I Was Told I Was Very Smart
theferrett.livejournal.com
theferrett.livejournal.com
Then I went to a top university in Computer Science. I was suddenly surrounded by people that were orders of magnitude better at computer science than I was. I had to study for hours to understand something they seemed to understand implicitly. It took two years of struggling to finally reach a point where I considered myself "good" at computer science. After that, it came fairly easily but I still had to work much harder than my friends who did it effortlessly.
I learned over time that I am fairly smart. Not off the charts smart, but I've got my strengths. I still have to work harder than those in the top of my field, but I'm certainly on the down slope of the bell curve.
But the most important thing that I've learned is that it doesn't matter how smart you think you are. There will always be those more or less smart than you. What's important is what you do with it, and how hard you work to achieve what you want.
Subject to the (entirely reasonable, I believe) presumption that humanity is finite, a lack of maximal and minimal elements implies that "is smarter than" is not a strict partial ordering. (All finite partially-ordered sets have maximal and minimal elements.)
This seems profoundly counterintuitive to me; both the asymmetry and transitivity of the "is smarter than" relation seem almost axiomatic (and the irreflexivity is indisputable).
It seems to me that there must be thousands of individuals who are maximally smart -- each of them, naturally, incomparable to the others.
Hah, you can't be serious! Look around you - asymmetry is so painfully obvious that even pop theories propose to split intelligence into "book smarts", "street smarts", "social smarts", etc.
In reality, I don't think "smart" is a word that makes much sense, outside of the context of signaling social status (pIQ).
Which is really total agreement with your point. "Smart" is as much a partial ordering as "friendly" is, for a lot of the same reasons.
I don't see the connection. Asymmetry in the relation "is smarter than" simply means that it is impossible to have both "X is smarter than Y" and "Y is smarter than X" (for X != Y).
In the context of individuals of incomparable intellect, it is inappropriate to say that either is smarter than the other -- never mind that they are both smarter than each other.
I think that's the core truth of "genius". Melville put it, "Genius all over the world stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round".
Joseph Campbell, Isamu Noguchi, Martha Graham, and Rudy Arnheim were all geniuses in very different fields, but they were also drawn to each other in friendship & collaboration. They can't compare to each other on any scale, but somehow shared something in common.
Secondly, even for someone X who is maximally smart, the statement "Y is smarter than X" can be true if its in a particular context. E.g. take two people who are maximally smart... there no one smarter than X in math (or whatever) and no one smarter than Y in history. Then X is smarter than Y and Y is smarter than X... depending on how you use the word.
Edit: So long as no one is maximumly smart.
Now define "smartness".
I think seemed is the key word here. Many people that are good at what they do give the impression that it's a breeze for them. When examining it closer, it isn't: they spend plenty of time studying. I've never really gotten to the bottom of it, but the difference seems to be that they simply talk less about the studying and more about the material itself, which gives the impression they know their stuff very well, even though they studied hard as well.
A comforting half-truth.
Basically, we humans are really bad at judging things, particularly abstract things like "intelligence". Heck, we can't even really define it yet.
Just get your results, and be happy with those.
The other part (working longer on hard problems) is important, but this is probably not so bad - there's rarely a point in doing math problems below your skill level.
The moral is simple. When you praise children, you motivate them to seek more praise. If your praise is about something that is out of their control, such as innate intelligence, you discourage them from trying to take control of their circumstances. But if it is within their control, such as effort, they apply energy in a useful direction.
If you're a parent, which would you prefer to do?
The first group already got their social approval for being smart. Once labeled "smart", they already "knew" they were smart.
But ones that were labeled "hard workers" needed to keep up "hard work" to retain the (desired positive) label.
Just compare:
"I'm still smart, even if I performed bad on boring task."
vs.
"I'm still hard worker, even if I didn't put much effort into boring task."
I take that as evidence from the students that boredom wasn't the cause of their results.
If you praise a child who is actually smart, for being smart, then things will work a lot better.
I understand the goal of this study was to see if increasing self esteem can help. But don't extrapolate that to also assuming that praising a child for things that really are praise worthy (including being smart) is bad.
The result of the study should be: don't lie in your praise.
This is actually a serious problem among gifted children. They are told they are smart for most of their lives while the work is very easy. Once work gets difficult for them, they start to think "this is different, it's HARD. Crap, maybe I'm not smart after all".
The linked NY Magazine article covers this concept nicely.
I remember the only time in school (5-16) I actually enjoyed it - instead of learning from the board, we had a year where the maths lessons were all taught from little booklets each with 10-20 pages, with a number of different subjects - about a third of the books were "core/basic" that everyone had to do by the end of the year, the rest you could move onto if you could pass the mini tests you could ask for once you had read it.
Everyone got to go at their own pace, the teacher just handed out and marked tests and answered questions as needed or helped out those most in need to get the basics covered.
