[HN Gopher] Beyond Smart
___________________________________________________________________
Beyond Smart
Author : razin
Score : 645 points
Date : 2021-10-21 17:04 UTC (1 days 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.
| auntienomen wrote:
| At least you still got a nautical metaphor in!
| defen wrote:
| One way to test out your theory would be to pretend that
| someone else wrote the essay. If the essay no longer
| makes sense, or if it still comes across as self-
| congratulatory, I would agree with you. However if you
| perform this thought experiment I think you'll find that
| neither is true, so I think you're just reacting to
| identity of the author and not his actual point.
| 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.
| tomp wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Not sure which posts you mean, but this post is _explicitly_
| about examining the difference between _intelligence_ and
| _having new ideas_ , in hopes of eventually being able to list
| the ingredients of the latter (the former seems mostly inborn)
| to be able to cultivate them more broadly in society.
| mcbishop wrote:
| My experience here reflects my general pattern: 1) Read an
| article via HN 2) Return to HN, to smash the upvote button 3)
| Go to the article's comments 4) Realize that there are problems
| with the article that I was totally oblivious to 5) Remind
| myself to not be so damn naive
|
| So big thanks to HN people, and PG.
| gfodor wrote:
| Plot twist: pg writes the articles to generate this effect
| and it's consequences.
| mcbishop wrote:
| Haha. Maybe he's testing the good-spirited rebelliousness
| and critical thinking of the HN community. (Or maybe not.)
| maxerickson wrote:
| Be sure to drink your Ovaltine.
| Gatsky wrote:
| I think one should just take the blog post for what it is. It
| isn't a UN resolution. He actually has thoughtful opinions that
| he is happy to put out there without endless qualifications.
| That is what makes it valuable, not why it is problematic. The
| broader relevance, the applicability of the notions to one's
| own life, the motivations of the author are all left as an
| exercise to the reader.
| 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.
| philosopher1234 wrote:
| >You've made a very concrete claim here: "PG appears to
| be a dishonest writer," and then showed no evidence of
| dishonesty.
|
| This is wrong. Here is my evidence: His articles are
| exclusively self serving. He consistently ignores and
| degrades canons of thought that might threaten his ideas.
| This is dishonest behavior, even if it isnt an outright
| lie, in the same way that saying "vaccines caused my
| cousins balls to inflate" would be dishonest even if it
| weren't a lie. It's dishonest in the same way the church
| shouting down Copernicus was dishonest. The dishonesty is
| omission + ignorance, not a direct lie.
|
| I and GP made this point to you many times, and you have
| continuously chosen to lower the wool over your eyes.
|
| >It sounds like we'll have to agree to disagree.
|
| I see no need to agree to this.
| zd123 wrote:
| You are absolutely right, but some people are unable to
| read between the lines. For them its not true unless pg
| writes it down in a confession in his essay.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| > He consistently ignores and degrades canons of thought
| that might threaten his ideas.
|
| Could you find a quote from any pg essay that supports
| this point? This seems mistaken.
|
| As for the self-serving part, I don't think it's a bad
| thing to write about one's own experiences.
| philosopher1234 wrote:
| Writing about ones own experiences may not necessarily be
| self serving. Ignoring others experiences whole cloth in
| order to make a point that benefits you is self serving.
|
| >Could you find a quote from any pg essay that supports
| this point? This seems mistaken.
|
| First of all, this is the wrong way to interpret my
| point. I'm making a point about ignorance. You need to
| look for whats not there, not what is there.
|
| Second, yes as it happens I can:
| https://twitter.com/geofft/status/1337895041990356994
|
| Is a racist who simply never talks to any POC, cites any
| of their work, or hires them, not racist just because
| they never explicitly say they hate minorities?
| 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.
| iambateman wrote:
| His essay says that we overrate intelligence and underrate
| independent-mindedness and writing.
|
| This is actionable - we can cultivate both with some minor
| changes, and meanwhile we aren't likely to get much marginal
| return on trying to improve general intelligence.
|
| If you'd like to provide an alternative theory, please do. But
| 100 words of eye-roll aren't moving society forward either.
|
| FWIW I was homeschooled and now work from home with a large
| team of folks in an office. I see a lot of people struggle with
| independent-mindedness, and I think it hurts our team's
| productivity.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Typically they are persuasive essays with all the furniture of
| an expository essay or research paper.
| nopinsight wrote:
| If you subscribe the general worldview that human well-being is
| an important goal for society and believe that we have
| progressed so much in the last few centuries because of
| scientific knowledge and technological inventions, then it
| becomes clear that the qualities described in this post,
| intelligence and the ability to come up with useful new ideas,
| are useful for society.
|
| In my reading, PG did not claim that these are the most
| important things for society.
| soared wrote:
| Most often my initial reaction is a clear awareness that pg
| doesn't spend much time outside of the Vc/start up bubble.
| xyzelement wrote:
| I don't understand the complaint. Everything that everyone
| writes is intended to be prefixed with a big fat "this is what
| I think. You can disagree, my job is present to you with the
| facts as I see them"
|
| I read this article and it was an interesting way to crystalize
| an idea I observed myself (I made a comment in this thread
| about my experience with smart but non-impactful people.) So I
| got value out of this post in that it names a concept for me.
|
| So your concern is not that the author is wrong, not that the
| idea is bad, not that it will lead to a bad outcome - but
| simply that the author wrote about something they thought was
| important?
| 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.
| mikewarot wrote:
| At Pumping Station One in Chicago, I learned a golden rule:
|
| Ideas aren't worth shit.
|
| I'm a veritable fountain of ideas, but that doesn't mean squat.
| Only instantiated ideas, whose value is successfully communicated
| to others stand a chance of impact in the world.
|
| Ideas spring from mapping the world (packers need not apply), and
| noticing things on the newly connected edges of the map. Those
| ideas then need to be brought into the real world with luck,
| preparedness, persistence in some mix.
|
| Then you need communication skills and people skills to
| communicated the ideas and tools you've created to others, to get
| them to invest their time and effort and start adoption.
|
| Being smart helps, but it's noticing the connections, and having
| a large set of tools to build on any ideas that are the key piece
| here. You need some smarts, curiosity, persistence, luck, people
| skills and a network once you've done the work.
| 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
| nicholast wrote:
| Just like in order to become a composer of music you need to
| start by performing other people's music, I think it helps in
| writing to start by responding to other people's ideas,
| dissecting and evaluating, which helps you build the competence
| to generate ideas of your own.
| 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.
| User23 wrote:
| I'm not sure, but I think it was Nabokov where I first saw the
| distinction between genius and intelligence most clearly
| articulated. The defining characteristic of genius is right there
| in the Latin root[1], it's fundamentally original. One could have
| Von Neumann tier intellectual horsepower and waste it all solving
| sudoku puzzles or something. Or one could have a much more modest
| intellect, and yet make utterly original and lasting
| contributions to human knowledge.
|
| [1] "generative power"
| chegra wrote:
| I think there are hard problems and easy problems, and smarts
| reflects ones ability to solve hard problems. So, the question
| should be how does one solve hard problems?
|
| The solutions to any problem can trivially be found by searching
| through the possible solutions and checking which solution works.
| The problem with this approach is that it is intractable space.
| Thus, the main ways that we traverse the search space of
| solutions is limiting the search space and by pattern matching.
| [Think in terms of chess where the search space is large to find
| the best possible move...The way they get around it is by simply
| reducing the search space and pattern matching.]
|
| Consequently, a smart person would be one who has developed
| intuition about a problem enough to limit the search space of the
| available solutions and has a vast collection of patterns to draw
| from that will aid in the problem solving process.
|
| He did touch on one point with all extraordinary genius, they
| were all obsess. I think this fosters having enough intuition
| about a problem and having a toolbox of patterns necessary to
| solve hard problems. Is there any genius without a vast toolbox
| of techniques to solve problems? Is there any genius without a
| supreme understanding of his problem area?
|
| Having intuition and huge toolbox for solving problems we know
| are necessary conditions for solving hard problems, but are they
| sufficient conditions?
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| Good comment. I think that maybe what you're getting at is the
| intuition on particular problems is not necessarily correlated
| to high IQ beyond a minimum threshold.
|
| From everything I've read, almost every contemporary of Von
| Neumann says he was the 'smartest' person they ever met. It
| seems his brain just worked at a completely different clock
| speed than normal people, even normal geniuses.
|
| However, while is contributions are immense and widespread, I
| don't think they come close to the utterly astounding work of
| Godel.
|
| While Godel was insanely smart, he also just looked at the
| world in a very unusual way that let him see certain meta
| axioms that have profound implications for pretty much every
| scientist and philosopher. I don't know if it was circumstance
| that led him to a special tool box, or obsession, or a certain
| spark of creativity everyone else lacked, but there's something
| worth exploring there.
| 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]
| bloudermilk wrote:
| How does pg _still_ not have SSL on his website?
| 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.
| avapark wrote:
| https://prestigeavalonpark.simdif.com/
| carabiner wrote:
| Using footnotes to add random tangents, rather than
| clarifications or directly related context, seems noisy. Why do
| writers in tech do this? I've never seen footnotes used like
| this.
| dvdhnt wrote:
| In my opinion, what made Einstein great was his grand perspective
| and ability to think deeply. He was brilliant and his brain could
| obviously connect dots that most people cannot. But what is that
| if not intelligence?
|
| As an aside, if you believe Einstein to be brilliant or
| interesting, definitely check out his essay "Why Socialism?" [1]
|
| 1. https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism
| 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".
| rramadass wrote:
| All of Hamming's books are Great. Most are available from
| _Dover Publications_ for cheap. In particular; checkout his
|
| * _Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability,
| and Statistics._
|
| * _The Art of Probability_.
| 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
| zem wrote:
| i think feynman's stance on "important problems" was a lot
| better: http://genius.cat-v.org/richard-
| feynman/writtings/letters/pr...
