Due to lurking online in the rationalist community as a teenager, I had so much anxiety about intelligence that affected my life. In particular, it made me avoid testing my fit for different things because I thought I wasn’t smart and didn’t want to confirm it to myself. And it made me more anxious about giving up on things that were a bad fit because I thought not being good at a thing was evidence of my not being smart enough. Things I would tell teenage me if I could go back in time:
It is valuable to explore the anxiety you feel around doing an IQ test. Things like learning about and hanging out with successful, cool people working on impressive projects who weren’t child prodigies will be helpful for exploring those anxious feelings and becoming comfortable with not being the smartest person in the room.
There are just some things that you won’t be good at because of lacking some sort of natural and mostly unchangeable quality that is correlated with raw intelligence. However, it still seems worth it to try things that would give you stronger evidence of what you are good at and what you are not—an IQ score is some evidence but not as good as actually trying the thing.
For a lot of things, including very intellectual pursuits like programming or doing certain kinds of research, you are probably underestimating the role of getting good mentorship and just practising and getting lots of feedback compared to just being naturally talented. Lots of people much smarter than you are going to be less good at it because they lack experience and motivation. Lots of people less smart than you are going to be much better than you because they will have experience and motivation.
Part of the anxiety you feel about your intelligence is because you’re consuming the thoughts of people who are older and more knowledgeable and attributing their being good at coming up with novel ideas and understanding concepts quickly to just raw intelligence. You will become a more impressive and interesting person yourself as you get older and more knowledgeable, and difficult concepts will take less time to understand compared to now.
Due to lurking online in the rationalist community as a teenager, I had so much anxiety about intelligence that affected my life. In particular, it made me avoid testing my fit for different things because I thought I wasn’t smart and didn’t want to confirm it to myself. And it made me more anxious about giving up on things that were a bad fit because I thought not being good at a thing was evidence of my not being smart enough. Things I would tell teenage me if I could go back in time:
It is valuable to explore the anxiety you feel around doing an IQ test. Things like learning about and hanging out with successful, cool people working on impressive projects who weren’t child prodigies will be helpful for exploring those anxious feelings and becoming comfortable with not being the smartest person in the room.
There are just some things that you won’t be good at because of lacking some sort of natural and mostly unchangeable quality that is correlated with raw intelligence. However, it still seems worth it to try things that would give you stronger evidence of what you are good at and what you are not—an IQ score is some evidence but not as good as actually trying the thing.
For a lot of things, including very intellectual pursuits like programming or doing certain kinds of research, you are probably underestimating the role of getting good mentorship and just practising and getting lots of feedback compared to just being naturally talented. Lots of people much smarter than you are going to be less good at it because they lack experience and motivation. Lots of people less smart than you are going to be much better than you because they will have experience and motivation.
Part of the anxiety you feel about your intelligence is because you’re consuming the thoughts of people who are older and more knowledgeable and attributing their being good at coming up with novel ideas and understanding concepts quickly to just raw intelligence. You will become a more impressive and interesting person yourself as you get older and more knowledgeable, and difficult concepts will take less time to understand compared to now.