Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
I'm posting this in Small-Scale because I don't want to get too weighty on this, but rather commiserate with other smart people about how difficult it is to appreciate how not smart the rest of the world is. Or at least convince you that it's freaking ugly out there.
A little bit of background first.
I consider myself retarded and slow and like I make lots of easy stupid mistakes. My brain feels really noisy and like I would regularly kill people if I worked in an ER or intensive care because I'd mis-dose them or get confused about what step in what procedure we're following. (Though some of these are probably ADHD issues, which a psychiatrist agreed enough with to write me an Rx for, as an Adderall-seeking adult)
I found myself becoming a misanthrope in public school because I considered it extremely, absurdly slow and boring and my school didn't appear to care. I'm sure I didn't make it easy for them because I found everything so trivial that I wouldn't do the work. I also thought most of my teachers were slackers who just wanted an easy job and didn't look up to them in any way (though there were some diamonds in the rough) and perhaps my contempt came across my facial expressions. I started cutting classes to hang out in the computer lab and write OpenGL programs. I can see how few if any teachers wanted to take a risk and advocate for me or would even imagine I was bored to tears intellectually. I also had no friends in HS, not even other supposedly smart kids. I'm not autistic by any means. Everyone just seemed... off. And also my carefully cultivated set of friends on IRC were so much better.
I was so disgusted with school and other people that I never went to college. The thought of taking any step in that direction was a hard no, I was desperate to get out into the work force and got a computer job when I was 18 and didn't think much about intelligence, for awhile.
I've slowly, eventually come to terms with the fact that I have a fairly big cognitive edge over most people. I don't mean this with a sense of pride. I mean this in a sense of horror.
One thing that's confused me a lot is that over the last decade or two, "verbal IQ" has gone up considerably. In the olden days it seemed like people on the internet were either smart or they were obvious morons because the obvious morons couldn't write, being new to keyboards and chatting. But nowadays even the most dimwitted Redditor writes English fluently and they'll even use words from the scientific and intellectual classes to argue, so I would spend a long time arguing with people who were just never going to understand me. Like man-years, I'm sure.
Anyway, it was still really hard to realize I have a cognitive edge? Charles Murray argues in Real Education that many smarter people don't realize just how smart they are, due to sorting. They seek out other smart people and compare themselves and see that they have minor relative strengths and weaknesses and conclude the differences between them, and thereby everyone actually, are cases of nurture and not nature. Meanwhile the people who can't do basic arithmetic in their heads or who could never handle a hypothetical conditional don't enter your universe, or you probably sense you're not very alike and don't get to know their intellectual life.
A few things have broken me out of this. In the Parable of the Talents, Scott writes:
Disturbing.
Did you see the conditional hypotheticals thing? Scott again, quoting the anonymous IQ researcher posting to 4chan this time (so grain of salt)
I tried the "didn't eat breakfast" thing on a few people I know. All of the adults got it (whew). It's very interesting to try it on kids. Kids five and under can't do it flat out, but at about 6+ they can. Imagining that some people are forever 5 years old in that part of their brain is freaking wild.
Swiveling back to Murray in Real Education, he tries to convince you of how not smart the average person is by showing a series of fairly trivial 8th grade exam questions and detailing how wrong most kids get them.
The answer isD, productive and peaceful
55% of Illinois 8th graders get this wrong.
I've posted a few of these to Twitter. Some are mathy, and some are word problems. This one about the Asanazi drives some people berserk; people apparently can't separate the author's portrayal from their own portrayal, or do the basic constraint logic needed to rule the rest out.
I saw someone joke in a different part of Twitter that stuff like LSAT questions are designed to maximize toxic Twitter engagement and I have to concur.
Last one. Scott again, writes recently.
I don't really know what this PIIAC thing is, so I asked ChatGPT4o to generate an example question that demonstrate proficiency.
IMO you should be able to do this in your head in a few seconds. It feels embarrassing to even talk about something this easy and connect any hint of pride to it, like this is an example of any cognitive edge at all. Yet huge portions of the population will struggle with it. I asked an 11th grader taking AP classes this question and they said they would need pen and paper to figure it out(!) He at least knew how to organize it in terms of x.
I could see a grand majority of the population never writing it in terms of x = ... and solving that way.
I'm trying to fill a position at work right now. A sys admin role. I want to ask that gas mileage question during technical interviews but I'm afraid the people who will get it right will be so insulted that they can't believe I'm asking this, while the people who get it wrong will feel very unfairly brutally discriminated against because I could pop such an irrelevant-to-their-job question on them.
So. How do we expect to become a Star Trek, space faring civilization again? There's so much work to do that we need smart people for and so few smart people.
We know how to avoid being overwhelmed by 65 IQ adults. In childhood you can ensure they don't suffer the worst poverty and go hungry and give them a K-6 education. Then they'll have 80-90 IQ. That's still grim, but a huge accomplishment.
Ignoring the Flynn effect, do we have any idea at all about how to shift, say, the middle of the curve from 100 IQ to 130 IQ? Is there any therapy or drug or surgery anywhere on the horizon that could achieve this?
