
“A change of perspective is worth 80 IQ points” - MaysonL
http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/867/
======
crux
If somebody offered me a dollar to stand up when I heard a certain word in a
certain talk, I'm sure my effective intelligence would go down, not up. I'd
spend all my attention waiting to hear a certain word, and cease paying
attention to or processing anything that was actually communicated.

~~~
nathanb
Agree; it would have been interesting to hear the responses if he had asked
Alice (or Bob) "what was I trying to say at the time where I said 'points'"?
Or if he had even asked them to summarize his talk up until that point.

~~~
electromagnetic
I remember a class back in my psychology course in college. They ask you to
focus on something, such as a counting task and (in this case waiting for him
to say 'points') put something totally obvious in front of you that you won't
see.

Here's a good example of the total blindness that focus can cause. [Ed: shasta
beat me to it] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pK0BQ9CUHk>; pretend there's
money on it (like this guys presentation had) and focus on it hard.

Remember, magicians rely on misleading your focus for their entire acts. Watch
the coin hidden in my right hand, when I really slipped it into my left hand
and dropped it into my pocket and oh look the coin is gone. Is it behind your
right ear? Oh no I took it out of my pocket and look it's behind your left
ear!

------
szany
The quote is out of context and doesn't really support the point. Kay wasn't
talking about soft problem solving strategies so much as concrete
representation systems.

Here's the full quote:

"At PARC we had a slogan: 'Point of view is worth 80 IQ points.' It was based
on a few things from the past like how smart you had to be in Roman times to
multiply two numbers together; only geniuses did it. We haven't gotten any
smarter, we've just changed our representation system. We think better
generally by inventing better representations; that's something that we as
computer scientists recognize as one of the main things that we try to do."

------
absconditus
"Many of us, myself included, often think of a person’s intellectual capacity
as something that’s fixed, a feature of their innate makeup.

Intellectually, we may know that this is not so, but we take it so much for
granted that it’s built into our language."

We do?

"It tells us that intellectual capacities aren’t innate, they can be
dramatically changed by shifts in our perspective."

It does?

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huherto
I don't think he makes justice to original phrase. The original was "(good)
perspective is worth 80 IQ points". It is not just changing the perspective
but having the right perspective.

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brendoncrawford
This only measures a person's ability to act on certain keywords. It has
nothing to do with intelligence. Even my dog can perform an action on a given
keyword.

