xkcd

by **dumbzebra** » Wed Sep 08, 2010 7:22 pm UTC

I personally would prefer (in a job interview, not in general) a medium-intelligent person who works his/her butt of over a super intelligent, who doesn´t do anything.
I´m myself of the later type, I consider myself to be above average intelligence, but I am lazy as hell.
I know what goes on in the heads of these people: "Oh he/she only is better than me because she worked, if I worked I could easyly be better than him/her". Yeah, that´s the point, it´s the result that counts.

by **TheKrikkitWars** » Thu Sep 09, 2010 3:05 pm UTC

I'm still extremely bright, I'm lazier than ever, and I'm on the verge of total failure. The hard work people have the advantage, they can actually be bothered...

Edit: As to the above poster, that sentiment isn't actually applicable to me at work, if I'm being paid I feel I have to warrant being paid, so I work hard, though the majority of my jobs so far have been semi-skilled as opposed to academic....

by **kernelpanic** » Thu Sep 09, 2010 10:50 pm UTC

I usually get A/A+ in maths, physics, chem & co., and B- to A- in languages and SS, C/D in anything arts-related (But my last art class was 4 years ago. Yay!), and I never brag about the grades, but it does feel bad that in maths and sciences some people study their asses off and I usually wake up on test day without knowing it, and we score the same.

by **katethegreat** » Thu Sep 09, 2010 11:31 pm UTC

While my first reaction would be to label myself as intelligent but incredibly lazy, this isn't really the case. I am a horrible procrastinator, dreadful, horrendous, I don't start work until midnight often. Here's the key: I take a long long long time to get around to working, but when I do, I make it quality. I don't settle for crud and I really think and put in effort. I want to learn WHY, not just spit the answer back. I want to write a well worded paper, not a five paragraph cookie cutter thing. I do have a natural facility for these things, but if I didn't work my ass off making a project the best it could be, really learning the methods in class for a subject on a test, etc. I really couldn't be top of my class like I am now.

Now, that said, I don't study much. I'm more of a cramming sort. Which contributes to my lack of improvement at the horn, you can't cram learning music.

The other kids in the upper percentiles of my grade don't strike me as hugely intelligent, they are the fantastic work ethic and suck up to teachers sort. Like, one can't write an thoughtful essay. Another is always asking me for help. Always. There's something to be said for being selfreliant and working through things yourself. Another studies for hours and hours, does tons of practice tests for a standardized test for his best subject and does significantly worse than me, when I did one practice test, far less studying, and hate the subject.

I can't help but respect the students who I feel are brighter, but can't be bothered working pointlessly and who actually enjoy their life.

by **TheKrikkitWars** » Sun Sep 12, 2010 10:16 pm UTC

katethegreat wrote:I can't help but respect the students who I feel are brighter, but can't be bothered working pointlessly and who actually enjoy their life.

Ditto, I have much greater respect for the people who (like me) are innately good at something, and are captialising on this to continue along their chosen path whilst having a really good time.

Simultaniously, I distinctly envy the people with the determination to go "I want to be x" and work all out to do it...

I'm finding it odd that at uni, I'm frequently in lectures or labs late, absentee, blind drunk or hungover, and my results generally come in at the borderline between a 2.1 and a 2.2 yet a lot of my coursemates regard my inteligence highly, even though many of them are doing significantly better than I am.

I suppose part of it is my ability to work independently and quickly think round problems (wherever possible I avoid working things out for myself by using "research-fu", so often the thinking round is little more than filling in the void between related articles) and being a relatively gifted "wet" chemist...I guess finishing a day early with a 90% yield is very visible, comparatively a gifted theoretician only shows it silently on paper in the exam hall.

Wow, I think I may have identified my own strengths there...

by **jmorgan3** » Sun Sep 12, 2010 11:17 pm UTC

TheKrikkitWars wrote:being a relatively gifted "wet" chemist

OT, but the combination of this sentence with your avatar makes for an amusing mental image.

by **nehpest** » Sun Sep 12, 2010 11:18 pm UTC

I went through high school taking every honors/AP course available to me; I sought out "weighted" classes like it was my job, to the point that the school district created new courses at the request of myself and a few similarly situated folks. I ended up getting straight A's and being named valedictorian (not because the salutatorian got any B's, but because I dropped lunch junior and senior year to take additional honors classes). All of this is in spite of the fact that I almost never studied for anything. I completed all my assignments, sure, but there were only one or two classes all four years that required any real effort from me. This, unfortunately, led to a fairly weak work ethic my freshman year of college, including an F in a class I could have taught (the rule being that one couldn't take the final without handing in all the non-graded homework assignments).

