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> Does cocaine temporarily boost intelligence? I thought it boosted the feeling of being intelligent. For people who lack confidence or an ego, this may very w

> Does cocaine temporarily boost intelligence? I thought it boosted the feeling of being intelligent. For people who lack confidence or an ego, this may very well be the same thing. Just the urge to prove myself got me far in life. Sometimes I clearly struggle more than others, especially when surrounded by extremely smart people at university, but at the end of the day I've gotten much further than those who capitulated at the very beginning, claiming they're not smart enough. At this point I've taught things considered hard to a fair number of people, and those who give up for no objective reason at all vastly outnumber those who really (probably) can't do it. You can tell someone "it will probably take you twenty hours to understand this", and they'll still throw their hands in the air after one hour and declare they can't do it or just silently quit. Being a quitter is as bad as being stupid. Worse, because it's also a waste. So maybe instead of doing drugs, try to scrounge up some arrogance, confidence, pride, whatever it takes to make you hang in there.

xanderlewis 2y ago
There is a lot of wisdom in this comment. So many of the world’s most ‘accomplished’ people at first appear to have been born special and to be fundamentally different from the rest of us but usually aren’t; they simply got on with it and then persisted long enough to have great success. They didn’t let the little voice in their head that says they’re not as good as the others win — either because they consciously chose to fight it, or because they were lucky to be born without it at all. To that extent, some of us are born fundamentally special. It’s so incredibly true that even if you tell someone something’s hard and it’ll take a while to get they’re still likely to give up too early and feel inferior for not ‘getting it’. This is why almost everyone (at least in the western world) thinks they “can’t do math”.
alias_neo 2y ago
I've long believed most people can learn most things if they're willing (and able) to make the effort and have the right resources available to them. When I left university, I started a job writing Android apps that required high-performance and low-level stuff, at the start I couldn't imagine it ever being "easy", I struggled at first to understand it all, and often wondered if I'd ever be good at it; but over time as I learned more and more of it, it got easier, then a few short years later I was a team lead, teaching others. 10+ years before this, as a child, I couldn't imagine understanding how to compile a driver for Linux and the dependencies and so on, I was tinkering with distros and reverse engineering/cracking software as a young teen, fast forward to now, I run Linux exclusively, write software targeting it exclusively and teach others as team lead (different company, different team, different role, different software, no longer client-side) These are just two major examples that have affected my every day life, both of these things put me through immense frustration and took years to develop to "expert". There have been others, but my take away was that I've done it before, I can always do it again, it gets a bit harder and a bit slower with age, but I've more experience underpinning anything I do try to learn (tech or otherwise) and am better at learning. For me, it was all about proving myself, mostly to myself, and being unwilling to fail. These days, I pick and choose what it is if I don't believe I have the time or resources (or desire) to succeed, we don't have to be good at everything, just whats important; the aforementioned skills pay my bills, allow me and my family to live comfortably, etc. I could learn to play the piano (I still might), but I don't _need_ to.
- eightysixfour 2y ago
  While this is true for many people, and most of the people you'd interact with on HN or, possibly in your daily life, it is not true for all people. High IQ correlations with life outcomes are usually pretty weak, but low IQ correlations with undesirable outcomes are very strong - I think smart people systematically underestimate how limiting it is to be not-smart.

xanderlewis 2y ago

There is a lot of wisdom in this comment. So many of the world’s most ‘accomplished’ people at first appear to have been born special and to be fundamentally different from the rest of us but usually aren’t; they simply got on with it and then persisted long enough to have great success. They didn’t let the little voice in their head that says they’re not as good as the others win — either because they consciously chose to fight it, or because they were lucky to be born without it at all. To that extent, some of us are born fundamentally special. It’s so incredibly true that even if you tell someone something’s hard and it’ll take a while to get they’re still likely to give up too early and feel inferior for not ‘getting it’. This is why almost everyone (at least in the western world) thinks they “can’t do math”.

alias_neo 2y ago

I've long believed most people can learn most things if they're willing (and able) to make the effort and have the right resources available to them. When I left university, I started a job writing Android apps that required high-performance and low-level stuff, at the start I couldn't imagine it ever being "easy", I struggled at first to understand it all, and often wondered if I'd ever be good at it; but over time as I learned more and more of it, it got easier, then a few short years later I was a team lead, teaching others. 10+ years before this, as a child, I couldn't imagine understanding how to compile a driver for Linux and the dependencies and so on, I was tinkering with distros and reverse engineering/cracking software as a young teen, fast forward to now, I run Linux exclusively, write software targeting it exclusively and teach others as team lead (different company, different team, different role, different software, no longer client-side) These are just two major examples that have affected my every day life, both of these things put me through immense frustration and took years to develop to "expert". There have been others, but my take away was that I've done it before, I can always do it again, it gets a bit harder and a bit slower with age, but I've more experience underpinning anything I do try to learn (tech or otherwise) and am better at learning. For me, it was all about proving myself, mostly to myself, and being unwilling to fail. These days, I pick and choose what it is if I don't believe I have the time or resources (or desire) to succeed, we don't have to be good at everything, just whats important; the aforementioned skills pay my bills, allow me and my family to live comfortably, etc. I could learn to play the piano (I still might), but I don't _need_ to.

eightysixfour 2y ago
While this is true for many people, and most of the people you'd interact with on HN or, possibly in your daily life, it is not true for all people. High IQ correlations with life outcomes are usually pretty weak, but low IQ correlations with undesirable outcomes are very strong - I think smart people systematically underestimate how limiting it is to be not-smart.