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Beyond Smart

• mcguire 5y ago
  Are new ideas inherently good?
• api 5y ago
  There are a few things he didn’t mention that I suspect are important: a variety of life experiences, exposure to more than one modality of thinking, and an opportunity to engage in autonomous unstructured play as a child. It’s good at any age but is likely pivotal in childhood.
• acmegeek 5y ago
  Success in the way PG seems to be talking about is indeed about more than intelligence, it is also about experience, perspective, perception, ignorance, interest, imagination, and a bit of luck. I've thought a lot about this, and I would break them down as follows: 1. Intelligence is more of a raw ability to process and synthesize information, and everyone genetically predisposed to have a starting measure. As one experiences life, one's intelligence can be developed, expanded, and refined. 2. Experiences shape us whether we like it or not, but those who tend to me more successful than others, experiences tend to be opportunities to grow, recalibrate, review, shed, and otherwise change who they are in a way that would ensure a more effective outcome in a similar future experience. 3. Perspective and perception are tightly knit in that as we mature through life experiences, the size, detail, and depth of the world and reality continues to grow. Perspective in this sense is having an intentional awareness of how much there really is to know, and also, how much there is still left to discover. Perception is more of being able to intentionally focus on and recognize the breadth, depth, and detail of our perspective. 4. Ignorance is simply the missing pieces to what you know or understand, the limits to your knowledge of the world and how it works. Awareness of one's own ignorance affords the opportunity to actively manage it, to either take steps to fill in gaps, or just be content in not knowing. 5. Interest is more about what items or aspects within our perspective and perception do we have a persistent affinity for? These affinities can be cultivated, and effort sown into some will reap greater rewards than others. 6. Imagination is likely the most powerful, since this is the ability to create a perspective that is not necessarily reflected or even inspired by something you have perceived. Imagination is surely informed by all of the preceding, but this is where the true magic happens, where success can increase exponentially. The preceding provide the bounds, drive, attraction, references, and understanding that can spark and fuel new ideas and connections. It is within imagination that all the ideas that advance humanity are born and nurtured since anything new is necessarily first imagined in a mind. 7. And last is luck, which in a sense, especially in the context of success, is really just a culmination of all of the preceding. The luckiest successful people are those: - who have a baseline intelligence that they have actively developed, - who have taken advantage of and sought out experiences that yielded opportunity to grow, - who have intentionally broadened and deepened their perspectives while improving their ability to focus and perceive effectively to notice and seize opportunities, - who manage their ignorance such that it doesn't become an impediment or lasting liability, - who latch onto worthwhile or beneficial interests, - and lastly, who actively charge and exercise their imagination, always wondering how they could add to or improve their realities. So PG is right, it is a lot more than just being smart, intelligence is just one ingredient in the recipe for success. World-changing new ideas are a result of being actively aware of and engaged with reality while having and following through on the drive to push the boundaries of what is known, understood, or possible.
• carabiner 5y ago
  Using footnotes to add random tangents, rather than clarifications or directly related context, seems noisy. Why do writers in tech do this? I've never seen footnotes used like this.
• raldi 5y ago
  Einstein's fame kinda ruined the word "genius" — people tend to think the word is just a synonym for smart. But to me (and I think the gen- root at the beginning supports this), the key thing about a genius is that they revolutionize a field and inspire others to think in wildly new ways. Problem was, Einstein was both of these things, and is so associated with the word that a lot of people's brains just go from "genius" -> Einstein -> "super smart".
  • asdfman123 5y ago
    I think the key thing that superior intelligence gives you in science is the ability to survey a large field of knowledge, quickly identify the essence of each idea, zero in on what's worth pursuing and what's worth throwing out. Research is like a crowd of people painstakingly searching through a cow pasture to find little gems buried in the dirt. If your vision is clearer and you can move 10x faster, you can run circles around other people. You can look over hundreds of leads, intuitively sense what works and what doesn't, and narrow in on promising ones.
• bencollier49 5y ago
  For anyone who's familiar with the roll of British entrepreneurs who did terribly at school and yet built massive companies, this post isn't some sort of massive reveal. Is this something more common in the UK than the US? If so, why?
• Madmallard 5y ago
  “Intelligence wins in conversation, and thus becomes the basis of the dominance hierarchy.” Okay Jordan Peterson. This is myopic.
• d_tr 5y ago
  As Alan Kay likes to say, "a change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points".
  • criddell 5y ago
    Does he say in which direction?
    • randcraw 5y ago
      My guess: repeatedly zooming out and in again -- to look at the many parts of the whole to see how they all interconnect and interact to then wonder why and why not.
    • d_tr 5y ago
      Could be up, could be down :)
  • david927 5y ago
    But this is wrong. The point of this essay is saying the opposite is true: A decent IQ gives you the chance to have a change of perspective. IQ is the artistic equivalent of "how well can you draw a line?" You need a good foundation for artistic expression but many, many people have that and still don't create art worth remembering. Intelligence (the capacity to process) combined with knowledge can give you that strong intellectual foundation -- but that's all it is. The rest is finding that change of perspective.
    • d_tr 5y ago
      I do not think there is any disagreement here. Your reply, the essay, as well as the quote I posted are all about this distance between being naturally intelligent and making something out of it.
      • david927 5y ago
        There is a disagreement, though, because it's about which aspect takes precedence -- which has the most value. Imagine a test called Artistic Quotient which gives you a numeric value for how correctly you draw lines, circles, etc. An average artist might have an AQ of 100 and a very good artist an AQ of 120. Now, imagine looking at a Van Gogh and saying, that the artistic expression he achieved is worth 80 AQ points, putting him on the level of someone who can free hand a perfect circle! It would sound ridiculous, right? Who cares if you can free hand a perfect circle? What does that give you? What's the value of that? Instead you would tell an aspiring artist, get to an AQ 120 or so as your foundation and then it's all about making something out of it.
• rguzman 5y ago
  one of the things that helps generate new ideas that can be cultivated is the ability to be playful. once a given problem or subject is sufficiently loaded onto a brain, if that person can relax and have child-like naivete about poking and prodding, novel insight is usually not far. cultivating this ability is fairly well understood in a lot of domains, i think. two examples that are top-of-mind are improv and jazz.
• whytaka 5y ago
  Recently I’ve been a bit disillusioned as all the cleverness of my youth had gone wasted. Albeit the ideas were low hanging fruits but had I had the skills to implement them I think I would have been better off. Now that I do have the skills, they’d long been executed by others. Now the world has gotten a lot more sophisticated and I don’t know what to sophisticate myself on. They all seem a bit boring or stupid on one hand, or another monumental climb where I’ll have to start over from the beginning.
  • handrous 5y ago
    A lot of the biggest Web-related tech money-makers and success stories are things it wouldn't have occurred to me to try, because I'd have assumed they were illegal or otherwise so awful that people'd tar and feather me if I proposed them. Sometimes, they were/are illegal, in fact, but it somehow worked out OK for the founders anyway (business might eventually fall apart, but who cares, they made millions, if not billions) Spying on what people do on web pages, down to their mouse movements, sometimes. Tracking all that across sites. Then using that to target ads at them. AirBnB and Uber... just, all of what they do. Crypto exchanges. It's crazy to me that these managed to go long enough to gain a toehold before facing any sort of banking or securities regulations. Addictive mechanics on social media and in pay-to-play games. Mint and other go-betweens with banks that just store and re-use credentials, including answers to "security questions". Seems like a really dangerous idea, probably involves encouraging a bunch of people to violate terms of service on a massive scale, and if you're presenting connections to banks that you know have those terms, seems like you'd be hella liable for that. And my god, if there's a breach that involves your systems and you've been hoovering up people's banking credentials? I'd fully expect to be facing extremely scary and probably-going-to-go-poorly-for-my-company lawsuits from a dozen enormous banks. How do these companies get insured in any way whatsoever? I don't get it. Inexplicably (to me), instead of crashing and burning and being laughed out of the room at any and all fundraising meetings, these made a few people very, very rich instead. And so on. Plenty of things not in those categories, of course. Stripe was a great idea, just a hard problem—I'd have had no clue how to seek terms from CC companies to get such a thing off the ground, to pick what's just step #1 of even starting to try at that. Some are great ideas that I might have come up with, but I haven't a clue about how to even begin to fundraise (I'm not past barely-an-acquaintance territory with any rich people, for even small values of "rich", so that doesn't help), and they're the kind of thing that pretty much requires a pile of cash to even make an attempt—actually, Stripe again seems like a good example. I couldn't feasibly have done even an MVP of that solo, or even with a very small team "in a garage"; the fundraising is another necessary hurdle to even credibly trying. Some stuff's smart people doing smart things that are eventually very lucrative. Those I (theoretically) could have done, I guess. Redis, for instance. Still, the really big money seems to be in convincing people to finance things that feel like they ought to be illegal (and might actually be), and how that all works continues to elude me. How do you spot a law you can break long enough to get traction against the "dinosaurs" who are bound to follow the law, versus one that will land you on the losing end of a ruinous lawsuit and make your name mud, or in prison? Do people actually know how to spot those, or are the successful ones just lucky? Is that in fact almost all laws once you have some rich people backing you? I haven't a clue. (Nb this is not intended as sour-grapes complaining, but rather an exploration of the ways in which "having an idea" is a really, really long way from even making a meaningful attempt at implementation for a variety of prominent tech products, including such hurdles as not understanding when doing illegal or horribly unethical stuff is actually a very good idea, if you're just trying to launch a product and get rich—these are deficiencies in my understanding of the world, clearly)
• bob1029 5y ago
  Lots of fun points in here. I would add that willing to be wrong 100% of the time and being open to constantly fucking things up will get you very far all on its own. As long as your intentions are good and you can limit the blast radius, these efforts are usually rewarded in time. Ablity to disregard shame and the scorn of others is the superpower in this context.
  • spfzero 5y ago
    In a similar vein, being good at fixing things after you've broken them. Gives you a little more confidence in trying new things without all of the work involved in first making sure they'll work.
• vjust 5y ago
  There are people who are challenged , in their writing ability, but come up with new ideas. I can't name one off the top of my head, but I think the capitalistic world of startup companies could yield many examples of inventions. To me tying the writing skill to that ability seems questionable.
• varjag 5y ago
  While I've been underwhelmed by many PG's essays this one is remarkable. It takes on a subject that's beaten to death in debates and finds some fresh perspective.
• hidden-spyder 5y ago
  Why is Firefox's Reader View not available for posts on PG's seemingly minimal site? Also, with my minimal knowledge of programming, I have no idea what's going on with that website's HTML markup. There's also a document type not mentioned error so that might be what's causing this. I wonder why @pg doesn't change this? I presume it'll only stand to benefit him with a higher SEO ranking.
  • zethus 5y ago
    I can't imagine pg being too concerned with SEO. I don't think he's necessarily marketing his essays for discoverability nor do his essays bring in direct income aside from enhancing YC's already established credibility.
  • lexicality 5y ago
    > Also, with my minimal knowledge of programming, I have no idea what's going on with that website's HTML markup. It's what we in the business call "old" That's just how we made websites before CSS was a thing. It still works, it's just horribly user unfriendly. Presumably Paul either doesn't care or likes the retro look.
• maest 5y ago
  I can't remember where, but I've heard the mathematical research process being described as (paraphrasing): "Once in a while we get a giant that makes huge strides in many fields. What is left for the rest of us is to walk in their wake and clean up and tighten up the theory based on the ideas that they provided". Graham's point about how being intelligent and having new ideas are two different things is interesting, but I'm not convinced that one is better than the other. I'm not sure a world full of giants is better - you need people who spend time tightening and working on the existing theory as well.
