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Comment by rdlecler1 | Hacker News Reader

I had the good fortune of having dyslexia and ADD before they tested these kinds of things, and eventually went on to become a high school dropout. Ultimately I went to university, got five degrees including a PhD from Yale. I published two papers in Nature journals now cited together over 250 times. One, a single author paper, overturned 10 years of high profile theory and originally caused a falling out with my advisor, a MacArthur fellow and one of the giants of Yale. Having grown up never feeling smart I was always intellectually humble and assumed I was wrong. I found my new theoretical discovery because I noticed an anomaly -- apparently others had encountered before, but swept it under the carpet. I on the other hand assumed I must have done something wrong and so I kept digging until I Worked out the answer. If you're too smart you can also be too confident in your own abilities to extrapolate and interpolate.

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http://msb.embopress.org/content/4/1/213.abstract for anyone else who is interested.

Funny, I think I remember reading this paper when I was playing with a-life around 2009.

How did this Yale giant respond when you explained your concerns? And after you published?

When I reported my findings to him he told me to stop what I was doing. I couldn't even get him to read the paper. This guy was a giant, and he completely dismissed it. And so I went out and got it published solo. About 8 months later I was doing a bioinformatics analysis on what they called junk DNA at the time. We came to very different conclusions about what we would find--my hypothesis was based on my research, his hypothesis on his research. When it was all done, I was right, and that work him up. This was a couple weeks before my dissertation defense and to be honest I wasn't even sure I was going to pass. When he introduced me he got up in front of the faculty and role a story of a 'boy who slated a dragon' and praised me for my intellectual courage and apologized. Unfortunately the damage was already done. I had been a Ronin for most of my academic career, still unformed, and not as brilliant at others. It would take me months to do what others could learn in days or weeks and I didn't want to risk a life of a low paying and money post doc and so I left academia.

Wow, that seems a very bad case of 'their loss', and collectively 'our loss'.

What a shame. With that kind of CV, you could easily have jumped straight to staff scientist or possibly assistant prof by looking outside the Ivies, as informatics skills are heavily in demand now. Also, if you're willing to collaborate with wet-lab biologists, there are nearly limitless opportunities to easily keep funded and have the respect of your peers (again, because informaticians are really needed to analyze all the data that's being generated nowadays).

But I have heard that for people who did PhDs at an Ivy, they are often unwilling to look outside them, as if it were some kind of failure. I'm not sure if that applies to you, but I think it takes a similar form of humility to the kind described in this article to realize that you can do good science and make a good career for yourself without always publishing in top-tier journals and working at top 10 institutions.

I did try. I even applied to second tier Universities in Asia. It's really not that easy. It's a very very competitive market. When you graduate you're broke and you don't have a lot of money so you can't wait around. As well, universities take a percentage of your grant money so they prefer to hire researchers that require expensive equipment. Finally to get a faculty position, even at a third tier university, you're going to have to have a sponsor on the faculty. The more novel your research is, the less likely you're going to find someone who sees you as a collaborator.

I of course don't know you, and neither am I able to verify your story, but kudos to you for overcoming that!

It also sounds a bit like impostor syndrome.

No, I just know where I rank in the scheme of things. I have a bunch of friends from CalTech who blow my mind. When you go to a place like Yale (or Google, or even SF) you may have been in the top 2-5 percentile before but you're average in places like that. That said, not all of my brilliant CalTech friends are wildly successful. While one is a Director at SpaceX working on their new hydrogen engine, another is doing back office work for a second tier financial firm. But to make it to the top you need to have both determination and the right set of other skills.

Yet, you seem to be speaking based upon assumptions almost opposite to the OP article. It's your hard work, not brilliant 'faster than everyone else' cleverness, and your determination which make for your success. See what all the guys, Einstein included, said about this.

If you want, I bet you can go back to Academia and excel. I know academia well and had a bad experience too, but you have more than enough ammo to succeed. And I have a bunch of the smartest Caltech friends, and my SF tribes mean that I'm never the smartest person in the room, and that's amazing. Still, there are things I can do, and ways I think, because of the reading and work I have done, which none of them can. You have your place, should you want it!

In my own experience, it's important to not be the smartest person in the room. You always need to surround yourself with better people. Otherwise your own growth will stagnate. Intellectually, socially and as a human being.

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