Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children

And I guess that's why Google et al. likes to hire PhDs. They can take all kinds of shit, and endure. Get to the bottom of those problems even in the face of internal politics/bureaucracy.

Like say IQ. Feynman wouldn't have qualified for Mensa, and happily too[0]. Maybe that's a good metric. The metric is happy not to be in Mensa, but also has a PhD.

Edit: Feynman's IQ was 126 and Mensa wants 132, at least according to Ericsson and Pool in their book Peak.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEUcmKDaklY

I totally agree with this. Also as an anecdote, I really struggled with the decision to pursue a PhD. In the end I decided not to for various reasons. I was never interested in academia, just in certain technology careers that seemed to demand a PhD at the time I was finishing my BS (also I went to a fairly ordinary state school for my BS even though I was accepted to much more prestigious schools figuring I would attend one of those for a graduate degree and avoid some student load debt). Many years later, in hindsight, I am very happy with that decision. I never think about going back in time and making the decision the other way. If anything I expect I would have been less successful by any metric (intellectual or otherwise) had I done so.

You don't have to be a genius to gain that. It might even be a liability - you don't have to follow the formula to get the right answer ( because you're impatient and want to go play outside ) ; you can just see the answer. This happened to me, and I spent a couple or four years as an undergrad undoing damage I'd done to myself that way.

I'd buy a lot more about what we think we know of human capability if there was even the most modest attempt to control for this factor.

I went to what used to be a "normal" school that had risen to university status. It still mainly taught teachers although I pursued a BSCS.

I asked the department chairman of the department why math was taught "from the wrong end of the telescope" and even he didn't really know why. I suppose the proofs course is no way to get buy in, but had I started with proofs rather than what they taught as algebra, I'd have had an easier time of it. I'd taken geometry but even algebra was still a morass, until I'd gotten a grounding in proofs.

Than again, I am not inside that 1 in 10000 range -- this study certainly does not apply to me. Or to the vast majority of people.

Opportunities for bright students in the United States are limited. Big news! We've always been anti-intellectual.

I believe the only mode of failure they were questioning in the study was the program coordinators own inability or failure to accurately identify people who did end up making large contributions to society (such as Shockley, aka the transistor) who failed to pass their initial thresholds for what they deemed as gifted. Much of the study focuses on questioning the failure of the program to adequately identify and support gifted children, not whether gifted children themselves ended up being successful. I'm honestly surprised noone has brought this up yet and that your comment is so presumptuous.

So yes she worked hard really really hard. But, those hours where simply worth more than other peoples.

In the end the nature vs. nurture debate is silly as it takes both to succeed. The minimums simply increase as you go up the scale. There are a few short people in the NBA, but nobody is below 5' tall. The top women are vastly better than the average man, but the classic men's vs women's sports has a core basis in biology.

*Shorthand for wanted to work for Disney as a kid, now has actual movie credits and words for Disney. That's about as concrete a form of success as you get for such a subjective field.

This is my thinking as well. I was a kid like this. I suspect there's a connection between being asocial and being 'gifted.' If you're happy playing with compilers and such and don't feel the need to run out of the house to play ball, then you're just going to soak up a whole lot of stuff other kids aren't. The laser focus is probably optional as well. Although, I suspect there's a connection with being asocial and being easily and deeply focused on things other than socializing.

As an adult, I'm still asocial. I also am not introverted, which seems to be a common misconception about this personality type. I can be very loud, outgoing and demanding if need be and feel perfectly natural. I just don't like to socialize very often.

So you believe in the 10 000 hours empirical rule based on "outliers" with very little evidence to support it?

Gifted children have the gift of being interested in things that are useful, that can give them money or high status like art, math, chess, technology...

A child who has an obsessive interest with candy or playing tag or watching TV (or just normal stuff that normal children do) will have to work harder to resist more temptations and focus on schoolwork and useful things.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/30/the-lottery-of-fascinat...