I don't get it. How do these people think it is anything but D? They go berserk defending not-D? By what justification?
Sure, the text says "peaceful," but "productive" is very much in the eye of the beholder. Are the listed tasks productive? Does the median 8th grader think so? I'm sure you could point to "internalized something" as a Western-centric view of why making anthropological artifacts is not terribly "productive." Or conversely, that cultural investment isn't inherently productive at all (what does this do for GDP?). "Productive" is a value judgement that isn't in the original text.
I could see some argument that constantly hunting and living on a diet of corn and squash (do kids like squash?) sounds rather dreary. And lots of difficult physical work (for kids that would prefer sitting in front of a flashing picture box).
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They refuse to interpret it based on the author's portrayal and instead substitute their own. As a human living in 2024, I find the thought of making beads, baskets, hunting and growing corn dull and dreary and who are you to say it's not? That's the best fit. Final answer. As you can see I have now proven the question is dumb and we are unfairly giving kids low marks.
This calls for the IQ bell curve meme. Left and right extremes: "well I can't know what the author wanted to say, I'm not a mind reader". The middle: "obviously D, the text and the answer both say 'productive'".
Unironically though: yes, we are unfairly giving kids low marks. Interpretive questions call for free-form answers, not multiple choice (as noted by other posters).
The guy on the right who looks like a monk knows what the intended expected midwit answer is though.
Yes. That doesn't mean he'll pick that answer if he doesn't have something to get out of it (like a passed test).
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There's a great deal of productive work people can do with very little abstract thinking skill. I went through basic training recently. I was probably the smartest, or at least close to it, at stuff like algebra and writing essays and reading comprehension. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people there would have trouble with those sorts of problems and would need to go through a couple hours of lessons to consistently get those problems correct, and even then would probably forget those lessons after a few months.
But that didn't matter at all. In boot camp, the things that mattered were how well you polished boots, folded clothes, made it to the place you were supposed to be on time, could do the multi-step safety check on your rifle, could put together a lean-to to sleep under, and all the fitness stuff. Almost all those people with lower IQs could blow me out of the water at those tasks(although there were a couple people that I expect would be especially bad at math and were even worse than me at basic skills). For regular life skills, stuff that wasn't abstract, they could do great- they weren't some barely conscious apes that barely managed not to kill themselves, like I feel like we'd both expect after hearing they couldn't answer 100-17 with mental math.
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The Anasazi question reminds me that adults forget what it is like to be young and are oblivious to the social constructs of middle age; there are cases to be made for B and C and a nit to be picked about D.
B The author depicts the Anasazi as doing fine weaving. Both by using the word, in the case of sashes woven from hair, and implying it in the case of basket, with a mesh without holes. fine is more work than coarse. Doing all that work will keep them busy. The child is probably dragged round the supermarket on shopping trips. Meat comes from the chill cabinet. Perhaps neighbors go hunting, but the child is discouraged from asking to go too, because guns are scary and dangerous. Hunting sounds forbidden and dangerous; certainly exciting. Hunting long ago, with a bow or s spear sounds harder and more dangerous. harder speaks to the Anasazi leading busy lives. You hunt, you catch nothing (you cannot just shoot your prey) so you hunt again the following day. You are kept busier than people today who can guarantee to get the whole weeks shopping with one car trip to the supermarket. dangerous might stand alone to the adult mind, but a child will pick up the message that the Anasazi lead exciting lives. B is a contender.
C "baskets woven tightly enough to hold water." is a strange claim. The child might have been paying attention when history covered the Spanish Armada. Sir Francis Drake Singed the King of Spains beard. One historian emphasizes burning stocks of seasoned timber, needed for wet cooperage. Wet cooperage is when a cooper makes a barrel so well that it is suitable for storing water. That is much harder than dry cooperage and needs seasoned timber. Burn that and there are no new barrels for storing water on board ship. No barrels, no Armada. What the attentive child knows is that holding water is a major pain under earlier, lo-tech conditions of life. The author is depicting the life of the Anasazi as difficult in two senses. First they do impressive feats of basket weaving. That is technically difficult. Second, they are likely forced to do this by a lack of technology (though what has gone wrong with their pots? Why aren't they holding water in pots? Unsuitable clay? Lack of glazes?). We would ordinarily summarize the problems posed by lack of basic technology by saying that life was difficult.
The author talks of beautiful pottery and turquoise jewelry. The thirteen year old boy answering the question knows just what the author is talking about. It is the fine china that lives in the cabinet, and the Meissen figurines, with their boring pastel colors. The limbs are not articulated, eliminating any play value, and you are not allowed to play with them anyway because of their impractical fragility. Turquoise jewelry is stupid, girly crap. The author is implying that the Anasazi lead lives that are boring as fuck. dreary is one of the polite adult words for this, difficult and dreary. C is a contender.
