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

scientificamerican.com

421–430 of 477 posts

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

#421
post #157

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…

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.

I'll support this with my experience. A PhD means you can do peer-reviewable original research. This means that you can't be too dumb, yes, but mostly that you have the elbow-grease to see it through. Maintaining motivation and stick-to-it-iveness are the most important qualities for doing a PhD.

Disclaimer: dropped out of a PhD program due to lack of interest and elbow-grease.

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

#422

> “... these people really do control our society,” says Jonathan Wai, a psychologist at the Duke University Talent Identification Program ... "The kids who test in the top 1% tend to become our eminent scientists and academics, our Fortune 500 CEOs and federal judges, senators and billionaires” The article assumes that promoting these super-bright people and geniuses is the way to solve the difficult problems the re…

Yep that is what I instantly thought of when reading this. I have no problem accepting that plenty of people are just smarter and more competent than I ever will be, but it will be difficult for me to swallow that they are actually automatically helpful. If they were, we'd probably live in some sort of utopia by now.

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

#423
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to break it to you, but the most influential video game designers were born in the 70s. They've made Doom, Baldur's Gate, Fallout 1-2, Everquest, Master of Orion and all the other classics in the 90s and very early 2000s. Most games released today are either donationware (WoT) or completely derivative works (think long running series like CoD or sports games), or survival-game clones like No Man's Sky (and abou…

You have a very limited conception of what video games are capable of. This is like going up to an aspiring writer in ancient Greece and saying "The Odyssey has already been written, there is nothing more to be done." Not realizing that 2,000 years later, authors like Joyce and Nabokov would still be breaking new ground. Assuming the human race endures long enough, video games are at the very beginning of what is goi…

I actually hope you prove me wrong in the most spectacular way possible, because the current games are very stale and derivative.

Star Citizen is the only thing on the horizon that shows promise, at least to my personal tastes.

Best of luck in your endeavors.

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

#424

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.

I think this is the one you are referring to: "I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times."

This can be interpreted in a multitude of ways, but I like to have it in the context of this other Bruce Lee quote: "Before I studied the art, a punch to me was just like a punch, a kick just like a kick. After I learned the art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick no longer a kick. Now that I've understood the art, a punch is just like a punch, a kick just like a kick"

My interpretation is that we've all gone through these three phases in one way or another: 1) how do we do this stuff? ok use an editor... who cares if it's emacs (boy is that tough to learn), vi (huh? what's this context thingy), nano (cool, a menu!) etc

2) learn that there's a whole bunch of gee whiz stuff we can use (hey look, I have this special screwdriver designed to fit around the corner). Proceed to OCD over the pros and cons, figure out special cases etc.

3) realise (hopefully not too late), that actually all these specialised tools are just a means to an end. Use the most appropriate one for the situation; and appropriate here might mean that you use that one kick practised 10,000 times ("superfoot" Bill Wallace anybody?), in the right situation, rather than try to remember than wushu butterfly kick that you practised once (it hits, hero points to infinity! but if it misses, oh boy am I in trouble...).

I think step (2) is where we can start to distinguish those who will make it to (3), and those who will not. In order to be really good, if not genius level, it's not sufficient to just practise 10,000 hours (a Gladwell meme which I'm not fond of, although I understand what Gladwell was trying to imply), but to also understand and appreciate these "tools" (whether tangible or not).

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

#425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, I didn't know about that. But I meant cognitive abilities, like Math.

Why would cognitive ability be different than any other characteristic, like height, athletic ability, and so on? Those same twin studies have shown that intelligence and academic performance are also highly heritable. Certainly nurturing an ability will enhance performance, but there's an inherent upper limit to everything. Just like eating right and exercising won't make you grow taller than some max threshold, so…

I'm astonished about how many people here are using physical traits that are observable (even with the naked eye) as analogies to brain functions. Yes, we know a lot about muscle fibers, nutrition, physics and all that stuff, we can make reasonable conclusions about physical limits, but we don't know much about our brains or minds for that matter, not even state-of-art neurology have come up with solid conclusions, yet people here are talking (and being absolutely sure, which is the worst part) about intelligence inherited by genes, brain limits...

I just can't.

