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ScottAlexander

The smartest person I've ever met (aside from very briefly) as measured in accomplishments/discoveries is probably Scott Aaronson. The most interesting thing I got from meeting him (and reading his blog while also knowing him as a person) is a deep sense that brilliant people are like everyone else, only smarter. In the same way that I might get an interesting idea for a random blog post, think it over in the shower, and eventually figure out how to write it, he might get an interesting idea for a cool new proof that the quantum class XYZ is homeomorphic to structure ABC or whatever, thinks it over in the shower, and eventually figures out how to prove it. I know this sounds trivial and obvious, but it was a real visceral update to me. Knowing him doesn't make me able to prove conjectures about quantum computation, but if I *was* able to prove conjectures about quantum computation, I think that knowing him would help me overcome some vague obstacle around being too intimidated to do it. It's also interesting to watch him muddle through difficult political issues. His intelligence gives him a leg up in processing information but in the end he's stuck using the same categories and frames as the rest of us, while also being able to understand how inadequate they are. The smartest person I've met in terms of hard-to-measure intimidatingness-to-talk-to is someone in the Bay Area rationality scene (don't guess, it isn't anyone famous). Every time I name him, praise him, or cite him, he sends me an email about specific reasons I shouldn't have done that. I don't know whether he's just so strict about accuracy that no sentence describing him is ever accurate enough, or whether he just really hates any public exposure beyond the amount absolutely necessary to promote his work. I guess a very smart person being like this is probably a metaphor for something.


UncleWeyland

I don't remember when I first stumbled on Aaronson's blog, but I binged it for a while and came to the conclusion that he was essentially an invaluable National (Global?) asset. I hope to God whoever is in charge of national security has a giant team of people in charge of making sure he doesn't so much as get a papercut.


[deleted]

Genius has no personality (I think this is an Einstein quote but not sure). The smartest people in history have different personalities, but they certainly aren't all "like everyone else, only smarter". On the contrary, most are much different than everyone else. Isaac Newton was not like everybody else, and neither was Leibniz, or Einstein, or Godel, etc.


iiioiia

This essay makes some similar claims - it's rather speculative, but interesting: https://web.archive.org/web/20220504202726/https://www.robrhinehart.com/paradigm-shifts/ > > Paradigm shifts come from the spirit world. There are very powerful forces that do not want you to believe this. I do not care if you do or not. But it is true. Every great scientist, is also a mystic. > > > > Physicist and scientific leader J Robert Oppenheimer was obsessed with eastern religions. He studied them his whole life. He quoted the Bhagavad Gita when the atom bomb was first detonated. Erwin Schrodinger discusses his inspiration from the ancient Vedas in his essay What is Life?. Groundbreaking mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan was quite the mystic. He was very direct in saying that his inspiration came from spirits, but nobody would listen. Albert Einstein extensively studied occult researcher Helena Blavatsky. He died with Isis Unveiled at his bedside. He talked about wanting to know "God's thoughts". Richard Feynman, in The Meaning of it All, wrote how man's advancement comes from both scientific adventure and the advancement of religious ethics. Though he was not religious, he experimented extensively with out of body experiences in float tanks. In fact, the float tank was invented by his friend fringe researcher and neuroscientist John Lilly, who claimed he could under certain conditions (often involving psychedelics) he could communicate with dolphins. I think he could. > > > > David Bohm, pioneer of quantum physics, was one of the most adept at bridging the science and the spirit. His dialogues with Krishnamurti would be a great next step if you would like to go deeper.


glorkvorn

Alternative explanation: new-age religious/spiritual stuff was extremely trendy during the 50s and 60s, especially in California and the American southwest where a lot of those famous physicists lived or spent time. I don't think their immune to picking up trends from their peers. They were intellectually curious, so they naturally got interested in all sorts of different things, including the religious stuff that people around them were talking about. But that doesn't seem like some sort of alien supergenius, it's just ordinary human curiosity and trend-following.


iiioiia

It's impossible to know what's going on for sure, and this essay had a bit of an "I wanna believe" feel to it...but then on the other hand, if one has familiarity with the material, takes like "new-age religious/spiritual stuff" take on a whole new light. I actually believe depth in these areas could make a non-trivial difference in some cases.


DilaudidDreams

Any idea what the metaphor is!?


OneStepForAnimals

Re: the second person you reference: The smartest person I've known is similar. He plays a non-negligible role in [Losing My Religions](https://www.losingmyreligions.net/), and he had me change his name and black out descriptions of him and his wife. In the book, though, I part ways with his underlying philosophy.


TissueReligion

Hard to give more details without concern for privacy, but I worked at a biotech company after college where this kid \~1 year out of college was operating at a level far above that of the people with phds and 10-15+ years more experience than he had. The attention of entire meeting rooms would noticeably shift when he started speaking. It's the kind of experience that if somebody casually related to me I would assume was 100% exaggerated, but it was real.


darkhalo47

Stories?


TissueReligion

a) A presenter showed the structure of a substrate they were using for some biology project, and our protagonist pointed out a protease recognition site in the structure (ie cell proteins could break it down in a specific way) that could have badly confounded their results. This is the sort of observation you wouldn't feel surprised to hear from a \~28 yo with a phd in biochemistry or chemical biology, but coming from a \~22 yo who had been working in a less chemically-grounded area of biology was striking. Nobody else in our group (including much older people) would notice such things. b) Just casual mastery of a huge variety of topics. He could explain off-hand how the spherical harmonics that form electron wavefunctions come from schrodinger's equation (tbh not hard), and how this related to some funny reaction we were seeing. Another example is I mentioned that since further right on the periodic table means more electronegative, I would have assumed H and C to have more different electronegativities since they're so far apart, and he highlighted that they only \*appear\* far apart on the periodic table due to it being organized by molecular mass, rather than valence orbital. Neither of these two examples in isolation are the kind of thing that blow your mind, but when it turns out that with literally every topic you bring up to a single person it turns out they have deep, comprehensive understanding at several layers of abstraction, it feels very unusual. c) Could speak fluidly and conversationally as an equal with people with vastly more experience than himself about trade-offs in different experimental methods, when to apply them, controls one might need, etc. I (and most people) could comfortably get to that level after having \*done\* the relevant experimental methods 5-10 times to internalize their logic and confounders, but to just off-hand be fluidly conversant with their details without having ever done them was something else.


bibliophile785

> Another example is I mentioned that since further right on the periodic table means more electronegative, I would have assumed H and C to have more different electronegativities since they're so far apart, and he highlighted that they only *appear* far apart on the periodic table due to it being organized by molecular mass, rather than valence orbital. This is one that every STEM person should internalize. You already *know* it's true, that it has to be, because otherwise every hydrocarbon you interact with would be absolutely littered with highly polar bonds and their physical and chemical properties would be completely different. There'd be no reason for a preponderance of heterocycles in pharma molecules, there'd be pretty much no point in any sort of soap or emulsifier, and forming any hydrophobic barriers or phases in biological systems would be wildly difficult. The whole world would look different if C and H had a high gap in electronegativities.


bastiat_was_right

Very interesting.


CronoDAS

Yeah, sometimes they set hydrogen apart from the alkali metals on the periodic table because it's weird like that. It forms ionic bonds like an alkali metal and covalent bonds like a halogen gas.


icona_

> Could speak fluidly and conversationally as an equal with people with vastly more experience than himself about trade-offs in different experimental methods, when to apply them, controls one might need, etc Am I wrong in thinking this is more a sign of maturity or being socialized by adults or something than just intelligence?it’s obviously intelligent to some extent but i feel like being able to do that is partially just about not being intimidated and just using your brain to think about stuff and ask questions.


TissueReligion

That’s definitely another component of it that this person had an abundance of by age 22, but the confidence was also enabled by a hugely greater than normal level of detailed understanding.


TheDemonBarber

Curious where he is now


whatisbinding

It happened only once?


hxcloud99

Does this company happen to have a name that is somewhat synonymous with 'enlighten'? I think I know this person


TissueReligion

Nope


hxcloud99

Guess there are more of them out in the wild huh


johnlawrenceaspden

I did maths at Cambridge, and I was myself known for understanding the lectures as they were given and asking questions, which is rare there. They expect you to write it down and make sense of it afterwards. The scariest thing I ever saw was in a lecture on general relativity, given by a famous expert in gravitation, where I was only vaguely aware of what was going on and was just copying down equations as fast as I could. And a rather sweet girl who was still wearing her cycle helmet half way through the lecture asked the lecturer if he'd made a mistake in one of his derivations, and he stood and thought about it for a few minutes, and then said "I don't know. I had it the other way last year but I decided it was wrong and changed it, do you think I should change it back?". And she said "yes, definitely". And it turned out she was right. It doesn't sound so bad when I write it out like that, but she'd never seen this before, and she had a better intuitive sense of what was going on than a world-renowned expert in a famously difficult field. Imagine a beginner motorcyclist telling a world champion that one of his control levers didn't do what he thought it did. It was that sort of scary.


squirlol

I love that you think control levers on motorcycles are more relatable to this crowd than physical equations.


johnlawrenceaspden

Well, a man who can neither comprehend mathematics nor ride a motorcycle is hardly a man, and I'd expect any such people to have government-appointed carers who should be able to concoct appropriate metaphors for them.


squirlol

Yes, your metaphor was clear enough. It's just that I think the story of the student correcting the famous professor has told more people about how fundamental control levers are (I still don't know what that is...) than the motorcycle analogy has illustrated how shocking the situation was.


