Interesting read, but I have one major qualm about this.
There seems to be a confirmatory bias among the academic community that a measure of intellectual success can be found in the percentage of individuals who earn a PhD. Sure, it's true that you need to be reasonably smart to earn a PhD, but I think that someone can have a lot of intellectual success (potentially just as much or maybe more) if they don't earn a PhD.
I think you could even argue that, depending on the field of study, a PhD is the "easy" route for someone who is intellectually gifted - it's a simply a continuation of what you have been doing. I would be more impressed by the intellectual who not only realizes that they can conduct their own independent research, but also has the creativity to come up with a use case that can improve and contribute to the world (and presumably, make a living doing so).
My point here is that, given two gifted cohorts, one which has a 45% PhD graduation rate and one which has a 50% PhD graduation rate, I don't know that you can conclusively say that one is more gifted than the other without looking at other metrics associated with intellectual accomplishment.
Knowing a few friends and other acquaintances with PhDs, all they have common is endurance and focus. They were not exceptionally creative, or apparently breathtakingly genius.
And I guess that's why Google et al. likes to hire PhDs. They can take all kinds of shit, and endure. Get to the bottom of those problems even in the face of internal politics/bureaucracy.
I can't believe that it's coincidence that every person I've ever come across that has been proclaimed a genius at whatever has had this very same sentiment to express.
There was a grain of talent and a moment of inspiration that led to a dogged pursuit of their interest.
People are quick to write it off as "oh, they had talent" or "oh they were a genius", but I'm reasonably confident given the number of amazing people I've met in this industry, everyone (well, everyone that's not an egotist) that's ever had this label attributed to them will attest: The talent comes from the countless hours of work, effort and frustration put into realizing that talent. It's only once we've overcome this effort and frustration and others think we make it look easy that they say "Oh, but you had talent"... sure, but I didn't have any to start with. Now after 10,000 hours of practice, of countless nights of going to bed frustrated that I couldn't understand something or make my fingers work right, of the number of times I played until my fingers and lips bled all in the pursuit of mastering whatever it is I'm trying to master. Only then does everyone see this talent. I don't see talent, all I see is the hard work to get where I am now and how far I still have left to go to consider myself part of the circle I still think are better or more accomplished than me. Any "talent" I may exhibit is the product of the pursuit of my interest.
My talent, my genius if you will is nothing more than this. I am not a genius. I am no more intelligent than has the capacity of any other that has the tenacity to stick with it through the basics and learn the fundamentals and go through the mental and physical pain that I have endured to get here.
Nobody ever mentions the counterexample, assuming it exists - the person who spends thousands of hours practicing but never gets anywhere. How many Salieris are there for each Mozart?
There's definitely a need for hard work in order to have success, but perhaps there's something necessary that has to be present for the hard work to build upon. Maybe that something is "genius".
Hard work is overrated. What you really want is curiosity. You can refine something with hard work, but broadening your horizons comes from a desire to see what can be done. Basically, do you want to create a refined version of what's already been done, or do you want to explore what's possible. You can alternate between them to push in both directions, but the mindset is different.
>Hard work is overrated. What you really want is curiosity.
This is BS, and the kind of BS that results in lazy entitled adults expecting the world to be their oyster because they have kept their dreamer curiosity intact.
Out of the people I've know who are internationally-recognized academics and/or world-class engineers, many are both hard working and creative. Probably the majority of them, in fact. But many more are hard working and not especially creative: they doggedly pursue single lines of inquiry or development, and possibilities for truly new ideas or techniques - not just refinements - are exposed through the intellectual equivalent of brute force.
I don't know any internationally-recognized academics or world-class engineers who are creative but not hard working.
> "they doggedly pursue single lines of inquiry or development, and possibilities for truly new ideas or techniques"
This could easily be attributed to curiosity. Don't dismiss curiosity as something wishy-washy.
As I said before, the mindset between hardworking and curious is different. That's not to say pursuing curiosity takes no effort. I'll use a musician analogy to explain. A hardworking musician works hard to master their skill and knowledge with an instrument in order to maximise their abilities. A curious musician by contrast is guided by much broader principles, including a greater focus on sound rather than their personal skill. A playing mistake that produces an interesting result is not something to be eliminated by refinement, but instead is the opening of a new avenue of inquiry. It helps to be open to interesting mistakes, and this is not something that is easy to do when you're hyper focused on perfecting yourself.
In other words, spending energy is necessary to get a fuller understanding of something, but what motivates you does have an impact on the end result. Hard work is driven by ego, playful curiosity less so, but it doesn't mean less energy. Work and play are not the same thing, but what separates them is not the activity per se, but rather the mindset of the individual.
I have a sample size of one that says this is false. For me at least, hard work comes from one of a number of things, none of which are ego.
1. The desire to deliver what I set out to deliver by the deadline I promised. I made a promise and I was raised that a man is only as good as his word. So unless you have a compelling reason why delivery is not an option, you see it through.
2. The desire for the satisfaction of looking at something that will pay future dividends, like learning to grow my own food takes hard work now, but at the end of it, I have a garden full of "free" food. Edit: On reflection, this one may be the most likely candidate for being ego - the ability to stand back and say proudly "I did that"... I will concede, this is probably ego.
3. The desire to master something I haven't yet mastered that either satisfies my fascination or because understanding it will enhance or simplify my life in the future - like small engine repair. I could easily take it to a shop and have them do it, but I'd rather learn how to do it myself because down the road there may be no shop nearby or I may just have to make do and improvise. If I don't work hard and spend the time and effort to understand the fundamentals and principles that make it all work, I wouldn't stand a chance.
So hard work isn't always about ego. The hard work may be fueled by curiosity, or it may be fueled by necessity. Certainly curiosity makes the hard work seem more like play than work, but that doesn't make it any less work. It just means that you don't realize how much effort you're putting in and it really just feels like an amusing way of playing or wasting time, but it's still work.
I notice your edit where you admit point 2 is likely ego. Point 1 is also particularly ego as in the sense of "self-image, as you use it explicitly to define an image of yourself that is distinct from others on a psychological level, as in "I am a man who makes good on promises". So two of your points are pretty ego based.
Now not saying that's a bad thing! I have learned the hard way that we all have egos and that guided properly it's actually a benefit, as it drives you to do valuable things both for yourself _and_ others, as is clear in all of your points.
Point 1 I will agree is about reputation. But to conflict with your perspective, this is less about ego than about contribution to your community and self preservation. If you're not as good as your word, eventually nobody trusts you or wants to work with you... and if nobody trusts you or wants to work with you, then your chances of getting where you need to go are quickly decimated.
> ". Certainly curiosity makes the hard work seem more like play than work, but that doesn't make it any less work. It just means that you don't realize how much effort you're putting in and it really just feels like an amusing way of playing or wasting time, but it's still work."
This is at the core of why we're disagreeing.
I'll make this as clear as I can. I have no problem with putting a lot of energy into something (or in your words, I have no problem with effort).
The reason we disagree is because for you effort = work, and for me the two are distinct. For me the worker mindset is one potential driving force behind putting in effort, and curiosity is another potential driving force behind putting in effort (there are others too; fear, anger, etc...).
The key point I've been trying to make is not about effort at all, but rather the difference between work and play. Whilst I do not deny that work has its place (as you indicated, it can lead to self-reliance, which is a good thing in my opinion), what I do think is that it lets ego get in the way of making things better.
Going back to a music analogy, let's imagine someone is creating a song. During the creation of the song, they discover a new sound that by chance fits the song perfectly. If the person wants this sound in their new song, they can either sample the existing sound, or learn how to create it from scratch. For someone with a 'hard work' mentality, the sampling option seems like cheating, in the sense of cheating yourself out of creating the song. However, if you're driven by curiosity/playfulness, your involvement in the creation of the song is of less importance, what matters more is the pleasure that comes from listening, and as the sound is identical to the one you wanted to hear there's no cheating of the listener.
Here's another analogy, the hacker vs. the academic. It's possible to become skilled with technology using either approach, but they are different approaches. The hacker lets curiosity guide their learning. The academic lets refinement of existing knowledge guide their learning. The academic appreciates best practices, the hacker looks for whatever works. You could make arguments both for and against both approaches, but IMO the hacker is more likely to be driven to explore, and enjoy doing so.
Hope I've clarified that my points have been about 'work vs. play' instead of 'effort vs. no effort'.
You seem to be mixing and matching hardworking vs. curious, incremental improvement vs. innovation, and results-oriented vs. process-oriented, all of which are completely different topics.
Saying hard work is ego driven while curiosity has some more noble, ineffable motivation is the exact same sort of BS I was decrying before. Hard work can just as well be driven by a sense of responsibility, a desire for more predictable outcomes, or faith, while curiosity/playfulness can be an ego-saving measure to offset mediocrity that the person can't or won't work past. Neither is more morally right, imo.
But to meander back to the core of the discussion, I don't think it's possible to become notably good at anything without at least some motivation towards self-improvement and foundational skills. People who ride playfulness and curiosity into lasting renown are able to do so because they have some degree of mastery of the fundamentals. Some people manage to earn lasting renown without much curiosity or playfulness, just a single-minded drive towards mastering known techniques.
Few to no people have ever earned lasting renown by noodling around in a field they had zero grounding in until they randomly struck gold. Some have earned infamy with that approach, but that's a different topic.
Mostly thinking the "so noxiously but unusually bad it's briefly popular" type of creative output by people clearly lacking in much grounding or practice in their fields. 'Singers' like William Hung, 'writers' like Gene Ray, 'filmmakers' like Tommy Wiseau, or 'actors' like Robert Coates.
I think it's two sides of a coin here. When someone asks me how I fixed some obscure bug or crazy performance issue, I will say something like 'I was the last one to give up on it'.
You could also say that many other people looked at the same thing and either didn't give a shit, or they weren't willing to continue suffering toward the payoff at some point.
Usually this is a combination of thousands of hours learning to understand how things work and how they break under certain circumstances. Once you get to a certain point, your ability to make the mental leap from the symptom to the cause can just be a feeling in your gut that seems to lead you uncannily to the right place, but you discount what it took to get you there. Is it tenacity that mean you were the last one to give up on it or is that just stubbornness because "fuck this shit, I'm not going to be beaten by a fucking computer!" <- That's me.
While curiosity might be what causes you to work hard, it's still the work itself that produces the results. Although if you're lucky it might not feel very much like work! :)
That something usually less genius and more a grain of inspiration followed by a love of the process, followed by a ton of hard work to get to a point that the instrument is an extension of the musician's soul.
I will concede that this may not always be the case. Of course, there are a thousand Salieris for every Mozart. But when you set out, you don't set out to become Salieri. When you play in an orchestra, you don't spend your life striving to play second fiddle and you certainly don't just get to sit down in the principal violin spot because you're a genius. You work for it, just like the guy who earned his right to be on that podium leading the orchestra.
For everything that's wrong with the movie Whiplash, there is a lot of nuance that it captures really well regarding the personalities in orchestras and what it really takes to get to the top of your game.
Not surprising. A lot of us probably qualify or come very close and the deciding factor is how much effort we expend to get there.
Meanwhile, I've got friends that live on welfare and legitimately couldn't understand neural networks (or even algebra) if they spent their whole lives dedicated to it. They are still excellent people, but perhaps mathematics isn't their best subject.
The guy I have in mind is an incredible impressionist and comedian, I wish he had more confidence in his talents.
also, I've yet to see anyone spending thousands of hours on productive practice and not get anywhere. Conversely, you can spend thousands of hours practicing a shitty golf swing and you're not going to get anywhere but an over-practiced shitty golf swing. Without correction and enforcing good technique and good habits at every practice, you're not going to get anywhere fast if at all.
Music is a bit of a poor example for application to "genius" actually because just like a golf swing much of it is in the practice of your gross and fine motor skills and good technique, which as we all know, if you don't rigorously practice good habits, you may as well not bother practicing at all because you're actively going in the wrong direction.
There is always a bell curve. It's more obvious in fields where people start practicing from a tender age, like chess or music, where you start learning when you're around 4. There are many who dedicate their lives to such pursuits, but very few become Kasparov or Mozart. The others still become extremely good, but not the best, and most are forgotten by history.
But to be honest, you don't need to be Mozart to be considered a musical genius today... There are a dozen orchestral genii alive today that could easily outstrip the genius of Mozart when you compare the body of their orchestral work. Yet when these composers are dead and gone, 30, 40, 50 years from now, everyone will still be talking about Mozart, and todays better-than-Mozarts will be lost to the sands of time. It's quite sad how biased our filters are really.
...or perhaps they're totally unaware of the existence of genius. Perhaps if they realized what they were attempting required genius they'd never have attempted it in the first place for fear that they didn't have the genius necessary to succeed.
Haha, no way. I've worked with or met a half dozen MacArthur fellows, and none of them were shy about bringing up that fact. You could argue that MacArthur selects for self-promoting geniuses, but such creatures clearly do exist.
This I've found over the years is more a product of insecurity than of ego or genius. People quick to tout their alumnus or IQ... or indeed any other measure of intelligence in such a manner are looking for validation and acceptance of their superiority because it satisfies their insecurity.
Though, I would have given my right arm to go to MIT earlier in my life, just for access to MITs professors, forget the degree.
Genius does not emerge solely from tenacity. Genius comes from figuring out new things to try in pursuit of a goal over a long period of time.
If you tried something and failed, how many permutations could you go through before you ran out of ideas of what to try? Could you do it for _years_? Could you keep trying, learning from your mistakes for a lifetime, until you reached your goal? Maybe you're a genius then.
Why not? Anyone could if the pursuit was worth it to them.
All it takes is being able to look at things and wonder "how could I apply this along with what I already know to achieve that goal?" Eventually you'll have some permutation of ideas that work. Even if you put it down and come back to it many years later. Maybe the goal isn't obvious until one day all the ideas come together to solve a problem that you need solved right now that yesterday you'd never even had cause to think about. That doesn't negate the work you did learning those things.
"Everyone is a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life thinking it's stupid." - Einstein
I think that what successful people tell themselves is not that important of an issue. What's important is the narrative we give people who are not yet successful.
I have a friend who's smart, and is a really good listener. We have really good philosophical conversations, and he kicks my ass at board games. I've been wanting him to get into programming, because right now he's working as an assistant manager at a sandwich shop chain. He absolutely has the talent to understand programming, but he has never put an ounce of effort into it. He really likes the idea of making 50k/yr (which would essentially be a doubling of his salary) so he could be less depressed about finances.
I offer him help... I tell him how I self-trained into programming, without a C.S. degree. And he just has a total lack of effort, and I think that he just tells himself that he can't do it.
When we establish the narrative that the only barrier is hard work, then we ought to be able to motivate people because they'll recognize that most things are within their reach with enough determination.
I have two counter-examples for you. I had two friends like this. I convinced them to learn programming while they were working menial jobs. Both of them did, and went on to have successful careers in the tech field.
I have a story of failure too. Two other frends expressed interest in learning to program, and I tried to teach them C while I was learning it myself. Big mistake. They quit after the first very intense and long lesson. I think I threw them in to the deep end of the pool, trying to teach them C as their first exposure to programming (when I myself didn't even know C and was learning along with them).
In the successful cases first mentioned above, both of my friends taught themselves languages they were interested in, at their own pace, and in their spare time (what little there was of it). They were also clearly very motivated, which my other two friends may not have been.
Moral of the story: I think it all depends on the student, the teacher, what they're trying to learn, how they're learning, how they're taught, and how motivated they are. You can't just generalize and say it'll work for everyone or not work for everyone.
The successes make me cautiously optimistic and I will personally try to help people again, if given the chance, despite there being no guarantee that it will work. In fact, I'd still try to help even every one of my previous attempts had failed.
Awesome to hear! So are you like, 2 for 4 as a mentor? That's much better than my 1 for 5. I have another teaching-inclined buddy who is 0 for 10.
I have remained optimistic, but yeah.. I do my best just to casually mention it to everyone that it's possible to get into, and that I'm always available as a resource.
I kind of understand how he got that. I do genuinely believe that hard work is the key to everything (although you do often need a little intelligence), but the way I talked was about what story would best help motivate people. It just helps that the two things match up.
I mean, imagine a world where I talked to my friend and was just like: "oh yeah. You're not smart enough. You never finished any bachelor degree. And I guess you could get into it anyway if you have been born into the upper class, but you weren't. There's no reason to try for anything better, you'll just fail." I'd be a pretty bad friend by modern standards.
"Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not: nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not: the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent."—Calvin Coolidge
I don't think he's using genius to mean "a genius". I think it's instead meant as a term for "a bright idea". i.e.: "to have genius" vs "to be a genius".
I am curious about how you come by your view. Have a look at this defense [0] of Hamilton on the $10. I can see from it how many could see him as a genius.
He is saying he has been credited with genius, that is intellectual power or talent, not that he has been credited with being "a genius". The former is now an archaic way of using genius, the latter was pretty new in Hamilton's time.
