7 ms·

“I will never forget the feeling of walking into the lobby of Building 7, looking up, and then touching the pillars to see if they were real. I couldn’t believe

by rtl49 11y ago

“I will never forget the feeling of walking into the lobby of Building 7, looking up, and then touching the pillars to see if they were real. I couldn’t believe I was at MIT. My life and my ambitions moved to another level at that moment.” I think this impressive achievement is more a testament to the role that aspirations acquired during childhood play in determining a person's success than it is a reflection of this young man's intelligence. Yes, the latter is necessary, but it isn't sufficient. I have little doubt that there are many 18 year olds entering MIT's class of 2019 who could have entered at 15 had they been provided a similarly advantageous upbringing. These stories attract the attention of some of us because we wish we had been raised similarly. Had we not devoted our attention as children to, say, petty family turmoil or a hedonistic preoccupation with computer games, perhaps we would have progressed through life with a singularity of purpose and self-confidence that would have situated us in a better position today. We might have been spared years in our teens and twenties trying to find a sense of meaning in our work, unlike this fellow, who seems to have it figured out. I won't speculate about his social skills. I've met college students his age running the gamut from borderline autistic to social butterfly. Yes, the sense of "peerlessness" must be a bit alienating, but many of us have had this experience without leapfrogging high school.

collyw 11y ago
Personally I am pretty glad that I had a "normal" childhood.
- rtl49 11y ago
  I'm glad to hear it. Some of us have had neither a normal childhood, nor the perks of one dedicated to study. Thus my remark.
- hackerboos 11y ago
  When I was 5 years old I had trouble mixing up the letters b and d. Given an MIT course at that age I probably would have ignored it in favor of playing outside.
  - sdegutis 11y ago
    Can confirm. Those 75 hours spent finding every secret and getting 100% in Super Metroid was time well spent.
  - thisone 11y ago
    I still mix my small B and small D, and my left and right. Five year old me would've loved a higher level of education though. School was incredibly boring.
    - newjersey 11y ago
      We had a new teacher for maths in eighth grade. I remember how enthusiastic he was about set theory. He was so excited to talk about it and reminisced that the first time he saw set theory was in the second year of college. Granted our stuff was just introductory stuff but I doubt I'd care the slightest between AND and OR and associate them with intersection and union if it wasn't for the teachers. Now my professor in college who teaches operating systems? She could not be more of a downer. You go ask her a question and she says "I can't answer any questions off the top of my head. I am not a genius." Never has she ever said "let's see" or "let's try to figure this out". Her level of enthusiasm makes me wonder why she even teaches at all. She appears exhausted and sad. To go a little off topic, I want a universal basic income (and universal free healthcare) so that people who don't like the jobs they do or would like to take a break can do so without worrying about money. Well, I guess my point is school can be boring or interesting depending on the teachers around you. This seems rather obvious. My hypothesis is that teachers who want to teach are likely to be better teachers than those who are just there because they need money.
      - thisone 11y ago
        I was bored, not because of the teachers, but because I didn't have to do much work to comprehend the material. I never thought of telling anyone that I was working through the rest of the textbook just to keep myself occupied in class. I just kept my head down and did my best to un-bore myself. Which bit me in the rear end when I got to University and started taking classes that required studying.
agentultra 11y ago
> These stories attract the attention of some of us because we wish we had been raised similarly. We wish we had been but we didn't live in the right time or place for an upbringing like this. I remember stealing my dad's college textbooks on mechanics and applied mathematics and sneaking them off to school; taking out Byte and Compute issues from the library when they were available... just starving for more all the time. Astronomy club. Chess club. In high school I went to night school with my friends' mom at the university in the big city when I wasn't working to help pay the rent. You just couldn't get the breadth and ease of access to information you can today. It was slow and laborious back then. But a world like this? Today? Amazing. You don't even have to leave your house. He is lucky. I'm 33 now and I'd kill to be able to study mathematics full time and be a professor some day. It just wasn't in the cards. Parents, circumstances, life and all of that. Yes... we'll envy stories like this. More of us could have been this hungry. We just couldn't get there.
- rtl49 11y ago
  It isn't cause for despair. In the grand scheme of things, none of us is so important and the desire to "achieve" more than we have is, in some sense, a wish to bless ourselves. There's nothing to prevent you from studying those things today, within the constraints of your spare time. If you find the study intrinsically gratifying, I see no reason you should enjoy it any less because it probably won't result in a professorship.
  - agentultra 11y ago
    It's not so much despair but longing for something that never could have been. My parents knew what was wrong with me but couldn't understand it themselves. They thought it would be best to hold me back so that I learned how to socialize. It was a rough education. When I do have spare time you bet you'll find me working on a problem, reading a paper, or studying. It's almost like regret knowing that I won't be able to dedicate my life to something I love for the mere circumstance I come from. When I read about stories like this one I can't help but feel happy for them. They're lucky! They got exactly what they wanted and needed! Not all of us can say the same.
mrdrozdov 11y ago
