, what's more, there are moments in Mr.
| Gould's performance that emerge with astonishing freshness and
| conviction. Thirdly, because we can all learn something from this
| extraordinary artist, who is a thinking performer, and finally
| because there is in music what Dimitri Mitropoulos used to call
| "the sportive element", that factor of curiosity, adventure,
| experiment, and I can assure you that it has been an adventure
| this week collaborating with Mr. Gould on this Brahms concerto
| and it's in this spirit of adventure that we now present it to
| you.
|
| Because some took this as an attack on Gould, Bernstein followed
| up with the remark:
|
| > Any discovery of Glenn's was welcomed by me because I worshiped
| the way he played: I admired his intellectual approach, his
| "guts" approach, his complete dedication to whatever he was
| doing.
|
| Anyway, it's an interesting parallel in the arts world. Jacob
| Collier is a musician of today that has similar qualities of
| "being smart with good ideas".
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/SvWPM783TOE
|
| [2]
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Philharmonic_concer...
| tallies wrote:
| Jacob Collier is an interesting example because the general
| response I've seen to his music from music fans is that it is
| too "smart". It's impressive and novel to music academics (and
| apparently the Grammys) but hardly interesting to fans of the
| genres he favors (soul, pop, R&B). Common complaints being lack
| of emotion, lack of taste, poor songwriting, over production.
| But any negative review will also acknowledge that he's
| immensely talented and has massive potential.
| mabub24 wrote:
| That was my immediate impression of his music. It feels
| strangely cold and extremely "produced", especially when he
| has made stabs at jazz, a genre that is in many cases "music
| for musicians". For a genre that prizes free flowing
| interpretation and individual creativity alongside
| instrumental virtuosity, his jazz music comes out utterly
| sterile compared to other modern jazz musicians. The same
| goes for his soul music. Everything he does feels like an
| exercise in a genre rather than playing _in_ it.
|
| Compare his stuff to the work of Kamasi Washington, Mary
| Halvorson's groups, or Shabaka Hutchings, or Christian Scott
| aTunde Adjuah, and you hear an enormous difference in the
| sheer craft of songwriting, emotional dynamics, and
| storytelling through their instruments.
|
| He's clearly a virtuoso at a kind of playing the instrument,
| and he's extremely good at explaining music theory and
| concepts, which is a rather archaic and unique language all
| its own, but I don't think he's quite there yet for
| songwriting.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| > archaic and unique language
|
| archaic or arcane?
| mabub24 wrote:
| Some of the words in music theory are just straight
| latin, or directly descendant from latin and old. A lot
| of people struggle with music theory until you
| "translate" it to using modern language (though you do
| lose some specificity in some cases). Like "ritardando",
| which is just "slow down", or accelerando, which is, you
| guessed it, "speed up".
|
| You can also use arcane.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _He's remembered as a pianist not because his fingers were
| quick and sensitive, but instead because he pushed boundaries
| in completely original ways._
|
| Or because a lot of this (even classical music) is pop culture,
| so he was quirky enough to establish a brand name, whereas
| others equally competent or even better didn't come with an
| assosicated story to sell them...
| reikonomusha wrote:
| I think the quirkiness perhaps helped propel him to greater
| fame, and made his name "stick" more easily, but it's
| certainly not _the_ reason he is famous or remembered. There
| are countless quirky no-names. He was of note more so because
| of his technical capacity and strong convictions for his
| unorthodox approach, which he voluminously described in
| writing, interviews, etc.
| ThePhysicist wrote:
| Brian Josephson received his nobel prize for a discovery he made
| at age 22 while being a PhD student. The accompanying paper is
| just two pages long [1]. Without diminishing his achievement I'd
| wager that thousands of bright PhD students could've come up with
| the same solution given the right circumstances.
|
| I no longer work in academia but what I observed when spending
| time in top-tier research groups is that it's at least as
| important where you work as how smart you are. You can be the
| most gifted researcher but if you work in a backwater university
| in a third-world country your chances of being noticed or doing
| well-recognized work are very dim. On the other hand, if you're a
| smart person working in a top-tier environment your chance of
| doing noteworthy work are much higher.
|
| Now of course smart people will usually find ways to get into
| better environments, but from my experience there's still a lot
| of elitism involved. For example, where I did my PhD in France
| almost all fellow PhD students in my group had parents that were
| high-ranking scientists, some of them leading research
| institutes. I always thought that it would be extremely unlikely
| to observe such a concentration if the selection process was
| really unbiased. Not saying my colleagues weren't gifted, but of
| course they had a lot of advantages as compared to gifted
| students from poor families as their parents knew exactly what to
| do to get them into the elite programs (in France you have to
| prepare for this for many years, starting with picking the right
| school for your children). So being in the right place and having
| the right pedigree is still a huge factor for getting a good shot
| at being really successful.
