As I've gone through life, I've found that your chances for happiness are increased if you wind up doing something that is a reflection of what you loved most when you were somewhere between nine and eleven years old.
Interviewer: Yes—something that had and still has the feeling of a hobby, a curiosity.
M: At that age, you know enough of the world to have opinions about things, but you're not old enough yet to be overly in by the crowd or by what other people are doing or what you thinkyou “should” be doing. If what you do later on ties into that reservoir in some way, then you are nurturing some essential part ofyourself. It's certainly been true in my case. I'm doing now, at eight, almost exactly what most excited me when I was eleven.
While Terence is -without a doubt- born with prodigious abilities, I think credit should also be given to his parents Billy and Grace who seem to have managed to simultaneously nurture these special abilities while still letting Terence have a happy (?) childhood. This is not easy to do.
A boy in my high school class made IMO and got a gold medal (and later on won the Putnam one year). They interviewed his parents and it was a similar story.
More importantly, it's not as though individuals like Clements or Erdos was corresponding with Terrence directly to arrange a meeting. His parents clearly played an important role in facilitating and allowing these encounters. That deserves a lot of credit!
Just the once, though, huh? [0]
- Learned Greek starting age three.
- Was studying Plato at age six.
- Studied Latin starting at age eight.
And more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stuart_Mill#Biography
I guess it helps that he had Jeremy Bentham hanging around his house from an early age.
Not to say the results weren't incredible, but certainly required sacrifice.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10378/10378-h/10378-h.htm#li...
Most people who learn three languages as a kid are surrounded by other speakers, not books.
And this is utterly unremarkable where I live.
When we visit my family (who are all monolingual), they think she is a prodigy.
She’s not. She’s just a normal kid.
Hence that scene in Monty Python's Life of Brian.
Still fun today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mip30YF1iuo
But if you imply that philosophy as such isn’t useful, it’s simply wrong, if not arrogant. Everyone needs philosophy.
I definitely empathize with "his preference for using an analytic, highly logical problem-solving strategy" (I'm not a genius ofc). It's often more immediately clear for me than visual/spatial manipulation.
I wonder how I ought to train up problem solving, given that I have an engineering degree to finish.
Was still a few years away from reassembly.
> 320 print "(brmmmm-brmmmm-putt-putt-vraow-chatter-chatter bye mr. fibonacci!)"
I remember when I was 6 or 7 teaching myself Applesoft BASIC and writing programs with funny (to me) little print statements all through them - when computing was just exploding with possibility.
I wouldn't have had a clue what a Fibonacci sequence was though ;)
In the Dune books, they banned computers so they bred super mentally capable humans.
I think we’d be better off optimizing for conscientiousness or empathy, frankly. Even a world run by gardeners would probably be more beautiful and meaningful than one run by math geniuses.
The question is: what do we want to optimize for?
Minimize pain and suffering for humans? The spread of mankind throughout the universe?
I’m pretty sure your idea would help with the latter. Not so sure about the former tbh.
No, they couldn't. And neither could most adults, for that matter.
Innate ability is real.
Also I didn’t say innate ability doesn’t exist. But in my opinion is a small multiplier on top of effort. That’s why I said close to.
And this was still people selected from the small subset of the population choosing an engineering major. Human are much, much more different than you seem to think
Would you ever be tempted to make such a claim (that everyone is close to the same in ability and effort is the main determiner of success) about athletes? It's so obviously untrue that it's laughable. Why would you think that mental ability is magically distributed evenly?
Well yes, absolutely. People don’t do quadruple axels on the ice because they were somehow born with the ability, they can do it because they practice figure skating every day for years. Innate ability (or in this case, let’s be honest, mostly genetics determining body shape) certainly makes the difference between becoming an Olympic gold medalist and just being very good at the sport, but you need to get very far in the field before it truly holds you back.
I don’t have a lot of experience with high-level professional sports, but I’m a classically trained violinist, and I’ve seen first-hand how a lot of the abilities that many people chalk up to “talent” (sense of rhythm, perfect pitch, composing music) are just skills that can be learned. Some students might need to practice more than others, sure, and some might reach a higher ceiling, but I firmly believe anyone can reach a high level with applied effort.
“I don’t have the talent to paint so I won’t learn to do it” is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Any child who read maths textbooks with enthusiasm for 3-4 hours a day for years could in theory at least get close to doing what he did, but what kid had that level of motivation?
As someone wrote here innate ability is a real thing
There’s plenty of mediocre musicians who became world-famous, and plenty of great musicians who nobody’s heard about. Skill and success are pretty weakly correlated.
