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gjm comments on Open thread, Nov. 02 - Nov. 08, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Pardon my candour, but if you are "shit at concentrating", are readily confused by things, and found Python too difficult to learn, then you might want to consider whether machine learning is a good choice of career.
(I gravely doubt that you are in fact stupid, and given sufficient dedication I expect you could do it, but it seems like a lot of pain. Are you sure it's worth it?)
I am fairly confident it will be worth it. I'm not good at a whole lot of other things too. But, big data is said to be a profitable career trajectory in the long term. Most if not everything I do for my career is fairly painful, but I try to enjoy it as I do it and I'm grateful for the experience. The question I ask myself is: what could I be doing instead? And I honestly don't have a lot of better things to be doing anyway, haha.
How strong are your math skills? Did you have IQ testing done?
Mathematicians don't give a shit about IQ. When was the last time you heard Terry Tao talk about IQ?
Writing papers >>>>> psychometrics.
That's because they are an exclusive high-IQ club to start with.
Take someone who scored in 300s on his SAT -- would you recommend him to try to become a mathematician?
What do you suppose Ramanujan's IQ was? Do you think Hardy cared?
No one has any idea since he lived before IQ tests.
That's like saying a basketball coach doesn't care about the player's height, he only cares how high can he jump.
IQ is not like height. Height is a fairly objective physical measurement that is directly relevant for basketball because of the game setup. IQ is the result of a projection of an extremely high dimensional space into a single number that is not directly relevant for mathematics (people do mathematics in an extremely heterogeneous way). Erdos, Ramanujan, and Groethendieck were all top notch and were all very very different from each other. Erdos I think couldn't tie his shoes. Ramanujan was an Indian peasant. Groethendieck wasn't exactly a high functioning individual.
A better analogy would be if a basketball coach cared about "hit points" (determined by whatever methods doctors use, slatestar would know more).
Ramanujan was a Brahmin. "Peasant' isn't quite appropriate.
"Peasant" is also technically wrong since neither he nor his parents tilled the soil (his father was a clerk).
How is it not "directly relevant"? What do you think the average IQ of mathematicians is, do you imagine it's anywhere close to the population average?
Being able (or not) to tie one's shoes or being an Indian peasant are NOT indicators of IQ. Not being socially successful is not an indicator of low IQ either.
I understand your point that genius mathematicians are really, really weird people. But I see no contradiction there, it's perfectly possible to have high IQ and be really weird.
My point isn't just that they are really weird, but that people think about mathematics in an extremely heterogeneous way, and reducing human brains to one number as some sort of "math hit points" is silly for that reason. You are just ignoring most relevant information.
What made Erdos good and what made Ramanujan good were weird complicated facts about their brains (I expect Ramanujan's IQ wouldn't be very different from his cohort in India, e.g. likely not super high, but for some reason he just "saw" natural numbers). This does not make Ramanujan or his cohort stupid. I just don't think "smart" and "stupid" is what IQ measures in any interesting way.
Telling people to go take an IQ test as a way to selecting themselves out from trying math is an especially toxic practice (especially if this advice is not coming from a mathematician).
I prove theorems for a living, and I say: ignore the haters, just read about math that interests you, try your hand at following and constructing arguments, etc. Math is hard (for everyone), don't worry about it. It's fun, too.
In NFL they do care about intelligence tests.
I don't claim that they do.
Clarity speaks of himself as stupid and the fact that he failed to learn python is indication of that. If his IQ is <100, I think that would be a valid ground on which to advice him against seeking a career in machine learning.
That's exactly the purpose for which IQ test were designed.
This is only a weak evidence for non-high IQ.
I know a few people who had bad opinion about their IQ, and when I convinced them to take the test, they scored above 130. It's because they believed the stereotype of "high IQ = math prodigy", and they happened to be average at math simply because they focused their lives on something else.
I haven't implied that it's strong evidence, for me the available evidence was enough to raise the question. The answer to that question matters for whether or not to tell him not to seek a career in machine learning.
I do think that for this purpose the testing that tells him that he's above average in math might be enough.
I think it would be useful to taboo "stupid." It is not a useful word.
Tabooing "stupid" is what asking for IQ is about and why I asked about IQ in this context.
Except you are not tabooing anything then, you are just substituing "low IQ" for "stupid." The point of tabooing stupid is to get binary classification out of an inherently complicated multidimensional problem.
The request of tabooing in general is a request for more cognitive work.
Scoring low on a specific test is something more complex than a label. Changing a vague term with a operationalised term is something that often makes sense for tabooing.
I think you confuse cognitive work with explicitely describing cognitive work. When it comes to speaking about negative features of other people it's worthwhile not to say every negative thing that can be said publically.