I'm content with my upbringing, but I think it's worth speculating about alternatives from a personal perspective since at one point we may raise our own children. For all we know, this person night have better social skills, personal development, etc. than those of us who had a "normal" upbringing. Normal should be defined by results rather than popularity. Don't you agree?
- rtl49 11y ago
  I do agree. The concerns are legitimate. In fact, most prestigious schools are hesitant to admit students like this young man because they fear for their social development. (Take the case of Bobby Fischer, for instance.) However, I disagree with the presumption that rapid advancement must result in poor social skills. In fact, I have met people who are living evidence to the contrary.
Retric 11y ago
I find the idea that the absolute best thing for a highly intelligent person to do is get to collage as soon as possible is a little sad. Life is not a race.
- rtl49 11y ago
  I don't believe there is anything in my comment to suggest otherwise. I was simply trying to capture the sentiment that some feel when reading stories like these. I tend to think this feeling results not from a failure to achieve (after all, many of us have still done admirably), but rather the sense of regret that one misused a period of one's life. I didn't mean to communicate that "life is a race" at all.
- jjaredsimpson 11y ago
  Some people enjoy the race. Seems like you are implying his time could've been better spent "doing kid stuff."
  - Retric 11y ago
    Write a book, start a company or a band, volunteer, learn to meditate or Kung foo, do whatever. It's not a question of being a kid, it's a question of living your life as a neurosurgeon because you decided that sounded cool when you were 8, and never really rethinking it until you had a lot of debt. Sure, if this is what they really want then great. But, thinking this is a good path and they would be wasting there potential being a raft guide is terribly hollow. Getting out of high school at 15 is cool, starting collage is not a goal just a path to something else.
  - Nimitz14 11y ago
    He's not implying anything. He's saying it's wrong to assume that everybody should want the same thing. Is it that hard to understand?
    - ruraljuror 11y ago
      I take your point, but would rephrase it slightly differently: everybody should want the same thing: happiness, but not everybody achieves happiness in the same way. To pick up on the racing comments from above, one should keep in mind Tal Ben-Shahar's warnings about the rat race happiness archetype, where one sacrifices in the present for perceived benefits in the future.
HAL9OOO 11y ago
Well put, I frequently read stories like this and wonder if I could have done the same if I wasn't constantly being distracted by family arguments/being poor/being envious of other's situations or wasting so much time on video games. I feel regret almost every single day and constantly feel 1 or 2 years behind the curve. Even now I don't have a singular vision like this kid probably because I get so distracted by real life tasks.
- learc83 11y ago
  >I feel regret almost every single day and constantly feel 1 or 2 years behind the curve. I'm not sure how old you are, but I'm guessing you're pretty young. The older you get the less a year or two matters matters. By the time you're 30, no one (not even yourself) will notice that you are 2 years behind your peers (based on whatever metric you're using). In fact, the older you get, the harder it is to measure what being 2 years behind even means. And, just think about the huge variations in life span. Say, for example, George finished college 2 years later than Bob. However, George lived to 90 and was able to do productive work right up to the end, and Bob died at 78. George had an entire extra decade, even though he had a slightly later start.
- spdionis 11y ago
  I'm only 21 but relatively recently I lost this regret and I'm just living life as it comes. Things are going well enough for me and I strive to do better. I know I could've done muuuch better given the right circumstances but i don't care anymore. Losing these regrets have made me much much happier and I enjoy a lot more of life now. EDIT: and no, I didn't mix up b and d when i was 5 years old. I was able to read fluently and to write pretty well. Who cares if I wasted my youth on videogames, I'd do it again.
- CrimsnBlade 11y ago
  Looking back on your past and feeling regret can be depressing, I too used to look back at all the wasted hours I could have spent being productive (especially when I think about how much I played video games...). However, I think it's important to be able to look back at everything and find the positives as well. I think you should take pride in where you are and where you come from. This kid has his story, and so too you have your own, just because it's different doesn't mean it's bad, it's just who you are, and that in itself holds a lot of value.
sbov 11y ago
We are who we are, in part, because of the journey we took. Today I can say that I would love to have had such an upbringing. At the same time, I can also say that my 5 year old self would have hated it.
jp_sc 11y ago
“(...) Had we not devoted our attention as children to, say, petty family turmoil or a hedonistic preoccupation with computer games (...)” I disagree. Altough I would have loved learn more when i had all that free time and no Internet, I don't regret for an second the time spent playing some videogames (Monkey Island, King/Space Quest, Civilization, etc), reading for pleasure (Dumas, Asimov, Dracula, Rowling... Spiderman!) or even watching movies or some TV. I'm a more complete (and interesting!) person because of all that.
hemantv 11y ago
The grass always seems green on another side. There is a lot of benefit to the singularity of purpose at the same time there are a lot of side effects. To give you one example, homeschooled kid lacks good social skills, which are more important to success in life than mere intelligence or knowledge.
- losvedir 11y ago
  > homeschooled kid lacks good social skills Definitely not the case, and I wish this tired cliche would go away already. My homeschooled sister is far more social than I am (I did the normal school thing), although we're both fine at it. Homeschoolers probably have a lot more realistic socialization opportunities, as it's all based around common interests and skill levels, just like the real world, rather than being packed together with a bunch of people whose only trait in common with you is their age.
