19 ms·

Childhoods of Exceptional People

322 points by lxm 4y ago

Scubabear68 4y ago
I don’t think the models from those time periods work today.
- swayvil 4y ago
  Home schooling, hanging with brilliant people, free to pursue your own goals. That's the models, right?
  - Scubabear68 4y ago
    Not what I meant. Back then you were either rich and had these golden opportunities, or you were like 99.999999% of humanity and had no chance at exceptionalism they would be noticed. With the Internet and modern connectedness, things are very different.
    - barry-cotter 4y ago
      > or you were like 99.999999% of humanity and had no chance at exceptionalism they would be noticed. I see where you’re coming from but those numbers are way off. Leonardo da Vinci and Rembrandt weren’t the children of peasants but neither were they nobles. They were relatively privileged but well over 1% of the population were as well off. Notary’s or miller’s son in a pre industrial society is bourgeois not one in less than a million.
  - OJFord 4y ago
    I think GP means in a quasi-statistical/ML sense: if you build your model for an upbringing for success on data of yesteryear, it doesn't necessarily work (give good predictions for) today.
    - seymourhersh 4y ago
      Isn’t this a meaningless truism that can be applied to any model you haven’t proven works?
ip26 4y ago
I like the process. I do think it reaffirms well understood themes: 1) wealthy family 2) motivated and involved parents 3) very bright kids That said it’s interesting to see specifics.
- paulpauper 4y ago
  Yeah, that seems to be consistently the winning formula. It's obviously no assurance of creating a superstar, but it certainly boosts the odds, as low as they are.
  - epicureanideal 4y ago
    Yeah, in all seriousness I probably could’ve been an exceptional person, but broken home and very low income childhood made a lot of things more challenging. Probably will end up in a pretty good situation in absolute terms but nowhere near what would’ve been possible.
    - klipt 4y ago
      Some families have bootstrapped their way out of poverty, but it usually takes multiple generations. Hence "families" rather than "individuals".
  - Foobar8568 4y ago
    This is so true. Just being able to read your kids some stories before night time until they can read makes your kids in the top 10% of his peers, and the kids enjoy it. Shared privileged moment with their parents.
ckardat123 4y ago
This is an interesting article, but I think it's hard to form any conclusions about the correct way to parent children from this information due to the inherent selection bias. It may be true that a lot of exceptional people were taken seriously by their parents and given serious responsibilities, but I think that also may be due to the parents realizing that their children were exceptional. If you have a child who's closer to average intellect, you might not get the same outcome. It's also possible that these approaches just increase the variance of outcomes. So it might be that they generate exceptional people 1% of the time, but generate miserable people who accomplish nothing 99% of the time. I don't think that this is likely to be true to that magnitude, and I think a lot of the advice seems pretty good intuitively (I feel like being treated seriously by my parents when I was young was a big benefit), but am curious if there is any more data-driven approach to the question of how to best raise your kids.
- paulpauper 4y ago
  Think of how many kids were tutored by wealthy families over the past 500 years. How many achieved close to anything of noteworthiness like the examples in the article?
  - Jill_the_Pill 4y ago
    How about the siblings of these people, with presumably the same upbringing?
  - ip26 4y ago
    At the same time it’s still instructive to note, however, all the wealthy kids who were not tutored and who do not show up in the list.
- mikeiz404 4y ago
  This article [1], linked from original article, looks at the effects of direct instruction and mastery learning across various studies. I did not read it all but it concludes from randomized interventions that these approaches have a beneficial outcome on students when compared to alternatives (though not as high as two standard deviations as previously suggested). 1: https://nintil.com/bloom-sigma/ https://nintil.com/bloom-sigma/
paulpauper 4y ago
When it comes to formal instruction, an important element is tutoring. Some do all of their formal learning this way (such as John Stuart Mill), others have it as a complement to schooling (such as Albert Einstein, who had a number of math-focused tutors outside of school). Erik Hoel, who has written a series of great essays about why we stopped making Einsteins (here, here, and here), singled out “aristocratic tutoring” as the most important factor. (In this term, Erik includes not only tutoring, in its classical sense, but also more casual interactions between children and competent adults.) If I had to guess, the reason is much of the low hanging fruit has been picked. Progress is much more incremental and hard, building on a huge body of technical existing literature. Being the next Einstein means you have to learn everything Einstein knew, plus another 100 years on top of that. Tons of papers on arXiv to go through. Lots of dense math.
