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 eventually learned to disengage and just look out the window. But if you develop that attitude, you never learn how to cram in knowledge for tests, which actually increases the odds of failing some "less interesting" classes down the line.
Another problem that I've seen with a lot of really clever folks is that if you're told your entire childhood you're smarter than others, but you see these "others" sometimes get more successful, it's really easy to fall into profound cynicism. You never try anything and just undermine others on the internet.
Ultimately, stories like this are an exception, not a rule, even for kids who are truly brilliant. And yeah, it's easy to underestimate the role the parents play, mostly in creating the right opportunities and instilling the right way of thinking about the world. A child doesn't learn to play piano at the age of eight unless there's a piano in the home and a family member or a paid tutor to show them the ropes. Even for stuff like math, it's a parent's choice to buy the right books versus just giving the kid a smartphone.
I think one thing that hurt me, in particular, is that I repeatedly got told "you're really going to go places some day!". And, so I waited for things to happen.
It took me way too long to realize I had to make things happen.
If you're reading this and you're young and gifted, you need to make things happen. You'll have people help you along the way, but odds are, you will never be discovered and have riches lavished upon you.
By high school, I was a 1.4 GPA student who was also on the Academic Decathlon team winning state-level medals. My upbringing was extremely abusive, which definitely contributed to the academic problems, but what I really needed was someone in my corner pushing me to explore and actually try. Being told I was smart wasn’t just useless, it was actively harmful. I became afraid to try and leaned on what came naturally (hence doing well on Decathlon tests) while consistently failing to finish things (no homework, no papers... and the GPA shows it).
What would have made a huge difference for me was being explicitly taught how and why to study, how to take and review notes, and how to manage my time. And just as importantly, someone consistently emphasizing that effort matters a lot more than being "smart."
Even now, I’m honestly surprised by how many people I work with in tech equate being "smart" with being good at math, algorithms, or pattern recognition, while seeming almost oblivious to some pretty big gaps in other areas. That mindset isn’t doing anyone any favors.
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 Terman or population registers or SMPY shows the opposite.
And while Tao is, of course, exceptional, the results for accelerated gifted kids are generally great. And Tao was part of SMPY (note the URL path, supporting documentation for https://gwern.net/smpy ) and helped demonstrate this in practice.
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.
1: https://t3x.org/files/vidya_324-325_NH_reprint.pdf (on HN 2015, 170 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13145853)
I think it was very beneficial to have to work hard to catch up with more advanced classes. I feel flexibility around this is something parents and schools should take seriously.
(Tbf I was also super lucky to find a very accepting group of nerdy friends in the new year that would tolerate someone younger.)
It’s a lie many start believing, that they don’t put in effort.
Debating something is, as my grandmother said "the ultimate concession", you only ever really debate something if you feel that there is a chance you are wrong. If there is an impasse, and you are confident in your response, there is usually no reason to continue, especially when there's a teacher-student asymmetry, they take it personal, and you gain nothing but make an enemy out of your teacher and spend your "question" points.
There's only so many times you can interrupt a professor, and spending your question points on correcting them isn't very useful to a student. And that the student believe that on one ocassion they know more than the professor, does not mean that there is nothing to learn from the professor.
Both of these mistakes (overextending a challenge and conflating a specific dominance over a general dominance) I think often come together under a personality trait that is generally identified as "arrogance". I do think there's a middle ground between believing one is superior and dropping all contentions of giftedness, but it's a thin line, and I think it's especially notable when the difference in talents (between the student and teacher, or between the gifted child and the average) is very marginal anyway, if it's undisputable then most tensions dissipate with the clarity.
I got suspended for three days, and also the enmity of his best friend the advanced social studies teacher. Yet, somehow I didn't get kicked off the basketball team. And I actually got a girlfriend, who punched me at the wrestling match, then we kissed behind the school during the dance.
I learned a valuable lesson that day.
While Terence is -without a doubt- born with prodigious abilities, I think credit should also be given to his parents Billy and Grace who seem to have managed to simultaneously nurture these special abilities while still letting Terence have a happy (?) childhood. This is not easy to do.
A boy in my high school class made IMO and got a gold medal (and later on won the Putnam one year). They interviewed his parents and it was a similar story.
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 role in facilitating and allowing these encounters. That deserves a lot of credit!
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 nearly fails his oral qualifying exams as he spent most of his time playing Civ rather than studying anything. Imagine the travesty for the world if 5 year old Terence had been handed an Xbox.
