10x programmers etc.

[ajschumacher]

see also: #92 debunked "double hump"

---

in https://www.nature.com/news/how-to-raise-a-genius-lessons-from-a-45-year-study-of-super-smart-children-1.20537:

what has become clear is how much the precociously gifted outweigh the rest of society in their influence.

“Whether we like it or not, these people really do control our society,” says Jonathan Wai, a psychologist at the Duke University Talent Identification Program in Durham, North Carolina, which collaborates with the Hopkins centre.

Some researchers and writers, notably psychologist Anders Ericsson at Florida State University in Tallahassee and author Malcolm Gladwell, have popularized the idea of an ability threshold. This holds that for individuals beyond a certain IQ barrier (120 is often cited), concentrated practice time is much more important than additional intellectual abilities in acquiring expertise.

[ajschumacher]

"Recall that Chetty's team was trying to figure out what areas are good at allowing people to reach the upper middle class. My study was trying to figure out what areas are good at allowing people to reach fame. The results are strikingly different." (page 184, Everybody Lies)

This is sort of an interesting look at success for the masses versus success for the few, or at least at different levels/types of "success"... A possible hypothesis might be that the two should go together (more general success, more peak success) but that doesn't seem to be the case. The ideas of success may be too different?

[ajschumacher]

"Many economists previously leaned toward the view that leaders largely were impotent figureheads pushed around by external forces. Not so, according to Jones and Olken's analysis of nature's experiment." (page 228, Everybody Lies)

That's referencing Hit or Miss? The Effect of Assassinations on Institutions and War, which has this abstract:

"Assassinations are a persistent feature of the political landscape. Using a new dataset of assassination attempts on all world leaders from 1875 to 2004, we exploit inherent randomness in the success or failure of assassination attempts to identify the effects of assassination. We find that, on average, successful assassinations of autocrats produce sustained moves toward democracy. We also find that assassinations affect the intensity of small-scale conflicts. The results document a contemporary source of institutional change, inform theories of conflict, and show that small sources of randomness can have a pronounced effect on history."

Kind of an interesting analysis for the great man theory...

[ajschumacher]

Medina gives a very reasonable presentation of intelligence and IQ, including this historical tidbit on how we got the term "Intelligence Quotient" in the first place:

"The score was the ratio of a child's mental age to his or her chronological age, multiplied by 100. So a 10-year-old who could solve problems normally solved only by 15-year-olds had an IQ of 150: (15/10) X 100." (page 95)

https://planspace.org/20181209-brain_rules_for_baby/

[ajschumacher]

"Here’s what I know: if someone’s much better than you at something, they probably try much harder. You probably underestimate how much harder they try. I’m not saying that talent isn’t a meaningful differentiator, because it certainly is, but I think people generally underestimate how effort needs to be poured into talent in order to develop it. So much of getting good at anything is just pure labor: figuring out how to try and then offering up the hours. If you’re doing it wrong you can do it a thousand times and not produce any particularly interesting results. So you have to make sure you’re trying the right way."

https://ava.substack.com/p/effort / https://ava.substack.com/about/ https://twitter.com/noampomsky

[ajschumacher]

Psychology:(103.) Unk, the big trouble with dumb bastards is that they are too dumb to believe there is such a thing as being smart.

from Kurt Vonnegut's "The Sirens of Titan"

[ajschumacher]

John Stuart Mill on equality: https://fs.blog/2021/03/john-stuart-mills-equality/

This take on equality, that it’s about getting contributions from everybody, is not so great... What’s the word? Instrumentalist ethics? Something like that? If we value equality to let everybody contribute, then what about people who can’t or don’t contribute? This is a cynical and exploitative rationale for equality. Not that it’s a wholly bad line of reasoning, but that it isn’t sufficiently complete to be a real foundation.

Mill even knows this when he says “ the legal subordination of one sex to the other is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement” - but the priority of the arguments can get lost.

[ajschumacher]

A Novel Effort to See How Poverty Affects Young Brains describes Baby's First Years, an RCT testing giving people money to see if it's good for the kids' brains.