What those who contradict you above fail to appreciate is just how little IQ difference makes someone seem "dumb". Most people with 140 IQs rarely spend any time having discussion of any depth with anyone who has an IQ below 120. They have not the slightest idea how dense someone with an IQ of 100 seems. When I was training as a physician I routinely needed to explain important things in depth to people with average and below average intelligence. It is shocking. Most of us live in a narrow world and make poor assumptions about life outside
It is not. The purpose of a PHD is to advance the sphere of human knowledge as it applies to a subset of existing data in a unique way. Getting the PHD by proving something empirically is the point of a PHD. This does not require a great deal of intelligence. Not enough to warrant more than a participation badge, anyway. e.g. Computer Science, where there's tons of data and few people have done the grunt work of organizing it for a statistician.
Nah, I forgot which top flight physicist (Nobel, I think) wrote in a book that he had explained to his mother that there were indeed very dumb PhDs, thanks to mere "sitzfleisch".
Almost all of the education system is about signalling your abilty to be told what to do and doing it, and not hardly at all about actually learning things necessary for a successful and productive life.
Don't study CS, Law is where the money is, don't start a business, it will probably fail, don't date that girl, her parents are bumpkins. Do as your told.
I have been working at academic institutes the last few years, where maybe a third of the staff are PhD students. The ones that have gone on to more senior positions are like you describe, but I wouldn't say its the majority. A fair few of them decide to quit science after the PhD.
I'll support this with my experience. A PhD means you can do peer-reviewable original research. This means that you can't be too dumb, yes, but mostly that you have the elbow-grease to see it through. Maintaining motivation and stick-to-it-iveness are the most important qualities for doing a PhD.
Disclaimer: dropped out of a PhD program due to lack of interest and elbow-grease.
Really? As a PhD what you do is explore a -- best case: niche, usually: theoretical and worst case: completely made up -- problem thoroughly in absence of workplace realities like deadlines, office politics and backstabbery, and try to come up with a solution that's better in at least some sense than what's been written before, then write a big piece of documentation about it whose total number of individual readers in most cases won't reach double digits.
This does not prepare you well for most workplaces, except for maybe Google, who have enough resources to create an alternate reality for their engineers so they don't have to grow up.
> in absence of workplace realities like deadlines, office politics and backstabbery
Really? I did not find that to be the case. I don't mind deadlines, but watching the day-to-day life of academics doing academia with their peers is what caused me to drop out of a PhD program and go finish my research project on my own. After seeing it in action, I wanted no part of being one of them for the rest of my career. I expect that I could have been at a rarely political university system, but after some medium-ish number of conferences (i.e. more than two dozen), I doubt that it was much worse than average. I found the whole thing quite "icky". In fact, I found it worse than any commercial environment I've been in (although I've been told I've been lucky in my experiences for failing to find it to such a degree in commercial environments).
Not a Ph.D but reports from (UK) doctorate holders suggest there's sometimes a lot of backstabbery, often deadlines (funding), very often lab/department politics.
A PhD doesn't show that you get to the bottom of problems, but rather that you can influence, and be influenced by, group-think.
Edit:
Looks like it is still a while before my speech ban is up, so I'm pasting my response to kevingwang's response (below) here:
>To a particular degree, anyway. Convincing a University, or being published in peer-journal, for example.
>I think some are more or less ignored, though I guess I can't say that has no influence whatsoever and I'm also not sure that you can entirely avoid the influence of others.
I agree, as a Chem Eng master (In the dutch system you do not leave university with a bachelor, it's interpreted as if you weren't good enough to get a master) I've noticed that most of the guys I considered to be the brightest left for corporate jobs, that Ph.D's were a mix of people with deep academic interest (and endurance), some very bright people, and some people that felt they weren't ready for the real world. I think it's too much of a short-cut to say PhD equals high intellectual success.
> some people that felt they weren't ready for the real world.
i know some of these people. i suspect a lot of phds are people like these. of those who stay through the entire 3-5 year program, yet some are happy to remain post docs for the rest of their lives. they seem to have no goal, no real curiosity, no desire to see what exists outside the academic life they've known since college... they are there simply because they were there.
Well, in the study, they tracked students that went onto become CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, billionaires, Senators, none of which require a Graduate Degree. In fact, most CEOs are Phd dropouts and decided to leave the graduate education system, and some of them dropped out of their Bachelors program even, Mark from FB is in there as well as Lady GaGa. They both have a large influence on society but neither have graduate degrees. I don't see where in this study they were tracking people with Phds only. They tracked all the students who went through the program regardless of what they did.
I believe the only mode of failure they were questioning in the study was the program coordinators own inability or failure to accurately identify people who did end up making large contributions to society (such as Shockley, aka the transistor) who failed to pass their initial thresholds for what they deemed as gifted. Much of the study focuses on questioning the failure of the program to adequately identify and support gifted children, not whether gifted children themselves ended up being successful. I'm honestly surprised noone has brought this up yet and that your comment is so presumptuous.
They tracked everyone, and measured success by the percentage that earned a PhD. So, while Mark and Lady GaGa were tracked, I don't think I saw any statistic that would have associated these two individuals with a positive outcome (except for the anecdotal line in the paper). I would argue that both Mark and Lady Gaga have probably had more influence than 99.9% of the tracked individuals in the study, and yet they are lowering the presented metric for success (percent that earned a PhD).
> I think that someone can have a lot of intellectual success (potentially just as much or maybe more) if they don't earn a PhD.
I totally agree with this. Also as an anecdote, I really struggled with the decision to pursue a PhD. In the end I decided not to for various reasons. I was never interested in academia, just in certain technology careers that seemed to demand a PhD at the time I was finishing my BS (also I went to a fairly ordinary state school for my BS even though I was accepted to much more prestigious schools figuring I would attend one of those for a graduate degree and avoid some student load debt). Many years later, in hindsight, I am very happy with that decision. I never think about going back in time and making the decision the other way. If anything I expect I would have been less successful by any metric (intellectual or otherwise) had I done so.
What's important is a familiarity and a comfort with rigor.
You don't have to be a genius to gain that. It might even be a liability - you don't have to follow the formula to get the right answer ( because you're impatient and want to go play outside ) ; you can just see the answer. This happened to me, and I spent a couple or four years as an undergrad undoing damage I'd done to myself that way.
I'd buy a lot more about what we think we know of human capability if there was even the most modest attempt to control for this factor.
I went to what used to be a "normal" school that had risen to university status. It still mainly taught teachers although I pursued a BSCS.
I asked the department chairman of the department why math was taught "from the wrong end of the telescope" and even he didn't really know why. I suppose the proofs course is no way to get buy in, but had I started with proofs rather than what they taught as algebra, I'd have had an easier time of it. I'd taken geometry but even algebra was still a morass, until I'd gotten a grounding in proofs.
> other metrics associated with intellectual accomplishment.
Like say IQ. Feynman wouldn't have qualified for Mensa, and happily too[0]. Maybe that's a good metric. The metric is happy not to be in Mensa, but also has a PhD.
Edit: Feynman's IQ was 126 and Mensa wants 132, at least according to Ericsson and Pool in their book Peak.
I've always thought Feynman did poorly on some test in high school for whatever reason and then used that score for the rest of his life as a good story. Feynman was all about the good stories.
Well, intelligence is a meaningless term as in "playing chess is intelligent" or sitting on a stool and answering questions about arithmetic is intelligent. Don't even get me started on creative or consciousness.
Oddly I feel that emotion is well defined as "behavioral modifications generated by reactions to circumstances", which is what John Maynard Smith told me it was.
the problem may have been the low ceiling of the test. For certain tests, getting a single question wrong may drop the IQ from 140 (possible maximum) to 135. Verbal questions can also be a challenge if you don't know obscure vocabulary words.
Feynman received the highest score in the country by a large margin on the notoriously difficult Putnam mathematics competition exam, although he joined the MIT team on short notice and did not prepare for the test.
> Such results contradict long-established ideas suggesting that expert performance is built mainly through practice—that anyone can get to the top with enough focused effort of the right kind.
Actually the claim is the other way around - that the people at the top got there through focused effort of the right kind.
Finding "gifted" children does not contradict this. Nobody pops out of the womb a math genius.
Gifted children are "gifted" with a laser focus on the unusual things that they find fun - math, music, what-have-you. They spend countless hours playing with numbers or with music, while little Johnny is playing with a ball.
I was one of these kids, I played with geometric objects, with music, etc. Sure I was weird sometimes. I didn't have anybody to share my interests with.
Anyway, point is, when people point to "gifted" talent, this is just another cop-out. They don't have an explanation. They are appealing to everybody's shared sense of magical outcomes.
But it boils down to the hours that kids put into their interests.
I don't feel like that's true. I didn't expend any effort on my studies and it just came easily to me. Now, I'm not a genius, but there's a huge difference between my aptitude towards anything and the average person. I scored in the 99th percentile in math on the California high school exit exam. I went to community college at 15 (while still taking some high school courses at first, but upon taking the proficiency exam I stopped taking high school courses), I transferred to a university as a junior at 17.
It took me longer to graduate at that point, but it was mostly because I was expected to do work and I never did before. I hated learning in a structured manner and being forced to do things. In fact, my lack of focus is what led me to learn about things on my own. I was reading calculus textbooks when I was 10 years old. I struggled with it, but it was fun. Then I'd read some physics instead because I felt like it.
Maybe successful people have lazer focus. But not all talented people are focused.
A 10 year old child who can enjoy them must have some gift that makes it easier for them to understand the difficult parts quickly and get straight to the rewarding part.
Calculus has a myth built up around it on how hard it is. A kindly professor once showed me how it worked in about a half hour, and I was like "is that all"? Of course that wasn't all, but that bit of help served me very well for years of more advanced math.
Forget the algebraic mechanics of symbolically evaluating an integral -- let a CAS do that for you -- and just focus on the relationship to the shape of the function being integrated.
It could have been a good teacher, who found a way to make it make sense, or some other series of positive reinforcement that shaped them and prepared them, to be thinking about mathematics clearly. It doesn't have to be the luck of the draw.
I don't want anyone to give up, thinking they just didn't get the gift, so they should be content with playing with the ball. If you don't get mathematics, you might just haven't had the right circumstances to get it yet.
Agreed. How many comments have we had on HN about particular subjects saying things like, "I just didn't enjoy learning the math, I never got a mathematical concept at an intuitive level, etc, until particular use case X came up for me, and now I really understand it. Why didn't my teachers teach it like that in the first place??"
Whether or not it would have worked to teach it that way in the original circumstances (perhaps there were other things that needed to fall into place first), it's very clear that the right motivation and the right context have a huge impact on people's eagerness to learn and their ability to grok a concept.
It just means the rest of us have to work harder. It doesn't mean you have to be content with less intellectual pursuits.
Just because most people will never be Olympic medalists doesn't mean they shouldn't play sports and exercise. Lots of people do those things even when they don't have a particular gift.
Indeed, I love https://betterexplained.com/ which is all about intuitive understanding of calculus and other stuff. A post on the constant 'e' - nobody ever told me what that number really means. More such material, and a willingness to learn is all thats needed for a majority of folks, in my opinion
I was self-taught. It was actually very frustrating asking my mother for an explanation because what she told me was technically correct, but not useful in explaining why the textbook said what it did. What we both missed is that the textbook said it was a UNIT circle which meant that the radius was one.
After this I didn't really rely on her help anymore.
Some people just can't be taught certain things. That article about programming aptitude matches a lot of my obssrvations and I'm reliving it again with one member of a chemistry class group activity.
Calculus class simply provides a method for testing how good your algebra is. It's an elaborate algebra test. The stuff where you use calculus is the calculus test, etc. etc.
I know of a specific technique for teaching algebra - write down the principle used to justify each step in a derivation/solution - that will teach algebra cold but it "costs" too much so we don't do that.
I've heard at least one "officer" ( like dean ) level academic say "We use calculus class to keep the stupid people outta med school."
When you disagreed in your first comment you disagreed to this:
> But it boils down to the hours that kids put into their interests.
While you then go on to say that that is exactly what you yourself did. That you don't like being forced to learn is besides the point, but also sort of confirms it. You spend time (learning) on things you enjoy. That's how you become "gifted". The trick is having kids be engaged with something productive and not spending time on [insert subjective detrimental activity here]. Whether parents can influence that or it's down to luck is debatable, but I definitely lean towards the former.
> Those weren't my studies. Those were my hobbies.
Then your case does not contradict the OC's view that "Gifted children are "gifted" with a laser focus on the unusual things that they find fun - math, music, what-have-you."
I didn't have lazer focus, in fact I spread myself over many different subjects. I studied zoogeography, physics, chemistry, history, etc. because I thought those things were interesting. This didn't stop me from finding calculus to be approachable and easy.
I agree with you. As a teenager, I seemed to have an intuitive ability to understand concepts that others struggled with. I tend to grok concepts very quickly and once I do, I don't forget them.
I would sit in class and play games (which I'd programmed) on my TI-83, or read books. I would drift my attention to the teacher's lecture occasionally, just enough to convince myself I understood what was being taught, then back to my game.
I never took notes, nor did I study for tests, even through my undergrad in computer science. I got an A+ in multivariable calculus just by listening to the prof talk, and piecing together my comprehension on the fly.
As far as focus goes, often my focus is laser guided but I'm not in control of the laser. When something catches my interest, it becomes all I can think about for weeks. I'll obsess over it and learn everything I can about it, until my interest wanes.
I'm left with really deep knowledge of really obscure topics, and shallow-to-nonexistent knowledge of many common topics, which makes me a surprising conversation partner.
I believe intellectual aptitude can be learned. Spending time nurture core problem solving skills in various domains. The education system today depends on things like memorization and not on teaching students how to think. I had mediocre success through the education program, and it was not until the mid 20's that I developed a strong mental model. Sometimes I even feel cheated that I was not exposed to the right challenges. Today most of my acquaintances, friends, and colleague respect my intelligence and its one of the attributes I am most proud of.
I was reading calculus textbooks when I was 10 years old.
I scored in the 99th percentile in math on the California high school exit exam.
I transferred to a university as a junior at 17.
Regardless of the nature/nurture debate, if you can achieve those things at those ages with any amount of work then you are clearly far smarter than most people, at least when it comes to mathematics.
That is exactly what he argued - that his achievements are due to being smart rather than "laser focused".
Not being a genius means that he is merely 2 standard deviations smarter than the mean (think "there's a few of those in every high school class") rather than 4 standard deviations smarter like the kids in the SMPY.
>think "there's a few of those in every high school class"
Rather a few of those in every high school. 2 standard deviations means 2.5% per side. This is one in 40 people, so probably on average 2-3 people per year in an average high school.
Of course, pre selection can lead to higher values, but having several children outside of 2std dev in a class won't be average in the vast majority of schools.
The Genius bar is not really that high, so I suspect you qualify. I bet there is a bit of ADHD thrown in there, which often accounts for not liking structured learning as much.
It's probably more fun or compulsive than laser focus. One savant was described as a calendar addict. He'd ask when you were born first thing when he met you. He developed an ability to calculate the day of the week for any given date in seconds.
I always think that is such a weird party trick that it is strange that savants develop it ob their own. You have to be a genius to do that without a structured system - but everyone can do that given an hour or two to remember the first day of the week for every decade, the number of days oer quarter%7, etc.
The guys who wrote Peak are probably sub-geniuses then, because they think some savants have figured out a system. In the book they call it mental representation. It's the obsessive ones who develop the skill, some just remain autistic and that's it. They would say it is our bias and desire to believe in magic that predispose us to believe these people are just gifted.
I met someone like this once, he could also tell you the phase of the moon on the day you were born as well as all the celebrities born that day. It was pretty striking.
I think you qualify as a genius. The technical definition of 'genius' is someone with a high-IQ (usually above 140), although the definition has since been modified to mean someone who accomplishes something of significant creative merit.
> The technical definition of 'genius' is someone with a high-IQ (usually above 140)
according to who? The best I can find is that a particular IQ test (the Stanford-Binet test) used that definition from 1916 to 1937[1]. Might be time to update your sources :P
> anything - I bet you just don't know how little aptitude you have at things you didn't happen to spend time with.
As compared to other people trying things for the first time I'm usually a very quick learner. I think being a quick learner is innate. I've had the ability to learn things quickly since early childhood.
> Reading is not understanding - maybe you just enjoyed the attention that you got from it.
I didn't get any attention from this, I tried to hide it from other kids so I don't stand out too much. When I placed first in the math Olympiad they kind of resented me and said "oh, he studies like a grade ahead of the rest of us". I was actually much further ahead. Calculus is NOT that hard. It's not a super power to be able to understand calculus. It's just a little bit more abstract (limits and so forth are not intuitive for some people).
