I feel pg’s point is similar to musicians. As an example, Glenn Gould was a classical pianist and renowned Bach interpreter. He had awesome technical ability at the piano, and a fantastic memory. But lots of incredible pianists have these abilities. Go to any university or observe any competition and you’ll plainly see awesome talent. These qualities are analogous to “being smart”.
However, what set Gould apart from his colleagues was his innovative and iconoclastic interpretations of well-known works with “standard” prescriptions. He had fundamentally different, but wholly consistent, ideas about musical interpretation, recording technology, presentation of music to audiences, and so on. He’s remembered as a pianist not because his fingers were quick and sensitive, but instead because he pushed boundaries in completely original ways.
Leonard Bernstein—a noted conductor and pianist—quips about this when he conducted the Brahms Concerto in D minor, with Gould at the piano [1]. I recommend listening but I’ll copy his words (from [2]) for posterity.
> Don't be frightened. Mr. Gould is here. He will appear in a moment. I'm not, um, as you know, in the habit of speaking on any concert except the Thursday night previews, but a curious situation has arisen, which merits, I think, a word or two. You are about to hear a rather, shall we say, unorthodox performance of the Brahms D Minor Concerto, a performance distinctly different from any I've ever heard, or even dreamt of for that matter, in its remarkably broad tempi and its frequent departures from Brahms' dynamic indications. I cannot say I am in total agreement with Mr. Gould's conception and this raises the interesting question: "What am I doing conducting it?" I'm conducting it because Mr. Gould is so valid and serious an artist that I must take seriously anything he conceives in good faith and his conception is interesting enough so that I feel you should hear it, too.
> But the age old question still remains: "In a concerto, who is the boss; the soloist or the conductor?" The answer is, of course, sometimes one, sometimes the other, depending on the people involved. But almost always, the two manage to get together by persuasion or charm or even threats to achieve a unified performance. I have only once before in my life had to submit to a soloist's wholly new and incompatible concept and that was the last time I accompanied Mr. Gould. (The audience roared with laughter at this.) But, but this time the discrepancies between our views are so great that I feel I must make this small disclaimer. Then why, to repeat the question, am I conducting it? Why do I not make a minor scandal — get a substitute soloist, or let an assistant conduct? Because I am fascinated, glad to have the chance for a new look at this much-played work; Because, what's more, there are moments in Mr. Gould's performance that emerge with astonishing freshness and conviction. Thirdly, because we can all learn something from this extraordinary artist, who is a thinking performer, and finally because there is in music what Dimitri Mitropoulos used to call "the sportive element", that factor of curiosity, adventure, experiment, and I can assure you that it has been an adventure this week collaborating with Mr. Gould on this Brahms concerto and it's in this spirit of adventure that we now present it to you.
Because some took this as an attack on Gould, Bernstein followed up with the remark:
> Any discovery of Glenn's was welcomed by me because I worshiped the way he played: I admired his intellectual approach, his "guts" approach, his complete dedication to whatever he was doing.
Anyway, it’s an interesting parallel in the arts world. Jacob Collier is a musician of today that has similar qualities of “being smart with good ideas”.
Jacob Collier is an interesting example because the general response I've seen to his music from music fans is that it is too "smart". It's impressive and novel to music academics (and apparently the Grammys) but hardly interesting to fans of the genres he favors (soul, pop, R&B). Common complaints being lack of emotion, lack of taste, poor songwriting, over production. But any negative review will also acknowledge that he's immensely talented and has massive potential.
That was my immediate impression of his music. It feels strangely cold and extremely "produced", especially when he has made stabs at jazz, a genre that is in many cases "music for musicians". For a genre that prizes free flowing interpretation and individual creativity alongside instrumental virtuosity, his jazz music comes out utterly sterile compared to other modern jazz musicians. The same goes for his soul music. Everything he does feels like an exercise in a genre rather than playing in it.
Compare his stuff to the work of Kamasi Washington, Mary Halvorson's groups, or Shabaka Hutchings, or Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, and you hear an enormous difference in the sheer craft of songwriting, emotional dynamics, and storytelling through their instruments.
He's clearly a virtuoso at a kind of playing the instrument, and he's extremely good at explaining music theory and concepts, which is a rather archaic and unique language all its own, but I don't think he's quite there yet for songwriting.
I don't disagree with you, but I'd like to make one small addendum that may go to explain why people might consider his music to feel overproduced. I believe that reason is his use of non-equal-temperament tuning.
For those unaccustomed to hearing pure intervals it can sound like a high-gloss "sheen" that gives an unreal quality to the music. In a way it becomes "too perfect" and unnatural to those who are used to hearing the equal temperament that most western music is recorded in. I hear it a lot in some acapella vocal groups and I often find the sound off-putting and it somehow feels a little corny to me.
I think that his use of Logic in particular is very relevant in this discussion, because not only it has excellent support for different temperaments, it also has Hermut tuning, which dynamically alters temperament of all the instruments played based on actual chords to reach perfect intervals regardless of the key you're in.
Still, his virtuosity allows him to do things that very few people are capable of conceiving, attempting, and doing. We're lucky to have him in the mix.
> That was my immediate impression of his music. It feels strangely cold and extremely "produced",
Billy Corgan of The Smashing Pumpkins is an example of someone who has both the talent and the taste for making great music in my opinion. There's a really old video of him shredding like a madman [1] completely off the dome which shows he has very good command of his guitar. He's not in the same sphere as Jacob Collier mind you but here me out. If you compare that video with the music he wrote in the pumpkins, it is very restrained. He knew when to exercise the full range of his skills and when to dial it back. Having learned a lot of pumpkins songs on guitar, it is clear to me that he favoured what sounded better and was more impactful over what appeared skillful.
There's another video of him in 2012 [2] where he talks about influential music coming from the internet and people in their desktop studios, not from guys with guitars trying to make it big. Beyond his talent he had a very keen eye for how music was evolving. Having talent is one thing, being able to contextualise your work, and others work accurately in the arena of the world is a quality that very few people possess and in my opinion is required for producing truly influential and impactful work.
> he talks about influential music coming from the internet and people in their desktop studios, not from guys with guitars trying to make it big
That's a great clip. You might enjoy some of what people have been doing with their desktop studios and guitars in the last few years. Two that immediately come to mind are Tim Henson [1] (already pretty well-known in the guitar world as part of Polyphia) and Manuel Gardner-Fernandes [2].
I cannot leave a comment of bedroom producers go without a mention of judd madden.
Probably quite out there (doom/drone/stoner) for most people but his music has always struck me as incredibly from the heart and not some noodling to impress others.
Some of the words in music theory are just straight latin, or directly descendant from latin and old. A lot of people struggle with music theory until you "translate" it to using modern language (though you do lose some specificity in some cases). Like "ritardando", which is just "slow down", or accelerando, which is, you guessed it, "speed up".
Italian, not Latin. Italian is the language of music. Italy used to be the capital of European music. That's where it comes from. I also wouldn't classify it as mere "theory". It's basic notation that appears in notes. Calling it "theory" is like calling control flow constructs in Pascal (the language) "theory".
PG dismisses creativity, but IMO that's a mistake in an otherwise interesting essay. Creativity is the difference between someone who is merely smart and someone who originates ideas.
Collier is merely smart. He's very, very smart indeed. But in the domain of music, expressive originality is far more important.
And it can be created by people who aren't technically music-smart at all. It's a different skill to the kind of grammatical/technical smartness that someone like Collier has.
That's not a distraction at all. It's exactly the point - creativity is orthogonal to smartness, and it's poorly understood and even more poorly supported.
One of the interesting thing that happened in English pop (until it stopped being possible a decade or two ago) was that successful pop artists were more likely to have been through art school than music school.
The exemplar is Eno - who studied with Roy Ascott, who is probably one of the most unknown influential pioneers of computer art.
Eno has taste and a willingness to experiment across multiple domains. The rest almost falls into place.
IMO the combination of openness to experimentation and instinctual feel for rightness/wrongness to guide that experimentation is the foundation of useful creativity.
Art school - more than anywhere else - gives people permission to experiment. Taste can be partially taught, but you need an instinctive feel for it, and that's probably innate.
Someone like Collier doesn't score highly on either experimentation or taste. He scores very highly on musical competence and technical skill. But both are a kind of conformity - which is the opposite of real originality.
I assume where PG is going with this is the suggestion that some people can originate incredibly successful business ideas, and most people can't.
Which might be nice if it were true. But in a startup sense the opposite is more likely. You need a baseline of conformity to be in business at all. Truly creative types don't find the business world open enough to be interesting.
Success in business relies on having ideas that are original enough to be different, but not so original they're incomprehensibly challenging and difficult.
Market fit mostly happens near the middle of the bell curve - for whatever metric you're measuring - and that's not where the most creative people like to live.
Ok, I hadn't really explored Collier's music until I read so many people panning his work on this thread.
One youtube rabbit hole later, and I have to strongly disagree. These threads are littered with Phrases like 'Doesn't score highly on either experimentation or taste', 'lack of emotion'. 'Seems overly clever but not nice sounding'.
Sorry, I'm not sure whether this is people hating on someone outside of your camp or what, but I think they're missing the point.
The way Collier brings ideas from Jazz, Classical, Synth culture, EDM, R&B into a modern a cappella multimedia collage is experimental, creative and I find quite emotional.
Granted it's not the emotion in traditional, analogue music forms coming from the voicing of the instrument - it's from the arrangement, the sampling, even the ebb and flow of precision.
And where most of the modern Glee-style a cappella are sanitized, overly produced and pretty pap (I'm not a fan of the genre, but my kids are), he's really pushing the boundaries of that genre. In ways that, from the handful of examples I've listened to, sound quite successful.
In particular I really enjoyed his arrangements of Stevie Wonder.
The music gate-keepers have always levelled these same criticisms electronic compositions, especially if the the composers are young and popular.
I don't like criticizing anyone or trying to talk about "objective" qualities of art, but I don't agree with your portrayal.
I love electronic composers; I almost exclusively listen to avant-garde/experimental electronic compositions, personally. Most of the artists are quite young. I agree Collier is definitely very experimental.
I do not think he's very artistic or emotional and agree with the above comments that he's in the "intelligent/skilled but not creative" camp. I think he has a lot of potential, but his work just doesn't seem very musical to me, and I have absolutely no biases against experimental, "weird", electronic, or new stuff.
Don't get me wrong, I'd much rather listen to James Blake or Moreno Veloso than Collier.
I'm not saying you have to like his music. I am saying that anyone maintaining that his compositions are not artistic, creative or musical... well, perhaps someone's definitions of these words are being biased by their preferences.
I mean, to take one example, he's rearranged a classic R&B song in 9-part jazz harmonies rarely heard in the pop genre. He layers in samples from household sounds. He put all this together in an entertaining media format without losing the sensibilities of his genre nor letting it collapse into noise.
You could argue that this is not entirely novel, and this kind of composition has been happening in less popular genres for decades. I can see arguments against his taste. I do agree with an earlier comment that this might be too sophisticated for his pop audience.
But not creative? Not musical? Not artistic? You don't have to like his music to recognise that these words absolutely apply.
When I was a teen, I hated certain genres of music - for example 'new country' and the popular dance music styles of the late 80s. My disdain for whole categories of music was part of my identity.
This made it near impossible for teen me to recognise (or more to the truth, admit) that any of the artists labelled as part of those genres had any talent at all.
This lead to all sorts of silliness, like asserting that MJ had no talent, or insisting that Neil Young doesn't play country. Or just plain missing out on some of the brilliant moments of Willie Nelson's career.
You're right that art is subjective, and I'm quibbling over words that have no quantitative meaning. But seriously, credit where credit is due.
This is mostly a personal stance validated by the talking of some other artists and musicians, and only a weak rebuttal/addendum to your point: But I've long understood creativity as literally just creating. A lot. And publishing only what you deem worthy.
I'm friends with a clique of techno producers and they grind their music 24/7, they have an endless supply of ideas that they've produced,they're also heavily immersed in the music etc. They will publish some tracks twice a year, to the outside it obviously seems like they've had a moment of genius, but it's probably just 5% of their actual production. Another example is the documentary on marina abramovich, where she has a consultant telling her what art to actually publish. The artist Jonathan Meese has outlined a similar stance on a Tracks documentary where he just rambles for 5min to the effect of "create create create".
Obviously doing something a lot develops skill, but choosing what to publish is probably more a question of taste.
Jazz soloing is probably a good counterexample, but a lot of jazz solos aren't that remarkable and these people are at the top of their game so their worst is likely most peoples best?
>> IMO the combination of openness to experimentation and instinctual feel for rightness/wrongness to guide that experimentation is the foundation of useful creativity.
This statement strongly resonated with me, thank you for this.
Yeah, I would compare Jacob Collier to Snarky Puppey or Tigran Hamasayan.
All of them are virtuosic and are branching away from classical ideas of jazz, and Collier might even be the smartest of the group, but he can't write a song to save a life.
Snarky Puppey and Tigram have on the other hand, found a fresh niche for themselves that is similarly creative, but has the humility of adding the necessary sugar and milk to make their supremely creative and bitter music drink palatable to a listening audience.
The lady who cleans Willie Nelson's tour bus finds scraps of paper with lyrics which have more potential than most of what is actually published in Nashville by other artists over the same period of time.
And this is what he's throwing away.
It can be amazing what one individual can do sometimes.
>the trouble with intelligence, they say, is that it's mostly inborn. The evidence for this seems fairly convincing, especially considering that most of us don't want it to be true, and the evidence thus has to face a pretty stiff headwind.
I think this is very well put.
Could be even more trouble with bright illumination if it turns out to be inborn to different degrees too.
Then if you need both in excess the odds get pretty slim for a dual strike between such outliers.
>He’s remembered as a pianist not because his fingers were quick and sensitive, but instead because he pushed boundaries in completely original ways.
Or because a lot of this (even classical music) is pop culture, so he was quirky enough to establish a brand name, whereas others equally competent or even better didn't come with an assosicated story to sell them...
I think the quirkiness perhaps helped propel him to greater fame, and made his name "stick" more easily, but it's certainly not the reason he is famous or remembered. There are countless quirky no-names. He was of note more so because of his technical capacity and strong convictions for his unorthodox approach, which he voluminously described in writing, interviews, etc.
Do you have any personal favorite interviews? I frequently find that folks discussing their craft at a high level often illuminates opportunities for cross-disciplinary knowledge transfer.
Yes! I love his discussion about Bach and appropriate use of instruments here [1]. He also gets into why he chooses some tempos, what’s arbitrary and what’s not, where to seek consistency in interpretative choices, and so on. I adore this interview!
I also love his slightly hyperbolic hot take on why Mozart isn’t that good [2]. It’s hilarious, to me at least, hearing him roast Mozart then proceed to play his music beautifully.
You'll hear Herb Alpert's "Rise" live on today sampled (not trumpet, guitar) in Notorious B.I.G.'s "Hypnotize," with enduring appeal. I went to dig up the connection and it's a lot more interesting than I first suspected. "Rise" was actually composed by Herb's nephew, and the article goes into why the Alperts rejected many sampling requests before accepting Notorious.
which is the same song as the one Judy Garland made famous, but Alpert's version is heavenly.
Before the intertoobs and CDs, I searched everywhere for that album (Herb Alpert's Ninth) for years, and finally found a brand new mint one in the cutout bin with the slot sliced in it. For $1. I couldn't believe my prize!
P.S. The yootoob version has poor sound quality. To hear how good Herb is with the trumpet, ya gotta get the CD.
> Before the intertoobs and CDs, I searched everywhere for that album (Herb Alpert's Ninth) for years, and finally found a brand new mint one in the cutout bin with the slot sliced in it. For $1. I couldn't believe my prize!
This cut-out practice is new to me, but a related one in the publishing/bookselling industry rang true. I learn a lot just by reading and reflecting on your comments. Thanks for posting this personal story.
I think we've lost a lot with the transition to digital, these kinds of bargain bins included, which is part of the reason I too love all kinds of secondhand stores and swap meets, etc.
I regularly troll pawn shops and thrift stores, you never know what you'll find there. For example, they usually have a bin full of vinyl. The staff pulls out any that are valuable, but what is valuable on the market has no relation to what I consider valuable. Jackie Gleason, for example, made many records that aren't available on CD. His stuff is great if you enjoy easy listening, old style.
A couple months back, the pawn shop had acquired what looked like an old DJ's 12 inch single collection from the 70s and 80s. $.50 per disk. I grabbed them all.
I’ve found that archive.org also has a large number of out of print vinyl.
What the market finds valuable is partially a signaling problem, as it is only loosely connected to any individual’s taste, and more connected to quick sales for record companies. The market as a whole can’t discover prices for products that individuals aren’t aware of and seeking out in the small window of first-sale. It’s not too different from the traditional VC investment strategy, now that I consider it.
I should also note that Bernstein was widely known to be a complete asshole.
I think this is partial confirmation of pg's observation that independence of thought is important for creativity: if you are both arrogant and independent, you have all the ingredients to be an asshole.
If arrogance is orthogonal to creativity, as I suspect, but independence of thought is not, then we would see a disproportionate number of assholes among those with new ideas.
This reminded me of Sergiu Celibidache, a revered and criticized conductor who had a different opinion about tempo on major classical works.
He viewed his performances more as "experiences" and certainly pushed the boundaries of the conventional style of playing classical music.
I really like his renditions of Bruckner, and the ending for Symphony N4 probably best describes why [1]. He does not rush, letting the music sync in, undoubtedly different from the "right" version.
Not being afraid of criticism is an essential quality of people who discover new things. Smart people often get dragged into the "correct", "proper" way of thinking, doing science, playing music, drawing, or doing other creative work. This is the best way to learn, but unfortunately, you need to go on an unbeaten path that is often criticized and even ostracized to discover new things. The life of Van Gogh and many others is quite an example of that.
> "What am I doing conducting it?" I'm conducting it because Mr. Gould is so valid and serious an artist that I must take seriously anything he conceives in good faith and his conception is interesting enough so that I feel you should hear it, too.
That is a VERY respectful point of view. I admire that so much.
Nice posting, thanks for that. I still cant really understand the hype around Gould and its goldberg interpretations. Yes, they are good. But no, they are far from the best I know. If you ever get the time and a recording, listen to Ragna Schirmer playing Goldberg. Her interpretation blows Gould's out of the water, IMO :-)
Gould is a sort of package deal. I like his Goldbergs but to see his “authentic self” I’d look at something a little kookier of his like his Alla Turca [1]. It will not be what you expect.
Another way to frame this topic: intelligence doesn't always lead to impact, and impact is what matters.
Example: I met a ton of trivia "nerds" through a friend a few years ago. They had all met at an Ivy League college, they were clearly "smart" in that they knew a lot of information and could follow a logical argument but somehow none of them were able to use their smarts for anything practical. They had jobs you didn't need to be that smart for, and their personal lives were sort of messy. I didn't really know what to make it them at the time, now I think they had the "smarts" but they didn't have the "drive" so their brains sort of did them no good.
Another example: Plenty of people are constantly frustrated that they are misunderstood. "I am so smart but I can't get anything done around here because everyone's an idiot." Some people go through their whole life believing this. Luckily I had a job that disabused me of this and taught me to communicate my ideas clearly and persuasively to others. But without that, without the ability to persuade people of your ideas, you might as well not have them.
> Another way to frame this topic: intelligence doesn't always lead to impact, and impact is what matters.
Impact is a great way of putting it. There are plenty of really smart and creative people who will never produce anything impactful in their life. Impact in my opinion is really all about time-sensitivity and sprinkling of genius. The impact may not even resonate fully with the public in the person's lifetime either. Nikola Tesla being a prime example of this. A lot of very incredible people tend to be VERY open to new ideas. John Dee comes to mind in particular. When he could find no more wisdom in science, he looked to the occult. Nikola Tesla I believe also was quite interested in the occult as well. While I wouldn't consider the occult "out there" by any stretch nowadays, it's a good example unorthodox ideas can come from.
> Plenty of people are constantly frustrated that they are misunderstood. "I am so smart but I can't get anything done around here because everyone's an idiot."
I've found that kind of thinking tends to be the reason why some of those people are misunderstood. When your frame for interacting with people is setup like that, it's not unreasonable to assume one would put up conversational barriers to confirm their own bias of "everyone's an idiot."
They understand that, they just don't want to pick up the Sisyphean task of trying to convince idiots. So instead they give up. Giving up doesn't mean that people stop complaining though, they know how to solve the problem but they don't want to do the work, it is called venting and most humans do it.
In that case I would question the smarts of someone who spends too much time focused on things they do not intend to change.
There comes a point where "raw" intelligence (if a real thing) must be tempered with the wisdom necessary to marry rubber and road, as it were. If you don't apply your staggeringly large intellect (/s?) to the problem of interfacing with other people, yet you persist putting yourself in situations where you must deal with that problem, what benefit has that intellect conferred?
You know, you sound like you are one of those people you describe yourself? Is that how you came to this realization?
Ask yourself, what is the goal with your current comment? And how does being snide achieve that goal? If the goal is to make fun of people and feel good about yourself, then you are doing a good job! And then you should understand how those people you describe feel, because they feel exactly as you feel now, wasting time making fun of things you have no intention or care to change or spread.
But if you want people to listen then you really need to get better at tempering what you say.
>They understand that, they just don't want to pick up the Sisyphean task of trying to convince idiots
I think that's a pretty bad attitude and it doesn't get anyone anywhere.
If I write Java code into my Python interpreter, I am not gonna say "dumb fucking Python can't understand what I mean" - I am gonna recognize that I am speaking the wrong language for the job.
Same if I am speaking to someone who "isn't as brilliant as I am" (or likely, has another set of priorities, context, focus, etc.) - I need to start with that reality, and then think about - how do I make this person care, how do I share with them what they need to understand, etc. There's a definite skill to this that is acquired with conscious practice and experience.
If you start off assuming that others aren't smart because they didn't connect to what you are so sure you explained so clearly, rather than questioning what is it about your explanation that didn't click with them, you're fucked.
There's also different types of "smarts". I think ability to memorise or generally know a lot is very different from noticing patterns or understanding of how things work and relate to each other.
Especially nowadays, there's Google, you don't need to memorise a lot as you can just check everything.
I think even Einstein said that "don't memorise what you can quickly check up" or had a similar sentiment.
Very often trivia kings and queens don't know how to apply that knowledge practically and a lot of knowledge has benefits just to appear intelligent to other people.
Also not to mention street smarts, emotional intelligence, leadership int and many other aspects.
What made Einstein special to me is his ability to imagine how things work together and then he and or his mind kept endlessly obsessing over it to reach further and further conclusions. Essentially trying to create a model of the world and or trying to simulate in mind whatever is happening and which can lead to greater insights of what is causing what.