It took me longer to graduate at that point, but it was mostly because I was expected to do work and I never did before. I hated learning in a structured manner and being forced to do things. In fact, my lack of focus is what led me to learn about things on my own. I was reading calculus textbooks when I was 10 years old. I struggled with it, but it was fun. Then I'd read some physics instead because I felt like it.

Maybe successful people have lazer focus. But not all talented people are focused.

If you understand that a human being has a higher cognitive function than a sea slug, a wasp, a mouse, a dog, a dolphin, an ape, by our genetics alone, then you have to accept that there is a degree of genetic variance between individual humans. It's not like the moment we all qualify as the same species all genetic variance in every regard goes away. Some people are taller than others, some people are better at abstract thought, some people are better at linear calculation.

Of course nurturing these talents is incredibly important, nobody is denying that. But the more studies that come out, the more it seems to suggest that the ability to produce exceptional results with the nurturing of specific practices is hugely magnified by genetic predisposition.

You can preserve your creativity (doing things your own way) if you are prepared to pay the social cost but intelligence is largely inherited.

And intelligent women are having fewer children nowadays...

Chess is a good example. I've seen a 12 year old kid at a chess competition wipe the floor with dozens of much older players (people in their 40's, 50's, and up), who've been playing chess -- obsessively -- their whole lives.

This 12 year old kid has been playing chess for maybe 6 years (let's say 8 years maximum), but he totally crushes others who've played 40 or 50 years or more. Chess can be very addictive, and a lot of people spend virtually all their waking time playing it, for decades on end, studying, competing, yet that's not enough, and they can be easily beaten by someone much, much younger than them, who's put in only a tiny fraction of the time and effort they have.

I've also seen a 10 year old kid, who was really hyperactive and distracted when he played, always looking around him at everything but the chessboard, apparently interested in anything but chess. His mother sat next to him, and had to struggle to get his attention back to the board whenever it was his move. Yet he played at a high level against people much older than him. Again, he really couldn't have put that much time in to it, no matter how interested he was in it.. and he clearly wasn't that interested.

Chess is one of those fields where prodigies are relatively common, especially compared to fields like poetry that really do require a lot of life experience to be effective. The kids I've described are not that rare. It happens even at the highest levels, with Bobby Fischer being the archetypical example (becoming the youngest grandmaster at 15 and winning the US championship at 14). These days chess prodigies are even more common than in Fisher's time, thanks to computers and the internet. Still, whatever happens with them is not explained by the hours they put in to the game alone, as many people put in many more hours and much more effort than they do and still fail miserably.

Finding "gifted" children does not contradict this. Nobody pops out of the womb a math genius.

Yes, technically no one pops out knowing trig or calculus, but some are born with the cognitive capacity, which later manifests in life, to readily master abstract and complicated stuff, and others aren't born with that ability so they struggle to understand concepts that smart people grasp easily. Although ability can be lopsided (some are better at math than verbal), the less intelligent tend to have no dominant strengths - they are just average. And that's fine. Most people are that way.

Gifted children are "gifted" with a laser focus on the unusual things that they find fun - math, music, what-have-you. They spend countless hours playing with numbers or with music, while little Johnny is playing with a ball.

Why don't adults play with paste, coloring books, and alphabet letters? Because they are too mentally mature for those activities. Likewise, high-IQ children have a higher mental age, hence they find these tasks tedious and boring, as adults do.

Anyway, point is, when people point to "gifted" talent, this is just another cop-out. They don't have an explanation. They are appealing to everybody's shared sense of magical outcomes. But it boils down to the hours that kids put into their interests.

Well, there's something called an IQ score, and it does a pretty good job at predicting all sorts of things, such as socioeconomic outcomes, job performance, educational attainment, welfare dependency, and learning ability. The IQ test is one of great achievements of human psychology, is much harder to manipulate than EQ tests, and scores tend to remain stable throughout life.

At the end to the day, hard work is what allows one to push the limits. A gift/talent is just a good kickstart that makes the owner's life easier, but people with talent are quickly limited if they don't work hard. the biggest issues are that people counting on their gift are afraid of exposing their limitation and become more and more shy of taking risk, they also often don't get into the habit of working.