- readthenotes1 4y ago
  Did not Einstein win his Nobel prize for explaining Brownian motion in classical Newtonian physics? That is, did he not also have to master the existing material of the day using the woeful tools of the late 19th and earliest 20th century? He had neither the internet nor Anki cards to help him learn anything. I do not think the problem is one of low-hanging fruit
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Kranar 4y ago
    Technically, Einstein won the Nobel prize for "his services to theoretical physics and especially the photoelectric effect", but in actuality he won it for his work on relativity. The reason the Nobel committee did not just give him the award for relativity was because until 1919, there was no way to experimentally verify relativity theory, and then in 1919 when it was experimentally verified, there was a significant increase in anti-semitism following the end of the first World War and a great deal of hesitation to award it to Einstein for what was considered an incredibly complex theory that few people could understand. Because of that, a compromise was reached, and Einstein would receive a deferred award for the photoelectric effect, which was much less contentious. But everyone understood that Einstein had won the award for his work on relativity.
anigbrowl 4y ago
Thinking about this question, I wrote down a list of twenty names—von Neumann, Tolstoy, Curie, Pascal, etc—selected on the highly scientific criteria “a random Swedish person can recall their name and think, Sounds like a genius to me”. This is not even wrong, never mind less.
- seymourhersh 4y ago
  Which of the people listed do you think are poor choices for the purposes of the article?
- 314 4y ago
  I tried this on a random Swedish person and she identified all of the names as people that sounded like a genius. Seems legit.
theGnuMe 4y ago
I taught myself linux at age 13 when it came out based on my experience with msdos. So dail-up modems and slackware. Now with the Internet things are amazing in terms of what you can learn if you are interested. I do think 1:1 tutoring is especially helpful but it doesn't help the socialization and group emotional regulation things that come up in school. Those are important skills as well.
- anon291 4y ago
  > I do think 1:1 tutoring is especially helpful but it doesn't help the socialization and group emotional regulation things that come up in school. Those are important skills as well. Unfortunately, children in school only learn how to emotionally regulate with children of the same age, which is why so many find 'adulting' hard.
  - vineyardmike 4y ago
    > which is why so many find 'adulting' hard. Being an adult is hard. Its so much harder than being a student living with your parents. It does require a dedicated skillset that isn't taught to minors anymore, and it requires owning a lot more responsibility, all at once. When I was in school there was no HomeEc, no woodshop, no financial literacy, and the closest thing to health info I learned was that men are gross and need deodorant while women should stay a virgin. There is a real stress and challenge with maintaining a home, saving for retirement, etc as a young (and likely lower-income) person. And that's to say nothing about the growing income and affordability gap present across generations, making it harder for younger generations to achieve the life their parents had. A generation ago most women didn't work and everyone got married at a young age. Consequently, most adults lived in a shared household where one person spent their entire day cooking and cleaning and preparing the household.
- sibeliuss 4y ago
  > it doesn't help the socialization and group emotional regulation things that come up in school I think this is almost certainly a myth. There are a lot of ways that children can learn this.
rosebay 4y ago
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wanderingmind 4y ago
Ramanujan is an extreme outlier but an aspiration to lot of Indians. Growing up in the southern tip of India in British Raj to a poor family, he had to literally struggle through all his life, going hungry a lot. It was because he was only good at Math and nothing else, which was unacceptable to be employed by the British. "The Man who knew Infinity" by "Robert Kanigel" is a great book that captures the essence of his work and life beautifully.
- barelyauser 4y ago
  Ramanujan was an anomaly. What do we learn from someone like him? Can we reproduce it? Should we aspire to reproduce it? Or will it cause more harm than not?
  - vlovich123 4y ago
    We should be crashing the conditions for as many anomalies as possible if we could. Talent like that is rare and moves humanity forward faster than the incrementalism we’re normally capable of
    - bryananderson 4y ago
      Trying to produce more Ramanujans by recreating the conditions of his childhood seems about as likely to work as trying to produce more cargo flights by waving landing signals around on a runway.
      - vlovich123 4y ago
        I didn’t at any point suggest we recreate the conditions of his childhood. All I said is we should create conditions that enables more of these anomalies to flourish in society. It feels like modern society is set up to stamp out such anomalies.