D Since the author uses the word peacefully, the use of the word peaceful immediately makes D a strong contender. The problem lies with the word productive having two conflicting meanings. A school pupils perhaps learns the school room notion of productivity from history lessons on Luddites and weavers. Power looms made weavers more productive. A lot more productive. It made those who wore clothes better off by bringing down the price of cloth. That is a lot of people and a big price fall, so a huge gain overall. On the other hand, weavers who expected to be better off, because prosperity comes from productivity, were shocked to find the surplus of cloth and the resulting price falls more than offset the gain in the amount of cloth produced. productive is an output measure, not an input measure. productivity is a specific measure of output: output per hour of labor.
You are productive when you pour a sack of polyethylene pellets into the hopper of your injection molding machine and produce a thousand water bottles an hour. You are unproductive when you spend a week or two weaving a basket so tightly that it just about holds water.
The alternative meaning of productive lies at the intersection of pastoral romance and the Protestant work ethic. You are unproductive in the taverna, drinking Ouzo and playing Back Gammon. You are productive when you return to your farm and tend your olive grove. It is not about the fertility of the grove or the price of olives. You are unproductive when you play a video game; you are productive when you write the program for a video game (but why would any-one buy a video game if playing it is disparaged as unproductive?)
Since I'm middle aged and middle class I'm acculturated to school as a center of pointless busywork that keeps children off the streets. The devil finds work for idle hands, and we use the word productive to praise keeping those hands busy with the right kind of pointless busy work (such as making beautiful pottery that doesn't hold water, and turquoise jewelry). It contrasts with the word unproductive which disparages the forms of pointless activity preferred by younger persons or those of lower social class.
Answer D is checking that the children are picking up the correct meaning of productive. Are they well on their way to being middle aged and middle class? We wouldn't want them saying that the Anasazi are "unproductive and peaceful". We prefer them to have a fashionable sense of "Ted Kaczynski"-lite, and ignore the crassly industrial notion of productive.
I'm in a pickle. I don't know what my comment implies. On first reading I'm defending the intelligence of Illinois 8th graders. They are not stupid, the question is bad. On second reading I'm trashing a question, chosen by a clever person, to illustrate a point. That is to say, chosen by a person who is clever compared to other people. But the question is still trash, so even "clever" people are smug and stupid and we as a species are ultra-doomed :-(
In my opinion, you are way overthinking this. I think this ties back into the subject of this thread, but probably 90% of tests are written for people who aren't particularly intelligent by other people who also aren't particularly intelligent as a clumsy and ham-fisted way to see if they're good enough for something. They're meant to see if you can think along with the author's mid-tier thought process, not stimulate discussion and sophisticated consideration.
I solved it in like 10 seconds. Skim it, check the answers, go over it a little more carefully, the words of the story are obviously meant to be about being productive and peaceful, mark D, done, move on to the next one. If you've managed to make it through a first-world school, you probably have an idea how tests are written and how the people who will grade them want you to answer.
The Motte loves our overthinking things. Most of the rest of the world does not. You (metaphorical you) will frequently in life be judged by people who are much dumber than you, but have power over you anyways. It's to your benefit to learn how to appear to pass their tests while being submissive to them temporarily. Giving the answer that they want fast codes to them as smart; going on a long tangent about how technically true it actually is may actually be a sign of greater intelligence, but will signal to them that you're an uncooperative weirdo spewing what seems like gibberish to them, not a supergenius.
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I think your comment says you are uneasy about questions that require so much human interpretation and you are, rightfully, distrustful of authorities who demand a precise answer.
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Yeah I leant B for a moment before concluding D was a better fit. These kinds of multiple choice questions should really be short answer questions. There's a reason that multiple choice only appears in tests and nowhere else in life!
But Illinois 8th graders or most people generally are pretty stupid.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-19801666
This is the pool of people who are allegedly, constitutionally, supposed to run government departments providing services to tens of millions. They control billions of dollars. Come on!
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The distracters aren't really effective if there's not a plausible argument for them. That's largely the point of distracters. The goal is to identify the best answer.
You are productive when you produce stuff. The question details 4 types of items and 2 crops that are produced. The crops are also produce.
There is a right answer, a wrong answer, and two distractors. The distractors focus the discriminating power of the test. If the distractors are almost right, even the clever get distracted and the test focuses on separating the very clever from clever. If the distractors are wrong, just not so blatantly wrong as the wrong answer, average test takers can find the right answer by elimination, and the detailed test results (separating out wrong versus distracted) serves to separate the very stupid and stupid.
The interpretation of
will vary depending on whether the distractors are nearly right or nearly wrong.
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In your reply, you focused on hunting but what about "growing corn and squash"?
Busy? Yes. But exciting? In what galaxy could you say growing corn and squash is exciting? That's a resounding no, to me. That significantly downgrades B as an answer, IMO.
What this is though, is productive. (We even call it "produce" in stores)
Some of these things sound dull or dreary, but I'm just not seeing how you can call doing all of these things dull and dreary. Beautiful pottery? Fine sashes? Turquoise jewelry? The picture the author is painting does not really communicate dull and dreary to me. I can see how they might be painstaking and hard, but they're still describing fashionable and pretty things. "Dull" is very much downgraded as a choice to me. What about hunting? Really hard to think dull and dreary here as well.
What all of these things have in best common is they involve producing. Fine jewelry, container chotchkas, or hunting or growing food to eat.
