Thanks for mentioning this. I don't know whether or not this is related to intelligence, but it does seem to be a fairly common pattern where someone will under

Thanks for mentioning this. I don't know whether or not this is related to intelligence, but it does seem to be a fairly common pattern where someone will underestimate the value of writing something down. I did notice this a couple times in danluu's article. A couple comments: 1) There's a lot of value in writing down something about one's experiences, even if the result is "obvious" to anyone else who has gone through the experience. There are likely a lot of people who HAVEN'T gone through that experience who would benefit from reading about it. 2) I worked on a project, mostly independently, for a year or so and produced something useful. To me, it seemed fairly pedestrian: some basic data structures, some ordinary algorithms, nothing particularly novel. A mentor suggested I write a conference proposal about it. I resisted, using the "it's obvious" argument. He came back and said "You've worked on this for a year, and no one else in the industry has worked on it. By definition you're the expert. It's worth a conference talk." Indeed it was, and it launched a significant portion of my career as a conference presenter. I think this is largely about the difficulty of thinking about what others think when one is too close to a topic. After working on something intensively for a time, one develops a familiarity and intuition of the knowledge about that area. When working with that understanding, things may seem "obvious" but that are totally non-obvious to someone who hasn't worked in the area. This is less about absolute intelligence per se than it is about expertise, and so it's a variation of Kay's aphorism "A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points."