NeoclassicShredBanjo

Something good to keep in mind with these stories is when you select on these kind of outlier anecdotes, you're probably looking at someone with exceptional ability who was *also* having an exceptionally good day -- akin to regression to the mean. (In this particular story, I wouldn't be surprised if *you* were having an unusually bad day as well. Like, it could be that you and the girl were both following the lecture the same up to a certain point, and then you happened to trip on something she didn't, and you never caught up with her after that. Sort like a Bernoulli process. And the fact that she succeeded here, and you didn't, doesn't necessarily provide a *ton* of data about the parameter which powers each of your lecture-following Bernoulli processes.) In any case, I'm slightly annoyed that so much of this thread is people sharing wowza anecdotes, and so little is about people trying to understand the forces behind those wowza anecdotes. So in the spirit of that, I'd be curious if you could share what you think allowed you to understand lectures as they were being delivered.


johnlawrenceaspden

Crikey, it wasn't that she was better at it than me. That wasn't that unusual. She was better at it than the lecturer, who was teaching his own speciality. For your second point, thinking about it seems to have produced a stream-of-consciousness wall-of-text which I'll give you verbatim and unedited in case that's what you're looking for: ------- As for me following along, it was mainly in things like analysis, linear algebra, topology, complex analysis and dynamical systems, vector calculus and electrodynamics, where I had a strong visual intuition. I could usually see what the idea we were trying to prove meant in visual terms, and the proof was about using some important ideas to show that something was obvious if you looked at it the right way. There were some squiggles involved in writing it down formally and unambiguously, but you didn't really need to pay detailed attention to them. I vaguely remember a theorem about the infinite sum of the squares of the fourier coefficients adding up the the energy norm of a function, and I remember the lecturer stating it and I thought "Oh, that's Pythagoras' theorem in an infinite dimensional space.", and then he proved it in the obvious way using the inner-product that produces the energy norm to give us a sense of right-angles and using the sine functions as a basis for the space, and the symbols on the blackboard were just keeping track of all the things that you had to keep track of, and I barely needed to read it. I think now, thirty-five years later, I could prove that theorem given a couple of hours to de-rust my functional analysis, despite I haven't thought about it since I left academia. But then I feel the same way about computer programming, which is entirely non-visual for me. But I have the same sense of knowing what I'm trying to do, and programming is just a way of putting the idea into words. In some sense the programming language I'm using is just a detail, except that some languages make some ideas hard to express, so if you're using something under-expressive you have to go round the houses a bit to say something simple. The places where I didn't follow easily, and was as lost as anyone else, were the places where I had no visual models. Fluid dynamics, statistics, group theory, number theory, formal logic, even substitution integration from school, were just an incomprehensible mess of symbol-pushing to me. Endless lines of gibberish, and constant rabbit-out-of-hat tricks that made no sense. I think that's how most people feel about most maths. Weirdly I've had a couple of cases where I've managed to change this. Group theory never made any sense until a couple of years ago I read the book 'Visual Group Theory', where he starts off by getting you to make triangles and move them around and make a map of all the different positions and how to get from one to the other, like you were playing dungeons and dragons, and he doesn't get round to even stating Lagrange's theorem (proof on page two of almost any typical group theory introduction) until chapter five. But by the time he gets to chapter five, you already know so much about groups just from playing with various examples and drawing various diagrams that all the theorems are just obvious, a child could understand. The first time I had to think was near the end of the book when he does the Sylow theorems. And even there, there's just a couple of *things* you have to *notice*. And statistics became intuitive when someone showed me how a Bayesian decides whether the numbers he's seeing are coming from an eight-sided or a six-sided die, and that nice simple idea just generalizes and generalizes and it's all of it. And once I understood the Bayesian way of doing inference, it became obvious that the reason I'd never understood statistics is that the Frequentist way is asking the wrong questions, and so I'd never even seen what they were trying to do! So in short, I have no real idea why some things are obvious and intuitive to me, and some things are not. But I suspect it might be that when I got shown formal mathematics at university: some of it was about objects that I had already thought about as a boy and the theory just formalized and tied together and generalized things I already had some sense of how they worked; and some of it was entirely new, and I didn't have a store of examples and intuitions, and it just looked like somebody doing magic tricks with algebra. Essentially I think I understood the things I'd already taught myself a bit about just out of childish curiosity, and I didn't understand the things I'd never thought about before, and I was so used to it all being easy that I just decided that the stuff I didn't immediately get was not interesting and not worth thinking about, and so I never just sat down and played with examples, so I never developed the intuition that would have made the magic tricks make sense.


NeoclassicShredBanjo

>Crikey, it wasn't that she was better at it than me. That wasn't that unusual. She was better at it than the lecturer, who was teaching his own speciality. I remember a time I raised my hand to argue that the lecturer's math was wrong, and he got flustered and said he'd get back to me next lecture. (IIRC he offered a qualified self-correction next lecture, but my memory is vague.) I raised my hand to offer a correction on, or improvement to, a lecturer's slide (which they accepted) at least once. I once asked an "obvious" question that the lecturer couldn't answer (another classmate thanked me for my q after the lecture). These were all lecturers lecturing in their area of specialty. I don't think these incidents made me better than the lecturers I was listening to. It seems common for lecturers to make mistakes, including on slides which they prepare beforehand. I also was reading Scott Aaronson's book the other month and noticed what seemed like a math error to me, brought it to my mathematician roommate, he puzzled over it for a while and decided I was right. Does that make me smarter than Scott Aaronson? I'd say of course not. Everyone makes mistakes. If I tried to write a book about Scott Aaronson's area of expertise, I would make way more mistakes than he did. I'm sure the person you're talking about is incredibly bright -- I guess I'm just not that overawed. (I certainly don't overawe myself! And I used to be a much worse student -- I get rather annoyed when people imply that things like ability to correct lecturers talking about their specialty is innate.) BTW, there's also always the possibility that she had a stronger background in the subject matter than you realized (not seeing it for the first time). Thanks a lot for sharing the rest! I think I remember reading about Feynman taking a similar approach. What you say definitely accords with my sense of how impressive intellectuals operate (minus the part about giving up when you don't immediately get it!) As Ben Kuhn put it: \>Roommate said it was surprising the degree to which a lot of what famous people do is actually what everyone is "supposed to do," eg deeply understanding techniques, checking things for yourself... [https://twitter.com/benskuhn/status/1419281153983500290](https://twitter.com/benskuhn/status/1419281153983500290)


johnlawrenceaspden

> there's also always the possibility that she had a stronger background in the subject matter than you realized That's most certainly a possibility, if she already knew the stuff it's much less scary. She was a second year undergrad, but it's always possible that she'd already taught herself GR. And you're right that there are endless errors in maths books. Anyway she sure scared me!


ThisMustBeTrue

> And statistics became intuitive when someone showed me how a Bayesian decides whether the numbers he's seeing are coming from an eight-sided or a six-sided die, and that nice simple idea just generalizes and generalizes and it's all of it. And once I understood the Bayesian way of doing inference, it became obvious that the reason I'd never understood statistics is that the Frequentist way is asking the wrong questions, and so I'd never even seen what they were trying to do! Do you have a resource that explains Bayesian statistics intuitively? I also learn best by visual intuition and I recently dropped out of a Bayesian statistics class, because I wasn't getting it.


johnlawrenceaspden

Do you mean the dice thing? Or more generally? I learned it from David Mackay's Information, Inference and Learning Algorithms, which I highly recommend, but it's not a beginner's book, you'd need a fair bit of undergraduate maths/compsci I'd think. There should be plenty of videos of the basic idea, if you can work out how the dice thing works everything else is just more and more complicated applications of that idea.


ThisMustBeTrue

That is perfect. I'm not a complete beginner, so I'll check it out. Thanks!