In retrospect, I see that I was driven by two things: an obsessive desire to know things, and an enormous ego that couldn't stand being second-best. The knowledge-lust has followed me through to now, and I consider it fairly central to my personality. The ego, on the other hand... I have matured a bit since then, and my work ethic has improved dramatically, much to my girlfriend's relief. The most important thing I've learned from all this (more important than the contents of any course) is that yes, there are lots of times when you can breeze by without working. There are even times that natural ability will win the day without a lick of work. However, if you get used to that, you're screwed when the time comes for work to be done, because you never actually learned HOW to do work.

/just my two cents

by **cjmcjmcjmcjm** » Mon Sep 13, 2010 4:42 am UTC

TheKrikkitWars wrote:gifted "wet" chemist...I guess finishing a day early with a 90% yield is very visible, comparatively a gifted theoretician only shows it silently on paper in the exam hall.

There's nothing like that feeling where you get a 90% yield when most of the lab was lucky to break 60%. Decanting-fu FTW!

by **sikyon** » Wed Sep 15, 2010 11:54 pm UTC

I used to breeze through everything, do very little work and still get a better mark than my engineering friends.

I then tried to work hard and I couldn't do it. It bit me in the ass one term where I was ambushed by exams that relied on memorizing derivations (which would be impossible to derive in the time allowed) and now I've trained myself to be able to push through. Lots of work experience helped too.

I respect hard workers who might not be as inherently intelligent as me much more now.

by **Solt** » Thu Sep 16, 2010 12:25 am UTC

Haven't read most of the thread, but I see so much here that describes me. I believe it's been called the curse of intelligence. I never understood what the big deal was in high school, then I got to college and realized I had literally no work ethic. Well, enough to keep me in college, but not enough to do well.

I'd take being able to work hard over being smart any day. Sure it feels nice that I can successfully argue the merits of healthcare reform with eloquence to impress everyone in the room while simultaneously constructing and solving nonlinear differential equations.... but that ability hasn't actually gotten me anything in life. Since graduating high school, it's only been the times I've worked my ass off that anyone gives me credit for now. The classes I did best in were the ones where I spent 12+ hours straight every week doing the homework or stayed awake for 3 days working on the final project, or literally memorized the entire quarter's lecture notes line by line for the final exam.

To all you smart people- respect the hard workers, because they will be the ones running things. They don't need to know and understand everything, they can just pay a few lazy asses like you to think for them while they make all the money and decisions.

by **Outis** » Sun Sep 19, 2010 3:17 pm UTC

How can intelligence be a curse? It seems to me like how hard you work is something you can change without too much trouble, while intelligence is not. The examples people have given about coasting through high school would suggest that intelligence is very powerful in that it can allow you to accomplish with little work what others must work very hard to do. But wouldn't the same apply at the opposite end of the spectrum: When someone intelligent works very hard on something, they accomplish more than someone less intelligent who is also working very hard?

I, too, coasted through high school; I'm definitely more of a science and math person, but I also picked up relatively easy 100s in Humanities classes during my senior year. (This was not just possible because I went to a lousy or easy high school; my high school is among the top public schools in the country.) Now I'm a few weeks into college and I, like many of the other posters, have realized I can no longer coast. I don't have any good study habits, but I'm trying to acquire those now. So when it turns out my math problem set had nontrivial things to prove, of course I didn't say to myself, "Oh no! I am smart, but I do not work hard, so I will surely be unable to complete this problem set." I just sat there and actually worked for several hours until I was done. I ended up getting about a 98% on it, while some others who spend three or four times as long as I did got about half that score. (Or to give a broader example, pretty much every startup company you can think of was just a few intelligent people who had a good idea and worked very, very hard to realize it.) There's no reason why the topic needs to be Hard Work vs. Smartishness. It may seem to exist as a dichotomy during high school, but there are plenty of smart and hardworking people in the real world.

by **++$_** » Mon Sep 20, 2010 3:28 am UTC

Solt wrote:To all you smart people- respect the hard workers, because they will be the ones running things. They don't need to know and understand everything, they can just pay a few lazy asses like you to think for them while they make all the money and decisions.