I think true understanding is being able to imagine and predict how something works as opposed to memorising a lot of information about the thing.
> communicate my ideas clearly and persuasively to others
How do you get the ability to do this? I've been attending a book club with a small number of friends and even in these casual settings I wish I could communicate my ideas better.
I have found that asking others about their concerns helps me understand my own, and also helps build a rapport with the other, which itself helps your own confidence in your communication skills, and helps inculcate domain knowledge. The more you know where others stand on an issue, and why, helps you to draw parallels and distinctions with your own beliefs and positions on an issue. The rapport and conversational dynamics you explore help you tailor your message so that your words and feelings are heard and felt, even if not shared.
It's okay to say you have a point you don't know how to express. Talking around a topic is called beating around the bush colloquially, and in that common usage it's seen as wasting the listener's time if unwanted or unwarranted, but it serves an important function in itself. It's how you flush the ideas/birds out without upsetting/endangering yourself or others.
Believe in yourself, and in your ideas. You both are valid. Your earnestness in your desire to express yourself better is the social proof!
> It's okay to say you have a point you don't know how to express. Talking around a topic is called beating around the bush colloquially, and in that common usage it's seen as wasting the listener's time if unwanted or unwarranted, but it serves an important function in itself
Agreed. When I do that, I call it out explicitly. I often say something like this in a meeting: "I haven't thought about how to articulate this too much, but I agree it's worth discussing. Mind if I 'talk at you' for a min and see where it gets us?"
I wouldn't ever call it "beating around the bush" because it creates the impression you're wasting time and that's not what you should want, but saying upfront "hey I am gonna consciously ramble a bit and we'll circle up on the synthesis" often buys you some runway to do that.
> I wouldn't ever call it "beating around the bush" because it creates the impression you're wasting time and that's not what you should want, but saying upfront "hey I am gonna consciously ramble a bit and we'll circle up on the synthesis" often buys you some runway to do that.
The link I posted about the etymology of the phrase is interesting for this very reason, as it’s a bit of a misnomer. Beating around the bush is safer than beating the bush itself, as you have to get that much closer to the unknown that may be lurking inside said bushes.
listen, listen, listen. The biggest step I took towards being able to interface my ideas with others was to first listen to their ideas, problems, needs, whatever it is they wanted to talk about. You have to make what's important to them important to you before you can do it the other way around - and it's for a bunch of reasons. in attempting to empathize with them you'll have ideas about what they could be doing better to communicate to you (and not make the same mistakes when you're the one talking). You'll build trust in yourself by genuinely caring about their business, and you'll learn what's important to them, which is really the thing you're eventually going to try to plug your ideas into.
The magic sauce that makes this work, though, is being genuine. Do the emotional work to really give a damn about the other people around you; which is a lot harder than I think people give credit for, but monumentally more beneficial.
> How do you get the ability to do this? I've been attending a book club with a small number of friends and even in these casual settings I wish I could communicate my ideas better.
It's hard. And it depends on the people. With the most logical people, it's easiest for me, I just slow myself down and break down my argument into small pieces. Like in the book club, you may be tempted to say "I think the author's secret message is X" and people go "huh?" But if I go - "there's a line that says A.. do y'all remember this line?" - they say "yes" - "well, this line jumped out at me as weird, because of B. Do y'all agree that it's an unusual way to say it?" - "yup" - "so I was thinking, why is this weird to me, and I realized the only way B would be true is if C were true. Does that make sense to you guys" - "yup" - "ok, so if the author is saying C is true, I wonder if he is saying it to teach us X. Does that seem crazy?" "nope that makes sense"
Basically, you walk people from A to B to C and then the leap to X is clean and people can follow the whole chain. If you just say "it's X" they go "huh?"
The reason this is hard is because you yourself may not know why you decided X, and others may not reach that conclusion for a ton of different reasons. So forcing yourself to articulate your own logic to yourself is step 1, walking others through it is step 2.
A related thing is - in my experience, you can NEVER over-communicate. Like, it's tempting for me to skip A,B,C because I read them, I assume others read them and must have interpreted the same thing, so it feels condescending to start there, but in reality it's never a problem - people either say "yup, it's great to know we're seeing the same thing" or very often "actually, we missed that."
I hope this helps. That's just one type of scenario. All this gets harder when emotions or egos are involved, so dealing with that is hard.
Actually one more tip - the art of TLDR - people often make their point in a rambling way, surfacing a bunch of stuff that is confusing. More is not always better, but to be able to synthesize it all into a digestible narrative is really important if you want people to get it.
(TL;DR: learn to notice aesthetic; learn to acquire perspective; get out of your head.)
What's worked for me:
0. General advice
- No negative self-talk!
Find more constructive ways to communicate your ideas _even to yourself_. "I wish I could communicate my ideas better" -> "Here's an idea I felt I did not communicate well, this time, in this context. Why do I feel this way? How could I have presented myself better? (Where can I gain competence?)"
- Write and rubber ducky!
Writing and rubber ducking are methods for practicing the linguistic aspects of communication. While verbalizing to the duck, play with the timbre, cadence, tone, etc., of your voice. Record yourself and listen to it. Have problems finding material to verbalize? Pick a poem. Memorize it. Recite it. This is, in my opinion, the calisthenics of social practice.
- The person with the most developed opinion of you- is you!
"He who despises himself will still respect his skills as a despiser." ~ Nietzsche, "Beyond Good And Evil" (paraphrased, can't be arsed to cite it just now)
_You_ might notice every failure of your communique, but then again: you have an ideal for your communique. A goal, a reason, a vision of how it ought to manifest. To everyone else, however, it's an utterance like any other. The ultimate measure of your effectiveness isn't how closely you manifest your idea, but how much of an impact (and of what kind) it has on the audience.
=== 1. Practice, practice, practice. ===
It's a skill, like any other; and like any other, you succeed to the level and quality of your training. If you want to "get better at talking to people," then go talk to people; if you want to "get better at talking to people, in a book club, with a small number of friends" then do that!
How to do the first (i.e., practice speaking to people)? Communication is both observational and "applicative," in that you apply yourself in the actual doing. This suggests a good path in itself: practice your observations and also practice the doing.
How to observe strangers? (in a socially-conscious way?) The easiest way is to be conscientious of your interactions. I got started by making mental notes, pushing myself to take note of the most simple and basic details. "Oh, her nails are purple;" "It's midday and he's wearing shorts;" "He has a GameStop tag on his keyring." The simpler you can break down a situation, the more data you have for a fuller analysis.
Of course, simply having data does not an analysis make. Even with a habit of conscientiousness, I found myself struggling to derive actionable insights. Why? Likely because I was leaning too heavily on poor tools to make my analyses. This was during a phase in my life where I was very concerned with reducing as much as I could to logical and rational principles, including my interactions with others. "Assuming that people's statements reflect their internal state, that their internal state is logically consistent, and further assuming that some particular data X is included in their analysis, I can reasonably conclude that (by their statement) they must internally position themselves thusly with regards to X." This is a good general example of my internal dialogue during this period; it was helpful in some ways, fatal in many others. I now believe that there is no decision funnel you can induce, explicitly or otherwise, which makes this line of thinking safe.
I've since abandoned this project of rationalizing, because a key assumption I made was that every healthy, moral, person must have a logically consistent internal state. Indeed, I considered logical consistency to be a prerequisite for any kind of morality. I now believe this foolish; whereas I previously considered Man to be the rational animal, I'm now of the opinion that Man is much closer to the aesthetic animal.
This was a key insight for me. It has directly led to the most socially productive period of my life (which I'm thankfully still enjoying).
What does 'the aesthetic animal' entail? That people are, at base, motivated by their sensibilities. I take the most basic statement of logic to be equation: "this is that;" more specifically- "this is this." I believe the most basic statement of aesthetic is: "this pleases some sensibility I have."
People reveal their sensibilities- their aesthetic- with their genuine smiles, their sincere fashions, their honest jokes. Take note of these; my analytical habit these days is to capture as much of someone's aesthetic as I can. Again, it starts with conscious conscientiousness and observation.
=== 2. Perspective, perspective, perspective ===
You are distinct from every other person. I like to keep myself in perspective with counting the number of "distinction points" by which I differ from another. My love for the Beatles is one such point; that I know Sgt. Peppers' Lonely Hearts Club Band by heart, but none of their other albums, is another. That I program, when and how I started, what I'm doing now (with which languages)- all of these, too, and even the breakfast I had.
Don't try to store all this state at all times; just develop a habit and method of counting, and apply it where appropriate. Of course, the method, the habit, the application, understanding in which contexts it's appropriate: all of these are skills, too!
This is how I attempt to understand the differences between my perspective and others. From there, I spend a lot of my downtime acquiring alternate perspectives. I find Nietzsche ("Beyond Good And Evil") helpful to this end. (NOTE: I explicitly disavow and condemn Nietzsche's misogyny.) "Tuesdays With Morrie" is indispensable, in my opinion; specifically, Morrie's advice to embrace emotions. All of them.
Allow yourself to be embroiled in your feelings, until it finds its natural conclusion. Then practice conjuring your emotions, and be conscientious with your emotions. Observe their onsets and evolutions- _not_ to rationalize them, but to explore your own sensibilities and aesthetic.
Once you've made a habit of these observations and conjurations, seek out stimuli that alter your perspective, and then practice your perspective. Imagine how your relation to that stimuli might change if you were elsewise distinct. Conjure the emotions that you feel inherent to that you-but-else, and explore them as your own.
I treat it like a game; to these ends, the methods of acting are instructive.
This helps me explore a wider, but still woefully limited, aesthetic space. That, in turn, helps my conscientiousness of aesthetic (of both mine and others). Further, with my method of distinction, it gives me a much richer insight into how I perceive the aesthetics of others.
=== 3. Accept your mistakes, acknowledge your success ===
The possibility of failure is a precondition of any endeavor. Unfortunately, social failures can be particularly impactful to certain dispositions. Social failure can mean embarrassment, self-doubt, stigmatization, and (perhaps worst of all) emotional fallout in others.
An anecdote: I decided, for a period, to exercise my sense of humor. I visited a male cousin of mine, shortly after he had taken a new wife. His lot in life had been unhappy til then, filled with struggles and poverty. My visit was on the heels of his release from a half-year prison sentence. Imagine my happy surprise when I approached his address, to find a rather generous estate! Great land, a beautiful home, healthy children... I said to them- he and his wife- "What great success! But, I have to ask: who died and left you this land?"
She meekly replied, "My ex-husband."
It took me a while to feel comfortable making jokes. I was absolutely mortified for months thereafter. The mortification is appropriate! But it's not reasonable, nor healthy, to avoid an entire category of expression over a mistake- even such a horrid mistake as that. Perhaps _especially_ even for such a mistake. Accept it, take the L, and be more conservative in those expressions for a time thereafter: but don't define yourself by your missteps.
Likewise, acknowledge tho successes you have. Ultimately, only you can define what success looks like, and your successes must be operationalized to the context- but cherish these memories. Meditate upon them. Try to embrace the graces that led to it, on your end and the audiences'; yet, at the same time, refute the desire to embody these graces. Do not define yourself by your successes, either.
Ultimately: get out of your head and learn to love the strangeness of your fellow humans :) we are all a unique vintage, some more delicious than others (and a few that spoiled on the vine) yet all worthy of at least one honest snifter.
=== Recommended Materials ===
Nietzsche (specifically, "Beyond Good and Evil" [again, I categorically disavow his misogyny.])
"Tuesdays With Morrie," Mitch Albom
=== The Extremely Unorthodox ===
I recommend psychedelics.
Talk to your doctor, your therapist, your spiritual mentor, the neighbors' dog- whomever can help ease your mind. If you have any doubts, don't do it! And, of course, responsibly indulge where legal and when you are safe.
I also recommend "escorts," of any gender.
Not for the sex, but because escorts are by-and-large social professionals. Perhaps the _most_ social professional. They are experts of aesthetic, masters of perspective. Pay their fees, reassure them that they need not disrobe, and just go off. Ask all those little questions that you usually dare not vocalize. They've experienced stranger. It helps you exercise failure modes in a significantly safer space. "Adult entertainers" and bartenders are also choice for this.
> Another way to frame this topic: intelligence doesn't always lead to impact, and impact is what matters.
Which leads to the example of my career, and the illustration of the two "tech worlds" that now exist. As a "programming engineer," I've written a lot of software tools for other engineers that have expanded the boundaries of what was possible to achieve in usual timeframes. I've (mostly) worked as a programmer in engineering departments, and once the word of these kinds of projects get out, they often get shut down or taken over by IT proper. This has happened either because MY management was psychopathic, or OTHER management was MORE psychopathic.
As a single full-stack developer, I've proven multiple times that I can launch a company-wide-impacting project at 100x the man-speed of a bog standard, outsourced, waterfall-managed IT project. I suspect embarrassment at this fact is why my projects have had such terrible luck politically. And this is my point: the human side -- the politics -- will always trump talent. If you don't "grease the wheels," you're going to have a bad time.
> Luckily I had a job that disabused me of this and taught me to communicate my ideas clearly and persuasively to others.
I have found it even worse than this. Despite clarity, people often hate feeling like you understand things at a level they will never. Sometimes, it's the clarity itself that puts people on their heels. Case in point: My boss and I just asked a group to add an API to get ONE PIECE of data from another, long-established, already-API-driven web site. After SEVERAL meetings about this, they finally came back with an implementation date TWO YEARS after we started asking. Another group on the other side of the world asked ME to implement an API in MY application, to get entire TABLES of information. I did it in 2 days. I cannot stress hard enough that management and other people hate, hate, HATE seeing this sort of discrepancy in ability. But what am I supposed to do? Delay my delivery by months just to make people feel better? Heck, maybe I should.
We nerds like to think that the tech world should be a meritocracy. On the internet of the 90's, it was. PG continues to live in a world where he can elevate insight above politics with money. Many, here, work in companies with proper technical tracks, which rewards insight handsomely. I don't (and won't move). And if you don't, you have to do yourself a favor and deal with that reality, and learn how to play the political game. It's the political game that will determine your impact, and "gate" your technical ability. It sucks to write that out, but it's a truism of the world.
I know a ton of smart people who get nothing done, not due to being surrounded by idiots but rather due to depression and anxiety(which anecdotally seems to hit harder when the person is smart for some reason).
Smart people are also very lazy. I've always been an underachiever and am just as happy writing emacs lisp to do cool things as I am to reengineering some mess at work. Still get paid the same amount. I do good work but I don't overextend myself. This is how i've avoided burning out after 30 years.
Sometimes the best way to persuade someone regarding an idea is to actually implement the idea without their knowledge and then present it to them for review.
We are talking about software, right? Only cost and liability around this is usually your time. I've only been scolded for writing a program a few times in my career.
"I am so smart but I can't get anything done around here because everyone's an idiot."
It's a thing. It's demoralizing to work with people who often make more than you do and are terrible at the craft and don't even look to improve. That along with obsessing about making me train "backups" in case I leave. I'm on my 4th backup now. They all left after I trained them.
Hamming (of Hamming codes) has a famous Bell Labs talk "You and Your Research", describing how to have a large impact. It covers a lot of the same ground, but in more detail:
How about having lots of `brains?' It sounds good. But great work is something else than mere brains.
The people who do great work with less ability but who are committed to it, get more done that those who have great skill and dabble in it.
The prepared mind sooner or later finds something important and does it. So yes, it is luck. The particular thing you do is luck, but that you do something is not.
One of the characteristics you see, and many people have it including great scientists, is that usually when they were young they had independent thoughts and had the courage to pursue them.
Hamming is great in general. Some years ago, I picked up a copy of "Numerical Methods for Scientists and Engineers" for like $2 at a used book store. I had no idea who Hamming was, but it was cheap so I bought it.
After the first chapter I thought, "this guy is pretty sharp let's see what else he's written." That is when I found "You and Your Research".
One of the relatively younger Bell Labs guys who experienced Hamming (in my memory it was either Ken Thompson or Kernighan) described in a public talk the way Hamming would approach young scientists and engineers in the cafeteria and harangue them if he deemed their current area of research non-world shaking, and therefore unworthy of their attention. It was a hilarious story because Hamming was described after a brief pause as a "curmudgeon" but one got the distinct impression Hamming's younger associates had other, more colorful words to describe him.
It seems to me that someone's ability to generate new ideas is at least in part driven by one's ability to make links between things that are not linked or very distantly so. It is at that intersection that novel ideas emerges.
To make it more concrete here's an example of my own.
I was playing the game Zelda Breath of The Wild and was in awe of the beautiful landscapes you could visit. However, I had already finished the game and did not want to have to fire up my Wii U every time just to see them.
This is when a novel idea emerged. What if I made a Google Map's Street Viewer for Zelda Breath of The Wild.
You can see here that I subsconsiously made a link between two very distant things a video game and Google Map's street view.
The idea was well recieved and gathered the attention of many gaming journals just google zelda street view to see for yourself. Before making this project I also searched if someone had done the same but no one did. I therefore thought that I had something pretty novel so worth doing.
While my idea isn't groundbreaking in terms of science it demonstrate well the characteristics of a novel idea. (The intersection of different domains that seems to most distant.)
It seems that to be able to do those links you must have breadth of knowledge instead of depth however it's still a mystery how some people are able to do this more frequently then others.
Also here's a free idea : Make the same thing I did with Zelda but for other open world games.
I suspect there are a lot of us here in particular who have 'unpopular opinions' in this domain that are more difficult to just try out, because others have invested in the idea of different domains being special and thus not conducive to fusion as in your example, or borrowing ideas whole cloth.
I have, for instance, some opinions on how skills from personal finance cross a whole host of problem domains. Some are obvious, but performance analysis is not typically one of them and people look at me like I have horns on my head when I bring it up. They have few complaints about the outcomes of me applying those theories, as long as they don't have to hear about them. So I mostly just don't ask permission, and save theory crafting for talk over beers when people start pulling out their crackpot ideas to keep the conversation flowing.
It's really no wonder at all to me why so many of milestones in The Enlightenment started over coffee. Caffeine is not as good a social lubricant but it'll do in a pinch and has fewer negative side effects on cognition and - importantly - memory. Last night's epiphany is mostly inaccessible to the drunk.
Brian Josephson received his nobel prize for a discovery he made at age 22 while being a PhD student. The accompanying paper is just two pages long [1]. Without diminishing his achievement I'd wager that thousands of bright PhD students could've come up with the same solution given the right circumstances.
I no longer work in academia but what I observed when spending time in top-tier research groups is that it's at least as important where you work as how smart you are. You can be the most gifted researcher but if you work in a backwater university in a third-world country your chances of being noticed or doing well-recognized work are very dim. On the other hand, if you're a smart person working in a top-tier environment your chance of doing noteworthy work are much higher.
Now of course smart people will usually find ways to get into better environments, but from my experience there's still a lot of elitism involved. For example, where I did my PhD in France almost all fellow PhD students in my group had parents that were high-ranking scientists, some of them leading research institutes. I always thought that it would be extremely unlikely to observe such a concentration if the selection process was really unbiased. Not saying my colleagues weren't gifted, but of course they had a lot of advantages as compared to gifted students from poor families as their parents knew exactly what to do to get them into the elite programs (in France you have to prepare for this for many years, starting with picking the right school for your children). So being in the right place and having the right pedigree is still a huge factor for getting a good shot at being really successful.
> where I did my PhD in France almost all fellow PhD students in my group had parents that were high-ranking scientists
You'll see this across all professional areas in the world. Medical students overindex on parents being doctors, law students on parents being lawyers. Heck, even young 10-year-old motorcycle racers at your local mini moto track almost all have a Dad back in the pit who is wrenching on their bikes and who comes from a moto background. It's literally everywhere you look.
The reality is that most of us can be successful in several different professional paths, and that we'll often choose the path that we're most familiar with from our upbringing.
On that note, whenever I meet someone who successfully broke their "family mold," I appreciate their success that much more.
This is partially why I decided not to go the PhD-> try to become a professor route. It really is an incestuous community these days. I also noticed that a very large portion of the people at the “top” of the pipeline into academia have connections to academia in the US (eg a parent professor) who can help them get or navigate getting a lot of these early “prestige” markers. If you don’t have that, even if you’re just as smart, you’ll have a hard time breaking in.
For example a lot of those kids will start doing “research” in HS, obviously in 99% of cases very closely directed by their mentor, who may be a parent. This gets them those fancy “17 year creates clean drinking water for $0.002/L” news coverage and possibly helps them win a nationally recognized science fair. Then they can also get tutored for Olympiads - unless you have a Von Neumann level intelligence you basically need a lot of special studying to be able to get far in those. Then they get into accelerated programs with local universities with the help of their parents, obviously get into whatever college they want, get the best research opportunities starting freshman year, and it continues to snowball from there.
Not saying this system doesn’t make great scientists, or that the people who benefit from it aren’t smart or qualified. Just, ultimately there are only so many professorships to go around, so good luck becoming a professor in STEM at an acclaimed R1 university without this kind of pipelining, even if you’re just as smart.
The list is full of people who are obviously 'smart' in some way, but somehow also incredibly full of bad ideas. It's possible that being insightful also requires you to have bad ideas as well - as if they're fountains of ideas, good and bad.
Crucially though, these Nobel Laureates possess a lack of critical thinking to filter out the bad ideas (that are often outside their field of expertise). They're definitely not unique among scientists.
I think this happens for the same reason they win their Nobel in the first place: to just go wherever their curiosity takes them, without having a pre-conceived notion about whether that is good or bad. If you open fifty thousand ugly oysters you're sure to find some gems, maybe even a priceless one. But you're also going to find a lot of junk. So you are likely on to something there, and the lack of a filter is definitely an issue.
You see this in other fields as well: at some point having an opinion is about name recognition. If you are some unknown person and you have a bullshit opinion about something the world will ignore you. But if you're a Nobel prize winner, and actor or media personality, a well known athlete, a business person or a venture capitalist with a lot of money then people will pay attention to what you say and will treat it with both more weight than they would otherwise and they will burn you down far worse than would ever happen compared to an unknown person.
The Dutch have a proverb about this (we have proverbs for everything, so this should be no surprise), that roughly translates as 'tall trees catch a lot of wind'.
>I think this happens for the same reason they win their Nobel in the first place
You are absolutely right. As they say There is a Thin Line Between Genius and Insanity. The very intensity of their out-of-the-box thinking which got them the Nobel prize in the first place is also what makes them prone to go off in many other directions without regard to Social Standing, Ethics and Morality.
