Nurturing Genius
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
https://yow.eventer.com/yow-2014-1222/stop-treading-water-le... (~40min)
(slides: http://yowconference.com.au/slides/yow2014/Kmett-StopTreadin...)
One of the topics he touched upon is Richard Feynman's approach to "being a genius":
You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems
constantly present in your mind, although by and large
they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or
read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of
your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once
in a while there will be a hit, and people will say,
“How did he do it? He must be a genius!”What you quoted is probably a genius not aware what limitation is the bottleneck for most people.
While Ed Kmett is in fact a Time Lord, that's largely because he doesn't seem to require sleep the way the rest of us do.
(I know him IRL.)
Speaking from a Texas point of view, there's three big problems: 1) Focusing on athletics. 2)Lack-luster public schools and of course the be-all end-all: 3) Crappy parents.
What are the people who were "gifted" but live a mediocre life supposed to do? Be bitter and drink for 40-60 years?
Not sure if utilitarian or humanitarian is the better metric, or if there is a real choice. The article does not seem to address the downsides to high prospect/low achievers.
As far as I can tell, we in the US have more resources devoted to creating environments where equality is tested in only in material status, and to transcend this fairly prescribed order is to risk ostracism.
It is not self-evident that giving growth opportunities to "talented" individuals maximizes ROI, as opposed to least privileged, for example.
The total untapped human potential is staggering once you take into account the effects of war, racism, sexism, general discrimination, mental illness, physical illness, disincentives, and poverty. At least most of these have improved in the last century.
I hope people realize this is not just about altruism, the economic boost would help everyone.
It is hard to give a brief yet universally applicable answer to "What are _____ supposed to do?", but neither "be bitter" nor "drink" is right.
The best advice I know of is "take well thought out action in pursuit of a worthwhile goal", which of course raises the question of what a worthwhile goal might be. Fortunately, there are many such goals, you don't have to worry about picking the very best goal. Health, fitness and education related goals seem like a good places to start, they will improve the capabilities needed to reach future goals, whatever those might be.
With one caveat: My guess is intervention probably has to start early.
Malcolm Gladwell pointed out how you will see clusters of geniuses emerge from the same time in the same neighborhoods and I think this supports the above as well.
I don't think it's limited to young people either, though it certainly helps. An established reputation will prevent people from being pushed beyond their limits.
Interesting enough as that "experiment" may have been, it only proved that certain persons of a certain background that includes genetic history unknown to us, can reach high degrees of competence in one __specialized__ field. Chess is also particularly well-coordinated with years of repetitive practice and dedication, but genius? I think not.
You could replace chess with playing the piano even, and the outcome would be the same.
There have been attempts in recent years to roll back and debase the definition of genius to be more compatible with egalitarianism (especially in parts of Europe) and the tenet of homogeneity but this is not what genius originally stood for.
Fabian Tasano writes: "Regarding the version of “genius” that is currently in retreat but still occasionally used: many people seem to have a simplistic idea of what it takes to be one. According to one popular model, all that is required is an increase in the magnitude of certain qualities which everyone already possesses in some measure. Make the particular qualities pronounced enough, and you get to genius. But a better way to understand the concept — assuming we’re applying the word to (say) Gauss or Picasso, rather than John Cleese or Wayne Rooney — may be that a genius has a particular capacity, which on a certain level can seem obvious or unremarkable, but which no one else has. A genius, on this understanding, is a person uniquely capable of making a leap ‘off the path’. With hindsight the leap may seem simple or obvious, but at the time no one else was, apparently, capable of making it. A potential leap of this kind is made possible by preceding leaps. Nevertheless its actual occurrence may go on not happening for decades. During that time there may be clear pointers towards it. Yet it is not until a genius comes along that the leap actually happens."
I could not agree more with this. Alan Kay also outlines an extremely similar point of view:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvmTSpJU-Xc
Also see his blue/red world metaphor.
However my guess is real nootropics won't take another century to get here. We may all be smarter someday.
Other factors seem very important anecdotally, have these been dismissed or just not fully studied yet?
1. Socioeconomic background - they mention it's not as predictive, but how sure are we Microsoft would exist if BG's/PA's parents were illiterate and couldn't afford to give them access to computers?
2. Mental health - Someone could be a 4th standard deviation genius yet be debilitated by anxiety, depression, or some other condition.
