6 ms·

Depends 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

Depends 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 ago
how do you know that? have they shown you iq test results?
- Bootvis 7y ago
  Brilliance is more than IQ.
  - mlevental 7y ago
    yes that's what i'm insinuating too.
arijo 7y ago
Have you actually measured all of those Neuroscience PhDs IQs?
- neural_thing 7y ago
  No, 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 ago
    Is 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 ago
      Both 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 ago
      Why would you say this? Assessing IQ is the entire purpose of standardized tests, and unsurprisingly it's something they do well.
      - mlevental 7y ago
        because you can prepare for them.
        saagarjha 7y ago
        Can you not prepare for an IQ test?
        losvedir 7y ago
        Only to some extent. I've tutored for the SAT and seen some improvement, but you can't get people to perfect scores. I got a perfect score with a bit of practice. Khan academy and the college board say your score can improve on average 115 pts with study, which is not nothing, but is still a long way from 1600 when the average score is ~1000. So when someone says that people treat SAT scores as a proxy for an IQ test, they mean someone with a 1550 likely has a well-above average IQ, and a higher one than someone who got a 1250, who's still probably somewhat above average. [0] https://www.khanacademy.org/about/blog/post/160451329150/studying-for-the-sat-for-20-hours-on-khan-academy https://www.khanacademy.org/about/blog/post/160451329150/stu...
  - BeetleB 7y ago
    Below I talk about the older GRE exams It's not hard to get a perfect score in the quantitative section. You just need to be decent at math, and simply careful and tedious not to make mistakes. It's not hard to get in the 99 percentile of verbal either - just memorize a lot of words, practice, and learn some of the tricks (e.g. for analogy questions, you can eliminate 3 of the 5 choices even if you don't know the meaning of both words presented to you). Now when they had the analytical section (different from the current one - they retired it in about 2004) - that was a bit more challenging. And that was the one that set people in top schools apart. Getting a near perfect score (770-800) in quantitative was the norm for people applying to any of the top 10 grad schools in technical fields. But the analytical section was tougher. I think Caltech had the highest median (about 780). The next highest was Wisconsin with 750. The next highest after that was 720, and the rest of the top 10 were in that vicinity. But they scrapped that section - the only one that was a useful differentiator. Anyway - bottom line is getting good grades in GRE in the old days (and I suspect today as well) is mostly an exercise in memorizing words, and learning test taking strategies - including simple things like if you have to solve an equation and have 5 choices for x - don't bother solving it - just plug each x in to the equation to see which one works. Most people don't do this well because: 1. They cram - spend only 2 months preparing for it. 2. They don't spend time in figuring out efficient test taking strategies. Actually, they don't need time - they just need to read a few books on the topic! I spent over a year preparing for it (only a few minutes a day, and with gaps of weeks at a time). It wasn't hard to get a perfect score in two of the categories and a 99 percentile in the third. And then when I went to grad school, I didn't perform better than those whose score was nowhere near as good.
dTal 7y ago
Bit of a sampling bias. "Neuroscience PhD at MIT" is a helluva qualifier.
- stingraycharles 7y ago
  I 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 ago
In which direction?
amelius 7y ago
They 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 ago
  Come 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 ago
The author does concede this point in the article
akhilcacharya 7y ago
While 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.

mlevental 7y ago

how do you know that? have they shown you iq test results?

Bootvis 7y ago
Brilliance is more than IQ.
- mlevental 7y ago
  yes that's what i'm insinuating too.

arijo 7y ago

Have you actually measured all of those Neuroscience PhDs IQs?

neural_thing 7y ago
No, 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 ago
  Is 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 ago
    Both 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 ago
    Why would you say this? Assessing IQ is the entire purpose of standardized tests, and unsurprisingly it's something they do well.
    - mlevental 7y ago
      because you can prepare for them.
      - saagarjha 7y ago
        Can you not prepare for an IQ test?
      - losvedir 7y ago
        Only to some extent. I've tutored for the SAT and seen some improvement, but you can't get people to perfect scores. I got a perfect score with a bit of practice. Khan academy and the college board say your score can improve on average 115 pts with study, which is not nothing, but is still a long way from 1600 when the average score is ~1000. So when someone says that people treat SAT scores as a proxy for an IQ test, they mean someone with a 1550 likely has a well-above average IQ, and a higher one than someone who got a 1250, who's still probably somewhat above average. [0] https://www.khanacademy.org/about/blog/post/160451329150/studying-for-the-sat-for-20-hours-on-khan-academy https://www.khanacademy.org/about/blog/post/160451329150/stu...
- BeetleB 7y ago
  Below I talk about the older GRE exams It's not hard to get a perfect score in the quantitative section. You just need to be decent at math, and simply careful and tedious not to make mistakes. It's not hard to get in the 99 percentile of verbal either - just memorize a lot of words, practice, and learn some of the tricks (e.g. for analogy questions, you can eliminate 3 of the 5 choices even if you don't know the meaning of both words presented to you). Now when they had the analytical section (different from the current one - they retired it in about 2004) - that was a bit more challenging. And that was the one that set people in top schools apart. Getting a near perfect score (770-800) in quantitative was the norm for people applying to any of the top 10 grad schools in technical fields. But the analytical section was tougher. I think Caltech had the highest median (about 780). The next highest was Wisconsin with 750. The next highest after that was 720, and the rest of the top 10 were in that vicinity. But they scrapped that section - the only one that was a useful differentiator. Anyway - bottom line is getting good grades in GRE in the old days (and I suspect today as well) is mostly an exercise in memorizing words, and learning test taking strategies - including simple things like if you have to solve an equation and have 5 choices for x - don't bother solving it - just plug each x in to the equation to see which one works. Most people don't do this well because: 1. They cram - spend only 2 months preparing for it. 2. They don't spend time in figuring out efficient test taking strategies. Actually, they don't need time - they just need to read a few books on the topic! I spent over a year preparing for it (only a few minutes a day, and with gaps of weeks at a time). It wasn't hard to get a perfect score in two of the categories and a 99 percentile in the third. And then when I went to grad school, I didn't perform better than those whose score was nowhere near as good.

dTal 7y ago

Bit of a sampling bias. "Neuroscience PhD at MIT" is a helluva qualifier.

stingraycharles 7y ago
I 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 ago

In which direction?

amelius 7y ago

They 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 ago
Come 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 ago

The author does concede this point in the article

akhilcacharya 7y ago

While 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.