That said, I was talking about ordinary children without any selection. After school I went to math faculty in university with similar children. That was cruel, I sometimes felt so stupid.

There's definitely talent. And there's hard work. And sometimes it goes hand-to-hand, sometimes it's not. There are untalented people who's working hard and achieve a lot. There are talented people who doesn't give a damn and yet achieve a lot. And there are talented people who word hard and flying in the sky.

Problem solving ability and comprehension levels will only take one so far if they can't bring themselves to bury their head in a book, or sit in front of a piano, or shoot hoops, for the time necessary to master said subject.

This is obviously untrue. It's been well established that a significant fraction of intelligence is heritable, which means nurture has little to do with innate ability.

Further, there are plenty of examples of true geniuses, like Mozart for music and Ramanujan for mathematics, where they almost immediately grasped their subject and became experts rivaling their contemporaries with very little practice.

But genius is clearly not a binary quality, it's a continuum. There exist people slightly less adept than Ramanujan, and so had to put in more work to become experts, but still far less work than an average person would. You didn't have anyone to share your interests because your age group just couldn't naturally see the beauty you saw in your interests. Not wouldn't, couldn't without some serious coaching.

in reality, inherent talent clearly plays a very strong role. As a crude illustration, suppose

math_skill = hours_worked * beta, and assume the "quality" of hours_worked is standardized. While beta is positive for most people, beta could vary a lot based on talent (obviously the function is not linear and may also peak / approach an asymptote. or for some people the function increases more slowly but reaches a higher peak. point is that it's complex).

Two thirds of the world's current math researchers can trace lineage to just 23, 17th century mathematicians.

Source: http://www.nature.com/news/majority-of-mathematicians-hail-f...

If you read Ericsson's papers, he does in fact specifically deny any role to talent and genes, by name, unequivocally. It's not a strawman, it's what he really believes. Deliberate practice is also falsified by Hambrick's meta-analyses: it does not explain much of difference in performance compared to talent. They are not gifted with 'a laser focus', they are gifted with things like intelligence.

Nature versus Nurture.

Nobody pops out a "math" genius. However, it could be supposed that some pop out with a greater ability to quickly recognize and remember patterns of information acquired by their senses. My ad-hoc life experience has shown that some people are good at most things they try to do, and it takes them significantly less time to acquire and use new skills than the norm.

Doesn't really match my experience of gifted children, many of which are not gifted "with a laser focus" on anything, and perform very well at things that they don't spend additional time on.

> But it boils down to the hours that kids put into their interests.

It pretty clearly does not; people don't get the same results out of putting the same hours into the same things.

I don't dispute that effort is a variable in long term performance, but it's more of a criterion for long term performance than a predictor of raw talent imo.

I will also say that being singled out for special treatment is pretty silly, I think a more constructive use of my time as a child would have been to help peers who were struggling.

In the end, I had practiced more and have pretty much programmed everyday for 7 years, while they only did the minimum requirement to pass classes in CS>

How do you propose competitiveness be constructively harnessed? If you are proposing selective schooling etc. there is a danger of creating social segregation which can reduce social mobility and as a result social cohesion. There is also a social benefit to both the talented and less-talented from interfacing - the talented can learn humility while the others can gain inspiration for example.

Competitiveness is worth nothing, if you compete to just get the best grades for the exam. Most of the exams have close to no value in real life and do not force you to think by yourself but to rehash hundred times what you have seen before. The opposite of creative thought.

A similar question can be asked of famous musicians.

How does Lady Gaga's success support, much less confirm, your pet theory? Did she have success in a STEM field? I see no mention of STEM in her Wikipedia biography. The article points out that while the original evaluation was based a math assessment, "[l]ater, researchers included the verbal portion and other assessments", so perhaps she was a one-percenter in verbal, not math.

From her bio, she put a lot of work into the arts. That would suggest a different possibility, which is that someone who has a good grasp of any subject would also excel in other favorite activities.

