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This matches my experience in college: some people were miles ahead in CS, but they were all people with an interest in it who put more time into it than the ba

This matches my experience in college: some people were miles ahead in CS, but they were all people with an interest in it who put more time into it than the bare minimum. Not necessarily a result of great practical relevance though, as people's interests aren't easy to change.

kibwen 4y ago
The dirty secret of perceived intelligence is that, in practice, mental acuity (or however you want to characterize IQ) matters less than passion for the subject matter. It doesn't matter how smart you are if you aren't motivated to immerse yourself in the subject matter. Of course, there's no reason a single person can't have both, but on balance I'll take a passionate person with moderate intelligence over an intelligent person with moderate motivation.
- vharuck 4y ago
  Yes. I've always seen IQ as a predictor for how fast you can learn material and make connections. So it saves time. Which makes people with high IQ look superhuman during school: new topics are introduced every month, and the smart kids breeze through. After school, when 99% of jobs (even the ones for those smart kids) don't require constantly learning progressively harder concepts, IQ matters less. The time it saves for a disinterested person can no longer compete with the time an interested person can spend.
  - ivanhoe 4y ago
    > I've always seen IQ as a predictor for how fast you can learn material and make connections. This is what we call being talented for something, it's not necessarily related to the one's IQ.
    - csa 4y ago
      > This is what we call being talented for something, it's not necessarily related to the one's IQ. I think you’re just playing word games here. My slightly different short definition of IQ is that it is an indicator of the capacity to learn, extend, and expand on new ideas (with exceptions for mental blocks, which exist even in higher IQ people). That is, it is not just speed and/or quantity. When you take two people with a large IQ difference and have them learning, extending, and expanding in a wide range of unfamiliar domains, the high IQ person will consistently do more and better. This is not merely talent.
      - usgroup 4y ago
        Just keep in mind that it’s correlation you’re talking about. You can have a high IQ and none of those capacities. You can have a high IQ and be severally autistic. Etc. You can also test normal but be very high functioning. So there is no necessary or causative connection between IQ and effective capacity. Robots like ChatGPT May test substantially in some IQ tests and have no intelligence or agency at all.
        csa 4y ago
        IQ is not a measure of low functioning or high functioning or “effective capacity”. I certainly have never claimed that it is. I think many people put the onus of predicting success on measures of IQ, and most/all good IQ tests don’t claim to do this. There would be a face validity issue, and there are much better tests that can predict success (however success is measured) than IQ tests. I think that this is grossly unfair to IQ tests. Will AI be able to do well in IQ tests? Maybe, but I don’t think that it will be relevant. My stance has been and is that IQ tests measure the capacity to learn, extend, and expand on new topics (in humans). Nothing more, nothing less. Some other points: - IQ tests are not a measure of effectiveness. Many, many more variables go into that. - IQ tests are biased, and pretty much have to be. That said, good IQ test designers try to minimize the bias for their target audience. I think that this has been more or less effectively done in the US for folks in the middle class or higher. - Related, any give score on an IQ test should be seen as an IQ floor rather than an IQ ceiling. There are many reasons why someone may not score their maximum score (or even close to it) when taking an IQ test. Anxiety and fatigue are simple examples. - IQ is correlated to income, but is this is a very broad correlation. Specifically, average income goes up with IQ up to about 135 or so (can’t remember the exact number) and then starts decreasing (possibly due to being in lower paid fields like academics, possibly due to social dysfunction). But these are all aggregated numbers. The individual results vary wildly within any narrow IQ band. - As you alluded to, effectiveness and/or success is predicted by many other things other than IQ, and in many cases IQ may only be a weak predictor. IQ tests don’t claim to predict success. Things like social skills, socio-economic status, access to resources, physical health, and mental health can be much better predictors of effectiveness/success depending on the task. - IQ tests are quite good at finding people at the extremes (very low and very high), but actually does a fairly poor job of differentiating folks at those ranges. On a personal level, I think the main use of IQ scores would be to identify these folks early and get them the resources they need. To close, here is a decent article that discusses one view on how IQ and “success” are only loosely related: https://www.verywellmind.com/are-people-with-high-iqs-more-successful-2795280 https://www.verywellmind.com/are-people-with-high-iqs-more-s...
