Two sentences jumped out at me.

First:

“There are very few who are as inherently bright as Natalie is, who have as much intellectual horsepower, who work as hard as she did. She didn’t take a single thing for granted.”

then:

If anything, stories like Ms. Portman’s show that great success, like DNA, is constructed of a few basic building blocks: tenacity, focus, and the old Woody Allen line about just showing up.

No question about the importance of things like hard work, tenacity, focus, not taking anything for granted, and just showing up. We all have to do these things.

The phrase that really got me thinking was "intellectual horsepower". What is that? And how important is that?

I used to be awfully hasty in judging others, "She is really smart," or "He is so stupid". Then I learned alot from my first mentor. He taught that there often isn't much difference between someone who appears smart and someone who doesn't. Perhaps no one spent enough time with them. Maybe they have other challenges, like family, health, or circumstances. Maybe they're just a fish out of water, spending too much time on things that don't interest him. Or maybe they appear dumb because they actually believe that they are. They've been told so many times that they now believe it.

At first, he sounded like some hippie idealist. But the more we worked together, the more his teachings manifested themselves in the people we worked with. People who appeared dumb blossomed under different circumstances all the time. The were smart deep down inside where no one ever explored. (These people were mostly hourly workers who knew way more than their bosses about running the business.)

To this day, when I see phrases like, "intellectual horsepower", I cringe. We "smarties" aren't that much smarter than most other people, if we are at all.

And just to stay humble, remember: we're all just one head injury from blissful ignorance.

I don't think this is true at all. People who are average intelligence or below can be very successful but have no chance of succeeding in high level intellectual pursuits. People who are smart don't understand this, because to them learning anything is just a matter of effort.

I think there is truth in what you are saying, because at a certain level of intelligence, hard work and attitude become more of a bottleneck than ability. This is supported by facts as well, studies have found that success increases by IQ score, but levels off or drops at a certain point where brainpower is more of a handicap to mental health than a benefit.

I disagree with your claim about Lebron James, but I don't think there's enough data for an evidence-based debate. I do think, however, that people want to believe that others who operate at the genius level in various activities have genetic gifts. It gives us an excuse for why we don't.

I agree that there are going to be variations in inherent intelligence, body composition, or even ability to play basketball. I just don't think it's as extreme as some people do, nor do I think it's enough to be the sole enabler of people who operate at the genius level in activities.

[1] Assuming they don't have a hormonal problem, which are known to cause people on reasonable diets to become obese.

I don't have much time right now, but I did find a good starting point: http://www.ajcn.org/content/53/6/1561S.abstract "In this regard, the proneness to store energy primarily as fat or as lean tissue is a major determinant of the response to a caloric surplus."

Also: http://www.nature.com/oby/journal/v8/n7/abs/oby200063a.html Talks about insulin secretion being different between races even after accounting for other factors.

gasp we all aren't created equal! We all don't have the same benefits. Some people are born disadvantaged and must work for things!

And to the comment a few levels up, my ~3,500kcal diet would make some people obese even after accounting for my activity levels! 1 kcal for you is not the same as 1 kcal for me, bodies differ in conversion, storage, and utilization.

I have a hard time understanding why people don't like admitting that just as we differ on the outside (beauty, fitness) we are also different on the inside (metabolism, disease susceptibility)

I can only speak for myself, but "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" sums it up pretty well for me.

Beautiful to whom?

Fit for what?

Susceptible to which diseases? Concrete example: Carrying a gene for sickle-cell disease is obviously bad... unless you want some resistance to malaria. So which is it now, good or bad?

Of course people are different, and that's awesome. But the idea that you can give people "scores" on a bunch of axes like the ones above, and then figure out who is "better" or "worse" seems to me naive at best.

So there is a backlash against that. Thankfully. And along the way, in the push back, facts may get lost. Fact's that really, in the context of war, were not helpful.

And now humanity's leading edge seems to be becoming comfortable with that fact we are all different and actually kind of the same and are accommodating of wonderful multiplicity.

Whilst watching the shadow aspects of our egos, in case they come out to grandstand.

Why would you think we're equally able to improve ourselves, either?

It's naive to think everyone is born equal that way.

It's naive and ignorant to ignore nurture in the debate. A lack of Vitamin D or cholesterol can inhibit myelin growth, which notably in the womb causes a miscarriage or still-birth/brain dead baby. It's reasonable to assume that a lack of Vitamin D or cholesterol in a child's formative years is going to cause severe developmental problems.