- matheweis 11y ago
  > homeschooled kid lacks good social skills... Stereotypes like this are broad generalizations and generally not representative of the facts... sort of like saying that all Blacks are criminals, all Muslims are terrorists, or that Gays are child abusers - none of which are generally true. Most of the homeschoolers I have known have excellent social skills, and further, even the few "creepy" homeschool kids that are really awkward socially tend to grow out of it completely within a couple of years of college.
- sannee 11y ago
  I wonder how does one learn social skills at a place where socializing is explicitly forbidden for about 85% of the time. Also, you get to interact with only about 20 other random people of the same age with the same skill set (by definition). For 10 or so years. Very realistic, totally happens in real life. I mean, schools are terribly inefficient at teaching skills/knowledge, but they are clearly even more terrible at teaching social skills.
  - vaishaksuresh 11y ago
    You talk to teachers, ergo learn the meaning of accepting someone's authority. You learn to share common resources in the classroom with your peers. You stick to a schedule and respect other people's time by doing things in a timely manner. You learn to have fun safely, you learn to deal with people more capable of you (intellectually and physically). I could go on. They all seem like pretty good social skills to me.
droithomme 11y ago
> had they been provided a similarly advantageous upbringing He's a minority immigrant that fled poverty and homeschooled himself. Please clarify in what ways this was an advantageous upbringing over say an american native raised in the suburbs by a wealthy family who attends the best public schools, few if any of whom enter MIT at 15.
- efaref 11y ago
  Aside from homeschooling not being possible here - attending a proper school is mandatory, with even a single day of truancy punishable by strict fines for the parents - there is a curious advantage to being a position of having nothing to lose. Whereas many working class families toil long hours and weekends at minimum wage jobs just to be able to pay the rent on their small house or apartment and so that they don't lose what little they have, those who have fallen upon hard times (particularly through misfortune, rather than their own laziness or fecklessness) have the opportunity of taking greater risks and investing more in themselves and in their future. It leads to this weird kind of envy where poor natives look at wealthy second-generation immigrants whose parents fled poverty (often becoming the landlords of the poor natives) and wonder where the hell they went wrong.
- Vraxx 11y ago
  Well, I think for one is the support of his parents. I don't think "advantages" necessarily have to be monetary ones. Certainly in this case his advantages included his parents and the opportunities that OCW provided. This is not to say that the kid did not work hard either as that is obviously false. Consider a similar situation where a five year old wants to take college courses through an online program in an american native family that is wealthy, except instead his parents dismissed that idea on the sheer ridiculousness of a 5 year old taking online college courses. Or his mother not taking time from her already limited schedule to continue trying to find material for him to consume. This hypothetical child will be advantaged in other aspects of their life to be sure, but they probably won't be accepted to MIT at 15.
  - Futurebot 11y ago
    "Having parents", "having supportive parents", "having parents with resources (that can come in multiple forms like time, knowledge, connections, and money) that they are willing and able to use on you", and "having a place that you can live in potentially rent-free whether or you're going to college, working, or need to return to if you lose your job" are things that some don't consider advantages, even though they should. Those things are springboards and safety nets that not everyone has access to.
nashequilibrium 11y ago
I will never bring my kids up this way, they will enjoy life. Imagine if Steve Jobs was raised this way, we would have no Apple, this kind of one dimensional excellence is for the parents satisfaction.
eanzenberg 11y ago
I will bet you any large sums of money that this kid will not accomplish anything extraordinary by the age of 40.
TrevorJ 11y ago
Good point. Talent may be what separates the top 1% or performers from the top 5% (where that tiny edge matters) but for the vast majority of the bell curve, hard work counts for so much more than raw aptitude. I think our view of this gets skewed by sports because it really is an edge case where you have to achieve a certain level of performance in a very specific time period because your body isn't in peak condition forever. Talent may mean you pick up those skills faster and hit that narrow target window. That constraint doesn't seem to be nearly as present in other areas to the same degree: if it takes somebody 5 extra years to become a superb programmer, that won't absolutely kill their chances of having a successful career at it even if they needed the extra time to get there.
- vonmoltke 11y ago
  > Talent may be what separates the top 1% or performers from the top 5% (where that tiny edge matters) but for the vast majority of the bell curve, hard work counts for so much more than raw aptitude. Perfectly summarized by one of the inspirational banners at my gym (a local independent that caters heavily to student athletes) reads, "Hard work beats talent when talent isn't willing to work hard".
g_delgado14 11y ago
Computer games can stimulate curiosity so labelling computer games and other child-related things as "hedonistic" might imply that they contain zero inherent value, which I think is a serious oversimplification.
gist 11y ago
Thanks so much for your comment. I am quoting it and sending it to my wife because we have differing views on how much time the kids should spend playing computer games (me=almost none). I was raised in an environment (and at a time) when there were no games like this and I filled the time doing other interesting things that were not only fun but lead to me being able to earn a good living after college.
nameless1up 11y ago
We could have been a great many things.

