Interesting. I've also considered myself on the slow end of the thinking-speed spectrum, and have the other memory traits too: not so good with precision/particulars (instead I depend on being able to go back to sources as necessary), and I basically can't memorize anything. I don't know even half the lyrics to a single song.

My personal take is that it's largely a matter of intellectual values. I think that if I considered memorization to be important when I was younger, I would have gotten better at it, for instance. Instead my values tend to be around understanding the reason something is one way or another. I remember a friend being very surprised when I gave a satisfactory definition of 'common law' (because I tend not to know 'random' things like that)—but the only reason I remembered it clearly is because I understood the role it served. That tends to be the only thing that makes things stick for me.

I think the slowness may in part be due to that too. There are a lot of things that folks will have remembered whole, but I just know how to reason my way back to the result from a smaller set of more fundamental things I've learned.

I agree. Memorizing facts or figures has never been interesting to me, beyond order of magnitude. Understanding the context within a greater system is the part that my brain wants to retain.

Can you share your definition of common law?

I said it was basically the idea of 'precedents' in law—previous court decisions increase the likelihood the the court will decide the same way in the future. And I pointed out that that probably helps to prevent legal systems from having an 'oscillating' stance on the legality of certain things (that's the 'role' I mentioned earlier, which made it stick for me).

(I think it was pretty close to that—but it was also like 6 years ago.)

I wonder how many of us slow thinkers are of the same calibre as Darwin but never achieve anything because life doesn't afford them the leisure to doggedly pursue their thoughts. In my case I think I only share Darwin's disadvantages but perhaps there are others out there who could have the same impact as he did if only the circumstances were right.

>I wonder how many of us slow thinkers are of the same calibre as Darwin but never achieve anything because life doesn't afford them the leisure to doggedly pursue their thoughts.

Very very few. Aside from the fact that if one's determined, they can do it (life doesn't allow or disallow anything -- no one is required to have a nice car or a fancy house or whatever, lots of people make sacrifices for their work), there are also tons of leisurely rich people that are slow thinkers, that have nonetheless contributed remotely comparable of Darwin...

Life does give you the chance to doggedly pursue your thoughts; you just have to devote yourself to it. I personally live this way, freelancing about 3 months a year and spending the rest of it on whatever interests me.

I think you're underselling your talent if you think the capability to live off 3 months / year of work is generally available to people. Most people just aren't good enough at anything to work that little and get by, no matter how hard they try.

I’m not underselling my talent - that’s how i can afford it. But I also know that it isn’t that special, so I basically think other people are underselling themselves, or unwilling to take the risk.

After 10 years of working as an average programmer for average companies, lots of big clients or governments will consider you for "temporary" roles, which pay very well but give no security. Maybe it takes 100 applications and interacting with recruiters but the opportunity is there.

That's kind of what the 'dogged pursuit' is supposed to answer. Sheer persistence counts for more than talent, always has. Not being convenient doesn't make the option unavailable.

I strongly disagree with this thinking and think at worst, it could be harmful.

You wouldn't want your heart,brain,etc operation to be in the hands of someone who isn't that talented but keeps on trying.

I strongly disagree with this based on personal experience. I regularly met people I was smarter than in medical school who _consistently_ out performed me. And the reason was simple: They were _extremely_ diligent, hard-working, motivated, and professional. Among other valuable lessons I learned that people vastly overestimate the role of intelligence in just about every aspect of life. It can give you sorts of advantages in life, but the majority of success is still chalked up to grit, persistence, motivation -- and the knowledge that results from it.

> You wouldn't want your heart,brain,etc operation to be in the hands of someone who isn't that talented but keeps on trying.

I dunno... I can't imagine any of the surgeons or doctors I've seen have been top of their class, at the #1 school in the country. Probably not even top 10. I've probably seen a lot of just average doctors, who probably did an average job at school, and now are pretty average as far as pure talent goes. But I'm still alive, so I guess it's not that bad.

>You wouldn't want your heart,brain,etc operation to be in the hands of someone who isn't that talented but keeps on trying.

If they tried enough that they got their degree and are known for having a good track record, then I absolutely do.

I'd also take them over a merely "talented" doctor any time.

