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Terence Tao, at 8 years old (1984) [pdf]

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Re: Terence Tao, at 8 years old (1984) [pdf]

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No .. not really. Not even close. Just like even if I practiced music 8 hours a day I wouldn't be able to come up with the music Kurt Cobain has or Mozart. There are plenty of musicians who try really hard but lack the innate talent - at best they can learn to play other people's music but never can come up with good original music, at least not something other people want to hear. As someone wrote here innate abilit…

I think you’re confusing mastery with marketability. “Other people want to hear it” is at best adjacent to someone’s skill at composing or playing music. There’s plenty of mediocre musicians who became world-famous, and plenty of great musicians who nobody’s heard about. Skill and success are pretty weakly correlated.

> I think you’re confusing mastery with marketability. “Other people want to hear it” is at best adjacent to someone’s skill at composing or playing music.

This is a fun and complicated topic. Yes, sometimes things outside of the music influence our perceptions of the music. If the Red Hot Chili Peppers were a bunch of bald fat dudes maybe they would have had less fans; if Kurt Cobain hadn't killed himself he would still be a legend but perhaps in the calbire of Eddie Vedder and not what he became. But the following underlying principal I believe to be true : it's impossible to survive the test of time in music without producing "good" music. Example of music that survived the test of time : The Beatles, Queen, Pink Floyd and I'd argue Nirvana, Pearl Jam etc. How do I define "survive the test of time" is another discussion I'd rather not get into lol.

Re: Terence Tao, at 8 years old (1984) [pdf]

#184
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. It's been decades, but personally being acquaintances with IMO and IOI gold medalists made me rethink a lot of things. With our society being ostensibly meritocratic regarding intelligence, people generally don't like to listen to stories that suggest that nurture and hard work aren't as important as they presume.

I don't think our society is even remotely meritocratic regarding intelligence. Maybe it is meritocratic regarding psychopathy. We merely have a few pockets, where the very brightest are rewarded. However going from average intelligence up to those pockets, there is a ton of people, who are clearly more intelligent than most others. Much more intelligent than the typical lie-your-way-through-life people, who haven't…

Hierarchies are promoted because they coordinate the work of large numbers of people and make them vastly more effective at scale. That's quite meritocratic.

Re: Terence Tao, at 8 years old (1984) [pdf]

#185

I really wonder what motivates a seven year old to persistently work on that „one thing“ and not get distracted/bored. I guess he knew he was special?

> His primary school principal described him as ‘a happy little fellow who has a clear understanding of the fact that he is different’.

Re: Terence Tao, at 8 years old (1984) [pdf]

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We pressure our kids into grit, but genius comes from the inside. Be grateful when it happens, but be happy if it does not.

Laszlo Polgar would disagree [1]. He contends that raising a genius is something you can actually target intentionally (whether or not you should). His proof being 3 daughters who became GMs and one that was a generational talent. As far as audibles go, that’s quite a flex. Yes, the daughters are not all equally talented and chess isn’t quite the same as math, but we’re talking about gradiation within an achievement…

Yes, but that kind of aristocratic tutoring is not scalable to the bulk of the population. You need the equivalent of deep PhD expertise in every subject to accomplish that, and even AIs are nowhere close to that level.

Re: Terence Tao, at 8 years old (1984) [pdf]

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you might be underrating the value of even that enabling work. Some parents would not have the financial resources to provide those learning materials. And some parents would take a normative stance on how an 8 year old ought to behave. More importantly, it's not as though individuals like Clements or Erdos was corresponding with Terrence directly to arrange a meeting. His parents clearly played an important…

Sure. But what about the parents who struggle every day with normally gifted children? They deserve even more credit. This seems like an easy child :)

One needs to be a (long term present) parent to understand these subtleties.

You also hear just the success stories which are often extremely marginal, when such approach wouldn't fit development curve of some other potential genius we would not be hearing their less successful story, would we.

Not diminishing the overall message, in 80s even in western democracies deeper info was not so readily available so its not like his parents just threw him wifi-connected tablet with wikipedia opened and that was it.

But I think what should be celebrated more is some proper hard long term effort and not just usual approach with exceptional results.

Re: Terence Tao, at 8 years old (1984) [pdf]

#188
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I can't help but think I could have ended up on a path like this much earlier if my teachers actually supported me rather than treating me like a problem. It's interesting you raise your teachers / organized schooling when Tao's parents were cited earlier in the thread for providing him materials. Where do you see mothers and fathers stepping in (or not!) with children of greater ability?

My parents did provide me with materials. They were happy to buy me books and stuff. But school is where I spent most my time and did most of my learning. My single father had enough to deal with, working full time alongside being a farmer. He isn't exactly an academic. He did what he could. The school system failed me massively. Both in not supporting nor encouraging my exceptional performance, and in ignoring my bu…

Thanks for sharing, I appreciate how hard it can be to revisit challenges from our youth.

Re: Terence Tao, at 8 years old (1984) [pdf]

#189
post #30

I read this earlier today and was thinking: how many such mathematically gifted individuals exist I. The world at one time? Assuming there are probably 20-30 Tao-caliber people in the US and an adversarial multiplier of 0.1 (only 1 in 10 such kids are nurtured), we reach 300 for this generation, about 1 in a million. That means in a generation there are ~ 10k such people in the world. Think about connecting them or n…

> Think about connecting them or nurturing them with AI companions.

Yes, let's give them only the blandest, most boring interactions possible.

Re: Terence Tao, at 8 years old (1984) [pdf]

#190
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. It's been decades, but personally being acquaintances with IMO and IOI gold medalists made me rethink a lot of things. With our society being ostensibly meritocratic regarding intelligence, people generally don't like to listen to stories that suggest that nurture and hard work aren't as important as they presume.

I don't think our society is even remotely meritocratic regarding intelligence. Maybe it is meritocratic regarding psychopathy. We merely have a few pockets, where the very brightest are rewarded. However going from average intelligence up to those pockets, there is a ton of people, who are clearly more intelligent than most others. Much more intelligent than the typical lie-your-way-through-life people, who haven't…

I don't disagree. That's why I qualified my statement with "ostensibly".

But being really intelligent, at least for the top 1% or so, is often advantageous enough to offset any disadvantages from your class/cultural background etc.

I also wonder whether your "psychopathy" is just "ambition". After all, while intelligence alone doesn't guarantee anything, "intelligence + ambition" takes you quite far.

Personally, I can see how even an honest-to-god meritocratic society ends up with psychopaths at the top. For most people with normal-ish psychology, the risks and stress that comes with being on top of anything high stakes is just too much.

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