Ask HN: What separates "super smart" people from commonfolk?

[biln]

I ponder about it.

Is it largely genetics? Does everyone have an "upper limit" of the "smart" they can be, which is determined by their genes?

Or is it just hyper-focus and concentration that makes someone smart?

Let us assume, smart here means the rate at which someone lears, grasps or solves things.

[InfiniteLoup]

I'm currently working with a senior developer whose breadth and depth of technical knowledge is simply incredible. Yesterday he talked for more or less six hours straight, starting with “What exactly does this function do?” from designing compilers, to opcodes and memory management, to the evolution of digital cameras. Listening to this guy is like drinking from a fire hose. And no part of it was rambling. It's just pure, high-density information, presented in a passionate manner. And I've been working with him for weeks now, most days are like the one mentioned above. The funny thing is that this guy spends most of his free time playing retro games and watching anime.

I often wonder what it would have been like working with somebody like John von Neumann or how they really see the world.

[illuminant]

Some are born with cognitive advantages, though cutting the grade may be done by anyone average functional through the experience of persistence. Some are instigated by the inspiration of others. Intelligence is contagious.

Cognitive strategies vary so much they are difficult to compare. Good memory vs deduction skills, tenacious will vs opportunistic, dogmatic structure vs chaotic exploration. Quirky yet elegant tastes vs OCD who picks at problems.

Does not regard convention. Beyond aware that there is such a thing, preoccupation of expectations is a barrier. One may not realize they are a smarty pants until long after everyone stalling comments on how far along you've gotten.

Obsession and compulsion has a lot to say for circumstances. Normal people are off enjoying their mental serenity, smarty pants are often agonizing over incongruous abstractions. A smooth character simply does not expose their restlessness.

Not knowing something is enough to stop a normal in their tracks, a smarty will observe, explore, relate, and experiment. Playing around, having interests, and not knowing there were supposed to be limits may be common traits.

Normals are too busy doing something else, comfortable in their not knowing, everything explained away.

[GianFabien]

Being judged as being smart is contextual. A smart programmer and a smart car mechanic are unlikely to perform well if they switched jobs. People I have considered to be very smart tend to have a passion for their area of expertise and are constantly building their knowledge and experience. In order to be a smart medical doctor you have to possess a strong understanding and intuition of biological processes, etc.

[lusus_naturae]

Consider that there are probably geniuses dying in rice fields, Gaza, or crushed to effective death due to poverty anywhere. Consider also that given enough resources and attention, any donkey can be made to believe that it’s a prized steed. The only defining characteristic is luck. The “genetics” answers has been drilled into wage slaves to make them believe they’re perpetually unworthy.

All that said, if you have the time and resources to pour into unabashed and uninterrupted learning, growing and exploring, it seems to help develop above average skill. Secondly, precise and guided attention and mentoring is very effective at reducing knowledge barriers.

There are literal geniuses, like Gauss for example, who can solve something on intuition without being taught, and there are maybe like 2-4 people who are actually like this alive today. The rest are seething and coping and pretending they’re genius, and taking the rage of their insecurities out on everyone else—a genius is the last person to talk about IQ tests, wordcels or shape rotators etc. Memorizing facts is not genius, it’s a memory trick.

[miguelaeh]

There is some genetic part, but I would say this also highly depends on the environment where you grow up. From my observation, people who grow up in villages are smarter than people who grow up in the city. They just know more about the world, the nature, the have been more "free" as it was safer for them to explore the environment. As you grow, being considered smart is usually more related to business, and I would say it is actually a matter of how good you are predicting the future. We all can learn the same things, just putting in more or less time, but what is more complex to change is the internal process you follow to reach a conclusion, and that's basically based on your previous experiences. So, the more things you live, the more things you interact with, the more technologies you learnt, the more books you read, etc is what makes you "smarter", basically because your internal thinking process has more information to contrast.

[kstenerud]

"Intelligence", though difficult to scientifically define, is generally regarded as how quickly one grasps a novel situation, allowing one to come up with a solution quicker than others could.

Although training in certain disciplines can help you score higher on intelligence tests by making the situations they test for less novel (and increase your "intelligence" as measured by the tests due to their foundational assumptions), it will do nothing to increase your actual intelligence - merely skew the results of the imperfect test a little bit.

That's not to say that training for an IQ test is a waste of time! A piece of paper showing a higher score is always valuable for getting ahead in society. And training to make large swaths of situations less novel makes you better able to navigate because now you have relevant experience (and thus require less intelligence to navigate successfully on your "first" try).

[illuminant → kstenerud]

Why assert that training does not increase actual intelligence?

The application may be limited, yet even knowing and experiencing that is a degree of intelligence.

I say [citizen] scientifically that intelligence is the mitigation of uncertainty. If it does not mitigate uncertainty it is not intelligence.

All that other stuff you attached is on you. You are telling yourself things about intelligence which may be something else mixed in. "Quicker than others", "will do nothing", that inference is an inferior kind of intelligence, etc.

[tobinfekkes]

It's also worth remembering that testing as "super smart" is not the same as being "super smart".

Tests are often singularly-focused, have clear right or wrong answers, and measure smartness.

Real life is uncertain, many competing layers and priorities, and measures wisdom.

[fuzzfactor]

>I ponder about it.

I did that too.

When it comes to genetics, you have to figure that underlying genetics set the baseline for the ability to respond to both culture & environment.

OTOH, genetics itself is quite fluid and adaptable on its own, capable of responding to both culture and environment over (sometimes unimaginable numbers of) generations not near the scale of a single individual's lifetime.

Making the breadth of what can be accomplished for any one person quite limited compared to what extremes may be accomplished over millennia under conditions that favor the desirable characteristics.

Whether the strongest influence is culture, environment, or both, has got to be an overwhelmingly complex set of variables.

Sometimes the culture is more stable over generations than the environment, or vice versa, sometimes neither one. Sometimes the genetics are more stable too, sometimes not.

Plus you can only imagine how bizarre some prehistoric cultures and/or environments were, and how some of the flourishers or surviviors deviated from others. Especially considering some environments and cultures were more widespread than others, or at the other extreme, relatively to completely isolated for more time than anything in recordable history. With a difference amounting to many orders of magnitude over all variables.

What are the odds that only one culture or environment selected for the hallmark learning, grasping, solving behavior that others are just not going to reach in a single lifetime? And from the variation that can be seen today, what are the odds that some other culture(s) did not deselect for the exact same characteristics?

If there was some lost culture of isolated super-intellectuals in the far prehistoric past, they were all just average people among themselves anyway.

But anything that far back can sure have an outsized outcome if the unconventional course is followed from such an early start, and the deviation from mainstream widens accordingly.

Regardless, I believe it is accepted that nobody is using but a small fraction of their brain constructively, and there are so many different kinds of talent. There might even be a common trend to using only a small portion of a single side of the brain more than anything else. So what.

So just about anybody should be able to mostly double their mental ability in a chosen area, and have plenty of room to spare, still utilizing only a small amount of what they were given to work with.

It's not going to happen unless you put your mind to it.

[hnthrowaway0328]

I'd say genetics and early childhood education, so basically luck...and luck.

I don't have proofs though.

[hindsightbias]

Research if curiosity and rational thought are genetic traits or learned.

[h2odragon]

The inability to ignore things.

[nabla9]

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