5 ms·

It became quickly very clear to me in undergrad that some people had this intuitive conceptual understanding of math and physics that I would simply never have,

It became quickly very clear to me in undergrad that some people had this intuitive conceptual understanding of math and physics that I would simply never have, despite the effort (and I did make good grades). Some of these guys just blew me away with how smart they were. The more time I spent around people a lot smarter than me, the more I realized that some people's brains are just operating at a completely different level. I could have done physics, but I never would have been doing cutting edge theoretical research. I'm simply not smart enough. There is quite clearly a spectrum of mental capabilities from mentally challenged all the way to genius level. To believe this has no impact on what you're capable of achieving in a lifetime is quite naive. And you would not have been doing me any favors by trying to convince me that I could have had a meaningful career pursuing theoretical physics research, something I'd never realistically achieve.

thundergolfer 4y ago
I'd venture that the "guys ... operating at a completely different level" likely gained their intuitive understanding of math and physics from earlier educational training (formal or informal). But this is really besides the point, because Seth says: > The number of tasks in our culture that require someone who was born with off-the-charts talent is small indeed. I think we can carve off advanced theoretical physics and pure mathematics as a tiny field where the 1/50,000 'genius' people are needed, and that leaves basically all the rest of society.
- DangitBobby 4y ago
  Yes, people do tend to think that differences like these are environmental (such as formal training early from early on), likely because their moral system insists on it. We like to believe meritocracy is a fair system driven primarily by your own decisions. But if you don't come by your merits with hard work, meritocracy stops sounding like a just way of deciding who gets to have a good life and who doesn't. It's clear to me as the nose on my face that education is a small piece of the merit puzzle. Not nothing, but it can be rectified, unlike the situation where you are lacking the brainpower. I was mainly talking about physics to color my opinion with my personal experience. The truth is, I know I'm smarter than most people, and I am fairly certain that intelligence is actually a significant hurdle that keeps people from being competent at my job. I disagree with the content of the article. Plenty of people are not smart enough to fill roles we need or to hold down a job that pays well.
  - teachersaredumb 4y ago
    The entire modern dialectic around intelligence is emotionally driven. Dumb/unsuccessful people want to believe that smart/successful people just got an unfair leg up in life. And smart/successful people want to believe that anyone can achieve what they did if society helped them enough. We don't want to accept that some people are born with what it takes to become elite and some are born without it and will never have it.
    - klipt 4y ago
      But the fact that most people aren't geniuses shows that being a genius doesn't confer that much of an evolutionary advantage. In fact it might even be evolutionarily negative - in general, more years of academic education correlates with having fewer children.
- teachersaredumb 4y ago
  Not to brag (is it even possible to brag through an anonymous throwaway account?), but throughout my schooling I skipped or skimmed most readings and avoided doing the homework, or copied it off my more diligent classmates. But I still got perfect grades in high school and graduate school, outperforming classmates who worked much harder. In undergrad, I had mediocre grades only because I just didn't do the homework and often turned in term projects many days late, but based on test performances, would have also had near perfect grades. I have a bad work ethic which holds me back in other ways, but I'm still near the top of my field for my age bracket. If I hear something once, I understand it and remember it for life. I don't mean memorizing lists; I mean learning how something works and why and how to apply that knowledge.
  - travisjungroth 4y ago
    If this isn’t to brag, then what is it for?
    - cglotr 4y ago
      To prove a point that some people are just smarter than others? A useful anecdote
    - senko 4y ago
      (not gp) To show that intuitive math understanding is a thing.
      - travisjungroth 4y ago
        Doesn’t really seem to settle things. Comment explained that people learn math from somewhere. Reply described someone learning math in school, quickly and with low effort.
        cglotr 4y ago
        Learning math elsewhere implies someone is smarter due to nurture. This dude experience implies raw intelligence (nature)
- m463 4y ago
  > gained their intuitive understanding ... from earlier educational training ... I wonder if at one point or likely one age you will never be able to gain an intuitive grasp on some subjects. I think not only of subjects like higher-level math and physics, but also language skills, like chinese or japanese for a lifelong western speaker. on the other hand, I wonder if some subjects might be easier without baggage, like having a lifetime of newtonian physics, then learning relativity or quantum physics.
