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.

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."

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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"?

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.

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.

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...

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?

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.

> and competent

Seems like begging the question.

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%.

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

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?