    - eastbound 4y ago
      Anomaly-based talent often implies that there persons sacrificed their lives, often their health, their family, to get an edge. A lot of high-achievers are suicidal, like Churchill, who only succeeded at plane dogfights because he’s the only outlier that didn’t die performing those crazy stunts. A lot of those who try and don’t succeed are very suicidal. I’m all for meritocracy, but we should strive so that most people can succeed in parallel to a good family life. So that the children are balanced and loved, and we have a second generation who’s even better.
bitwize 4y ago
So what made them brilliant was largely the usual suspects -- luck and privilege. Good to know.
- paulpauper 4y ago
  Maybe in those examples, but we're talking 20 people from 100 years ago. A lot has changed. Look at all the people earning good salaries at tech companies today. How many of them are from privileged backgrounds? Probably not that many. Looking at the bios of Forbes 400 CEOs or VCs or founders we see a similar pattern. Not so much being in the top 1% but more like the top 20%.
  - ahoya 4y ago
    [dead]
  - vineyardmike 4y ago
    > Look at all the people earning good salaries at tech companies today. They're obviously in a great place in their life, but thats hardly "exceptionalism" like Van Neumann was. Tech exceptionals are a different and more selective cohort (you said CEOs). Take Steve Jobs - he wasn't wealthy, but he spent time alone as a child, and his earlier teachers gave him extra personal attention. His parents would share their interests with him (eg carpentry), and gave him freedom to learn from them and also learn from the neighbors (who were Silicon Valley engineers). He cold-called Hewlett (H of HP) who gave him a job at 13. He was starting businesses in high school for money. Steve was given a long leash to learn, ample minds and talent to observe, and was treated like a self-directed adult as a child.
- aik 4y ago
  So interesting how people can read the same thing and get completely different lessons out of it. I read it in a much less defeatist way: A big predictor of success for your kids is to deliberately surround yourself and family as much as possible with the best people you know according to the values and ethic you want to bestow upon your kids.
- pico303 4y ago
Brushfire 4y ago
We often worry about how to make our children exceptional, but I wonder of the people studied here, how many were genuinely happy? Shouldn’t we want our children to be happy more than we want them to be exceptional? The two aren’t mutually exclusive of course, but the pursuit of exceptionalism might lead to a less happy life, especially if that exceptionalism doesn’t materialize. I know far too many people pushed incredibly hard by their family/circumstances and burned out fast.
- paulpauper 4y ago
  These are mutually exclusive or positively correlated slightly, that is, successful people generally being happier. It's not like you have to choose between one or the other.
  - kortilla 4y ago
    Successful and exceptional aren’t the same thing here.
- seymourhersh 4y ago
  The people described in the article don’t seem to have been “pushed incredibly hard” by their family or circumstances. For the most part it seems like the opposite - they were just given access to a lot of resources and expertise to help them in the directions they were already heading.
  - NovaDudely 4y ago
    Bingo! The strive to achieve was an innate function. Having others realize the resources they needed allowed it to happen.
- voisin 4y ago
  We are concerned with exceptionalism as a society because we want to benefit from the exceptional person. We tell people it is better to be great than happy and assign all sorts of value judgments around that. We as a society have collectively forgotten how to be present, mindful, and enjoy this moment. To do so would be to miss achieving our absolute highest and best social purpose.
steele 4y ago
An exceptional author would have more interesting examples if they had access to an education system beyond the myopia of Eurocentrism.
- yesenadam 4y ago
  You have a chance on HN to educate us. Give us some of the examples you refer to. If you know better, please share that knowledge. Instead of a shallow dismissal that gives off nothing but negativity. But I see your HN comments are usually just lazy responses of 4 or 5 words, or less, that add nothing to the site.
