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> I've always thought that being "smart" has everything to do with having a wealth of information and being able to draw connections between various facts and i

> I've always thought that being "smart" has everything to do with having a wealth of information and being able to draw connections between various facts and ideas. Yes. My pet theory is that the brain is just a huge pattern matching engine. Formal education is mostly about training the pattern recognizer with new patterns. Whenever you talk to people that are "uneducated" (or whatever word you may want to choose for that) that struggle with basic concepts, try to probe deeper. You'll find that, in many cases, they are being overwhelmed with new concepts being presented simultaneously. People with extensive formal education will have been exposed to innumerable problems and concepts by the time they reach adulthood. There's a wealth of information the brain can use to speed up comprehension. This is a pet theory though, being reinforced over the years by my own cognitive biases :)

elorant 10y ago
I second that. And one of the main reasons I daily visit HN is exactly that. It widens my horizons, presenting me with different point of views to various problems/issues. I literally think that coming here makes me a smarter person in the long run. I also experience that line of thinking in learning math. Mathematics seem like the perfect example of pattern matching. You progressively learn to adapt to a certain kind of thinking by solving a multitude of different exercises that broaden your conceptual understanding of a field. At least that's how it works for me. You keep exercising and at some point you experience an epiphany and then everything becomes crystal clear.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- imron 10y ago
  > I literally think that coming here makes me a smarter person in the long run. Good ole' placebo effect :-)
- syngrog66 10y ago
  I too continue to visit HN in part because its one of the rare places that feeds my smart side and inspires/stimulates/satisfies that aspect of my existence. At the same time I've repeatedly come close to abandoning HN entirely because of another aspect interwoven seemingly equally with the first thing, which might be described as a kind of smart-idiocy, different flavors of it, whether recursive irrelevant descents into subjective trivial minutia, or points-scoring one-upmanship in the field of PC-ness, the occasional pro-VC/pro-startup propaganda, or merely the blatant uncharitable assumptions about the intelligence/knowledge of the other party, or the increasing cases of "you want to learn more about 'foo', really? Gosh golly, let me Google that term for you, here are my top 5 results, and I suggest you learn about Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube, Khan Academy, etc.", or the thinly-disguised self-promotional posts/comments (humble-bragging, etc). Summary: there is gold here, utter gold. There is also shit, reeking shit. Make your choice, choose your focus, then tune your dial.
  - barking 10y ago
    You're a clever boy seeing as how you've packed all that into 33 days.
    - syngrog66 10y ago
      I've packed it into multiple decades. there is something else I'd like to feel allowed to say, but, barring that, hoping that @dang instantly bans you for extreme personal rudeness. If he does not, yet another notch in what I see as the dark side or decline of HN.
      - barking 10y ago
        I don't know how long hacker news is on the go, multiple decades surprises me. However you only registered 33 days ago, that was the point I was making. If you find that to be 'extreme personal rudeness' then you must get offended a lot.
        syngrog66 10y ago
randycupertino 10y ago
> This is a pet theory though, being reinforced over the years by my own cognitive biases :) Imo someone "smart" is someone who is smart enough to admit what they don't know.
- bear_south 10y ago
  yep, sort of a reverse dunning-krueger effect
  - msarchet 10y ago
    or you know, just the normal
- Aelinsaar 10y ago
  It's a terrible and ironic thing, that you require intelligence to analyze your own thoughts and actions, to realize that human intelligence is still all about degrees of monkeys counting on our fingers.
syngrog66 10y ago
agreed that a large part of "smart" is having a big enough pattern-matching apparatus think there is more to it than this, especially on the highest ends think the next biggest impact comes from having a large solid internal mental model of the world, of cause-and-effect, of action-reaction, perhaps two or more separate models, one or more models are "the way it is supposed to work" and one or more models are "the way it might work" think the next higher level of smart/genius is the purely creative/original/innovative/brainstorming/fount-based: ideas and urges and visions and impulses that arise from somewhere that a purely logical/controlling/categorical mindset can't nail down, and yet, it... happens. and yet we feel it, we experience it, we feel it, we can imagine it. whether it is real or fantastical, possible or impossible. I'd argue that the very smartest of us all may somehow leverage from all three of these levels
- gregmac 10y ago
  What you described is definitely how I feel when I really get into the zone of something, whether it be coding something very specific or doing overall design/architecture. As I get into it, it suddenly snaps into place, and I have a mental picture (which is more visceral than visual) of how all the moving pieces fit (or will fit) together, and can start adding on to it. With coding in particualr, usually my brain is going faster than my ability to type. I absolutely love that feeling.
  - syngrog66 10y ago
    well said. me too.