- zizee 4y ago
  > I'd venture that the "guys ... operating at a completely different level" likely gained their intuitive understanding of math and physics from earlier educational training (formal or informal). Surely it's a combination of nurture AND nature. It's likely some people are just born smarter than others, much like people are born with the "right stuff" to go further in athletic pursuits. Just like athletic training would play a part in the end result combined with natural athletic potential. It seems crazy to me that people would think that every brain starts as a blank slate, with the same potential, with the end result being purely due to education. I know that people are worried that even admitting it is a possibility immediately invites ideas of eugenics/racism, but surely we can entertain this idea without the discussion devolving into us goosestepping into oblivion.
  - bradlys 4y ago
    I don’t think most people disagree there’s a difference in how brains start - I think people disagree about the size of the difference and the importance. The brain seems far more plastic than the rest of the body in terms of potential. Someone being born with the genetic code to be 6’8” is gonna have an entirely different experience playing basketball than someone who is born with 5’8” code assuming equal effort put into training. We see this huge gap in professional sports because those advantages make it incredibly obvious - same as many other physical feats. People train incredibly hard but can’t win something due to an arbitrary constraint. The issue with mental stuff is that it’s basically down to niche tricks to make one stand out now. Yes - some people are born with an incredible(y useless) ability to calculate multiplying numbers quickly. Meanwhile - there’s folks who learn how to do something similar using a finger counting method… and then the rest of us just type it into a computer for basically no effort. Same with other things like memory and what not. (Which is easily defeated by typing something into Google) For most people and most positions in the world - these abnormal features are mostly irrelevant. The rest of things is down to ability to grind, experience, and not being too narrow in thought.
- heavenlyblue 4y ago
  > The number of tasks in our culture that require someone who was born with off-the-charts talent is small indeed. On the other hand, if you're really smart you are probably capable of getting away by doing less at work and enjoying many more different aspects of life VS concentrating only on your job.
mach1ne 4y ago
Interesting. I've come to believe there are no such creatures as geniuses. Certainly some proportion of individuals have a different understanding of maths and physics which allows them to see solutions that others don't and generally excel at the subjects, but I don't see them any smarter than other smart people. I see that it's a bit like processing a problem with verbal logic versus visual logic - perhaps some individuals have just learned a math logic.
- lordnacho 4y ago
  I call this the Tibetan plateau of intelligence. In the general population, there's not that many smart people. But there's enough smart people in the world that there are large congregations of smart people. These people are smarter than normal, but not the absolute peaks of human intelligence. When you go to a famous university, you meet plateau people. That mildly smart kid who was top two or three in his class of a few dozen, is generally interested in intellectual stuff, and wants to learn more. Those kids set the tone and the pace. The uber smart are among the plateau, but super rare. They generally have to deal with the ordinarily intelligent, and are restricted by the culture set by the majority. My thought is that most of us can climb the plateau, but you need something special to be a peak.
lytefm 4y ago
> There is quite clearly a spectrum of mental capabilities from mentally challenged all the way to genius level. To believe this has no impact on what you're capable of achieving in a lifetime is quite naive. I agree that Seth's view is too simplistic. Sure, it's socially difficult to accept that for some people it will be pretty much impossible to succeed at intellectual tasks are relatively easy for others. But that's what the intelligence research shows. It's pretty hard to even imagine how life would be in the bottom 10th percentile of the IQ distribution. For example, good look trying to get into the US army.
kirevmaco 4y ago
I'm convinced that a large part of this kind of thing is related to personality. People's ability to get "in the zone" depends on if the level of presentation fits them. I remember in AP Chemistry, some kids just thrived on the rote memorization nature of the whole course. They did great. Some of us found it nonsensical that we had to memorize so much without explanation but we still managed to push through and get good grades. The people who did better weren't "smarter," they just never cared to ask any bigger questions about the material. I'm sure that lack of curiosity helped them to succeed in standard careers. A person who was "smart enough" to do cutting edge theoretical research might get lucky and have a personality that fits with having a more standard life. Someone who isn't "smart enough" might be very interested in certain problems and push through to finding the answers. Someone who is "smart enough" to do that and doesn't like bureaucracy might drop out of grad school, or even undergrad.
