181–190 of 196 posts
This story is especially clear and dramatic (and well documented) but I've often thought this happens in every generation: the people who lead (businesses and nations) when they are in their 40s and 50s are often people who boldly go out and discover the world while they are in their teens and 20s, and so they take on a bit more risk than the average citizen, and this includes physical risk (whether in travel or info…
Hence the term "Surviorship bias".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"supportive teachers" != regular K12 teachers
I know a number of teachers. All of them want to do the best job possible. Unfortunately, a good number of them are in systems that don't support them as well as they should. That said, I'd take it a step further and say the (USA) culture doesn't do enough to support the systems and the teachers. What goes in, trickles down, and comes out the other end. With the power structure, teachers have some, but others have fa…
I hate this story and I hate most of the comments here. I homeschooled. I know a lot about homeschooling and giftedness and yadda. People who don't know anything about homeschooling and the myriad ways it differs from public school and private school -- it's a little like a bunch of Christians commenting on the life of a Muslim individual, having never studied their religion or culture or a bunch of Europeans in big…
I’ve been curious about homeschoolers and their perceptions and interactions with age ranges. I’ve heard criticisms about weird social distortions that manifest from the whole age stratification we find in schools through the grade system. Basically the values and preferences of a given age take on exaggerations among a bunch of peers that don’t get tempered by the opinions and thoughts from older peers and others ou…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember reading some article about why there are no adult prodigy, only child prodigy. It went something like, the reason there are only child prodigy, and no adult prodigy, is because other kids eventually catch up. And that child prodigies are basically just children that are ahead compared to other kids of the same age. It looked at the data, and showed that once adult, child prodigies just distribute themselve…
Wouldn’t an “adult prodigy” be referred to as a genius? Surely you believe there are people who are far more accomplished than 99.999% of the population that could be considered as such.
> Surely you believe there are people who are far more accomplished than 99.999% of the population that could be considered as such
This will obviously be a personal interpretation. One could consider the number 1 chess player an adult genius, but as I said, the article discussed that adults are no longer seen as such because the gap between the best and second best and everyone thereafter of similar training and experience is much smaller, so it no longer appears incredible, and people can very well imagine that someone else will soon come along and be even better than they are.
So it's not that there isn't ever one person arguably better at something than everyone else, but that they don't appear to be so due to a genius/prodigy gene, and they're no longer that much better that it seems impossible for anyone else to beat them ever.
Similarly, you'd expect that the best adults would likely have all been child prodigies no? And this appeared to be false based on my memory of that article.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know a number of teachers. All of them want to do the best job possible. Unfortunately, a good number of them are in systems that don't support them as well as they should. That said, I'd take it a step further and say the (USA) culture doesn't do enough to support the systems and the teachers. What goes in, trickles down, and comes out the other end. With the power structure, teachers have some, but others have fa…
I did not mean to blame teachers themselves and also believe there are systemic and cultural challenges. Not just in the US but globally. This is not surprising given the way in which education and media are often politicized, the use of access to tertiary education as an effective class battleground, and the scale and scope of recent technology impact on our culture.
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I read the article. In my reading it implied the whole family were disabled, the parents housebound, and that for half of his life the kid was effectively permanently engaged in self-directed business-linked study outside of the house.
Was there any indication that this kid would have been happier or “better off” in any other situation? It sounds like he thrived in the specific set of conditions that he was raised in. Would that be true if he had grown up middle class and went to a traditional public school and force-fed common core nonsense?
Given that we wanted her to be able to swim with them, we paid a professional to give her swimming lessons.
She's now 11, but any time in the last ~5 years, tipping over in a canoe or kayak would not have been fatal for her (even without a life vest).
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You can publish pretty much anything. The hard part is to get one of good publisher houses that can do promo etc. But publishing on itself does not require anything. Thins kid also supposedly bought 50000$ by himself at 11.
Financed. He was able to make the payments and I’m guessing the loan was in his parents names.
I feel like there is a huge elephant in the room here of how shitty Utah’s support system evidently is. No money to assist his disabled parents and his autistic brother. This whole family was living in desperate, grinding poverty, and that gave this kid a super strong urge to try and get out of it instead of having a childhood.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
Okay so, I have to say, at first this was a pretty feel-bad story for me. I then noticed a tidbit of information in another article about it that somehow made me feel different: Cole Summers didn't know how to swim. He was out on the water in a kayak, with no life jacket, with only an autistic child for company - and didn't know how to swim. Somehow it stopped feeling like a tragic accident and more like carelessness…
In rural communities, people are dying of many things, like not having medical care, drug addiction, murder, suicide, etc.
Obviously fate made this outing seem like a bad idea in hindsight, but I'd also say that leaving a 14 year kid to support a family of 4 is a bad idea in foresight.
i.e. if this is your takeaway, (respectfully) consider a different perspective
This story is especially clear and dramatic (and well documented) but I've often thought this happens in every generation: the people who lead (businesses and nations) when they are in their 40s and 50s are often people who boldly go out and discover the world while they are in their teens and 20s, and so they take on a bit more risk than the average citizen, and this includes physical risk (whether in travel or info…
His idol was Warren Buffet -- not exactly a reckless risk taker
And he was into regenerative farming. That is very much NOT a "get rich quick" scheme.
It was about building value over the long term.
This comment says more about you than the subject of article (and not in a bad way, just saying it doesn't really apply here)