11 ms·

Interesting read, but I have one major qualm about this. There seems to be a confirmatory bias among the academic community that a measure of intellectual succ

Interesting read, but I have one major qualm about this. There seems to be a confirmatory bias among the academic community that a measure of intellectual success can be found in the percentage of individuals who earn a PhD. Sure, it's true that you need to be reasonably smart to earn a PhD, but I think that someone can have a lot of intellectual success (potentially just as much or maybe more) if they don't earn a PhD. I think you could even argue that, depending on the field of study, a PhD is the "easy" route for someone who is intellectually gifted - it's a simply a continuation of what you have been doing. I would be more impressed by the intellectual who not only realizes that they can conduct their own independent research, but also has the creativity to come up with a use case that can improve and contribute to the world (and presumably, make a living doing so). My point here is that, given two gifted cohorts, one which has a 45% PhD graduation rate and one which has a 50% PhD graduation rate, I don't know that you can conclusively say that one is more gifted than the other without looking at other metrics associated with intellectual accomplishment.

pas 10y ago
Knowing a few friends and other acquaintances with PhDs, all they have common is endurance and focus. They were not exceptionally creative, or apparently breathtakingly genius. And I guess that's why Google et al. likes to hire PhDs. They can take all kinds of shit, and endure. Get to the bottom of those problems even in the face of internal politics/bureaucracy.
- jsprogrammer 10y ago
  A PhD doesn't show that you get to the bottom of problems, but rather that you can influence, and be influenced by, group-think. Edit: Looks like it is still a while before my speech ban is up, so I'm pasting my response to kevingwang's response (below) here: >To a particular degree, anyway. Convincing a University, or being published in peer-journal, for example. >I think some are more or less ignored, though I guess I can't say that has no influence whatsoever and I'm also not sure that you can entirely avoid the influence of others.
  - kevinwang 10y ago
    So, the same as every other human being?
- collyw 10y ago
  I have been working at academic institutes the last few years, where maybe a third of the staff are PhD students. The ones that have gone on to more senior positions are like you describe, but I wouldn't say its the majority. A fair few of them decide to quit science after the PhD.
- irrational 10y ago
  This reminds me of the old joke that PhD stands for "Pile it on Higher and Deeper".
  - wrp 10y ago
    It goes B.S. => More of Same => Piled Higher and Deeper.
  - kohanz 10y ago
    BS = Bulls--- MS = More s--- PhD = Piled higher and Deeper
    - mordae 10y ago
      I prefer this one: http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ OTOH, I bear neither.
    - sharemywin 10y ago
      My favorite was D stand for Diploma...
  - clueless123 10y ago
    When you think you know everything you get your BS When you find out you know nothing, you get your Masters When you realize no one else knows either you get your PHD
- wrp 10y ago
  I know a Chemistry professor whose favorite remark on this is, "A PhD is a badge of endurance, not intelligence."
  - Moshe_Silnorin 10y ago
    >A PhD is a badge of endurance, not intelligence It's very clearly both.
    - B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago
      Nah, I forgot which top flight physicist (Nobel, I think) wrote in a book that he had explained to his mother that there were indeed very dumb PhDs, thanks to mere "sitzfleisch". Most anyone in the business knows cases.
    - Panoramix 10y ago
      Smarter than average, for sure. But people tend to over estimate the intelligence of the average PhD.
    - jack9 10y ago
      It is not. The purpose of a PHD is to advance the sphere of human knowledge as it applies to a subset of existing data in a unique way. Getting the PHD by proving something empirically is the point of a PHD. This does not require a great deal of intelligence. Not enough to warrant more than a participation badge, anyway. e.g. Computer Science, where there's tons of data and few people have done the grunt work of organizing it for a statistician.
    - gmarx 10y ago
      What those who contradict you above fail to appreciate is just how little IQ difference makes someone seem "dumb". Most people with 140 IQs rarely spend any time having discussion of any depth with anyone who has an IQ below 120. They have not the slightest idea how dense someone with an IQ of 100 seems. When I was training as a physician I routinely needed to explain important things in depth to people with average and below average intelligence. It is shocking. Most of us live in a narrow world and make poor assumptions about life outside
- pmoriarty 10y ago
  "Godlike genius.. Godlike nothing! Sticking to it is the genius! I've failed my way to success." -- Thomas Edison "Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lives solely in my tenacity." -- Louis Pasteur "Men give me credit for genius; but all the genius I have lies in this: When I have a subject on hand I study it profoundly." -- Alexander Hamilton
  - forgotmysn 10y ago
    Sounds like an epic humblebrag by Hamilton. I don't think anyone, then or now, thinks he was a genius.
    - omginternets 10y ago
      I don't think he's using genius to mean "a genius". I think it's instead meant as a term for "a bright idea". i.e.: "to have genius" vs "to be a genius".
