In another New Yorker piece, Steven Milhauser explores aged genius in his short story, "In the Reign of Harad IV"
Excert:
he understood that he had travelled a long way from the early days, that he still had far to go, and that, from now on, his life would be difficult and without forgiveness.
This may be a little off-topic, but as I was reading the article, I started wondering about something. The author uses examples of genius in art and literature, and noted how Cézanne's early works weren't "very good" and how his later one's were much better, whereas Picasso's early works were considered his best.
So I googled paintings of both artists, and I'm perplexed. I have absolutely no clue what is considered "great". Obviously this is because my work is in science and I know next to nothing about art, but I'm still kind of curious what makes a work great in art and literature.
For instance, there's thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of painters in the world right now. And if you select the top 100 and showed me their paintings, and then showed me a Picasso, I wouldn't be able to point out why Picasso's is "better".
Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" is also mentioned as one of the best poems of all time. I'll admit, it's very beautiful, but I just don't understand what makes it that much more amazing than a contemporary poet's work.
Imagine if you took the world's population and wiped everyone's memories of great artists, and then asked them to reevaluate which which works are the "greatest". Would we arrive at the same conclusions? Without the bias of knowing "this is a famous artist, therefore his work must be good", would the rankings of art remain the same?
Unlike my literature teachers in high school, I don't believe in "magical qualities", so there has to be some numeric metric one could use to separate the very best from the "just good". What is it? (Perhaps it's not an easily calculable number, but it still must exist; if it didn't, then the whole field of art and literature criticism would be nonsense.)
The thing about a work of art being "good" is that it also largely depends on the surrounding art traditions of the time. Picasso's early works contributed most to new aesthetic thinking and the discussion of the nature of art, and within that context they are revolutionary and genius.
To give another example, in my opinion Duchamp's readymades were a genius piece of artistic trolling, great thought-provoking statements on aesthetics and the nature of art. Pretty much everyone who followed missed the point, as they did not add anything significant to the discussion - they just accepted the Fountain as art and proof that their readymades are therefore also valuable art.
Also, with many works of art you really need to see the real thing to even get the opportunity to "get" it. A real Mondrian is much better than you would expect based on pictures, because it's possible to empathise and "feel" how the artist made his brush strokes, the emotion behind it. That embodied experience of a work of art, which is essential to the readability of a painting, or any work of art, is often lost when translated to a digital JPG.
As for your last point, you fall for the mistake of believing that the external objective truth, which applies to the natural sciences, applies to art. Art is about (partially shared) subjective experiences, which can still be quantified to some degree if put in the proper context, but not in the same meaningful way we can calculate the value of Pi. For example, our eyes work mostly the same across our species, so before interpreting what we see the input should be largely similar, creating similarity in otherwise subjective experiences. But it's obvious that this similarity in perception is limited.
I suggest "Philosophy in the Flesh", by Lakoff and Johnson, if you want a nice empirically grounded discussion related to this - they apply empirical insights from the cognitive sciences to philosophy and in the process give you a good non-magical sense of how this subjective but shared experience works.
Think of it like people who quote movie lines too much, like Arnold Schwarzenegger saying "Hasta la vista, baby" in Terminator 2. When the line first came out, it was interesting. The repetition kills it for a while. It can eventually make a comeback, a nostalgic throwback, less a reference to the movie itself and more a harkening to our shared experience of it.
And it could then eventually fade away completely, at which point a new movie (Terminator 4D!) could use it and kick off a whole knew wave, completely oblivious to the original, until a cultural anthropologist somewhere writes a paper somewhere that will get poorly summarized in the popular news.
There is nothing objectively, measurably different about when Arnold said it the first time, when your coworkers drove it into the ground around the water cooler, or in later uses. What differs entirely is the cultural context in which we experience it.
And when it comes to "Ahht"-art, it's never about the pretty picture. It's about what it communicates about culture.
Art exists within contexts, and without understanding those contexts, you will have a hard time understanding why one piece of art is more respected/revered than another.