Sure, but "they continued this way until 1200 AD". That should put you in an old timey frame of reference. I don't know much about the time before 1200 AD but I bet baskets that hold water would be hella clutch.
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What are the odds of getting two heads in a row (on two independent unbiased coin flips)? Do you know the answer? How many UK politicians do you think can get the right answer?52%, sample size of 101 (Source here)
Math is hard. If, in a few seconds, you can see the relationship between 30 mile/gallon and $3/gallon means you get 10 miles per dollar, so for 450 miles you spend 45 dollars, then you probably have enough quantitative ability to work a six-figure job.
But broadly you're right. Talent is rarest resource in the universe and you can't make people smarter. But you only need one Newton or Haber to advance the frontier.
You can take a few seconds longer and just brute-force the calculation through 15 gallons. I guess the problem is that using math to solve problems feels like work to a large percentage of the population, so they don't do it if they can get away with not doing it. Why keep a rough running total of your shopping cart contents in your head when the cashier will just ring it up and you can just pay with your credit card? If you really must reduce your spending, then you can just sit down, get your calculator out and do work.
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That's actually so much better than I was expecting. Whew.
The frontier advancement is obviously important stuff, but still, having worked in orgs full of, say, approx 140+ IQ people and orgs that must be approx 115 IQ people, I can tell you the former is insanely productive and refreshing and the latter is almost oppressive and gets mired in stupid shit. I can't help but extrapolate to all of society and think how much harder better faster stronger the rest of the world would be if we brought the average up.
You are much more cynical than me. And I am extremely cynical, but damn, still not enough. Failing this in any capacity is just inexcusable.
It's still a disappointing result, don't get me wrong, but my prior was pretty low for MPs.
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I don't disagree. I think this is the thesis of Garrett Jones' "Hive Mind" book, but I haven't read it.
It would have to be genetic engineering, or embryo selection, or something like that. But selecting for intelligence is thought of negatively for arbitrary reasons.
Not so arbitrary; selecting for intelligence may have its drawbacks. The infamous paper Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence (NHAI) hypothesizes that Europe accidentally selected the Ashkenazi Jews for intelligence for 800 years, and that their population also got a larger proportion of genetic brain disorders compared to human baseline as a result. The implicit warning is that anyone attempting a similar result on purpose will get genetic brain disorders in the resulting population.
Some people try to find scientific refutations for this hypothesis (PDF), instead of outright rejecting it as “eugenics bad” and refusing to do science.
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I think hive mind actually says average IQ is more important than your geniuses for a country level wealth.
My guess it’s because any country can do catch up growth (mostly), but having low IQ makes politics and institutions too crappy.
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We use a question like this in our interviewing process. There's much more to it (this is just one component; they then have to design a software system around it), but it requires some basic multiplication.
For the first 2 years, we'd pop it on them live. The results were extremely poor. 90% of people had to pull out a calculator, and many of them would add or remove a 0 if they didn't. I hate to say it, but we had to provide the whole question beforehand to even get through the thing in an hour. I was originally horrified.
Then again, I don't think that solving this sort of complex problem with a timer over your head is empathetic or reasonable. In reality, when I come across a system constraint I have to engineer around, I at least have hours (if not days). My gut feeling was that many people failed because of the pressure and nerve aspect as opposed to the ability to solve the problem in a reasonable timeframe.
In any case, that's a long rant to say: "Feel Empowered to include basic shit like this and use it as a qualifier, but I suggest making it part of a larger question provided to the candidate the day before the interview."
I've been doing hiring off and on for about 20 years so I feel confident offering two quick thoughts.
Have you done mock interviews with the rest of the team to try these questions out? How do your own people do?
Is failing to complete the problem in time that big a deal? In general I find the journey of problem solving more important than reaching the end in the allotted time. You usually know after an hour if someone is too much of a dick to work with, or if they could finish if you gave them another 15 minutes. OTOH, if you and the candidate spend an entire hour struggling with what you thought would take ten minutes, that's probably bad.
Our entire interview suite uses those approaches, including our small take-home project, so we can easily cross-reference someone's performance with their salary requirements and stated YOE. The tech interview team explicitly defines the tiers of answer performance, and we all collaborate on them.
There have been some calls to introduce a new question to more closely represent the state of the art in modern development. After ~7 total years anything gets long in the tooth, and I'd be lying if I said I'm not a bit concerned about the performance of LLMs in the space. With excellent prompting, they can succeed in our interview if not blow us away. There's no substitute for seeing if someone can verbally describe how they'd solve or problem or change a solution.
Hmm, if it were me, I would be worried that this scenario question would get leaked online. But perhaps your company isn't famous enough that people collect interview questions on forums.
Lol ding ding ding! ~100 people so we are under the radar. Glassdoor doesn't have it on there yet.
But we've interviewed probably 2,000? I think it's still worth developing something, and even if someone knows the answer you can still qualify folks.
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I’d personally love to give someone a blank Excel and that mileage problem, if I was interviewing them for a job with Excel use as part of the job description/job ad.
