Some supplementary armchair psychologizing + navel gazing...
A core part of the recipe for a prototypical LWer seems to be: take a kid with a fairly high IQ (like, at least +2 sd, probably more). At some point, the kid notices that the authority figures in their life—teachers, bosses, parents, what have you—are just not that smart or competent. Indeed, relative to the capabilities of our prototypical LWer, it is basically true that the authority figures in their life are largely morons. (This was certainly my experience!)
… and a natural response to this is to reject the core dominance-hierarchies of society.
That, in turn, lifts the wool from the prototypical LWer’s eyes in many ways. They become able to apply an appropriate level of skepticism to authoritative sources of information, like e.g. academic papers. On the flip side, part of the cost is often losing the standard anti-akrasia mechanism.
I think a smart kid’s judgement of other people as incompetent is a very noisy and biased signal. To put simply, they’re wrong.
A more reliable signal is that many things around us are surprisingly well made. Take the smart kid in your example, and ask them to make a simple wooden chair. Or play a simple piece on the piano and make it sound good. Or draw a simple website design that looks appealing. There are tons of “ordinary” people, not any kind of authorities or top 1%ers, who routinely do these things well. But the smart kid will find it impossible to do any of these things well, unless they make a serious effort for a quite long time.
The general point you’re making might be true, but 2/3rds of your examples are working against you.
It depends on exactly how young the ‘smart kid’ is, of course, but I think (and have seen in practice) that a reasonably smart and tech-savvy 14-year-old can build a functional, pleasing-to-the-eye website in a week, especially if they have a lot of free time. To play any instrument well takes a certain amount of dedicated effort, but I think a lot of high-achieving kids start learning one early, especially if their parents push it on them.
Meanwhile, a lot of the world’s most popular websites are noisy, buggy, and full of ads. And pop music, even when it sounds good, is not very melodically complicated; that “simple piece on the piano” might be more interesting, even if it doesn’t have the juicy bass or whatever. Depending on what kinds of aesthetic judgements you’re making, I think it’s absolutely true that an individual smart kid can make something “better” than the public SOTA, without trying very hard, in either of those two categories. Honestly, I suspect this is true regardless of how smart the kid in question is.
That’s not to say it’s because everyone else is stupid. Mass-deployed websites are operating under a lot of constraints that a hobbyist Neocities page doesn’t need to worry about, so their job is a lot harder. And pop musicians are actively optimizing for something kinda basic, because that’s what reaches the widest audience. But these nuances might not be obvious to the kid in the scenario, and especially not if you just look at the product on its own. From the kid’s perspective, just looking at the things around us might give a sense that they’re surprisingly badly made, relative to what the kid could do (with a little effort).
Not sure about the chair, though. Maybe those really are surprisingly well made.
I really think it’s more about having autism-typical personality traits, which do often play badly with conventional schooling but aren’t particularly caused by it.
Some supplementary armchair psychologizing + navel gazing...
A core part of the recipe for a prototypical LWer seems to be: take a kid with a fairly high IQ (like, at least +2 sd, probably more). At some point, the kid notices that the authority figures in their life—teachers, bosses, parents, what have you—are just not that smart or competent. Indeed, relative to the capabilities of our prototypical LWer, it is basically true that the authority figures in their life are largely morons. (This was certainly my experience!)
… and a natural response to this is to reject the core dominance-hierarchies of society.
That, in turn, lifts the wool from the prototypical LWer’s eyes in many ways. They become able to apply an appropriate level of skepticism to authoritative sources of information, like e.g. academic papers. On the flip side, part of the cost is often losing the standard anti-akrasia mechanism.
I think a smart kid’s judgement of other people as incompetent is a very noisy and biased signal. To put simply, they’re wrong.
A more reliable signal is that many things around us are surprisingly well made. Take the smart kid in your example, and ask them to make a simple wooden chair. Or play a simple piece on the piano and make it sound good. Or draw a simple website design that looks appealing. There are tons of “ordinary” people, not any kind of authorities or top 1%ers, who routinely do these things well. But the smart kid will find it impossible to do any of these things well, unless they make a serious effort for a quite long time.
The general point you’re making might be true, but 2/3rds of your examples are working against you.
It depends on exactly how young the ‘smart kid’ is, of course, but I think (and have seen in practice) that a reasonably smart and tech-savvy 14-year-old can build a functional, pleasing-to-the-eye website in a week, especially if they have a lot of free time. To play any instrument well takes a certain amount of dedicated effort, but I think a lot of high-achieving kids start learning one early, especially if their parents push it on them.
Meanwhile, a lot of the world’s most popular websites are noisy, buggy, and full of ads. And pop music, even when it sounds good, is not very melodically complicated; that “simple piece on the piano” might be more interesting, even if it doesn’t have the juicy bass or whatever. Depending on what kinds of aesthetic judgements you’re making, I think it’s absolutely true that an individual smart kid can make something “better” than the public SOTA, without trying very hard, in either of those two categories. Honestly, I suspect this is true regardless of how smart the kid in question is.
That’s not to say it’s because everyone else is stupid. Mass-deployed websites are operating under a lot of constraints that a hobbyist Neocities page doesn’t need to worry about, so their job is a lot harder. And pop musicians are actively optimizing for something kinda basic, because that’s what reaches the widest audience. But these nuances might not be obvious to the kid in the scenario, and especially not if you just look at the product on its own. From the kid’s perspective, just looking at the things around us might give a sense that they’re surprisingly badly made, relative to what the kid could do (with a little effort).
Not sure about the chair, though. Maybe those really are surprisingly well made.
I made a wooden chair in a week from some planks when I was a teenager. Granted, this was for GCSE Design & Technology class.
I really think it’s more about having autism-typical personality traits, which do often play badly with conventional schooling but aren’t particularly caused by it.