3. Occasionally mental "disability" can seemingly be related to success. So many great scientists have been on the Autistic spectrum, or suffered from severe OCD. Can the success of the person be separated from the disorder? Could "cures" for Autism and OCD actually negatively affect scientific progress? Or could their condition cause them to be incorrectly screened out?
4. How do curiosity, motivation, and ambition affect success? Do high scoring kids automatically have these traits or is it a separate variable?
We can be entirely sure it would not exist. This is not a hard prediction.
What does this mean? I am not familiar with that. Is that related with IQ or some other metrics?
I googled 4th standard deviation, and it pointed me to Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/68%E2%80%9395%E2%80%9399.7_rul... Reading that article, I am still not sure what "4th standard deviation genius" means - does that mean "1 in 15787" of people based on some intelligence metrics?
So a +4SD IQ score would be 160, or about 1 in 15000. Sounds pretty good, but that makes 20,000 just in the US. There are only 450 NBA players and usually less than 20 A-List actresses at a given time as a comparison.
An aside, anyone who throws out their high IQ unsolicited doesn't seem to make for interesting conversation. Maybe it's too hard to keep up. :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford%E2%80%93Binet_Intelli...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wechsler_Intelligence_Scale_fo...
I don't know for sure, but I suspect that one of the reasons that 160 is the max score is that the tests need to be normed and that's difficult to do once you pass so many standard deviations.
As another note, the overall composite score can qualify a student for services in a public school, but a good diagnostician will be using the test to assess areas of strength and weakness. Basically, a student who has high spatial reasoning, but poor verbal IQ requires different assistance than the reverse.
Anyway, yes, I'll agree that I hate IQ measuring contests because they're just like the other anatomical measuring contests. Further, if even someone wants to have one, they're almost never about the results from a properly normed test like those from above and, further, those tests contain a lot more information than a single number.
The pool of people who aspire to be NBA players or A list actresses is not everyone though, so you have to estimate first the respective pools.
You can just as easily use statistics to assess whether an individual possesses the traits to become an NBA player or actress as you can assess their IQ without their cooperation.
Conversely if someone doesn't want to participate in IQ testing, it is equivalent to them not wanting to play in the NBA.
“Give me a child and I'll shape him into anything.”
But the belief that humans have "equal capabilities aside from their environment" is held by almost nobody. Most disagreements are about what we should do about both unequal capability and unequal environment. Dogmatism enters when we disagree over why anything should be done.
In case you're wondering how this plays out in practice:
http://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2009academicf...
B: "Wolves don't bark. No other canid barks."
A: "My neighbor's wolf barks all the time. Drives me crazy."
B: "That might lead you to suspect that your neighbor's 'wolf' is actually a wolf-dog. Or maybe just a husky? You should get out more, meet some actual wolves..."
East Coast coyotes are apparently full of dog DNA, as well as wolf DNA. So maybe they bark, or even howl a bit. But I maintain that barking remains a dog thing.
(I'm not one of them).
The question that enables rigorous analysis is always: "where did these ideas come from?" Some people invent ideas on their own, but that's so rare it's lost in the noise.
It's very, very unlikely that your hypothetical observer looked at the world and concluded independently that all members of the species Homo sapiens have equal potential.
First, this person would have to be thinking independently, which is very rare. Second, there is no empirical evidence for this proposition -- or at least, none has ever been brought to my attention. (Fortunately, equality of potential is by no means the only reason to believe in equality of opportunity.)
If I observe that someone is a Catholic, which is more likely: that he learned his Catholicism from another Catholic? Or that he independently derived the Trinity from empirical evidence?
Your hypothetical observer may have derived his or her opinions about school choice and local government from personal observation. More likely, they came from Rush Limbaugh. Their opinions on human biology are straight-up American humanism, ie, leftism. (With nontrivial historical links to Christianity, but that's a separate conversation.) So... a wolf-dog.
Speaking of abstracts ... https://arxiv.org/pdf/1110.2832.pdf
I'd rather take smarts and apply them to have better relationships, discover new and wonderful things, and build things i and other people find useful.
Being labeled as a genius seems like a huge drag.
There were real smart people there. I mean they just took one look at a red black tree and just got it. Not me I sweat all the way through that stuff.
How about nurturing normal people collaborating, respecting the scientific process, loving to discover new things, be curious, etc?
