5 ms·

What's the source for some of those claims? Calculus at seven I can believe, but teaching himself reading at 2 sounds like something that goes against what we

What's the source for some of those claims? Calculus at seven I can believe, but teaching himself reading at 2 sounds like something that goes against what we know about biological and social development of the child. And official IQs of 230 and 300 sounds like someone doesn't understand what IQ is or the meaningfulness of measuring/quantifying such in a standardised way. Obviously the person may be exceptional, and I do not mean to take anything away from Terence in his work that i'm clearly unqualified to comment on (it wouldn't surprise me if a bit of digging shows him unconnected to such claims), but we shouldn't just accept such things as given. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence...

AussieWog93 5y ago
>What's the source for some of those claims? Googling it, it seems like the claim that he taught himself to read when he was "a little over two" (ie not literally 24 months) has been repeated among multiple reputable news sources (New York Time, SMH, The Age). No comment on the IQ. >Calculus at seven I can believe, but teaching himself reading at 2 sounds like something that goes against what we know about biological and social development of the child. It doesn't seem too far-fetched, to be honest. Back when my wife worked in child-care, she knew this one kid who was speaking in multi-word sentences at 9 months old. Most kids don't reach this milestone until they're 2 1/2. Kids can and do surprise you.
ip26 5y ago
As a parent I’ve come to believe a lot of the stories about how so and so was playing golf or skiing or playing piano by 3 are very biased retrospectives. My kid was playing notes on harmonica at 18 months. Could he carry a tune? Of course not, but if one day he turned out to be a musical genius I could brag he has been playing instruments since he was an infant. See the careful embellishment? A kid who has memorized some sight words or some books can certainly claim “reading”, with just enough truth there for the tale to take hold when they do well later in life.
- eyelidlessness 5y ago
  To reinforce this: I remember feeling embarrassed by being described as a “natural” playing guitar. I also remember feeling humbled by my humility when I took guitar seriously and picked stuff up or figured out technique that astounded people.
- btilly 5y ago
  In many cases I'd agree with you. But in his case, he had come to the attention of researchers into high IQ by the age of 3, and the stories were recorded when they were still fairly fresh.
  - dwohnitmok 5y ago
    Yeah there's a considerable difference between "my kid is a genius among other kids" (probably what a lot of parents feel about their children) and "my kid is a genius even when compared to adults."
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ACow_Adonis 5y ago
  for the record I've got a son who is going on three now and I'm finding the developmental aspect fascinating. my wife is also studying some childhood development atm. I assumed he'll run risks of being my "problematically gifted" given his parents :P But i have a very skeptical mind, it pays the bills. I've observed in my research (and in real life) many various impressive renditions of what i call "stupid toddler tricks". i saw a 1 year old count to 20. my own kids take books to bed at 2 and "reads" them to himself. could the kid do math? could my kid read? No. of course not. you probe a little bit deeper and all the trappings of what we adults call cognisance fall away. the one year old has no idea what they were reciting. my kid repeats (albeit poorly) what he heard us say when . "reading",but a little bit of digging reveals the limits of his comprehension. kids use the pictures and other hints hints as cues, they're (the clever bastards),they have a brilliant verbal/aural ability at such an age, and they can have some kind of basic symbolic ability and rote repetition. And you can get them to do amazing things if you record them doing the trick but don't dig any deeper into their mental processes. I'm guessing that people who are downvoting don't understand child mental development, have a vastly simpler definition of reading than myself, or don't understand how many layers of development are required to arrive at actual reading that have to be passed first. i do think you could quickly show such a trick to a well meaning person and get the legend started however...
btilly 5y ago
Reading at 2 is well-attested by multiple sources. The IQ was a case of going back to the original kind of IQ test for children, mental age divided by physical age. At the age of 6 he performed at a level to be expected of a 14 year old on the Stanford-Binet test. At the extremes of these tests, the bell curve approximation. So yes, his IQ was measured that high. But it is not strictly comparable to adult IQ tests. It should be noted that Terrence Tao's early achievements were well documented because he met Dr Miraca Gross of New South Wales at age 3, who was running a longitudinal study of Australian gifted children. Tao, of course, wound up as the star of the approximately 60 children in the study.
- sida 5y ago
  Do we know what happened to the other 59 children?
  - wheelinsupial 5y ago