  • Jensson 5y ago
    The world has no lack of people tightening and working on existing theory, basically every knowledge worker taking a salary performs that role. So moving a few more of those to try to do new things wouldn't budge that huge micro optimization machine much at all.
  • samhw 5y ago
    I mean, better and worse doesn't really exist. They just are. Being smart has certain consequences, and being inventive has others. And what's better for the world (for some definition of 'good') may not be what's better for the individual - just ask people who volunteer to pick up litter. Certainly it seems like being inventive is much more profitable for the individual than being smart, but of course that's not all that matters.
  • mmmmpancakes 5y ago
    Moreover, ideas are worthless if you aren't smart and diligent enough to see them through. Emphasizing ideas, to me, feels like the wrong thing because this encourages, for most people, a lazy attitude where recognition is expected for having an idea (whereas recognition is only due for making something out of your idea). In the end, ideas are cheap. Every giant had both the idea (which may have been through luck and timing plus deep knowledge earned through hard work and persistence) plus those other abilities to make something out of it, without which they would not be giants.
• cinjon 5y ago
  This short essay is roughly a synospsis of the theme behind Asimov's short story The Profession.
  • avip 5y ago
    Which everybody should (must?) read. Seriously, should be a mandatory read in school curriculum, instead of "catcher in the rye" or some Scottish ballade [+]. [+] not that there's something wrong with any of them
• cperciva 5y ago
  To me, this is fundamentally the difference between science and engineering: Science involves discovering things which are new, while engineering takes those discoveries and makes them practically useful. In terms of my own work, tarsnap is absolutely a work of engineering -- I very deliberately avoided doing anything new, instead using established and well-tested concepts. The exception to this is scrypt, which I designed -- and proved the security of -- because there was no existing password based key derivation function which met my standards for security. On that one occasion I crossed the line from engineering into science. Science is great, but there's nothing to be ashamed about in doing engineering work. The world needs good engineers who can take basic scientific discoveries and make useful products out of them!
  • whiddershins 5y ago
    To me, this is still very creative, just at a different layer of abstraction.
    • hinkley 5y ago
      Even commodity manufacturing is its own art because you have to make millions of something per day instead of tens of thousands. You have to take material in one side of the factory and spit it out the other as fast as you can. You've crossed the limits of being able to warehouse half completed bits because machine #17 has gone on the fritz again and nobody can finish product. So I need more reliable equipment and then I still need to make them at a lower price than the luxury model I'm copying. I don't think anyone who has entirely avoided skilled manual labor in their lives quite comprehends how big a difference there is being able to do something well, and being able to do it at scale. It's almost not the same problem domain.
      • ahartmetz 5y ago
        That descrption of mass manufacturing reminds me of building reliable computing systems from unreliable parts (server farm(s)), something I have never done, only read about. It is apparently very different from regular software development in similar ways.
• nayuki 5y ago
  > Imagine you had a choice between being really smart but discovering nothing new, and being less smart but discovering lots of new ideas. I don't consider myself smart. I certainly don't claim to discover new ideas. But through my work of explaining and polishing existing ideas, it seems I found a niche and an audience.
• handrous 5y ago
  Being even a little clever—and that's the best I can claim—is living life on easy mode. It's so great. Once I realized that the other people in the room weren't not-saying the obvious thing because they'd already dismissed it for some reason I couldn't see, but because it wasn't obvious to them, it was like I unlocked a superpower. God, it's so wonderful. I half-ass my way through everything and get well-rewarded for it. Praise, money, recommendations. There is no chance I could do that without this (again, quite mild, I cannot emphasize enough that I'm not even all that smart) gift, the credit for which mostly goes to sheer chance and lucky circumstances. > I grew up thinking that being smart was the thing most to be desired. Perhaps you did too. But I bet it's not what you really want. Imagine you had a choice between being really smart but discovering nothing new, and being less smart but discovering lots of new ideas. Surely you'd take the latter. Shit no, because the whole rest of the time I'm not coming up with those handful of new ideas, I'm less-smart. Reading is harder. Math is harder. Learning anything new is harder. Following complex conversations is harder. Picking out subtext, allusions, et c., in all media, is harder. Keeping up with, let alone constructively challenging, my smarter-than-me kids is harder. I'd hesitate to take that deal even if the ideas themselves made me rich enough I wouldn't need to work again. I might take it, but I'd have to give it a good think. It'd radically change the entire way I relate to the world.
  • erulabs 5y ago
    I feel similarly having grown up near a computer when I was young. I can't imagine had I grown up busy farming and raising siblings and then children in my 20s I would have been able to accomplish anything at all. Or the fact that I got a rare fever from a tick as a child only a few years after an antidote was invented. The _vast_ majority of the pi-chart other than intelligence is luck.
    • solveit 5y ago
      I mean, intelligence is also luck. And (as much as people hate this), so is conscientiousness. At some point we have to acknowledge that dividing things into luck and not-luck is incoherent, and that we should use more useful axes.
• nassimsoftware 5y ago
  It seems to me that someone's ability to generate new ideas is at least in part driven by one's ability to make links between things that are not linked or very distantly so. It is at that intersection that novel ideas emerges. To make it more concrete here's an example of my own. I was playing the game Zelda Breath of The Wild and was in awe of the beautiful landscapes you could visit. However, I had already finished the game and did not want to have to fire up my Wii U every time just to see them. This is when a novel idea emerged. What if I made a Google Map's Street Viewer for Zelda Breath of The Wild. You can see here that I subsconsiously made a link between two very distant things a video game and Google Map's street view. You can try it out for yourself here : https://nassimsoftware.github.io/zeldabotwstreetview https://nassimsoftware.github.io/zeldabotwstreetview (Do not use it if you're using cellular data because the panoramas are quite heavy) The idea was well recieved and gathered the attention of many gaming journals just google zelda street view to see for yourself. Before making this project I also searched if someone had done the same but no one did. I therefore thought that I had something pretty novel so worth doing. While my idea isn't groundbreaking in terms of science it demonstrate well the characteristics of a novel idea. (The intersection of different domains that seems to most distant.) It seems that to be able to do those links you must have breadth of knowledge instead of depth however it's still a mystery how some people are able to do this more frequently then others. Also here's a free idea : Make the same thing I did with Zelda but for other open world games.
  • hinkley 5y ago
    That's really cool. I suspect there are a lot of us here in particular who have 'unpopular opinions' in this domain that are more difficult to just try out, because others have invested in the idea of different domains being special and thus not conducive to fusion as in your example, or borrowing ideas whole cloth. I have, for instance, some opinions on how skills from personal finance cross a whole host of problem domains. Some are obvious, but performance analysis is not typically one of them and people look at me like I have horns on my head when I bring it up. They have few complaints about the outcomes of me applying those theories, as long as they don't have to hear about them. So I mostly just don't ask permission, and save theory crafting for talk over beers when people start pulling out their crackpot ideas to keep the conversation flowing. It's really no wonder at all to me why so many of milestones in The Enlightenment started over coffee. Caffeine is not as good a social lubricant but it'll do in a pinch and has fewer negative side effects on cognition and - importantly - memory. Last night's epiphany is mostly inaccessible to the drunk.
• nabla9 5y ago
  The consensus among top physicists during the 'heroic era' was that Von Neumann was the smartest among them, higher IQ than Einstein's, but Einstein had something else. Eugene P. Wigner: > I have known a great many intelligent people in my life. I knew Planck, von Laue and Heisenberg. Paul Dirac was my brother in law; Leo Szilard and Edward Teller have been among my closest friends; and Albert Einstein was a good friend, too. But none of them had a mind as quick and acute as Jansci [John] von Neumann. I have often remarked this in the presence of those men and no one ever disputed me. [...] But Einstein's understanding was deeper even than von Neumann's. His mind was both more penetrating and more original than von Neumann's. And that is a very remarkable statement. Einstein took an extraordinary pleasure in invention. Two of his greatest inventions are the Special and General Theories of Relativity; and for all of Jansci's brilliance, he never produced anything as original.
  • NumberCruncher 5y ago
    Small remark: I think you have a typo there. Jancsi = Johnny in Hungarian.
• inetsee 5y ago
  Years and years ago I read Einstein's biography (the one by Isaacson). One anecdote that remains bright in my memory after all these years is about Einstein and sailing. Einstein liked sailing, and because of where he was living he mostly did lake sailing. One thing about lake sailing is that you can often end up becalmed. What Einstein did was to take a notebook with him when he went sailing; a notebook with notes about what he was working on at the time. Whenever the wind died down he would take out his notebook and start working on his current research. When the wind picked up he would put his notebook away and resume sailing. There is no doubt that Einstein was brilliant. I believe he was as successful as he was because he was also exceptionally self disciplined.
  • purple_ferret 5y ago
    I read that too, and I got the impression being forced to work alone at the patent office was crucial for his 1905 Annus mirabilis papers. Lots of other great ideas (e.g. Mendel, Darwin) have come about from intellectual isolation. I wonder how Graham would respond to that given he's so intertwined in Silicon Valley.
    • criddell 5y ago
      Lots of great ideas have come out of university settings as well. I don't know if you can say anything in general about intellectual isolation.
    • redshirtrob 5y ago
      And Bill James did a lot of his Sabermetric writing while working night shifts as a security guard.[0] He's not Einstein, but he was way ahead of his time in a particular area and it's fair to say he's been hugely influential in the baseball community for nearly 40 years. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_James https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_James
  • phonon 5y ago
    > I believe he was as successful as he was because he was also exceptionally self disciplined. Well, that's one way to put it. These were the rules he wrote out for his wife. [0] You will make sure: - that my clothes and laundry are kept in good order; - that I will receive my three meals regularly in my room; - that my bedroom and study are kept neat, and especially that my desk is left for my use only. You will renounce all personal relations with me insofar as they are not completely necessary for social reasons. Specifically, You will forego: - my sitting at home with you; - my going out or travelling with you. You will obey the following points in your relations with me: - you will not expect any intimacy from me, nor will you reproach me in any way; - you will stop talking to me if I request it; - you will leave my bedroom or study immediately without protest if I request it. You will undertake not to belittle me in front of our children, either through words or behaviour. [0] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2133922/Was-Einstein-worlds-worst-husband-Wife-ordered-room-tidy-serve-meals-day--expect-NO-affection--stop-talking-demands-it.html#ixzz1sxkshpJv https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2133922/Was-Einst...
• stupidcar 5y ago
  If you asked people what was special about Einstein, most would say that he had important new ideas. Even the ones who tried to give you a more sophisticated-sounding answer would probably think this first. Till a few years ago I would have given the same answer myself. But that wasn't what was special about Einstein. What was special about him was that he was really smart. Having important new ideas was a necessary precondition for properly utilizing that intelligence, but the two are not identical. It may seem a hair-splitting distinction to point out that inspiration and its consequences are not identical, but it isn't. There's a big gap between them. Anyone who's spent time around crackpot scientific theorists knows how big. There are a lot of genuinely original people who don't achieve very much. And so on...
  • maximus-decimus 5y ago
    Do people really think that having unorthodox ideas and being smart are the same thing?
• aardvarks 5y ago
  Just having the good new ideas isn't really enough, though. You have to be really persistent about figuring out all the details and making them work. This is related to, but definitely not the same as, being fascinated/obsessed by the topic. Of course Einstein had great ideas. But he also spent many years working out the consequences of, eg, his first ideas about the fixed speed of light in vacuum and its consequences in physics, initially during downtime at his patent office job. Nearly all of the impact of the theory is in that working-out.
