Beyond Smart

I feel pg’s point is similar to musicians. As an example, Glenn Gould was a classical pianist and renowned Bach interpreter. He had awesome technical ability at the piano, and a fantastic memory. But <i>lots</i> of incredible pianists have these abilities. Go to any university or observe any competition and you’ll plainly see awesome talent. These qualities are analogous to “being smart”.<p>However, what set Gould apart from his colleagues was his innovative and iconoclastic interpretations of well-known works with “standard” prescriptions. He had fundamentally different, but wholly consistent, ideas about musical interpretation, recording technology, presentation of music to audiences, and so on. He’s remembered as a pianist not because his fingers were quick and sensitive, but instead because he pushed boundaries in completely original ways.<p>Leonard Bernstein—a noted conductor and pianist—quips about this when he conducted the Brahms Concerto in D minor, with Gould at the piano [1]. I recommend listening but I’ll copy his words (from [2]) for posterity.<p>&gt; Don&#x27;t be frightened. Mr. Gould is here. He will appear in a moment. I&#x27;m not, um, as you know, in the habit of speaking on any concert except the Thursday night previews, but a curious situation has arisen, which merits, I think, a word or two. You are about to hear a rather, shall we say, unorthodox performance of the Brahms D Minor Concerto, a performance distinctly different from any I&#x27;ve ever heard, or even dreamt of for that matter, in its remarkably broad tempi and its frequent departures from Brahms&#x27; dynamic indications. I cannot say I am in total agreement with Mr. Gould&#x27;s conception and this raises the interesting question: &quot;What am I doing conducting it?&quot; I&#x27;m conducting it because Mr. Gould is so valid and serious an artist that I must take seriously anything he conceives in good faith and his conception is interesting enough so that I feel you should hear it, too.<p>&gt; But the age old question still remains: &quot;In a concerto, who is the boss; the soloist or the conductor?&quot; The answer is, of course, sometimes one, sometimes the other, depending on the people involved. But almost always, the two manage to get together by persuasion or charm or even threats to achieve a unified performance. I have only once before in my life had to submit to a soloist&#x27;s wholly new and incompatible concept and that was the last time I accompanied Mr. Gould. (The audience roared with laughter at this.) But, but this time the discrepancies between our views are so great that I feel I must make this small disclaimer. Then why, to repeat the question, am I conducting it? Why do I not make a minor scandal — get a substitute soloist, or let an assistant conduct? Because I am fascinated, glad to have the chance for a new look at this much-played work; Because, what&#x27;s more, there are moments in Mr. Gould&#x27;s performance that emerge with astonishing freshness and conviction. Thirdly, because we can all learn something from this extraordinary artist, who is a thinking performer, and finally because there is in music what Dimitri Mitropoulos used to call &quot;the sportive element&quot;, that factor of curiosity, adventure, experiment, and I can assure you that it has been an adventure this week collaborating with Mr. Gould on this Brahms concerto and it&#x27;s in this spirit of adventure that we now present it to you.<p>Because some took this as an attack on Gould, Bernstein followed up with the remark:<p>&gt; Any discovery of Glenn&#x27;s was welcomed by me because I worshiped the way he played: I admired his intellectual approach, his &quot;guts&quot; approach, his complete dedication to whatever he was doing.<p>Anyway, it’s an interesting parallel in the arts world. Jacob Collier is a musician of today that has similar qualities of “being smart with good ideas”.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;SvWPM783TOE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;SvWPM783TOE</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;New_York_Philharmonic_concert_of_April_6,_1962" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;New_York_Philharmonic_concer...</a>

Another way to frame this topic: intelligence doesn&#x27;t always lead to impact, and impact is what matters.<p>Example: I met a ton of trivia &quot;nerds&quot; through a friend a few years ago. They had all met at an Ivy League college, they were clearly &quot;smart&quot; in that they knew a lot of information and could follow a logical argument <i>but</i> somehow none of them were able to use their smarts for anything practical. They had jobs you didn&#x27;t need to be that smart for, and their personal lives were sort of messy. I didn&#x27;t really know what to make it them at the time, now I think they had the &quot;smarts&quot; but they didn&#x27;t have the &quot;drive&quot; so their brains sort of did them no good.<p>Another example: Plenty of people are constantly frustrated that they are misunderstood. &quot;I am so smart but I can&#x27;t get anything done around here because everyone&#x27;s an idiot.&quot; Some people go through their whole life believing this. Luckily I had a job that disabused me of this and taught me to communicate my ideas clearly and persuasively to others. But without that, without the ability to persuade people of your ideas, you might as well not have them.

Hamming (of Hamming codes) has a famous Bell Labs talk &quot;You and Your Research&quot;, describing how to have a large impact. It covers a lot of the same ground, but in more detail:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs.virginia.edu&#x2F;~robins&#x2F;YouAndYourResearch.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs.virginia.edu&#x2F;~robins&#x2F;YouAndYourResearch.html</a><p>A few points from it:<p>You&#x27;ve got to work on important problems.<p>How about having lots of `brains?&#x27; It sounds good. But great work is something else than mere brains.<p>The people who do great work with less ability but who are committed to it, get more done that those who have great skill and dabble in it.<p>The prepared mind sooner or later finds something important and does it. So yes, it is luck. The particular thing you do is luck, but that you do something is not.<p>One of the characteristics you see, and many people have it including great scientists, is that usually when they were young they had independent thoughts and had the courage to pursue them.

It seems to me that someone&#x27;s ability to generate new ideas is at least in part driven by one&#x27;s ability to make links between things that are not linked or very distantly so. It is at that intersection that novel ideas emerges.<p>To make it more concrete here&#x27;s an example of my own.<p>I was playing the game Zelda Breath of The Wild and was in awe of the beautiful landscapes you could visit. However, I had already finished the game and did not want to have to fire up my Wii U every time just to see them.<p>This is when a novel idea emerged. What if I made a Google Map&#x27;s Street Viewer for Zelda Breath of The Wild.<p>You can see here that I subsconsiously made a link between two very distant things a video game and Google Map&#x27;s street view.<p>You can try it out for yourself here : <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nassimsoftware.github.io&#x2F;zeldabotwstreetview" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nassimsoftware.github.io&#x2F;zeldabotwstreetview</a> (Do not use it if you&#x27;re using cellular data because the panoramas are quite heavy)<p>The idea was well recieved and gathered the attention of many gaming journals just google zelda street view to see for yourself. Before making this project I also searched if someone had done the same but no one did. I therefore thought that I had something pretty novel so worth doing.<p>While my idea isn&#x27;t groundbreaking in terms of science it demonstrate well the characteristics of a novel idea. (The intersection of different domains that seems to most distant.)<p>It seems that to be able to do those links you must have breadth of knowledge instead of depth however it&#x27;s still a mystery how some people are able to do this more frequently then others.<p>Also here&#x27;s a free idea : Make the same thing I did with Zelda but for other open world games.

