The Curse of Genius • Hacker News Board

Re: The Curse of Genius

#71

Post by mikeash » Thu, May 16, 2019, 12:54 PM UTC

derp_dee_derp wrote: post #65

dusted wrote: post #59

(disclaimer: not a genious, iq 125) grade 0, first day, found name of classmate interesting as it was the same name as a character in a tale I liked, I remarked this, was told that it was cruel to "call people names", class was encouraged to find a "bad name" for me. grade 1, teacher used to enjoy holding me in front of the class, telling "this is [name], he thinks he's special, he likes attention" and have the other…

> grade 3, handed in assignment in basic, we were supposed to write a story, and I wrote a small program with arrays of words, and arrays of indexes to print the story.. Teacher told me it didn't count to "write some hieroglyphs", I told he it was a program, she explained to me "it's not possible to just make a program". yeah, i'm with the teacher on this one. you didn't complete the assignment. At grade 3, a lot of…

The teacher was correct to reject the work. The teacher was horribly wrong to belittle and criticize the work from a position of ignorance.

Re: The Curse of Genius

#72

Post by jcon321 » Thu, May 16, 2019, 12:54 PM UTC

dusted wrote: post #59

(disclaimer: not a genious, iq 125) grade 0, first day, found name of classmate interesting as it was the same name as a character in a tale I liked, I remarked this, was told that it was cruel to "call people names", class was encouraged to find a "bad name" for me. grade 1, teacher used to enjoy holding me in front of the class, telling "this is [name], he thinks he's special, he likes attention" and have the other…

Why do programmers have a hard time writing coherent complete sentences?

Re: The Curse of Genius

#73

Post by dangerface » Thu, May 16, 2019, 12:57 PM UTC

dusted wrote: post #59

(disclaimer: not a genious, iq 125) grade 0, first day, found name of classmate interesting as it was the same name as a character in a tale I liked, I remarked this, was told that it was cruel to "call people names", class was encouraged to find a "bad name" for me. grade 1, teacher used to enjoy holding me in front of the class, telling "this is [name], he thinks he's special, he likes attention" and have the other…

This echos my experience of school the only thing they ever tried to teach me was to conform. Like you I was no genius but I guess the nail that sticks out gets the hammer.

Re: The Curse of Genius

#74

Post by thrower123 » Thu, May 16, 2019, 1:00 PM UTC

ungifted wrote: post #19

I went through a gifted program starting in 3rd grade but I don’t think I’m gifted. Most of what I think seems obvious. For example, the ability to ask simple questions in the moment is a skill anyone can learn. For the highest level poker player, analytical thoughts are rather systemic but require emotional and intellectual control. Had I focused on any one thing, I think I could had been a brilliant programmer, phy…

>My point is I think it’s all about process. Asking questions, reasoning from first principles, obsessive focus, curiosity and resiliency will make any person gifted.

People that are smarter than average rarely think that what they do is particularly mind-blowing. And a lot of it is really not Rainman-esque transcendent intelligence. But the reality is that the baseline of what most people are capable of is so very low. A huge percentage of people are laboring with short-term memory deficits, learning disabilities, dyslexia, dysgraphia, and a whole host of things that make basic logic and planning very difficult for them.

Re: The Curse of Genius

#75

Post by dusted » Thu, May 16, 2019, 1:05 PM UTC

friedegg wrote: post #69

A decade ago, my niece went in for pre-K testing, and the teacher showed her a list of animals, asking her to name them. Picture of a dog, spot. Picture of a cat, whiskers. Picture of a rabbit, hoppy, etc. The teacher tells her parents that she failed that section and needs to work on being able to identify animals. They point out to the teacher that she had asked her to name them, not identify them, and that's exact…

This reminds me of another math lesson failure of my own, we were asked to count "the dots in the boxes", our book used (as I learnt later) offset print, CMY (no K), and there were clusters of 4 dots.. One magenta, one yellow, and one cyan and one black.. I found this task difficult, because it was many dots and it was boring to count so many.. I did them all, 4 dots, 8 dots, 16 dots, 40 dots.. I failed them all. I was supposed to only count the black dots, how was I supposed to know that I was supposed to ignore the colored ones?

Re: The Curse of Genius

#76

Post by dusted » Thu, May 16, 2019, 1:10 PM UTC

jcon321 wrote: post #72

dusted wrote: post #59

(disclaimer: not a genious, iq 125) grade 0, first day, found name of classmate interesting as it was the same name as a character in a tale I liked, I remarked this, was told that it was cruel to "call people names", class was encouraged to find a "bad name" for me. grade 1, teacher used to enjoy holding me in front of the class, telling "this is [name], he thinks he's special, he likes attention" and have the other…

Why do programmers have a hard time writing coherent complete sentences?