by rtl49 11y ago

collyw 11y ago

Personally I am pretty glad that I had a "normal" childhood.

rtl49 11y ago
I'm glad to hear it. Some of us have had neither a normal childhood, nor the perks of one dedicated to study. Thus my remark.
hackerboos 11y ago
When I was 5 years old I had trouble mixing up the letters b and d. Given an MIT course at that age I probably would have ignored it in favor of playing outside.
- sdegutis 11y ago
  Can confirm. Those 75 hours spent finding every secret and getting 100% in Super Metroid was time well spent.
- thisone 11y ago
  I still mix my small B and small D, and my left and right. Five year old me would've loved a higher level of education though. School was incredibly boring.
  - newjersey 11y ago
    We had a new teacher for maths in eighth grade. I remember how enthusiastic he was about set theory. He was so excited to talk about it and reminisced that the first time he saw set theory was in the second year of college. Granted our stuff was just introductory stuff but I doubt I'd care the slightest between AND and OR and associate them with intersection and union if it wasn't for the teachers. Now my professor in college who teaches operating systems? She could not be more of a downer. You go ask her a question and she says "I can't answer any questions off the top of my head. I am not a genius." Never has she ever said "let's see" or "let's try to figure this out". Her level of enthusiasm makes me wonder why she even teaches at all. She appears exhausted and sad. To go a little off topic, I want a universal basic income (and universal free healthcare) so that people who don't like the jobs they do or would like to take a break can do so without worrying about money. Well, I guess my point is school can be boring or interesting depending on the teachers around you. This seems rather obvious. My hypothesis is that teachers who want to teach are likely to be better teachers than those who are just there because they need money.
    - thisone 11y ago
      I was bored, not because of the teachers, but because I didn't have to do much work to comprehend the material. I never thought of telling anyone that I was working through the rest of the textbook just to keep myself occupied in class. I just kept my head down and did my best to un-bore myself. Which bit me in the rear end when I got to University and started taking classes that required studying.