Brian Josephson received his nobel prize for a discovery he made at age 22 while being a PhD student. The accompanying paper is just two pages long [1]. Without diminishing his achievement I&#x27;d wager that thousands of bright PhD students could&#x27;ve come up with the same solution given the right circumstances.<p>I no longer work in academia but what I observed when spending time in top-tier research groups is that it&#x27;s at least as important where you work as how smart you are. You can be the most gifted researcher but if you work in a backwater university in a third-world country your chances of being noticed or doing well-recognized work are very dim. On the other hand, if you&#x27;re a smart person working in a top-tier environment your chance of doing noteworthy work are much higher.<p>Now of course smart people will usually find ways to get into better environments, but from my experience there&#x27;s still a lot of elitism involved. For example, where I did my PhD in France almost all fellow PhD students in my group had parents that were high-ranking scientists, some of them leading research institutes. I always thought that it would be extremely unlikely to observe such a concentration if the selection process was really unbiased. Not saying my colleagues weren&#x27;t gifted, but of course they had a lot of advantages as compared to gifted students from poor families as their parents knew exactly what to do to get them into the elite programs (in France you have to prepare for this for many years, starting with picking the right school for your children). So being in the right place and having the right pedigree is still a huge factor for getting a good shot at being really successful.<p>[1]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hacol13.physik.uni-freiburg.de&#x2F;fp&#x2F;Versuche&#x2F;FP1&#x2F;FP1-11-SQUID&#x2F;Anhang&#x2F;B.D.Josephson.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hacol13.physik.uni-freiburg.de&#x2F;fp&#x2F;Versuche&#x2F;FP1&#x2F;FP1-11...</a>

Being even a little clever—and that&#x27;s the best I can claim—is living life on easy mode. It&#x27;s so great. Once I realized that the other people in the room weren&#x27;t not-saying the obvious thing because they&#x27;d already dismissed it for some reason I couldn&#x27;t see, but because it <i>wasn&#x27;t obvious</i> to them, it was like I unlocked a superpower. God, it&#x27;s so wonderful. I half-ass my way through everything and get well-rewarded for it. Praise, money, recommendations. There is <i>no</i> chance I could do that without this (again, quite mild, I cannot emphasize enough that I&#x27;m <i>not even all that smart</i>) gift, the credit for which mostly goes to sheer chance and lucky circumstances.<p>&gt; I grew up thinking that being smart was the thing most to be desired. Perhaps you did too. But I bet it&#x27;s not what you really want. Imagine you had a choice between being really smart but discovering nothing new, and being less smart but discovering lots of new ideas. Surely you&#x27;d take the latter.<p>Shit no, because the whole rest of the time I&#x27;m not coming up with those handful of new ideas, I&#x27;m less-smart. Reading is harder. Math is harder. Learning anything new is harder. Following complex conversations is harder. Picking out subtext, allusions, et c., in all media, is harder. Keeping up with, let alone constructively challenging, my smarter-than-me kids is harder. I&#x27;d hesitate to take that deal <i>even if</i> the ideas themselves made me rich enough I wouldn&#x27;t need to work again. I might take it, but I&#x27;d have to give it a good think. It&#x27;d radically change the entire way I relate to the world.

It&#x27;s worth repeating Mark Kac&#x27;s famous quote:<p>&gt;<i>In science, as well as in other fields of human endeavor, there are two kinds of geniuses: the “ordinary” and the “magicians.” An ordinary genius is a fellow that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what he has done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. They are, to use mathematical jargon, in the orthogonal complement of where we are and the working of their minds is for all intents and purposes incomprehensible. Even after we understand what they have done, the process by which they have done it is completely dark. They seldom, if ever, have students because they cannot be emulated and it must be terribly frustrating for a brilliant young mind to cope with the mysterious ways in which the magician’s mind works. Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest caliber. Hans Bethe, whom [Freeman] Dyson considers to be his teacher, is an “ordinary genius”.</i><p>Einstein was unquestionably a magician. He had an incredible ability to come up with simple ideas, and follow the chain of logic wherever it leads, without prejudice against its outlandish conclusions. Those ideas appear as seeds of &#x27;genius&#x27; to those studying his work. I&#x27;m not sure if it&#x27;s &#x27;smart&#x27;, but it&#x27;s definitely insightful. I&#x27;ve met clever people, but sometimes, they&#x27;re not insightful. I&#x27;ve also met many insightful people who aren&#x27;t clever in many ways. To quote Kac again:<p>&gt;<i>I am reminded of something Balthazaar van der Pol, a great Dutch scientist and engineer who was also a fine musician, remarked to me about the music of Bach. “It is great,” he said, “because it is inevitable and yet surprising.” I have often thought about this lovely epigram in connection with mathematics… The inevitability is, in many cases, provided by logic alone, but the element of surprise must come from an insight outside the rigid confines of logic.</i>

Honestly, I am generally a big fan of pg, and many&#x2F;most of his points I agree with. But every time he puts out a new blog post I feel like I&#x27;m now reflexively starting with an eye roll: &quot;OK, what quality <i>that pg has in spades</i> has he decided to laud now as the one thing that&#x27;s super important for success, happiness and societal progress?&quot;<p>It&#x27;s not that I really disagree with him that much, but for a man who is obviously very smart, and who can come up with lots of new ideas, I find his blog posts shockingly lacking in introspection. It&#x27;s basically all the qualities that are needed to build a startup are <i>the most important</i> qualities for society at large. What I <i>never</i> see is thought processes along the lines of &quot;Gee, how can my world view be colored by my unique experiences, and how might I think differently if I had a different upbringing or experiences contrary to the ones that actually occurred?&quot;<p>As another commenter mentioned, so many of pg&#x27;s posts seem so concerned with &quot;sorting&quot; people: you&#x27;re smart or not, you&#x27;ve got lots of new ideas or you don&#x27;t. And it&#x27;s not hard to surmise why he has this worldview: literally his whole job is to sort through people pitching to find the winners from the losers.<p>But I wish he would just step back once and think a little more broadly about some contrarian ideas that don&#x27;t just totally support his vision of success in the world.

I think pg is right that less responsibility leads to new ideas.<p>Since having kids, my ability to pursue my interests is severely curtailed. My kids are just now at the point where most of them are sufficiently independent that I&#x27;d have less responsibility, and now my in-laws need care, with my parents probably not far behind.<p>It seems likely that I won&#x27;t have significant free time and mental energy until my parents are dead, which is a bit of a depressing thought...

I can&#x27;t remember where, but I&#x27;ve heard the mathematical research process being described as (paraphrasing):<p>&quot;Once in a while we get a giant that makes huge strides in many fields. What is left for the rest of us is to walk in their wake and clean up and tighten up the theory based on the ideas that they provided&quot;.<p>Graham&#x27;s point about how being intelligent and having new ideas are two different things is interesting, but I&#x27;m not convinced that one is better than the other. I&#x27;m not sure a world full of giants is better - you need people who spend time tightening and working on the existing theory as well.

Such a great read. I thought Paul&#x27;s most profound insight was right at the end where he mentions a connection between writing and discovering new ideas. I&#x27;ve found this personally to be true. I was blogging heavily from 2005 until 2010 and it led to me launching a string of products, getting funding for one of them, failing and continuing to launch until we succeeded spectacularly. Writing, I have found, enables my creative and analytical thought process. I&#x27;ve found that it serves as a kind of personal strategic planning process that educates the intuitive mind, and which results in insights over the proceeding days and weeks, which leads to more writing, and an iterative and exponential process.

The whole article reads bizarre to me. It’s like pg believes there is some kind of generic smartness metric that characterizes people, and so you’re either smart, very smart or not smart at all.<p>But people can be smart at things and terrible at others. And it’s not that smart people are terrible at things because they aren’t curious about them, it’s just that some tasks require different mindsets. Like I feel generally fairly smart in engineering, but I just can’t seem to learn chess at all.<p>Generating new ideas is an entirely different skill. You can’t balance having ideas and being smart. You should try and have both, and no, one is not more important than the other.<p>I mean the whole article feels like the stupid questions we’d ask ourselves when we were kids: would you rather have a 9-meter arm, or a boneless leg?

To me, this is fundamentally the difference between science and engineering: Science involves discovering things which are new, while engineering takes those discoveries and makes them practically useful.<p>In terms of my own work, tarsnap is absolutely a work of engineering -- I very deliberately <i>avoided</i> doing anything new, instead using established and well-tested concepts. The exception to this is scrypt, which I designed -- and proved the security of -- because there was no existing password based key derivation function which met my standards for security. On that one occasion I crossed the line from engineering into science.<p>Science is great, but there&#x27;s nothing to be ashamed about in doing engineering work. The world needs good engineers who can take basic scientific discoveries and make useful products out of them!

The consensus among top physicists during the &#x27;heroic era&#x27; was that Von Neumann was the smartest among them, higher IQ than Einstein&#x27;s, but Einstein had something else.<p>Eugene P. Wigner:<p>&gt; I have known a great many intelligent people in my life. I knew Planck, von Laue and Heisenberg. Paul Dirac was my brother in law; Leo Szilard and Edward Teller have been among my closest friends; and Albert Einstein was a good friend, too. But none of them had a mind as quick and acute as Jansci [John] von Neumann. I have often remarked this in the presence of those men and no one ever disputed me. [...] But Einstein&#x27;s understanding was deeper even than von Neumann&#x27;s. His mind was both more penetrating and more original than von Neumann&#x27;s. And that is a very remarkable statement. Einstein took an extraordinary pleasure in invention. Two of his greatest inventions are the Special and General Theories of Relativity; and for all of Jansci&#x27;s brilliance, he never produced anything as original.

