[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.

[true_religion]

So, we're engineers---very much not the average person.

Speaking from the point of view of someone who spent 8 years in school learning computer science, then the next 15+ practicing it:

I cannot create an RTS game engine in C. Not in a million years.

It's all good and well to be encouraging, but this is literally our field. If we can't identify our own short comings accurately (after for some people is decades of experience), then we are probably less capable than we think instead of more.

[isbadawi]

I don't understand why you wouldn't be able to, especially given "a million years" to learn whatever you need to learn. Why does it feel inaccessible to you?

[true_religion]

I'm not good at implementing algorithms that directly relate to mathematical equations. I learned this from 1 year banging away at computational photography while in university and 2 years banging away at automated trading systems at one of my first jobs.

Given enough time I can copy other peoples implementations, but its extremely mechanistic to the point where you can't say that I actually 'wrote' it or learned anything. And it would be questionable if all the functionality would fit together as a succinctly as the posters.

I hope you don't think that is goal post moving, but if I do something mathematical in order to get it correct I have to sacrifice everything else: speed of production, efficiency of the end-product, readability of the code, etc. Compared to my output in logic problems or HCI, you'd think two entirely different people were involved and one was significantly smarter.

It's a failing (of the sort where asked "What is your biggest weakness?" at an interview, I can always answer immediately this), but it's what allows me to be impressed with work like an entire RTS game engine in C in just 3 years as a passion project.

[IQunder130]

You say this as, in all likelihood, someone with significantly above average abilities.

[ironmagma]

Yes, as I’m sure the commenters above me are as well. The context of this being on HN is important, and I’d be a lot less likely to say an arbitrary person could do this project on some other forum.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

The shared delusion of HNer's that they are intellectually superior the rest of humanity because they write computer software continues to astound and infuriate me.

[samatman]

Superiority is a pretty loaded word.

I wouldn't call athletes "physically superior" either. That kind of supremacist talk is looked askance upon, for good reason.

But they're definitely faster/more coordinated/stronger than average, pretty much by definition. They can be proud of that.

Computer programmers are also smarter than average. If they weren't, they wouldn't stick around. It's not physics or higher maths; I figure anyone above the 80th percentile can do a good job of it, and some people in 60-80th can get the hang if it, but will probably never be great.

That's just the way it is. Phrasing it as being intellectually superior to the rest of humanity, that's just your hangup.

[ironmagma]

While that’s definitely frustrating sometimes on HN, that’s nowhere near what has been expressed in this thread (at least not in the comment you replied to).

[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.

[IQunder130]

Is there a better one? Bonus points for a scientific publication and not a tabloid article.

[distracted_boy]

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

[jhgb]

I'd say it isn't. IQ is the best thing we've found for measuring people's intelligence so far. That doesn't mean that it explains all the variance in people's results but I'm pretty sure it explains the majority of it, through the g factor. So it's not perfect, or maybe even very good, but I'd say it's still very far from "bad".

[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.

[op03]

Feynman wasn't ordinary - https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/finding-the-next-e...

"Feynman was universally regarded as one of the fastest-thinking and most creative theorists in his generation. Yet, it has been reported-including by Feynman himself-that he only obtained a score of 125 on a school IQ test.

I suspect that this test emphasized verbal, as opposed to mathematical, ability. Feynman received the highest score in the country by a large margin on the notoriously difficult Putnam mathematics competition exam, although he joined the MIT team on short notice and did not prepare for the test. He also reportedly had the highest scores on record on the math/physics graduate admission exams at Princeton.

It seems quite possible to me that Feynman's cognitive abilities might have been a bit lopsided — his vocabulary and verbal ability were well above average, but perhaps not as great as his mathematical abilities."

[samatman]

Yeah, the Feynman story doesn't prove what people who bring it up think it does, or indeed, what Feynman presented it as.

Anyone can botch a test. You can't fake winning the Putnam.

He was a very smart man. Also very sociable, a man of the people. I think Feynman demurring about his 125 IQ test was a way of presenting himself as relatable. He could have easily done the opposite by slamming home the point that he aced the Putnam and intimating that he was one of the most intelligent men alive, but he was smart not to.

[atq2119]

> 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.

This may be a selection effect. Perhaps the members of the 95%ile who are successful don't have the bandwidth left to join MENSA and see no value in doing so.

As a personal anecdote from ~15 years ago, which was the last time I affiliated with anybody who talked openly about being in MENSA, their activities there frankly sounded a bit like a self-therapy group which turned me off from even attempting to join.

[CRConrad]

> This may be a selection effect. Perhaps the members of the 95%ile who are successful don't have the bandwidth left to join MENSA and see no value in doing so.

That doesn't matter for the purposes of this discussion: It still shows that there's room for a lot of non-over-achievement in those top five IQ percentiles.

[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.

[radiator]

But how is the hiring of those engineers or managers relevant to the current thread, which is about a project explicitly described: "I am a one-man development team doing everything"?

[ironmagma]

Claim: Some people have a higher plane of capability than others, so high that it’s such a difference in scale that it’s a fundamental difference in kind as well.

Situation: “We have a broken company. Let’s hire one of these superhumans to fix everything.” Reality: the person hired is the same as everyone else, so they can’t apply their superhuman strength to fix the situation. Lesson: People are more similar than they seem.

Situation: Complex project seems to be so involved and difficult that it must have been done by someone possessing powers on a different plane than the rest of us. Reality: The creator spent a very long time learning about the concepts and technologies, then spent a shorter, but still long, time building the project. Lesson: Even those who accomplished great things did not do so effortlessly, and not overnight either. Unlike a god, they did not download the “desire to build great things” program and simply execute it.

Judgment of the claim: this appearance of higher kindedness is (mostly) an illusion. Most people are largely the same.

[radiator]

My point was, the two situations are very different. It is wrong to make similar conclusions.

In your first example, the superhuman cannot fix everything because he has to work with other average humans, who drag him down.

In the second case, since he is not forced to work in a team, his superior skills are shown in the result.

[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...

[read_if_gay_]

Why does it matter how it compares to some x10M performance difference that exists somewhere? The individual output of two people can still hugely differ, which is what this discussion was about, no?

[ironmagma]

The claim was that someone would be not just very slow but completely incapable of completing a task even given an arbitrary amount of time. That would mean there’s some kind of fundamental difference between the two people, which is just a ridiculous claim. What one person can accomplish in three years can almost certainly be accomplished by another in ten provided they are in the same profession and competent.

[oogabooga123]

> and competent

Seems like begging the question.

[ironmagma]

Again, let’s assume 50%ile, not “competent enough to complete the task.” Though realistically, I would bet Hacker News commenters skew higher than 50%.

[tshaddox]

Looking at relative differences without any perspective on the absolute difference is pretty silly.

[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?