Seriously? My Excel job interview question looks more like this:
Seriously. I’m not thinking of a job where Excel will be a primary tool for database work, but admin jobs and other jobs where Excel is an ancillary tool.
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Admittedly I can't do this in Excel (because I don't use it), but it's a trival squeal (SQL) or any other tabular tool question
Left join, but ok. The trick is doing this in Excel.
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How is your sysadmin recruiting going?
Having been in this space for nearly 30 years, the quality of the candidates seems lower now than in the 90's.
I recall working with people enthusiastic and curious about the technology we were administering. They'd have hobbies or intrests in adjacent but relevant areas.
Many now need more supervision than they receive. I also suspect the poor performers drag down the pay scales.
I work in tech accidentally. I'm a "little sister." My older brother was very into computers, and I fell into it because working overnights as tech support while I was in law school gave me a lot more time to study than working overnights at a gas station. I knew enough by virtue of being around my brother to be competent (and back then, knowing the difference between SLIP and PPP was enough to get hired). And there was a certain level of trouble shooting and just needing to understand computers that you had to know to use them. So I could swap out cards in my computer as I managed upgrades, I'm not afraid of an IRQ jumper. I've run cables. But I am not a computer person. These are just things I learned by virtue of being around people who lived and breathed this stuff, or because I had to know it in order to use the tools for my specific purposes. And ultimately, because I ended up liking working in tech more than working in law. I'm good at what I do. People who learn I didn't intend to go into tech or that I don't consider myself particularly a computer person are often surprised.
My daughter (college aged) is basically a power user, even growing up with two parents in tech. She hasn't had to do the trouble shooting or the general tech support we had to do, because computers are functional tools now. When something doesn't work, after she turns it off and back on, she's kind of stymied, because things usually "just work" for her. It's the same way a lot of folks are with cars. I grew up with beaters, so there's a level of mechanical trouble shooting I knew that people who grew up with cars that just worked didn't know. Now, because she grew up with parents in tech, she can do basic trouble shooting, she can build simple electronic devices, she knows percussive maintenance can just work. But she has peers (in STEM even) who couldn't figure out how to plug an ethernet cable in (they've never plugged in a phone jack, either...).
I don't think that folks are necessarily less capable, they just don't have the same skill set. It's not required in the way it used to be. In the 80's, if I couldn't build my own PC, I didn't have a PC. Nowadays, building your PC is a niche thing only people who are deeply into (some aspects of) computers do. My daughter and her peers are going to come across as less able, in a lot of ways, than those of us who were in tech in the 90s (or earlier). They aren't. They've just grown up with tools that work. They aren't shadetree mechanics because that hasn't been something in their environment. They know other things. And they obviously have the potential (it's not like we're smarter than them). Nowadays, they have no reason to be able to chant orange white, orange, green white, blue, blue white, green, brown white, brown. So when I'm interviewing (for a junior position), I look for the curiosity, the trouble shooting ability, the engagement. This is particularly challenging because interviewing has become very scripted, at least where I work currently. It's also challenging because there's something about computers that makes a lot of people in it want to be the smartest guy in the room, and they can get really demeaning, really quickly, about someone who doesn't act like they know it all right out of the gate. As if proving themselves superior is more important than finding someone who can do the job. It's not rocket science, even when it is.
I think we often hire the wrong people, both because the candidates show up with less of the knowledge we're looking for, so it's hard to pick out the best ones, and also because the hiring process has become so weird that the ways in which we might have dug for the passion, the enthusiasm, even the basic underlying abilities (do they give up when they don't know something, or do they poke at it again?) aren't allowed. But we focus on, how did this candidate not know the TCP 3 way handshake cold? (Sure, maybe he should have, but it ends up being more important because we aren't allowed to get into how he figured out how to manage pedal feedback, because we'll never learn that he plays guitar in a band for a hobby, and maybe him explaining THAT problem is what demonstrates the trouble shooting and tracing skills that we're looking for, even if he spaced on the 3 way handshake in a moment of stress.)
I've always thought of the tcp handshake as more of a tech shibboleth. It's something you pick up if you've been around, but I've never actually needed to know it. What's your experience on that?
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Yes, this is huge. My aunt was a programmer back in the 1970s, and debugged programs by staring at raw core dumps until they made sense. I will never develop that skill, because I have access to tools that are much better for over 99% of cases I will ever deal with. Similarly, I use her old punchcards as bookmarks.
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In your opinion what are these other things?
For my kid and her peers, their people skills are lightning years above the people skills of the computer people I know (and mine). There seems to be a higher baseline for presentations than there used to be. They have broad computer skills - they may "just" be power users, but they also don't just know excel, they know all the tools. They have better virtual meeting etiquette. I think they have broader skills in general. My kid and her STEM peers have high level accomplishments in athletics, arts, humanities, in a way that I didn't see among my computer peers in the 80s and 90s. Unless you count D&D, quoting Monty Python, and taking the Church of the SubGenius a little too seriously broad high level accomplishments.