Years and years ago I read Einstein&#x27;s biography (the one by Isaacson). One anecdote that remains bright in my memory after all these years is about Einstein and sailing. Einstein liked sailing, and because of where he was living he mostly did lake sailing. One thing about lake sailing is that you can often end up becalmed. What Einstein did was to take a notebook with him when he went sailing; a notebook with notes about what he was working on at the time. Whenever the wind died down he would take out his notebook and start working on his current research. When the wind picked up he would put his notebook away and resume sailing.<p>There is no doubt that Einstein was brilliant. I believe he was as successful as he was because he was also exceptionally self disciplined.

What if a smart person thought of a crypto currency and then foresaw its devastating impact on the planet, what do you think that person would do?<p>I belive smart people want to work on ideas that are net positive and as you know many ideas (even successfull ones) are net negative.<p>* Airbnb - locals are outbidded by tourists<p>* uber&#x2F;lyft - better solution is public transportation<p>* Amazon - big marketplace but no idea whats fake and have to pray to god that no one dies while trying to deliver our orer<p>* Roundup - kills grass and also friendly insects on top of that gives you cancer<p>* Teflon - no need to burn calarioes on washing dishes but pollutes ground water with forever chemicals<p>* meat industry - you get tasty meal but animals and earth suffer<p>* Zillion sataliets in orbit - remote locations (no one lives or not need) gets access to internet but astronomy suffers<p>the list goes on

Just having the good new ideas isn&#x27;t really enough, though. You have to be really persistent about figuring out all the details and making them work. This is related to, but definitely not the same as, being fascinated&#x2F;obsessed by the topic.<p>Of course Einstein had great ideas. But he also spent many years working out the consequences of, eg, his first ideas about the fixed speed of light in vacuum and its consequences in physics, initially during downtime at his patent office job. Nearly all of the impact of the theory is in that working-out.

&gt;Some would attribute the difference between intelligence and having new ideas to &quot;creativity,&quot; but this doesn&#x27;t seem a very useful term. As well as being pretty vague, it&#x27;s shifted half a frame sideways from what we care about: it&#x27;s neither separable from intelligence, nor responsible for all the difference between intelligence and having new ideas.<p>I find this dismissiveness of creativity to be somewhat strange. It&#x27;s by definition, what he should be looking for. I can&#x27;t help but think he&#x27;s got a paradigm in mind for finding &#x27;new ideas&#x27; and feels like creativity is too outside the box for it.

This was fairly obvious to me as early as elementary school. Some kids would just get new concepts and then easily apply their new knowledge, and some worked really really hard and also got good grades. The hard workers were not as &quot;smart&quot; but made up for it with hard work, because in my mind, smart was always &quot;the ability to learn something new and apply it quickly&quot;.<p>The difference got more obvious with each level of school, and when I got to college, the difference was stark. There were definitely the &quot;just smart&quot; people and the &quot;work really hard people&quot;.<p>In my work life, it&#x27;s nice to work with a mix of both. People who can take in new knowledge and generate new ideas, as well as people who just get it and work really hard. It&#x27;s especially great when idea generators can communicate well and the hard workers can make it happen.

Like other PG posts, I feel like he misses the elephant in the room, opportunity. You can be intelligent or highly creative, but unless you have the opportunity to use your abilities in some fashion, neither will do you much good.<p>Like so many others like him, they probably miss opportunity being such a big deal because it was so abundant for them. This is not to say they didn&#x27;t also have to be intelligent and work hard to get where they are, but they also had to have things align for them in their life, that were outside their control, to get where they are.

There are two types of people who have received 4.0 GPAs and very high SAT scores.<p>1. Geniuses. They can look at a calculus text book for 30 minutes and understand calculus and get an A on a calculus test.<p>2. Reasonably smart people who think that getting a 4.0 is very important, for whatever reason. So important that it becomes their identity. They spend every minute trying to get that 4.0.<p>I was probably in middle school or high school when I realized that I&#x27;m not nearly as smart as #1, but just as smart as #2. It just isn&#x27;t that hard to realize that the effort to outcome ratio isn&#x27;t good on being a #2 type person. And more importantly, long term if you go down that path you will be working some shitty job making less 400k a year at 80&#x2F;hours a week. Because your identity is being someone who is #1, even if #1 means billing the most hours doing tax accounting in the basement of some old building on a Friday night.

Recently I’ve been a bit disillusioned as all the cleverness of my youth had gone wasted. Albeit the ideas were low hanging fruits but had I had the skills to implement them I think I would have been better off. Now that I do have the skills, they’d long been executed by others.<p>Now the world has gotten a lot more sophisticated and I don’t know what to sophisticate myself on. They all seem a bit boring or stupid on one hand, or another monumental climb where I’ll have to start over from the beginning.

This short essay is roughly a synospsis of the theme behind Asimov&#x27;s short story The Profession.

As Alan Kay likes to say, &quot;a change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points&quot;.

Would add to the qualities of mind for new ideas: you need physical domain competence in something, because it will be the source of heuristics and isomorphisms that provide an intuitive fast map of a territory.<p>I identify as a hyper-stupid intelligent person, where I can go breadth first into a lot of domains and get out of my depth really quickly, while impressing the ignorant and irritating the competent. The opportunities are amazing, you get to appreciate the most incredible things, but this kind of virtuotic ignorance (curiosity, charitably) needs to be tempered by practice and education in at least one thing, as you are really only ever as good as the thing you are best at. Important thoughts.

A lot of new ideas come from unexpected combinations of ideas from multiple seemingly unrelated areas. James Burke writes a history of the world based on this in his book &quot;Connections&quot;. I wrote in my paper &quot;Origins of the D Programming Language&quot; how D is influenced by my experiences in airplane gearboxes.<p>Who would have thought that a gearbox had anything to do with programming language design?

There are, I believe, two kinds of thinking&#x2F;intelligence. One is analysis and that is the case of many smart people who achieve nothing - other than taking things apart and being critical.<p>There is a second kind which we don&#x27;t even seem to have a word for - lets call it gestalysis as opposed to analyis. Putting things together to form new things. The essence of this is to try understand something by building it. You can prove something by logic, but trying to build something and have it work also &quot;proves&quot; something.<p>For example can you build an ant colony? We may understand ant colonies by taking them apart and examining the parts, but an important part of an ant colony is the interactions and behaviors. Can we understand an ant colony by taking it apart (and certainly that helps) or can we understand it better if we can create a simulation?<p>And finally, there is a kind of gestalysis that goes further - creating behaviors and interactions that go beyond simulation of things we know. This is, I believe the provenance of startups and entrepreneurs.<p>It seems to me that Einstein&#x27;s brilliance not due to analysis but gestalysis. My 2 cents.<p>My 2 cents.

&gt; There are general techniques for having new ideas — for example, for working on your own projects ...<p>The project link is broken: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;paulgraham.com&#x2F;projects.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;paulgraham.com&#x2F;projects.html</a><p>anyone knows the actual link? Is it this one? - <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;paulgraham.com&#x2F;own.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;paulgraham.com&#x2F;own.html</a>

I find this to be an odd essay.<p>It&#x27;s trivially easy to come up with new ideas. Just take any existing idea and perturb in a random direction. With high probability it will be new.<p>Drugs and some mental disorders make it very easy to do this. The problem is, new ideas aren&#x27;t very valuable. What is valuable is intelligently generating new ideas that take into account what came before. And for that you need intelligence and education.<p>There is a kind of folk psychology in tech that emphasizes tinkering and working on projects. But almost all projects are bad. The reason tinkering produces results at a population level is because you have N agents randomly searching the terrain.<p>That is fine if you&#x27;re interested only in population effects, like VCs typically are. Then you can just watch for the random ideas that catch on and bet on them.<p>But if you&#x27;re going to decide whether you&#x27;d rather be smart or be a random-walking tinkerer, the choice is obvious. It&#x27;s vastly better to be smart because most tinkerers fail and never have anything to show for it.