IMO, this is not a fault but Genius applied to the wrong beliefs/ends which does not invalidate any of their other achievements. I will take the Genius with all their faults over the Common Average any-day.
Same problem in industry. It often matters more that you have $prestigious_school or $prestigious_company on your resume than how smart or hard working you are. Not to mention having the "right" people in your network or the right parents. I wish we wouldn't attach so much signal to these vanity attributes.
> Similarly, I read once that ugly people pay higher interest rates on loans despite being more likely to repay them.
Tinder loansharking.
"Hey there. It looks like Saturday night will be another lonely one since nobody is attracted to your ugly mug. But here's good news: you've been pre-approved for a $20,000 loan at a special introductory rate of 40% APR!"
Being even a little clever—and that's the best I can claim—is living life on easy mode. It's so great. Once I realized that the other people in the room weren't not-saying the obvious thing because they'd already dismissed it for some reason I couldn't see, but because it wasn't obvious to them, it was like I unlocked a superpower. God, it's so wonderful. I half-ass my way through everything and get well-rewarded for it. Praise, money, recommendations. There is no chance I could do that without this (again, quite mild, I cannot emphasize enough that I'm not even all that smart) gift, the credit for which mostly goes to sheer chance and lucky circumstances.
> I grew up thinking that being smart was the thing most to be desired. Perhaps you did too. But I bet it's not what you really want. Imagine you had a choice between being really smart but discovering nothing new, and being less smart but discovering lots of new ideas. Surely you'd take the latter.
Shit no, because the whole rest of the time I'm not coming up with those handful of new ideas, I'm less-smart. Reading is harder. Math is harder. Learning anything new is harder. Following complex conversations is harder. Picking out subtext, allusions, et c., in all media, is harder. Keeping up with, let alone constructively challenging, my smarter-than-me kids is harder. I'd hesitate to take that deal even if the ideas themselves made me rich enough I wouldn't need to work again. I might take it, but I'd have to give it a good think. It'd radically change the entire way I relate to the world.
I would say I have the opposite experience on being only a bit clever.
Being not smart at all usually also means you are ignorant to what you don't know, that life has its merits, Repetitive jobs don't bore you, and happiness comes from simpler joys in life. I wouldn't mind living that way at all.
Being very smart means none of the stuff you mention is hard. Math comes naturally, Crazy smart people need to put no effort to understand complex topics, while their happiness is typically in esoteric goals or breakthrough research, most people don't understand anything of what they do, so either society is sympathetic to challenges or oblivious to what they do. Financially/Socially once they have a safe academic job, the difference of success/failure is not visible to most regular people, even if they win a field's medal or Noble prize most people hardly understand it.
Being a bit clever is the worst of the lot, you understand enough to know how much you don't really know. Constantly you are making decisions basis what you know is poor understanding. Math, subtext, knowledge is all hard, but doesn't look so hard you will completely give up or blissfully don't know it exists.
Social peer groups keep missing that intelligence can be pretty scaled, we can perceive that someone is smarter than us but not by how much. Everyone one assumes there is just one level above them, equivalent to crazy smart. We are therefore accorded with the praise, money and recommendations and also responsibilities of being perceived crazy smart.
I would happily trade to being exactly perceived as I am or less and forgo all the money and praise if I didn't also be saddled with expectations of coming up with solutions all the time.
I'm one of eleven kids- I was the 'smart one' and what an absolute drag that title was and is. The title still sticks despite having a brother with multiple award winning plays, another brother being a successful serial entrepreneur, and sisters with published books.
I've watched them succeed while I didn't finish college due to ADHD driving me to distraction. Luckily I have the computer skills requisite to be a successful network architect- but I'm quite aware I could have been a surgeon, a constitutional lawyer, a good to great political commentator or a quant if I had that next bit of mental concentration and memory.
I'm very aware of that gap and it grinds in the gears pretty continually now that I'm older and firmly entrenched in a career- what a bit of ADHD meds at the right time in my life would have meant to allow that potential to be unlocked. To see those I was on the debate team with or in the same book clubs or Latin class being able to step up to the next level and build fairly continually rather than fighting against their mental shortcomings.
But really, in the end, I still have that bit more access to curiosity and the deeper things that come with that curiosity- I was commenting to my daughters in the car the other day that the acceleration they felt in the car pushing them back in their seats was functionally equivalent to gravity. That they are constantly accelerating towards the earth, which is what keeps them connected to the ground. That kind of thinking, though in many ways generic and obvious, is probably not a thing any of my siblings would say and an important part of how I think and approach the world- and not something I would trade to step down into for a bit more oblivious contentment.
> I've watched them succeed while I didn't finish college due to ADHD driving me to distraction. Luckily I have the computer skills requisite to be a successful network architect- but I'm quite aware I could have been a surgeon, a constitutional lawyer, a good to great political commentator or a quant if I had that next bit of mental concentration and memory.
Welcome to the party, pal :-)
I still think it's a hell of a lot better than being not smart and saddled with those problems, as guilty as I sometimes feel for not "living up to my potential". I'd probably be homeless or barely making ends meet while bouncing between minimum wage jobs, instead of living really well with shockingly little effort. My deficiencies are very frustrating and trigger lots of negative rumination when I think about what might have been if I'd had just the right person take notice early on and intervene in just the right ways—until I remind myself how much worse it could be, which is a whole damn lot worse.
> I'm one of eleven kids- I was the 'smart one' and what an absolute drag that title was and is. The title still sticks despite having a brother with multiple award winning plays, another brother being a successful serial entrepreneur, and sisters with published books.
Ah, a member of Salinger's Glass family, I see. ;-)
I have as many (or more) siblings as you, and adhd. I got meds somewhere not too far before my thirtieth birthday. That is now well above 10 years ago and yes, it has meant a lot.
And yes, being singled out for being smart, I know that too.
This is the first time I'm this specific about my background here but I thought you would like to know at least one other person here knows a little bit of what it feels like.
There's only a very small number of exceptional people who are so smart that they just understand everything without effort. Terry Tao comes to mind. Everybody else has to pick and choose what they understand, most "very smart" people are still only very smart within a certain domain.
This is more of a reflection of the richness of our world rather than the limitations of the human mind.
In Ancient Greece, it was possible for polymaths to exist, people who could contribute to the many disciplines that existed then. Then, Poincare has the title of "the last universalist" because of his contributions to many areas of mathematics. Now, no such generalist can exist, everything requires specialisation. But that is a good thing. It means that human knowledge is incredibly rich.
Yes you are right in sense that, in the ancient the number of educated people -> scholars -> professionals who could dedicate the life to research was small. It was far easier (easier than today not easy itself) to be able to dabble in many topics. [1] [2]
As you say much of what can be researched by a general philosopher who dabbles in many fields is already done, today to go further in any one field you will need to dedicate your life to it in mathematics or physics or other older fields of research.
That does not mean there are less generalists today. There are plenty of generalists in younger/newer fields like it was in math or physics back in those days .
Generalist scientists like Dr Lovelock was possible in the 60s. Generalist computer scientists was common till not that long ago. Generalist programmers were(are) there when I started in the industry, today to hire proper "full stack" developer is getting harder!
Point is generalists or specialization is always there, just the fields where it can happen keep changing.
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[1] We have to remember many of them were also institutions which they were only the head of, rather than only individual contributors, so attribution could be more to their school than them necessarily individually.
[2] A lot of the early work by ancient scholars was more documentation and formalization of somewhat known items than discovery or invention in the modern sense
>Being not smart at all usually also means you are ignorant to what you don't know, that life has its merits, Repetitive jobs don't bore you, and happiness comes from simpler joys in life. I wouldn't mind living that way at all.
You're mixing up all kinds of unrelated things here. As does PG. Whats smartness? Going by Joscha Bach, it's the ability to reach your goals, as opposed to intelligence, your ability to make models. Wether repetitive work bores you isn't a matter of intelligence or smartness, however it does correlate significantly with cognitive functions (Jung).
The then following paragraph seems projective to me, generalizations are just all over the place; thats just not how it works, neither from a neuro- nor from a psychological perspective. It doesn't matter wether you're intellectual middle or high brow, you will always be an idiot because you'll always be residing in a brain, being bound to its constraints of focus and attention. the notion of absolute intelligence that you imply when relating to "being a bit clever is the worst of the lot" seems off to me.
>I would happily trade to being exactly perceived as I am or less and forgo all the money and praise if I didn't also be saddled with expectations of coming up with solutions all the time.
You're contradicting yourself: first you say that the general population doesn't get what being smart implies, and then you say that the general population expects you to deliver on what being smart implies
Sorry if this came off hostile, it wasn't meant so in any way. I just can't relate to these absolute notions and would strongly suggest you to read into psychology and neuroscience
You lost me at the last sentence. (Jk, actually at Joscha Bach). The thing is, there is no consensus on what intelligence or smartness or any concept adjacent is. The layman notion is indeed wrong. But reading psychology and neuroscience will only put you deeper into this misery, as the theories proposed have shaky foundations and contradict each other.
I guess that the brain being a complex system there might not be one or multiple attributes of intelligence; just different behaviours.
> I guess that the brain being a complex system there might not be one or multiple attributes of intelligence; just different behaviours
I just ordered “Society of Mind” by Minsky. I spent some time this year working on multi agent simulations, then started wondering about the individual as really an apartment building of agents, and then started looking for the prior art, and found that book. This will probably be a dead end like so many before but that’s the current thread I’m on in my understanding of the complex system that is the brain.
I don't think anything you said is hostile. Perhaps I should have redrafted it better given that nature of of topic, I should have expected to be misunderstood a bit.
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Firstly Caveat Lector: Yes generalization is a natural hazard of this topic and I am guilty as everyone else on this thread, we(and PG) are drawing conclusions basis anecdotal personal experiences and generalizing that obviously may not hold. Perhaps I should have called out explicitly, I assumed that is already implicitly clear in this topic. Everything I say[1] in this kind of topic is almost always a opinion or a best a theory.
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The scale to me[2]: Not being smart[3] means everyone assumes you are their level or below them. A "little bit smart" means when some(many) people assume you know better than them. Crazy smart is people I cannot understand and are way smarter than I am.
I am not saying general population, I am saying it is difficult to comprehend how much smarter[2] anyone else for any person independent of their own personal levels that is by kind of basic limitation of not being as smart as them, if you could understand the gap you would probably as smart as well. It doesn't matter if the first person is super smart already and other person is even smarter. This has an effect that people inherently under or overestimate[4] what the other person is capable of, that is what am alluding to.
I don't have a knowledge on neuroscience to comment on that, however I absolutely do not have any interest in reading anymore psychology or debate with amateurs / professionals on it, my experience[5] interacting with the field : it is filled with pseudo-science (Yes including big names like Jung), every conventional term has always has different professional meaning which layman are expected to know fluently to discuss anything related, evidence/studies for many widely held theories is usually small sampled studies and typically math is at best basic linear regression models conflating correlation and causation .
Psychology and Economics are two fields I consider a lot of waste of time trying to study for non professionals [6], Metaphysics or philosophy at least is fully abstract( like Math?), this mixing of reality with pretty weak science[7] makes a pretty bad combination. I understand that may makes me ignorant in some eyes. Sadly a lot of economic and workplace policy is determined by influential schools of thought in both fields, as everybody is affected by policy everyone has(should have) a opinion .
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P.S. I didn't intend come across as aggressive/harsh or snide, but trying to be specific can come across has not being polite and snide, I am not that a gifted a writer(and English is not my first language) to write the same intent and make it sound better, apologies if it did not come out well.
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[1] For that matter anyone else says including professionals, I can only claim for myself though.
[2] This may not apply to others, I am not a professional to be able to generalize it, I am just sharing my anecdotal version.
[3] Smart here and all other terms I am using is common sense definitions, kind of similar to "I will know it when I see it" obscenity definition by Potter in the Roth test. I don't have any expertise or interest in framing in formal narrow terms
[4] In my experience
[5] I can only talk about my personal experience, all of these are generalizations, am sure will have dozens of exceptions or completely opposite view points backed with solid evidence. It is statement of opinion not fact.
[6] You( and the world) may a different opinion on this, I am not stating it as what everyone should also see it as, just how I see it, and I am fine not holding a consensus view
I feel similarly having grown up near a computer when I was young. I can't imagine had I grown up busy farming and raising siblings and then children in my 20s I would have been able to accomplish anything at all. Or the fact that I got a rare fever from a tick as a child only a few years after an antidote was invented. The _vast_ majority of the pi-chart other than intelligence is luck.
Don't underestimate ones ability to adapt and change their circumstances. I am a sample size of one, but I grew up busy farming and raising siblings. It is true that I was exposed to computers in the 80s, but didn't own one. In my mid-twenties I was able to re-orient my life, fail and succeed at startups, work at Be, Eazel, Apple, Amazon and more.
I have spent the last couple of years teaching adults whose backgrounds are filled with shocking adversity to think like programmers, build new careers and improve their lives. I am constantly amazed.
Modern medicine is miraculous. There is no doubt a vast amount of human potential has been saved from oblivion.
> I can't imagine had I grown up busy farming and raising siblings and then children in my 20s I would have been able to accomplish anything at all.
This really depends how you frame 'accomplishment', which is very much up to you. I think that successfully raising children who can successfully raise children is in and of itself an accomplishment; forming a family and keeping it intact through your inevitable troubles, working the land and producing enough excess food to earn everything else you need... our culture would be better if we actually viewed such people as 'accomplished' instead of pretending that being a C-suite officer of some SaaS b2b griftware is inherently of more value to anyone, anywhere.
I mean, intelligence is also luck. And (as much as people hate this), so is conscientiousness. At some point we have to acknowledge that dividing things into luck and not-luck is incoherent, and that we should use more useful axes.
We're competing with each other via billions of years of selection - there are major advantages if you're smart (and if you're pretty). You can also add the quality PG is talking about here which requires some amount of smartness as a prereq (curiosity?). I'm not sure how much it can really be cultivated above baseline, but it'd be interesting to know more. I'd guess there are some strategies, but a lot may still be tied to your inborn stats.
I'd argue we should strive for a society where the suffering you're exposed to if you're unlucky enough to be in the bottom quartile is bounded, while still allowing for the top to be unbounded in pushing humanity forward. Accepting there's natural variance here is part of that.
We're not all the same, things aren't fair. We shouldn't ignore that or pretend otherwise, but we also shouldn't think that means those dealt a bad genetic hand need to be totally screwed in our society (imo) and it doesn't mean you need to handicap the outliers on the other side in some Bergeron like pursuit of 'fairness' [0].
> I'd argue we should strive for a society where the suffering you're exposed to if you're unlucky enough to be in the bottom quartile is bounded, while still allowing for the top to be unbounded in pushing humanity forward.
FWIW, being unbounded in pushing humanity forward is different from being unbounded in pushing your individual wealth up, so those aren't really two sides of the same topic.
Or perhaps you really meant something different from what you wrote, because what you really meant doesn't sound so nice.
I'll second the recommendation of the Ted Chiang short story, it's well worth a read.
They're often related (look at Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, etc.) - I think it's good that the upper quartile creates new wealth (usually through reinvesting and building stuff). I think it's reasonable to try to structure things so that wealth doesn't give too much outsized political influence (easier said than done).
Allowing the incentives of unbounded wealth creation at the top is desirable imo.
If the upperbound is unlimited doesn't the lower bound essentially converge to zero? Imagine the upper strata (literally and figuratively) in flying cars and flying restaurants. The simple farm house would now seem like a desolate situation. Or would it?
I think it should be split into two graphs, practical and moral.
Practically, we all have to pretend we have free will. Hard work, diligence and deferment of the present for the future should be encouraged.
Morally, we shouldn't judge people who struggle with the above. "There but for the grace of god go I", etc etc. Society should try to be kind to all, resources permitting.
I love this sentiment, and it's one of a few I try to keep at the ready. I think it's underrated, as simple lanes to guide one's thinking go. I'm all-around much better, including more content, FWIW, when successfully holding that lane in-place.
I mean, yeah, it's basically just one of the key heuristics of practicing Stoicism, plus a hundred other practical ethical frameworks and religions, but I think the particular framing & phrasing is especially apt.
Kindness does indeed seem to be lacking. I constantly remind myself that all work is noble and aspire to extend empathy, compassion and sympathy to others.
The kids I grew up with in High School that attended the "Gifted And Talented" courses didn't really end up topping the gene pool after I met them at our 20 year reunion. The girl from our year book voted "most likely to succeed", did not meet her goals of being president, and probably may never do so... She actually had some rough life experiences like me too since then... I no longer have childhood goals of exceptionalism as a desire, nor the right social and political positioning for the role, not the right contacts or money. I just want to be happy and live on a tropical beach with a good wife and good kids without money problems to be honest.
Exceptionalism in this world is indeed luck, especially when you consider that there are almost 7 billion other people on this planet besides us, and limited world resources to share amongst us all...
To think that any one individual reached a point of higher talent or intelligence than everyone else is a total consumerism-driven lie. Movies and TV create celebrities because it drives profit and merchandise, not because they really feel the actors they back are unique and worthy. We find out often the people branded as "exceptional" suffer greatly for it very often because they gain popularity and consequently can't live up to the standards portrayed of them.
The biggest lie we can tell ourselves is that we're exceptional beyond everyone or anyone else, physically, spiritually, mentally, or in any other way. Somehow there's an ever present ideal pushed by Gyms, Churches, Psychologists, News Media, TV, and Movies that exceptionalism can exist, but it's simply not sustainable for any individual, and there's a pile of discarded celebrities down the hill by the river in Hollywood to prove it...
Once we're humble in life, and we realize that opportunity, paying attention, learning things, proper positioning, luck, and circumstance are what grant us the most potential for success -- It's the actions that we take to seize opportunities, THOSE ACTIONS WE TAKE are what set us apart from others who may be hesitant, not ready for, and/or unaware of and to the present opportunity.
When we reach points of success, it's important to remind ourselves of others and their situations and to not look down upon them, and to help others to succeed as much as possible in order to not feel isolated in ego and self praise.
I may sound like the Dali Lama here, but fighting against our own internal ego in a world like this one is a constant battle, so I work hard every day to keep everything in this kind of context in my own life, and I'm not perfect just like everyone else. Whenever I'm driving my car out in public though, everyone's a "frickin' idiot", that will never change... :P
> Shit no, because the whole rest of the time I'm not coming up with those handful of new ideas, I'm less-smart.
For better or worse, I am such a person: good at generating ideas and product vision, merely competent at technical execution. Put another way, my verbal iq and empathy (if that can be measured) are much stronger than my analytical iq, as confirmed by essentially every standardized test I’ve ever taken. As a result, I function and process information differently than a lot of my engineer peers. Some things are obviously harder for me, which can be painful and embarrassing, but as a rule I’m involved in lots of interesting discussions and design sessions and tend to be a de facto product manager. It’s just different, a trade off in mental styles.
I'm more of an analytical person myself, and my non-technical co-founder at our startup is much like you described yourself. I built the tech in the early days (today I mostly manage the tech team). He was the sales person and used his impressive communication skills to win our first key accounts. One thing that he though me long ago is that there are several types of intelligence. It's not linear. People usually assume the analytical type of intelligence is the true type of intelligence. I find that to be inaccurate.
> Shit no, because the whole rest of the time I'm not coming up with those handful of new ideas, I'm less-smart.
For lack of a better metric, how many IQ points would you be willing to trade per new idea? It feels likely that environmental factors and luck have a much higher impact on happiness and other outcomes for individuals within whatever defines the "high intelligence" or "slightly gifted range". I'd probably make the "less smart" trade for 1-2 novel/high quality ideas since you're basically guaranteeing one or two high rolls. I doubt a 1-2% bump in intelligence would outweigh the benefits.
I'm making lots of assumptions here around being able to successfully act on new ideas and that intelligence has marginal gains once you're locked into above-average-but-not-top quantiles.
> For lack of a better metric, how many IQ points would you be willing to trade per new idea? It feels likely that environmental factors and luck have a much higher impact on happiness and other outcomes for individuals within whatever defines the "high intelligence" or "slightly gifted range". I'd probably make the "less smart" trade for 1-2 novel/high quality ideas since you're basically guaranteeing one or two high rolls. I doubt a 1-2% bump in intelligence would outweigh the benefits.
For one that'd make me at least somewhat rich? Maybe one or two. But I have a feeling I'd end up regretting even that, worrying "would I have gotten this idea I'm not getting, if I hadn't made that trade?", or if a loss of interest in something is because I'm now slightly dumber, or whatever, every day, for the entire rest of my life. Aging-related brain changes are already terrifying, without helping them along.
My sister and I were just talking about this. We'd been coming to realize independently how much faster we think than average people. We didn't realize it growing up, since we went to gifted schools our whole lives (public schools we tested into, not private) and everybody was bright there. Living life outside of the gifted bubble has given us perspective on how lucky we were to born this way.
Perhaps we should question the assumption that some people are conciously thinking at all.
Being bored out of my mind in grade school and unable to read anything else during that time just led to a lot of day dreaming and not “productive” or directed thinking. What do people bored out their minds at work/life think about?
They think about the short term, an end result rather than how to get there. That's one constant that will persist through time with "less than smart" people.
Yup, but this always made school so fucking boring for me. Get it the 5 first minutes the teacher explains, spend 55 other minutes wandering in your mind about other stuff while the teacher proceeds to drill it into your peers memory repeating it ad-nauseaum until they sing it like fucking gospel.
That's the education I experienced at least, maybe someone else had better luck, but once you've to slowdown to the slowest of 30, and you're the fastest, things get pretty slow.
This messed me up so bad when I finally hit material I needed to work at even a little. Years and years and years of getting things instantly, with no effort whatsoever. Lecturing about the same thing again for the fifth day in a row, but I had it the first day? Cool, I'll draw cartoons and still answer any questions you ask me. Hand me a test? No problem. A-grade work in 5 minutes, read my book for the remainder of the hour. My stupid kid brain (this was... age 13 or so? Maybe 14?) was sure something horrible had happened to me over the Summer and I was now an idiot, when that stopped being how things worked. I wouldn't be surprised if I could have been diagnosed with actual depression, from then through my early 20s, mostly due to that and the follow-on effects.
I've since learned this is a super-common experience for gifted kids and one of the things really good gifted programs focus early on mitigating. I gather kids smarter than I was may still experience something similar, but not until they burn out hard and very suddenly, around Sophomore or Junior year of a challenging degree program.
If you had the choice understand the concept 10 times slower but in the end would come up with twice the amount of connections, would you consider it as something valuable?
Yes I see how it would make life easier, but is that really a meaningful goal?
And how do we know that the reasons behind that it makes life easier isn't just a bias society has towards its own traits? - E.g life is easier for right handed people aswell.
