Very relatable reverie. I'd add to this that, while the author focuses on the genius of von Neumann, most of the smart people around you aren't actually like that. They too have limitations, strengths and weaknesses, and the fact that you're working with them is already a good signal that you're clustered fairly close together in capacity.
I also struggle a lot with the limitations I have, frustrated at being so slow and stupid. I've also relied on flashcards as an augmentation, but I've started to question its value. For language we're already wired to pick up on it without tools like flashcards. As I think back, like most people (I assume) I learned English through watching TV without subtitles, and reading online. I didn't speak much (if at all) until I was about 20. By then I was pretty much fluent, just from TV and the internet, no flashcards nor lots of output (like conversations) needed. Ironically, I'm in the process of building a language learning tool, but it's aimed at bringing interesting native content (TV) down to a level where a lower intermediate learner can enjoy and learn from it.
Anyway, my hope is that the difference in performance between me and those more naturually "gifted" is in how they use the neurons they have, maybe there's a way for me to find a better way to use what I have. I think the key to this is spatial as well as social reasoning and memory. We're already wired to excel at these things. I can barely remember the formula for cross entropy loss, but I remember the layout and details of that coffee shop I frequented 10 years ago in a different country without much effort. Jeff Hawkins talking about thought through reference frames and movement in his book on the brain really indicates to me that taking the effort to encode our knowledge spatially, i.e. finding the right representation, rather than trying to beat it into our heads with spaced repetition is a bette rway. I've also noticed that when I can tie ideas to a face, a person, I'm more likely to remember them. I think a good way for me to remember science and math is to learn the history of the subject, like who invented/discovered what in what order, where (possibly) and why, i.e. what's the story behind it all.
I don't like mnemonics, because they're basically garbage encodings. They make it possible to retrieve a memory, very slowly, but don't encode things in a way such that you can reason over them. It's the difference between one-hot encoding a word in NLP vs a semantic word embedding.
I think you are onto something quite important. There's a ton of work being done right now on the psychology and cognitive mechanisms underlying learning. Part of the difference, it seems to me, is not just that you encode spatial information differently - it's also that you have no option but to use your spatial memory, and it's working all the time. It gets flexed naturally in a way that the part of your brain that memorizes a formula doesn't unless you have no choice but to exercise it very frequently, or possess a truly unusual brain.
Put another way - I have terrible visuospatial skills, but I still am able to navigate the world and manage fine because I have no choice. I had to learn to do visuospatial tasks in order to function, so, I can do them, and I do them constantly with low error rates. The muscle isn't naturally as strong as other peoples', but it's exercised enough to not make a functional difference.
This is where the idea of "mind palaces" come from - maybe such a visualization would help you.
I'm a bit confused. Did you not speak at all, to any human, until your 20s? Or is English a second language? Because the way this is phrased, I imagine you, somehow, growing up isolated in a cabin in the woods with internet. How does a baby feed itself?
You are right about the wording. So I asumed English is not his first language.
Another post by him supports this idea:
"I live in arguably one of the best countries for raising kids, with 18 months parental leave, free preschool, higher education, retirement homes for aging parents, health care, and just a child-friendly work environment overall (even dads are expected to be gone for at least a few months), and it's STILL super hard to raise a child"
He learned English by watching TV, which is something I couldn't have done. To GP: you are not stupid!
Interested in hearing about your app. I am building an app which uses high frequency words gathered from a body of text (eg TV subtitles), and allows a student to learn them using simple example sentences, synthetic audio, & spaced repetition. The goal is to learn a language subconsciously while taking a walk, doing the dishes, sleeping, etc. If you’re interested in chatting about your project, or language learning apps, my contact info is in my HN profile.
> A few problems in, I noticed him pause when starting on a new problem, and after a brief moment, he wrote down an answer without any intermediate steps or work.
Isn't that pretty frequent for high school work? I'm not a genius, far from it, but I spent a big part of high school writing down solutions and being bothered by the professors to write the steps (that's how I felt at the time, I've since understood why they acted that way).