>> "If your praise is about something that is out of their control, such as innate intelligence, you discourage them from trying to take control of their circumstances."
I'm not sure kids really understand or believe the above. The more you learn, the smarter/cleverer you become. So praising them by saying they're really smart/clever, is praising them for learning.
Personally I'm more inclined to say "Wow you're very clever to get that right" and gets a better response from my kids, than saying "Wow you worked really hard".
But I have a fundamental disagreement with the simplistic message of complimenting effort rather than brains. And that disagreement is that you're training kids to work hard, but not necessarily well. In my childhood the messages we got pushed us to always look for the trick. As an adult I really value the mental habit of always looking for the shortcut that makes things easy.
Another interesting variant I find myself using with my son is to compliment him for showing smarts, but follow it up with a theory that brains need practice to continue working. Thus "smart" becomes a compliment for what he does, and not what he is. For instance I'll say something like, "How did you get so smart? You must have been really using that brain! Just look at what you've learned!"
What, then? ;)
"Rewards and punishments are just two sides of the same coin -- and the coin doesn't buy very much. What is needed, Kohn explains, is an alternative to both ways of controlling people. The final chapters offer a practical set of strategies for parents, teachers, and managers that move beyond the use of carrots or sticks."
Has anyone read those final chapters and could tell us whether there are any actionable alternatives in there at all?
As one reviewer put it: "I believe Kohn realizes rewards are necessary, just not the rewards/reinforcement that have been in use. Learning is its own reward. If this wasn't true, why would these people who reviewed the book have read it? Were they paid to read it? Love is its own reward. Meaningful debate/discussion is its own reward. Generosity is its own reward. Using these as your reinforcers will bring results."
I know this is true, but it doesn't help. Incentives are a side-effect of competition for talent. If a business owner or manager doesn't offer them, people will find the above intrinsic rewards and enjoy them, but will still leave once the competition comes knocking with carrots.
I understand that Netflix does something like this. They pay salaried employees top dollar, give them choices about what to work on, and demonstrate their trust with policies such as the no-vacation-policy policy. < http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664 >.
The other 2 chapters in this end section are similar, with one each focusing on raising children and how to structure education.
Praise or a reward is the _easy_ solution. There is no motivator that applies to everyone, everywhere for every situation.
Here is a suggestion. Find out what the people you interact with want and tie it into the system. Do they want vacation? Do they want recognition? Money? As you scale up, create a corporate culture that values some set of things and attract people with shared values.
http://www.amazon.com/Peak-Companies-Maslow-non-Franchise-Le...
This mode of reinforcement really should be reapplied to anything "natural" vs practiced: athletics, grace, popularity, ninjitsu...
Since this article is still on the front page I would like to ask HN how does one deal with the similar issue of letting a young girl know she's pretty without suggesting it's of central importance
Well, my approach would be not to bother letting her know she's pretty. Let's face it, unless she is unlucky enough to be "ugly" in a way that removes her from the accepted norm, there is a high probability that somebody somewhere will date her and love her when she is older.
Not to discount the effect that our culture places on girls and physical attractiveness, but girls learn much from their parents, especially there fathers. If she can see that what she looks like doesn't matter to you one iota, odds are she will not see any real value in any guy that mentions how pretty she is. You can't be swept off your feet by somebody calling you pretty when being pretty isn't how you define your worth.
In other words, by worrying about her getting the pretty comment from you, you're probably working against your intended objective.
Very well said. The next step is that she should see that attractiveness is not the most important trait to me (or her father). With this perspective, the thing to do is not to vaccinate her, but to praise her abilities and values so she never associates her worth with physical appearance. Thus, she can skip the whole trouble altogether.
So, this generalizes not to attractiveness, but what people tie their worth to.
I realize you're in the big brother department and would like to protect her. But allow me to ask: would she be any less in need of your protection if she were plain-looking? or homely?
Children are incredibly bright. If she's pretty, she already knows. And I'd be willing to wager that she's already leveraging that knowledge when it suits her.
If you try to prepare her for it, all you're really doing is letting her know how important you think it is. And if she looks up to you, that will reflect on how she values it as a part of her identity. Which I feel is far more risky than calling her 'smart'. Because 'pretty' is transient.
No, but a helpful response might be more straightforward and wouldn't be helpful until well into adolescence.
You're probably right all around, but family isn't the only influence, and depending on the family, friends are a greater influence on a person. Junior high and high schools have weird social hierarchy that frequently stresses physical appearance. Some girls seem to have a need for male approval. I just want her feel no need for that. And there probably isn't anything I can do better than spending time with her. For some girls, with different families, I doubt this is the case.
And I absolutely agree that it is a risky proposition and probably not worth playing.