> If you had the choice understand the concept 10 times slower but in the end would come up with twice the amount of connections, would you consider it as something valuable?
But then they aren't just thinking slower, they are doing more processing. It isn't just "slow vs fast', it is "more processing vs less processing". Similarly if two people eat hamburgers as fast, but one of them eat twice as many hamburgers and therefore takes twice the time, it doesn't make him a "slow eater" it just means he eats a lot per meal.
I think the extent to which this actually occurs is overstated in discussions of intelligence because it makes people feel better, but maybe I'm just an asshole.
> Why do you think thinking fast is more important than thinking slowly?
I would say _that_ should be the definition of intelligence (as in, how 'smart' one is). If it takes someone a day to understand something, and it takes someone else 5 minutes to do the same, it's not just a matter of time spent. It completely shapes _how_ one thinks and how deep you can go in any given subject. There's only so much brainpower we can expend before getting tired and 'restarting' tasks is not easy.
Let's say if you are listening to a discussion with a topic you aren't very familiar with, but your peers are extremely familiar with. You'll see that the way the conversation flows is very different. They will rapid fire, exchange incomplete sentences (because the other person has inferred the rest) and overall have a much more rich and complex conversation. You'll be thinking about the next chess move, they will be thinking 10 steps ahead.
Then you'll say: "that's a bad example, this is about knowledge, not intelligence, they are doing it faster because they know more about the subject". Yes. I'll argue that a meaningful 'intelligence' delta doesn't really exist among healthy humans. It's all about how many patterns you have been exposed to. When we try to measure intelligence, we end up measuring knowledge, every single time.
Take the Mensa tests. Someone who went to good schools and did mentally challenging things will have most likely encountered similar questions before. Not exactly the same questions, but adapting something you have seen before to a new situation is much easier than doing this for the first time.
I read your comment as “yes I prefer life to be easier and complacent over difficult and interesting.” Is this too coarse of an interpretation? I seem to agree with pg: I’d much rather have good ideas and trouble “executing” because there are always smart people who can help me understand better, or execute better, or whatever; than being super smart and at the end of the day nothing to do with it.
Reminds me of genius programmers, who can easily coast through interviews or jobs, but who’ve otherwise got nothing of their own to write or show of it. That’s not bad, it just means their smarts are in service to someone else’s ideas—which is OK!
I see it as a trade-off between "glory" and having an otherwise very nice life, as framed—trading "being smart" for "having some really good ideas", which is a rather odd trade, but I'm addressing the text in its own terms. Between "have some very good ideas" and "be even a little smart the entire rest of the time", if I can only choose one, yes, I'm strongly inclined to choose the latter.
"Being smart" benefits me and shapes my very identity by affecting my perceptions and experience of everything, every waking second; having some very good ideas might make me money and make me known as "the guy who came up with X, Y and Z". Having both would be great, obviously! But if PG's presenting some weird "pick one" choice between the two, then claiming it's obvious which one a person would pick, yeah, I'm leaning toward, "no, your assertion and assumptions on which you're couching this entire line of argument are far too broad, it's 'be smart' by a mile and I doubt I'm alone in that choice".
It's Achilles' choice, as I see it (though, again, it's a weird pair of things to ask people to choose between) and as much as I like reading about him, and as impressive as it is that we still know his name and what he did (taking the stories as true, and the character as real, for the sake of lending what he opted for the most possible appeal), thanks but no thanks.
I find it interesting how people want to characterize your choice between "living easy" versus "living interesting". Or "living simple" versus "living complacent". There seems to be this tendency to inject some negative connotations into the approach of "living simple" such as "it's not interesting", "it's not difficult", "you aren't challenging yourself", "you are being lazy", "you are being complacent". There seems to be something innate in people that needs to attack this alternative approach to life.
It seems to be going over peoples heads that being personally smarter has the potential to enrich your own life in ways that being rich/being the "idea guy" don't. If you "aren't smart", it doesn't matter how much immense wealth you have, your personal relationships will be affected in some pretty fundamental ways.
I think there is a philosophy at the heart of Y Combinator and their philosophy that "ideas and execution are everything" - you need to start from a creative place and can fill in smart people as tools to enable your vision later. A corollary to this attitude is that they look for passionate younger people and foster an approach which is work very hard during your younger years building on your idea.
I find it relevant to share the Parable of the Fisherman from the 4 day workweek:
An American investment banker was taking a much-needed vacation in a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. The boat had several large, fresh fish in it.
The investment banker was impressed by the quality of the fish and asked the Mexican how long it took to catch them. The Mexican replied, “Only a little while.” The banker then asked why he didn’t stay out longer and catch more fish?
The Mexican fisherman replied he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs.
The American then asked, “But what do you do with the rest of your time?”
The Mexican fisherman replied, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siesta with my wife, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos: I have a full and busy life, señor.”
The investment banker scoffed, “I am an Ivy League MBA, and I could help you. You could spend more time fishing and with the proceeds buy a bigger boat, and with the proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy several boats until eventually, you would have a whole fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to the middleman you could sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You could control the product, processing and distribution.”
Then he added, “Of course, you would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City where you would run your growing enterprise.”
The Mexican fisherman asked, “But señor, how long will this all take?”
To which the American replied, “15–20 years.”
“But what then?” asked the Mexican.
The American laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich. You could make millions.”
“Millions, señor? Then what?”
To which the investment banker replied, “Then you would retire. You could move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siesta with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos.”
I think you're reading into the thoughts of others elsewhere too much. I don't think living a "simple life" or whatever is objected by anyone. I don't think "having ideas" is also some big stakes quality that totally upends someone's lifestyle. A lot of the most creative, interesting, and idea-ful people in history lived simple, modest lives. Many writers, painters, musicians, mathematicians, scientists, philosophers, etc. were well known for "schedules" that consisted of waking up late, having a nice meal, going for a walk, doing some creative stuff for a few hours, having a nice dinner, etc etc. A "simple" lifestyle is completely compatible with originality, productivity, creativity, and personal growth. Denying that would be a crime against yourself.
Yes, I think in this forum, sometimes there are hyperbolic takes on working hard, grinding, etc., but I think that's an orthogonal concern about work, startups, and the like.
These negative connotations that you mention come from obvious places. "I'm smart, life is easy, and I'd like to keep it that way." How is this not complacency? It's the epitome of self-satisfaction and a desire to remain static. What on earth grows, evolves, or improves without difficulty, self-imposed or otherwise? This angle works whether it be biological, social, intellectual, artistic, or technical. The very nature of improvement necessarily involves failure, and I contend a desire for comfort—especially that which is stood up from some natural intelligence—is equally a desire to not fail.
Having ideas is one manifestation of an avenue for failure. Most ideas are bad and don't work. Again, "ideas" here transcend business proposals, as we might assume here on HN. For instance, I'm an amateur classical musician, and sometimes when I'm playing a piece, I will try different things not marked in the score. Maybe they'll be good, maybe not. But I'd rather have ideas to try as a means to improve my musicianship (and perhaps even my own musical intelligence!) over simply being smart by reciting a score as written with a bone-dry, scholarly performance. Of course, this means my life is now made a hair more difficult, because the effort I put into performing something may be for nought if my idea turns out to be botched. But that's par for the course when you're doing something new that nobody else has done before. Are scholarly performances a bad thing? Not intrinsically, but I'd explicitly attach negative connotation to your musicianship if that's all you can do.
If I'm honest, I really want to go a step further and link creativity, ideas, etc. to some philosophical notion of being human, but it's certainly an argument beyond my caliber to make.
> "I'm smart, life is easy, and I'd like to keep it that way." How is this not complacency?
It's all about your perspective. "I have many ideas, I'm working hard to achieve them, and I'd like to keep it that way."
This could also be construed as static, self-satisfied, and "complacent" in it's own way. Complacency is ultimately a negative and derogatory word - using it to characterize an approach you don't agree with seems disingenuous.
You can lead a simple life and still be taking risks, and be comfortable with failure. There seems to be some hard intrinsic assumptions going on in this conversation that "having ideas and executing on them" is the only avenue in life worth pursuing, because failure, risk, fulfillment can't be defined along any other angles.
As you say: a "simple" lifestyle is completely compatible with originality, productivity, creativity, and personal growth. Denying that would be a crime against yourself.
You can lead a simple lifestyle, and still experiment with your passions. Creating new musical scores, taking risks, and putting yourself out in the world to fail - none of this is fundamentally incompatible with having a simple lifestyle.
I feel like we are both orbiting the same point but viewing things from two different perspectives. It may be as simple as us not fully agreeing on what a "simple lifestyle" actually entails. In the context of the original post, it's a dichotomy between "having ideas" and "being smart". As the grandparent alluded too, "having ideas" becomes a function on how you can impose yourself upon the world to influence it, "being smart" is a function of how you personally experience the world. I think that is really the heart of it, and for some, your personal experience is paramount to your short time on this planet you get to experience being alive - and compromising that just to have more ideas just seems antithetical to the entire enjoyment of life.
> It's all about your perspective. "I have many ideas, I'm working hard to achieve them, and I'd like to keep it that way."
> This could also be construed as static, self-satisfied, and "complacent" in it's own way. Complacency is ultimately a negative and derogatory word - using it to characterize an approach you don't agree with seems disingenuous.
This is a baffling. "Something that is always changing could be seen as not changing because it's never not changing." I'm having a hard time seeing that as a good-faith rebuttal.
> This is a baffling. "Something that is always changing could be seen as not changing because it's never not changing." I'm having a hard time seeing that as a good-faith rebuttal.
I think we are talking in abstract platitudes to such an extent that the forest might get missing for the trees.
In practical terms, a workaholic can fit the mold of "I have many ideas, I'm working hard to achieve them, and I'd like to keep it that way.". A workaholic can also have all the characteristics of a complacent individual - brimming with self-satisfaction, satisfied with their routine, self-smug attitude, no desire to change their ways.
Ironically, a workaholic could justify such an attitude to themselves by calling other people complacent.
And just for reference, the dictionary definition of the word complacent:
complacent: marked by self-satisfaction especially when accompanied by unawareness of actual dangers or deficiencies
“Having ideas” isn’t “being an idea person”—the latter I hear colloquially to mean “spitballs superficial proposals that other people sort through”. I also don’t think what you suggest is what pg suggests. Einstein had ideas, but he didn’t just blather about them at a high level until some smart person did the “real” work.
I also didn’t mean to suggest I’d rather “just have ideas”, I meant “I’d rather have ideas and a difficult time executing on them” as opposed to “being smart with no ideas at all.”
> "Reading is harder. Math is harder. Learning anything new is harder. Following complex conversations is harder. Picking out subtext, allusions, et c., in all media, is harder."
smarts can't be summed up into a single all-encompassing quality that you have or you don't. you can be socially savvy and not be good at math, or great at basketball and be socially awkward. this is a 'not smart' observation that undermines your whole humble-brag.
"The g factor (also known as general intelligence, general mental ability or general intelligence factor) is a construct developed in psychometric investigations of cognitive abilities and human intelligence. It is a variable that summarizes positive correlations among different cognitive tasks, reflecting the fact that an individual's performance on one type of cognitive task tends to be comparable to that person's performance on other kinds of cognitive tasks. "
I truly excel at the first three things -- I get high test scores and can get good at a wide range of things without even trying -- but I struggle to follow conversations due to ADHD + shyness and it drives me crazy.
Sure, the skills the parent comment mentioned are all separate skills, but they're probably pretty strongly (and positively) correlated with each other and with traditional measures of intelligence like performance on IQ tests. It's accurate to say that intelligence isn't the only thing that matters, and probably accurate to say that society generally overstates its importance, but claiming that intelligence doesn't exist is a severe and inaccurate overcorrection.
Not being too smart can be a forcing function on the quality of ideas. Very frequently the idea that wins in the minds of others is the one that is easy to think about.
I am frequently caught in the trap where I am enjoying the puzzlebox complexity of a problem, and building an equally complicated solution. I then attempt to explain my complicated solution to someone else, and I fail on delivery.
I also have a coworker whos mantra is "if its hard to think about, I don't do it". We actually worked on similarly aligned solutions to the same problem. His version met with significantly more success than mine did, and I credit the fact that he ensured that it was all easy to think about (and thus talk about). I don't begrudge him at all though, he's one of my favs!
IMO if you are unwilling or unable to think about overly complicated ideas, it might force you to eliminate them and develop new ones that are easier to talk about and think about.
Agree. Whether a business (or solution to a problem) is interesting, ingenious and innovative is a completely different matter from its being a good business. iirc warren buffet once said, "if it takes a calculator to figure out if it's a good business, it's not". In a similar vein (but with a different moral to it) my boss used to say that (in a corporate context) all back-of-the-envelope analysis was by definition correct - because it would only ever be checked via back-of-the-envelope calculations.
Strongly agreed about "smart" not being just one thing. Somewhere there's someone who's normal at the things I'm good at, and excellent at the things I'm so-so or bad at (there are several of those), and they're probably glad they get to "play" life on easy mode, too. Somewhere there's someone who's as good as both of us at all those things, and they probably own an island and have a private jet and don't think it was particularly challenging to get to that position in life. Maybe—if there's, in fact, exactly one thing they're bad at—they even wonder why other people don't do it.
> Being even a little clever—and that's the best I can claim—is living life on easy mode
That is probably true about being a little clever, but being really smart is not easy in the general case. Really smart people often share few ideas and interests with others and spend much of their lives lonely and misunderstood.
Yes, that's true. If you project down to a linear relationship, more IQ is associated with more income.
Most of the data you see on that stop around an IQ of 125, which is about the average IQ of a PhD in the US.
But there's also a lot of research on people with very high iq and the links with depression, anxiety, loneliness etc.
If you want the easiest life possible, I don't think you want to maximize IQ. I think you want to go high enough that you're eligible for the high paying jobs, but not so smart that you feel like the other people in those jobs are idiots.
There are several studies that show that IQ correlates with income, at least at the extremes. However the studies I've seen found no correlations between IQ and overall happiness or contentment with how their life turned out.
"Happiness/contentment" is effectively a "balancing thermostat" of our motivation, a functional aspect that is used by our bodies to regulate our behavior and thus, if it functions properly (as opposed to certain diseases e.g. anhedonia in clinical depression) its long term average will be pretty much the same no matter how well you do, it's almost orthogonal to any metric of actual wellbeing. For example, studies show both winning excessive amounts of money in lotteries and sustaining major life-changing injuries (e.g. losing limbs or causing other disabilities) do not correlate with happiness in the long-term. Happiness effectively reflects (a) recent short-term changes to wellbeing; (b) momentary expectations or worries about future wellbeing; and (c) innate baseline happiness. It's not a reflection of how well someone is living; in essence, people living long-term in a literal gulag may easily have on average the same overall happiness/contentment as living in a nice first world upper-middle-class environment.
The word "happiness" refers both to the temporary emotion and a long-term state of being satisfied with your life. Nowadays the long term state is often called "life satisfaction" in research.
Someone in a gulag would have low life satisfaction.
That study isn't the final word though. Other studies have found that winning the lottery increases life satisfaction, while still others have found that they don't.
LOL, dualism moment. There is no "you" outside of your genetics and the socialization you experienced. There is definitely some luck involved, but also you're the product of a lot more work and planning than you give yourself credit for.
Do you think you were “lucky” not to be a mosquito?
Do you think you were “lucky” not to be a 100kg mass of disconnected plasma inside the sun?
This doesn’t make any sense. There are different processes in our universe that produce different things, from plasma to rocks to mosquitos to unsuccessful people to successful people.
These processes are different, and their outputs are not fungible. There’s no luck. There’s no sense in which “you” could have been anything except what you are.
I mean. When folks use the term luck they often just use to express gratitude. Whether that’s to the void or to their god.
It’s weird to point out the usage here. Sure someone can say “I’m grateful the insane probabilities of every small detail that led to today collapsed on me living a good life”, but it’s easier to just say “I’m so lucky”.
> There’s no sense in which “you” could have been anything except what you are.
Perhaps yea, this feels tangential to the argument there is no free will and the universe is 100% deterministic. Maybe I’m reading too much into your comment, but for my lived experience. It certainly doesn’t feel that I was 100% destined to end up here. Im sure others feel the same way that their circumstances were never predetermined.
That isn't how people usually view luck. If someone says "My success was all luck!", people wouldn't assume that this guy was lucky to be born smart and hard working and therefore worked his ass off to achieve his results with no particularly lucky event happening past his birth. No, they'd assume something like, the guy next to him at a buss stop happened to be this rich businessman and just happened to need something right now, and then that lead to more similar events and now he is the CEO of a big multi national corporation.
I encounter this “luck” argument that implies dualism, of a self separate from biology and life experience that could have somehow existed in a different body, all the time.
And until I read this comment I felt like I was the only person who found that idea specious.
Dualism is a theory in philosophy of mind, not in personal identity. It doesn't have any opinion about who "you" are, so it doesn't have any opinion on the counterfactual "But for luck, I could have been less smart."
It sounds like what you really mean is something like a psychological continuity (identity is having psychological continuity) or animalist (identity is being the same human animal) view, which are both consistent with some mental characteristics (like intelligence) being accidental to who we are.
The propensity to work hard and be good at planning is just as heritable as IQ. The extent to which you can defer current pleasure for future gain is basically established by the time you're 6 years old, so reaping the benefits of it as an adult is luck.
In another way, yes hard work and good planning is vital to success. But you shouldn't pat yourself on the back too hard for it, and you shouldn't think of yourself morally better than anyone else for it.
(This isn't sour grapes from me. I'm successful and worked incredibly hard for years without much money.)
> Being even a little clever—and that's the best I can claim—is living life on easy mode. It's so great. Once I realized that the other people in the room weren't not-saying the obvious thing because they'd already dismissed it for some reason I couldn't see, but because it wasn't obvious to them, it was like I unlocked a superpower.
The thing is - I don't agree with Paul Graham at all. Sure, there might be a genetic component to being 'smart', but I doubt it means that people are just born with a better "CPU". Maybe they are 0.1% better overall.
Rather, I don't think we can properly control variables(ethically). If your parents are 'smart', they will do 'smart' things. They will give you the attention you need. They will give you a balanced diet. They will buy you books. They will teach you difficult concepts. You'll see them studying or otherwise getting invested in their careers and, as kids, we mimic what you see. Over time, you develop 'smart' habits, and you exercise your brain.
You'll also accumulate all sorts of 'patterns', that let you quickly see those things that aren't 'obvious' to everyone else. They are obvious to you, probably because you have seen something similar before, even in a different context. The more 'patterns' you have, the quicker you can spot them, and you can tie things together faster if you are not focusing on learning entirely new things at the same time.
Even if you had nothing of the sort growing up, by just trying to engage your brain while doing most of your tasks, you are far ahead of most people. What people tend to do is, whenever they find something that worked, even if only once, they will stick with that solution, for every situation. They don't normally ask themselves if the resolution is still appropriate for the situation in hand. Keep this as a background process, and you do have a superpower.
Your proposing a testable hypotheses which has been disproven through studies of the adopted and especially twins. Intelligence and genetics are strongly linked, most obviously via negatives like Down syndrome but that’s far from the only influence.
Read up on working memory. A lot of people can't hold enough items in their head long enough to write a function. And that's if you don't believe in IQ, which is already very heavily correlated with success.
P.S. I am in the somewhat unique situation of being "smart enough", but far from the smartest person in the room, so I can struggle and am close enough to the "incompetent" line to see it clearly, and it's a scary place. On the other hand, I can do enough to understand how truly fast "hyper-intelligent" people think at work to understand the difference, and it's a stark difference.
intelligence being a highly genetic trait was known for a long while. Recently they even discovered the genes responsible for a large part of it https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg.2017.104
>In science, as well as in other fields of human endeavor, there are two kinds of geniuses: the “ordinary” and the “magicians.” An ordinary genius is a fellow that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what he has done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. They are, to use mathematical jargon, in the orthogonal complement of where we are and the working of their minds is for all intents and purposes incomprehensible. Even after we understand what they have done, the process by which they have done it is completely dark. They seldom, if ever, have students because they cannot be emulated and it must be terribly frustrating for a brilliant young mind to cope with the mysterious ways in which the magician’s mind works. Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest caliber. Hans Bethe, whom [Freeman] Dyson considers to be his teacher, is an “ordinary genius”.
Einstein was unquestionably a magician. He had an incredible ability to come up with simple ideas, and follow the chain of logic wherever it leads, without prejudice against its outlandish conclusions. Those ideas appear as seeds of 'genius' to those studying his work. I'm not sure if it's 'smart', but it's definitely insightful. I've met clever people, but sometimes, they're not insightful. I've also met many insightful people who aren't clever in many ways. To quote Kac again:
>I am reminded of something Balthazaar van der Pol, a great Dutch scientist and engineer who was also a fine musician, remarked to me about the music of Bach. “It is great,” he said, “because it is inevitable and yet surprising.” I have often thought about this lovely epigram in connection with mathematics… The inevitability is, in many cases, provided by logic alone, but the element of surprise must come from an insight outside the rigid confines of logic.
I like this idea. Makes me think of nondeterministic v deterministic Turing Machines. It is easy to confirm that the magician is correct, but hard to see how they were able to get there.
Honestly, I am generally a big fan of pg, and many/most of his points I agree with. But every time he puts out a new blog post I feel like I'm now reflexively starting with an eye roll: "OK, what quality that pg has in spades has he decided to laud now as the one thing that's super important for success, happiness and societal progress?"
It's not that I really disagree with him that much, but for a man who is obviously very smart, and who can come up with lots of new ideas, I find his blog posts shockingly lacking in introspection. It's basically all the qualities that are needed to build a startup are the most important qualities for society at large. What I never see is thought processes along the lines of "Gee, how can my world view be colored by my unique experiences, and how might I think differently if I had a different upbringing or experiences contrary to the ones that actually occurred?"
As another commenter mentioned, so many of pg's posts seem so concerned with "sorting" people: you're smart or not, you've got lots of new ideas or you don't. And it's not hard to surmise why he has this worldview: literally his whole job is to sort through people pitching to find the winners from the losers.
But I wish he would just step back once and think a little more broadly about some contrarian ideas that don't just totally support his vision of success in the world.
My experience here reflects my general pattern:
1) Read an article via HN
2) Return to HN, to smash the upvote button
3) Go to the article's comments
4) Realize that there are problems with the article that I was totally oblivious to
5) Remind myself to not be so damn naïve
I think one should just take the blog post for what it is. It isn't a UN resolution. He actually has thoughtful opinions that he is happy to put out there without endless qualifications. That is what makes it valuable, not why it is problematic. The broader relevance, the applicability of the notions to one's own life, the motivations of the author are all left as an exercise to the reader.