They may end up running things, but we end up better off overall because we make plenty of money (even if not as much as they do), yet we don't have to work hard.

And we can secretly screw them over by giving them bad advice if we want.

by **cjmcjmcjmcjm** » Mon Sep 20, 2010 5:11 am UTC

++$_ wrote:And we can secretly screw them over by giving them bad advice if we want.

Nothing like giving bad advice and blaming it on your sources :twisted:

by **TheKrikkitWars** » Mon Sep 20, 2010 5:52 pm UTC

Outis wrote:How can intelligence be a curse? It seems to me like how hard you work is something you can change without too much trouble

That is not true!

by **supremum** » Mon Sep 20, 2010 10:05 pm UTC

I know this is a really trite story, but I can't resist the urge to tell it anyway...

I was one of those people in high school who didn't have to work hard to understand things...and you know what? I had a real wake up call no later than my first semester at college. Having been one those people who thought he was one of the smartest people in the world in high school, I decided to take probability and the harder version of multivariable calculus that was only available to people who took the AP calculus test in high school.

I was within inches of crashing and burning my first semester. I mean, in reality my grades weren't that bad, but I was well below the median in my calculus class and I was struggling to keep up in probability. If it weren't for the fact that I studied for days for the multivariable final, and the fact that I worked really hard and spent a really long time on my take-home probability final, I wouldn't have gotten the grade I did in either of those classes.

Look, what I'm saying is, you're not "doomed to fail" if you're not working hard in high school. However, you're going to face a real wake-up call if you think you can get through college (or real life for that matter!) without putting in a lot of work to understand things.

Finally, I'd like to point out that being able to get by without doing any real work isn't something necessarily worth bragging about- you can't tell what your full potential is unless you actually put some work in. Work quality doesn't necessarily scale linearly with effort, so there's no guarantee that on longer projects you would outperform the harder workers even if you put in the same amount of effort.

by **Solt** » Tue Sep 21, 2010 9:45 am UTC

Outis wrote:How can intelligence be a curse? It seems to me like how hard you work is something you can change without too much trouble, while intelligence is not.

The younger you are when you form a habit, the harder it is to change.

by **Eastwinn** » Sun Sep 26, 2010 6:05 pm UTC

Intelligence a curse? Oh please.

by **KestrelLowing** » Mon Sep 27, 2010 6:54 pm UTC

I do have to say that intelligence in general is not a curse, but the habits you learn from being intelligent can be a curse.

In a non-perfect schooling system (which is every schooling system ever) some students will not be challenged to their full potential. In my experience, this means that they will typically not work as hard as other students who are being challenged. This creates some habits, such as procrastination, not doing homework, etc. that would be very detrimental if they were being challenged fully.

For another anecdote, I did very well in high school - valedictorian if they actually still had that. I often didn't know when tests were, and just came to class and aced the tests. I did do all my homework, as I was kind of anal about my grades, so I didn't have as bad of a work ethic as some.

I got to college, and I went into engineering, so it's a fairly difficult major, depending on the discipline and where you're going to school. I did have a little bit of a wake-up call my first semester when I didn't study at all for my exams, and I ended up getting a B in what I thought was a very easy class. My habits that had been previously learned were very detrimental to doing well in the class. It was also around this time that I realized grades didn't matter so much if they were above a certain level, but I had to make sure I understood the material.

Right now, I'm in my fourth semester at college, but I took off Jan 2010 - Aug to go on co-op. I worked a different place in the summer and wasn't given any real work at all. I learned to waste the day doing nothing. It's amazing how quickly habits can form. When I came back to college, it was so hard to actually start working again. It also doesn't help that the classes I'm taking right now are some of the hardest in my major, according to the general consensus. I'm still working on breaking the habits I learned from last summer, five weeks into the semester. I received a huge wake up call last night when I realized I have no clue what I'm actually learning in vibes. I took the exam today, and I know I didn't do well, but I think I will be able to fill in the hole eventually, and hopefully get a better grasp of the material.

