Nope.

There are a lot of non-intelligent people out there. No matter how hard they try, they're not going to be theoretical physicists. If you think these people have the potential, but they're just not trying hard enough, that's an extremely bizarre view of the reality of their existence.

You're right though that David Karp's $180M payout is, in part, a product of luck and forces beyond his control.

According to probability, Karp probably is better at most things than a random person on HN. But is he better because of his $180M payout? Karp experienced a unique set of circumstances beyond his control (as each of us do) and none of his life experiences prevented him from reaching this payout (extremely lucky).

No doubt, his success and achievements suggest he is smart, hardworking, dedicated, etc. But another person, twice as smart, twice as hardworking, twice as dedicated, is affected daily by a totally different series of external events beyond his control, any one of which might preclude him from realizing the scenario where he gets a $180M payout.

And, some people choose paths in science/engineering/software/anything that preclude the possibility of a $180M payout. The researcher toiling in a lab to push forward the boundaries of human knowledge and achievement is most likely going to earn a modest salary his entire life (modest, at least, relative to Karp's). Is he worse in any way because he didn't create a microblogging platform that existed at the right place at the right time? Of course not.

> I do believe that all healthy human beings do have the same potential for the amount of knowledge they can consume, at least at birth.

If there's anything I've learned from my experience in neuropsychiatry research, it's that there's a whole lot of natural and environmental variation in human biology and psychology. I've seen kids who would otherwise appear healthy and sociable score astonishingly low on cognitive tests (e.g., on executive function, pattern recognition, block design, etc.). I've also seen kids who would otherwise appear completely healthy and normal score amazingly high, by way of extensive schooling and parental attention (and also very often, wealth).

So I'd disagree with both comments above that (1) intellectual capacity can't be trained and (2) healthy humans have the same intellectual potential.

This makes no sense whatsoever. Do you really believe that while people have genetics that control their skin color, hair color, susceptibility to various diseases, etc., etc., etc., somehow the brain is some magic non-biological organ that is not built by DNA?

"Amount of knowledge" isn't a useful metric, as anyone in pedagogy can tell you. It's not even about "healthiness", which is meaningless, or disability, which is less meaningless. Brains are not hard disks. They aren't knowledge storage machines. That's just one of its minor functions.

Well, no. You lack the knowledge for having a useful discussion about it. Spend time brushing up on pedagogical techniques, neuroscience, cognitive science, psychology: all the fields that touch on growth in the mental dimensions of a human being. My own expertise is pretty minimal, but just seeing the cutting edge of the research is fascinating and can help keep you honest when making claims.

This isn't a political/stylistic discussion. It rests on factual foundations, where people have actually looked at fMRIs or done longitudinal studies on schools or scrutinized the brain composition of different age groups.

I agree that in context of memory, the brain's capacity does appear limitless. However, the brain's capacity to process all of the information that it's exposed to is quite limited. For example, for most people, working memory is limited to 7 items plus/minus 2. One part of a standard cognitive test is to expose the subject to a list of numbers, and after hiding the numbers, ask the subject to repeat them back to you (and again, but backwards). A similar test of memory is to ask a subject to remember a list of items, then ask a series of other questions, then ask the subject to repeat the same list some time later. Some people do pretty well at these tests; some don't (approximating a normal distribution in ). So while it's theoretically possible that all subjects do have all of the numbers stored in their brain, it's quite clear that there's differing capability at least in memory encoding and/or retrieval.

I guess I also wanted to mention the concept of saliency. Different people will pay attention to different things even if all of the people are exposed to exactly the same stimuli. This is important because the brain only encodes to memory what it finds particularly important and/or interesting (i.e. salient). This can be trained to a degree: more experienced or trained people will be able to detect what's important, like a soldier being better able to "sense" the presence of an IED in a warzone. So even if everyone has exactly the same memory capacity, there'd still be variation in how well the brain itself decides to use that capacity.

OT technical note.

The reason you do not see a "reply" link is because you viewed the comment within X minutes of its posting. HN disables the reply link for that period. However, if you click on the permalink (the "link" text), you will still get a usable text box for replying.

My strategy is generally to do this, but sometimes I actually just refresh to pick up any new contextual comments.

This discussion is pretty difficult in that there are things we can't define. I don't even know if we're all talking about the same thing when we say "knowledge" and we can't define "healthy", and the term "capacity" for the human brain is assuming we all believe the human brain really does have a limit. I can only assume there is some kind of limit in the same way I assume if I traveled in a straight line forever I'd eventually reach the end of the universe. It's just imcomprehendably large and nothing we do in a lifetime, currently 100 years or so, will reach that limit.