My older siblings are much older and in STEM, which means I was informally schooled by them and spoke three languages before going to school. I used to read Science and Engineering magazines laying around as a child, then you get to school and you're put with kids who are just learning how to actually read the alphabet, and they're using pictures and scenes, and write big chunky letters. They're learning addition and multiplication while you at home write programs. Any idea how fucking miserable this could make anyone? I was excited about disassembling programs as a teenager and couldn't wait to get to college and study Engineering and meet teachers so I could avoid reinventing the wheel, only to be disappointed (if you teach programming and a kid who just turned 18 shows you programs he wrote in a bunch of languages including x86 assembly but you don't care: wake the fuck up and turn him to a colleague who does actually care about this stuff). I'm sure a smarter kid would have figured a way to end up at the right office at the right teacher, but I've sampled many professors to loose faith.
I tried to go study abroad in a very respected college to save my soul because I knew I wouldn't last in my college, received a response, then financing fell through like a Damocles sword. I spent 9 years in college. I resented academia where stupidity and cheating were more acceptable than absenteeism. If you didn't show up and did well, you were a cheat; if you showed up and cheated, you were okay. I was so used to proving I didn't cheat because the work was "too good" to be of a student (and this started in 4th grade with my fucking handwriting on a homework not being a child's handwriting. The teacher had accused me and it was my idea to write in front of her to disculpate me). I resented incompetent fossilized professors with out of date knowledge who'd just crush you for not following exactly their (factually wrong) exact way, and you could do nothing about it because they've been friends for 30 years with the dean or know the Minister or something. A system that reproached you of doing a good job, where doing nice work had bad consequences and of course it wasn't your work, just tell the truth. A system where it'd be so much easier to be mediocre.
I hated every fucking day of school from the day I got in, to the day I got out.
I'm all for increasing the average level of education, but "non-average" kids shouldn't be "tied" to average kids. Many people talk about "osmosis" and what the smart kids could bring when they're in class and these people don't really get osmosis: It's not the average kids who end up smarter, it's the smart kids who end up withering away. This may work for adults, but for kids? I think it's hard.
The system judges outliers with the same mindset it judges the average. They're just not the same. Special needs kids are not just on the left side of the Gaussian.
EDIT - To put things in context: I grew up in the midst of a civil war that made 200,000+ victims; son of a father with a job that made him a target; belonging to an ethnicity that is the prime target, and survived a bunch of explosions. Great childhood.
When I say education is the worst thing that's happened to me and that's left the bitterest of tastes in my mouth, I hope I'm able to fully convey to which extent it has traumatized me.
I feel like every bit of will to submit to education has been beaten out of me, and I'm done grinding my teeth. Feeling my energy draining away day by day. I was having symptoms similar to seasonal depression, except they didn't match the seasons but the academic year. The safety net a diploma offers is just. not. worth it.
.
It's a load off my mind and I'm feeling very good about my decision. It's been a week, and I haven't found any good reasons to revert it. I'm getting my website up and running again, setting up backups worthy of a professional and practicing my coding. I've always been interested in the work people around me do, and because of that (and my previous programming experience) I'm meeting my first client right after the holiday.
It's not exactly what I want to do for the rest of my life, but I think it's a great start (developing integration tests for an Angular-based EFQM/project management tool on a fixed-price + costs basis), and I'm considering subcontracting it to freelancers.
(Advice and comments are more than welcome. I'm 21 and HAVE to earn money for the first time, I want to build products as an entrepeneur but plan to do contracting to keep me afloat in the meantime. I'm located in the Netherlands.)
Just a thought, but living in certain countries can be very cheap while you build up your skills and pick up freelancing clients. If you want a totally knew experience, it can be a great way to educate yourself while working only part-time. Even teaching English abroad can be very lucrative and will afford you a lot of free time to continue learning on your own.
I'm a web developer and while I might not have much to teach you about programming, I've been working as a freelancer/small-business owner for the past half decade or so.
In the past year I've been actively working towards figuring out ways to help or collaborate with people who eschewed the typical college path and/or are looking into programming as a career path or just a way to make a living.
Based on the number ("200,000") and timing, I can't think of another conflict that fits the profile.
Yeap. Still in.
On a side note, how did you match it? Is this part of the stuff you usually read about, etc?