Here's an analogy: imagine you found an artist who had almost no background in science, and gave him a bunch of scientific papers to read. Would he be able to identify the significant or groundbreaking papers? By what criteria would he make his decisions?
Maybe our definitions of critical thinking are different, but I've always regarded artists as masters of critical thinking.
From the wikipedia article:
"The National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking defines critical thinking as the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action."
Try to do anything in art without a mastery of that and you're probably not going to produce good work.
Then why do so many artists practice crystal magic and goofy food fads? Why are so many deniers of science? Maybe its just the posers, the non-masters that do that?
Citation needed. All the artists I know are reasonable people. And I could fine plenty of scientists & enginers who practice the equivalent of crystal magic. For instance, Ray Kurzweill and his 100 vitamin pill a day bid to live long enough for his brain to be kept alive in a jar.
Artists would ask, why do so many scientists and engineers have such trouble telling good art from terrible art? Why do they have so much trouble distinguishing what they "can" do from what they "should" do? (example: the intense regret that many Manhattan Project scientists experienced during the Cold War)
Scientific knowledge affects all of us, but it is only one of a number of domains of knowledge. If you judge art based on scientific understanding, of course you're going to have trouble. It would be like trying to score a baseball game with football rules.
Maybe someday we'll be able to apply the equations of science to art--I do believe in a mechanical, causal universe (i.e. I don't believe in crystal magic). But art is a product of culture, which is itself an abstraction of incredibly complex interactions of incredibly complex systems: human beings.
Edit to add: artists have trouble with understanding science because they are attempting to judge it with their artistic understanding of the world. It's the inverse of my sports analogy above--they are trying to score a football game with baseball rules, so they get it wrong.
My point is that does not mean they are dumb or ignorant or incapable of critical thinking. Just differently trained and coming from a different context.
For what it's worth, there are plenty of engineers and programmers who also have trouble with scientific knowledge (see discussions of climate change here on HN or Slashdot). I think that is because engineering and science are two closely related, but ultimately different domains of knowledge.
I doubt there's a strong correlation between an artistic propensity and an adeptness for critical thinking. But if the artist is commercially successful, the correlation may exist, on the ground that commercial success implies effective reality-testing.
Also, it's important to say that what constitutes an artist is very, very subjective. Virtually anyone can say they're an artist, because there aren't any objective criteria that would pass muster with someone skilled in ... critical thinking.
Not everyone can say they understand everyday reality and can function within it, because that claim can be easily proven or falsified. But anyone can say they're an artist who hasn't found their audience yet. Such a claim appeals more to the charity of the listener than to a meaningful comparison with reality.
Try to paint a portrait without being able to critically deconstruct how light, shadow, and perspective interplay and you probably won't get too far. Seems to me it takes a lot of critical thinking about the world to be able to do that.
Or maybe it's contemporary conceptual based art you're thinking about? A lot of it requires the artist to think critically about human social structures in order to create commentary on it.
Sure, anyone can claim they're an artist and produce work that is not well thought out or executed, but that's not a reason to conclude that artists lack critical thinking skills. Every professional working artist I know here in NYC is exceptionally good with critical thought.
Just because you don't use a logic based language to reason doesn't mean you're not thinking critically.
I think it's probably a more accurate statement to say that scientists do not respect the critical thinking skills of artists. The fact is that many artists feel the same way about scientists. Feynman wrote about this in some of his memoirs.
Lets extend this to an easier subject we all have extensive experience with... evaluating the taste of the food we're eating.
If the food critic fad of the day prioritizes flavor balance, the "winner" will have an amazing balance of flavors but perhaps the texture will resemble dog food or clam chowder.
If the food critic fad of the day prioritizes texture, or heat, or visual appearance, or smell, or sweetness (well, food critics don't like corn syrup but walmart shoppers certainly do...).
Even worse, fads aren't binary either, its all a big ratio. That's at least partial explanation why some authors go in and out of favor in lit over centuries. Its actually a lot of work in lit to keep up with who is supposed to be cool and who is supposed to suck based on changing tastes.