  • kenjackson 5y ago
    Plus one on this. Work ethic is super important. The ability to grind on your ideas. And I think having some extrovert nature really helps in getting your ideas out there. I was Paul's definition of smart, w/o good ideas. I loved to learn things. But I didn't really have the work ethic to build new things. I feel like I've done fine in life, but had you asked my middle school and high school teachers -- and even university... I've probably underperformed. In contrast my son is bright, but not the academic star I was. But he has crazy work ethic in ideas he cares about. I've really nurtured his work ethic and played down the "smart" academic angle. If wants to finish a personal project and not study for that French quiz -- I'm fine with that. He gets an A-/B+ for the year, rather than an A. So what. The passion he pours into his ideas though is great and I think will serve him better over the course of his life.
    • urthor 5y ago
      How do you encourage that work ethic though? Just compliment it, or is there another trick to it.
      • kenjackson 5y ago
        I do compliment it. But probably more than that I emphasize that things worth doing are often hard and hard things often take time. So I taught him that setting short term goals along the way to long-term goals will help him stay on track. So he's becoming really good at showing me various intermediate states to his work, and I'm really excited when I see it. Whether its a game that he's writing or a business that he's creating. As a younger kid he loved Legos. I think that contributed. He'd just do progressively larger and larger sets. As a kid I never could do a large Lego set. I had them, but they all remained unfinished.
• JayStavis 5y ago
  PG making a case for the "idea guy"! It's interesting to see how often that trope is shot down in SV culture. I appreciate that he is qualifying or preconditioning the value of the idea guy as having intelligence along with other "mundane ingredients" like grit, sleep, stress, network, and passion. I very much agree with the approach and only wish for a framework to score these ingredients in the context of an entrepreneur's problem domain. I guess that's what VC's are supposed to do.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• Modernnomad84 5y ago
  Buried toward the end of the essay is a suggestion to become a better writer. Wondering if anyone has learned to become a better writer, and if so, what was your approach?
  • ligerzer0 5y ago
    Writing. There is no shortcut. Just like working out improves your range of movement and manipulating your own body and weights in space, writing does the same with ideas and expression.
  • dgs_sgd 5y ago
    Simply writing more will get you 99% of the way there.
    • achenet 5y ago
      And the final 1% comes from re-reading yourself.
  • motohagiography 5y ago
    Editing.
• reikonomusha 5y ago
  I feel pg’s point is similar to musicians. As an example, Glenn Gould was a classical pianist and renowned Bach interpreter. He had awesome technical ability at the piano, and a fantastic memory. But lots of incredible pianists have these abilities. Go to any university or observe any competition and you’ll plainly see awesome talent. These qualities are analogous to “being smart”. However, what set Gould apart from his colleagues was his innovative and iconoclastic interpretations of well-known works with “standard” prescriptions. He had fundamentally different, but wholly consistent, ideas about musical interpretation, recording technology, presentation of music to audiences, and so on. He’s remembered as a pianist not because his fingers were quick and sensitive, but instead because he pushed boundaries in completely original ways. Leonard Bernstein—a noted conductor and pianist—quips about this when he conducted the Brahms Concerto in D minor, with Gould at the piano [1]. I recommend listening but I’ll copy his words (from [2]) for posterity. > Don't be frightened. Mr. Gould is here. He will appear in a moment. I'm not, um, as you know, in the habit of speaking on any concert except the Thursday night previews, but a curious situation has arisen, which merits, I think, a word or two. You are about to hear a rather, shall we say, unorthodox performance of the Brahms D Minor Concerto, a performance distinctly different from any I've ever heard, or even dreamt of for that matter, in its remarkably broad tempi and its frequent departures from Brahms' dynamic indications. I cannot say I am in total agreement with Mr. Gould's conception and this raises the interesting question: "What am I doing conducting it?" I'm conducting it because Mr. Gould is so valid and serious an artist that I must take seriously anything he conceives in good faith and his conception is interesting enough so that I feel you should hear it, too. > But the age old question still remains: "In a concerto, who is the boss; the soloist or the conductor?" The answer is, of course, sometimes one, sometimes the other, depending on the people involved. But almost always, the two manage to get together by persuasion or charm or even threats to achieve a unified performance. I have only once before in my life had to submit to a soloist's wholly new and incompatible concept and that was the last time I accompanied Mr. Gould. (The audience roared with laughter at this.) But, but this time the discrepancies between our views are so great that I feel I must make this small disclaimer. Then why, to repeat the question, am I conducting it? Why do I not make a minor scandal — get a substitute soloist, or let an assistant conduct? Because I am fascinated, glad to have the chance for a new look at this much-played work; Because, what's more, there are moments in Mr. Gould's performance that emerge with astonishing freshness and conviction. Thirdly, because we can all learn something from this extraordinary artist, who is a thinking performer, and finally because there is in music what Dimitri Mitropoulos used to call "the sportive element", that factor of curiosity, adventure, experiment, and I can assure you that it has been an adventure this week collaborating with Mr. Gould on this Brahms concerto and it's in this spirit of adventure that we now present it to you. Because some took this as an attack on Gould, Bernstein followed up with the remark: > Any discovery of Glenn's was welcomed by me because I worshiped the way he played: I admired his intellectual approach, his "guts" approach, his complete dedication to whatever he was doing. Anyway, it’s an interesting parallel in the arts world. Jacob Collier is a musician of today that has similar qualities of “being smart with good ideas”. [1] https://youtu.be/SvWPM783TOE https://youtu.be/SvWPM783TOE [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Philharmonic_concert_of_April_6,_1962 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Philharmonic_concer...
• throwaway879080 5y ago
  I'd add systematic exploration of new ideas, one good example is Thomas Edison with his "idea factory". Masayoshi Son used to set aside some time during his week where he would "summon" invention, quite literally, until having a "hit" that actually worked and became his first business https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sa2_VBu0d7k&t=470s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sa2_VBu0d7k&t=470s
• david927 5y ago
  I always thought of IQ tests as the artistic equivalent of "how well can you draw a line?" You need a good foundation for artistic expression but many, many people have that and still don't create art worth remembering. Intelligence (the capacity to process) combined with knowledge can give you that strong intellectual foundation -- but that's all it is. Alan Kay was wrong; a change of perspective is not worth 80 IQ points. The opposite is true. A decent IQ gives you the chance to have a change of perspective.
  • criddell 5y ago
    Are there any standard measures of creativity?
    • david927 5y ago
      No. It's qualitative not quantitative. You measure quantities; you can only measure aspects of qualities (and that's not advised as it's incredibly dangerous). But as Paul says here, creativity is probably not the best word. I would describe it as "understanding".
• kens 5y ago
  Hamming (of Hamming codes) has a famous Bell Labs talk "You and Your Research", describing how to have a large impact. It covers a lot of the same ground, but in more detail: https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html A few points from it: You've got to work on important problems. How about having lots of `brains?' It sounds good. But great work is something else than mere brains. The people who do great work with less ability but who are committed to it, get more done that those who have great skill and dabble in it. The prepared mind sooner or later finds something important and does it. So yes, it is luck. The particular thing you do is luck, but that you do something is not. One of the characteristics you see, and many people have it including great scientists, is that usually when they were young they had independent thoughts and had the courage to pursue them.
  • gonehome 5y ago
    His book The Art of Doing Science and Engineering goes into some of this (and is just generally great): https://press.stripe.com/the-art-of-doing-science-and-engineering https://press.stripe.com/the-art-of-doing-science-and-engine...
    • not-elite 5y ago
      Hamming is great in general. Some years ago, I picked up a copy of "Numerical Methods for Scientists and Engineers" for like $2 at a used book store. I had no idea who Hamming was, but it was cheap so I bought it. After the first chapter I thought, "this guy is pretty sharp let's see what else he's written." That is when I found "You and Your Research".
      • rramadass 5y ago
        All of Hamming's books are Great. Most are available from Dover Publications for cheap. In particular; checkout his * Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics. * The Art of Probability.
  • bambax 5y ago
• giantg2 5y ago
  Being smart and having new ideas isn't that great either. You still need people to believe in the idea and/or resources to pursue it. I have various ideas and I'm not even that smart. They wont go anywhere because I dont have the time or money to pursue them. Plus, it's hard to come up with something truly new. Even if the item doesn't exist, it's probably patented (ran into that recently). "So what are the other ingredients in having new ideas?" The willingness to think about how and why things work or are broken, coupled with sufficient cross-domain knowledge to synthesize new ideas.
• johnwheeler 5y ago
  I like to use a car analogy. I think those with high IQs who don't accomplish much are like 2000-HP drag racers. Those things rip, but they don't necessarily get you anywhere useful. It's much better to be a Jeep.
• purple_ferret 5y ago
  >Some would attribute the difference between intelligence and having new ideas to "creativity," but this doesn't seem a very useful term. As well as being pretty vague, it's shifted half a frame sideways from what we care about: it's neither separable from intelligence, nor responsible for all the difference between intelligence and having new ideas. I find this dismissiveness of creativity to be somewhat strange. It's by definition, what he should be looking for. I can't help but think he's got a paradigm in mind for finding 'new ideas' and feels like creativity is too outside the box for it.
  • reikonomusha 5y ago
    This might be a bit of a hot take, but I feel creativity is more about being “untethered” and about synthesis of different ideas, techniques, etc. in novel ways. Unfortunately, one can be as creative as can be and still never come up with something “good”. (Who is to decide what’s good? It’s almost surely in large part a social or cultural thing, much like “genius” is.) I mentioned musicians elsewhere so I will again: A lot of creative musicians are great at noodling around, making neat new melodies, but aren’t coming up with any coherent or consistent ideas that “lead” to anywhere. Creativity just seems like a “raw ingredient” for ideas in this view.
• avinassh 5y ago
  > There are general techniques for having new ideas — for example, for working on your own projects ... The project link is broken: http://paulgraham.com/projects.html http://paulgraham.com/projects.html anyone knows the actual link? Is it this one? - http://paulgraham.com/own.html http://paulgraham.com/own.html
• omalleyt 5y ago
  Humans care about innate qualities such as intelligence because they are looking for mates, and want the best genes for their children. In this case, consider whether you would prefer to have children with a partner with a 150 IQ but who never develops a system to generate new ideas, or a partner with a 120 IQ who stumbles into a system / environment that allows them to generate new ideas. Who would you prefer? Hard mode: justify your choice without invalidating the premises by saying something like, "Well, if the first person was really smarter, they would have developed such a system." I speculate that most would prefer to have children with the first person, and then endeavor to teach their kids the second person's system.
  • gowld 5y ago
    Huh? For reproductive concerns, I'd rather marry someone who is an excellent parent, than someone who will make genius babies but ruin their development. And I'm not interested in find a mate who will adopt someone else's genius 23-chromosomes
• ThePhysicist 5y ago
  Brian Josephson received his nobel prize for a discovery he made at age 22 while being a PhD student. The accompanying paper is just two pages long [1]. Without diminishing his achievement I'd wager that thousands of bright PhD students could've come up with the same solution given the right circumstances. I no longer work in academia but what I observed when spending time in top-tier research groups is that it's at least as important where you work as how smart you are. You can be the most gifted researcher but if you work in a backwater university in a third-world country your chances of being noticed or doing well-recognized work are very dim. On the other hand, if you're a smart person working in a top-tier environment your chance of doing noteworthy work are much higher. Now of course smart people will usually find ways to get into better environments, but from my experience there's still a lot of elitism involved. For example, where I did my PhD in France almost all fellow PhD students in my group had parents that were high-ranking scientists, some of them leading research institutes. I always thought that it would be extremely unlikely to observe such a concentration if the selection process was really unbiased. Not saying my colleagues weren't gifted, but of course they had a lot of advantages as compared to gifted students from poor families as their parents knew exactly what to do to get them into the elite programs (in France you have to prepare for this for many years, starting with picking the right school for your children). So being in the right place and having the right pedigree is still a huge factor for getting a good shot at being really successful. [1]: http://hacol13.physik.uni-freiburg.de/fp/Versuche/FP1/FP1-11-SQUID/Anhang/B.D.Josephson.pdf http://hacol13.physik.uni-freiburg.de/fp/Versuche/FP1/FP1-11...