I don't understand the complaint. Everything that everyone writes is intended to be prefixed with a big fat "this is what I think. You can disagree, my job is present to you with the facts as I see them"
I read this article and it was an interesting way to crystalize an idea I observed myself (I made a comment in this thread about my experience with smart but non-impactful people.) So I got value out of this post in that it names a concept for me.
So your concern is not that the author is wrong, not that the idea is bad, not that it will lead to a bad outcome - but simply that the author wrote about something they thought was important?
His essay says that we overrate intelligence and underrate independent-mindedness and writing.
This is actionable - we can cultivate both with some minor changes, and meanwhile we aren’t likely to get much marginal return on trying to improve general intelligence.
If you’d like to provide an alternative theory, please do. But 100 words of eye-roll aren’t moving society forward either.
FWIW I was homeschooled and now work from home with a large team of folks in an office. I see a lot of people struggle with independent-mindedness, and I think it hurts our team’s productivity.
Could you quote a specific sentence that supports any of your claims here?
> I grew up thinking that being smart was the thing most to be desired. Perhaps you did too. But I bet it's not what you really want. Imagine you had a choice between being really smart but discovering nothing new, and being less smart but discovering lots of new ideas. Surely you'd take the latter. I would.
This seems like the closest thing. But it's perfectly fine to mention one's own childhood experiences.
You might want to read http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html, since it sounds like you don't actually disagree with him on anything. Which is to say, your reply is a DH2 at best.
Wouldn't it be better to comment on the actual essay rather than its author? It'd probably be more interesting.
1. This one, which is basically saying one of the most important things for society is coming up with new ideas. Not hard to see why someone who built his life around startups would think this.
2. "Weird Languages", touting the benefits of Lisp among others. Kinda feel like "nuff said" on this one.
3. "How to work hard", which I read basically as an overview of "how to work like you're running a startup".
4. "A project of one's own". How you should work toward your own goals, instead of someone else's.
Again, I don't really disagree with pg's essays, I just no longer find them interesting because I think they are now utterly predictable at this point.
I'll give you a concrete example: while I was definitely a tech and startup fan boy through the early 00s, I definitely have some amount of disillusionment around the whole startup ecosystem, and its effects on society. I never hear pg talk about really any of the downsides or regrets about the startup ecosystem that he helped unleash.
If I already know pretty much exactly what someone is going to say (and nearly all of it is self-serving), I'm not going to be that interested in listening.
> This one, which is basically saying one of the most important things for society is coming up with new ideas. Not hard to see why someone who built his life around startups would think this.
> If I already know pretty much exactly what someone is going to say (and nearly all of it is self-serving), I'm not going to be that interested in listening.
These seem to be your central points. Firstly, you're correct: the essay says that new ideas are one of the most important things for a society:
> There are more subtle reasons too, which persist long into adulthood. Intelligence wins in conversation, and thus becomes the basis of the dominance hierarchy. Plus having new ideas is such a new thing historically, and even now done by so few people, that society hasn't yet assimilated the fact that this is the actual destination, and intelligence merely a means to an end.
...
> So what are the other ingredients in having new ideas? The fact that I can even ask this question proves the point I raised earlier — that society hasn't assimilated the fact that it's this and not intelligence that matters. Otherwise we'd all know the answers to such a fundamental question.
But is this mistaken?
When choosing where to send your kids to school, would you rather send them to a school that believes strongly in their own ideas, or one that embraces more recent ideas?
My parents sent me to a small religious school. Personally, I would've been happier somewhere else.
But as you say, you don't disagree with the essay. Your central point is in your last sentence:
> If I already know pretty much exactly what someone is going to say (and nearly all of it is self-serving)...
You're saying that pg essays are no longer surprising to you. But I don't think you knew what it was going to say before you read it; you read it, and then said, "This isn't surprising."
Personally, I found it surprising that society could place so much emphasis on intelligence, if it's true that new ideas matter more.
You could try to argue that new ideas don't matter as much as intelligence, or that something else matters even more. It would be interesting if you were correct, since that would refute the essay's central point. But you haven't done any of that; your comment can be summed up as "I think pg sucks," because you're not making any concrete claims.
Your comment reads as defensive, and as though you are intentionally missing the point. The point is: PG appears to be a dishonest writer. He is not writing with the evenhanded pursuit of truth in mind, but with a very particular, convenient (self-serving) truth to support. He seems to consistently ignore any strain of thought (of which there are many, see: the entire humanities) which would generate a more nuanced view.
GP is saying PG is probably wrong, and probably misleading many people. This is useful, even if its not the same as saying "here is proof he is wrong".
Nevertheless, to indulge you, I will say: PG is wrong. There is more to life and contributing to society than just coming up with new important ideas. Yes new important ideas can lead to more food, more materials, or even in some cases (though certainly not in PGs case) deeper relationships. But there are many meanings to life, and not all of them start with increasing productivity.
PG's new ideas aren't going to raise a kid. They're not going to save any souls, or save a relationship on its last legs. They're also not going to plant any crops, or build any houses.
They are useful, but they are not everything, or even the most important thing. In fact, they're a luxury. They're one of the least important things in my life.
> GP is saying PG is probably wrong, and probably misleading many people. This is useful, even if its not the same as saying "here is proof he is wrong".
It sounds like we'll have to agree to disagree.
> PG's new ideas aren't going to raise a kid. They're not going to save any souls, or save a relationship on its last legs. They're also not going to plant any crops, or build any houses.
I'd be surprised if YC's investment portfolio didn't include both farming and construction startups. But I haven't looked.
Of course there's more to life. But that's true about any idea you could talk about. Why talk about anything at all, if there might be more to life? (I recently tried to face this question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28866558 ... Some of the replies were very good.)
You've made a very concrete claim here: "PG appears to be a dishonest writer," and then showed no evidence of dishonesty.
>You've made a very concrete claim here: "PG appears to be a dishonest writer," and then showed no evidence of dishonesty.
This is wrong. Here is my evidence: His articles are exclusively self serving. He consistently ignores and degrades canons of thought that might threaten his ideas. This is dishonest behavior, even if it isnt an outright lie, in the same way that saying "vaccines caused my cousins balls to inflate" would be dishonest even if it weren't a lie. It's dishonest in the same way the church shouting down Copernicus was dishonest. The dishonesty is omission + ignorance, not a direct lie.
I and GP made this point to you many times, and you have continuously chosen to lower the wool over your eyes.
You are absolutely right, but some people are unable to read between the lines. For them its not true unless pg writes it down in a confession in his essay.
Writing about ones own experiences may not necessarily be self serving. Ignoring others experiences whole cloth in order to make a point that benefits you is self serving.
>Could you find a quote from any pg essay that supports this point? This seems mistaken.
First of all, this is the wrong way to interpret my point. I'm making a point about ignorance. You need to look for whats not there, not what is there.
Is a racist who simply never talks to any POC, cites any of their work, or hires them, not racist just because they never explicitly say they hate minorities?
I think PG has definitely made the move at this point in his career from the previously more niche (interesting) insight years ago => mainstream (less interesting, more predictable) insight lately. It likely won't interest you and a non-negligible portion of the HN crowd at this point. But for the rest of society, he is still interesting and he is growing his following.
It's not just that he has to sort winners from the losers. It's that he has to be the first most important seeming VC in their minds. And he accomplishes that with these blog posts. That, and by using these posts to posit that people like him really are the best, he has a big hand in getting people to self-sort into venture-seeking types in the first place.
If you think of his posts as self-serving, that's true. But they're also propaganda meant to influence what we think of as being a worthy pursuit, and meant to define who should pursue such things. The more people believe his worldview – one where smarts dominate and make one powerful – then the more status he has, and the more easily he can do his job. People come to him whereas before he would've had to go to them!
I think he really believes what he writes. And I think it is true that smarts as defined by him are helpful to the kinds of entrepreneurs who see themselves in pg - like, the people he describes really are a type of person, and they should lean on their strengths. But I think it's not at all clear that pg-measured smarts matter more than other qualities for entrepreneurship, or that people like him are remotely close to the best sort of startup founder.
Maybe he's just found a way to seem high status to a subset of a population, and his success flows from that: he gets his pick of that subset, even though it is a tiny chunk of the world. Sure, he gets notoriety and status in a big chunk in status-seeking coders! But that needn't mean that he's actually cracked the code on entrepreneurialism. He has ABSOLUTELY cracked the code on how to speak to young men who feel like they can use what they're good at to achieve power and status.
Here's a scary thought: it's possible that by so completely dominating the conversation about what a startup founder should be, and by making the ideal startup founder seem like a reflection of his image, he's caused far greater numbers of more capable entrepreneurs to self-select out of entrepreneurial pursuits, because they aren't pg-like enough. Not saying that's true, or provable (though I have many many anecdotes that lead me to feel something's going on there). Just that it's important to consider that in making a hagiographic ideal the epitome of a startup founder, that you're necessarily excluding so so many other people for reasons that boil down to... pg got there first.
HN likes to point out just-so stories, and I think the stories he tells us are that. When we read posts like this and they seem to speak spookily clearly to something in us, it's probably because he's doing fanservice to people who serve to give him a tremendous amount of influence and power by believing him when he says we're special.
> As another commenter mentioned, so many of pg's posts seem so concerned with "sorting" people: you're smart or not, you've got lots of new ideas or you don't.
Not sure which posts you mean, but this post is explicitly about examining the difference between intelligence and having new ideas, in hopes of eventually being able to list the ingredients of the latter (the former seems mostly inborn) to be able to cultivate them more broadly in society.
If you subscribe the general worldview that human well-being is an important goal for society and believe that we have progressed so much in the last few centuries because of scientific knowledge and technological inventions, then it becomes clear that the qualities described in this post, intelligence and the ability to come up with useful new ideas, are useful for society.
In my reading, PG did not claim that these are the most important things for society.
> What I don’t understand: why do you wish him to step back and reflect?
Because I used to look forward to his essays. I found them interesting, insightful and witty. Now I just find them predictable and self-serving. I'm probably just feeling disillusioned with someone I greatly admired, that's all, and I'm wishing I could feel about that person the way I used to feel.
Writing a piece called “Beyond Smart” where you literally equate yourself with Einstein in the first paragraph is a special level of arrogance. His essays used to quirky, interesting and surprising. They have increasingly become predictable rants about how he’s uniquely great, and (ironically) contain less and less actual new ideas.
> Writing a piece called “Beyond Smart” where you literally equate yourself with Einstein in the first paragraph is a special level of arrogance.
He didn't equate himself with Einstein, in either the first paragraph or the rest of the essay. Furthermore, I interpreted the "Beyond" in the title in the sense of Nietzsche's "Beyond Good and Evil" - "Beyond Smart" doesn't mean "extra-super-duper smart, above and beyond smart". It means, we cannot ascribe such things to a simplistic concept of "smart", such as the kind that would be measured on IQ tests.
I am assuming either you are joking or you are failing to see the ham-handed self-congratulation pg gives himself through this entire piece of shit.
Paragraph 1: Einstein was smart, but he also had 'new ideas'
Paragraphs 2-15 : Reasons why I am smart and also have new ideas and you should remember to think of me like the Einstein of VCs. Just in case you missed this repeated point I am going to title this little think-piece 'Beyond Smart.'
I would trot out metaphors about Fonzie and water skis, but when it comes to pg that ship sailed years ago.
One way to test out your theory would be to pretend that someone else wrote the essay. If the essay no longer makes sense, or if it still comes across as self-congratulatory, I would agree with you. However if you perform this thought experiment I think you'll find that neither is true, so I think you're just reacting to identity of the author and not his actual point.
Whats the use in this comment? Is the earth flat because I can't see all the way around it? Can't we tolerate a little bit of interpretation, and not require that we only take texts literally? And, why the double standard? You interpreted OPs comment, so why can't he interpret PGs?
I think pg is right that less responsibility leads to new ideas.
Since having kids, my ability to pursue my interests is severely curtailed. My kids are just now at the point where most of them are sufficiently independent that I'd have less responsibility, and now my in-laws need care, with my parents probably not far behind.
It seems likely that I won't have significant free time and mental energy until my parents are dead, which is a bit of a depressing thought...
Unpopular opinion: with women taking a larger role in professional life, men are having to pick up the slack when it comes to child rearing. That leaves less time for men to invent, discover, create, etc. But women aren’t inventing, discovering or creating in proportion to their increased professional participation. Our society is worse off because of it.
Look at the people who made major scientific discoveries, or built new industries, or penned the most well known symphonies. They were almost entirely young men who were unmarried, or married in a time when women were expected to take care of the child rearing.
I was reading “How the Laser Happened” and the guy who invented it had four kids, but still had plenty of time to sit on park benches during evening walks by himself and ponder the physics of light. He went on many trips to visit other universities for research and worked tons of hours at Bell Labs. That was a normal way for men to work back then, even expected and viewed honorably.
We are going to have to accept less great discoveries and new inventions if society starts expecting men to bear half the effort of child rearing. You can’t come up with the laser or the Theory if Relativity if you’ve got crying kids you’re on the hook to watch while their mother is at work.
The alternative is to not even have kids, or to raise them poorly. And that’s not fair to them. Unfortunately, that seems to be what most people are settling on. Which does not bode well for the future of humanity, either.
This reminds me of the women who invented, made and fought for great things _despite_ the stigma and prejudice surrounding them.
A few famous examples in our field:
Ada Lovelace: the first program
Grace Hopper: the first compiler
Margaret Hamilton: software engineering, fault tolerance
We really should at least try to stop pushing women out of our field, so much potential might be lost by this nonsensical adversity that seems to be so prevalent.
No one is pushing them out of any field. If anything, there are concerted efforts to get young girls and women into any field that has historically been male dominant.
> But women aren’t inventing, discovering or creating in proportion to their increased professional participation.
Do you have evidence to suport this? (Geniunely curious)
Why do you think that is the case? Just the fact that they are more likely to be part-time or not able to be fully committed into their field while also being a mother does not warrant them enough time/energy/x to achieve those breakthroughs?
Each year, more women obtain degrees than ever have before. Many are post graduate degrees. More women are participating in the workforce than ever have before. More programs exist to promote women into STEM fields than we've ever had in the past. Western culture worships the idea of the strong, independent, intelligent woman. Women are participating in professional life like they never have before.
But go do a patent search. How many women do you see on a few random patents? Go do a search on LLCs in your state. Pull up a few. How many women do you see as the registered agent? Go do a search on LinkedIn on a few big tech companies. How many of the engineers, scientists, or programmers are women?
You can argue that things are just still not equal, and won't be until 50% of all programmers, engineers, scientists, etc. are women. But the trendline is pretty obvious for anyone willing to look. As more women and fewer men participate, you get the results I described above.
There's a lot of reasons for this. The first order effect is that men's productivity goes down as they devote more time to child rearing. That's just reality. I'm not even saying it's a bad one, but it's a reality nonetheless. That happens more frequently as men are expected to pick up the slack as women spend more time in the workforce.
But the bigger second order effect is that, at a societal level, we have at least two generations where both parents worked full time. Instead of mom staying home to raise them, they were raised in day care centers or with parents who were always distracted by work, neither one of which was 100% devoted to child rearing. One parent devoted 100% to a child's development is much more impactful than two parents devoted 50% of the time.
A society full of devoted, involved, active mothers increases productivity, discovery, and economic growth. You get children who grow up well adjusted, ready to face hardship in adulthood. Ready to build the future. And you get a larger quantity of such kids because parents aren't worried about the marginal cost of one more kid at the day care when both parents work. And those kids go onto have their own well adjusted kids, and you get new inventions, discoveries, etc.
We are lying to young girls, telling them the best thing they can do is go to college and get a great paying white collar job. And then we scratch our heads as to why birth rates are plummeting, and why male participation in the work force keeps dropping, and why family formation continues to fall. We have propagandized these women into despising motherhood: the culture doesn't even call them mothers anymore, they're "birthing people."
There's the first order effect of less male participation in ways that drive progress in science, industry, and the arts when you increase the participation of women in the workforce. But these second order effects are huge, and no one even realizes that they're happening under the hood. The Albert Einsteins or even Rosalind Franklins of tomorrow won't be nurtured, or even born, in a society that functions like this.
There are no doubt notable outliers, but go look at all the major composers of the last 300 years. How many women can you name? Same thing with Nobel Prizes. The vast majority are men. How many women built new industries or invented revolutionary machines or devices? It was almost entirely men.
Perhaps that will change in 100 years. I’m open to the argument that limited opportunity prevented women from accomplishing those things in the past. But historically that hasn’t been the case.
The societal factors that affect which gender produces an invention globally are very complex.
Using GPs example of raising children, sure we have more women in the workforce which is great. But we also have centuries of sexism deep in us that takes a while to root out. We have an imbalance of opportunity. Women today _still_ have a hard time rising capital for their companies. Etc. Etc.
Like you said, we'll see where things go over time but I remain quite excited for the ideas new minds will bring to our species regardless of gender, race, etc.
Even when mothers aren't pursuing a professional life, things are different because expectations of dads (and husbands for that matter) have gone up [1].
I think this is a good thing as far as families go (at least when the expectations remain realistic), as the bar for dad's parenting is still lower than mom's.
There's still more pressure on women to "do it all and look good while doing so" but men definitely are struggling with taking on responsibilities that their fathers could ignore.
1: it's actually a bit more nuanced than just higher expectations. You get more points just for not leaving than you used to, but once you are there, the expected role is a bit more involved. I read an article talking about how children's experiences with father's have diverged; either they aren't there at all, or they are far more involved then previous generations.
It's only bleak if you assume that men don't prefer taking care of children over spending time in science. Many men will prefer family life and are happy that it's now socially accepted to put their kids first.
And at the same time it frees up a lot of time for women to enter the field and make discoveries.
I can't remember where, but I've heard the mathematical research process being described as (paraphrasing):
"Once in a while we get a giant that makes huge strides in many fields. What is left for the rest of us is to walk in their wake and clean up and tighten up the theory based on the ideas that they provided".
Graham's point about how being intelligent and having new ideas are two different things is interesting, but I'm not convinced that one is better than the other. I'm not sure a world full of giants is better - you need people who spend time tightening and working on the existing theory as well.
The world has no lack of people tightening and working on existing theory, basically every knowledge worker taking a salary performs that role. So moving a few more of those to try to do new things wouldn't budge that huge micro optimization machine much at all.
Moreover, ideas are worthless if you aren't smart and diligent enough to see them through. Emphasizing ideas, to me, feels like the wrong thing because this encourages, for most people, a lazy attitude where recognition is expected for having an idea (whereas recognition is only due for making something out of your idea). In the end, ideas are cheap. Every giant had both the idea (which may have been through luck and timing plus deep knowledge earned through hard work and persistence) plus those other abilities to make something out of it, without which they would not be giants.
I mean, better and worse doesn't really exist. They just are. Being smart has certain consequences, and being inventive has others. And what's better for the world (for some definition of 'good') may not be what's better for the individual - just ask people who volunteer to pick up litter. Certainly it seems like being inventive is much more profitable for the individual than being smart, but of course that's not all that matters.
Such a great read. I thought Paul's most profound insight was right at the end where he mentions a connection between writing and discovering new ideas. I've found this personally to be true. I was blogging heavily from 2005 until 2010 and it led to me launching a string of products, getting funding for one of them, failing and continuing to launch until we succeeded spectacularly. Writing, I have found, enables my creative and analytical thought process. I've found that it serves as a kind of personal strategic planning process that educates the intuitive mind, and which results in insights over the proceeding days and weeks, which leads to more writing, and an iterative and exponential process.
The whole article reads bizarre to me. It’s like pg believes there is some kind of generic smartness metric that characterizes people, and so you’re either smart, very smart or not smart at all.
But people can be smart at things and terrible at others. And it’s not that smart people are terrible at things because they aren’t curious about them, it’s just that some tasks require different mindsets. Like I feel generally fairly smart in engineering, but I just can’t seem to learn chess at all.
Generating new ideas is an entirely different skill. You can’t balance having ideas and being smart. You should try and have both, and no, one is not more important than the other.
I mean the whole article feels like the stupid questions we’d ask ourselves when we were kids: would you rather have a 9-meter arm, or a boneless leg?
> The whole article reads bizarre to me. It’s like pg believes there is some kind of generic smartness metric that characterizes people, and so you’re either smart, very smart or not smart at all.
Yes it's true that some people are good at some things and bad at others. That does not mean there isn't a general underlying "cognitive ability" factor.
> That does not mean there isn't a general underlying "cognitive ability" factor.
Careful. "g" is a statistical regularity, not proof of a generalized "underlying cognitive ability."
From the same Wikipedia article:
>It is a variable that summarizes positive correlations among different cognitive tasks
>Yet, there is no consensus as to what causes the positive correlations between tests
This whole subject is a scientific, statistical, and ethical can of worms (as pg alludes to in the essay), and this isn't the place to get into it... I just want to flag that it's a bit more complicated/controversial than it might sound at first.
I also haven’t seen any explanations for why positive correlation between any particular set of tests leads to the conclusion that this is truly a general cognitive ability. If you test people on the ability to play the piano, organ, and harpsichord, and find positive correlation between competency in all of them, you wouldn’t conclude that this demonstrates general cognitive ability. You’d just conclude that those musical instruments are similar. Likewise, choosing a bunch of tests from, say, all the common areas of study in Western schools, doesn’t automatically say anything about the entire range of cognitive abilities.
The argument for general cognitive ability is because the correlation is observed among all the various measures related to cognitive ability that we have. If you test people on the ability to play the piano, organ, and harpsichord, and assert that this is a reflection of general cognitive ability, then this is prediction is testable by later correlating this ability with other measures, and gets falsified by observing the metrics with which it does not correlate. So far, the concept of "G" survives because it actually does succeed in various tests of alternative metrics of cognitive ability - e.g. "emotional intelligence" metrics, biological metrics such as reaction speed, and various 'outcomes' e.g. job performance and future income controlled for socioeconomic background.
In essence, the answer to "why positive correlation between any particular set of tests leads to the conclusion that this is truly a general cognitive ability" is that many respectable people have tried to find measures of aspects of cognitive ability that are separate and uncorrelated, however, as far as I know, all such attempts have failed so far and their experiments on alternative metrics did correlate with everything else and just became more data supporting the concept.
> Careful. "g" is a statistical regularity, not proof of a generalized "underlying cognitive ability."
I mean, the statistical regularity in question is the mean of all other cognitive abilities correlating. I'm not sure how else you'd define "underlying cognitive ability" than "the correlated first principal component of other, specific cognitive abilities".