Then dog pile a ton of groupthink on top with some politics and inevitable cultural issues (racism, nationalism, etc) and you can see how faddish some of this is.
On the other hand, if you have an agreed upon definition of impressionism, then you can evaluate who makes the best impressionist painter under that set of carefully defined rules. I think it would be hard to argue against Monet. Someone could claim Sisley but I think on long enough study that Monet beats Sisley overall. (edited to emphasize, beats Sisley at the defined rules... nothing wrong with liking a set of rules where Sisley beats Monet, just don't name that set of rules impressionistic painting)
Or, you can compare your Robert Frost to this dude named Robertson who wrote similar, yet somewhat inferior poems. I think it would be a lot of work or outright impossible to compare Frost to Kipling or to T S Elliot beyond sorta "and heres a different genre"
>whereas Picasso's early works were considered his best.
Having been to the Picasso museum here in Barcelona, it maybe because he could actually paint, as you can see in his earlier work, as opposed to his later stuff - which looks like it is done by a 5 year old.
I personally believe there is a lot of "celebrity culture" in art, even Banksy said something along those lines.
"The Art we look at is made by only a select few. A small group create, promote, purchase, exhibit and decide the success of Art. Only a few hundred people in the world have any real say. When you go to an Art gallery you are simply a tourist looking at the trophy cabinet of a few millionaires..."
I think this story is evidence that there are some non arbitrary qualities to artwork that you (and I) are not perceiving.
It would never have occurred to me to pick up this painting in the trash, but the woman did... a woman who was "not a modern-art aficionado" but felt the painting "had a strange power".
So since you (an admitted neophyte who knows "next to nothing" about art) can't discern good art from great art, art criticism as a whole must be invalid? It might be, but that's surely not evidence of it. You tout your ignorance as if that somehow lends credence to your comment.
Sure, there's a high degree of subjectivity inherent to art. But we can look to the originality of a given work of art, and and cultural impact that it has had.
If you wiped everyone's memories of great inventions, scientific discoveries, etc., and then asked them to compare the Model T to a Ford Focus, they'd of course say the Focus is a much better automobile. And an understanding of the impact and importance of the Model T would be lost on them.
I knew where this was headed as soon as I read the first three -- rather passive aggressive -- words of your reply. Yours seems to be the only comment among many implying I think "art criticism as a whole must be invalid". Curious that... I really despise people putting words in my mouth that were never there. You're looking for a fight that doesn't exist, so I flagged your post since it detracts from the discussion. Please abstain from these sorts of comments in the future.
> [You're] implying I think "art criticism as a whole must be invalid". Curious that... I really despise people putting words in my mouth that were never there.
Weird, I wonder where I got that notion from?
> so there has to be some numeric metric one could use to separate the very best from the "just good". What is it? (Perhaps it's not an easily calculable number, but it still must exist; if it didn't, then the whole field of art and literature criticism would be nonsense.)
That's where I got confused. I thought you were being sarcastic when you said that that art can be converted to a number.
I think it's possible (or very likely) that no such metric exists, and that if it did, it would be of little value. For instance, do you rank art based on aesthetic value, or the visceral effect it has had on viewers (mean or max?), or societal impact? Perhaps all the factors, but how do you weight them? Is there an objective measure of aesthetic value? It's more likely that different individuals/groups/cultures have different aesthetic tastes that vary over time, so perhaps you average over these variables? By averaging over these variables, will the "best art" be the perfectly pleasant art you might find hanging in a hotel lobby? Or will it be bolder art that a subset of people will revile? Who gets to decide?
There's always a chance that art can be converted into a meaningful and objective number. But if this metric does not exist, then by your logic, "art and literature criticism would be nonsense."
In my personal opinion, art is by its nature subjective. Aesthetic value is rather arbitrary. Art criticism is probably mostly a sham. But without them, how would rich people know which paintings to buy? Most people like being told what to like, what to wear, and when to laugh, and so they provide a useful service.
