either god or fatalistically stupid

The intelligence thing? Again???

[day 4/7 - epistemic status: blogpost therapy neurondump not checked or anything]

A coding interview. A coding interview for a position ostensibly often obtained by people who do not actually code day-to-day.

How hard can it be? After all, I’m smart, I study computer science explicitly. I can code. I’ll be fine.

Ignore that I might have accidentally taken 2 vyvanse this morning, haven’t eaten, didn’t bother to do any of the example questions and that I received a warning before starting that my signal was bad. I am god. I will be fine. My hubris is ontologically justified.

And I failed. I failed and I could give you 1000 words of confounding variables and if I was a bit more crass I would even call them excuses.¹ None of them change the fact that, I basically failed this thing, big time.

In an instant my brain automatically demotes itself from god to idiot². It is seemingly incapable of inhabiting the middle ground. Either I can do things or I can’t.

an attitude common amongst the youth apparently

I am properly mad at myself. I am basically never mad at myself. I am usually a proud inhabitant of type 1 growth mindset but today is different.

Can I please stop. Can this please just stop? Being good at things is not knowledge is not iq is not fatalism. I know this.

making sense of “intelligence”

Okay. I am tweaking, let’s back up.

In my “I am god” to “I am fatalistically, thought terminatingly stupid” spectrum I confuse the following 3, correlated but fundamentally separate things³

• IQ/g

  • very stable correlation between IQ in early adulthood and later in life⁴, but that doesn’t mean it can’t actually change.

  • Useless to worry about. There are good researchers with lower g than me.

• knowledge/understanding

  • “booksmarts”: How many factoids about kubernetes can you list? Did you know that the records on hitler’s vegetarianism are spotty? And that he wasn’t actually consciously administering drugs but that his doctor kind of tricked him?⁵ That sorta stuff.

  • Understanding is a bit more nuanced, but it’s kinda knowledge minus passwords.

• being good at doing X

  • usually talent + (time spent doing X * how well u reflected on how you can do X better next time)

  • I actually do not want to practice coding questions. The skills do not transfer to research. At best it is a fun way to stave off dementia. I would rather do domain relevant work. But! It is hubris to assume I would just generalize to be good at specific coding interview questions. Or being good at SWE in general. Despite really not wanting to be, I remain a never-employed masters student.

Good news! 2 and 3 can be quite reliably cultivated. All there is to do is work and improving.

I can do things but I am not special. Not this time. I need to work hard on things to get better, I won’t automatically be good at arbitrary things.⁶ I am not qualitatively different on this axis. Hubris is dangerous.

Yet the next time this happens, I’m sure my brain will call me stupid again, and I’ll have to revisit this blogpost to collect myself.

Hmm, not sure which way to prod/pull you here [….] [maybe consider] “I notice that I can be a little hubristic and overconfident, so when I realize that the thing I’m thinking of/preparing for is important to me, I can pause and double check myself about this particular question: am I being over confident, how would I act if i was being careful and well prepared here”

(Thank you vals <3)

Back to studying. Nothing to it but to do it.

1. internet fucked up, didn’t back up enough from the question, the environment was unfamiliar to me, tests took very long to run and it wasn;t clear if it was my internet or time complexity that was to blame.

2. my brain says “retard” actually

3. (I think this might be quite close to how people view intelligence generally but I can’t be too sure)

4. the 113 that haunts me is at 14.

5. blitzed

6. no free lunch etc