It's known that some things are certainly bad for kids' brains, like being in a crummy orphanage:

• Cognitive Recovery in Socially Deprived Young Children: The Bucharest Early Intervention Project
• Variation in neural development as a result of exposure to institutionalization early in childhood

[ajschumacher]

"He is worth a thousand lesser engineers." (page 170, Dr. X referring to Hackworth, in Diamond Age by Stephenson)

[ajschumacher]

"By nature, men are nearly alike; by practice, they get to be wide apart." (epigraph, quoting Confucius)

(epigraph in Diamond Age)

[ajschumacher]

"An investment in knowledge pays the best interest." ~ Benjamin Franklin

[ajschumacher]

“Seek to learn constantly while you live, do not wait in the faith that old age by itself will bring wisdom.” (Solon)

[ajschumacher]

differences in or increasing intelligence, vs. building mental tools (tools of the mind, etc.)

for example, magical number 7+/-2 (working memory): if you put more complex things in those slots, you do more without having to have more slots

[ajschumacher]

on human variation, sleep/energy:

Living with a short sleep gene: 'It's a gift' https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/22/health/short-sleep-gene-wellness-scn/index.html

Familial advanced sleep-phase syndrome: A short-period circadian rhythm variant in humans https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10470086/

Mutant neuropeptide S receptor reduces sleep duration with preserved memory consolidation https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31619542/

[ajschumacher]

catnip for Charles Murray and friends (The Bell Curve): "Reading Race: AI Recognises Patient's Racial Identity In Medical Images" https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.10356

[ajschumacher]

"we find that avoiding a toxic worker (or converting him to an average worker) enhances performance to a much greater extent than replacing an average worker with a superstar worker."

https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/16-057_d45c0b4f-fa19-49de-8f1b-4b12fe054fea.pdf

"We find that a superstar, defined as the top 1% of workers in terms of productivity, adds about $5,000 to firm profit per year, while a toxic worker costs about $12,000 per year."

"Interestingly, we also find that these toxic workers are actually much more productive than the average worker, which can perhaps explain why they tend to stick around an organization longer than they should. We also find that workers who profess that rules should always be followed are also more likely to be toxic. The toxic employee may be falling back on pedantry over common sense or decency."

"For example, we find that greater confidence predicts increased productivity. However, greater confidence also predicts greater likelihood of becoming toxic. For our setting, we can actually calculate the net effect on profit of this tradeoff. Each unit increase in confidence results in a worker adding roughly $122 to expected profit through increased productivity. However, that same increase in confidence results in a worker that is expected to cost the firm over $1,300 from toxic behavior. So hiring a more confident worker can cost the firm over $1,000 in profits, per worker."

https://rework.withgoogle.com/blog/how-toxic-are-toxic-employees/

[ajschumacher]

“the preponderance of psychological evidence indicates that experts are made, not born”

Ross, The Expert Mind

[ajschumacher]

"Mathematical talent is probably congenital, but aside from that the most important attribute of a genuine professional mathematician is scholarship. The scholar is always studying, always ready and eager to learn. The scholar knows the connections of his specialty with the subject as a whole; he knows not only the technical details of his specialty, but its history and its present standing; he knows about the others who are working on it and how far they have reached. He knows the literature, and he trusts nobody: he himself examines the original paper. He acquires firsthand knowledge no only of its intellectual content, but also of the date of the work, the spelling of the author's name, and the punctuation of the title; he insists on getting every detail of every reference absolutely straight. The scholar tries to be as broad as possible. No one can know all of mathematics, but the scholar can succeed in knowing the outline of it all: what are its parts and what are their places in the whole?" (Halmos, I want to be a mathematician, 268)

[ajschumacher]

"It is important to me to have something big and external, not inside myself, that I can devote my life to. Gauss and Goya and Shakespeare and Paganini are excellent, their excellence gives me pleasure, and I admire and envy them. They were also dedicated human beings. Excellence is for the few but dedication is something everybody can have—should have—and without it life is not worth living." (pages 321-322, Halmos, I want to be a mathematician)

[ajschumacher]

"I believe that the work of the world is done by people, not by committees. Socrates, the teacher, was not a committee, nor was Archimedes, the inventor and research mathematician. The great strides forward (in administration and in finance, as well as in science and in the humanities) have always been made by people, not by committees; Lincoln, Rothschild, Newton, and Goethe bear witness." (page 352, Halmos, I want to be a mathematician)

[ajschumacher]

"The notion of ability is as much about how we see ourselves and how others see us as it is about intelligence." (page 172, Didau, What if everything you knew about education was wrong?)

[ajschumacher]

Quoting Richard Sennett:

"We share in common and in roughly equal measure the raw abilities that allow us to become good craftsmen: it is the motivation and aspiration for quality that takes people along different paths in their lives. Social conditions shape these motivations." (page 320, Didau, What if everything you knew about education was wrong?)

[ajschumacher]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_psychology is the term used by noted monster Andrew Sabisky:

"Differential psychology — the science that investigates the nature and causes of differences between individuals in their cognition ..." (page 391, in What if everything you knew about education was wrong?)

