10 ms·

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

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.
  - gonehome 5y ago
    We're competing with each other via billions of years of selection - there are major advantages if you're smart (and if you're pretty). You can also add the quality PG is talking about here which requires some amount of smartness as a prereq (curiosity?). I'm not sure how much it can really be cultivated above baseline, but it'd be interesting to know more. I'd guess there are some strategies, but a lot may still be tied to your inborn stats. I'd argue we should strive for a society where the suffering you're exposed to if you're unlucky enough to be in the bottom quartile is bounded, while still allowing for the top to be unbounded in pushing humanity forward. Accepting there's natural variance here is part of that. We're not all the same, things aren't fair. We shouldn't ignore that or pretend otherwise, but we also shouldn't think that means those dealt a bad genetic hand need to be totally screwed in our society (imo) and it doesn't mean you need to handicap the outliers on the other side in some Bergeron like pursuit of 'fairness' [0]. [0]: http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html Also related on the prettiness bit, this short story is good: https://waldyrious.neocities.org/ted_chiang/liking-what-you-see-a-documentary.html https://waldyrious.neocities.org/ted_chiang/liking-what-you-...
    - apineda 5y ago
      If the upperbound is unlimited doesn't the lower bound essentially converge to zero? Imagine the upper strata (literally and figuratively) in flying cars and flying restaurants. The simple farm house would now seem like a desolate situation. Or would it?
      - gonehome 5y ago
        On the spectrum of possible intelligence human variance is small so in practice this isn't really an issue. Though what you’re touching on is why misaligned AGI is an e-risk.
    - whimsicalism 5y ago
      In our current context, selectively there are disadvantages if you are smart.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- winternett 5y ago
  The kids I grew up with in High School that attended the "Gifted And Talented" courses didn't really end up topping the gene pool after I met them at our 20 year reunion. The girl from our year book voted "most likely to succeed", did not meet her goals of being president, and probably may never do so... She actually had some rough life experiences like me too since then... I no longer have childhood goals of exceptionalism as a desire, nor the right social and political positioning for the role, not the right contacts or money. I just want to be happy and live on a tropical beach with a good wife and good kids without money problems to be honest. Exceptionalism in this world is indeed luck, especially when you consider that there are almost 7 billion other people on this planet besides us, and limited world resources to share amongst us all... To think that any one individual reached a point of higher talent or intelligence than everyone else is a total consumerism-driven lie. Movies and TV create celebrities because it drives profit and merchandise, not because they really feel the actors they back are unique and worthy. We find out often the people branded as "exceptional" suffer greatly for it very often because they gain popularity and consequently can't live up to the standards portrayed of them. The biggest lie we can tell ourselves is that we're exceptional beyond everyone or anyone else, physically, spiritually, mentally, or in any other way. Somehow there's an ever present ideal pushed by Gyms, Churches, Psychologists, News Media, TV, and Movies that exceptionalism can exist, but it's simply not sustainable for any individual, and there's a pile of discarded celebrities down the hill by the river in Hollywood to prove it... Once we're humble in life, and we realize that opportunity, paying attention, learning things, proper positioning, luck, and circumstance are what grant us the most potential for success -- It's the actions that we take to seize opportunities, THOSE ACTIONS WE TAKE are what set us apart from others who may be hesitant, not ready for, and/or unaware of and to the present opportunity. When we reach points of success, it's important to remind ourselves of others and their situations and to not look down upon them, and to help others to succeed as much as possible in order to not feel isolated in ego and self praise. I may sound like the Dali Lama here, but fighting against our own internal ego in a world like this one is a constant battle, so I work hard every day to keep everything in this kind of context in my own life, and I'm not perfect just like everyone else. Whenever I'm driving my car out in public though, everyone's a "frickin' idiot", that will never change... :P
- diskzero 5y ago
  Don't underestimate ones ability to adapt and change their circumstances. I am a sample size of one, but I grew up busy farming and raising siblings. It is true that I was exposed to computers in the 80s, but didn't own one. In my mid-twenties I was able to re-orient my life, fail and succeed at startups, work at Be, Eazel, Apple, Amazon and more. I have spent the last couple of years teaching adults whose backgrounds are filled with shocking adversity to think like programmers, build new careers and improve their lives. I am constantly amazed. Modern medicine is miraculous. There is no doubt a vast amount of human potential has been saved from oblivion.
- mikewave 5y ago
  > 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. This really depends how you frame 'accomplishment', which is very much up to you. I think that successfully raising children who can successfully raise children is in and of itself an accomplishment; forming a family and keeping it intact through your inevitable troubles, working the land and producing enough excess food to earn everything else you need... our culture would be better if we actually viewed such people as 'accomplished' instead of pretending that being a C-suite officer of some SaaS b2b griftware is inherently of more value to anyone, anywhere.
tibbar 5y ago
> Shit no, because the whole rest of the time I'm not coming up with those handful of new ideas, I'm less-smart. For better or worse, I am such a person: good at generating ideas and product vision, merely competent at technical execution. Put another way, my verbal iq and empathy (if that can be measured) are much stronger than my analytical iq, as confirmed by essentially every standardized test I’ve ever taken. As a result, I function and process information differently than a lot of my engineer peers. Some things are obviously harder for me, which can be painful and embarrassing, but as a rule I’m involved in lots of interesting discussions and design sessions and tend to be a de facto product manager. It’s just different, a trade off in mental styles.
- tcgv 5y ago
