Bringing Up Genius
chronicle.com
chronicle.com
As a parent when your children are young, I encourage you to encourage their curiosity in a healthy way, which leads to a life of wondering just why things are the way they are, and investing those questions in a productive way. Later in life its hard to rekindle the spark of curiosity, and early in life its easy to extinguish it.
Can this be backed up statistically ? Can a born genius have their spark extinguished by adverse circumstances or poor parenting ? I feel the exceptional ones march on their way to genius despite family support.
The best example I can think of is Chris Langan[1], though we only know who he is because he maintained some form of recognizable intellect in spite of his upbringing. Had his beatings led to debilitating psychological problems, brain damage, homelessness, or other things of that nature, we wouldn't be recognizing him as someone held back by his early childhood. Which sort of shows the inherent selection bias.
I will also add that it is the curse of parenting that you cannot re-do the experiment. And so every choice you make, strict/lenient, forbid/allow, debate/fiat, talk/not-talk is full of questions about whether or not it would be better for your child if you acted in a different way. It is really stressful on the parents.
Says so in the article. Chess has a unified global ranking scheme so you can objectively measure your success in chess.
The real tragedy is that these children grew up under Communism; there's another, even better, unified objective global ranking scheme he could have used if he raised them in a free country.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/jw5/how_much_wealth_is_produced_by_h...
Using a financial metric as opposed to a chess metric is an internal/external validity tradeoff that would support the claim that the parenting techniques used are useful in real-world scenarios. I think this is better because as many others have pointed out, how good you are at chess is usually not a factor in how successful a life you lead, whereas in the West, your net worth is basically a direct measurement of success.
Personally I believe that as far as financial success is concerned, how well you handle transactions is just as important as net worth (so it's best to have a lot of money and handle it really well), but that's impossible to quantify of course.
Too many of us have our idealism burnt out by dead end jobs and hectic lives.
For curiosity I read a lot to expose myself to new ideas, and follow up on things through journal articles, the occasional lab visit, and personal experimentation. It also helps to surround yourself with people who are curious, I identified that as one of the things that made college more "fun" than the office, everyone of my social group was excited to learn new things in college.
And a small note on "hectic". I find when I'm trying to do too many things at the same time my life is "hectic" because every activity is taking away from some other important activity and I don't feel good about the one thing I am getting done, I feel bad about the 9 things I am not making progress on. My wife helped me recognize this pattern in me and to combat it I put longer schedules on things to allow each week to have its "thematic" goal, and all progress against that goal is "good" and any non-progress against other goals is "expected" so not bad. I find I get the same amount of stuff done I just feel much better about the progress. And while I totally acknowledge it could be a "pop psych trick", it keeps my level of happiness up.
If you have given your child the gift of a life of the mind, you really do not have to press them to be able to reach elite performance levels in the domains where, if you haven't sacrificed a normal-ish childhood, you have missed the boat.
If you avoid doing that, you give them the chance to excel in areas where one can have lifelong participation and growth.
Perhaps one instead could hothouse a child in the life of the mind and produce a world-class young generalist, with the capacity to become a world-class specialist in a pursuit that makes them happy. I'm sure that happens a lot on an individual level. And indeed that could describe the goals of public education systems. But that's not exactly encouraging.
We seem to have methods of intensive training that produce world-class prodigies in the arts and in competitive arenas - musical performers, athletes and chess. Academic hothousing seems a much more mixed bag.
There's a limit to perseverance. Some may be blessed with an extraordinary amount of it but most aren't. So you're much more likely to keep at it if you progress fast enough to achieve 1 % percentile performance in say 3000 hours instead of 10,000.
3000 hours is 5 hours a day of practice for 3.5 years. We all have observed how some just rocket ahead .
Don't fret, my comment was not meant for you.
By using a subject that was well-known, widely available, cheap and popular, and very well-measured, he increased his chances of achieving his goal - convincing the world that his methods would get results out of bright kids so good that they would appear as geniuses to the world at large. He seems to have wildly succeeded, and the world just kinda shrugged.
I saw this first hand, I was naturally a much better climber than my friend but I didn't enjoy training or climbing as much. After a couple years he's putting up first ascents.
To give a shout out he's http://vividrea1ity.blogspot.com/
Take a visit to a children's area in a hospital if you want to meet some hyper intelligent children with less intelligent parents. They soak in an amazing vocabulary from being around doctors all day.
I'm wondering what his take on this article his.