  • opportune 5y ago
    This is partially why I decided not to go the PhD-> try to become a professor route. It really is an incestuous community these days. I also noticed that a very large portion of the people at the “top” of the pipeline into academia have connections to academia in the US (eg a parent professor) who can help them get or navigate getting a lot of these early “prestige” markers. If you don’t have that, even if you’re just as smart, you’ll have a hard time breaking in. For example a lot of those kids will start doing “research” in HS, obviously in 99% of cases very closely directed by their mentor, who may be a parent. This gets them those fancy “17 year creates clean drinking water for $0.002/L” news coverage and possibly helps them win a nationally recognized science fair. Then they can also get tutored for Olympiads - unless you have a Von Neumann level intelligence you basically need a lot of special studying to be able to get far in those. Then they get into accelerated programs with local universities with the help of their parents, obviously get into whatever college they want, get the best research opportunities starting freshman year, and it continues to snowball from there. Not saying this system doesn’t make great scientists, or that the people who benefit from it aren’t smart or qualified. Just, ultimately there are only so many professorships to go around, so good luck becoming a professor in STEM at an acclaimed R1 university without this kind of pipelining, even if you’re just as smart.
• tshaddox 5y ago
  I think the dismissal of "creativity" in the footnote is misguided. I think creativity is easier to define than "intelligence" and better explains the intuitive difference between e.g. humans and animals and between humans and current AI systems. "Intelligence" often gets mixed up with arguably irrelevant things like computational speed, memory (recall), or the ability to solve problems in some narrow niche. But creativity gets to the generalness of what humans can do that other animals and current AI systems apparently can not, which is to create new knowledge by conjecturing (and criticizing) new ideas with no apparent bounds on the subject matter or reach of those ideas.
• bluecheese33 5y ago
  I don't know if practicing writing has made me better at producing new ideas. And I'm not sure if the quality of my writing has improved, though it's certainly easier for me to write now. But for sure, I don't think I ever really understood and internalized ideas from complex non-fiction books until I started writing about them. Even writing privately helped, but I think the most effective way is to write publicly - there's an obligation to write and argue clearly.
• varelse 5y ago
  So waiting for people to try intentionally infecting themselves with toxoplasmosis to boost their creativity. It seems like a rule 34 near inevitability to me. YMMV.
• 123pie123 5y ago
  what is Intelligence? from wikipedia... "Intelligence has been defined in many ways: the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving. " I'm sure Einstein had most of these abilities in abundance I know a lot of people who would consider themselves as smart and they lack a lot the above skills
  • webmaven 5y ago
    There is reasonable evidence that Einstein was not particularly gifted in the areas of self-awareness or emotional knowledge.
    • 123pie123 5y ago
      I didn't know that I think he had abstraction, logic, understanding, learning, reasoning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving pinned down, I doubt the ability of planning would have mattered too much the key areas that I would personally say are important are logic, abstraction, critical thinking, problem solving and creativity the rest are important and can seriously help but are nice to haves
• davidw 5y ago
  The ability to see things in a novel or different light is often an element of humor. Taking something a bit out of context, or switching things around.
• ksec 5y ago
  Modern Smart are so focused on their niche most people failed to see the big ( or even medium ) picture. Because they are more specialised than ever their world view are extremely distorted by their lens. Peter Thiel touched on this as most of the successful founders and entrepreneur tends to be something similar to polymath. Another thing is Wisdom. Which the older I get the more I think have little to no relationship to being "Smart". I also think there are certain relationship with Wisdom and polymath. This topic also echo an article earlier [1], where it is more important to be curious than being smart. ( I am glad this narrative has finally caught on. ) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28753560 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28753560
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• jt2190 5y ago
  > * obsessive interest > * independent-mindedness > * work on your own projects > * work hard So an anti-list might be: * allowing your interest to wander * believing everything you’re told * work on other’s people’s stuff * work half-heartedly
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• tappio 5y ago
  Was Einstein really that smart? What if Einstein is just a meme, and there were dozens of other people who made similar findings but we're not published? What is with this obsession on trying to explain in hindsight why someone was successful?
  • yuuu 5y ago
    Einstein was known to be a complete idiot. That's why whenever anyone screws up at work, they say, "Great job, Einstein!" It's because Einstein was so stupid.
    • tappio 5y ago
      Have you read his work? There are many things which are memes without real background, such as people believing in the past that earth was flat. No. They didn't. Medieval people didn't believe earth was flat. This is something invented by 1800s historians. Einstein is the same kind if meme. Everyone keeps repeating how smart he was, but not many people have first hand information and know other researchers of his time. I don't know if he was smart or not. I've read some of his texts on politics which were not very good, but I guess he was better at physics. Or maybe those texts I've read even weren't Einsteins, but written by someone who just wanted to use his name to push an agenda. Who knows? Why does it matter? I'm wondering why people are so obsessed with this kind of things, because I've never been and it is hard for me to understand. Maybe you can provide some insight?
      • Jensson 5y ago
        > I've read some of his texts on politics which were not very good, but I guess he was better at physics. You know, Einstein was famous for his works in physics and was hailed as a world genius by his contemporaries? His insights into other topics might not have been ground breaking, but it is hard to argue about it with for physics. Edit: The thing is, judging his intelligence based on his writings about politics is like judging the intelligence of famous politicians by how well they write about physics. People who aren't experts at a field will always look like idiots when they write about it and are still learning about it.
• motohagiography 5y ago
  Would add to the qualities of mind for new ideas: you need physical domain competence in something, because it will be the source of heuristics and isomorphisms that provide an intuitive fast map of a territory. I identify as a hyper-stupid intelligent person, where I can go breadth first into a lot of domains and get out of my depth really quickly, while impressing the ignorant and irritating the competent. The opportunities are amazing, you get to appreciate the most incredible things, but this kind of virtuotic ignorance (curiosity, charitably) needs to be tempered by practice and education in at least one thing, as you are really only ever as good as the thing you are best at. Important thoughts.
• rationalfaith 5y ago
  The fact that this is popular here just reinforces how many autists are on this website. Nothing new and upvoted out of ignorance.
• mywittyname 5y ago
  > Why do so many smart people fail to discover anything new? We live in a world were so much has been discovered already by the smart people before us. There isn't anymore low hanging fruit today, discovering novel things likely involves spending your early adulthood learning all the things our smart ancestors discovered as a primer to being able to understand what's left to discover. Most of us will need to be happy with merely understanding what has already been discovered. And realize that, for every Newton or Euler of the word, there were billions of people that history forgot.
  • egfx 5y ago
    >There isn't anymore low hanging fruit today, discovering novel things likely involves spending your early adulthood learning all the things our smart ancestors discovered as a primer to being able to understand what's left to discover. Just the opposite. Discovery happens when your confined and forced to discover (be creative) to survive and evolve. If your learning from everyone before your not discovering anything, your just repeating history.
    • mywittyname 5y ago
      What I'm getting at is, if you want to expand humanities understanding of physics, you first need to spend six or so years learning everything that humanity already knows about physics. After that, you can spend a few years doing research or designing experiments -- usually alongside someone whose dedicated their life to the field -- which will then, hopefully, culminate in your tiny little contribution to the knowledge of humanity. But, even just 150 years ago, you could have made multiple ground-breaking contributions to the world of science, or even developed entire fields of study.
      • pathsjs 5y ago
        Good luck learning everything that humanity knows about physics in six years! :-) Luckily, you don't really need to do that before starting research
• mmaunder 5y ago
  Such a great read. I thought Paul's most profound insight was right at the end where he mentions a connection between writing and discovering new ideas. I've found this personally to be true. I was blogging heavily from 2005 until 2010 and it led to me launching a string of products, getting funding for one of them, failing and continuing to launch until we succeeded spectacularly. Writing, I have found, enables my creative and analytical thought process. I've found that it serves as a kind of personal strategic planning process that educates the intuitive mind, and which results in insights over the proceeding days and weeks, which leads to more writing, and an iterative and exponential process.
  • achenet 5y ago
    DaVinci kept a journal. There may indeed be something about expressing one's thoughts, especially in writing, that enables them to get better.
• deleted 5y ago
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• jerrygoyal 5y ago
  I believe smartness is rather contextual. For instance a person might be smart at a specific job like troubleshooting hardware but he'd not be so-smart in some other areas of life. Was Einstein smart in most areas of life? I highly doubt that. This (contextual) smartness is build-up with time. People who have screen-facing jobs tend to get smarter about gadgets/software. People whose jobs are dealing with other human beings gets smarter at soft skills like persuasion. It all boils down to giving enough time.
• aroundtown 5y ago
  Like other PG posts, I feel like he misses the elephant in the room, opportunity. You can be intelligent or highly creative, but unless you have the opportunity to use your abilities in some fashion, neither will do you much good. Like so many others like him, they probably miss opportunity being such a big deal because it was so abundant for them. This is not to say they didn't also have to be intelligent and work hard to get where they are, but they also had to have things align for them in their life, that were outside their control, to get where they are.
  • randcraw 5y ago
    I think emphasizing opportunity is putting the cart before the horse. I believe opportunity follows from initiative, imagination, and boldly asking and exploring great questions. Game-changers like Einstein differ from other geniuses like Oppenheimer by asking imaginative questions and then independently exploring even when they lead to weird disruptive implications like warped space and time. Einstein never waited to be invited to the party. He created his own.
    • aroundtown 5y ago
      Without opportunity there is no cart, nor horse, nor road to travel on. Einstein was fortunate to be born into a family that was educated and well off enough to afford him to study. (Same with Oppenheimer and I'd reason most celebrated intellects) Had Einstein been born in the son of former slaves in the US South, he never would have been allowed to study math or physics, he likely wouldn't have been able to escape his situation as a farmer, and some other scientist would have had to figure out relativity. All of that is opportunity.
• biswaroop 5y ago
  It's worth repeating Mark Kac's famous quote: >In science, as well as in other fields of human endeavor, there are two kinds of geniuses: the “ordinary” and the “magicians.” An ordinary genius is a fellow that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what he has done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. They are, to use mathematical jargon, in the orthogonal complement of where we are and the working of their minds is for all intents and purposes incomprehensible. Even after we understand what they have done, the process by which they have done it is completely dark. They seldom, if ever, have students because they cannot be emulated and it must be terribly frustrating for a brilliant young mind to cope with the mysterious ways in which the magician’s mind works. Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest caliber. Hans Bethe, whom [Freeman] Dyson considers to be his teacher, is an “ordinary genius”. Einstein was unquestionably a magician. He had an incredible ability to come up with simple ideas, and follow the chain of logic wherever it leads, without prejudice against its outlandish conclusions. Those ideas appear as seeds of 'genius' to those studying his work. I'm not sure if it's 'smart', but it's definitely insightful. I've met clever people, but sometimes, they're not insightful. I've also met many insightful people who aren't clever in many ways. To quote Kac again: >I am reminded of something Balthazaar van der Pol, a great Dutch scientist and engineer who was also a fine musician, remarked to me about the music of Bach. “It is great,” he said, “because it is inevitable and yet surprising.” I have often thought about this lovely epigram in connection with mathematics… The inevitability is, in many cases, provided by logic alone, but the element of surprise must come from an insight outside the rigid confines of logic.