"Throughout the 19th century, most commentators on mental abilities assumed they were independent — a school of thought called 'faculty psychology'. [in the sense of multiple intelligences] Such a model remained untested until an English psychologist, Charles Spearman, found that boys' grades in school subjects were highly correlated; the boys who excelled at math were likely to be better than average in English and Latin. Spearman developed a novel statistical technique called factor analysis to analyze his data and proposed that one common factor, g, explained most of the variance in a battery of mental tests, but that each subtest also had its own specific variance (Spearman called this non-shared variation s factor). Spearman's original finding has since been modified by later analyses and the factors derived from analyses of mental tests are best thought to fit into a pyramidal structure, with g at the top (see Figure A2.1). The finding that all mental tests positively inter-correlate is probably the most replicated result in all of psychology, and factor analyses is now an extremely popular statistical tool used widely across the social and biological sciences." (pages 392-393)

"G does not appear to be a chimerical statistical artefact, as has sometimes been alleged by Stephen J. Gould and others, but a biological reality fundamental to cognition." (page 393)

[ajschumacher]

Human Biodiversity: the Pseudoscientific Racism of the Alt-Right https://forward.com/opinion/346533/human-biodiversity-the-pseudoscientific-racism-of-the-alt-right/

sometimes referenced as just "HBD" as in https://twitter.com/doxtdatorb/status/1228931953023430656

[ajschumacher]

"The difference of natural talents in different men is, in reality, much less than we are aware of ... The difference between the most dissimilar characters, between a philosopher and a common street porter, for example, seems to arise not so much from nature as from habit, custom, and education." (page 85 of Didau's Making Kids Cleverer, quoting Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations)

[ajschumacher]

The Lambda School data science program requires applicants pass the Criteria Cognitive Ability Test (CCAT), which has questions as here: https://www.aptitudetests.org/criteria-ccat/

[ajschumacher]

https://wiki.c2.com/?FeynmanAlgorithm has some interesting discussion, starting from the joke (?):

The Feynman Algorithm:

1. Write down the problem.
2. Think real hard.
3. Write down the solution.

[ajschumacher]

this Binet mental age thing is an interesting stepping stone from IQ as ratio with 15-year-old or whatever:

from a 1944 paper, "Verbal Intelligence of the American Adult" https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00221309.1943.10544458

"The first and most imposing enterprise in testing representative adults was the testing of draftees in 1917 (6). The scores for a large sample of those tested were analyzed and reported, and these scores have provided adult norms on the Army Alpha test. A translation of these results into Binet mental ages, giving approximately 13 years as the average mental age for the white draft group, aroused much heated debate during the years after the war."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_age

[ajschumacher]

"general EF" Individual Differences in Executive Functions Are Almost Entirely Genetic in Origin

not 100% directly related, but:

"As Dostoevsky reminded us, “It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.”" (page 141)

(reference is to Crime and Punishment)

Genetically-mediated associations between measures of childhood character and academic achievement

In Figure 7.3 of the book, a list based on that ref:

• grit
  • passion and perseverance for long-term goals
• growth mindset
  • belief that intelligence is malleable
• intellectual curiosity
  • desire to think about difficult or new problems
• mastery orientation
  • motivation to learn for the sake of learning
• self-concept
  • belief that one is smart and capable of learning
• test motivation
  • trying hard on tests

"The SNPs correlated with non-cognitive skills were correlated with higher risk for several mental disorders, including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, anorexia nervosa, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. This result warns us against viewing the genetic variants that are associated with going further in current systems of formal education as being inherently “good” things. A single genetic variant might make it a tiny bit more likely that someone will go further in school, but that same variant might also elevate their risk of developing schizophrenia or another serious mental disorder." (page 144)

Strong genetic overlap between executive functions and intelligence

[ajschumacher]

“The most important step in becoming successful in anything is to first become interested in it."

— Sir William Osler

[ajschumacher]

https://planspace.org/2011/05/15/iq-vs-motivation-vs-activity-level/

[ajschumacher]

chess masters are way better than normal people, or even fairly good people

think exhibition matches where they play a dozen people at the same time and beat them all

10x

[ajschumacher]

"The key to elite chess is preparation, which Stockfish facilitates." (page 84, Seven Games)

[ajschumacher]

"Bonhoeffer‘s Theory of Stupidity" https://sproutsschools.com/bonhoeffers-theory-of-stupidity/

https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/bonhoeffers-theory-of-stupidity-explains-the-world-perfectly-957cbb3fbac1

[ajschumacher]

well-defined vs. not https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/why-arent-smart-people-happier

[ajschumacher]

The plateauing of cognitive ability among top earners https://academic.oup.com/esr/advance-article/doi/10.1093/esr/jcac076/7008955

[ajschumacher]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need_for_cognition

[ajschumacher]

"Engineered Genius" - like in Hidden Potential, how do we create really good performance?