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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

#151

Post by sporkenfang »

saint_fiasco wrote: post #47
inputcoffee wrote: post #21

Consider 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.

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.

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

#153

Post by truth_sentinell »

smnplk wrote: post #128
truth_sentinell wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?

It takes genetics to be interested in something too I believe.

I need proof. This is one of the questions I have been interested in for a long time. Do we invent or discover ourselves?

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

#154

Post by magicalist »

geocar wrote: post #136
saint_fiasco wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calculus textbooks are difficult but rewarding. 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.

> must have some gift Or what? The rest of us are dumb? 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 b…

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.

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

#155

Post by panglott »

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…

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.

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

#156

Post by netrus »

0xdeadbeefbabe wrote: post #108
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…

> Maybe successful people have lazer focus. 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.

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

#157

Post by pas »

squigs25 wrote: post #143

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 P…

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.

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

#158

Post by jawarner »

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…

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.

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

#159

Post by comex »

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.

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.

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

#160

Post by magicalist »

paulpauper wrote: post #109
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 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

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genius#IQ_and_genius

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