I think beyond even having supportive parents, the most important part was that he had a parent that had a degree in the field that he happened to be a genius in. His mother knew exactly how to guide her child through the material, even if it just was to let him go off to a corner and read the books she guided him towards for 3-4 hours a day for fun. So many children have advanced proclivities for certain things and parents that just can't even see what it is their child is brilliant at.
Having someone that knows the path and can point it out to them is a beautiful thing to have as a child.
Without any statistical significance, but nonetheless the sample size is greater than 5. None of us consider their parents to be great, or even good teachers. All kids squandered sometime after they are free from the parents, usually in universities.
This experience impacts me so much, that I have a bias that teachers should not teach their own kids.
So I agree that yes, just having a parent who is a teacher doesn't necessarily get you much, outside of likely being in a home environment where school is deemed important (many don't have this unfortunately). But where things become slightly magical is when you have a genetically gifted child and a parent that both knows how to guide that genius and has the resources to do so.
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.
We are discussing his parent's contribution to his growth. Some, like me, tend to agree they just gave him (good) tools and he found his interest and way through and beyond due to superior analytical skills and overall intelligence, not through some super duper tutoring by them.
I have cca such cousin. He was way ahead of his class (which was already math-focused class from secondary school), geniune interest in deeper math, physics and philosophy from early age. Even very good at software development in old Pascal or C. Nobody was tutoring him in any way, he just went to public library and borrowed what he liked.
The stuff thats not hard but still counts as discovery and learning must be self-motivating in way more average folks simply don't experience, not with same topics.
In contrast when I was a kid and was thinking about optimizing my program to print all prime numbers, my mother, instead of telling me about the sieve of Eratosthenes, told me to do school-approved math instead.
Now shoutout to my actual math teacher, who, having been told that I got stuck on writing a program to solve simultaneous linear equations, told me about Gaussian elimination.
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.
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 they could have been this or that are likely discounting their own contributions that they made and make every day to their own trajectory.
No, you were never going to be Einstein, no matter what, but you can still be the best version of yourself- the kindest, the most capable, the happiest, the least resentful.
Maybe that’s happy talk? Certainly some people have been dealt a tough hand, and it’s an American naive attitude to think that can always be overcome. Sometimes it can’t.
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 a certain point. If you need someone to coddle your abilities, then I would argue you aren't nearly as gifted nor talented as you may have been lead to believe. I am not claiming that only the truly talented will be able to white-knuckle their entire way through life on their own. Rather, I believe people contribute equally to their environment, which I believe is similar to what you were stating.
> you were never going to be Einstein, no matter what, but you can still be the best version of yourself- the kindest, the most capable, the happiest, the least resentful.
Tao himself would say that one does not have to be like him nor the best at anything to make a meaningful contribution towards something. I think the example he once used was a lot of the technology we currently have. Sure, perhaps some exceptional people designed it, but how many thousands upon thousand of people contributed to turning the design into an actual product?
> it’s an American naive attitude to think that can always be overcome. Sometimes it can’t.
While true, what kind of world do you want to live in? I rather go to the grave believing I had a chance versus knowing my destiny was essentially invariable. I believe that even ordinary people can be full of surprises given the right catalysts and circumstances. Maybe not Von Neumann level of surprises, but humans are pretty clever creatures.
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 person of average intellect Tao's life of dedication and work ethic, then he's going to end up a world class mathematician. He probably won't end up at the top of the top, as that's going to be reserved for those that hit the mega-lottery of genetics + dedication, but will also have no problem leaving his mark on this world and living a comfortable life.
But surely you're not going to mention this as potentially factual, and then praise his dedication and work ethic... right?
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 mathematics, then can an average intellect with an obsession for math end up working a job a normal person might call 'mathematician' by working on AutoCAD or 3D rendering game engine or industrial statistics and process control or economics or vehicle aerodynamics and be in the top 10% of the world in mathematical ability? Possibly yes. And you can adjust the numbers and criterion to get a yes or no whichever way you like.
Good idea, I'll do that :)
>can an average intellect with an obsession for math end up
>working on AutoCAD or 3D rendering game engine or industrial statistics and process control or economics or vehicle aerodynamics and be in the top 10% of the world in mathematical ability?
I think this does happen quite a bit and the need for strong math in these difficult areas is so great that there will never be enough people as briliant as Tao to fill the positions.
That's so far outside the mainstream anyway, most systems are going to screen the rare person like that out without understanding why.
Now what happens when those having top 10% of ability are very excellent themselves, but cases come up that would yield only to a Tao level of "natural-born" problem-solver?
Nobody would ever know :\
Good, we don't need billions of them anyway.