I did not see the word "imagination" mentioned in that article. It seems like a glaring omission given the topic. "How can imagination be cultivated?" would be an important question in that context. It could include things like letting kids (and adults) have more unstructured time, etc. We've largely banished boredom from the world now that we're constantly connected to the internet via our smartphones, but boredom could also be important for imagination. In my experience a lot of my best ideas came not with hard focus ("working hard") on a problem but while I was on a walk in nature not particularly focused on anything.
Pithy Einstein quotes likely fail to capture the full picture of what Einstein did and should not be used as a basis for casually dismissing attempts to have meatier discussions.
I don't think he's lost much in the article by not descending into the rabbit-hole of developing a nuanced view of what "smart" means. I think it's a word used frequently enough in common language that the reader can do justice in interpreting it correctly and in good faith. Same goes for other, equally generic terms like, "she really has it all together" or "he's a pretty sharp guy". These aren't vacuous, meaningless statements, despite the lack of precision in their meaning.
Fair enough, I probably didn’t express myself well.
It’s just that the article re-plays the old “intelligence vs creativity” debate, and is full of naive statements about it. And you kind of want to answer: “you know, I think it’s a little more complicated”
Hmm, it seems like the article has addressed most of your points directly.
> It’s like pg believes there is some kind of generic smartness metric that characterizes people, and so you’re either smart, very smart or not smart at all.
> But people can be smart at things and terrible at others. And it’s not that smart people are terrible at things because they aren’t curious about them, it’s just that some tasks require different mindsets. Like I feel generally fairly smart in engineering, but I just can’t seem to learn chess at all.
He addressed this specific point in the "if intelligence/smartness is all that matters" scenario:
"If intelligence is what matters, and also mostly inborn, the natural consequence is a sort of Brave New World fatalism. The best you can do is figure out what sort of work you have an "aptitude" for, so that whatever intelligence you were born with will at least be put to the best use, and then work as hard as you can at it."
He is acknowledging that different people have good intelligence in different things (like engineering vs chess in your example). But he is saying this really shouldn't be the focus at all, because intelligence isn't truly what matters.
> Generating new ideas is an entirely different skill.
It is and he spent most of the article saying that skill can be cultivated (and isn't necessarily about intelligence).
> You should try and have both, and no, one is not more important than the other.
He also stated this as well at the introduction and this was pretty much the point of the essay.
> I mean the whole article feels like the stupid questions we’d ask ourselves when we were kids: would you rather have a 9-meter arm, or a boneless leg?
Not sure I get it or how the essay feels like that question. He isn't saying you can only have one (intelligence) or the other (skill to generate new ideas). He said it's ideal to have both.
New ideas - are created by recombination and filtering. Your subconscious generates new recombination, the wider the scope and stranger the combinations - the higher the chances of a miss, but also of discovering a "pass" to a new field.
Now these re-combinations are filtered, again first subconsciously.
If you murdered your childish, playful self in your late youth or give too much about societys evaluation of what society can not even evaluate your idea might never creep into your aware consciousness.
Now for the ugly part. Some of us are, by curse or luck, predisposed to have a more flexible brain when it comes to recombinating ideas, persons, circumstances.
My basic assumption always was, that it is a useful side-effect of watchfulness aka the guardian role aka looking for danger in noise.
This of course can go horribly wrong.
A creatives world is just one frail filter function working away from, writing game of thrones too living in game of thrones in your living room.
I really would love to see the statistics here, to test this.
Any center of creativity should be surrounded by camps of relatives were the filter functions went haywire.
Now for the final touch. There is no recipe. No "cook" this algorithm, dance this dance through your brain and you will turn more creative. If asked for it- the brain will fantasize and invent those recipes. Which will be nice to read, but worthless when attempting to reproduce. The closest one would get is to reproduce the education that shaped shapeable brains into extraordinary creative people.
And if all this works out, you are still just somebody with a (good) idea. Ideas are plenty in the sea and having good ideas does not equal the ability to execute on it.
I haven't read it but "smart" isn't some universal trait. One can be "smart" in one area and really dumb in another. I don't understand how someone can be a good chef. You can be great at that, intuitively using the chemistry of it while failing even the most basic chemistry class.
To me, this is fundamentally the difference between science and engineering: Science involves discovering things which are new, while engineering takes those discoveries and makes them practically useful.
In terms of my own work, tarsnap is absolutely a work of engineering -- I very deliberately avoided doing anything new, instead using established and well-tested concepts. The exception to this is scrypt, which I designed -- and proved the security of -- because there was no existing password based key derivation function which met my standards for security. On that one occasion I crossed the line from engineering into science.
Science is great, but there's nothing to be ashamed about in doing engineering work. The world needs good engineers who can take basic scientific discoveries and make useful products out of them!
If I think of PG's accomplishments they could be characterized as "discovering things which are new" to him, but also characterized as taking ideas that were cutting edge, uncommon, or out of favor and bringing them to fruition (sounds more like engineering).
I don't think of the YC structure as discovering anything inherently new but taking an approach that was not being done in the VC industry and trying to scientifically iterate on it.
Bayesian spam filtering seemed a discovery to him, but it wasn't for science: someone else had already published a paper even. However, the results of previous attempts weren't good enough until PG focused on the problem and used a large enough corpus of data.
Even commodity manufacturing is its own art because you have to make millions of something per day instead of tens of thousands. You have to take material in one side of the factory and spit it out the other as fast as you can. You've crossed the limits of being able to warehouse half completed bits because machine #17 has gone on the fritz again and nobody can finish product.
So I need more reliable equipment and then I still need to make them at a lower price than the luxury model I'm copying.
I don't think anyone who has entirely avoided skilled manual labor in their lives quite comprehends how big a difference there is being able to do something well, and being able to do it at scale. It's almost not the same problem domain.
That descrption of mass manufacturing reminds me of building reliable computing systems from unreliable parts (server farm(s)), something I have never done, only read about. It is apparently very different from regular software development in similar ways.
There is a lot of science which is "stamp collecting" or "puzzle solving", i.e. all the fiddly bits of fleshing out the new theory and its ramifications. There is also, in engineering, the occasional need to develop something really innovative and new.
The thing is, no one outside of science notices all the non-discovery stuff, because it doesn't make it into the textbooks or histories of science. But, it's most of what goes on in science. Also, in engineering, much of the most innovative stuff requires too much prior knowledge to even understand what it is, so not many people find out about it.
Not really. You just, correctly, described the relationship between science and engineering as a feedback loop. But that also means there is no first and last.
A step in engineering reveals a problem that scientists can focus on. A scientific discovery makes new engineering possible. Progress of engineering enables building tools that make new kinds of observations possible, enabling scientific research that was previously not possible. Rinse, repeat. There's no separating one from another - they run in lockstep.
If an engineer designs a bridge and says "well, it seems to stay up, but I don't know why... go ask a scientist?" they'll lose their license pretty damn fast.
I think the point is that bridge building originated as a craft that was informed by a lot of examples that happened to survive (ie. survivorship bias) leading to rules of thumb and patterns that gradually yielded to scientific explanations (often driven by trying to understand failed bridges designed according to rules applied / patterns extended outside of the context where they were valid).
The consensus among top physicists during the 'heroic era' was that Von Neumann was the smartest among them, higher IQ than Einstein's, but Einstein had something else.
Eugene P. Wigner:
> I have known a great many intelligent people in my life. I knew Planck, von Laue and Heisenberg. Paul Dirac was my brother in law; Leo Szilard and Edward Teller have been among my closest friends; and Albert Einstein was a good friend, too. But none of them had a mind as quick and acute as Jansci [John] von Neumann. I have often remarked this in the presence of those men and no one ever disputed me. [...] But Einstein's understanding was deeper even than von Neumann's. His mind was both more penetrating and more original than von Neumann's. And that is a very remarkable statement. Einstein took an extraordinary pleasure in invention. Two of his greatest inventions are the Special and General Theories of Relativity; and for all of Jansci's brilliance, he never produced anything as original.
Years and years ago I read Einstein's biography (the one by Isaacson). One anecdote that remains bright in my memory after all these years is about Einstein and sailing. Einstein liked sailing, and because of where he was living he mostly did lake sailing. One thing about lake sailing is that you can often end up becalmed. What Einstein did was to take a notebook with him when he went sailing; a notebook with notes about what he was working on at the time. Whenever the wind died down he would take out his notebook and start working on his current research. When the wind picked up he would put his notebook away and resume sailing.
There is no doubt that Einstein was brilliant. I believe he was as successful as he was because he was also exceptionally self disciplined.
I read that too, and I got the impression being forced to work alone at the patent office was crucial for his 1905 Annus mirabilis papers. Lots of other great ideas (e.g. Mendel, Darwin) have come about from intellectual isolation.
I wonder how Graham would respond to that given he's so intertwined in Silicon Valley.
And Bill James did a lot of his Sabermetric writing while working night shifts as a security guard.[0]
He's not Einstein, but he was way ahead of his time in a particular area and it's fair to say he's been hugely influential in the baseball community for nearly 40 years.
> I believe he was as successful as he was because he was also exceptionally self disciplined.
Well, that's one way to put it. These were the rules he wrote out for his wife. [0]
You will make sure:
- that my clothes and laundry are kept in good order;
- that I will receive my three meals regularly in my room;
- that my bedroom and study are kept neat, and especially that my desk is left for my use only.
You will renounce all personal relations with me insofar as they are not completely necessary for social reasons. Specifically, You will forego:
- my sitting at home with you;
- my going out or travelling with you.
You will obey the following points in your relations with me:
- you will not expect any intimacy from me, nor will you reproach me in any way;
- you will stop talking to me if I request it;
- you will leave my bedroom or study immediately without protest if I request it.
You will undertake not to belittle me in front of our children, either through words or behaviour.
Charitably, the context of the time, this sounds like a man with a broken marriage who wants to continue providing for his wife who likely didn't work and their children.
I think asking to be left alone in his private spaces, to not have drama, to do really basic chores like cooking and cleaning (in the context of the era) if you're not working or bringing in income seems really reasonable.
He's a bigger man than me - I'd never live with an essentially ex wife.
I couldn't imagine writing something like that to someone who I shared a life with for over a decade, and the mother of my children. But maybe thing were different back then...
> "I belive smart people want to work on ideas that are net positive"
Do you have any basis for that belief or is that just wishful thinking? Or is that the way how you choose to define "smart", so it becomes true by definition?
I would say that a persons goals, purposes and values is an important aspect that's pretty much orthogonal to their intellectual ability to figure out how to best achieve their long-term goals and further their values, whatever they happen to be. Perhaps there's some correlation there, but IMHO it's not necessary nor very strong, all kinds of counterexamples come to mind; there certainly are people who are very intelligent and effective while literally being sociopaths.
Smart people also realize the world isn't perfect, and it wasn't before we were here either. In a world where long term outcomes have infinite factors taking actions with short term benefits is rational because there is no control or impact over the long term effects.
That is obviously not totally true, but I think probabilistically speaking, it's _somewhat_ true.
Close. Smart people are _willing_ to take actions with short term benefits at the cost of long term detriments.
Smart people understand that there are multiple correct answers to the same problem depending on what timeframe you are operating under, and that the long timeframe is less controllable.
Just having the good new ideas isn't really enough, though. You have to be really persistent about figuring out all the details and making them work. This is related to, but definitely not the same as, being fascinated/obsessed by the topic.
Of course Einstein had great ideas. But he also spent many years working out the consequences of, eg, his first ideas about the fixed speed of light in vacuum and its consequences in physics, initially during downtime at his patent office job. Nearly all of the impact of the theory is in that working-out.
Work ethic is super important. The ability to grind on your ideas. And I think having some extrovert nature really helps in getting your ideas out there.
I was Paul's definition of smart, w/o good ideas. I loved to learn things. But I didn't really have the work ethic to build new things. I feel like I've done fine in life, but had you asked my middle school and high school teachers -- and even university... I've probably underperformed.
In contrast my son is bright, but not the academic star I was. But he has crazy work ethic in ideas he cares about. I've really nurtured his work ethic and played down the "smart" academic angle. If wants to finish a personal project and not study for that French quiz -- I'm fine with that. He gets an A-/B+ for the year, rather than an A. So what. The passion he pours into his ideas though is great and I think will serve him better over the course of his life.
I do compliment it. But probably more than that I emphasize that things worth doing are often hard and hard things often take time. So I taught him that setting short term goals along the way to long-term goals will help him stay on track. So he's becoming really good at showing me various intermediate states to his work, and I'm really excited when I see it. Whether its a game that he's writing or a business that he's creating.
As a younger kid he loved Legos. I think that contributed. He'd just do progressively larger and larger sets. As a kid I never could do a large Lego set. I had them, but they all remained unfinished.
>Some would attribute the difference between intelligence and having new ideas to "creativity," but this doesn't seem a very useful term. As well as being pretty vague, it's shifted half a frame sideways from what we care about: it's neither separable from intelligence, nor responsible for all the difference between intelligence and having new ideas.
I find this dismissiveness of creativity to be somewhat strange. It's by definition, what he should be looking for. I can't help but think he's got a paradigm in mind for finding 'new ideas' and feels like creativity is too outside the box for it.
This might be a bit of a hot take, but I feel creativity is more about being “untethered” and about synthesis of different ideas, techniques, etc. in novel ways. Unfortunately, one can be as creative as can be and still never come up with something “good”. (Who is to decide what’s good? It’s almost surely in large part a social or cultural thing, much like “genius” is.) I mentioned musicians elsewhere so I will again: A lot of creative musicians are great at noodling around, making neat new melodies, but aren’t coming up with any coherent or consistent ideas that “lead” to anywhere. Creativity just seems like a “raw ingredient” for ideas in this view.
This was fairly obvious to me as early as elementary school. Some kids would just get new concepts and then easily apply their new knowledge, and some worked really really hard and also got good grades. The hard workers were not as "smart" but made up for it with hard work, because in my mind, smart was always "the ability to learn something new and apply it quickly".
The difference got more obvious with each level of school, and when I got to college, the difference was stark. There were definitely the "just smart" people and the "work really hard people".
In my work life, it's nice to work with a mix of both. People who can take in new knowledge and generate new ideas, as well as people who just get it and work really hard. It's especially great when idea generators can communicate well and the hard workers can make it happen.
There are other aspects as well. Much of them have to do with managing the load up times of the mental model of the topic at hand, with focus, but also setting up/starting correctly.
Quickness
Some people pick up things very quickly, others take a while to pick them up. Neither is necessarily "smarter" because they might have different thresholds to what they consider "getting it". The depth that they pick some new thing and feel they "get it" might be different. Additionally, how well they grasp it might be different levels in terms of when they feel they fully grok it. Smart or skilled on something is holistic understanding, the speed isn't always as important but is definitely helpful. Like learning something with prototypes rather than a big sprawling project, the former will be faster.
Longevity or Ability to Stick With It
Another aspect is people that pick up skills and how much they want to use them. If you quickly get skills, that may also mean you get bored with the skills/knowledge quicker. The people that work harder at it or have a deeper threshold or attainment level of how they "get it", may work with that more because it took more effort to grasp or the more they iterate on it the more depth/detail/interest is found.
Some people will be able to stick with something they get longer, others may want to move to the next thing. There are all sorts of variables with this: time, goal alignment, need, survival, effort, results, groups you are in like if it was for something personal or at work etc.
Self Starter
A key aspect to smartness is being a "self starter", one that looks into things driven by interest or potential need. The ability to just start playing and prototyping is a great skill to have.
Ability to Finish
On top of that, setting things up to easily ship is another way people can be professional. When you start a prototype but get the line to production setup early, the work you do will take less adjustments and make it easier to ship when needed. Right after a prototype I like to setup tools/games/apps all the way to the end on device, different platforms, different styles, basically two of everything so that issues you run into are already smoothed. This makes it easy to ship.
Simple to Approach
I like concepts that are simple to start, and potentially advanced long term to keep interest.
Since I make games and tools I like the "easy to approach, difficult to master" aspect of things and try to create that in my productions. I like the game/tool to be a "friend" so you like using it and it isn't tasking. That is another aspect, how much effort is required.
"If you can't explain something in simple terms, you don't understand it." -- Feynman
Iteration, Practice and Deeper Dives
Most highly skilled people are smart, of varying levels of speed, but the ultimate way to build skills is the repetition and iteration of consist creation/production and shipping. A deeper dive. The more detail and depth the better you can do it "simple". I usually judge people, at least in games, as what they have shipped. Sometimes I am amazed at how those people that produce come to the result, some get there fast and others are constantly re-learning, both have their benefits.
A Beginners Mind
A "beginners mind" or Shoshin [1] helps to refine that and keep things simple/approachable, which I think is the main goal of creation/production. I also believe the job of engineering is taking complex systems and making them simple, but still allowing the advanced users access to highly customize or use deeper features. This technique also makes it easy to come back to work on something years later that doesn't take a long time to load up the mental model.
Like other PG posts, I feel like he misses the elephant in the room, opportunity. You can be intelligent or highly creative, but unless you have the opportunity to use your abilities in some fashion, neither will do you much good.
Like so many others like him, they probably miss opportunity being such a big deal because it was so abundant for them. This is not to say they didn't also have to be intelligent and work hard to get where they are, but they also had to have things align for them in their life, that were outside their control, to get where they are.
I think emphasizing opportunity is putting the cart before the horse. I believe opportunity follows from initiative, imagination, and boldly asking and exploring great questions.
Game-changers like Einstein differ from other geniuses like Oppenheimer by asking imaginative questions and then independently exploring even when they lead to weird disruptive implications like warped space and time. Einstein never waited to be invited to the party. He created his own.
Without opportunity there is no cart, nor horse, nor road to travel on.
Einstein was fortunate to be born into a family that was educated and well off enough to afford him to study. (Same with Oppenheimer and I'd reason most celebrated intellects) Had Einstein been born in the son of former slaves in the US South, he never would have been allowed to study math or physics, he likely wouldn't have been able to escape his situation as a farmer, and some other scientist would have had to figure out relativity. All of that is opportunity.
There are two types of people who have received 4.0 GPAs and very high SAT scores.
1. Geniuses. They can look at a calculus text book for 30 minutes and understand calculus and get an A on a calculus test.
2. Reasonably smart people who think that getting a 4.0 is very important, for whatever reason. So important that it becomes their identity. They spend every minute trying to get that 4.0.
I was probably in middle school or high school when I realized that I'm not nearly as smart as #1, but just as smart as #2. It just isn't that hard to realize that the effort to outcome ratio isn't good on being a #2 type person. And more importantly, long term if you go down that path you will be working some shitty job making less 400k a year at 80/hours a week. Because your identity is being someone who is #1, even if #1 means billing the most hours doing tax accounting in the basement of some old building on a Friday night.
Recently I’ve been a bit disillusioned as all the cleverness of my youth had gone wasted. Albeit the ideas were low hanging fruits but had I had the skills to implement them I think I would have been better off. Now that I do have the skills, they’d long been executed by others.
Now the world has gotten a lot more sophisticated and I don’t know what to sophisticate myself on. They all seem a bit boring or stupid on one hand, or another monumental climb where I’ll have to start over from the beginning.
All monumental climbs start with a single step. It's easy to get lost thinking about what could have been or what will be and forget about what can be, right now at this very moment.
It's not enjoyable to think about wasted opportunities in your past, so don't let your future self suffer the same fate.
Do at least part of one of the ideas you find boring or stupid to get back into the mindset of being someone who is able to create. Armed with that, you'll spend less time thinking about whether you can do it and more time about what you want to do.
Obviously for people who are depressed or suffer from ADHD you often can't "just do it" but in general I think it's worth trying to shift the way we think about the things we can accomplish.
A lot of the biggest Web-related tech money-makers and success stories are things it wouldn't have occurred to me to try, because I'd have assumed they were illegal or otherwise so awful that people'd tar and feather me if I proposed them. Sometimes, they were/are illegal, in fact, but it somehow worked out OK for the founders anyway (business might eventually fall apart, but who cares, they made millions, if not billions)
Spying on what people do on web pages, down to their mouse movements, sometimes. Tracking all that across sites. Then using that to target ads at them.
AirBnB and Uber... just, all of what they do.
Crypto exchanges. It's crazy to me that these managed to go long enough to gain a toehold before facing any sort of banking or securities regulations.
Addictive mechanics on social media and in pay-to-play games.
Mint and other go-betweens with banks that just store and re-use credentials, including answers to "security questions". Seems like a really dangerous idea, probably involves encouraging a bunch of people to violate terms of service on a massive scale, and if you're presenting connections to banks that you know have those terms, seems like you'd be hella liable for that. And my god, if there's a breach that involves your systems and you've been hoovering up people's banking credentials? I'd fully expect to be facing extremely scary and probably-going-to-go-poorly-for-my-company lawsuits from a dozen enormous banks. How do these companies get insured in any way whatsoever? I don't get it. Inexplicably (to me), instead of crashing and burning and being laughed out of the room at any and all fundraising meetings, these made a few people very, very rich instead.
And so on.
Plenty of things not in those categories, of course. Stripe was a great idea, just a hard problem—I'd have had no clue how to seek terms from CC companies to get such a thing off the ground, to pick what's just step #1 of even starting to try at that.
Some are great ideas that I might have come up with, but I haven't a clue about how to even begin to fundraise (I'm not past barely-an-acquaintance territory with any rich people, for even small values of "rich", so that doesn't help), and they're the kind of thing that pretty much requires a pile of cash to even make an attempt—actually, Stripe again seems like a good example. I couldn't feasibly have done even an MVP of that solo, or even with a very small team "in a garage"; the fundraising is another necessary hurdle to even credibly trying.
Some stuff's smart people doing smart things that are eventually very lucrative. Those I (theoretically) could have done, I guess. Redis, for instance. Still, the really big money seems to be in convincing people to finance things that feel like they ought to be illegal (and might actually be), and how that all works continues to elude me. How do you spot a law you can break long enough to get traction against the "dinosaurs" who are bound to follow the law, versus one that will land you on the losing end of a ruinous lawsuit and make your name mud, or in prison? Do people actually know how to spot those, or are the successful ones just lucky? Is that in fact almost all laws once you have some rich people backing you? I haven't a clue.
(Nb this is not intended as sour-grapes complaining, but rather an exploration of the ways in which "having an idea" is a really, really long way from even making a meaningful attempt at implementation for a variety of prominent tech products, including such hurdles as not understanding when doing illegal or horribly unethical stuff is actually a very good idea, if you're just trying to launch a product and get rich—these are deficiencies in my understanding of the world, clearly)
Which everybody should (must?) read.
Seriously, should be a mandatory read in school curriculum, instead of "catcher in the rye" or some Scottish ballade [+].