|
| [1]: http://hacol13.physik.uni-
| freiburg.de/fp/Versuche/FP1/FP1-11...
| ryandrake wrote:
| Same problem in industry. It often matters more that you have
| $prestigious_school or $prestigious_company on your resume than
| how smart or hard working you are. Not to mention having the
| "right" people in your network or the right parents. I wish we
| wouldn't attach so much signal to these vanity attributes.
| achenet wrote:
| There's probably a way to make money exploiting this.
|
| For example, develop a hiring process to hire smart people
| with non prestigious backgrounds.
|
| Similarly, I read once that ugly people pay higher interest
| rates on loans despite being more likely to repay them.
|
| That's a golden opportunity if I ever saw one, legal
| regulations permitting.
| biswaroop wrote:
| This may be off-topic, but it's incredible how Brian Josephson
| went off the rails with his paranormal quantum theories.
|
| A fascinating read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease
|
| The list is full of people who are obviously 'smart' in some
| way, but somehow also incredibly full of bad ideas. It's
| possible that being insightful also requires you to have bad
| ideas as well - as if they're fountains of ideas, good and bad.
|
| Crucially though, these Nobel Laureates possess a lack of
| critical thinking to filter out the bad ideas (that are often
| outside their field of expertise). They're definitely not
| unique among scientists.
| svachalek wrote:
| Interesting, I had not heard of that. For an older example,
| Isaac Newton spent most of his life researching alchemy.
| opportune wrote:
| This is partially why I decided not to go the PhD-> try to
| become a professor route. It really is an incestuous community
| these days. I also noticed that a very large portion of the
| people at the "top" of the pipeline into academia have
| connections to academia in the US (eg a parent professor) who
| can help them get or navigate getting a lot of these early
| "prestige" markers. If you don't have that, even if you're just
| as smart, you'll have a hard time breaking in.
|
| For example a lot of those kids will start doing "research" in
| HS, obviously in 99% of cases very closely directed by their
| mentor, who may be a parent. This gets them those fancy "17
| year creates clean drinking water for $0.002/L" news coverage
| and possibly helps them win a nationally recognized science
| fair. Then they can also get tutored for Olympiads - unless you
| have a Von Neumann level intelligence you basically need a lot
| of special studying to be able to get far in those. Then they
| get into accelerated programs with local universities with the
| help of their parents, obviously get into whatever college they
| want, get the best research opportunities starting freshman
| year, and it continues to snowball from there.
|
| Not saying this system doesn't make great scientists, or that
| the people who benefit from it aren't smart or qualified. Just,
| ultimately there are only so many professorships to go around,
| so good luck becoming a professor in STEM at an acclaimed R1
| university without this kind of pipelining, even if you're just
| as smart.
| aerosmile wrote:
| > where I did my PhD in France almost all fellow PhD students
| in my group had parents that were high-ranking scientists
|
| You'll see this across all professional areas in the world.
| Medical students overindex on parents being doctors, law
| students on parents being lawyers. Heck, even young 10-year-old
| motorcycle racers at your local mini moto track almost all have
| a Dad back in the pit who is wrenching on their bikes and who
| comes from a moto background. It's literally everywhere you
| look.
|
| The reality is that most of us can be successful in several
| different professional paths, and that we'll often choose the
| path that we're most familiar with from our upbringing.
|
| On that note, whenever I meet someone who successfully broke
| their "family mold," I appreciate their success that much more.
| tshaddox wrote:
| I think the dismissal of "creativity" in the footnote is
| misguided. I think creativity is easier to define than
| "intelligence" and better explains the intuitive difference
| between e.g. humans and animals and between humans and current AI
| systems. "Intelligence" often gets mixed up with arguably
| irrelevant things like computational speed, memory (recall), or
| the ability to solve problems in some narrow niche. But
| creativity gets to the _generalness_ of what humans can do _that
| other animals and current AI systems apparently can not_ , which
| is to create new knowledge by conjecturing (and criticizing) new
| ideas with no apparent bounds on the subject matter or reach of
| those ideas.
| tappio wrote:
| Was Einstein really that smart? What if Einstein is just a meme,
| and there were dozens of other people who made similar findings
| but we're not published? What is with this obsession on trying to
| explain in hindsight why someone was successful?
| yuuu wrote:
| Einstein was known to be a complete idiot. That's why whenever
| anyone screws up at work, they say, "Great job, Einstein!" It's
| because Einstein was so stupid.