I wish modern society would quit focusing on individual intelligence over collective intelligence. We can take something like the microprocessor, for example. The smart group that designed the microprocessor was not the same group that designed the software nor the group the built the parts nor the group the assembled the device. However, every group is equally important.
Having grown up in australia but living in the us, this attitude is very american. It's quite funny to see when you don't grow up thinking it. I married into a very athletic family and have a child who is a precocious athlete. Many parents ask us what training regime or practice sessions we do. The answer is nothing. People don't react well.
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 shown any significant skill, yet are elected by the masses.
OK, this is making it political, but it's true in many countries, if not most. The truly very intelligent people rather focus on their area of expertise, where not many other humans are able to understand what they are doing or able to achieve a similar result. Similar thing happens in businesses. Talkers rise in the hierarchies, doers who don't self-promote massively remain low in the hierarchies, in most businesses. I don't see many scientists becoming millionaires for advancing humanity. We don't recognize great skills and smart people collectively in many cases. We chase silly trends and make-believe.
I could see "meritocratic regarding intelligence" somewhat in the way that smart kids don't have many problems at school usually, and then later at university, and then can maybe get a well paid job. But that's where the meritocratic system ends. In the job world it's mostly about other things. Like how well people fake being social with their higher-ups. Or how they have less worries about lying about their abilities. Or how they promote first and foremost themselves, rather than everyone, who significantly contributed to some achievement.
While meritocracy in high dimensional humans is a muddy thing, as being capable, and being capable at what is actually needed often diverge.
But at the organization level, the benefits of strong coordination of the right things are clear. Virtually every business study, studies this. Virtually every political leadership study, studies this.
Cooperation has so many efficiency and effectiveness benefits. Institutionalizing the right kinds of cooperation, i.e. coordinating it, even more so.
This is the civilization superpower.
This is why billions of people can spend their days doing other things than food production, and can live in places with no food production in sight.
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.
Be grateful when it happens, but be happy if it does not.
Also, the idea that chess is a good proxy for genius is a bit out of date.
Most of the people so could be chess grandmasters are busy applying their brains to something else.
Try the same with babies who are already visibly not the brightest (say in kindergarden group), their parents are also average or worse regarding intelligence. There is a ceiling, it may be high or not but its there. If you haven't experienced it in your life you are one of lucky few (and certainly didn't push yourself hard enough to sense it).
Same goes with memory - you can train it far, use various techniques. Then comes somebody natural (yet still far from what we would call genius) who didn't bother with any of that and immediately surpasses whatever was achieved. We are not created equal and all have hard boundaries, be it health, cognition, body regeneration and so on.
Where did you find this information? I haven't been able to find any source that states he was above an amateur level.
> Same goes with memory - you can train it far, use various techniques. Then comes somebody natural (yet still far from what we would call genius) who didn't bother with any of that and immediately surpasses whatever was achieved.
It’s always hard to compare how much effort and for how long they’ve been applying it between people. Someone starting earlier can make them seem like a genius. Someone who spent time developing their memory through various games may feel like they spent no time on it and “it’s natural” while someone else had to explicitly work at it instead because they never were encouraged to play memory strengthening games.
> We are not created equal and all have hard boundaries, be it health, cognition, body regeneration and so on.
Thats true, but the same was said of height but height only became 90% genetic once we fixed nutrition. I see no indication that our systems of parenting and child rearing are robust enough to make intelligence and academic outcomes purely genetic. It’s far too chaotic and you need to apply consistent effort daily almost from birth before the intentional learning stuff even happens. Making sure the mother is in good physical shape before birth, taking all the supplements before and after birth, limiting exposure to toxic stuff, making sure the baby is getting a good mix of engaged play, time to be chill, and exercise, making sure both parents are able to keep the child engaged and studying and understanding of expectations, adjusting the environment appropriately as they develop so they’re constantly challenged and enjoy and seek out challenges, that’s it’s emotionally and psychologically safe for the child, riding the balance of a little bit of frustration and recovering from that vs no frustration or frustration without a break, etc etc etc. a bunch of that happens before you start academic play to teach verbal and math skills and each of these is an add on (eg we know physical education is important for brain development).
Data point: I was at a prenatal class and after the nurse said marijuana isn’t good for the baby, one of the parents was asking “but like what’s the actual limit before it’s harmful”. So don’t be too sure that “surely kindergarten is early enough that kids are still on equal footing”. Another data point is I know a parent that has a 4 yold that doesn’t know how to read nor write because “he’s stubborn” nor is he going to preschool. Yet every parent that I know of that’s applied effort has their child typically by 2 or 3 and writing by 4/5 which is when basic math should already be going.