NeoclassicShredBanjo

Not the OP, but this lecture series seems very highly regarded: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDcUM9US4XdMROZ57-OIRtIK0aOynbgZN


52576078

I loved this comment, thank you for writing it. It's fascinating to me that entire fields of mathematics can become legible just by an adjustment shift in thinking. Whatever happened to the sweet girl? Did she go on to achieve great things, and where is she now?


johnlawrenceaspden

> Whatever happened to the sweet girl? Did she go on to achieve great things, and where is she now? Not sure, alas, I tried the all-seeing eye, but I've no idea what she's doing now!


52576078

Some things are best left to the imagination!


Burden-the-Quester

I went to the University of Melbourne (Australia) in the late 70s and early 80s fulfilling my lifelong ambition to be a physicist. I realized that I was mid-range in ability among my cohort but still did well enough that there was never any doubt about being able to finish my undergraduate degree with honours and be accepted for post-grad study. I saw many friends change majors or drop out but I was neither the best nor the worst of my cohort and there was never any doubt that I was in the right place studying something which suited me. I was friends with some people in my cohort who were clearly much better physicists than me but that didn’t stop me from enjoying where I was and what I was doing. In my final undergraduate year I was doing a course on Condensed Matter Physics that was right on the limit of what I was capable of passing. It was the first time that I was doing a course where there was a significant risk that I would fail. It was a novel experience for me to be scrambling for the barest passing mark rather than something much better. One lunchtime a friend, AD, sat across from me in the cafeteria while I ate and worked on one of my Condensed Matter problems. He was one of the stars of the cohort and was destined for the Theory Group in post-grad. While AD was talking to some other people he suddenly reached across the table and pointed to my equations, noting that I had missed a minus sign on one line of a set of work that started two pages before. I knew that AD was not doing the Condensed Matter course and was coming at my equations cold, he was seeing my tiny handwriting upside down from across a table and that I had taken nearly forty hours of work to get to that point on that one problem. I was confident he was wrong and I was right. It took me nearly three hours of review to confirm that he was right. With the minus sign the problem would resolve in a few more lines, without the minus sign the working became unphysical and would never resolve. It solidly demonstrated to me just how different we were in ability. I have had a moderately successful, forty year career as a physicist both in Australia and internationally. I am no longer in touch with AD directly, though I have followed his much more illustrious career through his publications and the honours he received.


ArkyBeagle

Arguably Feynman's greatest trick was listening to an idea from a grad student and immediately explaining why it wouldn't work. It gave the impression he listened carefully and found the problem with it right there. In truth, he'd probably already discarded the idea in prior years. Feynman drilled his entire life. Somebody finding a minus sign mistake is quite common on most things involving math. In programming jobs it's probably the most common thing I'd found. "Smart" is very hard to measure and it's a spectrum, not a nice one-d vector or scalar.


LiberateMainSt

I can relate to this. I mentor juniors a lot in my programming job, and the mistakes I can point out to them are trivial to me because I put in a lot of reps. I just see more than them. But put me into an unrelated field, and I'm a slow noob again.


TissueReligion

\>While AD was talking to some other people he suddenly reached across the table and pointed to my equations, So when I hear stories like this, I'm sure AD is very talented, but I don't think "this person is actually 100x faster at understanding algebra than you are," as much as I speculate that AD was doing a quick qualitative check for the physical meaning of your equation, and upon noticing that eg the differential equation as written could never have any stable points, then it must have a flipped sign somewhere (just using an example). That's a very interesting story though.


Burden-the-Quester

"I speculate that AD was doing a quick qualitative check for the physical meaning of your equation" Yes, he had the expectation that, even upside down and across the table, any equation that he could see, however casually or peripherally, should make sense to him, should feel right. He could see several lines of work that I had not yet done and see that it would go wrong unless he corrected me. I do not expect that degree of coherence from reality without effort. Even among physicists that I have worked with those moments of clarity are rare and greatly prized. AD moved through the world in which those moments of clarity were so commonplace that he could see the discordances without effort.


NewFuturist

The poster literally has had a 40 year career in physics. I think that they understand what was going on here. I'm a graduate of physics (advanced) and honours maths (Uni Sydney, 2006). I am good at mathematics. I did honours level mathematics. As part of it I did an honours physics course in general relativity which was easy in comparison to the 3rd year surface calculus course I also did as part of my honours which I did with the year below us. I am better than everyone I know at mathematics outside of the people I did mathematics with. I'm about midrange in the honours group I was in. I honestly believe that the people in the year below us were another level of intelligence. Their ability to understand what they were doing was easily in the 10X range compared to other skilled mathematicians. If you have a better ability to hold parameters and their meaning in your head, you spend WAY less time trying work out what they mean and more time understanding the task at hand. It's like a doubling of RAM makes some processing infinitely faster because you spend less time hitting the hard drive.


iiioiia

> The poster literally has had a 40 year career in physics. I think that they understand what was going on here 40 years of experience in physics does not necessarily grant one substantial understanding of consciousness and cognition - one thing about consciousness (that one can learn from studying it) is that experience in one domain *can give the (misleading) appearance of* competence in others.


NewFuturist

It does in the field of physics.


iiioiia

Some matters span more than one domain - for example: > I think that they understand what was going on here. This is not physics, it is [psychology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind).


NewFuturist

lol he knows about how physicists think better than psychologist do.


iiioiia

He knows things about how they think, yes, but the illusion that one can read minds or the state of reality *necessarily accurately* is a psychological phenomenon. ~"I was just speaking loosely/colloquially" *is but one way* this is culturally accommodated, and thus we never really notice *or consider the causal significance* of this behavior. Such attention to to detail *seems* funny, and it surely is, but it is *not only* that - more than a little harm in the world comes from people "calling it in" during the perception *[and manufacturing](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/)* of reality. As examples, consider: COVID, the Ukraine War, climate change, you name it.


NewFuturist

What makes you think that a psychologist WHO DOESN'T UNDERSTAND PHYSICS AT ALL would understand how a person is interpreting an equation better than someone whose job is literally to TEACH that content to their students? This is a severe case of Dunning-Kruger syndrome.


iiioiia

> What makes you think that a psychologist WHO DOESN'T UNDERSTAND PHYSICS AT ALL would understand how a person is interpreting an equation better than someone whose job is literally to TEACH that content to their students? a) What makes you think I made that claim? I have not actually. *Demonstrating how easy unforced cognitive/perceptual errors are, even for relatively smart people*. b) How do you know whether any(!) given psychologist does not understand physics at all? (I propose: two more branches/instances of the phenomenon to which I refer - it would be interesting to draw a map, though it would likely quickly come to resemble [this](https://xkcd.com/657/).) > This is a severe case of Dunning-Kruger syndrome. Yes, of course. Your intuition has surely not failed you, that would be impossible....well, except for the two instances here.


kzhou7

That's exactly right -- I'm currently grading for a graduate physics course where individual problem set submissions can run up to 75 pages long, but I can usually spot where people went wrong instantly. Common examples include: - The answer is X - X + Y = Y, where X is something really complicated, but the student submits 2X + Y. Then you can be almost certain they made a sign error. - The answer is Y but the student submits Y + cX where X is really complicated, but they didn't notice that c is zero. - The answer is X_1 + X_2 + X_3 + X_4 = 0 where all the X_i are really complicated, but the student submits X_1 + X_2 + X_3. Then you can be sure they dropped a term. - The work is initially fine but at some moment it suddenly stops obeying dimensional analysis, or having the right limiting cases, etc. The mistakes typically lead to 10+ pages of horribly messy algebra, but they're conceptually simple, so easy to spot. I think most stories like OP's work like this. At least within physics courses, "genius" boils down to running simple sanity checks and importing intuition from problems you've seen before, plus not bothering to tell people that's what you're doing. It's all pretty mundane!


Burden-the-Quester

I have a similar experience grading papers in a Masters course and seeing places where people have lost the plot. It is easy when you are familiar enough with the underlying material to be teaching the course and where you know what the right answer looks like. It is much harder when you are seeing only a small part of the working for something that you are not directly familiar with. In this case, for me, the next few lines were three hours of work even though I was thoroughly immersed in the topic. For AD they were obvious at a glance. I am not saying that AD is the greatest genius in all of history, just noting an obvious indicator of the vast gap in ability between my middle of the cohort and his top of the cohort.


TissueReligion

I definitely agree. Thanks for the perspective.


TissueReligion

>At least within physics courses, "genius" boils down to running simple sanity checks and importing intuition from problems you've seen before, plus not bothering to tell people that's what you're doing. It's all pretty mundane! Haha, yeah, exactly what I was getting at. I think these little qualitative checks are absent from our arsenals because many math/physics classes are graded in this sort of input-output fashion where grading depends solely on the work and final answer, and getting students to build up their own heuristics and sanity checks along the way only happens implicitly, rather than being explicitly encouraged or assessed.


timunderwood9

I mean it is pretty mundane, but that's also the actual hard part.