| tappio wrote:
| Have you read his work? There are many things which are memes
| without real background, such as people believing in the past
| that earth was flat. No. They didn't. Medieval people didn't
| believe earth was flat. This is something invented by 1800s
| historians. Einstein is the same kind if meme. Everyone keeps
| repeating how smart he was, but not many people have first
| hand information and know other researchers of his time. I
| don't know if he was smart or not. I've read some of his
| texts on politics which were not very good, but I guess he
| was better at physics. Or maybe those texts I've read even
| weren't Einsteins, but written by someone who just wanted to
| use his name to push an agenda. Who knows? Why does it
| matter? I'm wondering why people are so obsessed with this
| kind of things, because I've never been and it is hard for me
| to understand. Maybe you can provide some insight?
| Jensson wrote:
| > I've read some of his texts on politics which were not
| very good, but I guess he was better at physics.
|
| You know, Einstein was famous for his works in physics and
| was hailed as a world genius by his contemporaries? His
| insights into other topics might not have been ground
| breaking, but it is hard to argue about it with for
| physics.
|
| Edit: The thing is, judging his intelligence based on his
| writings about politics is like judging the intelligence of
| famous politicians by how well they write about physics.
| People who aren't experts at a field will always look like
| idiots when they write about it and are still learning
| about it.
| yuuu wrote:
| People are obsessed with Einstein because he made three
| fundamental breakthroughs in physics in a year, then beat
| everyone else to general relativity. They were real
| contributions, and they were pretty creative. He wasn't a
| computing machine like Von Neumann, but Einstein was a
| clever guy. Don't know why you're judging based on
| political contributions.
| davidw wrote:
| The ability to see things in a novel or different light is often
| an element of humor. Taking something a bit out of context, or
| switching things around.
| vjust wrote:
| There are people who are challenged , in their writing ability,
| but come up with new ideas. I can't name one off the top of my
| head, but I think the capitalistic world of startup companies
| could yield many examples of inventions.
|
| To me tying the writing skill to that ability seems questionable.
| laserlight wrote:
| Einstein had already explained what was special about him: "I
| have no special talent. I am only passionately curious."
| IceDane wrote:
| Oh wow, yet another pseudo-intellectual, navel-gazing snooze fest
| in 8pt and 90% white space. I have been biting my nails waiting
| since the last one.
| preordained wrote:
| One thing I feel like is an elephant in the room is that these
| great new ideas sure aren't being cultivated or drawn out by the
| VC machine. It seems like in a lot of ways _that_ thing is poison
| to genuine inspiration. It 's about the last thing some people
| probably want to hear, but a lot of great ideas just seem to be a
| genuine product of love and curiosity that seems unable to grow
| in the shadow of something that wants to wring money out of it.
| It's only if and after it survives to show some promise, far away
| from eyes sporting money symbols, that it can be shaken down for
| money.
| motohagiography wrote:
| Would add to the qualities of mind for new ideas: you need
| physical domain competence in something, because it will be the
| source of heuristics and isomorphisms that provide an intuitive
| fast map of a territory.
|
| I identify as a hyper-stupid intelligent person, where I can go
| breadth first into a lot of domains and get out of my depth
| really quickly, while impressing the ignorant and irritating the
| competent. The opportunities are amazing, you get to appreciate
| the most incredible things, but this kind of virtuotic ignorance
| (curiosity, charitably) needs to be tempered by practice and
| education in at least one thing, as you are really only ever as
| good as the thing you are best at. Important thoughts.
| bluecheese33 wrote:
| I don't know if practicing writing has made me better at
| producing new ideas. And I'm not sure if the quality of my
| writing has improved, though it's certainly easier for me to
| write now.
|
| But for sure, I don't think I ever really understood and
| internalized ideas from complex non-fiction books until I started
| writing about them. Even writing privately helped, but I think
| the most effective way is to write publicly - there's an
| obligation to write and argue clearly.
| [deleted]
| rationalfaith wrote:
| The fact that this is popular here just reinforces how many
| autists are on this website.
|
| Nothing new and upvoted out of ignorance.
| bob1029 wrote:
| Lots of fun points in here. I would add that willing to be wrong
| 100% of the time and being open to constantly fucking things up
| will get you very far all on its own. As long as your intentions
| are good and you can limit the blast radius, these efforts are
| usually rewarded in time. Ablity to disregard shame and the scorn
| of others is the superpower in this context.
| spfzero wrote:
| In a similar vein, being good at fixing things after you've
| broken them. Gives you a little more confidence in trying new
| things without all of the work involved in first making sure
| they'll work.
| mywittyname wrote:
| > Why do so many smart people fail to discover anything new?