    - cfmcdonald 10y ago
      He is saying he has been credited with genius, that is intellectual power or talent, not that he has been credited with being "a genius". The former is now an archaic way of using genius, the latter was pretty new in Hamilton's time.
    - habitue 10y ago
      Alexander Hamilton was definitely super smart. Read his biography, it's nuts how young he was while he was writing treatises that shaped world events
    - pjmorris 10y ago
      I am curious about how you come by your view. Have a look at this defense [0] of Hamilton on the $10. I can see from it how many could see him as a genius. [0] http://www.financialsense.com/contributors/michael-pettis/please-do-not-diminish-hamilton http://www.financialsense.com/contributors/michael-pettis/pl...
    - karma_vaccum123 10y ago
- cubano 10y ago
  Almost all of the education system is about signalling your abilty to be told what to do and doing it, and not hardly at all about actually learning things necessary for a successful and productive life.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
    Although... Being able to do what your told is fairly necessary for a productive life. Don't do drugs, brush your teeth, get a good education, exercise regularly, shower regularly, spend less than you make, eat healthy. Do as your told.
    - tonyedgecombe 10y ago
      Don't study CS, Law is where the money is, don't start a business, it will probably fail, don't date that girl, her parents are bumpkins. Do as your told.
      - jimmaswell 10y ago
        The vast majority of the time, you shouldn't start a tech startup.
- rsp1984 10y ago
  Really? As a PhD what you do is explore a -- best case: niche, usually: theoretical and worst case: completely made up -- problem thoroughly in absence of workplace realities like deadlines, office politics and backstabbery, and try to come up with a solution that's better in at least some sense than what's been written before, then write a big piece of documentation about it whose total number of individual readers in most cases won't reach double digits. This does not prepare you well for most workplaces, except for maybe Google, who have enough resources to create an alternate reality for their engineers so they don't have to grow up.
  - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
    Not a Ph.D but reports from (UK) doctorate holders suggest there's sometimes a lot of backstabbery, often deadlines (funding), very often lab/department politics.
  - ci5er 10y ago
    > in absence of workplace realities like deadlines, office politics and backstabbery Really? I did not find that to be the case. I don't mind deadlines, but watching the day-to-day life of academics doing academia with their peers is what caused me to drop out of a PhD program and go finish my research project on my own. After seeing it in action, I wanted no part of being one of them for the rest of my career. I expect that I could have been at a rarely political university system, but after some medium-ish number of conferences (i.e. more than two dozen), I doubt that it was much worse than average. I found the whole thing quite "icky". In fact, I found it worse than any commercial environment I've been in (although I've been told I've been lucky in my experiences for failing to find it to such a degree in commercial environments).
- vacri 10y ago
  I'll support this with my experience. A PhD means you can do peer-reviewable original research. This means that you can't be too dumb, yes, but mostly that you have the elbow-grease to see it through. Maintaining motivation and stick-to-it-iveness are the most important qualities for doing a PhD. Disclaimer: dropped out of a PhD program due to lack of interest and elbow-grease.
paulpauper 10y ago
a STEM PHD is anything but 'easy' - it requires an original contribution of research, for one , and it must be defended and published
- mod 10y ago
  Not sure if you read the sentence in context, but the OP said that it was the easier of the two choices he presented.
jl6 10y ago
Well, don't they say that to do a PhD you have to be smart enough to be able to do one, but dumb enough to actually do one?
hectormalot 10y ago
I agree, as a Chem Eng master (In the dutch system you do not leave university with a bachelor, it's interpreted as if you weren't good enough to get a master) I've noticed that most of the guys I considered to be the brightest left for corporate jobs, that Ph.D's were a mix of people with deep academic interest (and endurance), some very bright people, and some people that felt they weren't ready for the real world. I think it's too much of a short-cut to say PhD equals high intellectual success.
- princeb 10y ago
  > some people that felt they weren't ready for the real world. i know some of these people. i suspect a lot of phds are people like these. of those who stay through the entire 3-5 year program, yet some are happy to remain post docs for the rest of their lives. they seem to have no goal, no real curiosity, no desire to see what exists outside the academic life they've known since college... they are there simply because they were there.
0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago
> other metrics associated with intellectual accomplishment. Like say IQ. Feynman wouldn't have qualified for Mensa, and happily too[0]. Maybe that's a good metric. The metric is happy not to be in Mensa, but also has a PhD. Edit: Feynman's IQ was 126 and Mensa wants 132, at least according to Ericsson and Pool in their book Peak. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEUcmKDaklY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEUcmKDaklY
