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How to do things if you're not that smart and don't have any talent

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Re: How to do things if you're not that smart and don't have any talent

#171

Post by vinnyvichy »

eschulz wrote: post #160
MontgomeryPi2 wrote: post #92

The article made me think of General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord's officer classification: "I distinguish four types. There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff. The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever an…

Napoleon apparently joked about the importance of having dumb and energetic soldiers shot. https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/12/27/dumb-and-gets-thin...

This sounds like a significant refinement over KvH-E quadrants above, and indeed highlights the danger of the dumb and not-lazy. But it's probably not Napoleon..

Napoleon would more likely say something along the lines of.. "Know when to go for it and when to take it slow."

After all, he signalled his willingness to work hard with his bee emblem.

Re: How to do things if you're not that smart and don't have any talent

#172

Post by Rewrap3643 »

toolz wrote: post #101
BOOSTERHIDROGEN wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would be the safest drugs to consume ?

Considering there's no biological measurement being used to diagnose or correct ADHD, it's more of an "art" than a science. I presume you're looking for the safest drug that's also effective, because the safest would be not taking any drugs and optimizing for general health and lifestyle. I've heard of people achieving modest success with modafinil. Also with l-thyeanine/caffeine combos. Both of which have very well…

Psychs won't prescribe it because it's a wakefulness promoting agent, not a typical stimulant. There's insufficient evidence to prescribe it as a first-line treatment for ADHD. Insurance companies are also unlikely to pay for it in absence of a diagnosed sleep disorder.

Methylphenidate is the clinically correct alternative to amphetamines.

Re: How to do things if you're not that smart and don't have any talent

#173

Post by [deleted] »

GeoAtreides wrote: post #117
j7ake wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give a concrete example of tech work that a "low IQ person" would not be able to tackle?

Writing an embedded C program using ESP-IDF that polls a Bosch BME688 sensor, feeds it Bosch BSEC library (compiled for ESP32, of course) and then pushes the response to an AWS mqtt queue.

[deleted]

Re: How to do things if you're not that smart and don't have any talent

#174

Post by 15457345234 »

api wrote: post #75
15457345234 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not: nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not: the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. -- Ronald Reagan

This feeds into one of my pet hypotheses about human ability: the most important biological factors determining success lie not in whatever influences IQ or other intelligence or creativity attributes but in the dopamine system. Take 20 IQ points from someone and replace that with the ability to engage focus and flow state at will and see what happens. Our dopamine system is tuned for a world that is far slower than…

Amphetamines are truly an evil drug, they bring out and emphasise the worst qualities of people.

Re: How to do things if you're not that smart and don't have any talent

#175

Post by kamaal »

justanotherjoe wrote: post #154
MontgomeryPi2 wrote: post #92

The article made me think of General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord's officer classification: "I distinguish four types. There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff. The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever an…

Your comment makes me think of taoism's wu wei. Sometimes the best thing to do is nothing. And when you do do nothing, you'll look like a lazy person for sure.

Isn't taoism more on the lines of making things happen by design and not fight through things to get them done?

Sure many times that means doing nothing at all, But most of the times it means working with things in a way that things are so well designed you just flow with things instead of fighting through the system to make them happen.

Re: How to do things if you're not that smart and don't have any talent

#176

Post by ativzzz »

15457345234 wrote: post #174
api wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feeds into one of my pet hypotheses about human ability: the most important biological factors determining success lie not in whatever influences IQ or other intelligence or creativity attributes but in the dopamine system. Take 20 IQ points from someone and replace that with the ability to engage focus and flow state at will and see what happens. Our dopamine system is tuned for a world that is far slower than…

Amphetamines are truly an evil drug, they bring out and emphasise the worst qualities of people.

Just like most everything else in life, amphetamines lie on a spectrum. People like Paul Erdos[0] would disagree completely.

People who are prone to addictive behavior should stay away from recreational cocaine use. Meth is pretty destructive. But lots of people basically become functional (ADHD) on amphetamine.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s

Re: How to do things if you're not that smart and don't have any talent

#177

Post by neonlights84 »

MontgomeryPi2 wrote: post #92

The article made me think of General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord's officer classification: "I distinguish four types. There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff. The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever an…

And the worst of all are the hardworking lazy ones, who exist only to swallow up their compatriots in universe-unravelling paradoxes.

Re: How to do things if you're not that smart and don't have any talent

#178

Post by PeterisP »

hackerlight wrote: post #40
paxys wrote: post #14

From my experience in the tech industry I can say with utmost confidence that "not smart"/"talentless" people who are determined and hard-working lead to significantly better real world results than geniuses who are lazy, unmotivated or overall not action oriented. The vast majority of problems at any company are easy and don't need any big technological breakthroughs to solve. They are instead held back by (1) lack…

If it's in R&D, medium intelligence people simply can't contribute even if they try really hard.

IDK, working on research experiments has a lot of required effort that can be done by pretty much everyone, I'd estimate that about 80% of our total person-hours is spent on all kinds of "glorified plumbing", wrangling data, etc. And for other domains, if you get a chance, ask a biochem researcher about how much of the contribution required for some discovery involved really thoroughly cleaning glassware.

Re: How to do things if you're not that smart and don't have any talent

#179

Post by tcgv »

j7ake wrote: post #88
kypro wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really depends what you're referring to as tech work here... Low IQ people in my opinion are almost incapable of tackling certain technical problems – generally those which require complex maths or reasoning ability. That said, most tech work isn't that. In fact, most tech work isn't even technical. Designers or product owners are tech workers, but don't necessarily need to be "smart". And even the technical roles…

Can you give a concrete example of tech work that a "low IQ person" would not be able to tackle?

I can think of a few examples that often pose challenges for less experienced Devs, some of whom don't overcome these challenges, whether due to lack of motivation, capacity, or any other reason:

- Handle DateTime in different timezones consistently, according to the expectations of each customer and their geography.

- Proper use of caching, basic search algorithms and data structures.

- Thread synchronization / race condition.

- Anything that requires recursion.

- Database and query tunning.

Re: How to do things if you're not that smart and don't have any talent

#180

Post by Apocryphon »

corobo wrote: post #102
Jensson wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that those pills fixes focus, not motivation. Even with pills you will fail if your motivation falters, just like regular people. I think the main tell of ADHD is if you feel you lack motivation to complete simple but tedious tasks that has high rewards that you really care about. In that case you don't lack motivation, you really care about the reward, you don't lack confidence since the task is simple, you jus…

I wish I had the "draw the rest of the owl" part but the thing that clicked for me was this comic (apologies for the rehost, couldn't find the original) https://img.imgy.org/rwdQ.jpg Motivation is too fleeting to rely on it to get you through the entire project. Use any rare moments of motivation to practice discipline rather than go into a project raw Again sorry I don't have the how-to, (un)fortunately just seeing…

Here it is: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-to-draw-an-owl
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