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I think pg is right that less responsibility leads to new ideas.
|
| Since having kids, my ability to pursue my interests is severely
| curtailed. My kids are just now at the point where most of them
| are sufficiently independent that I'd have less responsibility,
| and now my in-laws need care, with my parents probably not far
| behind.
|
| It seems likely that I won't have significant free time and
| mental energy until my parents are dead, which is a bit of a
| depressing thought...
| MisterMower wrote:
| Unpopular opinion: with women taking a larger role in
| professional life, men are having to pick up the slack when it
| comes to child rearing. That leaves less time for men to
| invent, discover, create, etc. But women aren't inventing,
| discovering or creating in proportion to their increased
| professional participation. Our society is worse off because of
| it.
|
| Look at the people who made major scientific discoveries, or
| built new industries, or penned the most well known symphonies.
| They were almost entirely young men who were unmarried, or
| married in a time when women were expected to take care of the
| child rearing.
|
| I was reading "How the Laser Happened" and the guy who invented
| it had four kids, but still had plenty of time to sit on park
| benches during evening walks by himself and ponder the physics
| of light. He went on many trips to visit other universities for
| research and worked tons of hours at Bell Labs. That was a
| normal way for men to work back then, even expected and viewed
| honorably.
|
| We are going to have to accept less great discoveries and new
| inventions if society starts expecting men to bear half the
| effort of child rearing. You can't come up with the laser or
| the Theory if Relativity if you've got crying kids you're on
| the hook to watch while their mother is at work.
|
| The alternative is to not even have kids, or to raise them
| poorly. And that's not fair to them. Unfortunately, that seems
| to be what most people are settling on. Which does not bode
| well for the future of humanity, either.
|
| Any way you slice it, it's a bleak future.
| dgb23 wrote:
| This reminds me of the women who invented, made and fought
| for great things _despite_ the stigma and prejudice
| surrounding them.
|
| A few famous examples in our field:
|
| Ada Lovelace: the first program
|
| Grace Hopper: the first compiler
|
| Margaret Hamilton: software engineering, fault tolerance
|
| We really should at least try to stop pushing women out of
| our field, so much potential might be lost by this
| nonsensical adversity that seems to be so prevalent.
| dx034 wrote:
| It's only bleak if you assume that men don't prefer taking
| care of children over spending time in science. Many men will
| prefer family life and are happy that it's now socially
| accepted to put their kids first.
|
| And at the same time it frees up a lot of time for women to
| enter the field and make discoveries.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Even when mothers aren't pursuing a professional life, things
| are different because expectations of dads (and husbands for
| that matter) have gone up [1].
|
| I think this is a good thing as far as families go (at least
| when the expectations remain realistic), as the bar for dad's
| parenting is still lower than mom's.
|
| There's still more pressure on women to "do it all and look
| good while doing so" but men definitely are struggling with
| taking on responsibilities that their fathers could ignore.
|
| 1: it's actually a bit more nuanced than just higher
| expectations. You get more points just for not leaving than
| you used to, but once you are there, the expected role is a
| bit more involved. I read an article talking about how
| children's experiences with father's have diverged; either
| they aren't there at all, or they are far more involved then
| previous generations.
| urthor wrote:
| The same can be said for all sorts of minorities.
|
| The lack of participation in science is totally driven by
| psychological insecurities around high achievement.
| tricolon wrote:
| > But women aren't inventing, discovering or creating in
| proportion to their increased professional participation.
|
| Can you back up your claim?
| MisterMower wrote:
| There are no doubt notable outliers, but go look at all the
| major composers of the last 300 years. How many women can
| you name? Same thing with Nobel Prizes. The vast majority
| are men. How many women built new industries or invented
| revolutionary machines or devices? It was almost entirely
| men.
|
| Perhaps that will change in 100 years. I'm open to the
| argument that limited opportunity prevented women from
| accomplishing those things in the past. But historically
| that hasn't been the case.
| nostalgiac wrote:
| > But women aren't inventing, discovering or creating in
| proportion to their increased professional participation.
|
| Do you have evidence to suport this? (Geniunely curious)
|
| Why do you think that is the case? Just the fact that they
| are more likely to be part-time or not able to be fully
| committed into their field while also being a mother does not
| warrant them enough time/energy/x to achieve those
| breakthroughs?
| 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.
| PeterisP wrote:
| The argument for general cognitive ability is because the
| correlation is observed among all the various measures
| related to cognitive ability that we have. If you test
| people on the ability to play the piano, organ, and
| harpsichord, and assert that this is a reflection of
| general cognitive ability, then this is prediction is
| testable by later correlating this ability with other
| measures, and gets falsified by observing the metrics
| with which it does not correlate. So far, the concept of
| "G" survives because it actually does succeed in various
| tests of alternative metrics of cognitive ability - e.g.
| "emotional intelligence" metrics, biological metrics such
| as reaction speed, and various 'outcomes' e.g. job
| performance and future income controlled for
| socioeconomic background.
|
| In essence, the answer to "why positive correlation
| between any particular set of tests leads to the
| conclusion that this is truly a general cognitive
| ability" is that many respectable people have tried to
| find measures of aspects of cognitive ability that are
| separate and uncorrelated, however, as far as I know, all
| such attempts have failed so far and their experiments on
| alternative metrics did correlate with everything else
| and just became more data supporting the concept.
| 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."
| lincpa wrote:
| I agree, I am an amateur, and the theory I created is based on
| common sense and elementary school mathematics. This seems to
| have nothing to do with IQ.
|
| My theory based on the simple, classic, vivid, and widely used in
| social production practice, elementary school mathematics "water
| input/output of the pool" as a mathematical prototype, Therefore,
| it is scientific. Its name is "The Grand Unified Programming
| Theory: The Pure Function Pipeline Data Flow with Principle-based
| Warehouse/Workshop Model".
|
| The "von Neumann architecture" used by computers now has no
| mathematical model support. So it cannot prove its scientificity.
|
| My theory rebuilt the theoretical foundation of the IT industry,
| The IT industry is fundamentally associated with mathematics.
| Solved the most fundamental and core major problems in the IT
| industry.
|
| Therefore, my "warehouse/workshop model" will surely replace the
| "von Neumann architecture" and become the first architecture in
| the computer field, and it is the first architecture to achieve a
| unified software and hardware.
|
| Software and hardware are factories that manufacture data, so
| they have the same "warehouse/workshop model" and management
| methods as the manufacturing industry.
|
| In the IT field, only it and binary system fully comply with
| these 5 aesthetics: Simplicity, Unity, order, symmetry and
| definiteness.
|
| It has a wide range of applications, from SOC to supercomputer,
| from software to hardware, from stand-alone to network, from
| application layer to system layer, from single thread to
| distributed, from general programming to explainable AI, from
| manufacturing industry to IT industry, from energy to finance,
| from the missile's "Fire-and-Forget" technology to Boeing
| aircraft pulse production line technology, from myth to
| Transformers.
|
| The Grand Unified Programming Theory: The Pure Function Pipeline
| Data Flow with Principle-based Warehouse/Workshop Model
|
| https://github.com/linpengcheng/PurefunctionPipelineDataflow
| jstgord wrote:
| I'm not going to read this, yet - PGs ideas always seem to be so
| interesting they drown out my own - rather Ill pose a question :
|
| What if being 'smart' is a measure of the useful 'technology' we
| have running as the OS in our minds ?
|
| What if all of our smarts are merely the result of opportunity /
| time / resources / environment / education .. exposure to good
| ideas and patterns of thinking - asking questions, following
| trains of thought, going back to first principles, exposure to
| diverse language and culture, opportunity to read good books,
| wealth and time to devote to puzzles when young, habit of
| critical thinking, fluency in math, exposure to ideas such as
| Evolution, access to computers/internet/information, time devoted
| to hobbies / making things etc.
|
| I think one of the things that works in Silicon Valley is the
| recycling of 'talented' developers from one startup to another -
| so you have a hive-mind pool of continually honed elite creative
| technical skill-sets competing and cooperating to build new
| things from modern building blocks .. and when the 'thing'
| doesn't work, people can move on to the next thing until they hit
| a local gravity well of a startup going nova. When that happens,
| they get wealthy from equity .. then recycle that wealth via
| investment in other startups, and their time into mentoring.
|
| Its been painful to watch this not happen in Australia over the
| past couple decades - a few wins, but no real ecosystem develop,
| despite there being a fair bit of nascent talent in game
| development, crypto, ML, math, biotech etc. The mining/resource
| boom has dominated our trade and little of that wealth has been
| plowed back into technology / science investment. We should be
| 'mining' our solar energy wealth and exporting that up into Asia
| via cable. We should have a hive of ML and green-tech and when
| one doesn't make it, the people move on to other ones.
|
| Another way of saying this is "smart doesn't come from nowhere"
| .. you need a pyramid ecosystem of soil, worms, molds, bacteria
| where smart shoots can arise naturally. Its hard to be book-
| smart, startup-smart or math-smart if you're homeless and all
| your bandwidth is spent on shelter... or if the best job a smart
| person can have in your locale is selling houses and you need to
| do that to pay off your student debt.
|
| Conversely, if things are too comfortable there is no need to get
| smart - but the wealth inequality curve is such that we needn't
| worry about the vanishingly small talent pool of ultra wealthy
| teen proto-engineer entrepreneurs who will work on hard things to
| hone their smarts : a more plausible benefit is they dabble with
| cash bets in tech startups, science research or philanthropy.
|
| I guess Im arguing that we concentrate on the ecosystem, rather
| than the individual - the smart long bet is to fund math
| education, science outreach, K2 reading programs : looking
| around, is there any doubt we need to aggressively promote ideas
| such as Evolution or the Carbon Cycle ? I love zombie movies way
| too much, but am appalled that no one ever asks how they keep
| walking around forever without eating - its as if conservation of
| energy is not part of the general public's meme-set.
|
| We all lose when young people are prevented from becoming smart
| by their environment - poverty, religion, anti-science, anti-
| education culture, political or economic instability.
|
| What are the best ways to urgently improve this ? Maybe
| immigration of skilled/educated/motivated/talented people from
| poor countries to rich countries is one of the most effective
| measures that works on a short timescale [ where immigrants work
| in startups, tech companies or university research labs ]
|
| In Australia, our politicians love to be seen with spade in hand
| at the opening of a newly built school - well designed new
| buildings are nice, but they don't seem to have a plan to
| actually educate people to a higher level in science and math,
| despite the buzzwords and virtue signalling. One of our best
| mini-exports is the AMC ( Australian Maths Competition ), its
| well regarded in Malaysia and Singapore, but many schools here
| don't even participate as its seen as too hard, or perhaps too
| elite or not relevant. Schools have tech sessions where they
| might fly a drone or use a 3D printer .. but they dont seem to
| dig into the internals of how these things work. We seem to have
| a kind of cargo-cult mindset, where we are losing the ability to
| fix or improve anything. We outsource our refuse processing to
| Asia, but now they are refusing this, so our "green solution" is
| to burn rubbish, rather than invest in better recycling
| technology. Even after the worlds largest fires and smoke over
| our cities, we have not really woken up to the challenge of
| climate change. Covid has shown up how badly we fumble at
| organizing ourselves into action based on science. The Empire is
| crumbling here on Anacreon - we need a Hari Seldon plan.