I think you could make a case for a sort of back-and-forth, where you test your understanding by trying to do it all in your head, get the wrong answer, carefully check your work by doing all of the steps on paper, find the mistake, make an "oh-of-course" facepalm, and then try doing the next problem in your head.
I think this is an up-close look at a small part of a much larger overarching concept that most people never really come to grips with in the way that the author does: Life isn’t fair.
Great article. From the perspective of someone who's getting older, you have to come to grips with the fact that your mind and brain change in ability just like your body does. At first it can be frustrating, and you see it only as a negative. But strangely, having your brain change a bit in terms of its speed or its ability to memorize and recall things can actually give you a new perspective on solving problems and thinking about things in general. I'm not saying it's a bed of roses, for the most part it's a loss. I'm just saying you can learn to accept that and move on with the capabilities you have at the moment, rather than wallow in self-pity and see every cup as half empty.
There's also the fact that as you get older you simply know more, you've seen more patterns and data. You're like a machine learning algorithm that's been trained on a larger corpus.
well, you have no choice but to accept it. whats the alternative? depression? meth? some tips i'm thinking for myself are: rely on the wisdom crutch--solve the right problems. stop investing mental energy in chasing the next persons fad / weekend project. take advantaged of mastered knowledge, have it finally pay it's dividends.
the older i get, the more i appreciate technology that isn't rewritten every release candidate cycle. a tip for the fifteen year old self, don't take this advice just be aware of it so you know what technology to invest in. You'll eventually want those dividends.
a tip for the fifteen year old self, don't take this advice just be aware of it so you know what technology to invest in
This one is awesome advice! I remember the discussions with my dad. I told him there's no other way than to compile your own operating system from scratch. How could you ever not do that? I was trying out LFS and gentoo at the time and loved it! He worked on business critical software on IBM mainframes.
I wouldn't be where I am today and wouldn't know what I know today if I hadn't done what I did at the time. Installing an LFS system teaches you a tremendous amount about how your operating system actually works (if you don't just blindly copy and paste stuff and give up if something fails). I created `ebuilds` for my favourite software at the time that wasn't part of gentoo yet. I learned a lot from compiling software with my own optimization combinations, including some things that recently went by here on HN (-O2 and -O3 are way different and while one may make things faster it can also horribly break software). I'm not a C developer and I no longer do sys/network admin work but I do like to think that it gave me a great foundation and it definitely has helped me in more than one job to be the "bridge" between the devs and the sys admins. I spoke both languages. When other devs just complained about the "unreasonable requests" the admins had for them I understood why they made those requests. I also understood the dev side though. I could translate between the two.
Nowadays? I cringe at recompiling my operating system. I just want to `apt-get install` and be done with it already from one LTS release to the next because nothing is worse than having the "TV" out of commission for longer than the couple hours it takes to download and do all the upgrades. I don't have time for this (as you can guess, my TV is a Linux box hooked up to the biggest monitor I could find for the kind of money I wanted to spend. There's not ever gonna be a "Smart TV" in my house, not over my dead body). I have kids that need their Netflix running!
It's a matter of perspective. And of self fulfilling prophecy to some extent. If one's abilities are declining in one department and they think of themselves as less capable it stops them from pursuing other things, things which they may excel at even at older age.
My memory deteriorated in my early twenties. Granted it was quite spectacular as a teen and is still well above average but the feeling of loss was still palpable. I used to be able to recall written pages by having a memory of where on a page things were written. Not entirely visual but the layout was there with the information. That just went away.
"There's also the fact that as you get older you simply know more, you've seen more patterns and data. You're like a machine learning algorithm that's been trained on a larger corpus."
I want to add that the professionals (MDs) I have asked think that a better education does not protect people from dementia. It only hides the creeping advance of dementia on us as we grow old.
Getting as much education and experience, IMO, is desirable because, IMO, it enriches life. But as of yet, expecting diminishing capacities is something we must accept, and plan for.
Sönke Ahrens has a good point on forgetting in "How To Take Smart Notes". We view it as a negative thing, but if we remembered everything we would be drowned in details and we wouldn't be able to distinguish signal from the noise. He argues that forgetting makes us able to learn.
