[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

Eh, yeah, it can feel like that, but the probably reality is that you just have different priorities in life. Especially as you get older and it starts to sink in how finite your time is, you can't let yourself be fooled into thinking you have to accomplish certain things to be worthy.

I program, rock climb, ride bikes, and write. For any given one of those I can easily find 10,000 people who are more accomplished than I am and often at a younger age. I accept that I will never be that good at any of them, not because I can't be, but because I don't want to invest that much of myself into one of them. There's nothing wrong with that.

[weerd]

Don't discount the creativity, intelligence, and dedication it takes to create something like this. Chances are you actually can't, even if you did make it a priority.

[ironmagma]

Nonsense. Sure, they wouldn’t make this exact game, but neither would the entire rest of the population who is capable of making a project like this. Most people are roughly the same in terms of physical and mental capability, and if you need to convince yourself of that, think about how fast a computer can do an arbitrary thing versus how fast a human can, or how different a mouse’s musical intellect is from a human’s.

[oogabooga123]

> Most people are roughly the same in terms of physical and mental capability

This is a story we stop telling kids around the end of high school. We tell this story because, as a child, being told you’re dumb can stunt intellectual growth, or being told you’re not physically capable can stop kids from forming a habit of exercising.

[ironmagma]

I don’t mean it in the way it’s sometimes expressed as, “you can train anyone to do anything,” I mean it in the sense that the 50%ile capable person is really all things considered, not that different from the 95%ile capable person. The range is just not that high. A person can only accomplish so much in the day and with the animal body we are given. Compare that to a computer, which for many tasks, can accomplish things at a rate 10,000,000 times faster than a human.

[IQunder130]

Let's not pretend someone in the 50th percentile can write a game engine in C.

If you're on this website and your day job is programming, your expected IQ is already way north of 100.

[ironmagma]

They very much can. Have you ever walked into a classroom and seen the ancient runes left on the board from a more advanced class, wondering how any person can possibly understand all that and wonder whether it was possibly even scribbled as a joke? And then two years later, you realize that you have learned and mastered that very content you saw on the board that seemed so unachievable. Many things seem unlearnable, but given the right conditions (teacher, home situation, motivation) most people are surprised by the scope of what can be learned by an average person.

[nemacol]

It is amusing that your comment is about IQ and your name is IQunder130... I feel like you might be too focused on a poor measure of human intellect.

[distracted_boy]

Isn't it a fact that IQ is bad at measuring people's intelligence?

[oogabooga123]

> I mean it in the sense that the 50%ile capable person is really all things considered, not that different from the 95%ile capable person.

You must be living on a different planet from me. I can kind of see how someone might be tempted to just say “you know what, you’re right” and let you keep on thinking that, though.

[fao_]

Both my parents are MENSAns. I agree with the parent poster, there isn't specifically anything special about being a 95%ile, and most of the members of the 95%ile that have joined MENSA aren't massively successful, any more than anyone on the middle of the bell curve.

It's not, what you have. It's what you do with it. I struggle with some things my parents find easy, vice versa, most of the 95%ile that I know have various mental health problems or other hidden disabilities that make daily life difficult -- especially achieving something like this.

And Feynman went far with being just an ordinary person supposedly slightly lower on the bell curve.

The only thing that actually tangibly matters is dedication and sweat, and how much time and effort you're willing to put in to something.

Of course, that's not to outright say that an IQ test or however you want to measure cognitive "capital"* isn't valuable in some aspect -- it does measure something, after all. Less fighter pilots died in training once they started selecting using early IQ tests (Source is a psych book from the 80s I skimmed a few years back :P). But that's an extreme case. For projects like this, for most of the things you will ever, ever want to do, it outright does not matter and the emphasis on it in programming and "intellectual circles" (on the internet, I don't think anyone in real life actually gives a shit outside of college admissions) is massively overblown.

* - I'm phrasing this in capitalist terms explicitly because "cognitive capital" is an explicitly western construct that to be honest seems to be more detrimental than it has been positive. Also, outright racist in the historical use and implementation.

