Natalie Portman - Scientist • Hacker News Board

Re: Natalie Portman - Scientist

#141

Post by Dn_Ab » Wed, Mar 02, 2011, 4:03 AM UTC

lwat wrote: post #140

btrask wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd probably be better than most other basketball players. If you want to be the best in the world, it's true that factors outside of your control come into play. If you can "settle" for being in the top 10, top 100, or top 1000, instead of #1, you probably don't need much besides a lot of well-directed effort. In my experience.

Well if he's 5'9 he's not gonna make even the top 1000.

I am going to guess you have not heard of dunk contest winning NBA players Spud Webb (5'7) or Nate Robinson (5 '9) then.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1pykLK_CUs

Re: Natalie Portman - Scientist

#142

Post by electromagnetic » Wed, Mar 02, 2011, 4:19 AM UTC

lwat wrote: post #122

electromagnetic wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone isn't born equal, but everything we have doesn't solely come from genetics. Nurture plays a huge role in our development. Saying Natalie Portman is successful solely because of her DNA is wholly disrespectful to her hard work. She didn't get best actress and a masters degree by just slumming it because her genes did all the work. It's naive and ignorant to ignore nurture in the debate. A lack of Vitamin D or…

If she didn't have the right genes to go with her hard work she wouldn't get anywhere either.

She'd have probably got somewhere average. Similarly if she had all the right genes and none of the hard work she'd have got somewhere average again. However, there's people who work way too hard to succeed and totally burn out.

We have nature, nurture and random chance that create all of us. I wouldn't have said "life's too short" and moved country if I hadn't read a single book (The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin) that I have no clue how it came to be in my possession.

My entire life is based on seemingly random chances. I met my wife via friends of friends of friends whom I originally met in a chat room. I got my dog (Dachshund x Jack Russell) by going to the SPCA when they were flooded with Labrador crosses and they had no terriers up for adoption, but she was getting taken out for a walk at that very moment.

Our entire lives are quantified by our reaction to random chance. I had less odds of being where I am today than I have of winning the lottery, but why do the events of my life occur so but my lottery ticket is always going to be a dud for the rest of my life.

It's the mixture of our nature and nurture that define who we are, by how we react to random occurrences. What random shit defined your life so far?

Re: Natalie Portman - Scientist

#143

Post by defen » Wed, Mar 02, 2011, 4:31 AM UTC

brown9-2 wrote: post #27

I'd like to take this opportunity to point out another "scientist" (minor) actor not mentioned in this article: - speaks Swedish, English, Spanish, some German, some French, some Japanese, and some Italian - awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - has a master's degree in chemical engineering from the University of Sydney (1982) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolph_lundgren

You forgot "European karate champion". My favorite Dolph story is that he put Stallone in the ICU for 8 days:

> Sylvester Stallone has stated that the original punching scenes filmed between him and Dolph Lundgren in the first portion of the fight are completely authentic. Stallone wanted to capture a realistic scene and Lundgren agreed that they would engage in legitimate sparring. One particularly forceful Lundgren punch to Stallone's chest slammed his heart against his breastbone, causing the heart to swell and his breathing to become labored. Stallone, suffering from labored breathing and a blood pressure over 200, was flown from the set in Canada to St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica and was forced into intensive care for eight days.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_IV

Re: Natalie Portman - Scientist

#144

Post by rtaycher » Wed, Mar 02, 2011, 5:06 AM UTC

poet wrote: post #30

HSO wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I have no doubt she is very intelligent and _could_ have been a scientist if she had chosen to. But until she publishes her own peer-reviewed research or gets an advanced science degree, she is "an actress with a BA in psychology", thank you. She's impressive enough w/o artificial hype.

She has published peer reviewed research: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi... (her actual name is Natalie Hershlag). One of the co-authors is Jerome Kagan: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_Kagan . Seems good enough to me. Certainly not a career scientist; very few would be with another venture making millions. But she has walked the walk. There's no hype here.

She has a Erdos-Bacon number(degrees of kevin bacon + paper co-author distance from the extremlly well published mathematician Paul Erdős) of 6.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s%E2%80%93Bacon_number)

Re: Natalie Portman - Scientist

#145

Post by Dn_Ab » Wed, Mar 02, 2011, 5:24 AM UTC

jhamburger wrote: post #87

TheSOB88 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if the reason people are 'smart' is because of the way their brain has organized itself over the years in response to learning so much? Then it isn't that dumb people are dumb, just behind.

That isn't reality. The genetic factors of intelligence are well documented. I could have played basketball six hours a day, every day for the last 25 years, and I'd be really really good. But I wouldn't be as good as Lebron James was when he was 12 years old.

Not a given. This will depend on how directed your training was and how good Lebron James was at 12 and how long he had been playing at that point. Getting good at something is like any other type of optimization, getting that final bit of performance takes an inordinate amount of work. [EDIT I took it upon myself to skim a bio. Sure Lebron had talent but he owes a lot to his coaches who took a special interest in him as a youth]

Most people can get within less than 2 seconds of Usain Bolt's best time. Going beyond that you run into a sheer cliff face. For athletes those fractions of a second is where biology starts to make a difference, the vast majority of differences in skill however, can be found in hard work.

