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You Don't Need to Be Brilliant to Do Brilliant Work
- suff 7y agoReally good read. So true that most 'innovation' is really a lot of tedious work most people don't bother doing. That is in sharp contrast to the 'Eurika!' moment that most people think of. There may never be a eurika moment, just a bunch of small insights put together into a body of work.
- bumby 7y agoI think it was Issac Asimov's quote that the most exciting phrase in science is not "Eureka!" but "Hmmm... that's funny..." Meaning, many innovations are the result of unexpected outcomes rather than a brilliant mind setting out to prove a specific result
- neural_thing 7y agoDepends on what you count as "brilliant work". All of the Neuroscience PhDs at Stanford, UCSF and MIT (non-exhaustive list, just examples) I've met are at least 2 standard deviations away from average intelligence and many are 3 SDs away. Makes me think that some brilliant work requires being brilliant.
- mlevental 7y agohow do you know that? have they shown you iq test results?
- arijo 7y agoHave you actually measured all of those Neuroscience PhDs IQs?
- neural_thing 7y agoNo, but I know their GRE scores, which are a good proxy for IQ. Plus, seeing the kind of math they do on the fly gives you a good idea.
- electricslpnsld 7y agoIs there a reference or study for that? I thought GRE scores were mostly a proxy for cramming English vocabulary into your brain (verbal) and for knowledge of basic geometry facts and inferences from them (quantitative).
- syrrim 7y agoBoth are proxies for TDTPT: https://hotelconcierge.tumblr.com/post/113360634364/the-stanford-marshmallow-prison-experiment https://hotelconcierge.tumblr.com/post/113360634364/the-stan...
- mlevental 7y ago...standardized tests are terrible proxies for iq
- thaumasiotes 7y agoWhy would you say this? Assessing IQ is the entire purpose of standardized tests, and unsurprisingly it's something they do well.
- mlevental 7y agobecause you can prepare for them.
- dTal 7y agoBit of a sampling bias. "Neuroscience PhD at MIT" is a helluva qualifier.
- stingraycharles 7y agoI guess this highlights the problem, that “brilliance” is in fact subjective and relative. To some “brilliance” is a PhD at MIT, to others it is being able to do something much more mundane.
- rajacombinator 7y agoIn which direction?
- amelius 7y agoThey need to get more brilliant, because frankly I don't see that many useful results coming from the field of neuroscience lately. E.g. the standard drug for depression being SSRIs for so long makes it seem like we are stuck in the dark ages.
- mattkrause 7y agoCome on now.... Brains and behavior are absolutely, absurdly, ridiculously complicated, at every level from individual ion channels on up to neurons, circuits, brain regions, and even between people. It's true that there's a lot of hype, both from well-meaning folks who are excited about their results and cynically manipulative people trying to boost up their careers. It's true that the incentive and career structures are falling apart. But it's certainly not true that the lack of progress is because the researchers are dummies...
- tomhoward 7y ago> But it's certainly not true that the lack of progress is because the researchers are dummies True. I have no doubt that it takes extreme-outlier-level intellect to fully grasp the mechanics of neuroscience. But do you really believe that's it's due simply to misaligned incentives that there has not been a major breakthrough in psychiatry for so long? Any researcher who made a huge breakthrough would be hailed as hero and should be able to enjoy vast career benefits. Here's an alternate hypothesis: the experts in the field are so fixated on the mechanics of neurological function, that they can't think laterally and/or holistically about the problems, which is why those problems have continued to go unsolved after decades of research. The idiom "can't see the forest for the trees" comes to mind. My own experience is that I spent several years experiencing a combination of symptoms that psychiatry would diagnose with terms like depression, anxiety/panic disorder, bipolar disorder, OCD and personality disorder (narcissistic etc). The psychiatric profession considers most of these conditions to be incurable, and really only treatable with long-term medication. I wasn't willing to accept this, so I did my own research and ended up undertaking a combination of subconscious trauma-healing practices, along with nutritional work, exercise (yoga etc) and detoxification of heavy metals and hormone-disruptors. After about 7 years undertaking these treatments, my symptoms are nearly all gone. Some still linger, but my treatment continues, as does the steady improvement. Where are the researchers in the field looking into this kind of stuff? It's not as if it's not talked about by prominent figures within the biomedical field. Bruce Lipton, Gabor Maté, Rupert Sheldrake and Stan Grof have been talking about this stuff for a long time, and the hypotheses and anecdotes are right there waiting to be researched. Sure, one might look at the incentives and career paths that keep most researchers focused on drug discovery and nothing else. But a key part of being a ”brilliant” person involves a willingness to break ranks with the mainstream and find new explanations and solutions for persistent old problems. I'd have to agree with your parent commenter that there doesn't seem to have been much of that in recent memory, at least from the psychiatric side of neuroscience.
