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Doubtless Hungarian Ashkenazim like von Neumann, Teller, Erdos, Soros were extraordinarily intelligent but I also wonder how much of this has to do with family
by morpheos137 5y ago
Doubtless Hungarian Ashkenazim like von Neumann, Teller, Erdos, Soros were extraordinarily intelligent but I also wonder how much of this has to do with family environments and social connections vs. just innate capability. An upper middle class bourgeois upbringing can do wonders for intellectual development. Kind of a chicken vs. the egg problem.
- ProAm 5y agoAre you saying their genius was a result of their class?
- wolfram74 5y agoHaving enough to eat and free time to think certainly didn't hurt.
- asciimov 5y agoGenius level intellect is fairly well distributed amount the global population. However, the opportunity for these people to add to the collective knowledge isn’t well distributed. If you look at the backgrounds of most of the well known geniuses, rare are the ones that were the children of poor or destitute people. Anecdotally, I’ve met quite a few rural poor that were hyper intelligent. The types of things that matter to them aren’t really applicable to anyone else.
- bserge 5y ago
- JamesBarney 5y agoWe have a bunch of twin studies that say your biological parents have far more impact on your intellect than your adopted parents. We know there are upper middle class all over the world, and almost half the Manhattan project came from the same neighborhood and ethnicity. It would be amazing if we find out that one weird trick that increases your intellect by 2 standard deviations. But most likely it's just Ashekanazi have lots of smart genes.