Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children • Hacker News Board

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

#251

Post by Moshe_Silnorin » Wed, Sep 07, 2016, 5:49 PM UTC

wrp wrote: post #208

pas wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I know a Chemistry professor whose favorite remark on this is, "A PhD is a badge of endurance, not intelligence."

>A PhD is a badge of endurance, not intelligence

It's very clearly both.

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

#252

Post by cubano » Wed, Sep 07, 2016, 5:49 PM UTC

pas wrote: post #157

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.

Almost all of the education system is about signalling your abilty to be told what to do and doing it, and not hardly at all about actually learning things necessary for a successful and productive life.

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

#253

Post by ChuckMcM » Wed, Sep 07, 2016, 5:49 PM UTC

I think the integration with the existing education system is, and will continue to be, problematic. One thing that really brought that home for me was how kids who were developmentally behind were given extra care and attention and kids who were developmentally ahead were not. At the extreme ends (very behind, very ahead) the contrast is startling both in programs that are available and in how the school "celebrates" the achievements of the students in those categories.

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

#254

Post by Comfy » Wed, Sep 07, 2016, 5:50 PM UTC

Jimmy wrote: post #247

icefox wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Got a link to your games?

I hope to release my first project in 4-5 months.

What's it about?

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

#255

Post by VLM » Wed, Sep 07, 2016, 5:50 PM UTC

Retric wrote: post #22

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…

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…

Its interesting to compare artistic drawing to drafting.

My observations from a year of drafting in high school (Future engineers need to be able to make and read blueprints was a fad a couple decades ago) and work with people in the field, there are people who can do three dimensional transforms and manipulations in their head with little effort beyond the mere mechanics of pencil on paper (or fingers on CAD workstation). There are also those who cannot visualize complex shapes in three dimensions. Just like you can't verbally tell people to train harder to grow taller it does not appear possible to learn how to visualize. I've observed those who can't visualize have all kinds of interesting coping mechanisms ranging from simply asking for help to leaving the field entirely to really elaborate memorized heuristics. Either you can, or cannot, visualize a basic transmission for a crane complete with which direction the gears rotate. No amount of staring at a blank sheet of paper will help, and practice does not help those people who can't and merely wastes the time of those who can.

Apparently you can train creativity and style, but the mental act of three dimensional visualization is either functional or absent.

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

#256

Post by aab0 » Wed, Sep 07, 2016, 5:51 PM UTC

fragola wrote: post #87

>Stanley convinced a dean at Johns Hopkins to let Bates, then 13, enrol[sic] as an undergraduate. >“I was shy and the social pressures of high school wouldn't have made it a good fit for me,” says Bates, now 60. “But at college, with the other science and math nerds, I fit right in, even though I was much younger. I could grow up on the social side at my own rate and also on the intellectual side, because the faster…

I don't think the students at Johns Hopkins are the usual sort of 20-29yos who would knock up a teen girl. And inasmuch as SMPY has been running for so many decades and has thousands of participants, if 10 or 20% of the participants were becoming teen moms, someone probably would've noticed by now.

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

#257

Post by cloverich » Wed, Sep 07, 2016, 5:51 PM UTC

ekianjo wrote: post #37

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…

> Meanwhile in East Europe (namely Romania, Moldova, Ukraine, Russia, probably other countries too but I don't know anything about them) competitiveness between children is crazy high in some circles and that's why a lot of the best engineers come from that area. Competitiveness is worth nothing, if you compete to just get the best grades for the exam. Most of the exams have close to no value in real life and do not…

> Most of the exams have close to no value in real life and do not force you to think by yourself but to rehash hundred times what you have seen before. The opposite of creative thought.

True, but to some extent rigor and discipline are required to achieve, creative or otherwise. And discipline can be learned. I'm not supporting the hyper competitive nature of some schooling systems, but at least some can benefit from learning how to survive (or thrive) in competitive systems.

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

#258

Post by aab0 » Wed, Sep 07, 2016, 5:53 PM UTC

hackaflocka wrote: post #49

Survivorship 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.

This is a longitudinal study, not a cross-sectional one; attrition can be measured. You should also provide some evidence for the idea that hordes of high-IQ people are going homeless and committing suicide, as opposed to occasional ones with mental illness (especially schizophrenia), given that all the existing evidence tends to imply the opposite, if you don't want to come off as a Taleb-citing crank.

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

#259

Post by 0xdeadbeefbabe » Wed, Sep 07, 2016, 5:53 PM UTC

netrus wrote: post #156

0xdeadbeefbabe wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The guys who wrote Peak are probably sub-geniuses then, because they think some savants have figured out a system. In the book they call it mental representation. It's the obsessive ones who develop the skill, some just remain autistic and that's it. They would say it is our bias and desire to believe in magic that predispose us to believe these people are just gifted.

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

#260

Post by 0xdeadbeefbabe » Wed, Sep 07, 2016, 5:54 PM UTC

matthewvincent wrote: post #145

0xdeadbeefbabe wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 met someone like this once, he could also tell you the phase of the moon on the day you were born as well as all the celebrities born that day. It was pretty striking.

It's pretty striking you could tell he was right :)