elorant 10y ago

I second that. And one of the main reasons I daily visit HN is exactly that. It widens my horizons, presenting me with different point of views to various problems/issues. I literally think that coming here makes me a smarter person in the long run. I also experience that line of thinking in learning math. Mathematics seem like the perfect example of pattern matching. You progressively learn to adapt to a certain kind of thinking by solving a multitude of different exercises that broaden your conceptual understanding of a field. At least that's how it works for me. You keep exercising and at some point you experience an epiphany and then everything becomes crystal clear.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
imron 10y ago
> I literally think that coming here makes me a smarter person in the long run. Good ole' placebo effect :-)
syngrog66 10y ago
I too continue to visit HN in part because its one of the rare places that feeds my smart side and inspires/stimulates/satisfies that aspect of my existence. At the same time I've repeatedly come close to abandoning HN entirely because of another aspect interwoven seemingly equally with the first thing, which might be described as a kind of smart-idiocy, different flavors of it, whether recursive irrelevant descents into subjective trivial minutia, or points-scoring one-upmanship in the field of PC-ness, the occasional pro-VC/pro-startup propaganda, or merely the blatant uncharitable assumptions about the intelligence/knowledge of the other party, or the increasing cases of "you want to learn more about 'foo', really? Gosh golly, let me Google that term for you, here are my top 5 results, and I suggest you learn about Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube, Khan Academy, etc.", or the thinly-disguised self-promotional posts/comments (humble-bragging, etc). Summary: there is gold here, utter gold. There is also shit, reeking shit. Make your choice, choose your focus, then tune your dial.
- barking 10y ago
  You're a clever boy seeing as how you've packed all that into 33 days.
  - syngrog66 10y ago
    I've packed it into multiple decades. there is something else I'd like to feel allowed to say, but, barring that, hoping that @dang instantly bans you for extreme personal rudeness. If he does not, yet another notch in what I see as the dark side or decline of HN.
    - barking 10y ago
      I don't know how long hacker news is on the go, multiple decades surprises me. However you only registered 33 days ago, that was the point I was making. If you find that to be 'extreme personal rudeness' then you must get offended a lot.
      - syngrog66 10y ago

randycupertino 10y ago

> This is a pet theory though, being reinforced over the years by my own cognitive biases :) Imo someone "smart" is someone who is smart enough to admit what they don't know.

bear_south 10y ago
yep, sort of a reverse dunning-krueger effect
- msarchet 10y ago
  or you know, just the normal
Aelinsaar 10y ago
It's a terrible and ironic thing, that you require intelligence to analyze your own thoughts and actions, to realize that human intelligence is still all about degrees of monkeys counting on our fingers.

syngrog66 10y ago

agreed that a large part of "smart" is having a big enough pattern-matching apparatus think there is more to it than this, especially on the highest ends think the next biggest impact comes from having a large solid internal mental model of the world, of cause-and-effect, of action-reaction, perhaps two or more separate models, one or more models are "the way it is supposed to work" and one or more models are "the way it might work" think the next higher level of smart/genius is the purely creative/original/innovative/brainstorming/fount-based: ideas and urges and visions and impulses that arise from somewhere that a purely logical/controlling/categorical mindset can't nail down, and yet, it... happens. and yet we feel it, we experience it, we feel it, we can imagine it. whether it is real or fantastical, possible or impossible. I'd argue that the very smartest of us all may somehow leverage from all three of these levels

gregmac 10y ago
What you described is definitely how I feel when I really get into the zone of something, whether it be coding something very specific or doing overall design/architecture. As I get into it, it suddenly snaps into place, and I have a mental picture (which is more visceral than visual) of how all the moving pieces fit (or will fit) together, and can start adding on to it. With coding in particualr, usually my brain is going faster than my ability to type. I absolutely love that feeling.
- syngrog66 10y ago
  well said. me too.