  I'm more of an analytical person myself, and my non-technical co-founder at our startup is much like you described yourself. I built the tech in the early days (today I mostly manage the tech team). He was the sales person and used his impressive communication skills to win our first key accounts. One thing that he though me long ago is that there are several types of intelligence. It's not linear. People usually assume the analytical type of intelligence is the true type of intelligence. I find that to be inaccurate.
clairity 5y ago
> "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." smarts can't be summed up into a single all-encompassing quality that you have or you don't. you can be socially savvy and not be good at math, or great at basketball and be socially awkward. this is a 'not smart' observation that undermines your whole humble-brag.
- asdfman123 5y ago
  I truly excel at the first three things -- I get high test scores and can get good at a wide range of things without even trying -- but I struggle to follow conversations due to ADHD + shyness and it drives me crazy.
- tfehring 5y ago
  Sure, the skills the parent comment mentioned are all separate skills, but they're probably pretty strongly (and positively) correlated with each other and with traditional measures of intelligence like performance on IQ tests. It's accurate to say that intelligence isn't the only thing that matters, and probably accurate to say that society generally overstates its importance, but claiming that intelligence doesn't exist is a severe and inaccurate overcorrection.
- achenet 5y ago
  "The g factor (also known as general intelligence, general mental ability or general intelligence factor) is a construct developed in psychometric investigations of cognitive abilities and human intelligence. It is a variable that summarizes positive correlations among different cognitive tasks, reflecting the fact that an individual's performance on one type of cognitive task tends to be comparable to that person's performance on other kinds of cognitive tasks. " from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_%28psychometrics%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_%28psychometrics%29
reikonomusha 5y ago
I read your comment as “yes I prefer life to be easier and complacent over difficult and interesting.” Is this too coarse of an interpretation? I seem to agree with pg: I’d much rather have good ideas and trouble “executing” because there are always smart people who can help me understand better, or execute better, or whatever; than being super smart and at the end of the day nothing to do with it. Reminds me of genius programmers, who can easily coast through interviews or jobs, but who’ve otherwise got nothing of their own to write or show of it. That’s not bad, it just means their smarts are in service to someone else’s ideas—which is OK!
- gowld 5y ago
  "there are always smart people who can help me understand better, or execute better," Not if everyone becomes an Idea Person like pg proposes! There's more to "do" than just "discover new things". What's the point of discovering new things if we don't use them for anything?
  - reikonomusha 5y ago
    “Having ideas” isn’t “being an idea person”—the latter I hear colloquially to mean “spitballs superficial proposals that other people sort through”. I also don’t think what you suggest is what pg suggests. Einstein had ideas, but he didn’t just blather about them at a high level until some smart person did the “real” work. I also didn’t mean to suggest I’d rather “just have ideas”, I meant “I’d rather have ideas and a difficult time executing on them” as opposed to “being smart with no ideas at all.”
- handrous 5y ago
  I see it as a trade-off between "glory" and having an otherwise very nice life, as framed—trading "being smart" for "having some really good ideas", which is a rather odd trade, but I'm addressing the text in its own terms. Between "have some very good ideas" and "be even a little smart the entire rest of the time", if I can only choose one, yes, I'm strongly inclined to choose the latter. "Being smart" benefits me and shapes my very identity by affecting my perceptions and experience of everything, every waking second; having some very good ideas might make me money and make me known as "the guy who came up with X, Y and Z". Having both would be great, obviously! But if PG's presenting some weird "pick one" choice between the two, then claiming it's obvious which one a person would pick, yeah, I'm leaning toward, "no, your assertion and assumptions on which you're couching this entire line of argument are far too broad, it's 'be smart' by a mile and I doubt I'm alone in that choice". It's Achilles' choice, as I see it (though, again, it's a weird pair of things to ask people to choose between) and as much as I like reading about him, and as impressive as it is that we still know his name and what he did (taking the stories as true, and the character as real, for the sake of lending what he opted for the most possible appeal), thanks but no thanks.
5faulker 5y ago
I'm not sure how smart you are, but there's a lot of wisdom in what you said. Smart is multi-dimensional for me anyway.
- handrous 5y ago
  > Smart is multi-dimensional for me anyway. Strongly agreed about "smart" not being just one thing. Somewhere there's someone who's normal at the things I'm good at, and excellent at the things I'm so-so or bad at (there are several of those), and they're probably glad they get to "play" life on easy mode, too. Somewhere there's someone who's as good as both of us at all those things, and they probably own an island and have a private jet and don't think it was particularly challenging to get to that position in life. Maybe—if there's, in fact, exactly one thing they're bad at—they even wonder why other people don't do it.
cm2012 5y ago
My sister and I were just talking about this. We'd been coming to realize independently how much faster we think than average people. We didn't realize it growing up, since we went to gifted schools our whole lives (public schools we tested into, not private) and everybody was bright there. Living life outside of the gifted bubble has given us perspective on how lucky we were to born this way.
- psysharp 5y ago
  Why do you think thinking fast is more important than thinking slowly?
  - cm2012 5y ago
    It makes life easier. E.G. - Someone is explaining a concept. - We get it in a few seconds, can come up connections, next steps, implications, etc. - Other people need to have it explained longer, or miss the main point, or don't see how it connects to other pertinent things. You can see how that would make life easier, and make you more effective at a variety of real time tasks.
    - agustif 5y ago
      Yup, but this always made school so fucking boring for me. Get it the 5 first minutes the teacher explains, spend 55 other minutes wandering in your mind about other stuff while the teacher proceeds to drill it into your peers memory repeating it ad-nauseaum until they sing it like fucking gospel. That's the education I experienced at least, maybe someone else had better luck, but once you've to slowdown to the slowest of 30, and you're the fastest, things get pretty slow.
