Looks like the two good comments were taken (Feynman, Kahnemann). I'll just leave a couple quotes I thought of when I read a few paragraphs further about the hierarchy for ability in math and how it can be quite upsetting to discover how far up it goes beyond you, when you thought you were pretty high up.
>> [Pascal Costanza] Why is it that programmers always seem to think that the rest of the world is stupid?
> Because they are autodidacts. The main purpose of higher education
and making all the smartest kids from one school come together with
all the smartest kids from other schools, recursively, is to show every
smart kid everywhere that they are not the smartest kid around, that
no matter how smart they are, they are not equally smart at everything
even though they were just that to begin with, and there will therefore
always be smarter kids, if nothing else, than at something other than
they are smart at. If you take a smart kid out of this system, reward
him with lots of money that he could never make otherwise, reward him
with control over machines that journalists are morbidly afraid of and
make the entire population fear second-hand, and prevent him from ever
meeting smarter people than himself, he will have no recourse but to
believe that he /is/ smarter than everybody else. Educate him properly
and force him to reach the point of intellectual exhaustion and failure
where there is no other route to success than to ask for help, and he
will gain a profound respect for other people. Many programmers act
like they are morbidly afraid of being discovered to be less smart than
they think they are, and many of them respond with extreme hostility on
Usenet precisely because they get a glimpse of their own limitations.
To people whose entire life has been about being in control, loss of
control is actually a very good reason to panic.
> Fermi and von Neumann overlapped. They collaborated on problems of Taylor instabilities and they wrote a report. When Fermi went back to Chicago after that work he called in his very close collaborator, namely Herbert Anderson, a young Ph.D. student at Columbia, a collaboration that began from Fermi's very first days at Columbia and lasted up until the very last moment. Herb was an experimental physicist. (If you want to know about Fermi in great detail, you would do well to interview Herbert Anderson.) But, at any rate, when Fermi got back he called in Herb Anderson to his office and he said, "You know, Herb, how much faster I am in thinking than you are. That is how much faster von Neumann is compared to me."
Man, that Naggum quote hits home. I was a much bigger asshole early in life before I went to work at Microsoft. Usually one of, if not the, smartest kids in the room. Go to work, usually the same thing. I had to be insufferable at times. Then off to Microsoft I go to get thoroughly humbled. Much like I didn't know what "rich" really meant until surrounded by millionaires, I didn't know what "really smart" was, either. I still consider myself to be "pretty smart", but I now know that I am a long way from anything resembling brilliant, and always will be. So how about I tone down that attitude, eh?
Lesson #2 was that those super-smart folks I worked with had absolutely no problem saying, "I have no idea what you're talking about, could you explain it?" Probably how they got so super-smart.
So though I learned a lot about the craft in my time at Microsoft, I'd dare say I learned a little bit about how to be a more decent human, too.
Very good! I got an early education in college when I took Real Analysis in my first year (which most programmers do not take) and it kicked my ass so hard I still have impostor syndrome. But I don't make the error that I'm the smartest person around anymore.
Yeah, same here. As embarrassing as it is to admit, I think a lot of us grew up thinking we are The Smartest People Ever because it seems like so much of your self-perception is solidified in your early teenage years.
It takes a whole lot to shake that. If you see a few pieces of evidence that other people are smarter, it's easy to dismiss. However, if you regularly surround yourself with people who can run circles around you and provide so much evidence that you can't ignore it, you're eventually forced to reevaluate yourself.
>> [Pascal Costanza] Why is it that programmers always seem to think that the rest of the world is stupid?
> Because they are autodidacts. The main purpose of higher education and making all the smartest kids from one school come together with all the smartest kids from other schools, recursively, is to show every smart kid everywhere that they are not the smartest kid around, that no matter how smart they are, they are not equally smart at everything even though they were just that to begin with, and there will therefore always be smarter kids, if nothing else, than at something other than they are smart at. If you take a smart kid out of this system, reward him with lots of money that he could never make otherwise, reward him with control over machines that journalists are morbidly afraid of and make the entire population fear second-hand, and prevent him from ever meeting smarter people than himself, he will have no recourse but to believe that he /is/ smarter than everybody else. Educate him properly and force him to reach the point of intellectual exhaustion and failure where there is no other route to success than to ask for help, and he will gain a profound respect for other people. Many programmers act like they are morbidly afraid of being discovered to be less smart than they think they are, and many of them respond with extreme hostility on Usenet precisely because they get a glimpse of their own limitations. To people whose entire life has been about being in control, loss of control is actually a very good reason to panic.
–– Erik Naggum, 2004 https://www.xach.com/naggum/articles/3284144796180060KL2065E...
> Fermi and von Neumann overlapped. They collaborated on problems of Taylor instabilities and they wrote a report. When Fermi went back to Chicago after that work he called in his very close collaborator, namely Herbert Anderson, a young Ph.D. student at Columbia, a collaboration that began from Fermi's very first days at Columbia and lasted up until the very last moment. Herb was an experimental physicist. (If you want to know about Fermi in great detail, you would do well to interview Herbert Anderson.) But, at any rate, when Fermi got back he called in Herb Anderson to his office and he said, "You know, Herb, how much faster I am in thinking than you are. That is how much faster von Neumann is compared to me."
-- Relayed by Nick Metropolis
I got the second one from https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2012/03/differences-are-enormo... which also quotes this submission at the point a bit further, no wonder it was so familiar and these quotes came to mind.