“I’m not that smart” • Hacker News Board

Re: “I’m not that smart”

#61

Post by Balgair » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 1:40 PM UTC

DangitBobby wrote: post #5

It became quickly very clear to me in undergrad that some people had this intuitive conceptual understanding of math and physics that I would simply never have, despite the effort (and I did make good grades). Some of these guys just blew me away with how smart they were. The more time I spent around people a lot smarter than me, the more I realized that some people's brains are just operating at a completely differe…

Point of caution:

I felt much the same way in secondary school. I thought that there were people that were naturally gifted in things like math and the sciences, while I was somewhat gifted in things like English and subjects that required writing skills. Even the kids that were jocks and stoners could be amazing at math and science, subjects I loved, but was just not fit for.

Welp, it turned out that I just wasn't part of the cheating ring.

My teachers were so lazy that they never changed a single test or homework assignment and a lot of the kids found out; I was not one of them. The subjects with definitive answers thus gave my cheating fellows a corpus of perfect grades and I was forced to compete with the answer key. Subjects where any iota of reading or comprehension was required, they then had to rely on past examples of good grades, giving the rest of us a small chance.

Still, when I got to uni, I also was wowed by the intellect of certain people in the physics departments. There truly are some people that make me feel like a peanut. It's just not the dumb jocks that I knew to be dumb jocks but had to gaslight myself into thinking were actually good at math.

You know the smart ones when you see them.

Re: “I’m not that smart”

#62

Post by rramadass » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 1:43 PM UTC

cranium wrote: post #33

jzellis wrote: post #23

I'm a pretty bright cat, in that I'm world-class good at inductive and deductive reasoning, and better at making intuitive leaps (where I "get it" but I can't explain how I get it). It's served me very well in my life, but I have constantly been undermined by my own inability to focus and the fact that I often abandon ideas and projects because I'm easily bored with them or I can see why, ten steps down the road, why…

I was like that until I consciously started doing more and thinking less (about the ramifications). You need to start small and solve a small pain for you, then go from there. You will encounter problems but you will have your full mental power to solve them. You cannot solve the big problems from ten steps ahead, you're simply not involved enough to give it your best shot. It's during the crisis that you'll find a c…

Great Insight!

Re: “I’m not that smart”

#63

Post by rowanG077 » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 1:51 PM UTC

lordnacho wrote: post #60

rowanG077 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes unnormalized IQ scores of kids increase when they get older. That's why only the normalized to their age IQ score is reported. I won't get seduced into a discussion about whether IQ is really intelligence. It's the best proxy we have that's all that matters for this discussion.

But it can make perfect sense that your rank doesn't change within your cohort. The better you are above your cohort, the more encouraged you are, and the more help you'll get from the system. So in that sense it can be the case that it's very hard to change your intelligence.

That's an assumption. It could be true or not. If true you'd expect steadily increasing IQ stores for people who are slightly above average, which is not what happens. The same effect should be observed in weaker students if it's true. I'm not interested in conjecture. I'm looking for peer-reviewed papers.

Re: “I’m not that smart”

#64

Post by istinetz » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 1:53 PM UTC

blackbrokkoli wrote: post #51

teachersaredumb wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but the major aspect of being smart is about wealth and educational inequality No, this is flat out wrong. There has been so much research on this, and intelligence is both highly predictive of life outcomes (controlling for wealth) and extremely heritable. If you take the biological kids of smart people and raise them in poor households, they still turn out very smart, much smarter than the biological kids of dumb…

Could you provide a citation? I am asking because this conflicts (not overstating) with every single study I read on this general topic. To name a few: * The only relevant factor for predicting chess skill at any level seems to be hours spent on deliberate practice, see for example: https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.1106 * There is the decently famous Terman research ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Terman ), who was…

>The only relevant factor for predicting chess skill at any level seems to be hours spent on deliberate practice, see for example: https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.1106

This is wildly implausible, and indeed the paper makes no such claims.

Re: “I’m not that smart”

#65

Post by auganov » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 2:06 PM UTC

rowanG077 wrote: post #55

auganov wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most trivial brain training exercises routinely show major increases in IQ scores. Those who favor a static hypothesis (and they seem to be the majority) like to simply assume these are fake gains. But without ground truth, there's no way to know. You'd also be surprised how few studies there are that have people directly practice IQ test taking. The static hypothesis seems to rely on common sense rather than har…

Can you source some peer-reviewed research that shows this? Everywhere I look the baseline seems to be IQ scores can't be trained save a tiny few points. And 3 IQ points don't really make a genius out of someone smart. Free will has nothing to do with not being able to do something because physical constraints are placed on a person. e.g. A person in a wheel chair does not have more or less free will then someone who…

In case of losing weight, it very much does. You don't even need to do anything, you need to not eat (as much). Given high heritability of obesity it may very well be that some genetic configurations make it harder to stop eating. Plenty of studies show that most fail at dieting. Statistically speaking, it may be impossible to lose weight for most. So if you don't believe in even soft free will, you may as well conclude it is in fact impossible for these people to lose weight.

Alternatively, one could claim many simply don't want to lose weight. Then it should be fair game to claim many don't want to improve their intelligence.

