41–50 of 63 posts
Depends on what you count as "brilliant work". All of the Neuroscience PhDs at Stanford, UCSF and MIT (non-exhaustive list, just examples) I've met are at least 2 standard deviations away from average intelligence and many are 3 SDs away. Makes me think that some brilliant work requires being brilliant.
I think brilliant, not-brilliant, idiot or any other judgemental terms spent on tagging someone or ourselves is just a waste of time. The greater the effort spent on something by someone, greater is the probability of a favourable outcome to them. But it is still a probability and not a certainty because of variables involved.
As long as people work to live, there will be a pressing demand for such labels, flawed though they may be. Top organizations will always want to hire the smartest/most brilliant/non-idiotic people they can afford, for various practical definitions of these terms. If two people seem similar in every way, but Person 1 has demonstrated that they achieve greater probability of success compared to Person 2 given comparab…
But there's plenty of occasions where judgements is a waste of time, like at the personal level expressed in the OP article. OP does agree that the activity is result from the ego, I don't think he/she did enough to explore the ego resulting in injustice to the colleague as whole in the article.
Although high general intelligence is common among hackers, it is not the sine qua non one might expect. Another trait is probably even more important: the ability to mentally absorb, retain, and reference large amounts of ‘meaningless’ detail, trusting to later experience to give it context and meaning. A person of merely average analytical intelligence who has this trait can become an effective hacker, but a creati…
How can one learn or acquire this trait?
I've had a few situations where people thought I had years of experience with some technology, framework, or programming language when actually I just picked it up last week. One situation in particular, I had a buddy who was using WordPress as the basis of a pretty profitable affiliate site business he was running until he ended up running into some issues that involved needing to make some pretty significant modifications to WordPress itself. He offered to get me in on his affiliate business if I could solve his problem for him. To make a long story short, though I had never even looked at PHP or WordPress before this, within 4 days of using spaced repetition to learn PHP and the intricacies of the WP framework, I was fluently writing plugins that handily solved his problem and a whole lot more and never had to open the reference books again as the whole thing was committed to memory. Not tooting my horn just giving an example of how what ESR was talking about above can be actualized.
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How can one learn or acquire this trait?
just start drinking from the firehose. the trick is to convince yourself not to care about the immediate utility of what you’re learning. And store pointers to data, it’s lighter weight.
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Have you actually measured all of those Neuroscience PhDs IQs?
No, but I know their GRE scores, which are a good proxy for IQ. Plus, seeing the kind of math they do on the fly gives you a good idea.
It's not hard to get a perfect score in the quantitative section. You just need to be decent at math, and simply careful and tedious not to make mistakes. It's not hard to get in the 99 percentile of verbal either - just memorize a lot of words, practice, and learn some of the tricks (e.g. for analogy questions, you can eliminate 3 of the 5 choices even if you don't know the meaning of both words presented to you).
Now when they had the analytical section (different from the current one - they retired it in about 2004) - that was a bit more challenging. And that was the one that set people in top schools apart. Getting a near perfect score (770-800) in quantitative was the norm for people applying to any of the top 10 grad schools in technical fields. But the analytical section was tougher. I think Caltech had the highest median (about 780). The next highest was Wisconsin with 750. The next highest after that was 720, and the rest of the top 10 were in that vicinity.
But they scrapped that section - the only one that was a useful differentiator.
Anyway - bottom line is getting good grades in GRE in the old days (and I suspect today as well) is mostly an exercise in memorizing words, and learning test taking strategies - including simple things like if you have to solve an equation and have 5 choices for x - don't bother solving it - just plug each x in to the equation to see which one works.
Most people don't do this well because:
1. They cram - spend only 2 months preparing for it.
2. They don't spend time in figuring out efficient test taking strategies. Actually, they don't need time - they just need to read a few books on the topic!
I spent over a year preparing for it (only a few minutes a day, and with gaps of weeks at a time). It wasn't hard to get a perfect score in two of the categories and a 99 percentile in the third. And then when I went to grad school, I didn't perform better than those whose score was nowhere near as good.
A friend recounted a conversation where he was talking to one of his friends, saying he couldn't understand how these people could be so dumb. (I don't recall what "these" refers to...) His friend said, "I don't think it's that they're dumb. They just aren't curious." That was an enlightened comment. I think that is one of the elements that is needed to do brilliant things, just as Csonger says he was interested in u…
Heck, most people understand very little about the myriad of everyday systems that keep them alive. Forget engines, computers or say, type theory. Most literally don’t know where their water comes from (to any level deeper than “it comes in a pipe”) or where their poo goes - and collectively that’s ok because the benefit of society is that this stuff gets taken care of for us.
I think looking up now and then, scratching the surface of our own ignorance, can help specialists build empathy when communicating with others outside their field.
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Lots of people have one skill, few people have two, and only a tiny fraction ever put multiple skills to use at once.
So true. This is also the 'Dilbert Theory of Value Creation' that I have used to great profit. Scott Adams likes to say, he is not the funniest guy around but funnier than most people. At best, he'd be a mediocre comedian. He can also draw better than most but hardly a Picasso. And yet, by combining both skills he has something "rare and valuable" that has led to enormous financial success. He also adds that it easie…
Muggsy would disagree ;)
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The path to billionare is unique and can't be copied and involves luck and usually some business skills and almost always communication skills or skills to get others to do work for you. Being an nba player involves luck and hard work and a high spacial iq. Anyone could become a billiarie with luck (powerball lottery in one extreme). Only 100,000 people in the world would even have a chance to compete to be an nba pl…
You do realize there are 6 foot NBA players right. Hardly 100000 in the world. So if you're gonna go to the power ball extreme on one end then you must extend the analogy just as far on the other side of the argument. Most billionaires were born in top 0.01 percentile of their respective population pool. And had to be lucky and smart amongst other traits.