> This contextually implies you consider yourself talented
I think I'm talented. I just don't actually do anything useful with my life. The last course I had to complete to finish college was a technical writing course. It was 100% busywork and presentations and posters and BSing. It was the worst.
> I think I'm talented. I just don't actually do anything useful with my life.
mmh ... what a calm and measured response. and now I feel a bit bad for having responded so harsh - though honestly more tongue in cheek.
actually I can relate to what you said. also read calculus and algebra books as a teenager, wrote a book about JavaScript when I was fifteen, later studied math, most of my teachers in high school told me on a regular basis that I'm a genius and our gifted.
now, I wouldn't say that I didn't do anything useful with my life ... though nothing useful of the academic or technological kind. I rather lost respect for intelligence, the focus on IQ, status symbols and success in general. instead i try to become a happier and inspired person which brings something good to the world and into the life of the people surrounding me.
Why is everybody so binary about this? Are we really suggesting that some individuals are not capable of intellectual tasks at a greater capacity, or a greater speed than others?
If you understand that a human being has a higher cognitive function than a sea slug, a wasp, a mouse, a dog, a dolphin, an ape, by our genetics alone, then you have to accept that there is a degree of genetic variance between individual humans. It's not like the moment we all qualify as the same species all genetic variance in every regard goes away. Some people are taller than others, some people are better at abstract thought, some people are better at linear calculation.
Of course nurturing these talents is incredibly important, nobody is denying that. But the more studies that come out, the more it seems to suggest that the ability to produce exceptional results with the nurturing of specific practices is hugely magnified by genetic predisposition.
Of course there are innate factors and learned/environmental factors, but the relationship between genetic predisposition and learning are huge, and they magnify each other.
A human infant at birth has a brain size similar to a chimpanzee, but the human's brain grows much, much larger and more complex over the next decade of two. Human brains also grow to support the cognitive burdens they're directed to: people who study music intensively rather than baseball will grow distinctive brain folds, for example.
God forbid either of those words imply there's a difference despite the very definitions of those words are to classify and distinguish plainly different groups.
Do you really need a study to see that the top athletes in the Olympics, for example, are all there due to genetic advantages?
Whether it's higher endurance, a tiny difference in bone structure, longer arms, greater height, etc. - that's all mostly genetics with a bit of environmental factors mixed in (like childhood nutrition)
But cognitive abilities and intelligence are far less understood, because you simply can't measure it as well as physical achievements (in fact, some of the top comments here gripe about using a PhD degree as a benchmark for achievement; or patents; or publications; or even income level)
I perfectly understand the physical genetics advantages. But people here and everywhere are attributing intelligence to genetics as it was as evident as physical traits.
I didn't say "only" genetics. I'm just saying that your genes are enormously responsible for what you can excel in.
Are you really suggesting that genetics don't play a role in who can successfully play football? If I'm 6'5", is that because I practiced at my height for 10,000 hours?
By the way, to act like genetics are "suddenly" king because of some pop-science trend is ridiculous. Genetics have always been king, it's how we evolved from a single celled organism to what we are now.
Physical advantage due to genetics is very different from cognitive advantage due to genetics. First and foremost because we don't even have an absolute way of assessing intelligence, nor we have an appropriate scale (I personally think IQ is BS).
That said, where exactly is the genetic factor that determines whether a person is more intelligent than other? Is it more neurons? More connections among them? the ability to process information quicker?
You can validly support the genetic basis for cognitive advantage without understanding the precise functioning of the brain, because the brain is a physical structure. Being complex its unlikely a single genetic factor (nor is intelligence singular anyways) determines it. But there is a substantial amount of evidence that supports at least some genetic basis for traits that give some people a cognitive advantage over others, inline with the genetic influence for all other physical traits.
Ok, so you are admitting your ideas are fact-less, mere assumptions that can easily be true or false, yet you're down voting my comment because it doesn't align with your evidence-less assumptions about the brain?
Again, what's that evidence? Is it a genome? some sort of better brain capacity?
> so you are admitting your ideas are fact-less, mere assumptions that can easily be true or false
I'm saying that were there a dearth of evidence either way, the argument for a genetic basis would still be valid based on the premise that the brain is a physical structure (among other things). In actuality, there's a good bit of evidence that its at least partially, and perhaps mostly, genetic.
> Again, what's that evidence? Is it a genome? some sort of better brain capacity?
Its polygenetic and at least partially influenced by the environment. Its unlikely that higher brain capacity plays a large role (in the difference between humans). Identical twins separated at birth provide the best evidence
The idea that we don't fully understand intelligence does not negate the idea that intelligence would be genetically influenced in a similar manner to observable physical traits.
I wholeheartedly disagree with your opening statement, the two are not very different in all likelihood.
It could be as it couldn't. Both our opinions are on the same level because we're fact-less.
In most sports, we have clear rules about who is better at it. Let's say long jump. It's clear that a person with larger limbs (genetics) will have an advantage above one that has shorter limbs. How do we translate this in cognitive ability?
A person is more intelligent than other because they passed a test? because they can draw better? Everything is loosely defined.
In this comment, you're just calling into question the definition of intelligence.
We have widely-accepted manners in which to gauge intelligence. If you dispute them, that's another matter.
It's well-established that the measures show a genetic correlation.
If you were to find another measure of intelligence, besides the standard ones, we can use our experience and facts to surmise with a high confidence that those, too, would prove to be influenced by genetics.
> Are actually there studies that claim a special ability is due to genetics only?
Of course there are, like tetrachromacy [1]. Or even more mundane: XY chromosomes prevent men from having the ability to give birth.
I also think you're vastly underappreciating the results from genetic studies. Twin studies have repeatedly shown that identical twins separated at birth and growing up in wildly differing conditions, still largely end up with similar temperaments, similar world views, and similar intelligence.
Why would cognitive ability be different than any other characteristic, like height, athletic ability, and so on? Those same twin studies have shown that intelligence and academic performance are also highly heritable.
Certainly nurturing an ability will enhance performance, but there's an inherent upper limit to everything. Just like eating right and exercising won't make you grow taller than some max threshold, so studying and solving riddles won't make you more intelligent than some upper bound dictated by your genes. We don't know how to measure that yet, for either height or intelligence, but that bound is there.
I'm astonished about how many people here are using physical traits that are observable (even with the naked eye) as analogies to brain functions. Yes, we know a lot about muscle fibers, nutrition, physics and all that stuff, we can make reasonable conclusions about physical limits, but we don't know much about our brains or minds for that matter, not even state-of-art neurology have come up with solid conclusions, yet people here are talking (and being absolutely sure, which is the worst part) about intelligence inherited by genes, brain limits...
You're arguing for magic. If brain function does not follow from our physical makeup, then where exactly do you think it comes from? Sure learning is like exercising a muscle and can shape your brain, but environment affects muscle growth too via exercise and nutrition. Would you deny that your genetics place an upper limit on your achievable strength?
Sorry to say, there is already plenty of evidence of direct genetic impact on cognitive ability that you can see with your own eyes, even ignoring the twin studies that all but prove that cognitive functions are largely heritable. For instance, down syndrome, Tay-Sachs disease and Leukodystrophies.
The scientific case is in: given comparable nutrition and a standard education, your intelligence as compared to your peers is determined by your genetic makeup.
This says nothing about your work ethic or your determination of course, and thus what you can achieve if you put in enough effort. Intelligence is merely a metric stating that given the same amount of work expended on cognitive problems, those with higher intelligence will do better on average.
> Are actually there studies that claim a special ability is due to genetics only?
For various special abilities, including intelligence, there are studies that establish the degree to which they are heritable, as well as the effect of particular environmental and other factors in determining the non-inherited portion of the variability.
You might enjoy reading some of the discussions of free will (or the lack thereof) in the face of a material universe. A good starting point might be searching for "free will" on Jerry Coyne's blog: https://www.google.com/search?q=site:whyevolutionistrue.word...
In certain areas, hours might be enough, but not always and everywhere.
Chess is a good example. I've seen a 12 year old kid at a chess competition wipe the floor with dozens of much older players (people in their 40's, 50's, and up), who've been playing chess -- obsessively -- their whole lives.
This 12 year old kid has been playing chess for maybe 6 years (let's say 8 years maximum), but he totally crushes others who've played 40 or 50 years or more. Chess can be very addictive, and a lot of people spend virtually all their waking time playing it, for decades on end, studying, competing, yet that's not enough, and they can be easily beaten by someone much, much younger than them, who's put in only a tiny fraction of the time and effort they have.
I've also seen a 10 year old kid, who was really hyperactive and distracted when he played, always looking around him at everything but the chessboard, apparently interested in anything but chess. His mother sat next to him, and had to struggle to get his attention back to the board whenever it was his move. Yet he played at a high level against people much older than him. Again, he really couldn't have put that much time in to it, no matter how interested he was in it.. and he clearly wasn't that interested.
Chess is one of those fields where prodigies are relatively common, especially compared to fields like poetry that really do require a lot of life experience to be effective. The kids I've described are not that rare. It happens even at the highest levels, with Bobby Fischer being the archetypical example (becoming the youngest grandmaster at 15 and winning the US championship at 14). These days chess prodigies are even more common than in Fisher's time, thanks to computers and the internet. Still, whatever happens with them is not explained by the hours they put in to the game alone, as many people put in many more hours and much more effort than they do and still fail miserably.
With athletics there's not much debate that the Lance Armstrongs and Usain Bolts of the world have physiological advantages over others giving them an edge that extends well beyond just effort and smart training. Our brains are physiological things as well, with considerable developmental variation from one person to the next.
I absolutely agree. Chess reveals in a very concrete way that you can just run out of talent. Every player seems to have an innate ceiling on their abilities that no amount of study will overcome. Spend long enough in a club and you'll see it over and over - the duffers in their forties who can never seem to break 1800 and the snotty kids who skyrocket to 2300 with no apparent effort.
Golf seems to be fairly similar. Lots of players spend every weekend at the range and take endless lessons and workshops, but never manage to get their handicap down to single figures.
I'm not sure if it's all about talent either. Many of those weak, older players started when they were older, or weren't exposed to a lot of chess (or chess training) when they were young, while the "talented" kids often did start young and got training or at least were surrounded by many other chess-playing kids. I think that makes a big difference.
It seems that there's a critical age when one's mind is better able to assimilate and make sense of the patterns in chess, and to memorize moves and positions. Chess requires a lot of pattern recognition and memorization, and if one does not train those early enough, it may be too late.
It would be a very interesting study to find out how many of those old, weak players actually did have a lot of exposure to and training in chess when they were young.. my bet is not a lot.
Also, I wouldn't expect to find a lot of highly achieving chess players who started playing chess later in life (let's say past their teens), no matter how brilliant and talented they are in other fields, or how well they perform on IQ tests or SATs. They'll probably be beaten by much younger players, no matter how much time and effort they put in to chess.
Learning to play chess well seems to be somewhat similar to becoming fluent in a foreign language, which children also usually excel in compared to adults.
I've been labeled a genius as a kid and e.g. loved to beat the best chess computers at that time, Mephisto III on the highest level in the 80ies. I loved to play blind also, but stopped that when I couldn't get to sleep or would not stop dreaming about tricky moves.
But I never had a chance against humans on lower levels.
The problem was the time constraint and nervousness.
In tournaments and chess clubs deep thinking is not valued, only experience. Folks in the chess club mainly do train speed chess, and simple tournaments limit the time to 30mins.
But the good parts of my chess start when I can concentrate deeper than that, to the 2.5 hrs mark. As with playing against the computer those times. With time constraints I got nervous, didn't calculate through, took too high risks, or when playing against girls just made stupid mistakes. I usually was the last or 2nd to last in club tournaments (30min). I didn't like playing chess against humans at all, that's why I stopped playing it. And nowadays I could never beat a good chess computer. Because they are too fast and force me to play too fast also. It's not fun anymore.
Speed chess (or blitz chess) has become popular in recent decades, but I think the standard tournament times are 2 to 2.5 hours, if I'm not mistaken. You might have gone to blitz tournaments, where yes, your inability to play quickly would have been a great handicap.
But blitz tournaments are not the only, or even the most popular type of tournament. When you see someone's chess rating (ie. 1700, 2000, etc), those are ratings at slow time controls. When someone is referred to as a "grandmaster", it refers to a title that is earned at slow time controls. The world chess championship is played at slow time controls. There are blitz tournaments, but they are not as popular. Blitz is very popular in clubs, though. You're right there.
My guess is that you couldn't leverage your superior slow chess skills to blitz because you just didn't practice much blitz (ie. short time controls or fast games) on your computer, or against human players. This is understandable, and is quite common. It takes some practice to get used to playing blitz. I'd bet you would have made a fine blitz player if you'd put in some time practicing it, and your slow chess skills would have helped you in blitz, as blitz and slow chess aren't different games, but blitz relies more on intuition as opposed to deep analysis. But both blitz and slow chess require good pattern recognition and memorization, so your aptitude in the slow chess would have helped you in blitz, once you got enough practice in playing more intuitively at faster speeds.
Finally, as far as chess computer these days go: just because the computer moves fast doesn't mean you have to move fast. You can set whatever time controls you want when you play against a computer -- hours, days, weeks, or even turn the clock off altogether. On the other hand, chess computers have gotten so good these days that unless you're a world class player, you're just not going to beat them at their highest difficulty settings, no matter how much time you have (unless you cheat). They're still good to practice with, and you can still play slow chess (even correspondence chess, where you mail or email moves to each other and take a long time to reply) against humans. I think if you look, you'll find plenty of slow chess fans around the world that you can play.
Actually, his example was very relevant in this regard. Chess has a limited set of rules, once learned all that remains is practicing and letting it to sink in ...for those who are slow at that. To develop poetry is not about the rules themselves as it is about the subjective appreciation of your readership. That skill is not that technical and may take years to hone it right.
>Chess has a limited set of rules, once learned all that remains is practicing and letting it to sink in //
I learnt recently that Chess computers/programs are pre-seeded with standard moves and apparently do very badly if they're set to play without using the traditional openings. This seems to move against your analysis of what is needed to play chess well. Study of stock openings also appears to be required to perform well.
Gifted children are "gifted" with a laser focus on the unusual things that they find fun - math, music, what-have-you
Gifted children have the gift of being interested in things that are useful, that can give them money or high status like art, math, chess, technology...
A child who has an obsessive interest with candy or playing tag or watching TV (or just normal stuff that normal children do) will have to work harder to resist more temptations and focus on schoolwork and useful things.
Plenty of people spend hours drawing and still suck at it. My sister spent hours with a coloring book as a kid, and now has a growing IMDB page.* Sure, she went to a great art school, but not because of some single minded focus as she had ~10 AP classes and ended up High school Valedictorian. Even this did not take her full attention as she had a wide circle of friends, was very popular, and spent a lot of time on makeup etc.
So yes she worked hard really really hard. But, those hours where simply worth more than other peoples.
In the end the nature vs. nurture debate is silly as it takes both to succeed. The minimums simply increase as you go up the scale. There are a few short people in the NBA, but nobody is below 5' tall. The top women are vastly better than the average man, but the classic men's vs women's sports has a core basis in biology.
*Shorthand for wanted to work for Disney as a kid, now has actual movie credits and words for Disney. That's about as concrete a form of success as you get for such a subjective field.
> Plenty of people spend hours drawing and still suck at it.
Definitely, but people don't get good at drawing without spending hours at it.
You may be stuck at a local maximum, and it may take a good or different coach to get you around it, but generally you can always improve.
But just trying harder is ineffective. You have to diagnose your problem, and how to fix it. Maybe you need a coach.
I remember having to "invent" all kinds of ways of looking at my drawings to get better. To get them to the next level. After a while you can't look at them objectively ... so you look at them in a mirror. You squint, to get a better sense of the balance. Upside down. You get the idea. It's problem solving.
I got comments on my artwork in kindergarten due to level of detail and such things. I was oil painting landscapes at age 8.
I took every elective I could in school, and would have taken more if AP and college prep classes weren't a priority for my parents. I used how-to books, and I still look up techniques from time to time. I've had lots and lots of practice: I went for years drawing and painting daily. That was probably my biggest increase in quality. I used to wish for art school.
My current liking is doing surrealist and visionary art in watercolor and ink: I've currently 3 canvases waiting on acrylic.
And through it all, I truly think it is a combination of talent plus practice plus interest/focus in some form. Most folks with enough practice can make beautiful landscapes and still life pictures, just like folks can learn to take a basic excellent picture most times. Everyone can learn basics.
Not everyone can bend their minds in ways to incorporate subdued symbolism in surrealist work - not everyone can look at a canvas in that way. Some of the really great photography is because the person thought to take the picture - not everyone does that in that way. Not everyone can create. That is where the talent bit comes in.
However, if art didn't interest me, I very much doubt I would have filled my time with it to get better.
I think this works similarly for math and other things, for the majority of us.
Its interesting to compare artistic drawing to drafting.