ambicapter 4y ago
I’m sure you could have had a meaningful career in theoretical physics even without the sharpest of cutting edges of a brain. There is always tons of boring-but-necessary work to do in every field, and perhaps you could have enabled someone else to make a breakthrough. Either that or just greatly enjoyed your time doing it, which is meaningful in of itself.
Aeolun 4y ago
> And you would not have been doing me any favors by trying to convince me that I could have had a meaningful career pursuing theoretical physics research, something I'd never realistically achieve. Not with that mindset, no ;) I suck at anything beyond basis probability theory math-wise, but I don’t believe it’s anything to do with inherent ability (or at least not mostly). Math is just boring. Hmm, though, I guess you can call that inherent. And I certainly wouldn’t achieve anything if someone tried to get me to do research on it.
- istinetz 4y ago
  >I suck at anything beyond basis probability theory math-wise, but I don’t believe it’s anything to do with inherent ability (or at least not mostly). Math is just boring. You're generalizing your circumstances.
cosmodisk 4y ago
I tend to agree. There are things that some groups find super easy, yet others struggle and I don't even talk about complex things like physics. For instance, I remember at Uni we had mechanical engineering classes where you have top, side, and front view and you need to draw the piece from a perspective. I could 'rotate' the object in my head like I was wearing a VR set,but some people absolutely struggled with even simplest objects. It'd be good to know why it's like this.
Balgair 4y ago
Point of caution: I felt much the same way in secondary school. I thought that there were people that were naturally gifted in things like math and the sciences, while I was somewhat gifted in things like English and subjects that required writing skills. Even the kids that were jocks and stoners could be amazing at math and science, subjects I loved, but was just not fit for. Welp, it turned out that I just wasn't part of the cheating ring. My teachers were so lazy that they never changed a single test or homework assignment and a lot of the kids found out; I was not one of them. The subjects with definitive answers thus gave my cheating fellows a corpus of perfect grades and I was forced to compete with the answer key. Subjects where any iota of reading or comprehension was required, they then had to rely on past examples of good grades, giving the rest of us a small chance. Still, when I got to uni, I also was wowed by the intellect of certain people in the physics departments. There truly are some people that make me feel like a peanut. It's just not the dumb jocks that I knew to be dumb jocks but had to gaslight myself into thinking were actually good at math. You know the smart ones when you see them.
spiffytech 4y ago
I saw the same thing in college, but I narrowed it down not to intelligence, but aptitude for abstract vs concrete thought. In high school everyone either struggles with geometry or algebra, while finding the other relatively accessible. College magnifies this effect. I intensely struggled with calculus, far and away my hardest subject. Friends those raw intelligence was similar to my own found calculus to be laughably easy - I complained about how poorly our textbook explained new concepts, and my friends praised exactly the traits I criticized. I also found that some people had to learn computer science bottom-up, while others (like myself) had to learn top-down. Some friends couldn't get comfortable with high-level concepts until they understood how every piece worked, down to the metal, while I couldn't wrap my head around the low-level concepts until I understood how they fit into the big picture of problem solving. I've seen this pattern repeat again and again during and after college. And it doesn't help that the people who like teaching abstract subjects are the people who never found those subjects a struggle.
- exolymph 4y ago
  > not to intelligence, but aptitude for abstract vs concrete thought. But this is simply a dimension of intelligence. All of our cognitive abilities are.
  - spiffytech 4y ago
    Yeah, I didn't word that very well. What I'm trying to say is that people who are considered smart in the traditional sense won't always be good at math (or any other specific subject). The difference is something more nuanced than "I'd be good at math if I was smarter".
tabtab 4y ago
I notice I'm a "visual thinker" while others seem to be "linguistic thinkers". Both approach problem solving differently and perhaps do better at different things. Certain calculus problems I could solve without doing the "pencil steps" because I found a (mentally) visual way to process them, while chemistry equations often tripped me up because I couldn't turn them into pictures. It may just be a matter of knowing how one's brain works and leveraging what it does best. But the training and descriptive material may not cater to one or the other. (I come from a long family of visual artists.)