      - handrous 5y ago
        This messed me up so bad when I finally hit material I needed to work at even a little. Years and years and years of getting things instantly, with no effort whatsoever. Lecturing about the same thing again for the fifth day in a row, but I had it the first day? Cool, I'll draw cartoons and still answer any questions you ask me. Hand me a test? No problem. A-grade work in 5 minutes, read my book for the remainder of the hour. My stupid kid brain (this was... age 13 or so? Maybe 14?) was sure something horrible had happened to me over the Summer and I was now an idiot, when that stopped being how things worked. I wouldn't be surprised if I could have been diagnosed with actual depression, from then through my early 20s, mostly due to that and the follow-on effects. I've since learned this is a super-common experience for gifted kids and one of the things really good gifted programs focus early on mitigating. I gather kids smarter than I was may still experience something similar, but not until they burn out hard and very suddenly, around Sophomore or Junior year of a challenging degree program.
WFHRenaissance 5y ago
> sheer chance and lucky circumstances. LOL, dualism moment. There is no "you" outside of your genetics and the socialization you experienced. There is definitely some luck involved, but also you're the product of a lot more work and planning than you give yourself credit for.
- mywittyname 5y ago
  > you're the product of a lot more work and planning than you give yourself credit for. Some people are lucky enough to have parents/family that handle this planning for us at young ages, knowing we will benefit in the future.
  - ogre_magi 5y ago
    Do you think you were “lucky” not to be a mosquito? Do you think you were “lucky” not to be a 100kg mass of disconnected plasma inside the sun? This doesn’t make any sense. There are different processes in our universe that produce different things, from plasma to rocks to mosquitos to unsuccessful people to successful people. These processes are different, and their outputs are not fungible. There’s no luck. There’s no sense in which “you” could have been anything except what you are.
    - ahevia 5y ago
      I mean. When folks use the term luck they often just use to express gratitude. Whether that’s to the void or to their god. It’s weird to point out the usage here. Sure someone can say “I’m grateful the insane probabilities of every small detail that led to today collapsed on me living a good life”, but it’s easier to just say “I’m so lucky”. > There’s no sense in which “you” could have been anything except what you are. Perhaps yea, this feels tangential to the argument there is no free will and the universe is 100% deterministic. Maybe I’m reading too much into your comment, but for my lived experience. It certainly doesn’t feel that I was 100% destined to end up here. Im sure others feel the same way that their circumstances were never predetermined.
SquishyPanda23 5y ago
> Being even a little clever—and that's the best I can claim—is living life on easy mode That is probably true about being a little clever, but being really smart is not easy in the general case. Really smart people often share few ideas and interests with others and spend much of their lives lonely and misunderstood.
- cm2012 5y ago
  Nonetheless, IQ correlates to life outcomes like income really well. Averages are by no means destiny, but on average IQ makes life easier.
  - dagw 5y ago
    There are several studies that show that IQ correlates with income, at least at the extremes. However the studies I've seen found no correlations between IQ and overall happiness or contentment with how their life turned out.
    - PeterisP 5y ago
      "Happiness/contentment" is effectively a "balancing thermostat" of our motivation, a functional aspect that is used by our bodies to regulate our behavior and thus, if it functions properly (as opposed to certain diseases e.g. anhedonia in clinical depression) its long term average will be pretty much the same no matter how well you do, it's almost orthogonal to any metric of actual wellbeing. For example, studies show both winning excessive amounts of money in lotteries and sustaining major life-changing injuries (e.g. losing limbs or causing other disabilities) do not correlate with happiness in the long-term. Happiness effectively reflects (a) recent short-term changes to wellbeing; (b) momentary expectations or worries about future wellbeing; and (c) innate baseline happiness. It's not a reflection of how well someone is living; in essence, people living long-term in a literal gulag may easily have on average the same overall happiness/contentment as living in a nice first world upper-middle-class environment.
      - 5y ago
manquer 5y ago
I would say I have the opposite experience on being only a bit clever. Being not smart at all usually also means you are ignorant to what you don't know, that life has its merits, Repetitive jobs don't bore you, and happiness comes from simpler joys in life. I wouldn't mind living that way at all. Being very smart means none of the stuff you mention is hard. Math comes naturally, Crazy smart people need to put no effort to understand complex topics, while their happiness is typically in esoteric goals or breakthrough research, most people don't understand anything of what they do, so either society is sympathetic to challenges or oblivious to what they do. Financially/Socially once they have a safe academic job, the difference of success/failure is not visible to most regular people, even if they win a field's medal or Noble prize most people hardly understand it. Being a bit clever is the worst of the lot, you understand enough to know how much you don't really know. Constantly you are making decisions basis what you know is poor understanding. Math, subtext, knowledge is all hard, but doesn't look so hard you will completely give up or blissfully don't know it exists. Social peer groups keep missing that intelligence can be pretty scaled, we can perceive that someone is smarter than us but not by how much. Everyone one assumes there is just one level above them, equivalent to crazy smart. We are therefore accorded with the praise, money and recommendations and also responsibilities of being perceived crazy smart. I would happily trade to being exactly perceived as I am or less and forgo all the money and praise if I didn't also be saddled with expectations of coming up with solutions all the time.
- hans1729 5y ago
