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Talking about passionate interest just passes the buck. Sure Tao was, but why was he passionately interested and can we replicate it in an average person? >The
by solveit 7y ago
Talking about passionate interest just passes the buck. Sure Tao was, but why was he passionately interested and can we replicate it in an average person?
>There are vanishingly few people in the world who spent as much time or had as much guidance at a similar age. It’s basically impossible to find a reasonable comparison vs. Tao of someone who had similar amounts of support and spent a similar amount of time and yet was never able to learn anything.
Sure. But do you think you (or someone with suitable skills) can replicate Tao's success? I don't think you can.
>There is no particular reason to believe that any average baby adopted into the same family at birth would not also have become a skilled chess player.
No reason, except that this sort of thing is very very rarely done despite the obvious rewards. Maybe most people wouldn't be inclined to go through such an arduous project, but authoritarian governments certainly will (and the Olympics prove that they do, and that this works to some extent, although not as spectacularly as you're selling it, for some sports). Where is the horde of Soviet Nobel laureates? Where are the North Korean Fields medalists?
- jacobolus 7y ago> why was he passionately interested and can we replicate it in an average person? That is a very good question. I would imagine there been a lot written about this, but I’m not sure how systematically it has been studied. One thing that definitely does not work for the general student is typical classrooms with scores, grades, a fixed pace, and tons of bureaucratic overhead. > this sort of thing [the Polgar experiment] is very very rarely done despite the obvious rewards The “reward” to being a child prodigy isn’t that great. If the cost is most of the parents’ full-time attention, then most families can’t afford it. This doesn’t scale.
- solveit 7y agoIt does if you're a totalitarian state that really really wants to win an ideological battle by producing Olympic medals and Nobel prizes. Only one of those were produced.
- MagnumOpus 7y agoNobels are given by committees, so they are not necessarily a fair comparison. Olympic medals are more comparable to IMO medals, and the latter were won disproportionately by communists states with dedicated preparation: China in the last 30 years, before that the Soviets, the Hungarians, Romanians and East Germans. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Mathematical_Olympiad#/media/File:International_Mathematical_Olympiad_highest_team_score_bar_chart.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Mathematical_Oly...