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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So despite your clearly large intellect, it seems like you didn't understand the English verb "to brag."
I would say this in response, what you describe: being good at middle and high and able to get perfect grades there, isn't particularly impressive. Most good students can excel in high school. You note that things got harder for you in college, this is more normal, "smart kids" usually get found out in college when the work becomes harder. I'm not sure if you went on to postgrad education but I'd hazard a guess that if you went on to do a PhD you would have had a big shock.
My point is this, being able to "ace" teenager level work isn't actually all that big of a deal. I went to a private all-boys school where there were many, many boys who aced every piece of homework and tests they took. It didn't mean they were super special, that's just what you get when schools select for the brightest kids. Now, if they went straight from school and then aced their PhD in a year, that would actually be unusual.
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.
> If I hear something once, I understand it and remember it for life
Must be nice to have that kind of recall at the age of 100.
That being said, some people (John Von Neumann) seem to have had fantastic visual and textual recall.
A number of artists (Kim Jung Gi) and musicians (Mozart) seem to have developed remarkable visual and auditory memories.
And many children or fans who were nothing special in school can easily name every Pokémon, or tell you the stats and history of every member of a sports league, or recite the Star Wars saga line for line.
(And chickens, flightless though they may be, still possess the spatial brain of a migratory bird and can memorize (and peck) 300 random locations in their cage space - or on a piano - in order. They're also much better than rats (or humans?) at mazes.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.)
> 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.
> 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.
>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.
My first attempt at university I took an intro CS class because I was interested in computers and thought it might be a better fit for me than my major at the time. I did all right for a couple of weeks, but struggled and eventually failed the class. I wrote it off as my brain simply not being wired for programming.
When I actually had a programming problem I was interested in solving, I did great. I discovered many years later that what caused my early failure was mostly me being a bad student. I didn’t do the reading, I didn’t do the homework, I did the labs when I could make sense of them. The trouble was, I didn’t realize that was the problem. In my defense, the class was a weed out class, and made a lot of assumptions about what you knew going in. But ultimately I wasn’t really prepared for school, and didn’t really understand how coursework and personal effort contributed to success in that space.
I guess what I’m saying is, don’t write someone off as not willing to do the work. They may not know that they can do the work.
> When I actually had a programming problem I was interested in solving, I did great.
If you're interested in actually doing something with the knowledge you're trying to attain, you'll likely work far harder to attain it. I suspect a large percentage of developers probably got into the field as kids because they wanted to do things like create a website about a topic they were interested in or create mods for the game they were playing at the moment. That end goal probably drove them far more than any course or professor ever could.
And I suspect that's one reason there's a divide between those that seem to 'get' it in school and uni and those that don't; the former are okay just learning/working for the sake of it, whereas the latter are like "why are we doing this? How is this going to help me?"
My take on this is that intelligence is like strength or other physical qualities. If you are in a hyper competitive area, you need good genes. But not everything is competitive.
Yes, there are absolutely limits on your physical development that you are born with. You won't run 100m under 10s if you're a woman, and you're much more likely if you have recent roots in certain countries. You won't get to play professional basketball unless you're quite a lot taller than average. If you're going to win Mr Olympia, you need to possess the kind of body that can be turned into a hunk of muscle.
But you can do better than most people at almost everything by practicing. You can cut your 100m time just by losing the gut. You can practice throwing the ball in the hoop by yourself. You can lift weights and you'll get more muscular.
Intelligence is no different. If you're going to be a research mathematician, it's going to be incredibly tough competing with the smartest kids in your generation. But if you just want to appreciate quantum physics or complex numbers, it's actually quite low hanging fruit that you will figure out if you want to. Most people do not figure out complex numbers despite it being taught at every high school.
The thing with intelligence, and I suppose we mean the mathematical kind, is it's invisible until you interact with people. If you're very weak or fat there's reasons to do something about it. If you just don't know how vector calculus works, chances are you won't get outed.
Our culture in the West also has a static view of intelligence, the opposite of Dweck's growth mindset, which really harms everyone who should be encouraged to practice getting smarter. The loss of not stopping people without world class brains from pursuing math professorships is greatly outweighed by the loss of everyday people not improving strengthening their thinking skills.
I wholeheartedly subscribe to this. I was never super smart, mildly above-average in both primary, secondary, high school and university too. You could say I always matched the challenge, but not much more.
All the time, there were people around me who were significantly smarter than me, grokking things easily, learning faster, remembering better. Ie my roommate during whole campus was a guy who passed whole high school without the need to study at home, he just remembered it all and did homework just before the classes. there were tons of guys like him. I had to study every day, not too much but consistently. He didn't perform much better than me re grades on university, but he didn't have to work as much.