  >Being not smart at all usually also means you are ignorant to what you don't know, that life has its merits, Repetitive jobs don't bore you, and happiness comes from simpler joys in life. I wouldn't mind living that way at all. You're mixing up all kinds of unrelated things here. As does PG. Whats smartness? Going by Joscha Bach, it's the ability to reach your goals, as opposed to intelligence, your ability to make models. Wether repetitive work bores you isn't a matter of intelligence or smartness, however it does correlate significantly with cognitive functions (Jung). The then following paragraph seems projective to me, generalizations are just all over the place; thats just not how it works, neither from a neuro- nor from a psychological perspective. It doesn't matter wether you're intellectual middle or high brow, you will always be an idiot because you'll always be residing in a brain, being bound to its constraints of focus and attention. the notion of absolute intelligence that you imply when relating to "being a bit clever is the worst of the lot" seems off to me. >I would happily trade to being exactly perceived as I am or less and forgo all the money and praise if I didn't also be saddled with expectations of coming up with solutions all the time. You're contradicting yourself: first you say that the general population doesn't get what being smart implies, and then you say that the general population expects you to deliver on what being smart implies Sorry if this came off hostile, it wasn't meant so in any way. I just can't relate to these absolute notions and would strongly suggest you to read into psychology and neuroscience
admissionsguy 5y ago
> Being even a little clever—and that's the best I can claim—is living life on easy mode. Doesn't even compare to being tall and good looking.
cosentiyes 5y ago
> > 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. For lack of a better metric, how many IQ points would you be willing to trade per new idea? It feels likely that environmental factors and luck have a much higher impact on happiness and other outcomes for individuals within whatever defines the "high intelligence" or "slightly gifted range". I'd probably make the "less smart" trade for 1-2 novel/high quality ideas since you're basically guaranteeing one or two high rolls. I doubt a 1-2% bump in intelligence would outweigh the benefits. I'm making lots of assumptions here around being able to successfully act on new ideas and that intelligence has marginal gains once you're locked into above-average-but-not-top quantiles.
- handrous 5y ago
  > For lack of a better metric, how many IQ points would you be willing to trade per new idea? It feels likely that environmental factors and luck have a much higher impact on happiness and other outcomes for individuals within whatever defines the "high intelligence" or "slightly gifted range". I'd probably make the "less smart" trade for 1-2 novel/high quality ideas since you're basically guaranteeing one or two high rolls. I doubt a 1-2% bump in intelligence would outweigh the benefits. For one that'd make me at least somewhat rich? Maybe one or two. But I have a feeling I'd end up regretting even that, worrying "would I have gotten this idea I'm not getting, if I hadn't made that trade?", or if a loss of interest in something is because I'm now slightly dumber, or whatever, every day, for the entire rest of my life. Aging-related brain changes are already terrifying, without helping them along.
outworlder 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. The thing is - I don't agree with Paul Graham at all. Sure, there might be a genetic component to being 'smart', but I doubt it means that people are just born with a better "CPU". Maybe they are 0.1% better overall. Rather, I don't think we can properly control variables(ethically). If your parents are 'smart', they will do 'smart' things. They will give you the attention you need. They will give you a balanced diet. They will buy you books. They will teach you difficult concepts. You'll see them studying or otherwise getting invested in their careers and, as kids, we mimic what you see. Over time, you develop 'smart' habits, and you exercise your brain. You'll also accumulate all sorts of 'patterns', that let you quickly see those things that aren't 'obvious' to everyone else. They are obvious to you, probably because you have seen something similar before, even in a different context. The more 'patterns' you have, the quicker you can spot them, and you can tie things together faster if you are not focusing on learning entirely new things at the same time. Even if you had nothing of the sort growing up, by just trying to engage your brain while doing most of your tasks, you are far ahead of most people. What people tend to do is, whenever they find something that worked, even if only once, they will stick with that solution, for every situation. They don't normally ask themselves if the resolution is still appropriate for the situation in hand. Keep this as a background process, and you do have a superpower.
- Retric 5y ago
  Your proposing a testable hypotheses which has been disproven through studies of the adopted and especially twins. Intelligence and genetics are strongly linked, most obviously via negatives like Down syndrome but that’s far from the only influence. One of many examples: https://resources.corwin.com/sites/default/files/handout_18.1.pdf https://resources.corwin.com/sites/default/files/handout_18....
- throw1234651234 5y ago
  Read up on working memory. A lot of people can't hold enough items in their head long enough to write a function. And that's if you don't believe in IQ, which is already very heavily correlated with success.
dmueller39 5y ago
Not being too smart can be a forcing function on the quality of ideas. Very frequently the idea that wins in the minds of others is the one that is easy to think about. I am frequently caught in the trap where I am enjoying the puzzlebox complexity of a problem, and building an equally complicated solution. I then attempt to explain my complicated solution to someone else, and I fail on delivery. I also have a coworker whos mantra is "if its hard to think about, I don't do it". We actually worked on similarly aligned solutions to the same problem. His version met with significantly more success than mine did, and I credit the fact that he ensured that it was all easy to think about (and thus talk about). I don't begrudge him at all though, he's one of my favs! IMO if you are unwilling or unable to think about overly complicated ideas, it might force you to eliminate them and develop new ones that are easier to talk about and think about. Thanks for sharing BTW.
- alanlammiman 5y ago
  Agree. Whether a business (or solution to a problem) is interesting, ingenious and innovative is a completely different matter from its being a good business. iirc warren buffet once said, "if it takes a calculator to figure out if it's a good business, it's not". In a similar vein (but with a different moral to it) my boss used to say that (in a corporate context) all back-of-the-envelope analysis was by definition correct - because it would only ever be checked via back-of-the-envelope calculations.

