Background

On CF I think you can tend to see people attributing good rating to IQ. This is often associated with hopelessness when people are stuck in gray/green.

I think it's the perfect cope — it's the easiest thing to say that completely explains why you're 1100 and your friend is orange, and, bonus, if anyone tries to prove you wrong, you can just claim that they are privileged and intelligent.

You may think I am 2000 and thus out of touch to be able to comment on this topic, which may be true. However, I was also once a noob who got 28/1000 on a USACO silver round. And I was pretty overweight as a kid and sucked at sports and always thought of myself as not having the genetics to be an athlete, but I now hold the squat, bench, and deadlift 18-and-under state records in my powerlifting federation. (Probably not for long though lol)

A lot of this is inspired by my powerlifting coach, Matt Vena. He's big on psychology in sport and I think that has greatly improved my progress in both powerlifting and CP. Also that's why a lot of my examples are lifting related

Self-limiting beliefs influence results

Your beliefs can improve or harm your progress. Simply being told that you have good IQ for CP or good genetics for powerlifting can impact your abilities.

1. Male varsity athletes were given placebo steroids. On bench and squat, placebo steroids resulted in significantly higher strength gains (p < 0.05 on an F-test), while on the other two exercises the difference was not significant. (Ariel & Saville, 1972)
2. Nationally ranked powerlifters were given fake steroids and improved their totals by around 70 pounds instantly when told they were given steroids. For reference, I would be super happy with a 70 pound increase in my total in 4 months. (Maganaris, 2000; analysis by Greg Nuckols from Stronger by Science) The funniest part is that when they told half of the lifters that the steroids were fake, they immediately lost the "fake strength" they had gained!
3. They measured a gene associated with aerobic capacity (how fast you can run), and told half the participants the truth and lied to the other half. Being told that one had the good gene had a greater effect size than actually having the good gene! (Turnwald et al., 2019; analysis by Greg Nuckols from Stronger by Science)
4. In the famous "Mind over Milkshake" study, hormonal hunger responses to food were affected by whether the milkshake was labeled low or high calories, even though all of them actually had the same amount. (Crum et al., 2011)

Bonus resource: another Stronger by Science article.

The bottom line is, if your expectations can so greatly influence inherently physiological things like strength, mile time, or hunger horomone levels, how greatly can they influence a mind sport like CP?

Worry about what you can control

Let's abstractly model

where $$$\text{Work}$$$ is a combination of good coaching, effort put into practice every day, and additionally for powerlifting things like sleep, nutrition, etc.

I won't pretend like I have data to support this, but for most people the $$$\text{Work}$$$ value will quickly outpace the $$$\text{IQ}$$$ value. Low effort practice for not a long time may be something like 1000 if your genetics/IQ is unlucky to 1700 if it is. With lots of high effort over a long period of time, even if you are unlucky, I think you can reach 2200 or 2300 eventually, and if you are lucky then you will become tourist.

Anecdotally, I also have noticed that a lot of powerlifting champions come from the same area. (For those into powerlifting, take for example Dillon Johnson and Chase Gravitt being from the same gym, lots of people at PWRBLD, Will Ball literally training in Evan Hawk's living room, etc.) If genetics mattered a lot more than effort, we should expect high-level lifters randomly distributed across the country. Instead, we see a boost in results that is probably caused by a boost in effort from having multiple high-level lifters motivating each other.

Again, I'm not going to pretend that this is scientifically supported data, but whenever I'm at the gym, I tend to notice that the people with the biggest muscles are also the ones that show up every day and hit the workouts that they have planned. Also among my friends I can pretty easily see who will improve and who won't depending on how seriously they take the sport.

IQ is a shit metric anyway

If you're still not convinced that IQ and genetics are cope, an IQ test is a horrifically bad indicator of intelligence. It only really captures how good you are at something at the very moment, not how good you can get over time.

They can't even measure intelligence. Some guy DMed me a few weeks ago asking me to take a CORE IQ test, and they have you do:

If there are some other ones you want to see me debunk, let me know.

And how do you make sure an IQ test is measuring intelligence, which I'm defining here as similar to genetics, which is something that you're born with? And not something that is practiceable, like shapes-on-scales algebra, pattern recognition in competitive programming, or digit memorizing? If you're going to give up after seeing a test result, it should be seeing the rating you can reach, not what is essentially a heavily confounded measurement of your rating right now.

You're more average than you think

What if I told you that you could be the a GM with some practice?

You'd probably say, nah, I'm not lucky enough to be one of those people.

Then why do you think you're unlucky enough to be stuck in newbie forever?

The population average is the average for a reason. You're probably there.

So why aren't you improving?

Proper methods

"Just practice more" is not optimal advice in my opinion. If you're doing English problems to practice CP, that's obviously not going to get you very far.

Read up on how a bunch of accomplished people like to practice, and also be introspective about your own practice. Try to identify weaknesses to work on, what things you do that seem to work well, etc.

Remember that there are multiple optimal approaches to training; as long as you're following the general principles, you will be okay.

Self-deception

It's easy to think you are putting a very high amount of effort when you are actually half-assing it every day. Refer to https://codeforces.me/blog/entry/98621 .

Time

If you think you can go from 1400 to 2000 in a month practicing an hour per day, then that would imply that I could go from 2000 to something like 2900 in a year practicing 3 hours per day.

Once you get out of the beginner stage, the amount of time it takes to notice improvement will start to be measured in months. In powerlifting, I do a 4-month training cycle and then compete at the end. On a good training cycle, I'll be able to add something like 17.5 kilos to my squat. That's less than 10 pounds per month, and that's with powerlifting taking up a significant chunk of my life (I spend about 13 hours per week in the gym, another like 2 hours of cardio now every week, and nutrition and sleep).

Okay, but what if I'm actually stupid?

If you can:

• Understand the tutorials and most (like 80-90%) of the editorials of easy/normal problems and some of the hard problems on USACO Guide silver section, and maybe also the gold section if you want to get beyond ~1800ish(?) (very rough estimate and my opinion only)
• Notice yourself applying a technique you learned from a past problem every so often. (It does not have to be every problem, I'll only think "oh hey this problem uses a strat I have kind of used before" maybe once every like 15 problems.)
• If you get stuck on a problem that's like within 300 points above your rating and read the editorial, you should be able to understand the editorial solution most of the time. (It is ok to spend a while to digest the editorial, or not understand it entirely every so often.)

Then you're at where I am and you're probably smart enough. Put in some hours — genuine hours, but also intelligently allocated hours — and I'm sure you'll improve.

Also read Zhtluo's blog on being Russian. "I think I'm stupid and low IQ, the trick looks obvious" may be the emotion you feel when it's actually "I haven't done enough CP to be good at the 'Russianness' ability to spot tricks/strategies". The trick for most 1400-1700 problems, even into the 2000s, are always obvious in hindsight; try your best to not feel too bad if you fail to see what you think should have been obvious (obviously it is ok to be disappointed... I feel it too) (but now you will never make that mistake ever again!)

To recap:

• Expectations matter. Your overstressing about IQ hurts you more than having an allegedly bad IQ.
• Effort outperforms IQ/genetics. (Anecdotally)
• IQ tests aren't good statistical tools.
• Your IQ/genetics are probably average.

So yeah, that's my rant for the day. More technical posts will be back $$$\text{Soon}^\text{TM}$$$.

If you want to argue with me in the comments (and/or increase the absolute value of my contribution by turning it negative), please do (actually please don't turn my contribution negative); I'll try to keep an open mind.