Accountability

I did not post the past two days as I was at HackMIT–we ended up winning which was very awesome! I’ve been a lot of hackathons where I worked my ass off for nothing, so it was gratifying to finally be rewarded for my hard work (I think the last hackathon that I won was way back in spring semester).

It’s pretty interesting to me that I can see how my productivity shoots up when there’s a time crunch. Every hackathon project, we go from not having a product to having a full fleshed out demo in perhaps the final hour of the hackathon. Crunch time baby!

Overall, I had a ton of fun at HackMIT, was capped off with a satisfying ending, and I got to see so many of my friends. Good weekend–now about those psets…

Also, I haven’t gotten around to make a prev/next page for my articles…should do that eventually huh? Maybe when I’m running on more than 30 minutes of sleep.

Productive Thinking

In the modern world, intelligence is a trait that is almost universally desired and is one of the most prominent descriptors of any individual. This is especially true for my circles, which, as I’m a student, primarily deal with students (obviously). There’s no place where intelligence is so clearly and distinctly compared as when individuals are set in an environment where their ability to learn and master content is directly compared via numeric measurements (grades).

Intelligence, to me, is such an interesting concept because on one hand, it is a very definitive attribute. Einstein was smart, Newton was smart, Terrence Tao is smart–we have these legendary individuals at the top of humanity whose abilities transcend the rest of society by so much that there is no denying that they possess a special something (high intelligence) that clearly separates them from everyone.

However, on the other hand, although we can clearly see that there is a separation, exactly what the separation is composed of is very very ambiguous. You may be surprised, as I was, to learn that geniuses such as Einstein and Richard Feynman had surprisingly low IQ scores compared to their recognized genius. In fact, while at these upper echelon of genius it is hard to deny that these individuals were just born special, something I believe is overlooked is the vast amount of all the other things that must be immaculate in order for an individual to attain such a level of genius.

I’ll take a relatable, everyday example–just like all skills, some people are better at math than others. The conventional societal wisdom is to attribute this to saying that some people are “math” people and others are just not born with this magical gene. This is the identical situation that extends to artists–some people are born musically/artistically talented, and others are “just born without it.” But, as anyone who’s been in these shoes can attest, “math” genes are not magically unlocked–they’re grinded and drawn out after hours and hours of work.

All in all, the fact that such a specific, universally-used character trait can be so ambiguous is fascinating. There’s so much more that goes into intelligence than some chemical/physical aspect of your brain–habits, patterns, beliefs, even your ethics all affect how you learn and process information. If we don’t consider other character traits such as honesty or kindness as things that people are magically born with, neither should we consider intelligence to be–good news for me because it means that being “dumb” is always fixable.