[+] not that there's something wrong with any of them
But this is wrong. The point of this essay is saying the opposite is true: A decent IQ gives you the chance to have a change of perspective.
IQ is the artistic equivalent of "how well can you draw a line?" You need a good foundation for artistic expression but many, many people have that and still don't create art worth remembering.
Intelligence (the capacity to process) combined with knowledge can give you that strong intellectual foundation -- but that's all it is. The rest is finding that change of perspective.
I do not think there is any disagreement here. Your reply, the essay, as well as the quote I posted are all about this distance between being naturally intelligent and making something out of it.
There is a disagreement, though, because it's about which aspect takes precedence -- which has the most value.
Imagine a test called Artistic Quotient which gives you a numeric value for how correctly you draw lines, circles, etc. An average artist might have an AQ of 100 and a very good artist an AQ of 120.
Now, imagine looking at a Van Gogh and saying, that the artistic expression he achieved is worth 80 AQ points, putting him on the level of someone who can free hand a perfect circle! It would sound ridiculous, right? Who cares if you can free hand a perfect circle? What does that give you? What's the value of that?
Instead you would tell an aspiring artist, get to an AQ 120 or so as your foundation and then it's all about making something out of it.
My guess: repeatedly zooming out and in again -- to look at the many parts of the whole to see how they all interconnect and interact to then wonder why and why not.
Would add to the qualities of mind for new ideas: you need physical domain competence in something, because it will be the source of heuristics and isomorphisms that provide an intuitive fast map of a territory.
I identify as a hyper-stupid intelligent person, where I can go breadth first into a lot of domains and get out of my depth really quickly, while impressing the ignorant and irritating the competent. The opportunities are amazing, you get to appreciate the most incredible things, but this kind of virtuotic ignorance (curiosity, charitably) needs to be tempered by practice and education in at least one thing, as you are really only ever as good as the thing you are best at. Important thoughts.
A lot of new ideas come from unexpected combinations of ideas from multiple seemingly unrelated areas. James Burke writes a history of the world based on this in his book "Connections". I wrote in my paper "Origins of the D Programming Language" how D is influenced by my experiences in airplane gearboxes.
Who would have thought that a gearbox had anything to do with programming language design?
There are, I believe, two kinds of thinking/intelligence. One is analysis and that is the case of many smart people who achieve nothing - other than taking things apart and being critical.
There is a second kind which we don't even seem to have a word for - lets call it gestalysis as opposed to analyis. Putting things together to form new things. The essence of this is to try understand something by building it. You can prove something by logic, but trying to build something and have it work also "proves" something.
For example can you build an ant colony? We may understand ant colonies by taking them apart and examining the parts, but an important part of an ant colony is the interactions and behaviors. Can we understand an ant colony by taking it apart (and certainly that helps) or can we understand it better if we can create a simulation?
And finally, there is a kind of gestalysis that goes further - creating behaviors and interactions that go beyond simulation of things we know. This is, I believe the provenance of startups and entrepreneurs.
It seems to me that Einstein's brilliance not due to analysis but gestalysis. My 2 cents.
It's trivially easy to come up with new ideas. Just take any existing idea and perturb in a random direction. With high probability it will be new.
Drugs and some mental disorders make it very easy to do this. The problem is, new ideas aren't very valuable. What is valuable is intelligently generating new ideas that take into account what came before. And for that you need intelligence and education.
There is a kind of folk psychology in tech that emphasizes tinkering and working on projects. But almost all projects are bad. The reason tinkering produces results at a population level is because you have N agents randomly searching the terrain.
That is fine if you're interested only in population effects, like VCs typically are. Then you can just watch for the random ideas that catch on and bet on them.
But if you're going to decide whether you'd rather be smart or be a random-walking tinkerer, the choice is obvious. It's vastly better to be smart because most tinkerers fail and never have anything to show for it.
Smart people with ideas know that that uploading fledgling, unrealised ideas into the world can mean feeding their baby into a meat grinder of criticism, scepticism, plagiarism and probably some other -isms.
E.g., Andrew Wile had some pretty good insights as to how to go about tackling the solution of Fermat's theorem (read Fermat's Last Theorem by Simon Singh - good book), but did he go 'Hey, listen everybody - what if we did X?' Like hell he did.
Instead he secluded himself and worked on it till he could present a robust proof fait accompli.
This is by no means an unusual story - think of all the bright folks who are tinkering with projects all over the world, even devoting themselves to it full time - trying to realise something that they can call their own.
So, the 'gap between intelligence and ideas' may be partly due to the desire of intelligent people to contain their ideas until they can own the downstream benefits arising from them.
At Pumping Station One in Chicago, I learned a golden rule:
Ideas aren't worth shit.
I'm a veritable fountain of ideas, but that doesn't mean squat. Only instantiated ideas, whose value is successfully communicated to others stand a chance of impact in the world.
Ideas spring from mapping the world (packers need not apply), and noticing things on the newly connected edges of the map. Those ideas then need to be brought into the real world with luck, preparedness, persistence in some mix.
Then you need communication skills and people skills to communicated the ideas and tools you've created to others, to get them to invest their time and effort and start adoption.
Being smart helps, but it's noticing the connections, and having a large set of tools to build on any ideas that are the key piece here. You need some smarts, curiosity, persistence, luck, people skills and a network once you've done the work.
1. Noticing hundreds, thousands, of details and how they fit together into a larger whole.
- Example: When someone is so deep into an industry they understand every role, action, problem, and solution, and the shortcomings, and use that information to spot out the most important problems and tie them together into a new business idea.
2. Having an intuition of how something should be, and digging out that intuition through the act of creation.
- Example: Artwork that is trying fully express the most ideal form of beauty, nature, violence, grandness, etc.
3. Noticing "bugs" / paradoxes in real life - things that don't make sense - and having the curiosity to debug it.
- Example: Einstein realizing a paradox - "If I pursue a beam of light with the velocity c (velocity of light in a vacuum), I should observe such a beam of light as an electromagnetic field at rest though spatially oscillating."
"The worlds smartest man means no more to me than the worlds smartest ant". Dr Manhattan
I am not the smartest person in the room nor the least. But I know my smartness / IQ lies on a spectrum - just like my tolerance for cold or for oxygen etc.
It's pretty easy to find places where my tolerance for cold is utterly exhausted, and there are situations where the same is for my IQ. And it's fairly easy to find animals or other organisms who can easily handle temperatures I cannot.
I suspect in the big universe there are plenty of creatures whose intelligence and smartness extends out past the spectrum on which I, pg or Einstein sit.
I would like to know the answers they have to these questions - and I wonder if I would ever understand them.
One day we might meet such a species. Will we be happy as the pet?
Being smart and having new ideas isn't that great either. You still need people to believe in the idea and/or resources to pursue it.
I have various ideas and I'm not even that smart. They wont go anywhere because I dont have the time or money to pursue them. Plus, it's hard to come up with something truly new. Even if the item doesn't exist, it's probably patented (ran into that recently).
"So what are the other ingredients in having new ideas?"
The willingness to think about how and why things work or are broken, coupled with sufficient cross-domain knowledge to synthesize new ideas.
> Why do so many smart people fail to discover anything new?
We live in a world were so much has been discovered already by the smart people before us. There isn't anymore low hanging fruit today, discovering novel things likely involves spending your early adulthood learning all the things our smart ancestors discovered as a primer to being able to understand what's left to discover.
Most of us will need to be happy with merely understanding what has already been discovered. And realize that, for every Newton or Euler of the word, there were billions of people that history forgot.
>There isn't anymore low hanging fruit today, discovering novel things likely involves spending your early adulthood learning all the things our smart ancestors discovered as a primer to being able to understand what's left to discover.
Just the opposite. Discovery happens when your confined and forced to discover (be creative) to survive and evolve. If your learning from everyone before your not discovering anything, your just repeating history.
What I'm getting at is, if you want to expand humanities understanding of physics, you first need to spend six or so years learning everything that humanity already knows about physics. After that, you can spend a few years doing research or designing experiments -- usually alongside someone whose dedicated their life to the field -- which will then, hopefully, culminate in your tiny little contribution to the knowledge of humanity.
But, even just 150 years ago, you could have made multiple ground-breaking contributions to the world of science, or even developed entire fields of study.
The most interesting point to me in this was the observation that it could be things associated with youth, which made me think immediately of John Cleese's brilliant talks on creativity. He (Cleese) makes the point that good ideas need time, in two ways: time without pressure to produce, and time set aside to focus. Both of these are so, so much harder for late or mid stage career adults to make. I truly believe this is the most important ingredient in getting interesting things done in the second half of life.
I only skimmed the discussion and original post, but "training" didn't jump out at me from either. One can distinguish "ideas": neat new apps for iOS that will make money, or, say, string theory or quantum chromodynamics.
The first requires people to pay attention to how people are using their phones and, probably, how business operates. But then, Angry Birds was probably a hack-inspired project so maybe luck's a component as well. The others require a whole lot of background in math, physics, a sense of what is beautiful in these disciplines and some idea of how the current models work. Way more effort, and not really subject to a hack attack.
Both are facilitated by intelligence, opportunity, etc. But I wonder whether people are interested in or appreciate the amount of spade work involved for some areas. If you want to work hard AND make some bucks, work on material science (catalyst design, high-temp superconductors) or try to understand the human immune system and how it could be modulated.
Lots of coding in there, and the winners are heroes who will be feted worldwide. Oh, I'll throw in another one... A critical skill in Pharma is, to be blunt, patent breaking. If one can determine that two molecules are sufficiently different to be outside a patent but sufficiently similar (biochemically and physicochemically) to be active at the same target in the same strength or better... I should point out that modern drugs can make several Billion a quarter once on the market.
I always thought of IQ tests as the artistic equivalent of "how well can you draw a line?" You need a good foundation for artistic expression but many, many people have that and still don't create art worth remembering.
Intelligence (the capacity to process) combined with knowledge can give you that strong intellectual foundation -- but that's all it is.
Alan Kay was wrong; a change of perspective is not worth 80 IQ points. The opposite is true. A decent IQ gives you the chance to have a change of perspective.
No. It's qualitative not quantitative. You measure quantities; you can only measure aspects of qualities (and that's not advised as it's incredibly dangerous).
But as Paul says here, creativity is probably not the best word. I would describe it as "understanding".
I think there are hard problems and easy problems, and smarts reflects ones ability to solve hard problems.
So, the question should be how does one solve hard problems?
The solutions to any problem can trivially be found by searching through the possible solutions and checking which solution works. The problem with this approach is that it is intractable space. Thus, the main ways that we traverse the search space of solutions is limiting the search space and by pattern matching. [Think in terms of chess where the search space is large to find the best possible move...The way they get around it is by simply reducing the search space and pattern matching.]
Consequently, a smart person would be one who has developed intuition about a problem enough to limit the search space of the available solutions and has a vast collection of patterns to draw from that will aid in the problem solving process.
He did touch on one point with all extraordinary genius, they were all obsess. I think this fosters having enough intuition about a problem and having a toolbox of patterns necessary to solve hard problems. Is there any genius without a vast toolbox of techniques to solve problems? Is there any genius without a supreme understanding of his problem area?
Having intuition and huge toolbox for solving problems we know are necessary conditions for solving hard problems, but are they sufficient conditions?
Good comment. I think that maybe what you're getting at is the intuition on particular problems is not necessarily correlated to high IQ beyond a minimum threshold.
From everything I've read, almost every contemporary of Von Neumann says he was the 'smartest' person they ever met. It seems his brain just worked at a completely different clock speed than normal people, even normal geniuses.
However, while is contributions are immense and widespread, I don't think they come close to the utterly astounding work of Godel.
While Godel was insanely smart, he also just looked at the world in a very unusual way that let him see certain meta axioms that have profound implications for pretty much every scientist and philosopher. I don't know if it was circumstance that led him to a special tool box, or obsession, or a certain spark of creativity everyone else lacked, but there's something worth exploring there.
I know quite a few conventional entrepreneurs that I wouldn't consider smart in a general context, but are extremely well versed in what they do.
Experience will help you to develop an instinct, and once you understand why everything is the way it is, you need to focus on finding an edge/making a difference/having an impact.
This takes time, experimentation, and most of all the willingness and ability to fail, while you gain deeper and new insights.
Willingness comes from personal grit and belief, but ability usually comes from your network, venture capital, a rich family, or having a successful business in the first place...
Following Taleb's ideas, I'd say that, to find your edge, it would make more sense to try something new 52 weeks in a row, instead of spending 52 weeks on a single idea.
Assume you have the grit and ability to experiment, then you still need a heuristic to determine which ideas are worth pursuing, and that's where luck comes in. Markets do not behave rationally, so reasoning can only bring you so far.
"How to be successful" formulas could be compared to the "how to draw an owl" meme [0]: you need grit, the ability to experiment, and hope that this combination will eventually put you in the perfect context at a time where everything aligns, and where you take the decision to pursue the correct opportunity...
one of the things that helps generate new ideas that can be cultivated is the ability to be playful. once a given problem or subject is sufficiently loaded onto a brain, if that person can relax and have child-like naivete about poking and prodding, novel insight is usually not far.
cultivating this ability is fairly well understood in a lot of domains, i think. two examples that are top-of-mind are improv and jazz.
Maybe it’s to do with luck. As in, smart people will encounter problems and work on them and solve them, and the smartest ones will solve them faster and solve more problems, but the search space of problems is vast and only in retrospect do we know which ones were of crucial importance. Therefore the Einstein is more likely to be not-the-smartest, and the smartest is unlikely to be the Einstein (though more likely than any other individual).
A way to test this would be to check how many of the most important breakthroughs were things that were considered vital in advance and had everyone trying to solve them. Like will the next Einstein be the person who solves fusion, or something else entirely?
Another dimension is practical experimentation. Were the Wright brothers geniuses? I think it’s more that the hands-on approach yields much faster innovation than the dry theorising.
If you asked people what was special about Einstein, most would say that he had important new ideas. Even the ones who tried to give you a more sophisticated-sounding answer would probably think this first. Till a few years ago I would have given the same answer myself. But that wasn't what was special about Einstein. What was special about him was that he was really smart. Having important new ideas was a necessary precondition for properly utilizing that intelligence, but the two are not identical.
It may seem a hair-splitting distinction to point out that inspiration and its consequences are not identical, but it isn't. There's a big gap between them. Anyone who's spent time around crackpot scientific theorists knows how big. There are a lot of genuinely original people who don't achieve very much.
Modern Smart are so focused on their niche most people failed to see the big ( or even medium ) picture. Because they are more specialised than ever their world view are extremely distorted by their lens. Peter Thiel touched on this as most of the successful founders and entrepreneur tends to be something similar to polymath.
Another thing is Wisdom. Which the older I get the more I think have little to no relationship to being "Smart". I also think there are certain relationship with Wisdom and polymath.
This topic also echo an article earlier [1], where it is more important to be curious than being smart. ( I am glad this narrative has finally caught on. )
Einstein was one of history's most successful, perhaps the most successful, abstract thinkers.
Some of his reasoning was based on simple observation of light and making logical deductions about how it must work. It's pretty amazing when you can make simple observations and reason about the workings of the universe.
Abstraction is in and of itself an art which is both a learned skill and highly dependent upon intellect.
Now, this is the stinker. Imagine that Einstein had been born in a non-English-speaking part of the world. Would this separation from the scientific community have prevented him from telling us all about relativity? I imagine it would have, and it's likely that a good number of abstract thinkers of his caliber have lived and died without us learning from them.
There are a few things he didn’t mention that I suspect are important: a variety of life experiences, exposure to more than one modality of thinking, and an opportunity to engage in autonomous unstructured play as a child. It’s good at any age but is likely pivotal in childhood.
One thing that bothers me in this essay is that it relies a lot on intelligence being somewhat clear/measurable and agreed upon metric. But there isn't really a comprehensive definition of intelligence, let alone a comprehensive way to measure it (IQ for example to a large extent measures how good someone is at taking tests).
Coming up with new ideas can itself be a measure of intelligence!
That is not to say the spirit of the article is wrong - I've met plenty of people who came across as very smart and didn't really achieve as much in life (so far) as other people who didn't appear to be as smart or smarter. I think other large factors must include ambition, risk-aversion (or lack thereof), confidence and opportunity.
I think the dismissal of "creativity" in the footnote is misguided. I think creativity is easier to define than "intelligence" and better explains the intuitive difference between e.g. humans and animals and between humans and current AI systems. "Intelligence" often gets mixed up with arguably irrelevant things like computational speed, memory (recall), or the ability to solve problems in some narrow niche. But creativity gets to the generalness of what humans can do that other animals and current AI systems apparently can not, which is to create new knowledge by conjecturing (and criticizing) new ideas with no apparent bounds on the subject matter or reach of those ideas.
Humans care about innate qualities such as intelligence because they are looking for mates, and want the best genes for their children.
In this case, consider whether you would prefer to have children with a partner with a 150 IQ but who never develops a system to generate new ideas, or a partner with a 120 IQ who stumbles into a system / environment that allows them to generate new ideas.
Who would you prefer? Hard mode: justify your choice without invalidating the premises by saying something like, "Well, if the first person was really smarter, they would have developed such a system."
I speculate that most would prefer to have children with the first person, and then endeavor to teach their kids the second person's system.
Huh? For reproductive concerns, I'd rather marry someone who is an excellent parent, than someone who will make genius babies but ruin their development.
And I'm not interested in find a mate who will adopt someone else's genius 23-chromosomes
People are often prevented from going down a path to success because of the assumption that something is impossible, when if they would actually check they might find a solution that makes it possible.
This is true in science, as in Einstein going down the path of considering time dilation, while others might have not even considered it worth another thought. But it’s also true in general life. People who have a can-do attitude often end up achieving more simply because they’ve tried.
Perhaps a way of learning how to do this is to sometimes stop and think which paths to success have been discarded as impossible, and then consider investigating if that assumption is true.
One thing I feel like is an elephant in the room is that these great new ideas sure aren't being cultivated or drawn out by the VC machine. It seems like in a lot of ways that thing is poison to genuine inspiration. It's about the last thing some people probably want to hear, but a lot of great ideas just seem to be a genuine product of love and curiosity that seems unable to grow in the shadow of something that wants to wring money out of it. It's only if and after it survives to show some promise, far away from eyes sporting money symbols, that it can be shaken down for money.
I think being smart needs solid foundations in order to flourish. Paul mentions getting adequate sleep and avoiding certain stresses, which is a whole science to me.
There is the old archetype of the 'unstable genius' or 'mad scientist' that although they are clever; fail to one day make it and become the person known for $company or $product or $patent.
There are many ingredients needed for the smart person to thrive. Personally I find essays about topics that concern me to be useful, as-well as cross-synaptic thinking otherwise known as 'creativity' or 'joining the dots'.
I have been revisiting an idea I've had many times in my life that is tangential to Paul's "Smart" vs. "New idea" differentiation. That is the difference between "Knowledge/Intelligence" on one axis and "Experience/Understanding" on another. I feel our modern society, as obsessed as it is with science and logic, highly prioritizes the former and unduly devalues the latter. I've started to wonder what "Artificial Understanding" looks like and if there is some systematic way to describe it. I also loosely define "Wisdom" as a kind of dialectic synthesis that bridges intelligence and understanding (and thereby knowledge and experience). I believe Wisdom is the place where new ideas are bred.
However, his essay struck a chord in me because it suggests a double edged sword. I'm ever-so-slightly above average intelligence. In almost every group I have ever been part of I sort near the top but rarely at the top. But I definitely have always demonstrated different thinking and often times new ideas. And I can report that not all new ideas are good ideas. This leads to quite a bit of insecurity/self-doubt. Sometimes I am literally a prophet that sees the future that no one else expected. Often I am completely off base. I have no repeatable means of discriminating between those cases.
What I have learned, in those times I have acted as a leader/manager, is that I don't always go with the most logical/intellectual idea presented to me. I try to always take into account experience/understanding. That is doubly true when I evaluate my own new ideas. I should ask myself: Am I leaning too heavily on knowledge/intelligence in an area where I lack understanding/experience?
Therefore I think Paul's stated trade-off of intelligence for new ideas is not strictly correct. I wonder if he would accept my knowledge/intelligence vs. experience/understanding description. If so, perhaps what he means to say is that for the generation of new ideas he might be willing to accept trading some innate capacity for intelligence for some innate capacity for understanding. In that way, perhaps one could increase the likelihood of synthesis between the two. Stated another way, it would be a sacrifice of intelligence to gain understanding with a goal to promote wisdom.
I believe smartness is rather contextual. For instance a person might be smart at a specific job like troubleshooting hardware but he'd not be so-smart in some other areas of life. Was Einstein smart in most areas of life? I highly doubt that.
This (contextual) smartness is build-up with time. People who have screen-facing jobs tend to get smarter about gadgets/software. People whose jobs are dealing with other human beings gets smarter at soft skills like persuasion. It all boils down to giving enough time.
PG making a case for the "idea guy"! It's interesting to see how often that trope is shot down in SV culture.
I appreciate that he is qualifying or preconditioning the value of the idea guy as having intelligence along with other "mundane ingredients" like grit, sleep, stress, network, and passion. I very much agree with the approach and only wish for a framework to score these ingredients in the context of an entrepreneur's problem domain. I guess that's what VC's are supposed to do.
I'm not sure, but I think it was Nabokov where I first saw the distinction between genius and intelligence most clearly articulated. The defining characteristic of genius is right there in the Latin root[1], it's fundamentally original. One could have Von Neumann tier intellectual horsepower and waste it all solving sudoku puzzles or something. Or one could have a much more modest intellect, and yet make utterly original and lasting contributions to human knowledge.
Einstein's fame kinda ruined the word "genius" — people tend to think the word is just a synonym for smart. But to me (and I think the gen- root at the beginning supports this), the key thing about a genius is that they revolutionize a field and inspire others to think in wildly new ways.
Problem was, Einstein was both of these things, and is so associated with the word that a lot of people's brains just go from "genius" -> Einstein -> "super smart".
I think the key thing that superior intelligence gives you in science is the ability to survey a large field of knowledge, quickly identify the essence of each idea, zero in on what's worth pursuing and what's worth throwing out.
Research is like a crowd of people painstakingly searching through a cow pasture to find little gems buried in the dirt. If your vision is clearer and you can move 10x faster, you can run circles around other people. You can look over hundreds of leads, intuitively sense what works and what doesn't, and narrow in on promising ones.
While I've been underwhelmed by many PG's essays this one is remarkable. It takes on a subject that's beaten to death in debates and finds some fresh perspective.
I don't know if practicing writing has made me better at producing new ideas. And I'm not sure if the quality of my writing has improved, though it's certainly easier for me to write now.