- spraak 7y agoThe author does concede this point in the article
- akhilcacharya 7y agoWhile this may be true I've become increasingly skeptical of people who make claims like this, if only because I've noticed a strong correlation that they think less of me for my average IQ. I honestly fear for the future of people like me.
- teddyh 7y agoMore or less the same point which Richard Hamming makes in his talk You and Your Research: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1zDuOPkMSw&list=PL2FF649D0C4407B30&index=31#t=14s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1zDuOPkMSw&list=PL2FF649D0C... Except, of course, that Hamming gives a few more practical pointers.
- hprotagonist 7y ago“make friends with admins” is no joke!
- teddyh 7y agoSlightly better video and sound (from the same source material): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3msMuwqp-o&list=PLctkxgWNSR89bl7hTOS3F3wuoGj7id3Xy&index=32#t=22s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3msMuwqp-o&list=PLctkxgWNSR...
- hprotagonist 7y agoAlthough high general intelligence is common among hackers, it is not the sine qua non one might expect. Another trait is probably even more important: the ability to mentally absorb, retain, and reference large amounts of ‘meaningless’ detail, trusting to later experience to give it context and meaning. A person of merely average analytical intelligence who has this trait can become an effective hacker, but a creative genius who lacks it will swiftly find himself outdistanced by people who routinely upload the contents of thick reference manuals into their brains. [During the production of the first book version of this document, for example, I learned most of the rather complex typesetting language TeX over about four working days, mainly by inhaling Knuth's 477-page manual. My editor's flabbergasted reaction to this genuinely surprised me, because years of associating with hackers have conditioned me to consider such performances routine and to be expected. —ESR] http://catb.org/jargon/html/personality.html http://catb.org/jargon/html/personality.html
- rl1987 7y agoHow can one learn or acquire this trait?
- hprotagonist 7y agojust start drinking from the firehose. the trick is to convince yourself not to care about the immediate utility of what you’re learning. And store pointers to data, it’s lighter weight.
- owyn 7y agoagree. read a lot. especially other people's source code.
- hprotagonist 7y agoread a lot, and i'd say read more or less any and all competent texts you can find.
- bobblywobbles 7y ago
- wsxcde 7y agoI enjoyed the article, but I think the author learned the wrong lesson from his friend's success story. Csongor says: > Then learning the answer revealed that it's actually something that can be fixed --- as is always the case with these things if you think about them enough. The author focuses on the consequent, thinking long and hard about something, but misses the antecedent, acquiring a deep understanding of a problem area. I'd say the antecedent is as important as the consequent, if not more important. If you went to grad school you likely knew tons of brilliant people who worked long and hard on important and difficult problems and got nowhere. What they were missing was not some secret effortsauce, but that they picked a problem on which they didn't have an opening or insight into, so all their hard work was them spinning their wheels while standing still. One thing I tell my students now is that they should always pick problems where they have something everybody else working in the same area doesn't. Like if you want to do formal verification but your background is years spent in industry as a kernel developer, you should avoid the temptation to chase the latest fad (e.g., adversarial machine learning or Spectre/Meltdown), and instead pick a poorly understood and validated module in the kernel and try to find out what you can do to make that module more secure.
- zwkrt 7y agoLots of people have one skill, few people have two, and only a tiny fraction ever put multiple skills to use at once.
- jkuria 7y agoSo true. This is also the 'Dilbert Theory of Value Creation' that I have used to great profit. Scott Adams likes to say, he is not the funniest guy around but funnier than most people. At best, he'd be a mediocre comedian. He can also draw better than most but hardly a Picasso. And yet, by combining both skills he has something "rare and valuable" that has led to enormous financial success. He also adds that it easier to do this (combining two or more skills) than it is to be the very best at one thing e.g. an NBA player--it is actually easier, statistically, to become a billionaire than it is to become an NBA player. There are more than 2,000 billionaires worldwide but only about 480 NBA players (32 teams with roughly 15 people on the roster). And if you think about it, becoming a billionaire usually involves multiple skills (good at programming + business, bill gates. Good at research/analysis + cultivating a rare temperament that allows you to act on the insights produced by the research even when everyone around you is losing their shirt, Warren Buffett etc, etc). Being an NBA player requires one skill at a minimum. Being tall!