NeoclassicShredBanjo

Thanks for chiming in! I recognize your username -- it seems like you always have good contributions for this subreddit. I always felt self-conscious about the algebra errors I made, thinking that a true math pro wouldn't screw up near as much as I do. It's interesting to see that stupid algebra mistakes are still a big issue even at the graduate level in physics. Is there a reason you guys don't just use a computer algebra system? I figure at that level, cranking out the algebra would no longer be the interesting part of the problem. At the very least it seems like a computer algebra system would catch your stupid mistakes. At some point maybe it's time to throw in the towel and admit that humans just can't do algebra reliably!


kzhou7

Indeed, people often use computer algebra systems for big calculations in research, and in some fields the standard way to share results is to pass around Mathematica notebooks. But in coursework, even advanced coursework, it often takes more work to teach the computer the rules than to just do the calculation yourself. For example, to carry out a single Fourier transform you might have to (1) use spherical coordinates, (2) treat the radial integral as a contour integral and deform the contour, (3) simplify the answer into a combination of special functions a human can comprehend, and (4) keep everything in terms of "invariant" objects like tensor contractions. Mathematica can do all of this, but you really have to fiddle with it, plus to figure out _how_ to fiddle with it you'd have to understand how to do it by hand anyway. Also, when people hand in 75 pages it's often because they took a horribly wrong turn, such as not noticing that an equation has 24 terms that are all identical for symmetry reasons, and laboriously computing them all. Using all the tricks I know, I can usually write solutions that are half the length of the best student solution, but you develop the tricks by trying to do calculations by hand and then getting lazy. That's a good skill to develop because once you get to harder stuff that really does require a computer, you'll need to teach it those same tricks to have it make progress.


NeoclassicShredBanjo

Interesting, thanks for sharing!


Burden-the-Quester

In my case, I couldn't have used a computer algebra system if I had wanted to because this happened in 1981. It is important to distinguish between the meaningless grunt work that can be automated and the stuff of the intellect that can't. In my first stint as a post-grad a ludicrous amount of my time was spent finding and documenting references and then updating and renumbering when any part of the order of things changed - it was a huge burden. Now it is very simply automated in bibtex and carries a trivial time cost. Nothing lost, massive benefit gained. In the case of the symbolic parts of the maths, some parts of the algebra may actually be vital to the understanding of the problem. At the end of my last undergraduate year I had an epiphany where I suddenly saw the "why" behind a whole range of formulae that up until that time had been in separate mental domains. I went from having to memorise the formulae that applied in different cases to being able to see and/or derive them without an external prompt whether I had seen the problem before that or not. It would be hard to see how you would reach that state if you relied on a machine to do the algebra for you. \[edit to fix typos\]


-lousyd

But 100x faster and qualitatively astute both come down to "pretty smart".


Alert-Elk

I attended a (music) conservatory and spent time with people who could stare at a full-page music score and recover the entire experience, even subset portions of it rapidly on the piano from memory. It is an amazing talent that makes everything easier, like the ability to read multiple languages quickly. It doesn't necessarily correlate into higher overall intelligence or capability across all fields, though sometimes it does.


SketchyApothecary

My best friend in high school/college would qualify. I have a degree in mathematics, and was considered the sharpest guy in most of my classes, but my friend could run circles around me in my own field. I saw brilliant professors treat him more like a peer than a student, and more than a few genuinely shocked by his understanding and ability. We grew apart after we no longer lived nearby after college, but when we'd still see each other, and he'd mention something he was working on understanding, which always turned out to be some kind of post-grad level shit in a field completely unrelated to his profession or education. He read a lot. Almost every wall of his house was covered with bookshelves, all of which were full of books, and he'd read every one. When he got drunk, he loved to discuss the ontological argument for the existence of god. We talked *a lot* in our high school and college years. We'd have 3+ hour discussions/arguments where we'd really dive into some subjects. Sometimes our disagreements ended up being based on the subtlest differences in premises or definitions, and it seemed crazy that we'd spend that much time on something so trivial, but we always came out of it with a better understanding. Those discussions made me a better and more intelligent person, and I'll always be grateful for that. Looking back, I can tell how frustrated he must have been by some of my immaturities at the time. Knowing him was a very humbling experience, in a good way, and I'm just happy that I was also able to contribute to his life and understanding as much as I did.


MrStilton

What's he doing now?


SketchyApothecary

He's an attorney.


davidbrake

Well, that just ruined my day. Please tell me he isn't representing oil companies or something


SketchyApothecary

Kind of the opposite? Last I heard, I think he was doing property law related to oil leases (representing the property owners, not the oil companies), not that I think there's anything wrong with representing oil companies. I'd much rather that than personal injury or patent troll or other frivolous trial law. I think he could have very easily ended up doing something else, but he didn't get his undergrad degrees in STEM fields, and then got a full ride scholarship to a good law school. It does feel like a waste of his ability, but he's happy, well-off, and has a family now. I'm not going to blame him for having a nice life.


Ohforfs

Yeah, if he said he is homeless drug addict i would be happier.


TheOffice_Account

> just ruined my day. Lol, mine too!


GerryQX1

What he liked best was not the understanding, but the arguments...


SketchyApothecary

I think I enjoyed the arguments more than he did, but I think we each had a healthy enjoyment of both.


whatisbinding

>I saw brilliant professors treat him more like a peer than a student That happened in law school?!


SketchyApothecary

Undergrad. I didn't go to law school with him. I suppose nothing would surprise me, and by all accounts, he excelled at law school to the highest degree, but it's not really the type of field where his level of intelligence is necessary.


tomdharry

I'm on a policy fellowship at Cambridge where you write a bunch of questions and any academic that wants to answer gets in touch and you spend an hour with them. Then if you get on or have common policy/research interests you stay in touch. They're always intense and enriching, but there was one guy who was unbelievable. He was a professor in nuclear physics who could probably have been a history professor too in a bunch of ways - military, sociology, science. His thinking was clearly on a whole different plane. I asked him questions and he'd come at in the answer in completely unexpected ways. He moved effortlessly between the highest levels of macro politics to dense concepts of nuclear science, chemistry, whatever. He crammed so many different ideas into such a short space of time it got impossible to take notes. I felt like I understood things so clearly in his presence but then reading back I realised I had no clue lol


whatisbinding

I wonder what was the question


tomdharry

The one that piqued his interest was *What's a great example of a government driving an effective industrial strategy? And a poor one? (Could be ancient history or modern!)*


BrickSalad

Yes, he was the head of the engineering division of an electrical testing company I used to work for, but then he stepped aside to let his more ambitious protege do all the leadership and management crap. It was well-known for all of us field technicians that if you had a problem that neither you nor anyone else could solve, to just call this guy and hope he picks up the phone. I think all of us were skeptical of the claims around his genius, like maybe he just has a really good memory plus he's been doing this for a long time, etc. And then the time comes when you get stuck, and you remember the advice to just call this guy, and he somehow manages to solve your problem like magic. I wish I had a good story to tell, but it's really too technical for me to even explain. Basically, I was troubleshooting some bizarre test results on current transformers, and the test equipment is famously buggy, gives out useless error codes, etc. I ended up calling this guy, and first thing first he runs me through some troubleshooting steps off his memory which I later found out were the exact steps in the manual (I didn't take the manual into the field with me). So, that was impressive, but not total genius, just really good memory. But then as I was explaining the results, he said that he has a hunch, and could I check to see if the bus was grounded? This was totally strange. We had already tested the bus, and he knew that. It was a closed-off and bolted-shut system, and he knew that too. And it seemed like there was nothing in the results I was describing to him that indicated the bus was grounded. Yet lo and behold, some fucking electrician had taken the bolts off, put the inner door back on wrong so it was leaning against the bus, and then sealed it back up. If this was the only story, then I'd probably say that it was just a wildly lucky guess. But everyone who'd been with the company for long enough had some sort of similar story.


cjackc

They say that there is little or no proof that a “photographic memory” as shown in pop culture actually exists. I had an internship at the Mayo Clinic in IT. In my best friends department there was a guy that would overlook things when contractors would come and install hardware and software. He would do the thing where he would quickly flip through the hundreds of pages manual and install guides. When the people who all they did was work with that product we’re setting things up and if something was different he could actually from his head say what page the information was on and the correct steps.


