5 ms·

> It could be that the scientists are simply smarter; most physicists could, if necessary, make it through a PhD program in French literature, but few professo

> It could be that the scientists are simply smarter; most physicists could, if necessary, make it through a PhD program in French literature, but few professors of French literature could make it through a PhD program in physics. Well having taken a lesson from the article, I think he's purely mistaken with this point. (As well as divisive, insensitive, etc..) Quite the hubris to make that assumption!

tomrod 7y ago
There is a certain, je ne sais quoi, gravity to it.
voidhorse 7y ago
Totally, it’s the classic blowhard man of science attitude: “I think what I do is more difficult than any other human endeavor and though I’ve never attempted the grand feats of intelligence I claim to be capable of...” there’s a reason actual polymaths and polyglots are rare occurences in history. The very attitude itself shows that what someone has in specialized knowlegde they clearly lack in wisdom, which makes it highly unlikely that such a person is actually capable of their prideful delusions of grandeur. He has a point about the sokal hoax but the proper conclusion from that is that there are issues with the academic system and structure around work in the humanities—not that physicists are “smarter”—we’re talking about a system thats largely free-form vs one that’s inherently rigorous—theres no reasonable way to derive any strong claims about general intelligence based on this. The only reason physicists wouldnt get tripped up by hoax is because theres a centuries long system of rigor around what they do that makes it very hard fr them to let anything bogus slip in—its proceedure—they have a way better instrument backing them up, it has nothing to do with the intelligence of individuals, only learned behavior and functioning within prescribed systems. It’s hubris that’s a product of our age. Technologists, even more so than scientists at this point, are supossed to be the priestly class capable of miracles (while in reality the vast majority of them, even the brightest, have at best a passing knowledge of the humanities just like humanists have scant expertise in the sceinces! In fact such a reality is practically deterministic due to the hyperspecialization of knowledge) Paul Graham’s writings, at least what I’ve read, annoy me. No matter how much studying he may have actually done in reality, he always comes off as an individual that assumed he could play at philosophy and cultural critique just fine while maintaining a total disregard for the tradition and without ever having engaged with it in a deep way. Makes for literature that sounds very self-assured and pompous with little to back it up. Kind of like reading the incredibly naive thoughts of a cocky teenager with slightly more life experience. This essay for example, covers subject matter (moral relativism, bleeding into relativism in general, as well as the engine of history) that has been examined to death in the history of philosophy, yet paul graham doesn’t cite one person from that tradition. Why? Because, at the time, he was totally oblivious and had a superiority complex that wasn’t at all critical, self-reflective, or intelligent, which probably kept him from engaging with people that might’ve pointed outthe vast history of exploration into the topic that he handles as though man discovered history yesterday. Of course this doesn’t actually matter, because his target audience is totally oblivious too (people who, through no fault of their own, have been pushed into a very narrow specialized sphere of life—note this isn’t a sufficient condition for “smartness”), and we’ll all remain blind and blundering until we really introduce some cross-disciplinary study back into schooling and life itself.
- porknubbins 7y ago
  You described how I’ve always felt about Paul Grahams writings except maybe the startup or programming ones on which I defer to him as more of an expert. He is sometimes an engaging essayist and doing what I guess essayists do which is describe the world from their perspective without letting too much rigor get in the way of an interesting story. I just get turned off by making a point like “we don’t say fuck around kids because of our precious taboos and because we want to think of kids as innocent” which is not particularly wrong but so oversimplified as to be not really worth saying except to imply that the writer is more enlightened than the rest of us.
jf- 7y ago
We can pretend to be outraged by it but he’s very likely right. We’ve arrived at a point where it’s unacceptable to say that people have different levels of ability or that some professions require more than others. (And this comment didn’t go straight to the bottom this time, that’s a nice change.)
- voidhorse 7y ago
  But it’s a very naive and limited conception of intelligence that equates intellegence strictly with mathematical reasoning (and perhaps experimentation). There are many forms of intellect. For example, plenty of people that excel in mathematics and physics have a horrible time of expressing themselves linguistically and are usually not very good at socializing. And let’s be really honest then: the vast majority of people that are good at rigorous studies and “hard” sciences are actually people who don’t question accepted beliefs—they use an entire framework of reasoning without ever questioning it on a day to day basis. Hardly skeptics. In fact one of the best qualities you can have as a scientist is to follow mundane proceedures without questioning a thing and regardless of the changing circumstances.
  - jf- 7y ago
    Yes, I equate intelligence with reasoning. For me, and realistically most everyone else, intelligence is the ability to reason, formulate solutions to problems and to quickly grasp concepts. There are a host of other skills that are worthwhile and desirable and whatever else, but why pretend that they are the same thing as intelligence? I’m not sure I understand the relevance of your skeptics comment. Edit: you added this since I wrote my reply: > In fact one of the best qualities you can have as a scientist is to follow mundane proceedures without questioning a thing and regardless of the changing circumstances. I’m afraid you now just sound like you have a chip on your shoulder.
    - voidhorse 7y ago