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.
- gonehome 5y ago
  We're competing with each other via billions of years of selection - there are major advantages if you're smart (and if you're pretty). You can also add the quality PG is talking about here which requires some amount of smartness as a prereq (curiosity?). I'm not sure how much it can really be cultivated above baseline, but it'd be interesting to know more. I'd guess there are some strategies, but a lot may still be tied to your inborn stats. I'd argue we should strive for a society where the suffering you're exposed to if you're unlucky enough to be in the bottom quartile is bounded, while still allowing for the top to be unbounded in pushing humanity forward. Accepting there's natural variance here is part of that. We're not all the same, things aren't fair. We shouldn't ignore that or pretend otherwise, but we also shouldn't think that means those dealt a bad genetic hand need to be totally screwed in our society (imo) and it doesn't mean you need to handicap the outliers on the other side in some Bergeron like pursuit of 'fairness' [0]. [0]: http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html Also related on the prettiness bit, this short story is good: https://waldyrious.neocities.org/ted_chiang/liking-what-you-see-a-documentary.html https://waldyrious.neocities.org/ted_chiang/liking-what-you-...
  - apineda 5y ago
    If the upperbound is unlimited doesn't the lower bound essentially converge to zero? Imagine the upper strata (literally and figuratively) in flying cars and flying restaurants. The simple farm house would now seem like a desolate situation. Or would it?
    - gonehome 5y ago
      On the spectrum of possible intelligence human variance is small so in practice this isn't really an issue. Though what you’re touching on is why misaligned AGI is an e-risk.
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    In our current context, selectively there are disadvantages if you are smart.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
winternett 5y ago
The kids I grew up with in High School that attended the "Gifted And Talented" courses didn't really end up topping the gene pool after I met them at our 20 year reunion. The girl from our year book voted "most likely to succeed", did not meet her goals of being president, and probably may never do so... She actually had some rough life experiences like me too since then... I no longer have childhood goals of exceptionalism as a desire, nor the right social and political positioning for the role, not the right contacts or money. I just want to be happy and live on a tropical beach with a good wife and good kids without money problems to be honest. Exceptionalism in this world is indeed luck, especially when you consider that there are almost 7 billion other people on this planet besides us, and limited world resources to share amongst us all... To think that any one individual reached a point of higher talent or intelligence than everyone else is a total consumerism-driven lie. Movies and TV create celebrities because it drives profit and merchandise, not because they really feel the actors they back are unique and worthy. We find out often the people branded as "exceptional" suffer greatly for it very often because they gain popularity and consequently can't live up to the standards portrayed of them. The biggest lie we can tell ourselves is that we're exceptional beyond everyone or anyone else, physically, spiritually, mentally, or in any other way. Somehow there's an ever present ideal pushed by Gyms, Churches, Psychologists, News Media, TV, and Movies that exceptionalism can exist, but it's simply not sustainable for any individual, and there's a pile of discarded celebrities down the hill by the river in Hollywood to prove it... Once we're humble in life, and we realize that opportunity, paying attention, learning things, proper positioning, luck, and circumstance are what grant us the most potential for success -- It's the actions that we take to seize opportunities, THOSE ACTIONS WE TAKE are what set us apart from others who may be hesitant, not ready for, and/or unaware of and to the present opportunity. When we reach points of success, it's important to remind ourselves of others and their situations and to not look down upon them, and to help others to succeed as much as possible in order to not feel isolated in ego and self praise. I may sound like the Dali Lama here, but fighting against our own internal ego in a world like this one is a constant battle, so I work hard every day to keep everything in this kind of context in my own life, and I'm not perfect just like everyone else. Whenever I'm driving my car out in public though, everyone's a "frickin' idiot", that will never change... :P
diskzero 5y ago
Don't underestimate ones ability to adapt and change their circumstances. I am a sample size of one, but I grew up busy farming and raising siblings. It is true that I was exposed to computers in the 80s, but didn't own one. In my mid-twenties I was able to re-orient my life, fail and succeed at startups, work at Be, Eazel, Apple, Amazon and more. I have spent the last couple of years teaching adults whose backgrounds are filled with shocking adversity to think like programmers, build new careers and improve their lives. I am constantly amazed. Modern medicine is miraculous. There is no doubt a vast amount of human potential has been saved from oblivion.
mikewave 5y ago
> 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. This really depends how you frame 'accomplishment', which is very much up to you. I think that successfully raising children who can successfully raise children is in and of itself an accomplishment; forming a family and keeping it intact through your inevitable troubles, working the land and producing enough excess food to earn everything else you need... our culture would be better if we actually viewed such people as 'accomplished' instead of pretending that being a C-suite officer of some SaaS b2b griftware is inherently of more value to anyone, anywhere.