  - steele 4y ago
    Go to school to learn, or beg for labor elsewhere.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
hnthrowaway0315 4y ago
I'm thinking about childhood tutoring these days as my son has reached the age that doing activities with him altogether is not totally boring for me. However, I realized that I myself is not a good tutor. I don't retain a lot of academic knowledge even as a Master graduate some 10 years ago. Neither do I have a lot of time or energy to sacrifice plus I'm reluctant to sacrifice all of that to him -- which will make me quite unhappy as depression already hits due to chronic sleep deprivation. I'm not sure what's other people's plan, but I'm thinking about applying for the best local university to study Physics part-time in 5 years. I have always wanted to study General Relativity and this can kill the other bird of tutoring my son by just talking serious science and mathematics to him. I cam even invite say Doctorerate students to my home to freely discuss all kinds of topics so that my son can bath in that too. I wish I had the fuck you $$$ to immediately start executing my plan. I could do that part-time if I'm struggling with depression and fear of jobless in this economy. Anyway I wish you all good luck and your progeny having a bright future -- and more importantly have the freedom to pursuit his or her curiosoties instead of being a salary slave.
jhanschoo 4y ago
I like how this author's cursory research was so scientific that it fails to consider and control for all the other aristocratic children from those eras that his list is from who had tutors, connections, and apprenticeships and failed nevertheless to become "exceptional".
- api 4y ago
  Typical “rationalist” stuff: a supposedly smart person makes bald faced assertions backed by sophistry. Bonus points if it’s asserting something contrarian. But what do I know. I’m not officially high IQ enough to blindly assert that my personal biases are valid a priori because I’m smart.
  - bryananderson 4y ago
    Double bonus points if the “contrarian” thing is the exact opposite of contrarian within the intended audience.
- traject_ 4y ago
  That could mean it is a necessary but not sufficient condition; I don't think your observation by itself invalidates anything the author said.
  - curiousgal 4y ago
    I just typed the same comment before reading this. I totally agree!
- barry-cotter 4y ago
  The point, one presumes, is to make it as likely as possible that your child will become exceptional if they have the potential to do so. If these things are necessary but not sufficient doing them takes the odds from non-existent to small. More likely it takes them from extremely small to very small.
- Atheros 4y ago
  He didn't fail to consider that, he just didn't consider that, because he had no reason to consider that, just like he didn't consider the orbit of Pluto or the phases of the moon. If you think he should have considered and controlled for something, say why explicitly.
Imnimo 4y ago
Do the kids participating in, say, the math Olympiad not receive an amount of tutoring and exposure to satisfy these criteria?
- impossiblefork 4y ago
  I think it's too late and too little. There are some maths olympiad medalists who have become great mathematicians though, so it's probably good.
thepasswordis 4y ago
In summary: homeschool until 12, send them to Catholic school after that. Surround them with smart people, foster a culture of inquisitiveness, and encourage independence.
LiamMcCalloway 4y ago
Looks like sampling on the dependent variable.
ilaksh 4y ago
The internet changes this in some ways. You don't need to literally be surrounded or in the same social circle to interface with gifted people now. Although the other aspects like being wealthy and having excellent role models and private tutors certainly still make a difference. Also home schooling means that people learn at individual rates rather than being held back by the class.
twayt 4y ago
One thing you realize after a certain age is that the notion of a person having any attribute X, whether X is a good thing (genius etc.) or bad thing, is almost completely a product of the environment / society and has little to do with the person themselves. People are just people, society puts these labels on people and that shapes people to express / develop certain attributes and hide others. The more interesting question is why certain attributes are highlighted over others. Think about that for a bit and the answers will probably surprise you. Some reasons are self-reinforcing / recursive but others are rooted in a functional reason or a flaw in thinking (also interesting to consider why some flaws are so common that they are grandfathered into the system). My thinking abruptly stops once I get to the physical survival layer and I don’t think we have sufficient language to reason beyond that.
paganel 4y ago
Parents obsessing over the intellectual fate of their children is just a middle-bourgeois endeavour, it reeks of desperation and of missed opportunities (for those adults themselves).
- emodendroket 4y ago
  Don't forget anxiety about their children not growing up to have the same class position.
emptybits 4y ago
Most parents won't drastically change the financial resources or personal time they commit to their kids' development. They probably can't. But this aspect seems immediately achievable and costs little: "It is just a way of viewing children: as capable of competence, as craving meaningful work, as worthy to be included in serious discussions. We can learn to view them like that, but it is a subtle and profound shift in perception, a shift away from the way we are taught to view children."
b800h 4y ago
This is an interesting article, and it's obviously inspirational, but I think to complete the job you'd have to reverse the process, and ask what the outcomes were like for ALL children raised with the techniques he's identified. For example, home tutoring might result in a greater number of exceptional people, but it might also lead to a higher incidence of those children going completely off the rails. Perhaps the question might be which child-raising techniques have the strongest benefit/risk ratio. That said, I bet most of the things in the list are largely upside.
steve1977 4y ago
It seems this article is biased towards examples of people considered “positively exceptional”. That could be a bit dangerous. It would be interesting to also look at biographies of “negatively exceptional” people (mass murders etc.) If those two groups have things in common in their biographies, some caution would probably be warranted.
