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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

#331

Post by karma_vaccum123 »

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.

Right...many people seem to confuse genius with being really smart.

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

#332

Post by karma_vaccum123 »

digler999 wrote: post #236
karma_vaccum123 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, you might do well to assume that a large majority of the people here that you are trying to put down also tested in top percentages in school tests. The audience of YC and HN is self-selected nerds. Which is exactly why so much of the discussion here is predicated on middlebrow intellectual checkboxes instead of legitimate insight. But if you want to keep thinking this is some genius society, I can't stop you…

> middlebrow intellectual checkboxes instead of legitimate insight. Nice humblebrag about your superior judgement of whats "middlebrow" vs "legitimate".

The post to which I was responding made the absurd claim that technically-minded/introverted individuals who score high on tests can approximate themselves to being geniuses. I really don't think it was much of a reach to ridicule that assertion...given that it is...well, ridiculous.

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

#333

Post by rileymat2 »

naasking wrote: post #189
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 immedi…

There surely is a natural gift for things, but don't underestimate how much effort [if effort is the right word for something you are drawn to] your two examples put in at an early and impressionable age.

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

#334

Post by petters »

0xdeadbeefbabe wrote: post #271
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…

> other metrics associated with intellectual accomplishment. Like say IQ. Feynman wouldn't have qualified for Mensa, and happily too[0]. Maybe that's a good metric. The metric is happy not to be in Mensa, but also has a PhD. Edit: Feynman's IQ was 126 and Mensa wants 132, at least according to Ericsson and Pool in their book Peak. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEUcmKDaklY

But also:

    Feynman received the highest score in the country by a large margin on the notoriously difficult Putnam mathematics competition exam, although he joined the MIT team on short notice and did not prepare for the test.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/finding-the-next-einste...

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

#335

Post by ThePawnBreak »

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…

> 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.

In Romania we have elite high-schools where admissions is based on exams (mostly math). This means that the pupils a class will be of somewhat similar intelligence, and makes things easier for teachers. The best pupils are encouraged to participate in olympiads, and the worst usually transfer to lower-rated institutions. I think this system works quite well (apart from the fact that the very lowly rated high-schools are completely useless).

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

#336

Post by Panoramix »

Moshe_Silnorin wrote: post #251
wrp wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Smarter than average, for sure. But people tend to over estimate the intelligence of the average PhD.

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

#337

Post by dragonwriter »

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…

> 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

I get the abstract reason why one might think this in a vacuum, OTOH, we have real societies with selective schooling in place -- is there any evidence from experience to support that in net this hurts social mobility and/or cohesion?

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

#339

Post by sokoloff »

betenoire wrote: post #310
sokoloff wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the study and the long-term tracking surveys they send us periodically have many questions designed to ferret out different aspects and indicators of happiness and success in different dimensions of life. I can't imagine how I could be much happier in life. I have a great, healthy family, great career in a field that allows me to use my brain to create tons of business value for my company, take home an approp…

Thanks for the comment. I have a sincere question for you, if you didn't have a great healthy family, and you had a shitty career or whatever, would you still be happy?

I tend to be fairly optimistic and see the good in even bad situations, so I'd probably OK with even a worse set of circumstances (once that was the steady-state normal).

IOW, if I suddenly lost my wife or we split up, I'd be unhappy as hell for a while. In a counterfactual where I never met her or even ended up single, I'd probably still be happy because I'd shape my world and interpret my world in a way that made me happy. Likewise, a career that paid me the local median wage, I'd probably find a way to be happy.

I don't claim this to be a super-human strength of mine, but just a choice. I have friends and friends-of-friends who seem miserable despite no particularly devastating circumstances. They just choose to focus on the bad rather than the good. I have no idea if that's correlated with anything SMPY-related or not, just one guy's life experience.

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

#340

Post by sluggg »

k2xl wrote: post #272

So... the higher a students test score the more likely they are to be a scientist - isn't that a truism? In order to become a scientist you have to get accepted into universities ... that will look at your test scores as judgement of whether you should be admitted. Can anyone think of a notable scientist that didn't do well in school? We don't really encourage people who perform poorly on tests to become scientists -…

well lady gaga was listed she is sorta a rapper.
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