My observations from a year of drafting in high school (Future engineers need to be able to make and read blueprints was a fad a couple decades ago) and work with people in the field, there are people who can do three dimensional transforms and manipulations in their head with little effort beyond the mere mechanics of pencil on paper (or fingers on CAD workstation). There are also those who cannot visualize complex shapes in three dimensions. Just like you can't verbally tell people to train harder to grow taller it does not appear possible to learn how to visualize. I've observed those who can't visualize have all kinds of interesting coping mechanisms ranging from simply asking for help to leaving the field entirely to really elaborate memorized heuristics. Either you can, or cannot, visualize a basic transmission for a crane complete with which direction the gears rotate. No amount of staring at a blank sheet of paper will help, and practice does not help those people who can't and merely wastes the time of those who can.
Apparently you can train creativity and style, but the mental act of three dimensional visualization is either functional or absent.
I suspect tradeoffs on underlying performance as the cause for Aphantasia. There's a guy in Sonoma I met and he can see in 3D like I feel it, but then he can put textures on the model and see that. Visualize it. He's also monochrome color blind, so it's a tradeoff. He makes really awesome wooden furniture.
School took a lot of time, but was not her main focus.
Considering she wanted to be an artist and mostly did that on the side, school was a net loss of time. It's one thing to scrape a C and doodle in all your classes, it's another to find time to draw on the side in the middle of a hectic schedule. Getting a 5 in AP calculus is hard for most people who want to use it, for someone who has little interest in math that's a huge time investment.
AKA if you do one thing well then you can argue it's a time investment, when you do everything well that takes something more.
She wanted to work as an artist for Disney as a kid, realized that would take a lot of effort and put the time in. Considering how many other people try and do the same thing and fail it seems like a reasonable metric for success.
It's a surprisingly brutal world. She got into CalArts which has a 27.5% acceptance rate and the application takes a lot of time, so I suspect they scare off a lot of people.
I like that metric, because I was considered super smart as a kid, and I have two IMDB credits. (one even a Sundance winner)
But I failed the other criteria in the article, inventions (even if I invented a certain computer-game-as-artform category in the 90ies), PhD, scientific success, ...
Yes, it's a funny metric. And even if e.g. Cannes states that you can attend the festival if you are on IMDB, they never let me in. (Nowadays I wouldn't want to either because of politics)
So it's inconsistent also.
> My sister spent hours with a coloring book as a kid, and now has a growing IMDB page
Anyone in SAG can have an IMDB page. I know this because I have a child who has one after doing some trivial commercial and short film work...it really isn't a high bar, sorry.
Uhh, I mean creating real movies like Big hero Six at Disney. You know the kind of thing that's shown a most movie theaters and you can find their name in the credits.
Yea, it's not curing cancer. But, I know a lot more failed artists than successful ones.
Okay, the people who serve lunch to the movie crew also gets their names in credits. She has a job...cool, but its not any more meaningful than anything else because her industry makes you look at a scrolling list of everyone related to the project.
Having artistic credits aka not just being a gofer on several major animated films is a significantly more exclusive club than being a tenured professor at an Ivy League School, or being a lawyer at a major law firm. So, when that's the goal it's a reasonable measure for success.
People can always add an arbitrary benchmark. But, having reached a major and difficult life goal at mid twenty is further than the vast majority of people out there.
> Nobody pops out of the womb a math genius. [...] But it boils down to the hours that kids put into their interests.
This is obviously untrue. It's been well established that a significant fraction of intelligence is heritable, which means nurture has little to do with innate ability.
Further, there are plenty of examples of true geniuses, like Mozart for music and Ramanujan for mathematics, where they almost immediately grasped their subject and became experts rivaling their contemporaries with very little practice.
But genius is clearly not a binary quality, it's a continuum. There exist people slightly less adept than Ramanujan, and so had to put in more work to become experts, but still far less work than an average person would. You didn't have anyone to share your interests because your age group just couldn't naturally see the beauty you saw in your interests. Not wouldn't, couldn't without some serious coaching.
There surely is a natural gift for things, but don't underestimate how much effort [if effort is the right word for something you are drawn to] your two examples put in at an early and impressionable age.
Paraphrasing Dweck's, but also matching my personal experience:
At the end to the day, hard work is what allows one to push the limits. A gift/talent is just a good kickstart that makes the owner's life easier, but people with talent are quickly limited if they don't work hard. the biggest issues are that people counting on their gift are afraid of exposing their limitation and become more and more shy of taking risk, they also often don't get into the habit of working.
Finding "gifted" children does not contradict this. Nobody pops out of the womb a math genius.
Yes, technically no one pops out knowing trig or calculus, but some are born with the cognitive capacity, which later manifests in life, to readily master abstract and complicated stuff, and others aren't born with that ability so they struggle to understand concepts that smart people grasp easily. Although ability can be lopsided (some are better at math than verbal), the less intelligent tend to have no dominant strengths - they are just average. And that's fine. Most people are that way.
Gifted children are "gifted" with a laser focus on the unusual things that they find fun - math, music, what-have-you. They spend countless hours playing with numbers or with music, while little Johnny is playing with a ball.
Why don't adults play with paste, coloring books, and alphabet letters? Because they are too mentally mature for those activities. Likewise, high-IQ children have a higher mental age, hence they find these tasks tedious and boring, as adults do.
Anyway, point is, when people point to "gifted" talent, this is just another cop-out. They don't have an explanation. They are appealing to everybody's shared sense of magical outcomes.
But it boils down to the hours that kids put into their interests.
Well, there's something called an IQ score, and it does a pretty good job at predicting all sorts of things, such as socioeconomic outcomes, job performance, educational attainment, welfare dependency, and learning ability. The IQ test is one of great achievements of human psychology, is much harder to manipulate than EQ tests, and scores tend to remain stable throughout life.
>Gifted children are "gifted" with a laser focus on the unusual things that they find fun - math, music, what-have-you.
This is my thinking as well. I was a kid like this. I suspect there's a connection between being asocial and being 'gifted.' If you're happy playing with compilers and such and don't feel the need to run out of the house to play ball, then you're just going to soak up a whole lot of stuff other kids aren't. The laser focus is probably optional as well. Although, I suspect there's a connection with being asocial and being easily and deeply focused on things other than socializing.
As an adult, I'm still asocial. I also am not introverted, which seems to be a common misconception about this personality type. I can be very loud, outgoing and demanding if need be and feel perfectly natural. I just don't like to socialize very often.
Many children from my school spent a lot of time and additional classes to learn math. I never did that. I almost always skipped my homework. Yet I was the best in my class. Things, that other children found confusing and hard to understand, were very obvious to me and when I was asked to solve something from home work, I just did it immediately.
That said, I was talking about ordinary children without any selection. After school I went to math faculty in university with similar children. That was cruel, I sometimes felt so stupid.
There's definitely talent. And there's hard work. And sometimes it goes hand-to-hand, sometimes it's not. There are untalented people who's working hard and achieve a lot. There are talented people who doesn't give a damn and yet achieve a lot. And there are talented people who word hard and flying in the sky.
> Gifted children are "gifted" with a laser focus on the unusual things that they find fun - math, music, what-have-you. They spend countless hours playing with numbers or with music, while little Johnny is playing with a ball.
Doesn't really match my experience of gifted children, many of which are not gifted "with a laser focus" on anything, and perform very well at things that they don't spend additional time on.
> But it boils down to the hours that kids put into their interests.
It pretty clearly does not; people don't get the same results out of putting the same hours into the same things.
As someone who was measurably "gifted" as a child, I will say that the idea that I was more tenacious or laser-focused could not be farther from the truth. Instead, I just "got" things very quickly, such that it required very little effort to learn. I also read at a very high level through practice (I read fiction voraciously), which probably helped. I have since levelled off, and confess to struggling to learn through brute force things I don't readily apprehend. That said, I find the frequency of really good, creative ideas that I have is much higher than my peers, which has translated into a lot of success in the dev world (I dropped out of a phd program in philosophy and joined ama-google-softbook as a dev, as a bridge to starting a business).
I don't dispute that effort is a variable in long term performance, but it's more of a criterion for long term performance than a predictor of raw talent imo.
I will also say that being singled out for special treatment is pretty silly, I think a more constructive use of my time as a child would have been to help peers who were struggling.
I think you hit the nail on the head here. The "gift" of the genius seems to be the ability to spend hours and hours ~focusing~ On literally anything.
Problem solving ability and comprehension levels will only take one so far if they can't bring themselves to bury their head in a book, or sit in front of a piano, or shoot hoops, for the time necessary to master said subject.
I was going to remark on the very same sentence. I'm not sure whether gifted children have a natural affinity toward math, of if they're just genetically predisposed to be more interested in it. In either case, neuroplasticity means that the final capabilities of our brains are not predetermined, and anyone can reach the performance of a "gifted" student through training.
"Gifted children are "gifted" with a laser focus on the unusual things that they find fun - math, music, what-have-you. They spend countless hours playing with numbers or with music, while little Johnny is playing with a ball."
If you read Ericsson's papers, he does in fact specifically deny any role to talent and genes, by name, unequivocally. It's not a strawman, it's what he really believes. Deliberate practice is also falsified by Hambrick's meta-analyses: it does not explain much of difference in performance compared to talent. They are not gifted with 'a laser focus', they are gifted with things like intelligence.
you're trying to explain high levels of skill with only one factor: hours of "focused effort of the right kind"
in reality, inherent talent clearly plays a very strong role. As a crude illustration, suppose
math_skill = hours_worked * beta, and assume the "quality" of hours_worked is standardized. While beta is positive for most people, beta could vary a lot based on talent (obviously the function is not linear and may also peak / approach an asymptote. or for some people the function increases more slowly but reaches a higher peak. point is that it's complex).
This. I found that I was on a different level than my peers in college in terms of programming ability. I knew I was on a different level because we had group work, and it was very annoying having to explain simple things like how to do a linear search for an element in an array. At that point, I believed that some people with CS degrees actually _can\'t_ do fizzbuzz
In the end, I had practiced more and have pretty much programmed everyday for 7 years, while they only did the minimum requirement to pass classes in CS>
Nobody pops out a "math" genius.
However, it could be supposed that some pop out with a greater ability to quickly recognize and remember patterns of information acquired by their senses.
My ad-hoc life experience has shown that some people are good at most things they try to do, and it takes them significantly less time to acquire and use new skills than the norm.
Gladwell used someone else's studies and came up with the 10k hours. I recommend you read the original authors' book: Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, from Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool. They say the 10k rule doesn't exist and explain what they meant, but it does indeed boil down to "deliberate practice".
Really odd misreading. That's a lineage of teacher-pupil relations, not genetic. If anything, it points in the opposite direction of what you're claiming, though in reality it's either just a statement about the clubbiness of mathematics or a statistical likelihood because of how trees work.
> Pioneering mathematicians Terence Tao and Lenhard Ng were one-percenters, as were Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Google co-founder Sergey Brin and musician Stefani Germanotta (Lady Gaga), who all passed through the Hopkins centre.
Didn't expect Lady Gaga to be listed although it confirms one of my pet theories. It has long been my opinion that success in STEM fields correlates with general high intelligence which will affect strongly with a person's success in her field, be it maths or sculpture.
It's only anecdotal but I've noticed that people that have a good grasp of maths when young also excel in their other favorite activities, even if it's physical activities.
EDIT: more thoughts on the article
> In Europe, support for research and educational programmes for gifted children has ebbed, as the focus has moved more towards inclusion.
This is truly a pity, and it's not only about educational programmes, but the general mentality in Europe is against competitiveness, and sometimes people will even frown at you if you suggest that there truly are different intelligence levels among the population.
Meanwhile in East Europe (namely Romania, Moldova, Ukraine, Russia, probably other countries too but I don't know anything about them) competitiveness between children is crazy high in some circles and that's why a lot of the best engineers come from that area.
There was a comment here the other day on a post about interviewing saying that russian candidates were much more likely to excel at technical interviews than european candidates, and in my experience many more engineers in this area are really dedicated to their work.
How many "pioneering mathematicians" are not one-percenters? If the answer is "99%", then there's no bias in favor of those who do well on the SAT. The article doesn't give that information.
A similar question can be asked of famous musicians.
How does Lady Gaga's success support, much less confirm, your pet theory? Did she have success in a STEM field? I see no mention of STEM in her Wikipedia biography. The article points out that while the original evaluation was based a math assessment, "[l]ater, researchers included the verbal portion and other assessments", so perhaps she was a one-percenter in verbal, not math.
From her bio, she put a lot of work into the arts. That would suggest a different possibility, which is that someone who has a good grasp of any subject would also excel in other favorite activities.
"How many "pioneering mathematicians" are not one-percenters? If the answer is "99%", then there's no bias in favor of those who do well on the SAT. The article doesn't give that information."
The article doesn't give that information, but unless you believe that being in the top 1% is actively harmful to becoming a pioneering mathematician, the odds ratios of they give for doctorates gives you a good idea, since no one will be a pioneering mathematician without earning a doctorate in math these days. Something like 25% of them have doctorates, compared to the general population which is more like ~1.7%, so simply going by proportion and ignoring the curves in https://my.vanderbilt.edu/smpy/files/2013/02/Ferriman_20101.... and the extreme tail behaviors of these things, at least 0.25*0.01 / 0.017 = 15% of pioneering mathematicians will have been 1%ers. (Take into account the tail, and it'll go up quite a bit.)
> Meanwhile in East Europe (namely Romania, Moldova, Ukraine, Russia, probably other countries too but I don't know anything about them) competitiveness between children is crazy high in some circles and that's why a lot of the best engineers come from that area.
Competitiveness is worth nothing, if you compete to just get the best grades for the exam. Most of the exams have close to no value in real life and do not force you to think by yourself but to rehash hundred times what you have seen before. The opposite of creative thought.
> Most of the exams have close to no value in real life and do not force you to think by yourself but to rehash hundred times what you have seen before. The opposite of creative thought.
True, but to some extent rigor and discipline are required to achieve, creative or otherwise. And discipline can be learned. I'm not supporting the hyper competitive nature of some schooling systems, but at least some can benefit from learning how to survive (or thrive) in competitive systems.
I'd put Stand-Up Comedians and Auto-Mechanics in there as well. Though not 'traditionally' smart, Comedians are in a cut throat environment to see the world in a different and funny light. Mechanics, the ones not on meth or in the bottle, also need to use as many senses as possible to diagnose and cheaply fix very complicated machines with unknown histories. I have found that even the ok-to-good ones (and there are a LOT of bad comedians and mechanics) are very logical people and can easily grok any Calculus, it's just that their other personality traits (ADD, tactile needs, love of attention and 'the laugh') and circumstances move them towards their chosen fields.
I've heard a few comedians say they developed their humour as a shield to deflect attention away from failings in some other part of their life, often academic struggles.
I once had a manager who said he played football with a Proat one point. He said this of the game, "he wasn't the strongest on the field, he wasn't the fastest or the tallest, but man - he knew exactly where to be when the rest of us looked like we were just guessing."
That's why in my theory (and experience) mathematicians and afghans are by far the best football players. Ha!
In all our university football tournaments mathematicians beat the hell out of all other faculties. Not on the big field, but in the hall, with 3-5 players. They expected where the ball would flow, and how it should flow best.
Afghans? This happened with street ball, a super small field like basketball, with 2 players + goal keeper. The Afghan teams I know in the homeless soccer worldchampionships became top 3 of the world a couple of times already. They are small, not athletic. They have athletically no chance against Nigeria or Ghana, who just push them around. Or the traditional European teams. Or technically against Brazil, who are masters to play alone, but together with a partner they struggle. But they are fast, and they play like mathematicians, they know exactly how his partner would react, and vice versa. They love to play, even if on the big field they would have no chance, athletically.
Chile, Mexico and Afghans are the best actually. Maybe because they are small, but mostly I think because they train a lot on the streets, for fun by themselves and know how to play together.
I see the arts as an intersect of science (explaining our own world) and engineering (building new worlds). It's building a world with the goal to touch humans emotionally by referencing our own one. Being good at both is what makes a good artist - see also Renaissance artists like Da Vinci or the best filmmakers like Kubrick and Kurosawa.
While I'm all for the logical/rational ideal of extracting the most amount of potential from people, but competition needs to be treated with care.
How do you propose competitiveness be constructively harnessed? If you are proposing selective schooling etc. there is a danger of creating social segregation which can reduce social mobility and as a result social cohesion. There is also a social benefit to both the talented and less-talented from interfacing - the talented can learn humility while the others can gain inspiration for example.
The trouble with competition is that it creates an order of magnitude more losers than it does winners. Yet it is the foundational element of nearly all school systems in the world. Students don't just get accepted to every school they apply to; they have to compete to "get in." The basis of that competition is grades.
If you want to fix competition in education you must first do something about grades and how they influence outcomes rather than learning.
