logoalt Hacker News

dgflyesterday at 1:27 PM1 replyview on HN

Bad article. The thesis may even be valuable, but it’s riddled with falsehoods trying to prove the point. It reads more as the usual person disliking the idea of IQ and trying to bash its foundation. Some actual facts are:

1. Einstein was a great student (as common sense would expect) [1]. Top in his class in ETHZ, and the supposed failed exam is because he tried to do the exam earlier than intended. He had great, although not flawless, grades all the way through. He wasn’t a mindless robot and clearly got some feathers ruffed by not showing up for classes, but his academic record is exactly what you would expect from a brilliant but somewhat nonconformist mind. He may not have been Von Neumann or Terence Tao, I suppose.

2. The main “source” of the article is an even more flawed blog post [2], which again just bashes on IQ with no sliver of proof that I can see other than waving hands in the hair while saying “dubious statistical transformations”, as if that wasn’t the only possible way to do these kinds of tests. Please prove me wrong and show me some proper study in there, I can’t see it but I’m from mobile.

Disappointing. What’s the point of it? Quote actual scientists, for example Higgs, who are on record saying that modern academic culture is too short term focused. Basically everyone I’ve ever spoken to about it in academia agrees. Might be a biased sample, but I think it’s more that everyone realizes we’ve dug ourselves into a hole that’s not so easy to escape.

[1]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2zwZsjlJ-G4

[2]: https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/your-iq-isnt-160-n...


Replies

neomyesterday at 4:17 PM

I also didn't enjoy it, sloppy boundary drawing combined with some motivated reasoning. He explicitly distinguishes research from development in paragraph 4, but then spends the rest of the essay treating "fast" and "legible" as inherently inferior without consistently applying his own distinction...like, If you're building a bridge or shipping software, legibility and speed aren't signs you're not pushing boundaries...they're signs you're being competent. also, he seems to suggest that slow thinking is actually a different kind of intelligence that institutions miss. But this conflates processing speed with intellectual ambition, plenty of fast thinkers work on hard, illegible problems.... Plenty of slow thinkers work on trivial ones.