agentultra 11y ago

> These stories attract the attention of some of us because we wish we had been raised similarly. We wish we had been but we didn't live in the right time or place for an upbringing like this. I remember stealing my dad's college textbooks on mechanics and applied mathematics and sneaking them off to school; taking out Byte and Compute issues from the library when they were available... just starving for more all the time. Astronomy club. Chess club. In high school I went to night school with my friends' mom at the university in the big city when I wasn't working to help pay the rent. You just couldn't get the breadth and ease of access to information you can today. It was slow and laborious back then. But a world like this? Today? Amazing. You don't even have to leave your house. He is lucky. I'm 33 now and I'd kill to be able to study mathematics full time and be a professor some day. It just wasn't in the cards. Parents, circumstances, life and all of that. Yes... we'll envy stories like this. More of us could have been this hungry. We just couldn't get there.

rtl49 11y ago
It isn't cause for despair. In the grand scheme of things, none of us is so important and the desire to "achieve" more than we have is, in some sense, a wish to bless ourselves. There's nothing to prevent you from studying those things today, within the constraints of your spare time. If you find the study intrinsically gratifying, I see no reason you should enjoy it any less because it probably won't result in a professorship.
- agentultra 11y ago
  It's not so much despair but longing for something that never could have been. My parents knew what was wrong with me but couldn't understand it themselves. They thought it would be best to hold me back so that I learned how to socialize. It was a rough education. When I do have spare time you bet you'll find me working on a problem, reading a paper, or studying. It's almost like regret knowing that I won't be able to dedicate my life to something I love for the mere circumstance I come from. When I read about stories like this one I can't help but feel happy for them. They're lucky! They got exactly what they wanted and needed! Not all of us can say the same.

mrdrozdov 11y ago

I'm content with my upbringing, but I think it's worth speculating about alternatives from a personal perspective since at one point we may raise our own children. For all we know, this person night have better social skills, personal development, etc. than those of us who had a "normal" upbringing. Normal should be defined by results rather than popularity. Don't you agree?

rtl49 11y ago
I do agree. The concerns are legitimate. In fact, most prestigious schools are hesitant to admit students like this young man because they fear for their social development. (Take the case of Bobby Fischer, for instance.) However, I disagree with the presumption that rapid advancement must result in poor social skills. In fact, I have met people who are living evidence to the contrary.

Retric 11y ago

I find the idea that the absolute best thing for a highly intelligent person to do is get to collage as soon as possible is a little sad. Life is not a race.

rtl49 11y ago
I don't believe there is anything in my comment to suggest otherwise. I was simply trying to capture the sentiment that some feel when reading stories like these. I tend to think this feeling results not from a failure to achieve (after all, many of us have still done admirably), but rather the sense of regret that one misused a period of one's life. I didn't mean to communicate that "life is a race" at all.
jjaredsimpson 11y ago
Some people enjoy the race. Seems like you are implying his time could've been better spent "doing kid stuff."
- Retric 11y ago
  Write a book, start a company or a band, volunteer, learn to meditate or Kung foo, do whatever. It's not a question of being a kid, it's a question of living your life as a neurosurgeon because you decided that sounded cool when you were 8, and never really rethinking it until you had a lot of debt. Sure, if this is what they really want then great. But, thinking this is a good path and they would be wasting there potential being a raft guide is terribly hollow. Getting out of high school at 15 is cool, starting collage is not a goal just a path to something else.
- Nimitz14 11y ago
  He's not implying anything. He's saying it's wrong to assume that everybody should want the same thing. Is it that hard to understand?
  - ruraljuror 11y ago
    I take your point, but would rephrase it slightly differently: everybody should want the same thing: happiness, but not everybody achieves happiness in the same way. To pick up on the racing comments from above, one should keep in mind Tal Ben-Shahar's warnings about the rat race happiness archetype, where one sacrifices in the present for perceived benefits in the future.