Right now, I'd probably rather be a bit less intelligent, and more hard-working.

by **not good at these things** » Sun Oct 17, 2010 10:40 pm UTC

In high school I thought of myself as that "smartish" person. I had good common sense and problem solving, I was naturally good at math and physics and reading. In college though I need to do work. I'll never just "get" my atomics lesson, I need to go through practice problems, read, maybe show up to a supplement class, go to lab, etc. I think everyone around me is similar though, even the guy who's top right now in his electrics class is working 4 hours on his homework of just 1 problem. At some point in life your "smartish" is gonna run out and you need to be okay with actually working and possibly failing at something, I see a lot of high school kids assuming they're just naturally bright but really high school classes aren't so hard to begin with and it's hardly anything to the real world.

Also, I want to make this point that if success were a pie chart it'd be 50% luck, 40% hard work, and maybe 10% natural talent. People that claim to live on "smartishness" are either lying to you or themselves when they say there was no luck or hard work involved.

by **manictheatrefan** » Tue Oct 19, 2010 3:31 am UTC

I'm a high school student, and have noticed that the people who get the best grades and the people who are the most intelligent aren't the same people. The students who get good grades know how the school system works and how to (exploit? That word seems a little negative) it. They know how to give the teachers what they want.

In Science (most parts, except for physics), English and (some parts of ) Social Studies, I'm one of those "smartish" people—I speed through assignments (e.g. worksheets), and get really good marks on tests. I'm lazy with projects sometimes, though (like making posters! ugh I hate making posters), and that brings my mark down.

In Math, physics, and Social Studies (the parts where we have to memorize dates and other such numbers), I have to work hard. I don't naturally "get" numbers as well as I do words.

I think the current education system (at least the primary/elementary and secondary/high school) in North America is hugely flawed because it presumes that everyone learns the same way, which isn't true. Only a small percentage of students are really understanding and benefiting from the current way things are taught. There are some people who "learn" that they don't have to work very hard and will get good grades anyways, and people who get pushed so quickly and forcefully through memorizing material that they forget everything once they're done some big test.

by **Jorpho** » Tue Oct 19, 2010 4:53 am UTC

manictheatrefan wrote:I'm a high school student, and have noticed that the people who get the best grades and the people who are the most intelligent aren't the same people. The students who get good grades know how the school system works and how to (exploit? That word seems a little negative) it. They know how to give the teachers what they want.

And that makes them less intelligent?

by **masakatsu** » Tue Oct 19, 2010 2:03 pm UTC

I have peers in my doctorate program who are brilliant writers, engaging speakers, and can't think themselves out of a wet paper bag.

by **Dark567** » Tue Oct 19, 2010 11:22 pm UTC

manictheatrefan wrote:(like making posters! ugh I hate making posters)

I also hated this at ever level of schooling. It bothered me because far too often it seemed that the grades were much more representative of the creativity of the poster, than my own knowledge, or the ability to carry out the project the poster was reporting on("Hey, I created a perpetual motion device", "yeah, but your poster sucks. F-"). Although I guess anyway of grading on knowledge also is a grade on the medium it is being presented in, this one always just seemed like one of the worst ones.

by **Eastwinn** » Wed Oct 20, 2010 12:35 am UTC

Jorpho wrote:
manictheatrefan wrote:I'm a high school student, and have noticed that the people who get the best grades and the people who are the most intelligent aren't the same people. The students who get good grades know how the school system works and how to (exploit? That word seems a little negative) it. They know how to give the teachers what they want.
And that makes them less intelligent?

I don't think that's what he intended to say.

I hate posters with a passion. What a waste of time! Then again, you could replace "posters" in those last two sentences with almost anything I do in school.

by **Jorpho** » Wed Oct 20, 2010 4:26 am UTC

HA! Guess what you do in grad school when you're doing kickass research and get invited to a conference somewhere? You get to make POSTERS!