Excepting von Neumann, I've recently enjoyed the parts in Turing's Cathedral on Nils Barricelli, and would encourage anyone interested to look into the sections about his kilobyte-scale genetic algorithms.
I think there is actually a lot of benefit in being "smart enough" but not a genius in some areas.
When I was growing up, if you were too smart as a young kid, you'd be singled out as "gifted and talented" and then put in special classes, asked to do more schoolwork, etc. This separation had both positive and negative effects - on the one hand, it was a lot less boring to work on accelerated material. On the other hand, adults came to view you as "special" and just inherently smart in a way others weren't. That's both denigrating to others, and an intense amount of pressure for a kid.
Personally, my response to this pressure was always to shut down if I didn't immediately grasp something. I just didn't bother to try - why fail and look stupid? It wasn't until college that I learned how to study and flex mental muscles that weren't already strong. In fact, I took introductory calculus three times - once in high school, twice in college - before I actually understood what was going on. Unlike language-related fields, higher mathematics just didn't come naturally. It took three tries because I had to figure out how to study, which I had never needed to do until that point, and because I'd taken the idea that I had to study as a sign I was unfit to be learning the material at all.
I went on to do just as well as my peers, or better, in the other higher mathematics classes I needed to take, but the fear was always there - what if this is finally the thing I can't do, that my brain just can't learn? What if this is just too hard, because it doesn't come naturally at all?
It's much better, in my view, to be someone who knows they can do anything, but that they have to put in effort. Learning to put in that effort consistently and not be disheartened by the challenge is much more valuable in some ways than knowing how to do the specific thing one is learning.
I hear you brother! It's both a blessing and a curse to be good at something. You ace things others don't and you don't even understand why others don't understand instantly! Math was always easy for me at school. No need to study, instant A or B. Good enough. Language? Easy too! Just grammar, pronunciation and spelling. Easy peasey! Interpreting what that author meant? What do you mean there's hidden meaning? Why would anyone do that? Makes no sense to me!
This only changes once university came around. Finally I got rid of the interpreting Shakespeare parts and there were problems in math and computer science that I actually had to spend brain cycles on to stay on As and Bs! Definitely a "learning curve". One of the first classes at university I got F (by 1 point). I had to redo the test. I actually went and studied that time around. Got an A.
Do I need any of that stuff now? Well I can't remember the last time I really needed a bin packing algorithm to be honest. But I do agree it's valuable to know that thing exists. I was in a study group with a bunch of really smart guys that aced those things like I did high school. They work at the Teslas, Googles and Facebooks (actually all three of those for real, lol) of this world now and I work somewhere else. That's totally OK. They still ace Tesla. I ace my job.
That anime character perspective reminded me of myself when I first started out. I figured with hard work over time, I would someday be able to confidently just sit down and start cranking out code to fix most every problem.
How wrong I was, the further I go along the more time I spend being totally out of my comfort zone and learning new frameworks or trying to figure out someone else's code.
If we could foster scenius instead of genius we would have a lot more opportunities for collaboration and would not need a genius around to leap forward...
If you value intelligence, in and of itself, you’re going to have a crisis when your brain inevitably decays with age. A more resilient, but similar, value is: doing the most with the intelligence you’re gifted.
I think intelligence is more then just biology. Its a technology. In my experiance we can significantly improve our ability to learn just with aquiring different mental techniques. Theres no getting around that some peoples brains are already pre-wired or had experiences to cause this, and thus have a headstart (all these geniuses like von Neumann etc) but that doesn't mean you can't start treading in the same path.
Everyone's brain might be different, but that just means you might need different mental techniques then someone else. For example, I'm terrible at memorizing things, my working memory is rather small compared to the average person I've come to find[1]. To adapt, I focused on finding things that would let me compress memory, focusing on the 'core' of things so to speak and ignoring everything else. For example, in math and physics, I ignore pretty much all the equations and instead try to find the similarities that tie everything else together and use that to derive/figure out the rest as needed. This way I can get away with knowing much less. (I've also been lucky to have teachers that let us reference the equations on tests). Suprisingly, I found this acts as a great foundation for learning new things, letting them slot together much more readily. (I also got into the habit of using a notebook as both a reference and workspace for ideas, letting me refer back to things that dropped out of my working memory quickly)
The thing is though, if I didn't pressure myself to develop that habit in the first place, I would never have improved.