thundergolfer 4y ago

I'd venture that the "guys ... operating at a completely different level" likely gained their intuitive understanding of math and physics from earlier educational training (formal or informal). But this is really besides the point, because Seth says: > The number of tasks in our culture that require someone who was born with off-the-charts talent is small indeed. I think we can carve off advanced theoretical physics and pure mathematics as a tiny field where the 1/50,000 'genius' people are needed, and that leaves basically all the rest of society.

DangitBobby 4y ago
Yes, people do tend to think that differences like these are environmental (such as formal training early from early on), likely because their moral system insists on it. We like to believe meritocracy is a fair system driven primarily by your own decisions. But if you don't come by your merits with hard work, meritocracy stops sounding like a just way of deciding who gets to have a good life and who doesn't. It's clear to me as the nose on my face that education is a small piece of the merit puzzle. Not nothing, but it can be rectified, unlike the situation where you are lacking the brainpower. I was mainly talking about physics to color my opinion with my personal experience. The truth is, I know I'm smarter than most people, and I am fairly certain that intelligence is actually a significant hurdle that keeps people from being competent at my job. I disagree with the content of the article. Plenty of people are not smart enough to fill roles we need or to hold down a job that pays well.
- teachersaredumb 4y ago
  The entire modern dialectic around intelligence is emotionally driven. Dumb/unsuccessful people want to believe that smart/successful people just got an unfair leg up in life. And smart/successful people want to believe that anyone can achieve what they did if society helped them enough. We don't want to accept that some people are born with what it takes to become elite and some are born without it and will never have it.
  - klipt 4y ago
    But the fact that most people aren't geniuses shows that being a genius doesn't confer that much of an evolutionary advantage. In fact it might even be evolutionarily negative - in general, more years of academic education correlates with having fewer children.
teachersaredumb 4y ago
Not to brag (is it even possible to brag through an anonymous throwaway account?), but throughout my schooling I skipped or skimmed most readings and avoided doing the homework, or copied it off my more diligent classmates. But I still got perfect grades in high school and graduate school, outperforming classmates who worked much harder. In undergrad, I had mediocre grades only because I just didn't do the homework and often turned in term projects many days late, but based on test performances, would have also had near perfect grades. I have a bad work ethic which holds me back in other ways, but I'm still near the top of my field for my age bracket. If I hear something once, I understand it and remember it for life. I don't mean memorizing lists; I mean learning how something works and why and how to apply that knowledge.
- travisjungroth 4y ago
  If this isn’t to brag, then what is it for?
  - cglotr 4y ago
    To prove a point that some people are just smarter than others? A useful anecdote
  - senko 4y ago
    (not gp) To show that intuitive math understanding is a thing.
    - travisjungroth 4y ago
      Doesn’t really seem to settle things. Comment explained that people learn math from somewhere. Reply described someone learning math in school, quickly and with low effort.
      - cglotr 4y ago
        Learning math elsewhere implies someone is smarter due to nurture. This dude experience implies raw intelligence (nature)
m463 4y ago
> gained their intuitive understanding ... from earlier educational training ... I wonder if at one point or likely one age you will never be able to gain an intuitive grasp on some subjects. I think not only of subjects like higher-level math and physics, but also language skills, like chinese or japanese for a lifelong western speaker. on the other hand, I wonder if some subjects might be easier without baggage, like having a lifetime of newtonian physics, then learning relativity or quantum physics.
zizee 4y ago
> I'd venture that the "guys ... operating at a completely different level" likely gained their intuitive understanding of math and physics from earlier educational training (formal or informal). Surely it's a combination of nurture AND nature. It's likely some people are just born smarter than others, much like people are born with the "right stuff" to go further in athletic pursuits. Just like athletic training would play a part in the end result combined with natural athletic potential. It seems crazy to me that people would think that every brain starts as a blank slate, with the same potential, with the end result being purely due to education. I know that people are worried that even admitting it is a possibility immediately invites ideas of eugenics/racism, but surely we can entertain this idea without the discussion devolving into us goosestepping into oblivion.
- bradlys 4y ago
  I don’t think most people disagree there’s a difference in how brains start - I think people disagree about the size of the difference and the importance. The brain seems far more plastic than the rest of the body in terms of potential. Someone being born with the genetic code to be 6’8” is gonna have an entirely different experience playing basketball than someone who is born with 5’8” code assuming equal effort put into training. We see this huge gap in professional sports because those advantages make it incredibly obvious - same as many other physical feats. People train incredibly hard but can’t win something due to an arbitrary constraint. The issue with mental stuff is that it’s basically down to niche tricks to make one stand out now. Yes - some people are born with an incredible(y useless) ability to calculate multiplying numbers quickly. Meanwhile - there’s folks who learn how to do something similar using a finger counting method… and then the rest of us just type it into a computer for basically no effort. Same with other things like memory and what not. (Which is easily defeated by typing something into Google) For most people and most positions in the world - these abnormal features are mostly irrelevant. The rest of things is down to ability to grind, experience, and not being too narrow in thought.
heavenlyblue 4y ago
> The number of tasks in our culture that require someone who was born with off-the-charts talent is small indeed. On the other hand, if you're really smart you are probably capable of getting away by doing less at work and enjoying many more different aspects of life VS concentrating only on your job.