|
| I dont think voting matters, I dont think democracy is really
| functioning and the Universities themselves seem to be large
| beurocracies guarding their massive wealth, churning out
| marketing and management degrees for profit. Rather, we the
| technologists must exert whatever power we have - either by
| education, marketing/dialog, building truly useful things, or
| using our new-wealth to buy off idiot politicians and fund the
| technology projects that will improve things.
|
| Not to be alarmist .. but it really is 11:59 and our planet is
| dying. We need to get smart as a group and as a species.
| Applejinx wrote:
| Reminds me of reading 'Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain'.
| The way that book tries to get you to un-hook the judging and
| structuring parts of your mind so your hand can form shapes with
| NO WORDS to describe them.
|
| As soon as you say 'I'm drawing an arm' your brain tries to
| define 'arm' and what it would mean to appropriately outline the
| parts of one on your paper... and the image you'd ideally produce
| might bear no resemblance to the 'arm' definition your brain
| gives you. It's an elaborate process of shutting down certain
| kinds of 'smart' that are overly naive and reductive, to get to
| images that are available but undescribable by analytical words.
| The perfect lines of an elbow are not 'triangle' or 'circle' or
| even anatomical parts: they're the image one's eye understands
| immediately, but getting it on paper is a whole other story.
|
| I find when I'm live-coding audio DSP and getting close to
| dialing in a tonal detail that I'm trying hard to capture, or
| even rapidly debugging and evolving the code of the program to do
| it, when I'm most effective I lose the words to explain what I'm
| doing. It becomes 'and now I this, to do this, and then we ah...
| you'll see, it should... there. That.'
|
| I'll play the sound, and my model will exactly resemble the thing
| I'm trying to make it sound like, but I'm miles away from being
| able to articulate what I did. Or, more likely, I could tell you
| 'I subtracted the thing and it needed to be 1.52 rather than 1.5,
| and that and the other idea got it to where it sounds like that.
| Because the filter's lower, and it's interacting with the input
| sample in thus and so a way'. The tangible STUFF I'm doing is
| rarely that complicated.
|
| But being on the point of knowing to DO that stuff and exactly
| that stuff to get there... is what Graham is talking about. I
| don't know if it can be learned but it can damn well be trained.
| People as disparate as ad guy David Ogilvy, and writer John
| Gardner, have understood that.
|
| And you can be a literal writer and still have important parts of
| your process locked away in that no-words zone. At those times,
| you are the writer. Your literal writing ability and vocabulary,
| are the stenographer. It's waiting on you having something to
| say. That 'something to say' may not be coming from a 'words
| place'.
| 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.
| fossuser wrote:
| They're often related (look at Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos,
| Bill Gates, etc.) - I think it's good that the upper
| quartile creates new wealth (usually through reinvesting
| and building stuff). I think it's reasonable to try to
| structure things so that wealth doesn't give too much
| outsized political influence (easier said than done).
|
| Allowing the incentives of unbounded wealth creation at
| the top is desirable imo.
| 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.
| tcgv wrote:
| I'm more of an analytical person myself, and my non-technical
| co-founder at our startup is much like you described
| yourself. I built the tech in the early days (today I mostly
| manage the tech team). He was the sales person and used his
| impressive communication skills to win our first key
| accounts. One thing that he though me long ago is that there
| are several types of intelligence. It's not linear. People
| usually assume the analytical type of intelligence is the
| true type of intelligence. I find that to be inaccurate.
| 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.
| PeterisP wrote:
| "Happiness/contentment" is effectively a "balancing
| thermostat" of our motivation, a functional aspect that
| is used by our bodies to regulate our behavior and thus,
| if it functions properly (as opposed to certain diseases
| e.g. anhedonia in clinical depression) its long term
| average will be pretty much the same no matter how well
| you do, it's almost orthogonal to any metric of actual
| wellbeing. For example, studies show both winning
| excessive amounts of money in lotteries and sustaining
| major life-changing injuries (e.g. losing limbs or
| causing other disabilities) do not correlate with
| happiness in the long-term. Happiness effectively
| reflects (a) recent short-term changes to wellbeing; (b)
| momentary expectations or worries about future wellbeing;
| and (c) innate baseline happiness. It's not a reflection
| of how well someone is living; in essence, people living
| long-term in a literal gulag may easily have on average
| the same overall happiness/contentment as living in a
| nice first world upper-middle-class environment.
| cm2012 wrote:
| It's amazing how so many things in the human body work
| from a thermostat principle
| 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.
| flavius29663 wrote:
| intelligence being a highly genetic trait was known for a
| long while. Recently they even discovered the genes
| responsible for a large part of it
| https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg.2017.104
| 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....
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| Read up on working memory. A lot of people can't hold enough
| items in their head long enough to write a function. And
| that's if you don't believe in IQ, which is already very
| heavily correlated with success.
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| P.S. I am in the somewhat unique situation of being "smart
| enough", but far from the smartest person in the room, so I
| can struggle and am close enough to the "incompetent" line
| to see it clearly, and it's a scary place. On the other
| hand, I can do enough to understand how truly fast "hyper-
| intelligent" people think at work to understand the
| difference, and it's a stark difference.
| 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
| zarzavat wrote:
| There's only a very small number of exceptional people who
| are so smart that they just understand everything without
| effort. Terry Tao comes to mind. Everybody else has to pick
| and choose what they understand, most "very smart" people are
| still only very smart within a certain domain.
|
| This is more of a reflection of the richness of our world
| rather than the limitations of the human mind.
|
| In Ancient Greece, it was possible for polymaths to exist,
| people who could contribute to the many disciplines that
| existed then. Then, Poincare has the title of "the last
| universalist" because of his contributions to many areas of
| mathematics. Now, no such generalist can exist, everything
| requires specialisation. But that is a good thing. It means
| that human knowledge is incredibly rich.
| manquer wrote:
| Depends on how you see it .
|
| Yes you are right in sense that, in the ancient the number
| of educated people -> scholars -> professionals who could
| dedicate the life to research was small. It was far easier
| (easier than today not easy itself) to be able to dabble in
| many topics. [1] [2]
|
| As you say much of what can be researched by a general
| philosopher who dabbles in many fields is already done,
| today to go further in any one field you will need to
| dedicate your life to it in mathematics or physics or other
| _older fields_ of research.
|
| That does not mean there are less generalists today. There
| are plenty of generalists in younger/newer fields like it
| was in math or physics back in those days .
|
| Generalist scientists like Dr Lovelock was possible in the
| 60s. Generalist computer scientists was common till not
| that long ago. Generalist programmers were(are) there when
| I started in the industry, today to hire proper "full
| stack" developer is getting harder!
|
| Point is generalists or specialization is always there,
| just the fields where it can happen keep changing.
|
| ---
|
| [1] We have to remember many of them were also institutions
| which they were only the head of, rather than only
| individual contributors, so attribution could be more to
| their school than them necessarily individually.
|
| [2] A lot of the early work by ancient scholars was more
| documentation and formalization of somewhat known items
| than discovery or invention in the modern sense
| 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.
| skinkestek wrote:
| I have as many (or more) siblings as you, and adhd. I got
| meds somewhere not too far before my thirtieth birthday.
| That is now well above 10 years ago and yes, it has meant a
| lot.
|
| And yes, being singled out for being smart, I know that
| too.
|
| This is the first time I'm this specific about my
| background here but I thought you would like to know at
| least one other person here knows a little bit of what it
| feels like.
|
| Good luck going forward!
| 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. ;-)
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| Sheesh this feels familiar. I always feel just a step under
| the folks I talk to who are smart, always missing something.
| dmueller39 wrote:
| Not being too smart can be a forcing function on the quality of
| ideas. Very frequently the idea that wins in the minds of
| others is the one that is easy to think about.
|
| I am frequently caught in the trap where I am enjoying the
| puzzlebox complexity of a problem, and building an equally
| complicated solution. I then attempt to explain my complicated
| solution to someone else, and I fail on delivery.
|
| I also have a coworker whos mantra is "if its hard to think
| about, I don't do it". We actually worked on similarly aligned
| solutions to the same problem. His version met with
| significantly more success than mine did, and I credit the fact
| that he ensured that it was all easy to think about (and thus
| talk about). I don't begrudge him at all though, he's one of my
| favs!
|
| IMO if you are unwilling or unable to think about overly
| complicated ideas, it might force you to eliminate them and
| develop new ones that are easier to talk about and think about.
|
| Thanks for sharing BTW.
| alanlammiman wrote:
| Agree. Whether a business (or solution to a problem) is
| interesting, ingenious and innovative is a completely
| different matter from its being a good business. iirc warren
| buffet once said, "if it takes a calculator to figure out if
| it's a good business, it's not". In a similar vein (but with
| a different moral to it) my boss used to say that (in a
| corporate context) all back-of-the-envelope analysis was by
| definition correct - because it would only ever be checked
| via back-of-the-envelope calculations.
| 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.
| danrocks wrote:
| > I read your comment as "yes I prefer life to be easier and
| complacent over difficult and interesting."
|
| A bit unrelated but this reminded me of Slavoj Zizek's "Why
| be happy when you could be interesting?".
|
| https://bigthink.com/articles/why-be-happy-when-you-could-
| be...
| WalterBright wrote:
| A lot of new ideas come from unexpected combinations of ideas
| from multiple seemingly unrelated areas. James Burke writes a
| history of the world based on this in his book "Connections". I
| wrote in my paper "Origins of the D Programming Language" how D
| is influenced by my experiences in airplane gearboxes.
|
| Who would have thought that a gearbox had anything to do with
| programming language design?
| thedragonline wrote:
| Interesting. Do you have a concrete example that would
| illuminate the connection?
| WalterBright wrote:
| Origins of the D Programming Language
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3386323
| m0zg wrote:
| It's a double whammy on "smart" people, actually. They are
| usually conditioned by their "academic success" that they are
| only allowed to have "smart" ideas. So "smart" people tend to
| play it real, real safe - they don't want to destroy the illusion
| they are "smart" either in themselves or (worst of all) their
| peers. A necessary prerequisite to wander off the beaten path is
| to have lots of "dumb" ideas as well, some of which will turn out
| not so dumb after all.
|
| Personally I was quickly disabused of the notion that I'm "smart"
| after I spent 3 years working in a research lab alongside some
| _real_ genius quality folks. I was also able to discern their
| weakness that I allude to above. People who are genuinely smart
| yet not afraid to try dumb things are unstoppable, and I'd say
| that the latter is more important than the former, as long as
| you're willing to put in the extra work and are learning
| something from your mistakes. Yet it's also not "socially
| acceptable", so we get what we get - best minds of our generation
| playing it safe instead of going where no one has gone before,
| and worse - shitting on the people who do from the height of
| their ivory tower.
| aneeqdhk wrote:
| Taken to the extreme though, this could lead to neomania. New for
| the sake of new.
