LeetCode is not a clean measure of intelligence

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 12:57

   There's this idea, I think this was true throughout when I was learning math and, you know, various things in school. This is this idea of, like, deriving something when you need it and then memorization. In this hierarchy, deriving it is the true intelligence. That's where you really, you know, you come up into the math. You don't know the formulas, but you're good with math and you can figure it out on the fly.

2. 13:24

   what percent of performance in leak code do you think is is just people memorizing the solutions versus you know deriving things when they hear the the question if i had to guess and even just from like speaking with people i'd say like at least 90 it's people just kind of memorizing one way or another which i think is fine because if you look at like the entire problem of like interview preparation there's a lot to cover and you just can't like possibly do it yourself but the other thing I will say is that you can't just memorize you do have to like and this is what makes it really hard because you have to cover a lot of stuff but at the same time you have to like build at least some of the skills to like understand what's going on so you're not just like blindly memorizing or you're not like asking yourself okay should I do like DFS or BFS like you

3. 14:16

   should still have like some like high level understanding and that's really hard i think um like actually like covering things in like a smart way i guess since we're talking about this memorization versus deriving and you've taught so many people leak code is leak code an accurate assessment of intelligence i think definitely not i think there's components to it i think like is the sat like a sign of intelligence i think not really but it's a sign of like a lot of things that correlate with it and it like some subset of it surely isn't intelligence because it's not like a dog could like pass those tests or like do an elite code problem or something it's like yes but i think it's i don't know i think people get like caught up on that because then they've like they see some people doing well and some people aren't and they're like well it

4. 15:05

   just must be intelligence or something else like maybe partially but i think that's it's not just that like i'm just saying this just to say it but i actually believe it now like after meeting so many people and like seeing so much stuff i'm sure you've seen so many like high performing people and you've spoken to a lot of like guests and stuff i feel like the the number one thing the the number one bottleneck is usually like some level of enjoyment or passion or work ethic or just something of that nature where like somebody keeps doing something because i don't think i really did anything that special all i did was just made a lot of leak code videos when most people wouldn't have been willing to do that or just not had the time to do that and i think that's what most things boil down to like a lot of the like really smart people that you have

5. 15:47

   uh on the podcasts i think they just enjoyed what they did and then just kept doing it and then built their life around that and um then it just becomes that i think the people usually in terms of leak code they're usually people that either did a lot of math or programming or some kind of like math club when they were kids like to get to a certain level like the code forces level and stuff you just have to have