- guelo 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure the purpose of the essay is to find child rearing ideas making the childhoods of negatively exceptional people irrelevant.
  - fastball 4y ago
    I think you're missing the point GC was trying to make, which is that the kind of child-rearing patterns that make "positive" geniuses might also make negative ones. i.e. "all positive geniuses were given X, but not all people given X became positive geniuses (some became mass murderers).
    - steve1977 4y ago
      That was my point, thanks for putting it into words a bit better than I could.
  - dijit 4y ago
    on the contrary, its possible there is a common factor for both which may become more obvious if plotted with the rest. it might also point out things that might corrupt an exceptional person to become net-negative to society.
  - vineyardmike 4y ago
    One of the commonalities the essay highlighted was lots of alone time as a child: > A common theme in the biographies is that the area of study which would eventually give them fame came to them almost like a wild hallucination induced by overdosing on boredom. They would be overcome by an obsession arising from within I can easily imagine a child being left alone for long periods of time becoming disconnected from society, potentially to a destructive or anti-social point. Force-ably isolating your child for hours a day is probably not something that should be recommended lightly. Even mildly, its possible that your child will seemly be socially awkward or feel disconnected from their peers, which could affect them growing up more than any exceptionalism.
mcqueenjordan 4y ago
I really like a lot of the conclusions the article draws -- 1:1 tutoring, Taking Children Seriously, Access to an Exceptional Milieu, etc. However, I have always thought that the answer to the question "What happened to all the geniuses?" was somewhat obvious -- we ran out of an abundance of low hanging fruit to discover. The 'ease of discovery' for breakthroughs in science and math are on a some sort of a non-linear curve, and they aren't getting easier.
- thatoneguytoo 4y ago
  IMO "abundance of low hanging fruit" is the main factor As Physics got more saturated, and matured, these geniuses somehow just stopped.
  - substation13 4y ago
    Yep. And these historic geniuses were often Polymaths. Every field was smaller and an individual could realistically make several contributions.
    - thatoneguytoo 4y ago
      we see the same in tech too. many of the genius billionaires somehow just got started during the boom period.
      - danuker 4y ago
        The boom period may have more to do with macroeconomics affording hiring more people, than their ability to solve problems.
    - trudler 4y ago
      I don't get you guys... The geniuses can still make very valuable contributions to humanity. It's just that the general public will have a hard time understanding a new achievement. We already see this everywhere. "Higgs Teilchen" and so on. The media showed it, nobody cared and everyone was confused (found at the CERN in geneva). It only makes sense. We still make immense progress, but in very detaily branches often, that people just want to use but not having to know about, because of the sheer complexity. I wonder where the borders of humans will be. :) We might not be far from them anymore. Nowadays, to get into unknows territory, you need to do scientific research for decades often and an exceptional brain. Because you need to get the basics first, to which others created the paths. The next real innovation I see will be affordable space travelling and populating other planets. Other than that, some minor stuff will be implemented like nuclear fusion reactors and the like. The hardest thing will be to define "individuals" who contributed some of that stuff alone, as it used to be in the past (more or less).
jalapenos 4y ago
A wonderful article. Albeit one that makes me sad to think of what could have been. I hope everyone can think of how to raise their kids more like this.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  Step 1 is being rich, by the sounds of it. > Michel Montaigne’s father employed only servants who were fluent in Latin, Is one example
ChemSpider 4y ago
This article is a good example of how NOT to do science and analysis. It is a completely arbitrary mix of what the authors thinks are exceptional people. To me it feels he wrote the conclusions first and then picked the people to support his theory.