Nowhere did I state that there aren’t natural limits. But I also think academic achievement isn’t 90% genetic - there’s plenty of “naturally gifted” people who go on to not achieve anywhere as near as much as those who just work - perseverance trumps almost everything and environment trumps that because that’s how you learn perseverance.
The closest to the truth for Polgar is he had time to spend with his kids, but mainly because he prioritized doing so in a way to help them grow. Also, he did so with help from his wife. He wasn’t a chess prodigy. He chose chess because there was a clear demonstratable progression that a) could be used to demonstrate his theories b) his kids had immediate feedback on success c) could repeat the game endlessly to try out various tactics d) they studied chess as a family.
I agree, not every child can become a genius. Most of the reason for that today is less because of a learning disability or “physical limits” and more because of the environment the children are raised in (and the need to teach them perseverance and to keep trying regardless of how others are achieving).
But I could be wrong. He is definitely a genius so maybe he did grasp the ideas rather early, like from 3 or 4.
Just the once, though, huh? [0]
He learned to read and write by himself. I'm pretty sure he would've been fine regardless of shape.
What sticks in my mind from the pre-school Mad magazines was the mascot philosophy; "What, me worry?"
I was very 'school-shaped' if by school you mean I could sit quietly and read books and solve problems. More school-shaped than the other kids.
If by school you mean that bullies don't find you interesting, that nobody threatens to kill you, then I was not 'school-shaped' at all.
I was really excited to go to school on day one, within a year it tuned very bad and I wish, retrospectively, I'd had the courage to stay home.
My problem was everything was too easy. I was bored. I would get reprimanded for not working because they gave us an hour worth of work, I finished it in 10 minutes and then did other stuff. I basically didn't have to study for anything, I just showed up and got Bs. If I put in 10% effort I got As. And all I ever got for it was yelled at for having done everything they asked me to do too fast.
So I started sitting in the back of the classroom minding my own business and trying not to be noticed. I'm convinced my life would have been very different if I hadn't been completely jaded from most of my teachers basically punishing me for being better than the rest. By my mid teens I didn't give a shit, I was happy coasting along doing better than the rest just by showing up.
My choices were my own and I'm doing pretty well now. Got my shit together in my late 20s and got a CS degree. Best decision I ever made. 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?
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 bullies even when they walked in on it and when I told them about it.
As I've gone through life, I've found that your chances for happiness are increased if you wind up doing something that is a reflection of what you loved most when you were somewhere between nine and eleven years old.
Interviewer: Yes—something that had and still has the feeling of a hobby, a curiosity.
M: At that age, you know enough of the world to have opinions about things, but you're not old enough yet to be overly in by the crowd or by what other people are doing or what you thinkyou “should” be doing. If what you do later on ties into that reservoir in some way, then you are nurturing some essential part of yourself. It's certainly been true in my case. I'm doing now, at fifty-eight, almost exactly what most excited me when I was eleven.
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 that age, and that's what I do now.
There are probably a lot of things you were not exposed during that age, that could have been the perfect match.
There are also lots of kids who just play games, or video games, do sports, watch films or so during that age, without really being exposed to any "potential useful" activities. Some parents would maybe even say that this is how it should be.
As a parent, I guess a good advice would be to try to expose your child to as much things as possible, without forcing it to do anything of course.
So for him, as a video editor, it was using a tape recorder to record sounds, and reorganize them in an aesthetically appealing way. He didn't actually get into video editing specifically until after college IIRC.
It does't matter when the plug finds the socket - it is always electric.
As endearing as it sounds, that's pure selection bias on Walter's end rather than something even remotely common.
Clearly there are cases of this sort, like arts and other creative tangents, but on average it's a result of a discovery process much later in life.
And so the thing you were interested in at that age is probably similar to what you’ll be interested in now, if you remove social and financial expectations.
- Learned Greek starting age three.
- Was studying Plato at age six.
- Studied Latin starting at age eight.
And more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stuart_Mill#Biography
I guess it helps that he had Jeremy Bentham hanging around his house from an early age.
Not to say the results weren't incredible, but certainly required sacrifice.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10378/10378-h/10378-h.htm#li...
Most people who learn three languages as a kid are surrounded by other speakers, not books.
Especially when you actually know the language these kinds of people claim to speak and you realize they actually don't speak 7 languages but maybe know 2 or 3 fluently and know 'kitchen' versions of all the others. I'm not going to name names because I don't want an argument and don't have the spoons for it, but lots of these international luminaries and leaders and such with "speaks 7 language" are often little more than conmen or simply enjoy building their own little hagiographies for their own PR goals.