|
| What should we term the quality of knowing not to fix something
| if it ain't broke?
|
| I think that line of thinking would be the intellectual opposite
| of PG's (albeit still coherent in it's conjectures or lack
| thereof)
| neom wrote:
| I think there are two buckets that form a venn. Smart on one
| side, Intelligent on the other. One can loosely be thought of as
| horsepower, the other abstract/creative/alternative thinking. The
| Venn of them is genius.
| 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.
| xbpx wrote:
| Lot's of people have ideas, great ideas even. Ideas are not
| particularly rare nor hard. Luck, expertise, privilege (for those
| not born into it) and timing are more difficult. More
| importantly, to help ensure maximum impact, one needs to want to
| push an idea into the world, and push hard. Generally there are
| better and more fun things to do in life (most would agree with
| me as pg noted himself).
|
| Academics have great ideas and it takes thousands of them
| building on each other to drive a technological revolution. There
| would have been another Einstein (or collection of
| Einsteinlettes), it may have taken a decade but the soil was
| fertile. Einstein helped develop the ideas behind Quantum Physics
| but had no further world changing ideas left to contribute once
| it materialized.
|
| So what type of ideas are we talking about? Capitalist
| entrepreneurial ideas for building startups with? That seems like
| a depressingly narrow understanding of ideas and what they mean
| for humanity.
| 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.
| iainctduncan wrote:
| The most interesting point to me in this was the observation that
| it could be things _associated with youth_ , which made me think
| immediately of John Cleese's brilliant talks on creativity. He
| (Cleese) makes the point that good ideas need time, in two ways:
| time without pressure to produce, and time set aside to focus.
| Both of these are so, so much harder for late or mid stage career
| adults to make. I truly believe this is the most important
| ingredient in getting interesting things done in the second half
| of life.
| 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.
| Madmallard wrote:
| "Intelligence wins in conversation, and thus becomes the basis of
| the dominance hierarchy."
|
| Okay Jordan Peterson. This is myopic.
| 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.
| alex_young wrote:
| Einstein was one of history's most successful, perhaps the most
| successful, abstract thinkers.
|
| Some of his reasoning was based on simple observation of light
| and making logical deductions about how it must work. It's pretty
| amazing when you can make simple observations and reason about
| the workings of the universe.
|
| Abstraction is in and of itself an art which is both a learned
| skill and highly dependent upon intellect.
|
| Now, this is the stinker. Imagine that Einstein had been born in
| a non-English-speaking part of the world. Would this separation
| from the scientific community have prevented him from telling us
| all about relativity? I imagine it would have, and it's likely
| that a good number of abstract thinkers of his caliber have lived
| and died without us learning from them.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Einstein was born in the German speaking part of Germany.
| alex_young wrote:
| And quickly emigrated to Switzerland and then the US.
|
| What if he was born in, say, Indonesia, or sub-saharan
| Africa?
| BurningFrog wrote:
| We can't know, of course, but I expect he would have
| applied his talents in some more practical field and had
| considerable success there.
|
| I also think there were 100 just as talented people born in
| Germany at the time, who mostly ended up doing well working
| in other fields.
| [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?
| [deleted]
| 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._
| johncearls wrote:
| I like this idea. Makes me think of nondeterministic v
| deterministic Turing Machines. It is easy to confirm that the
| magician is correct, but hard to see how they were able to get
| there.
| 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...
| killtimeatwork wrote:
| Plenty of divorces are much much nastier than that.
| [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.
| jokoon wrote:
| The Silicon Valley gave birth to "business philosophy". It is as
| ridiculous as it sounds.
| 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
| zurvania wrote:
| The title for PG's post should've been Creativity is more
| important than being smart.
| 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.
| ouid wrote:
| Intelligence is not a total order.
| 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...
| maximus-decimus wrote:
| Do people really think that having unorthodox ideas and being
| smart are the same thing?
| 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.
| urthor wrote:
| How do you encourage that work ethic though? Just compliment
| it, or is there another trick to it.
| kenjackson wrote:
| I do compliment it. But probably more than that I emphasize
| that things worth doing are often hard and hard things
| often take time. So I taught him that setting short term
| goals along the way to long-term goals will help him stay
| on track. So he's becoming really good at showing me
| various intermediate states to his work, and I'm really
| excited when I see it. Whether its a game that he's writing
| or a business that he's creating.
|
| As a younger kid he loved Legos. I think that contributed.
| He'd just do progressively larger and larger sets. As a kid
| I never could do a large Lego set. I had them, but they all
| remained unfinished.
| 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.
| amznbyebyebye wrote:
| You need to have a vision, and the vision needs to be the right
| vision. How do you know it's the right vision? I think most just
| get lucky on this. Maybe the successful serial entrepreneurs have
| figured it out (Musk, Jobs)
|
| Getting the vision right isn't enough, you have to know how to
| get to the vision. This usually requires a combination of smarts,
| grit, passion, and luck.
| 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.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| That descrption of mass manufacturing reminds me of
| building reliable computing systems from unreliable parts
| (server farm(s)), something I have never done, only read
| about. It is apparently very different from regular
| software development in similar ways.
| 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
| jecel wrote:
| http://www.paulgraham.com/antispam.html
|
| This is a page of links.
| 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.
| rramadass wrote:
| This pg essay reminds me of the Chinese saying _Cast a Brick to
| Attract Jade_. :-)
| [deleted]
| xyzelement wrote:
| Another way to frame this topic: intelligence doesn't always lead
| to impact, and impact is what matters.
|
| Example: I met a ton of trivia "nerds" through a friend a few
| years ago. They had all met at an Ivy League college, they were
| clearly "smart" in that they knew a lot of information and could
| follow a logical argument _but_ somehow none of them were able to
| use their smarts for anything practical. They had jobs you didn
| 't need to be that smart for, and their personal lives were sort
| of messy. I didn't really know what to make it them at the time,
| now I think they had the "smarts" but they didn't have the
| "drive" so their brains sort of did them no good.
|
| Another example: Plenty of people are constantly frustrated that
| they are misunderstood. "I am so smart but I can't get anything
| done around here because everyone's an idiot." Some people go
| through their whole life believing this. Luckily I had a job that
| disabused me of this and taught me to communicate my ideas
| clearly and persuasively to others. But without that, without the
| ability to persuade people of your ideas, you might as well not
| have them.
| bob1029 wrote:
| Sometimes the best way to persuade someone regarding an idea is
| to actually implement the idea without their knowledge and then
| present it to them for review.
|
| We are talking about software, right? Only cost and liability
| around this is usually your time. I've only been scolded for
| writing a program a few times in my career.
| mmargerum wrote:
| "I am so smart but I can't get anything done around here
| because everyone's an idiot."
|
| It's a thing. It's demoralizing to work with people who often
| make more than you do and are terrible at the craft and don't
| even look to improve. That along with obsessing about making me
| train "backups" in case I leave. I'm on my 4th backup now. They
| all left after I trained them.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| >They had jobs you didn't need to be that smart for, and their
| personal lives were sort of messy.
|
| One of the smartest people I know works in the building trade.
| He likes to save his mental energy for pursuits outside of
| work.
| mmargerum wrote:
| is his name will?
| hresvelgr wrote:
| > Another way to frame this topic: intelligence doesn't always
| lead to impact, and impact is what matters.
|
| Impact is a great way of putting it. There are plenty of really
| smart and creative people who will never produce anything
| impactful in their life. Impact in my opinion is really all
| about time-sensitivity and sprinkling of genius. The impact may
| not even resonate fully with the public in the person's
| lifetime either. Nikola Tesla being a prime example of this. A
| lot of very incredible people tend to be VERY open to new
| ideas. John Dee comes to mind in particular. When he could find
| no more wisdom in science, he looked to the occult. Nikola
| Tesla I believe also was quite interested in the occult as
| well. While I wouldn't consider the occult "out there" by any
| stretch nowadays, it's a good example unorthodox ideas can come
| from.
|
| > Plenty of people are constantly frustrated that they are
| misunderstood. "I am so smart but I can't get anything done
| around here because everyone's an idiot."
|
| I've found that kind of thinking tends to be the reason why
| some of those people are misunderstood. When your frame for
| interacting with people is setup like that, it's not
| unreasonable to assume one would put up conversational barriers
| to confirm their own bias of "everyone's an idiot."
| xyzelement wrote:
| > it's not unreasonable to assume one would put up
| conversational barriers
|
| Yes exactly and likewise people aren't likely to be clamoring
| to hear your genius ideas when you're treating them like
| idiots.
| pksebben wrote:
| ... which leaves one to wonder how smart someone really is,
| for missing something so obvious.
| Jensson wrote:
| They understand that, they just don't want to pick up the
| Sisyphean task of trying to convince idiots. So instead
| they give up. Giving up doesn't mean that people stop
| complaining though, they know how to solve the problem
| but they don't want to do the work, it is called venting
| and most humans do it.
| pksebben wrote:
| In that case I would question the smarts of someone who
| spends too much time focused on things they do not intend
| to change.
|
| There comes a point where "raw" intelligence (if a real
| thing) _must_ be tempered with the wisdom necessary to
| marry rubber and road, as it were. If you don 't apply
| your staggeringly large intellect (/s?) to the problem of
| _interfacing with other people_ , yet you persist putting
| yourself in situations where you must deal with that
| problem, what benefit has that intellect conferred?
| Jensson wrote:
| You know, you sound like you are one of those people you
| describe yourself? Is that how you came to this
| realization?
|
| Ask yourself, what is the goal with your current comment?
| And how does being snide achieve that goal? If the goal
| is to make fun of people and feel good about yourself,
| then you are doing a good job! And then you should
| understand how those people you describe feel, because
| they feel exactly as you feel now, wasting time making
| fun of things you have no intention or care to change or
| spread.
|
| But if you want people to listen then you really need to
| get better at tempering what you say.
| xyzelement wrote:
| >They understand that, they just don't want to pick up
| the Sisyphean task of trying to convince idiots
|
| I think that's a pretty bad attitude and it doesn't get
| anyone anywhere.
|
| If I write Java code into my Python interpreter, I am not
| gonna say "dumb fucking Python can't understand what I
| mean" - I am gonna recognize that I am speaking the wrong
| language for the job.
|
| Same if I am speaking to someone who "isn't as brilliant
| as I am" (or likely, has another set of priorities,
| context, focus, etc.) - I need to start with that
| reality, and then think about - how do I make this person
| care, how do I share with them what they need to
| understand, etc. There's a _definite_ skill to this that
| is acquired with conscious practice and experience.