It might be because we were sent out of class so often? Also, while it is no excuse, English is my second language, and I did poor in school as explained before. I also admit that my focus was on sharing something I've not shared before, which I've found difficult to share before.

Re: The Curse of Genius

#77

Post by geggam » Thu, May 16, 2019, 1:11 PM UTC

Nasrudith wrote: post #63

peteretep wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the realization that luck had nothing to do with their success should happen Convince me.

The strong version is trivially disproveable - if they had got eaten by a dingo as an infant you would never seen any success regardless of how smart said poor illfated baby would be. That said talent, genius, and drive certainly are factors even with priviledged upbringing like needing money for education, seed capital and ability to dedicate their timr without side jobs. While self-made men, women and nonbinaries a…

Being eaten by a dingo is a strawman.

Given two people in the same place with the same opportunity you will see the difference. Yes chaos can happen and create challenges. Genius rises above it.

Re: The Curse of Genius

#78

Post by dusted » Thu, May 16, 2019, 1:12 PM UTC

derp_dee_derp wrote: post #65

dusted wrote: post #59

(disclaimer: not a genious, iq 125) grade 0, first day, found name of classmate interesting as it was the same name as a character in a tale I liked, I remarked this, was told that it was cruel to "call people names", class was encouraged to find a "bad name" for me. grade 1, teacher used to enjoy holding me in front of the class, telling "this is [name], he thinks he's special, he likes attention" and have the other…

> grade 3, handed in assignment in basic, we were supposed to write a story, and I wrote a small program with arrays of words, and arrays of indexes to print the story.. Teacher told me it didn't count to "write some hieroglyphs", I told he it was a program, she explained to me "it's not possible to just make a program". yeah, i'm with the teacher on this one. you didn't complete the assignment. At grade 3, a lot of…

Well, she told us to write it down, not how, she could have asked me to run and print it instead. At that age, I still had a sense of wonder about the world, and I thought exploring it was why we were here. I didn't understand that conforming was more important that exploring, but I understand that now.

Re: The Curse of Genius

#79

Post by wolfgke » Thu, May 16, 2019, 1:13 PM UTC

derp_dee_derp wrote: post #65

dusted wrote: post #59

(disclaimer: not a genious, iq 125) grade 0, first day, found name of classmate interesting as it was the same name as a character in a tale I liked, I remarked this, was told that it was cruel to "call people names", class was encouraged to find a "bad name" for me. grade 1, teacher used to enjoy holding me in front of the class, telling "this is [name], he thinks he's special, he likes attention" and have the other…

> grade 3, handed in assignment in basic, we were supposed to write a story, and I wrote a small program with arrays of words, and arrays of indexes to print the story.. Teacher told me it didn't count to "write some hieroglyphs", I told he it was a program, she explained to me "it's not possible to just make a program". yeah, i'm with the teacher on this one. you didn't complete the assignment. At grade 3, a lot of…

> At grade 3, a lot of the value in homework is simply in learning how to do homework correctly.

In other words: turning the respective pupil into a virtuously working machine.

Re: The Curse of Genius

#80

Post by Nasrudith » Thu, May 16, 2019, 1:13 PM UTC

I am somewhat of a mixed bag myself - certainly not to those extremes but above average. On the autistic spectrum and - withim normal developmental time tables but I had a habit of unthreading myself from infant car seats repeatedly and an unusually far back memory. I always remember being able to read but lacking much of an attention span for it.

I will refrain from the "G"-word and say I went to college at 16 and skipped trigonometry because I knew enough about SOH CAH TOA to work around the other details - it was just a subset of geometry so I didn't get why it was considered the more advanced class. B-average Computer Engineering student. Not the best luck with careers or self starting with side projects - late ADHD diagnosis which in retrospect made sense didn't come up too much because I found most of the stuff interesting.

Anyway my personal suspicion is that much of the curse comes from mismatch with society and its paradigms and the difficulty of finding kindred spirits.

It often feels like the masses are barking mad and yet you are the crazy one for pointing out it makes no goddamned sense.

Like charging a teen as an adult - especially for status offenses like sexting. Practically nobody questions the hypocrisy of "treated as a minor until we find it convenient otherwise" or takes the "insufficiently functioning brain argument" to give a cut off age to elder votes because we can't trust them to be fulky functioning mentally.

Or the interviewing process judging people on suits and posture is batshit insane, that they find people incapable of or not mimicking their tone less trustworthy for being insufficiently deceptive and more.