I'm not meaning to talk down myself or my peers. But I would like those of us who are shocked at what the kids don't know to consider why they don't know it. If I can't show someone how to plug in an ethernet cable that's on me. It's unreasonable to expect everyone to know everything. I've been employed in tech since 1995, and got "my" (it was a family computer) first computer in 1979 (Atari gang represent!). There are loads of things I don't know. Even things I obviously should know that I just don't.
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Definitely video editing.
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I think there's truth to this, but there are limits. To use your example, if someone who wants to work in tech can't figure out how to plug in an Ethernet cable, then they are in fact lacking skills. Specifically, basic troubleshooting skills. I should be able to hand anyone an Ethernet cable and a computer with a port, and have them figure out how the two fit together. The large majority of one's value as a tech person isn't the specific things they know how to work with, it's their ability to figure out new things when confronted with them. I don't care if someone knows how to set master/slave IDE jumpers, but I do care if they just give up and say "I don't know" when confronted with such a problem.
Agreed. In many jobs, to be successful you need to be curious, willing to take risks, able to think things through logically, and problem solve. But for a kid who's never plugged in a phone jack, it shouldn't be surprising if they're also confused when asked about an ethernet cable. This came up because when my kid lived in her first dorm at college, we set her up with a hard wired connection, expecting wireless to be completely overwhelmed. She became the tech support person on her dorm floor because apparently no one else walked their kids through this process. So she'd take her friends to Staples, get them whatever they needed for their particular computer, show them where the jack was in their room (kind of hidden) and get them set up. These kids have not been taught or encouraged to take risks, so the idea of plugging a very expensive computer into some random thing in a way they've never seen or done wasn't something they took to immediately. It all makes sense if you consider the current environment.
This is why I don't want to look for quiz answers or trick questions when interviewing. I want to look for the curious ones, the ones who're willing to try to puzzle through something. I don't care as much about how accurate they are, I care that they're willing to take the risk of admitting they don't know something in front of someone else and try and talk through how they might arrive at an answer.
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Sysadmin seems to be a bit of a dying role - most of the competent people are probably looking for DevOps or SRE roles.
Which... is really just sysadmin with a fancy name tbh.
Eh, I'd argue that sysadmin is maintaining running systems by hand, and DevOps is Infrastructure-as-Code. There is a qualitative difference when you switch from one to the other.
Sysadmin jobs haven't been maintaining systems by hand for the last 20 years (my entire career). A good sysadmin has long used scripts and other tools to help his work, and from there it's easy to move to infrastructure as code.
That's true. Maybe the shift also is from servers-as-pets to servers-as-cattle.
I just think there's a definite shift between the two types of admin, even if it occurs in parts. And because the change is large enough, we use two different words to describe the jobs.
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I can't really say. I've changed industries a few times the last 20 years. It certainly seems like more people are replying to job openings now. Like hundreds at a time. 2 years ago it would be tens. I don't have a read yet if the quality is higher though. E.g. a lot of these numbers could be blown up from layoffs, and the laid off people are probably not the cream of the crop.
Me too. Tech before / during the dot com bust. Finance / investment banking, managed services, defense.
I think I may be seeing some geographic selection effects too. It could be the median candidate in London, UK is better than the median candidate in the Boston suburbs.
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The more we pay, the worse the candidate pool is, simply because it draws more normies that are in it for the money than geeks.
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Even at 6 figures the quality is poorer than I recall.
I suspect it's the increased size of the industry that we're failing to produce the quality candidates at scale or there is insufficient human capital as a starting point.
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... switch out the variable names? E.g. "Every time the server reboots, it has to pull down a 450MB file over a 30MBPS connection before it can start serving requests. The server drops any requests that come in before it finishes booting. Assuming the system gets 3 requests per second, how many requests are dropped every time the server reboots?"
There are 8 billion people. Half of those people have above-median intelligence. While the number of very smart people, as a fraction, seems very small, the absolute number of such people is mind-bogglingly large.
That suggests one approach might be to try to get a large group of IQ>130 people together in one location for the purposes of advancing the state of knowledge of the universe, maybe in a small city that is specifically focused on supporting those people. Since it's a city dedicated to the study of the universe, I propose calling it a "universe city".
Okay I needed to write this one down, but only because you said megabits.
Technically he didn't. MBps is megabytes per second, not megabits.
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Sounds sexy af.
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If you are a smart person, you should have multiple children. They’ll probably increase the number of smart people in the world just by you having some romantic evenings.
I think we're doing a poorer job of engaging the the children of smart people.
We have 4 children. They're all smart, but my middle son has tested as > 99.9% in math and taught himself to read somewhere between ages 3 and 4. Despite being in one of the more affluent districts in our state in the Northeast there are no services for gifted children. As long as children are performing at grade level asking for more academic rigor is met with shrugs. This is partially why we're homeschooling now.
In 80's California our class sizes were bigger but there was a GATE program and divided start to better group the class into reading groups by ability / level. I'm sure there are lots of 'studies' but the couple I've dug into seem like bullshit.