Smart people with ideas know that that uploading fledgling, unrealised ideas into the world can mean feeding their baby into a meat grinder of criticism, scepticism, plagiarism and probably some other -isms.<p>E.g., Andrew Wile had some pretty good insights as to how to go about tackling the solution of Fermat&#x27;s theorem (read Fermat&#x27;s Last Theorem by Simon Singh - good book), but did he go &#x27;Hey, listen everybody - what if we did X?&#x27; Like hell he did.<p>Instead he secluded himself and worked on it till he could present a robust proof fait accompli.<p>This is by no means an unusual story - think of all the bright folks who are tinkering with projects all over the world, even devoting themselves to it full time - trying to realise something that they can call their own.<p>So, the &#x27;gap between intelligence and ideas&#x27; may be partly due to the desire of intelligent people to contain their ideas until they can own the downstream benefits arising from them.

At Pumping Station One in Chicago, I learned a golden rule:<p>Ideas aren&#x27;t worth shit.<p>I&#x27;m a veritable fountain of ideas, but that doesn&#x27;t mean squat. Only instantiated ideas, whose value is successfully communicated to others stand a chance of impact in the world.<p>Ideas spring from mapping the world (packers need not apply), and noticing things on the newly connected edges of the map. Those ideas then need to be brought into the real world with luck, preparedness, persistence in some mix.<p>Then you need communication skills and people skills to communicated the ideas and tools you&#x27;ve created to others, to get them to invest their time and effort and start adoption.<p>Being smart helps, but it&#x27;s noticing the connections, and having a large set of tools to build on any ideas that are the key piece here. You need some smarts, curiosity, persistence, luck, people skills and a network once you&#x27;ve done the work.

Some ways new ideas form:<p>1. Noticing hundreds, thousands, of details and how they fit together into a larger whole.<p>- Example: When someone is so deep into an industry they understand every role, action, problem, and solution, and the shortcomings, and use that information to spot out the most important problems and tie them together into a new business idea.<p>2. Having an intuition of how something should be, and digging out that intuition through the act of creation.<p>- Example: Artwork that is trying fully express the most ideal form of beauty, nature, violence, grandness, etc.<p>3. Noticing &quot;bugs&quot; &#x2F; paradoxes in real life - things that don&#x27;t make sense - and having the curiosity to debug it.<p>- Example: Einstein realizing a paradox - &quot;If I pursue a beam of light with the velocity c (velocity of light in a vacuum), I should observe such a beam of light as an electromagnetic field at rest though spatially oscillating.&quot;

&quot;The worlds smartest man means no more to me than the worlds smartest ant&quot;. Dr Manhattan<p>I am not the smartest person in the room nor the least. But I know my smartness &#x2F; IQ lies on a spectrum - just like my tolerance for cold or for oxygen etc.<p>It&#x27;s pretty easy to find places where my tolerance for cold is utterly exhausted, and there are situations where the same is for my IQ. And it&#x27;s fairly easy to find animals or other organisms who can easily handle temperatures I cannot.<p>I suspect in the big universe there are plenty of creatures whose intelligence and smartness extends out past the spectrum on which I, pg or Einstein sit.<p>I would like to know the answers they have to these questions - and I wonder if I would ever understand them.<p>One day we might meet such a species. Will we be happy as the pet?

Being smart and having new ideas isn&#x27;t that great either. You still need people to believe in the idea and&#x2F;or resources to pursue it.<p>I have various ideas and I&#x27;m not even that smart. They wont go anywhere because I dont have the time or money to pursue them. Plus, it&#x27;s hard to come up with something truly new. Even if the item doesn&#x27;t exist, it&#x27;s probably patented (ran into that recently).<p>&quot;So what are the other ingredients in having new ideas?&quot;<p>The willingness to think about how and why things work or are broken, coupled with sufficient cross-domain knowledge to synthesize new ideas.

&gt; Why do so many smart people fail to discover anything new?<p>We live in a world were so much has been discovered already by the smart people before us. There isn&#x27;t anymore low hanging fruit today, discovering novel things likely involves spending your early adulthood learning all the things our smart ancestors discovered as a primer to being able to understand what&#x27;s left to discover.<p>Most of us will need to be happy with merely understanding what has already been discovered. And realize that, for every Newton or Euler of the word, there were billions of people that history forgot.

The most interesting point to me in this was the observation that it could be things <i>associated with youth</i>, which made me think immediately of John Cleese&#x27;s brilliant talks on creativity. He (Cleese) makes the point that good ideas need time, in two ways: time without pressure to produce, and time set aside to focus. Both of these are so, so much harder for late or mid stage career adults to make. I truly believe this is the most important ingredient in getting interesting things done in the second half of life.

I only skimmed the discussion and original post, but &quot;training&quot; didn&#x27;t jump out at me from either. One can distinguish &quot;ideas&quot;: neat new apps for iOS that will make money, or, say, string theory or quantum chromodynamics.<p>The first requires people to pay attention to how people are using their phones and, probably, how business operates. But then, Angry Birds was probably a hack-inspired project so maybe luck&#x27;s a component as well. The others require a whole lot of background in math, physics, a sense of what is beautiful in these disciplines and some idea of how the current models work. Way more effort, and not really subject to a hack attack.<p>Both are facilitated by intelligence, opportunity, etc. But I wonder whether people are interested in or appreciate the amount of spade work involved for some areas. If you want to work hard AND make some bucks, work on material science (catalyst design, high-temp superconductors) or try to understand the human immune system and how it could be modulated.<p>Lots of coding in there, and the winners are heroes who will be feted worldwide. Oh, I&#x27;ll throw in another one... A critical skill in Pharma is, to be blunt, patent breaking. If one can determine that two molecules are sufficiently different to be outside a patent but sufficiently similar (biochemically and physicochemically) to be active at the same target in the same strength or better... I should point out that modern drugs can make several Billion a quarter once on the market.

I always thought of IQ tests as the artistic equivalent of &quot;how well can you draw a line?&quot; You need a good foundation for artistic expression but many, many people have that and still don&#x27;t create art worth remembering.<p>Intelligence (the capacity to process) combined with knowledge can give you that strong intellectual foundation -- but that&#x27;s all it is.<p>Alan Kay was wrong; a change of perspective is not worth 80 IQ points. The opposite is true. A decent IQ gives you the chance to have a change of perspective.

I think there are hard problems and easy problems, and smarts reflects ones ability to solve hard problems. So, the question should be how does one solve hard problems?<p>The solutions to any problem can trivially be found by searching through the possible solutions and checking which solution works. The problem with this approach is that it is intractable space. Thus, the main ways that we traverse the search space of solutions is limiting the search space and by pattern matching. [Think in terms of chess where the search space is large to find the best possible move...The way they get around it is by simply reducing the search space and pattern matching.]<p>Consequently, a smart person would be one who has developed intuition about a problem enough to limit the search space of the available solutions and has a vast collection of patterns to draw from that will aid in the problem solving process.<p>He did touch on one point with all extraordinary genius, they were all obsess. I think this fosters having enough intuition about a problem and having a toolbox of patterns necessary to solve hard problems. Is there any genius without a vast toolbox of techniques to solve problems? Is there any genius without a supreme understanding of his problem area?<p>Having intuition and huge toolbox for solving problems we know are necessary conditions for solving hard problems, but are they sufficient conditions?

