Comment by zzzeek
1 day ago
reading through this I eventually realized a situation similar to my experience of it is what my dog sees if I attempt to explain Python programming to him.
1 day ago
reading through this I eventually realized a situation similar to my experience of it is what my dog sees if I attempt to explain Python programming to him.
Some people downvoting you, but I think it is a valuable illustration of IQ gap.
And chances are that humanity at large will be soon trying to follow ai inventions and discoveries not unlike your dog follows your Python code.
I really don’t think IQ has much to do with it. Understanding this stuff is like a skill you practice. Yes, granted, if you had a low IQ your chances of ever understanding it goes down, if you have a high IQ maybe you can gain the prerequisite understanding faster.
A lot of maths is about both being able to wrap your head around hard problems and gaining the prerequisite knowledge to make it easier to do so.
Math is literally the most g-loaded thing there is.
IQ limits your rate of gaining the prerequisite knowledge creating a lifetime ceiling.
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The difference is your dog will never understand the Python code but you could probably understand this post in a matter of days or weeks if you really wanted to. Can we all please stop acting like this Terry guy is so special?
I'm not sure if you're taking the piss or genuinely don't know who he is
I certainly do not think that the average HN reader "could probably understand this post in a matter of days or weeks". I think the level of background information you need is something like an undergraduate degree in mathematics and at many universities that's probably not enough either.
There's a difference between understanding something and being able to do something. For example you can get a broad understanding of what calculus does in a matter of minutes: a derivative is just the rate of change of a curve, and an integral is the total area under a curve - you're practically there! Of course it'd take months of work to understand how to apply it yourself, let alone all the tricks involved, but a basic understanding of what stuff is, is very easy to obtain.
And I think that generalizes to math. Its normal presentation is completely impenetrable due to a large use of symbols and terms with no outside meaning (or, even worse, a meaning that contradicts the colloquial usage). But I think if we somehow resolved that issue, the average person would be fully capable of following along even if they're going to have to take everything at face value as opposed to being able to meaningfully understand the exact methods and tricks being used to get from A to B.
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Goats though, they get it. Bang your head against a monitor until things start working.
Yeah this Tao guy is just your average scrub. You would be able to tell the difference, right richard_chase?
I'm not dumb. I'm relatively smart. I am, however, smart enough to see that people like Terry or Ramanujan are actually that special.
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