Dual n back studies are a good starting point. Could go through gwern's article [0]. Which I very much disagree with, but it does cover a lot of research. He essentially concludes the active placebo studies that produce as many gains as dnb prove dnb doesn't work. But without ground truth there's no way to know these active placebo gains are fake. Many of these active placebos are other cognitive training methods, it's perfectly plausible they may not be placebos at all. IMO we can only conclude that if dnb does work it isn't uniquely great.

Another thing to remember - if we want to determine if it is possible to improve intelligence we should care about maximum gains not average gains. Again, without ground truth, one cannot simply claim big gainers are meaningless outliers that can be discounted. There may not be anything producing 2 SD on average (though plenty showing much more than the 3 points you mention), but many such improvements have been recorded.

Imagine weight was something we couldn't observe or understand. Based on statistical science, many may similarly conclude it is impossible to change it.

[0] https://www.gwern.net/DNB-meta-analysis

Re: “I’m not that smart”

#66

Post by jabthedang » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 2:12 PM UTC

[dead]

Re: “I’m not that smart”

#67

Post by teachersaredumb » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 2:16 PM UTC

saberience wrote: post #15

teachersaredumb wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to brag (is it even possible to brag through an anonymous throwaway account?), but throughout my schooling I skipped or skimmed most readings and avoided doing the homework, or copied it off my more diligent classmates. But I still got perfect grades in high school and graduate school, outperforming classmates who worked much harder. In undergrad, I had mediocre grades only because I just didn't do the homework a…

So despite your clearly large intellect, it seems like you didn't understand the English verb "to brag." I would say this in response, what you describe: being good at middle and high and able to get perfect grades there, isn't particularly impressive. Most good students can excel in high school. You note that things got harder for you in college, this is more normal, "smart kids" usually get found out in college whe…

No post body was provided.

Re: “I’m not that smart”

#68

Post by lordnacho » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 2:30 PM UTC

rowanG077 wrote: post #63

lordnacho wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it can make perfect sense that your rank doesn't change within your cohort. The better you are above your cohort, the more encouraged you are, and the more help you'll get from the system. So in that sense it can be the case that it's very hard to change your intelligence.

That's an assumption. It could be true or not. If true you'd expect steadily increasing IQ stores for people who are slightly above average, which is not what happens. The same effect should be observed in weaker students if it's true. I'm not interested in conjecture. I'm looking for peer-reviewed papers.

I struggle to remember the paper, I'll post it here if I think of it.

Re: “I’m not that smart”

#69

Post by spiffytech » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 2:30 PM UTC

DangitBobby wrote: post #5

It became quickly very clear to me in undergrad that some people had this intuitive conceptual understanding of math and physics that I would simply never have, despite the effort (and I did make good grades). Some of these guys just blew me away with how smart they were. The more time I spent around people a lot smarter than me, the more I realized that some people's brains are just operating at a completely differe…

I saw the same thing in college, but I narrowed it down not to intelligence, but aptitude for abstract vs concrete thought.

In high school everyone either struggles with geometry or algebra, while finding the other relatively accessible. College magnifies this effect.

I intensely struggled with calculus, far and away my hardest subject. Friends those raw intelligence was similar to my own found calculus to be laughably easy - I complained about how poorly our textbook explained new concepts, and my friends praised exactly the traits I criticized.

I also found that some people had to learn computer science bottom-up, while others (like myself) had to learn top-down. Some friends couldn't get comfortable with high-level concepts until they understood how every piece worked, down to the metal, while I couldn't wrap my head around the low-level concepts until I understood how they fit into the big picture of problem solving.

I've seen this pattern repeat again and again during and after college. And it doesn't help that the people who like teaching abstract subjects are the people who never found those subjects a struggle.

Re: “I’m not that smart”

#70

Post by rowanG077 » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 2:57 PM UTC

auganov wrote: post #65

rowanG077 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you source some peer-reviewed research that shows this? Everywhere I look the baseline seems to be IQ scores can't be trained save a tiny few points. And 3 IQ points don't really make a genius out of someone smart. Free will has nothing to do with not being able to do something because physical constraints are placed on a person. e.g. A person in a wheel chair does not have more or less free will then someone who…

In case of losing weight, it very much does. You don't even need to do anything, you need to not eat (as much). Given high heritability of obesity it may very well be that some genetic configurations make it harder to stop eating. Plenty of studies show that most fail at dieting. Statistically speaking, it may be impossible to lose weight for most. So if you don't believe in even soft free will, you may as well concl…

> In case of losing weight, it very much does. You don't even need to do anything, you need to not eat (as much). Given high heritability of obesity it may very well be that some genetic configurations make it harder to stop eating. Plenty of studies show that most fail at dieting. Statistically speaking, it may be impossible to lose weight for most. So if you don't believe in even soft free will, you may as well conclude it is in fact impossible for these people to lose weight.

That's way too much black and white thinking. It's pretty safe to say most obese people would like to lose weight. They just don't want to sacrifice the things they are doing, either consciously or subconsciously. This is orthogonal to free will. What you are talking about is the whether the conscious mind can win over the subconscious mind. That's called discipline. Not free will.