But are they happy?
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Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children
41–50 of 477 posts
Re: Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children
#42> 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…
> But it boils down to the hours that kids put into their interests. So you believe in the 10 000 hours empirical rule based on "outliers" with very little evidence to support it?
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".
Re: Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a huge stretch to consider patents and peer-refereed publications "actual evidence". Others have taken other approaches and found no correlations.
There were five different features that they plotted vs. SAT score [1]. All five rely heavily on intelligence: 1. any doctorate 2. STEM publications 3. STEM doctorates 4. Patents 5. Income in the 95th percentile A person in Q4 was 60% more likely than a person in Q3 to earn income in the 95th percentile. I'd say that's pretty significant. [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/sciam/assets/Image/Child_...
I believe that is only evidence of bias towards high score holders, which we already know exists.
Minor issue: why does that figures' caption lead with a quip about the top 1%, but only present data for quartiles?
Re: Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ma…
I dont want to detract from your story, but >has an IMDB page is a funny metric for success.
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.
Re: Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children
#45Despite 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.”
Re: Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children
#46> 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…
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.
Re: Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children
#47Consider this: Their gift is the ability to work hard. They are able to work hard because they find it fun. Q: We have all felt the "fun" of learning math (for instance), so how do we share that with others?
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.
Re: Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children
#49Survivorship Bias (what Taleb calls Silent Evidence).
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.
Re: Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children
#50> 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…
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.