As I read this post, I couldn't help but feel like it crossed over from reasonable advice into elitism. I wouldn't argue with the basic idea of surrounding yourself with smart, interesting people who will help stimulate you intellectually and push you to grow. But spending your time worrying about how many standard deviations above the mean everyone's IQ is seems like it's crossing a line from reasonable to excessive, particularly when you describe normal life as "living among the monkeys."
So what I'd say to this is that yes, finding and befriending people who are smart is great. Same with people who are kind, people who are sincere, people who have a deep understanding of their emotions, people who make art, people who can build things with their hands, people who care for others, people who support their communities...
If you're a smart kid in high school it can be especially frustrating to not feel like you have intellectual peers. I absolutely get that, but I want to caution against advice that deemphasizes all the other worthwhile things about people in response. People are good and valuable and can teach you in myriad ways.
When you say "a smart kid in high school", what threshold or range of are you referring to? (Insofar as "smart" refers to .) A kid with a two standard deviations below the mean isn't smart. A kid four standard deviations above the mean is smart. Where do you draw the cutoff?
I don't want to get too into the weeds here. But I think that someone in the top few percent of their school would be smart. The kind of kid who might be feeling without intellectual peers and posting here about it could be the smartest in their school or their town (or they could not). But I don't think that really changes the conclusions.
You have used the word "feel(ing)" twice. The core question isn't whether he feels he has intellectual peers he can talk to. It is whether he genuinely does or doesn't have intellectual peers of his caliber. I believe this high school student when he implies he doesn't have anyone near his intellect at his school and at other programs he has tried out. You do not. I think this is the crux of our disagreement.
I put so much effort into standard deviations because "smart" papers over a broad range of intelligences. Someone with an IQ of 115 is "smart". Someone with an IQ of 175 is "smart". The difference between someone with an IQ of 115 and someone with an IQ of 175 is four standard deviations. Four standard deviations is huge. It is equal to the difference between a PhD in science and someone hovering on the edge of an intellectual disability. It would be absurd for a PhD in science to look for intellectual peers in the same place as someone bordering on the edge of intellectual disability. The same goes for someone with an IQ of 115 verses someone with an IQ of 175.
The difference between someone with an IQ of 115 and someone with an IQ of 175 is four standard deviations. Four standard deviations is huge. It is equal to the difference between a PhD in science and someone hovering on the edge of an intellectual disability.
I'd be careful with this kind of comparison. IQ numbers and SDs may look like cardinal measurements, but they're actually an ordinal hierarchical system. What one can say is that someone with IQ n+1 is "smarter than" someone with IQ n, who in turn is "smarter than" someone with IQ n-1. But there's no way, for now, to convert that in a cardinality.
Hence, in an absolute sense of literal, actual intelligence, the difference in between an IQ 175 and an IQ 115 may be either greater or smaller than the difference in intelligence between an IQ 115 and an IQ 55. My personal hunch is that it's much smaller, although, evidently, I have no way to back that up.
Personally, the thing I find people constantly lacking in isn't raw mental horsepower, or pattern recognition, or any of the things IQ generally maps to.
It's just being willing to think.
When I was younger, I wanted to meet the smart people. I've met the smart people since then, and they're not any more willing to think than anyone else; if anything, smart people are more frustrating to interact with.
My username, and my posts, may hint at a particular interpretation of the above statements. I'm not talking about that, although those kinds of interactions are no more immune to the phenomenon than anything else. I'm talking about the user, who is fully capable of writing their own SQL, who routinely sends said SQL to me for editing after running into efficiency issues with it - and who, when I send back the edited SQL with explanations of why each change was made, will then, a week later, send me SQL containing the exact same mistakes.
The thing you want is not somebody who is very smart; in fact, I think selecting for "very smart" is likely to select away from actually interesting thinkers. The thing you want is somebody who is willing to be wrong, over and over and over again, in different ways. The people who go into fields where the very smart people are, I think, tend to be the sort of people who want to find out the right answer so they don't have to think anymore. You want people who aren't afraid to look foolish.
If you're looking for interesting thinkers, and you spend your time looking for smart people, you're going to look right past all the genuinely interesting thinkers, because interesting thinkers spend most of their time thinking being horribly wrong. People who want to be right can't afford to think interesting thoughts - because most interesting thoughts are, when you get down to it, incorrect. Being at the edge of the map of truth means spending most of your time being wrong; once you start being right, it's time to move on, because there's nothing left to explore.
I think your perspective on Intelligence vs. Willingness to Think is interesting, but wrong – my model is that how willing you are to think is strongly correlated with how easy thinking is for you, and how easy thinking is for you is pretty directly just what intelligence is (yes, correlation isn't transitive, and tails come apart, but I think both hold in general for non-weird cases).
I think that's a somewhat more literal interpretation than I was aiming for; what I'm gesturing at is also partially conveyed in the final paragraph, where I talk about willingness to be wrong.
If what you're thinking about is easy, what this translates to, I think, is that it's easy to be right. If you're wrong most of the time, then it's not actually very easy.