There's this wonderful deep-dive on youtube on Feynman's high-questionable personal mythology that is a great example of this kind of self-promotion and how easy it is to sell one's self, especially in academic and techie circles, if you have a certain amount of charisma and drive.
Also as a lefty, I'm also not impressed by breathless ambidextrous tales either as most lefties are forced to be ambidextrous and its not actually exceptional at all. I can write with both hands, play musical instruments either way, play sports either way, etc. The left hand is better at these things, but my right-hand is okay-ish at almost all these things and I use a right-hand dominant near everything in my life anyway. I even like to switch it up to keep wear and tear down. At work the mouse is on the left, but at home for gaming its on the right. This is all boring everyday stuff for lefties.
There's a toxic 'great man' mythology that humanity still can't get over and its weird seeing it taken seriously when so many 'great men' have been debunked or seen as recipients of the system they were under (Mills' father pushing him so hard and being in the privileged class that would allow all this instead of back-breaking farm labor all day). Personal talent is important but its vastly played up in dishonest ways for dishonest gains. We probably pass many highly talented people a day on the street, but only some had the opportunity to grow those gifts into something they can use.
The famous quote comes to mind. "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." - Stephen Jay Gould
And this is utterly unremarkable where I live.
When we visit my family (who are all monolingual), they think she is a prodigy.
She’s not. She’s just a normal kid.
Latin was required for philosophy, law, rhetoric, and the classics. Greek skewing more towards the sciences, logic and also philosophy. One would be constantly encounter Latin/Greek in their materials and not just as a obtuse code to memorize like how a modern biology student typically views e.g. binomial nomenclature today.
So when viewed through the 21st century lens of English dominance throughout education, it loses the context that makes it much more understandable why and how a young student, especially a precocious one, would pick up those languages specifically in the course of their tutoring, reading, etc. (And not as some kind of genius parlor trick as modern retellings tend to portray it).
Hence that scene in Monty Python's Life of Brian.
Still fun today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mip30YF1iuo
But if you imply that philosophy as such isn’t useful, it’s simply wrong, if not arrogant. Everyone needs philosophy.
"“However, by being so long in the lowest form I gained an immense advantage over the cleverer boys. They all went on to learn Latin and Greek and splendid things like that. But I was taught English. We were considered such dunces that we could learn only English. Mr. Somervell—a most delightful man, to whom my debt is great—was charged with the duty of teaching the stupidest boys the most disregarded thing—namely, to write mere English. He knew how to do it. He taught it as no one else has ever taught it. Not only did we learn English parsing thoroughly, but we also practised continually English analysis."
Even better if you can do both!
Your final sentence seems a bit odd in that context though: Churchill's point is that Latin and Greek actually isn't useful at all, so it would follow that it isn't better to do both (i.e. study the classics as well as English), especially as time to learn them would have a huge opportunity cost, e.g. you could use that time to study more English composition instead.
(If you think they're worth learning just for their own sake then that's another matter, but the quote seems to imply that Churchill wouldn't agree.)
I was lucky, I had two or three excellent English teachers. Very inspiring and helpful. I wish I could say the same about mathematics (most of my teachers were terrible and one didn't even teach us how to do the problems)... Or my French teacher. I think we spoke better French than he did at the end. Since I spent a lot of my childhood in rural Scotland I was effectively bilingual anyway.
I definitely empathize with "his preference for using an analytic, highly logical problem-solving strategy" (I'm not a genius ofc). It's often more immediately clear for me than visual/spatial manipulation.
I wonder how I ought to train up problem solving, given that I have an engineering degree to finish.
> 320 print "(brmmmm-brmmmm-putt-putt-vraow-chatter-chatter bye mr. fibonacci!)"
I remember when I was 6 or 7 teaching myself Applesoft BASIC and writing programs with funny (to me) little print statements all through them - when computing was just exploding with possibility.
I wouldn't have had a clue what a Fibonacci sequence was though ;)
In the Dune books, they banned computers so they bred super mentally capable humans.
I think we’d be better off optimizing for conscientiousness or empathy, frankly. Even a world run by gardeners would probably be more beautiful and meaningful than one run by math geniuses.
(I do agree biological intelligence is not close to its peak)
The question is: what do we want to optimize for?
Minimize pain and suffering for humans? The spread of mankind throughout the universe?
I’m pretty sure your idea would help with the latter. Not so sure about the former tbh.
This is a real possibility in our lifetimes due to AI.
No, they couldn't. And neither could most adults, for that matter.