Actually, that is the one part of the article I was rather skeptical about. Certainly in Germany there's an abundance of programs designed especially to nurture gifted pupils. They range from extra-curricular activities in school to summer academies and "early studying", where pupils take university classes one day a week instead of going to school.

Yes, we also have a lot of inclusion efforts, and that's a Good Thing, but we definitely don't neglect the other side of the intellectual spectrum.

I personally feel that a balance of 'normal' life as a child along with a rigorous and expansive set of opportunities for that child to explore their gifts would be healthiest and most productive for the gifted and the societies they inhabit.

I see this claim often and when pressed it looks like there's a lot of social pressure to "learn the test," and the people those cultures produce are vastly uncreative, difficult to work with, and often very dishonest (openly cheat for example), but test well in their cultures.

There's a big difference between talent and schooling. The latter can be gamed, and often is.

But ... all the students they followed had been through their program. Doesn't that equally prove that its clear how much those going through their program outweigh the rest in their influence? Isn't this just some kind of confirmation bias?

These tests are predictive, and as you point out, it's disingenuous to claim otherwise. They're measuring something valid. However, they're doing so relatively poorly, or rather, roughly. Even the quote you cite suggests that the total amount of variance accounted for was about 19%, which isn't too shabby by any means, but is also very crude when you think about implications for real-world consequences. Interpreting that 19% also becomes very murky, when you consider factors like teaching to tests, that tests like those are used for academic and career selection, leading to self-fulfilling prophecies. In rare circumstances where researchers have been able to remove some of these effects (for example, due to unusual legal decisions about acceptable use of test scores), the relationship between test scores and career performance has been shown to be very weak in the short-term, and almost non-existent in the long term.

Somewhere underlying the distribution of test scores is some distribution of ability that makes it easier for some people to thrive in certain settings. But ability is just one thing in a long list of things, along with practice, resources and other environmental factors that contribute to success, and sociological dynamics. Add to that test scores being very crude indices of ability to begin with, and you're in a very messy situation.

What's frustrating to me is that there's this sort of all-or-nothing attitude about testing, where tests are seen as useless, or as a perfect indicator of skill or ability. The truth is in-between.

I also spent some in summer camps with other students in the study and have remained casual friends with some of them over the years. I don't see any evidence to suggest that that level of demonstrated ability is transient.

I have never understood the intention behind this type of statement (which I've seen many variants of commonly espoused). Let X be the event "got a high test score at a particular test at a certain point in time." Is Matthews saying X = X (an uninteresting tautology)? Or is he claiming that X is uncorrelated or not predictive of other variables of interest (career success, ability on other task) which is clearly empirically false.

What would make you say that? Since there is no actual filter and no one is actually forcing any requirement, it should be that most of any group are somewhat similar to the standard distribution of the population, so most on HN should be like most of any other group, bog standard average.

I know I am.

+1 for skipping. Mentally, socially, and physically challenging.

We're a generation that needs therapy to realize that a stable, six-figure job as a mid-level engineer at 30 isn't failure. Our expectations (some might say entitlement) were set so unreasonably high that most of us have no chance of meeting them.

Buying in-the-money call options using 3-1 leverage on Google, Amazon, and Facebook has returned 200% since 2013 vs. 30% for S&P 500.

The motivation behind this strategy is that average-IQ people can make good money piggybacking off the creative contributions of America's smartest .1%. Facebook, Amazon, and Google stock will keep rising, as part of this trend, allowing average people to profit by joining the ride.

But existential problems are harder to solve than money ones, and even the smartest are faced with them (hence philosophy as a subject).

My point is that academic performance and intellect doesn't mean shit outside the academy and is a terrible indicator to use for success or accomplishment. It's never too late.

Telling one of these kids to shut the book and watch tv isn't going to make them happier.

Essentially, can you weigh the potential benefits to humanity against that child's preferences?

I think this isn't universal. "Tiger mother"-style parenting[1] doesn't seem optimized for happiness, and whatever impulse is behind punishing or occasionally murdering your children for premarital sex[2] doesn't seem happiness-focused either.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_mother

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honor_killing

Me too, hate this type of article, couldn't find it either.

