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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

#281

Post by scarmig »

nibs wrote: post #235
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" Two thirds of the world's current math researchers can trace lineage to just 23, 17th century mathematicians. Source: http://www.nature.com/news/majority-of-mathematicians-hail-f...

Really odd misreading. That's a lineage of teacher-pupil relations, not genetic. If anything, it points in the opposite direction of what you're claiming, though in reality it's either just a statement about the clubbiness of mathematics or a statistical likelihood because of how trees work.

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

#282

Post by shostack »

paulpauper wrote: post #129
Jimmy wrote: post #11

I get quite depressed when I read articles like this. I'm resentful of the fact that my early academic performance was merely above average, rather than exceptional. Some days I feel confident in my abilities and my plans for the future; other days, I fear that it's already too late for me to accomplish anything of note.

That's why you need to invest in index funds (ideally the S&P 500 or Nasdaq 100), high-IQ companies - specifically Google Amazon and Facebook- or use the inverse ETF decay strategy that makes 20-40 percent a year. Buying in-the-money call options using 3-1 leverage on Google, Amazon, and Facebook has returned 200% since 2013 vs. 30% for S&P 500. The motivation behind this strategy is that average-IQ people can make g…

I was with you until the individual stock purchase and leverage bit. For most people this is NOT a wise strategy as they have neither the investing experience nor savings to gamble like that.

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

#283

Post by sharemywin »

kohanz wrote: post #215
irrational wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of the old joke that PhD stands for "Pile it on Higher and Deeper".

BS = Bulls--- MS = More s--- PhD = Piled higher and Deeper

My favorite was D stand for Diploma...

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

#284

Post by 1812Overture »

iopq wrote: post #46
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 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…

Are you me? Pretty much same story here, except in Arizona not California.

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

#286

Post by trendia »

dalke wrote: post #183
trendia wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

OK, let's use your hypothetical that if we accept everyone, that they will have equal graduate attainment (regardless of test scores).

Then, we would expect that there would be little correlation between testing scores and outcomes. Especially whether they get a degree. For instance, someone who gets a lower test score will have the same outcomes as someone who gets a higher test score.

But that's not what the research suggests:

> The report, which examined 1,753 studies, found that GRE scores could help predict students' graduate grade point averages, first-year GPAs, ratings from faculty, exam scores, degree attainment and number of citations earned. The specific subject tests were even stronger indicators of students' performance.

http://www.apa.org/gradpsych/2012/09/cover-success.aspx

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

#287

Post by cfmcdonald »

forgotmysn wrote: post #240
pmoriarty wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Godlike genius.. Godlike nothing! Sticking to it is the genius! I've failed my way to success." -- Thomas Edison "Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lives solely in my tenacity." -- Louis Pasteur "Men give me credit for genius; but all the genius I have lies in this: When I have a subject on hand I study it profoundly." -- Alexander Hamilton

Sounds like an epic humblebrag by Hamilton. I don't think anyone, then or now, thinks he was a genius.

He is saying he has been credited with genius, that is intellectual power or talent, not that he has been credited with being "a genius". The former is now an archaic way of using genius, the latter was pretty new in Hamilton's time.

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

#288

Post by habitue »

forgotmysn wrote: post #240
pmoriarty wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Godlike genius.. Godlike nothing! Sticking to it is the genius! I've failed my way to success." -- Thomas Edison "Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lives solely in my tenacity." -- Louis Pasteur "Men give me credit for genius; but all the genius I have lies in this: When I have a subject on hand I study it profoundly." -- Alexander Hamilton

Sounds like an epic humblebrag by Hamilton. I don't think anyone, then or now, thinks he was a genius.

Alexander Hamilton was definitely super smart. Read his biography, it's nuts how young he was while he was writing treatises that shaped world events

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

#289

Post by jstelly »

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…

> I think that someone can have a lot of intellectual success (potentially just as much or maybe more) if they don't earn a PhD.

I totally agree with this. Also as an anecdote, I really struggled with the decision to pursue a PhD. In the end I decided not to for various reasons. I was never interested in academia, just in certain technology careers that seemed to demand a PhD at the time I was finishing my BS (also I went to a fairly ordinary state school for my BS even though I was accepted to much more prestigious schools figuring I would attend one of those for a graduate degree and avoid some student load debt). Many years later, in hindsight, I am very happy with that decision. I never think about going back in time and making the decision the other way. If anything I expect I would have been less successful by any metric (intellectual or otherwise) had I done so.

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

#290

Post by fragola »

dragonwriter wrote: post #262
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…

> OK, I might take a lot of heat for this, but I don't think it's a good idea to put a 13-year-old with college students. These kinds of things are rare enough that they tend to get a lot of attention, and I've yet to hear of a horror story of the kind that people tend to raise in the abstract, so I think that between parents, school administrators, and the particular students involved when this actually occurs in pr…

>I've yet to hear of a horror story of the kind that people tend to raise in the abstract

First result on Google:

>When Sufiah Yusof was 13 in 1997, she was accepted by Oxford University but left the school in 2001. Although she later returned, she did not earn her degree. It was later found she worked as a prostitute in England before finding employment in the social work field[0]

People in this thread are acting like denying these kids entry to college is denying them the opportunity to learn. I just don't think college is the only way to learn (arguably, it's not even the best way). We have online courses, we have all kinds of resources.

[0]http://study.com/articles/How_Young_is_Too_Young_to_Enroll_i...

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