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Dr. Kay is a genius of the highest order. He not only understands that we're not at the Promise Land, he understands why we're not and gives valid advice on ho

Dr. Kay is a genius of the highest order. He not only understands that we're not at the Promise Land, he understands why we're not and gives valid advice on how to get there, including working on it himself. This is not to say the he doesn't get many things wrong. VPRI's COLA, for example, and the IQ/Knowledge/Outlook portion of this presentation is horribly off-base. I won't go into it here, the margins are too small and it doesn't matter. The main point is that he's still the bright torch in a dark night.

pavpanchekha 15y ago
Yep. This talk has made me want to watch and read everything Kay had ever done. He and Steele have laid out the clearest case for inventing new languages that I've heard. Have you, perchance, heard Steele's "How to Grow a Language" (not too relevant, but also a great talk).
- DanielRibeiro 15y ago
  Great Talk as well. Link: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8860158196198824415# http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8860158196198824415...
barrkel 15y ago
Can you explain more about the knowledge / IQ thing - even briefly? In my experience, I've seen many misguided intelligent people not much helped by it, some even worse off as they use their smarts to muddle through where the terrain should have dissuaded them long ago; think eg over-complicated under-abstracted code. And reading Mensa newsgroups will disabuse you very quickly of the idea IQ alone is even a positive, rather than neutral at best, trait. You need intelligence to make a leap of insight, but knowing that a leap of insight is possible, that any particular problem deserves a novel solution rather than an existing one, requires perspective or foreknowledge, or knowledge of the history of solutions that didn't quite make it. So I'd agree with Kay here; smarts alone are almost useless. Or to make an analogy: IQ is like strength, but knowing where to push needs perspective (literally a different point of view) or a map (knowledge). Applying that strength to gain perspective instead of just pushing requires some self-awareness, particularly if just pushing even harder always worked for you in the past.
- david927 15y ago
  Sure. It's a big subject but here's my take: IQ, first off, does not measure intelligence. Intelligence is qualititative, like beauty, not quantitative like height. While you can be one inch taller than someone else, you can't be one point prettier. You can measure cheekbones in women, and higher cheekbones will on average indicate "more beautiful". You can say, Czech women have higher cheekbones on average than other nationalities and as a country, it tends to produce more super models per capita, and draw some correlation. IQ can be used this way too, but it's measuring aspect associatied with intelligence, not intelligence. Worse, for years there was an understanding that IQ can't be changed per person, leading us to believe we are 'this' smart and can't get smarter. What a fiasco because we now know that it's like fitness in this regard: The more you work at it, the smarter you can become. Dr. Kay mentions outlook and that does apply. This beauty analogy is important, so let's keep using it. My wife and I were in Monaco yesterday, and two women passed us who had clearly undergone tremendous amounts of plastic surgery; and we agreed that it made them look hideous. If there was a Beauty Quotient (BQ), they would proudly declare themselves to have "a high BQ". It simply doesn't work that way. Take any public figure you find beautiful and look at their feature set. You'll find it's not a simple addition of beauty features that makes them beautiful. It's about the mix of features -- for that time and culture. In other words, it's partly about "character" (what Kay calls "outlook"). But while that's where it ends for beauty, that's only where it starts for intelligence. Because your character, how you define yourself, will block your ability to make the right connections. If you think of yourself as a patriot, you will block information that will run contrary to that belief. If you define yourself as being smart, you won't be able to accept conclusions that might be contraversial and place that image in doubt, and so you will be less intelligent for it. Dr. Kay calls knowledge important. It is, but not as much as he thinks. If we consider Graph Theory, we can say "knowledge" is like the vertices -- the dots. When learning you group dots and break apart dots: ascern (my word) and discern. Ascern means finding common properties in group of data points: wine and water are both part of the set of liquids. Discern means distinguishing differences: wine can be red or white, and red wine can be from different grapes such as merlot, pinot noir, etc. "Understanding" is the equivalent of the edges -- the lines connecting the dots (of various abstraction levels). You can't understand what you don't know, so you need knowledge, but that alone won't get you there. In fact, too much knowledge in any particular space can inhibit your ability to draw inferences and truly 'understand' the subject (making relations amount the data points) because you're dealing with information in terms of too small of data points; you're not abstracting high enough. The edges are not as simple as I'm making them out to be. The edges actually say, this applies to that 'usually' and 'in certain cases'. Water belongs to the set of liquids, but only when the temperature is right. So these data points are abstracted via edges, and so, in conditional ways. Understanding also means knowing at a comfort level that allows you to play with the information at the right abstraction level. Let's say you are air-dropped into New York City. All you know is what you've heard about Central Park and the Empire State Building. So what you do, initially, is to abstract around those landmarks. Where is the really good Thai restaurant? A bit to the South-West of Central Park. But as you learn more about NYC, you get more detailed: the place is next to the Roxy on Lex and 23rd. You're able to talk in terms of greater granualarity: What are the bad areas? At first they will be big swaths of areas of NYC, but later more and more like little bubbles throughout the city. Sorry, that's not a good explanation at all -- I'll try to come up with something better. The main thing is that "understanding" lets you create verticies when you don't have them (via approximation to other edges and vertices), and use unknowns with more ease. If you don't "understand", you will cling more tightly to your landmarks, but when you understand, you don't have to anymore. We often call understanding about life "wisdom". We don't have a word for understand about cars and microbiology. And it's this understanding combined with character, where true intelligence or genius arises.

pavpanchekha 15y ago

Yep. This talk has made me want to watch and read everything Kay had ever done. He and Steele have laid out the clearest case for inventing new languages that I've heard. Have you, perchance, heard Steele's "How to Grow a Language" (not too relevant, but also a great talk).