mach1ne 4y ago

Interesting. I've come to believe there are no such creatures as geniuses. Certainly some proportion of individuals have a different understanding of maths and physics which allows them to see solutions that others don't and generally excel at the subjects, but I don't see them any smarter than other smart people. I see that it's a bit like processing a problem with verbal logic versus visual logic - perhaps some individuals have just learned a math logic.

lordnacho 4y ago
I call this the Tibetan plateau of intelligence. In the general population, there's not that many smart people. But there's enough smart people in the world that there are large congregations of smart people. These people are smarter than normal, but not the absolute peaks of human intelligence. When you go to a famous university, you meet plateau people. That mildly smart kid who was top two or three in his class of a few dozen, is generally interested in intellectual stuff, and wants to learn more. Those kids set the tone and the pace. The uber smart are among the plateau, but super rare. They generally have to deal with the ordinarily intelligent, and are restricted by the culture set by the majority. My thought is that most of us can climb the plateau, but you need something special to be a peak.

lytefm 4y ago

> There is quite clearly a spectrum of mental capabilities from mentally challenged all the way to genius level. To believe this has no impact on what you're capable of achieving in a lifetime is quite naive. I agree that Seth's view is too simplistic. Sure, it's socially difficult to accept that for some people it will be pretty much impossible to succeed at intellectual tasks are relatively easy for others. But that's what the intelligence research shows. It's pretty hard to even imagine how life would be in the bottom 10th percentile of the IQ distribution. For example, good look trying to get into the US army.

kirevmaco 4y ago

I'm convinced that a large part of this kind of thing is related to personality. People's ability to get "in the zone" depends on if the level of presentation fits them. I remember in AP Chemistry, some kids just thrived on the rote memorization nature of the whole course. They did great. Some of us found it nonsensical that we had to memorize so much without explanation but we still managed to push through and get good grades. The people who did better weren't "smarter," they just never cared to ask any bigger questions about the material. I'm sure that lack of curiosity helped them to succeed in standard careers. A person who was "smart enough" to do cutting edge theoretical research might get lucky and have a personality that fits with having a more standard life. Someone who isn't "smart enough" might be very interested in certain problems and push through to finding the answers. Someone who is "smart enough" to do that and doesn't like bureaucracy might drop out of grad school, or even undergrad.

ambicapter 4y ago

I’m sure you could have had a meaningful career in theoretical physics even without the sharpest of cutting edges of a brain. There is always tons of boring-but-necessary work to do in every field, and perhaps you could have enabled someone else to make a breakthrough. Either that or just greatly enjoyed your time doing it, which is meaningful in of itself.