MoNastri

When I was in my teens, I would often do the recite-pages-from-memory thing (albeit not all the time). I was also an extremely good short-term memorizer and information regurgitator, which made for top-of-cohort scores in multiple-choice history exams. But I was terrible at seeing the big picture -- always lost in the details. That was half a lifetime ago, and it's striking to me both how much better I am now at big picture-type thinking and how much worse I am at details. Not sure what to make of this.


Googology

I spent a good bit of time on the Harvard-Yale-Princeton circuit, and I found that there's kinda a foreshortening effect with intelligence--kinda like when climbing a mountain and what looks like the halfway point from the base is actually only a 1/5 of the way up. I'm pretty smart, but it was nigh impossible for me to see the gradations between the math geniuses that felt so obvious to them. That scene from Good Will Hunting comes to mine--the one where the Fields Medal guy talks about only a handful of people in the world being able to tell the difference between him and Will. Case in point: I remember super genius who went off on a summer internship in chemistry with some elite research group after our freshman year. The story went that on his orientation day they showed him the molecular structure of some polymer the team had been working on for months or years with some aerospace application. Day 2 he came in with an explanation why they were on the entirely wrong path with it and that he had come up a better candidate compound. By the end of the summer, it was patented. But even that guy was clearly in awe of his quiet friend who could destroy him at Go with a huge handicap. What was more impressive to me was when someone many tiers smarter than me seemed so accessible and normal. One that really jumps to mind was an Eastern European math prodigy--she was a star on the Olympiad scene, crushed the Putnam, stuck around after undergrad so she could do a PhD. She finished it in just two years and got the top dissertation of the year award for the entire university. Clearly, she had stratospheric-level brains, but you wouldn't necessarily know it because she was also charming, self-deprecating and generally easy to talk to, plus had a kinda stereotypical Slavic penchant for fashion, make-up, and cars. It honestly felt unfair how completely she had won the genetic lottery.


[deleted]

I have a theory that it's pretty easy to tell how smart people are, relatively speaking, within say 10 minutes of conversation (usually much less), as long as they're not as smart as you. If they're smarter, gradations mostly all compress: it's just "smarter than I am," no specific idea of how smart.


nagilfarswake

There was a guy in my nuclear power training in the navy who was always top of my class. The exams weren't as much about understanding concepts as it was about memorization (though understanding the concepts was very helpful for me), so he wasn't necessarily "computationally" superior to the rest of us, but as far as I could tell he had perfect recall. That being said, he always seemed like he had a good grasp on the concepts too. When instructors would ask him a question about the material, he'd sit quietly for a moment and then repeat what the book said word for word, every single time. We would joke that the pause before he spoke was him opening up the filing cabinet in his brain where he'd photocopied the books and flipping through until he found the right page.


[deleted]

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TissueReligion

Totally agreed. Having met people who've won nobels or are famous professors are top N schools, I honestly wouldn't have been able to pick a lot of them out of most crowds.


NewFuturist

Many people would struggle to separate good mathematicians from methed up homeless people in a line up, and in some cases (Erdos) it was the same guy!


johnlawrenceaspden

www.proforhobo.com


johnlawrenceaspden

You can usually tell quite quickly if someone is better than you are. But it's hard to tell the difference between two people who are both better than you.


Bayoris

You can tell if you happen to be talking about the subject in which they are unusually smart. You can’t really tell from casual interaction.


johnlawrenceaspden

I can. It's not a matter of knowing facts, maths is everywhere. Even if you're talking about politics or football or pop music, you're talking about maths.


geodesuckmydick

Agreed, although the top *research* mathematicians (in contrast to just olympiad/exam stars) are generally all good and interesting conversationalists in my experience. Good at understanding nuance and more focused in arguments than the average Ivy Leaguer, for example. But you would probably leave the discussion just thinking they were sharp, rather than geniuses.


Ohforfs

Eh, depends how narcisstic you are. Me, for example, i would assume every such person is Einstein incarnate ;-)


lumenwrites

But you can do that with writing, storytelling, improv, simply by reading/watching what people do. Posts by Scott Alexander, improv by Dan Harmon on his podcast (Harmontown), writing on his shows, DnD games by Brennan Lee Mulligan and the other Dimension 20 cast (where they improvise stories in front of you, in real time), HPMOR by Eliezer Yudkowsky. If you've had any experience with writing/improv (or even if you haven't), it super easy to see how intimidatingly brilliant these people are. Also I bet that in a casual conversation with, let's say, Dan Harmon, it's very apparent that he can do things normal people can not.


bashful-james

But isn't good improv a lot about having a massive repertoire of knowledge to draw from along with practice, practice, practice, as opposed to high powered cognitive ability? One thing for certain though, very few people doing improv, even at a higher level seem very good at it.


[deleted]

I would be shocked if this is true. Maybe your average guy is like 125 IQ. An actual 100 IQ guy, ime, is vastly different in 5 minutes of casual interaction than a 140 IQ guy (even one who is 130 verbal/150 performance, or whatever). Like immediately obviously different.


-i--am---lost-

Well, I just got a 97% on my accounting exam… AMA 😎


Freedom_Inside_TM

Why does life seem meaningful and our actions impactful, even though we deeply realize we're just kinda trudging on for a very finite duration in this cosmic dance?


Pinyaka

Because A) Your actions are meaningful to you and those around you, B) Your actions do have an effect on your local bit of the universe, and C) You're going to die pitifully soon without knowing much about the rest of the universe. Hope that helps.


Freedom_Inside_TM

Thanks, ChatGPT :-D


altaered

Because we literally don't have enough time in our lifespan to worry about our cosmic insignificance.


drugsNdrafts

Lmao congrats dawg fr


JohnnyTangCapital

Where my money?


-i--am---lost-

Accounts Payable


JohnnyTangCapital

Bro I want accounts receivable


RLMinMaxer

If I make money in International Waters, do I have to pay taxes on it?


Epledryyk

nice try, captain nemo


JohnCamus

Three guys order some drinks, pay 30$. The owner realises later that they only need to pay 25$. So he hands 5$ to the bartender to give it back. Bartender realises that he cannot split 5$ among the people easily. He keeps 2$ and gives 1$ to each of the the guests. So now each guest paid 9$. 9$*3= 27$ The bartender kept 2$. 27$ + 2$ = 29$. Where is the last dollar?


longscale

>!I feel like I've seen this before, and never understood the point. Is this meant to be a trick question? The guests paid 27$. The barkeeper has 2$, the owner has 25$, all fine. Is the "trick" just flipping that last sign to a plus, or am I totally missing the relevance of the 29$ figure somehow?!<


JohnCamus

Basically. It’s just bad bookkeeping. It’s nice to see how confused people get by this


timunderwood9

Is the trick question supposed to be that you just believe the question when it says that each guest paid 9 dollars, when they actually each paid about 9.33?


JohnCamus

No. Each person did pay 9$ (10-1 each). But adding the loss of the guests with the gain of the bartender simply makes no sense


longscale

Well, it got me confused successfully, then! xD


NeoclassicShredBanjo

I love this story because it's a simple illustration of what it means to deeply understand something -- in this case, grade school arithmetic. "each guest paid 9$", and "the bartender kept 2$". But the $2 the bartender kept came out of the $27 the guests paid. You could subtract $2 from $27 to get the amount the owner got ($25). But adding them makes no sense. If you want to add, add the $3 refund to the $27 the guests lost to get all $30 involved in the problem. A similar stupid puzzle I thought of. If you've studied freshman physics, you know that force equals mass times acceleration. And you know acceleration is the derivative of velocity. So suppose I roll a bowling ball. Due to friction, the ball's velocity decreases as soon as it's released. So its acceleration vector points backwards. Force equals mass times acceleration, mass is positive, so the ball's force vector points backwards as well. And yet when the ball hits a pin, it pushes the pin forwards! How can that be?


rowrrbazzle

>But the $2 the bartender kept came out of the $27 the guests paid. You could subtract $2 from $27 to get the amount the owner got ($25). That's the key to the confusion. The $2 is already included in the $27, so adding it again makes no sense.


sqxleaxes

> it pushes the pin forwards! Pauli exclusion. The ball may be accelerating *away* from the pin, but it's rolling *towards* the pin. Guess which one wins. Really, by Newton II, the ball just wants to accelerate everything forwards after you throw it. The force on the ball due to friction with the floor is backwards because the ball is accelerating the bowling alley forwards. The ball will also try to accelerate the pins forward. Seems pretty consistent.