Natalie Portman has a degree and an oscar for one simple thing: She works hard.

If she didn't work hard she might be a recognizable actress, but she'd be like a huge number of university enrollees in that they never get any degree.

Genetics is a firm foundation, bad genetics can cause lots of problems. But only work is going to build a house, and only hard work is going to build you a mansion.

Anyway, your point gets into issues of free will and consciousness that philosophers have been debating for centuries. If everything has a cause, how can we say what we're actually responsible for, and how much is just a reaction to random chance? Perhaps consciousness is largely an illusion: the brain makes decisions based on firmly ingrained circuits that function at a subconscious level, and only later does that bubble up to the conscious level.

We may all end up near enough (for all practical purposes) at the same endpoint if we all worked hard and performed necessary rotations and frame changes given our situations. The brain is very malleable.

There is also the fact that people start at different places for different areas and that chooses where they end up specializing. And there is probably some self-fulfilling prophecy going on that trains people to avoid smarty pants subjects which are vital for developing rigorous thinking. why is it a matter of pride to be terrible at maths and technical subjects? or the fact of growing up with certain teachers and society all but directly informing you that certain races aren't up for certain more mathy subjects. I can certainly attest to that stuff messing up your ability to keep on when things get difficult.

We have nature, nurture and random chance that create all of us. I wouldn't have said "life's too short" and moved country if I hadn't read a single book (The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin) that I have no clue how it came to be in my possession.

My entire life is based on seemingly random chances. I met my wife via friends of friends of friends whom I originally met in a chat room. I got my dog (Dachshund x Jack Russell) by going to the SPCA when they were flooded with Labrador crosses and they had no terriers up for adoption, but she was getting taken out for a walk at that very moment.

Our entire lives are quantified by our reaction to random chance. I had less odds of being where I am today than I have of winning the lottery, but why do the events of my life occur so but my lottery ticket is always going to be a dud for the rest of my life.

It's the mixture of our nature and nurture that define who we are, by how we react to random occurrences. What random shit defined your life so far?

But more significantly, intelligence is a very fuzzy concept, much harder to describe and more so define than eye color or height. It is also as much of a cultural concept as things like beauty, charisma, etc... Which is also why it is a more touchy subject than eye color or height: it is much more related to one own ideology.

Because intelligence is much less understood than most of the rest of our bodies. For example, there have been various discoveries that seem to indicate our language has an effect on what we can know and understand [1, 2, etc.]. Perhaps there are dramatic differences in what each of our brains are capable at the "hardware" level, but the "software" (language) dampens the effect.

[1] The Piraha can't learn numbers after a certain age because they have no words to describe them

[2] An article a few months back about deaf people growing up without any language ended up bringing out the fact that some asian languages have words to describe some aspect of color that westerners do not. Babies are able to see the difference but gradually lose the ability as they grow up with no way of expressing it.

If you want to be the best in the world, it's true that factors outside of your control come into play. If you can "settle" for being in the top 10, top 100, or top 1000, instead of #1, you probably don't need much besides a lot of well-directed effort.

In my experience.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1pykLK_CUs

Another case in point: taxi drivers apparently have growing brain regions for geographic stuff (learning their city by heart). I guess you wouldn't expect most taxi drivers to have above average intelligence, but if you tested their geographic "senses", they might register as geniuses. But they also probably didn't become taxi drivers because of their talent - it developed by them being taxi drivers.

I'm just happy if they have a GPS navigation system and can vaguely understand the directions issued from same.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicabs_of_the_United_Kingdom#...

When taxi drivers are required to demonstrate a deep knowledge of the geography of their area and are not allowed to rely on maps or GPS navigation systems in order to be certified, you end up with taxi drivers that are very good at navigating the city.

Most people can get within less than 2 seconds of Usain Bolt's best time. Going beyond that you run into a sheer cliff face. For athletes those fractions of a second is where biology starts to make a difference, the vast majority of differences in skill however, can be found in hard work.

Relevant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woOu_4l3lio

The last time I was familiar with the literature (~10 years ago), intelligence was best defined as having many dimensions. It's a collection of weakly related gifts. Spatial reasoning, for example, is a different kind of intelligence than musical ability. Perhaps someone more up to date on the science can chime in.