I know quite a few conventional entrepreneurs that I wouldn&#x27;t consider smart in a general context, but are extremely well versed in what they do.<p>Experience will help you to develop an instinct, and once you understand why everything is the way it is, you need to focus on finding an edge&#x2F;making a difference&#x2F;having an impact.<p>This takes time, experimentation, and most of all the willingness and ability to fail, while you gain deeper and new insights.<p>Willingness comes from personal grit and belief, but ability usually comes from your network, venture capital, a rich family, or having a successful business in the first place...<p>Following Taleb&#x27;s ideas, I&#x27;d say that, to find your edge, it would make more sense to try something new 52 weeks in a row, instead of spending 52 weeks on a single idea.<p>Assume you have the grit and ability to experiment, then you still need a heuristic to determine which ideas are worth pursuing, and that&#x27;s where luck comes in. Markets do not behave rationally, so reasoning can only bring you so far.<p>&quot;How to be successful&quot; formulas could be compared to the &quot;how to draw an owl&quot; meme [0]: you need grit, the ability to experiment, and hope that this combination will eventually put you in the perfect context at a time where everything aligns, and where you take the decision to pursue the correct opportunity...<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;funny&#x2F;comments&#x2F;eccj2&#x2F;how_to_draw_an_owl&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;funny&#x2F;comments&#x2F;eccj2&#x2F;how_to_draw_an...</a>

one of the things that helps generate new ideas that can be cultivated is the ability to be playful. once a given problem or subject is sufficiently loaded onto a brain, if that person can relax and have child-like naivete about poking and prodding, novel insight is usually not far.<p>cultivating this ability is fairly well understood in a lot of domains, i think. two examples that are top-of-mind are improv and jazz.

Maybe it’s to do with luck. As in, smart people will encounter problems and work on them and solve them, and the smartest ones will solve them faster and solve more problems, but the search space of problems is vast and only in retrospect do we know which ones were of crucial importance. Therefore the Einstein is more likely to be not-the-smartest, and the smartest is unlikely to be the Einstein (though <i>more</i> likely than any other individual).<p>A way to test this would be to check how many of the most important breakthroughs were things that were considered vital in advance and had everyone trying to solve them. Like will the next Einstein be the person who solves fusion, or something else entirely?<p>Another dimension is practical experimentation. Were the Wright brothers geniuses? I think it’s more that the hands-on approach yields much faster innovation than the dry theorising.

If you asked people what was special about Einstein, most would say that he had important new ideas. Even the ones who tried to give you a more sophisticated-sounding answer would probably think this first. Till a few years ago I would have given the same answer myself. But that wasn&#x27;t what was special about Einstein. What was special about him was that he was really smart. Having important new ideas was a necessary precondition for properly utilizing that intelligence, but the two are not identical.<p>It may seem a hair-splitting distinction to point out that inspiration and its consequences are not identical, but it isn&#x27;t. There&#x27;s a big gap between them. Anyone who&#x27;s spent time around crackpot scientific theorists knows how big. There are a lot of genuinely original people who don&#x27;t achieve very much.<p>And so on...

Modern Smart are so focused on their niche most people failed to see the big ( or even medium ) picture. Because they are more specialised than ever their world view are extremely distorted by their lens. Peter Thiel touched on this as most of the successful founders and entrepreneur tends to be something similar to polymath.<p>Another thing is Wisdom. Which the older I get the more I think have little to no relationship to being &quot;Smart&quot;. I also think there are certain relationship with Wisdom and polymath.<p>This topic also echo an article earlier [1], where it is more important to be curious than being smart. ( I am glad this narrative has finally caught on. )<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28753560" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28753560</a>

Einstein was one of history&#x27;s most successful, perhaps the most successful, abstract thinkers.<p>Some of his reasoning was based on simple observation of light and making logical deductions about how it must work. It&#x27;s pretty amazing when you can make simple observations and reason about the workings of the universe.<p>Abstraction is in and of itself an art which is both a learned skill and highly dependent upon intellect.<p>Now, this is the stinker. Imagine that Einstein had been born in a non-English-speaking part of the world. Would this separation from the scientific community have prevented him from telling us all about relativity? I imagine it would have, and it&#x27;s likely that a good number of abstract thinkers of his caliber have lived and died without us learning from them.

There are a few things he didn’t mention that I suspect are important: a variety of life experiences, exposure to more than one modality of thinking, and an opportunity to engage in autonomous unstructured play as a child. It’s good at any age but is likely pivotal in childhood.

One thing that bothers me in this essay is that it relies a lot on intelligence being somewhat clear&#x2F;measurable and agreed upon metric. But there isn&#x27;t really a comprehensive definition of intelligence, let alone a comprehensive way to measure it (IQ for example to a large extent measures how good someone is at taking tests).<p>Coming up with new ideas can itself be a measure of intelligence!<p>That is not to say the spirit of the article is wrong - I&#x27;ve met plenty of people who came across as very smart and didn&#x27;t really achieve as much in life (so far) as other people who didn&#x27;t appear to be as smart or smarter. I think other large factors must include ambition, risk-aversion (or lack thereof), confidence and opportunity.

I think the dismissal of &quot;creativity&quot; in the footnote is misguided. I think creativity is easier to define than &quot;intelligence&quot; and better explains the intuitive difference between e.g. humans and animals and between humans and current AI systems. &quot;Intelligence&quot; often gets mixed up with arguably irrelevant things like computational speed, memory (recall), or the ability to solve problems in some narrow niche. But creativity gets to the <i>generalness</i> of what humans can do <i>that other animals and current AI systems apparently can not</i>, which is to create new knowledge by conjecturing (and criticizing) new ideas with no apparent bounds on the subject matter or reach of those ideas.

Humans care about innate qualities such as intelligence because they are looking for mates, and want the best genes for their children.<p>In this case, consider whether you would prefer to have children with a partner with a 150 IQ but who never develops a system to generate new ideas, or a partner with a 120 IQ who stumbles into a system &#x2F; environment that allows them to generate new ideas.<p>Who would you prefer? Hard mode: justify your choice without invalidating the premises by saying something like, &quot;Well, if the first person was <i>really</i> smarter, they would have developed such a system.&quot;<p>I speculate that most would prefer to have children with the first person, and then endeavor to teach their kids the second person&#x27;s system.

People are often prevented from going down a path to success because of the assumption that something is impossible, when if they would actually check they might find a solution that makes it possible.<p>This is true in science, as in Einstein going down the path of considering time dilation, while others might have not even considered it worth another thought. But it’s also true in general life. People who have a can-do attitude often end up achieving more simply because they’ve tried.<p>Perhaps a way of learning how to do this is to sometimes stop and think which paths to success have been discarded as impossible, and then consider investigating if that assumption is true.

One thing I feel like is an elephant in the room is that these great new ideas sure aren&#x27;t being cultivated or drawn out by the VC machine. It seems like in a lot of ways <i>that</i> thing is poison to genuine inspiration. It&#x27;s about the last thing some people probably want to hear, but a lot of great ideas just seem to be a genuine product of love and curiosity that seems unable to grow in the shadow of something that wants to wring money out of it. It&#x27;s only if and after it survives to show some promise, far away from eyes sporting money symbols, that it can be shaken down for money.

I think being smart needs solid foundations in order to flourish. Paul mentions getting adequate sleep and avoiding certain stresses, which is a whole science to me.<p>There is the old archetype of the &#x27;unstable genius&#x27; or &#x27;mad scientist&#x27; that although they are clever; fail to one day <i>make it</i> and become the person known for $company or $product or $patent.<p>There are many ingredients needed for the smart person to thrive. Personally I find essays about topics that concern me to be useful, as-well as cross-synaptic thinking otherwise known as &#x27;creativity&#x27; or &#x27;joining the dots&#x27;.