(Now, the utility of poster sessions as a means of disseminating information has always struck me as highly questionable, but they keep doing them anyway.)

by **cjmcjmcjmcjm** » Wed Oct 20, 2010 5:24 am UTC

Dark567 wrote:
manictheatrefan wrote:(like making posters! ugh I hate making posters)

I also hated this at ever level of schooling. It bothered me because far too often it seemed that the grades were much more representative of the creativity of the poster, than my own knowledge, or the ability to carry out the project the poster was report("Hey, I created a perpetual motion device", "yeah, but your poster sucks. F-"). Although I guess anyway of grading on knowledge also is a grade on the medium it is being presented in, this one always just seemed like one of the worst ones.

Posters are really useless. Way too much of the grading goes into how good you clip art selection, bubble letters, and backing paper are and not into whether or not you know anything. Waste of time!

by **manictheatrefan** » Thu Oct 21, 2010 5:15 am UTC

Eastwinn wrote:
Jorpho wrote:
manictheatrefan wrote:I'm a high school student, and have noticed that the people who get the best grades and the people who are the most intelligent aren't the same people. The students who get good grades know how the school system works and how to (exploit? That word seems a little negative) it. They know how to give the teachers what they want.
And that makes them less intelligent?

I don't think that's what she intended to say.
.

Sorry, I should have been more clear about what I meant when I said "intelligent." I'm not suggesting that people who have to work hard in school are somehow inferior to those who just "get" it.

cjmcjmcjmcjm wrote:
Dark567 wrote:
I also hated this at ever level of schooling. It bothered me because far too often it seemed that the grades were much more representative of the creativity of the poster, than my own knowledge, or the ability to carry out the project the poster was report("Hey, I created a perpetual motion device", "yeah, but your poster sucks. F-"). Although I guess anyway of grading on knowledge also is a grade on the medium it is being presented in, this one always just seemed like one of the worst ones.

Posters are really useless. Way too much of the grading goes into how good you clip art selection, bubble letters, and backing paper are and not into whether or not you know anything. Waste of time!

Speaking from my experience, a person's mark on their poster is directly proportional to the amount of time they spent coloring it.

by **Ave** » Wed Oct 27, 2010 9:41 pm UTC

I began reading the posts in this thread arguing (constructively) for or against grading as a measure of ability versus effort--I'm surprised that no one has used the word 'proficiency,' yet. If exams are meant to measure ability, wouldn't they test students on material that has never been taught within the classroom? I always thought that testing was to measure proficiency in the subject being taught with the assumption that the student has either no or the requisite background knowledge.

Also, I can't help but chuckle at the standardized grading system being used as the measuring stick for achievement here. If one couldn't possibly get A's without having a 'knack' for the subject at hand, or if you couldn't get a job in a field you loved without being naturally talented in it, we'd be living in a much different world. Education is there to teach people things they don't know how to do, and it defeats the purpose of the model to tailor it to people that already do know or have a unique or uncanny advantage over others in how well they are able to do those things. Yes, it's boring to be in a class where you already know the answers--because you already put for the effort to learn it (or are somehow a savant). Yes, it sucks if your school has no way of challenging and stimulating people who are a step above the rest. I can't understand the vibes that I'm getting from some posts that somehow because people who work hard are less deserving of success (scholastic or otherwise) when said complainant obviously couldn't be arsed to use their 'superior intelligence' to prove that they were a cut above (there are posts about that later on about regretting laziness, I'm not referring to those).

I consider myself smart--not a genius. I was tested, found 'gifted' and enjoyed a couple of years in a nice program in school (before it was cut). I was raised to be a hard worker. I excelled in classes, but I knew that I could be do more, and where I could, I did. In the 'real world,' being a genius means nothing if you have nothing to show for it. If you haven't put forth an effort that shows exactly the level of your ability, who will take your word for it? In the real world, there is no 'A+' because someone out there at any time can do whatever it is you did, only better. I can tell you that until you are established in your field, showing that you are motivated to and capable of learning something new is much more valuable than showing you are an expert but don't care enough to develop yourself.

by **Dark567** » Wed Oct 27, 2010 10:06 pm UTC

Ave wrote:I began reading the posts in this thread arguing (constructively) for or against grading as a measure of ability versus effort--I'm surprised that no one has used the word 'proficiency,' yet. If exams are meant to measure ability, wouldn't they test students on material that has never been taught within the classroom? I always thought that testing was to measure proficiency in the subject being taught with the assumption that the student has either no or the requisite background knowledge.

