Born and/or made

AVI linked to an essay dissecting twin studies.(*) David Bessis wrote a book (which I have not read) which sounds interesting and useful, but I suspect overclaims. "People think that it (mathematics) requires a special gift or that comprehension is a matter of genes. Yet the greatest mathematicians throughout history, from René Descartes to Alexander Grothendieck, have insisted that this is not the case. Like Albert Einstein, who famously claimed to have “no special talent,” they said that they had accomplished what they did using ordinary human doubts, weaknesses, curiosity, and imagination."

I'm not on the same level as those fellows, but I'm well better than average at math.

I only know that by comparison.

I don't feel particularly smart.

It's trivial for me to find problems that stump me. There are people who can solve those problems--and in an academic environment I meet them.

Being acutely aware that a colleague can easily deal with things that puzzle me is a ticket to imposter syndrome. I can't have the same painful awareness of the things that puzzle my colleague that I know how to deal with. Once you've solved a problem it seems easy, so the world is full of hard problems and all I solve are the easy ones.

I don't think that a researcher is always, or perhaps even often, going to be the best judge of how smart he is. An honest man or woman will be honestly humble, a member of the society of the puzzled.

Further, when you're surrounded by the best, that becomes your normal. At Princeton, Einstein didn't run into a lot of people who were no good at math.

FWIW, I suspect that most people are capable of understanding much more math than they dream. Mathematicians are born, but they need to train their minds in ways of looking at things, and with "crystallized intelligence" (standing on the shoulders of giants) even those of us who aren't great geniuses can learn how to make contributions.

I've griped before that advanced math books (and papers) often throw theorems at you without enough examples or motivation. That's not how they did the work to get there -- they played with examples, had some motivation to point them the way they did, and they did a lot of noodling around trying this approach and that.

(*) I'd always wondered how often it would happen that twins would be broken up to different homes. Among other details Bessis dug up, many of the separated twins were raised by relatives in their extended family, so their environments may not have differed that much.

Advice to analysts

"What I Learned in 40 Years of Doing Intelligence Analysis for US Foreign Policymakers" by Martin Petersen: From September 2010.

During one of the most challenging times in my analytical career, I worked for the finest analyst I ever knew. In the middle of the Tiananmen Crisis in 1989—when everyone’s hair was on fire—I found him late one afternoon going through a stack of musty old reports. I asked him what he was doing. He said, “I am looking for things that did not make sense then, but do now.” He found some, and it profoundly affected our line of analysis.

The article ends with this:

The colleague who teaches the Kent School’s Art of Review Seminar with me tells a story about Abraham Lincoln, who in one of the darkest hours of the Civil War attended a Sunday service in that little church that still stands across from the White House. On his way back, he was asked by a fellow parishioner what he thought of the young reverend. Lincoln replied that he had a strong voice and clear message, but that he failed to do one thing; he failed to ask us to do something great.

It's a pity the agency deteriorated so badly. We could use some intelligence.

Ignorant, Dumb, Stupid

Why some of the smartest people can be so very stupid

The essay distinguishes between “dumbness” and “stupidity.” The former is lack of intellectual horsepower (and not the same as ignorance, which is the universal human default, though curable). The stupid apply the wrong model to the problem at hand—and don’t learn better.

Sometimes this is because the old model used to work, and the new problem sort-of looks like the old. He uses the example of Gen. Haig in WW-I:

British high command during the First World War frequently understood trench warfare using concepts and strategies from the cavalry battles of their youth. As one of Field Marshal Douglas Haig’s subordinates later remarked, they thought of the trenches as ‘mobile operations at the halt’: ie, as fluid battle lines with the simple caveat that nothing in fact budged for years. Unsurprisingly, this did not serve them well in formulating a strategy: they were hampered, beyond the shortage of material resources, by a kind of ‘conceptual obsolescence’, a failure to update their cognitive tools to fit the task in hand.

Stupidity needn’t just come from obsolete models “that used to work”; it can also come from adopting fashionable models from another context. His example is the currently fashionable “social justice” models from the US, which are being adopted in lands whose history isn’t remotely like ours—and whose social problems have different sources.

Education as such won’t fix “stupid,” since one of its attributes is unwillingness to change models even after painful experience. It might make the stupid worse, since the subject will now think himself more clever than usual. Stupid might even spread: “There are some things so stupid only an intellectual can believe them.” And they do.

Another essayist more charitably calls these “luxury belief systems.”

“Once upon a time, it was more advantageous to know the facts of the world than not to, so we developed science. Today, our beliefs are less a reflection of our reality than a means of identifying our respective political tribes and negotiating our status within them.”