Nobody ever said you should always choose persistence, just that in the absence of a better plan, persistence will work.

I still don't understand the argument, even less so with your explanation. Perhaps I'm missing something big.

I was arguing from the perspective of somebody trying to get something they want, the individual perspective, but it seems like you are considering the social utility one. While I can facially agree that there can be some arenas in which persistence can cause concern, I don't understand where your strong disagreement comes from.

And personally, I want my heart operated on by the guy that's done hundreds of heart operations, preferably my exact procedure. I want Dr. House to diagnose me, and Todd from Scrubs to actually do the operation. Dr. House's brilliant diagnosis doesn't actually affect my body, the potential problems that genius presents only guide what more sane, stable, dispassionate professional hands actually do to me. Stable dispassion is the realm of persistence.

> the individual perspective

I see your side more clearly now. You are correct that I was thinking more along the social unity side. Not sure I'd say I agree completely with you, but I see where I was mistaken before.

On the individual note, is it that persistence wins, or that the win is felt with the inevitable mental compromise taken in order to feel one has succeeded? I do see that it's better to try and fail than never try at all, just feel it's 'elitist' to think that persistence wins, as only the wealthy can really persevere. In my mind anyway.

When you look at how wealth is built, perseverance approaches (hard work) usually win out over attempts to avoid hustling. The idea is to build a vehicle, like a company, that can then continue to generate income without direct application of effort. This vehicle can only be built through hard and smart work. The startup community also likes to focus their efforts on ideas that can scale to more broadly socially-useful ideas.

What wealth buys you is the ability to employ someone else to do the grunt work. But to get there the grunt work needs to get done.

Most wealthy people worked their asses off to get there. Persistence wins again.

It's sad, but this is a fact that so many people discount. It's much easier to think in terms of "the rich asshole" who got all his money from Daddy and didn't have to lift a finger.

How to get freelance clients?

Very probable I think. Just keep in mind, the same was true back in his day I think. Most people were tied up in the drudgery of getting food on the table, quite literally.

I've always worried that it's worse than that.

Even if there's plenty of deep thinkers (which is what slow thinking is in my opinion) - there should always be some people with good fortune and circumstances to push at the peripheral. I honestly do not see that today in Silicon Valley - I see a lot of useless bullshit and superficial replacements, there's only a handful of people out there keeping it together.

However... poverty of Time is not likely to be the main constraint unless you live in the Middle Ages. Many intellectuals have taken jobs which enable them to kill two birds, merely being physically active and forced to be active by a job that requires it is a genuine cognitive advantage - not to mention the infinite distractions that can smear your available leisure time such that you produce nothing of value. Most aristocrats did not belong to the Royal Society.

No - the real problem is that we're too synchronized. We think alike - we have a 'frame problem' of our own.

Being here on HN or on the Internet in general is not an advantage. It at first appears to be valuable in the sense that you understand what exists and who is doing what, the context. That is I suspect the opposite of what we need for true innovation.

For true innovation you need to connect up with 'the network' once or twice a year - and the rest of the time fuck off and do something good (ideally with a small close knit group).

“[..]Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species." Yes? Why is that?" Because it means the end of innovation," Malcolm said. "This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they'll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behaviour. We innovate new behaviour to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That's the effect of mass media - it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there's a McDonald's on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there's less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity - our most necessary resource? That's disappearing faster than trees. But we haven't figured that out, so now we're planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it'll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity. [..]”

― Michael Crichton, The Lost World

Silicon Valley is suffering by being too middle class - the hubris is coming out of the groupthink. I think it takes a peculiar mixture of working class and middle class thinking to do something really good. I don't think that's a new insight, it's in the plot of the 1927 Metropolis but sometimes a cliché is really true. The people I've met at HackerSpaces, the people who impressed me were always adept at dealing with a lot of information - a middle class trait, but had a deep blue streak in their character that is completely absent from the people I went to University with. Matthias Wandel and Bill Gray are examples I think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wZ1v4PIsYI

http://www.velkess.com/

I’ve wondered recently if speed and intelligence have anything to do with each other at all. It does in IQ tests but Darwin by his account would have been average at best.