Yes. In athletics for instance it's very easy. Each sport has a built-in scoring system from the get-go. I would also say it's pretty easy to pick out the best scientists. Simply evaluate the improvement in predictive power that their contribution to the field elicits, and I think Einstein, Feynman, et al. would fall out pretty easily as the best.
Many competitive sports are strongly context-dependent, though--just like art. Part of the beauty of basketball, for example, is we will never know if Wilt Chamberlain or Michael Jordan or LeBron James is really the greatest basketball player of all time because they played in different eras. Athletic training was so much different in Chamberlain's era that it's tough to predict if he'd be as dominant today. Even in the early years of Jordan's career, plenty of players didn't lift weights for fear of becoming too bulky.
Sports where competitors are measured against a clock or a tape measure are easier to compare across eras but even then equipment changes make it difficult. Pole vaulting, for example, became a completely different sport when flexible fiberglass poles were introduced. Major track events were still being run on cinder tracks into the 1970's.
This is a really good link to share. Thanks, I also ordered Thinking, Fast and Slow the book because of this posting and the comments. This thread has been pretty interesting to me even from an "at speed of thought" perspective.
Certainly in lower levels of education, "fast" thinking against known problems and problemsets is the norm (at least in the United States). I worked with a few "fast" thinkers that fell into a strange, at the time to me, category of people that I could recognize as intelligent and could solve a certain class of issue or problem easily, but when it came to a more difficult problem space or perhaps one that requires delayed gratification (or no real external recognition/validation/praise) they would give up. The "deep" thinkers seemed to give equal or near equal weight to the validity of options in many cases. There's a time, place, and type of problem that can benefit from each mode of thinking.
Its interesting to analogize thinking with athleticism.
There are some athletes who just outperform most people in all areas as a class.
There are athletes who are experts in certain fields and useless in others (don't enter a football defensive lineman in an ultra-marathon, etc)
Some athletes peak very young. Some train very slowly, some develop very fast. Some athletes start training late in life.
It is mystifying if you're trapped in the dead/dying idea of mind-body dualism, but if the mind and brain are just another pile of nutrient consuming protein just like muscle, it makes sense that the observations are similar.
I would imagine if it were easy to measure, we'd find similar performance trends WRT pancreas or kidney function.
To me, the question of precocity vs. late blooming can be summed up thusly:
1) The 70-year lifespan is a recent development. Producing great work in one's 20s and 30s was a necessity because one's 40s and 50s weren't guaranteed. Social inertia took over from there.
2) The young also have greater marketability (looks, energy) and can usually be controlled more easily. This makes them more attractive to backers. This matters a lot in many fields, but in the arts especially, where the artist receives as much attention as their art.
I can think of 2 reasons very quickly - #1, the brain is far more capable and plastic and active in adolescence than it is in adulthood or later. #2, human beings have a finite lifespan. If you wish to get further than others, you have to surpass their development at all stages.
Until we can change biology, no one is going to have a brain that works better than an adolescent, that's just how we evolved.
When I read the title I assumed it was an article about the unfairness of the education system, and the whole-life impact of an assessment carried out at an arbitrary point in your 18th year. Perhaps that's an even more pernicious example of the problem.
I read this years ago and thought he had a great premise for a book. I guess it kinda ties into Gladwell's Outliers and David and Goliath, but I still hope he writes more on this topic in the future.
Offhand remark regarding the title: everyone can recognize the brilliance of a 5 year old doing calculus, because it's still sort of in the realm of something people may have encountered, and can compare to their own experience. Compare with someone who is, say, 30, and doing some topological quantum lattice tensor dilithium crystal quark extractor thing, it's just "blub" - it's so far beyond most of us we can't tell much more than that person is quite smart at something we know nothing about.
I would agree with and extend your remarks that it takes a certain level of competence in a field to correctly evaluate someone at a higher level in the field, and as the level of the evaluated person increases, the required level of the evaluator increases.
