

The Effort Effect (2007) - jcr
https://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=32124

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pjungwir
As a "talented" person who believes intelligence is mostly trying, I'm
thrilled to see these ideas appearing so often on HN and in the culture. I ran
into this idea in a striking way while reading a biography of Thomas Aquinas
that called him "patient" because he was willing to see the world as it is
rather than pushing it to fit a preconceived model. (Whether you agree about
Thomas is not really the point.) Likewise a lot of existential and post-modern
thinkers have talked about how reason and language forcibly distort reality by
losing details. To understand anything you have to sit with it for a while and
let it come into focus. And you have to keep poking holes in your ideas to see
where they fail, so you can improve them.

I think the Aristotelian/Thomistic idea of "habit" is very important to
intelligence. Intelligence is a habit of trying. I feel like there is an
active and passive part: of verbally reasoning about the thing, but also of
sitting back and waiting for understanding to come. You can sort of alternate
between the two postures, ratiocination and contemplation, and neither is the
same as giving up.

My five-year-old is learning to read, and after 10 minutes or so he gets tired
and just starts guessing, rather than sounding out the letters. At that point
we stop or change the lesson to something easier, because we don't want him to
form a habit of guessing--or "learned helplessness."

When I tutored calculus in college I often asked students to verbalize how
they were thinking through the problem, and I think it helped a lot. Most
people fear silence, so it sort of forces them to work through the problem one
small step at a time, rather than seeing an intimidating, irreducible, misty
whole and giving up.

It's sort of like chess: to get better, all you have to do is not move until
you have a plan, and keep asking yourself questions to poke holes in your
plan. Moving just because it's your turn will make you stagnate, but pushing
yourself to think through just a little more than you feel capable of will
make you better and better.

In programming one of my pet peeves is "debugging by superstition," where
people rapidly change a line here and a line there to see if it happens to fix
things, rather than reading and understanding the code. There's nothing wrong
with forming a hypothesis and testing it, but at least spend some time coming
up with a good one.

I think all these things are the same or at least overlapping: patience,
perseverance, determination, stubborness, curiosity, optimism.

~~~
gmarx
I believe that most people who believe as you do haven't spent a lot of time
in deep interaction with people who are significantly less intelligent than
they are. If you frequent Hacker news, i'd hazard a guess that you almost
never have an intellectual conversation with anyone whose IQ is below 115. If
you ever have the opportunity to try to extract information from or explain
something to a person with an IQ of, say, 90, you may change your mind.

~~~
KennyCason
The only problem with this statement is that I have also spent time around
people who were young and bright. They definitely showed great potential. But
due to environment, 10-15 years later, I feel that their IQ may have actually
dropped or at least not developed to reach it's full potential.

All this to say, I'm not combatting the notion that genetics plays a role, but
am suggesting there is more to the picture.

~~~
gmarx
Fair enough but I was making a statement about the contribution of genetics to
IQ. I was making a statement about the notion that someone with a low IQ can
do high IQ stuff just by trying really hard. I'm not a psychometrician and I
don't know the age IQ sets. In my experience, definitely a 25 year old with a
90 IQ can't do advanced math just by trying hard

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tokenadult
The title here should probably be edited to add "(2007)," which is when I
first read this interesting and informative article. This article was
published just around the time that Carol Dweck was putting together her
popular book _Mindset_ ,[1] which is well worth reading for all the Hacker
News participants who have missed out on reading the book so far. Follow-up
research by Dweck and other researchers have continued to show benefits to
"growth mindset" and good effects from interventions designed to build growth
mindset in young learners and older learners.[2] I'm very glad that this
research program was pursued while my children were still young, as I think
that my children have benefited from mindset interventions that emphasize
effort in practice over "natural" talent.

[1] [http://mindsetonline.com/](http://mindsetonline.com/)

[2] [http://www.stanforduniversity.info/dept/psychology/cgi-
bin/d...](http://www.stanforduniversity.info/dept/psychology/cgi-
bin/drupalm/system/files/brainpoints_chi.pdf)

[http://www.pnas.org/content/110/37/14818.full](http://www.pnas.org/content/110/37/14818.full)

[https://intranet.tudelft.nl/fileadmin/Files/medewerkersporta...](https://intranet.tudelft.nl/fileadmin/Files/medewerkersportal/os/Onderwijscentrum_OC_Focus/Lunchlezingen_Studiesucces/Dweck_White_Paper_2013_How_Can_We_Instill_Productive_Mindsets_at_Scale.pdf)

[http://cpl.psy.msu.edu/wp-
content/uploads/2014/08/Schroder-e...](http://cpl.psy.msu.edu/wp-
content/uploads/2014/08/Schroder-et-al-in-press-Mindset-Induction.pdf)

~~~
jcr
You're right. Thanks for the suggestion on the title change.

It seems most people tend to look at the "growth mindset" work through the
lens of child development, or adult development, or business management, or
general learning, or similar. For some reason, I enjoyed thinking about it in
terms of code and coding. When code fails to do what I want or expect, there
is always a knowable reason for it behaving as it does, and there is always a
standing challenge for me to figure it out why it works as it does. If I'm
dissatisfied with the code I'm running today, then there's always a standing
challenge for me to try improving it. Even if I "fail" to improve it, I can
still enjoy the challenge of trying to improve it, and as a side effect, I'll
most likely learn something new, exciting and useful along the way.

------
AceJohnny2
The concept of "growth vs fixed mindset" is great, and relates to the
advantage of encouraging children with "good work" rather than "you're smart".

I read the Mindset book a couple years ago, or should I say, I read part of
it. Halfway through and it was still repeating the same mantra "be a 'growth'
mindset, not a 'fixed' mindset!" without much variation.

One problem with it is that it had the approach of you having a _single_
mindset, which isn't my experience. In some fields, such as programming, I
innately believe in learning and improving. In others, such as interpersonal
behaviour, I apparently do not.

I get the "growth mindset" idea, but the book didn't seem to provide specific
tools to help me address the fixed mindset I have in some fields, as I
subconsciously conclude "I don't need this because I've got the right mindset
in $other_ field".

