I’m not a psychologist but I thought I could improve on the vagueness of the original discussion.
There are a few factors which determine “smartness” (or potential for success):
Speed. Having faster hardware.
Pattern Recognition. Being better at “chunking”.
Memory.
Creativity. (=”divergent” thinking.)
Detail-awareness.
Experience. Having incorporated many routines into the subconscious thanks to extensive practice.
Knowledge. (Quality is more important than quantity.)
The first five traits might be considered part of someone’s “talent.” Experience and knowledge, which I’ll group together as “training”, must be gained through hard work. Potential for success is determined by a geometric (rather than additive) combination of talent and training: that is, roughly,
potential for success=talent * training
All this math, of course, is not remotely intended to be taken at face value, but it’s merely the most efficient way to make my point.
The “super-smart” start life with more talent than average. The rule of the bell curve holds, so they generally do not have an overwhelming cognitive advantage over the average person. But they have enough talent to justify investing much more of their resources into training. This is because a person with 15 talent will gain 15 success for every unit of time they put into training, while a unit of training is worth 17 success for a person with 17 talent. The less time you have to spend, the more time costs, so all other things being equal, the person with more talent will put more time into training. Suppose the person with 15 talent puts 100 units of time into training, and the person with 17 talent puts 110 units of time into training. Then:
person with 15 talent * 100 training ⇒ 15000 success
person with 17 talent * 110 training ⇒ 18700 success
Which is 25% more success for only 13% more talent.
There’s probably some more formal work done along these lines, I’m not an economist either.
I’m not a psychologist but I thought I could improve on the vagueness of the original discussion.
There are a few factors which determine “smartness” (or potential for success):
Speed. Having faster hardware.
Pattern Recognition. Being better at “chunking”.
Memory.
Creativity. (=”divergent” thinking.)
Detail-awareness.
Experience. Having incorporated many routines into the subconscious thanks to extensive practice.
Knowledge. (Quality is more important than quantity.)
The first five traits might be considered part of someone’s “talent.” Experience and knowledge, which I’ll group together as “training”, must be gained through hard work. Potential for success is determined by a geometric (rather than additive) combination of talent and training: that is, roughly,
potential for success=talent * training
All this math, of course, is not remotely intended to be taken at face value, but it’s merely the most efficient way to make my point.
The “super-smart” start life with more talent than average. The rule of the bell curve holds, so they generally do not have an overwhelming cognitive advantage over the average person. But they have enough talent to justify investing much more of their resources into training. This is because a person with 15 talent will gain 15 success for every unit of time they put into training, while a unit of training is worth 17 success for a person with 17 talent. The less time you have to spend, the more time costs, so all other things being equal, the person with more talent will put more time into training. Suppose the person with 15 talent puts 100 units of time into training, and the person with 17 talent puts 110 units of time into training. Then:
person with 15 talent * 100 training ⇒ 15000 success
person with 17 talent * 110 training ⇒ 18700 success
Which is 25% more success for only 13% more talent.
There’s probably some more formal work done along these lines, I’m not an economist either.