tibbar 5y ago

> Shit no, because the whole rest of the time I'm not coming up with those handful of new ideas, I'm less-smart. For better or worse, I am such a person: good at generating ideas and product vision, merely competent at technical execution. Put another way, my verbal iq and empathy (if that can be measured) are much stronger than my analytical iq, as confirmed by essentially every standardized test I’ve ever taken. As a result, I function and process information differently than a lot of my engineer peers. Some things are obviously harder for me, which can be painful and embarrassing, but as a rule I’m involved in lots of interesting discussions and design sessions and tend to be a de facto product manager. It’s just different, a trade off in mental styles.

tcgv 5y ago
I'm more of an analytical person myself, and my non-technical co-founder at our startup is much like you described yourself. I built the tech in the early days (today I mostly manage the tech team). He was the sales person and used his impressive communication skills to win our first key accounts. One thing that he though me long ago is that there are several types of intelligence. It's not linear. People usually assume the analytical type of intelligence is the true type of intelligence. I find that to be inaccurate.

clairity 5y ago

> "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." smarts can't be summed up into a single all-encompassing quality that you have or you don't. you can be socially savvy and not be good at math, or great at basketball and be socially awkward. this is a 'not smart' observation that undermines your whole humble-brag.

asdfman123 5y ago
I truly excel at the first three things -- I get high test scores and can get good at a wide range of things without even trying -- but I struggle to follow conversations due to ADHD + shyness and it drives me crazy.
tfehring 5y ago
Sure, the skills the parent comment mentioned are all separate skills, but they're probably pretty strongly (and positively) correlated with each other and with traditional measures of intelligence like performance on IQ tests. It's accurate to say that intelligence isn't the only thing that matters, and probably accurate to say that society generally overstates its importance, but claiming that intelligence doesn't exist is a severe and inaccurate overcorrection.
achenet 5y ago
"The g factor (also known as general intelligence, general mental ability or general intelligence factor) is a construct developed in psychometric investigations of cognitive abilities and human intelligence. It is a variable that summarizes positive correlations among different cognitive tasks, reflecting the fact that an individual's performance on one type of cognitive task tends to be comparable to that person's performance on other kinds of cognitive tasks. " from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_%28psychometrics%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_%28psychometrics%29

reikonomusha 5y ago

I read your comment as “yes I prefer life to be easier and complacent over difficult and interesting.” Is this too coarse of an interpretation? I seem to agree with pg: I’d much rather have good ideas and trouble “executing” because there are always smart people who can help me understand better, or execute better, or whatever; than being super smart and at the end of the day nothing to do with it. Reminds me of genius programmers, who can easily coast through interviews or jobs, but who’ve otherwise got nothing of their own to write or show of it. That’s not bad, it just means their smarts are in service to someone else’s ideas—which is OK!

gowld 5y ago
"there are always smart people who can help me understand better, or execute better," Not if everyone becomes an Idea Person like pg proposes! There's more to "do" than just "discover new things". What's the point of discovering new things if we don't use them for anything?
- reikonomusha 5y ago
  “Having ideas” isn’t “being an idea person”—the latter I hear colloquially to mean “spitballs superficial proposals that other people sort through”. I also don’t think what you suggest is what pg suggests. Einstein had ideas, but he didn’t just blather about them at a high level until some smart person did the “real” work. I also didn’t mean to suggest I’d rather “just have ideas”, I meant “I’d rather have ideas and a difficult time executing on them” as opposed to “being smart with no ideas at all.”
handrous 5y ago
I see it as a trade-off between "glory" and having an otherwise very nice life, as framed—trading "being smart" for "having some really good ideas", which is a rather odd trade, but I'm addressing the text in its own terms. Between "have some very good ideas" and "be even a little smart the entire rest of the time", if I can only choose one, yes, I'm strongly inclined to choose the latter. "Being smart" benefits me and shapes my very identity by affecting my perceptions and experience of everything, every waking second; having some very good ideas might make me money and make me known as "the guy who came up with X, Y and Z". Having both would be great, obviously! But if PG's presenting some weird "pick one" choice between the two, then claiming it's obvious which one a person would pick, yeah, I'm leaning toward, "no, your assertion and assumptions on which you're couching this entire line of argument are far too broad, it's 'be smart' by a mile and I doubt I'm alone in that choice". It's Achilles' choice, as I see it (though, again, it's a weird pair of things to ask people to choose between) and as much as I like reading about him, and as impressive as it is that we still know his name and what he did (taking the stories as true, and the character as real, for the sake of lending what he opted for the most possible appeal), thanks but no thanks.

5faulker 5y ago

I'm not sure how smart you are, but there's a lot of wisdom in what you said. Smart is multi-dimensional for me anyway.

handrous 5y ago
> Smart is multi-dimensional for me anyway. Strongly agreed about "smart" not being just one thing. Somewhere there's someone who's normal at the things I'm good at, and excellent at the things I'm so-so or bad at (there are several of those), and they're probably glad they get to "play" life on easy mode, too. Somewhere there's someone who's as good as both of us at all those things, and they probably own an island and have a private jet and don't think it was particularly challenging to get to that position in life. Maybe—if there's, in fact, exactly one thing they're bad at—they even wonder why other people don't do it.

cm2012 5y ago

My sister and I were just talking about this. We'd been coming to realize independently how much faster we think than average people. We didn't realize it growing up, since we went to gifted schools our whole lives (public schools we tested into, not private) and everybody was bright there. Living life outside of the gifted bubble has given us perspective on how lucky we were to born this way.