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

#426
post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my college class there were two kids I would call absolute geniuses, possibly the smartest folk I have ever met. One wrote his senior thesis his second year there (on compilers and type theory) and another was a young philosophy transfer student from Deep Springs who regularly owned and outwitted professors in class to such a degree that rumors abounded he would be offered a faculty position after graduating. And…

I won't ever know how people like that process the world but my guess is that they are attuned to the sheer horror of it in a way that most people can't conceive of, and aren't able to distract themselves from this with other pursuits. Following this taking their own lives becomes the only solution they can envision.

I'm a 22 year old student and developer. I took a test that said I was gifted as a kid. Since I was very young, I've sensed 'sheer horror' constantly. It's when I see my friends and family, and they describe their aspirations that they won't reach for lack of insight; its the people that get stuck in a local minimum of cognotive dissonance who decide not to seek the global minimum. The coming death of the world is the strongest and most painful, because to help avoid that is to decimate my interpersonal relationships in pursuit of a craft that I could use to grow a business that might have some shred of succeeding and granting me the power of influence. I can't meet people without perceiving their flaws that they won't acknowledge. Every day I am appalled by my mistakes and failures of the week, yet my standards are so high that I cannot even express my grief without people rolling their eyes at my lofty goals.

I should be writing my integration tests.

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

#427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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…

> Hard work is driven by ego I have a sample size of one that says this is false. For me at least, hard work comes from one of a number of things, none of which are ego. 1. The desire to deliver what I set out to deliver by the deadline I promised. I made a promise and I was raised that a man is only as good as his word. So unless you have a compelling reason why delivery is not an option, you see it through. 2. The…

I notice your edit where you admit point 2 is likely ego. Point 1 is also particularly ego as in the sense of "self-image, as you use it explicitly to define an image of yourself that is distinct from others on a psychological level, as in "I am a man who makes good on promises". So two of your points are pretty ego based.

Now not saying that's a bad thing! I have learned the hard way that we all have egos and that guided properly it's actually a benefit, as it drives you to do valuable things both for yourself _and_ others, as is clear in all of your points.

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

#428
post #255
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of people spend hours drawing and still suck at it. My sister spent hours with a coloring book as a kid, and now has a growing IMDB page.* Sure, she went to a great art school, but not because of some single minded focus as she had ~10 AP classes and ended up High school Valedictorian. Even this did not take her full attention as she had a wide circle of friends, was very popular, and spent a lot of time on ma…

Its interesting to compare artistic drawing to drafting. My observations from a year of drafting in high school (Future engineers need to be able to make and read blueprints was a fad a couple decades ago) and work with people in the field, there are people who can do three dimensional transforms and manipulations in their head with little effort beyond the mere mechanics of pencil on paper (or fingers on CAD worksta…

I suspect tradeoffs on underlying performance as the cause for Aphantasia. There's a guy in Sonoma I met and he can see in 3D like I feel it, but then he can put textures on the model and see that. Visualize it. He's also monochrome color blind, so it's a tradeoff. He makes really awesome wooden furniture.

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

#429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now, I'm not a genius And yet you also told us: I was reading calculus textbooks when I was 10 years old. I scored in the 99th percentile in math on the California high school exit exam. I transferred to a university as a junior at 17. Regardless of the nature/nurture debate, if you can achieve those things at those ages with any amount of work then you are clearly far smarter than most people, at least when it comes…

That is exactly what he argued - that his achievements are due to being smart rather than "laser focused". Not being a genius means that he is merely 2 standard deviations smarter than the mean (think "there's a few of those in every high school class") rather than 4 standard deviations smarter like the kids in the SMPY.

>think "there's a few of those in every high school class"

Rather a few of those in every high school. 2 standard deviations means 2.5% per side. This is one in 40 people, so probably on average 2-3 people per year in an average high school.

Of course, pre selection can lead to higher values, but having several children outside of 2std dev in a class won't be average in the vast majority of schools.

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

#430

Hung out with a brilliant heart surgeon, genius. I asked him about what cartoons he watched growing up. He said "what's a cartoon?" He was dead serious. Parents would never let him not study. Never. 100+ hour weeks. Zero time for anything else. He was happy, rich, had it all. But wondering if he every found time to watch a cartoon.

He didn't know what a cartoon was? Or was it a bit of playful retort?

He said the surgeon was "dead serious"... but it must have been an act, right?

Sure, maybe he never saw one, but being unaware of at least the dictionary definition of "cartoon" seems highly unlikely.

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