- HlessClaudesman 4y ago
  Many posts raising objections to this obviously non-scientific article seem to be falling victim to motivated reasoning. Parents these days are stressed, two breadwinner families are the norm, adding child rearing to this is asking two people to do the work of three. Overworked parents would rather shoot the messenger proclaiming that they could / should have put more thought and energy into their kids' upbringing. It's an uncomfortable idea that the thing that has been sacrificed to maintain our two car lifestyle lies somewhere between our child's ears.
  - kurthr 4y ago
    True and that's seen in many societies. It's a huge cause of the falling birth rate. Many parents simply don't have the resources to raise multiple children.
    - simonh 4y ago
      Are you seriously implying that the average family in the developed world nowadays is more impoverished than their grandparents? We have the resources, but we choose to devote them to other priorities. It's the two car lifestyle bit that's the issue. But frankly in past generations for the vast majority investment in the education and development of children was almost non-existent. treating children seriously and investing in their development was a luxury only a few could afford, and only a tiny few of them bothered to do so. Nowadays with universal public education the base level of education of most children is orders of magnitude better resourced, but of course still fairly generic. We just don't bother to add much on top of that, mostly.
      - 4y ago
the_omegist 4y ago
I've quickly read the blog post. Indeed, every comment here agrees on the recipe : wealthy family, private/personal tutoring and gifted children to begin with. But it seems, when asking if it can still be reproduced nowadays, no one here mentions the negative factors, the "inhibitors". I think social medias, tv (less nowadays), an education system less focused on core knowledge and more on "social" trivia, without mentioning a society that just is/seems giving less praise to smart people or intellectual achievements is not a soil from where geniuses can grow. People love to mention "low hanging fruits" but for music, philosophy or writing, there are no "low hanging fruits", yet I hope no one is gonna question the fact we don't see new Platos, Mozart or Hugos emerging...
- raspberry1337 4y ago
  I am Hugo and I just merged
- eggsmediumrare 4y ago
  Don't we? Or is our culture orders of magnitude bigger and thus the Platos and Mozarts and Hugos go less recognized due to competition from the Kants and Beethovens and Wolfes who are doing their thing at the same time? Did Plato have anything more profound to say than Daniel Kahneman or Sam Harris? Is Tosin Abasi less of a virtuoso than Mozart? How many brilliant writers toil away unrecognized because they can't break through Amazon's stranglehold on self-publishing?
  - the_omegist 4y ago
    I believe the only advantage our societies have over the previous ones is better technology. I don't think we evolved (much) as a species since Plato's times. So to answer your question let me ask you one : do you think the names you quoted will still be remembered (and influential) in 100yrs? 1000yrs ? Sam Harris hype already faded after a couple of years and he said nothing special than Mark Twain didn't already say in "what is Man?". If by "culture" & "orders of magnitude bigger" you are referring to the amount of music,books, ... produced every year : I see it like noise or pollution, making it even more difficult to find potential gems. But I can agree genius didn't leave the world : it is just that the people who would have been found by institutions or who would have had more incentives to show their work are "out of phase" with modern society and "gone underground".
alex_duf 4y ago
Wouldn't looking only at successful people be running right into the survivor bias?
jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 4y ago
I feel like the conclusion I draw from this data is that smart people tend to have smart (and wealthy) parents
- tjpnz 4y ago
  Having wealthy parents buys a lot of private tutoring which pays huge dividends if you were born with decidedly average analytical ability.
  - jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 4y ago
    Does it? I'd be interested in the data on private tutoring. Would be really interesting if tutoring could turn an average student into a great mind.
liammclennan 4y ago
I feel that the author has largely just identified the correlation between “exceptionalism” and wealth in the 18th and 19th centuries.
- stuckinhell 4y ago
  I agree with you here.
9991 4y ago
Such sloppy reasoning from a site that pretends to care so much about rationality. No attempt from the author to distinguish the effects of childhood from other things that might impact genius. Did he even consider alternative hypotheses for 5 minutes? Or how to distinguish effects from one another. Not even getting into that this is a study of a list of people the author has heard of.
nottorp 4y ago
Interesting but... Survivor bias? How many other children had similar childhoods and didn't grow up to be exceptional?
- frodetb 4y ago
  You are right to point that out, but I don't think the article is making a claim that its findings compose a recipe for exceptionalism. It actually seems very careful not to make any claims at all, except that it presents "a few of the patterns that have struck [the author] after having skimmed 42 biographies".
