Brain surgeons and rocket scientists no brighter than the rest of us | Hacker News Reader

Brain surgeons and rocket scientists no brighter than the rest of us

theguardian.com

29 pointskawera25 comments

They certainly have an above average ability to stay in school. They probably have an above average ability to focus.

Rocket scientists are certainly better than average at math and science.

Brain surgeons (surgeons in general) probably have significantly better fine motor control.

I suppose the study is saying, there’s nothing innately special about rocket scientist s or brain surgeons. So kids out there, you can become whatever you want if you can commit to the education and practice required to master it.

I think we already suspected this though.

"You know what they call people who graduated bottom of their class in medical school? Doctors."

Most people are clustered somewhere near the middle of the normal distribution in terms of the testable attributes supposedly required for highly specialized work. Most jobs that are just jobs (as opposed to Nobel laureates, astronauts, etc) have enough people in their number that they can't only contain truly exceptional outliers.

In other words, the only people who are outright excluded for such specialized jobs are negative outliers, who often have identifiable genetic/developmental problems or injuries. Everyone else at least has a shot, like you say.

Abilities are not normally distributed but power law distributed (a tiny elite of skilled people and a fat tail that represents the unskilled mass). This is one of the shortcomings of IQ (which is coerced into a normal distribution) and its purported ability to 'predict' real-life abilities.

I'm not talking about acquired skill, I'm talking about inherent ability, which is normally distributed due to genetics, evolution, and metabolic limitations. (To argue otherwise leads us on the slippery slope towards eugenics.)

Results: The neurosurgeons showed significantly higher scores than the aerospace engineers in semantic problem solving (difference 0.33, 95% confidence interval 0.13 to 0.52). Aerospace engineers showed significantly higher scores in mental manipulation and attention (−0.29, −0.48 to −0.09). No difference was found between groups in domain scores for memory (−0.18, −0.40 to 0.03), spatial problem solving (−0.19, −0.39 to 0.01), problem solving speed (0.03, −0.20 to 0.25), and memory recall speed (0.12, −0.10 to 0.35). When each group’s scores for the six domains were compared with those in the general population, only two differences were significant: the neurosurgeons’ problem solving speed was quicker (mean z score 0.24, 95% confidence interval 0.07 to 0.41) and their memory recall speed was slower (−0.19, −0.34 to −0.04).

Guardian calls this 'no brighter'.

he, journalists really should step up their statistics game.

The only brain surgeon I’ve met was certainly a different breed of both technical and emotional intelligence. The guy was a complete machine. Came by the room I was visiting at like 8pm after a day of surgeries and teaching. Was going to go home and review the files, then sleep, and then was at the hospital at 5am upset with the surgery team for being behind. He did surgeries, taught, and performed research. I have ZERO idea how someone can be that busy but that focused, literally holding lives in his hands.

I consider myself to be an intelligent person, but I do not possess the complete emotionally stability and dedication required to be a brain surgeon, or any surgeon for that matter. A rocket scientist is different, but being a surgeon does require a certain type of personality and emotional makeup.

This is absolutely true. Until I helped some family members with multiple surgeries, I didn’t realize surgeons often performed multiple surgeries back-to-back every day (except a couple office days taken to actually talk to patients rather than cut on them). Each one of those surgeries is likely a life-altering event for those patients, but for the surgeon, it’s not only just another day but just another hour’s work. It’s physically demanding work and emotionally demanding. Finally, you get calls from patients day and night forwarded to you on a constant basis.

The medical field is incredibly demanding in ways that I will simply not experience as an engineer.

> It may therefore be best to ditch rocket science and brain surgery idioms for phases like “it’s a walk in the park”, added the researchers.

Researchers in the department of censorship and political correctness?

It comes down to doing the work to get the degree you want. You can be the smartest but if you don't do the work and follow thru then you'll get no where. Here's Edison's quote that says it all. "Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration"

What Edison knew about being a genius? He was a money guy. The actual genius there was Tesla.

I was surprised to hear that it is not even being taught in the West. Edison is still being taught as the guy who invented this and that, when in fact it was Nikola Tesla. I suppose it is more likely in the USA.

"If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once... until he found the object of his research. I was sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculations would have saved him 90 percent of his labor."

-Nikola Tesla

This is just an article to make average intelligence people feel okay about themselves, instead of embracing and accepting the crushing underlying reality that intelligence is real, that some people have more of it and some have less of it, that's it a genetic lottery, that it's distribution isn't fair, and that there isn't really anything you can do to improve it in any meaningful way (you will never have a 120 IQ if you have a 100 IQ).

Yeah... sucks. That's life. The Universe isn't fair and Nature doesn't play favorites.

Since we're embracing nihilism it seems appropriate to add that IQ scores are normalized by age, peak at 24 and then decline steadily after that.

A thought on that. I have a theory there isn't so much a decline as a "widening" or "offloading" of thought/intelligence.

Completely anecdotal, mind, but I've found people older than me spend more time repeating and talking betwixt each other, while often asking me for answers to hard questions. I've even caught myself doing it with some of my juniors. Eventually, what I answered tends to circle back in the form of zeitgeist several months to years later.

It's eerie. I don't know if that's just how it's always been, or not, but I can almost see the fractal self-similarity of an organism whose cognitive function derives from massively parallel firing of action potentials in neuronal networks manifesting in a macroscopic, yet subconscious way through how group activity tends to organize itself at a societal level.

Or maybe I'm just nuts.

Raw intelligence exists but is not that important. Average intelligence is sufficient for most purposes.

What sets people apart the most is not raw intelligence but temperament: do they work hard or slack off? Are they willing to question orthodoxy or content to blindly follow it? Do they have a right-sized ego: big enough to give them self-confidence, but not so big that they are blind to their flaws? By and large these are the things that separate great people from the rest of us. Plenty of 'intelligent' people lead inconsequential lives.

IQ isn't a linear scale, so 120 IQ isn't actually all that high (90th percentile vs 50) You can get half way there with proper diet, sleep and a few years of education.

That said, I think it would be a terrible experience to have IQ in the outlier ranges.

Imagine living in a world where everyone's IQ dropped by like 30 points. Imagine if the dominant forms of entertainment were screeching children yelling obscenities. Imagine if all levels of government were controlled by these people, because they were more relatable and thus more electable. Imagine if everyone shared certain idiotic beliefs, and made those beliefs manifest through the weight of sheer numbers.

Anyways, I think 90th percentile is a good sweet spot.

>Imagine living in a world where everyone's IQ dropped by like 30 points. Imagine if the dominant forms of entertainment were screeching children yelling obscenities. Imagine if all levels of government were controlled by these people, because they were more relatable and thus more electable. Imagine if everyone shared certain idiotic beliefs, and made those beliefs manifest through the weight of sheer numbers.

... this is basically how it is already.

> You can get half way there with proper diet, sleep and a few years of education.

Who told you this... and why do you believe it?

The literature is pretty clear... you can swing a few points with intense optimization, and that's it - at best.

In another episode of things people say themselves to feel safe

Perhaps not but I’m in awe of anyone that can take a scalpel to another’s brain and keep a steady hand

I disagree. Studies have found that college graduates have higher IQs on average, "brain surgeons" and "rocket scientists" have graduate degrees. When I look up "average IQ doctor" I see numbers of 120+. The average IQ is 100 by definition.

How would they explain that you can basically map choice of major to MCAT/LSAT scores with Math/Physics/Philosophy at the top? I question if there some agenda here.

Math and physics are tested on the MCAT. There is also a reasoning section which a philosophy education would probably help you do well on.

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