      Your differentiation between "intelligence" and "other skills" partially refutes Paul's point in the article. If we were to take your definition, Paul's saying that physicists, because they're better at ratiocination should be good enough at french literature to get a PHD, but based on your claim french literature involves a host of abilities that have nothing to do with intelligence (not strict ratiocination or problem solving) so how could we possibly conclude from the fact that physicists are better at ratiocination that they're therefore better equipped to learn about French literature than french lit profs are to learn about ratiocination and subsequently physics? It's also predicated on an imprecise and singular use of the term "reason". Do you mean calculation? Or do you mean analogical thinking (the construction of metaphors, "grasping concepts"), for instance, both of which could be called forms of reason but both of which are very different. It's a totally inane question. Claims like Paul's are just the intellectual equivalent of chest puffing. Don't get roped into the stupidity. This kind of attitude causes divisions and turns you into a prideful douche. It's indicative most of all that the author takes an extreme pride in whatever he takes to be his "intellect." Goliaths' waiting for their Davids. As for the skeptics, what I mean is that working scientists usually can't engage in radical questioning--this is left to mathematicians (in the pure sense) and philosophers. They need to have faith, just like everyone else, that their systems work. While the application of reason provides probabilistic assurances around certainty you leave the realm of complete, inviolable certainty as soon as you exit the heaven of pure theory and turn it into practice.
Reedx 7y ago
Paul's response to this: "Actually, for illustrative purposes I did include a few things you can't say, but I stuck to domain-specific ones. Within university faculties, this is the great unmentionable. And look at how much trouble I got in for bringing it up. (So far no one from the US car industry has complained though, perhaps because I mentioned explicitly that a heresy was coming, instead of just inlining it.) Try this thought experiment. A dictator takes over the US and sends all the professors to re-education camps. The physicists are told they have to learn how to write academic articles about French literature, and the French literature professors are told they have to learn how to write original physics papers. If they fail, they'll be shot. Which group is more worried? We have some evidence here: the famous parody that physicist Alan Sokal got published in Social Text. How long did it take him to master the art of writing deep-sounding nonsense well enough to fool the editors? A couple weeks? What do you suppose would be the odds of a literary theorist getting a parody of a physics paper published in a physics journal?" http://www.paulgraham.com/resay.html http://www.paulgraham.com/resay.html
- lazyasciiart 7y ago
  Pretty high - has he updated his response yet? https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/oct/22/nonsense-paper-written-by-ios-autocomplete-accepted-for-conference https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/oct/22/nonsense-pap...
  - knzhou 7y ago
    This is one of those predatory conferences that accepts literally everything. Nobody working seriously in the field has ever gone to any of these -- they exist solely to allow non-serious people to pad their resumes, which is exactly what happened here.
- bsanr2 7y ago
  That's a bad analogy, though. In one case, you have a group who has to examine, and a group that has to discover. They both employ high-level critical-thinking and creative-thinking skills, but their output of novel work under even normal circumstances differs due to the nature of their work.
dmurray 7y ago
The follow up [0] to this essay tells how he didn't want to explicitly claim anything as an "unsayable truth" today, but that he snuck this one in anyway. It's...controversial, not PC and quite possibly wrong, but it has some chance of being one of those truths. > Actually, for illustrative purposes I did include a few things you can't say, but I stuck to domain-specific ones. Within university faculties, this is the great unmentionable. And look at how much trouble I got in for bringing it up... > Try this thought experiment. A dictator takes over the US and sends all the professors to re-education camps. The physicists are told they have to learn how to write academic articles about French literature, and the French literature professors are told they have to learn how to write original physics papers. If they fail, they'll be shot. Which group is more worried? [0] http://www.paulgraham.com/resay.html http://www.paulgraham.com/resay.html
rland 7y ago
Statements like these are STEM vs. Non-STEM version of "why does Twitter need 4000 software engineers? I could make that in two weeks!" Didn't Paul Graham write an article about that?
- bgrainger 7y ago
  There's a Dan Luu essay on that subject: https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/ https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/
- Retric 7y ago
  That’s a rather poor example as you can say all this stuff: https://github.com/twitter https://github.com/twitter Also, Twitter does not have 4,000 total employees let alone software engineers. It’s core software was initially built by a tiny team, with the company only growing to 130 people in total after two years.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Such statements aren't about "4000 software engineers" but "4000 employees", and the answer always is, "3960 of those are in administrative or sales and marketing roles".
lawnchair_larry 7y ago
It’s a sign that we are in crazy times when people even think his claim is debatable. Come on. Whether it’s divisive or insensitive is irrelevant. It’s true.
hinkley 7y ago
There is the concept of a polymath. There is overlap in that group with autodidacts (people who can teach themselves about anything if they only want it badly enough). I think Paul may be falling prey to a correlation issue here. If you are an autodidact and a polymath, are you more likely to end up as a scientist or engineer, or as a professor of French Literature? Very few people in the CS program understood why I was contemplating 300 level French classes (I placed out of 4 semesters of french, and that left 2-3 200 level classes and then you were into the hard stuff). A lot of them could not have 'suffered' through twelve semesters of French, no matter how much you bet them.
- tempestn 7y ago
  If you're saying that more polymaths are likely to end up as physics professors than French professors, doesn't that actually support the point he's making?
  - hinkley 7y ago
    Proving that it makes sense for anecdotes to exist doesn't suddenly turn them into data. Polymaths are physicists does not even mean that physicists are polymaths.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      No, but "polymaths are smarter than non-polymaths" and "polymaths are much more likely to go into physics than French literature" combined essentially prove PG's point.
toasterlovin 7y ago
It appears that nobody in this thread has gone and tried to find it, but I believe there is research showing that hard scientists do actually tend to have very strong verbal skills in addition to their strong quantitative skills, whereas non-quantitative academics tend be strong only with verbal stuff.