In any case, attempts to squash all those dimensions into a single numerical scale (like an IQ) hide a lot of information and can be very misleading.

1) Algorithmic intelligence: the layman's usual picture of intellegence around working with concepts, figures, space, so on and so forth

2) Verbal intelligence: working with language and expression, vocabulary, etc

3) Social intelligence: being able to read people and social situations

This was the state of play ~15 years ago and things may have restructured, but it points out that acuity can be in places other than the usual geeky fare. The sales guy that can sell you something you don't want and make you feel good about it is able to read your cues and formulate responses to counter 'incorrect' behaviour.

When I first moved out to Silicon Valley and started working at Google, I met lots of people that consistently saw things that I missed. Even ones who didn't have as much experience as I did, at least in terms of year-as-a-computer-programmer.

Now that I've been here a couple years, I've found that I'm consistently seeing things that other people are missing. Even, in some cases, the same people that consistently saw things I missed when I joined.

It hasn't been because my innate intelligence has gone up. (In fact, as measured by my performance against the Starcraft: Brood War AI, my reaction time and ability to think quickly seems to be going consistently down since high school.) Rather, I've accumulated lots more domain knowledge. And it's tacit domain knowledge, little subconscious bits that are floating around the Valley culture but that people aren't aware of on a conscious level. If you don't know to look for such domain knowledge, it seems like the person is just massively smarter than you. And if you have that domain knowledge, you usually aren't aware that you have it, and so it seems like you're massively smarter than everyone else. But if you actually look closely at the leaps of logic that intelligent people make, and then trace those solutions back to the knowledge that enables them, you can almost always find some particular fact hidden away in the back of somebody's brain that accounts for it.

It's interesting many traditional software companies seem to promote the idea of "subject matter experts" (SMEs) as a key part of their software development process. Although I think the concept of SMEs is somewhat flawed, the idea that domain knowledge is vitally important becomes more clear to me the longer I spend working in a particular area. You can't be an effective developer in any industry unless you work on building up your domain expertise.

Equal in that sense, not identical.

But then still, it's entirely possible that person A is better at many more things than person B. So 'equal' as in 'A and B are the best in an equal amount of things', I don't see any reason why it would be so.

If I see a really big guy in the gym lifting a ton of weight, we can agree he's strong. That doesn't make a judgement on his work ethic vs. his genetics, and it doesn't imply that people who aren't as strong don't have every bit of potential to get to where he is.

It's simply an observation on the facts of reality the way they are now. Now, I happen to be in the camp that believes you can make yourself smarter, so passing judgement on someone's intellectual horsepower in no way is me critiquing their potential.

Amen!

Doesn't sound too smart..

As: Few people who have the same level of intelligence she does, work as hard as she did.

As I understood it, the professor was saying that she outworked her peers, not that she was the smartest of the group but that her work ethic made her exceptional in an already smart group

When I deliberately dis-engage in uninteresting conversations with "smart people" I can see them judging me immediately. Sometimes I just don't want to faux-argue over inconsequential bullshit. The older you get the better you get at letting your ego go in these kinds of meaningless contests.

Agreed. And this is the perspective I have for a lot of the discussion threads here on HN. I love HN. But honestly, much of the so-called discussion here is picking at nits and stamp collecting. Even when you "win" you lose because you've wasted the time and effort that could have been better spent in the real world, or doing something to improve your financial or health situation. Not saying all discussion is bad, but one should pick and choose and get the most bang for your buck.

- speaks Swedish, English, Spanish, some German, some French, some Japanese, and some Italian

- awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

- has a master's degree in chemical engineering from the University of Sydney (1982)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolph_lundgren

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bud_Spencer

Edit: He is also a jet pilot, helicopter pilot, holder of multiple patents, and a startup founder with a successful exit as Wikipedia shows! :)

Edit: I just can't read... it's there as mentioned below.

Oh, you mean acting.

> Sylvester Stallone has stated that the original punching scenes filmed between him and Dolph Lundgren in the first portion of the fight are completely authentic. Stallone wanted to capture a realistic scene and Lundgren agreed that they would engage in legitimate sparring. One particularly forceful Lundgren punch to Stallone's chest slammed his heart against his breastbone, causing the heart to swell and his breathing to become labored. Stallone, suffering from labored breathing and a blood pressure over 200, was flown from the set in Canada to St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica and was forced into intensive care for eight days.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_IV

The last sentence, "You can be a scientist, but if you want your name in lights, you’d better play one on TV." made me a little sad. Eventually, we get what we celebrate; if we celebrate being a cheerleader (or a beauty queen) more than being a scientist, then we'll get more of those. I don't know how much progress a society can make if everyone aspires to be a cheerleader.