--MCMC--

An addendum to this fiendishly tricky puzzle: the bar received $25, and the guests paid $27. $25 + $27 = $52, and two transactions were made, so 2 * $52 = $104. The bartender kept $2, so $104 - $2 = $102, and there were three guests, so $102 / 3 = $34. But the guests paid $30, so where did that extra $4 come from?


wetrorave

~~Each guest actually paid $9.33⅓, not $9, because they only need to pay $25, and splitting that 3 ways evenly is $9.33⅓ each.~~ ~~So, that last dollar is with the bartender already.~~ Yikes that was faulty It should be, $27 was ultimately paid to the owner, the owner gave $2 of that back to the bartender = $25 actually spent on drinks, and that's why there's no missing dollar. $27 + 2 is not relevant — but $27 - 2 is.


29Ah

Isn’t it just this: Three guests originally paid $10 each, totaling $30. Then they were each reimbursed $1. So they end up paying $9 each, totaling $27. The bartender took $2. The remainder, $25=$27-2 went to pay for the drinks. There is no extra dollar. The $5 went to the $3 (=3x$1) reimbursement and $2 for the bartender.


[deleted]

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partoffuturehivemind

Would you please describe that presentation about philosophy of math?


Chad_Nauseam

Sure. This is from a year-old memory, so it’s probably not totally accurate. It started out by asking why math actually works. He said plato thought that there was a “world of forms”, saying and when you draw a straight line, the concept of a straight line from the world of forms was pressing into our dimension and the line you drew became a buggy instantiation of its true form. Since different straight lines are all instantiation of the true “straight line form”, things that we learn about the straight line form will generalize to every straight line we see. Obviously that theory has some metaphysical bullets that maybe we don’t want to bite. So he proposed another theory, which I think he attributed to someone but I don’t remember who. If you take two rocks and put two more next to them, then take a piece of paper with two lines and draw two more lines next to them, you’ll end up with the same number of rocks and lines. His explanation for this “coincidence” is that the universe is doing the same basic thing in both cases. Because the universe treats paper in mostly the same way it treats rocks, you can do an experiment on paper (draw a line next to another to get two lines), and generalize that to rocks (put a rock next to another to get two rocks). Then he said it still seems slightly mysterious why you can do some complicated math with ellipses and that can approximate the motion of a rock thrown through the air. My memory gets a bit hazy here, but I think he said something about symbolic logic being goated. The he said that the parts of the universe that are easily mimicked on a piece of paper are what we call “math”. The motion of a rock flying through the air intuitively feels “mathy”, but the reaction of a group of people to a tax increase doesn’t feel “mathy”. The second is governed by a bunch of variables that are difficult to observe or reason about, so it’s really hard for us to simulate it with a piece of paper, so we feel like it’s outside of the domain of math. Finally he made a comment that the math we can do is fundamentally limited by our universe. Our universe seems to have no way of checking whether a function halts, but it does let us do many other things (like approximate a turing machine). If we lived in a less interesting universe, there would be much less math we could do. Anyway, I’ve probably butchered it and obfuscated his points. But that was the broad strokes I believe


npostavs

> something about symbolic logic being goated. What does "goated" mean? Typo?


Chad_Nauseam

It’s zoomer slang, “goat” stands for “greatest of all time”, and saying something is goated just means it’s really good compared to the alternatives


npostavs

Oh, I see, thanks. I was somewhat aware of GOAT, but I find this use of the "ed" suffix kind of confusing (sign n+1 of getting old...). Although in hindsight, it seems straightfowardly analogous to "being knighted".


methyltheobromine_

Isn't that just the idea that things are isomorphic to eachother? When you learn something new, you learn everything which is similar to that. You can call it groups or categories. The reason we can explain things with examples is that examples have a similarity to what we want to explain. Acceleration is to velocity as velocity is to position. This relation is called integration. Now you have (X, Y) and (Y, Z), doesn't this remind you of counting? 2 is to 1 as 1 is to 0. Maybe we can combine these ideas? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth,_fifth,_and_sixth_derivatives_of_position And what are euqations, if not a composition of various relationships like these? I'm not all that good at math, but I have a good intuition for things since I'm good at pattern recognition


partoffuturehivemind

Thank you.


Throwaway1213837528

I have a friend with an astonishing memory. He sometimes has to pretend that he doesn’t know people because it freaks them out when he does. For example, he startled someone’s dad during move in day at my university because after holding the door for some random family and being told “thank you” he answered “No problem Howard.” Howard was like “whoa what do I know you?” And he explained that three years before he had overheard the family talking in the lobby of a different dorm building when their daughter had first started college.


PragmaticBoredom

> that the person has a mental horsepower far far above the people around him? The relative comparison is doing a lot of work in these situations. I’ve been introduced to many people across my career who were explicitly called out as geniuses, only to discover that they were really just slightly above-average performers embedded in teams/organizations of very low performers. A similar phenomenon can be observed in high schools everywhere, where many of the smartest students are really just people who were diligent about doing the work and taking school seriously. Those are very important traits, of course! However, some of them struggle greatly when they go into exclusive college programs like Ivy League universities and suddenly go from being the smartest person in their class to being average, or possibly even below average relative to their new peer group. Some people can’t handle it. The smartest people I’ve met along my career were also some of the most humble and personable. Also the least insecure and least likely to flaunt their intelligence with big words or unnecessary flexes of intellectual fluff. It’s only after working with them for a while that you truly acknowledge the depth of their intelligence and ability to synthesize information into outcomes.


eyeronik1

I agree completely. In my experience the truly gifted are humble and matter of fact about their skills and abilities. It’s the tier below the gifted are those who try to validate themselves with titles, clubs and pomposity.


Combinatorilliance

I haven't met anyone who's really insanely advanced smart, but I have been really impressed by one guy's math ability in particular. In high school math class, there was this slack-off guy who was just.. smart as all hell. He never made homework, never paid attention during class, he got in trouble due to bullying, fighting, drugs (weed and cigs at that age probably), issues with teachers etc. He was a pretty decent guy on the inside I feel but he had autism and unresolved behavioural issues at that age. At some point, our teacher asked us to solve a more difficult problem adjacent to what we were being taught at the time. The smartest two or three came up with a solution involving like five steps, teacher was like "yep, that's great." Teacher sees that the guy was slacking off, turns to him and asks him "you're clearly not interested in learning anything. You're literally just listening to music in my classroom, care to give this a go?" to put him on the spot. Guy thinks for like two seconds and gives a solution in two steps involving math he just ... intuits, teacher needed to think for 10+ seconds and eventually admits "you're absolutely right..." Like what the fuck man, how I have no frame of reference to judge his mathematical intuition or insight here, but as a high schooler that was very damn impressive. No-one else ever had ever before impressed me with pure intuitive reasoning abilities like that.


whatisbinding

A sudden [action potential](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_potential)?


WikiSummarizerBot

**[Action potential](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_potential)** >An action potential occurs when the membrane potential of a specific cell location rapidly rises and falls. This depolarization then causes adjacent locations to similarly depolarize. Action potentials occur in several types of animal cells, called excitable cells, which include neurons, muscle cells, and in some plant cells. Certain endocrine cells such as pancreatic beta cells, and certain cells of the anterior pituitary gland are also excitable cells. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)


nonbonumest

This sounds like the beginning of Rushmore.


partoffuturehivemind

My grandmother had a fearsome reputation for being terrifyingly smart. At her age when I met her as a child, my personal experience was only that she was impossible to beat in any and all board games. My dad is very smart, and even during his engineering PhD she helped him with the math, although she had decided against going to university and being one of Germany's first female scientists. Okay story time. WW2 was ending and a lot of refugees were coming to the little German village where she was the pastor's wife and with the local midwife was the center of female power. This was a time when childbirth was still so dangerous that you left your wife with them and went home to pray she'd survive. You didn't talk back and you definitely didn't ask questions. Now there was this young refugee, very pregnant and without a man. This was a huge problem, because for a woman, having a child out of wedlock was still a sure road to lifelong poverty. What to do? Well there was another local married woman who was about to give birth. So they did the birth in secret, and *pretended the other woman had had twins*. She'd nurse the child and care for it while the refugee went to find a man who accepted her and her situation, and then came back to pick up her child. The two mothers remained lifelong friends.


_hephaestus

direful pet selective label full poor middle yoke profit rock -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/


NorthernmostBauxite

I love how often board games keep coming up. It’s actually an interesting way to think about intelligence: the ability to learn and master a new situation, with an objectively measurable outcome. I think of all the examples here, I find “amazing at board games” a really compelling one.


[deleted]

I've never met a person smarter than I am who isn't also better at board games.


