retskrad

Interesting perspective, thanks

Speaking of IQ, when I listen to interviews and podcasts of supposed high IQ people like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, I struggle to see signs of intelligence (not saying that they don’t have above average IQ). I find that these 2 have a hard time sifting through the noise (competing thoughts) in their head to get to want they want to say (the signal).

When I listen to Steve Jobs, I hear someone who has very strong ability to sift through noise. So Jobs couldn’t see engineering in a new way like Elon does but Elon couldn’t do what Jobs did either.

Regarding Zuckerberg, from what I’ve read he is the Bill Gates type where he has the traditional variant of high IQ, aka raw hardware/horsepower but lower on creativity/imagination side.

So intelligence seems to have different shapes and sizes.

Look at the Settings app on your iPhone or iPad. It’s constantly nudging you to subscribe to some Apple service, like AppleCare, or to pay for more iCloud storage because your measly 5 GB is running out. If Tim Cook is this shameless, then ads in Maps are practically old-school Apple by comparison.

Speaking of these standardised tests, I think it's ridiculous that even for someone like Elon Musk, who read for up to 10 hours a day for most of his of pre college days and learned how to build rockets with the use of books och instruction manuals, only scored 730 on the Math section and 670 on the Verbal section for a total composite score of 1400. The fact that he couldn't get higher score means something is wrong with these tests. They are mirroring a very narrow frequency of aptitude.

Reading text is a recent phenomenon and the brain doesn't have hardware acceleration. I'm not surprised that less and less people read long form text. Becoming an intermediate reader is exhausting when you didn’t grow up with books. After 500 hours, I can only navigate titles like The Selfish Gene with middling comprehension. Black text on white background feels flat and dopamine free, yet the grind itself becomes the reward, and social media’s quick hits lose their appeal.

After reading the book "Apple in China", it’s hilarious to observe the contrast between Apple as a ruthless, amoral capitalist corporation behind the scenes and these WWDC presentations...