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Comment by DavidSJ | Hacker News Reader

We've tried to domesticate genius, and lost it:

“It has been pointed out that we no longer have infant and child prodigies, or that at least they are now much rarer than before. … We sacrificed genius for our present interest in homogeneity. We began to dislike precocity in children and to dislike children themselves. Our insistence on uniformity began the modern oppression of children.” —Richard Farson, Birthrights

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I feel like there's a common thread in many conversations I have these days, which can be described well by "We've tried to domesticate genius, and lost it." It's the parents that push their kids to be measurably good at all the things they've been told geniuses are good at. It's the students who go to university because that's how they're told they will get good jobs, and not due to a thirst for learning. It's the managers that try to create a workplace that has some superificial resemblance to another place that has turned out great work, and then expect that they've flipped on the genius switch.

We're so used to measuring and planning everything, that when we decide we want 'genius' all we think to do is measure what we can in other instances, and force that to happen. I suspect it's very hard for a lot of people to believe that (a) it takes all kinds of un-measured hard work, (b) there are so many more aspects than they can think of that go into creating genius, and (c) there's a measure of luck to it and they can't control everything.

Back to the topic of the article though, I see parents who believe there is a causal link from Good School --> 'Good Job', and see a link to Good School from all these things 'geniuses have been known to do.'

Absolutely. But I also question the criteria of the hypercompetition, and the judges' valuation of the signals. Volunteer work in a Guatemalan day care center may indicate altruism and awareness, right up the moment when it becomes an aid, or a requirement, of Harvard admission. Likewise the school paper. Maybe the insistence on being "well-rounded" pushes kids outside a purely academic focus, and gets them exposed to things they might otherwise miss. But how much will a kid get from an experience without an interior interest? "Gotta go check the 'well-rounded' box."

Likewise I wonder about the curriculum they have to hit. If they are doing so much homework, why aren't they more numerate, why aren't they more familiar with the underpinnings of our literature and history? Why isn't Harvard conducting interviews in foreign languages?

We've made a grueling admissions process that measures compliance with a particular norm of social and political values, and tries to be "academically rigourous" without suggesting that particular topics are especially important or essential.

And why, exactly, is Harvard so much more important than Brown, and Brown than Wesleyan? The education available at these cannot be so different as the quality of the social network established. Now networks are extraordinarily important, but are the Harvard grads _learning_ that much more after college? or is the difference in their positioning for various status competitions?

It's hardly surprising that this process perpetuates the same status structure that determines its rewards and criteria. Those rewards and criteria are stated in vague but emphatic terms, which can only be judged subjectively. Is it any wonder that the process seems crazy? or that makes suspicious the very notion of "excellence" supposedly at its core?

But given there are a fixed number of slots at a place that a lot of people want to attend (which may not be the case forever, with online education) how else do you propose they judge the students?

The idea they have is that they don't just want the 4.0/1600 SAT students. They want students who have interests and passions outside of the class. The person who wins the Westinghouse competition, or the IMO gold medalist, or the 17 year old NY Times best seller, or the kid who toured with the Marsalis' on sax.

Sure all these things could be application padding w/o passion purely to get into Harvard, but how do you distinguish? How do you select for passion/competence, but not look at their actual accomplishments? What's a better way to do this?

You could ask them to code on the whiteboard. :-)

Not sure. For a start, I submit that the Ivy League inundation by 4.0 / 1600 students signals that high schools aren't grading hard enough. A more informative grade scale might clarify the competition. And I bet these 4.0s are hiding some academic posers, kids who maybe did a lot of work but are graded heavily on the fuss their parents would make over an A-.

If the schools are guessing less about which 4.0 signifies more ability, they'd have more time for serious attention to other parts of the portfolio.

I've sometimes toyed with the idea of starting a university which gives no degree, in fact won't even confirm or deny a person's past attendance to any other institutions, in order to weed out those who are there for the degree.

In the US we have community colleges, which offer a range of "adult ed" courses outside the degree program. Many universities also have Continuing/Night non-degree programs.

Yeah, unfortunately those institutions tend to be for people who want academic "appetizers", or a degree. They're not for serious intellectual pursuit.

How do I sign up?

This is one of the reasons I love programs like open courseware.

My suggestion is using a modified version of sortition. Grade the students, then add some white noise to their final grading. You deliberately make the process less precise, hoping that this will discourage students from gaming the system too hard (which will more accurately get the intrinsically motivated ones in).

Even better, if you keep track of the random noise you added, you can do all sorts of interesting statistical experiments. Introduce a few kids who didn't get top scores into an MBA program, and see what factors later predict success.

There is an interesting trend at top schools where the marginal applicants from less prestigious prep-schools tend to do better. The better your parents help you game the system the lower your average intelligence after admission.