  - scotty79 4y ago
    IQ is literally just the speed of thinking. IQ tests are timed.
  - ryan93 4y ago
    By the time you meet kids in CS at good schools they have all been heavily selected. Most kids at michigan or berkeley or wherever were easily top students with minimal effort their whole life. A decent number were genuinely outstanding. Id like to see top programs accept random students and see what happens.
- ivanhoe 4y ago
  Not necessarily the true passion for the particular subject, as much as being highly motivated to pass it. I know some folks who were absolutely average IQ and not truly passionate about anything Uni related (except the idea of finishing it), but simply had firm self-discipline and work-habits instilled into them by parents, as well as this crazy level of competitiveness and ambition that they have to be the best in everything... and frankly they were killing it in all subjects.
  - kibwen 4y ago
    Sure, motivation can be internal (I'm doing this because the mere act of doing it gives me joy) or external (I'm doing this because I expect to be rewarded by others), even if the former is harder to "fake" than the latter. At the end of the day, what matters is that you really and truly Give A Fuck, capital G, capital A, capital F.
- SpeedilyDamage 4y ago
  Maybe "smart" people have learned how to be passionate and/or motivated about topics, rather than have some increased capacity for learning. And maybe "great" leaders have figured out how to make a boring topic interesting for their ICs. One thing I've learned over my time in tech is that it's a lot easier to tap into someone's ego than it is to tap into their inherent interest in their job. People might be interested in preserving their ego more than they like the actual work involved in building/maintaining a random service.
  - UK7 4y ago
    This. Not to deny that some people are just smarter, a lot of "innate talent" has somethings going for it - early exposure, initial success and some sort of mentoring. This tends to make people passionate towards the thing - they're chasing the domaine from the success. Do it enough, they'll get better than most peers.
  - chongli 4y ago
    No, I don’t think so. I have seen plenty of smart people who have no interest in a subject and find it utterly boring still able to rip through an assignment in 20 minutes that would take many hours for another student who is passionate about the subject. Some people are just crazy smart and they can rapidly understand complex mathematics. Other people essentially have no hope at all of understanding these things.
    - SpeedilyDamage 4y ago
      Well yeah, because they had passion, got to a certain level of skill, then lost that passion. Sounds like it fits perfectly both with what I've said and what the submission is about, and again has nothing to do with "crazy smarts". Just practice.
  - barking_biscuit 4y ago
    Reading through The Neuroscience of Intelligence it seems there's some evidence in support of the efficient brain hypothesis, which from what I took away indicated that there were physiological differences in the amount of energy used by the brain in a given task, and the general principle being that this differential modulates the amount of time individuals are willing to engage in the task and this leads to cumulative differences over time.
yamtaddle 4y ago
The whole time I was doing my CS program I was thinking that anyone coming in "cold", as is common in many other degree programs, would be totally screwed. Already being quite "good with computers" and having at least some existing familiarity with programming—way beyond what's generally taught in k-12 school—was basically an unstated prerequisite if you didn't want to feel like you were in a living hell. It's more like a music degree program, in that regard, except I think those usually reject people who try to apply without substantial prior experience and facility with music. Or like attempting an art major when you don't already have above-average-for-your-age art skills. Like, I'm pretty sure the 100-level biology classes don't assume you've already spent hundreds to thousands of hours dissecting frogs for fun, but rather, have maybe done a very little of it in high school.
- teaearlgraycold 4y ago
  I think some people can handle that just fine. But the real issue comes down to the job market. Why hire someone who just has a BS in CS when it's super common to have a new grad with a BS and thousands of hobby hours.