|
| If you start off assuming that others aren't smart
| because they didn't connect to what you are so sure you
| explained so clearly, rather than questioning what is it
| about your explanation that didn't click with them,
| you're fucked.
| michaelbrave wrote:
| I know a ton of smart people who get nothing done, not due to
| being surrounded by idiots but rather due to depression and
| anxiety(which anecdotally seems to hit harder when the person
| is smart for some reason).
| mmargerum wrote:
| Smart people are also very lazy. I've always been an
| underachiever and am just as happy writing emacs lisp to do
| cool things as I am to reengineering some mess at work. Still
| get paid the same amount. I do good work but I don't
| overextend myself. This is how i've avoided burning out after
| 30 years.
| doublepg23 wrote:
| > communicate my ideas clearly and persuasively to others
|
| How do you get the ability to do this? I've been attending a
| book club with a small number of friends and even in these
| casual settings I wish I could communicate my ideas better.
| cybernautique wrote:
| (TL;DR: learn to notice aesthetic; learn to acquire
| perspective; get out of your head.)
|
| What's worked for me:
|
| 0. General advice
|
| - No negative self-talk!
|
| Find more constructive ways to communicate your ideas _even
| to yourself_. "I wish I could communicate my ideas better" ->
| "Here's an idea I felt I did not communicate well, this time,
| in this context. Why do I feel this way? How could I have
| presented myself better? (Where can I gain competence?)"
|
| - Write and rubber ducky!
|
| Writing and rubber ducking are methods for practicing the
| linguistic aspects of communication. While verbalizing to the
| duck, play with the timbre, cadence, tone, etc., of your
| voice. Record yourself and listen to it. Have problems
| finding material to verbalize? Pick a poem. Memorize it.
| Recite it. This is, in my opinion, the calisthenics of social
| practice.
|
| - The person with the most developed opinion of you- is you!
|
| "He who despises himself will still respect his skills as a
| despiser." ~ Nietzsche, "Beyond Good And Evil" (paraphrased,
| can't be arsed to cite it just now)
|
| The Spotlight Effect:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotlight_effect
|
| _You_ might notice every failure of your communique, but then
| again: you have an ideal for your communique. A goal, a
| reason, a vision of how it ought to manifest. To everyone
| else, however, it's an utterance like any other. The ultimate
| measure of your effectiveness isn't how closely you manifest
| your idea, but how much of an impact (and of what kind) it
| has on the audience.
|
| === 1. Practice, practice, practice. ===
|
| It's a skill, like any other; and like any other, you succeed
| to the level and quality of your training. If you want to
| "get better at talking to people," then go talk to people; if
| you want to "get better at talking to people, in a book club,
| with a small number of friends" then do that!
|
| How to do the first (i.e., practice speaking to people)?
| Communication is both observational and "applicative," in
| that you apply yourself in the actual doing. This suggests a
| good path in itself: practice your observations and also
| practice the doing.
|
| How to observe strangers? (in a socially-conscious way?) The
| easiest way is to be conscientious of your interactions. I
| got started by making mental notes, pushing myself to take
| note of the most simple and basic details. "Oh, her nails are
| purple;" "It's midday and he's wearing shorts;" "He has a
| GameStop tag on his keyring." The simpler you can break down
| a situation, the more data you have for a fuller analysis.
|
| Of course, simply having data does not an analysis make. Even
| with a habit of conscientiousness, I found myself struggling
| to derive actionable insights. Why? Likely because I was
| leaning too heavily on poor tools to make my analyses. This
| was during a phase in my life where I was very concerned with
| reducing as much as I could to logical and rational
| principles, including my interactions with others. "Assuming
| that people's statements reflect their internal state, that
| their internal state is logically consistent, and further
| assuming that some particular data X is included in their
| analysis, I can reasonably conclude that (by their statement)
| they must internally position themselves thusly with regards
| to X." This is a good general example of my internal dialogue
| during this period; it was helpful in some ways, fatal in
| many others. I now believe that there is no decision funnel
| you can induce, explicitly or otherwise, which makes this
| line of thinking safe.
|
| I've since abandoned this project of rationalizing, because a
| key assumption I made was that every healthy, moral, person
| must have a logically consistent internal state. Indeed, I
| considered logical consistency to be a prerequisite for any
| kind of morality. I now believe this foolish; whereas I
| previously considered Man to be the rational animal, I'm now
| of the opinion that Man is much closer to the aesthetic
| animal.
|
| This was a key insight for me. It has directly led to the
| most socially productive period of my life (which I'm
| thankfully still enjoying).
|
| What does 'the aesthetic animal' entail? That people are, at
| base, motivated by their sensibilities. I take the most basic
| statement of logic to be equation: "this is that;" more
| specifically- "this is this." I believe the most basic
| statement of aesthetic is: "this pleases some sensibility I
| have."
|
| People reveal their sensibilities- their aesthetic- with
| their genuine smiles, their sincere fashions, their honest
| jokes. Take note of these; my analytical habit these days is
| to capture as much of someone's aesthetic as I can. Again, it
| starts with conscious conscientiousness and observation.
|
| === 2. Perspective, perspective, perspective ===
|
| You are distinct from every other person. I like to keep
| myself in perspective with counting the number of
| "distinction points" by which I differ from another. My love
| for the Beatles is one such point; that I know Sgt. Peppers'
| Lonely Hearts Club Band by heart, but none of their other
| albums, is another. That I program, when and how I started,
| what I'm doing now (with which languages)- all of these, too,
| and even the breakfast I had.
|
| Don't try to store all this state at all times; just develop
| a habit and method of counting, and apply it where
| appropriate. Of course, the method, the habit, the
| application, understanding in which contexts it's
| appropriate: all of these are skills, too!
|
| This is how I attempt to understand the differences between
| my perspective and others. From there, I spend a lot of my
| downtime acquiring alternate perspectives. I find Nietzsche
| ("Beyond Good And Evil") helpful to this end. (NOTE: I
| explicitly disavow and condemn Nietzsche's misogyny.)
| "Tuesdays With Morrie" is indispensable, in my opinion;
| specifically, Morrie's advice to embrace emotions. All of
| them.
|
| Allow yourself to be embroiled in your feelings, until it
| finds its natural conclusion. Then practice conjuring your
| emotions, and be conscientious with your emotions. Observe
| their onsets and evolutions- _not_ to rationalize them, but
| to explore your own sensibilities and aesthetic.
|
| Once you've made a habit of these observations and
| conjurations, seek out stimuli that alter your perspective,
| and then practice your perspective. Imagine how your relation
| to that stimuli might change if you were elsewise distinct.
| Conjure the emotions that you feel inherent to that you-but-
| else, and explore them as your own.
|
| I treat it like a game; to these ends, the methods of acting
| are instructive.
|
| This helps me explore a wider, but still woefully limited,
| aesthetic space. That, in turn, helps my conscientiousness of
| aesthetic (of both mine and others). Further, with my method
| of distinction, it gives me a much richer insight into how I
| perceive the aesthetics of others.
|
| === 3. Accept your mistakes, acknowledge your success ===
|
| The possibility of failure is a precondition of any endeavor.
| Unfortunately, social failures can be particularly impactful
| to certain dispositions. Social failure can mean
| embarrassment, self-doubt, stigmatization, and (perhaps worst
| of all) emotional fallout in others.
|
| An anecdote: I decided, for a period, to exercise my sense of
| humor. I visited a male cousin of mine, shortly after he had
| taken a new wife. His lot in life had been unhappy til then,
| filled with struggles and poverty. My visit was on the heels
| of his release from a half-year prison sentence. Imagine my
| happy surprise when I approached his address, to find a
| rather generous estate! Great land, a beautiful home, healthy
| children... I said to them- he and his wife- "What great
| success! But, I have to ask: who died and left you this
| land?"
|
| She meekly replied, "My ex-husband."
|
| It took me a while to feel comfortable making jokes. I was
| absolutely mortified for months thereafter. The mortification
| is appropriate! But it's not reasonable, nor healthy, to
| avoid an entire category of expression over a mistake- even
| such a horrid mistake as that. Perhaps _especially_ even for
| such a mistake. Accept it, take the L, and be more
| conservative in those expressions for a time thereafter: but
| don't define yourself by your missteps.
|
| Likewise, acknowledge tho successes you have. Ultimately,
| only you can define what success looks like, and your
| successes must be operationalized to the context- but cherish
| these memories. Meditate upon them. Try to embrace the graces
| that led to it, on your end and the audiences'; yet, at the
| same time, refute the desire to embody these graces. Do not
| define yourself by your successes, either.
|
| Ultimately: get out of your head and learn to love the
| strangeness of your fellow humans :) we are all a unique
| vintage, some more delicious than others (and a few that
| spoiled on the vine) yet all worthy of at least one honest
| snifter.
|
| === Recommended Materials ===
|
| Nietzsche (specifically, "Beyond Good and Evil" [again, I
| categorically disavow his misogyny.]) "Tuesdays With Morrie,"
| Mitch Albom
|
| === The Extremely Unorthodox ===
|
| I recommend psychedelics.
|
| Talk to your doctor, your therapist, your spiritual mentor,
| the neighbors' dog- whomever can help ease your mind. If you
| have any doubts, don't do it! And, of course, responsibly
| indulge where legal and when you are safe.
|
| I also recommend "escorts," of any gender.
|
| Not for the sex, but because escorts are by-and-large social
| professionals. Perhaps the _most_ social professional. They
| are experts of aesthetic, masters of perspective. Pay their
| fees, reassure them that they need not disrobe, and just go
| off. Ask all those little questions that you usually dare not
| vocalize. They've experienced stranger. It helps you exercise
| failure modes in a significantly safer space. "Adult
| entertainers" and bartenders are also choice for this.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| I have found that asking others about their concerns helps me
| understand my own, and also helps build a rapport with the
| other, which itself helps your own confidence in your
| communication skills, and helps inculcate domain knowledge.
| The more you know where others stand on an issue, and why,
| helps you to draw parallels and distinctions with your own
| beliefs and positions on an issue. The rapport and
| conversational dynamics you explore help you tailor your
| message so that your words and feelings are heard and felt,
| even if not shared.
|
| It's okay to say you have a point you don't know how to
| express. Talking around a topic is called beating around the
| bush colloquially, and in that common usage it's seen as
| wasting the listener's time if unwanted or unwarranted, but
| it serves an important function in itself. It's how you flush
| the ideas/birds out without upsetting/endangering yourself or
| others.
|
| Believe in yourself, and in your ideas. You both are valid.
| Your earnestness in your desire to express yourself better is
| the social proof!
