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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]

#21
Genuine curiosity: if you are gifted with a certain “wiring” (genes, brain chemistry etc) why is that considered an accomplishment? Also - We, as a society, tend to celebrate people with “natural didn’t really need to work for” type gifts quite inconsistently - eg A supermodel who is gifted with the gift of looks, beauty etc is also in the same category of “natural” talent but sure doesn’t get the same celebration as a prodigy in maths or science. In both cases the people are fundamentally bestowed with abilities they didn’t really have to work extremely hard to acquire but are perhaps looked at differently. What’s kind of psychology is at play here? Would love to understand how we tend to interpret such things and then form beliefs.

I realize and acknowledge both sets had talents and the spent thier time doing something with it to produce something extraordinary but we seem to tend to overlook the massive head start they also had. Why so?

(Totally understandable if you feel like downvoting but I would ask you to articulate and share the cord it struck with you if you down vote)

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

#22
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gwern hosts a lot of PDFs -- see https://gwern.net/archiving

I guess that makes sense in the light of her previous post and work on making a new archiving solution for being able to host singlefile archives more efficiently. Thank you

https://www.google.com/search?q=Gwern+Branwen

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

#23
post #15

Don't miss the program he wrote after teaching himself BASIC from a book at age six (Fig 5 / book page 222 / PDF page 10): > 320 print "(brmmmm-brmmmm-putt-putt-vraow-chatter-chatter bye mr. fibonacci!)"

This does feel like something a super smart alien pretending to be an 8 year old would write.

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

#24
post #19

I know it must be obvious but this proves to me that biological intelligence hasn't nearly reached its peak. If we select for pure intelligence, biological brains can get much smarter. Imagine if we had 5 million geniuses as smart or smarter than Tao doing quantum physics. But life doesn't select for pure intelligence, it selects for survival. In the Dune books, they banned computers so they bred super mentally capab…

Not sure it works like that, I think his biggest superpower was intrinsic motivation. Any child who read maths textbooks with enthusiasm for 3-4 hours a day for years could in theory at least get close to doing what he did, but what kid had that level of motivation?

> Any child who read maths textbooks with enthusiasm for 3-4 hours a day for years could in theory at least get close to doing what he did

No, they couldn't. And neither could most adults, for that matter.

Innate ability is real.

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

#25

Genuine curiosity: if you are gifted with a certain “wiring” (genes, brain chemistry etc) why is that considered an accomplishment? Also - We, as a society, tend to celebrate people with “natural didn’t really need to work for” type gifts quite inconsistently - eg A supermodel who is gifted with the gift of looks, beauty etc is also in the same category of “natural” talent but sure doesn’t get the same celebration as…

It depends on how much value their talents can bring to humankind, I guess.

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

#26

At 8 years old I was able to expertly dismantle many radios. Was still a few years away from reassembly.

At 8 years I recycled filesystem directories. I didn't know you can create new folders, so when I needed one I grabbed a random one from C:\Windows, moved it to my desktop and deleted its contents.

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

#27

At 8 years old I was able to expertly dismantle many radios. Was still a few years away from reassembly.

At 8 years I recycled filesystem directories. I didn't know you can create new folders, so when I needed one I grabbed a random one from C:\Windows, moved it to my desktop and deleted its contents.

Makes total sense, it used to be called "Recycle Bin" after all!

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

#28
I like that test where some of the questions are wrong and wonder whether we should have that kind of thing in maths textbooks.

I think people need to be trained to be more confident in what they know, and if we gave them that kind of thing we could maybe train them to become so.

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

#29
post #19

I know it must be obvious but this proves to me that biological intelligence hasn't nearly reached its peak. If we select for pure intelligence, biological brains can get much smarter. Imagine if we had 5 million geniuses as smart or smarter than Tao doing quantum physics. But life doesn't select for pure intelligence, it selects for survival. In the Dune books, they banned computers so they bred super mentally capab…

Not sure it works like that, I think his biggest superpower was intrinsic motivation. Any child who read maths textbooks with enthusiasm for 3-4 hours a day for years could in theory at least get close to doing what he did, but what kid had that level of motivation?

  Any child who read maths textbooks with enthusiasm for 3-4 hours a day for years could in theory at least get close to doing what he did, but what kid had that level of motivation?
There is no way this is true. I've met and worked with enough people to know that not everyone has the same mental ability. There are some exceptionally sharp people and many dim witted ones too.

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

#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 nurturing them with AI companions.

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