Earlier quoted context omitted.
This comment seems highly fantastical to me.
Why?
The superhuman deduction in the middle, the general tone of self-absorption, and the Batman-villain userid. Maybe I'm wrong.
Curse Of The Gifted (2000)
181–190 of 371 posts
Re: Curse Of The Gifted (2000)
#182edit a little stream of consciousness follows Curse of being gifted is very real. I wonder sometimes how many people couldn't break out of it and have ended up in bad jobs, or worse. Probably like many HNers I also suffered from it mightily in K-12 and by the time I realized what was going on, I was already so far behind that escaping school, rather than redoing years of what I missed, was the easier option. It took…
> the kinds of problems most people have seem trivially simple to me This sounds a bit narcissistic. If you think other people's problems are trivial, maybe you're just not being empathic enough to understand their full scope. If everything looks like it follows simple patterns, maybe you just aren't looking close enough. When you learn something new, there's often this point where you feel you understand it all. If…
> This sounds a bit narcissistic.
I know. That's the trouble with talking about growing up or being highly intelligent, you end up sounding like a narcissistic prick.
Even saying something like "I've tested in the top 1-2% of dozens of aptitude and intelligence tests" sounds like I'm lording it over those who haven't. But I don't think it's really all that different than saying "I'm taller than 99% of the population". Except tall people, or people with some other exceptional attribute can get together and commiserate about their exceptional attribute without the kinds of social stigma attached to it that intelligence does.
It's very hard to have an honest discussion about being smart without diving into lots of euphemisms and using lots of humbling verbiage.
Most people's problems are simple. They just don't want to fix them because the emotional cost for them is high. So they endlessly try to find ways to solve their problems with the minimum of emotional impact and they make no progress. Getting past your own emotions to make forward progress with your life is the best skill almost anybody can make with respect to solving the problems in their life.
It's not easy, and I don't mean to minimize the impact emotions have. It was definitely a difficult skill for me to learn (and I'm still learning it).
But take money, every single person's money problem is solved with the very simple "don't spend more than you earn". Yet there are literally hundreds of thousands of pages written on financial advice and dealing with personal debt. We think it's a complicate topic, and we treat it like it is, but it's not.
I've found that most problems people deal with are similar.
I'm pretty overweight, and when I think it's a problem, I come up with all kinds of excuses about it and how to solve it and endlessly mill about not doing anything. But it's hilariously simple for me to solve: exercise more, eat less. But I struggle with it like many people struggle with money or relationships or whatever.
Re: Curse Of The Gifted (2000)
#183I am miles away from Eric or Linus, but the "curse of the gifted" is very real. Thankfully I wasn't smart or gifted enough that I could ride it for long, but when it comes to math and problem-solving I rode it well into my high school years. I never learned to do algebra "by the book," because I didn't need to. Or maybe because I wasn't smart enough to. The math teacher would teach "3x + 6 = 9." Basic algebraic probl…
I never hit a wall with mathematics. My approach was to write down what I have to and do everything else in my head. I hit a wall within the first five minutes of programming. I know I will mistakes and I make up for that by making small, clear code commits and trying to make my code easy to read. I'm a much better programmer than I am a physicist. I am also much happier working as a programmer than I was studying ph…
I definitely make mistakes, so one tactic I use is liberal use of code comments. I start with a comment about what the overall task is about, so that I can keep perspective, and then I will use a series of "TODO ..." comments to break things down into smaller steps.
The nice thing about this is, some of those survive revisions and can then be line comments which explain the next few lines of code:
# Frob the Foo.womble, so that Bar gets its input
# in the format it expects
Re: Curse Of The Gifted (2000)
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not entirely a marshmallow test and I disagree with your blanket categorization of it as such. During elementary school, a friend and I got a hold of a Math review book meant for college-age folks who didn't really grok Math in High School. We enjoyed competing with each other in learning math, but it resulted in us going into 6th grade knowing everything we would be learning for the next three years. In Math al…
You skipped two grades in one subject with a peer so you weren't by yourself among the older children. I can certainly believe that worked out fine. Maybe even in the more extreme case of a child skipping several grades altogether by himself, that's the best of a bad set of choices. But we shouldn't be offering only bad choices. At least in/near any decent size city, there should be a large enough population to creat…
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Re: Curse Of The Gifted (2000)
#185Linus' signature is shockingly relevant these days: "...The Bill of Rights is a literal and absolute document. The First Amendment doesn't say you have a right to speak out unless the government has a 'compelling interest' in censoring the Internet. The Second Amendment doesn't say you have the right to keep and bear arms until some madman plants a bomb. The Fourth Amendment doesn't say you have the right to be secur…
That was Eric Raymond's signature, not Linus'.
Re: Curse Of The Gifted (2000)
#186edit a little stream of consciousness follows Curse of being gifted is very real. I wonder sometimes how many people couldn't break out of it and have ended up in bad jobs, or worse. Probably like many HNers I also suffered from it mightily in K-12 and by the time I realized what was going on, I was already so far behind that escaping school, rather than redoing years of what I missed, was the easier option. It took…
> the kinds of problems most people have seem trivially simple to me This sounds a bit narcissistic. If you think other people's problems are trivial, maybe you're just not being empathic enough to understand their full scope. If everything looks like it follows simple patterns, maybe you just aren't looking close enough. When you learn something new, there's often this point where you feel you understand it all. If…
Perhaps is "seem (ie: Look to me) trivially simple" instead of "are trivially simple".