|
| https://knowyourphrase.com/beating-around-the-bush
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_proof
| xyzelement wrote:
| > It's okay to say you have a point you don't know how to
| express. Talking around a topic is called beating around
| the bush colloquially, and in that common usage it's seen
| as wasting the listener's time if unwanted or unwarranted,
| but it serves an important function in itself
|
| Agreed. When I do that, I call it out explicitly. I often
| say something like this in a meeting: "I haven't thought
| about how to articulate this too much, but I agree it's
| worth discussing. Mind if I 'talk at you' for a min and see
| where it gets us?"
|
| I wouldn't ever call it "beating around the bush" because
| it creates the impression you're wasting time and that's
| not what you should want, but saying upfront "hey I am
| gonna consciously ramble a bit and we'll circle up on the
| synthesis" often buys you some runway to do that.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| > I wouldn't ever call it "beating around the bush"
| because it creates the impression you're wasting time and
| that's not what you should want, but saying upfront "hey
| I am gonna consciously ramble a bit and we'll circle up
| on the synthesis" often buys you some runway to do that.
|
| The link I posted about the etymology of the phrase is
| interesting for this very reason, as it's a bit of a
| misnomer. Beating around the bush is safer than beating
| the bush itself, as you have to get that much closer to
| the unknown that may be lurking inside said bushes.
| xyzelement wrote:
| Yes but "who cares"? To 100% of the people you will be
| talking to, Beating Around the Bush has a negative
| connotation.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| The act of conversationally beating around the bush need
| not have a negative connotation, however.
| pksebben wrote:
| listen, listen, listen. The biggest step I took towards being
| able to interface my ideas with others was to first listen to
| their ideas, problems, needs, whatever it is they wanted to
| talk about. You have to make what's important to them
| important to you before you can do it the other way around -
| and it's for a bunch of reasons. in attempting to empathize
| with them you'll have ideas about what they could be doing
| better to communicate to you (and not make the same mistakes
| when you're the one talking). You'll build trust in yourself
| by genuinely caring about their business, and you'll learn
| what's important to them, which is really the thing you're
| eventually going to try to plug your ideas into.
|
| The magic sauce that makes this work, though, is being
| genuine. Do the emotional work to really give a damn about
| the other people around you; which is a lot harder than I
| think people give credit for, but monumentally more
| beneficial.
| xyzelement wrote:
| > How do you get the ability to do this? I've been attending
| a book club with a small number of friends and even in these
| casual settings I wish I could communicate my ideas better.
|
| It's hard. And it depends on the people. With the most
| logical people, it's easiest for me, I just slow myself down
| and break down my argument into small pieces. Like in the
| book club, you may be tempted to say "I think the author's
| secret message is X" and people go "huh?" But if I go -
| "there's a line that says A.. do y'all remember this line?" -
| they say "yes" - "well, this line jumped out at me as weird,
| because of B. Do y'all agree that it's an unusual way to say
| it?" - "yup" - "so I was thinking, why is this weird to me,
| and I realized the only way B would be true is if C were
| true. Does that make sense to you guys" - "yup" - "ok, so if
| the author is saying C is true, I wonder if he is saying it
| to teach us X. Does that seem crazy?" "nope that makes sense"
|
| Basically, you walk people from A to B to C and then the leap
| to X is clean and people can follow the whole chain. If you
| just say "it's X" they go "huh?"
|
| The reason this is hard is because you yourself may not know
| why you decided X, and others may not reach that conclusion
| for a ton of different reasons. So forcing yourself to
| articulate your own logic to yourself is step 1, walking
| others through it is step 2.
|
| A related thing is - in my experience, you can NEVER over-
| communicate. Like, it's tempting for me to skip A,B,C because
| I read them, I assume others read them and must have
| interpreted the same thing, so it feels condescending to
| start there, but in reality it's never a problem - people
| either say "yup, it's great to know we're seeing the same
| thing" or very often "actually, we missed that."
|
| I hope this helps. That's just one type of scenario. All this
| gets harder when emotions or egos are involved, so dealing
| with that is hard.
|
| Actually one more tip - the art of TLDR - people often make
| their point in a rambling way, surfacing a bunch of stuff
| that is confusing. More is not always better, but to be able
| to synthesize it all into a digestible narrative is really
| important if you want people to get it.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| There's also different types of "smarts". I think ability to
| memorise or generally know a lot is very different from
| noticing patterns or understanding of how things work and
| relate to each other.
|
| Especially nowadays, there's Google, you don't need to memorise
| a lot as you can just check everything.
|
| I think even Einstein said that "don't memorise what you can
| quickly check up" or had a similar sentiment.
|
| Very often trivia kings and queens don't know how to apply that
| knowledge practically and a lot of knowledge has benefits just
| to appear intelligent to other people.
|
| Also not to mention street smarts, emotional intelligence,
| leadership int and many other aspects.
|
| What made Einstein special to me is his ability to imagine how
| things work together and then he and or his mind kept endlessly
| obsessing over it to reach further and further conclusions.
| Essentially trying to create a model of the world and or trying
| to simulate in mind whatever is happening and which can lead to
| greater insights of what is causing what.
|
| I think true understanding is being able to imagine and predict
| how something works as opposed to memorising a lot of
| information about the thing.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| > Another way to frame this topic: intelligence doesn't always
| lead to impact, and impact is what matters.
|
| Which leads to the example of my career, and the illustration
| of the two "tech worlds" that now exist. As a "programming
| engineer," I've written a lot of software tools for other
| engineers that have expanded the boundaries of what was
| possible to achieve in usual timeframes. I've (mostly) worked
| as a programmer in engineering departments, and once the word
| of these kinds of projects get out, they often get shut down or
| taken over by IT proper. This has happened either because MY
| management was psychopathic, or OTHER management was MORE
| psychopathic.
|
| As a single full-stack developer, I've proven multiple times
| that I can launch a company-wide-impacting project at 100x the
| man-speed of a bog standard, outsourced, waterfall-managed IT
| project. I suspect embarrassment at this fact is why my
| projects have had such terrible luck politically. And this is
| my point: the human side -- the politics -- will always trump
| talent. If you don't "grease the wheels," you're going to have
| a bad time.
|
| > Luckily I had a job that disabused me of this and taught me
| to communicate my ideas clearly and persuasively to others.
|
| I have found it even worse than this. Despite clarity, people
| often hate feeling like you understand things at a level they
| will never. Sometimes, it's the clarity itself that puts people
| on their heels. Case in point: My boss and I just asked a group
| to add an API to get ONE PIECE of data from another, long-
| established, already-API-driven web site. After SEVERAL
| meetings about this, they finally came back with an
| implementation date TWO YEARS after we started asking. Another
| group on the other side of the world asked ME to implement an
| API in MY application, to get entire TABLES of information. I
| did it in 2 days. I cannot stress hard enough that management
| and other people hate, hate, HATE seeing this sort of
| discrepancy in ability. But what am I supposed to do? Delay my
| delivery by months just to make people feel better? Heck, maybe
| I should.
|
| We nerds like to think that the tech world should be a
| meritocracy. On the internet of the 90's, it was. PG continues
| to live in a world where he can elevate insight above politics
| with money. Many, here, work in companies with proper technical
| tracks, which rewards insight handsomely. I don't (and won't
| move). And if you don't, you have to do yourself a favor and
| deal with that reality, and learn how to play the political
| game. It's the political game that will determine your impact,
| and "gate" your technical ability. It sucks to write that out,
| but it's a truism of the world.
| 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)
| ido wrote:
| One thing that bothers me in this essay is that it relies a lot
| on intelligence being somewhat clear/measurable and agreed upon
| metric. But there isn't really a comprehensive definition of
| intelligence, let alone a comprehensive way to measure it (IQ for
| example to a large extent measures how good someone is at taking
| tests).
|
| Coming up with new ideas can itself be a measure of intelligence!
|
| That is not to say the spirit of the article is wrong - I've met
| plenty of people who came across as very smart and didn't really
| achieve as much in life (so far) as other people who didn't
| appear to be as smart or smarter. I think other large factors
| must include ambition, risk-aversion (or lack thereof),
| confidence and opportunity.
| 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...
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I should also note that Bernstein was widely known to be a
| complete asshole.
|
| I think this is partial confirmation of pg's observation that
| independence of thought is important for creativity: if you are
| both arrogant and independent, you have all the ingredients to
| be an asshole.
|
| If arrogance is orthogonal to creativity, as I suspect, but
| independence of thought is not, then we would see a
| disproportionate number of assholes among those with new ideas.
| maxekman wrote:
| > "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.
|
| That is a VERY respectful point of view. I admire that so much.
| ganzuul wrote:
| More than respect; this is wisdom.
| WalterBright wrote:
| It reminds me of Herb Alpert's re-imagining of Beatles songs.
| Alpert's albums were very popular in the 1960s, but are pretty
| much forgotten today.
|
| I've bought all of his albums. The man is a genius in his
| trumpet arrangements.
| nwatson wrote:
| You'll hear Herb Alpert's "Rise" live on today sampled (not
| trumpet, guitar) in Notorious B.I.G.'s "Hypnotize," with
| enduring appeal. I went to dig up the connection and it's a
| lot more interesting than I first suspected. "Rise" was
| actually composed by Herb's nephew, and the article goes into
| why the Alperts rejected many sampling requests before
| accepting Notorious.
|
| https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/hip-
| hop/7709057/n...
| grasshopperpurp wrote:
| Lady Fingers is one of the most beautiful things I've heard.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Of course, having the most famous album cover ever helps!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6U1JB7z-I8
|
| A personal favorite of mine is The Trolley Song:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_pCM8jzvtw
|
| which is the same song as the one Judy Garland made famous,
| but Alpert's version is heavenly.
|
| Before the intertoobs and CDs, I searched everywhere for
| that album (Herb Alpert's Ninth) for years, and finally
| found a brand new mint one in the cutout bin with the slot
| sliced in it. For $1. I couldn't believe my prize!
|
| P.S. The yootoob version has poor sound quality. To hear
| how good Herb is with the trumpet, ya gotta get the CD.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| > Before the intertoobs and CDs, I searched everywhere
| for that album (Herb Alpert's Ninth) for years, and
| finally found a brand new mint one in the cutout bin with
| the slot sliced in it. For $1. I couldn't believe my
| prize!
|
| This cut-out practice is new to me, but a related one in
| the publishing/bookselling industry rang true. I learn a
| lot just by reading and reflecting on your comments.
| Thanks for posting this personal story.
|
| I think we've lost a lot with the transition to digital,
| these kinds of bargain bins included, which is part of
| the reason I too love all kinds of secondhand stores and
| swap meets, etc.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stripped_book
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remaindered_book
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut-
| out_(recording_industry)
| WalterBright wrote:
| I regularly troll pawn shops and thrift stores, you never
| know what you'll find there. For example, they usually
| have a bin full of vinyl. The staff pulls out any that
| are valuable, but what is valuable on the market has no
| relation to what I consider valuable. Jackie Gleason, for
| example, made many records that aren't available on CD.