  • johncearls 5y ago
    I like this idea. Makes me think of nondeterministic v deterministic Turing Machines. It is easy to confirm that the magician is correct, but hard to see how they were able to get there.
• asciimov 5y ago
  New idea's are a dime a dozen. In fact a bigger problem for those that have new ideas is that someone else had that new idea first and did something about it.
• Alex3917 5y ago
  This piece seems to conflate being smart with being intelligent. Basically being smart means being well educated, whereas being intelligent means you have fast processing speed. Or maybe you have slightly different definitions, whatever, but either way it's confusing to see them being used as synonyms.
• sysadm1n 5y ago
  I think being smart needs solid foundations in order to flourish. Paul mentions getting adequate sleep and avoiding certain stresses, which is a whole science to me. There is the old archetype of the 'unstable genius' or 'mad scientist' that although they are clever; fail to one day make it and become the person known for $company or $product or $patent. There are many ingredients needed for the smart person to thrive. Personally I find essays about topics that concern me to be useful, as-well as cross-synaptic thinking otherwise known as 'creativity' or 'joining the dots'.
• IceDane 5y ago
  Oh wow, yet another pseudo-intellectual, navel-gazing snooze fest in 8pt and 90% white space. I have been biting my nails waiting since the last one.
• SquishyPanda23 5y ago
  I find this to be an odd essay. It's trivially easy to come up with new ideas. Just take any existing idea and perturb in a random direction. With high probability it will be new. Drugs and some mental disorders make it very easy to do this. The problem is, new ideas aren't very valuable. What is valuable is intelligently generating new ideas that take into account what came before. And for that you need intelligence and education. There is a kind of folk psychology in tech that emphasizes tinkering and working on projects. But almost all projects are bad. The reason tinkering produces results at a population level is because you have N agents randomly searching the terrain. That is fine if you're interested only in population effects, like VCs typically are. Then you can just watch for the random ideas that catch on and bet on them. But if you're going to decide whether you'd rather be smart or be a random-walking tinkerer, the choice is obvious. It's vastly better to be smart because most tinkerers fail and never have anything to show for it.
• spyckie2 5y ago
  Some ways new ideas form: 1. Noticing hundreds, thousands, of details and how they fit together into a larger whole. - Example: When someone is so deep into an industry they understand every role, action, problem, and solution, and the shortcomings, and use that information to spot out the most important problems and tie them together into a new business idea. 2. Having an intuition of how something should be, and digging out that intuition through the act of creation. - Example: Artwork that is trying fully express the most ideal form of beauty, nature, violence, grandness, etc. 3. Noticing "bugs" / paradoxes in real life - things that don't make sense - and having the curiosity to debug it. - Example: Einstein realizing a paradox - "If I pursue a beam of light with the velocity c (velocity of light in a vacuum), I should observe such a beam of light as an electromagnetic field at rest though spatially oscillating."
• ChicagoDave 5y ago
  There's another step in this thinking of smart vs new ideas. You need smart + new ideas + execution/productivity. Einstein didn't just have new ideas. He also excelled at communicating those ideas.
  • ChicagoDave 5y ago
    My own personal example (let's assume I'm smart and have new ideas!) Because I was a part of an online community from the onset of the Internet age (1997) and also a consultant in Fortune 500 businesses, I was always coming up with ideas. One particular idea I came up with in 2009 was essentially what Slack became five years later. I drew up the UI, pitched it to a bunch of people, INCLUDING MICROSOFT, and yet I was unable to convince anyone that it was a good idea. (Microsoft was so focused on SharePoint, that they never saw the potential). I did not know how to build my idea or execute the concept to prove it to others. So that third piece, execution, is just as critical.
• gitfan86 5y ago
  There are two types of people who have received 4.0 GPAs and very high SAT scores. 1. Geniuses. They can look at a calculus text book for 30 minutes and understand calculus and get an A on a calculus test. 2. Reasonably smart people who think that getting a 4.0 is very important, for whatever reason. So important that it becomes their identity. They spend every minute trying to get that 4.0. I was probably in middle school or high school when I realized that I'm not nearly as smart as #1, but just as smart as #2. It just isn't that hard to realize that the effort to outcome ratio isn't good on being a #2 type person. And more importantly, long term if you go down that path you will be working some shitty job making less 400k a year at 80/hours a week. Because your identity is being someone who is #1, even if #1 means billing the most hours doing tax accounting in the basement of some old building on a Friday night.
  • potatoman22 5y ago
    There's those two types... And everyone in between
• reggieband 5y ago
  I have been revisiting an idea I've had many times in my life that is tangential to Paul's "Smart" vs. "New idea" differentiation. That is the difference between "Knowledge/Intelligence" on one axis and "Experience/Understanding" on another. I feel our modern society, as obsessed as it is with science and logic, highly prioritizes the former and unduly devalues the latter. I've started to wonder what "Artificial Understanding" looks like and if there is some systematic way to describe it. I also loosely define "Wisdom" as a kind of dialectic synthesis that bridges intelligence and understanding (and thereby knowledge and experience). I believe Wisdom is the place where new ideas are bred. However, his essay struck a chord in me because it suggests a double edged sword. I'm ever-so-slightly above average intelligence. In almost every group I have ever been part of I sort near the top but rarely at the top. But I definitely have always demonstrated different thinking and often times new ideas. And I can report that not all new ideas are good ideas. This leads to quite a bit of insecurity/self-doubt. Sometimes I am literally a prophet that sees the future that no one else expected. Often I am completely off base. I have no repeatable means of discriminating between those cases. What I have learned, in those times I have acted as a leader/manager, is that I don't always go with the most logical/intellectual idea presented to me. I try to always take into account experience/understanding. That is doubly true when I evaluate my own new ideas. I should ask myself: Am I leaning too heavily on knowledge/intelligence in an area where I lack understanding/experience? Therefore I think Paul's stated trade-off of intelligence for new ideas is not strictly correct. I wonder if he would accept my knowledge/intelligence vs. experience/understanding description. If so, perhaps what he means to say is that for the generation of new ideas he might be willing to accept trading some innate capacity for intelligence for some innate capacity for understanding. In that way, perhaps one could increase the likelihood of synthesis between the two. Stated another way, it would be a sacrifice of intelligence to gain understanding with a goal to promote wisdom.
• laserlight 5y ago
  Einstein had already explained what was special about him: “I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.”
• deleted 5y ago
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• talkingtab 5y ago
  There are, I believe, two kinds of thinking/intelligence. One is analysis and that is the case of many smart people who achieve nothing - other than taking things apart and being critical. There is a second kind which we don't even seem to have a word for - lets call it gestalysis as opposed to analyis. Putting things together to form new things. The essence of this is to try understand something by building it. You can prove something by logic, but trying to build something and have it work also "proves" something. For example can you build an ant colony? We may understand ant colonies by taking them apart and examining the parts, but an important part of an ant colony is the interactions and behaviors. Can we understand an ant colony by taking it apart (and certainly that helps) or can we understand it better if we can create a simulation? And finally, there is a kind of gestalysis that goes further - creating behaviors and interactions that go beyond simulation of things we know. This is, I believe the provenance of startups and entrepreneurs. It seems to me that Einstein's brilliance not due to analysis but gestalysis. My 2 cents. My 2 cents.
  • playing_colours 5y ago
    Synthesis may be the name you were looking for?
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• nazgulnarsil 5y ago
  Was a pretty big deal to stumble across the idea that the machinery that generates insights could be trained back on itself to improve at gaining insights. You may have heard of it under the moniker of insight practice. :p
• allo37 5y ago
  > Imagine you had a choice between being really smart but discovering nothing new, and being less smart but discovering lots of new ideas. Surely you'd take the latter. Not sure if that Semmelweis guy would agree (had the idea that washing your hands between handling corpses and delivering babies is a good idea, everyone else at the time disagreed and he died in an asylum). Didn't Tesla also die penniless and alone? Maybe you'll be well remembered by history, but what a life! I wonder how many people had lots of new genius ideas but took the "safe" option...
• brador 5y ago
  Skills, opportunity, motivation. He had all 3. Together we just call them luck.
• Barrin92 5y ago
  >why do so many smart people fail to discover anything new? Given his background as a venture capitalist not a surprising question but much of the implicit premise of the piece is that novelty is somehow superior to maintaining things that exist, which isn't that obvious. doing 'new' things is fine but the world to a large degree runs on maintaining and very marginally improving what we have or just fixing things in very small ways that would probably not pass his excitement test. Before someone like Einstein can come along and dig up some paradigm changing idea it often takes decades of work to refine something to the point where some individual can come along and discover what's wrong with it. Even within an individual life like Einstein's that is the kind of work he did most of the time. novelty is the exception, a world of novelty after novelty without long periods of ordinary work during which people refine is hard to imagine. So just like 80% of Einstein's life was probably doing normal maths, 80% of people are probably going to do normal things, there's nothing wrong with it. It's like the popular analogy of a handful of astronauts standing on the backs of hundreds of people. Every single one of them does a necessary job, and a lot of smart people will do work that in the world of Paul Graham is somehow considered unglamorous.
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• d--b 5y ago
  The whole article reads bizarre to me. It’s like pg believes there is some kind of generic smartness metric that characterizes people, and so you’re either smart, very smart or not smart at all. But people can be smart at things and terrible at others. And it’s not that smart people are terrible at things because they aren’t curious about them, it’s just that some tasks require different mindsets. Like I feel generally fairly smart in engineering, but I just can’t seem to learn chess at all. Generating new ideas is an entirely different skill. You can’t balance having ideas and being smart. You should try and have both, and no, one is not more important than the other. I mean the whole article feels like the stupid questions we’d ask ourselves when we were kids: would you rather have a 9-meter arm, or a boneless leg?
  • Osiris 5y ago
    I haven't read it but "smart" isn't some universal trait. One can be "smart" in one area and really dumb in another. I don't understand how someone can be a good chef. You can be great at that, intuitively using the chemistry of it while failing even the most basic chemistry class. I guess I should read the article.
  • fullshark 5y ago
    Reads to me like a VC frustrated by the lack of investment opportunities he’s been presented lately.
  • pedrosorio 5y ago
    > Like I feel generally fairly smart in engineering, but I just can’t seem to learn chess at all. This seems like binary thinking. Can't learn chess over what period of time, with what resources and for what definition of "learning chess"?
  • UncleOxidant 5y ago
    I did not see the word "imagination" mentioned in that article. It seems like a glaring omission given the topic. "How can imagination be cultivated?" would be an important question in that context. It could include things like letting kids (and adults) have more unstructured time, etc. We've largely banished boredom from the world now that we're constantly connected to the internet via our smartphones, but boredom could also be important for imagination. In my experience a lot of my best ideas came not with hard focus ("working hard") on a problem but while I was on a walk in nature not particularly focused on anything.