- 1812Overture 10y ago
  If Feynman's IQ was only 126 then IQ is a totally meaningless metric of intelligence.
  - paulpauper 10y ago
    the problem may have been the low ceiling of the test. For certain tests, getting a single question wrong may drop the IQ from 140 (possible maximum) to 135. Verbal questions can also be a challenge if you don't know obscure vocabulary words.
  - sgt101 10y ago
    Well, intelligence is a meaningless term as in "playing chess is intelligent" or sitting on a stool and answering questions about arithmetic is intelligent. Don't even get me started on creative or consciousness. Oddly I feel that emotion is well defined as "behavioral modifications generated by reactions to circumstances", which is what John Maynard Smith told me it was. He was an intelligent fella.
  - Gargoyle 10y ago
    I've always thought Feynman did poorly on some test in high school for whatever reason and then used that score for the rest of his life as a good story. Feynman was all about the good stories.
- petters 10y ago
  But also: Feynman received the highest score in the country by a large margin on the notoriously difficult Putnam mathematics competition exam, although he joined the MIT team on short notice and did not prepare for the test. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/finding-the-next-einstein/201112/polymath-physicist-richard-feynmans-low-iq-and-finding-another https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/finding-the-next-einste...
jstelly 10y ago
> I think that someone can have a lot of intellectual success (potentially just as much or maybe more) if they don't earn a PhD. I totally agree with this. Also as an anecdote, I really struggled with the decision to pursue a PhD. In the end I decided not to for various reasons. I was never interested in academia, just in certain technology careers that seemed to demand a PhD at the time I was finishing my BS (also I went to a fairly ordinary state school for my BS even though I was accepted to much more prestigious schools figuring I would attend one of those for a graduate degree and avoid some student load debt). Many years later, in hindsight, I am very happy with that decision. I never think about going back in time and making the decision the other way. If anything I expect I would have been less successful by any metric (intellectual or otherwise) had I done so.
ArkyBeagle 10y ago
What's important is a familiarity and a comfort with rigor. You don't have to be a genius to gain that. It might even be a liability - you don't have to follow the formula to get the right answer ( because you're impatient and want to go play outside ) ; you can just see the answer. This happened to me, and I spent a couple or four years as an undergrad undoing damage I'd done to myself that way. I'd buy a lot more about what we think we know of human capability if there was even the most modest attempt to control for this factor. I went to what used to be a "normal" school that had risen to university status. It still mainly taught teachers although I pursued a BSCS. I asked the department chairman of the department why math was taught "from the wrong end of the telescope" and even he didn't really know why. I suppose the proofs course is no way to get buy in, but had I started with proofs rather than what they taught as algebra, I'd have had an easier time of it. I'd taken geometry but even algebra was still a morass, until I'd gotten a grounding in proofs.
mrcactu5 10y ago
I am concerned about the metrics these guys are using to measure aptitude and their measures of success. Top 95% income bracket -- I mean that's nice. Than again, I am not inside that 1 in 10000 range -- this study certainly does not apply to me. Or to the vast majority of people. Opportunities for bright students in the United States are limited. Big news! We've always been anti-intellectual.
usmeteora 10y ago
Well, in the study, they tracked students that went onto become CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, billionaires, Senators, none of which require a Graduate Degree. In fact, most CEOs are Phd dropouts and decided to leave the graduate education system, and some of them dropped out of their Bachelors program even, Mark from FB is in there as well as Lady GaGa. They both have a large influence on society but neither have graduate degrees. I don't see where in this study they were tracking people with Phds only. They tracked all the students who went through the program regardless of what they did. I believe the only mode of failure they were questioning in the study was the program coordinators own inability or failure to accurately identify people who did end up making large contributions to society (such as Shockley, aka the transistor) who failed to pass their initial thresholds for what they deemed as gifted. Much of the study focuses on questioning the failure of the program to adequately identify and support gifted children, not whether gifted children themselves ended up being successful. I'm honestly surprised noone has brought this up yet and that your comment is so presumptuous.
- squigs25 10y ago
  They tracked everyone, and measured success by the percentage that earned a PhD. So, while Mark and Lady GaGa were tracked, I don't think I saw any statistic that would have associated these two individuals with a positive outcome (except for the anecdotal line in the paper). I would argue that both Mark and Lady Gaga have probably had more influence than 99.9% of the tracked individuals in the study, and yet they are lowering the presented metric for success (percent that earned a PhD).