But here lies the rub - I could easily surpass people like him, even better ones, by just putting in enough time and learn things. In many topics that didn't interest people like him, I was much better. Much smarter folks than me were fired from university since at some point stuff became too hard to just visit seminars and they completely lacked the habit to spent time to learn hard stuff, even by far the smartest guy in whole 120-member class had to put in significant time to learn it for exams to pass.
I kept working on myself, learned various languages (ie right now battling with french), re-discovered topics that forceful learning in high school made me resent (geography, history, biology, physics) and discovered stuff on my own by backpacking around the world (more history and how everything interacted, cultures, food, appreciation of people sometimes vilified back home like Muslims) and just generally stepping far away of my comfort zone for decade and a half, right after finishing university. Now when I look back (and/or meet some of them), I am much more whole and experienced person, when we meet and their kids come and show me some backward place on globe I tell them some stories I've experienced in that region and a bit about their culture and history (don't want to sound condescending, I love them, and my roommate remained my good friend and has very senior management position).
I completed backwardish unknown university and for last decade work among graduates form best European universities. There is very little difference amongst us.
Its truly what IIRC Chaplin said - success is 10% talent and 90% hard work.
I thought that intelligence is pretty static by almost(or all?) measurement tools we have. Is that not the case? Not to say that our measurement tools might have serious issues but then you enter the unanswered question of making very concrete what intelligence is.
The most trivial brain training exercises routinely show major increases in IQ scores. Those who favor a static hypothesis (and they seem to be the majority) like to simply assume these are fake gains. But without ground truth, there's no way to know. You'd also be surprised how few studies there are that have people directly practice IQ test taking.
The static hypothesis seems to rely on common sense rather than hard evidence. It's rare for somebody who seems dull to become a genius all of a sudden. And when it does happen it's easy to assume they seemed dull rather than actually were.
There is no disconnect between intelligence being simple yet hard to improve. Losing weight is very simple. But it's hard. Obesity is only slightly less heritable than IQ (both highly heritable), yet we know for a fact it's 100% controllable by the individual (unless one is strongly against the notion of free will).
Can you source some peer-reviewed research that shows this? Everywhere I look the baseline seems to be IQ scores can't be trained save a tiny few points. And 3 IQ points don't really make a genius out of someone smart.
Free will has nothing to do with not being able to do something because physical constraints are placed on a person. e.g. A person in a wheel chair does not have more or less free will then someone who can walk. Even though the latter clearly has more freedom in a certain sense.
In case of losing weight, it very much does. You don't even need to do anything, you need to not eat (as much). Given high heritability of obesity it may very well be that some genetic configurations make it harder to stop eating. Plenty of studies show that most fail at dieting. Statistically speaking, it may be impossible to lose weight for most. So if you don't believe in even soft free will, you may as well conclude it is in fact impossible for these people to lose weight.
Alternatively, one could claim many simply don't want to lose weight. Then it should be fair game to claim many don't want to improve their intelligence.
Dual n back studies are a good starting point. Could go through gwern's article [0]. Which I very much disagree with, but it does cover a lot of research. He essentially concludes the active placebo studies that produce as many gains as dnb prove dnb doesn't work. But without ground truth there's no way to know these active placebo gains are fake. Many of these active placebos are other cognitive training methods, it's perfectly plausible they may not be placebos at all. IMO we can only conclude that if dnb does work it isn't uniquely great.
Another thing to remember - if we want to determine if it is possible to improve intelligence we should care about maximum gains not average gains. Again, without ground truth, one cannot simply claim big gainers are meaningless outliers that can be discounted. There may not be anything producing 2 SD on average (though plenty showing much more than the 3 points you mention), but many such improvements have been recorded.
Imagine weight was something we couldn't observe or understand. Based on statistical science, many may similarly conclude it is impossible to change it.
> In case of losing weight, it very much does. You don't even need to do anything, you need to not eat (as much). Given high heritability of obesity it may very well be that some genetic configurations make it harder to stop eating. Plenty of studies show that most fail at dieting. Statistically speaking, it may be impossible to lose weight for most. So if you don't believe in even soft free will, you may as well conclude it is in fact impossible for these people to lose weight.
That's way too much black and white thinking. It's pretty safe to say most obese people would like to lose weight. They just don't want to sacrifice the things they are doing, either consciously or subconsciously. This is orthogonal to free will. What you are talking about is the whether the conscious mind can win over the subconscious mind. That's called discipline. Not free will.