There are tests that test students on material that hasn't been taught. IQ tests are generally this way. The SAT and ACT also attempt to include sections that specifically don't test on previous knowledge, but instead focus on the students reasoning ability.

by **Ave** » Thu Oct 28, 2010 1:48 pm UTC

Dark567 wrote:
Ave wrote:I began reading the posts in this thread arguing (constructively) for or against grading as a measure of ability versus effort--I'm surprised that no one has used the word 'proficiency,' yet. If exams are meant to measure ability, wouldn't they test students on material that has never been taught within the classroom? I always thought that testing was to measure proficiency in the subject being taught with the assumption that the student has either no or the requisite background knowledge.

There are tests that test students on material that hasn't been taught. IQ tests are generally this way. The SAT and ACT also attempt to include sections that specifically don't test on previous knowledge, but instead focus on the students reasoning ability.

Touché, I got the feeling that most were referring to the grading system used in regular ol' school curriculums to grade progress--these are the sorts of grades that shadow people through school (prior to the SATs and assuming they never were in a position to take an IQ test) and generally are forefront in their mind when measuring their achievement against their peers.

by **Plebian** » Wed Nov 03, 2010 12:19 am UTC

In my experience failing to understand is ussually because you weren't given all the information. Often the people who catch on to things faster than I do are simply not considering the exceptions or using a lower standard for knowledge. Its kind of like the comic about the airfoil. I never understood how an airfoil worked untill I took fluid dynamics but I`m sure people thought I was dumb for having to think about it so much.

by **achan1058** » Wed Nov 03, 2010 4:16 am UTC

Plebian wrote:In my experience failing to understand is ussually because you weren't given all the information. Often the people who catch on to things faster than I do are simply not considering the exceptions or using a lower standard for knowledge. Its kind of like the comic about the airfoil. I never understood how an airfoil worked untill I took fluid dynamics but I`m sure people thought I was dumb for having to think about it so much.

Or they can logically deduce more consequences than you do. There are scary people out there that can visualize the whole proof of a difficult problem/concept with just a little hint given.

by **Dark567** » Wed Nov 03, 2010 4:24 am UTC

achan1058 wrote:
Plebian wrote:In my experience failing to understand is ussually because you weren't given all the information. Often the people who catch on to things faster than I do are simply not considering the exceptions or using a lower standard for knowledge. Its kind of like the comic about the airfoil. I never understood how an airfoil worked untill I took fluid dynamics but I`m sure people thought I was dumb for having to think about it so much.
Or they can logically deduce more consequences than you do. There are scary people out there that can visualize the whole proof of a difficult problem/concept with just a little hint given.

Einstein deduced most of relativity from one simple fact(the speed of light was constant in every frame of reference). The ability to see the consequences of logic, is the foundation of any level of intelligence. Hell, sometimes I considered it to be intelligence.

by **nobody28** » Thu Nov 04, 2010 6:55 pm UTC

achan1058 wrote:There are scary people out there that can visualize the whole proof of a difficult problem/concept with just a little hint given.

It is true, my Maths lecturer told me about them, the Fields medalists and so. Those guys are amazingly intelligent!

Anyways, you can be as smart as want to be, but the harder you work the further you will get. I am not nearly as smart as Fields medalists, but I am smart enough to pass my exams without studying to hard, but then I only pass. I only work hard for projects and then I get good grades.

by **Thank God I'm an Atheist** » Tue Nov 09, 2010 12:06 am UTC

KestrelLowing wrote:I do have to say that intelligence in general is not a curse, but the habits you learn from being intelligent can be a curse.

In a non-perfect schooling system (which is every schooling system ever) some students will not be challenged to their full potential. In my experience, this means that they will typically not work as hard as other students who are being challenged. This creates some habits, such as procrastination, not doing homework, etc. that would be very detrimental if they were being challenged fully.

...I did do all my homework, as I was kind of anal about my grades, so I didn't have as bad of a work ethic as some.