In all seriousness: find a private tutor that works with gifted kids. It won't be cheap -- you can expect to spend somewhere in the $50-$200 per lesson range -- but it will be cheaper than an actually good private school, and while he won't have the peer group, at least he'll have someone who is capable of working with his educational needs. (Though it sounds like you personally may have this covered with homeschooling -- and that's awesome if you do.)
My wife actually does some of this (she also works with struggling kids too, since there's a lot more demand for that kind of tutoring), and for a while had a student in almost exactly your situation (down to the region of the country) -- a second (?) grader doing roughly sixth grade level math (though of course they were not using a normal curriculum). Unfortunately the student had to quit because something happened and the family could no longer afford it, I think.
The main reason that most schools are not willing to do anything for gifted kids is that there's so little real demand for it that they can just not bother. Even most parents of gifted kids are not willing to really invest, and are satisfied with the kid getting As and being in a million activities. Or they are more concerned with their kids maxing out the metrics in the system they are in -- grades, test scores, impressive sounding extracurriculars -- than with actually getting them the best education. Either way, accommodating the real needs of gifted kids is not on the schools' radar because it's not the parents' priority.
PS: If anyone reading this has an elementary or middle school age kid who is gifted in math, can meet before 7 PM eastern time, and is able to handle doing tutoring lessons over Zoom, DM me -- my wife might be interested. (Yes, Zoom is not as good as in person, but she's had a lot of experience with it at this point and can make it work surprisingly well.)
PPS: If you are homeschooling an elementary aged kid who is gifted in math and are not using Beast Academy, do yourself a favor and look into it. My wife swears by it as a gifted curriculum, and you can either (a) just buy the books and use them for homeschooling, (b) enroll in an online class through Art of Problem Solving, or (c) find a private tutor (like my wife) who is familiar with it to work with your kid.
The peer group at the Russian School of Math is a benefit.
This was our first year homeschooling. My wife is happy with the progress they're making.
Before being a FT SAHM / homemaker, she was MD/PhD.
The lack of support for gifted kids is part of it. The lack of rigor in the curriculum in general is surprising. There are no letter grades. Seldom / rarely any homework. Spelling is typically not corrected on any submitted work, students are not expected to correct / revise their own work for resubmission. The concept of penmenship seems to have disappeared entirely. There's no copy work. No spelling / writing from dictation. Rarely any reading aloud. No deficiency notices. Yet there's still somehow less time for recess.
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One of my kids is like this. He taught himself to read at age 5 and he's about 3 grades ahead in math ability. He's supposed to start first grade in the fall but we're homeschooling him instead because, among other things, the public schools have no resources for gifted kids. We're in the PNW and not the Northeast. I'd try a private school here but they're all either religious or some woo woo hippie shit.
(I also think he'd go through a misanthrope period if he was forced to hang out with kids that much slower than him, like I did)
I wouldn't necessarily be opposed to the religious schools unfortunately many are sponsored by denominations that have embraced idpol or alphabetism. Also my wife would likely need to return to work to pay the tuition.
We're supplementing homeschooling with weekly foreign language (my wife's native language) in a classroom environment and The Russian School of Math.
I was identified as gifted in elementary school, the GATE program in the district as kooky as it was made school much more engaging.
Just to let you know- my memory of Catholic schools was there was no gifted and talented available at all. There was honors/AP classes available in high school for some subjects, and that was it.
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It's a real shame. Some students are far more effective consumers of education than others, so with limited educational resources we really ought to be focusing on them, but this goes against the equity dogma of the day.
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If you're a smart person, how do you find this work that needs doing? I consider myself a smart person. I inevitably find myself working for companies where I do tons of work that only a really smart person could do, but that work is ultimately pretty meaningless and has little impact on society.
I drive down the costs of software systems, I improve operational maintainability of these systems, etc. I do this for products that you yourself know and have used. But still, it doesn't really matter much in the grand scheme of things, as I find it really unlikely that these products will change the course of human civilization, and I find it unlikely that my work to make it more maintainable or cost less is going to even matter much for these products. I'm a cog on a team inside of an organization inside of several much larger organizations, and everything that gets done is just so operational that it basically feels completely meaningless.
Give me something meaningful to do, where I really can make an impact. I'd love to do it. But everyone tells you they're working on meaningful stuff, and it always ends up being the same operational crap.
...
Your first instinct is probably to run screaming from these meaningful environments because, besides the principal investigators or chief scientist being big swinging dicks and fairly competent most of the team is mid, the bureaucracy is soul crushing, or both.
Aside from academic labs or pharma departments doing meaningful work, there are many startups out there that have the same form. Started by a few scientists writing Python, they got funded, and now they're trying to scale their operation and it's a fucking nightmare between bad platforms and bad dependency management and spaghetti code bases and otherwise mid dev teams. Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to come in and shine it up while also fighting intense resistance to change. Also they're paying low six figures at best and there's 10+ meetings a week.
A few more OOMs of smart people would help a lot.
Well, my current job has most of the things you describe as being a part of the meaningful startups: the seniors with egos, the bureaucracy, the poorly thought out code bases and dependencies. The main differences are the fact that my job doesn't feel as impactful, but it pays triple to quadruple the salary you're citing for startups.