    There is a book with 2 editions published by the researcher about them. An excerpt can be found here: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ746290.pdf https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ746290.pdf The outcomes depend on how much and when the students were accelerated in school. ETA: The two extremes: “… 17 of the 60 young people were radically accelerated. None has regrets. Indeed, several say they would probably have preferred to accelerate still further or to have started earlier…. The majority entered college between ages 11 and 15. Several won scholarships to attend prestigious universi- ties in Australia or overseas. All have graduated with extremely high grades and, in most cases, university prizes for exemplary achieve- ment. All 17 are characterized by a passionate love of learning and almost all have gone on to obtain their Ph.D.s.” “The remaining 33 young people were retained, for the duration of their schooling,… Two dropped out of high school and a number have dropped out of university. Several more have had ongoing difficul- ties at university,…” Based on this HN comment [1] it appears the participants have been anonymized. It also quotes some of Terrence Tao’s education and makes a claim there was someone else who may have equaled Tao in math ability, but did not have the educational support structure to recognize and nurture it. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11510032 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11510032
jonahx 5y ago
This video may help convince you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_IFTN2Toak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_IFTN2Toak
- ACow_Adonis 5y ago
  People seem to interpret my comments as some kind of tall-poppy syndrome or ignorance, but I actually believe that a lot of these mathematical abilities do generate at about the age that Terrence was said to display them (even if we accept he was early and prodigious). if someone told you that they developed sight before they physically developed eyes, surely you'd pause for thought. But make similar claims concerning the neurological development or mental faculties in prodigies at a young age and suddenly everyone's critical thinking switches off. I've actually read the study which involved Terrence before this thread, and I'll repeat it again: nothing I'm saying is trying to take away from his accomplishments or current abilities. The far more plausible story is simply that he had two highly educated parents, one of whom was a math teacher, he has some innate ability, and his parents specifically focused on him and taught and pushed him in math from an early age, then they went about accessing opportunities for him to learn and continue his development at an abnormally early age and they additionally got him special access to educational resources, educators and equipment. If anything, the video and further research confirms my early conclusions, but my point is really quite fundamental and has little to do with Terence's abilities or current day achievements: I don't believe a 2 year old can teach themselves to read (or at least to anything approximating what a skeptical person would call reading). I think anyone who's had dealing with kids and understands development would say that claim at least SMELLS of bullshit if it isn't actually so.
  - alisonkisk 5y ago
    Why can't a 2 yr old start reading but a 10 yr old can solve the hardest mathematics problems posed?
    - ACow_Adonis 5y ago
      well, firstly, the claim can be broken down into two parts: taught himself, and reading at two. I won't address the first because the discussion will get too long if you think that's genuinely how children learn, even geniuses. on the later, because the basic foundations of math can be found in (at least some) ten year old minds. what the common man believes is possible in math is mainly influenced by cultural exposure and the order in which we learn it. But there's really only 3 - 4 meta-concepts that underlie all of math, and the rest is about exposure/experimentation, syntax and terminology. Terrence himself I believe says as much and if you read through the accounts of interviews with Terrence at a young age it's apparent that's how his mind is working (and explains the concepts he understands, the mistakes he makes, and those areas he hasn't had exposure to). whereas the cognitive layers required for reading take time to develop in the child's brain, and you first have to wait for the verbal/aural language systems to develop the actual language structure first, then tack on some symbolic representation for letters, then understand composition for words, then attach words to their meanings, etc. You can skip some of those bits to perform party tricks (I.e rote symbolic recognition and repetition of aural sounds on cue), but this does not reading make. Reading we believe, from a cognitive science point of view, we think is a kind of a kind of kludge on top of later developed brain mechanics, whereas it's aural/verbal language that appears as an almost innate developmental ability around that age. (I say innate, but you still have to be exposed to other humans interacting and speaking for a young mind to learn the language).
philipswood 5y ago
I'm only addressing teaching himself to read at two: Check out "How Teach your baby to read" by Glen Doman. He makes the case that it is pretty much an inmate ability if encouraged correctly. The method has been around long enough to have some backing and witness, but it doesn't actually seem to confer much long term advantage. I ended up not using it with my kids after feedback from a friend and some further reading. My understanding is that for most people intelligence isn't a result of starting early, but rather having the brain finish late - i.e. remaining plastic longer.
- whoisburbansky 5y ago
  What was the feedback/further reading that made you decide not to use it?
  - ip26 5y ago
    doesn't actually seem to confer much long term advantage
- ip26 5y ago
  I wasn't prepared for how innate verbal language, specifically stories, are. My kid would come home from preschool and accurately recite ten minute long books, full of unknown words, the same way I idly hum a tune. It was a lightbulb moment for me- I had always wondered how oral tradition could possibly hold up over centuries, but my god we're wired for it.
Rerarom 5y ago
Wtf, I was reading at 2½yo (but learned calculus at 16-17)
kaetemi 5y ago
Adults underestimate toddlers. I 'taught' my daughter to read some words at the age of 1. She could learn around 3 per week. Two weeks to learn to recognize them without any context. It's just a matter of providing the opportunity, and taking advantage of their curiosity.