DanielRibeiro 15y ago
Great Talk as well. Link: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8860158196198824415# http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8860158196198824415...

barrkel 15y ago

Can you explain more about the knowledge / IQ thing - even briefly? In my experience, I've seen many misguided intelligent people not much helped by it, some even worse off as they use their smarts to muddle through where the terrain should have dissuaded them long ago; think eg over-complicated under-abstracted code. And reading Mensa newsgroups will disabuse you very quickly of the idea IQ alone is even a positive, rather than neutral at best, trait. You need intelligence to make a leap of insight, but knowing that a leap of insight is possible, that any particular problem deserves a novel solution rather than an existing one, requires perspective or foreknowledge, or knowledge of the history of solutions that didn't quite make it. So I'd agree with Kay here; smarts alone are almost useless. Or to make an analogy: IQ is like strength, but knowing where to push needs perspective (literally a different point of view) or a map (knowledge). Applying that strength to gain perspective instead of just pushing requires some self-awareness, particularly if just pushing even harder always worked for you in the past.

david927 15y ago
Sure. It's a big subject but here's my take: IQ, first off, does not measure intelligence. Intelligence is qualititative, like beauty, not quantitative like height. While you can be one inch taller than someone else, you can't be one point prettier. You can measure cheekbones in women, and higher cheekbones will on average indicate "more beautiful". You can say, Czech women have higher cheekbones on average than other nationalities and as a country, it tends to produce more super models per capita, and draw some correlation. IQ can be used this way too, but it's measuring aspect associatied with intelligence, not intelligence. Worse, for years there was an understanding that IQ can't be changed per person, leading us to believe we are 'this' smart and can't get smarter. What a fiasco because we now know that it's like fitness in this regard: The more you work at it, the smarter you can become. Dr. Kay mentions outlook and that does apply. This beauty analogy is important, so let's keep using it. My wife and I were in Monaco yesterday, and two women passed us who had clearly undergone tremendous amounts of plastic surgery; and we agreed that it made them look hideous. If there was a Beauty Quotient (BQ), they would proudly declare themselves to have "a high BQ". It simply doesn't work that way. Take any public figure you find beautiful and look at their feature set. You'll find it's not a simple addition of beauty features that makes them beautiful. It's about the mix of features -- for that time and culture. In other words, it's partly about "character" (what Kay calls "outlook"). But while that's where it ends for beauty, that's only where it starts for intelligence. Because your character, how you define yourself, will block your ability to make the right connections. If you think of yourself as a patriot, you will block information that will run contrary to that belief. If you define yourself as being smart, you won't be able to accept conclusions that might be contraversial and place that image in doubt, and so you will be less intelligent for it. Dr. Kay calls knowledge important. It is, but not as much as he thinks. If we consider Graph Theory, we can say "knowledge" is like the vertices -- the dots. When learning you group dots and break apart dots: ascern (my word) and discern. Ascern means finding common properties in group of data points: wine and water are both part of the set of liquids. Discern means distinguishing differences: wine can be red or white, and red wine can be from different grapes such as merlot, pinot noir, etc. "Understanding" is the equivalent of the edges -- the lines connecting the dots (of various abstraction levels). You can't understand what you don't know, so you need knowledge, but that alone won't get you there. In fact, too much knowledge in any particular space can inhibit your ability to draw inferences and truly 'understand' the subject (making relations amount the data points) because you're dealing with information in terms of too small of data points; you're not abstracting high enough. The edges are not as simple as I'm making them out to be. The edges actually say, this applies to that 'usually' and 'in certain cases'. Water belongs to the set of liquids, but only when the temperature is right. So these data points are abstracted via edges, and so, in conditional ways. Understanding also means knowing at a comfort level that allows you to play with the information at the right abstraction level. Let's say you are air-dropped into New York City. All you know is what you've heard about Central Park and the Empire State Building. So what you do, initially, is to abstract around those landmarks. Where is the really good Thai restaurant? A bit to the South-West of Central Park. But as you learn more about NYC, you get more detailed: the place is next to the Roxy on Lex and 23rd. You're able to talk in terms of greater granualarity: What are the bad areas? At first they will be big swaths of areas of NYC, but later more and more like little bubbles throughout the city. Sorry, that's not a good explanation at all -- I'll try to come up with something better. The main thing is that "understanding" lets you create verticies when you don't have them (via approximation to other edges and vertices), and use unknowns with more ease. If you don't "understand", you will cling more tightly to your landmarks, but when you understand, you don't have to anymore. We often call understanding about life "wisdom". We don't have a word for understand about cars and microbiology. And it's this understanding combined with character, where true intelligence or genius arises.