I think that is the main obstacle to most people doing highly effective work and putting in long hours. You hear some call people who don't 'work hard' lazy, but my impression is that it's emotional capacity, and a lot of that comes from family.
I wonder if there is a correlation between prodigies and emotionally stable, healthy, present parents. It's hard to imagine children under a lot of stress - e.g., from abusive parents, highly unreliable parents (e.g., overwhelmed by addictions to drugs), emotionally unstable parents (e.g., narcissists), highly neglectful parents (e.g., who abandon their kids) ... - it's hard to imagine those kids doing what Tao did, regardless of their talent.
I think people need to be trained to be more confident in what they know, and if we gave them that kind of thing we could maybe train them to become so.
Long-term retention is is hard when encountering new symbols. He seemed quite comfortable at that age absorbing the new stuff and manipulating it. Where does that comfort come from? Is there a way to test that explicitly? Finally, there is the ability to take the new and use it well. What about creating new shorthand? Being able to divine hidden patterns and articulate them?
Ramunujam seems to have had this.
Some people appear to have a capacity for learning, retention and understanding that is well outside the normal range. People like Ramanujan or von Neumann, or Tao. They learn at a speed that far exceeds the speed of what we would consider gifted students, they reach a deep and intuitive understanding of the material, and go on to make many discoveries / inventions of which even one would be enough for an ordinary scientist to be considered successful.
It seems there is something very different about their minds, but just what is it that allows those minds to operate at such a level?
I realize and acknowledge both sets had talents and the spent thier time doing something with it to produce something extraordinary but we seem to tend to overlook the massive head start they also had. Why so?
(Totally understandable if you feel like downvoting but I would ask you to articulate and share the cord it struck with you if you down vote)
Ability to persevere is also wired in.
If you pull this thread to it's conclusion, then nothing is worth celebrating. Just law of physics doing their thing.
It's complex; first of all society has an interest for exceptional people to be respected and well compensated; if there was absolutely no prestige or compensation in being a math genius it's quite possible Terrence Tao would have become a schoolteacher. So a well functioning capitalist society has both monetary and prestige tools to incentivize extreme accomplishment.
Second, I think it's human nature to like and want hierarchy. Admiring figures for their looks, charisma or intellectual accomplishments could very will be in our wiring - 20 thousand years ago we would admire the shaman, the great hunter or the storyteller.
But ultimately I totally agree with you - not only were these people born into the unique genetic and envrionmental circumstances that made the accomplishment possible , I also don't believe they had any say after being born in becoming what they had become; e.g I don't believe there's a "free will" and that Terrence Tao "chose" to become a math genius. He was born into that reality in a fluke.
Even among the people who have similar "luck" in that respect, some still stand out. The people we think of as elite performers aren't just elite relative to the 99% of us. They're also elite within the top 1% that makes up their field: they're dominant even among the people who should be their peers.
Not that I mean the percentages factually, more like an order of magnitude.
But my point is, in terms of "natural ability", I don't believe there is that much of a gap among top performers, but that things like work ethic and determination, and also some luck in environments, is what ends up setting them apart.
That's why I think they're worth praising: it's not just a spin of genetic roulette (unless one believes every single attribute about us is genetic, I guess).
You could be right; I tend to disagree but its all speculation. My 2 cents is that the vast majority of researches/professors are motivated and driven people; you can't reach those levels if you don't know how to sit on your butt and concentrate. They all have good work ethic. I tend to think what separates Tao from the rest of the smart researchers is not that he works 15 hours a day while the rest work only 9 but rather his very very rare genius. But yeah, speculation of talent vs work ethic.
We living on the same planet?
Pretty sure the supermodel gets infinitely more attention and certainly makes orders of magnitudes more money than some math prodigy, at least on mine.
Modeling is notorious for its negative impact on models' health.
They absolutely work for it, and in one of the most toxic work environments.
That being said, supermodels are more famous, have a much larger following and earn much more money than math geniuses. That says we, humans, care more about entertainment than value.
That means in a generation there are ~ 10k such people in the world. Think about connecting them or nurturing them with AI companions.
The most important part of nurturing, as I understand it, is to be seen and loved by other humans, and to be made to feel safe and lovable.
Thank you
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A child prodigy,[18] Terence Tao skipped five grades.[19][20] Tao exhibited extraordinary mathematical abilities from an early age, attending university-level mathematics courses at the age of 9. He is one of only three children in the history of the Johns Hopkins Study of Exceptional Talent program to have achieved a score of 700 or greater on the SAT math section while just eight years old; Tao scored a 760.[21] Julian Stanley, Director of the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth, stated that Tao had the greatest mathematical reasoning ability he had found in years of intensive searching.[7][22]
Saved you a click...
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