AussieWog93 5y ago

>What's the source for some of those claims? Googling it, it seems like the claim that he taught himself to read when he was "a little over two" (ie not literally 24 months) has been repeated among multiple reputable news sources (New York Time, SMH, The Age). No comment on the IQ. >Calculus at seven I can believe, but teaching himself reading at 2 sounds like something that goes against what we know about biological and social development of the child. It doesn't seem too far-fetched, to be honest. Back when my wife worked in child-care, she knew this one kid who was speaking in multi-word sentences at 9 months old. Most kids don't reach this milestone until they're 2 1/2. Kids can and do surprise you.

ip26 5y ago

As a parent I’ve come to believe a lot of the stories about how so and so was playing golf or skiing or playing piano by 3 are very biased retrospectives. My kid was playing notes on harmonica at 18 months. Could he carry a tune? Of course not, but if one day he turned out to be a musical genius I could brag he has been playing instruments since he was an infant. See the careful embellishment? A kid who has memorized some sight words or some books can certainly claim “reading”, with just enough truth there for the tale to take hold when they do well later in life.

eyelidlessness 5y ago
To reinforce this: I remember feeling embarrassed by being described as a “natural” playing guitar. I also remember feeling humbled by my humility when I took guitar seriously and picked stuff up or figured out technique that astounded people.
btilly 5y ago
In many cases I'd agree with you. But in his case, he had come to the attention of researchers into high IQ by the age of 3, and the stories were recorded when they were still fairly fresh.
- dwohnitmok 5y ago
  Yeah there's a considerable difference between "my kid is a genius among other kids" (probably what a lot of parents feel about their children) and "my kid is a genius even when compared to adults."
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ACow_Adonis 5y ago
for the record I've got a son who is going on three now and I'm finding the developmental aspect fascinating. my wife is also studying some childhood development atm. I assumed he'll run risks of being my "problematically gifted" given his parents :P But i have a very skeptical mind, it pays the bills. I've observed in my research (and in real life) many various impressive renditions of what i call "stupid toddler tricks". i saw a 1 year old count to 20. my own kids take books to bed at 2 and "reads" them to himself. could the kid do math? could my kid read? No. of course not. you probe a little bit deeper and all the trappings of what we adults call cognisance fall away. the one year old has no idea what they were reciting. my kid repeats (albeit poorly) what he heard us say when . "reading",but a little bit of digging reveals the limits of his comprehension. kids use the pictures and other hints hints as cues, they're (the clever bastards),they have a brilliant verbal/aural ability at such an age, and they can have some kind of basic symbolic ability and rote repetition. And you can get them to do amazing things if you record them doing the trick but don't dig any deeper into their mental processes. I'm guessing that people who are downvoting don't understand child mental development, have a vastly simpler definition of reading than myself, or don't understand how many layers of development are required to arrive at actual reading that have to be passed first. i do think you could quickly show such a trick to a well meaning person and get the legend started however...

btilly 5y ago

Reading at 2 is well-attested by multiple sources. The IQ was a case of going back to the original kind of IQ test for children, mental age divided by physical age. At the age of 6 he performed at a level to be expected of a 14 year old on the Stanford-Binet test. At the extremes of these tests, the bell curve approximation. So yes, his IQ was measured that high. But it is not strictly comparable to adult IQ tests. It should be noted that Terrence Tao's early achievements were well documented because he met Dr Miraca Gross of New South Wales at age 3, who was running a longitudinal study of Australian gifted children. Tao, of course, wound up as the star of the approximately 60 children in the study.

sida 5y ago
Do we know what happened to the other 59 children?
- wheelinsupial 5y ago
  There is a book with 2 editions published by the researcher about them. An excerpt can be found here: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ746290.pdf https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ746290.pdf The outcomes depend on how much and when the students were accelerated in school. ETA: The two extremes: “… 17 of the 60 young people were radically accelerated. None has regrets. Indeed, several say they would probably have preferred to accelerate still further or to have started earlier…. The majority entered college between ages 11 and 15. Several won scholarships to attend prestigious universi- ties in Australia or overseas. All have graduated with extremely high grades and, in most cases, university prizes for exemplary achieve- ment. All 17 are characterized by a passionate love of learning and almost all have gone on to obtain their Ph.D.s.” “The remaining 33 young people were retained, for the duration of their schooling,… Two dropped out of high school and a number have dropped out of university. Several more have had ongoing difficul- ties at university,…” Based on this HN comment [1] it appears the participants have been anonymized. It also quotes some of Terrence Tao’s education and makes a claim there was someone else who may have equaled Tao in math ability, but did not have the educational support structure to recognize and nurture it. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11510032 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11510032

jonahx 5y ago

This video may help convince you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_IFTN2Toak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_IFTN2Toak