Someone with a BS in physics level of knowledge or maybe grad degree can possibly evaluate Feynman vs Einstein as per the debate in the comments today. However, I suspect most people can't do a useful evaluation of those two.
There are obvious HN on topic analogies with coding, system design, database design, network design.
Genius, in the popular conception, is inextricably tied up with precocity—doing something truly creative, we’re inclined to think, requires the freshness and exuberance and energy of youth.
It is also tied up with the idea that "geniuses" are fast. It was nice to see profiles of Maryam Mirzakhani indicate that she was a deep thinker, not a fast thinker. Maybe we can start changing some of these popular mis-conceptions.
This isn't really true; scientists also praised Einstein for his deep mathematical intuition. His work on Brownian motion and general relativity was new and difficult mathematics (GR still is). GR is also startling for the mind-bending fundamental intuitions behind it. He asked mathematicians for help hammering out details, but 1) everyone does this and 2) mathematical rigor and abstraction wasn't nearly as well-established back then as it is now, and was difficult to grasp for many physicists and even mathematicians. For example it was several years before Minkowski established the connection between special relativity and the "shape" of spacetime, giving rigor to Einstein's intuition--but doing so is nowdays an easy exercise in undergraduate mathematics.
I copied the quote from [1] however credible you find that source. (Though they provide references to several books at the end of their article.)
Also, Darwin:
"At no time am I a quick thinker or writer: whatever I have done in science has solely been by long pondering, patience, and industry." [2]
On a personal note, I entirely relate to the slow thinker. Most smart peers of mine are fast thinkers and I'll usually lose to them on puzzles and tricky math problems when it is a matter of speed, but then I'll solve problems that these same people give up on and claim too difficult if I can sit in a quiet room with my fists on my head.
I have a suspicion that fast thinking involves a developed ability to filter out (quickly) what seem like dead end avenues -- so the fast thinker can hone in on the promising avenues and get to a local maxima solution faster. But for some problems -- especially ones that require very non-traditional paths to solutions -- this filter fails and prunes away avenues that actually lead to a solution to that "impossible" problem or global maxima solution.
I realized a long time ago the danger in pruning away the "obvious" dead ends, so I think my slow thinking comes from a refusal to categorize anything as a dead end until it is provably so -- because of a worry I'll prune away the solution. A bunch of avenues will present and I'll need to consciously sort through them. So my filter is slow and requires me to retreat to that quiet room to go sort through all the possibilities. But then I'll come up with gold.
I have a theory that I'll put out here... that slow and fast thinking are developed tendencies not innate qualities. In my experience most of the smart people I know are fast thinkers. Which makes sense if this is developed, because there's an ego reward involved -- especially in our educational systems -- for developing that way. And the only reward for slow thinking is solving a hard problem, but as a kid in school, where's the external reward in that? And how often is the opportunity for solving really hard problems given? Basically what I'm saying is that I'd like to see more slow thinkers in the world. (I'm not kidding.)
As a fast thinker, everything you say here makes sense to me, especially about quickly pruning dead ends. I admire my slow-thinker friends for not doing that, and I've always considered slowing my thinking to be a top career goal.
As for whether it's a developed vs innate quality, I don't remember ever thinking differently and being trained to think the way I do because of my environment. I would agree that in our system fast thinkers are rewarded more, but that doesn't mean that our system develops fast thinkers at the expense of slow thinkers, or that its any less innate. It just means that slow thinkers have more difficulty being recognized earlier (hence "late bloomer" or missing the "precocious" label.
"This is related to another comment about two types of genius. There are people who solve a problem the same way that you do, just much much faster. You can imagine doing the same work they had done, but rather than an hour or a day, you would have got to the same place after months of hard work and dead ends. These people are much like ourselves, only a lot quicker. Then there are the other people who show you a solution, and you have absolutely no idea how they even got started. Feynman fell into this latter group." [1]
"Upon starting high school, Feynman was quickly promoted into a higher math class and an unspecified school-administered IQ test estimated his IQ at 125—high, but "merely respectable" according to biographer James Gleick;"[2]
I think people with extremely high IQ tend to be "fast thinkers" and they seem to rely more on logical thinking while those who have sufficient IQ tend to be "deep thinkers" and rely more on intuition/epiphanies.[3]
John von Neumann would the "fast thinker" type of Genius.
