9 ms·

From its inception in 1942 until 1994, the search recognized more than 2000 precocious teenagers as finalists. But just 1 percent ended up making the National A

From its inception in 1942 until 1994, the search recognized more than 2000 precocious teenagers as finalists. But just 1 percent ended up making the National Academy of Sciences, and just eight have won Nobel Prizes. Just eight have won Nobel Prizes? What a bunch of dunces. But wait, only 870 people have ever won a Nobel Prize. So these numbskulls have only managed to win 1% of all Nobel Prizes ever. If your parenting standard is "Nobel Prize or the gutter" there's a serious problem.

jeffwass 11y ago
Yeah, strange thresholds for success. They mention just 1% have won Nobel Prizes, and then in the next sentence say "For every Lisa Randall who revolutionizes theoretical physics, there are many dozens who fall far short of their potential." Lisa Randall didn't win a Nobel Prize in physics (yet), though she is in he National Academy of Sciences. So I guess you must have one or the other honour to be judged a success. Meanwhile her collaborator Raman Sundrum (of the Randall-Sundrum model, which Lisa Randall is most famous for) is neither a Nobel laureate nor on the National Academy of Sciences. But one day if he does win the Nobel, his Success status changes overnight?
glaberficken 11y ago
I came here to write the same =)
artpepper 11y ago
Also, the article segues to fostering creativity without ever coming back to the question of whether those kids are more successful as adults. So having fewer rules supposedly leads to more creative children, but do those kids do well later in life? Article doesn't say. I'm basically sympathetic to the more "hands off" parenting style being discussed. But the article really doesn't make its case.
- pappyo 11y ago
  >So having fewer rules supposedly leads to more creative children, but do those kids do well later in life? Is having no rules a steadfast rule? Chew on that one for a while :) And while you're thinking about that, realize that most children growing up in poor environments don't have many rules to follow. Few people would consider poor communities as bastions of creativity (not to say there isn't creative things happening in these communities, just they are not perceived that way). The problem with this article and others like it is the subjects - children - are not one thing in a vacuum. Some children will thrive in a structureless home life. But most won't. Some children will thrive with rigid structure. But most won't. So what's the answer? It depends on the kid. From my experience, most children need some sort of structure in their lives. They simply don't have the faculties to deal with the complexity of how life is today. That's what the parent is for. But to go overboard with rules generally doesn't work very well either.
  - samshih 11y ago
    I feel that raising your child like so (having fewer rules) in fact parallels doing well later in life. The measure of success, especially here on hacker news, feels heavily skewed towards making money, success in the Silicon Valley, etc. But while some creative lifestyles may not make enough money (poets, writers, artists) I would argue that they would end up living more fulfilling lives, following their intrinsic motivations rather than any socially constructed notion of success.
    - pappyo 11y ago
      My point was children, in the abstract, are easy to overgeneralize. In reality, it's difficult to say how any given child will react to any given stimuli. Few rules might work for one child but not the next...and there is no rhyme or reason to it. Children are complicated things. Just as adults are complicated things.
- sitkack 11y ago
  In raising my own child in this manner, I am not so much fostering creativity, but not suppressing the person who is already there. We should enable everyone to be the best possible person. We raise or lower all of those around us.
x5n1 11y ago
I see these sort of parents mostly as scumbags that accomplish little on their own and pass the burden of their own failings to their kids. Parents should expect at most their kids to achieve their level of success and no more. That's reasonable expectation. Anything more than that is a lottery and a fluke.
- notmonsters 11y ago
  It's actually unreasonable for parents these days to expect that kids will achieve their own level of success, because the distribution of rewards in society now fall so much more disproportionally to the handful at the very top of any field than they did in their parent's generation, and the generation before that. "Nobel prize or the gutter" is merely a logical conclusion in a world where only the very best at anything are valued.
  - phkahler 11y ago
    >> It's actually unreasonable for parents these days to expect that kids will achieve their own level of success, because the distribution of rewards in society now fall so much more disproportionally to the handful at the very top of any field than they did in their parent's generation, and the generation before that. That's meritocracy.
  - bobby_9x 11y ago
    I disagree. It's the same. Its just that too many people expect more of the reward, for less of the work and never realized just how much work it actually took to achieve these rewards in the first place. I see it all the time with people trying to start businesses. They see the success stories and want a rich and profitable company in less than a year. I believe it's the result of perceived instant gratification on the Internet and from the idea that started in the early 90s that 'everyone needs a trophy', which I saw first-hand. I’ve met so many college graduates that either want a six-figure income right out of school, a management position within 6 months, or a flex schedule at every job. It's not just a want, they feel entitled to it. It's why Bernie Sanders is so popular among the youth: he's promising many rewards without any of the work.
