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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]

#301

Post by zozbot234 »

Viliam1234 wrote: post #299
tarentel wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure that's true. I am by no means gifted in the sense of Terence Tao, or even people much more gifted than me but far less gifted than him, but I did well in school up to a certain point in college. I never really learned how to study until I got fairly far in my education process. I put very little effort into school up until that point. That's when I actually had to put effort in and it was quite a wake up cal…

Exactly. Up to some point, you actually do well because you are smart . Then, in the middle of the game, the rules change (from your perspective), and it may catch you by surprise. It would be much better for the gifted children to attend schools where their effort is visible since the beginning. That is, schools with other gifted children. For example, in math, my kids didn't learn anything new during their first th…

> Exactly. Up to some point, you actually do well because you are smart.

No, you do well because you put in the effort. Even trivial effort is still effort. Sometimes it's all that's genuinely needed (quite often in fact!) and it's important to realize this - but not always, and that's important to realize as well.

> my kids didn't learn anything new during their first three years

I think it's almost always possible to revise even these 'trivial' subjects in more depth. Granted, it's hard to do this in elementary math without some kind of outside involvement - someone to explicitly introduce the nuances. Other subjects this is quite a bit easier.

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

#302

Post by Viliam1234 »

hnfong wrote: post #191
vlovich123 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Even if you disregard the anecdote (n=1) thing, it's quite obvious that genius has a genetic component to it, and the father being a good chess player tilts the odds in his favor quite a bit. Also, the idea that chess is a good proxy for genius is a bit out of date.

> Also, the idea that chess is a good proxy for genius is a bit out of date.

He wrote that the reason he chose chess was because it was objectively measurable. You play the game, you either win or you lose; there is no way to dispute the outcome.

Imagine that you have dozen children, each of them genius at something different, and that you are surrounded by people who want to prove you wrong. Whatever the artistic genius does, the people who hate you can simply say "yeah, he did something technically impressive, but it's lacking the... nebulous artistic qualities that only we can judge... therefore, not a true genius". Now the chess genius comes and wins every tournament against the adults, there is no way to argue that "yeah, he won all the chess tournaments, but... for some reason we still don't consider him to be a chess grandmaster".

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

#303

Post by gwern »

drited wrote: post #291
gwern wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd note that there are many studies showing that the usual outcomes for gifted kids are not all that great. No, there's not, and they do do great. And this goes back to Terman: there's a handful of highly selected examples (eg the Australian kids recruited from child psychologist referrals, the self-selected self-diagnosed Mensa adult survey), furious anecdotes, and then every systematic prospective sample like Te…

Gwern on that smpy site what does the O-like character next to certainty: log mean? I'm viewing on chrome from an Android device. I'm trying to figure out what your certainty on smpy is. Also thank you for your site. I read your n back analysis some years ago and found it to be very interesting.

The SMPY page is essentially an annotated bibliography: fulltext + abstract + commentary. Since the papers are of highly varied quality, it doesn't much make sense to try to put any particular confidence on it; I am convinced of some things, but definitely not others - particularly the early papers when they had little data and were still experimenting a lot. If I had an essay making a specific claim about SMPY then sure, but I don't really.

The fact that 'certainty' ratings don't make sense for pages like that is part of why these days, I wouldn't have a page like that at all. An annotated bibliography is not an 'essay' and shouldn't be shoehorned into my framework meant for that kind of opinionated writing. I realized that if I was going to 'annotate' a paper, I would either have to go without, or copy-paste it all around indefinitely and it'd violate DRY and be a nightmare. Long story short, https://gwern.net/doc/iq/high/smpy/index is closer to what that page should be, but it's a lot of work to sit down and convert the legacy page over to pure annotations, so, it is what it is. Maybe a LLM can do it for me soon - it seems within the ability of Claude Code.

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

#304

Post by svat »

aa-jv wrote: post #107
svat wrote: 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!)"

Found myself counting characters in case there was an easter egg in there. Spoiler: there isn't an easter egg in there.

The whole program is an Easter egg :) “sorry, he wasn’t born yet! try again” vs “no, he is already in heaven, try again”, and that cute goodbye routine.

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

#305

Post by danielmarkbruce »

Viliam1234 wrote: post #300
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Dedication and work ethic" is almost certainly nonsense here. Some people do the activity a lot without having any ethic or dedication - they like it.

Yeah, it's easier to do the difficult and boring stuff when it's actually easy and interesting for you.

Lots of examples in sports. Tiger Woods loved practicing. Most golfers (like me..) enjoy about 30 mins at the range... then it's torture.

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

#306

Post by fouc »

lich_king wrote: post #231

Since the discussion here focuses mostly on child prodigies in general, I'd note that there are many studies showing that the usual outcomes for gifted kids are not all that great. I think the issue is that it's just harder to fit in. I remember being way ahead in some classes in middle school, and I actually ending up drawing the ire of some teachers when I had answers to every question (let alone corrected them). I…

> let alone corrected them

oof, I felt this one.

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

#308

Post by jodrellblank »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #277
jodrellblank wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like a bit of a pointless and unanswerable argument about semantics, the only bit is the irritating "ohh if it's SOOO EASY" about something that was definitely framed not to be easy. If your cutoff of "world class mathematician" is a few hundred or thousand people, then no chance. If their cutoff is "earn a comfortable living" and the top 10% of the world is 800,000,000 people most of whom don't study mathem…

A mathematician is someone who creates or advances math. Not someone who uses math. If you don't understand how the word is used, that's your problem, not a problem with the statement.

Let me check that claim using a dictionary:

    mathematician /măth″ə-mə-tĭsh′ən/

        A person skilled or learned in mathematics.
    
        One versed in mathematics.
    
        An expert on mathematics. 
    
    The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition • More at Wordnik
None of the definitions require creating or advancing mathematics.

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

#309

Post by somenameforme »

hnfong wrote: post #267
somenameforme wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still meritocratic even with dramatic genetic differences between individuals. A peer comment mentioned an anecdote of Terence nearly failing his orals because he ended spending all of his time playing Civ instead of studying anything. It's basically the Gattaca story. Somebody can have the most brilliant mind in the world, but without actually applying it, they're not going to do great in life. If you give a pe…

I don't know whether Terence Tao nearly failed because he spent all his time playing Civ. But surely you're not going to mention this as potentially factual, and then praise his dedication and work ethic... right?

He stopped playing video games, presumably in part because of this event. [1] Many, if not most of us, would instead just let our professional life dip a bit and try to roll back the gaming a bit. Going completely cold turkey is a person with a special sort of dedication and ethic.

[1] - https://archive.is/dIpCu

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

#310

Post by desertrider12 »

nananana9 wrote: post #26
suprjami wrote: post #14

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.

That’s funny. When I was little I found “format” in my mp3 player’s settings. Thought it would customize the UI or something, but instead I ended up with no music for the rest of the road trip.
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