Well, my opinion is not entirely uninformed or off the cuff. I was briefly Director of Community Life for The TAG Project. I homeschooled my gifted-learning disabled sons. I attended a gifted conference and was a low-level presenter. I did plenty of reading on the subject for a time and participated in lots of discussions with other informed individuals in the gifted community, including some fairly important professionals in this niche field.
First of all, most IQ tests do not go above 140. So anything anywhere near 140 may only be telling you the person is at about the limits of what the test can measure. Even for those tests that do go above 140, it requires a qualified assessor to interpret it properly. The smartest kids often do not measure as being all that smart by standard measures. "Genius" is, basically by definition, someone who thinks differently from others. So measuring the kid who is radically different by standard measures has a track record of missing a lot.
In recent years, there is increasingly research into and available literature on the idea that gifted kids have different minds. They are not merely "more" of something, they are fundamentally different. The correlation of "speed = intelligence" is a rubric which assumes gifted kids are simply "more" of something. Yes, they do tend to be faster than average, even if they are slow compared to other gifted students, but it's really a lot more complicated than that and I think the emphasis on speed does a huge disservice to the gifted community.
The "fast = smart" paradigm is a really major metaphor for giftedness in the world. For example, Stephanie Tolan's essay "Is it a cheetah?" is very popular: http://www.stephanietolan.com/is_it_a_cheetah.htm
I once wrote something of a polite rebuttal to that which used redwoods and gazelles as other metaphors. I am not terribly important in the world and it did not become popular (and is no longer online, unless it got captured on The Way Back Machine). I think the cheetah metaphor does a disservice to the gifted community in part because of the unstated assumption that smart people are all dangerous predators. Gazelles are just as fast and are not predators. Why not use that as a metaphor?
Anyway, I am quite busy today so I don't plan to argue this or dig up detailed supporting links. If you really want to look into it, HN's member who goes by the handle tokenadult is a good resource on the topics of intelligence and education. I believe his profile contains links to resources and his posting history, both comments and articles, is likely to be enlightening. (Though I have no idea if he would agree with any of my views above. He and I are not close. We haven't talked in quite a long time. But I have reason to believe he remains far more current on these subjects than I am.)
I actually agreed with everything you say. You can be a really great Genius, much like Feynman/Einstein without needing to have a stratospheric IQ like John Von Neumann.
Deep thinkers tend to be more original and there is actually a negative correlation between extremely high IQ and creativity.
Those profiles are probably just trying to make her seem more relatable.
Extremely fast thinking is the name of the game in the IMO and similar competitions. In fact, the emphasis is so much on speed that there are often doubts as to whether the medalists will also be good at research.
It may be worth clarifying the sort of "speed" we're talking about here.
An IMO takes place over two days. On each day the candidates get a question paper with three questions on it. They have 4.5 hours to attack the questions. The threshold for getting a gold medal might be roughly equivalent to getting five of the six problems more or less completely solved.
The questions are always of the form "prove X" -- maybe occasionally "prove or disprove X, whichever is possible" or "find quantity X, with proof"; but it's always a matter of finding proofs -- where X is something no more than a few lines long.
So it's "speed math" in comparison with actual academic mathematical research, which typically takes place on a timescale from weeks to years and where there's no guarantee that any human-accessible solution exists. But it's a whole lot slower than pretty much anything else these (roughly) 16-19-year-olds are being asked to do in mathematics.
And, empirically, it does turn out that people who do well in IMOs tend to do pretty well in mathematical research, and in other mathematical things they put their minds to. (But yes, of course there are kinds of genius that have nothing to do with mathematics, and kinds of impressiveness that have nothing to do with genius; and there are plenty of first-rate researchers who never took to IMO-like problem-solving.)