Innate ability is real.
Isn't that a bit too certain for something that's not settled at all? How else would you explain the Polgar sisters? I'm sure there are other examples, but this is the most famous one.
> How else would you explain the Polgar sisters?
Genetics is the obvious explanation. The father was clearly very intelligent.
Also to clarify: I agree that training and effort can have large effects, and that focusing on them is a good strategy. Over-believing in them is probably a good bias, even. But the idea that everyone is more or less the same except for effort is ridiculous.
Also I didn’t say innate ability doesn’t exist. But in my opinion is a small multiplier on top of effort. That’s why I said close to.
And this was still people selected from the small subset of the population choosing an engineering major. Human are much, much more different than you seem to think
Would you ever be tempted to make such a claim (that everyone is close to the same in ability and effort is the main determiner of success) about athletes? It's so obviously untrue that it's laughable. Why would you think that mental ability is magically distributed evenly?
Well yes, absolutely. People don’t do quadruple axels on the ice because they were somehow born with the ability, they can do it because they practice figure skating every day for years. Innate ability (or in this case, let’s be honest, mostly genetics determining body shape) certainly makes the difference between becoming an Olympic gold medalist and just being very good at the sport, but you need to get very far in the field before it truly holds you back.
I don’t have a lot of experience with high-level professional sports, but I’m a classically trained violinist, and I’ve seen first-hand how a lot of the abilities that many people chalk up to “talent” (sense of rhythm, perfect pitch, composing music) are just skills that can be learned. Some students might need to practice more than others, sure, and some might reach a higher ceiling, but I firmly believe anyone can reach a high level with applied effort.
“I don’t have the talent to paint so I won’t learn to do it” is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
You've changed my claim. My claim isn't that world-class athletes, or even good athletes, don't have to work hard because of their talent to achieve elite levels. It's merely that talent is a huge determiner in success. It's also a huge determiner in how effective training is. An hour of training might improve a talented person 5 or 10x more than an hour of training would improve someone else.
This is all blindingly obvious if you've seen a sample of kids growing up. I remember the sister of one of my daughters friends, at age 3, was easily out-performing her brother and my daughter, who were a couple years older. This little 3 year could fearlessly climb up jungle gyms with ease, and kick around a ball, and swim fast. She hadn't practiced more. She could just do it.
OTOH maybe there is no posibility whatsoever that genetics can determine mind shape no matter what.
It's hard to say whether the motivation came from the good skills (understanding, memory) e.g. "I'm good at this, I like it!", or that the good skills came from the motivation. I believe both are important though, and that they are intertwined.
As someone wrote here innate ability is a real thing
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.
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.
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?
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 until the very last moment. Herb was an experimental physicist. (If you want to know about Fermi in great detail, you would do well to interview Herbert Anderson.) But, at any rate, when Fermi got back he called in Herb Anderson to his office and he said, "You know, Herb, how much faster I am in thinking than you are. That is how much faster von Neumann is compared to me." [0]
I think that is the main obstacle to most people doing highly effective work and putting in long hours. You hear some call people who don't 'work hard' lazy, but my impression is that it's emotional capacity, and a lot of that comes from family.
I wonder if there is a correlation between prodigies and emotionally stable, healthy, present parents. It's hard to imagine children under a lot of stress - e.g., from abusive parents, highly unreliable parents (e.g., overwhelmed by addictions to drugs), emotionally unstable parents (e.g., narcissists), highly neglectful parents (e.g., who abandon their kids) ... - it's hard to imagine those kids doing what Tao did, regardless of their talent.
If my GP comment is true to some significant degree, it matters for people who are prodigies. It matters for the world, which benefits from the prodigies.
But I don't want to underemphasize the first or overemphasize the second. These are human beings, which is the overwhelming issue. They have the same needs and same importance as everyone else. That means we don't want to disregard their needs either because they are unusual and therefore more expensive to nurture, or because the world benefits from them and and doesn't care about their individual needs or thinks their needs can be sacrificed.
And on a similar basis, it has strong implications for all the other kids in the world, who need stable, loving, nurturing family.
Was still a few years away from reassembly.
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.
Making mistakes in lecture is a standard technique used by good teachers, to promote active listening and critical thinking.
Have you tried Dragon Box? I've had my son doing that for awhile. Parent reporting is lacking.
Also briefly did Khan Academy Kids but he's so far ahead that seems pretty useless now.
No, I don’t mean it is hard to feed a kid and educate him a bit. That’s like at least 70% of the parents can do. What is remarkable is that they not only found Terence’s interests and nurtured on it, consistently without any major error. God you have no idea how hard it is. So many constellations have to be on the right places. And it’s definitely way more than luck.