This. I really do respect people with excellent work ethics. Personally I would say I have a 'bad' work ethic (I'm not 'terrible' though and believe myself to have an above average work ethic, I say 'bad' relative to an ideal work ethic). I am especially bad when it comes to long, extended projects in subjects such as Geography. I never put myself into the work until a week or two before its due, often this results in a massive "OH SHIIiIiiiIiiIIiIIT!!!!11!!1!!!!" and lots of hip-flask swigging. :wink:

Ultimately I feel I should blame only myself for my work ethic; however as you mentioned it is largely down to the schooling system I've been in. I count myself as an intelligent person, and have rarely felt challenged academically in my life. Particularly in regards to Mathematics the teacher would teach a topic/concept then I would do what ever the fuck I wanted for god-knows how long until the entire class understood the idea. At this point I knew this idea and I was very unlikely to forget it.

Additionally, up until the year I am currently in at school (the equivalent of Sophomore year, I live in the UK) I have had very little cause to spend much time out of school doing school-work. There was very little homework set previously and I really felt like I could ( and I really could!) just cruise by without really trying or working hard. This has had a very large part to play in how hard this year has hit me. Having said my work-ethic is bad, zomg it ain't when it comes to out-of-school projects I complete. I will spend hundreds of hours completing programs I have written in that new language I've learned and many, many hours researching areas of CS and Maths I'm fascinated by.

heh, a major problem I often face when trying to say, do some shitty English essay is I can't stop thinking about questions I want answered about Maths or whatever. Unfortunately a simple Google search for the topic usually brings up only more curiosity. This is usually shares an inversely proportional relationship with my productivity. Where c=curiosity and p=productivity it is often the case for me that p=k/c :cry:

Sorry about the unstructured, sloppily written post, I'm tired lol. Read it at your peril! No wait, ... "You've read it at your peril!"

by **PaulNefets** » Fri Nov 12, 2010 6:48 pm UTC

dumbzebra wrote:I personally would prefer (in a job interview, not in general) a medium-intelligent person who works his/her butt of over a super intelligent, who doesn´t do anything.
I´m myself of the later type, I consider myself to be above average intelligence, but I am lazy as hell.
I know what goes on in the heads of these people: "Oh he/she only is better than me because she worked, if I worked I could easyly be better than him/her". Yeah, that´s the point, it´s the result that counts.

Agreed. In personality studies using the 5 factor model:

<> Conscientiousness was the highest indicator for success
<> Inquisitiveness (slightly correlated with IQ) was not

School is designed to create good little obedient employees...Its by accident (not really encouraged/rewarded) that smart people can get through without doing much work. That's the way of the world sadly though... unless... you monetize your creativity through entrenpeaneruship or other...

by **Bingo Little** » Sat Nov 13, 2010 10:32 pm UTC

Oh lord, here we go.

I have a friend called Lucy. Now, although she's not top of the class or anything, I go to a very posh school, and it only accepts pretty good students. So, nationally, she's pretty smart. Just, you know.

Not smart enough to know that unicorns aren't real without having to be told.

This girl is seventeen.

Yeah.

She also once threw a malteser at a swan "because it looked hungry", and asked what superman was. Not who, what. She is a very strange individual indeed.

by **kernelpanic** » Sun Nov 14, 2010 1:55 am UTC

Bingo Little wrote:asked what superman was. Not who, what. She is a very strange individual indeed.

There are lots of people who would be astonished to know that you have no idea what is the Jonas Brothers' latest hit (Do they still exist? I don't even know), or that Cristiano Ronaldo scored a goal against whoever Real Madrid played last weekend. Superman is very famous, yes, but it alters in no way at all a 17 year old girl's life, just as it doesn't affect me if Apple releases a new product. I just don't care.

by **Izawwlgood** » Sun Nov 14, 2010 2:29 am UTC

What's a malteser?

by **Bingo Little** » Sun Nov 14, 2010 8:34 am UTC

Small sweet/candy which is round biscuit covered in a layer of chocolate.

And oh, I'm not expecting her to know about Kal El, last son of Krypton, but surely the name Superman must ring some bells?

I'm drawing up blanks on many of the best stories involving her, but we also had to inform her that seahorses were a real animal.

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