(Random example of an IMO question, from this year's IMO, to give an idea of what a typical X looks like: "For each positive integer n, the Bank of Cape Town issues coins of denomination 1/n. Given a finite collection of such coins (of not necessarily different denominations) with total value at most 99+1/2, prove that it is possible to split this collection into 100 or fewer groups, such that each group has total value at most 1.")
My point wasn't that there aren't multiple types, but that someone who wins both the IMO and the Fields Medal is exhibiting at least two "types" of genius at once -- normal thinking but at a much faster rate (IMO); slow thinking but at a much deeper level (Fields Medal).
Do you or anyone else have any further sources studying this split between "fast thinkers" and "deep thinkers"? I would be very interested in a way to find people who were "deep;" it seems like most of the technical interviewing techniques screen more for "fast" people.
You might wish to look at fewer applicants sporting advanced degrees and specifically hire roles that deep thinkers would naturally gravitate toward, degree or not.
As elsewhere mentioned, our educational system often ties success to fast thinking. I've always known I am not a fast thinker and, in fact, had often been the slowest thinker in my classes. This made school difficult and I struggled accordingly. Ultimately, I offset this by studying harder than my peers. For me, it has never been about reading the material and repeating, for example, some mathematics system from memory, but in truly understanding that system.
I consider myself a deep thinker that can easily connect concepts, graph relationships, and see the big picture. This is why I prefer to work as an architect, on security projects, and inevitably play the right stocks on the market. I suppose, anecdotally, if I'm any model, that deep thinkers might be better suited to certain roles and might naturally gravitate toward them.
Finally, and now a bit off-topic: The fact that deep thinkers might be equated with "late-bloomers" might have to do less with "figuring out what they're good at", and more to do with a society and a system which is prejudiced against them. If deep-thinkers were better nurtured and led through the educational system, they may not spend their thirties, or even 40's, learning how and where to apply their talents.
I think a better distinction are qualities of intelligence. For example a meticulous person will do well in a hard pattern matching puzzle, but ask them to do symbol substitution and they will be relatively slow and get a low score.
interesting. the "fast vs deep" comment intrigued me; i find i can go exceedingly deep when i can let things "simmer." to your comment, i had an intelligence test administered as a teen and the two outliers were basically symbol substation (< avg) and pattern matching (high).
It's a common pattern with engineering types. In programming you have to be highly detailed and accurate because computer languages are not forgiving, and you have to notice tricky patterns to fix bugs. It's called being meticulous officially I think. This is why you need someone trained to interpret your IQ test, you cant just feed them into a scantron.
There is a skill component to those things although. You could practice them a bit and improve your scores significantly. But is that really intelligence or just skill? It will always be a combination.
It's pretty obvious as time goes on, unfortunately it's not better. For some who didn't maximise their earlier it looks like they did, but no, they didn't get better.
But it's great art to think it does. So perhaps it's true after all. It's a nice artistic article.
I have pretty extreme ADD, even on medication, and I could never hope to finish an article like this. I can never leisurely read; I have to skim. "tl;dr"s and commentary are what I thrive on, and ultimately how I derive a large percentage of my present context.
I'm not saying that I can't get deep into technical specs or literature, but when it comes to a form that is largely prose... forget about it. Breadth-first search takes over.
That's completely mistaken. Everyone has finite time, and we need a way to find out what's worth reading. HackerNews and the Internet in general is filled with unnecessarily bloated articles.
Folks have been using tldr's in the academic sphere for centuries; they're called 'abstracts'.
Right, so you need a site that provides tldrs, whereas HN was built for discussion of the finer points of a topic. Neither desire is wrong, but you can't criticize the New Yorker for not being Reader's Digest.
Excert: he understood that he had travelled a long way from the early days, that he still had far to go, and that, from now on, his life would be difficult and without forgiveness.
Link: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/04/10/in-the-reign-of...