You Don't Need to Be Brilliant to Do Brilliant Work (opens in new tab)

I guess this highlights the problem, that “brilliance” is in fact subjective and relative. To some “brilliance” is a PhD at MIT, to others it is being able to do something much more mundane.

Come on now....

Brains and behavior are absolutely, absurdly, ridiculously complicated, at every level from individual ion channels on up to neurons, circuits, brain regions, and even between people.

It's true that there's a lot of hype, both from well-meaning folks who are excited about their results and cynically manipulative people trying to boost up their careers. It's true that the incentive and career structures are falling apart. But it's certainly not true that the lack of progress is because the researchers are dummies...

Brilliance is more than IQ.

No, but I know their GRE scores, which are a good proxy for IQ. Plus, seeing the kind of math they do on the fly gives you a good idea.

For the last few years whenever I need to accumulate a large and comprehensive declarative knowledge of some subject I use spaced repetition and Anki. My system is simply find a good several hundred page book on the subject then spend four or five days of intense card making. At the end I have a working knowledge and memory of the subject matter at least as good as what most people accumulate in months of ad hoc reading and studying. Also the mere act of distilling the information to cards helps clarify what's important. To maintain the knowledge, I just keep up with the repetition schedule. If I want to go a bit deeper, I'll find the most tagged questions on Stack Overflow and Anki the good stuff from those.

I've had a few situations where people thought I had years of experience with some technology, framework, or programming language when actually I just picked it up last week. One situation in particular, I had a buddy who was using WordPress as the basis of a pretty profitable affiliate site business he was running until he ended up running into some issues that involved needing to make some pretty significant modifications to WordPress itself. He offered to get me in on his affiliate business if I could solve his problem for him. To make a long story short, though I had never even looked at PHP or WordPress before this, within 4 days of using spaced repetition to learn PHP and the intricacies of the WP framework, I was fluently writing plugins that handily solved his problem and a whole lot more and never had to open the reference books again as the whole thing was committed to memory. Not tooting my horn just giving an example of how what ESR was talking about above can be actualized.

just start drinking from the firehose.

the trick is to convince yourself not to care about the immediate utility of what you’re learning. And store pointers to data, it’s lighter weight.

I always tend to get interested in some technology or library and go straight to the docs. They usually have intro or tutorial/gallery type sections that help you get started. It helps to have a use case in mind and imagine applying it as you read through the API details. This worked for me equally well for ML libraries as it did for learning kernel stuff (except for the latter i went to a reference book).

It's real similar to just doing your normal software job, but in this case it's just for fun!

There is a cost to curiosity. Lack of focus. I had a real challenge in my career- I continuously ranged far afield in learning well beyond the direct subject areas of my network engineering career.

That often took away time I 'should' have spent directly researching problem areas applicable to my day job. It finally led me to separating with a company I had been with for 8 years and had a lot of close relationships with.

But what it did was put me on a path to actually use that store of knowledge. Now I'm a Network/Enterprise Architect and a key cog for my current CTO. I wasn't being used optimally previously but I also didn't make sure I was in the correct position that those skills/tendencies could be recognized and not be a hindrance. So much in life is in the framing of things- control that story, and your success is much more likely.

That's a good point about specialists building empathy. One of my college physics professors complained about how dumb the ROTC people were - but a lot of them are humanities majors forced to take physics, which they couldn't care less about. Meanwhile, my political science professor was berating the science and engineering majors because all they would do is memorize and not learn concepts. That was on the day I scored higher on my physics test than my government test, and the physics test was out of 50 and the government test was out of 100.

So true. This is also the 'Dilbert Theory of Value Creation' that I have used to great profit. Scott Adams likes to say, he is not the funniest guy around but funnier than most people. At best, he'd be a mediocre comedian. He can also draw better than most but hardly a Picasso. And yet, by combining both skills he has something "rare and valuable" that has led to enormous financial success.

He also adds that it easier to do this (combining two or more skills) than it is to be the very best at one thing e.g. an NBA player--it is actually easier, statistically, to become a billionaire than it is to become an NBA player.

There are more than 2,000 billionaires worldwide but only about 480 NBA players (32 teams with roughly 15 people on the roster). And if you think about it, becoming a billionaire usually involves multiple skills (good at programming + business, bill gates. Good at research/analysis + cultivating a rare temperament that allows you to act on the insights produced by the research even when everyone around you is losing their shirt, Warren Buffett etc, etc).

Being an NBA player requires one skill at a minimum. Being tall!

I largely agree and work is a test environment, like any other test e.g. SAT; one who performs better is rewarded.

But there's plenty of occasions where judgements is a waste of time, like at the personal level expressed in the OP article. OP does agree that the activity is result from the ego, I don't think he/she did enough to explore the ego resulting in injustice to the colleague as whole in the article.