psysharp 5y ago
Why do you think thinking fast is more important than thinking slowly?
- cm2012 5y ago
  It makes life easier. E.G. - Someone is explaining a concept. - We get it in a few seconds, can come up connections, next steps, implications, etc. - Other people need to have it explained longer, or miss the main point, or don't see how it connects to other pertinent things. You can see how that would make life easier, and make you more effective at a variety of real time tasks.
  - agustif 5y ago
    Yup, but this always made school so fucking boring for me. Get it the 5 first minutes the teacher explains, spend 55 other minutes wandering in your mind about other stuff while the teacher proceeds to drill it into your peers memory repeating it ad-nauseaum until they sing it like fucking gospel. That's the education I experienced at least, maybe someone else had better luck, but once you've to slowdown to the slowest of 30, and you're the fastest, things get pretty slow.
    - handrous 5y ago
      This messed me up so bad when I finally hit material I needed to work at even a little. Years and years and years of getting things instantly, with no effort whatsoever. Lecturing about the same thing again for the fifth day in a row, but I had it the first day? Cool, I'll draw cartoons and still answer any questions you ask me. Hand me a test? No problem. A-grade work in 5 minutes, read my book for the remainder of the hour. My stupid kid brain (this was... age 13 or so? Maybe 14?) was sure something horrible had happened to me over the Summer and I was now an idiot, when that stopped being how things worked. I wouldn't be surprised if I could have been diagnosed with actual depression, from then through my early 20s, mostly due to that and the follow-on effects. I've since learned this is a super-common experience for gifted kids and one of the things really good gifted programs focus early on mitigating. I gather kids smarter than I was may still experience something similar, but not until they burn out hard and very suddenly, around Sophomore or Junior year of a challenging degree program.

WFHRenaissance 5y ago

> sheer chance and lucky circumstances. LOL, dualism moment. There is no "you" outside of your genetics and the socialization you experienced. There is definitely some luck involved, but also you're the product of a lot more work and planning than you give yourself credit for.

mywittyname 5y ago
> you're the product of a lot more work and planning than you give yourself credit for. Some people are lucky enough to have parents/family that handle this planning for us at young ages, knowing we will benefit in the future.
- ogre_magi 5y ago
  Do you think you were “lucky” not to be a mosquito? Do you think you were “lucky” not to be a 100kg mass of disconnected plasma inside the sun? This doesn’t make any sense. There are different processes in our universe that produce different things, from plasma to rocks to mosquitos to unsuccessful people to successful people. These processes are different, and their outputs are not fungible. There’s no luck. There’s no sense in which “you” could have been anything except what you are.
  - ahevia 5y ago
    I mean. When folks use the term luck they often just use to express gratitude. Whether that’s to the void or to their god. It’s weird to point out the usage here. Sure someone can say “I’m grateful the insane probabilities of every small detail that led to today collapsed on me living a good life”, but it’s easier to just say “I’m so lucky”. > There’s no sense in which “you” could have been anything except what you are. Perhaps yea, this feels tangential to the argument there is no free will and the universe is 100% deterministic. Maybe I’m reading too much into your comment, but for my lived experience. It certainly doesn’t feel that I was 100% destined to end up here. Im sure others feel the same way that their circumstances were never predetermined.

SquishyPanda23 5y ago

> Being even a little clever—and that's the best I can claim—is living life on easy mode That is probably true about being a little clever, but being really smart is not easy in the general case. Really smart people often share few ideas and interests with others and spend much of their lives lonely and misunderstood.

cm2012 5y ago
Nonetheless, IQ correlates to life outcomes like income really well. Averages are by no means destiny, but on average IQ makes life easier.
- dagw 5y ago
  There are several studies that show that IQ correlates with income, at least at the extremes. However the studies I've seen found no correlations between IQ and overall happiness or contentment with how their life turned out.
  - PeterisP 5y ago
    "Happiness/contentment" is effectively a "balancing thermostat" of our motivation, a functional aspect that is used by our bodies to regulate our behavior and thus, if it functions properly (as opposed to certain diseases e.g. anhedonia in clinical depression) its long term average will be pretty much the same no matter how well you do, it's almost orthogonal to any metric of actual wellbeing. For example, studies show both winning excessive amounts of money in lotteries and sustaining major life-changing injuries (e.g. losing limbs or causing other disabilities) do not correlate with happiness in the long-term. Happiness effectively reflects (a) recent short-term changes to wellbeing; (b) momentary expectations or worries about future wellbeing; and (c) innate baseline happiness. It's not a reflection of how well someone is living; in essence, people living long-term in a literal gulag may easily have on average the same overall happiness/contentment as living in a nice first world upper-middle-class environment.
    - 5y ago

manquer 5y ago

I would say I have the opposite experience on being only a bit clever. Being not smart at all usually also means you are ignorant to what you don't know, that life has its merits, Repetitive jobs don't bore you, and happiness comes from simpler joys in life. I wouldn't mind living that way at all. Being very smart means none of the stuff you mention is hard. Math comes naturally, Crazy smart people need to put no effort to understand complex topics, while their happiness is typically in esoteric goals or breakthrough research, most people don't understand anything of what they do, so either society is sympathetic to challenges or oblivious to what they do. Financially/Socially once they have a safe academic job, the difference of success/failure is not visible to most regular people, even if they win a field's medal or Noble prize most people hardly understand it. Being a bit clever is the worst of the lot, you understand enough to know how much you don't really know. Constantly you are making decisions basis what you know is poor understanding. Math, subtext, knowledge is all hard, but doesn't look so hard you will completely give up or blissfully don't know it exists. Social peer groups keep missing that intelligence can be pretty scaled, we can perceive that someone is smarter than us but not by how much. Everyone one assumes there is just one level above them, equivalent to crazy smart. We are therefore accorded with the praise, money and recommendations and also responsibilities of being perceived crazy smart. I would happily trade to being exactly perceived as I am or less and forgo all the money and praise if I didn't also be saddled with expectations of coming up with solutions all the time.