My younger sister went though this process recently. She was Valedictorian, had 5's on something like 12 AP tests, ran her own business, and had enough artistic talent that she was accepted into the top Graphics Art School in the country with an average admissions age of ~20. Now, she was considering a business degree and could have easily gotten a full ride at an Ivy, but the students where 'stressed and boring' so she gave up on that idea really quickly.

Which is an odd trap, where not only are poeple gaming the system to get in, you drive away the types of students you actually want because your student is so focused on checking things off a some list they never really learn to think for themselves.

PS: Continue down this path for long enough and we are going to end up with Japan's higher education system.

With everything you said -- isn't that the way you're supposed to do things? Seriously. You see what others do who are successful and you try to understand what it is and replicate it and improve on it.

It's not about domesticating genius, but its about understanding and application. And last time I checked the ONLY scientific method we have for understanding something is measurement.

Basically, applying the scientific method here would be a great idea, but keep in mind that correlation != causation. Just because many geniuses you've heard of could pick up a difficult instrument and learn it quickly, it does not follow that learning to play an instrument is a necessary step towards geniushood. The idea that I latched on to "We've tried to domesticate genius, and lost it" suggests that parents are shaping kids that exhibit secondary characteristics of genius, but we've failed to nurture the spark that pushes someone to do amazing things.

I offer the hypothesis that an important factor towards developing very high talent in a field is a love for it and an opportunity to explore within it, make mistakes, do "some costructive play." If this is true, it seems quite possible to me that training someone to exhibit all kinds of secondary signs of genius (that they may well enjoy, but not truly love) can take up time and energy that they might otherwise dedicate to developing their true genius.

Sometimes genius isn't where you expect it. What if the next Jim Hensons are currently practicing tuba between lacrosse games and advanced calculus courses, admonished whenever they "waste their time playing" and painting their WarHammer models?

I think you nailed it.

In a world in which so much routine work has been and continues to be automated, originality is becoming more and more essential for success. But originality can't be taught -- it has to be nurtured.

Yes, in order to do original work, you need mastery of a medium, whether that be lacrosse, tuba, or mathematics (to borrow your examples). But people think that the mastery is the whole point, when it's actually just the toolchest. Without originality to guide the use of those tools, you're just a mechanic -- and we don't need many mechanics anymore.

Originality really isn't the right word. I've been original my whole life -- almost everyone has by definition. I can do a lot of original dumb stuff. I think what you want is closer to ingenuity. And this is why mastery is important. And its also why mastery of certain things is important. I was one of the most original (and skilled) Gorf players of my day -- no one really cares. Had I been equally skilled at chess I probably could have gotten into Harvard on that alone. Both relatively equally non-transferrable skills.

Just happened across a blog post on this topic, more or less:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelellsberg/2011/07/22/life-...

And it was done deliberately, systematically and with full (or nearly full) understanding of the consequences.

At least if you believe John Taylor Gatto. I would like to write him of as a loony, but having read his book (available for free http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm) that isn't as easy as I assumed it would be.

Thats not saying that he is right, only that he makes a damn good and interesting argument.

Whatever the initial motivations, the system only persists due to the continued support of the masses, who genuinely (and misguidedly) believe it to be the best thing for children. It's a tragedy, not a conspiracy.

The free version of the book is the first edition. If you're going to take the time to read it, you might as well just buy the newest edition on Amazon, which has (from what I hear) eliminated a few mistakes.

How do we even know that's true? First, I've never really believed in the idea of a child prodigy, (partially a consequence to my subscription to the "10,000 hour expert" rule) and second in a hypercompetitive world what once looked like a Touch from God now looks like every other kid in their class.

There is something behind this that people from genetics and evolutionists don't talk about and even don't want you to know. The reason why there are so many men in our history who were prodigies is very simple, and not a result of female oppression. The genes of men are much more randomly activated/mutated/spread than those of women. Why? Because changing the genes of women could be dangerous to giving birth or raise children. As men can have much more children than women, let's call the reason "nature", nature decided that women have a dense distribution of qualities and men a very high variance. You can see this in the distribution of shoe sizes, the number of men with small feet is the same as those with big feet. And women all have the same, ask Al Bundy. Now if men have a much higher variance in their genes, chances are this affects their way to understand problems and therefor the huge mass of different approaches and a wider spectrum will produce solutions in a collective much faster than in the dense normal distribution of women. If we now keep on insisting that all humans are the same and no one is different and therefor better at understanding a specific problem, we might never solve a problem if it's not in the solution space of our normal distribution of the average human. (If you think I said women are less smarter than men you did not understand me. Women and men are equally smart with the same median, but there are more idiots and geniuses amongst men)

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