|
| We live in a world were so much has been discovered already by
| the smart people before us. There isn't anymore low hanging fruit
| today, discovering novel things likely involves spending your
| early adulthood learning all the things our smart ancestors
| discovered as a primer to being able to understand what's left to
| discover.
|
| Most of us will need to be happy with merely understanding what
| has already been discovered. And realize that, for every Newton
| or Euler of the word, there were billions of people that history
| forgot.
| egfx wrote:
| >There isn't anymore low hanging fruit today, discovering novel
| things likely involves spending your early adulthood learning
| all the things our smart ancestors discovered as a primer to
| being able to understand what's left to discover.
|
| Just the opposite. Discovery happens when your confined and
| forced to discover (be creative) to survive and evolve. If your
| learning from everyone before your not discovering anything,
| your just repeating history.
| mywittyname wrote:
| What I'm getting at is, if you want to expand humanities
| understanding of physics, you first need to spend six or so
| years learning everything that humanity already knows about
| physics. After that, you can spend a few years doing research
| or designing experiments -- usually alongside someone whose
| dedicated their life to the field -- which will then,
| hopefully, culminate in your tiny little contribution to the
| knowledge of humanity.
|
| But, even just 150 years ago, you could have made multiple
| ground-breaking contributions to the world of science, or
| even developed entire fields of study.
| SquishyPanda23 wrote:
| I find this to be an odd essay.
|
| It's trivially easy to come up with new ideas. Just take any
| existing idea and perturb in a random direction. With high
| probability it will be new.
|
| Drugs and some mental disorders make it very easy to do this. The
| problem is, new ideas aren't very valuable. What is valuable is
| intelligently generating new ideas that take into account what
| came before. And for that you need intelligence and education.
|
| There is a kind of folk psychology in tech that emphasizes
| tinkering and working on projects. But almost all projects are
| bad. The reason tinkering produces results at a population level
| is because you have N agents randomly searching the terrain.
|
| That is fine if you're interested only in population effects,
| like VCs typically are. Then you can just watch for the random
| ideas that catch on and bet on them.
|
| But if you're going to decide whether you'd rather be smart or be
| a random-walking tinkerer, the choice is obvious. It's vastly
| better to be smart because most tinkerers fail and never have
| anything to show for it.
| talkingtab wrote:
| There are, I believe, two kinds of thinking/intelligence. One is
| analysis and that is the case of many smart people who achieve
| nothing - other than taking things apart and being critical.
|
| There is a second kind which we don't even seem to have a word
| for - lets call it gestalysis as opposed to analyis. Putting
| things together to form new things. The essence of this is to try
| understand something by building it. You can prove something by
| logic, but trying to build something and have it work also
| "proves" something.
|
| For example can you build an ant colony? We may understand ant
| colonies by taking them apart and examining the parts, but an
| important part of an ant colony is the interactions and
| behaviors. Can we understand an ant colony by taking it apart
| (and certainly that helps) or can we understand it better if we
| can create a simulation?
|
| And finally, there is a kind of gestalysis that goes further -
| creating behaviors and interactions that go beyond simulation of
| things we know. This is, I believe the provenance of startups and
| entrepreneurs.
|
| It seems to me that Einstein's brilliance not due to analysis but
| gestalysis. My 2 cents.
|
| My 2 cents.
| playing_colours wrote:
| Synthesis may be the name you were looking for?
| raldi wrote:
| Einstein's fame kinda ruined the word "genius" -- people tend to
| think the word is just a synonym for smart. But to me (and I
| think the gen- root at the beginning supports this), the key
| thing about a genius is that they revolutionize a field and
| inspire others to think in wildly new ways.
|
| Problem was, Einstein was both of these things, and is so
| associated with the word that a lot of people's brains just go
| from "genius" -> Einstein -> "super smart".
| asdfman123 wrote:
| I think the key thing that superior intelligence gives you in
| science is the ability to survey a large field of knowledge,
| quickly identify the essence of each idea, zero in on what's
| worth pursuing and what's worth throwing out.
|
| Research is like a crowd of people painstakingly searching
| through a cow pasture to find little gems buried in the dirt.
| If your vision is clearer and you can move 10x faster, you can
| run circles around other people. You can look over hundreds of
| leads, intuitively sense what works and what doesn't, and
| narrow in on promising ones.
| brador wrote:
| Skills, opportunity, motivation. He had all 3. Together we just
| call them luck.
| varelse wrote:
| So waiting for people to try intentionally infecting themselves
| with toxoplasmosis to boost their creativity. It seems like a
| rule 34 near inevitability to me. YMMV.
| [deleted]
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