To me it is chess. I know how the piece move but that is it.
Chill man. There’s loads of types of smart. Some people are great at chess, others have an intuitive feel of how a ball moves in the air, or how musical notes harmonize, or how equations collapse into simple forms, or how color or smell evokes emotion, or how ingredients work together to create pleasant texture and flavors, or how materials fold under the strike of a hammer, …
Point is, while you may not be smart in one area, there’s always areas to explore. Who knows, you may be a savant in your field. Enjoy the journey and appreciate the diversity.
I hate that people don’t recognize the depth of what intelligence can be. You alluded to athletic intelligence, but there’s so many more. Emotional intelligence is a big buzzword, but just being a kind person is a reflection of that type.
Some of the most insufferable people I’ve ever met are “smart” but holy shit would I prefer to spend my time with someone else.
I don’t think there is a great way to quantify intelligence, but IQ and MENSA ain’t it. And chess is just boring. I’m not good at it because I don’t want to be.
I don’t think I’ve ever met a genuinely smart person that wasn’t kind. Most insufferable people I’ve met weren’t outstandingly smart. But maybe that’s just the bubble I live in and a little bit of luck.
Or I’m just very tolerant and have a high ceiling for what I’d describe as insufferable.
I think intelligence brings with an awareness of the scale of all knowledge, and that imbues a sense of humility. It’s the people who let it get to their head, maybe because they solved one problem within their locus, or managed to monetize one thing that puts them at an economic advantage, and it ruins their character.
Some people are very smart at writing smart things like you !
Thanks, friend. I really needed that in light of the recent news.
You don’t. If you’re even entertaining the thought that there is more to learn than what you already know you are displaying intelligence. Stupid people “know” they’re NOT stupid and intelligent people constantly question their own intelligence. This is why a grown adult with the reading age of a 12yr old can spend twenty minutes online and become the world’s foremost authority on… 5G, vaccines, international geo politics, chemtrails, why the Nazi party were “ackshully” socialist etc. etc.
What is smart… I mean, most of us Lemmy tech people are good at computers but completely useless and may even despise other activities such as dancing, singing, acting, psychology, and so on.
Never forget that the school system evaluates how good of a worker you can be, not how good of a human you can be. The entire system is just built for economic growth, not your happiness. In fact, you consume more when you are feeling like shit.
A bit of a side note, I know, but it’s all connected to a bigger picture, so…
If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it’ll spend its life believing it’s a failure.
Yeah but I can’t even figure out how to breathe water
Being bad at chess doesn’t mean you aren’t smart.
Doesn’t mean you’re not smart. People’s brains work differently. Some people enjoy thinking five moves ahead, or memorizing standard plays and reactions. Other people are good at math or chemistry. Talents aren’t an “all or nothing” thing.
I was tested as a child and had an iq of 164 at 10 years old. For my entire childhood every adult treated me like I was smarter than them and in most cases I was. I was in gifted and accelerated classes and excelled.
I know I’m not smart because from the headstart in life I got I went on to barely graduate from high school, drop out of community college twice, never hold a job for longer than 18 months, and have more gaps on my resume than experience.
Sounds a lot like ADHD.
It is! Or at least what a previous therapist thought.
That’s all because you’re bored. The world isn’t geared for genius level intelligence.
Boredom is a lot more dangerous and potentially disastrous than most people realize, but it’s definitely not my only problem. I struggle with some mental health issues that make most things a lot harder for me than many other people.
or even… I’m slightly above average, they put me in honors classes etc. functionally because I played Magic School Bus games as a kid and showed up to 2nd grade already knowing what an herbivore was, I got more boring homework to do for my entire adolescence. Whatbreally doomed me was “academically gifted” math class was just skipping a grade and my math performance never recovered.
I was fortunate that individuals in my elementary school actually made accommodations for me being ahead of average. My third grade teacher gave me a fourth grade math book and special assignments from it. The pull-out classes for smart kids were K-2 and 3-5, but I got put in the 3-5 class in second grade. My principal supported my parents in moving me to a different class because of teachers who weren’t supporting me (multiple times, actually).
My school was in a pretty low-income district, but I completely lucked out with educators (and parents) who fought for me.
Definitely still ended up on the gifted child > burnt out teen/adult who struggles with some basic life skills, but at least I didn’t end up struggling with my ADHD in school until high school because of the support in my younger years.
I went to decent schools in a decent district, they had “Academically Gifted” programs for elementary and middle school students, with “honors” and “AP” classes for high schoolers. A structural problem I think they had is they were operating kind of on video game logic: “You’re smart so for you we’re going to make classes harder for you.” You’re doing too well on Medium, we’re bumping you up to Hard.