I have been revisiting an idea I&#x27;ve had many times in my life that is tangential to Paul&#x27;s &quot;Smart&quot; vs. &quot;New idea&quot; differentiation. That is the difference between &quot;Knowledge&#x2F;Intelligence&quot; on one axis and &quot;Experience&#x2F;Understanding&quot; on another. I feel our modern society, as obsessed as it is with science and logic, highly prioritizes the former and unduly devalues the latter. I&#x27;ve started to wonder what &quot;Artificial Understanding&quot; looks like and if there is some systematic way to describe it. I also loosely define &quot;Wisdom&quot; as a kind of dialectic synthesis that bridges intelligence and understanding (and thereby knowledge and experience). I believe Wisdom is the place where new ideas are bred.<p>However, his essay struck a chord in me because it suggests a double edged sword. I&#x27;m ever-so-slightly above average intelligence. In almost every group I have ever been part of I sort near the top but rarely at the top. But I definitely have always demonstrated different thinking and often times new ideas. And I can report that not all new ideas are good ideas. This leads to quite a bit of insecurity&#x2F;self-doubt. Sometimes I am literally a prophet that sees the future that no one else expected. Often I am completely off base. I have no repeatable means of discriminating between those cases.<p>What I have learned, in those times I have acted as a leader&#x2F;manager, is that I don&#x27;t always go with the most logical&#x2F;intellectual idea presented to me. I try to always take into account experience&#x2F;understanding. That is doubly true when I evaluate my own new ideas. I should ask myself: Am I leaning too heavily on knowledge&#x2F;intelligence in an area where I lack understanding&#x2F;experience?<p>Therefore I think Paul&#x27;s stated trade-off of intelligence for new ideas is not strictly correct. I wonder if he would accept my knowledge&#x2F;intelligence vs. experience&#x2F;understanding description. If so, perhaps what he means to say is that for the generation of new ideas he might be willing to accept trading some innate capacity for intelligence for some innate capacity for understanding. In that way, perhaps one could increase the likelihood of synthesis between the two. Stated another way, it would be a sacrifice of intelligence to gain understanding with a goal to promote wisdom.

I believe smartness is rather contextual. For instance a person might be smart at a specific job like troubleshooting hardware but he&#x27;d not be so-smart in some other areas of life. Was Einstein smart in most areas of life? I highly doubt that. This (contextual) smartness is build-up with time. People who have screen-facing jobs tend to get smarter about gadgets&#x2F;software. People whose jobs are dealing with other human beings gets smarter at soft skills like persuasion. It all boils down to giving enough time.

PG making a case for the &quot;idea guy&quot;! It&#x27;s interesting to see how often that trope is shot down in SV culture.<p>I appreciate that he is qualifying or preconditioning the value of the idea guy as having intelligence along with other &quot;mundane ingredients&quot; like grit, sleep, stress, network, and passion. I very much agree with the approach and only wish for a framework to score these ingredients in the context of an entrepreneur&#x27;s problem domain. I guess that&#x27;s what VC&#x27;s are supposed to do.

I&#x27;m not sure, but I think it was Nabokov where I first saw the distinction between genius and intelligence most clearly articulated. The defining characteristic of genius is right there in the Latin root[1], it&#x27;s fundamentally original. One could have Von Neumann tier intellectual horsepower and waste it all solving sudoku puzzles or something. Or one could have a much more modest intellect, and yet make utterly original and lasting contributions to human knowledge.<p>[1] &quot;generative power&quot;

Einstein&#x27;s fame kinda ruined the word &quot;genius&quot; — people tend to think the word is just a synonym for smart. But to me (and I think the gen- root at the beginning supports this), the key thing about a genius is that they revolutionize a field and inspire others to think in wildly new ways.<p>Problem was, Einstein was both of these things, and is so associated with the word that a lot of people&#x27;s brains just go from &quot;genius&quot; -&gt; Einstein -&gt; &quot;super smart&quot;.

While I&#x27;ve been underwhelmed by many PG&#x27;s essays this one is remarkable. It takes on a subject that&#x27;s beaten to death in debates and finds some fresh perspective.

I don&#x27;t know if practicing writing has made me better at producing new ideas. And I&#x27;m not sure if the quality of my writing has improved, though it&#x27;s certainly easier for me to write now.<p>But for sure, I don&#x27;t think I ever really understood and internalized ideas from complex non-fiction books until I started writing about them. Even writing privately helped, but I think the most effective way is to write publicly - there&#x27;s an obligation to write and argue clearly.

New idea&#x27;s are a dime a dozen. In fact a bigger problem for those that have new ideas is that someone else had that new idea first and did something about it.

Reminds me of reading &#x27;Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain&#x27;. The way that book tries to get you to un-hook the judging and structuring parts of your mind so your hand can form shapes with NO WORDS to describe them.<p>As soon as you say &#x27;I&#x27;m drawing an arm&#x27; your brain tries to define &#x27;arm&#x27; and what it would mean to appropriately outline the parts of one on your paper… and the image you&#x27;d ideally produce might bear no resemblance to the &#x27;arm&#x27; definition your brain gives you. It&#x27;s an elaborate process of shutting down certain kinds of &#x27;smart&#x27; that are overly naive and reductive, to get to images that are available but undescribable by analytical words. The perfect lines of an elbow are not &#x27;triangle&#x27; or &#x27;circle&#x27; or even anatomical parts: they&#x27;re the image one&#x27;s eye understands immediately, but getting it on paper is a whole other story.<p>I find when I&#x27;m live-coding audio DSP and getting close to dialing in a tonal detail that I&#x27;m trying hard to capture, or even rapidly debugging and evolving the code of the program to do it, when I&#x27;m most effective I lose the words to explain what I&#x27;m doing. It becomes &#x27;and now I this, to do this, and then we ah… you&#x27;ll see, it should… there. That.&#x27;<p>I&#x27;ll play the sound, and my model will exactly resemble the thing I&#x27;m trying to make it sound like, but I&#x27;m miles away from being able to articulate what I did. Or, more likely, I could tell you &#x27;I subtracted the thing and it needed to be 1.52 rather than 1.5, and that and the other idea got it to where it sounds like that. Because the filter&#x27;s lower, and it&#x27;s interacting with the input sample in thus and so a way&#x27;. The tangible STUFF I&#x27;m doing is rarely that complicated.<p>But being on the point of knowing to DO that stuff and exactly that stuff to get there… is what Graham is talking about. I don&#x27;t know if it can be learned but it can damn well be trained. People as disparate as ad guy David Ogilvy, and writer John Gardner, have understood that.<p>And you can be a literal writer and still have important parts of your process locked away in that no-words zone. At those times, you are the writer. Your literal writing ability and vocabulary, are the stenographer. It&#x27;s waiting on you having something to say. That &#x27;something to say&#x27; may not be coming from a &#x27;words place&#x27;.

Why is Firefox&#x27;s Reader View not available for posts on PG&#x27;s <i>seemingly minimal</i> site?<p>Also, with my minimal knowledge of programming, I have no idea what&#x27;s going on with that website&#x27;s HTML markup. There&#x27;s also a document type not mentioned error so that might be what&#x27;s causing this.<p>I wonder why @pg doesn&#x27;t change this? I presume it&#x27;ll only stand to benefit him with a higher SEO ranking.

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Lots of fun points in here. I would add that willing to be wrong 100% of the time and being open to constantly fucking things up will get you very far all on its own. As long as your intentions are good and you can limit the blast radius, these efforts are usually rewarded in time. Ablity to disregard shame and the scorn of others is the superpower in this context.

You need to have a vision, and the vision needs to be the right vision. How do you know it’s the right vision? I think most just get lucky on this. Maybe the successful serial entrepreneurs have figured it out (Musk, Jobs)<p>Getting the vision right isn’t enough, you have to know how to get to the vision. This usually requires a combination of smarts, grit, passion, and luck.

Like all of PG&#x27;s essays, this one is an exploration of his own thought processes more than a generalization about other people in general.<p>What it tells us is why PG created Y Combinator. He did it to gain access to other people&#x27;s ideas.<p>PG is a smart guy.<p>He&#x27;s also a rich guy, getting richer every day, because he uses his smarts to multiply his reach by mixing with other people&#x27;s ideas.

Some of the most successful people in the world are almost always wrong, know little. They just find what works and then do that.

Einstein had already explained what was special about him: “I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.”

&gt; Imagine you had a choice between being really smart but discovering nothing new, and being less smart but discovering lots of new ideas.<p>I don&#x27;t consider myself smart. I certainly don&#x27;t claim to discover new ideas. But through my work of explaining and polishing existing ideas, it seems I found a niche and an audience.

This piece seems to conflate being smart with being intelligent.<p>Basically being smart means being well educated, whereas being intelligent means you have fast processing speed. Or maybe you have slightly different definitions, whatever, but either way it&#x27;s confusing to see them being used as synonyms.