tomrod 7y ago

There is a certain, je ne sais quoi, gravity to it.

voidhorse 7y ago

Totally, it’s the classic blowhard man of science attitude: “I think what I do is more difficult than any other human endeavor and though I’ve never attempted the grand feats of intelligence I claim to be capable of...” there’s a reason actual polymaths and polyglots are rare occurences in history. The very attitude itself shows that what someone has in specialized knowlegde they clearly lack in wisdom, which makes it highly unlikely that such a person is actually capable of their prideful delusions of grandeur. He has a point about the sokal hoax but the proper conclusion from that is that there are issues with the academic system and structure around work in the humanities—not that physicists are “smarter”—we’re talking about a system thats largely free-form vs one that’s inherently rigorous—theres no reasonable way to derive any strong claims about general intelligence based on this. The only reason physicists wouldnt get tripped up by hoax is because theres a centuries long system of rigor around what they do that makes it very hard fr them to let anything bogus slip in—its proceedure—they have a way better instrument backing them up, it has nothing to do with the intelligence of individuals, only learned behavior and functioning within prescribed systems. It’s hubris that’s a product of our age. Technologists, even more so than scientists at this point, are supossed to be the priestly class capable of miracles (while in reality the vast majority of them, even the brightest, have at best a passing knowledge of the humanities just like humanists have scant expertise in the sceinces! In fact such a reality is practically deterministic due to the hyperspecialization of knowledge) Paul Graham’s writings, at least what I’ve read, annoy me. No matter how much studying he may have actually done in reality, he always comes off as an individual that assumed he could play at philosophy and cultural critique just fine while maintaining a total disregard for the tradition and without ever having engaged with it in a deep way. Makes for literature that sounds very self-assured and pompous with little to back it up. Kind of like reading the incredibly naive thoughts of a cocky teenager with slightly more life experience. This essay for example, covers subject matter (moral relativism, bleeding into relativism in general, as well as the engine of history) that has been examined to death in the history of philosophy, yet paul graham doesn’t cite one person from that tradition. Why? Because, at the time, he was totally oblivious and had a superiority complex that wasn’t at all critical, self-reflective, or intelligent, which probably kept him from engaging with people that might’ve pointed outthe vast history of exploration into the topic that he handles as though man discovered history yesterday. Of course this doesn’t actually matter, because his target audience is totally oblivious too (people who, through no fault of their own, have been pushed into a very narrow specialized sphere of life—note this isn’t a sufficient condition for “smartness”), and we’ll all remain blind and blundering until we really introduce some cross-disciplinary study back into schooling and life itself.