pas 10y ago

Knowing a few friends and other acquaintances with PhDs, all they have common is endurance and focus. They were not exceptionally creative, or apparently breathtakingly genius. And I guess that's why Google et al. likes to hire PhDs. They can take all kinds of shit, and endure. Get to the bottom of those problems even in the face of internal politics/bureaucracy.

jsprogrammer 10y ago
A PhD doesn't show that you get to the bottom of problems, but rather that you can influence, and be influenced by, group-think. Edit: Looks like it is still a while before my speech ban is up, so I'm pasting my response to kevingwang's response (below) here: >To a particular degree, anyway. Convincing a University, or being published in peer-journal, for example. >I think some are more or less ignored, though I guess I can't say that has no influence whatsoever and I'm also not sure that you can entirely avoid the influence of others.
- kevinwang 10y ago
  So, the same as every other human being?
collyw 10y ago
I have been working at academic institutes the last few years, where maybe a third of the staff are PhD students. The ones that have gone on to more senior positions are like you describe, but I wouldn't say its the majority. A fair few of them decide to quit science after the PhD.
irrational 10y ago
This reminds me of the old joke that PhD stands for "Pile it on Higher and Deeper".
- wrp 10y ago
  It goes B.S. => More of Same => Piled Higher and Deeper.
- kohanz 10y ago
  BS = Bulls--- MS = More s--- PhD = Piled higher and Deeper
  - mordae 10y ago
    I prefer this one: http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ OTOH, I bear neither.
  - sharemywin 10y ago
    My favorite was D stand for Diploma...
- clueless123 10y ago
  When you think you know everything you get your BS When you find out you know nothing, you get your Masters When you realize no one else knows either you get your PHD
wrp 10y ago
I know a Chemistry professor whose favorite remark on this is, "A PhD is a badge of endurance, not intelligence."
- Moshe_Silnorin 10y ago
  >A PhD is a badge of endurance, not intelligence It's very clearly both.
  - B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago
    Nah, I forgot which top flight physicist (Nobel, I think) wrote in a book that he had explained to his mother that there were indeed very dumb PhDs, thanks to mere "sitzfleisch". Most anyone in the business knows cases.
  - Panoramix 10y ago
    Smarter than average, for sure. But people tend to over estimate the intelligence of the average PhD.
  - jack9 10y ago
    It is not. The purpose of a PHD is to advance the sphere of human knowledge as it applies to a subset of existing data in a unique way. Getting the PHD by proving something empirically is the point of a PHD. This does not require a great deal of intelligence. Not enough to warrant more than a participation badge, anyway. e.g. Computer Science, where there's tons of data and few people have done the grunt work of organizing it for a statistician.
  - gmarx 10y ago
    What those who contradict you above fail to appreciate is just how little IQ difference makes someone seem "dumb". Most people with 140 IQs rarely spend any time having discussion of any depth with anyone who has an IQ below 120. They have not the slightest idea how dense someone with an IQ of 100 seems. When I was training as a physician I routinely needed to explain important things in depth to people with average and below average intelligence. It is shocking. Most of us live in a narrow world and make poor assumptions about life outside
pmoriarty 10y ago
"Godlike genius.. Godlike nothing! Sticking to it is the genius! I've failed my way to success." -- Thomas Edison "Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lives solely in my tenacity." -- Louis Pasteur "Men give me credit for genius; but all the genius I have lies in this: When I have a subject on hand I study it profoundly." -- Alexander Hamilton
