fmora's comments

This my response to all the people that have disagreed with me and have asked me for proof. There have been studies like "The Bell Curve" book were they attempt to demonstrate how intelligence varies among people. You can read more about the book here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve

Basically it supports the view of many people here that there are great variations of intelligence among people. An article that counteracts this type of belief to some degree is this one:

http://minority-health.pitt.edu/archive/00000515/01/Intellig...

I'm not trying to make this a talk about race but unfortunately these are the closest things I could find that talk about human intelligence overall.

As a young person I used to believe that some students in my class were really indeed smarter than most of us. They always seemed to get good grades. I used to think that you were either smart or not and that there was nothing you could do about it. As a young mind thinking like this was very destructive. Who knows how I got out of it but I finally discovered in high school that just by studying regularly I could achieve good grades even if I were not smart. That I could get as good grades as the smartest kids in class and that sometimes I was "the smart kid". Though I knew that it was only because of the hard work I put in. I've seen a lot of friends doing really bad at school and that once they started putting some real work their grades started to improve. The only time that I've seen work made no difference was with kids that had mental disabilities.

Eventually by reading the biographies of several successful people like Buffet, Edison, Einstein, Newton, Trump, Galileo and books like "All The Money In The World" by Peter W. Bernstein And Annalyn Swan I came to the conclusion that what really makes the difference is hard work. All of the successful people that I read about had one thing in common, they worked really hard to become successful.

I have to admit that I'm still highly surprised that people would disagree with me on this one. I'm still in shock. I know I'm going to get down voted for this but I'm highly suspicious that a lot of people like to believe that some people are smarter than others to make themselves feel special. Honestly I think is complete B.S. and I'm calling you guys out on this one. You guys are all full of B.S. Most human beings posses the same level of intelligence.

Thinking that only some people are smart enough to do certain things is like poison. I certainly do not want to be around people that think like that since if you do they will poison you too. And yes, I won't let let door hit me on the way out.

>>Hey, why give up? Doesn't Hard Work Conquer All?

very funny

My experience has always been that people that do bad in school is because they simply don't work at it. Or that they've neglected years of school and suddenly studying really hard will not make up for all the years of neglect.

Cramming at the end of a semester will not help you at all. It has to be slow and incremental. Baby steps and it has to be consistent. If you keep this up for years eventually you get to a point where it seems that you are learning so much faster than everybody else but it really is just that you have been at it for years already and learning new information using the context of all the previous information makes it a lot easy to learn.

>>Not everyone is talented enough to be a professional >>athlete or a tenured physicist.

Many of the people that think this way always think that it has to do with talent. The thing is that the road to get there is paved with thousands of hours of hard work. That people can be lazy and make excuses I do no dispute. However, we all have the potential to do almost anything we want, as long as you are willing to work for it.

The differences that you are talking about have to do more with environment and culture.

You said: -------> On the contrary, your thesis goes against our everyday experience, not only because we know people who are stupider than us, but also people who are much smarter than us. <-------

This reminds me of how a couple of hundred years ago it was obvious that the earth was flat and how we were the center of the universe.

Read it, it doesn't state up to how many significant digits that percent is accurate so it doesn't prove I'm wrong. They may have just shorten it for brevity.

I read a couple of paragraphs. Is one thing to do a study on rats then to do a study in humans. This doesn't disprove my claim.

Edit: Also, it seems that you are implying that the differences are so huge that we should have a lot of retarded people walking around us. The proof that the gaps in intelligence are small should be obvious by simply looking at your environment. There are people getting phd's from all corners of the world. China, Japan, USA, Mexico, Europe, Africa, Australia. How did those same genes that enable people to get phd's get to places so far away as China or Japan which have been isolated for so long? Even for thousands of years? The thing is that those genes have been there all along for thousands of years.

I think I already agree that there are differences but I do not agree that the differences are huge. Otherwise some of these groups of people, like china or japan who have been isolated for thousands of years, would have serious intelligence differences as the rest of us.

