331–340 of 343 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This can descend from a hive-mind of not ever giving credit to anyone different than themselves.
Who is this aimed at?
You cleared that up real well.
But that's where that kind of thing comes from.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Thank you! I've read much of the page now and it is fascinating.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder a bit about that. What activities or possibilities are you exposed at during that age. I know many computer science colleagues who were not exposed to programming during that age and only later came to it. I feel kind of lucky that somewhat randomly I stumbled into computer programming (because XtreeGold could show the content of files, and I was learning to understand BAT-files by looking into them) during…
I first touched a computer after completing my university degree and I still remember the happiness I felt by simply running a DOS command and seeing the expected output. It does't matter when the plug finds the socket - it is always electric.
This is really beautiful.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This was not undergraduate math in my case, but I still don't agree. I don't think anyone of average intelligence can excel at undergraduate math. It of course depends on the degree and the school. Can anyone with average intelligence excel at an undergraduate math course in community college for their psychology degree? Probably yes. But an undergraduate math course at oxford as part of a maths degree? Not for sure…
The data on this site is extremely dubious.
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. And most modern parents would swamp the child with a bunch of mind rotting auto playing TV and video games. There's an account of Terence's time at university where he nearl…
He would just become a software engineer like the rest of us, and probably would have started google or netflix.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
At the individual level of a newborn infant, all the genetic gifts collapse into a fixed quantity. Nurture and hard work (and self care and many other things) become 100% of the controllable factors. Nurture and parental mental health are not controllable by the child, so those become fixed from their perspective as they grow to maturity. That still leaves a lot. All the former G&T kids on here talking about whether…
> All the former G&T kids on here talking about whether they could have been this or that are likely discounting their own contributions that they made and make every day to their own trajectory. I completely agree. I commonly see such sentiments online. People claim that if they were truly challenged more or had better resources, then they would truly become something noteworthy. However, I disagree with them after…
You don’t have to be a perpetual optimist to choose the best path available to you. But still, that best path is pretty rough going for many people all over the world.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, Fermi was such an unmotivated slacker. Relayed by Nick Metropolis: Fermi and von Neumann overlapped. They collaborated on problems of Taylor instabilities and they wrote a report. When Fermi went back to Chicago after that work he called in his very close collaborator, namely Herbert Anderson, a young Ph.D. student at Columbia, a collaboration that began from Fermi's very first days at Columbia and lasted up un…
I’m confused to be honest as to your point here
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m confused to be honest as to your point here
No amount of effort would have made Dr. Anderson think as fast as Fermi and Fermi think as fast as von Neumann