But for sure, I don't think I ever really understood and internalized ideas from complex non-fiction books until I started writing about them. Even writing privately helped, but I think the most effective way is to write publicly - there's an obligation to write and argue clearly.
New idea's are a dime a dozen. In fact a bigger problem for those that have new ideas is that someone else had that new idea first and did something about it.
Reminds me of reading 'Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain'. The way that book tries to get you to un-hook the judging and structuring parts of your mind so your hand can form shapes with NO WORDS to describe them.
As soon as you say 'I'm drawing an arm' your brain tries to define 'arm' and what it would mean to appropriately outline the parts of one on your paper… and the image you'd ideally produce might bear no resemblance to the 'arm' definition your brain gives you. It's an elaborate process of shutting down certain kinds of 'smart' that are overly naive and reductive, to get to images that are available but undescribable by analytical words. The perfect lines of an elbow are not 'triangle' or 'circle' or even anatomical parts: they're the image one's eye understands immediately, but getting it on paper is a whole other story.
I find when I'm live-coding audio DSP and getting close to dialing in a tonal detail that I'm trying hard to capture, or even rapidly debugging and evolving the code of the program to do it, when I'm most effective I lose the words to explain what I'm doing. It becomes 'and now I this, to do this, and then we ah… you'll see, it should… there. That.'
I'll play the sound, and my model will exactly resemble the thing I'm trying to make it sound like, but I'm miles away from being able to articulate what I did. Or, more likely, I could tell you 'I subtracted the thing and it needed to be 1.52 rather than 1.5, and that and the other idea got it to where it sounds like that. Because the filter's lower, and it's interacting with the input sample in thus and so a way'. The tangible STUFF I'm doing is rarely that complicated.
But being on the point of knowing to DO that stuff and exactly that stuff to get there… is what Graham is talking about. I don't know if it can be learned but it can damn well be trained. People as disparate as ad guy David Ogilvy, and writer John Gardner, have understood that.
And you can be a literal writer and still have important parts of your process locked away in that no-words zone. At those times, you are the writer. Your literal writing ability and vocabulary, are the stenographer. It's waiting on you having something to say. That 'something to say' may not be coming from a 'words place'.
Why is Firefox's Reader View not available for posts on PG's seemingly minimal site?
Also, with my minimal knowledge of programming, I have no idea what's going on with that website's HTML markup. There's also a document type not mentioned error so that might be what's causing this.
I wonder why @pg doesn't change this? I presume it'll only stand to benefit him with a higher SEO ranking.
> Also, with my minimal knowledge of programming, I have no idea what's going on with that website's HTML markup.
It's what we in the business call "old"
That's just how we made websites before CSS was a thing. It still works, it's just horribly user unfriendly. Presumably Paul either doesn't care or likes the retro look.
I can't imagine pg being too concerned with SEO. I don't think he's necessarily marketing his essays for discoverability nor do his essays bring in direct income aside from enhancing YC's already established credibility.
Lots of fun points in here. I would add that willing to be wrong 100% of the time and being open to constantly fucking things up will get you very far all on its own. As long as your intentions are good and you can limit the blast radius, these efforts are usually rewarded in time. Ablity to disregard shame and the scorn of others is the superpower in this context.
In a similar vein, being good at fixing things after you've broken them. Gives you a little more confidence in trying new things without all of the work involved in first making sure they'll work.
You need to have a vision, and the vision needs to be the right vision. How do you know it’s the right vision? I think most just get lucky on this. Maybe the successful serial entrepreneurs have figured it out (Musk, Jobs)
Getting the vision right isn’t enough, you have to know how to get to the vision. This usually requires a combination of smarts, grit, passion, and luck.
> Imagine you had a choice between being really smart but discovering nothing new, and being less smart but discovering lots of new ideas.
I don't consider myself smart. I certainly don't claim to discover new ideas. But through my work of explaining and polishing existing ideas, it seems I found a niche and an audience.
This piece seems to conflate being smart with being intelligent.
Basically being smart means being well educated, whereas being intelligent means you have fast processing speed. Or maybe you have slightly different definitions, whatever, but either way it's confusing to see them being used as synonyms.
Just like in order to become a composer of music you need to start by performing other people's music, I think it helps in writing to start by responding to other people's ideas, dissecting and evaluating, which helps you build the competence to generate ideas of your own.
>why do so many smart people fail to discover anything new?
Given his background as a venture capitalist not a surprising question but much of the implicit premise of the piece is that novelty is somehow superior to maintaining things that exist, which isn't that obvious.
doing 'new' things is fine but the world to a large degree runs on maintaining and very marginally improving what we have or just fixing things in very small ways that would probably not pass his excitement test.
Before someone like Einstein can come along and dig up some paradigm changing idea it often takes decades of work to refine something to the point where some individual can come along and discover what's wrong with it. Even within an individual life like Einstein's that is the kind of work he did most of the time. novelty is the exception, a world of novelty after novelty without long periods of ordinary work during which people refine is hard to imagine.
So just like 80% of Einstein's life was probably doing normal maths, 80% of people are probably going to do normal things, there's nothing wrong with it. It's like the popular analogy of a handful of astronauts standing on the backs of hundreds of people. Every single one of them does a necessary job, and a lot of smart people will do work that in the world of Paul Graham is somehow considered unglamorous.
For anyone who's familiar with the roll of British entrepreneurs who did terribly at school and yet built massive companies, this post isn't some sort of massive reveal.
Is this something more common in the UK than the US? If so, why?
I think there are two buckets that form a venn. Smart on one side, Intelligent on the other. One can loosely be thought of as horsepower, the other abstract/creative/alternative thinking. The Venn of them is genius.
Was a pretty big deal to stumble across the idea that the machinery that generates insights could be trained back on itself to improve at gaining insights. You may have heard of it under the moniker of insight practice. :p
The argument, at least to me, appears to lean heavily on a false dichotomy: You can either be smart, have good ideas, or some blend of the two. Yet he begins with a counter-example in the case of Einstein.
Seriously though, the best and simplest way to get new ideas is with hypnosis. Go into trance and give yourself a post-hypnotic suggestion to come up with new ideas.
My own personal example (let's assume I'm smart and have new ideas!)
Because I was a part of an online community from the onset of the Internet age (1997) and also a consultant in Fortune 500 businesses, I was always coming up with ideas.
One particular idea I came up with in 2009 was essentially what Slack became five years later.
I drew up the UI, pitched it to a bunch of people, INCLUDING MICROSOFT, and yet I was unable to convince anyone that it was a good idea. (Microsoft was so focused on SharePoint, that they never saw the potential).
I did not know how to build my idea or execute the concept to prove it to others.
So that third piece, execution, is just as critical.
I think those with high IQs who don't accomplish much are like 2000-HP drag racers. Those things rip, but they don't necessarily get you anywhere useful.
Using footnotes to add random tangents, rather than clarifications or directly related context, seems noisy. Why do writers in tech do this? I've never seen footnotes used like this.
Buried toward the end of the essay is a suggestion to become a better writer. Wondering if anyone has learned to become a better writer, and if so, what was your approach?
Just like working out improves your range of movement and manipulating your own body and weights in space, writing does the same with ideas and expression.
The ability to see things in a novel or different light is often an element of humor. Taking something a bit out of context, or switching things around.
from wikipedia... "Intelligence has been defined in many ways: the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving. "
I'm sure Einstein had most of these abilities in abundance
I know a lot of people who would consider themselves as smart and they lack a lot the above skills
I think he had abstraction, logic, understanding, learning, reasoning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving pinned down,
I doubt the ability of planning would have mattered too much
the key areas that I would personally say are important are logic, abstraction, critical thinking, problem solving and creativity the rest are important and can seriously help but are nice to haves
Lot's of people have ideas, great ideas even. Ideas are not particularly rare nor hard. Luck, expertise, privilege (for those not born into it) and timing are more difficult. More importantly, to help ensure maximum impact, one needs to want to push an idea into the world, and push hard. Generally there are better and more fun things to do in life (most would agree with me as pg noted himself).
Academics have great ideas and it takes thousands of them building on each other to drive a technological revolution. There would have been another Einstein (or collection of Einsteinlettes), it may have taken a decade but the soil was fertile. Einstein helped develop the ideas behind Quantum Physics but had no further world changing ideas left to contribute once it materialized.
So what type of ideas are we talking about? Capitalist entrepreneurial ideas for building startups with? That seems like a depressingly narrow understanding of ideas and what they mean for humanity.
It's about a very twisted perception of what is important.
PG seems to equate success with innovation. As if living life raising a family and having meaningful relationships is just a frivolous pass time of the lazy.
Was Einstein really that smart? What if Einstein is just a meme, and there were dozens of other people who made similar findings but we're not published? What is with this obsession on trying to explain in hindsight why someone was successful?
Einstein was known to be a complete idiot. That's why whenever anyone screws up at work, they say, "Great job, Einstein!" It's because Einstein was so stupid.
Have you read his work? There are many things which are memes without real background, such as people believing in the past that earth was flat. No. They didn't. Medieval people didn't believe earth was flat. This is something invented by 1800s historians. Einstein is the same kind if meme. Everyone keeps repeating how smart he was, but not many people have first hand information and know other researchers of his time. I don't know if he was smart or not. I've read some of his texts on politics which were not very good, but I guess he was better at physics. Or maybe those texts I've read even weren't Einsteins, but written by someone who just wanted to use his name to push an agenda. Who knows? Why does it matter? I'm wondering why people are so obsessed with this kind of things, because I've never been and it is hard for me to understand. Maybe you can provide some insight?
> I've read some of his texts on politics which were not very good, but I guess he was better at physics.
You know, Einstein was famous for his works in physics and was hailed as a world genius by his contemporaries? His insights into other topics might not have been ground breaking, but it is hard to argue about it with for physics.
Edit: The thing is, judging his intelligence based on his writings about politics is like judging the intelligence of famous politicians by how well they write about physics. People who aren't experts at a field will always look like idiots when they write about it and are still learning about it.
I didn't judge Einstein, and my question was not about Einstein. I'm not in the position to judge his works in physics. I really know nothing about him, all I know is what they teach in school and what you occasionally read online. Like most of us.
It is interesting that one might get defensive when they think that someone questions Einsteins intelligence. Why is this meme so important? It's almost as if he was some sort of a God.
People are obsessed with Einstein because he made three fundamental breakthroughs in physics in a year, then beat everyone else to general relativity. They were real contributions, and they were pretty creative. He wasn't a computing machine like Von Neumann, but Einstein was a clever guy. Don't know why you're judging based on political contributions.
To me your response reads like the perfect high school text book answer. But I'll take your response as if it came from someone who really knows his work, and assume that what you said is true. Let's not question this meme any further.
I didn't really mean to judge Einstein. When a story sounds "too good to be true" it most often tends to lean towards fiction. My 'judgement' was towards people who blindly believe everything about memes.
In reality, there really was no point and it does not really matter if this particular story is true or not. I just like to question things that people assume obvious.
In my opinion, what made Einstein great was his grand perspective and ability to think deeply. He was brilliant and his brain could obviously connect dots that most people cannot. But what is that if not intelligence?
As an aside, if you believe Einstein to be brilliant or interesting, definitely check out his essay “Why Socialism?” [1]
Imagination and diversity of experience are some other factors. I.e., the ability to imagine
new combinations of disparate ideas, gained through a variety of unique experiences.
You could argue Einstein's imagination, coupled with his scientific intelligence, is what made him brilliant.
But like others have said, the essay reads like there is a linear and narrow definition of "smart." But having followed pg on twitter, he seems to tend towards an Ayn Rand style worldview, so I guess I'm not surprised.
> Imagine you had a choice between being really smart but discovering nothing new, and being less smart but discovering lots of new ideas. Surely you'd take the latter.
Not sure if that Semmelweis guy would agree (had the idea that washing your hands between handling corpses and delivering babies is a good idea, everyone else at the time disagreed and he died in an asylum). Didn't Tesla also die penniless and alone?
Maybe you'll be well remembered by history, but what a life! I wonder how many people had lots of new genius ideas but took the "safe" option...
There are people who are challenged , in their writing ability, but come up with new ideas. I can't name one off the top of my head, but I think the capitalistic world of startup companies could yield many examples of inventions.
To me tying the writing skill to that ability seems questionable.
I'm not going to read this, yet - PGs ideas always seem to be so interesting they drown out my own - rather Ill pose a question :
What if being 'smart' is a measure of the useful 'technology' we have running as the OS in our minds ?
What if all of our smarts are merely the result of opportunity / time / resources / environment / education .. exposure to good ideas and patterns of thinking - asking questions, following trains of thought, going back to first principles, exposure to diverse language and culture, opportunity to read good books, wealth and time to devote to puzzles when young, habit of critical thinking, fluency in math, exposure to ideas such as Evolution, access to computers/internet/information, time devoted to hobbies / making things etc.
I think one of the things that works in Silicon Valley is the recycling of 'talented' developers from one startup to another - so you have a hive-mind pool of continually honed elite creative technical skill-sets competing and cooperating to build new things from modern building blocks .. and when the 'thing' doesn't work, people can move on to the next thing until they hit a local gravity well of a startup going nova. When that happens, they get wealthy from equity .. then recycle that wealth via investment in other startups, and their time into mentoring.
Its been painful to watch this not happen in Australia over the past couple decades - a few wins, but no real ecosystem develop, despite there being a fair bit of nascent talent in game development, crypto, ML, math, biotech etc. The mining/resource boom has dominated our trade and little of that wealth has been plowed back into technology / science investment. We should be 'mining' our solar energy wealth and exporting that up into Asia via cable. We should have a hive of ML and green-tech and when one doesn't make it, the people move on to other ones.
Another way of saying this is "smart doesn't come from nowhere" .. you need a pyramid ecosystem of soil, worms, molds, bacteria where smart shoots can arise naturally. Its hard to be book-smart, startup-smart or math-smart if you're homeless and all your bandwidth is spent on shelter... or if the best job a smart person can have in your locale is selling houses and you need to do that to pay off your student debt.
Conversely, if things are too comfortable there is no need to get smart - but the wealth inequality curve is such that we needn't worry about the vanishingly small talent pool of ultra wealthy teen proto-engineer entrepreneurs who will work on hard things to hone their smarts : a more plausible benefit is they dabble with cash bets in tech startups, science research or philanthropy.
I guess Im arguing that we concentrate on the ecosystem, rather than the individual - the smart long bet is to fund math education, science outreach, K2 reading programs : looking around, is there any doubt we need to aggressively promote ideas such as Evolution or the Carbon Cycle ? I love zombie movies way too much, but am appalled that no one ever asks how they keep walking around forever without eating - its as if conservation of energy is not part of the general public's meme-set.
We all lose when young people are prevented from becoming smart by their environment - poverty, religion, anti-science, anti-education culture, political or economic instability.
What are the best ways to urgently improve this ? Maybe immigration of skilled/educated/motivated/talented people from poor countries to rich countries is one of the most effective measures that works on a short timescale [ where immigrants work in startups, tech companies or university research labs ]
In Australia, our politicians love to be seen with spade in hand at the opening of a newly built school - well designed new buildings are nice, but they don't seem to have a plan to actually educate people to a higher level in science and math, despite the buzzwords and virtue signalling. One of our best mini-exports is the AMC ( Australian Maths Competition ), its well regarded in Malaysia and Singapore, but many schools here don't even participate as its seen as too hard, or perhaps too elite or not relevant. Schools have tech sessions where they might fly a drone or use a 3D printer .. but they dont seem to dig into the internals of how these things work. We seem to have a kind of cargo-cult mindset, where we are losing the ability to fix or improve anything. We outsource our refuse processing to Asia, but now they are refusing this, so our "green solution" is to burn rubbish, rather than invest in better recycling technology. Even after the worlds largest fires and smoke over our cities, we have not really woken up to the challenge of climate change. Covid has shown up how badly we fumble at organizing ourselves into action based on science. The Empire is crumbling here on Anacreon - we need a Hari Seldon plan.
I dont think voting matters, I dont think democracy is really functioning and the Universities themselves seem to be large beurocracies guarding their massive wealth, churning out marketing and management degrees for profit. Rather, we the technologists must exert whatever power we have - either by education, marketing/dialog, building truly useful things, or using our new-wealth to buy off idiot politicians and fund the technology projects that will improve things.
Not to be alarmist .. but it really is 11:59 and our planet is dying. We need to get smart as a group and as a species.
Success in the way PG seems to be talking about is indeed about more than intelligence, it is also about experience, perspective, perception, ignorance, interest, imagination, and a bit of luck.
I've thought a lot about this, and I would break them down as follows:
1. Intelligence is more of a raw ability to process and synthesize information, and everyone genetically predisposed to have a starting measure. As one experiences life, one's intelligence can be developed, expanded, and refined.
2. Experiences shape us whether we like it or not, but those who tend to me more successful than others, experiences tend to be opportunities to grow, recalibrate, review, shed, and otherwise change who they are in a way that would ensure a more effective outcome in a similar future experience.
3. Perspective and perception are tightly knit in that as we mature through life experiences, the size, detail, and depth of the world and reality continues to grow. Perspective in this sense is having an intentional awareness of how much there really is to know, and also, how much there is still left to discover. Perception is more of being able to intentionally focus on and recognize the breadth, depth, and detail of our perspective.
4. Ignorance is simply the missing pieces to what you know or understand, the limits to your knowledge of the world and how it works. Awareness of one's own ignorance affords the opportunity to actively manage it, to either take steps to fill in gaps, or just be content in not knowing.
5. Interest is more about what items or aspects within our perspective and perception do we have a persistent affinity for? These affinities can be cultivated, and effort sown into some will reap greater rewards than others.
6. Imagination is likely the most powerful, since this is the ability to create a perspective that is not necessarily reflected or even inspired by something you have perceived. Imagination is surely informed by all of the preceding, but this is where the true magic happens, where success can increase exponentially. The preceding provide the bounds, drive, attraction, references, and understanding that can spark and fuel new ideas and connections. It is within imagination that all the ideas that advance humanity are born and nurtured since anything new is necessarily first imagined in a mind.
7. And last is luck, which in a sense, especially in the context of success, is really just a culmination of all of the preceding. The luckiest successful people are those:
- who have a baseline intelligence that they have actively developed,
- who have taken advantage of and sought out experiences that yielded opportunity to grow,
- who have intentionally broadened and deepened their perspectives while improving their ability to focus and perceive effectively to notice and seize opportunities,
- who manage their ignorance such that it doesn't become an impediment or lasting liability,
- who latch onto worthwhile or beneficial interests,
- and lastly, who actively charge and exercise their imagination, always wondering how they could add to or improve their realities.
So PG is right, it is a lot more than just being smart, intelligence is just one ingredient in the recipe for success.
World-changing new ideas are a result of being actively aware of and engaged with reality while having and following through on the drive to push the boundaries of what is known, understood, or possible.
It's a double whammy on "smart" people, actually. They are usually conditioned by their "academic success" that they are only allowed to have "smart" ideas. So "smart" people tend to play it real, real safe - they don't want to destroy the illusion they are "smart" either in themselves or (worst of all) their peers. A necessary prerequisite to wander off the beaten path is to have lots of "dumb" ideas as well, some of which will turn out not so dumb after all.
Personally I was quickly disabused of the notion that I'm "smart" after I spent 3 years working in a research lab alongside some _real_ genius quality folks. I was also able to discern their weakness that I allude to above. People who are genuinely smart yet not afraid to try dumb things are unstoppable, and I'd say that the latter is more important than the former, as long as you're willing to put in the extra work and are learning something from your mistakes. Yet it's also not "socially acceptable", so we get what we get - best minds of our generation playing it safe instead of going where no one has gone before, and worse - shitting on the people who do from the height of their ivory tower.
So waiting for people to try intentionally infecting themselves with toxoplasmosis to boost their creativity. It seems like a rule 34 near inevitability to me. YMMV.
However, what set Gould apart from his colleagues was his innovative and iconoclastic interpretations of well-known works with “standard” prescriptions. He had fundamentally different, but wholly consistent, ideas about musical interpretation, recording technology, presentation of music to audiences, and so on. He’s remembered as a pianist not because his fingers were quick and sensitive, but instead because he pushed boundaries in completely original ways.
Leonard Bernstein—a noted conductor and pianist—quips about this when he conducted the Brahms Concerto in D minor, with Gould at the piano [1]. I recommend listening but I’ll copy his words (from [2]) for posterity.
> Don't be frightened. Mr. Gould is here. He will appear in a moment. I'm not, um, as you know, in the habit of speaking on any concert except the Thursday night previews, but a curious situation has arisen, which merits, I think, a word or two. You are about to hear a rather, shall we say, unorthodox performance of the Brahms D Minor Concerto, a performance distinctly different from any I've ever heard, or even dreamt of for that matter, in its remarkably broad tempi and its frequent departures from Brahms' dynamic indications. I cannot say I am in total agreement with Mr. Gould's conception and this raises the interesting question: "What am I doing conducting it?" I'm conducting it because Mr. Gould is so valid and serious an artist that I must take seriously anything he conceives in good faith and his conception is interesting enough so that I feel you should hear it, too.
> But the age old question still remains: "In a concerto, who is the boss; the soloist or the conductor?" The answer is, of course, sometimes one, sometimes the other, depending on the people involved. But almost always, the two manage to get together by persuasion or charm or even threats to achieve a unified performance. I have only once before in my life had to submit to a soloist's wholly new and incompatible concept and that was the last time I accompanied Mr. Gould. (The audience roared with laughter at this.) But, but this time the discrepancies between our views are so great that I feel I must make this small disclaimer. Then why, to repeat the question, am I conducting it? Why do I not make a minor scandal — get a substitute soloist, or let an assistant conduct? Because I am fascinated, glad to have the chance for a new look at this much-played work; Because, what's more, there are moments in Mr. Gould's performance that emerge with astonishing freshness and conviction. Thirdly, because we can all learn something from this extraordinary artist, who is a thinking performer, and finally because there is in music what Dimitri Mitropoulos used to call "the sportive element", that factor of curiosity, adventure, experiment, and I can assure you that it has been an adventure this week collaborating with Mr. Gould on this Brahms concerto and it's in this spirit of adventure that we now present it to you.
Because some took this as an attack on Gould, Bernstein followed up with the remark:
> Any discovery of Glenn's was welcomed by me because I worshiped the way he played: I admired his intellectual approach, his "guts" approach, his complete dedication to whatever he was doing.
Anyway, it’s an interesting parallel in the arts world. Jacob Collier is a musician of today that has similar qualities of “being smart with good ideas”.
[1] https://youtu.be/SvWPM783TOE
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Philharmonic_concer...