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Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children

scientificamerican.com

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Re: Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children

#111

Post by Balgair »

spdionis wrote: post #5

> 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…

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.

Re: Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children

#112

Post by Pica_soO »

karma_vaccum123 wrote: post #99

I just knew these comments would fill up with humblebrags from HNers who wish to casually and inoffensively proclaim their genius.

But if everyone is a genius, then no one is.

Les time spend comparing, more time spend focused on the one thing you love => genius status, but you wont notice, or wont give a thing about it.

Re: Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children

#113

Post by truth_sentinell »

ralusek wrote: post #60
Isamu wrote: post #14

> 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…

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 hum…

"Genetics" is the new God. Apparently people assign whatever they don't know or understand to genetics.

Can't play football? That's genetics!! Knows math? More genetics!!

Are actually there studies that claim a special ability is due to genetics only?

Re: Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children

#114

Post by Jimmy »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #106
Jimmy wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Stop focusing on being special and actually dedicate yourself to something real.

I have an extremely specific set of projects I want to implement.

Re: Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children

#116

Post by 6stringmerc »

yomly wrote: post #75

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 pro…

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.

Re: Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children

#117

Post by mhurron »

Practicality wrote: post #105

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…

> 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.

I know I am.

Re: Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children

#118

Post by Jimmy »

csallen wrote: post #80
Jimmy wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

May I ask how old you are? And what you're trying to achieve?

I'm 24.

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.

Re: Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children

#119

Post by smnplk »

jaunkst wrote: post #86
iopq wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

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 ch…

You are such a humble person.

Re: Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children

#120

Post by jmde »

trendia wrote: post #7

> “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…

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.

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