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Comment by AQuantized | Hacker News Reader

Disagree totally with this. My psychometric IQ has been stable for a long time, yet my problem solving ability has increased significantly.

Some ways to modulate it might be reading material such as George Polya's "How to Solve It," taking your own notes on heuristics and techniques you've found useful and continuously reapplying and iterating them, and simply delving deep into many hard problems (be they directly coding related or not).

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Agreed. Problem solving is a skill separate from IQ and unlike IQ it can be developed over time. If you want to level up your problem solving skill, carry around a small notebook and pay attention to the problems you see in other people, or in the office, in public, or in yourself. Write down the problem and its cause, continually drilling down into root causes. Then make a graph of problems and root causes, with directed edges showing causation.

Within one or two years of doing this you will recognize patterns others do not see. I have improved my problem solving skill by at least 7-8% by doing this. The key is iteration.

My IQ has been stable like yours, around the 96th percentile, and despite being a Tier 1 top-talent engineer, I’ve had to actively improve my problem solving ability over time.

Interesting that you are you self-aware you can tell the difference between a 6% and a 9% increase is something as nebulous as "problem solving ability."

Edit: Oh, the account is nothing but troll comments. Nevermind.

IQ is a prerequisite for being a problem solver, but is not enough. You also need to have the correct mindset for it.

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