Personally, the thing I find people constantly lacking in isn’t raw mental horsepower, or pattern recognition, or any of the things IQ generally maps to.
It’s just being willing to think.
When I was younger, I wanted to meet the smart people. I’ve met the smart people since then, and they’re not any more willing to think than anyone else; if anything, smart people are more frustrating to interact with.
My username, and my posts, may hint at a particular interpretation of the above statements. I’m not talking about that, although those kinds of interactions are no more immune to the phenomenon than anything else. I’m talking about the user, who is fully capable of writing their own SQL, who routinely sends said SQL to me for editing after running into efficiency issues with it—and who, when I send back the edited SQL with explanations of why each change was made, will then, a week later, send me SQL containing the exact same mistakes.
The thing you want is not somebody who is very smart; in fact, I think selecting for “very smart” is likely to select away from actually interesting thinkers. The thing you want is somebody who is willing to be wrong, over and over and over again, in different ways. The people who go into fields where the very smart people are, I think, tend to be the sort of people who want to find out the right answer so they don’t have to think anymore. You want people who aren’t afraid to look foolish.
If you’re looking for interesting thinkers, and you spend your time looking for smart people, you’re going to look right past all the genuinely interesting thinkers, because interesting thinkers spend most of their time thinking being horribly wrong. People who want to be right can’t afford to think interesting thoughts—because most interesting thoughts are, when you get down to it, incorrect. Being at the edge of the map of truth means spending most of your time being wrong; once you start being right, it’s time to move on, because there’s nothing left to explore.
I think your perspective on Intelligence vs. Willingness to Think is interesting, but wrong – my model is that how willing you are to think is strongly correlated with how easy thinking is for you, and how easy thinking is for you is pretty directly just what intelligence is (yes, correlation isn’t transitive, and tails come apart, but I think both hold in general for non-weird cases).
I think that’s a somewhat more literal interpretation than I was aiming for; what I’m gesturing at is also partially conveyed in the final paragraph, where I talk about willingness to be wrong.
If what you’re thinking about is easy, what this translates to, I think, is that it’s easy to be right. If you’re wrong most of the time, then it’s not actually very easy.
This is not to say you should think with the intent to be wrong—that’s just another way of doing things the easy way, and is also, I suppose, another way of taking what I’m saying more literally than I intend it. This is a difficult set of concepts to convey, but—if you’re unwilling to struggle, you’re unwilling to think, in the sense that I mean.
Personally, the thing I find people constantly lacking in isn’t raw mental horsepower, or pattern recognition, or any of the things IQ generally maps to.
It’s just being willing to think.
When I was younger, I wanted to meet the smart people. I’ve met the smart people since then, and they’re not any more willing to think than anyone else; if anything, smart people are more frustrating to interact with.
My username, and my posts, may hint at a particular interpretation of the above statements. I’m not talking about that, although those kinds of interactions are no more immune to the phenomenon than anything else. I’m talking about the user, who is fully capable of writing their own SQL, who routinely sends said SQL to me for editing after running into efficiency issues with it—and who, when I send back the edited SQL with explanations of why each change was made, will then, a week later, send me SQL containing the exact same mistakes.
The thing you want is not somebody who is very smart; in fact, I think selecting for “very smart” is likely to select away from actually interesting thinkers. The thing you want is somebody who is willing to be wrong, over and over and over again, in different ways. The people who go into fields where the very smart people are, I think, tend to be the sort of people who want to find out the right answer so they don’t have to think anymore. You want people who aren’t afraid to look foolish.
If you’re looking for interesting thinkers, and you spend your time looking for smart people, you’re going to look right past all the genuinely interesting thinkers, because interesting thinkers spend most of their time thinking being horribly wrong. People who want to be right can’t afford to think interesting thoughts—because most interesting thoughts are, when you get down to it, incorrect. Being at the edge of the map of truth means spending most of your time being wrong; once you start being right, it’s time to move on, because there’s nothing left to explore.
I think your perspective on Intelligence vs. Willingness to Think is interesting, but wrong – my model is that how willing you are to think is strongly correlated with how easy thinking is for you, and how easy thinking is for you is pretty directly just what intelligence is (yes, correlation isn’t transitive, and tails come apart, but I think both hold in general for non-weird cases).
I think that’s a somewhat more literal interpretation than I was aiming for; what I’m gesturing at is also partially conveyed in the final paragraph, where I talk about willingness to be wrong.
If what you’re thinking about is easy, what this translates to, I think, is that it’s easy to be right. If you’re wrong most of the time, then it’s not actually very easy.
This is not to say you should think with the intent to be wrong—that’s just another way of doing things the easy way, and is also, I suppose, another way of taking what I’m saying more literally than I intend it. This is a difficult set of concepts to convey, but—if you’re unwilling to struggle, you’re unwilling to think, in the sense that I mean.
Yeah, that clears things up. Thanks!
How do tail come apart—on intelligence versus easy to think?
I guess both stages, but more willingness to think & easiness to think.