- Abishek_Muthian 7y agoI think brilliant, not-brilliant, idiot or any other judgemental terms spent on tagging someone or ourselves is just a waste of time. The greater the effort spent on something by someone, greater is the probability of a favourable outcome to them. But it is still a probability and not a certainty because of variables involved.
- EForEndeavour 7y agoAs long as people work to live, there will be a pressing demand for such labels, flawed though they may be. Top organizations will always want to hire the smartest/most brilliant/non-idiotic people they can afford, for various practical definitions of these terms. If two people seem similar in every way, but Person 1 has demonstrated that they achieve greater probability of success compared to Person 2 given comparable time investments, then you'd probably want to hire Person 1. Real life is never this cut and dried, but the principle holds.
- Abishek_Muthian 7y agoI largely agree and work is a test environment, like any other test e.g. SAT; one who performs better is rewarded. But there's plenty of occasions where judgements is a waste of time, like at the personal level expressed in the OP article. OP does agree that the activity is result from the ego, I don't think he/she did enough to explore the ego resulting in injustice to the colleague as whole in the article.
- gpsx 7y agoA friend recounted a conversation where he was talking to one of his friends, saying he couldn't understand how these people could be so dumb. (I don't recall what "these" refers to...) His friend said, "I don't think it's that they're dumb. They just aren't curious." That was an enlightened comment. I think that is one of the elements that is needed to do brilliant things, just as Csonger says he was interested in understanding why this was "not possible".
- zxcmx 7y agoNot even “not curious”, but often just “not curious about that thing, right now”. Heck, most people understand very little about the myriad of everyday systems that keep them alive. Forget engines, computers or say, type theory. Most literally don’t know where their water comes from (to any level deeper than “it comes in a pipe”) or where their poo goes - and collectively that’s ok because the benefit of society is that this stuff gets taken care of for us. I think looking up now and then, scratching the surface of our own ignorance, can help specialists build empathy when communicating with others outside their field.
- mrkstu 7y agoThere is a cost to curiosity. Lack of focus. I had a real challenge in my career- I continuously ranged far afield in learning well beyond the direct subject areas of my network engineering career. That often took away time I 'should' have spent directly researching problem areas applicable to my day job. It finally led me to separating with a company I had been with for 8 years and had a lot of close relationships with. But what it did was put me on a path to actually use that store of knowledge. Now I'm a Network/Enterprise Architect and a key cog for my current CTO. I wasn't being used optimally previously but I also didn't make sure I was in the correct position that those skills/tendencies could be recognized and not be a hindrance. So much in life is in the framing of things- control that story, and your success is much more likely.
- gpsx 7y agoThat's a good point about specialists building empathy. One of my college physics professors complained about how dumb the ROTC people were - but a lot of them are humanities majors forced to take physics, which they couldn't care less about. Meanwhile, my political science professor was berating the science and engineering majors because all they would do is memorize and not learn concepts. That was on the day I scored higher on my physics test than my government test, and the physics test was out of 50 and the government test was out of 100.
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- nullwasamistake 7y agoThis goes along with a study I read a while back that you can do practically any job with an IQ of 120. Higher than average, but not anywhere close to genius level. With an average IQ of 100 you can still preform well in something like 80% of jobs. Software engineers have an average IQ of 110ish so most HN readers are capable of doing almost any job. It's really about effort and things that are harder to measure like creativity
- saagarjha 7y ago> Software engineers have an average IQ of 110ish so most HN readers are capable of doing almost any job. Do you have a source for this?
- kissgyorgy 7y agoNot sure about that. Brilliant work is by definition brilliant. :D Although you can do pretty great things and even be very famous or very rich even if you are not smart.
- akhilcacharya 7y agoThis was a good article, but I'm skeptical if someone from UWaterloo can attest to being "Normal". People that came from Waterloo are pretty exceptional on average unlike normal people like me.
- mjcohen 7y agoSomething I read many years ago: There are two way to get a Ph.D. - find a problem and solve it or find a solution method and come up with a problem that the method solves. The second way is by far the easier.