You Don't Need to Be Brilliant to Do Brilliant Work
sandymaguire.me
You Don't Need to Be Brilliant to Do Brilliant Work
1–10 of 63 posts
Re: You Don't Need to Be Brilliant to Do Brilliant Work
#2Really good read. So true that most 'innovation' is really a lot of tedious work most people don't bother doing. That is in sharp contrast to the 'Eurika!' moment that most people think of. There may never be a eurika moment, just a bunch of small insights put together into a body of work.
Re: You Don't Need to Be Brilliant to Do Brilliant Work
#3Depends 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.
Re: You Don't Need to Be Brilliant to Do Brilliant Work
#4More or less the same point which Richard Hamming makes in his talk You and Your Research:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1zDuOPkMSw&list=PL2FF649D0C...
Except, of course, that Hamming gives a few more practical pointers.
Re: You Don't Need to Be Brilliant to Do Brilliant Work
#5Depends 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.
how do you know that? have they shown you iq test results?
Re: You Don't Need to Be Brilliant to Do Brilliant Work
#6Depends 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.
how do you know that? have they shown you iq test results?
Brilliance is more than IQ.
Re: You Don't Need to Be Brilliant to Do Brilliant Work
#7Really good read. So true that most 'innovation' is really a lot of tedious work most people don't bother doing. That is in sharp contrast to the 'Eurika!' moment that most people think of. There may never be a eurika moment, just a bunch of small insights put together into a body of work.
I think it was Issac Asimov's quote that the most exciting phrase in science is not "Eureka!" but "Hmmm... that's funny..."
Meaning, many innovations are the result of unexpected outcomes rather than a brilliant mind setting out to prove a specific result
Re: You Don't Need to Be Brilliant to Do Brilliant Work
#8Although 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 creative genius who lacks it will swiftly find himself outdistanced by people who routinely upload the contents of thick reference manuals into their brains. [During the production of the first book version of this document, for example, I learned most of the rather complex typesetting language TeX over about four working days, mainly by inhaling Knuth's 477-page manual. My editor's flabbergasted reaction to this genuinely surprised me, because years of associating with hackers have conditioned me to consider such performances routine and to be expected. —ESR]
Re: You Don't Need to Be Brilliant to Do Brilliant Work
#9Depends 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.
Have you actually measured all of those Neuroscience PhDs IQs?
Re: You Don't Need to Be Brilliant to Do Brilliant Work
#10I enjoyed the article, but I think the author learned the wrong lesson from his friend's success story. Csongor says:
> Then learning the answer revealed that it's actually something that can be fixed --- as is always the case with these things if you think about them enough.
The author focuses on the consequent, thinking long and hard about something, but misses the antecedent, acquiring a deep understanding of a problem area.
I'd say the antecedent is as important as the consequent, if not more important. If you went to grad school you likely knew tons of brilliant people who worked long and hard on important and difficult problems and got nowhere. What they were missing was not some secret effortsauce, but that they picked a problem on which they didn't have an opening or insight into, so all their hard work was them spinning their wheels while standing still.
One thing I tell my students now is that they should always pick problems where they have something everybody else working in the same area doesn't. Like if you want to do formal verification but your background is years spent in industry as a kernel developer, you should avoid the temptation to chase the latest fad (e.g., adversarial machine learning or Spectre/Meltdown), and instead pick a poorly understood and validated module in the kernel and try to find out what you can do to make that module more secure.