Posts tagged with intelligence
John Bonner’s slime mould movies (por princetonuniversity)
Heraclitus (who died ∼475 BC)
I might be exaggerating a little if I say things like
But I wouldn’t be completely making sh_t up. Those messages, or something like them, ∃ in the culture I come from and maybe in the culture you come from as well. Peter Thiel described a tournament to get into an Ivy League school, followed by a harder tournament to get into Stanford Law, followed by a harder tournament on Wall Street, … and left out of his story the 99.99% of us who didn’t even make it to the first tournament.
What about the supermajority? I’m pretty sure a hundred weak people can lift more weight than the strongest man on Earth. And I’m even more sure that the 50 smartest people on the planet can’t run Wall Street by themselves—let alone all the shops, shipyards, data centres, and engineering the runways of the airstrips to a millimetre of precision, that make up the economy.
So what about the rest of us? How much sense does it make to see the world in Thiel’s terms—the best versus the rest?
Well basic economics 101 tells us that a modern economy is made up of many specialised actors. The people who bend the tubes to make neon lights don’t know much about sewing shoes or sourcing the material for shoes, and none of those people know—or should know—how to do Ruby on Rails or Haskell.
Some people who research expertise also have developed a theory of 10,000 hours. If you practise something for 10^4 hours—so five years of work experience or ten years as a very, very consistent hobby—then you become awesome at it. A related theory is that if I have been doing something for a year or two and Peter Thiel tries to compete with me on it, I will still win regardless that he’s a chess master and a Stanford Law graduate and handsome and so on.
In other words, ∃ an equally or more compelling narrative than the A Player narrative: about everybody being different and that being okay and in fact more efficient.
Viewing education as a signalling mechanism to rank a one-dimensional hierarchy of best to worst people is one possibility—and one that BCG possibly uses to its advantage in applying profitable friction to the large companies who for some reason decide that some A+++ 24-year-olds know how to run their business better than they do. (Ooh, I really wanted to work in ‘fiction’ and ‘friction’ somehow. Too bad I was never a good enough student or I could have worked it.) But the dominant messages I hear from people who went into highly-paid frictional professions—accounting, law, consulting, finance—are that they want their kids to “find their own path”—i.e., do something with a tangible contribution to the society. Not necessarily fundraising for Laotian villagers, but something profitable that measurably increases the wealth of their community.
So the “everyone is a special individual” message doesn’t just come from warmhearted Kindergarten teachers wearing seashell necklaces. If specialisation, difference, and diversity are more important than uniformly learning
— then the hard-nosed economists are also telling us the same message. Maybe it is not about me being better than you and worse than Peter Thiel, but rather a high-dimensional poset network of symplectic skills and attributes, mostly not substitutable by smart people over dumb people and yet all worth pursuing as they complementarily add size to the world GDP.
We are telling kids who are good at school that they have better opportunities than others (and kids that are not good at school that they are doomed). Then we are telling kids who are good at school to stay in school. We (including politicians who make policy that entrenches this) are telling kids that being good at school is the key thing needed to earn a decent living.
This is ALL lies.
The fact that we then compound those lies by telling the people who are good at university that they should stay in university and that if they are really good someone will eventually pay them to stay in university is just the icing on the cake of lies.
In philosophical debates about absolute truth, people cite “the truths of pure mathematics” as beyond reproach—eternal and universal things discovered/invented by us fallible mortals. But the more deeply I look into these issues myself, the more I see evidence that mathematics is not as stable as I’d supposed:
Norman Wildberger thinks real numbers have been a wrong turning in mathematics. He also claims, here in the video above, that angles θ are illogical. (Or maybe I should say, certain angles are used illogically.) Some angles, like 60°, can be constructed via ruler and compass. But other angles like 34° and 26° are not constructible.
So although “I know what you mean” when you talk about a real number or an angle that measures 90.1°, maybe we should both recognise that they don’t really make sense and speak in air quotes.
Related but different. On the topic of left-brains, right-brains, closed-minds, and open-minds in science. You can see youtube user njwildberger being beaten up on the XKCD forums for suggesting such unconventional and—ick!—philosophical ideas. Listen to these self-satisfied, smarter-than-thou sabelotodos savaging the “ridiculousness” of someone who would undercut this Well Established Knowledge.
I find that incredible because XKCD’s vision of science seems to be about open-mindedness, learning from data, and accepting the truth based on logic rather than tradition or popularity.
OK, “data” needs to be replaced with something else in theoretical maths. But you could at least listen to what the guy’s saying rather than his credentials or his sweatpants. (Conversely: if John Conway says it, does that make it true? He gives talks in sweatpants as well.)
I bet ≥ some of these know-it-alls have lauded Galileo for smashing the accepted wisdoms handed down from Aristotle with cold, hard logic. What’s the difference to making fun of njwildberger because he’s suggesting something weird or unconventional? Prima facie it makes sense to me.
Maybe you don’t care about the foundational issues (isn’t that called hand-waving elsewhere?), or maybe you can disprove what he’s saying—but this PageRank 7 site is just attacking him rather than his idea. (For example they look at his publication record to see if he’s “someone we should take seriously”.)
You want to know why people aren’t interested in science? I think it’s in part because science and maths is associated with such stuck-up, judgmental people—putting down everyone who’s less “intelligent” than they are.
You may have heard that attitude is everything. Perhaps. How you view the world will definitely affect what you do.
But that’s just it: it is what you do that is important, not how you feel or how you present yourself to the world. Attitude, then, is only as good as the actions that it supports. And in many cases, the actions themselves affect the very attitude you have.
(Source: sonshi.com)
—David Brooks
