He's saying that people who he thinks are smart, intelligent,
tend not to sort of accept things until they completely understand them. And
completely understanding it is often a case of kind of banging your head against
something in many different ways, until it really actually clicks. And why and
he's saying that this is actually a software trait rather than a hardware trait.
It's not like the sort of IQ, a definition of intelligence, it's more of like a
hardware thing that's trying to test of like, How fast can this person think?
How much stuff can they memorize?
This kind of stuff it's like, you know, it's trying to get at this idea of some,
you know, hardwired thing called intelligence, what Nabeel is saying is that,
sure that's part of it. But a big part of it is also just your kind of
intellectual integrity and honesty and bravery, when it comes to facing concepts
you don't understand. And so and this is like a learnable trait, every one of us
can, you know, you know, if we don't understand something, we can keep banging
our head against the same problem until we actually understand it, regardless of
like, what your IQ may be, or whatever. And he's saying that, yeah, intelligence
is not fixed, despite what many people try and claim nowadays, I think. So that
was his first point. I think that's pretty interesting.
And this is, this is another thing. It's so weird when you come across a post
like this that just like touches on loads of things that you've been thinking
about recently. The other thing I was thinking about recently, I think I had a
Twitter draft of this is a tweet draft sitting around, which is that I found
that my my maths friends, my friends who studied maths seem to have a much
higher bar for when they will claim to have understood something than everyone
else. And so for example, yeah, I ran into this at university, I think at
University at the start of university, I had a very low bar for when I when I
think I understood something, because actually, during most of school, I don't
think I understood anything, really.
And that'd be that'd be a bunch of occasions in first year, where we'd be like,
talking, we like studying something. And yeah, that'd be like a group of us
studying together, whatever. And someone would say, like, hey, do you? Do you
get this thing? And I'd be like, yeah, yeah, I get this thing. It's like, blah,
blah, blah. And then they asked, like a follow up question, but I guess I didn't
get this thing. And I found, I mean, even recently says, this was an interesting
experiment, as I was trying to learn a new thing. Recently, a couple of weeks
ago, I was trying to teach myself about accounting, and the different kind of
principles and accounting and stuff like that. And I have some friends who have
studied a bit of accounting, maybe as part of their degree or part of their job
or whatever.
And so I was trying to, like, really get to the bottom of some accounting
concepts. And I asked about, I asked bunch people, like, hey, do you? Do you
want to understand what the point of cash flow statement is, or whatever? And I
got the impression that a lot of them gave the answer I would have given in
first year of university of like, yeah, I understand what it is. And then, you
know, they can sort of recite the definition or something. But then when you
kind of drill down into it of like, Okay, why is that the case like me what
motivates this definition, then, it's just not really there. And so that was
something I'm thinking about, which is that like, it feels like different
subjects lend themselves to kind of understanding things in different ways. And
I'm getting off on a personal tangent here, we will get back to the post.
But this is all it's all like the same. It's all the same idea, really. But
yeah, one of one of the frustrations I had at school was that it didn't feel
like we could ever really understand most of what we were learning, right? So
for example, in biology or something, they'll tell you that, Oh, this is how a
cell works. And it has this thing. And then it has the chlorophyll to do the
photosynthesis to eat the air eat the sunlight, kind of thing.