Just like in order to become a composer of music you need to start by performing other people&#x27;s music, I think it helps in writing to start by responding to other people&#x27;s ideas, dissecting and evaluating, which helps you build the competence to generate ideas of your own.

Taken to the extreme though, this could lead to neomania. New for the sake of new.<p>What should we term the quality of knowing not to fix something if it ain&#x27;t broke?<p>I think that line of thinking would be the intellectual opposite of PG&#x27;s (albeit still coherent in it&#x27;s conjectures or lack thereof)

&gt;why do so many smart people fail to discover anything new?<p>Given his background as a venture capitalist not a surprising question but much of the implicit premise of the piece is that novelty is somehow superior to maintaining things that exist, which isn&#x27;t that obvious.<p>doing &#x27;new&#x27; things is fine but the world to a large degree runs on maintaining and very marginally improving what we have or just fixing things in very small ways that would probably not pass his excitement test.<p>Before someone like Einstein can come along and dig up some paradigm changing idea it often takes decades of work to refine something to the point where some individual can come along and discover what&#x27;s wrong with it. Even within an individual life like Einstein&#x27;s that is the kind of work he did most of the time. novelty is the exception, a world of novelty after novelty without long periods of ordinary work during which people refine is hard to imagine.<p>So just like 80% of Einstein&#x27;s life was probably doing normal maths, 80% of people are probably going to do normal things, there&#x27;s nothing wrong with it. It&#x27;s like the popular analogy of a handful of astronauts standing on the backs of hundreds of people. Every single one of them does a necessary job, and a lot of smart people will do work that in the world of Paul Graham is somehow considered unglamorous.

The Silicon Valley gave birth to &quot;business philosophy&quot;. It is as ridiculous as it sounds.

For anyone who&#x27;s familiar with the roll of British entrepreneurs who did terribly at school and yet built massive companies, this post isn&#x27;t some sort of massive reveal.<p>Is this something more common in the UK than the US? If so, why?

I think there are two buckets that form a venn. Smart on one side, Intelligent on the other. One can loosely be thought of as horsepower, the other abstract&#x2F;creative&#x2F;alternative thinking. The Venn of them is genius.

Was a pretty big deal to stumble across the idea that the machinery that generates insights could be trained back on itself to improve at gaining insights. You may have heard of it under the moniker of insight practice. :p

&gt; * obsessive interest &gt; * independent-mindedness &gt; * work on your own projects &gt; * work hard<p>So an anti-list might be:<p>* allowing your interest to wander * believing everything you’re told * work on other’s people’s stuff * work half-heartedly

The argument, at least to me, appears to lean heavily on a false dichotomy: You can either be smart, have good ideas, or some blend of the two. Yet he begins with a counter-example in the case of Einstein.

You get new ideas from that place in Schenectady.<p>Seriously though, the best and simplest way to get new ideas is with hypnosis. Go into trance and give yourself a post-hypnotic suggestion to come up with new ideas.

There&#x27;s another step in this thinking of smart vs new ideas. You need smart + new ideas + execution&#x2F;productivity.<p>Einstein didn&#x27;t just have new ideas. He also excelled at communicating those ideas.

I like to use a car analogy.<p>I think those with high IQs who don&#x27;t accomplish much are like 2000-HP drag racers. Those things rip, but they don&#x27;t necessarily get you anywhere useful.<p>It&#x27;s much better to be a Jeep.

Using footnotes to add random tangents, rather than clarifications or directly related context, seems noisy. Why do writers in tech do this? I&#x27;ve never seen footnotes used like this.

Buried toward the end of the essay is a suggestion to become a better writer. Wondering if anyone has learned to become a better writer, and if so, what was your approach?

The ability to see things in a novel or different light is often an element of humor. Taking something a bit out of context, or switching things around.

what is Intelligence?<p>from wikipedia... &quot;Intelligence has been defined in many ways: the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving. &quot;<p>I&#x27;m sure Einstein had most of these abilities in abundance<p>I know a lot of people who would consider themselves as smart and they lack a <i>lot</i> the above skills

The title for PG&#x27;s post should&#x27;ve been Creativity is more important than being smart.

This pg essay reminds me of the Chinese saying <i>Cast a Brick to Attract Jade</i>. :-)

Skills, opportunity, motivation. He had all 3. Together we just call them luck.

Lot&#x27;s of people have ideas, great ideas even. Ideas are not particularly rare nor hard. Luck, expertise, privilege (for those not born into it) and timing are more difficult. More importantly, to help ensure maximum impact, one needs to want to push an idea into the world, and push hard. Generally there are better and more fun things to do in life (most would agree with me as pg noted himself).<p>Academics have great ideas and it takes thousands of them building on each other to drive a technological revolution. There would have been another Einstein (or collection of Einsteinlettes), it may have taken a decade but the soil was fertile. Einstein helped develop the ideas behind Quantum Physics but had no further world changing ideas left to contribute once it materialized.<p>So what type of ideas are we talking about? Capitalist entrepreneurial ideas for building startups with? That seems like a depressingly narrow understanding of ideas and what they mean for humanity.

This is not about what being smart is.<p>It&#x27;s about a very twisted perception of what is important.<p>PG seems to equate success with innovation. As if living life raising a family and having meaningful relationships is just a frivolous pass time of the lazy.<p>I can&#x27;t with these randian heros....

Was Einstein really that smart? What if Einstein is just a meme, and there were dozens of other people who made similar findings but we&#x27;re not published? What is with this obsession on trying to explain in hindsight why someone was successful?

How does pg <i>still</i> not have SSL on his website?

In my opinion, what made Einstein great was his grand perspective and ability to think deeply. He was brilliant and his brain could obviously connect dots that most people cannot. But what is that if not intelligence?<p>As an aside, if you believe Einstein to be brilliant or interesting, definitely check out his essay “Why Socialism?” [1]<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;monthlyreview.org&#x2F;2009&#x2F;05&#x2F;01&#x2F;why-socialism" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;monthlyreview.org&#x2F;2009&#x2F;05&#x2F;01&#x2F;why-socialism</a>

Imagination and diversity of experience are some other factors. I.e., the ability to imagine new combinations of disparate ideas, gained through a variety of unique experiences.<p>You could argue Einstein&#x27;s imagination, coupled with his scientific intelligence, is what made him brilliant.<p>But like others have said, the essay reads like there is a linear and narrow definition of &quot;smart.&quot; But having followed pg on twitter, he seems to tend towards an Ayn Rand style worldview, so I guess I&#x27;m not surprised.

&gt; Imagine you had a choice between being really smart but discovering nothing new, and being less smart but discovering lots of new ideas. Surely you&#x27;d take the latter.<p>Not sure if that Semmelweis guy would agree (had the idea that washing your hands between handling corpses and delivering babies is a good idea, everyone else at the time disagreed and he died in an asylum). Didn&#x27;t Tesla also die penniless and alone?<p>Maybe you&#x27;ll be well remembered by history, but what a life! I wonder how many people had lots of new genius ideas but took the &quot;safe&quot; option...

Intelligence is not a total order.

Are new ideas inherently good?

There are people who are challenged , in their writing ability, but come up with new ideas. I can&#x27;t name one off the top of my head, but I think the capitalistic world of startup companies could yield many examples of inventions.<p>To me tying the writing skill to that ability seems questionable.