> If you are proposing selective schooling etc. there is a danger of creating social segregation which can reduce social mobility and as a result social cohesion
I get the abstract reason why one might think this in a vacuum, OTOH, we have real societies with selective schooling in place -- is there any evidence from experience to support that in net this hurts social mobility and/or cohesion?
> If you are proposing selective schooling etc. there is a danger of creating social segregation which can reduce social mobility and as a result social cohesion.
In Romania we have elite high-schools where admissions is based on exams (mostly math). This means that the pupils a class will be of somewhat similar intelligence, and makes things easier for teachers. The best pupils are encouraged to participate in olympiads, and the worst usually transfer to lower-rated institutions. I think this system works quite well (apart from the fact that the very lowly rated high-schools are completely useless).
One of the best things a "gifted" child can learn is the value of those different than themselves, and how to work with others to not only reach their own capabilities but encourage the capabilities of others who may not be "gifted."
I personally feel that a balance of 'normal' life as a child along with a rigorous and expansive set of opportunities for that child to explore their gifts would be healthiest and most productive for the gifted and the societies they inhabit.
> > In Europe, support for research and educational programmes for gifted children has ebbed, as the focus has moved more towards inclusion.
Actually, that is the one part of the article I was rather skeptical about. Certainly in Germany there's an abundance of programs designed especially to nurture gifted pupils. They range from extra-curricular activities in school to summer academies and "early studying", where pupils take university classes one day a week instead of going to school.
Yes, we also have a lot of inclusion efforts, and that's a Good Thing, but we definitely don't neglect the other side of the intellectual spectrum.
From the OP: " clear is how much the precociously gifted outweigh the rest of society in their influence."
But ... all the students they followed had been through their program. Doesn't that equally prove that its clear how much those going through their program outweigh the rest in their influence? Isn't this just some kind of confirmation bias?
>Meanwhile in East Europe (namely Romania, Moldova, Ukraine, Russia, probably other countries too but I don't know anything about them) competitiveness between children is crazy high in some circles and that's why a lot of the best engineers come from that area.
I see this claim often and when pressed it looks like there's a lot of social pressure to "learn the test," and the people those cultures produce are vastly uncreative, difficult to work with, and often very dishonest (openly cheat for example), but test well in their cultures.
There's a big difference between talent and schooling. The latter can be gamed, and often is.
> “A high test score tells you only that a person has high ability and is a good match for that particular test at that point in time,” says Matthews.
If Matthews is correct that scores are transient, then we'd expect test scores to have little to no predictive ability. In other words, we'd expect the rate of career achievement among high test takers to be approximately equal to the rate of achievement among low test takers.
But this claim is directly contradicted by actual evidence:
> Follow-up surveys—at ages 18, 23, 33 and 48—backed up his hunch. A 2013 analysis found a correlation between the number of patents and peer-refereed publications that people had produced and their earlier scores on SATs and spatial-ability tests. The SAT tests jointly accounted for about 11% of the variance; spatial ability accounted for an additional 7.6%.
Depending on how you define it, you could say my research is in this general area. My sense of how to interpret these sorts of findings has changed greatly over time, and become much more moderate and humble. Discussions over these issues tend to be very heated and people oversimplify issues on both ends.
These tests are predictive, and as you point out, it's disingenuous to claim otherwise. They're measuring something valid. However, they're doing so relatively poorly, or rather, roughly. Even the quote you cite suggests that the total amount of variance accounted for was about 19%, which isn't too shabby by any means, but is also very crude when you think about implications for real-world consequences. Interpreting that 19% also becomes very murky, when you consider factors like teaching to tests, that tests like those are used for academic and career selection, leading to self-fulfilling prophecies. In rare circumstances where researchers have been able to remove some of these effects (for example, due to unusual legal decisions about acceptable use of test scores), the relationship between test scores and career performance has been shown to be very weak in the short-term, and almost non-existent in the long term.
Somewhere underlying the distribution of test scores is some distribution of ability that makes it easier for some people to thrive in certain settings. But ability is just one thing in a long list of things, along with practice, resources and other environmental factors that contribute to success, and sociological dynamics. Add to that test scores being very crude indices of ability to begin with, and you're in a very messy situation.
What's frustrating to me is that there's this sort of all-or-nothing attitude about testing, where tests are seen as useless, or as a perfect indicator of skill or ability. The truth is in-between.
"Even the quote you cite suggests that the total amount of variance accounted for was about 19%, which isn't too shabby by any means, but is also very crude when you think about implications for real-world consequences."
This is 19% after range restriction. They're making the same point that the graph of quartiles does: even after you set an extremely high bar, differences in the test score are still predicting quite a bit of variance despite all the other possible diluting factors like geography/family/test-error/personality/interest/wealth/opportunity... If anything, it shows that institutions aren't being 'crude' enough - if they were using the test scores optimally and extracting all of the signal, the variance would be 0%.
>What's frustrating to me is that there's this sort of all-or-nothing attitude about testing, where tests are seen as useless, or as a perfect indicator of skill or ability. The truth is in-between.
Yes. This is a major point people need to focus on.
I think, to bastardize a famous quote, that testing is the worst simple measure of aptitude, except all the others we've tried. In a perfect world, any admissions/hiring decision would be made after multiple independent in-depth examinations of a candidate's past work, plus extensive interviews. Since that level of vetting is unfeasible for all but a tiny sliver of the most desirable spots, we need ballpark estimates like testing that will be more predictive than coin flips.
I am part of the SMPY study cohort (from 1982) and have another close friend who is from the 1983 or 1984 study cohort. (The qualification at the time was 700 or greater on the SAT Math before age 13. This was, of course "SAT one" scoring system.)
I also spent some in summer camps with other students in the study and have remained casual friends with some of them over the years. I don't see any evidence to suggest that that level of demonstrated ability is transient.
“A high test score tells you only that a person has high ability and is a good match for that particular test at that point in time,” says Matthews.
I have never understood the intention behind this type of statement (which I've seen many variants of commonly espoused). Let X be the event "got a high test score at a particular test at a certain point in time." Is Matthews saying X = X (an uninteresting tautology)? Or is he claiming that X is uncorrelated or not predictive of other variables of interest (career success, ability on other task) which is clearly empirically false.
My read is that expertise carries with it specificity. If you happen to be very good at some X[3], but a test is only effectively measuring ability in X[5], where 3 & 5 are some arbitrary specialisations of a capability X, then your test score may not be particularly high.
This depends on just how specific a skill is, whether or not the particular subject is a polymath or specialist, and much more.
To take an example from athletics, Lance Armstrong was a world-leading cyclist (with, it turns out, the advantage of doping). When he entered into marathon events -- for which his light body frame is generally still an advantage -- he placed respectably, but not as one of the very top finishers. A skills or abilities test for Armstrong had to be specific to his ~60 km cycling distance specialisation.
There is some crossover of many skills, but the deep specialisation, ingrained structures, algorithmic knowledge, solution sapces, bags-of-tricks, etc., that are associated with being best in class (not merely "very good") can be quite complex.
That's a great example and I don't disagree with you.
The way I think about "intelligence" is not to mull over what it "really means" but to think about lots of common "intellectual" tasks (in which aptitude can be measured) that people are interested in: reading, writing, math, programming, solving puzzles, etc. Or ideally, theoretical "potential" in each of these tasks, since one person may put more or less effort into another field.
What's supported by research and anectodal evidence is that if you did principal components analysis on these measured "aptitudes", there would be a principal component explaining a lot of the variation. A good test can try to measure this principal component.
But when you're talking about the very highest levels of specific tasks like cycling or swimming, it would be reasonable to expect that amongst the population of already "elite athletes" there would be less of a dominant first principal component
There are different definitions of intelligence. One I like (though I don't quite find it comprehensive) is David Krakauer (of Santa Fe Institute), "Intelligence is Search". That is: it's a search across an n-dimensional space for a least-cost function.
There's the question of "function for what?", and I'm thinking here something which allows for useful prediction or outmaneuvering an adversary (as with chess).
This gives a set of related or subroutine functions which are required, including many on your list: information acquisitionprocessing, and output. An interesting concept I ran across in the past year or so is that of the medieval curriculum, comprised of the trivium and the quadrivium. The first is further broken down into grammar, logic, and rhetoric, or if you prefer, input (and framing), processing, and output. This tickles my brain.
Another element I'm familiar with is that there comes a point in any skill at which it's somewhat less the things you get right as what you avoid getting wrong that matters. A champion athlete has strength or stamina, but also optimised physiology (Michael Phelps's long arms and torso, short legs, and huge feet, for example, are swimming gold, QED), and not screwing anything up in the event. Nailing starts, turns, finishes, and technique, not getting in your own way.
Further pondering intelligence also brings into the fold what knowledge, wisdom, correctness, and quality are. Interesting questions.
It's a huge stretch to consider patents and peer-refereed publications "actual evidence". Others have taken other approaches and found no correlations.
Features #1-3 do not "rely heavily on intelligence". While intelligence certainly has a role, they rely much more heavily on training. All three also depend on knowing what is interesting, which is more a form of curiosity guided by knowing what other people know than a form of intelligence that can be measured by taking the SAT.
(I don't know enough about #4 or #5 to make a comment.)
People with graduate degrees have higher than average IQ, but people with higher IQ do not necessarily have graduate degrees.
That is, intelligence is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition to get a graduate degree in STEM. The other necessary conditions you mention (training, interest, etc.) are also important, but still require a baseline ability.
Even looking at undergraduate degrees, IQ is a significant factor in what degree is obtained. Physics and astronomy majors have an average of IQ [1] of over 130 -- that's 2 standard deviations above the mean. If interest, training, and hard work alone were sufficient to get a physics degree, we'd see a much lower average IQ among physics students.
I wrote "While intelligence certainly has a role, they rely much more heavily on training".
Everything you wrote just now agrees with my statement.
Originally you wrote "All five rely heavily on intelligence". It is that emphasis on "heavily" that I am disputing. I argue that it's less important than training, though of course not un-important.
I disagree with your interpretation of [1]. You wrote "Physics and astronomy majors have an average of IQ [1] of over 130". However, your [1] shows not a measure of IQ but an approximate estimate of IQ based on the cumulative SAT.
After showing the plots, your [1] then points out the correlation is only with the quantitative/analytical section of the SAT, and not the verbal, commenting "we see why this IQ estimation is potentially misleading."
> This tells us that the original plot is actually showing preference for quantitative majors: The higher the estimated IQ, the more quantitative/analytical the major, and the fewer women enrolling in those majors.
> This brings up an interesting question of how valuable the SAT is as a standardized test across all majors, if a higher SAT score is really only indicating that the student is better at solving quantitative/analytical problems. Not all majors require a high analytical aptitude, after all.
Your source therefore does not seem to be making the statement that "Physics and astronomy majors have an average of IQ of over 130" but that physics and astronomy require a high analytical aptitude, which is correlated to how well a student does on a test for analytical aptitude, which is correlated to the cumulative SAT score, which is correlated to g factor. That's a weaker conclusion than what you described.
In any case, undergraduate study does not require the ability to identify what is scientifically interesting, which is a key point of my objection to your original statement.
EDIT: Also, your [1] points out "men and women have about the same IQ" then shows that physics and astronomy has a greatly disproportionate number of men than women. Thus, being male is a stronger correlation for those undergraduate degrees than intelligence. Thus suggests that some other factor than general intelligence is biasing the numbers.
Again, you are only exposing group bias. Doctorates are largely predicated on test scores - they are a filter on who can access a defense committee - of course those with doctorates will have higher prior test scores; those with high test score were intentionally picked as doctoral candidates, in part, because of their test score(s).
What I think you're trying to say is that intelligence is irrelevant to getting a Doctorate because test scores, not intelligence, are the factor. But of course doctorates are based on test scores. That's because test scores are an indicator of intelligence, and so admissions committees filter based on test scores in order to filter on intelligence. So that means yes, admissions depends on test scores, but no, test scores are not independent of intelligence.
That is:
P(high IQ | high test score) > P(low IQ | high test score)
What you're trying to say is that getting a doctorate a degree doesn't depend on intelligence, and is just an indicator of some "group bias". What I'm saying is that test scores are correlated with IQ. This implies that if you do not have high intelligence, it is going to be extremely difficult to get the test scores required to get into graduate school, and thus intelligence is required for admission.
In other words, intelligence is indeed a necessary but not sufficient condition to get a graduate degree in STEM.
No one thinks intelligence is irrelevant to getting a PhD.
The question is, how do you know that getting a PhD relies "heavily on intelligence"? How do you know that intelligence has a strong or weak correlation? Or that there isn't some sort of threshold, where an effective IQ of at least 90 is important, but 140 is no more important?
What other factors have you considered, and why have you concluded they are less significant to getting a PhD than the intelligence that can be measured by the SAT?
jsprogrammer has, I think, a different point. Let's suppose that everyone has an equal chance of getting a PhD should they be admitted into graduate school. Let's also suppose that the selection committees believe that test scores are correlated with intelligence, and that only those with a high test score (and presumably higher intelligence) should get into graduate school.
This would end up with PhDs who all had good test scores, simply because of the selection bias. It would not reveal anything about the underlying population, because it confounds any association between intelligence and getting a PhD.
The people who get a PhD this way become members of a selection committee. They know the process worked for them, and repeat it, making this a stable system.
How do you know that PhD students now aren't selected in part because of a cultural belief which places a higher weight on test scores than is justified? How much of an effect does that bias have on the correlations you keep pointing to?
OK, let's use your hypothetical that if we accept everyone, that they will have equal graduate attainment (regardless of test scores).
Then, we would expect that there would be little correlation between testing scores and outcomes. Especially whether they get a degree. For instance, someone who gets a lower test score will have the same outcomes as someone who gets a higher test score.
But that's not what the research suggests:
> The report, which examined 1,753 studies, found that GRE scores could help predict students' graduate grade point averages, first-year GPAs, ratings from faculty, exam scores, degree attainment and number of citations earned. The specific subject tests were even stronger indicators of students' performance.
I specifically said that intelligence was a factor.
The hypothetical was meant to show that your analysis was insufficiently sensitive, not to posit that the hypothetical was actually the case.
You have an odd habit of pointing to secondary and preprint material, rather than the primary literature. Your APA links to several papers, including http://www.drtomascp.com/uploads/HungryMind_PPS_2011.pdf , titled "The Hungry Mind: Intellectual Curiosity Is the Third Pillar of Academic Performance". It concludes:
> The current study suggests that traditional sets of predictors of academic performance, notably general intelligence and Conscientiousness, should be accompanied by a third factor: intellectual curiosity. Jensen (1998) stated that “[general intelligence] g acts only as a threshold variable that specifies the essential minimum ability required for different kinds of achievement. Other, non-g special abilities and talents, along with certain personality factors ..., are also critical determinants of educational and vocational success” (p. 544–545). A remarkable number of studies on determinants of academic
achievement have focused exclusively on ability and effort; the present findings, however, recommend further expanding the “g-nexus” for a better understanding of individual differences in academic performance. The latter requires—beyond intelligence and effort—a hungry mind.
It does say "intelligence is the single most powerful predictor of academic performance", then said:
> intelligence sustained the strongest effect on academic performance with a path weight
of .35. TIE and Conscientiousness had slightly lower, identical path parameters of .20.
I believe that means that the other two legs together are more important than intelligence alone.
The specific report isn't linked to in the article you posted, but I wonder how closely the first year grad curiculi resembled GRE tests and why the tests were apparently not predictive beyond a single academic year.
I'm not sure what those Q1-Q4 numbers are, but I don't think they are quartiles. I went to a TIP ceremony for kids who'd scored well on the SATs in 7th grade. There were a few hundred kids there (I think something like 1000 got you there?), a few dozen with 1200 something, and one kid up on stage with a 1400.
Step 1: Take highly able kids who score in the top 1% in entrance exams or can get SAT scores of 700 at age 13.
Step 2: Sort these highly able kids into quartiles by their test scores.
Result: Even within the top 1% of IQ, the relative ability still matters. I.e. there is no "cutoff" for becoming a great scientist or inventor; smarter is always better.
Didn't see any answer on how to "raise a genius". The presumption is that we want more geniuses and that Ph.D.s are precious resources to society. Is there also a tacit belief here in the Great Man theory of history?
The message here is, well if you don't get a Ph.D., make a lot of money. If you don't make a lot of money, get a patent. If you don't get a patent, at least get published. There are other things that we also want to be able to cultivate other than those I bet.
When a group of geniuses could build a nuclear weapon to take out a whole country, I believe the interest in genius started to spark. Before then, what was the icon of a a genius (I'm thinking before Einstein became iconic)?
The article is interesting, what were the lessons though?
There are other measures of value to society other than STEM publications, income, patents, and Ph.D.s It's often the outliers that don't even fit the Gaussian that are more interesting to me. (Feynman said he scored 120 something on an IQ test.)
the idea is that more resources are needed to nurture top talent, instead of these smart people being neglected. Cognitive capital is like any resource, and it should not go to waste.
