zlacker

Seems very Taleb's Ugly Surgeon / Berkson's Paradox to me. It's like how software engineers who are at Google are worse if they're better competitive programmers.

e.g. https://viz.roshangeorge.dev/taleb-surgeon/

>>arjie+(OP)
Makes sense. My perspective is that fast learners are fast because they absorb information quickly without the overhead of cross-domain synthesis. They have more logical contradictions in their minds which they haven't resolved or aren't even aware of. Their worldview is not coherent as a whole. In some cases, they don't have a worldview; instead they just rely on expert data to inform their decisions... But the experts themselves are often victim to the same kind of domain-specific tunnel vision. Such people often lack creativity in their work because cross-domain pattern synthesis is precisely how you can solve complex problems that haven't been solved before.

>>jongjo+Qo
That is a very idealistic perspective. There are certainly fast learners due to the fact they are faster at cross domain synthesis.

>>gmadse+WI
In my experience when I am able to pick something up quickly it's because I can exploit cross domain knowledge. I have ready-made analogies to things I understand, or I understand the domain which informs the fundamentals of the new domain.

>>gmadse+WI
This does not match my observations. Also, what I've heard from experts is that 'intelligent' people are more suggestible. The way society measures intelligence is thinking speed; which tends to correlate with learning speed.

Some people learn surface-level information quickly without deep integration; what educational researchers sometimes call "shallow learning." And specialization can create blind spots.

>>jongjo+JT
I'm sure there is an association between personality traits {openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism} with preferences to specialize or learn broadly. That is seperate from the phenomena of nearly all cognitive tasks being correlated with each other positively, e.g. verbal scores are positively correlated with math and musical scores. This is referred to as g-factor in literature.

My overall point being, yes people learn differently, but it is also true that there exists outliers in general intelligence

>>maxbon+JM
I was surprised in college that the math for electronics circuits, mass-spring-damper systems, stress of materials, etc., was all the same.

>>arjie+(OP)
> It's like how software engineers who are at Google are worse if they're better competitive programmers.

That's not true. It didn't replicate and Norvig has said as much somewhere on HN, IIRC.

(I also agree with the other criticisms that this 'old vs young' setup in OP is obviously at least partially, and perhaps entirely, regression to the mean and Berkson.)

>>jongjo+JT
I've seen very often people with good memory will be regarded as intelligent. They integrate "knowledge" by just recording verbatim phrases. That takes them a very long way... But when the time comes to analyze something, they break down. I've fallen in that myself, people I regarded as intelligent, because they "knew" so much things, could not keep up with the most basic syllogism, they were just stupid.

>>gwern+Ij1
Thanks for sharing. I didn't know that.

>>maxbon+JM
Correct - heuristics - ie, experience, wisdom, etc.

>>arjie+Qr1
(To stop being lazy, the 2020 reference is: >>25426329 )