On Being Smart (2009) [pdf]

No, I just know where I rank in the scheme of things. I have a bunch of friends from CalTech who blow my mind. When you go to a place like Yale (or Google, or even SF) you may have been in the top 2-5 percentile before but you're average in places like that. That said, not all of my brilliant CalTech friends are wildly successful. While one is a Director at SpaceX working on their new hydrogen engine, another is doing back office work for a second tier financial firm. But to make it to the top you need to have both determination and the right set of other skills.

When I reported my findings to him he told me to stop what I was doing. I couldn't even get him to read the paper. This guy was a giant, and he completely dismissed it. And so I went out and got it published solo. About 8 months later I was doing a bioinformatics analysis on what they called junk DNA at the time. We came to very different conclusions about what we would find--my hypothesis was based on my research, his hypothesis on his research. When it was all done, I was right, and that work him up. This was a couple weeks before my dissertation defense and to be honest I wasn't even sure I was going to pass. When he introduced me he got up in front of the faculty and role a story of a 'boy who slated a dragon' and praised me for my intellectual courage and apologized. Unfortunately the damage was already done. I had been a Ronin for most of my academic career, still unformed, and not as brilliant at others. It would take me months to do what others could learn in days or weeks and I didn't want to risk a life of a low paying and money post doc and so I left academia.

The learning period is a good point. Contact juggling has a rather cliff-like learning curve and many people don't progress because of it.

A supportive environment makes a world of difference. I hsf people around early on to who offered constructive advice and encouragement and that made all the difference.

I remember insisting very strongly to teachers and friends that my body was just simply not cut out to play barre chords on a guitar. I was convinced that it was impossible. Turns out... it's not.

With music the contrast between the desired outcome and the actual results for a beginner is extremely, painfully, embarrassingly obvious. The whole point is that you want to make beautiful sounds, not horrible sounds. You want to be in tune, in rhythm, melodious, but instead you feel clumsy, weak, confused, tone deaf, and awkward.

So that can easily kill your whole motivation if you don't really internalize the idea of progressive learning.

John Holt's book "How Children Learn" has some thoughts about learning instruments.

> There is a special sense in which it may be fair to say that the child scientist is a less efficient thinker than the adult scientist. He is not as good at cutting out unnecessary and useless information, at simplifying the problem, at figuring out how to ask questions whose answers will give him the most information. Thus, a trained adult thinker, seeing a cello for the first time, would probably do in a few seconds what it takes a child much longer to do—bow each of the strings, to see what sounds they give, and then see what effect holding down a string with the left hand has on the sound made by that string

> That is, if—and it is a very big if—he could bring himself to touch the cello at all. Where the young child, at least until his thinking has been spoiled by adults, has a great advantage is in situations—and many, even most real life situations are like this—where there is so much seemingly senseless data that it is impossible to tell what questions to ask. He is much better at taking in this kind of data; he is better able to tolerate its confusion; and he is much better at picking out the patterns, hearing the faint signal amid all the noise. Above all, he is much less likely than adults to make hard and fast conclusions on the basis of too little data, or having made such conclusions, to refuse to consider any new data that does not support them. And these are the vital skills of thought which, in our hurry to get him thinking the way we do, we may very well stunt or destroy in the process of "educating him".

> But the greatest difference between children and adults is that most of the children to whom I offer a turn on the cello accept it, while most adults, particularly if they have never played any other instrument, refuse it.

One thing that really sparked my motivation for music even while I was sucking horribly was the realization that you can make pretty neat melodies in very simple ways, for example by just improvising on the 0 2 3 5 7 9 10 frets on the high E string and sometimes hitting the low E string for bass—this way you can sound kind of like an Indian raga without too much practice.

Can you completely discount the part played by one's innate ability, though? I have been able to sing in tune and play percussion instruments (mainly the tabla) from a very young age, though I am no prodigy. Sadly, I was never motivated enough to put in the effort to become better at music and am still an amateur.

I think I'd have had an (initial) advantage over someone who absolutely sucks at music and is learning to sing or play a percussion instrument.

I feel the same thing when I look at people who are much smarter than me when it comes to intelligence.

People also seem to be different in how much they can or want to focus on a single thing or a small number of things, versus how much they want to jump around and study tons of stuff in a broad way.

I'm very much the second way. The pretentious word is "polymath" but for me it's just that my attention works that way. It does seem to have something to do with being somehow fundamentally restless.

I really don't want to be a graduate student because it seems terribly excruciating and I don't think I have the capacity, not because I'm stupid but because I'm restless. But I would love to hang out with graduate students, from different fields.

In a utopian world, I could get food and shelter by just being a guy who spends 12 hours a day reading about different things, re-explaining them, connecting them and introducing people to different ideas.

(Politically charged digression: I think a basic income would free up truly enormous potential for innovation, if the innate creativity and productivity of people were disconnected from the tedious demand for employment and funding. Talking critically about the economics of it before trying it seems ridiculous because the entire point, it seems to me, is that totally novel things would happen.)

