Anyone interested in the nature-nurture debate, and prodigies should take a look at Stephen Wiltshire (the "human camera"):
Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children
241–250 of 477 posts
Re: Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children
#242> 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…
"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.)
Re: Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children
#243> 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…
> 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.
Re: Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, i…
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…
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.
Re: Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children
#245[deleted]
Re: Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children
#246> “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…
“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…
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.
Re: Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children
#247Earlier 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.
Got a link to your games?
I hope to release my first project in 4-5 months.
Re: Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children
#248> “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 somethi…
"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%.
Re: Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Intelligence is a physical trait; how could it be anything else?
Re: Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children
#250> “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…
It's a huge stretch to consider patents and peer-refereed publications "actual evidence". Others have taken other approaches and found no correlations.
What alternatives would you propose? Why?