HAL9OOO 11y ago

Well put, I frequently read stories like this and wonder if I could have done the same if I wasn't constantly being distracted by family arguments/being poor/being envious of other's situations or wasting so much time on video games. I feel regret almost every single day and constantly feel 1 or 2 years behind the curve. Even now I don't have a singular vision like this kid probably because I get so distracted by real life tasks.

learc83 11y ago
>I feel regret almost every single day and constantly feel 1 or 2 years behind the curve. I'm not sure how old you are, but I'm guessing you're pretty young. The older you get the less a year or two matters matters. By the time you're 30, no one (not even yourself) will notice that you are 2 years behind your peers (based on whatever metric you're using). In fact, the older you get, the harder it is to measure what being 2 years behind even means. And, just think about the huge variations in life span. Say, for example, George finished college 2 years later than Bob. However, George lived to 90 and was able to do productive work right up to the end, and Bob died at 78. George had an entire extra decade, even though he had a slightly later start.
spdionis 11y ago
I'm only 21 but relatively recently I lost this regret and I'm just living life as it comes. Things are going well enough for me and I strive to do better. I know I could've done muuuch better given the right circumstances but i don't care anymore. Losing these regrets have made me much much happier and I enjoy a lot more of life now. EDIT: and no, I didn't mix up b and d when i was 5 years old. I was able to read fluently and to write pretty well. Who cares if I wasted my youth on videogames, I'd do it again.
CrimsnBlade 11y ago
Looking back on your past and feeling regret can be depressing, I too used to look back at all the wasted hours I could have spent being productive (especially when I think about how much I played video games...). However, I think it's important to be able to look back at everything and find the positives as well. I think you should take pride in where you are and where you come from. This kid has his story, and so too you have your own, just because it's different doesn't mean it's bad, it's just who you are, and that in itself holds a lot of value.

sbov 11y ago

We are who we are, in part, because of the journey we took. Today I can say that I would love to have had such an upbringing. At the same time, I can also say that my 5 year old self would have hated it.

jp_sc 11y ago

“(...) Had we not devoted our attention as children to, say, petty family turmoil or a hedonistic preoccupation with computer games (...)” I disagree. Altough I would have loved learn more when i had all that free time and no Internet, I don't regret for an second the time spent playing some videogames (Monkey Island, King/Space Quest, Civilization, etc), reading for pleasure (Dumas, Asimov, Dracula, Rowling... Spiderman!) or even watching movies or some TV. I'm a more complete (and interesting!) person because of all that.

hemantv 11y ago

The grass always seems green on another side. There is a lot of benefit to the singularity of purpose at the same time there are a lot of side effects. To give you one example, homeschooled kid lacks good social skills, which are more important to success in life than mere intelligence or knowledge.

losvedir 11y ago
> homeschooled kid lacks good social skills Definitely not the case, and I wish this tired cliche would go away already. My homeschooled sister is far more social than I am (I did the normal school thing), although we're both fine at it. Homeschoolers probably have a lot more realistic socialization opportunities, as it's all based around common interests and skill levels, just like the real world, rather than being packed together with a bunch of people whose only trait in common with you is their age.
matheweis 11y ago
> homeschooled kid lacks good social skills... Stereotypes like this are broad generalizations and generally not representative of the facts... sort of like saying that all Blacks are criminals, all Muslims are terrorists, or that Gays are child abusers - none of which are generally true. Most of the homeschoolers I have known have excellent social skills, and further, even the few "creepy" homeschool kids that are really awkward socially tend to grow out of it completely within a couple of years of college.
sannee 11y ago
I wonder how does one learn social skills at a place where socializing is explicitly forbidden for about 85% of the time. Also, you get to interact with only about 20 other random people of the same age with the same skill set (by definition). For 10 or so years. Very realistic, totally happens in real life. I mean, schools are terribly inefficient at teaching skills/knowledge, but they are clearly even more terrible at teaching social skills.
- vaishaksuresh 11y ago
  You talk to teachers, ergo learn the meaning of accepting someone's authority. You learn to share common resources in the classroom with your peers. You stick to a schedule and respect other people's time by doing things in a timely manner. You learn to have fun safely, you learn to deal with people more capable of you (intellectually and physically). I could go on. They all seem like pretty good social skills to me.

