[Letter] Advice for High School #2

[-][anonymous]5y180

As I read this post, I couldn't help but feel like it crossed over from reasonable advice into elitism. I wouldn't argue with the basic idea of surrounding yourself with smart, interesting people who will help stimulate you intellectually and push you to grow. But spending your time worrying about how many standard deviations above the mean everyone's IQ is seems like it's crossing a line from reasonable to excessive, particularly when you describe normal life as "living among the monkeys."

So what I'd say to this is that yes, finding and befriending people who are smart is great. Same with people who are kind, people who are sincere, people who have a deep understanding of their emotions, people who make art, people who can build things with their hands, people who care for others, people who support their communities...

If you're a smart kid in high school it can be especially frustrating to not feel like you have intellectual peers. I absolutely get that, but I want to caution against advice that deemphasizes all the other worthwhile things about people in response. People are good and valuable and can teach you in myriad ways.

[-]lsusr5y10

What, precisely, do you mean when you use the word "smart"?

[-][anonymous]5y20

I think of "smart" as (at least approximately) referring to g.

[-]lsusr5y10

When you say "a smart kid in high school", what threshold or range of are you referring to? (Insofar as "smart" refers to $g$ .) A kid with a $g$ two standard deviations below the mean isn't smart. A kid four standard deviations above the mean is smart. Where do you draw the cutoff?

[-][anonymous]5y00

I don't want to get too into the weeds here. But I think that someone in the top few percent of their school would be smart. The kind of kid who might be feeling without intellectual peers and posting here about it could be the smartest in their school or their town (or they could not). But I don't think that really changes the conclusions.

[-]lsusr5y80

You have used the word "feel(ing)" twice. The core question isn't whether he feels he has intellectual peers he can talk to. It is whether he genuinely does or doesn't have intellectual peers of his caliber. I believe this high school student when he implies he doesn't have anyone near his intellect at his school and at other programs he has tried out. You do not. I think this is the crux of our disagreement.

I put so much effort into standard deviations because "smart" papers over a broad range of intelligences. Someone with an IQ of 115 is "smart". Someone with an IQ of 175 is "smart". The difference between someone with an IQ of 115 and someone with an IQ of 175 is four standard deviations. Four standard deviations is huge. It is equal to the difference between a PhD in science and someone hovering on the edge of an intellectual disability. It would be absurd for a PhD in science to look for intellectual peers in the same place as someone bordering on the edge of intellectual disability. The same goes for someone with an IQ of 115 verses someone with an IQ of 175.

[-]alexgieg5y120

The difference between someone with an IQ of 115 and someone with an IQ of 175 is four standard deviations. Four standard deviations is huge. It is equal to the difference between a PhD in science and someone hovering on the edge of an intellectual disability.

I'd be careful with this kind of comparison. IQ numbers and SDs may look like cardinal measurements, but they're actually an ordinal hierarchical system. What one can say is that someone with IQ n+1 is "smarter than" someone with IQ n, who in turn is "smarter than" someone with IQ n-1. But there's no way, for now, to convert that in a cardinality.

Hence, in an absolute sense of literal, actual intelligence, the difference in between an IQ 175 and an IQ 115 may be either greater or smaller than the difference in intelligence between an IQ 115 and an IQ 55. My personal hunch is that it's much smaller, although, evidently, I have no way to back that up.

[-]ACrackedPot5y131

Personally, the thing I find people constantly lacking in isn't raw mental horsepower, or pattern recognition, or any of the things IQ generally maps to.

It's just being willing to think.

When I was younger, I wanted to meet the smart people. I've met the smart people since then, and they're not any more willing to think than anyone else; if anything, smart people are more frustrating to interact with.

My username, and my posts, may hint at a particular interpretation of the above statements. I'm not talking about that, although those kinds of interactions are no more immune to the phenomenon than anything else. I'm talking about the user, who is fully capable of writing their own SQL, who routinely sends said SQL to me for editing after running into efficiency issues with it - and who, when I send back the edited SQL with explanations of why each change was made, will then, a week later, send me SQL containing the exact same mistakes.

The thing you want is not somebody who is very smart; in fact, I think selecting for "very smart" is likely to select away from actually interesting thinkers. The thing you want is somebody who is willing to be wrong, over and over and over again, in different ways. The people who go into fields where the very smart people are, I think, tend to be the sort of people who want to find out the right answer so they don't have to think anymore. You want people who aren't afraid to look foolish.

If you're looking for interesting thinkers, and you spend your time looking for smart people, you're going to look right past all the genuinely interesting thinkers, because interesting thinkers spend most of their time thinking being horribly wrong. People who want to be right can't afford to think interesting thoughts - because most interesting thoughts are, when you get down to it, incorrect. Being at the edge of the map of truth means spending most of your time being wrong; once you start being right, it's time to move on, because there's nothing left to explore.