- forgotmysn 10y ago
  Sounds like an epic humblebrag by Hamilton. I don't think anyone, then or now, thinks he was a genius.
  - omginternets 10y ago
    I don't think he's using genius to mean "a genius". I think it's instead meant as a term for "a bright idea". i.e.: "to have genius" vs "to be a genius".
  - cfmcdonald 10y ago
    He is saying he has been credited with genius, that is intellectual power or talent, not that he has been credited with being "a genius". The former is now an archaic way of using genius, the latter was pretty new in Hamilton's time.
  - habitue 10y ago
    Alexander Hamilton was definitely super smart. Read his biography, it's nuts how young he was while he was writing treatises that shaped world events
  - pjmorris 10y ago
    I am curious about how you come by your view. Have a look at this defense [0] of Hamilton on the $10. I can see from it how many could see him as a genius. [0] http://www.financialsense.com/contributors/michael-pettis/please-do-not-diminish-hamilton http://www.financialsense.com/contributors/michael-pettis/pl...
  - karma_vaccum123 10y ago
cubano 10y ago
Almost all of the education system is about signalling your abilty to be told what to do and doing it, and not hardly at all about actually learning things necessary for a successful and productive life.
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
  Although... Being able to do what your told is fairly necessary for a productive life. Don't do drugs, brush your teeth, get a good education, exercise regularly, shower regularly, spend less than you make, eat healthy. Do as your told.
  - tonyedgecombe 10y ago
    Don't study CS, Law is where the money is, don't start a business, it will probably fail, don't date that girl, her parents are bumpkins. Do as your told.
    - jimmaswell 10y ago
      The vast majority of the time, you shouldn't start a tech startup.
rsp1984 10y ago
Really? As a PhD what you do is explore a -- best case: niche, usually: theoretical and worst case: completely made up -- problem thoroughly in absence of workplace realities like deadlines, office politics and backstabbery, and try to come up with a solution that's better in at least some sense than what's been written before, then write a big piece of documentation about it whose total number of individual readers in most cases won't reach double digits. This does not prepare you well for most workplaces, except for maybe Google, who have enough resources to create an alternate reality for their engineers so they don't have to grow up.
- pbhjpbhj 10y ago
  Not a Ph.D but reports from (UK) doctorate holders suggest there's sometimes a lot of backstabbery, often deadlines (funding), very often lab/department politics.
- ci5er 10y ago
  > in absence of workplace realities like deadlines, office politics and backstabbery Really? I did not find that to be the case. I don't mind deadlines, but watching the day-to-day life of academics doing academia with their peers is what caused me to drop out of a PhD program and go finish my research project on my own. After seeing it in action, I wanted no part of being one of them for the rest of my career. I expect that I could have been at a rarely political university system, but after some medium-ish number of conferences (i.e. more than two dozen), I doubt that it was much worse than average. I found the whole thing quite "icky". In fact, I found it worse than any commercial environment I've been in (although I've been told I've been lucky in my experiences for failing to find it to such a degree in commercial environments).
vacri 10y ago
I'll support this with my experience. A PhD means you can do peer-reviewable original research. This means that you can't be too dumb, yes, but mostly that you have the elbow-grease to see it through. Maintaining motivation and stick-to-it-iveness are the most important qualities for doing a PhD. Disclaimer: dropped out of a PhD program due to lack of interest and elbow-grease.