Further, the argument goes that there exists a g factor, and performance in a test that is sufficiently complex will be predictive of performance at anything else sufficiently complex ... Yet if we allow time to vary this seems to be so obviously false...

I've often thought about this - I suffered at school because the subject matter quickly seemed to arrive at one or more foundational concepts to not be explored further, whereas my brain would constantly ask, 'but why?'. The relentless pace didn't suit me at all. Nevertheless I learnt to override this in time and now have a BSc and MSc.

That’s interesting, I shared the “but why” until mid way through a BSc in Physics. The foundational concepts of “this is how {thermo|mechanics|quantum} works” was exciting, but the remainder of each semester was “now let’s work through all the edge cases” and I had difficulty keeping up.

I had that problem at school too. It felt like a denial of service attack.

Did you begin a parallel learning project for actually understanding the material?

When I was at school you mean?

Same here! Glad other people felt this way.

I kind of think that an intelligence tests should moreso try to evaluate how “Turing complete” you are , rather than how quick the processor is at a narrow range ...

Kind of reminds me of the programming language shootout dilemma . X is better than Y because it does Fibonacci sequences quicker ... mostly has no real world utility

Properly administered IQ tests with real psycometric rigor evaluate both, insofar as either can be empirically measured.

Except it doesn’t ...

Compare Rationality Quotient to Intelligence Quotient. You’d think they relate but they don’t ...

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/18/opinion/sunday/the-differ...

This is without considering give-a-f??k quotient, the most important of all, and that by which every test is confounded.

Yes, they actually do. IQ tests evaluate not just mental processing speed but also a number of orthogonal cognitive faculties. You cited an opinion article from the New York Times regarding the divergence between rationality and intelligence. I'm not talking about rationality, and in fact I would not immediately believe rationality and intelligence can be adequately tested using the same examination. One relates to decision making processes and the other relates to learning and aptitude processes. There is some overlap, but they're categorically different things.

I could direct you to a survey of studies that would more accurately describe the breadth of IQ assessments [1], but I think using my own IQ examination as an example might be more instructive. I've taken a formally administered IQ assessment under a qualified clinician. This assessment included the usual tests, such as the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale and Wechsler Memory Scale (among others).

The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale includes composite domains for "Full Scale IQ", "Verbal Comprehension", "Perceptual Reasoning", "Working Memory" and "Processing Speed." Note that mental processing speed is merely one of the measured dimensions of intelligence here. Each of these is given its own percentile score.

Within the Verbal Comprehension Scale domain there are subtests for "Similarities", "Vocabulary" and "Information." Under Percentual Reasoning there are subtests for "Block Design", "Matrix Reasoning" and "Visual Puzzles." Working Memory includes tests for "Digit Span" and "Arithmetic", and finally Processing Speed includes "Symbol Search" and "Coding."

During the verbal comprehension battery, you'd be asked questions such as, "How are an apartment and a house alike", or "What is the definition of this word?" You'll also be assessed on your knowledge of various culturally relevant facts.

Perceptual reasoning will test spatial orientation, integration performance and fine motor skills. This might include arranging blocks of various colors and shapes into different patterns and being asked to find the missing portion in a complex visual pattern.

The working memory examination will test for how much you can focus on simultaneously, and explicitly does not test for your processing speed. You'll be asked about sequences of numbers and tested for both long and short term recollection, as well as how accurately you can mentally perform operations on sequences while keeping them in your mind. That's the digit span test; the arithmetic tests are self-explanatory.

The only portion of the examination which explicitly tests for processing speed are the ones focusing on symbol search and coding. Therein you're asked to quickly scan a group of symbols and find a match of one or two targets, or to copy numbers lexicographically coded to symbols as quickly as possible.

I am interested in what measure of analogous "Turing Completeness" in human intelligence should thus be measured that is not already reflected in the examination I've just outlined. If you'd like to define that as rationality, then that's fine. But as I said before, I don't believe rationality should be coupled with intelligence. And moreover, I don't think "Turing Completeness" is a good analogy for rationality, since computers are (almost definitionally) neither rational nor irrational, regardless of their computational capabilities.