porknubbins 7y ago
You described how I’ve always felt about Paul Grahams writings except maybe the startup or programming ones on which I defer to him as more of an expert. He is sometimes an engaging essayist and doing what I guess essayists do which is describe the world from their perspective without letting too much rigor get in the way of an interesting story. I just get turned off by making a point like “we don’t say fuck around kids because of our precious taboos and because we want to think of kids as innocent” which is not particularly wrong but so oversimplified as to be not really worth saying except to imply that the writer is more enlightened than the rest of us.

jf- 7y ago

We can pretend to be outraged by it but he’s very likely right. We’ve arrived at a point where it’s unacceptable to say that people have different levels of ability or that some professions require more than others. (And this comment didn’t go straight to the bottom this time, that’s a nice change.)

voidhorse 7y ago
But it’s a very naive and limited conception of intelligence that equates intellegence strictly with mathematical reasoning (and perhaps experimentation). There are many forms of intellect. For example, plenty of people that excel in mathematics and physics have a horrible time of expressing themselves linguistically and are usually not very good at socializing. And let’s be really honest then: the vast majority of people that are good at rigorous studies and “hard” sciences are actually people who don’t question accepted beliefs—they use an entire framework of reasoning without ever questioning it on a day to day basis. Hardly skeptics. In fact one of the best qualities you can have as a scientist is to follow mundane proceedures without questioning a thing and regardless of the changing circumstances.
- jf- 7y ago
  Yes, I equate intelligence with reasoning. For me, and realistically most everyone else, intelligence is the ability to reason, formulate solutions to problems and to quickly grasp concepts. There are a host of other skills that are worthwhile and desirable and whatever else, but why pretend that they are the same thing as intelligence? I’m not sure I understand the relevance of your skeptics comment. Edit: you added this since I wrote my reply: > In fact one of the best qualities you can have as a scientist is to follow mundane proceedures without questioning a thing and regardless of the changing circumstances. I’m afraid you now just sound like you have a chip on your shoulder.
  - voidhorse 7y ago
    Your differentiation between "intelligence" and "other skills" partially refutes Paul's point in the article. If we were to take your definition, Paul's saying that physicists, because they're better at ratiocination should be good enough at french literature to get a PHD, but based on your claim french literature involves a host of abilities that have nothing to do with intelligence (not strict ratiocination or problem solving) so how could we possibly conclude from the fact that physicists are better at ratiocination that they're therefore better equipped to learn about French literature than french lit profs are to learn about ratiocination and subsequently physics? It's also predicated on an imprecise and singular use of the term "reason". Do you mean calculation? Or do you mean analogical thinking (the construction of metaphors, "grasping concepts"), for instance, both of which could be called forms of reason but both of which are very different. It's a totally inane question. Claims like Paul's are just the intellectual equivalent of chest puffing. Don't get roped into the stupidity. This kind of attitude causes divisions and turns you into a prideful douche. It's indicative most of all that the author takes an extreme pride in whatever he takes to be his "intellect." Goliaths' waiting for their Davids. As for the skeptics, what I mean is that working scientists usually can't engage in radical questioning--this is left to mathematicians (in the pure sense) and philosophers. They need to have faith, just like everyone else, that their systems work. While the application of reason provides probabilistic assurances around certainty you leave the realm of complete, inviolable certainty as soon as you exit the heaven of pure theory and turn it into practice.