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• jedberg 5y ago
  This was fairly obvious to me as early as elementary school. Some kids would just get new concepts and then easily apply their new knowledge, and some worked really really hard and also got good grades. The hard workers were not as "smart" but made up for it with hard work, because in my mind, smart was always "the ability to learn something new and apply it quickly". The difference got more obvious with each level of school, and when I got to college, the difference was stark. There were definitely the "just smart" people and the "work really hard people". In my work life, it's nice to work with a mix of both. People who can take in new knowledge and generate new ideas, as well as people who just get it and work really hard. It's especially great when idea generators can communicate well and the hard workers can make it happen.
  • drawkbox 5y ago
    There are other aspects as well. Much of them have to do with managing the load up times of the mental model of the topic at hand, with focus, but also setting up/starting correctly. Quickness Some people pick up things very quickly, others take a while to pick them up. Neither is necessarily "smarter" because they might have different thresholds to what they consider "getting it". The depth that they pick some new thing and feel they "get it" might be different. Additionally, how well they grasp it might be different levels in terms of when they feel they fully grok it. Smart or skilled on something is holistic understanding, the speed isn't always as important but is definitely helpful. Like learning something with prototypes rather than a big sprawling project, the former will be faster. Longevity or Ability to Stick With It Another aspect is people that pick up skills and how much they want to use them. If you quickly get skills, that may also mean you get bored with the skills/knowledge quicker. The people that work harder at it or have a deeper threshold or attainment level of how they "get it", may work with that more because it took more effort to grasp or the more they iterate on it the more depth/detail/interest is found. Some people will be able to stick with something they get longer, others may want to move to the next thing. There are all sorts of variables with this: time, goal alignment, need, survival, effort, results, groups you are in like if it was for something personal or at work etc. Self Starter A key aspect to smartness is being a "self starter", one that looks into things driven by interest or potential need. The ability to just start playing and prototyping is a great skill to have. Ability to Finish On top of that, setting things up to easily ship is another way people can be professional. When you start a prototype but get the line to production setup early, the work you do will take less adjustments and make it easier to ship when needed. Right after a prototype I like to setup tools/games/apps all the way to the end on device, different platforms, different styles, basically two of everything so that issues you run into are already smoothed. This makes it easy to ship. Simple to Approach I like concepts that are simple to start, and potentially advanced long term to keep interest. Since I make games and tools I like the "easy to approach, difficult to master" aspect of things and try to create that in my productions. I like the game/tool to be a "friend" so you like using it and it isn't tasking. That is another aspect, how much effort is required. "If you can't explain something in simple terms, you don't understand it." -- Feynman Iteration, Practice and Deeper Dives Most highly skilled people are smart, of varying levels of speed, but the ultimate way to build skills is the repetition and iteration of consist creation/production and shipping. A deeper dive. The more detail and depth the better you can do it "simple". I usually judge people, at least in games, as what they have shipped. Sometimes I am amazed at how those people that produce come to the result, some get there fast and others are constantly re-learning, both have their benefits. A Beginners Mind A "beginners mind" or Shoshin [1] helps to refine that and keep things simple/approachable, which I think is the main goal of creation/production. I also believe the job of engineering is taking complex systems and making them simple, but still allowing the advanced users access to highly customize or use deeper features. This technique also makes it easy to come back to work on something years later that doesn't take a long time to load up the mental model. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshin
• wiremine 5y ago
  Imagination and diversity of experience are some other factors. I.e., the ability to imagine new combinations of disparate ideas, gained through a variety of unique experiences. You could argue Einstein's imagination, coupled with his scientific intelligence, is what made him brilliant. But like others have said, the essay reads like there is a linear and narrow definition of "smart." But having followed pg on twitter, he seems to tend towards an Ayn Rand style worldview, so I guess I'm not surprised.
• hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  Honestly, I am generally a big fan of pg, and many/most of his points I agree with. But every time he puts out a new blog post I feel like I'm now reflexively starting with an eye roll: "OK, what quality that pg has in spades has he decided to laud now as the one thing that's super important for success, happiness and societal progress?" It's not that I really disagree with him that much, but for a man who is obviously very smart, and who can come up with lots of new ideas, I find his blog posts shockingly lacking in introspection. It's basically all the qualities that are needed to build a startup are the most important qualities for society at large. What I never see is thought processes along the lines of "Gee, how can my world view be colored by my unique experiences, and how might I think differently if I had a different upbringing or experiences contrary to the ones that actually occurred?" As another commenter mentioned, so many of pg's posts seem so concerned with "sorting" people: you're smart or not, you've got lots of new ideas or you don't. And it's not hard to surmise why he has this worldview: literally his whole job is to sort through people pitching to find the winners from the losers. But I wish he would just step back once and think a little more broadly about some contrarian ideas that don't just totally support his vision of success in the world.
  • maxerickson 5y ago
    Typically they are persuasive essays with all the furniture of an expository essay or research paper.
  • nopinsight 5y ago
    If you subscribe the general worldview that human well-being is an important goal for society and believe that we have progressed so much in the last few centuries because of scientific knowledge and technological inventions, then it becomes clear that the qualities described in this post, intelligence and the ability to come up with useful new ideas, are useful for society. In my reading, PG did not claim that these are the most important things for society.
  • tomp 5y ago
    > As another commenter mentioned, so many of pg's posts seem so concerned with "sorting" people: you're smart or not, you've got lots of new ideas or you don't. Not sure which posts you mean, but this post is explicitly about examining the difference between intelligence and having new ideas, in hopes of eventually being able to list the ingredients of the latter (the former seems mostly inborn) to be able to cultivate them more broadly in society.
• P00RL3N0 5y ago
  The argument, at least to me, appears to lean heavily on a false dichotomy: You can either be smart, have good ideas, or some blend of the two. Yet he begins with a counter-example in the case of Einstein.
  • dragonwriter 5y ago
    > The argument, at least to me, appears to lean heavily on a false dichotomy: You can either be smart, have good ideas, or some blend of the two. That’s not a dichotomy but a continuum, because of the third option.
• preordained 5y ago
  One thing I feel like is an elephant in the room is that these great new ideas sure aren't being cultivated or drawn out by the VC machine. It seems like in a lot of ways that thing is poison to genuine inspiration. It's about the last thing some people probably want to hear, but a lot of great ideas just seem to be a genuine product of love and curiosity that seems unable to grow in the shadow of something that wants to wring money out of it. It's only if and after it survives to show some promise, far away from eyes sporting money symbols, that it can be shaken down for money.
• Tycho 5y ago
  Maybe it’s to do with luck. As in, smart people will encounter problems and work on them and solve them, and the smartest ones will solve them faster and solve more problems, but the search space of problems is vast and only in retrospect do we know which ones were of crucial importance. Therefore the Einstein is more likely to be not-the-smartest, and the smartest is unlikely to be the Einstein (though more likely than any other individual). A way to test this would be to check how many of the most important breakthroughs were things that were considered vital in advance and had everyone trying to solve them. Like will the next Einstein be the person who solves fusion, or something else entirely? Another dimension is practical experimentation. Were the Wright brothers geniuses? I think it’s more that the hands-on approach yields much faster innovation than the dry theorising.
• jleyank 5y ago
  I only skimmed the discussion and original post, but "training" didn't jump out at me from either. One can distinguish "ideas": neat new apps for iOS that will make money, or, say, string theory or quantum chromodynamics. The first requires people to pay attention to how people are using their phones and, probably, how business operates. But then, Angry Birds was probably a hack-inspired project so maybe luck's a component as well. The others require a whole lot of background in math, physics, a sense of what is beautiful in these disciplines and some idea of how the current models work. Way more effort, and not really subject to a hack attack. Both are facilitated by intelligence, opportunity, etc. But I wonder whether people are interested in or appreciate the amount of spade work involved for some areas. If you want to work hard AND make some bucks, work on material science (catalyst design, high-temp superconductors) or try to understand the human immune system and how it could be modulated. Lots of coding in there, and the winners are heroes who will be feted worldwide. Oh, I'll throw in another one... A critical skill in Pharma is, to be blunt, patent breaking. If one can determine that two molecules are sufficiently different to be outside a patent but sufficiently similar (biochemically and physicochemically) to be active at the same target in the same strength or better... I should point out that modern drugs can make several Billion a quarter once on the market.
• lifeisstillgood 5y ago
  "The worlds smartest man means no more to me than the worlds smartest ant". Dr Manhattan I am not the smartest person in the room nor the least. But I know my smartness / IQ lies on a spectrum - just like my tolerance for cold or for oxygen etc. It's pretty easy to find places where my tolerance for cold is utterly exhausted, and there are situations where the same is for my IQ. And it's fairly easy to find animals or other organisms who can easily handle temperatures I cannot. I suspect in the big universe there are plenty of creatures whose intelligence and smartness extends out past the spectrum on which I, pg or Einstein sit. I would like to know the answers they have to these questions - and I wonder if I would ever understand them. One day we might meet such a species. Will we be happy as the pet?
• carapace 5y ago
  You get new ideas from that place in Schenectady. Seriously though, the best and simplest way to get new ideas is with hypnosis. Go into trance and give yourself a post-hypnotic suggestion to come up with new ideas.
• samuelfekete 5y ago
  People are often prevented from going down a path to success because of the assumption that something is impossible, when if they would actually check they might find a solution that makes it possible. This is true in science, as in Einstein going down the path of considering time dilation, while others might have not even considered it worth another thought. But it’s also true in general life. People who have a can-do attitude often end up achieving more simply because they’ve tried. Perhaps a way of learning how to do this is to sometimes stop and think which paths to success have been discarded as impossible, and then consider investigating if that assumption is true.
• paulpauper 5y ago
  Some of the most successful people in the world are almost always wrong, know little. They just find what works and then do that.
• xbpx 5y ago
  Lot's of people have ideas, great ideas even. Ideas are not particularly rare nor hard. Luck, expertise, privilege (for those not born into it) and timing are more difficult. More importantly, to help ensure maximum impact, one needs to want to push an idea into the world, and push hard. Generally there are better and more fun things to do in life (most would agree with me as pg noted himself). Academics have great ideas and it takes thousands of them building on each other to drive a technological revolution. There would have been another Einstein (or collection of Einsteinlettes), it may have taken a decade but the soil was fertile. Einstein helped develop the ideas behind Quantum Physics but had no further world changing ideas left to contribute once it materialized. So what type of ideas are we talking about? Capitalist entrepreneurial ideas for building startups with? That seems like a depressingly narrow understanding of ideas and what they mean for humanity.
• wombatmobile 5y ago
  Like all of PG's essays, this one is an exploration of his own thought processes more than a generalization about other people in general. What it tells us is why PG created Y Combinator. He did it to gain access to other people's ideas. PG is a smart guy. He's also a rich guy, getting richer every day, because he uses his smarts to multiply his reach by mixing with other people's ideas.
• m0zg 5y ago
  It's a double whammy on "smart" people, actually. They are usually conditioned by their "academic success" that they are only allowed to have "smart" ideas. So "smart" people tend to play it real, real safe - they don't want to destroy the illusion they are "smart" either in themselves or (worst of all) their peers. A necessary prerequisite to wander off the beaten path is to have lots of "dumb" ideas as well, some of which will turn out not so dumb after all. Personally I was quickly disabused of the notion that I'm "smart" after I spent 3 years working in a research lab alongside some _real_ genius quality folks. I was also able to discern their weakness that I allude to above. People who are genuinely smart yet not afraid to try dumb things are unstoppable, and I'd say that the latter is more important than the former, as long as you're willing to put in the extra work and are learning something from your mistakes. Yet it's also not "socially acceptable", so we get what we get - best minds of our generation playing it safe instead of going where no one has gone before, and worse - shitting on the people who do from the height of their ivory tower.