I think a huge part of mental ability is simply having motivation to go through the process.(admittedly a large part of motivation is biological/just how you are wired)
[1]This is a bit subjective, the important part I think though, was the pressure it caused me to put on myself to improve.
Don't set yourself short on biology, since you're clearly referring to your genetic make-up. Gene-expression is way more complex and a much bigger factor than most people give it credit for. The environment impacts gene-expression quite a bit and I believe it's a big part of learning new things as experience provokes or suppresses gene expression. More to come.
38 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 53.0 ms ] threadAnyway, my hope is that the difference in performance between me and those more naturually "gifted" is in how they use the neurons they have, maybe there's a way for me to find a better way to use what I have. I think the key to this is spatial as well as social reasoning and memory. We're already wired to excel at these things. I can barely remember the formula for cross entropy loss, but I remember the layout and details of that coffee shop I frequented 10 years ago in a different country without much effort. Jeff Hawkins talking about thought through reference frames and movement in his book on the brain really indicates to me that taking the effort to encode our knowledge spatially, i.e. finding the right representation, rather than trying to beat it into our heads with spaced repetition is a bette rway. I've also noticed that when I can tie ideas to a face, a person, I'm more likely to remember them. I think a good way for me to remember science and math is to learn the history of the subject, like who invented/discovered what in what order, where (possibly) and why, i.e. what's the story behind it all.
I don't like mnemonics, because they're basically garbage encodings. They make it possible to retrieve a memory, very slowly, but don't encode things in a way such that you can reason over them. It's the difference between one-hot encoding a word in NLP vs a semantic word embedding.
Put another way - I have terrible visuospatial skills, but I still am able to navigate the world and manage fine because I have no choice. I had to learn to do visuospatial tasks in order to function, so, I can do them, and I do them constantly with low error rates. The muscle isn't naturally as strong as other peoples', but it's exercised enough to not make a functional difference.
This is where the idea of "mind palaces" come from - maybe such a visualization would help you.
Another post by him supports this idea:
"I live in arguably one of the best countries for raising kids, with 18 months parental leave, free preschool, higher education, retirement homes for aging parents, health care, and just a child-friendly work environment overall (even dads are expected to be gone for at least a few months), and it's STILL super hard to raise a child"
He learned English by watching TV, which is something I couldn't have done. To GP: you are not stupid!
Isn't that pretty frequent for high school work? I'm not a genius, far from it, but I spent a big part of high school writing down solutions and being bothered by the professors to write the steps (that's how I felt at the time, I've since understood why they acted that way).
There's also the fact that as you get older you simply know more, you've seen more patterns and data. You're like a machine learning algorithm that's been trained on a larger corpus.
the older i get, the more i appreciate technology that isn't rewritten every release candidate cycle. a tip for the fifteen year old self, don't take this advice just be aware of it so you know what technology to invest in. You'll eventually want those dividends.
straight to the solutions. are you close to being ‘older’?
I wouldn't be where I am today and wouldn't know what I know today if I hadn't done what I did at the time. Installing an LFS system teaches you a tremendous amount about how your operating system actually works (if you don't just blindly copy and paste stuff and give up if something fails). I created `ebuilds` for my favourite software at the time that wasn't part of gentoo yet. I learned a lot from compiling software with my own optimization combinations, including some things that recently went by here on HN (-O2 and -O3 are way different and while one may make things faster it can also horribly break software). I'm not a C developer and I no longer do sys/network admin work but I do like to think that it gave me a great foundation and it definitely has helped me in more than one job to be the "bridge" between the devs and the sys admins. I spoke both languages. When other devs just complained about the "unreasonable requests" the admins had for them I understood why they made those requests. I also understood the dev side though. I could translate between the two.
Nowadays? I cringe at recompiling my operating system. I just want to `apt-get install` and be done with it already from one LTS release to the next because nothing is worse than having the "TV" out of commission for longer than the couple hours it takes to download and do all the upgrades. I don't have time for this (as you can guess, my TV is a Linux box hooked up to the biggest monitor I could find for the kind of money I wanted to spend. There's not ever gonna be a "Smart TV" in my house, not over my dead body). I have kids that need their Netflix running!