* : "I love books too, Peter". In reference to Peter Kapitza. I should get back to learning Russian.
Hard to think of something off the top of my head. I don't really think about this stuff with "internationalization" in mind so I've never paid attention to which authors were translated.
Not sure if you'd like content in a "History" perspective, I know Benjamin Stora is translated.
Henri Alleg also wrote about it (The Question. He was in trouble with Maurice Audin). Frantz Fanon was in the Algerian Liberation Front.
For novels, you can look up Mouloud Mammeri, Mouloud Feraoun, Albert Camus, Assia Djebar, etc.
Again, sorry for the late reply.
> I hope I'm able to fully convey to which extent it has traumatized me.
I always feel bad about thinking these two things, because to be honest my life was mostly privileged and because many people would feel lucky just to have access to some form of education, but I truly feel the same way.
I went through the public school system in the US and hated every moment of it, despite being socially adept and not subject to bullying from other students. I was just so incredibly bored. That's not to say that my teachers were necessarily bad, or that every subject was too easy / not worth learning (though some were), it was just that sitting still and silent in a classroom of 30+ kids for 8 hours a day ran contrary to my ideal learning environment in every possible way. It is not natural for most children to be silent, and then be yelled at for giving in to the massive urge to socialize. It is not natural to have almost no physical stimulation throughout the day. Now even as an adult I need to exercise 1.5 - 2 hours a day to keep my mind calm. I was so overstimulated by my environment that paying attention in school was hopeless. I cannot focus when I am around other people (especially at the time the opposite sex). Past 6th grade or so I was daydreaming nearly every minute of the day. I learned literally nothing in junior high and high school. I asked to drop out and home school myself on a routine basis but it wasn't an option. It took a long time after to break certain negative associations and rekindle the love of learning that I always knew that I had.
Some teachers in primary school used to let me play in class (go to the back and sort of move around, get between two tables and play pendulum/swing with my legs). Apparently it was that painful to watch a bored kid. But I think it was better because I also did a lot of physical activities that I think helped mitigate.
As to college, to be honest, the curriculum is truly primo quality, straight out of the Soviet system. The college was about 40,000 students, all in Sci & Tech. (no humanities).
Engineering students go through two years of common core where you study a bunch of Math/Physics/Chemistry/Strength of Materials/Manufacturing(lathe, molding)/Industrial drawing/Programming courses.
Every Engineering student goes through that, except Software people who only do one year (they miss the coolest one).
The syllabus is good.. (we got to learn about RST controllers which are rarely taught).
The problem though is that they don't capitalize on what has been done to do more and they don't have ways to test out of courses (there's a bunch of courses I could have tested out of. I ended up had good grades in them and it just wasted my time). And also some profs are unethical (nice when they give you a class or a half to tutor, and then slaughter your grade and disappear, some don't even correct your sheet).
Plus you don't get to build on what you've learned. Scarce electronic parts. Rare projects. You had to search a lot to find good solder. You can't do PCB traces under a certain width. Forget about SMD.
I struggled to get a credit card, and then the stuff you buy online either got "permanently misplaced", lost, or held at customs. It's like that Carl Sagan quote: "If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe." Struggling to do the basic stuff for so long gets tiring, and dulls your edge.
I'm telling you, the Chinese were onto something with the imperial examinations.
What we do is set up a test focusing on IQ and aptitude taken at, say 10 years. Based on that, we segregate everyone into castes; say, manual laborers, blue collar workers, white collar workers, and professionals. Then we focus subsequent instruction for the particular caste: professionals and white collars get pre-college material, blue collars get trade schools and the rest get baby-sat to keep them out of trouble. Further tests can provide finer gradations, particularly important for the higher castes, to identify that 1% that will become the leaders. Those are given all the advantages they need to reach their potential without having resources sapped by sheer wastage.
Careers and such are determined properly, by aptitude and intelligence, and not by stupid crap like which class the hot girl is taking.
The system has a number of other advantages: we can ditch the goofy democracy for everyone thing, since the majority aren't going to have valid opinions anyway. The result is less stress and more happiness for everyone.
[Edit] It just occurred to me that Plato would probably think that this is his Republic. Except that we could make this actually work.
Unfortunately, this kind of caste system already exists as a de facto result of socioeconomic background, and I think it would be better to acknowledge and counteract the effects of background, than to make an explicit division based on early age testing.