The article is short on actual lessons learned from the study. Two representative paragraphs:
SMPY researchers say that even modest interventions—for example, access to challenging material such as college-level Advanced Placement courses—have a demonstrable effect. Among students with high ability, those who were given a richer density of advanced precollegiate educational opportunities in STEM went on to publish more academic papers, earn more patents and pursue higher-level careers than their equally smart peers who didn't have these opportunities.
Despite SMPY's many insights, researchers still have an incomplete picture of giftedness and achievement. “We don't know why, even at the high end, some people will do well and others won't,” says Douglas Detterman, a psychologist who studies cognitive ability at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. “Intelligence won't account for all the differences between people; motivation, personality factors, how hard you work and other things are important.”
This article is a bit of a mess regarding who it is talking about. It hops around and changes it's target constantly.
Sometimes it is talking about people in the .01%, AKA, 1 in 10000, so actual geniuses. Sometimes discussing people in the above average range, IQ of 120+, which is about 10% of the population (depending on your test), as well as people in gifted programs, which again, depending on your test is the top 1 or 2%.
These are three different cohorts with different needs. The top 10% need to be continually challenged so they can find satisfying careers. These are your class president types, people who really excel within the program, I think society serves these types well.
The top 1% are your gifted people (again, I know definitions vary), and they usually need something extra. Depends on the person, but it might be extra math or extra latin studies, or the ability to do side projects, but they generally flourish with something special.
The top .01% though? I have no idea. Most here on HN are in one of the other two groups (sorry, me too). The article seems to say that they just need to skip grades. But it's hard to tell if they are right since they are talking about a moving target.
> Most here on HN are in one of the other two groups
What would make you say that? Since there is no actual filter and no one is actually forcing any requirement, it should be that most of any group are somewhat similar to the standard distribution of the population, so most on HN should be like most of any other group, bog standard average.
The topics and the community are both a filter and forcing a requirement. From my own observation I would wager that a majority here are in that top 10% .
People are not just randomly assigned to reading and commenting on Hacker News. It's an intellectual community that would naturally attract those who have such skills.
Of the users of this site with top 100 karma there's at least two people that are unquestionably in the top 0.01% of math ability. (They'd both pass the 0.001% cutoff, too.) And there'd be a third if we went to the top 150 karma (basing this off how karma tails off on https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders).
That would be very unlikely if HN was a random assortment of the population, or a random assortment of the top 25%.
If you go by the "engineering" part of that, then average would be 125, if you go by "computer occupations" then average is a little over 110.
Regarding entrepreneurs, there isn't much data. I found this quote
"A more recent working paper by Simeon Djankov of the World Bank, Yingyi Qian of the University of California at Berkeley, Gérard Roland of the University of California at Berkeley, and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya of the Center for Economic and Policy Research examined “400 entrepreneurs and 540 non-entrepreneurs of the same age, gender, education and location in 7 Brazilian cities” and found that the “entrepreneurs scored quite higher on cognitive scores…”
Either way, the data does seem to agree that people on HN should be higher than average.
I would also argue that the community here will tend to dissuade people who make nonsensical arguments from sticking around, which would filter out people as well.
Except it is, you are trying to put forward that IQ among engineers is high as some proof that HN must be of a higher general intelligence than the rest of the population.
I said IQ is bullshit, the implication being it can not be used to prove your position. For IQ to support your position, it must be a valid measurement of intelligence.
My original post was all about the distribution and rarity of people with different IQ results and how the article confuses the three different cohorts. Those three cohorts are defined by IQ. The terms "above average," "gifted" and "genius" all refer to IQ scores.
I agree with you that using these terms in the colloquial sense is undefined, and therefore useless to discuss. Hence, why I wasn't using that meaning of the word "intelligent."
If my argument was that HN commenters had higher intelligence and I was referring to an amorphous concept, then yes, my position would not be possible to defend.
However, my position was that the majority of commenters on here would be in the top 10%, as defined by IQ tests, since that is what the original article was talking about.
[Edit: I mean, what would I even be saying to say someone is in the top 10%, 1% or .01% of a subjective, poorly defined quality? It would be nonsense. I would have to be referring to something measurable to even try to divide people into cohorts by such measure.
Unless you actually think I am sitting there looking at people and saying hmm, I think, yes, you are better than 99 out of 100 people I know in terms of intelligence. And you, yes, you, you are better than 9,999 out of 10,000 people. You are just that smart. That's just silly.
And come to think of it, if I was referring to a subjective quality, then I could decide who is the best, and I could just declare that HN commentators are in the top 10%, because well, that's the the way I feel about it]
IQ is a valid measure of intelligence. Individuals' outcomes on different intelligence tests are positively correlated with one another, you see. And they're correlated with external metrics of ability, of course.
I get quite depressed when I read articles like this. I'm resentful of the fact that my early academic performance was merely above average, rather than exceptional. Some days I feel confident in my abilities and my plans for the future; other days, I fear that it's already too late for me to accomplish anything of note.
Don't fret; everyone in our generation was raised to believe we were the 1 in 10,000. That simply can't be true 99.99% of the time.
We're a generation that needs therapy to realize that a stable, six-figure job as a mid-level engineer at 30 isn't failure. Our expectations (some might say entitlement) were set so unreasonably high that most of us have no chance of meeting them.
Well, that's simply unacceptable to me. A stable six-figure job is failure. If I'm fated to try and fail for the rest of my life to break into the 1 in 10,000, then so be it.
I think the idea is that the 1-in-10,000 in this context is that it's not something you can "break into"; you're either born gifted or you're not.
It's really hard for our generation to accept that some people really are born "better" -- which is exactly why the article mentions the education system now focuses on bringing up lower performers rather than identifying and accelerating gifted students.
I'm a strong believer in the idea that some people are born better, you don't have to convince me.
The extent of my abilities is still unknown to me. I know what I want to achieve and I will continue trying to achieve it until I succeed or I am dead. To accept anything less is equivalent to death.
My goal is to be one of the most influential video game designers of this century. I may not be considered the absolute greatest (rankings like that are very fickle anyway, and never universally agreed upon, even in the sciences). But I do want my works to be considered necessary for any future survey of the major works of this period.
> My goal is to be one of the most influential video game designers of this century.
Shouldn't your goal be to make great games? Otherwise, aren't you striving for a goal defined by other people? For goals like yours, politics and personality can matter as much as the work itself.
If you are enjoying the journey you are on, then go for it (and I hope you are spending as much time on your social network as you are on games). Otherwise, I'd urge you to consider the opportunity costs of a narrow, intense focus.
That was an implied sub-goal. The verification criteria I gave was merely to illustrate what the concrete results of my endeavors might look like. If I said flatly "I want to make great games," then someone might reasonably respond "how do you know you're succeeding?"
>For goals like yours, politics and personality can matter as much as the work itself.
This is quite true. But Paul Graham has a great quote which I think might be applicable here: "Everyone in the sciences secretly believes that mathematicians are smarter than they are... And so there is a great temptation to work on problems you can treat formally, rather than problems that are, say, important."
Being influential and making something great aren't necessarily linked. In music, for example, lots of musicians I adore list Captain Beefheart as an influence. Captain Beefheart never really achieved much commercial success. I don't like his stuff at all.
Anyway, I sincerely hope that your work towards making something great is enjoyable or at least doesn't consume all of your time. Life is short and there's more things worth experiencing than we have time for.
Sorry to break it to you, but the most influential video game designers were born in the 70s.
They've made Doom, Baldur's Gate, Fallout 1-2, Everquest, Master of Orion and all the other classics in the 90s and very early 2000s.
Most games released today are either donationware (WoT) or completely derivative works (think long running series like CoD or sports games), or survival-game clones like No Man's Sky (and about 500 others)
Your best bet would probably be to join Valve and get them to release Episode 3 if you ever want to get any renown and not just endlessly try to push your games on Greenlight.
You have a very limited conception of what video games are capable of.
This is like going up to an aspiring writer in ancient Greece and saying "The Odyssey has already been written, there is nothing more to be done." Not realizing that 2,000 years later, authors like Joyce and Nabokov would still be breaking new ground.
Assuming the human race endures long enough, video games are at the very beginning of what is going to be a very long and interesting history.
Star Citizen isn't even revolutionary though; it's more or less a modern re-imagining of EVE Online. It'll likely devolve into spreadsheet hell just like EVE -- reality is boring, and most of the real world is tracked in spreadsheets.
I do think there is some possibility for innovation in gaming with AR/VR, but I also agree we've probably reached the point of diminishing returns with what we can do with current control schemes (monitor + mouse/keyboard/gamepad).
It's funny you should mention EVE Online, because it's the only MMORPG I've ever played seriously and the only game I've played for longer than a year that kept my interest. It was also pretty revolutionary for 2003 when it came out.
The highest level of gameplay involved very little spreadsheet hell and a lot more skill, leadership and coordination that one might think originally if they did not have a strong corporation to align with. It's true that there a LOT of numbers behind the gameplay that you had to consider, but spreadsheet hell was a result of poor UI/UX choices and not necessarily of game design.
If Star Citizen can replicate that, but with better graphics, and personal ship control (instead of EVE's point and click) - they will already be a success in my book.
Please forgive my blunt opinion, but I think you're incorrectly equating your potential with your legacy. Legacy is greatly influenced by achieving your potential, but ultimately outside of your control. It depends on timing, politics, other people, etc. You cannot control whether you will be recognized or not. You can only wake up each day and do your best. It sounds corny but imo its the only sane way to go about achieving your potential.
One of my further goals is to disabuse people of notions such as this.
As it happens, though, I'm already too late to be the initiator of this sort of cultural shift. Universities like NYU and CMU already offer MFAs in game design. There are conferences and journals dedicated to game studies. So the wheels are already in motion.
Reminds of this experiment in a subway station where they put a world class violinist with a stradivarius to play some of the most highly regarded violin music. The only person that stopped for this high art performance was one that recognized the musician.
The point being that high art can be right in front of us and we may miss it.
I'm not sure if I want to go into details, since I haven't decided if I want to link any of my internet accounts to my professional identity yet... perhaps when it's released I will come back and make an announcement. :)
To get to 95% income percentile, you need to earn at least $190k a year. I'd be very interested in seeing how many gifted students don't reach, say, 75% percentile, which is around $90k a year, and why.
Not only it's not a failure, it's the optimal happiness zone. It's enough that all the basic needs are met and there is a decent amount of freedom and low stress, and low enough to be able to keep a modest mentality.
In my college class there were two kids I would call absolute geniuses, possibly the smartest folk I have ever met. One wrote his senior thesis his second year there (on compilers and type theory) and another was a young philosophy transfer student from Deep Springs who regularly owned and outwitted professors in class to such a degree that rumors abounded he would be offered a faculty position after graduating. And he was. But he didn't take the position. Why? Because he killed himself a few days later, jumped in front of a train. The kid who wrote his senior thesis sophomore year got a job working for Google when he was nineteen (this was back when Google was still cool and considered the elite of the elite) and killed himself before his 21st birthday.
My point is that academic performance and intellect doesn't mean shit outside the academy and is a terrible indicator to use for success or accomplishment. It's never too late.
I won't ever know how people like that process the world but my guess is that they are attuned to the sheer horror of it in a way that most people can't conceive of, and aren't able to distract themselves from this with other pursuits. Following this taking their own lives becomes the only solution they can envision.
I'm a 22 year old student and developer. I took a test that said I was gifted as a kid. Since I was very young, I've sensed 'sheer horror' constantly. It's when I see my friends and family, and they describe their aspirations that they won't reach for lack of insight; its the people that get stuck in a local minimum of cognotive dissonance who decide not to seek the global minimum. The coming death of the world is the strongest and most painful, because to help avoid that is to decimate my interpersonal relationships in pursuit of a craft that I could use to grow a business that might have some shred of succeeding and granting me the power of influence. I can't meet people without perceiving their flaws that they won't acknowledge. Every day I am appalled by my mistakes and failures of the week, yet my standards are so high that I cannot even express my grief without people rolling their eyes at my lofty goals.
On the face of it, this is nonsensical, and highly offensive to people who are actually suffering. My first intuition is that no safe, warm, and dry college student could be "attuned to the sheer horror of the world" on the basis of their intelligence alone.
On the other hand, you clearly have to be in a lot of pain if you're driven to kill yourself, and we shouldn't underestimate the degree of torture that one can inflict on oneself with one's own mind.
Yes, I think you are right. These were two very well-off people who basically had a meal ticket to success and accomplishment but chose a different path. I don't think it's because they were 'attuned' to suffering moreso than anyone (it doesn't take a genius to realize the world is a horrible, cruel place) but rather their immense mental faculties took up so much of their mind's resources that their well-being and emotional intellect suffered. At least, that's what it seemed to me but we will never know. Neither left a note.
My academic performance was average, but I did place first in a math Olympiad in my school. That said, I was competing with kids that didn't know algebra and I got basically every question right.
That's why you need to invest in index funds (ideally the S&P 500 or Nasdaq 100), high-IQ companies - specifically Google Amazon and Facebook- or use the inverse ETF decay strategy that makes 20-40 percent a year.
Buying in-the-money call options using 3-1 leverage on Google, Amazon, and Facebook has returned 200% since 2013 vs. 30% for S&P 500.
The motivation behind this strategy is that average-IQ people can make good money piggybacking off the creative contributions of America's smartest .1%. Facebook, Amazon, and Google stock will keep rising, as part of this trend, allowing average people to profit by joining the ride.
But existential problems are harder to solve than money ones, and even the smartest are faced with them (hence philosophy as a subject).
I was with you until the individual stock purchase and leverage bit. For most people this is NOT a wise strategy as they have neither the investing experience nor savings to gamble like that.
The backtest of the strategy I developed risks $10k to make $100k since 2013. It attains maximum drawdown if all three stocks (AMZN FB GOOG ) fall 30% because 3-1 leverage is used. But since it's an option strategy, you don't risk more than the $10k invested. Yeah there is risk, but GOOG AMZN and FB have a combined market cap of about 1 trillion. It could be modified to be more diverse but returns are less. The sharpe ratio fr the strategy (which is a way of quantifying risk vs. returns) is 2 vs .80 for the S&P 500 in that period.
This strategy could be a good way for someone with a small amount of money to make quick returns and then later move to a more conservative strategy.
-- I got my first algebra book when I was 4, and aced the subject immediately.
-- I had one IQ test score higher than the one that got Marilyn vos Savant into the Guinness Book of World Records.
-- The National Merit folks thought that I was the youngest winner of their scholarships until that day.
-- I got a math PhD from Harvard when I was 19.
-- At least up to a point, I check a lot of the usual boxes, like music and chess.
That said, I was not some kind of math genius. Ofer Gabber and Ran Donagi were at Harvard when I was, having started in grad school at 16 and 17 respectively (I started at 16), and both were clearly better at math than I was, even adjusted for age.
More particularly:
-- When I was young, I was really, really good at keeping a problem in my mind and worrying at it until I made progress. I could fall asleep doing that and keep going when I woke up. I understand that's quite unusual, and as I aged I lost the ability myself.
-- I'm not particularly good at spatial reasoning. I can power my way through some of it by raw inferencing, at which I am indeed very good, but that's about it.
-- I can learn a bit about any subject and appreciate key issues in it very, very quickly. That's reflected in my actual career, and also in the large number of subjects I dabbled in in school.
-- I probably COULD have been world-class somewhere in the vicinity of economics/public policy (as academic areas). But I was burned out on academia at age 21, after 9 years at universities, left for the business world, and never went back.
-- I don't know how good I'd have been as a computer scientist. I never tried.
I'm one of those gifted children (at least by the measure of standardized tests) who were missed by the people looking for them, I reckon. I was always in the .999 percentile on those (SAT, ACT, GRE, LSAT), was very good at math and loved it at a young age.
Somewhere in my teens I lost the desire to achieve all this stuff discussed in the article. Intellectually it would not have been difficult, but emotionally I didn't give a shit. I didn't really mature until I was in my 30s or 40s (and some would say, not yet!).
Sometimes I think, well, I wasted my life. Then again, although I haven't done anything noteworthy, I have no regrets for the life I have lived so far, even though many would say I "squandered" a lot of talent. The core values instilled in me by my parents are intact and actually stronger, and those values don't place much emphasis on reaching the pinnacle of success as described in the article. Frankly, the responsibility for shaping the world into what it has become would be almost too much to bear.
My advice would be that if you are one of those high achieving geniuses, it is worth thinking about yet again whether what you value is the best it can be. If you have a very gifted child, be extraordinarily careful about who you allow to influence them for as long as you can. Teach them your values, and make sure they're worthwhile.