Relevant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woOu_4l3lio

Re: Natalie Portman - Scientist

#146

Post by rospaya » Wed, Mar 02, 2011, 5:33 AM UTC

sp_ wrote: post #68

brown9-2 wrote: post #27

I'd like to take this opportunity to point out another "scientist" (minor) actor not mentioned in this article: - speaks Swedish, English, Spanish, some German, some French, some Japanese, and some Italian - awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - has a master's degree in chemical engineering from the University of Sydney (1982) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolph_lundgren

Or how about this fellow who has an undergraduate degree in Chemistry, a PhD in law, and was an Olympic swimmer but is best known for his movies where he gets into fights with other guys (pretty much everybody in my age bracket in Germany and some other European countries knows him). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bud_Spencer Edit: He is also a jet pilot, helicopter pilot, holder of multiple patents, and a startup foun…

I'm lost for words.

Re: Natalie Portman - Scientist

#147

Post by nostrademons » Wed, Mar 02, 2011, 5:35 AM UTC

trunnell wrote: post #104

edw519 wrote: post #45

Nice article. Two sentences jumped out at me. First: “There are very few who are as inherently bright as Natalie is, who have as much intellectual horsepower, who work as hard as she did. She didn’t take a single thing for granted.” then: If anything, stories like Ms. Portman’s show that great success, like DNA, is constructed of a few basic building blocks: tenacity, focus, and the old Woody Allen line about just sh…

Intelligence is real but very difficult to quantify. The last time I was familiar with the literature (~10 years ago), intelligence was best defined as having many dimensions. It's a collection of weakly related gifts. Spatial reasoning, for example, is a different kind of intelligence than musical ability. Perhaps someone more up to date on the science can chime in. In any case, attempts to squash all those dimensio…

Intelligence may or may not have multiple facets, but the "multiple intelligences" fad proposed by Howard Gardner was basically shown to be bunk, devoid of any real scientific evidence.

Re: Natalie Portman - Scientist

#148

Post by nostrademons » Wed, Mar 02, 2011, 5:50 AM UTC

richcollins wrote: post #59

edw519 wrote: post #45

Nice article. Two sentences jumped out at me. First: “There are very few who are as inherently bright as Natalie is, who have as much intellectual horsepower, who work as hard as she did. She didn’t take a single thing for granted.” then: If anything, stories like Ms. Portman’s show that great success, like DNA, is constructed of a few basic building blocks: tenacity, focus, and the old Woody Allen line about just sh…

I thought that too until I moved to San Francisco and started meeting people that consistently see things that I miss. It wasn't that they had more domain knowledge or worked harder, it was that they were just better at seeing remotely connected things.

That doesn't necessarily mean that they're innately smarter than you.

When I first moved out to Silicon Valley and started working at Google, I met lots of people that consistently saw things that I missed. Even ones who didn't have as much experience as I did, at least in terms of year-as-a-computer-programmer.

Now that I've been here a couple years, I've found that I'm consistently seeing things that other people are missing. Even, in some cases, the same people that consistently saw things I missed when I joined.

It hasn't been because my innate intelligence has gone up. (In fact, as measured by my performance against the Starcraft: Brood War AI, my reaction time and ability to think quickly seems to be going consistently down since high school.) Rather, I've accumulated lots more domain knowledge. And it's tacit domain knowledge, little subconscious bits that are floating around the Valley culture but that people aren't aware of on a conscious level. If you don't know to look for such domain knowledge, it seems like the person is just massively smarter than you. And if you have that domain knowledge, you usually aren't aware that you have it, and so it seems like you're massively smarter than everyone else. But if you actually look closely at the leaps of logic that intelligent people make, and then trace those solutions back to the knowledge that enables them, you can almost always find some particular fact hidden away in the back of somebody's brain that accounts for it.

Re: Natalie Portman - Scientist

#149

Post by nostrademons » Wed, Mar 02, 2011, 6:01 AM UTC

m0nastic wrote: post #71

jleyank wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know it's (barely) related to the current thread, but Queen has an astrophysicist as a lead guitarist... Face it, some people can pull this multi-discipline s*ht off.

There's also Brian Cox (there must be something in the UK water about turning out musicians/physicists): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Cox_(physicist)

Also Tom Scholz of Boston. MIT-trained mechanical engineer, worked for Polaroid, and then left to found one of great classic rock bands.

Re: Natalie Portman - Scientist

#150

Post by Dn_Ab » Wed, Mar 02, 2011, 6:33 AM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #135

electromagnetic wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone isn't born equal, but everything we have doesn't solely come from genetics. Nurture plays a huge role in our development. Saying Natalie Portman is successful solely because of her DNA is wholly disrespectful to her hard work. She didn't get best actress and a masters degree by just slumming it because her genes did all the work. It's naive and ignorant to ignore nurture in the debate. A lack of Vitamin D or…

There's a fair bit of evidence that hard work is itself genetic, and the ability to focus attention and delay gratification is largely due to certain brain structures. Those brain structures can be affected by genetics, by environment (eg. fetal alcohol syndrome results in a marked loss of impulse control later), or by practice, but not everybody starts from the same point. Anyway, your point gets into issues of free…

Even if not everyone starts at the same point that doesn't mean they will continue to stay ahead. People operate under the assumption of a constant veclocity in development. And that development is non-inertial (in the physics sense). The rate of development function could well be logistic or with an asymptote or some like - removing that insurmountable gap implicit in so many statements.

We may all end up near enough (for all practical purposes) at the same endpoint if we all worked hard and performed necessary rotations and frame changes given our situations. The brain is very malleable.

There is also the fact that people start at different places for different areas and that chooses where they end up specializing. And there is probably some self-fulfilling prophecy going on that trains people to avoid smarty pants subjects which are vital for developing rigorous thinking. why is it a matter of pride to be terrible at maths and technical subjects? or the fact of growing up with certain teachers and society all but directly informing you that certain races aren't up for certain more mathy subjects. I can certainly attest to that stuff messing up your ability to keep on when things get difficult.