I applaud Eliezer for trying to make himself redundant, and think it's something every intellectually successful person should spend some time and effort on. I've been trying to understand my own "edge" or "moat", or cognitive traits that are responsible for whatever success I've had, in the hope of finding a way to reproduce it in others, but I'm having trouble understanding a part of it, and try to describe my puzzle here. For context, here's an earlier EAF comment explaining my history/background and what I do understand about how my cognition differs from others.[1]

More Background

In terms of raw intelligence, I think I'm smart but not world-class. My SAT was only 1440, 99th percentile at the time, or equivalent to about 135 IQ. (Intuitively this may be an underestimate and I'm probably closer to 99.9th percentile in IQ.) I remember struggling to learn the GNFS factoring algorithm, and then meeting another intern at a conference who had not only mastered it in the same 3 months that I had, but was presenting an improvement on the SOTA. (It generally seemed like cryptography research was full of people much smarter than myself.) I also considered myself lazy or [...]

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Outline:

(00:41) More Background

(02:05) The Puzzle

(04:10) A Plausible Answer?

The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
November 3rd, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ophhRzHyt44qcjnkS/trying-to-understand-my-own-cognitive-edge

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“Trying to understand my own cognitive edge” by Wei Dai

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“Trying to understand my own cognitive edge” by Wei Dai