The hard way to do something would require a lot of effort, but actually very little brain power. An example would be trying to modify a set of data. The hard way would be to do it by hand. That's the most obvious method and thus requires little brain power to arrive at. However the faster way is to write a Python script that does it.
Probably part of the de-emphasis on smarts is society's general attitude towards innate intelligence. We don't like to believe that some people are simply born better than others, so we stress that more effort is better instead.
There's no arguing the fact that not everyone is equally gifted in terms of brain power, so I think it's kind of silly to try to ignore intelligence. Intelligent people are creative, open minded, and flexible. But an intelligent person who's allergic to actual effort is the real problem we want to avoid. Also we're probably more equal in intelligence than we are in our ability to work hard. So in practice, this is probably why effort is a better indicator of ability to succeed than intelligence is.
For me, it became obvious very early in elementry school that I was smart. So my mother told me that my mind was a gift. She also told me that being given such a gift meant I had a special responsibility to develop it to its fullest capacity.
Henceforth, it was not failure in any given project that I feared. On the contrary, I routinely failed and thought that if I didn't, I wasn't taking on sufficiently difficult challenges. What I feared was not pushing myself hard enough. Not living up to my potential.
In elementry school, I set my own intellectual pace, and as a professional, I still do. I sought out challenges and ideas, and still do. I feared complacency, and still do. Being taught that intelligence equated to responsibility has done more for me than raw intelligence ever might have.
I skipped second grade (not recommended) and heard a lot about "potential". I wouldn't wish that on anybody.
Which is why I don't think they're actually counter examples. The danger described is of teaching children that 'being smart' is, in and of itself, praise-worthy.
Reasoning: Is it intrinsic that Einstein needs 25 tries, or is it because he also knows "fetch", "lay", "roll over", and "play dead"? It's a very important distinction, and most usage of "smart" implies the former - intrinsic ability. That's the difference between "smart" and "experienced".
Among my peers, however, I don't see any intrinsic differences in learning whatsoever. If person A needs less iteration than person B to learn the classwork, she's either more determined or has more related experience (or both). The two go hand-in-hand, because experience is just the integral of determination over time. Intrinsic "smartness" is completely unnecessary in describing learning ability.
I wouldn't be surprised if both determination and related experience correlate highly with intelligence, but I would be surprised if they explain it completely. Have you ever taught one of the lower grades (elementary school, K-5)? There're some students that just "get it", and others that struggle no matter how many different ways you approach the material. Some of that's undoubtedly family background - how much value the family places on education, whether they've been exposed to intellectual concepts early, etc. But I really doubt all of it is, particularly given differences even between siblings. And I doubt that determination factors into it much at that age, given the average willpower of a 6-year-old...
I've also noticed very few intrinsic differences in learning among my peers. But remember that a peer, by definition, is an equal. I can't really place my peers as being smarter or dumber, but that's because they've all made it through elite colleges already and been through the Google hiring process. If I broaden my sample out to "everyone I've known during my lifetime", there're some really stark differences in learning, and some of the people who struggled the most were just as determined or moreso than I was, and they continued to struggle despite approaching the material through several different angles.
Seeing a good magic trick at a young age, for example, is probably what leads to true understanding of epistemology - you need that initial feeling of "reality is not what it seems". Intuitively understanding logic is also indirect - it can come from a toy peaking a child's curiosity at the just the right time in just the right way.
No learning opportunity is missed completely, just as 30-somethings can learn to speak foreign languages, but there are certainly windows for the quick acquisition of certain ideas over others.
Environment certainly plays a role, but to what extent? It isn't just parental involvement -- there are plenty of bright accomplished people whose parents were busy doing something else during their upbringing. It isn't likely to be the toys that you get to play with, because there are bright kids even amongst the poorest of the poor -- though they do tend to be rarer exceptions.
I'd wager my money on a higher influence from genetics than many people in our society would currently want to believe. Some people, at birth, are predisposed to certain natural talents. They simply have good spatial reasoning, for example -- it's not something that they had to learn to mimic at a young age, it's something they were actually born with.
From there, the talent is subjected to environmental conditions, some positive, some adverse. Maybe their spatial reasoning and their parents' guidance gets them into sports instead of taking things apart. Maybe their natural talents manage to survive even very adverse environments. Or, maybe the abilities just wither away and die under conditions that don't nurture them.
(you might argue that labeling a child as 'not smart' or at least not singling out a child as 'smart' might motivate them to prove the evaluation wrong - but I think those cases are by far the exception rather than the rule)
Now, the label of 'hard working' is on a very different scale from intelligence; I can understand how calling kids 'smart' rather than 'hard working' could decrease their performance. Nevertheless, over the course of our academic lives I think we all get a sense of how we fit in, intelligence-wise, even if we aren't explicitly labeled, from grades, peer performance, parent/teacher expectations and evaluations... the smart ones fear being 'found out' as dumb or tarnishing their reputations, the 'dumb' ones fear (even more, I would imagine) the criticism or negative evaluation of their work they expect to be forthcoming, the average ones fear being confirmed as merely average...