Reedx 7y ago

Paul's response to this: "Actually, for illustrative purposes I did include a few things you can't say, but I stuck to domain-specific ones. Within university faculties, this is the great unmentionable. And look at how much trouble I got in for bringing it up. (So far no one from the US car industry has complained though, perhaps because I mentioned explicitly that a heresy was coming, instead of just inlining it.) Try this thought experiment. A dictator takes over the US and sends all the professors to re-education camps. The physicists are told they have to learn how to write academic articles about French literature, and the French literature professors are told they have to learn how to write original physics papers. If they fail, they'll be shot. Which group is more worried? We have some evidence here: the famous parody that physicist Alan Sokal got published in Social Text. How long did it take him to master the art of writing deep-sounding nonsense well enough to fool the editors? A couple weeks? What do you suppose would be the odds of a literary theorist getting a parody of a physics paper published in a physics journal?" http://www.paulgraham.com/resay.html http://www.paulgraham.com/resay.html

lazyasciiart 7y ago
Pretty high - has he updated his response yet? https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/oct/22/nonsense-paper-written-by-ios-autocomplete-accepted-for-conference https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/oct/22/nonsense-pap...
- knzhou 7y ago
  This is one of those predatory conferences that accepts literally everything. Nobody working seriously in the field has ever gone to any of these -- they exist solely to allow non-serious people to pad their resumes, which is exactly what happened here.
bsanr2 7y ago
That's a bad analogy, though. In one case, you have a group who has to examine, and a group that has to discover. They both employ high-level critical-thinking and creative-thinking skills, but their output of novel work under even normal circumstances differs due to the nature of their work.

dmurray 7y ago

The follow up [0] to this essay tells how he didn't want to explicitly claim anything as an "unsayable truth" today, but that he snuck this one in anyway. It's...controversial, not PC and quite possibly wrong, but it has some chance of being one of those truths. > Actually, for illustrative purposes I did include a few things you can't say, but I stuck to domain-specific ones. Within university faculties, this is the great unmentionable. And look at how much trouble I got in for bringing it up... > Try this thought experiment. A dictator takes over the US and sends all the professors to re-education camps. The physicists are told they have to learn how to write academic articles about French literature, and the French literature professors are told they have to learn how to write original physics papers. If they fail, they'll be shot. Which group is more worried? [0] http://www.paulgraham.com/resay.html http://www.paulgraham.com/resay.html

rland 7y ago

Statements like these are STEM vs. Non-STEM version of "why does Twitter need 4000 software engineers? I could make that in two weeks!" Didn't Paul Graham write an article about that?

bgrainger 7y ago
There's a Dan Luu essay on that subject: https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/ https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/
Retric 7y ago
That’s a rather poor example as you can say all this stuff: https://github.com/twitter https://github.com/twitter Also, Twitter does not have 4,000 total employees let alone software engineers. It’s core software was initially built by a tiny team, with the company only growing to 130 people in total after two years.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
Such statements aren't about "4000 software engineers" but "4000 employees", and the answer always is, "3960 of those are in administrative or sales and marketing roles".

lawnchair_larry 7y ago

It’s a sign that we are in crazy times when people even think his claim is debatable. Come on. Whether it’s divisive or insensitive is irrelevant. It’s true.

hinkley 7y ago

There is the concept of a polymath. There is overlap in that group with autodidacts (people who can teach themselves about anything if they only want it badly enough). I think Paul may be falling prey to a correlation issue here. If you are an autodidact and a polymath, are you more likely to end up as a scientist or engineer, or as a professor of French Literature? Very few people in the CS program understood why I was contemplating 300 level French classes (I placed out of 4 semesters of french, and that left 2-3 200 level classes and then you were into the hard stuff). A lot of them could not have 'suffered' through twelve semesters of French, no matter how much you bet them.

tempestn 7y ago
If you're saying that more polymaths are likely to end up as physics professors than French professors, doesn't that actually support the point he's making?
- hinkley 7y ago
  Proving that it makes sense for anecdotes to exist doesn't suddenly turn them into data. Polymaths are physicists does not even mean that physicists are polymaths.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    No, but "polymaths are smarter than non-polymaths" and "polymaths are much more likely to go into physics than French literature" combined essentially prove PG's point.

toasterlovin 7y ago

It appears that nobody in this thread has gone and tried to find it, but I believe there is research showing that hard scientists do actually tend to have very strong verbal skills in addition to their strong quantitative skills, whereas non-quantitative academics tend be strong only with verbal stuff.