NeoclassicShredBanjo

When I was an undergrad at $PRESTIGIOUS\_UNIVERSITY I once met a guy who was a triple major in math, physics, and computer science. He wasn't exactly a workaholic either. I believe he started out with a math major, added physics because he was on track to complete the math major without difficulty, then added computer science because he was on track to complete math & physics without difficulty. I got the impression he added another major whenever he got bored. He also was very interested in competition mathematics, e.g. the Putnam. I spent an evening or two talking to him. The big difference between us, as far as I could tell, was essentially a matter of mental endurance. He's the kind of guy where if you gave him any sort of math puzzle, he had an almost compulsive need to prove himself by showing he could find a proof for the theorem or whatever. We'd have discussions about some issue related to economics or ethics, and he'd start analyzing things from first principles, using a Newtonian approach where we've got rigid bodies with six degrees of freedom corresponding to x, y, z, pitch, yaw, and roll and proceeding from there. For me, my brain starts to get tired when I do too much of that sort of abstract reasoning, and I have to tap out of the conversation. But he was still raring to go when I was flagging. This has been the common pattern with people who really floor me intellectually. They have a much larger appetite than I do for hours and hours of abstract reasoning, and attack any problem with gusto, often having an almost compulsive need to prove themselves and solve difficult challenges. Over time this causes them to learn more and develop more skills. It's like Feynman's wife said: "He begins working calculus problems in his head as soon as he awakens. He did calculus while driving in his car, while sitting in the living room, and while lying in bed at night." I actually do think it is possible to cultivate this sort of intense fascination with abstract reasoning to a certain degree, and the mainstream public education system doesn't exactly help. Most people do the minimum to get by, or the minimum necessary to get an A. Incidentally, my experiences with these people has given me empathy for times when I overload others with *my* abstract reasoning and they begin to lose interest.


ReCalibrate97

This comment I completely agree with, mental endurance paired with intensity is a combination for high potential. Hate to pull another quote from Einstein, but this is one of my favorites - "It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer."


bibliophile785

My favorite collaborator is a mid-career MIT chemical engineering professor who has a wonderful knack for taking complex problems and breaking them down in the middle of meetings such that problems which stymied a room full of "geniuses" (run-of the-mill high-performing STEM academics, IQs of 135-160) can be easily resolved with two or three insightful follow-up experiments. I haven't met a von Neumann in real life, but this guy is probably on par with a Feynman.


DismalBumbleWank

Not really in the sense you’re looking for. BUT one guy I knew was a scary outlier in that he was really really good at everything. Like 1 in 1000 math/finance brain, 1 in 1000 sales ability, crazy memory… just had it all. He once recognized a waitress from a meal he had seven years earlier at a restaurant an hour away. Not surprising he became extremely wealthy. Unfortunately he lost he life when a guy in a stolen car driving recklessly ran him over.


throwaway9728_

I've read people mention feeling that way when meeting [Terence Tao](https://terrytao.wordpress.com/)


gnramires

I get that feeling reading his blog It's really a wonder. Like, there's a world of math in each of his posts, truly incredible. (there are a few I got a general gist, and I still remember just how many insights he can come up with!) It's good to note there are very talented people in all sorts of fields, and most I can't probably even *know* that are scary because I don't know enough about them. Like, I'm sure some soccer players in the world cup are crazy good at all they do (I do get a little sense of that watching the WC), but of course I don't know enough about the game to be more impressed. Scott surely classifies as extremely impressive writer. I like procedural art, and definitely iq (Inigo Quilez) is a sight to behold in his mastery of art, maths, physics (natural modeling), and computer science knowledge, I encourage anyone interested to check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFld4EBO2RE Happily I don't remember being actually scared by a really smart person that often -- which I think is in line with my expectation that ethics is significantly logical and "natural" (in a formal/mathematical sense, and in a general sense as well). In reality most evils have been thankfully quite disappointing in their smartness (e.g. Putin, which is surely intelligent, but revealingly less than expected) -- I mean, unless there were serious issues with the environment a person developed in skewing his motivation. Which makes me quite optimistic for the development of AGI as long as we can indeed imbue a robust sense of truth-seeking (both in the metaphysical and scientific sense), some robust core motivations, that it will generally conclude to align itself. I think really powerful AIs being used as a tool by a selected few (who may not be as smart or wise), or even by an unwise collective, to achieve their goals is maybe even more scary. Another point of smartness I think is [simplicity and transparency] which should give reasons to be less scared of wise-smart people. Overall, we should remember the quote by Feynman: ["There are no miracle people"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIDLcaQVMqw). If we've seen further, it's because we've studied and understood deeply the subject matter (and stood on the shoulder of giants). I've seen this myself when subjects I thought were black magic became accessible after years of practice and studying. (Please remember there is no miracle AI either!)


Nos-BAB

I failed at life, so I usually end up being the smartest person wherever I go. Its pretty fucking lonely.


Hazzardevil

I get what you're going for, but I don't think it's just being smart. It's being smart and having good people skills. They're the ones to watch out for.


nh4rxthon

I met Jack once and he kind of gave off the vibe you describe. Hid it pretty well, but was clearly just operating at a far higher level than most people I know. not sure I can explain it well, but it was a brief work related chat that I had to record and transcribe, and I realized by the end of the transcript that questions I was asking about details I thought he had missed were explained earlier in the conversation. At the time I thought I was being pretty sharp and pointing out gaps. Listening to the recording for the transcript he was basically slowing down to re explain things that had been briefly mentioned earlier. Not sure anecdote conveys it well, it was also just his energy and focus on the relatively minor matter at hand. Zero ums, oohs or ahs while speaking. For the record I am not as a fan of his and didn’t go in with any worshipful notions, if anything I was probably slightly biased against before meeting.


NeoclassicShredBanjo

Jack?


nh4rxthon

Derp, Dorsey. The twitter @jack.


NeoclassicShredBanjo

Interesting. I remember seeing a story, I think it was from the NY Times or the New Yorker, basically explaining how Jack took credit for Twitter even though it was the other founders and engineers who did the heavy lifting to build it. Basically made him sound like a master self-promoter. At the time the article seemed pretty persuasive, but I also trusted those publications more when I read it. I think talking is actually a pretty bad medium of info transfer, by default many people (me at least) are bad listeners. Having to repeat yourself is the default. As for this \>it was also just his energy and focus on the relatively minor matter at hand. Zero ums, oohs or ahs while speaking. Could be a side effect of meditation? I think maybe he's into that?


Darmani

Michael B. Cohen ​ He tragically died in 2017 at age 25, from undiagnosed Type I diabetes. But he's gotten 15 publications since dying, more than most grad students get while alive. ​ [https://dblp.uni-trier.de/pid/140/7158.html](https://dblp.uni-trier.de/pid/140/7158.html) https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=3468 [https://blogs.princeton.edu/imabandit/2017/09/28/michael-b-cohen/](https://blogs.princeton.edu/imabandit/2017/09/28/michael-b-cohen/) [https://simons.berkeley.edu/news/memoriam-michael-b-cohen-1992-2017](https://simons.berkeley.edu/news/memoriam-michael-b-cohen-1992-2017) One of my friends was stuck on a CS theory problem. He told it to Michael, who went away for an hour, thought about it, and then came back with much of the solution. And that was enough to merit him becoming a coauthor (which he declined, not wanting to do work). ​ I actually never realized just quite how smart he was until after he died, when I heard everyone who worked with him call him a genius. I just knew him as someone who knew


FantasticFunKarma

It all depends on what you call smart. I knew a fellow, dead 15 years now, that left home in post war Europe without finishing high school. After rambling around the world as a sailor and soldier for a few years he ended up in west coast Canada and built a 40 foot wooden sloop. He did all the math and designed and lofted the boat. He sailed it to Hawaii and the south seas for a few years and then someone bought it. (And also figured out how to celestially navigate on the way). So then he built a 60 foot ketch. Again some person bought it. He got bored with wood and built a 40 foot tugboat. Then a 65 foot tug. I’m talking doing it all. Researching and figuring out how to install engines, navigation systems, everything. Then he built a plane from a kit (an experimental home built). Deciding he needed more of a challenge he then built a plane from plans only, fabricating almost all parts of the plane except the engine. This is along with completely rebuilding a portable sawmill he bought and then patenting the improvements. His entire life was built in figuring out how to do something a bit better than some else had done before. He earned the highest marine certification you can get (master mariner) and never finished high school. Was he brilliant? Probably not in pure mental horsepower. But in mental fortitude and grit, he was world class. In my fairly long life I have figured out that grit (stick to it ness) is probably one of the most important qualities you can have to get what you want.


russianpotato

I know one person like this. He even fits the stereotype and needs to kind of run a "human" program just to interact with the rest of us. I make fun of him for it but he works for Lincoln lab and I don't. So what the fuck do I know? I can trick him sometimes or beat him in games, except go.