• xyzelement 5y ago
  Another way to frame this topic: intelligence doesn't always lead to impact, and impact is what matters. Example: I met a ton of trivia "nerds" through a friend a few years ago. They had all met at an Ivy League college, they were clearly "smart" in that they knew a lot of information and could follow a logical argument but somehow none of them were able to use their smarts for anything practical. They had jobs you didn't need to be that smart for, and their personal lives were sort of messy. I didn't really know what to make it them at the time, now I think they had the "smarts" but they didn't have the "drive" so their brains sort of did them no good. Another example: Plenty of people are constantly frustrated that they are misunderstood. "I am so smart but I can't get anything done around here because everyone's an idiot." Some people go through their whole life believing this. Luckily I had a job that disabused me of this and taught me to communicate my ideas clearly and persuasively to others. But without that, without the ability to persuade people of your ideas, you might as well not have them.
  • bob1029 5y ago
    Sometimes the best way to persuade someone regarding an idea is to actually implement the idea without their knowledge and then present it to them for review. We are talking about software, right? Only cost and liability around this is usually your time. I've only been scolded for writing a program a few times in my career.
  • hresvelgr 5y ago
    > Another way to frame this topic: intelligence doesn't always lead to impact, and impact is what matters. Impact is a great way of putting it. There are plenty of really smart and creative people who will never produce anything impactful in their life. Impact in my opinion is really all about time-sensitivity and sprinkling of genius. The impact may not even resonate fully with the public in the person's lifetime either. Nikola Tesla being a prime example of this. A lot of very incredible people tend to be VERY open to new ideas. John Dee comes to mind in particular. When he could find no more wisdom in science, he looked to the occult. Nikola Tesla I believe also was quite interested in the occult as well. While I wouldn't consider the occult "out there" by any stretch nowadays, it's a good example unorthodox ideas can come from. > Plenty of people are constantly frustrated that they are misunderstood. "I am so smart but I can't get anything done around here because everyone's an idiot." I've found that kind of thinking tends to be the reason why some of those people are misunderstood. When your frame for interacting with people is setup like that, it's not unreasonable to assume one would put up conversational barriers to confirm their own bias of "everyone's an idiot."
• dvdhnt 5y ago
  In my opinion, what made Einstein great was his grand perspective and ability to think deeply. He was brilliant and his brain could obviously connect dots that most people cannot. But what is that if not intelligence? As an aside, if you believe Einstein to be brilliant or interesting, definitely check out his essay “Why Socialism?” [1] 1. https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism
• lincpa 5y ago
  I agree, I am an amateur, and the theory I created is based on common sense and elementary school mathematics. This seems to have nothing to do with IQ. My theory based on the simple, classic, vivid, and widely used in social production practice, elementary school mathematics "water input/output of the pool" as a mathematical prototype, Therefore, it is scientific. Its name is "The Grand Unified Programming Theory: The Pure Function Pipeline Data Flow with Principle-based Warehouse/Workshop Model". The "von Neumann architecture" used by computers now has no mathematical model support. So it cannot prove its scientificity. My theory rebuilt the theoretical foundation of the IT industry, The IT industry is fundamentally associated with mathematics. Solved the most fundamental and core major problems in the IT industry. Therefore, my "warehouse/workshop model" will surely replace the "von Neumann architecture" and become the first architecture in the computer field, and it is the first architecture to achieve a unified software and hardware. Software and hardware are factories that manufacture data, so they have the same "warehouse/workshop model" and management methods as the manufacturing industry. In the IT field, only it and binary system fully comply with these 5 aesthetics: Simplicity, Unity, order, symmetry and definiteness. It has a wide range of applications, from SOC to supercomputer, from software to hardware, from stand-alone to network, from application layer to system layer, from single thread to distributed, from general programming to explainable AI, from manufacturing industry to IT industry, from energy to finance, from the missile's "Fire-and-Forget" technology to Boeing aircraft pulse production line technology, from myth to Transformers. The Grand Unified Programming Theory: The Pure Function Pipeline Data Flow with Principle-based Warehouse/Workshop Model https://github.com/linpengcheng/PurefunctionPipelineDataflow https://github.com/linpengcheng/PurefunctionPipelineDataflow
• alex_young 5y ago
  Einstein was one of history's most successful, perhaps the most successful, abstract thinkers. Some of his reasoning was based on simple observation of light and making logical deductions about how it must work. It's pretty amazing when you can make simple observations and reason about the workings of the universe. Abstraction is in and of itself an art which is both a learned skill and highly dependent upon intellect. Now, this is the stinker. Imagine that Einstein had been born in a non-English-speaking part of the world. Would this separation from the scientific community have prevented him from telling us all about relativity? I imagine it would have, and it's likely that a good number of abstract thinkers of his caliber have lived and died without us learning from them.
  • BurningFrog 5y ago
    Einstein was born in the German speaking part of Germany.
    • alex_young 5y ago
      And quickly emigrated to Switzerland and then the US. What if he was born in, say, Indonesia, or sub-saharan Africa?
      • BurningFrog 5y ago
        We can't know, of course, but I expect he would have applied his talents in some more practical field and had considerable success there. I also think there were 100 just as talented people born in Germany at the time, who mostly ended up doing well working in other fields.
• jstgord 5y ago
  I'm not going to read this, yet - PGs ideas always seem to be so interesting they drown out my own - rather Ill pose a question : What if being 'smart' is a measure of the useful 'technology' we have running as the OS in our minds ? What if all of our smarts are merely the result of opportunity / time / resources / environment / education .. exposure to good ideas and patterns of thinking - asking questions, following trains of thought, going back to first principles, exposure to diverse language and culture, opportunity to read good books, wealth and time to devote to puzzles when young, habit of critical thinking, fluency in math, exposure to ideas such as Evolution, access to computers/internet/information, time devoted to hobbies / making things etc. I think one of the things that works in Silicon Valley is the recycling of 'talented' developers from one startup to another - so you have a hive-mind pool of continually honed elite creative technical skill-sets competing and cooperating to build new things from modern building blocks .. and when the 'thing' doesn't work, people can move on to the next thing until they hit a local gravity well of a startup going nova. When that happens, they get wealthy from equity .. then recycle that wealth via investment in other startups, and their time into mentoring. Its been painful to watch this not happen in Australia over the past couple decades - a few wins, but no real ecosystem develop, despite there being a fair bit of nascent talent in game development, crypto, ML, math, biotech etc. The mining/resource boom has dominated our trade and little of that wealth has been plowed back into technology / science investment. We should be 'mining' our solar energy wealth and exporting that up into Asia via cable. We should have a hive of ML and green-tech and when one doesn't make it, the people move on to other ones. Another way of saying this is "smart doesn't come from nowhere" .. you need a pyramid ecosystem of soil, worms, molds, bacteria where smart shoots can arise naturally. Its hard to be book-smart, startup-smart or math-smart if you're homeless and all your bandwidth is spent on shelter... or if the best job a smart person can have in your locale is selling houses and you need to do that to pay off your student debt. Conversely, if things are too comfortable there is no need to get smart - but the wealth inequality curve is such that we needn't worry about the vanishingly small talent pool of ultra wealthy teen proto-engineer entrepreneurs who will work on hard things to hone their smarts : a more plausible benefit is they dabble with cash bets in tech startups, science research or philanthropy. I guess Im arguing that we concentrate on the ecosystem, rather than the individual - the smart long bet is to fund math education, science outreach, K2 reading programs : looking around, is there any doubt we need to aggressively promote ideas such as Evolution or the Carbon Cycle ? I love zombie movies way too much, but am appalled that no one ever asks how they keep walking around forever without eating - its as if conservation of energy is not part of the general public's meme-set. We all lose when young people are prevented from becoming smart by their environment - poverty, religion, anti-science, anti-education culture, political or economic instability. What are the best ways to urgently improve this ? Maybe immigration of skilled/educated/motivated/talented people from poor countries to rich countries is one of the most effective measures that works on a short timescale [ where immigrants work in startups, tech companies or university research labs ] In Australia, our politicians love to be seen with spade in hand at the opening of a newly built school - well designed new buildings are nice, but they don't seem to have a plan to actually educate people to a higher level in science and math, despite the buzzwords and virtue signalling. One of our best mini-exports is the AMC ( Australian Maths Competition ), its well regarded in Malaysia and Singapore, but many schools here don't even participate as its seen as too hard, or perhaps too elite or not relevant. Schools have tech sessions where they might fly a drone or use a 3D printer .. but they dont seem to dig into the internals of how these things work. We seem to have a kind of cargo-cult mindset, where we are losing the ability to fix or improve anything. We outsource our refuse processing to Asia, but now they are refusing this, so our "green solution" is to burn rubbish, rather than invest in better recycling technology. Even after the worlds largest fires and smoke over our cities, we have not really woken up to the challenge of climate change. Covid has shown up how badly we fumble at organizing ourselves into action based on science. The Empire is crumbling here on Anacreon - we need a Hari Seldon plan. I dont think voting matters, I dont think democracy is really functioning and the Universities themselves seem to be large beurocracies guarding their massive wealth, churning out marketing and management degrees for profit. Rather, we the technologists must exert whatever power we have - either by education, marketing/dialog, building truly useful things, or using our new-wealth to buy off idiot politicians and fund the technology projects that will improve things. Not to be alarmist .. but it really is 11:59 and our planet is dying. We need to get smart as a group and as a species.
• WalterBright 5y ago
  A lot of new ideas come from unexpected combinations of ideas from multiple seemingly unrelated areas. James Burke writes a history of the world based on this in his book "Connections". I wrote in my paper "Origins of the D Programming Language" how D is influenced by my experiences in airplane gearboxes. Who would have thought that a gearbox had anything to do with programming language design?
  • thedragonline 5y ago
    Interesting. Do you have a concrete example that would illuminate the connection?
    • WalterBright 5y ago
      Origins of the D Programming Language https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3386323 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3386323
• neom 5y ago
  I think there are two buckets that form a venn. Smart on one side, Intelligent on the other. One can loosely be thought of as horsepower, the other abstract/creative/alternative thinking. The Venn of them is genius.
• mikewarot 5y ago
  At Pumping Station One in Chicago, I learned a golden rule: Ideas aren't worth shit. I'm a veritable fountain of ideas, but that doesn't mean squat. Only instantiated ideas, whose value is successfully communicated to others stand a chance of impact in the world. Ideas spring from mapping the world (packers need not apply), and noticing things on the newly connected edges of the map. Those ideas then need to be brought into the real world with luck, preparedness, persistence in some mix. Then you need communication skills and people skills to communicated the ideas and tools you've created to others, to get them to invest their time and effort and start adoption. Being smart helps, but it's noticing the connections, and having a large set of tools to build on any ideas that are the key piece here. You need some smarts, curiosity, persistence, luck, people skills and a network once you've done the work.
• ouid 5y ago
  Intelligence is not a total order.