As both a passionate study of both guitar and writing (fiction, essays, etc), I do agree that reaching 'beyond' is part of achieving high personal success in either field. Sort of like the phrase "knowing the rules before breaking them" can acknowledge the role of both structure and rebellion. Both have important facets in growth, and I think a lot of times lay-people can mistake "broken rules" that accidentally work for "talent" and it is frustrating.

EDIT: changed an example to be more specific and precise.

(They weren't around when I was a kid, so I can't say from experience.)

I have no experience with them yet.

Another problem is that there's a spectrum of ability/interest being turned into a binary. For those near the threshold of the criteria, this is especially problematic.

On the flip side, my brother was also a SET member, and there are some contrasts with me - he got his PhD in chemistry at 25 (I never finished my PhD in math) and was accelerated, having gone to college after 10th grade after cutting school for most of the year. He picked working with semiconductors, and that turned out to be a poor career choice. He accomplished much more in academic prestige than me, but his mistake cost him quite a bit financially - he is currently retooling to become a data scientist & is currently interviewing for entry level/junior positions.

Insisting that rich people must feel more existential dread than poor people (money can't buy happiness!) and smart people must be more sad than stupid people (ignorance is bliss!) is a classic symptom of just-world fallacy.

I wouldn't claim to know if either are happy.

I can't imagine how I could be much happier in life.

I have a great, healthy family, great career in a field that allows me to use my brain to create tons of business value for my company, take home an appropriate fraction of that, all for doing things that I'd pretty much happily do for free if I could afford to do so.

I seem to recall reading general summaries of the survey that suggest that we are, on the whole, happier than the average for our respective age groups, but I don't have any of those report summaries handy nor could I readily find them online.

This can be interpreted in a multitude of ways, but I like to have it in the context of this other Bruce Lee quote: "Before I studied the art, a punch to me was just like a punch, a kick just like a kick. After I learned the art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick no longer a kick. Now that I've understood the art, a punch is just like a punch, a kick just like a kick"

My interpretation is that we've all gone through these three phases in one way or another: 1) how do we do this stuff? ok use an editor... who cares if it's emacs (boy is that tough to learn), vi (huh? what's this context thingy), nano (cool, a menu!) etc

2) learn that there's a whole bunch of gee whiz stuff we can use (hey look, I have this special screwdriver designed to fit around the corner). Proceed to OCD over the pros and cons, figure out special cases etc.

3) realise (hopefully not too late), that actually all these specialised tools are just a means to an end. Use the most appropriate one for the situation; and appropriate here might mean that you use that one kick practised 10,000 times ("superfoot" Bill Wallace anybody?), in the right situation, rather than try to remember than wushu butterfly kick that you practised once (it hits, hero points to infinity! but if it misses, oh boy am I in trouble...).

I think step (2) is where we can start to distinguish those who will make it to (3), and those who will not. In order to be really good, if not genius level, it's not sufficient to just practise 10,000 hours (a Gladwell meme which I'm not fond of, although I understand what Gladwell was trying to imply), but to also understand and appreciate these "tools" (whether tangible or not).

Les time spend comparing, more time spend focused on the one thing you love => genius status, but you wont notice, or wont give a thing about it.

Also, you might do well to assume that a large majority of the people here that you are trying to put down also tested in top percentages in school tests. The audience of YC and HN is self-selected nerds.

These kinds of things are rare enough that they tend to get a lot of attention, and I've yet to hear of a horror story of the kind that people tend to raise in the abstract, so I think that between parents, school administrators, and the particular students involved when this actually occurs in practice, things are generally handled fairly well.

That's not to say that there isn't legitimate reason to consider carefully, but I think the idea that this is somehow universally an unacceptable risk in every case is simply unsupportable from the factual experience. I'm interested in seeing any concrete evidence that would suggest otherwise, but generalization from what is typical of age groups to cases that are clearly atypical for their age group is, I think, insufficient to make that case.