Children learn 24/7, not just at designated "learning times". You had the benefit of having been blessed with extremely good teachers as parents.
Author is probably referring to the study that kids who are praised on being "smart" do less well than kids who are praised on being "hard working".
Here's the first google result, looks like it:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-secret-...
Jives true to me as well. Most of the people who have identities based on being smart far underperform their intelligence. I was praised for being smart growing up, I fight that off like crazy now. "Me? Not smart at all. Just curious." "Nah, I'm dumb as a box of rocks. I just keep going." And so on. It's done wonders for me. (Also, realizing just how much I didn't know was pretty humbling - and the scariest is realizing how much that I'm not even aware I don't know...)
But the reason had nothing to do with fear, and everything to do with not seeing any value in what I was being asked to do. I knew the amount of effort that would be needed to slide by, and that was all the effort that I put in.
Nor do I shy away now from being "smart". My intelligence is a tool, and I should use it well, and I am not ashamed -- or afraid -- of it.
Well, there isn't.
A person that's naturally beautiful doesn't have a responsibility to become an actor or an actress or a model. In our society, it's frowned upon if their parents do things like push them into beauty pageants.
People that are naturally strong or powerfully built don't have a responsibility to take a manual labor job, and nobody tells them that they aren't "living up to their ability" if they don't take a job in construction.
Now, there's a caveat: there are certain problems in human society which smart people are better suited to solving. That doesn't mean they will solve them -- most of the problems require multiple talents, and intelligence is just one -- but they do have some edge.
But that's not your responsibility, or mine, or anyone else's. You should decide what's important to you and then do that.
There's nothing wrong with spending your life having fun.
Then again, I do spend a lot of my time learning and improving myself, and I'm not sure I need a 4.0 to back up some claim to knowledge. The most intelligent person I've ever met was a horrible student. He spent most of his hours studying, but he never really studied the things that his classes were teaching. You could certainly pin that on a lack of judgment, but I don't know anyone that would say he lacked intelligence.
But I think that statement right there puts the lie to saying that you're doing it for yourself, and not for society. That may well be your intention, but is it possible that you're still driven at least in part by the expectations of others? If not, then why does it matter that you have it, and they don't?
BTW, I don't mean to discourage people that are doing something with what they have. Quite the contrary, I really wish more people would, whether they're creative or analytical or otherwise. However, I also think that the expectations placed upon kids of certain aptitudes by their parents, teachers, and others at a young age are perverse and cruel.
People should feel driven to accomplish great things because they want to, not because others expect it, or because they feel guilty if they don't.
Best example, William James Sidis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sidis).
Someone I think we all can identify with on a lot of levels.
"A true man in a world full of animals." Powerful words.
Most people who have identities based on any single term underperform. I think you'd find that people who live life in a singleminded "athlete" way, or "gamer" way, or on and on, underperform similarly. Possibly they're happy that way, possibly they've just pidgeonholed themselves.
If you've been taught to judge your worth by your intelligence, and simultaneously believe intelligence is fixed at birth, it's a logical consequence that you might do a lot of dumb things to preserve your internal belief that you're smart.
I guess that by being told you're smart, it builds up high expectations within your own mind, leading to emotional distress when you fail to meet those expectations.
Instead of "admiration", let's say I give you $100 a day as long as you're "smart". Now, do you want to risk my perception by trying something new, or keep doing whatever you're good at?
It's still utility maximization, through and through.
It is very easy with all the labour saving devices we now have for parents to just do pretty much all the chores, rather than expend the possibly greater effort of browbeating the kids into do them regularly. The other part is to mix it up - they all need in the end to be able to iron, wash clothes, put out trash, help with shopping, etc., so ensure they all do some of each rather than one "easy" chore they like every day/week (some are age dependant of course, but you have a decade or so to cover everything so that shouldn't be an issue)
http://www.amazon.com/Mindset-Psychology-Success-Carol-Dweck...
Instead of thinking about how smart I am, I instead think about how much I don't know, especially about things I need to know, either for my professional life or for my personal life. This list can quickly grow, especially since the more you know, the more you become aware of the things you don't know. This is a more concrete measuring stick. Yeah we're both smart, but you know things I need to know to get through my day, so at least today, you're better off than I am. But hey, I'm so smart, maybe I'll figure it out.
I might as well join an organization of naturally brown-haired people.
And I also don't think the second one is necessarily a new phenomenon.
It's already said in a better way.
"When you’re ripe you rot, when you’re green you grow"
Sorry. Working smart beats working hard. EOM