| His stuff is great if you enjoy easy listening, old
| style.
|
| A couple months back, the pawn shop had acquired what
| looked like an old DJ's 12 inch single collection from
| the 70s and 80s. $.50 per disk. I grabbed them all.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| I've found that archive.org also has a large number of
| out of print vinyl.
|
| What the market finds valuable is partially a signaling
| problem, as it is only loosely connected to any
| individual's taste, and more connected to quick sales for
| record companies. The market as a whole can't discover
| prices for products that individuals aren't aware of and
| seeking out in the small window of first-sale. It's not
| too different from the traditional VC investment
| strategy, now that I consider it.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics)
| gsinclair wrote:
| I've seen that video before but thank you for reproducing
| Bernstein's words here. They bring great joy even in print.
| 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.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| PG dismisses creativity, but IMO that's a mistake in an
| otherwise interesting essay. Creativity _is_ the difference
| between someone who is merely smart and someone who
| originates ideas.
|
| Collier is merely smart. He's very, very smart indeed. But in
| the domain of music, expressive originality is far more
| important.
|
| And it can be created by people who aren't technically music-
| smart at all. It's _a different skill_ to the kind of
| grammatical /technical smartness that someone like Collier
| has.
|
| That's not a distraction at all. It's exactly the point -
| creativity is orthogonal to smartness, and it's poorly
| understood and even more poorly supported.
|
| One of the interesting thing that happened in English pop
| (until it stopped being possible a decade or two ago) was
| that successful pop artists were more likely to have been
| through art school than music school.
|
| The exemplar is Eno - who studied with Roy Ascott, who is
| probably one of the most unknown influential pioneers of
| computer art.
|
| Eno has _taste_ and a willingness to experiment across
| multiple domains. The rest almost falls into place.
|
| IMO the combination of openness to experimentation and
| instinctual feel for rightness/wrongness to guide that
| experimentation is the foundation of useful creativity.
|
| Art school - more than anywhere else - gives people
| permission to experiment. Taste can be partially taught, but
| you need an instinctive feel for it, and that's probably
| innate.
|
| Someone like Collier doesn't score highly on either
| experimentation or taste. He scores very highly on musical
| competence and technical skill. But both are a kind of
| conformity - which is the opposite of real originality.
|
| I assume where PG is going with this is the suggestion that
| some people can originate incredibly successful business
| ideas, and most people can't.
|
| Which might be nice if it were true. But in a startup sense
| the opposite is more likely. You need a baseline of
| conformity to be in business at all. Truly creative types
| don't find the business world open enough to be interesting.
|
| Success in business relies on having ideas that are original
| enough to be different, but not so original they're
| incomprehensibly challenging and difficult.
|
| Market fit mostly happens near the middle of the bell curve -
| for whatever metric you're measuring - and that's not where
| the most creative people like to live.
| earth_walker wrote:
| Ok, I hadn't really explored Collier's music until I read
| so many people panning his work on this thread.
|
| One youtube rabbit hole later, and I have to strongly
| disagree. These threads are littered with Phrases like
| 'Doesn't score highly on either experimentation or taste',
| 'lack of emotion'. 'Seems overly clever but not nice
| sounding'.
|
| Sorry, I'm not sure whether this is people hating on
| someone outside of your camp or what, but I think they're
| missing the point.
|
| The way Collier brings ideas from Jazz, Classical, Synth
| culture, EDM, R&B into a modern a cappella multimedia
| collage _is_ experimental, creative and I find quite
| emotional.
|
| Granted it's not the emotion in traditional, analogue music
| forms coming from the voicing of the instrument - it's from
| the arrangement, the sampling, even the ebb and flow of
| precision.
|
| And where most of the modern Glee-style a cappella are
| sanitized, overly produced and pretty pap (I'm not a fan of
| the genre, but my kids are), he's really pushing the
| boundaries of that genre. In ways that, from the handful of
| examples I've listened to, sound quite successful.
|
| In particular I really enjoyed his arrangements of Stevie
| Wonder.
|
| The music gate-keepers have always levelled these same
| criticisms electronic compositions, especially if the the
| composers are young and popular.
| awild wrote:
| This is mostly a personal stance validated by the talking
| of some other artists and musicians, and only a weak
| rebuttal/addendum to your point: But I've long understood
| creativity as literally just creating. A lot. And
| publishing only what you deem worthy.
|
| I'm friends with a clique of techno producers and they
| grind their music 24/7, they have an endless supply of
| ideas that they've produced,they're also heavily immersed
| in the music etc. They will publish some tracks twice a
| year, to the outside it obviously seems like they've had a
| moment of genius, but it's probably just 5% of their actual
| production. Another example is the documentary on marina
| abramovich, where she has a consultant telling her what art
| to actually publish. The artist Jonathan Meese has outlined
| a similar stance on a Tracks documentary where he just
| rambles for 5min to the effect of "create create create".
|
| Obviously doing something a lot develops skill, but
| choosing what to publish is probably more a question of
| taste.
|
| Jazz soloing is probably a good counterexample, but a lot
| of jazz solos aren't that remarkable and these people are
| at the top of their game so their worst is likely most
| peoples best?
| dudouble wrote:
| >> IMO the combination of openness to experimentation and
| instinctual feel for rightness/wrongness to guide that
| experimentation is the foundation of useful creativity.
|
| This statement strongly resonated with me, thank you for
| this.
| baby wrote:
| I was thinking of Jacob Collier when reading GP's comment. It
| seems very clever, but I don't find it "nice-sounding".
| 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.
| Slow_Hand wrote:
| I don't disagree with you, but I'd like to make one small
| addendum that may go to explain why people might consider
| his music to feel overproduced. I believe that reason is
| his use of non-equal-temperament tuning.
|
| For those unaccustomed to hearing pure intervals it can
| sound like a high-gloss "sheen" that gives an unreal
| quality to the music. In a way it becomes "too perfect" and
| unnatural to those who are used to hearing the equal
| temperament that most western music is recorded in. I hear
| it a lot in some acapella vocal groups and I often find the
| sound off-putting and it somehow feels a little corny to
| me.
| tallies wrote:
| That may be an aspect of it, but...
|
| https://twitter.com/trndytrndy/status/1395944850911080459
| golergka wrote:
| I think that his use of Logic in particular is very
| relevant in this discussion, because not only it has
| excellent support for different temperaments, it also has
| Hermut tuning, which dynamically alters temperament of
| all the instruments played based on actual chords to
| reach perfect intervals regardless of the key you're in.
| roryokane wrote:
| Logic Pro documentation link for Hermode Tuning:
| https://support.apple.com/guide/logicpro/hermode-tuning-
| lgcp...
| Slow_Hand wrote:
| Touche.
|
| Still, his virtuosity allows him to do things that very
| few people are capable of conceiving, attempting, and
| doing. We're lucky to have him in the mix.
| 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.
| namarie wrote:
| I think most of it is Italian instead of Latin, including
| your two examples.
| yakubin wrote:
| Italian, not Latin. Italian is the language of music.
| Italy used to be the capital of European music. That's
| where it comes from. I also wouldn't classify it as mere
| "theory". It's basic notation that appears in notes.
| Calling it "theory" is like calling control flow
| constructs in Pascal (the language) "theory".
| noobly wrote:
| It's called music theory though? I agree it's a bad name,
| but that's what it's called..
| hresvelgr wrote:
| > That was my immediate impression of his music. It feels
| strangely cold and extremely "produced",
|
| Billy Corgan of The Smashing Pumpkins is an example of
| someone who has both the talent and the taste for making
| great music in my opinion. There's a really old video of
| him shredding like a madman [1] completely off the dome
| which shows he has very good command of his guitar. He's
| not in the same sphere as Jacob Collier mind you but here
| me out. If you compare that video with the music he wrote
| in the pumpkins, it is very restrained. He knew when to
| exercise the full range of his skills and when to dial it
| back. Having learned a lot of pumpkins songs on guitar, it
| is clear to me that he favoured what sounded better and was
| more impactful over what appeared skillful.
|
| There's another video of him in 2012 [2] where he talks
| about influential music coming from the internet and people
| in their desktop studios, not from guys with guitars trying
| to make it big. Beyond his talent he had a very keen eye
| for how music was evolving. Having talent is one thing,
| being able to contextualise your work, and others work
| accurately in the arena of the world is a quality that very
| few people possess and in my opinion is required for
| producing truly influential and impactful work.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hYPo2py77A
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4C7NCpfUC90
| jacquesm wrote:
| Another person in the same vein: Tim Finn. Able to dial
| it back at will and to let it shine when needed.
| FreakLegion wrote:
| > he talks about influential music coming from the
| internet and people in their desktop studios, not from
| guys with guitars trying to make it big
|
| That's a great clip. You might enjoy some of what people
| have been doing with their desktop studios _and_ guitars
| in the last few years. Two that immediately come to mind
| are Tim Henson [1] (already pretty well-known in the
| guitar world as part of Polyphia) and Manuel Gardner-
| Fernandes [2].
|
| 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkHD4OVjS4E
|
| 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLCtH0KAY8Q
| awild wrote:
| I cannot leave a comment of bedroom producers go without
| a mention of judd madden.
|
| Probably quite out there (doom/drone/stoner) for most
| people but his music has always struck me as incredibly
| from the heart and not some noodling to impress others.
|
| https://juddmadden.bandcamp.com/album/float
|
| https://juddmadden.bandcamp.com/album/artesian
| screye wrote:
| Yeah, I would compare Jacob Collier to Snarky Puppey or
| Tigran Hamasayan.
|
| All of them are virtuosic and are branching away from
| classical ideas of jazz, and Collier might even be the
| smartest of the group, but he can't write a song to save a
| life.
|
| Snarky Puppey and Tigram have on the other hand, found a
| fresh niche for themselves that is similarly creative, but
| has the humility of adding the necessary sugar and milk to
| make their supremely creative and bitter music drink
| palatable to a listening audience.
| q-base wrote:
| Thanks a lot for this! I really appreciate it. Comments like
| this is why I really like HN.
| mlang23 wrote:
| Nice posting, thanks for that. I still cant really understand
| the hype around Gould and its goldberg interpretations. Yes,
| they are good. But no, they are far from the best I know. If
| you ever get the time and a recording, listen to Ragna Schirmer
| playing Goldberg. Her interpretation blows Gould's out of the
| water, IMO :-)
| reikonomusha wrote:
| Gould is a sort of package deal. I like his Goldbergs but to
| see his "authentic self" I'd look at something a little
| kookier of his like his Alla Turca [1]. It will not be what
| you expect.