ACow_Adonis 5y ago
People seem to interpret my comments as some kind of tall-poppy syndrome or ignorance, but I actually believe that a lot of these mathematical abilities do generate at about the age that Terrence was said to display them (even if we accept he was early and prodigious). if someone told you that they developed sight before they physically developed eyes, surely you'd pause for thought. But make similar claims concerning the neurological development or mental faculties in prodigies at a young age and suddenly everyone's critical thinking switches off. I've actually read the study which involved Terrence before this thread, and I'll repeat it again: nothing I'm saying is trying to take away from his accomplishments or current abilities. The far more plausible story is simply that he had two highly educated parents, one of whom was a math teacher, he has some innate ability, and his parents specifically focused on him and taught and pushed him in math from an early age, then they went about accessing opportunities for him to learn and continue his development at an abnormally early age and they additionally got him special access to educational resources, educators and equipment. If anything, the video and further research confirms my early conclusions, but my point is really quite fundamental and has little to do with Terence's abilities or current day achievements: I don't believe a 2 year old can teach themselves to read (or at least to anything approximating what a skeptical person would call reading). I think anyone who's had dealing with kids and understands development would say that claim at least SMELLS of bullshit if it isn't actually so.
- alisonkisk 5y ago
  Why can't a 2 yr old start reading but a 10 yr old can solve the hardest mathematics problems posed?
  - ACow_Adonis 5y ago
    well, firstly, the claim can be broken down into two parts: taught himself, and reading at two. I won't address the first because the discussion will get too long if you think that's genuinely how children learn, even geniuses. on the later, because the basic foundations of math can be found in (at least some) ten year old minds. what the common man believes is possible in math is mainly influenced by cultural exposure and the order in which we learn it. But there's really only 3 - 4 meta-concepts that underlie all of math, and the rest is about exposure/experimentation, syntax and terminology. Terrence himself I believe says as much and if you read through the accounts of interviews with Terrence at a young age it's apparent that's how his mind is working (and explains the concepts he understands, the mistakes he makes, and those areas he hasn't had exposure to). whereas the cognitive layers required for reading take time to develop in the child's brain, and you first have to wait for the verbal/aural language systems to develop the actual language structure first, then tack on some symbolic representation for letters, then understand composition for words, then attach words to their meanings, etc. You can skip some of those bits to perform party tricks (I.e rote symbolic recognition and repetition of aural sounds on cue), but this does not reading make. Reading we believe, from a cognitive science point of view, we think is a kind of a kind of kludge on top of later developed brain mechanics, whereas it's aural/verbal language that appears as an almost innate developmental ability around that age. (I say innate, but you still have to be exposed to other humans interacting and speaking for a young mind to learn the language).

philipswood 5y ago

I'm only addressing teaching himself to read at two: Check out "How Teach your baby to read" by Glen Doman. He makes the case that it is pretty much an inmate ability if encouraged correctly. The method has been around long enough to have some backing and witness, but it doesn't actually seem to confer much long term advantage. I ended up not using it with my kids after feedback from a friend and some further reading. My understanding is that for most people intelligence isn't a result of starting early, but rather having the brain finish late - i.e. remaining plastic longer.

whoisburbansky 5y ago
What was the feedback/further reading that made you decide not to use it?
- ip26 5y ago
  doesn't actually seem to confer much long term advantage
ip26 5y ago
I wasn't prepared for how innate verbal language, specifically stories, are. My kid would come home from preschool and accurately recite ten minute long books, full of unknown words, the same way I idly hum a tune. It was a lightbulb moment for me- I had always wondered how oral tradition could possibly hold up over centuries, but my god we're wired for it.

Rerarom 5y ago

Wtf, I was reading at 2½yo (but learned calculus at 16-17)

kaetemi 5y ago

Adults underestimate toddlers. I 'taught' my daughter to read some words at the age of 1. She could learn around 3 per week. Two weeks to learn to recognize them without any context. It's just a matter of providing the opportunity, and taking advantage of their curiosity.