I’ve come to assume that I wouldn’t actually be good at research but sometimes I wonder whether that isn’t due to lack of intelligence but rather due to bad habits (like my tendency to isolate myself rather than collaborate). https://twitter.com/the_aiju/status/1300349788169351168

Forgot to mention why I linked the thread lol, I *think* I’m alluding to Everett’s theories but I actually came up with this stuff independently while writing a textbook on QM for fun.

I squandered a lot of potential because

(a) I derived my self worth from being smart and avoided situations that might prove me not-smart

(b) I assumed being smart means figuring out stuff by yourself rather than existing in a network of other thinkers

I would see other kids solve problems I couldn’t solve and my natural reaction was to flinch away, I didn’t want to compete, I didn’t want to risk being proven not-smart.

Rather than being curious and asking “how did they do that?”

I just assumed they were smarter than me

When I was young I had a naive mental model of wit as being something like “intelligence” and “knowledge” where intelligence is being able to figure out stuff and knowledge being disjoint facts like “Berlin is the capital of Germany”.

Suffice to say this is 100% bogus

I saw a tweet with some quick calculation tricks that I couldn’t follow and my assumptions (probably correctly) jumped to “they probably do that kinda stuff a lot” rather than “wow super genius”

In reality a lot of “knowledge” is also “problem-solving ability”, if you do a lot of physics problems it will train your ability to solve physics problems, you’re not just adding more disjointed facts like “F=ma”.

tl;dr cognitivism bad, pop cognitivism super bad

Sometimes I wonder whether this kind of bogus model is also what leads ppl to stan IQ (I think it was certainly a factor in me taking IQ seriously)

Maybe a good analogy for how I feel about IQ is the 0-100 time of a car. Sure, it tells you *something* about how fast the car is and “fastness” of a car is certainly a thing. But it would be silly to equate the two in a deep sense(&I feel many IQ proponents do this implicity)

Sure, a Ferrari with a great 0-100 might also be the #1 on the racetrack. But it won’t beat a tractor at plotting a field or a 737 at getting to New York. Maybe it wouldn’t even be #1 at going down Mt Akina (sorry dunno enough about cars to complete this part of the analogy)

“But, but, studies show IQ correlates with life outcomes”

Yeah but so does educational attainment and yet you people keep insisting that a Harvard degree is pure signalling and 0% value.

Sorry didn’t mean to shake fists at the rats again.