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1. http://www.gwern.net/Iodine

Thanks for the thought through response. Here's what I think in turn:

1. The g-factor premise is that a sufficiently complex test reveals an "underlying" intelligence factor and performance in it will be predictive of performance in other complex tests (whether that's Sudoku or life in general).

2. Mensa in the UK use the Cattell Culture Fair II test which strongly correlates with WAIS without the fanfare (i.e. it's just non-verbal puzzles). Triumph for g-factor, thus I discount your "battery of tests are better or somehow more revealing of the brains potential" argument.

3. One would expect that intelligence and rationality would correlate since it'll directly impact your ability to solve complex situations. It turns out that it doesn't, and I think a notion of arational or irrational intelligence is without sense.

4. However IQ does seem to correlate with the ability to "think quicker" and "cut out the noise". E.g. https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/2013/05/23/iq-vision-brai... . If you follow the thread, you'll find that it also comes with disadvantages (e.g. being less able to perceive slow change).

5. I'm using "Turing complete" as a dumb analogy to computing. Something that tests the range of things that you can solve, at any speed. To continue the analogy, if I'm a slow Turing machine but you're a lightening fast pushdown automata, fast as you might be within your domain, there's still a world of things that you can't solve that I can.

6. Anecdotally, I've observed that amongst my guys, being a bad-ass mathematician and being able to actually model or understand the world are separate skills. A narrow example, but an example nontheless, in my opinion Physics > Mathematics in terms of expressing the potential of a rational thinker precisely because it requires more "Turing machine".... to wit, consider all the maths that just never would have happened without the bad-ass physicists (again IMO exactly for the same reason stated).

My undergrad was in mathematics. I routinely failed midterms, but would ace the final exams.

I generally felt that, by the end of the term, I understood the material and simply had more time during the final exam than the midterms.

When I had my IQ test results it seemed like standard practise where I was to give two numbers: one total, and one when not counting the tests relying on speed. Not too surprisingly to anyone who knows me, the difference between the two numbers was for me unusually high.

On the other hand, contrary to the Darwin quote, I scored very high on abstraction capabilities -- although before getting my results, I had assumed I was doing very bad at that.

Conclusion: you probably want to measure all subtests individually to make sense of your strengths and weaknesses.

This is indeed known in the psychological practice in general (it's called "processing speed"), but most lay people aren't aware of it. Ask your friends if they ever got a professional IQ score and if they got the the different scores you describe. You tend to see it with people whose parents notice a high intelligence with learning difficulty and fight for thorough diagnostic testing and educational services.

Common tests don't explicitly measure it, but the test design either implicitly demands processing speed (timed tests, or rapidly spoken prompts/questions) or avoid it.

I think most people with high iq are awful to work with since they obviously lose interest trying to explain things to less intelligent people. This makes people feel bad around them, and they avoid asking them things.

I have seen nice people with high iq but I think it's more common that they are not great around people.

How could you tell the IQ of people you were working with? I'm struggling to see how you could arrive at this conclusion unless you've 1) worked with an inordinate number of both high IQ individuals, who 2) explicitly mentioned their IQ scores to you.

Personal hypotheses such as this one spread like wildfire online because they're easy to state, play to a narrative and are extremely difficult to disprove. They're stated confidently while skipping over so many little gaps - for example, I don't see anything obvious about how high IQ individuals would stop trying to explain things to low IQ individuals. It makes sense as a heuristic for explaining the behavior of one particular individual who is perhaps a misanthrope or has little patience. But it's very poorly generalizable.

How high an IQ are you talking here? I have a moderately high IQ (~130) and being able to explain complex topics to family and friends in a simple enough way that they understand it is one of the things I enjoy most, probably because having a basic summary then the meaty material is how I best learn complex topics.

I don't think humility, empathy, and high IQ are mutually exclusive, though given some of my experiences with smart people I can see why you might think that way.

I am not sure about that - those people I know who are waaay cleverer than me have bad days of course, but mostly if you ask them to explain the subject they love, they will talk (down) for days without getting bored.

Perhaps it's true for us all, we love to talk about what we do.

I also think some people with high iq learn to fake a lower iq and thus, go below the radar.

There are some times I wish I had gone with this option... would have made a lot of life so much easier than the "but you're so smart, how come you're having trouble with ______?"

Wow that sounds whiny but true.