I certainly don't recommend it for everyone, but for Paul Erdős apparently some drugs worked well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s#Personality
I do not possess his genius, but my life has been far from worthless.
I do not feel myself slipping, and I have much to look forward and appreciate.
It's not awful. I am still sharper than most, I find. But damn if it isn't depressing.
Which is where I am now.
Two mitigation strategies I employ:
1. More Sleep 2. No Alcohol
I want to add that the professionals (MDs) I have asked think that a better education does not protect people from dementia. It only hides the creeping advance of dementia on us as we grow old.
Getting as much education and experience, IMO, is desirable because, IMO, it enriches life. But as of yet, expecting diminishing capacities is something we must accept, and plan for.
Not to mention how difficult it would be to distinguish past from present.
When I was growing up, if you were too smart as a young kid, you'd be singled out as "gifted and talented" and then put in special classes, asked to do more schoolwork, etc. This separation had both positive and negative effects - on the one hand, it was a lot less boring to work on accelerated material. On the other hand, adults came to view you as "special" and just inherently smart in a way others weren't. That's both denigrating to others, and an intense amount of pressure for a kid.
Personally, my response to this pressure was always to shut down if I didn't immediately grasp something. I just didn't bother to try - why fail and look stupid? It wasn't until college that I learned how to study and flex mental muscles that weren't already strong. In fact, I took introductory calculus three times - once in high school, twice in college - before I actually understood what was going on. Unlike language-related fields, higher mathematics just didn't come naturally. It took three tries because I had to figure out how to study, which I had never needed to do until that point, and because I'd taken the idea that I had to study as a sign I was unfit to be learning the material at all.
I went on to do just as well as my peers, or better, in the other higher mathematics classes I needed to take, but the fear was always there - what if this is finally the thing I can't do, that my brain just can't learn? What if this is just too hard, because it doesn't come naturally at all?
It's much better, in my view, to be someone who knows they can do anything, but that they have to put in effort. Learning to put in that effort consistently and not be disheartened by the challenge is much more valuable in some ways than knowing how to do the specific thing one is learning.
This only changes once university came around. Finally I got rid of the interpreting Shakespeare parts and there were problems in math and computer science that I actually had to spend brain cycles on to stay on As and Bs! Definitely a "learning curve". One of the first classes at university I got F (by 1 point). I had to redo the test. I actually went and studied that time around. Got an A.
Do I need any of that stuff now? Well I can't remember the last time I really needed a bin packing algorithm to be honest. But I do agree it's valuable to know that thing exists. I was in a study group with a bunch of really smart guys that aced those things like I did high school. They work at the Teslas, Googles and Facebooks (actually all three of those for real, lol) of this world now and I work somewhere else. That's totally OK. They still ace Tesla. I ace my job.
The irony...
How wrong I was, the further I go along the more time I spend being totally out of my comfort zone and learning new frameworks or trying to figure out someone else's code.
Everyone's brain might be different, but that just means you might need different mental techniques then someone else. For example, I'm terrible at memorizing things, my working memory is rather small compared to the average person I've come to find[1]. To adapt, I focused on finding things that would let me compress memory, focusing on the 'core' of things so to speak and ignoring everything else. For example, in math and physics, I ignore pretty much all the equations and instead try to find the similarities that tie everything else together and use that to derive/figure out the rest as needed. This way I can get away with knowing much less. (I've also been lucky to have teachers that let us reference the equations on tests). Suprisingly, I found this acts as a great foundation for learning new things, letting them slot together much more readily. (I also got into the habit of using a notebook as both a reference and workspace for ideas, letting me refer back to things that dropped out of my working memory quickly)
The thing is though, if I didn't pressure myself to develop that habit in the first place, I would never have improved.
I think a huge part of mental ability is simply having motivation to go through the process.(admittedly a large part of motivation is biological/just how you are wired)
[1]This is a bit subjective, the important part I think though, was the pressure it caused me to put on myself to improve.