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I've had this job. The 'meaningfulness' wears off. Now I look for meaning in myself and family, not my work.
At work I trade my time for money to fund the meaningful part of my life.
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This only works when the there's lots of >100 IQ people, 80 IQ are unable to support society which they need to be 80 IQ. So, we do not know to avoid overwhelmed by 65 IQ adults.
touché
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No, there's not, although hypothetically you could shift the fertility curve to eventually generate a 130 IQ population. You can also generate small, temporary IQ boosts through stimulants.
Polygenic screening is both unlikely to see mass adoption(it can only apply to IVF, and IVF couples both have other things they care about[People want their kids to be cute, obedient, calm, and sometimes athletically talented at least as much as they want them to be smart], and also IVF is not a majority of births), and unable to increase IQ by two standard deviations, or indeed, more than like 20% of a standard deviation on average.
A very large fraction of public is in denial of genes having substantial effect on intelligence with few exceptions.
This might change if costs go down and accuracy of PGS up.
I doubt it. Adopting IVF as the default way to make babies is probably associated with a decline in the birth rate, so populations which don’t will, even all other things being equal, tend to have a higher birth rate than populations who do. Of course all other things aren’t equal, populations which would continue to make babies after a date night already have higher birthrates. IVF as the norm would probably just make the gap wider.
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Interestingly, another point Murray makes in Real Education is that IQ and other talents appear correlated. Despite the dumb football player stereotype, or the nerd who trips over their own feet stereotype, in the aggregate people with high athletic skill also have higher IQs.
if atheticism is correlated with IQs, why correlation of IQ and male attractiveness as rated by women is ~0 ?
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How many motteizeans played sports?
My personal observation has been that particularly good athletes tend to be upper end of average, like 110 or so, but that athleticism is basically uncorrelated with intelligence beyond that, although golf and the like tends to be a bit smarter. The unusually smart crowd is usually not great at sports, although there are a few exceptions.
I was a Div 1 college athlete and got a perfect score on my SAT and took 14 AP exams.
Yeah, this is a balls out, face first brag. I've never actually said it like that in real life. Thank you, internet.
In my experience the top tier athletes are one of two camps; yes, group one is all around above average 110+ IQ types who also have very good emotional intelligence and social capability. Remember how the teen bully is the football star and also the homecoming king? He's probably also going to like, UT-Austin. I had a fraternity brother who was Div 1 in a different sport, head of the Panhellenic Council (so, literally the boss of all of the fraternity and sorority bosses and yes, it did function exactly like the mafia) ... ended up becoming an Air Force Officer and now does Consulting for basically the defense-focused version of McKinsey. If I had to wager some money on "knowing a future member of congress" ... there you go.
The other types, however, are the sports savants. These are the guys (and girls) who probably have built their entire life around whatever sport they're doing. Frequently this included some pretty extreme parental ... "supervision." The GOAT poster boy for this is Tom Brady. He's a football genius (and, yes, it was him not Belichik) but, outside of that, he's fucking weird and awful. To get to that level, and then to absolutely crush it at that level, means your brain maps so perfectly onto the sport that you're Ramanujan levels of brilliant in that domain. This can't be explained away with "Dad made me practice every day" or even "My ex Soviet sports machine dad made me practice every day" ... you have to be born with it.
But I use "savant" on purpose. Some of these guys are fucking useless outside of that sport and actually lead kind of fucked up lives. I can't say the sport without probably doxxing myself - but I grew up training with the Bobby Fisher / Tony Hawk / Tom Brady of my sport.
Yeah, he's fucking weird and lives at home still and can't drive or cook for himself. When the clock runs out or he blows out a knee, I am super, super worried what happens next. Sports aren't transferable skillets. If you're rainman and can math-your-ass-off, you can probably find work for a variety of places that will be happy to put you in your special room 8 hours a day so long as you can fill out the reports. You can earn a living, even if that living gets reinvested into Hungry Man TV dinners, porn, and cheetohs. Sports with a limited professional (I.e. money making) applicability? Not so much.
So who do you want to be? My old friend, Captain Chad Thundercock? Or VictoryBot9000? Above median breadth but, perhaps, never true greatness? Or brilliant, early greatness that will be remembered far past your life ... which will be 70% "over the hill nothingness."
(P.S. The answer is always Captain Chad Thundercock)
I'd argue there's a third category of some people who just have absurd physical gifts and don't need to be particularly switched on or with it. NBA Centers tend to have more diverse personalities/interests than other positions since they have to be 7-footers to even qualify so the effective pool of potential NBA Centers is small.
I'm a very large person and got to fringe professional academy levels in Rugby. There were only like 10 people in my region who were effectively credible competition for what ended up being 4 low-paid slots on the development pathway. Meanwhile a normal-sized human position was hundreds of people competing for like 5 spots.
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Awhile ago there was a thread here, or perhaps on /r/themotte, where a parent observed that their smart kids were a lot more prosocial and did a lot more sportsy things than they did when they were kids and other parents chimed in and observed this as well. Just all around sports, social activity, video games and also good grades and deep nerd shit in their cohorts.
(I pretty much suck at sports myself though)
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