I find very hard to be in a "regular" conversation. Bored/dislike me pop, realities, and the normal kind of conversation that people have. Even if I understand that some of that conversations are important or are NOT stupid, still, I can't plug in. Neither talk by phone, or use any kind of chat or social app (even before all that NSA stuff!).
Boy, how I regret pass my time in a library, all days, all the time...
Re: Curse Of The Gifted (2000)
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
"I got very lucky and found a wife who's smarter than me, and she keeps me on my toes and from drawing the world down into my brain and further isolating myself with walls of internally consistent, but bad ideas. I've never figured out how to predict her thinking process beyond some high level abstract patterns. I think she does it on purpose, to keep me appreciative of her." "a wife who's smarter than me" Would love…
I remember when we were dating, we got in an argument about something, I don't remember what exactly, and a typical lover's debate ensued. In a debate I'm usually able to rationally disassemble another person's arguments and "win"...and I remember the moment that she presented her argument and it was different than mine and I realized she was absolutely correct and I had built a sloppy argument in my mind. I told mys…
Thanks for your reply.
Wow that's really interesting and great as well. [1]
Won't get into why I think my wife is "smart" and won't say anymore lest she reads this and the wrong thing happens! (I'll leave it at that).
That said I'm always amazed at the number of people I've run into who think there is some downside to not having a basically "stupid" woman that is totally dependent on the husband. I've had people actually question why I would want to be married to someone who is "smart". (My wife is a Physician so people automatically think "smart"). [2]
[1] Typically when someone thinks someone is smart [3] it's because they know something the other person doesn't and can run circles around them. (Reason why people say "he's really good with computers" in other words anything more than what they know is "really smart".)
Anyway in the case of what you have presented above you say:
a) "In a debate I'm usually able to rationally disassemble another person's arguments and "win"'
(So you think you are good at this)
then
b) "I remember the moment that she presented her argument and it was different than mine and I realized she was absolutely correct "
(So you see she is better at something you think you are really good at that really intesifies things since you have a point of reference (whereas people evaluating the computer guy have less of that for sure)
c) "And then it happened again and again."
d) "I had never met another human being where that happened, ever."
So you are in awe of her because your metric is your own intelligence which you have already figured out is quite high. And you have proof of that from past experience.
[2] I dated another woman who was a Physician and she didn't know you couldn't heat a pizza in a pizza box in other words that paper burned in the oven. (really). So much for that type of smarts.
[3] Edit: Other than the obvious markers like degree, grades, job title etc.
Re: Curse Of The Gifted (2000)
#188I think, in context, Linus was probably right. There are some situations where having 2 very different project/modules depend on common code could be hell. Just remember the multiple WebKit debacles or the BSDs. It might be better to keep an eye on each other, pick the specific updates, but have total independency. Else, you end up in commit wars and endless arguing on mailing lists. ESR is way overrated, IMHO.
>Just remember the multiple WebKit debacles or the BSDs
I don't know anything about webkits, but how are "the BSDs" relevant?
Re: Curse Of The Gifted (2000)
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can relate to that. College-level calculus burned me so much , I didn't had the algebra background necessary to grok it, much of it is memorizing heuristics and "tricks", and college professors (specially in my public uni) didn't had much patience either. I even did well in other math-related classes, but calculus was a chimera. Unfortunately, I fell so much behind the curriculum that I had to drop out of college t…
It is very rare for an incoming calculus student to know algebra. In fact, I often tell my students that the first goal of college-level calculus is to make them actually learn algebra. It's an extremely sad state of affairs for me (a mathematician). Relevant (an article I wrote): http://j2kun.svbtle.com/you-never-did-math-in-high-school
My high school curriculum was deliberately set up so that Calculus is where we really learn algebra. 9th and 10th grade were designed to teach mathematical thinking. In 11th grade you have the choice of taking 11th grade math or Calc 1 (with permission of your 10th grade math teacher), both of which would instill algebra (technically, you are aloud to take any math elective, but I think everyone takes at least one of these two). The concept is that, because algebra is being used as a tool to solve a more complicated problem, there is no choice but to actually learn it.
Having said that, we did go into it being passingly familiar with algebra, which may be more than you observe in your students. Also, I don't think it is possible to go through the 9th and 10th grade courses without developing some feel for meaningful symbol manipulation.
EDIT: I just read your article, I think our math program is like you describe it should be.
Re: Curse Of The Gifted (2000)
#190Warning to the unexpecting, this was written by Eric S. Raymond.
I get that the guy is inflammatory, but what is the problem with letting the content stand on its own? But if you are going to mention that ESR is involved, you may as well mention that Linus is present as well.
Torvalds is abrasive, but Raymond is just an asshole supreme, and if I had known this was an ESR post I wouldn't have opened it in the first place.