[-]niplav5y60

I think your perspective on Intelligence vs. Willingness to Think is interesting, but wrong – my model is that how willing you are to think is strongly correlated with how easy thinking is for you, and how easy thinking is for you is pretty directly just what intelligence is (yes, correlation isn't transitive, and tails come apart, but I think both hold in general for non-weird cases).

[-]ACrackedPot5y90

I think that's a somewhat more literal interpretation than I was aiming for; what I'm gesturing at is also partially conveyed in the final paragraph, where I talk about willingness to be wrong.

If what you're thinking about is easy, what this translates to, I think, is that it's easy to be right. If you're wrong most of the time, then it's not actually very easy.

This is not to say you should think with the intent to be wrong - that's just another way of doing things the easy way, and is also, I suppose, another way of taking what I'm saying more literally than I intend it. This is a difficult set of concepts to convey, but - if you're unwilling to struggle, you're unwilling to think, in the sense that I mean.

[-]niplav5y40

Yeah, that clears things up. Thanks!

[-]Pattern5y30

How do tail come apart - on intelligence versus easy to think?

[-]niplav5y10

I guess both stages, but more willingness to think & easiness to think.

[-]Zac Hatfield-Dodds5y80

Nonfiction

For tech history - it's worth knowing how modern industrial civilisation arose! - I'd recommend

Lewis Mumford's Technics and Civilisation (1934)
The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie (1920)
My Life & Work - An Autobiography of Henry Ford (1922)
The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 by David Edgerton (2006)

Why read old books to understand technology? Because they come for a different world-view and make very different assumptions about the direction that things are going - because they have only the context of their past, and can't fit it to the usual narratives about WWII and post-war economic and industrial history. "The books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them."

The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy From Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography by Simon Singh

I haven't re-read it in years, but this is the book that got me interested in computer science (and later reading The Art of Unix Programming on a hike got me into software engineering).

I'd also recommend Quantum Computing Since Democritus by Scott Aaronson as the single best introduction to quantum computing from someone who actually knows how it works and what it can't do.

Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott

Disagree - it's a good book, but you're better off reading the linked review and then James C. Scott's Two Cheers for Anarchism instead.

The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

A colorful author, but there's plenty to learn from his books. If you can read more than one, I'd suggest Fooled by Randomness and then Antifragile instead (the preceeding and following books; between them they cover almost all of The Black Swan).

On the mathematical end it's also worth skimming through his Statistical Consequences of Fat Tails. Pair with Gwern's statistical notes, and if you're going to do it properly Judea Pearl's Causality and E.T. Jaynes' Probability Theory: The Logic of Science.

Fiction

Arthur C. Clarke: Rendezvous with Rama
Greg Egan: everything; but to start with the short stories In the Ruins, Oceanic, and TAP are excellent.
Diane Duane's Young Wizards series (or everything). Easily my personal most-important fiction.

[-]lsusr5y*50

The Art of Unix Programming helped me get into software engineering too—especially Chapter 2. Jason Crawford has written up his highlights from the Carnegie book. I replaced The Black Swan with your recommendations.

You are right about Seeing Like A State. I have removed Seeing Like A State from the list. The Secret of Our Success belongs with Seeing Like A State.

Why read old books to understand technology? Because they come for a different world-view and make very different assumptions about the direction that things are going - because they have only the context of their past, and can't fit it to the usual narratives about WWII and post-war economic and industrial history.

Yep!

[-]Ulisse Mini3y30

I'd be happy to talk to [redacted] and put them in touch with other smart young people. I know a lot from Atlas, ESPR and related networks. You can pass my contact info on to them.

College Undergraduate Major	IQ
Physics & Astronomy	133
Mathematical Sciences	130
Philosophy	129
Materials Engineering	129
Economics	128
Chemical Engineering	128
Other Engineering	128
Mechanical Engineering	126
Engineering	126
Electrical Engineering	126
Physical Sciences	125
Banking & Finance	125
Other Humanities & Art	124
Chemistry	124
Computer & Information Science	124
Civil Engineering	124
Industrial Engineering	123
Religion & Theory	121
Earth, Atmosphere & Marine Science	121
Biological Sciences	121
English Language & Literature	120
Humanities & Arts	120
Art History, Theory, Critical Theory	120
Political Science	120
Foreign languages & Literature	119
Anthropology & Archaeology	119
History	119
Architecture	118
Library & Archival Sciences	117
Other Natural Sciences	117
Social Sciences	115
Agriculture	115
Arts-Performance & Studio	114
Life Sciences	114
Sociology	114
Business	114
Psychology	113
Communications	111
Curriculum & Instruction	111
Health & Medical Sciences	111
Business Admin & Management	111
Other Social Science	110
Education	110
Accounting	110
Evaluation & Research	109
Public Administration	109
Other Education	109
Elementary Education	108
Administration	107
Home Economics	106
Student Counseling	105
Early Childhood Education	104
Social Work	103

LESSWRONG
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LESSWRONG
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[Letter] Advice for High School #2

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