Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Paul_S 5023 days ago
The frankness of the question caught me by surprise. I don't think I can help you though as I'm not one of those poeple you mention. There's tons of better programmers around the office and most of them are my friends so I'm quite at home with not being the smartest person on the planet. There's more to life than solving problems, as long as you enjoy your time together who cares.

It bothers me though when people try to invent different types of intellect as some sort of consolation prize. Accept that people are different, life's too short to be comparing penis sizes all your life.

1 comments

> It bothers me though when people try to invent different types of intellect as some sort of consolation prize. Accept that people are different, life's too short to be comparing penis sizes all your life.

Doesn't your first sentence contradict your second one? Or at least the spirit of the two seems contradictory.

The multiple intelligence theory is fairly popular and to be fair it is fairly decent too. As you yourself said people are different and they have different skills.

Intelligence or "smarts" are just vague terms without concrete meanings. It is only in recent times that we decided to measure them using either general knowledge ("gameshow trivia") or mathematical skill.

But for most of human history I bet the most celebrated person in the village would be measured using other yard sticks (e.g. hunting, fighting, running speed, maybe even engineering/inventing) none of which we value at all today.