I still recall a story about Thomas Aquinas in his old age. He realized that his magnum opus, the Summa Theologica, was worthless vanity and tried to destroy it. The professor or author who told the story said, "Fortunately, he was prevented from doing so." But was it fortunate? Who better to judge than its author what its true value was? How many of these people will find small comfort in their accomplishments when they reach a ripe old age?
But talking this way is very unpopular, I realize.
It seems weird to me that nobody seems to see the evidence: as a parent you just want your kids to be happy. Happy in the correct way, which means long-term happiness, built with good cultural background, reasonable social skills, constructive hobbies, ability to have some of those good friends, etc.
Most of these are not achieved if you're kid is "super smart". Being the father of Einstein is probably very good for the ego, but "being Einstein" is a curse. (Same with pop or movie stars: people that get a lot of attention are less happy.)
I think this isn't universal. "Tiger mother"-style parenting[1] doesn't seem optimized for happiness, and whatever impulse is behind punishing or occasionally murdering your children for premarital sex[2] doesn't seem happiness-focused either.
Sure honor killing is an exception, but tiger mothers will tell you that they work hard to make sure their kids will be happy in their adult life. Maybe I wouldn't agree with their definition of happiness, because to me bring the best is very far from it. Being able to ensure high pressure, however, is a condition of happiness in many places.
It doesn't really matter if being "super smart" makes your kid happier or not; they are who they are. If they're "super smart, academic interests will likely have intrinsic rewards, and supporting that is going to increase happiness.
Telling one of these kids to shut the book and watch tv isn't going to make them happier.
Shut the book and watch tv (and eat chocolate bars) is the sure way to low self esteem, you'd never go that way. Your kid being super smart doesn't matter here.
Also most parents will believe their kid is smarter than average, no need to encourage this illusion which can hurt a lot when you have to face reality.
This is certainly true, but there is another way to think about it. If you suspect that some kid (including your own) will be likely to make some moderate-scale positive contribution to the world (e.g. invention of the telephone) do you have some moral obligation to ensure that the kid has the training, resources, and encouragement to do so?
Essentially, can you weigh the potential benefits to humanity against that child's preferences?
In theory this is an interesting argument bit I feel that in practice it relies on too much hypothetical thinking. There's no way to predict what such a contribution might even look like in our era.
Yes. If your kid is obviously a piano genius at five and asks for a good master you should provide. But be careful to not project your own dreams onto your kids. No need to push.
There are several kinds of happiness. You seem to be describing contentment. What about the happiness that comes from knowing that you are the very best? The ego is a very powerful motivator of human behavior...just look around you for proof that everyone wants fame or notoriety of some kind.
I don't think contentment is equatable to happiness. Specifically there's a misconception that people that are extremely happy resign themselves to contently doing nothing. But the opposite is the case -- happy people achieve the best of their potential, make the best decisions, and feel more motivated to seek out new (perhaps creative, challenging) tasks.
> just look around you for proof that everyone wants fame or notoriety of some kind
I think another way to look at that is -- everyone wants to be socially accepted, respected, and loved.
Was Albert Einstein cursed? It seemed that he lived a full life. He married, was a respected lecturer for the entirety of his life even after his peak in his mid-20s.
I feel like we put too much weight on the idea of detecting intelligence in children. I always did really well on all tests as a kid, getting 100% on assessment tests and crap. But I'm a total dumbass. Just look at my comment history.
Just raise your kid the best you can, if you are trying to purposely craft a genius you'll probably just instead make someone with serious performance anxiety and neurosis.
I skimmed the article pretty quickly because I was looking for the answer posed by the title and rightly expecting 90% background and filler stories. I didn't find much in the way of answers... Let me know if I missed anything.
Why some kids excel greatly beyond most others is still pretty mysterious. Don't call them gifted. High school is not a great social environment for introverts to learn in. Just give them access to more advanced material. Spacial ability may play an important role and we aren't focusing on it much.
The problem with studies like these is that, in almost all fields, we find that the average is much better than the average of 50-100 years ago while the top is only slightly better.
This holds across things that even have physical components like athletics or music. The virtuosos of yesteryear may be as good as the virtuosos of today (and I dispute that) but the average orchestra player is WAY better today than even some of the best players of 100 years ago. Similarly, the average athlete today is WAY better than the average athlete of 50 years ago.
> “... these people really do control our society,” says Jonathan Wai, a psychologist at the Duke University Talent Identification Program ... "The kids who test in the top 1% tend to become our eminent scientists and academics, our Fortune 500 CEOs and federal judges, senators and billionaires”
The article assumes that promoting these super-bright people and geniuses is the way to solve the difficult problems the rest of us face. There's a faith in the generosity and altruism of these high-performers.
But, I see plenty of selfishness in their behavior too.
It seems plausible that the top layer of brilliant geniuses is creating as many problems for the rest of us as it is solving. Maybe the top layer of brilliant geniuses mostly focuses on work that is personally enriching (e.g. financial engineering, patent lawsuits, investing in 140-character-type startups, pharmaceuticals that don't actually cure diseases, etc)
Maybe what society needs is not "more geniuses" but a better system of regulations and incentives for existing geniuses.
Yep that is what I instantly thought of when reading this. I have no problem accepting that plenty of people are just smarter and more competent than I ever will be, but it will be difficult for me to swallow that they are actually automatically helpful. If they were, we'd probably live in some sort of utopia by now.
California seems like an interesting case. A disproportionate share of Nobel prize winners and other exceedingly bright people live here.
At the same time California has a large number of impoverished residents, a huge backlog of unfunded repair work on roads and bridges, huge unfunded worker pension obligations, much of the nation's worst traffic, a housing shortage for the middle and lower classes, severe water shortages in various places (like East Porterville), a persistent diversity problem in tech employment, a low credit rating, low per-capita spending on education, state college and university funding shortfalls, mediocre educational results at the elementary and secondary school levels, etc.
As someone interested in education (of self and of others) and generally interested in the notion of talent itself, I have been trying to form my own personal understanding of what it means to be talented.
My fundamental belief is that almost anything can be learned under the right instruction. Talent determines two things:
1 - your upper ceiling of "achievement" in a particular dimension, and
2 - how far you can progress within a given dimension without instruction.
That is, a naturally gifted person is likely to get very good at something they were "destined to do" regardless of if they had any decent instruction. With the right instruction, they may well reach some stratospheric heights.
1 is important because at some point a talented individual reaches a place where there is no longer any one person who can teach them anything new in their dimension and so they have to rely on their instinct to progress further.
Schopenhauer had the quote:
Talent is like the marksman who hits a target which others cannot reach; genius is like the marksman who hits a target … which others cannot even see.
There seems to be some conflict in how Schopenhauer interpret talent and genius, but that final sentiment is important to my point regarding a talented/gifted/genius individual not requiring instruction. No one can really teach you how to push a field to new unreached heights.
My personal favourite anecdote of genius is when Chopin's first musical teacher Zywny refrained from teaching him (aged 8 years old) any keyboard technique lest he interfere with his natural instinct. In his later teenage years and early twenties went on to write music quite unlike anything written for the piano at the time - thanks to his unorthodox technique.
Related to your Chopin anecdote, numerous monster & legendary guitar players and song writers (Chet Atkins, Willie Nelson, & tons more) cited Django Reinhardt, the "two-fingered gypsy jazz guitarist" as opening their horizons more than any other. It was from his technique that his creativity could flow. As if the handicap was simply an augmentation - as you mention - and didn't terribly interfere with what he was 'destined to do' by way of art.
As both a passionate study of both guitar and writing (fiction, essays, etc), I do agree that reaching 'beyond' is part of achieving high personal success in either field. Sort of like the phrase "knowing the rules before breaking them" can acknowledge the role of both structure and rebellion. Both have important facets in growth, and I think a lot of times lay-people can mistake "broken rules" that accidentally work for "talent" and it is frustrating.
>I think a lot of times lay-people can mistake "broken rules" that accidentally work for "talent" and it is frustrating.
Couldn't agree more. To quote Picasso:
"It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child"
Children break all the rules when painting and it literally took him his life's work to understand how to effectively formalise the lack of formalism. And thus there are millions/billions of children in the history of art, but there was only one Picasso...
"They're just developing different talents," says Lubinski, a former high-school and college wrestler. "But our society has been much more encouraging of athletic talents than we are of intellectual talents."
Bingo! Along with our society has been much more encouraging with the extrovert personalities vs the introverts.
I encourage everyone to read the book Quiet by Susan Cain.
Maybe it's impossible. Just like you can't force a gay man to be more interested in women and you can't force an asocial nerd to enjoy loud parties, you just can't force most people to enjoy math.
EDIT: changed an example to be more specific and precise.
There are a lot of people for whom "math" means just the algorithmic computation drudgery they teach you to vomit out on exams by pouring it down a funnel into you in an ordinary American high school or UK A-levels math course. Doing a similar (or even the same) calculation a bunch of times to get the same result is, in short, boring, no matter how you dress it up.
If prior to college everyone learned how to visualize math and some of the cool things you can do with, say, something as fundamental yet "advanced" as the FFT (the "why" to go along with the mechanics of the thing) I think the story would be different.
And I'm sure some homosexual men just haven't found the right woman yet.
But clearly most homosexual men just don't like women no matter how attractive they are. Is it so hard to believe that some people see math in a similar way?
Yes. It is incredibly hard to believe, considering sexual orientation isn't a matter of like (as in liking math, or strawberries, or the color blue) but as far as I know is innate.
Preference outside of sexuality is attained through experimentation and learning. A lot of people are deeply suspicious to the point of hatred of cultures and ways of thought they don't understand well or have a misunderstanding of. I believe dislike of mathematics falls into the misunderstanding category. Being a gay man versus a straight man isn't a misunderstanding, it's part of who a person is. Obviously it took some self discovery for an individual to determine their sexual identity, but whether you like or dislike math isn't on the same level. Some people are more spatially inclined and have an easier time grasping higher math (I am not included in this group) but some people have to work their ass off for every shred of mathematical understanding (I am in this group). Some people don't understand why this work would or could be worth it. Some people never even get to the point where they have to do anything other than 'plug and chug' to get the right answer for the worksheet, and so see nothing valid or useful in the stuff we teach in most math classes before upper division college level.
Math was a random example, but it is hard for me to imagine that a people aren't born with an innate interest in some intellectual pursuit.
You see it in people who talk about Baseball statistics, or Dungeons and Dragons rules. You just have to let them see that the same pleasure center can get lit up by Linear Algebra.
(That might be a bad example. I still wish someone could explain the intuition behind matrix multiplication.)
What's the correct word for someone who doesn't enjoy socialization?
What does introverted mean? Does it just mean "person who enjoys being alone" or "person who is not good at socializing, even though they may enjoy it"?
Introverted means you feel tired after socializing, while extroverted people feel excited and energized. Both need to socialize, but the introvert needs to recharge alone.
Only very weird people are asocial. This trait was very heavily selected against in tribal societies because surviving on your own is much less likely.
I feel tired after studying calculus but I can still do it if I try really hard. When I study discrete math or lineal algebra I don't feel as tired and can study for longer. Naturally, I'm much better at discrete math than I am at calculus.
I expect extroverted people are better at socializing than introverted people for similar reasons. Are there many introverted politicians?
I probably had a gifted kid but never had enough bandwidth to lead him, comparing to his siblings he just memorizes so well(e.g, mechanically memorized PI to 600+ digits in two days until I asked him to stop), doing high-school-level math at 4th grade, learn many things by himself and so on. Meanwhile he is bored, hard to make peer friends due to lack of shared interests, etc.
Everyday I have to work and care for other kids, I tried to home-school him but then you get the financial pressure quickly.
I wish there are some programs that can help kids like him, i.e. group them somewhere to study and learn from each other. We have quite some program taking care of the disadvantaged kids, what about the gifted ones? After all, they can potentially contribute to the society in some way that helps many others. We probably need a state-level or federal-level or even college-sponsored program for those really gifted kids.
No I'm not talking about the gifted class in the school district, those helps, but far from enough for those really gifted, you probably only have about 5 who are really gifted in each school district.
The gift is being interested in something and feeding ones own curiosity. It is the difference between an organism that grows only when fed vs one that feeds itself. I was "gifted", the biggest factor was an environment of experimentation and exploration. Questions with answers beget more questions. Feed that cycle.
completely unrelated - wasn't sure how to send you a message (maybe I'm missing some obvious DM ui on HN) - but thanks for the Samsara recommendation. legit.
Naturally, when the result of a scientific study is entangled emotionally with something so personal like intelligence, it is hard to look at the results without bias. Lots of people are going to have a problem with this study, because it literally makes 99.999% of the population feel inadequate.
The popularity of comments about hard work on this thread make me think that it's difficult for people to accept studies like this. And for two reasons: 1) We are born with very different innate abilities, which leads to great inequalities in our lives together, and 2) That innate difference is not to the credit of the gifted. They had nothing to do with it. It's like being born rich or white or male or American or all of them at once. So it's an undeserved privilege. An yet people born with such talents should be treated differently. We should cultivate them, because they can do so much to advance society. To those who have much, much is given...
why is it bad to label somebody ungifted? if i had known before i did not have what it takes to become a good mathematician, i would perhaps not have pursued that. maybe i would have saved myself a lot of trouble.
The problem with labels is "gifted" vs "ungifted" is very often interpreted as "smart" vs "stupid"
Another problem is that there's a spectrum of ability/interest being turned into a binary. For those near the threshold of the criteria, this is especially problematic.
There are many ungifted people who make their livings as mathematicians. Have you already abandoned math? If you haven't given up yet, there are likely things you can do to improve your chances of success.
Sure. It depends on what definition we're using for "gifted". Practice may not make you into von Neumann, but it may very well make you into a professional mathematician with stable employment.
My intuition is that if someone is interested enough in a career in mathematics that they begin putting regular practice into it, then they're already likely (but not certainly) past the minimum IQ threshold.
Interesting piece from one of the studies referred to by article:
"...many individuals who completed their degrees in non-math-science areas ultimately chose math-science occupations, and vice versa. Among mathematically talented populations,the leaking pipeline is not an appropriate metaphor. Upon reflection, this fluidity is not surprising for mathematically precocious females. In samples of males and females selected for mathematical talent, females display higher levels of verbal ability than males, and also more uniform levels of mathematical and verbal ability. Thus, mathematically precocious females more often than mathematically talented males are endowed with talents that enable them to excel with distinction in domains that require highly developed verbal-linguistic skills (these skills and the flexibility they lend could perhaps propel these individuals in varied directions, in part because verbal-linguistic skills tend to co-occur with social, or organic, interests and values)."
Interesting read. However, I wonder if for education purposes it would better if every student who is bored with their current schoolwork could just move into more advanced materials until they are not bored, instead of trying to spot the "super geniuses" early on and leaving the rest, the "not talented enough", to continue with the normal course material.
Because if you have some kind of test for identifying the geniuses who can enter your "special gifted genius program", the test is going to have a some cut-off line or threshold, and that's going to be unfair. For example, assume you're using an IQ test, and the kids who score above some arbitrary threshold would be ushered into the special awesome program, but the kid who scores only one point below the threshold does not get in. Even if the difference is just one point ... That would be a quite silly (and deeply unfair) policy, because there's always going to be some random noise in the test taking.
So... the higher a students test score the more likely they are to be a scientist - isn't that a truism? In order to become a scientist you have to get accepted into universities ... that will look at your test scores as judgement of whether you should be admitted.
Can anyone think of a notable scientist that didn't do well in school? We don't really encourage people who perform poorly on tests to become scientists - so none of these results are surprising.
How many students that score in the high .01% on tests end up becoming professional athletes? Or a rapper? Probably just as unlikely as a student who scores in the low .01% becoming a doctor.
Is it because smart people aren't interested in sports or don't like rap music? Doubt it.
For better or worse, our society pushes archetypes. If you do well on biology tests you are "supposed" to become a biologist. Good with computer? Become a programmer.
As someone who has been through the CTY program (I was a SET member, having scored above a 700 in math in 7th grade), I can say I've never been happier - I'm well off financially, have a career I greatly enjoy, and for the most part I can enjoy all the activities I have a desire for.
On the flip side, my brother was also a SET member, and there are some contrasts with me - he got his PhD in chemistry at 25 (I never finished my PhD in math) and was accelerated, having gone to college after 10th grade after cutting school for most of the year. He picked working with semiconductors, and that turned out to be a poor career choice. He accomplished much more in academic prestige than me, but his mistake cost him quite a bit financially - he is currently retooling to become a data scientist & is currently interviewing for entry level/junior positions.
I think he's not happy at the moment, especially after working a stint at Samsung as a senior chemical engineer after his post-doc - he is much happier than when he was working there though.
I attribute my happiness a lot to luck that I was able to get a foot in the door into software engineering, then made the most of it with a combination of my intelligence and work ethic. I was in total despair after leaving grad school without a PhD.
Apparently yes. Some people are just more privileged than others.