kibwen 4y ago

The dirty secret of perceived intelligence is that, in practice, mental acuity (or however you want to characterize IQ) matters less than passion for the subject matter. It doesn't matter how smart you are if you aren't motivated to immerse yourself in the subject matter. Of course, there's no reason a single person can't have both, but on balance I'll take a passionate person with moderate intelligence over an intelligent person with moderate motivation.

vharuck 4y ago
Yes. I've always seen IQ as a predictor for how fast you can learn material and make connections. So it saves time. Which makes people with high IQ look superhuman during school: new topics are introduced every month, and the smart kids breeze through. After school, when 99% of jobs (even the ones for those smart kids) don't require constantly learning progressively harder concepts, IQ matters less. The time it saves for a disinterested person can no longer compete with the time an interested person can spend.
- ivanhoe 4y ago
  > I've always seen IQ as a predictor for how fast you can learn material and make connections. This is what we call being talented for something, it's not necessarily related to the one's IQ.
  - csa 4y ago
    > This is what we call being talented for something, it's not necessarily related to the one's IQ. I think you’re just playing word games here. My slightly different short definition of IQ is that it is an indicator of the capacity to learn, extend, and expand on new ideas (with exceptions for mental blocks, which exist even in higher IQ people). That is, it is not just speed and/or quantity. When you take two people with a large IQ difference and have them learning, extending, and expanding in a wide range of unfamiliar domains, the high IQ person will consistently do more and better. This is not merely talent.
    - usgroup 4y ago
      Just keep in mind that it’s correlation you’re talking about. You can have a high IQ and none of those capacities. You can have a high IQ and be severally autistic. Etc. You can also test normal but be very high functioning. So there is no necessary or causative connection between IQ and effective capacity. Robots like ChatGPT May test substantially in some IQ tests and have no intelligence or agency at all.
      - csa 4y ago
        IQ is not a measure of low functioning or high functioning or “effective capacity”. I certainly have never claimed that it is. I think many people put the onus of predicting success on measures of IQ, and most/all good IQ tests don’t claim to do this. There would be a face validity issue, and there are much better tests that can predict success (however success is measured) than IQ tests. I think that this is grossly unfair to IQ tests. Will AI be able to do well in IQ tests? Maybe, but I don’t think that it will be relevant. My stance has been and is that IQ tests measure the capacity to learn, extend, and expand on new topics (in humans). Nothing more, nothing less. Some other points: - IQ tests are not a measure of effectiveness. Many, many more variables go into that. - IQ tests are biased, and pretty much have to be. That said, good IQ test designers try to minimize the bias for their target audience. I think that this has been more or less effectively done in the US for folks in the middle class or higher. - Related, any give score on an IQ test should be seen as an IQ floor rather than an IQ ceiling. There are many reasons why someone may not score their maximum score (or even close to it) when taking an IQ test. Anxiety and fatigue are simple examples. - IQ is correlated to income, but is this is a very broad correlation. Specifically, average income goes up with IQ up to about 135 or so (can’t remember the exact number) and then starts decreasing (possibly due to being in lower paid fields like academics, possibly due to social dysfunction). But these are all aggregated numbers. The individual results vary wildly within any narrow IQ band. - As you alluded to, effectiveness and/or success is predicted by many other things other than IQ, and in many cases IQ may only be a weak predictor. IQ tests don’t claim to predict success. Things like social skills, socio-economic status, access to resources, physical health, and mental health can be much better predictors of effectiveness/success depending on the task. - IQ tests are quite good at finding people at the extremes (very low and very high), but actually does a fairly poor job of differentiating folks at those ranges. On a personal level, I think the main use of IQ scores would be to identify these folks early and get them the resources they need. To close, here is a decent article that discusses one view on how IQ and “success” are only loosely related: https://www.verywellmind.com/are-people-with-high-iqs-more-successful-2795280 https://www.verywellmind.com/are-people-with-high-iqs-more-s...
- scotty79 4y ago
  IQ is literally just the speed of thinking. IQ tests are timed.
- ryan93 4y ago
  By the time you meet kids in CS at good schools they have all been heavily selected. Most kids at michigan or berkeley or wherever were easily top students with minimal effort their whole life. A decent number were genuinely outstanding. Id like to see top programs accept random students and see what happens.
ivanhoe 4y ago
Not necessarily the true passion for the particular subject, as much as being highly motivated to pass it. I know some folks who were absolutely average IQ and not truly passionate about anything Uni related (except the idea of finishing it), but simply had firm self-discipline and work-habits instilled into them by parents, as well as this crazy level of competitiveness and ambition that they have to be the best in everything... and frankly they were killing it in all subjects.
- kibwen 4y ago
  Sure, motivation can be internal (I'm doing this because the mere act of doing it gives me joy) or external (I'm doing this because I expect to be rewarded by others), even if the former is harder to "fake" than the latter. At the end of the day, what matters is that you really and truly Give A Fuck, capital G, capital A, capital F.
SpeedilyDamage 4y ago
Maybe "smart" people have learned how to be passionate and/or motivated about topics, rather than have some increased capacity for learning. And maybe "great" leaders have figured out how to make a boring topic interesting for their ICs. One thing I've learned over my time in tech is that it's a lot easier to tap into someone's ego than it is to tap into their inherent interest in their job. People might be interested in preserving their ego more than they like the actual work involved in building/maintaining a random service.
- UK7 4y ago
  This. Not to deny that some people are just smarter, a lot of "innate talent" has somethings going for it - early exposure, initial success and some sort of mentoring. This tends to make people passionate towards the thing - they're chasing the domaine from the success. Do it enough, they'll get better than most peers.
- chongli 4y ago
  No, I don’t think so. I have seen plenty of smart people who have no interest in a subject and find it utterly boring still able to rip through an assignment in 20 minutes that would take many hours for another student who is passionate about the subject. Some people are just crazy smart and they can rapidly understand complex mathematics. Other people essentially have no hope at all of understanding these things.
  - SpeedilyDamage 4y ago
    Well yeah, because they had passion, got to a certain level of skill, then lost that passion. Sounds like it fits perfectly both with what I've said and what the submission is about, and again has nothing to do with "crazy smarts". Just practice.
- barking_biscuit 4y ago
  Reading through The Neuroscience of Intelligence it seems there's some evidence in support of the efficient brain hypothesis, which from what I took away indicated that there were physiological differences in the amount of energy used by the brain in a given task, and the general principle being that this differential modulates the amount of time individuals are willing to engage in the task and this leads to cumulative differences over time.

yamtaddle 4y ago

The whole time I was doing my CS program I was thinking that anyone coming in "cold", as is common in many other degree programs, would be totally screwed. Already being quite "good with computers" and having at least some existing familiarity with programming—way beyond what's generally taught in k-12 school—was basically an unstated prerequisite if you didn't want to feel like you were in a living hell. It's more like a music degree program, in that regard, except I think those usually reject people who try to apply without substantial prior experience and facility with music. Or like attempting an art major when you don't already have above-average-for-your-age art skills. Like, I'm pretty sure the 100-level biology classes don't assume you've already spent hundreds to thousands of hours dissecting frogs for fun, but rather, have maybe done a very little of it in high school.

teaearlgraycold 4y ago
I think some people can handle that just fine. But the real issue comes down to the job market. Why hire someone who just has a BS in CS when it's super common to have a new grad with a BS and thousands of hobby hours.