For a starter, as a parent of a five years old kid, I always feel I failed and will fail my kiddo. I’m so unsatisfied with my own lives that my mind has to be focused on improving myself other than devoting time for anyone else, including my wife and my son. I know my son has some potential, just like pretty much every kid out there, but I didn’t, and won’t take the time to learn early education and use the knowledge to nurture him properly. I know he has some shortcomings that could use some guidance, but I don’t want to spend months, years to figure that out. I’m swarmed by my own thoughts and needs. That’s why I always tell my friends, don’t get a kid if you are not contend with life —- you won’t have the capacity.
And then there is the question of what to do even if I have enough time. Kids aren’t robots. They don’t automatically do things you want them to do, which is understandable. But when you have to fight for simple things in life, or fight with wife if you don’t always agree on certain things, God it’s such a mess that struggling to live like a normal human being is not a trivial task.
Anyway, I’m really glad that his parents brought out the best of him, and his brother’s too. They should be recognized for that.
And I don’t have the time, will and experience to guide mine.
Before becoming a parent I'd always thought "when I have a kid I'll teach him such and such" but now turns out that my kid just wants to jump around and break things.
I don't know, let me know if you want to talk. Mine is little over 4yo.
I guess parenting is a bit easier if your interests/work align with the kid’s interests. But if not then it’s going to be tough, because parents only have time to do one thing extra, so they either have to ignore the kids and do what they love, or forfeit what they love and do what the kids may or may not want.
And then most kids are average in most of the ways but have sparks here and there, so it’s again the question of “do I invest here for a bunch of money and one year or just skip for the next?”. My father was very into building me as a pianist and a math wizard from early on, neither of which I had strong interests in, but nevertheless I dragged on for many years. I think he gave up the Math part when I was in early middle school and the piano part when I said I don’t want to go to a music school.
I wouldn’t be surprised if I cost him a whole career. He was one of the top Mathematicians in my country back then but he didn’t publish much after I was born. All for what? I don’t want to repeat his mistake.
Disregarding the unusual age in this case, I believe that most people could be significantly better at mathematics than they are, if only they found it interesting enough.
Then realized, I mistook him for his Autistic brother Trevor. Trevor too is a mathematician.
Like others called out their parents must be great too. It is not easy.
So he was able to attend classes out of his own year. What country is this? USA? Is that normal in the USA? I think here in the UK this isn't possible.
Like Terence I also had "out of band" classes and free time to read advance material in both primary and high school.
During that period Australia also had good federal and state programs for clustering advanced kids on yearly subsidised specialist camps - optional and free if parents couldn't afford to chip in.
I bumped into him at the same time Paul Erdős was doing the rounds and hanging out with anyone that might show promise.
That strains credulity. Those familiar with common Chinese parenting strategies know how involved and directly instructed they can be at times. How much of that has been downplayed (And for what purpose)?
I don’t mean to undermine any of Tao’s achievements. They are unassailable. But I genuinely want to know a true account of what it took to get him there.
I guess it's being one of the biggest geniuses in the history. Why people find it so hard to accept that there can be HUGE differences in intellectual capabilities and that parenting does not account for even 1% of that? I can bet that if Tao's parents did same things they did for him to 1000 of random children, none would come even remotely close to Tao.
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)
Case in point, that dance...
Society rewards 'good genes'. Which is interesting because it is effectively the club of good genes rewarding themselves by co-opting the ones without, either by amassing actual gold or by amassing gold medals. And we all let them because we recognize that they really do have good genes and they put in the hard work.
The problems arrive when the ones that are good at amassing actual gold and that are intelligent do not have a similar endowment in the ethics department. And weirdly enough we don't have a backstop for that unless they act in a limited number of ways that we consider 'criminal', usually reserved for the ones with 'bad genes'. So as long as they stay away from those we just look at the grit and the money and go 'that's ok then'.
And if you have amassed enough shiny rocks even those criminal laws seems to no longer matter and you can do whatever the hell you want and expect to get away with it.
Ability to persevere is also wired in.
If you pull this thread to it's conclusion, then nothing is worth celebrating. Just law of physics doing their thing.
Even among the people who have similar "luck" in that respect, some still stand out. The people we think of as elite performers aren't just elite relative to the 99% of us. They're also elite within the top 1% that makes up their field: they're dominant even among the people who should be their peers.
Not that I mean the percentages factually, more like an order of magnitude.