Insisting that rich people must feel more existential dread than poor people (money can't buy happiness!) and smart people must be more sad than stupid people (ignorance is bliss!) is a classic symptom of just-world fallacy.
Good point. Assuming that was what I was saying is another type of fallacy.
I understand why you'd want to have intelligent kids. All else equal, it is clearly an advantage in some respects.
But personally, I see no correlation between happiness and intelligence (even inversely as you suggest). I just find it peculiar that this collectively interests us. I spend a lot of time as a parent trying to teach my children that personal happiness is independent of what other people tell you about yourself. And here we are telling children how great they are.
I knew of only two SET students when I was in school. Student A you'd never guess was in the program. She went to a small college with only regional recognition, and she currently works as an accountant for a small business. Student B was another childhood friend of mine. Total geek who got me interested in programming when we were 13. He went to MIT for a semester when he was 17, and he returned home suicidal. He graduated from a community college and works at a Texas Roadhouse.
I'm in the study and the long-term tracking surveys they send us periodically have many questions designed to ferret out different aspects and indicators of happiness and success in different dimensions of life.
I can't imagine how I could be much happier in life.
I have a great, healthy family, great career in a field that allows me to use my brain to create tons of business value for my company, take home an appropriate fraction of that, all for doing things that I'd pretty much happily do for free if I could afford to do so.
I seem to recall reading general summaries of the survey that suggest that we are, on the whole, happier than the average for our respective age groups, but I don't have any of those report summaries handy nor could I readily find them online.
Thanks for the comment. I have a sincere question for you, if you didn't have a great healthy family, and you had a shitty career or whatever, would you still be happy?
I tend to be fairly optimistic and see the good in even bad situations, so I'd probably OK with even a worse set of circumstances (once that was the steady-state normal).
IOW, if I suddenly lost my wife or we split up, I'd be unhappy as hell for a while. In a counterfactual where I never met her or even ended up single, I'd probably still be happy because I'd shape my world and interpret my world in a way that made me happy. Likewise, a career that paid me the local median wage, I'd probably find a way to be happy.
I don't claim this to be a super-human strength of mine, but just a choice. I have friends and friends-of-friends who seem miserable despite no particularly devastating circumstances. They just choose to focus on the bad rather than the good. I have no idea if that's correlated with anything SMPY-related or not, just one guy's life experience.
I've not went and read any of the actual studies, only the article, but it seems that they start measuring kids around the age of 10 onwards, is this not too late?
One of the themes seems to be that certain measurements of ability at this age were accurate indicators of future success if the kids were not discouraged (ie allowed to push themselves and learn more advanced stuff). But by age 10 surely most kids have already been discouraged? I was reading another article earlier today that I can't find talking about pre-school being more important for life chances than high school. Could it be far more kids than we think are capable of being 'geniuses' and that the majority are discouraged at an early age? I'm not read up on this so if anyone is please share!
"Many educators and parents continue to believe that acceleration is bad for children—that it will hurt them socially, push them out of childhood or create knowledge gaps."
And we still wonder why in the US our children are so stupid? Clearly, they're getting a lot of help in being the dumbest they can be. To hold a child back from their full potential so they can be bullied and made fun of for another year or few is an atrocity that should be criminalized. I can think of few things worse than ruining a child's life in this way. Instead, these people are our children's' teachers, teaching them to be mediocre, stupid, mindless, lazy, underachieving idiots.
What's missing: all the children whose parents raised them the same way, and who ended up committing suicide, or are in mental institutions, or fill the ranks of the homeless today.
This is a longitudinal study, not a cross-sectional one; attrition can be measured. You should also provide some evidence for the idea that hordes of high-IQ people are going homeless and committing suicide, as opposed to occasional ones with mental illness (especially schizophrenia), given that all the existing evidence tends to imply the opposite, if you don't want to come off as a Taleb-citing crank.
I don't doubt that there's a wide range in people's aptitudes for various subjects. However, when it comes to the study cited, it seems there's no control sample so you can't tell what part of the outcome is really because these people are special and what is because some study identified them as special when they were children and they've gotten special opportunities ever since.
I was "student one". AMA. I dislike that the title of this article conflates intelligence and genius. Genius is impact, not talent. The one thing I've learned is that intelligence is highly overrated. Especially in the thing I know the most about: programming.
Instead of super-smart they ought to say good at something, because concepts like super-smart got us into this mess.
I know of a kid who was responsible for a sheep herd at the age of 12. He'd live in the mountains and take care of sheep for weeks. Have some imagination.
Ask HN: I'm quite interested in this, but it's a long read; can someone who has taken the plunge summarize these lessons? Though there are many comments already, searching for terms like "TL" and "summary" yields nothing.
What do people actually mean when they say "genetics"?
Is it some physical aspect of the brain (like more neurons, more connections among them, etc) or is it that somehow the ability to do Math or any other thing is coded into their DNA?
This reminds me of a Bruce Lee quote. My opponent practiced 1000 kicks and I practiced a kick 1000 times. I am paraphrasing that quote But he mentioned this in the context of focus and priority to become great at something.
I think this is the one you are referring to: "I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times."
This can be interpreted in a multitude of ways, but I like to have it in the context of this other Bruce Lee quote: "Before I studied the art, a punch to me was just like a punch, a kick just like a kick. After I learned the art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick no longer a kick. Now that I've understood the art, a punch is just like a punch, a kick just like a kick"
My interpretation is that we've all gone through these three phases in one way or another:
1) how do we do this stuff? ok use an editor... who cares if it's emacs (boy is that tough to learn), vi (huh? what's this context thingy), nano (cool, a menu!) etc
2) learn that there's a whole bunch of gee whiz stuff we can use (hey look, I have this special screwdriver designed to fit around the corner). Proceed to OCD over the pros and cons, figure out special cases etc.
3) realise (hopefully not too late), that actually all these specialised tools are just a means to an end. Use the most appropriate one for the situation; and appropriate here might mean that you use that one kick practised 10,000 times ("superfoot" Bill Wallace anybody?), in the right situation, rather than try to remember than wushu butterfly kick that you practised once (it hits, hero points to infinity! but if it misses, oh boy am I in trouble...).
I think step (2) is where we can start to distinguish those who will make it to (3), and those who will not. In order to be really good, if not genius level, it's not sufficient to just practise 10,000 hours (a Gladwell meme which I'm not fond of, although I understand what Gladwell was trying to imply), but to also understand and appreciate these "tools" (whether tangible or not).
Despite the article's title which gives the impression of unlocking the training secrets to "produce genius scientists", it is actually a "Nature vs Nurture" report. This particular article is biased more towards "nature."
The opposing sides are mentioned in the middle of the article:
>Such results contradict long-established ideas suggesting that expert performance is built mainly through practice—that anyone can get to the top with enough focused effort of the right kind. SMPY, by contrast, suggests that early cognitive ability has more effect on achievement than either deliberate practice or environmental factors such as socio-economic status.
The sentences favoring either "nature" or "nurture" are interwoven and alternate throughout the piece but the 2 sides can be seen more clearly by grouping them together...
Excerpts about "nature":
>, what has become clear is how much the precociously gifted outweigh the rest of society in their influence.
>Wai combined data from 11 prospective and retrospective longitudinal studies, including SMPY, to demonstrate the correlation between early cognitive ability and adult achievement. “The kids who test in the top 1% tend to become our eminent scientists and academics,
>But data from SMPY and the Duke talent programme dispute that hypothesis [about practice time]. A study published this year compared the outcomes of students in the top 1% of childhood intellectual ability with those in the top 0.01%. Whereas the first group gain advanced degrees at about 25 times the rate of the general population, the more elite students earn PhDs at about 50 times the base rate.
Excerpts about "nurture":
>“For those children who are tested, it does them no favours to call them 'gifted' or 'ungifted'. Either way, it can really undermine a child's motivation to learn.”
>In Europe, support for research and educational programmes for gifted children has ebbed, as the focus has moved more towards inclusion.
>Matthews contends that when children who are near the high and low extremes of early achievement feel assessed in terms of future success, it can damage their motivation to learn and can contribute to what Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck calls a fixed mindset. It's far better, Dweck says, toencourage a growth mindset, in which children believe that brains and talent are merely a starting point, and that abilities can be developed through hard work and continued intellectual risk-taking.
>“There's a general belief that kids who have advantages, cognitive or otherwise, shouldn't be given extra encouragement; that we should focus more on lower-performing kids.”
My martial arts teacher told me a relevant proverb: people are like vessels, some larger than others, and the vessel with less capacity can still hold more water.
There is a characteristic not mentioned that can determine if someone will reach a high level or not. Self gratification or the ability to delay self gratification. The "marshmallow kid", even a gifted kid that cannot fight their own human condition to seek a dopamine reward from eating, entertainment, etc can't reach their potential. If you got a reward from problem solving and knowledge acquisition then it wouldn't take much to focus.
Why can we focus for hours gaming, but when it comes to solving a math problem, most of us will never start or stop shortly after.
I think the integration with the existing education system is, and will continue to be, problematic. One thing that really brought that home for me was how kids who were developmentally behind were given extra care and attention and kids who were developmentally ahead were not. At the extreme ends (very behind, very ahead) the contrast is startling both in programs that are available and in how the school "celebrates" the achievements of the students in those categories.
I will not deign
To now refrain
From laying bear the nudity of scholars
Who think their robes
Befitting clothes
And prove it to themselves in words and dollars
The fittest minds
In all mankind
Regret now all they ever took for granted
Remove your blinds
And see the signs;
There's more to all than said will be recanted.
In to make a post before a bunch of narcissist HN'ers (subtly) brag about their childhood accomplishments of being math wizards and programming assembly at age 6 and a half.
- How do we control for self-fulfilling prophecy? I would imagine that having "Member of gifted kids study" will be quite impressive to the gatekeepers at elite universities. Did they add a few dummies to control?
- How do we even measure ability? You'd think the smart kids are smart because they try to learn the things that are tested. It's like testing people for strength. People who've trained are stronger. And they want to be.
- It makes sense that spatial ability is somehow predictive. Nobody ever teaches it, so you're left with whatever nature gave you. Probably like testing someone's toe strength as an indicator of overalll muscle quality (not that I know anything about physiology, it's just that I've never seen anyone at the gym training their toes).
- From what I can tell, it helps an awful lot to have someone nearby who has the skills you're after. Look at the people mentioned. Terence Tao's parents were both highly educated in STEM. Lenhard Ng's dad is a Physics prof. That kind of resource takes you an awfully long way along your path. I mean imagine being able to ask the guy you eat dinner with every night anything from "what is a prime number" to "what's the quantum hall effect". If you don't happen to have a parent, it probably helps to go to a school that is well resourced. There will be teachers around who find time for the kids who show aptitude. I remember being put up a year in math and sent to math contests. I don't think I'd have studied it as much if I hadn't been noticed by the teachers at a young age.
- There's an inherent conflict between society's goals and the gifted. It's a lot more economical to pour money into the mediocre for society. You want to teach everyone to read, write, and a little math. It's cheaper to produce that resource, and it's at the margin you get the most bang for your buck. PhDs cost a fair bit to fund, and like that famouns xkcd, you are only slightly enlarging the world's knowledge. Putting a kid in front of a world authority is expensive.
- It may not be so bad that society doesn't spend money on the gifted (I'd rather call them the more motivated, but...) than the marginals. It's possible that the mass of money needs to be spent making sure everyone can be a little educated, while a rather different effort is made to help the gifted. For instance, what I really, really needed as a kid was other kids who cared. These days that should be easy enough to arrange over the internet.
- There will be a natural experiment occurring soon, right now, about whether it's innate ability or exposure. The proliferation of materials on the internet will create a bunch of kids who are able to learn huge amounts about whatever they're interested in, before they even finish school. When I was a kid, you had to lug your ass to a library to find out what a quaternion was. And it wasn't a specialist library, and there'd be a chapter or something like that. These days there's a flood of information, you just have to type into google. There's so much that if one guy doesn't explain it well, another guy will.
I don't think that's fair. It's pretty hard to talk about one's personal experience with the scenarios described in the article without it coming across as a brag, humble or otherwise.
Having tested in the 99th percentile of scholastic tests despite being a lazy git is not humblebrag, it is relevant to the discussion at hand.
Also, you might do well to assume that a large majority of the people here that you are trying to put down also tested in top percentages in school tests. The audience of YC and HN is self-selected nerds.
> Also, you might do well to assume that a large majority of the people here that you are trying to put down also tested in top percentages in school tests. The audience of YC and HN is self-selected nerds.
Which is exactly why so much of the discussion here is predicated on middlebrow intellectual checkboxes instead of legitimate insight.
But if you want to keep thinking this is some genius society, I can't stop you.
The post to which I was responding made the absurd claim that technically-minded/introverted individuals who score high on tests can approximate themselves to being geniuses. I really don't think it was much of a reach to ridicule that assertion...given that it is...well, ridiculous.
Show me the law that says you're not allowed to talk about your own intelligence when its germane to the subject matter ? Is a mover not allowed to talk about the time he lifted a refrigerator up a flight of stairs cause thats "humblebragging" about how strong he is?
Oh please, get off your high horse and pull your head out of your ass. He's making a perfectly valid point. Anybody who genuinely believes some people cannot by innately better at some subjects to the point that they can study several grades ahead of their peers without putting in more effort is an idiot. Not everybody can learn what everybody else can by simply putting in more hours, innate ability is most definitely a thing.
>Stanley convinced a dean at Johns Hopkins to let Bates, then 13, enrol[sic] as an undergraduate.
>“I was shy and the social pressures of high school wouldn't have made it a good fit for me,” says Bates, now 60. “But at college, with the other science and math nerds, I fit right in, even though I was much younger. I could grow up on the social side at my own rate and also on the intellectual side, because the faster pace kept me interested in the content.”
OK, I might take a lot of heat for this, but I don't think it's a good idea to put a 13-year-old with college students. In this case, he was a boy, but imagine if he were a girl? One of the main causes of failure to achieve educationally for bright girls is getting pregnant. 40% of the fathers who impregnate girls under 15 are 20-29 years old [0]. So in the case of girls, this is a super visible obvious problem, but what happens with a teenage boy? I could see him getting in an abusive relationship or otherwise preyed upon in a zillion ways.
This article takes a blasé attitude toward the social concerns and cites no sources about the actual social outcomes for these kids. Let your kid study by themselves, send them to a gifted child summer camp, etc.
They called it "radical acceleration", but they don't do it anymore. There were some mixed outcomes, like mine. These days it would be considered unethical experimentation on human subjects.
Yeah big time. Not that it's ever easy for smart asocial people, but being four years younger than everyone else made it way worse for me. Some people managed a lot better though, especially if they could pass for older.
> OK, I might take a lot of heat for this, but I don't think it's a good idea to put a 13-year-old with college students.
These kinds of things are rare enough that they tend to get a lot of attention, and I've yet to hear of a horror story of the kind that people tend to raise in the abstract, so I think that between parents, school administrators, and the particular students involved when this actually occurs in practice, things are generally handled fairly well.
That's not to say that there isn't legitimate reason to consider carefully, but I think the idea that this is somehow universally an unacceptable risk in every case is simply unsupportable from the factual experience. I'm interested in seeing any concrete evidence that would suggest otherwise, but generalization from what is typical of age groups to cases that are clearly atypical for their age group is, I think, insufficient to make that case.
>I've yet to hear of a horror story of the kind that people tend to raise in the abstract
First result on Google:
>When Sufiah Yusof was 13 in 1997, she was accepted by Oxford University but left the school in 2001. Although she later returned, she did not earn her degree. It was later found she worked as a prostitute in England before finding employment in the social work field[0]
People in this thread are acting like denying these kids entry to college is denying them the opportunity to learn. I just don't think college is the only way to learn (arguably, it's not even the best way). We have online courses, we have all kinds of resources.
I don't think the students at Johns Hopkins are the usual sort of 20-29yos who would knock up a teen girl. And inasmuch as SMPY has been running for so many decades and has thousands of participants, if 10 or 20% of the participants were becoming teen moms, someone probably would've noticed by now.
There seems to be a confirmatory bias among the academic community that a measure of intellectual success can be found in the percentage of individuals who earn a PhD. Sure, it's true that you need to be reasonably smart to earn a PhD, but I think that someone can have a lot of intellectual success (potentially just as much or maybe more) if they don't earn a PhD.
I think you could even argue that, depending on the field of study, a PhD is the "easy" route for someone who is intellectually gifted - it's a simply a continuation of what you have been doing. I would be more impressed by the intellectual who not only realizes that they can conduct their own independent research, but also has the creativity to come up with a use case that can improve and contribute to the world (and presumably, make a living doing so).
My point here is that, given two gifted cohorts, one which has a 45% PhD graduation rate and one which has a 50% PhD graduation rate, I don't know that you can conclusively say that one is more gifted than the other without looking at other metrics associated with intellectual accomplishment.