Which basically did the opposite of what I really needed. I didn’t need more and longer assignments. In most subjects you could go a little deeper in detail with me and I’d keep up. In math class, I needed more concrete explanations of what the numbers meant. Math class is so often just “Here is how you do this algortihm. Follow these rules and you get the answer.” “Okay, I got 7.” “No, you were supposed to get -2, you forgot the transistational property of non-equal equality. You need to talk to the guidance counselor about your future because at this rate you’re not going to pass this class.” Funny how I did extremely well in chemistry and physics where they explained the math in concrete terms that I could build an intuitive relationship with.
I think there’s also a problem where…Picture a mathematician. What do you see? A man in a sweater vest in an ivy covered building filling a chalkboard with greek letters and arcane symbols that prove some deep truth about reality, right? That’s what it looks like to be good at math, so that’s what we’re going to make math class look like for every single citizen. Never mind that administrators rarely do math at all, a lot of office workers are fine with a 4-function calculator, meanwhile a carpenter needs a functioning understanding of trigonometry. In academia, aesthetics is more important than reality.
There are multiple kinds of ‘smart’. The following section in Wiki breaks them down into IQ, emotional, social, and moral. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence#Human
Historically, a lot of ‘high IQ’ people didn’t necessarily ‘fit in’ to society. See the story of William James Sidis … ‘He entered Harvard University at age 11 and, as an adult, was claimed by family members to have an IQ between 250 and 300’.
Also historically, people smart enough to see that a lot of the world is about shuckin’ and jivin’ and not giving a crap? may not be not interested in playing the game. Some find other interests and don’t see the point in ‘accomplishing’ things that will mostly be forgotten. Ramanujan had a HUGE talent for math ONLY, unrecognized until he wrote a professor halfway around the world.
We were all born without a manual. There are ways to enjoy life on your own terms.
People smart enough to realize how much they don’t know are most likely to think that they aren’t smart… and it takes a certain level of intelligence to do that.
Something something Dunning-Kruger Effect. Dumb people who know very little about a topic will tend to overestimate their knowledge about said topic. As you gain more knowledge about the topic, the more you realize you don’t know, and the less confident you are about it.
In extreme cases, it ends with the person having Imposter Syndrome. When a person is very knowledgeable and experienced in a certain topic, but believes they aren’t qualified enough to be considered an expert. They feel like an imposter who will inevitably get outed by someone more knowledgeable than they are. So they have a lot of anxiety about speaking on the topic, because they’re afraid it will result in them being outed as an imposter.
Calculus III kicked my ass.
Calculus in general is beyond my ability
I was good at math until Cal III when I hit the wall. I’ve forgotten almost all of what I learned, though. So I’m not really good at math anymore. Unless you enter certain career paths, most people won’t need to use advanced math in their day-to-day. I bet you’re good at some non-math stuff.
Cal III was fun it was just a bunch of multivariable differentials. Cal II though sucked thanks to all the integration processes.
I’m smart enough to know that everyone is both smart and stupid.
I’m stupid enough to believe that doesn’t apply to me.
I live on the Earth, home to humans. Every human I’ve met, heard, or read about has been pretty stupid about something. I can’t imagine that I’d be the sole exception, so if I had to guess I’m not smart.
More to the spirit of the question, for me it has to do with programming. I love programming, I went to school for it and learned a ton. It really covers a wide breadth of applications, and you can make anything happen with a computer if you’re determined enough. And, like any field, there’s general knowledge as well as deeper specializations.
If you’re not into programming, know that there’s a divide in every application between what’s called the Back End and the Front End. The front end is what the user interacts with, and ultimately is an interface for the back end which actually runs the application.
I don’t know if it would still be considered accurate, but in school we’d joke about how the back end is more complex (more services to integrate with), and the front end is easier because it’s all about look and feel. Generally speaking, people develop an affinity for one or the other and then further specialize based on that.
I can’t seem to pick up a front end framework to save my life. The thing that the self-described smart kids called easier is wayyy more complicated than it looks. I have a lot of training, I’m skilled in multiple languages, and I can whisper the secret words that open up the database. But I don’t know if I could Hello World my way through a React app if there was a gun to my head.
On chess, there is a moment in 2001: a Space Odyssey wherein HAL and Frank Poole are playing chess. A more attentive person than me pointed out HAL cheated. I paused and looked at the board forever. I almost gave up. I thought I would never figure it out. Finally figured it out! I have never felt so smart for wasting so much time.
