I will not deign
To now refrain
From laying bear the nudity of scholars
Who think their robes
Befitting clothes
And prove it to themselves in words and dollars
The fittest minds
In all mankind
Regret now all they ever took for granted
Remove your blinds
And see the signs;
There's more to all than said will be recanted.
Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children
391–400 of 477 posts
Re: Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children
#392Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 sand…
So we should be willing to lie if it makes a better story?
I'm not sure how you got that idea from the post you are responding to.
Re: Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children
#393Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> "they doggedly pursue single lines of inquiry or development, and possibilities for truly new ideas or techniques"
This could easily be attributed to curiosity. Don't dismiss curiosity as something wishy-washy.
As I said before, the mindset between hardworking and curious is different. That's not to say pursuing curiosity takes no effort. I'll use a musician analogy to explain. A hardworking musician works hard to master their skill and knowledge with an instrument in order to maximise their abilities. A curious musician by contrast is guided by much broader principles, including a greater focus on sound rather than their personal skill. A playing mistake that produces an interesting result is not something to be eliminated by refinement, but instead is the opening of a new avenue of inquiry. It helps to be open to interesting mistakes, and this is not something that is easy to do when you're hyper focused on perfecting yourself.
In other words, spending energy is necessary to get a fuller understanding of something, but what motivates you does have an impact on the end result. Hard work is driven by ego, playful curiosity less so, but it doesn't mean less energy. Work and play are not the same thing, but what separates them is not the activity per se, but rather the mindset of the individual.
Re: Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children
#394Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 sand…
i have friends like this.
trust me, you're not going to convince him.
he's probably going to just do nothing, for a long time, and tell you how lucky you are every time you visit.
Re: Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children
#395Earlier 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.
Really? As a PhD what you do is explore a -- best case: niche, usually: theoretical and worst case: completely made up -- problem thoroughly in absence of workplace realities like deadlines, office politics and backstabbery, and try to come up with a solution that's better in at least some sense than what's been written before, then write a big piece of documentation about it whose total number of individual readers…
> in absence of workplace realities like deadlines, office politics and backstabbery
Really? I did not find that to be the case. I don't mind deadlines, but watching the day-to-day life of academics doing academia with their peers is what caused me to drop out of a PhD program and go finish my research project on my own. After seeing it in action, I wanted no part of being one of them for the rest of my career. I expect that I could have been at a rarely political university system, but after some medium-ish number of conferences (i.e. more than two dozen), I doubt that it was much worse than average. I found the whole thing quite "icky". In fact, I found it worse than any commercial environment I've been in (although I've been told I've been lucky in my experiences for failing to find it to such a degree in commercial environments).
Re: Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children
#396The popularity of comments about hard work on this thread make me think that it's difficult for people to accept studies like this. And for two reasons: 1) We are born with very different innate abilities, which leads to great inequalities in our lives together, and 2) That innate difference is not to the credit of the gifted. They had nothing to do with it. It's like being born rich or white or male or American or all of them at once. So it's an undeserved privilege. An yet people born with such talents should be treated differently. We should cultivate them, because they can do so much to advance society. To those who have much, much is given...
Re: Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children
#397Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps true geniuses know the social value of humility.
Haha, no way. I've worked with or met a half dozen MacArthur fellows, and none of them were shy about bringing up that fact. You could argue that MacArthur selects for self-promoting geniuses, but such creatures clearly do exist.
Exception that proves the rule.
How do you know if someone you met went to Harvard? They already told you.
Re: Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children
#398Interesting 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 agree, as a Chem Eng master (In the dutch system you do not leave university with a bachelor, it's interpreted as if you weren't good enough to get a master) I've noticed that most of the guys I considered to be the brightest left for corporate jobs, that Ph.D's were a mix of people with deep academic interest (and endurance), some very bright people, and some people that felt they weren't ready for the real world.…
> some people that felt they weren't ready for the real world.
i know some of these people. i suspect a lot of phds are people like these. of those who stay through the entire 3-5 year program, yet some are happy to remain post docs for the rest of their lives. they seem to have no goal, no real curiosity, no desire to see what exists outside the academic life they've known since college... they are there simply because they were there.
Re: Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children
#399Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 sand…
i have friends like this. trust me, you're not going to convince him. he's probably going to just do nothing, for a long time, and tell you how lucky you are every time you visit.
I have two counter-examples for you. I had two friends like this. I convinced them to learn programming while they were working menial jobs. Both of them did, and went on to have successful careers in the tech field.
I have a story of failure too. Two other frends expressed interest in learning to program, and I tried to teach them C while I was learning it myself. Big mistake. They quit after the first very intense and long lesson. I think I threw them in to the deep end of the pool, trying to teach them C as their first exposure to programming (when I myself didn't even know C and was learning along with them).
In the successful cases first mentioned above, both of my friends taught themselves languages they were interested in, at their own pace, and in their spare time (what little there was of it). They were also clearly very motivated, which my other two friends may not have been.
Moral of the story: I think it all depends on the student, the teacher, what they're trying to learn, how they're learning, how they're taught, and how motivated they are. You can't just generalize and say it'll work for everyone or not work for everyone.
The successes make me cautiously optimistic and I will personally try to help people again, if given the chance, despite there being no guarantee that it will work. In fact, I'd still try to help even every one of my previous attempts had failed.
Re: Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children
#400Earlier 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.
I think it's two sides of a coin here. When someone asks me how I fixed some obscure bug or crazy performance issue, I will say something like 'I was the last one to give up on it'.
You could also say that many other people looked at the same thing and either didn't give a shit, or they weren't willing to continue suffering toward the payoff at some point.
Is that tenacity? Curiosity? Some of each?