hans1729 5y ago
>Being not smart at all usually also means you are ignorant to what you don't know, that life has its merits, Repetitive jobs don't bore you, and happiness comes from simpler joys in life. I wouldn't mind living that way at all. You're mixing up all kinds of unrelated things here. As does PG. Whats smartness? Going by Joscha Bach, it's the ability to reach your goals, as opposed to intelligence, your ability to make models. Wether repetitive work bores you isn't a matter of intelligence or smartness, however it does correlate significantly with cognitive functions (Jung). The then following paragraph seems projective to me, generalizations are just all over the place; thats just not how it works, neither from a neuro- nor from a psychological perspective. It doesn't matter wether you're intellectual middle or high brow, you will always be an idiot because you'll always be residing in a brain, being bound to its constraints of focus and attention. the notion of absolute intelligence that you imply when relating to "being a bit clever is the worst of the lot" seems off to me. >I would happily trade to being exactly perceived as I am or less and forgo all the money and praise if I didn't also be saddled with expectations of coming up with solutions all the time. You're contradicting yourself: first you say that the general population doesn't get what being smart implies, and then you say that the general population expects you to deliver on what being smart implies Sorry if this came off hostile, it wasn't meant so in any way. I just can't relate to these absolute notions and would strongly suggest you to read into psychology and neuroscience

admissionsguy 5y ago

> Being even a little clever—and that's the best I can claim—is living life on easy mode. Doesn't even compare to being tall and good looking.

cosentiyes 5y ago

> > 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. For lack of a better metric, how many IQ points would you be willing to trade per new idea? It feels likely that environmental factors and luck have a much higher impact on happiness and other outcomes for individuals within whatever defines the "high intelligence" or "slightly gifted range". I'd probably make the "less smart" trade for 1-2 novel/high quality ideas since you're basically guaranteeing one or two high rolls. I doubt a 1-2% bump in intelligence would outweigh the benefits. I'm making lots of assumptions here around being able to successfully act on new ideas and that intelligence has marginal gains once you're locked into above-average-but-not-top quantiles.

handrous 5y ago
> For lack of a better metric, how many IQ points would you be willing to trade per new idea? It feels likely that environmental factors and luck have a much higher impact on happiness and other outcomes for individuals within whatever defines the "high intelligence" or "slightly gifted range". I'd probably make the "less smart" trade for 1-2 novel/high quality ideas since you're basically guaranteeing one or two high rolls. I doubt a 1-2% bump in intelligence would outweigh the benefits. For one that'd make me at least somewhat rich? Maybe one or two. But I have a feeling I'd end up regretting even that, worrying "would I have gotten this idea I'm not getting, if I hadn't made that trade?", or if a loss of interest in something is because I'm now slightly dumber, or whatever, every day, for the entire rest of my life. Aging-related brain changes are already terrifying, without helping them along.

outworlder 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. The thing is - I don't agree with Paul Graham at all. Sure, there might be a genetic component to being 'smart', but I doubt it means that people are just born with a better "CPU". Maybe they are 0.1% better overall. Rather, I don't think we can properly control variables(ethically). If your parents are 'smart', they will do 'smart' things. They will give you the attention you need. They will give you a balanced diet. They will buy you books. They will teach you difficult concepts. You'll see them studying or otherwise getting invested in their careers and, as kids, we mimic what you see. Over time, you develop 'smart' habits, and you exercise your brain. You'll also accumulate all sorts of 'patterns', that let you quickly see those things that aren't 'obvious' to everyone else. They are obvious to you, probably because you have seen something similar before, even in a different context. The more 'patterns' you have, the quicker you can spot them, and you can tie things together faster if you are not focusing on learning entirely new things at the same time. Even if you had nothing of the sort growing up, by just trying to engage your brain while doing most of your tasks, you are far ahead of most people. What people tend to do is, whenever they find something that worked, even if only once, they will stick with that solution, for every situation. They don't normally ask themselves if the resolution is still appropriate for the situation in hand. Keep this as a background process, and you do have a superpower.

Retric 5y ago
Your proposing a testable hypotheses which has been disproven through studies of the adopted and especially twins. Intelligence and genetics are strongly linked, most obviously via negatives like Down syndrome but that’s far from the only influence. One of many examples: https://resources.corwin.com/sites/default/files/handout_18.1.pdf https://resources.corwin.com/sites/default/files/handout_18....
throw1234651234 5y ago
Read up on working memory. A lot of people can't hold enough items in their head long enough to write a function. And that's if you don't believe in IQ, which is already very heavily correlated with success.

dmueller39 5y ago

Not being too smart can be a forcing function on the quality of ideas. Very frequently the idea that wins in the minds of others is the one that is easy to think about. I am frequently caught in the trap where I am enjoying the puzzlebox complexity of a problem, and building an equally complicated solution. I then attempt to explain my complicated solution to someone else, and I fail on delivery. I also have a coworker whos mantra is "if its hard to think about, I don't do it". We actually worked on similarly aligned solutions to the same problem. His version met with significantly more success than mine did, and I credit the fact that he ensured that it was all easy to think about (and thus talk about). I don't begrudge him at all though, he's one of my favs! IMO if you are unwilling or unable to think about overly complicated ideas, it might force you to eliminate them and develop new ones that are easier to talk about and think about. Thanks for sharing BTW.

alanlammiman 5y ago
Agree. Whether a business (or solution to a problem) is interesting, ingenious and innovative is a completely different matter from its being a good business. iirc warren buffet once said, "if it takes a calculator to figure out if it's a good business, it's not". In a similar vein (but with a different moral to it) my boss used to say that (in a corporate context) all back-of-the-envelope analysis was by definition correct - because it would only ever be checked via back-of-the-envelope calculations.