I&#x27;m not going to read this, yet - PGs ideas always seem to be so interesting they drown out my own - rather Ill pose a question :<p>What if being &#x27;smart&#x27; is a measure of the useful &#x27;technology&#x27; we have running as the OS in our minds ?<p>What if all of our smarts are merely the result of opportunity &#x2F; time &#x2F; resources &#x2F; environment &#x2F; education .. exposure to good ideas and patterns of thinking - asking questions, following trains of thought, going back to first principles, exposure to diverse language and culture, opportunity to read good books, wealth and time to devote to puzzles when young, habit of critical thinking, fluency in math, exposure to ideas such as Evolution, access to computers&#x2F;internet&#x2F;information, time devoted to hobbies &#x2F; making things etc.<p>I think one of the things that works in Silicon Valley is the recycling of &#x27;talented&#x27; developers from one startup to another - so you have a hive-mind pool of continually honed elite creative technical skill-sets competing and cooperating to build new things from modern building blocks .. and when the &#x27;thing&#x27; doesn&#x27;t work, people can move on to the next thing until they hit a local gravity well of a startup going nova. When that happens, they get wealthy from equity .. then recycle that wealth via investment in other startups, and their time into mentoring.<p>Its been painful to watch this not happen in Australia over the past couple decades - a few wins, but no real ecosystem develop, despite there being a fair bit of nascent talent in game development, crypto, ML, math, biotech etc. The mining&#x2F;resource boom has dominated our trade and little of that wealth has been plowed back into technology &#x2F; science investment. We should be &#x27;mining&#x27; our solar energy wealth and exporting that up into Asia via cable. We should have a hive of ML and green-tech and when one doesn&#x27;t make it, the people move on to other ones.<p>Another way of saying this is &quot;smart doesn&#x27;t come from nowhere&quot; .. you need a pyramid ecosystem of soil, worms, molds, bacteria where smart shoots can arise naturally. Its hard to be book-smart, startup-smart or math-smart if you&#x27;re homeless and all your bandwidth is spent on shelter... or if the best job a smart person can have in your locale is selling houses and you need to do that to pay off your student debt.<p>Conversely, if things are too comfortable there is no need to get smart - but the wealth inequality curve is such that we needn&#x27;t worry about the vanishingly small talent pool of ultra wealthy teen proto-engineer entrepreneurs who will work on hard things to hone their smarts : a more plausible benefit is they dabble with cash bets in tech startups, science research or philanthropy.<p>I guess Im arguing that we concentrate on the ecosystem, rather than the individual - the smart long bet is to fund math education, science outreach, K2 reading programs : looking around, is there any doubt we need to aggressively promote ideas such as Evolution or the Carbon Cycle ? I love zombie movies way too much, but am appalled that no one ever asks how they keep walking around forever without eating - its as if conservation of energy is not part of the general public&#x27;s meme-set.<p>We all lose when young people are prevented from becoming smart by their environment - poverty, religion, anti-science, anti-education culture, political or economic instability.<p>What are the best ways to urgently improve this ? Maybe immigration of skilled&#x2F;educated&#x2F;motivated&#x2F;talented people from poor countries to rich countries is one of the most effective measures that works on a short timescale [ where immigrants work in startups, tech companies or university research labs ]<p>In Australia, our politicians love to be seen with spade in hand at the opening of a newly built school - well designed new buildings are nice, but they don&#x27;t seem to have a plan to actually educate people to a higher level in science and math, despite the buzzwords and virtue signalling. One of our best mini-exports is the AMC ( Australian Maths Competition ), its well regarded in Malaysia and Singapore, but many schools here don&#x27;t even participate as its seen as too hard, or perhaps too elite or not relevant. Schools have tech sessions where they might fly a drone or use a 3D printer .. but they dont seem to dig into the internals of how these things work. We seem to have a kind of cargo-cult mindset, where we are losing the ability to fix or improve anything. We outsource our refuse processing to Asia, but now they are refusing this, so our &quot;green solution&quot; is to burn rubbish, rather than invest in better recycling technology. Even after the worlds largest fires and smoke over our cities, we have not really woken up to the challenge of climate change. Covid has shown up how badly we fumble at organizing ourselves into action based on science. The Empire is crumbling here on Anacreon - we need a Hari Seldon plan.<p>I dont think voting matters, I dont think democracy is really functioning and the Universities themselves seem to be large beurocracies guarding their massive wealth, churning out marketing and management degrees for profit. Rather, we the technologists must exert whatever power we have - either by education, marketing&#x2F;dialog, building truly useful things, or using our new-wealth to buy off idiot politicians and fund the technology projects that will improve things.<p>Not to be alarmist .. but it really is 11:59 and our planet is dying. We need to get smart as a group and as a species.

Success in the way PG seems to be talking about is indeed about more than intelligence, it is also about experience, perspective, perception, ignorance, interest, imagination, and a bit of luck.<p>I&#x27;ve thought a lot about this, and I would break them down as follows:<p>1. Intelligence is more of a raw ability to process and synthesize information, and everyone genetically predisposed to have a starting measure. As one experiences life, one&#x27;s intelligence can be developed, expanded, and refined.<p>2. Experiences shape us whether we like it or not, but those who tend to me more successful than others, experiences tend to be opportunities to grow, recalibrate, review, shed, and otherwise change who they are in a way that would ensure a more effective outcome in a similar future experience.<p>3. Perspective and perception are tightly knit in that as we mature through life experiences, the size, detail, and depth of the world and reality continues to grow. Perspective in this sense is having an intentional awareness of how much there really is to know, and also, how much there is still left to discover. Perception is more of being able to intentionally focus on and recognize the breadth, depth, and detail of our perspective.<p>4. Ignorance is simply the missing pieces to what you know or understand, the limits to your knowledge of the world and how it works. Awareness of one&#x27;s own ignorance affords the opportunity to actively manage it, to either take steps to fill in gaps, or just be content in not knowing.<p>5. Interest is more about what items or aspects within our perspective and perception do we have a persistent affinity for? These affinities can be cultivated, and effort sown into some will reap greater rewards than others.<p>6. Imagination is likely the most powerful, since this is the ability to create a perspective that is not necessarily reflected or even inspired by something you have perceived. Imagination is surely informed by all of the preceding, but this is where the true magic happens, where success can increase exponentially. The preceding provide the bounds, drive, attraction, references, and understanding that can spark and fuel new ideas and connections. It is within imagination that all the ideas that advance humanity are born and nurtured since anything new is necessarily first imagined in a mind.<p>7. And last is luck, which in a sense, especially in the context of success, is really just a culmination of all of the preceding. The luckiest successful people are those:<p>- who have a baseline intelligence that they have actively developed,<p>- who have taken advantage of and sought out experiences that yielded opportunity to grow,<p>- who have intentionally broadened and deepened their perspectives while improving their ability to focus and perceive effectively to notice and seize opportunities,<p>- who manage their ignorance such that it doesn&#x27;t become an impediment or lasting liability,<p>- who latch onto worthwhile or beneficial interests,<p>- and lastly, who actively charge and exercise their imagination, always wondering how they could add to or improve their realities.<p>So PG is right, it is a lot more than just being smart, intelligence is just one ingredient in the recipe for success.<p>World-changing new ideas are a result of being actively aware of and engaged with reality while having and following through on the drive to push the boundaries of what is known, understood, or possible.

“Intelligence wins in conversation, and thus becomes the basis of the dominance hierarchy.”<p>Okay Jordan Peterson. This is myopic.

It&#x27;s a double whammy on &quot;smart&quot; people, actually. They are usually conditioned by their &quot;academic success&quot; that they are only allowed to have &quot;smart&quot; ideas. So &quot;smart&quot; people tend to play it real, real safe - they don&#x27;t want to destroy the illusion they are &quot;smart&quot; either in themselves or (worst of all) their peers. A necessary prerequisite to wander off the beaten path is to have lots of &quot;dumb&quot; ideas as well, some of which will turn out not so dumb after all.<p>Personally I was quickly disabused of the notion that I&#x27;m &quot;smart&quot; after I spent 3 years working in a research lab alongside some _real_ genius quality folks. I was also able to discern their weakness that I allude to above. People who are genuinely smart yet not afraid to try dumb things are unstoppable, and I&#x27;d say that the latter is more important than the former, as long as you&#x27;re willing to put in the extra work and are learning something from your mistakes. Yet it&#x27;s also not &quot;socially acceptable&quot;, so we get what we get - best minds of our generation playing it safe instead of going where no one has gone before, and worse - shitting on the people who do from the height of their ivory tower.

So waiting for people to try intentionally infecting themselves with toxoplasmosis to boost their creativity. It seems like a rule 34 near inevitability to me. YMMV.

Oh wow, yet another pseudo-intellectual, navel-gazing snooze fest in 8pt and 90% white space. I have been biting my nails waiting since the last one.