This reminds me of a Bruce Lee quote. My opponent practiced 1000 kicks and I practiced a kick 1000 times. I am paraphrasing that quote But he mentioned this in the context of focus and priority to become great at something.
Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children
371–380 of 477 posts
Re: Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children
#372Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
"at least two people that are unquestionably in the top 0.01% of math ability." To whom are you referring to, if I may ask, and what do they do? (I would just like to learn about them)
cperciva and michaelochurch (not listed on /leaders because he hasn't posted in a while), and it's easy enough to look up what they do.
Re: Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children
#373It seems weird to me that nobody seems to see the evidence: as a parent you just want your kids to be happy. Happy in the correct way, which means long-term happiness, built with good cultural background, reasonable social skills, constructive hobbies, ability to have some of those good friends, etc. Most of these are not achieved if you're kid is "super smart". Being the father of Einstein is probably very good for…
This is certainly true, but there is another way to think about it. If you suspect that some kid (including your own) will be likely to make some moderate-scale positive contribution to the world (e.g. invention of the telephone) do you have some moral obligation to ensure that the kid has the training, resources, and encouragement to do so? Essentially, can you weigh the potential benefits to humanity against that c…
Yes. If your kid is obviously a piano genius at five and asks for a good master you should provide. But be careful to not project your own dreams onto your kids. No need to push.
Re: Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children
#374Interesting 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 am concerned about the metrics these guys are using to measure aptitude and their measures of success. Top 95% income bracket -- I mean that's nice.
Than again, I am not inside that 1 in 10000 range -- this study certainly does not apply to me. Or to the vast majority of people.
Opportunities for bright students in the United States are limited. Big news! We've always been anti-intellectual.
Re: Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children
#375“Whether we like it or not, these people really do control our society,”
I'd be pretty disappointed if this is actually true..
Re: Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who has been through the CTY program (I was a SET member, having scored above a 700 in math in 7th grade), I can say I've never been happier - I'm well off financially, have a career I greatly enjoy, and for the most part I can enjoy all the activities I have a desire for. On the flip side, my brother was also a SET member, and there are some contrasts with me - he got his PhD in chemistry at 25 (I never f…
You almost suggest your brother isn't as happy as you, but you don't come out and say that. You just mention financial costs. Do you attribute your happiness do your intelligence? Just curious
I think he's not happy at the moment, especially after working a stint at Samsung as a senior chemical engineer after his post-doc - he is much happier than when he was working there though.
I attribute my happiness a lot to luck that I was able to get a foot in the door into software engineering, then made the most of it with a combination of my intelligence and work ethic. I was in total despair after leaving grad school without a PhD.
Re: Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children
#377>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.
Did you run into social adjustment issues?
Re: Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children
#378Earlier 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.
What those who contradict you above fail to appreciate is just how little IQ difference makes someone seem "dumb". Most people with 140 IQs rarely spend any time having discussion of any depth with anyone who has an IQ below 120. They have not the slightest idea how dense someone with an IQ of 100 seems. When I was training as a physician I routinely needed to explain important things in depth to people with average and below average intelligence. It is shocking. Most of us live in a narrow world and make poor assumptions about life outside
Re: Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children
#379> 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…
How would you know that? Maybe you had a natural aptitude and so enjoyed geometric objects and music more than others?
Re: Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children
#380Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody ever mentions the counterexample, assuming it exists - the person who spends thousands of hours practicing but never gets anywhere. How many Salieris are there for each Mozart? There's definitely a need for hard work in order to have success, but perhaps there's something necessary that has to be present for the hard work to build upon. Maybe that something is "genius".
Hard work is overrated. What you really want is curiosity. You can refine something with hard work, but broadening your horizons comes from a desire to see what can be done. Basically, do you want to create a refined version of what's already been done, or do you want to explore what's possible. You can alternate between them to push in both directions, but the mindset is different.
>Hard work is overrated. What you really want is curiosity.
This is BS, and the kind of BS that results in lazy entitled adults expecting the world to be their oyster because they have kept their dreamer curiosity intact.
Out of the people I've know who are internationally-recognized academics and/or world-class engineers, many are both hard working and creative. Probably the majority of them, in fact. But many more are hard working and not especially creative: they doggedly pursue single lines of inquiry or development, and possibilities for truly new ideas or techniques - not just refinements - are exposed through the intellectual equivalent of brute force.
I don't know any internationally-recognized academics or world-class engineers who are creative but not hard working.