lordnacho 11y ago
And also consider people who win a science Nobel tend to be pretty old. Suppose you have to be ~55 or so to win one, you'd have to be born latest in ~1960, probably doing the contest in the late 1970s. And I would guess the field of finalists got bigger as the contest got older.
- tosseraccount 11y ago
  You may have to be 55 or so; but the work was done 20 years ago. "What's more, after 1985 about 60% of physics, 52% of chemistry, and 49% of medicine prizes were awarded following a post-discovery delay of more than 20 years." [ source : http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/magazine/physicstoday/news/10.1063/PT.5.2012 http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/magazine/physicstoday/n... ]
dynofuz 11y ago
i dont have kids but, .4% rate of winning the nobel prize is way better than the 0.00000124% rate of the rest of the world. And "stepping back" may lead to much less success than pushing a kid to practice and i'd take that risk of .4% creativity vs the rest of the population.
- icn2 11y ago
  Lots of people just don't get it :).
cfcef 11y ago
Similar to how people mention the Terman study didn't enrol two future Nobelists because they just barely missed the cutoff and so this proves IQ tests are bunk. It would have been much better to cite the SMPY longitudinal results for a meaningful idea of how child prodigies fare.
- ap22213 11y ago
  I had to look up Terman and SMPY [1]. I scanned it, and it seems to suggest that IQ 'is kind of bunk' - that it's more effective to evaluate mathematical reasoning, alone. But, what I find more interesting is that not all mathematically precocious achieve, and very many achievers were not mathematically precocious. So, what's going on in the middle? It's cool to see that 2000 kids out of 400M were high achievers, but how do we get, say, 1M high achievers out of the next 400M? [1] https://my.vanderbilt.edu/smpy/files/2013/01/Article-PS-Lubinski-et-al-2014-DEC-FINAL.pdf https://my.vanderbilt.edu/smpy/files/2013/01/Article-PS-Lubi...
  - ap22213 11y ago
    Also, the data from SMPY seems odd. I took their achievement percentages (# of individuals in top positions 40 years later), and did some rough calculations. The SMPY cohorts seemed to perform much better than if one had randomly selected a 'top %1' individual from the total U.S. population. So, either the longitudinal study had an effect on the cohorts, or their original sampling method was biased.
  - tomaskafka 11y ago
    By filtering out the 399M and telling them they suck (eg on standard test) so they should not even try. Then you'll have 1M of post traumatic survivors to label as high achievers. Well that's what schools do today.
cfcef 11y ago
Similar to how people mention the Terman study didn't enrol two future Nobelists because they just barely missed the cutoff and so this proves IQ tests are bunk. It would have been much better to cite the SMPY longitudinal results for a meaningful idea of how child prodigies fare.
memracom 11y ago
Yeah, Bill Gates never won the Nobel prize. Neither did Steve Jobs. Or Donald Trump for that matter. Look carefully at a normal curve. If your kid is slightly above average, say C+, then they are doing better than 50% of the poulation. That is already pretty good. By all means, encourage and assist them to do better than that, but lay off the judgements. A Happy kid who runs a daycare center in the city, is someone that you should be proud of, because believe me, society in general is proud of people like that and does not judge them because they failed to win a Nobel prize. If your kid can wake up every morning and honestly say, every day in every way I am getting better and better and better, then you are a superlative parent.
- kozukumi 11y ago
  Yes! I was a C student. I had it drummed into me that wasn't good enough. It took me many years to realise I am good enough and to work past all that negative re-enforcement that was thrown at me every day for several years. Now I have a great job, a lovely wife and two beautiful children. I live in a lovely house in west London. I am financially independent and I love going to work every morning. If that isn't "good enough" then god knows what is!
uiri 11y ago
All 8 of those Nobel Prizes were won by individuals who were finalists in 1968 or earlier. So for half of the years in that date range, not a single finalist has been awarded a Nobel Prize. Since 3 of those Nobel Prizes have been in the last 15 years, it is likely too early to tell what the final percentage of Nobel Laureates is among those 2000 finalists.
shas3 11y ago
Spurious cherry-picked statistics. I'm pretty sure most Westinghouse / Intel winners are doing exceptionally well, being in the top 1-10% of the society. A couple of such articles I'm reminded of: 1. Statistician Andrew Gelman's batch of math Olympiad campers: http://andrewgelman.com/2015/03/17/1980-math-olympiad-program-now/ http://andrewgelman.com/2015/03/17/1980-math-olympiad-progra... 2. Indian IIT exam toppers: http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/nation/where-are-they-now http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/nation/where-are-they... 3. Famous Intel talent winners: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Science_Talent_Search https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Science_Talent_Search Nobel Prizes are a cherry-picked metric. Yeah, not all prodigies become adult geniuses. But the article grossly overstates the problem.

