I also experience that line of thinking in learning math. Mathematics seem like the perfect example of pattern matching. You progressively learn to adapt to a certain kind of thinking by solving a multitude of different exercises that broaden your conceptual understanding of a field. At least that's how it works for me. You keep exercising and at some point you experience an epiphany and then everything becomes crystal clear.
Summary: there is gold here, utter gold. There is also shit, reeking shit. Make your choice, choose your focus, then tune your dial.
Did these possibilities not occur to you?
I await your ban from @dang. otherwise I will re-conclude that HN has too high a ratio anymore of assholes-to-signal.
however... I've looked at your follow-up comments since, and I've spelunked through your post history. Therefore I now believe you did truly make a mistake, and that you honestly did not intend to sound the way that you did. And you gave some reasonable responses. I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt.
I've learned to take an increasingly hard-line against assholes in real life. But I've also learned to try even harder to show empathy and see things from other people's shoes. Therefore I apologize if you felt I over-reacted. And I look forward to seeing awesome contributions from you here in the future. ;-)
Good ole' placebo effect :-)
think there is more to it than this, especially on the highest ends
think the next biggest impact comes from having a large solid internal mental model of the world, of cause-and-effect, of action-reaction, perhaps two or more separate models, one or more models are "the way it is supposed to work" and one or more models are "the way it might work"
think the next higher level of smart/genius is the purely creative/original/innovative/brainstorming/fount-based: ideas and urges and visions and impulses that arise from somewhere that a purely logical/controlling/categorical mindset can't nail down, and yet, it... happens. and yet we feel it, we experience it, we feel it, we can imagine it. whether it is real or fantastical, possible or impossible.
I'd argue that the very smartest of us all may somehow leverage from all three of these levels
As I get into it, it suddenly snaps into place, and I have a mental picture (which is more visceral than visual) of how all the moving pieces fit (or will fit) together, and can start adding on to it. With coding in particualr, usually my brain is going faster than my ability to type.
I absolutely love that feeling.
Imo someone "smart" is someone who is smart enough to admit what they don't know.
Yes. My pet theory is that the brain is just a huge pattern matching engine. Formal education is mostly about training the pattern recognizer with new patterns.
Whenever you talk to people that are "uneducated" (or whatever word you may want to choose for that) that struggle with basic concepts, try to probe deeper. You'll find that, in many cases, they are being overwhelmed with new concepts being presented simultaneously.
People with extensive formal education will have been exposed to innumerable problems and concepts by the time they reach adulthood. There's a wealth of information the brain can use to speed up comprehension.
This is a pet theory though, being reinforced over the years by my own cognitive biases :)