On a positive note: I've been watching bits and pieces of Jeopardy's "Teen Championship" and girls are doing very well in that! I hope the finals is an all-girls affair, that would be great.

Can I ask why? It wouldn't make a difference to her performances, so if she chooses to not use her scientific creds why should anyone feel the need to mention them? It doesn't validate her as a person anymore than if she was a talented actress who used to be a waitress.

I'm going to stuff words into ajays' mouth but if someone as "cool" as Natalie Portman can be so intelligent, that perhaps helps to counter a little of the anti-intelligence schtick that's common in some areas of life.

That said, many famous people are more qualified and intellectually agile than their public personas and media coverage give them credit for..

This is important if you beleive that 1) A society with more Scientist idols would get more scientists than one with more beauty queen idols 2) A society with more scientists would be a better place than if it had more beauty queens.

Because it would encourage a lot of people to become interested in science.

I could go on about how awful some movies have been but that's for another discussion.

Serious question. I wonder why if anti-intellectualism is so widespread in the US, you guys still have some of the best native-born scientists in the world (although there are more and more imported ones). What are the offsetting factors that allow all these smart kids to pursue what they love despite the anti-intellectualism in the wider culture? Anyone with good answers please do chime in.

Also, if the quote is true, then China and India with their strong, sometimes even fanatic, encouragement on nurturing and praising smart kids (from everyone, including other kids) will take over the scientific world in due course.

Of course there are other factors that disadvantage them: funding, bureaucratic system & work environment for scientists, to name a few. But those are getting better very quickly. A key factor that slows down scientific progress in these countries though is the focus on making money and building one's wealth for societal and familial respect instead of pursuing one's passion.

In spite of the all those things, I recently read from the Economist that China will overtake the US in the number of patents granted this year or the next. (And that is probably because patents are more likely than scientific papers to help with wealth creation for its inventors and funding organizations).

If it's like Australia, it's because when you escape adolescent daycare, you discover at university that there are people as smart as you. Often smarter.

And it's bloody marvellous.

Woodie Flowers always used to say that we need an "LA Engineer" (a play on "LA Law for you younger folks) to bring science and engineering into the mainstream. I always cringe at shows like Big Bang Theory that portray smart folks as socially inept - given that association, it's no surprise that many kids would rather be "dumb and cool" than "smart and nerdy" when in fact smart people are just like everyone else.

I think thats what Big Bang Theory does best... portray smart people who are socially inept as someone that anyone can relate to. In the show, they are just regular people trying to get by, find love, etc... well, except for Sheldon.

To me, its amazing that a show that is completely over the top nerdy is incredibly popular.

... Wait, what? You know you're talking about a sitcom, right? The whole point of the show is to be ridiculous for laughs.

My point was that people other than traditional 'geeks' find the show amusing. They get the humor. Geek-culture has gone mainstream.

That's just it - the folks that do spend there time on a computer or in a lab (off the top of my head: the goth girl from NCIS, the Law & Order lab techs, Chloe on 24) all have some sort of anti-social nerd personality type.

Why can't there be a computer tech who works hard at his/her job, has a beer after work, watches sports, etc like everyone else?

Well sure, but the folks on TV are better looking and less socially awkward across the board than their real-life counterparts.

Fringe makes science look pretty cool, IMHO.

They go on to talk about some other people besides Natalie Portman.

"handful of high-profile actors who happen to have serious scientific credentials"

Hedy Lamarr, Danica McKellar, Mayim Bialik, and Leonard Nimoy all get substantial mentions in the article. The article is framed around Ms. Portman but the inclusion of the other actors indicate that it is not just about her. Certainly Dylan (who has actually performed with Ms. Portman) is more relevant than the other actors who, AFAICT, have not.

Franco has been described as having "an unusually high metabolism for productivity...a superhuman ability to focus". Dissatisfied with his career's direction, Franco reenrolled at UCLA in the fall of 2006 as an English major with a creative writing concentration. Having received permission to take as many as 62 course credits per quarter compared to the normal limit of 19 while continuing to act, he received his undergraduate degree in June 2008 with a GPA over 3.5.