Another example is the Mayans, also isolated for thousands of years from Europe. Independently invented the zero and developed a Mayan calendar unequal on precision until recently. Many of their descendants have gone on to get PHD's. If there were really large differences then some groups of people would not even be able to get PHD's.

Again, the there are differences but they are tiny. Yes, there are studies saying that there are huge differences between groups of people but frankly many of these studies are questionable and sometimes they almost seem to carry a hidden agenda.

I would just add a couple of more nines to that 99.9%.

I do agree that some people may have higher learning rates than others but the differences are too small to matter. I will even agree that there may be outliers, a super tiny amount of the population (although I've never met one, and some that are considered true geniuses have some serious mental deficiencies). Overall the differences when it comes to the general population are too small to be that much significant. The people getting phd degrees have in general the same degree of potential learning ability as the general population.

If there were really that big of a difference between their potential ability to learn as opposed to the general population than they would be passing this down to their kids. Since you claim that the difference is so large than with careful breeding we should be able to produce a super race of geniuses within a couple of generations. That is not how evolution works.

Improvements are infinitesimally small and I don't see why would intelligence be any different. We all evolve as a species, not as individuals. I do not get the sense that we have been getting that much smarter based on our overall written history of the past thousand years.

The reason why some choose to pursue a phd and some don't is the same as why some choose to pursue a career as a painter, musician, writer and why some just choose to be a blue collar worker. It is what they feel passionate about. Some don't feel passionate about anything.

Culture and environment also play a major role and this is really what makes a difference between people choosing to do a phd or not. If you or your peers tell you that you cannot get a phd and believe it then it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

There are differences in rates in learning but they are not large enough to matter. Culture and environment play a major role.

Edit: Not even Einstein could be called an outlier. He was a bright person but I hardly believe that his potential ability to learn was that much higher than yours or mine. He was even considered mediocre by many of his professors. It really was luck that he happened to be born at the right time in history to be able to make the contribution he did. Even he had to ask one of his mathematician friend for help when doing the mathematics for relativity. (you need to read his biography).

Newton considered a giant of physics was considered a pretty ordinary student. He didn't amaze anybody by showing a high potential for learning during andy of his school years nor did anybody imagine that he would come to make such huge contribution to physics.

You will never be a michael jordan but if you practice hard enough you will become close. That is my point. The differences that you are talking are superficial differences. And how can you compare beauty to potential to learn? Beauty is on the eye of the beholder. Even in races the difference between the top world runner and his peers is not by much. Genetically speaking we humans are pretty much identical. Which means that all of us are given almost the same amount of tools to exist in this world.

>>I know doing maths and statistics at university that there >>were many spending more than 40 hours a week studying and >>still obtained poor grades AND more importantly had less >>understanding than others doing no study.

This is just an anecdote and you are using this as your entire argument to disagree with me. I find this incredibly disturbing. The first thing that a genius will tell you is that he had to work really hard at it. That nothing was free. He had to spend hours upon hours working at it.

I worded that wrong. I meant to ask whether there are elitist in Hacker News.

This supports my thesis that all human population has the potential to be as smart as any phd graduate. All you need is to put the work required to get there. i.e. put thousands of hours into it and you will become a master of your field. For whatever reason a lot of people have been down voting me for saying this. They believe that not everybody can obtain a phd. That only some people are capable of becoming educated to the level of a phd. I wonder if it is because hacker news is filled with elitists. Am I offending egos by saying that a person in a hot dog stand has the same potential to get a phd as a person that currently has a phd? Is it that educated people like to believe that they somehow are special and separate from people that did not go to college? Granted that if you went to college you will be more educated than a person that did not. But that uneducated person can reach the same level of intellect as you if he wants to, as long as he/she decides to invest the amount of work required. We are all stupid monkeys. Pretty much all of us have the same potential to learn.

Frankly it completely stomps me that people would think otherwise. I took it as universal knowledge that all humans have almost the same potential to learn. Yes there will be variations but all in all they will be statistically insignificant. Apparently I was wrong in my belief and some people think that only a chosen few can become as highly educated as a phd.