That's fine we can call it discipline (which some in the weight loss debate believe is impossible to cultivate, not myself). The point is, if there is indeed a conceptually simple way to increase intelligence, there's no inherent contradiction in most being unable to do it and statistical evidence looking the way it does.
Are IQ tests what we really mean when we mean someone is intelligent? What about that kid who can't do calculus one year, then the next year they can? Haven't they gotten smarter?
Yes unnormalized IQ scores of kids increase when they get older. That's why only the normalized to their age IQ score is reported. I won't get seduced into a discussion about whether IQ is really intelligence. It's the best proxy we have that's all that matters for this discussion.
But it can make perfect sense that your rank doesn't change within your cohort. The better you are above your cohort, the more encouraged you are, and the more help you'll get from the system. So in that sense it can be the case that it's very hard to change your intelligence.
That's an assumption. It could be true or not. If true you'd expect steadily increasing IQ stores for people who are slightly above average, which is not what happens. The same effect should be observed in weaker students if it's true. I'm not interested in conjecture. I'm looking for peer-reviewed papers.
Yes and no. Lifestyle has an impact on intelligence. You probably can't train yourself into a higher IQ, but you can many things that will dimish it (not sleeping well, bad nutrition, drugs, stress, etc.)
So if you've led a non ideal lifestyle in the past, you might be able to increase your intelligence by making less mistakes, relative to your current abilities.
I'm a pretty bright cat, in that I'm world-class good at inductive and deductive reasoning, and better at making intuitive leaps (where I "get it" but I can't explain how I get it). It's served me very well in my life, but I have constantly been undermined by my own inability to focus and the fact that I often abandon ideas and projects because I'm easily bored with them or I can see why, ten steps down the road, why they'll turn out to be a bad idea. It's like conceding a chess game ten moves in because you can already see you're screwed.
Consequently, I'm basically a failure as far as career goes. A lot of dumb people have much easier and more luxurious lives than I do, because they just get to doing the thing without ever worrying or caring if the thing is worth doing in the first place. This used to bug me, but it no longer does.
I was like that until I consciously started doing more and thinking less (about the ramifications). You need to start small and solve a small pain for you, then go from there. You will encounter problems but you will have your full mental power to solve them. You cannot solve the big problems from ten steps ahead, you're simply not involved enough to give it your best shot. It's during the crisis that you'll find a creative solution.
To take your chess analogy, if you concede at the start you're assuming the opponent will play perfectly and grind you until defeat. But mistakes are made and the balance shifts. In real life, opportunities are created just from starting something. You will learn even from the smallest task, and speaking about it to other people might open new paths for you.
Treating “intelligence” as a synonym for “training” is a more effective and positive approach than thinking certain people have some from-birth advantage over others.
So many people walk around thinking they’re stupid when they’re not. They just were not trained well in things society considers the core competencies of smart people (math, literature, physics, etc)
You can read perspectives on intelligence from people who’ve won the Putnam and they convey that they ‘just’ put in a crazy amount of work training in competitive mathematics. And even before they were deliberately training for the Putnam, they were raised in an environment that trained them for mathematical competency.
Of course there is likely a genetic and/or physical component to intelligence, but the major aspect of being smart is about wealth and educational inequality.
>but the major aspect of being smart is about wealth and educational inequality
No, this is flat out wrong. There has been so much research on this, and intelligence is both highly predictive of life outcomes (controlling for wealth) and extremely heritable. If you take the biological kids of smart people and raise them in poor households, they still turn out very smart, much smarter than the biological kids of dumb people who are raised in rich households.
Could you provide a citation? I am asking because this conflicts (not overstating) with every single study I read on this general topic. To name a few:
* The only relevant factor for predicting chess skill at any level seems to be hours spent on deliberate practice, see for example: https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.1106
* There is the decently famous Terman research (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Terman), who was convinced that he could predict future Nobel price winners, executives and wealthy people by IQ-testing them as a child. His approach basically did not work at all - to just name on aspect; he actually excluded two future Nobel-price winners from his group of future winners because their IQ was too low
* Students who are picked to fulfill minority quotas are just as likely to have successful law careers after graduating than their picked-by-intelligence colleagues (https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-4469.2000.tb00967.x)
I could name many more, but it is not my intention to win an argument by wall-of-text here, I am genuinely interested in sources pointing into a different direction. Thank you for your time!
>The only relevant factor for predicting chess skill at any level seems to be hours spent on deliberate practice, see for example: https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.1106
This is wildly implausible, and indeed the paper makes no such claims.
