Every few weeks this topic comes up and I don’t see people being very academic/scientific about it. Here’s a clue, read; instead of vehemently trying to change or argue against the opinions of an associate professor whose specialty is actually computer science—not neuroscience or psychology.
Yes, the existence of raw basic intelligence is not a settled science. There are many theories and many experiments. And then you have all sorts of confounders that make it difficult to ascertain whether intelligence is so intrinsic to a person that things like motivation plays little to no part in its determination. Then you have the challenge of measuring intrinsic motivation, i.e how interested is someone in learning any particular thing. So sure, if it makes you feel better, the jury is actually out on intelligence. All people have are anecdotal evidence. The theory that people seem to have a problem with is the hardware + software theory. I’m guessing people don’t like it because it is simplistic and it sounds like something you overhear in the hawker centre. The point I want to argue today is, in practice, it doesn’t matter.
The main question we should be asking is: does it really matter that much what the reason is for not doing well? A lazy person can only push himself so far at being hard-working but it is not his natural state and therefore it is not sustainable. Same goes for being unmotivated. Whether or not you have “horsepower” is immaterial. If you don’t have the physical horsepower nor the temperamental horsepower, you will fail regardless. People need to be more cognizant of the fact that you don’t have to force yourself to do something you’re not good at or you don’t like. If you’re not good at physics, for whatever reason, who actually is forcing you to do physics? Does it matter if the reason you’re not good at physics is because you have poor logical-mathematical intelligence or if you’re just naturally very lazy? You can’t really fix the latter either.
My field is physics and I have a doctorate from Berkeley. We’re lucky because people don’t really pick physics unless they are passionate about it since there is not a lot of income premium here. So what you don’t have is a whole bunch of undergraduates who are forcing themselves to do well in something they wouldn’t have done if not for the money. Interest/motivation goes a long way. If you’re not smart enough to be a world-class programmer, pointing it out to you is not a form of gatekeeping. You could be very smart in some other thing but you’re wasting your talent in CS. If your only reason for wanting to be a software engineer is the pay, you’re not looking at the problem strategically. In the long run, you can make a lot more money doing something you’re good at and like doing.
By the way, being very smart is not the way to make a lot of money. I am a post-doc and I make peanuts. I have an uncle in Malaysia who distributes chemical cleaning products and he makes well over $1M a year in profit. It is actually counterproductive to be very technically gifted if you want to be rich. These people tend to focus too much on the work and not enough on the business. Yes, engineers and scientist have built wonderful technology that benefit all of humanity. But the people getting rich are not them. It’s probably some rich VC guy with a mansion in the Hamptons with an art history degree. There also a massive luck factor. So, honestly, intelligence is just one of those things that is fun to brag about but doesn’t translate to very much in personal material utility.