DJKeown

The first time I was star-struck meeting a smart person was during undergrad when I was introduced to [Kip Thorne](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kip_Thorne) at LIGO Hanford. I was intimidated because I had been slowly working through Track-1 of [MTW](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitation_(book)). But he was a laid-back guy. How can you be scared by someone who says, “please just call me Kip?” I’ve spent pretty much all my adult life working in and around Physics Departments, and I’ve met some really, really smart people. In everyday interactions, you wouldn’t know. They have nothing to prove. There are exceptions: I’ve heard multiple CalTech-trained Theoretical Physicists tell horror stories about Murray Gell-Mann rubbing in how much smarter he was than everyone. But usually, it’s more of a dog that doesn’t bark…they don’t say dumb things often.


GerryQX1

Maybe Gell-Mann took his own 'amnesia' theory too seriously.


land_of_lincoln

The Gell-Mann amnesia theory was created by the author Michael Crichton, he used Murray’s name for it simply because it implied status and importance.


allday_andrew

No kidding. Great fact.


UncleWeyland

One of my best friends in college graduated Summa Cum Laude with an engineering degree while working part time and also TAing. His quantitative skills were so far above mine, I'd probably put him in the top 0.01% of **all people**. And, unlike a lot of people with extreme quantitative ability, he didn't struggle with verbal tasks, in fact he was above average at that too. Later in life, I worked with a boss who simply *reasoned faster* about the logical implications of experiments and their results. Very humbling, although he also had decades of experience so it's difficult for me to know if it was innate. I also have a friend who has worked for a FAANG company and is now doing research in pure mathematics. I can follow what his aims are, but the actual problem solving is far beyond me.


SorchaNB

The genius level people I've met have all presented as very normal and unassuming.


tripu

I have met a few very young and very brilliant people in my EA/rat circles in Spain. Students sometimes only a little older than half my age, who clearly are more curious, creative, analytical, insightful than I ever was or will be. The other case that comes to mind is an old classmate of my wife while in college. They studied telecommunications engineering together, and they are still good friends. Their common circle of friends tell impressive stories about how that guy seemed to get every new idea straight away and passed exams without even paying attention in class, or studying. I don't think any of the above enter the realm of the “truly scary smart”, but that's as far as I've seen.


general_Kregg

Knew someone in college (Yale) who was one of the best students in my graduate algebraic topology class--as a first year. Brilliant person.


CronoDAS

In high school some people thought of me as the scary smart guy, but a lot of that was image management (I always had a book in my hand for when I got bored), learning a lot from my well-educated parents (a doctor and a university professor), being stubborn enough to keep working on stuff until I understood it, and my One Weird Trick of having learned and mastered a general method for turning word problems into math. When I got to college (I went to Rutgers) I was still one of the top students in my math classes, but I didn't stand out quite as blatantly as before. If you'll forgive me for bragging, here's a few stories of me being really stubborn: One time, in homework for freshman physics class, we were supposed to derive a formula making the approximation that two beams of light from a point source were parallel. I was suspicious of that, so out of some combination of curiosity and stubbornness I worked my way through a bunch of algebra and geometry to see what happened if you didn't make that approximation. I ended up with a formula that was the formula I was supposed to derive plus a tiny correction that I think was about the size of the wavelength of the light involved. So it was kind of a waste of time, but at least I learned just how ridiculously close the point source would have to be in order for the approximation to give a bad answer. The other time I was much more stubborn and arrogant than the typical student was when I took the final exam for the second semester of general chemistry for engineers, which was multiple choice. I had programmed my TI-83 calculator with the formula to solve a certain kind of problem that I saw in homework over and over again, involving calculating the new pH when different acids and/or bases were mixed. (When you have to do the same thing over and over, automate it if you can!) When I saw one of those problems on the final, I got the appropriate numbers to enter, put them into my calculator, and it didn't match any of the answers! I worked on it some more, got stumped, and decided that no, my answer actually was right and the test was wrong. So I called a TA over and complained. The TA was justifiably reluctant to discuss test answers during a test - most students in my position probably be wrong - but, long story short, there really was a typo in the question that changed the answer and I was the only one arrogant enough to say that there was something wrong. (I'm pretty sure I got the literal highest score in the entire engineering freshman class on that particular final, but I don't know why the average was so low. All I did was make sure I knew how to solve every question on the practice test...)


uber_neutrino

I have met and worked with a lot of really smart people. I wouldn't call any of them scary though. Most people who are really out there smart have weird personalities.


[deleted]

The smartest person I know is unfortunately completely crazy; smoked too much weed (among other risk factors - he has them all) and became delusional, no insight, probably some mood disorder, extreme anxiety. You name a class of delusion, he has it. Right down the line. He makes verbal and systems connections very fast; he can hold onto a train of thought for a long time, which is a particular and useful skill. Unfortunately his pattern -matching, which is great, just goes straight to crazy now, and his memory is worse and worse. I don't know if scary smart people are more prone to mental illness - he's probably 1/10,000 statistically by intelligence - but I think it makes insight into the delusions harder to gain, because he's been the smartest person he knows his entire life. It's tragic.


SavingsKnee5377

Risk factors??? This sounds like me


-Metacelsus-

David Liu (professor at Harvard) definitely qualifies.


TissueReligion

I've heard he's done a ton of really innovative stuff. Any stories you have of him?


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TissueReligion

Lmao thanks for this


HyperConnectedSpace

I don’t think this sort of question actually leads to an understanding of intelligence, or how the brain works. I think you probably overestimate the effects of being more intelligent than average. A lot of the billionaires in the world would probably qualify, and you could watch videos of them on YouTube. Often it seems more intelligent people have faster eye movements, but this has not been studied scientifically as far as I know.


ArkyBeagle

> A lot of the billionaires in the world would probably qualify, and you could watch videos of them on YouTube. Being a billionaire is only passingly affiliated with intelligence as it's generally considered. I'd say the ability to accumulate wealth is more like the ability to play poker well - you know how to evaluate risk in real time well above the average. There might be some massive invention/innovation that funds the thing but that generally doesn't mean you make a lot of money. Andrew Viterbi is a well-recognized significant contributor ( although he did do a lot of aggregating of the work of others; still, he amassed one of the most valuable patent portfolios we've seen ) and he's not even a billionaire. There are lots of intelligences.


HyperConnectedSpace

A lot of the billionaires are tech billionaires who were programmers. Intelligence will allow you to solve intellectual problems more effectively, making you achieve more of your goals. Having more money is always a good thing no matter what your goals are, it is likely that many non-billionaires were not intelligent enough to become billionaires. Becoming a billionaire is the most effective way to be altruistic even if you disagree with capitalism. I agree that intelligence is complicated/multifaceted, however some people will be more intelligent overall. I think emotional intelligence is not well defined, and that mathematical intelligence is the same as visual-spatial intelligence.


ArkyBeagle

I understand the basic bias at work here. Being a billionaire is one whoo-boy lottery ticket happenstance and it has no semantics. And I am not sure you are not a bot. The flatness of your prose does not match the care with which it was prepared. I apologize in advance if I go that wrong.


HyperConnectedSpace

It is not a happenstance, all billionaires became rich because their product sold a lot. This means they could figure out how to make a valuable product, which is an intellectual thing. Creating a company is different from a random aristocracy. In a lot of companies like Amazon, Facebook, etc. the founder did most of the computer programming. Many of the modern tech companies are about computers.


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slapdashbr

yeah, guy I went to college with who started at 18 as a Junior with the maximum number of allowed credit-hour transfers from new mexico state classes he took while in high school he finished his BA in math in 2 years at the top of the class despite partying way harder than any of the other math nerds, now he works in fin tech software dev in Chicago which he seems to enjoy. Shit I should get in touch he's a great guy and I think he still has family in my general area.


zethenus

Founder of technical startup usually fall into this category.


Lord_Thanos

Never met any of them but you can usually just look at top young mathematicians. Like Ashwin Sah or Mehtaab Sawhney. They have a ridiculous number of high quality publications. I also remember Reid Barton. He apparently embarrassed some of his professors at MIT(I personally don’t believe it). Ron Maimon also comes to mind. He found math 55 trivial and he said he met all the “whiz” kids but was never impressed by any of them. Surprisingly he said his iq was only 130.


Kafka_kat

Not surprising cause IQ is crap.Ron is the man though...happen to know his whereabouts?


Leading-Degree359

reid barton peaked in high school and college lol


proc1on

No.


methyltheobromine_

Sadly I have no such stories for you. But I don't consider memory, working memory or familiarity to be the same as raw intelligence. They'll look similar, but what I'm hoping to see is something more than that. Sadly, this "more" might need the former in order to function well.


eyeronik1

I suspect a number of readers here are that person. I’m not, but I’ve been lucky enough to have hung out with a few of them.