[ironmagma]

Maybe it’s born out of all these times I’ve seen “10x engineers” hired, or “very senior” managers who will “change everything.” There’s just not that much that one human can do that is fundamentally different from what the median human can, so these hires are almost always overblown.

[jacobr1]

The argument is a relative one. It isn't that these mid-level person and high-level intelligence people aren't quite different in many ways ... it is that relative to non-human standards of intelligence, they are likely relatively close (say within an order of magnitude of capability).

Here is a much better summary of the argument:

https://aiimpacts.org/is-the-range-of-human-intelligence-sma...

[tshaddox]

You're probably just thinking about differences between people in relative terms. Yes, the best marathon runner does it in less than half the time of the average marathon finisher, and finishing a marathon is already considered a significant accomplishment that a very small portion of people ever do. But compared to a car, there's no point in even looking at the absolute difference in speed between different marathon runners. Why beat yourself up about the relative difference between the human runners?

[strangeattractr]

>Most people are roughly the same in terms of physical and mental capability

I don't think this is true. People vary wildly in how long it takes them to learn and understand concepts. Some people are better at this and so they achieve more with the same amount of time devoted to a particular endeavour. We can be honest about this without feeling worthless. I could devote my entire life to mathematics and I wouldn't become Euler.

Thankfully people vary just as wildly in their affinity for things and that's why we see impressive projects like this. But I aqree with your general premise that seeing other people's endeavours and achievements shouldn't make you feel depressed about how you spend your life.

[willcipriano]

> Most people are roughly the same in terms of physical and mental capability

Most of the people on the street? Yes. Most of the people in a history book or at the top of their fields? Not remotely. The author of this is in the second category.

[astrange]

> Most of the people in a history book or at the top of their fields? Not remotely.

They mostly got there through the trick of being a good leader and then getting assigned all the credit for their group's work in the history book.

> "There's a tendency among the press to attribute the creation of a game to a single person," says Warren Spector, creator of Thief and Deus Ex.

[_carbyau_]

Your history book assertion seems similar to an assertion regarding "Magic". That being it is simply "hidden work".

Stage magicians can spend years conceiving, preparing and rehearsing a "trick". But on stage, when the audience experiences the illusion ... it is magic.

Similar to some workplaces stuff. There can be many man hours of time spent propping up repositories, testing, debugging, logging etc etc capabilities in general.

And when the shit hits the fan and the capability solves the problem ... magic.

Then the audience says "Thanks for solving the problem 10x Dev."

[dasKrokodil]

> "There's a tendency among the press to attribute the creation of a game to a single person," says Warren Spector, creator of Thief and Deus Ex.

I see what you did there.

[avereveard]

I mean it's not breaking any new ground. It's a great accomplishment for a person because of the amount of time committed, but there isn't any single fundamentally hard piece that's out of reach from an average developer.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

I think you overestimate what it takes. I've done hard things that took dedication before, for instance I'm a national champion slot car racer, and I've lost over 150lbs. The most important step in accomplishing those things was putting in the time and effort to do them. You also overestimate how smart you need to be to program a game, which I've also done before. What people usually call "talent" is not some innate ability but rather the result of thousands of hours of learning and practicing. Which isn't to say that innate advantages don't exist, but without hard work and dedication they will always be surpassed by someone who put the effort in.

[elwell]

> Chances are you actually can't, even if you did make it a priority.

In this sentence, the first 'you' is a different person/reality than the second 'you'. Our priorities are integral to our identity.

[ZoomZoomZoom]

I prefer this to remain my fear, not to succumb to it being my belief.

[Siira]

> not because I can't be

So what difference does it make if you can't be? Realistically speaking, the very best pour both their soul and their genes into an endeavor, and most people literally can't match them even if they tried.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

Who's talking about 'the very best'? No disrespect to the author of this game engine, but I'd hardly rank them with the likes of John Carmack. You don't have to be John Carmack to write a game engine, but you do have to devote time and effort to it. Parent is comparing themselves to someone who successfully did a thing, while apparently having not put any effort in to this particular thing, and feeling bad. That doesn't make any sense.

[Siira]

You're correct.