But still with regression to the mean, no? The child of two great geniuses is likely to be a somewhat lesser genius. Above average, but below their parents. A few generations of such regression to the mean and there might not be that much extra intelligence in the descendants of great geniuses.
As with any multigenic inheritance with few dominants, this is true.
That said, a few point difference is expected to remain in 5 generations, and if the line has more children the higher the chance of a genius line surviving.
there is a lot of studies in that topic. Even wikipedia agrees:
>Early twin studies of adult individuals have found a heritability of IQ between 57% and 73%,[6] with some recent studies showing heritability for IQ as high as 80%.[7] IQ goes from being weakly correlated with genetics for children, to being strongly correlated with genetics for late teens and adults. The heritability of IQ increases with the child's age and reaches a plateau at 18–20 years old, continuing at that level well into adulthood. However, poor prenatal environment, malnutrition and disease are known to have lifelong deleterious effects.[8][9][10]
You are right that the field of genetics is of course applicable to humans, with a lot more muddiness when it comes to the ethics - not the point.
The term "eugenics" describes a certain philosophy/set of ethics which directly grew out of racist narratives at worst and some very loose interpretations of the scientific methods two hundred years ago at best. Furthermore it can argued that the "field" of eugenics never really attempted to shed this, even as of today. Thus, calling eugenics pseudo-scientific is considered fair game. At least that's my understanding.
I'm not that smart, but for a lot of things I put in a bit of effort and care, seemingly more than average. So in a programming context if I have to add some feature, for example, I won't just do the first thing that works, but try to think ahead on the long term a bit, think about good API design, maybe UX, write decent docs, etc. Plus I tend to be fairly pro-active in many things.
It always surprises me when people don't do that kind of stuff; which happens surprisingly often IMO. People add stuff with the shittiest of APIs, without thinking more than a week ahead, or write documentation that barely even qualifies as English (from native or very proficient speakers).
As a result, people have often considered me "very smart". But I'm not. I'm not dumb either, but certainly not some sort of programming whizkid.
Point being: attitude counts for quite a bit.
I think everyone knows a few people who are not necessarily "dumb" in the sense that their brains aren't computing well enough, but are nonetheless "dumb" because of their attitude towards certain things. If you never take an interest in anything, or just always go for the simple explanations and solutions you will forever stay dumb, no matter how smart you are.
Innate ability and education also counts. I have no idea how much share each have, although lack of innate ability can certainly be a ceiling to what you can achieve, even with the best attitude. But as the post says: for most things that doesn't actually matter all that much.
But sometimes "the reading" means doing research during personal hours in order to solve work problems. And while the me of 20 years ago would have been perfectly fine doing work that I wasn't going to be compensated for, that shit doesn't fly with the me of today and if it got weeded entirely out of corporate culture, especially software development, we'd all be better off for it.
Raise your hand if you've never had any real formal workplace training in your supposed area of expertise.
Raise your hand if you've watched the same managers who can't find a budget for your personal training go to training seminars and / or conferences.
Raise your hand if your employer decides to adopt some new bit of technology that nobody on your team has familiarity with and then give an incredibly aggressive timeframe to integrate it into your current systems.
Life is too short to deal with that. If your experience with employers is that that toxic, maybe it's time to break out and work for yourself, start your own software business instead.
I don’t care enough to do the reading, to fail along the way, to show up, to make a promise, to learn as I go, to confront failure, to get better at the work.
All of that might be true.
But you’re almost certainly smart enough.
This is so true, and I find it somewhat heartening that even grade schools, down to pre-K (at least in my area of northern california), have put deliberate, consistent emphasis on the “growth mindset”
I don’t know if it will shift culture to reward and encourage effort, perseverance, grit, etc… over apparent “talent”, but it’s a step in the right direction.
In my experience smart is a nice quality to have in people you work with but it's on par with pleasant to be around. Motivated on the other hand is crucial - I'd rather work with a dumb toxic person who wants to get the job done then an nice genius who doesn't care about the work.
I'm really on board with Woody Allen's line that 90% of life is showing up.
An intelligent person just has to apply themselves to grasp a difficult concept. An unintelligent person cannot grasp the concept no matter how much effort they put in.
But the purpose of the author seems to be social rather than truth seeking. If people believe they are stupid and don’t try, it’s likely they are not succeeding at the level they possibly could.
It's not a post about cheering people up for social purpose, it's explaining there are few problems that are "too difficult" and most can be solved by doing the work.
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.