But my point is, in terms of "natural ability", I don't believe there is that much of a gap among top performers, but that things like work ethic and determination, and also some luck in environments, is what ends up setting them apart.
That's why I think they're worth praising: it's not just a spin of genetic roulette (unless one believes every single attribute about us is genetic, I guess).
You could be right; I tend to disagree but its all speculation. My 2 cents is that the vast majority of researches/professors are motivated and driven people; you can't reach those levels if you don't know how to sit on your butt and concentrate. They all have good work ethic. I tend to think what separates Tao from the rest of the smart researchers is not that he works 15 hours a day while the rest work only 9 but rather his very very rare genius. But yeah, speculation of talent vs work ethic.
It's complex; first of all society has an interest for exceptional people to be respected and well compensated; if there was absolutely no prestige or compensation in being a math genius it's quite possible Terrence Tao would have become a schoolteacher. So a well functioning capitalist society has both monetary and prestige tools to incentivize extreme accomplishment.
Second, I think it's human nature to like and want hierarchy. Admiring figures for their looks, charisma or intellectual accomplishments could very will be in our wiring - 20 thousand years ago we would admire the shaman, the great hunter or the storyteller.
But ultimately I totally agree with you - not only were these people born into the unique genetic and envrionmental circumstances that made the accomplishment possible , I also don't believe they had any say after being born in becoming what they had become; e.g I don't believe there's a "free will" and that Terrence Tao "chose" to become a math genius. He was born into that reality in a fluke.
I just want to point out that this is most likely not true, and that this is cultural. The long argument you can find in the book "The Dawn of Everything".
In short, when the West came into contact with other civilizations, one of the most striking features of our culture from their point of view was how hierarchical we are.
We might as well chose to praise those of us who were gifted with abilities that we aspire to.
We living on the same planet?
Pretty sure the supermodel gets infinitely more attention and certainly makes orders of magnitudes more money than some math prodigy, at least on mine.
Modeling is notorious for its negative impact on models' health.
They absolutely work for it, and in one of the most toxic work environments.
There may not be many other things which can contribute the same advantage.
Too bad humankind is almost never paying attention.
That being said, supermodels are more famous, have a much larger following and earn much more money than math geniuses. That says we, humans, care more about entertainment than value.
They can also produce a lot of damage unless they refrain to an extent.
Funny remark.
That means in a generation there are ~ 10k such people in the world. Think about connecting them or nurturing them with AI companions.
Yes, let's give them only the blandest, most boring interactions possible.
The most important part of nurturing, as I understand it, is to be seen and loved by other humans, and to be made to feel safe and lovable.
More than three years after this episode took place, Terence, still a little boy, happily played hide and seek with his two younger brothers when the Tao family visited the Clements household. He is a happy, well-mannered lad who obviously loves and respects his parents and his two brothers. He gets on well with others, too. Mr John Fidge, his Year 11 Mathematics teacher at Blackwood High School for the first two terms of 1983, told me that after he had been attending the Year 11 Mathematics classes for about a fortnight he was accepted as just another member of the class. He is always willing to volunteer answers to questions asked by his teachers and was regarded as a friendly, humble, but very bright boy by his classmates.
Thank you
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A child prodigy,[18] Terence Tao skipped five grades.[19][20] Tao exhibited extraordinary mathematical abilities from an early age, attending university-level mathematics courses at the age of 9. He is one of only three children in the history of the Johns Hopkins Study of Exceptional Talent program to have achieved a score of 700 or greater on the SAT math section while just eight years old; Tao scored a 760.[21] Julian Stanley, Director of the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth, stated that Tao had the greatest mathematical reasoning ability he had found in years of intensive searching.[7][22]
Saved you a click...
The HN mods apparently have a sign in the HN control room
It's been [ ] days since the last Terrence Tao submissionHis biggest talent though, I believe it's something more rare. He can get people excited about mathematics, make people dream and imagine.
Long-term retention is is hard when encountering new symbols. He seemed quite comfortable at that age absorbing the new stuff and manipulating it. Where does that comfort come from? Is there a way to test that explicitly? Finally, there is the ability to take the new and use it well. What about creating new shorthand? Being able to divine hidden patterns and articulate them?
Ramunujam seems to have had this.
Some people appear to have a capacity for learning, retention and understanding that is well outside the normal range. People like Ramanujan or von Neumann, or Tao. They learn at a speed that far exceeds the speed of what we would consider gifted students, they reach a deep and intuitive understanding of the material, and go on to make many discoveries / inventions of which even one would be enough for an ordinary scientist to be considered successful.
It seems there is something very different about their minds, but just what is it that allows those minds to operate at such a level?