Standard arguments about the IQ claims: it's moderately heritable (see twin studies comparing monozygotic and dizygotic twins - why would they have different upbringings?), tests as silly seeming as reaction time correlates with IQ, and I don't think most IQ test takers are training on Raven's Progressive Matrices (this critique doesn't apply to crystallized intelligence tests like weschler vocab, but basically applies to other fluid intelligence loaded tests), and Raven Matrices correlate well with g. There's also mediation experiments - we would not otherwise expect the g factor to mediate the effect of genes and environment on outcomes (meaning that once I tell you g, then telling you genes and environment doesn't tell you much more about outcomes).
Don't limit yourself though. Try whatever hard thing anyways, though you should accept that you may be just forever not up to snuff. That shouldn't necessarily stop you from trying, and on an individual level the rest of your life gives you so much more information than, say, an IQ test
"Focus on what's important to you" I think this is definitely directionally correct for a decent class of people, probably including readers. I would potentially add the caveat of "check if the other thing is worth caring about first"?
I agree. Narrowing in on the class: it seems like all of the smartest/competentest people I know have 'productive' freetime hobbies (including myself). For example, all the actually good coders I've met have coded up stuff for fun, or switched to Linux and chose to do stuff on the command line when possible. Recently I was at a math competition with probably around the best 6 math undergrads at my uni, and it was established that like half of them had read Conways' Winning Ways For Your Mathematical Plays on surreal numbers and combinatorial game theory, and each were either currently reading or previously had read about some advanced topic like cluster algebras or Hausdorff dimension.
Each of those people could probably be benefitted from having followed what's important to them when younger, unless they already did so. How does one tell if they are or could be that kind of person, as a 12 year old? Well, I think the first step is awareness, the next is to try it out for a bit and see if it suits you.
(I don't want to spam top level comments, so vill do my other point level replies as a second level comment)
"Don't be a sheep". There's a difference between noticing when other people are wrong and actively assuming everyone else is dumb.
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"Don't delude yourself. Sometimes it's useful to pretend to believe a falsehood, but don't go so far as to actually believe it yourself." I think this implicitly assumes that you know what is true or false, and everyone around you will believe dumb things
Your points apply to other parts of the advice, but I think you misread this section. As a kid I was more vulnerable to standard cognitive biases, especially social ones - and I expect this to be true of kids generally. There's more distortion in your thoughts around not thinking things that go against consensus, or convincing myself that I didn't disagree. Generally, lots of not-noticing moments of confusion or discontent, especially when it was caused by something an adult said or what it seemed like all the other kids believed.
Sometimes, consensus is right! But you have to be able to think "uhh, everyone else, including my friends and teachers, think something obviously wrong or did something cruel", in order to properly calibrate how much you should rely on the consensus view.
As an example, we have cultural memes meant to protect kids from pedophilia like "if you feel uncomfortable, say something!" or "it's not okay for an adult to touch your private parts!". To me this operates on the (correct) theory that by telling kids that what the adult did was not okay, they will be less likely to quash their internal feelings of discomfort, their sense that this ain't right.
Perhaps you simply rationalized less than me, but I know I did (much less serious) versions of that and suffered for it, and wish we as a society extended this advice to more things and even to adults.
I recently read this post by Nina Panickssery on advice for children. I felt that several of the recommendations are actively harmful the children they are aimed at. I am going to assume that this advice is targeted at children who are significantly more intelligent than average and maybe 7-12 years of age? It may be worth reading the original post beforehand, or maybe having it open in another tab while you read through this one.
We'll go through the points one by one:
There is a huge amount of evolutionary pressure that has gone into designing kids' behaviour; survival past childhood is pretty important if you want to have kids of your own.
Simple examples of childhood behaviour, such as playing, are good illustrations of this design, but even seemingly idiotic activities like eating dirt can help you develop the antibodies you need as you grow up. As a kid, even a smart one, I would basically expect following the crowd to produce better results than figuring everything out from scratch, especially given the criticality to humans of social interaction.
Modified rule: Follow the crowd, but understand why they are doing what they are doing, but don't do it if it seems obviously dumb.
Often if people think something is just wrong, it is because it is just wrong.
Modified version: Keep an open mind, the world is confusing, and sometimes you're confused; sometimes others are. Notice where you're confused and try to reduce your confusion there.
There seems to be an opinion difference between myself and a large portion of this community, where I basically expect that a large amount of the observed genetic variance in e.g IQ is down to coding for something like curiosity or willingness to learn, as opposed to raw computational capacity[1].
Nevertheless, even ignoring this, it seems to me that thinking too hard about your potential limits is far more likely to result in you limiting yourself than in any benefit coming from it.
As an example, I have a friend from high school who never played in sports, as, lacking one eye, he didn't have depth perception. Towards the end of high school I found out I also didn't have depth perception. I could already juggle 5 balls, and by the end of university I was playing ice hockey with the Team Great Britain University team.
Modified version: Try everything, do your best, and don't believe limits people place on you. If you want to be better at something, practice it and do your best to improve. If you decide to not do a particular activity, check first that it's not because you believe you can't do it.
Overall, I think that the main issue I took with this post was the adversarial stance it took – reading it, I felt like everyone was dumb and this was my route to navigating a world full of idiots. Possibly my upbringing was less full of idiots than Nina's, but I broadly feel like in most cases the correct thing to do as a high-intelligence child is to understand that there is some decently high chance that you are wrong in some way. Your capabilities are probably very jagged as compared to the adults around you, and as such you are going to be right in some circumstances and not in others. It is difficult to figure out which those are.
I expect raw computation to have been heavily optimised within the constraints of brain size and resource availability, while excessive curiosity can have disastrous side effects in the ancestral environment.