paulpauper 10y ago

a STEM PHD is anything but 'easy' - it requires an original contribution of research, for one , and it must be defended and published

mod 10y ago
Not sure if you read the sentence in context, but the OP said that it was the easier of the two choices he presented.

jl6 10y ago

Well, don't they say that to do a PhD you have to be smart enough to be able to do one, but dumb enough to actually do one?

hectormalot 10y ago

I agree, as a Chem Eng master (In the dutch system you do not leave university with a bachelor, it's interpreted as if you weren't good enough to get a master) I've noticed that most of the guys I considered to be the brightest left for corporate jobs, that Ph.D's were a mix of people with deep academic interest (and endurance), some very bright people, and some people that felt they weren't ready for the real world. I think it's too much of a short-cut to say PhD equals high intellectual success.

princeb 10y ago
> some people that felt they weren't ready for the real world. i know some of these people. i suspect a lot of phds are people like these. of those who stay through the entire 3-5 year program, yet some are happy to remain post docs for the rest of their lives. they seem to have no goal, no real curiosity, no desire to see what exists outside the academic life they've known since college... they are there simply because they were there.

0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago

> other metrics associated with intellectual accomplishment. Like say IQ. Feynman wouldn't have qualified for Mensa, and happily too[0]. Maybe that's a good metric. The metric is happy not to be in Mensa, but also has a PhD. Edit: Feynman's IQ was 126 and Mensa wants 132, at least according to Ericsson and Pool in their book Peak. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEUcmKDaklY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEUcmKDaklY

1812Overture 10y ago
If Feynman's IQ was only 126 then IQ is a totally meaningless metric of intelligence.
- paulpauper 10y ago
  the problem may have been the low ceiling of the test. For certain tests, getting a single question wrong may drop the IQ from 140 (possible maximum) to 135. Verbal questions can also be a challenge if you don't know obscure vocabulary words.
- sgt101 10y ago
  Well, intelligence is a meaningless term as in "playing chess is intelligent" or sitting on a stool and answering questions about arithmetic is intelligent. Don't even get me started on creative or consciousness. Oddly I feel that emotion is well defined as "behavioral modifications generated by reactions to circumstances", which is what John Maynard Smith told me it was. He was an intelligent fella.
- Gargoyle 10y ago
  I've always thought Feynman did poorly on some test in high school for whatever reason and then used that score for the rest of his life as a good story. Feynman was all about the good stories.
petters 10y ago
But also: Feynman received the highest score in the country by a large margin on the notoriously difficult Putnam mathematics competition exam, although he joined the MIT team on short notice and did not prepare for the test. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/finding-the-next-einstein/201112/polymath-physicist-richard-feynmans-low-iq-and-finding-another https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/finding-the-next-einste...

jstelly 10y ago

> I think that someone can have a lot of intellectual success (potentially just as much or maybe more) if they don't earn a PhD. I totally agree with this. Also as an anecdote, I really struggled with the decision to pursue a PhD. In the end I decided not to for various reasons. I was never interested in academia, just in certain technology careers that seemed to demand a PhD at the time I was finishing my BS (also I went to a fairly ordinary state school for my BS even though I was accepted to much more prestigious schools figuring I would attend one of those for a graduate degree and avoid some student load debt). Many years later, in hindsight, I am very happy with that decision. I never think about going back in time and making the decision the other way. If anything I expect I would have been less successful by any metric (intellectual or otherwise) had I done so.

ArkyBeagle 10y ago

What's important is a familiarity and a comfort with rigor. You don't have to be a genius to gain that. It might even be a liability - you don't have to follow the formula to get the right answer ( because you're impatient and want to go play outside ) ; you can just see the answer. This happened to me, and I spent a couple or four years as an undergrad undoing damage I'd done to myself that way. I'd buy a lot more about what we think we know of human capability if there was even the most modest attempt to control for this factor. I went to what used to be a "normal" school that had risen to university status. It still mainly taught teachers although I pursued a BSCS. I asked the department chairman of the department why math was taught "from the wrong end of the telescope" and even he didn't really know why. I suppose the proofs course is no way to get buy in, but had I started with proofs rather than what they taught as algebra, I'd have had an easier time of it. I'd taken geometry but even algebra was still a morass, until I'd gotten a grounding in proofs.

mrcactu5 10y ago

I am concerned about the metrics these guys are using to measure aptitude and their measures of success. Top 95% income bracket -- I mean that's nice. Than again, I am not inside that 1 in 10000 range -- this study certainly does not apply to me. Or to the vast majority of people. Opportunities for bright students in the United States are limited. Big news! We've always been anti-intellectual.

usmeteora 10y ago

Well, in the study, they tracked students that went onto become CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, billionaires, Senators, none of which require a Graduate Degree. In fact, most CEOs are Phd dropouts and decided to leave the graduate education system, and some of them dropped out of their Bachelors program even, Mark from FB is in there as well as Lady GaGa. They both have a large influence on society but neither have graduate degrees. I don't see where in this study they were tracking people with Phds only. They tracked all the students who went through the program regardless of what they did. I believe the only mode of failure they were questioning in the study was the program coordinators own inability or failure to accurately identify people who did end up making large contributions to society (such as Shockley, aka the transistor) who failed to pass their initial thresholds for what they deemed as gifted. Much of the study focuses on questioning the failure of the program to adequately identify and support gifted children, not whether gifted children themselves ended up being successful. I'm honestly surprised noone has brought this up yet and that your comment is so presumptuous.

squigs25 10y ago
They tracked everyone, and measured success by the percentage that earned a PhD. So, while Mark and Lady GaGa were tracked, I don't think I saw any statistic that would have associated these two individuals with a positive outcome (except for the anecdotal line in the paper). I would argue that both Mark and Lady Gaga have probably had more influence than 99.9% of the tracked individuals in the study, and yet they are lowering the presented metric for success (percent that earned a PhD).