The title here should probably be edited to add "(2007)," which is when I first read this interesting and informative article. This article was published just around the time that Carol Dweck was putting together her popular book Mindset,[1] which is well worth reading for all the Hacker News participants who have missed out on reading the book so far. Follow-up research by Dweck and other researchers have continued to show benefits to "growth mindset" and good effects from interventions designed to build growth mindset in young learners and older learners.[2] I'm very glad that this research program was pursued while my children were still young, as I think that my children have benefited from mindset interventions that emphasize effort in practice over "natural" talent.

[1] http://mindsetonline.com/

[2] http://www.stanforduniversity.info/dept/psychology/cgi-bin/d...

http://www.pnas.org/content/110/37/14818.full

https://intranet.tudelft.nl/fileadmin/Files/medewerkersporta...

http://cpl.psy.msu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Schroder-e...

You're right. Thanks for the suggestion on the title change.

It seems most people tend to look at the "growth mindset" work through the lens of child development, or adult development, or business management, or general learning, or similar. For some reason, I enjoyed thinking about it in terms of code and coding. When code fails to do what I want or expect, there is always a knowable reason for it behaving as it does, and there is always a standing challenge for me to figure it out why it works as it does. If I'm dissatisfied with the code I'm running today, then there's always a standing challenge for me to try improving it. Even if I "fail" to improve it, I can still enjoy the challenge of trying to improve it, and as a side effect, I'll most likely learn something new, exciting and useful along the way.

As a "talented" person who believes intelligence is mostly trying, I'm thrilled to see these ideas appearing so often on HN and in the culture. I ran into this idea in a striking way while reading a biography of Thomas Aquinas that called him "patient" because he was willing to see the world as it is rather than pushing it to fit a preconceived model. (Whether you agree about Thomas is not really the point.) Likewise a lot of existential and post-modern thinkers have talked about how reason and language forcibly distort reality by losing details. To understand anything you have to sit with it for a while and let it come into focus. And you have to keep poking holes in your ideas to see where they fail, so you can improve them.

I think the Aristotelian/Thomistic idea of "habit" is very important to intelligence. Intelligence is a habit of trying. I feel like there is an active and passive part: of verbally reasoning about the thing, but also of sitting back and waiting for understanding to come. You can sort of alternate between the two postures, ratiocination and contemplation, and neither is the same as giving up.

My five-year-old is learning to read, and after 10 minutes or so he gets tired and just starts guessing, rather than sounding out the letters. At that point we stop or change the lesson to something easier, because we don't want him to form a habit of guessing--or "learned helplessness."

When I tutored calculus in college I often asked students to verbalize how they were thinking through the problem, and I think it helped a lot. Most people fear silence, so it sort of forces them to work through the problem one small step at a time, rather than seeing an intimidating, irreducible, misty whole and giving up.

It's sort of like chess: to get better, all you have to do is not move until you have a plan, and keep asking yourself questions to poke holes in your plan. Moving just because it's your turn will make you stagnate, but pushing yourself to think through just a little more than you feel capable of will make you better and better.

In programming one of my pet peeves is "debugging by superstition," where people rapidly change a line here and a line there to see if it happens to fix things, rather than reading and understanding the code. There's nothing wrong with forming a hypothesis and testing it, but at least spend some time coming up with a good one.

I think all these things are the same or at least overlapping: patience, perseverance, determination, stubborness, curiosity, optimism.

I believe that most people who believe as you do haven't spent a lot of time in deep interaction with people who are significantly less intelligent than they are. If you frequent Hacker news, i'd hazard a guess that you almost never have an intellectual conversation with anyone whose IQ is below 115. If you ever have the opportunity to try to extract information from or explain something to a person with an IQ of, say, 90, you may change your mind.

The only problem with this statement is that I have also spent time around people who were young and bright. They definitely showed great potential. But due to environment, 10-15 years later, I feel that their IQ may have actually dropped or at least not developed to reach it's full potential.

All this to say, I'm not combatting the notion that genetics plays a role, but am suggesting there is more to the picture.

Fair enough but I was making a statement about the contribution of genetics to IQ. I was making a statement about the notion that someone with a low IQ can do high IQ stuff just by trying really hard. I'm not a psychometrician and I don't know the age IQ sets. In my experience, definitely a 25 year old with a 90 IQ can't do advanced math just by trying hard

The concept of "growth vs fixed mindset" is great, and relates to the advantage of encouraging children with "good work" rather than "you're smart".

I read the Mindset book a couple years ago, or should I say, I read part of it. Halfway through and it was still repeating the same mantra "be a 'growth' mindset, not a 'fixed' mindset!" without much variation.

One problem with it is that it had the approach of you having a single mindset, which isn't my experience. In some fields, such as programming, I innately believe in learning and improving. In others, such as interpersonal behaviour, I apparently do not.

I get the "growth mindset" idea, but the book didn't seem to provide specific tools to help me address the fixed mindset I have in some fields, as I subconsciously conclude "I don't need this because I've got the right mindset in $other_ field".