Aeolun 4y ago

> And you would not have been doing me any favors by trying to convince me that I could have had a meaningful career pursuing theoretical physics research, something I'd never realistically achieve. Not with that mindset, no ;) I suck at anything beyond basis probability theory math-wise, but I don’t believe it’s anything to do with inherent ability (or at least not mostly). Math is just boring. Hmm, though, I guess you can call that inherent. And I certainly wouldn’t achieve anything if someone tried to get me to do research on it.

istinetz 4y ago
>I suck at anything beyond basis probability theory math-wise, but I don’t believe it’s anything to do with inherent ability (or at least not mostly). Math is just boring. You're generalizing your circumstances.

cosmodisk 4y ago

I tend to agree. There are things that some groups find super easy, yet others struggle and I don't even talk about complex things like physics. For instance, I remember at Uni we had mechanical engineering classes where you have top, side, and front view and you need to draw the piece from a perspective. I could 'rotate' the object in my head like I was wearing a VR set,but some people absolutely struggled with even simplest objects. It'd be good to know why it's like this.

Balgair 4y ago

Point of caution: I felt much the same way in secondary school. I thought that there were people that were naturally gifted in things like math and the sciences, while I was somewhat gifted in things like English and subjects that required writing skills. Even the kids that were jocks and stoners could be amazing at math and science, subjects I loved, but was just not fit for. Welp, it turned out that I just wasn't part of the cheating ring. My teachers were so lazy that they never changed a single test or homework assignment and a lot of the kids found out; I was not one of them. The subjects with definitive answers thus gave my cheating fellows a corpus of perfect grades and I was forced to compete with the answer key. Subjects where any iota of reading or comprehension was required, they then had to rely on past examples of good grades, giving the rest of us a small chance. Still, when I got to uni, I also was wowed by the intellect of certain people in the physics departments. There truly are some people that make me feel like a peanut. It's just not the dumb jocks that I knew to be dumb jocks but had to gaslight myself into thinking were actually good at math. You know the smart ones when you see them.

spiffytech 4y ago

I saw the same thing in college, but I narrowed it down not to intelligence, but aptitude for abstract vs concrete thought. In high school everyone either struggles with geometry or algebra, while finding the other relatively accessible. College magnifies this effect. I intensely struggled with calculus, far and away my hardest subject. Friends those raw intelligence was similar to my own found calculus to be laughably easy - I complained about how poorly our textbook explained new concepts, and my friends praised exactly the traits I criticized. I also found that some people had to learn computer science bottom-up, while others (like myself) had to learn top-down. Some friends couldn't get comfortable with high-level concepts until they understood how every piece worked, down to the metal, while I couldn't wrap my head around the low-level concepts until I understood how they fit into the big picture of problem solving. I've seen this pattern repeat again and again during and after college. And it doesn't help that the people who like teaching abstract subjects are the people who never found those subjects a struggle.

exolymph 4y ago
> not to intelligence, but aptitude for abstract vs concrete thought. But this is simply a dimension of intelligence. All of our cognitive abilities are.
- spiffytech 4y ago
  Yeah, I didn't word that very well. What I'm trying to say is that people who are considered smart in the traditional sense won't always be good at math (or any other specific subject). The difference is something more nuanced than "I'd be good at math if I was smarter".

tabtab 4y ago

I notice I'm a "visual thinker" while others seem to be "linguistic thinkers". Both approach problem solving differently and perhaps do better at different things. Certain calculus problems I could solve without doing the "pencil steps" because I found a (mentally) visual way to process them, while chemistry equations often tripped me up because I couldn't turn them into pictures. It may just be a matter of knowing how one's brain works and leveraging what it does best. But the training and descriptive material may not cater to one or the other. (I come from a long family of visual artists.)