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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

#181

Post by riskable »

yomly wrote: post #28
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…

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 tale…

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.

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

#182

Post by Jimmy »

criddell wrote: post #139
Jimmy wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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…

>Shouldn't your goal to be to make great games?

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."

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

#183

Post by dalke »

trendia wrote: post #162
jsprogrammer wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

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?

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

#184

Post by antisthenes »

Jimmy wrote: post #118
csallen wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Sorry if this sounded harsh.

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

#185

Post by ralusek »

truth_sentinell wrote: post #113
ralusek wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

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

#186

Post by rurban »

ckluis wrote: post #10
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 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.

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

#187

Post by Jimmy »

soared wrote: post #169
Jimmy wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well... you talk about video games as if they are a high art. You might be in for more than one wake up call in the near future.

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.

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

#188

Post by jl6 »

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…

Well, don't they say that to do a PhD you have to be smart enough to be able to do one, but dumb enough to actually do one?

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

#189

Post by naasking »

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…

> 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.

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

#190

Post by Practicality »

mhurron wrote: post #174
Practicality wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> People are not just randomly assigned to reading and commenting on Hacker News No they randomly show up being either directly or tangentially associated with either technology or startup culture. That's it. And while those people really do love to think of themselves as more intelligent than the general population, I don't see it.

The most recent data I can find on that is 20 years old so it's hard to say: http://sq.4mg.com/IQ-jobs.htm

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…”

http://smallbiztrends.com/2010/10/how-smart-is-the-average-e...

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.

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