The Inappropriately Excluded | Hacker News Reader

The Inappropriately Excluded

polymatharchives.blogspot.com

4 pointswajdiben6 comments

I make no comment about the "science", but it certainly does jive with reality.

Outperform joe average in an intellectual pursuit, and he'll pat you on the back. Outperform the middle of the pack in the gifted class--people who've built their entire identity around being "smart"--and my God! watch the knives come out!

Garbage. See my comments there: it's bad math, and worse research. No longitudinal study like Terman or SMPY (https://www.gwern.net/SMPY) of high-IQ types has ever supported his claims. High IQ is an (unearned) privilege and a huge advantage for things like going to Harvard Medical. As Murray puts it, "life is yours to lose". (So what does that say about people with high IQ who gravitate to Mensa or blog posts like this to complain about their failures in life...?)

I'd take a step back here. With phrases like "garbage" and "(unearned) privilege", this has obviously pushed a more personal button than poor methodology.

I just know from the (admittedly) small sample I am familiar with, it lines up perfectly.

The middle-of-the-roaders all became attorneys, executives, top bureaucrats, etc--precisely as foretold. The outliers--the ones who could still clean everyone's clock while hung over and half asleep--all ended up in markedly less glamorous circumstances: secretaries, clerks, pot-head househusbands, librarians, gigolos, and the perpetually unemployed. I'm not sure I'd call it a tragedy though. They all seem happy enough where they are.

edit: I grew up pre-internet. Post-internet, this may be a moot crisis. With all of the opportunities it has to offer for independent study, perhaps those secretaries and clerks would have become scientists and mathematicians?

It pushes a personal button because the sheer intellectual dishonesty in service of poisonous self-pitying disgusts me. That the mathematical flim-flammery is so obvious (ah yes, let's just assume that every subset of a normal distribution is also a normal distribution, that definitely makes sense...) and so blatantly assumes its conclusion just makes it even more offending.

> I just know from the (admittedly) small sample I am familiar with, it lines up perfectly.

That's too bad, because it's wrong. For example, the SMPYers, all of whom are almost certainly smarter than even those who could 'clean everyone's clock', are enormously successful, and the ones who could clean the other SMPYers' clocks are even more successful. This is all pre-Internet, too.

I could understand getting that worked-up over a science with some kind of objective basis, but this is psychology we're talking about! Might as well get mad at a Tarot reader for pulling the cards in the wrong order.

That, and SMPY isn't a particularly compelling example. 1972-1997 is prime-time for computing, megacorporations, cold war military-industrial complex, and college educations all-around. Hard to imagine a more provident time to be a mathematically precocious youth! Looking at this in a broader slice of history, a comparison to the lives of men like Ramanujan or Heaviside would be more fitting.

Perhaps the "Inappropriately Excluded" from the article just haven't lucked into their own personal force-multiplier yet. Gates and Buffet were having some discussion on how well they would have fared under more primitive circumstances. Gates's answer was something along the lines of "lion food". I think that is a fair answer.

edit:

> "sheer intellectual dishonesty in service of poisonous self-pitying"

If this article set you off, I can only imagine how you deal with politics. ;-)

> That, and SMPY isn't a particularly compelling example. 1972-1997 is prime-time for computing, megacorporations, cold war military-industrial complex, and college educations all-around. Hard to imagine a more provident time to be a mathematically precocious youth! Looking at this in a broader slice of history, a comparison to the lives of men like Ramanujan or Heaviside would be more fitting.

SMPY covers the same time period as much of the anecdotal or self-selected evidence he invokes. What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

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