I have a personal anecdote you might find interesting.
All through elementary school I seemed to be the smartest kid in every situation. Not surprising: my IQ scores came in around 145 which puts me at +3 standard deviations or in the 99.7th percentile, or put another way I should only expect to encounter 3/1000 people who are as smart or smarter than me. The entire population of the school was < 800 kids across all grades with about 120 in my grade, so not unexpected that I never met anyone as smart.
It wasn’t until middle school, in 8th grade, that I met someone definitely smarter than me. To make matters worse, he was 2 years younger than me in 6th grade. But that was thankfully just in math (he was the only person to solidly outperform me on my school’s Mathcounts team). So I was able to keep up the charade that I was the smartest kid in school, there was just the dweeb that was some sort of math savant. So much cope.
I was able to keep this up through high school. There’d be kids who were smarter than me in some narrow domain but I was able to hold onto the idea that I might well be the smartest of them all in general.
Then I met @Eliezer Yudkowsky and was humbled. I mean not at first. It took a few years of seeing him operate up close (can you be up close online?), but I eventually had to accept that I was out classed. And of course I should be: there’s ~24 million people in the world who should have the same or higher IQ than me, and that’s a helluva lot of people. I’m just a +3 scrub living in the +4′s world.
Only, not quite. As I eventually learned, just being smarter, at least for humans, is not always correlated with better life outcomes. I saw people who I was smarter than also doing better than me, getting promotions a head of me, making more money, etc. Since I was young I’d put all my eggs in the IQ basket, and then sometimes in my mid-twenties found out that was a mistake for all but a tiny minority of people.
As you note, I had to learn how to make the most of my comparative advantage. And this has only become more important as I’ve aged because my fluid intelligence has definitely started to fall off despite trying my best to prevent it. Without the help of something like ChatGPT, I may well never write better code than I did in the past or come up with more clever proofs of mathematical propositions. So I’ve really leaned into finding other ways to excel, because there’s always going to be someone younger, smarter, and faster than me. And at least for now, that’s enough.
I have a personal anecdote you might find interesting.
All through elementary school I seemed to be the smartest kid in every situation. Not surprising: my IQ scores came in around 145 which puts me at +3 standard deviations or in the 99.7th percentile, or put another way I should only expect to encounter 3/1000 people who are as smart or smarter than me. The entire population of the school was < 800 kids across all grades with about 120 in my grade, so not unexpected that I never met anyone as smart.
It wasn’t until middle school, in 8th grade, that I met someone definitely smarter than me. To make matters worse, he was 2 years younger than me in 6th grade. But that was thankfully just in math (he was the only person to solidly outperform me on my school’s Mathcounts team). So I was able to keep up the charade that I was the smartest kid in school, there was just the dweeb that was some sort of math savant. So much cope.
I was able to keep this up through high school. There’d be kids who were smarter than me in some narrow domain but I was able to hold onto the idea that I might well be the smartest of them all in general.
Then I met @Eliezer Yudkowsky and was humbled. I mean not at first. It took a few years of seeing him operate up close (can you be up close online?), but I eventually had to accept that I was out classed. And of course I should be: there’s ~24 million people in the world who should have the same or higher IQ than me, and that’s a helluva lot of people. I’m just a +3 scrub living in the +4′s world.
Only, not quite. As I eventually learned, just being smarter, at least for humans, is not always correlated with better life outcomes. I saw people who I was smarter than also doing better than me, getting promotions a head of me, making more money, etc. Since I was young I’d put all my eggs in the IQ basket, and then sometimes in my mid-twenties found out that was a mistake for all but a tiny minority of people.
As you note, I had to learn how to make the most of my comparative advantage. And this has only become more important as I’ve aged because my fluid intelligence has definitely started to fall off despite trying my best to prevent it. Without the help of something like ChatGPT, I may well never write better code than I did in the past or come up with more clever proofs of mathematical propositions. So I’ve really leaned into finding other ways to excel, because there’s always going to be someone younger, smarter, and faster than me. And at least for now, that’s enough.