jeffwass 11y ago

Yeah, strange thresholds for success. They mention just 1% have won Nobel Prizes, and then in the next sentence say "For every Lisa Randall who revolutionizes theoretical physics, there are many dozens who fall far short of their potential." Lisa Randall didn't win a Nobel Prize in physics (yet), though she is in he National Academy of Sciences. So I guess you must have one or the other honour to be judged a success. Meanwhile her collaborator Raman Sundrum (of the Randall-Sundrum model, which Lisa Randall is most famous for) is neither a Nobel laureate nor on the National Academy of Sciences. But one day if he does win the Nobel, his Success status changes overnight?

glaberficken 11y ago

I came here to write the same =)

artpepper 11y ago

Also, the article segues to fostering creativity without ever coming back to the question of whether those kids are more successful as adults. So having fewer rules supposedly leads to more creative children, but do those kids do well later in life? Article doesn't say. I'm basically sympathetic to the more "hands off" parenting style being discussed. But the article really doesn't make its case.

pappyo 11y ago
>So having fewer rules supposedly leads to more creative children, but do those kids do well later in life? Is having no rules a steadfast rule? Chew on that one for a while :) And while you're thinking about that, realize that most children growing up in poor environments don't have many rules to follow. Few people would consider poor communities as bastions of creativity (not to say there isn't creative things happening in these communities, just they are not perceived that way). The problem with this article and others like it is the subjects - children - are not one thing in a vacuum. Some children will thrive in a structureless home life. But most won't. Some children will thrive with rigid structure. But most won't. So what's the answer? It depends on the kid. From my experience, most children need some sort of structure in their lives. They simply don't have the faculties to deal with the complexity of how life is today. That's what the parent is for. But to go overboard with rules generally doesn't work very well either.
- samshih 11y ago
  I feel that raising your child like so (having fewer rules) in fact parallels doing well later in life. The measure of success, especially here on hacker news, feels heavily skewed towards making money, success in the Silicon Valley, etc. But while some creative lifestyles may not make enough money (poets, writers, artists) I would argue that they would end up living more fulfilling lives, following their intrinsic motivations rather than any socially constructed notion of success.
  - pappyo 11y ago
    My point was children, in the abstract, are easy to overgeneralize. In reality, it's difficult to say how any given child will react to any given stimuli. Few rules might work for one child but not the next...and there is no rhyme or reason to it. Children are complicated things. Just as adults are complicated things.
sitkack 11y ago
In raising my own child in this manner, I am not so much fostering creativity, but not suppressing the person who is already there. We should enable everyone to be the best possible person. We raise or lower all of those around us.

x5n1 11y ago

I see these sort of parents mostly as scumbags that accomplish little on their own and pass the burden of their own failings to their kids. Parents should expect at most their kids to achieve their level of success and no more. That's reasonable expectation. Anything more than that is a lottery and a fluke.

notmonsters 11y ago
It's actually unreasonable for parents these days to expect that kids will achieve their own level of success, because the distribution of rewards in society now fall so much more disproportionally to the handful at the very top of any field than they did in their parent's generation, and the generation before that. "Nobel prize or the gutter" is merely a logical conclusion in a world where only the very best at anything are valued.
- phkahler 11y ago
  >> It's actually unreasonable for parents these days to expect that kids will achieve their own level of success, because the distribution of rewards in society now fall so much more disproportionally to the handful at the very top of any field than they did in their parent's generation, and the generation before that. That's meritocracy.
- bobby_9x 11y ago
  I disagree. It's the same. Its just that too many people expect more of the reward, for less of the work and never realized just how much work it actually took to achieve these rewards in the first place. I see it all the time with people trying to start businesses. They see the success stories and want a rich and profitable company in less than a year. I believe it's the result of perceived instant gratification on the Internet and from the idea that started in the early 90s that 'everyone needs a trophy', which I saw first-hand. I’ve met so many college graduates that either want a six-figure income right out of school, a management position within 6 months, or a flex schedule at every job. It's not just a want, they feel entitled to it. It's why Bernie Sanders is so popular among the youth: he's promising many rewards without any of the work.