I think you and me are using different definitions of smart. You think a person is smart only if he goes to school. That is not what I mean by smart. So that you understand I'll use potential education ability as my definition for smart. A person from a hot dog stand has the same potential to get a phd as anybody else. A person from 2000 years ago has the same potential to get a phd as anybody as in our time. Now, what is the potential for a dog. Its potential is that he can learn a couple of hundreds of words during his life time. You cannot increase your potential to learn when you are born the same way that a dog cannot increase his potential to learn so that it matches that of a human. I would say the majority (99%) of the human population today as with those of 2000 years ago have the potential to earn a phd.

Please read this article: http://calnewport.com/blog/2010/08/09/beyond-the-10000-hour-...

A person with far more education than you and me and by your definition much more smarter than you or me pretty much agrees with me. If you want to become great- i.e. get a phd and do great research - you have to work harder than the other person. Notice how much "work" is emphasized.

Honestly if you still don't agree with me after this than I give up. Go on believing that only a selected few chosen by God were given the gift of being smart. You cannot convince the person that simply refuses to see.

I stand corrected. You are assuming that a person with a phd is inherently smarter than a person running a hot dog stand. He is not. He has more accumulated knowledge but I don't think he is necessarily smarter. I bet that if the hot dog person had been rightly motivated at a young age he could also get a phd. Also, a lot of people are able to game interviews.

The difference between an average intelligent person and a super genius is really quite small when it comes to brain power. What you will notice is that the super genius got to where he is because he has worked harder at it than anybody else. From the outside it looks like he is just that much smarter than you or me. The truth is that he is probably just as smart as you or me. He just works harder than you or me at what he does. Same with talented pianist or painters. People like to think that they are borne that way. The truth is that they log thousands and thousands of hours working at it, usually at a very young age. Once they become very good at what they do people label it as talent and do not remember the hard work that it took them to get there. A really brief example, to people from 2000 years ago you will seem like a super-super genius because of all the things you know. Is that truth? No, people from 2000 years are just as smart as you and me. Difference between geniuses and average person is probably so minuscule that it really doesn't contribute that much to success. Persistence and working at it is what makes the difference. There are a lot of supposed geniuses (really high IQ averages) that are complete bums and never achieve anything in life.

If people are poor then they won't be able to buy your stuff. On the other hand people with more money means that they'll have a stronger buying power. It benefits the rich that the average person is also well off.

People will kill to own a singularity device. However, I don't think this will be necessary since by the time we are technologically ready to invent such a machine it will be invented or duplicated in every single country on earth and by anybody that wants one. We will reach a point in our future where the knowledge to build an Artificial Intelligence machine will be obvious by everybody the same way it is obvious now that the earth is round. This will make it impossible for any single entity to control this technology. The knowledge will be out there in the net for anybody to read. This assuming that we are not stupid enough to destroy ourselves before we reach this point.

The problem is that many of these libraries are underfunded. Not enough new books are being added. All the books that I have needed over the last couple of years I can never find them in a library. I've pretty much stopped relying on libraries and just go straight to Amazon if I really need a book. The additional funding could be used to buy more books or provide more services. At least I hope.

With the rise of the internet you can get almost any information you need from your computer. I haven't had the need to go and do research in a library for a long time.

Lets assume that P==NP, why assume that we would be able to find algorithms to easily crack crypto?

Let me put it another way, lets say that we finally discover that it is possible to time travel to the past. However, the energy needed to travel back int time is the equivalent of a million Suns because that is the amount of energy needed to warp space enough so that time will reverse itself. And we found proof of this when we observed the black holes of two galaxies colliding. So, even if it were possible it would still not matter. Practically speaking, it would still not be possible to travel back in time.

My gut feeling is that if it were to turn out that P==NP that would not necessarily mean that all of a sudden we would be able to find the exact algorithms that make it easy to crack cryptography algorithms easily.

True, some of those intellectuals must have poor eyesight due to a lifetime of reading.

Just buy two extra battery packs or a portable power supply that you can fit in your backpack.

I would never have burned down the library of Alexandrida. Not unless there were a backup for every book there. Then I would burn it down. :)