• User23 5y ago
  I'm not sure, but I think it was Nabokov where I first saw the distinction between genius and intelligence most clearly articulated. The defining characteristic of genius is right there in the Latin root[1], it's fundamentally original. One could have Von Neumann tier intellectual horsepower and waste it all solving sudoku puzzles or something. Or one could have a much more modest intellect, and yet make utterly original and lasting contributions to human knowledge. [1] "generative power"
• chegra 5y ago
  I think there are hard problems and easy problems, and smarts reflects ones ability to solve hard problems. So, the question should be how does one solve hard problems? The solutions to any problem can trivially be found by searching through the possible solutions and checking which solution works. The problem with this approach is that it is intractable space. Thus, the main ways that we traverse the search space of solutions is limiting the search space and by pattern matching. [Think in terms of chess where the search space is large to find the best possible move...The way they get around it is by simply reducing the search space and pattern matching.] Consequently, a smart person would be one who has developed intuition about a problem enough to limit the search space of the available solutions and has a vast collection of patterns to draw from that will aid in the problem solving process. He did touch on one point with all extraordinary genius, they were all obsess. I think this fosters having enough intuition about a problem and having a toolbox of patterns necessary to solve hard problems. Is there any genius without a vast toolbox of techniques to solve problems? Is there any genius without a supreme understanding of his problem area? Having intuition and huge toolbox for solving problems we know are necessary conditions for solving hard problems, but are they sufficient conditions?
  • VirusNewbie 5y ago
    Good comment. I think that maybe what you're getting at is the intuition on particular problems is not necessarily correlated to high IQ beyond a minimum threshold. From everything I've read, almost every contemporary of Von Neumann says he was the 'smartest' person they ever met. It seems his brain just worked at a completely different clock speed than normal people, even normal geniuses. However, while is contributions are immense and widespread, I don't think they come close to the utterly astounding work of Godel. While Godel was insanely smart, he also just looked at the world in a very unusual way that let him see certain meta axioms that have profound implications for pretty much every scientist and philosopher. I don't know if it was circumstance that led him to a special tool box, or obsession, or a certain spark of creativity everyone else lacked, but there's something worth exploring there.
• bloudermilk 5y ago
  How does pg still not have SSL on his website?
• aidenn0 5y ago
  I think pg is right that less responsibility leads to new ideas. Since having kids, my ability to pursue my interests is severely curtailed. My kids are just now at the point where most of them are sufficiently independent that I'd have less responsibility, and now my in-laws need care, with my parents probably not far behind. It seems likely that I won't have significant free time and mental energy until my parents are dead, which is a bit of a depressing thought...
  • MisterMower 5y ago
    Unpopular opinion: with women taking a larger role in professional life, men are having to pick up the slack when it comes to child rearing. That leaves less time for men to invent, discover, create, etc. But women aren’t inventing, discovering or creating in proportion to their increased professional participation. Our society is worse off because of it. Look at the people who made major scientific discoveries, or built new industries, or penned the most well known symphonies. They were almost entirely young men who were unmarried, or married in a time when women were expected to take care of the child rearing. I was reading “How the Laser Happened” and the guy who invented it had four kids, but still had plenty of time to sit on park benches during evening walks by himself and ponder the physics of light. He went on many trips to visit other universities for research and worked tons of hours at Bell Labs. That was a normal way for men to work back then, even expected and viewed honorably. We are going to have to accept less great discoveries and new inventions if society starts expecting men to bear half the effort of child rearing. You can’t come up with the laser or the Theory if Relativity if you’ve got crying kids you’re on the hook to watch while their mother is at work. The alternative is to not even have kids, or to raise them poorly. And that’s not fair to them. Unfortunately, that seems to be what most people are settling on. Which does not bode well for the future of humanity, either. Any way you slice it, it’s a bleak future.
    • urthor 5y ago
      The same can be said for all sorts of minorities. The lack of participation in science is totally driven by psychological insecurities around high achievement.
    • 5y ago
• Applejinx 5y ago
  Reminds me of reading 'Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain'. The way that book tries to get you to un-hook the judging and structuring parts of your mind so your hand can form shapes with NO WORDS to describe them. As soon as you say 'I'm drawing an arm' your brain tries to define 'arm' and what it would mean to appropriately outline the parts of one on your paper… and the image you'd ideally produce might bear no resemblance to the 'arm' definition your brain gives you. It's an elaborate process of shutting down certain kinds of 'smart' that are overly naive and reductive, to get to images that are available but undescribable by analytical words. The perfect lines of an elbow are not 'triangle' or 'circle' or even anatomical parts: they're the image one's eye understands immediately, but getting it on paper is a whole other story. I find when I'm live-coding audio DSP and getting close to dialing in a tonal detail that I'm trying hard to capture, or even rapidly debugging and evolving the code of the program to do it, when I'm most effective I lose the words to explain what I'm doing. It becomes 'and now I this, to do this, and then we ah… you'll see, it should… there. That.' I'll play the sound, and my model will exactly resemble the thing I'm trying to make it sound like, but I'm miles away from being able to articulate what I did. Or, more likely, I could tell you 'I subtracted the thing and it needed to be 1.52 rather than 1.5, and that and the other idea got it to where it sounds like that. Because the filter's lower, and it's interacting with the input sample in thus and so a way'. The tangible STUFF I'm doing is rarely that complicated. But being on the point of knowing to DO that stuff and exactly that stuff to get there… is what Graham is talking about. I don't know if it can be learned but it can damn well be trained. People as disparate as ad guy David Ogilvy, and writer John Gardner, have understood that. And you can be a literal writer and still have important parts of your process locked away in that no-words zone. At those times, you are the writer. Your literal writing ability and vocabulary, are the stenographer. It's waiting on you having something to say. That 'something to say' may not be coming from a 'words place'.
• Fckd 5y ago
  What if a smart person thought of a crypto currency and then foresaw its devastating impact on the planet, what do you think that person would do? I belive smart people want to work on ideas that are net positive and as you know many ideas (even successfull ones) are net negative. * Airbnb - locals are outbidded by tourists * uber/lyft - better solution is public transportation * Amazon - big marketplace but no idea whats fake and have to pray to god that no one dies while trying to deliver our orer * Roundup - kills grass and also friendly insects on top of that gives you cancer * Teflon - no need to burn calarioes on washing dishes but pollutes ground water with forever chemicals * meat industry - you get tasty meal but animals and earth suffer * Zillion sataliets in orbit - remote locations (no one lives or not need) gets access to internet but astronomy suffers the list goes on
  • darkerside 5y ago
    Smart people also realize the world isn't perfect, and it wasn't before we were here either. In a world where long term outcomes have infinite factors taking actions with short term benefits is rational because there is no control or impact over the long term effects. That is obviously not totally true, but I think probabilistically speaking, it's _somewhat_ true.
    • TchoBeer 5y ago
      So the defining feature of intelligence is that the truly smart take actions with short term benefits at the cost of long term detriments?
      • darkerside 5y ago
        Close. Smart people are _willing_ to take actions with short term benefits at the cost of long term detriments. Smart people understand that there are multiple correct answers to the same problem depending on what timeframe you are operating under, and that the long timeframe is less controllable.
  • PeterisP 5y ago
    > "I belive smart people want to work on ideas that are net positive" Do you have any basis for that belief or is that just wishful thinking? Or is that the way how you choose to define "smart", so it becomes true by definition? I would say that a persons goals, purposes and values is an important aspect that's pretty much orthogonal to their intellectual ability to figure out how to best achieve their long-term goals and further their values, whatever they happen to be. Perhaps there's some correlation there, but IMHO it's not necessary nor very strong, all kinds of counterexamples come to mind; there certainly are people who are very intelligent and effective while literally being sociopaths.
• aneeqdhk 5y ago
  Taken to the extreme though, this could lead to neomania. New for the sake of new. What should we term the quality of knowing not to fix something if it ain't broke? I think that line of thinking would be the intellectual opposite of PG's (albeit still coherent in it's conjectures or lack thereof)
• amznbyebyebye 5y ago
  You need to have a vision, and the vision needs to be the right vision. How do you know it’s the right vision? I think most just get lucky on this. Maybe the successful serial entrepreneurs have figured it out (Musk, Jobs) Getting the vision right isn’t enough, you have to know how to get to the vision. This usually requires a combination of smarts, grit, passion, and luck.
• ToJans 5y ago
  I know quite a few conventional entrepreneurs that I wouldn't consider smart in a general context, but are extremely well versed in what they do. Experience will help you to develop an instinct, and once you understand why everything is the way it is, you need to focus on finding an edge/making a difference/having an impact. This takes time, experimentation, and most of all the willingness and ability to fail, while you gain deeper and new insights. Willingness comes from personal grit and belief, but ability usually comes from your network, venture capital, a rich family, or having a successful business in the first place... Following Taleb's ideas, I'd say that, to find your edge, it would make more sense to try something new 52 weeks in a row, instead of spending 52 weeks on a single idea. Assume you have the grit and ability to experiment, then you still need a heuristic to determine which ideas are worth pursuing, and that's where luck comes in. Markets do not behave rationally, so reasoning can only bring you so far. "How to be successful" formulas could be compared to the "how to draw an owl" meme [0]: you need grit, the ability to experiment, and hope that this combination will eventually put you in the perfect context at a time where everything aligns, and where you take the decision to pursue the correct opportunity... [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/eccj2/how_to_draw_an_owl/ https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/eccj2/how_to_draw_an...
• mola 5y ago
  This is not about what being smart is. It's about a very twisted perception of what is important. PG seems to equate success with innovation. As if living life raising a family and having meaningful relationships is just a frivolous pass time of the lazy. I can't with these randian heros....
• rramadass 5y ago
  This pg essay reminds me of the Chinese saying Cast a Brick to Attract Jade. :-)
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• jokoon 5y ago
  The Silicon Valley gave birth to "business philosophy". It is as ridiculous as it sounds.
• avapark 5y ago
  https://prestigeavalonpark.simdif.com/ https://prestigeavalonpark.simdif.com/
• nicholast 5y ago
  Just like in order to become a composer of music you need to start by performing other people's music, I think it helps in writing to start by responding to other people's ideas, dissecting and evaluating, which helps you build the competence to generate ideas of your own.
• ido 5y ago
  One thing that bothers me in this essay is that it relies a lot on intelligence being somewhat clear/measurable and agreed upon metric. But there isn't really a comprehensive definition of intelligence, let alone a comprehensive way to measure it (IQ for example to a large extent measures how good someone is at taking tests). Coming up with new ideas can itself be a measure of intelligence! That is not to say the spirit of the article is wrong - I've met plenty of people who came across as very smart and didn't really achieve as much in life (so far) as other people who didn't appear to be as smart or smarter. I think other large factors must include ambition, risk-aversion (or lack thereof), confidence and opportunity.
• zurvania 5y ago
  The title for PG's post should've been Creativity is more important than being smart.
• iainctduncan 5y ago
  The most interesting point to me in this was the observation that it could be things associated with youth, which made me think immediately of John Cleese's brilliant talks on creativity. He (Cleese) makes the point that good ideas need time, in two ways: time without pressure to produce, and time set aside to focus. Both of these are so, so much harder for late or mid stage career adults to make. I truly believe this is the most important ingredient in getting interesting things done in the second half of life.
• Andy_G11 5y ago
  Smart people with ideas know that that uploading fledgling, unrealised ideas into the world can mean feeding their baby into a meat grinder of criticism, scepticism, plagiarism and probably some other -isms. E.g., Andrew Wile had some pretty good insights as to how to go about tackling the solution of Fermat's theorem (read Fermat's Last Theorem by Simon Singh - good book), but did he go 'Hey, listen everybody - what if we did X?' Like hell he did. Instead he secluded himself and worked on it till he could present a robust proof fait accompli. This is by no means an unusual story - think of all the bright folks who are tinkering with projects all over the world, even devoting themselves to it full time - trying to realise something that they can call their own. So, the 'gap between intelligence and ideas' may be partly due to the desire of intelligent people to contain their ideas until they can own the downstream benefits arising from them.
• known 5y ago
  "You are a product of your environment" --Clement Stone (b. 1902) https://archive.is/yPhyn https://archive.is/yPhyn