lordnacho 11y ago

And also consider people who win a science Nobel tend to be pretty old. Suppose you have to be ~55 or so to win one, you'd have to be born latest in ~1960, probably doing the contest in the late 1970s. And I would guess the field of finalists got bigger as the contest got older.

tosseraccount 11y ago
You may have to be 55 or so; but the work was done 20 years ago. "What's more, after 1985 about 60% of physics, 52% of chemistry, and 49% of medicine prizes were awarded following a post-discovery delay of more than 20 years." [ source : http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/magazine/physicstoday/news/10.1063/PT.5.2012 http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/magazine/physicstoday/n... ]

dynofuz 11y ago

i dont have kids but, .4% rate of winning the nobel prize is way better than the 0.00000124% rate of the rest of the world. And "stepping back" may lead to much less success than pushing a kid to practice and i'd take that risk of .4% creativity vs the rest of the population.

icn2 11y ago
Lots of people just don't get it :).

cfcef 11y ago

Similar to how people mention the Terman study didn't enrol two future Nobelists because they just barely missed the cutoff and so this proves IQ tests are bunk. It would have been much better to cite the SMPY longitudinal results for a meaningful idea of how child prodigies fare.

ap22213 11y ago
I had to look up Terman and SMPY [1]. I scanned it, and it seems to suggest that IQ 'is kind of bunk' - that it's more effective to evaluate mathematical reasoning, alone. But, what I find more interesting is that not all mathematically precocious achieve, and very many achievers were not mathematically precocious. So, what's going on in the middle? It's cool to see that 2000 kids out of 400M were high achievers, but how do we get, say, 1M high achievers out of the next 400M? [1] https://my.vanderbilt.edu/smpy/files/2013/01/Article-PS-Lubinski-et-al-2014-DEC-FINAL.pdf https://my.vanderbilt.edu/smpy/files/2013/01/Article-PS-Lubi...
- ap22213 11y ago
  Also, the data from SMPY seems odd. I took their achievement percentages (# of individuals in top positions 40 years later), and did some rough calculations. The SMPY cohorts seemed to perform much better than if one had randomly selected a 'top %1' individual from the total U.S. population. So, either the longitudinal study had an effect on the cohorts, or their original sampling method was biased.
- tomaskafka 11y ago
  By filtering out the 399M and telling them they suck (eg on standard test) so they should not even try. Then you'll have 1M of post traumatic survivors to label as high achievers. Well that's what schools do today.

cfcef 11y ago

memracom 11y ago

Yeah, Bill Gates never won the Nobel prize. Neither did Steve Jobs. Or Donald Trump for that matter. Look carefully at a normal curve. If your kid is slightly above average, say C+, then they are doing better than 50% of the poulation. That is already pretty good. By all means, encourage and assist them to do better than that, but lay off the judgements. A Happy kid who runs a daycare center in the city, is someone that you should be proud of, because believe me, society in general is proud of people like that and does not judge them because they failed to win a Nobel prize. If your kid can wake up every morning and honestly say, every day in every way I am getting better and better and better, then you are a superlative parent.

kozukumi 11y ago
Yes! I was a C student. I had it drummed into me that wasn't good enough. It took me many years to realise I am good enough and to work past all that negative re-enforcement that was thrown at me every day for several years. Now I have a great job, a lovely wife and two beautiful children. I live in a lovely house in west London. I am financially independent and I love going to work every morning. If that isn't "good enough" then god knows what is!

uiri 11y ago

All 8 of those Nobel Prizes were won by individuals who were finalists in 1968 or earlier. So for half of the years in that date range, not a single finalist has been awarded a Nobel Prize. Since 3 of those Nobel Prizes have been in the last 15 years, it is likely too early to tell what the final percentage of Nobel Laureates is among those 2000 finalists.

shas3 11y ago

Spurious cherry-picked statistics. I'm pretty sure most Westinghouse / Intel winners are doing exceptionally well, being in the top 1-10% of the society. A couple of such articles I'm reminded of: 1. Statistician Andrew Gelman's batch of math Olympiad campers: http://andrewgelman.com/2015/03/17/1980-math-olympiad-program-now/ http://andrewgelman.com/2015/03/17/1980-math-olympiad-progra... 2. Indian IIT exam toppers: http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/nation/where-are-they-now http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/nation/where-are-they... 3. Famous Intel talent winners: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Science_Talent_Search https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Science_Talent_Search Nobel Prizes are a cherry-picked metric. Yeah, not all prodigies become adult geniuses. But the article grossly overstates the problem.