He moved to New York to simultaneously attend graduate school at Columbia University's MFA writing program, New York University's Tisch School of the Arts for filmmaking,and Brooklyn College for fiction writing, while occasionally commuting to North Carolina's Warren Wilson College for poetry.[1] He received his MFA from Columbia in 2010. Franco is a Ph.D. student in English at Yale University and will also attend the Rhode Island School of Design.

Sometimes I wonder what kind of difference that would make in my life, particularly when I was in grad school.

And then I tell myself to shut up and get back to work.

If you are the type who could work all those extra hours, try outsourcing as many activities as possible. Start with housekeeping services, as an example, and perhaps a personal cook.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s%E2%80%93Bacon_number...

EDIT: it is 6, not 5, sorry

I know, I know, it's hardly a worthy ambition. But still.

<sigh>

Recently a good colleague of mine died very suddenly. I realised that there was so much I had wanted to ask him about, and never got the chance. Last year I got to spend an afternoon with one of my childhood - and adulthood - heroes. That was just 2 months before he died.

If you put up a piece of A0 paper marked off in centimeter squares, and I marked them off one per day, there's a very good chance I wouldn't cross them all off before I die. I'm starting to think of some of the things I want to do for me, as well as the things I want to leave for others.

Maybe I should write to Kevin Bacon.

Now, maybe I'm projecting my own stupidity to this remark but it just seems hare-brained. This effect is very easy to understand: many beautiful people you've met before have little/no interest in science, i.e. appear to be stupid, so your subconscious Bayesian learner assigns a low probability to the gorgeous woman you see having invented a new spread spectrum technique.

http://images2.memegenerator.net/ImageMacro/6023659/Maybe-yo...

"She’d been in films directed by Woody Allen, Tim Burton and Luc Besson, appeared opposite Julia Roberts, Jack Nicholson, Matt Dillon, Uma Thurman, Drew Barrymore and I’m getting tired of typing celebrity names here. She took on the major role of Queen Amidala in the Star Wars prequel trilogy that rocketed her to international fame."

To be honest, I'm not sure there's any degree where the mere act of receiving it would be more impressive than the above feat.

Because being in the presence of popular people is a major accomplishment, right? Far greater an accomplishment than the defense of any original PhD thesis, right?

I can drive to the Viceroy hotel bar right now and be in the presence of a random A-list celebrity if I so choose. By your logic, that act alone sets me worlds apart from the entire body of original research being done by PhD candidates all over the world.

I will never understand the nature of being starstruck. If I want to shut down my rational faculty, I have a bottle of Glenkinchie at the ready.

No one is starstruck by Woody Allen. But you're startstruck by his work.

Let me put it to you this way. I'm FAR more certain that you can get a PhD than you could ever get half the critical acclaim or box office receipts that Natalie has gotten.

Although, I'd just love to find out you are actually Will Smith and have just blown my thesis to pieces. :-)

i know who she is since i saw beautiful girls and of course leon and she always stood out to me as a very, very smart person, but in my book one student co-authorship does not make one a "scientist". it's more like "very good student", "on the way" or "caught the attention of a famous prof and got a head start". none of which detracts from her, btw.

but hey, i suffer my own forms of hero worship, all of which is harmless fun, which is what hollywood is here for, i suppose. ;-)

My heroes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Kay, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Kennedy, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Powers.

People I'd place in the category of scientist based on the fact that she co-authored a paper with one of the pioneers of developmental psychology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natalie_Portman.

That's a far cry from being a hero. Please, let's be reasonable.

The New York Times has been reduced to gawking.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr#Frequency-hopping_s...

another movie like this that comes to mind is The Incredibles, which despite featuring superheroes has clear respect for physics

i sure wouldn't mind more movies like that. i think there is greater creativity from starting with a rigorous foundation

Additionally he has, not only his pilot's license, but his APTL license (which requires 1500 flight hours) and is a certified Flight Instructor who has made a round-the-world flight in 10 days.

I for one believe that shows intelligence and hard work.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Cox_(physicist)

And apparently the lead singer/guitarist/keyboardist for OK Go (although I think that was after I left)

Would love to see the battle of votes on that comment. But sheesh, isn't it ok to have a little fun now and then. I mean it is even kinda on topic. :)