This is not to say you should think with the intent to be wrong - that's just another way of doing things the easy way, and is also, I suppose, another way of taking what I'm saying more literally than I intend it. This is a difficult set of concepts to convey, but - if you're unwilling to struggle, you're unwilling to think, in the sense that I mean.
For tech history - it's worth knowing how modern industrial civilisation arose! - I'd recommend
Why read old books to understand technology? Because they come for a different world-view and make very different assumptions about the direction that things are going - because they have only the context of their past, and can't fit it to the usual narratives about WWII and post-war economic and industrial history. "The books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them."
The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy From Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography by Simon Singh
I haven't re-read it in years, but this is the book that got me interested in computer science (and later reading The Art of Unix Programming on a hike got me into software engineering).
I'd also recommend Quantum Computing Since Democritus by Scott Aaronson as the single best introduction to quantum computing from someone who actually knows how it works and what it can't do.
Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott
Disagree - it's a good book, but you're better off reading the linked review and then James C. Scott's Two Cheers for Anarchism instead.
The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
A colorful author, but there's plenty to learn from his books. If you can read more than one, I'd suggest Fooled by Randomness and then Antifragile instead (the preceeding and following books; between them they cover almost all of The Black Swan).
On the mathematical end it's also worth skimming through his Statistical Consequences of Fat Tails. Pair with Gwern's statistical notes, and if you're going to do it properly Judea Pearl's Causality and E.T. Jaynes' Probability Theory: The Logic of Science.
The Art of Unix Programming helped me get into software engineering too—especially Chapter 2. Jason Crawford has written up his highlights from the Carnegie book. I replaced The Black Swan with your recommendations.
You are right about Seeing Like A State. I have removed Seeing Like A State from the list. The Secret of Our Success belongs with Seeing Like A State.
Why read old books to understand technology? Because they come for a different world-view and make very different assumptions about the direction that things are going - because they have only the context of their past, and can't fit it to the usual narratives about WWII and post-war economic and industrial history.
Yep!
I'd be happy to talk to [redacted] and put them in touch with other smart young people. I know a lot from Atlas, ESPR and related networks. You can pass my contact info on to them.
Dear [redacted],
Don't worry about having too few cards in your Anki. Reviews pile up fast. Sustainability is more important than intensity. If you need more cards you can go to Ankiweb and download a frequency-based vocabulary deck for the foreign language of your choice.
Finding someone near your intellect…
Young people are sorted by geography. The average IQ at a typical high school is 100. Going to college bumps it up by a standard deviation to 115. An MD gets it a little higher to 120.
Enrolling in the hardest college major brings the IQ distribution a full two standard deviations above average to 130 which equals the average IQ of a science PhD. If you have an IQ of at least 145 (three standard deviations above the mean) then no undergraduate degree is sufficient.
An eminent theoretical physicist is at least 160. An IQ of 160 makes you 1 in 32,000. An IQ of 175 makes you 1 in 1.5 million. There are 200 such people in the entire United States—and that includes adults. If you have an IQ of 175 then there might be three equally-smart teenagers your age in the entire country. How do such people find each other?
When I worked at a particle physics laboratory it was the first time I felt like I was interacting with my own species. But the physicists didn't feel alive. My colleagues weren't Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman. The first time I felt like I was talking to cognitive equals was at the Y-Combinator interview pool when I met a pair of Nigerians (this is not a joke) who were attempting to monopolize the entire African financial system.
The second time was when I met someone on Less Wrong who runs his own hedge fund.
If you are four or more standard deviations above average then you won't find equals at your high school. You won't find them at teenage chess tournaments or teenage music tournaments either because success there is driven by parents—training outweighs innate talent. Maybe try math or debate tournaments?
I don't live near you so I can't recommend anything specific to your region. I have never been to an IRL rationality event. Here is general advice for meeting smart people. Try it out to discover what works for you. Discard strategies that don't work.
The best way to live among the monkeys is to assume a leadership role for yourself. Organize events. Get groups of people to do novel things. Make stuff happen. You may be surprised by how much it is possible to accomplish out of sheer nerve. Especially when your competition is the ordinary high school students who happen to live in [redacted].
The most important thing for you right now is to try all sorts of different things. Don't wait until you feel ready to live your life. You never will. Just do it. Failure is fine, as long as you recover. Don't hurt other people. Don't cause significant financial damage. Don't injure yourself. Don't throw away years of your life. Mere embarrassment doesn't matter. It is best you decondition yourself ASAP.
More Book Recommendations
I have excluded all books mentioned in the previous letter. I have excluded math, science and engineering textbooks too along with drawing manuals. Nothing has prerequisites. Listening instead of reading is fine.
Books with extraordinary claims I have not verified are marked with a dagger †. Books I have not read cover-to-cover at the time of writing this letter are marked with a double dagger ‡.
Autobiographies
Biographies
History
Ethnographies
Cyber
Physics
Biology
Sociology & Economics
Psychology
Altered States of Consciousness
Modern Art
Science Fiction
Fantasy
Fiction, Other
Classics
Oral
Miscellaneous
Podcasts
YouTube
Lastly, check out Code Geass.
Yours truly,
Lsusr