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/eTZ33EVK3Ug
| 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.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| Do you have any personal favorite interviews? I frequently
| find that folks discussing their craft at a high level
| often illuminates opportunities for cross-disciplinary
| knowledge transfer.
| reikonomusha wrote:
| Yes! I love his discussion about Bach and appropriate use
| of instruments here [1]. He also gets into why he chooses
| some tempos, what's arbitrary and what's not, where to
| seek consistency in interpretative choices, and so on. I
| adore this interview!
|
| I also love his slightly hyperbolic hot take on why
| Mozart isn't that good [2]. It's hilarious, to me at
| least, hearing him roast Mozart then proceed to play his
| music beautifully.
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/38VMAfSmL8Q
|
| [2] https://youtu.be/1pR74rorRxs
| addictedcs wrote:
| This reminded me of Sergiu Celibidache, a revered and
| criticized conductor who had a different opinion about tempo on
| major classical works.
|
| He viewed his performances more as "experiences" and certainly
| pushed the boundaries of the conventional style of playing
| classical music. I really like his renditions of Bruckner, and
| the ending for Symphony N4 probably best describes why [1]. He
| does not rush, letting the music sync in, undoubtedly different
| from the "right" version.
|
| Not being afraid of criticism is an essential quality of people
| who discover new things. Smart people often get dragged into
| the "correct", "proper" way of thinking, doing science, playing
| music, drawing, or doing other creative work. This is the best
| way to learn, but unfortunately, you need to go on an unbeaten
| path that is often criticized and even ostracized to discover
| new things. The life of Van Gogh and many others is quite an
| example of that.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YVdTI21rZQ
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| The lady who cleans Willie Nelson's tour bus finds scraps of
| paper with lyrics which have more potential than most of what
| is actually published in Nashville by other artists over the
| same period of time.
|
| And this is what he's throwing away.
|
| It can be amazing what one individual can do sometimes.
|
| >the trouble with intelligence, they say, is that it's mostly
| inborn. The evidence for this seems fairly convincing,
| especially considering that most of us don't want it to be
| true, and the evidence thus has to face a pretty stiff
| headwind.
|
| I think this is very well put.
|
| Could be even more trouble with bright illumination if it turns
| out to be inborn to different degrees too.
|
| Then if you need both in excess the odds get pretty slim for a
| dual strike between such outliers.
| ToJans wrote:
| I know quite a few conventional entrepreneurs that I wouldn't
| consider smart in a general context, but are extremely well
| versed in what they do.
|
| Experience will help you to develop an instinct, and once you
| understand why everything is the way it is, you need to focus on
| finding an edge/making a difference/having an impact.
|
| This takes time, experimentation, and most of all the willingness
| and ability to fail, while you gain deeper and new insights.
|
| Willingness comes from personal grit and belief, but ability
| usually comes from your network, venture capital, a rich family,
| or having a successful business in the first place...
|
| Following Taleb's ideas, I'd say that, to find your edge, it
| would make more sense to try something new 52 weeks in a row,
| instead of spending 52 weeks on a single idea.
|
| Assume you have the grit and ability to experiment, then you
| still need a heuristic to determine which ideas are worth
| pursuing, and that's where luck comes in. Markets do not behave
| rationally, so reasoning can only bring you so far.
|
| "How to be successful" formulas could be compared to the "how to
| draw an owl" meme [0]: you need grit, the ability to experiment,
| and hope that this combination will eventually put you in the
| perfect context at a time where everything aligns, and where you
| take the decision to pursue the correct opportunity...
|
| [0]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/eccj2/how_to_draw_an...
| 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.
| LurkingPenguin wrote:
| > Similarly, I read once that ugly people pay higher
| interest rates on loans despite being more likely to repay
| them.
|
| Tinder loansharking.
|
| "Hey there. It looks like Saturday night will be another
| lonely one since nobody is attracted to your ugly mug. But
| here's good news: you've been pre-approved for a $20,000
| loan at a special introductory rate of 40% APR!"
| 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.
| [deleted]
| jacquesm wrote:
| I think this happens for the same reason they win their Nobel
| in the first place: to just go wherever their curiosity takes
| them, without having a pre-conceived notion about whether
| that is good or bad. If you open fifty thousand ugly oysters
| you're sure to find some gems, maybe even a priceless one.
| But you're also going to find a lot of junk. So you are
| likely on to something there, and the lack of a filter is
| definitely an issue.
|
| You see this in other fields as well: at some point having an
| opinion is about name recognition. If you are some unknown
| person and you have a bullshit opinion about something the
| world will ignore you. But if you're a Nobel prize winner,
| and actor or media personality, a well known athlete, a
| business person or a venture capitalist with a lot of money
| then people will pay attention to what you say and will treat
| it with both more weight than they would otherwise _and_ they
| will burn you down far worse than would ever happen compared
| to an unknown person.
|
| The Dutch have a proverb about this (we have proverbs for
| everything, so this should be no surprise), that roughly
| translates as 'tall trees catch a lot of wind'.
| rramadass wrote:
| >I think this happens for the same reason they win their
| Nobel in the first place
|
| You are absolutely right. As they say _There is a Thin Line
| Between Genius and Insanity_. The very intensity of their
| out-of-the-box thinking which got them the Nobel prize in
| the first place is also what makes them prone to go off in
| many other directions without regard to Social Standing,
| Ethics and Morality.
|
| IMO, this is not a fault but _Genius applied to the wrong
| beliefs /ends_ which does not invalidate any of their other
| achievements. I will take the Genius with all their faults
| over the Common Average any-day.
|
| PS: Relevant two-part article -
| https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-hidden-habits-
| ge...
| svachalek wrote:
| Interesting, I had not heard of that. For an older example,
| Isaac Newton spent most of his life researching alchemy.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| > Examples Of Otherwise Good Scientists Who Were Consumed By
| Their Pet Theories Despite Weak/Contradictory Evidence?
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/aoh607/exam.
| ..
| 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.
| tappio wrote:
| I didn't judge Einstein, and my question was not about
| Einstein. I'm not in the position to judge his works in
| physics. I really know nothing about him, all I know is
| what they teach in school and what you occasionally read
| online. Like most of us.
|
| It is interesting that one might get defensive when they
| think that someone questions Einsteins intelligence. Why
| is this meme so important? It's almost as if he was some
| sort of a God.
| 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.
| tappio wrote:
| To me your response reads like the perfect high school
| text book answer. But I'll take your response as if it
| came from someone who really knows his work, and assume
| that what you said is true. Let's not question this meme
| any further.
|
| I didn't really mean to judge Einstein. When a story
| sounds "too good to be true" it most often tends to lean
| towards fiction. My 'judgement' was towards people who
| blindly believe everything about memes.
|
| In reality, there really was no point and it does not
| really matter if this particular story is true or not. I
| just like to question things that people assume obvious.
| yuuu wrote:
| Hey man, sorry about that. It was a high school answer to
| a question from someone who sounds like a high schooler.
| wombatmobile wrote:
| Like all of PG's essays, this one is an exploration of his own
| thought processes more than a generalization about other people
| in general.
|
| What it tells us is why PG created Y Combinator. He did it to
| gain access to other people's ideas.
|
| PG is a smart guy.
|
| He's also a rich guy, getting richer every day, because he uses
| his smarts to multiply his reach by mixing with other people's
| ideas.
| 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.
| pathsjs wrote:
| Good luck learning everything that humanity knows about
| physics in six years! :-) Luckily, you don't really need to
| do that before starting research
| mola wrote:
| This is not about what being smart is.
|
| It's about a very twisted perception of what is important.
|
| PG seems to equate success with innovation. As if living life
| raising a family and having meaningful relationships is just a
| frivolous pass time of the lazy.
|
| I can't with these randian heros....
| 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.
| Fckd wrote:
| What if a smart person thought of a crypto currency and then
| foresaw its devastating impact on the planet, what do you think
| that person would do?
|
| I belive smart people want to work on ideas that are net positive
| and as you know many ideas (even successfull ones) are net
| negative.
|
| * Airbnb - locals are outbidded by tourists
|
| * uber/lyft - better solution is public transportation
|
| * Amazon - big marketplace but no idea whats fake and have to
| pray to god that no one dies while trying to deliver our orer
|
| * Roundup - kills grass and also friendly insects on top of that
| gives you cancer
|
| * Teflon - no need to burn calarioes on washing dishes but
| pollutes ground water with forever chemicals
|
| * meat industry - you get tasty meal but animals and earth suffer
|
| * Zillion sataliets in orbit - remote locations (no one lives or
| not need) gets access to internet but astronomy suffers
|
| the list goes on
| darkerside wrote:
| Smart people also realize the world isn't perfect, and it
| wasn't before we were here either. In a world where long term
| outcomes have infinite factors taking actions with short term
| benefits is rational because there is no control or impact over
| the long term effects.
|
| That is obviously not totally true, but I think
| probabilistically speaking, it's _somewhat_ true.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| So the defining feature of intelligence is that the truly
| smart take actions with short term benefits at the cost of
| long term detriments?
| PeterisP wrote:
| > "I belive smart people want to work on ideas that are net
| positive"
|
| Do you have any basis for that belief or is that just wishful
| thinking? Or is that the way how you choose to define "smart",
| so it becomes true by definition?
|
| I would say that a persons goals, purposes and values is an
| important aspect that's pretty much orthogonal to their
| intellectual ability to figure out how to best achieve their
| long-term goals and further their values, whatever they happen
| to be. Perhaps there's some correlation there, but IMHO it's
| not necessary nor very strong, all kinds of counterexamples
| come to mind; there certainly are people who are very
| intelligent and effective while literally being sociopaths.
| 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]
| Andy_G11 wrote:
| Smart people with ideas know that that uploading fledgling,
| unrealised ideas into the world can mean feeding their baby into
| a meat grinder of criticism, scepticism, plagiarism and probably
| some other -isms.
|
| E.g., Andrew Wile had some pretty good insights as to how to go
| about tackling the solution of Fermat's theorem (read Fermat's
| Last Theorem by Simon Singh - good book), but did he go 'Hey,
| listen everybody - what if we did X?' Like hell he did.
|
| Instead he secluded himself and worked on it till he could
| present a robust proof fait accompli.
|
| This is by no means an unusual story - think of all the bright
| folks who are tinkering with projects all over the world, even
| devoting themselves to it full time - trying to realise something
| that they can call their own.
|
| So, the 'gap between intelligence and ideas' may be partly due to
| the desire of intelligent people to contain their ideas until
| they can own the downstream benefits arising from them.
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