droithomme 11y ago

> had they been provided a similarly advantageous upbringing He's a minority immigrant that fled poverty and homeschooled himself. Please clarify in what ways this was an advantageous upbringing over say an american native raised in the suburbs by a wealthy family who attends the best public schools, few if any of whom enter MIT at 15.

efaref 11y ago
Aside from homeschooling not being possible here - attending a proper school is mandatory, with even a single day of truancy punishable by strict fines for the parents - there is a curious advantage to being a position of having nothing to lose. Whereas many working class families toil long hours and weekends at minimum wage jobs just to be able to pay the rent on their small house or apartment and so that they don't lose what little they have, those who have fallen upon hard times (particularly through misfortune, rather than their own laziness or fecklessness) have the opportunity of taking greater risks and investing more in themselves and in their future. It leads to this weird kind of envy where poor natives look at wealthy second-generation immigrants whose parents fled poverty (often becoming the landlords of the poor natives) and wonder where the hell they went wrong.
Vraxx 11y ago
Well, I think for one is the support of his parents. I don't think "advantages" necessarily have to be monetary ones. Certainly in this case his advantages included his parents and the opportunities that OCW provided. This is not to say that the kid did not work hard either as that is obviously false. Consider a similar situation where a five year old wants to take college courses through an online program in an american native family that is wealthy, except instead his parents dismissed that idea on the sheer ridiculousness of a 5 year old taking online college courses. Or his mother not taking time from her already limited schedule to continue trying to find material for him to consume. This hypothetical child will be advantaged in other aspects of their life to be sure, but they probably won't be accepted to MIT at 15.
- Futurebot 11y ago
  "Having parents", "having supportive parents", "having parents with resources (that can come in multiple forms like time, knowledge, connections, and money) that they are willing and able to use on you", and "having a place that you can live in potentially rent-free whether or you're going to college, working, or need to return to if you lose your job" are things that some don't consider advantages, even though they should. Those things are springboards and safety nets that not everyone has access to.

nashequilibrium 11y ago

I will never bring my kids up this way, they will enjoy life. Imagine if Steve Jobs was raised this way, we would have no Apple, this kind of one dimensional excellence is for the parents satisfaction.

eanzenberg 11y ago

I will bet you any large sums of money that this kid will not accomplish anything extraordinary by the age of 40.

TrevorJ 11y ago

Good point. Talent may be what separates the top 1% or performers from the top 5% (where that tiny edge matters) but for the vast majority of the bell curve, hard work counts for so much more than raw aptitude. I think our view of this gets skewed by sports because it really is an edge case where you have to achieve a certain level of performance in a very specific time period because your body isn't in peak condition forever. Talent may mean you pick up those skills faster and hit that narrow target window. That constraint doesn't seem to be nearly as present in other areas to the same degree: if it takes somebody 5 extra years to become a superb programmer, that won't absolutely kill their chances of having a successful career at it even if they needed the extra time to get there.

vonmoltke 11y ago
> Talent may be what separates the top 1% or performers from the top 5% (where that tiny edge matters) but for the vast majority of the bell curve, hard work counts for so much more than raw aptitude. Perfectly summarized by one of the inspirational banners at my gym (a local independent that caters heavily to student athletes) reads, "Hard work beats talent when talent isn't willing to work hard".

g_delgado14 11y ago

Computer games can stimulate curiosity so labelling computer games and other child-related things as "hedonistic" might imply that they contain zero inherent value, which I think is a serious oversimplification.

gist 11y ago

Thanks so much for your comment. I am quoting it and sending it to my wife because we have differing views on how much time the kids should spend playing computer games (me=almost none). I was raised in an environment (and at a time) when there were no games like this and I filled the time doing other interesting things that were not only fun but lead to me being able to earn a good living after college.

nameless1up 11y ago

We could have been a great many things.