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

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

#351

Post by civilian »

KaneMorgan wrote: post #313
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

Saying I worked hard is a more comforting story than saying I was lucky. I think people are likely to put more value on hard work than its due.

I think that what successful people tell themselves is not that important of an issue. What's important is the narrative we give people who are not yet successful.

I have a friend who's smart, and is a really good listener. We have really good philosophical conversations, and he kicks my ass at board games. I've been wanting him to get into programming, because right now he's working as an assistant manager at a sandwich shop chain. He absolutely has the talent to understand programming, but he has never put an ounce of effort into it. He really likes the idea of making 50k/yr (which would essentially be a doubling of his salary) so he could be less depressed about finances.

I offer him help... I tell him how I self-trained into programming, without a C.S. degree. And he just has a total lack of effort, and I think that he just tells himself that he can't do it.

When we establish the narrative that the only barrier is hard work, then we ought to be able to motivate people because they'll recognize that most things are within their reach with enough determination.

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

#352

Post by pbhjpbhj »

restalis wrote: post #132
XparXnoiAx wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In certain areas, hours might be enough, There is no area where hours are enough. How you apply the hours is extremely important.

Actually, his example was very relevant in this regard. Chess has a limited set of rules, once learned all that remains is practicing and letting it to sink in ...for those who are slow at that. To develop poetry is not about the rules themselves as it is about the subjective appreciation of your readership. That skill is not that technical and may take years to hone it right.

>Chess has a limited set of rules, once learned all that remains is practicing and letting it to sink in //

I learnt recently that Chess computers/programs are pre-seeded with standard moves and apparently do very badly if they're set to play without using the traditional openings. This seems to move against your analysis of what is needed to play chess well. Study of stock openings also appears to be required to perform well.

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

#353

Post by Gargoyle »

1812Overture wrote: post #280
0xdeadbeefbabe wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

If Feynman's IQ was only 126 then IQ is a totally meaningless metric of intelligence.

I've always thought Feynman did poorly on some test in high school for whatever reason and then used that score for the rest of his life as a good story. Feynman was all about the good stories.

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

#354

Post by clueless123 »

irrational wrote: post #196
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.

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

When you think you know everything you get your BS

When you find out you know nothing, you get your Masters

When you realize no one else knows either you get your PHD

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

#355

Post by SamReidHughes »

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.

Of the users of this site with top 100 karma there's at least two people that are unquestionably in the top 0.01% of math ability. (They'd both pass the 0.001% cutoff, too.) And there'd be a third if we went to the top 150 karma (basing this off how karma tails off on https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders).

That would be very unlikely if HN was a random assortment of the population, or a random assortment of the top 25%.

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

#356

Post by SamReidHughes »

mhurron wrote: post #350
Practicality wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That may or may not be true, but it's not what we were talking about. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_the_goalposts#Logical_f...

Except it is, you are trying to put forward that IQ among engineers is high as some proof that HN must be of a higher general intelligence than the rest of the population. I said IQ is bullshit, the implication being it can not be used to prove your position. For IQ to support your position, it must be a valid measurement of intelligence. I am attacking the validity of your data.

IQ is a valid measure of intelligence. Individuals' outcomes on different intelligence tests are positively correlated with one another, you see. And they're correlated with external metrics of ability, of course.

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

#357

Post by xyzzyz »

rb808 wrote: post #140
Jimmy wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that's simply unacceptable to me. A stable six-figure job is failure. If I'm fated to try and fail for the rest of my life to break into the 1 in 10,000, then so be it.

>A stable six-figure job is failure. If you look at the study, only a quarter of the gifted students made it to the 95% income percentile. Being a Genius doesn't make you rich or happy or give you a satisfaction. It makes it more likely you'll have a PhD & produce academic papers.

To get to 95% income percentile, you need to earn at least $190k a year. I'd be very interested in seeing how many gifted students don't reach, say, 75% percentile, which is around $90k a year, and why.

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

#358

Post by abecedarius »

ausjke wrote: post #149

I probably had a gifted kid but never had enough bandwidth to lead him, comparing to his siblings he just memorizes so well(e.g, mechanically memorized PI to 600+ digits in two days until I asked him to stop), doing high-school-level math at 4th grade, learn many things by himself and so on. Meanwhile he is bored, hard to make peer friends due to lack of shared interests, etc. Everyday I have to work and care for oth…

You might try something like https://www.mathcircles.org/

(They weren't around when I was a kid, so I can't say from experience.)

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

#359

Post by jonathanedwards »

I was "student one". AMA. I dislike that the title of this article conflates intelligence and genius. Genius is impact, not talent. The one thing I've learned is that intelligence is highly overrated. Especially in the thing I know the most about: programming.

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

#360

Post by jonathanedwards »

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…

They called it "radical acceleration", but they don't do it anymore. There were some mixed outcomes, like mine. These days it would be considered unethical experimentation on human subjects.
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