I think this is really dependent on the activity. Sometimes I can really drill into something new, and other times I can't help but say "fuck it"

I picked up stick juggling a couple of years ago and have gotten quite good at it. People always say I must have some talent, but I was just as bad as anyone else when I first started. I've noticed two common behaviors when people do it

1. They try it a few times, get embarrassed / bored / discouraged, and give up 2. They try it a few times, and every time they drop it it almost adds fuel to the fire. They see it as a challenge they have to overcome

I second that, thanks for the share ph33r.

The story highlights that 'smartness' is linked more to a learning mentality then actually knowing a lot of things.

Humility.

Similarly to the study shared in the OP, if you tell yourself that you are good at something, you are less likely to try hard, thats when you'll fall behind. I read a book that shared a story like this recently, 'David and Goliath' by Malcolm Gladwell.

There was a study posted here recently that disagrees with you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10488998

The summary is that very intelligent people do not seem to have any unique genetic or environmental factors that explain that, they just happen to be at the edge of the bell curve. This is not true of very unintelligent people; there are lots of genetic and environmental factors that can decrease intelligence.

From the abstract: "We found that high intelligence is familial, heritable, and caused by the same genetic and environmental factors responsible for the normal distribution of intelligence."

If you're talking about people not nearly as smart as they think they are, ESR is up near the top.

Wow! I've been looking for an english translation of Recoltes et Semailles for a while. I see now it's easily reachable by google (oops), but still, thanks!

re: Only innocence can surmount them ... when we find ourselves able to listen to things, totally and intensely absorbed in child play. — Grothendieck

Apropos is something another Frenchman once said:

"Talent is long patience, and originality an effort of will and of intense observation." — Flaubert

I was going to reply saying _Creativity_ is the wedge.

Andrew Wiles said much the same on solving FLT: "Perhaps I can best describe my experience of doing mathematics in terms of a journey through a dark unexplored mansion. You enter the first room of the mansion and it's completely dark. You stumble around bumping into the furniture, but gradually you learn where each piece of furniture is. Finally, after six months or so, you find the light switch, you turn it on, and suddenly it's all illuminated. You can see exactly where you were. Then you move into the next room and spend another six months in the dark. So each of these breakthroughs, while sometimes they're momentary, sometimes over a period of a day or two, they are the culmination of—and couldn't exist without—the many months of stumbling around in the dark that proceed them."

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/andrew-wiles-fermat.htm...

it's possible, but let's not ignore the heritable / family aspect of this. In my family noone has done unskilled labor going back to 19th century at least and possibly earlier. So it's fair to say I am not in danger of that. But I agree with your point that a bit of compassion from those more fortunate wouldn't hurt

Very nice insight, and I thank you for sharing. As a musician and writer, I've never really shied away from dealing with emotions, as they can influence so much in 'tone' (in the case of sound) or 'behavior' (in the case of fictional characters). You're right about emotions being valuable and enlightening, that's a nice way of putting it. Upon reflection, I think maybe what I was striving to convey is that even as a smart person, a caring person, and with time to think things through, there's still the reality of life to confront - as in, thought and good will alone can't change the world for the better. It's difficult trying to 'fight the good fight' (in whatever form it may be - daily social interactions, actions with consequences, etc), and honestly, not very rewarding in a practical sense. I guess it's the burden for some to be borne many years after they're born!

Genesis 2:9 does mention a "tree of life," though in this case certainly 6stringmerc did mean "the tree of knowledge of good and evil" from which Adam was commanded not to eat.

I'd claim the fear can be just irrational. Maybe learned behavior, you we afraid of doing homework once. The next time you remember that experience and it becomes grueling experience. After some time you have learned to fear, but there is not really anything you are afraid off.

Or there is, but you don't know it. Humans are really good at inventing explanations for their feelings and believing those explanations.

I think just acknowledging that it's fear is good first step.

I like that. But he says a couple of dumb things. Like "It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, ..." Sure, some of those jobs do seem to add no value. But be careful what you include in a BS jobs list, because if you understand why insurance is important then you might realize that actuaries do something kind of important.

And then there's this "...success mobilizing resentment against school teachers, or auto workers (and not, significantly, against the school administrators or auto industry managers who actually cause the problems)..." because if those bad managers and administrators would just keep giving bigger raises the unions wouldn't have to shut down businesses and schools.

Impostor Syndrome may be a better fit for that than Dunning Kruger: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome

I didn't say Dunning-Kruger would suggest anything about should. That's why I posed the should as a question. Anybody can chime in, including you.

But that comment was not very well developed. I admit that.

Agreed, maybe it would be more clear to take out "just" and emphasize that the brain is a muscle.

> practice of a specific mental skill has little influence on other mental skills

Care to elaborate on this? I'm trying to imagine what you mean here.

>practice of a specific mental skill has little influence on other mental skills

I disagree. Take reading, for example. Does reading not make you a better writer?