Reading a book that explains a book I don’t understand and failing to understand either at the end.
Sounds like at least one of the books in question is shit
Or the subject matter is advanced.
I’ve read a lot of material on quantum physics and it’s still mostly word salad to me.
A lot of people who present quantum mechanics to a laymen audience seem to intentionally present it to be as confusing as possible because they like the “mystery” behind it. Yet, it is also easy to present it in a trivially simple and boring way that is easy to understand.
Here, I will tell you a simple framework that is just 3 rules and if you keep them in mind then literally everything in quantum mechanics makes sense and follows quite simply.
- Quantum mechanics is a probabilistic theory where, unlike classical probability theory, the probabilities of events can be complex-valued. For example, it is meaningful in quantum mechanics for an event to have something like a -70.7i% chance of occurring.
- The physical interpretation of complex-valued probabilities is that the further the probability is from zero, the more likely it is. For example, an event with a -70.7i% probability of occurring is more likely than one with a 50% probability of occurring because it is further from zero. (You can convert quantum probabilities to classical just by computing their square magnitudes, which is known as the Born rule.)
- If two events or more become statistically correlated with one another (this is known as “entanglement”) the rules of quantum mechanics disallows you from assigning quantum probabilities to the individual systems taken separately. You can only assign the quantum probabilities to the two events or more taken together. (The only way to recover the individual probabilities is to do something called a partial trace to compute the reduced density matrix.)
If you keep those three principles in mind, then everything in quantum mechanics follows directly, every “paradox” is resolved, there is no confusion about anything.
For example, why is it that people say quantum mechanics is fundamentally random? Well, because if the universe is deterministic, then all outcomes have either a 0% or 100% probability, and all other probabilities are simply due to ignorance (what is called “epistemic”). Notice how 0% and 100% have no negative or imaginary terms. They thus could not give rise to quantum effects.
These quantum effects are interference effects. You see, if probabilities are only between 0% and 100% then they can only be cumulative. However, if they can be negative, then the probabilities of events can cancel each other out and you get no outcome at all. This is called destructive interference and is unique to quantum mechanics. Interference effects like this could not be observed in a deterministic universe because, in reality, no event could have a negative chance of occurring (because, again, in a deterministic universe, the only possible probabilities are 0% or 100%).
If we look at the double-slit experiment, people then ask why does the interference pattern seem to go away when you measure which path the photon took. Well, if you keep this in mind, it’s simple. There’s two reasons actually and it depends upon perspective.
If you are the person conducting the experiment, when you measure the photon, it’s impossible to measure half a photon. It’s either there or it’s not, so 0% or 100%. You thus force it into a definite state, which again, these are deterministic probabilities (no negative or imaginary terms), and thus it loses its ability to interfere with itself.
Now, let’s say you have an outside observer who doesn’t see your measurement results. For him, it’s still probabilistic since he has no idea which path it took. Yet, the whole point of a measuring device is to become statistically correlated with what you are measuring. So if we go to rule #3, the measuring device should be entangled with the particle, and so we cannot apply the quantum probabilities to the particle itself, but only to both the particle and measuring device taken together.
Hence, for the outside observer’s perspective, only the particle and measuring device collectively could exhibit quantum interference. Yet, only the particle passes through the two slits on its own, without the measuring device. Thus, they too would predict it would not interfere with itself.
Just keep these three rules in mind and you basically “get” quantum mechanics. All the other fluff you hear is people attempting to make it sound more mystical than it actually is, such as by interpreting the probability distribution as a literal physical entity, or even going more bonkers and calling it a grand multiverse, and then debating over the nature of this entity they entirely made up.
It’s literally just statistics with some slightly different rules.
That’s a helpful perspective. I appreciate it.
I still have a lot of work on the underlying math because I didn’t put in near the effort I should have in any of my actual classes, but I do genuinely want to get over the hump.
Right, I was expecting the earlier one to be a work of fiction
No no philosophy :(
You’re not dumb if you fail to understand a book of philosophy. Very few are as straightforward as Das Kapital for example.
I’ll agree with that. Convoluted nonsense for the sake of being convoluted is very rarely good writing. There’s some stuff with more complexity and longer developing story-lines, but the minute to minute reading should still flow even if you don’t see how the big picture is going to develop.
one of the smarter folks of western civilisation history said “i know that i do kot know” so maybe asking yourself whether you are or are not smart is all it takes
My brain insists on telling me so several times a day so nowadays I just roll with it.
Same