  - nottorp 4y ago
    I do happen to agree with idle time, unrestricted access to information for self study and high level entourage. Not so sure about tutoring.
irthomasthomas 4y ago
Sorry, but as it is, this is useless. It falls into the same trap as all of those books on the habits of successful people. Unless you include a control group it doesn't tell you anything. You need to also study the childhoods of unexceptional people, in order that determine what is actually unique. Go out and take the biographies of a few hundred homeless people and compare.
BlandDuck 4y ago
I have two problems with this line of reasoning. Not just this article, but this line of reasoning in general. First, it postulates that "if you want to master something, you should study the highest achievements of your field". I don't think this is obvious at all. Exceptional achievement is often attained through a unique combination of individual traits and random luck, which it is not necessarily useful to study or trying to replicate. As an example, people who have attained extreme wealth have often done so by being very lucky at very concentrated financial bets, and this is definitely not an approach that it is advisable to mimic. In the same vein, the article talks about home schooling and exposing children to exceptional circumstances, which sounds like it may increase the volatility more than the mean. Second, it fails to run the reasoning through Bayes rule. The relevant question is not whether exceptional people have certain traits or experiences in common, per se. The more relevant question is whether these traits and experiences make you more or less likely to become exceptional than people who don't share those traits and experiences. For that, you also need a sense of the prevalence of these traits and experiences, and associated outcomes, in the broader population.
omgomgomgomg 4y ago
I am having this issue now, the kid is getting into phase where we need to make a decision about languages and schools etc. Currently, we are in Spain, the salaries we have are very good for here, but the economy is the worst in the EU by far, docs and lawyers earn barely more than 2300 Euro net after graduating, I really like Spain, but perhaps the kids chances for the future would be severly inhibited going to school here. We are solid upper middle class here. The other option would be Switzerland, but we would be lower middle class or worse there. Switzerland does have what I think is the best education system, with some caveats, its very competitive and if youre slow, youll be delegated into a low performer segment which will prevent you from attending faculty(you can qualify for this later). University cost is cheap, actually, even at the renomated ETH Zurich. The 3rd option would be Colombia, there we would be top tier class and the kid would have a privileged upbringing and education. The country is a bit dangerous and a private university costs more than the ETH. Jobs are scarce in Colombia, many people with masters and doctorates can be without a job for months or years and the pay is worse than Spain. Many dentists and such leave for Europe only to work in a fish fabric or some other no skill job. 4th option is UK, I only like London there, but it is definitelly too dear and we would get the worst bang for the buck, so to say. I consider the UK education as fantastic, if you make it to university. I have lived and worked in all the places and I wonder if 15 to 20 years from now most jobs will be remote, or at least accessible to most. Any feedback and input from you people would be greatly appreciated. I do not want to make the kid exceptional, unconditional love and best possible upbringing is my goal. Exceptional kids often come at a very heavy price.
- elhudy 4y ago
  The formal education system at the university level in any of those countries, to me, seems like the exact opposite type of education this article so highly touts. Not only that, but those universities are typically attended much later in life at a time when most children could have already experienced exceptional growth. I'm having a hard time seeing the parallel between your thought / decision-making process and the article.
  - omgomgomgomg 4y ago
patwolf 4y ago
Scott Alexander has written several pieces mentioning Von Neumann. This is one of them: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-consid... From what I recall, there was a singular time and place from which many exceptional people were born. They were Jewish Hungarians, born prior to WW2. He was an exceptional person that happened to be born at the right time and place for it to be fully realized.
iambateman 4y ago
This article asks fascinating questions and then answers them in a bizarre way. For starters, the confounding variable among many of these folks is being rich. Simply being rich increases one’s odds of doing something remarkable because one need devote less time to the daily work of being human. But also, there is no explanatory power here. To say “Woolf grew up homeschooled and alone” does not explain why she was special and her sister was not. I too grew up homeschooled and was often alone and got to see many other children in the same situation. Many of them struggle in adulthood. Today, my capacity for aloneness is much higher than most, but I am probably not in danger of writing a classic novel. Again, interesting questions; dubious answers.
bedobi 4y ago
This is peak HN. Those of you who seriously contemplate subjecting your children to emulating what the article describes should be banned from having children, lol.
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29athrowaway 4y ago
Feynman grew up fixing old radios where electronic components were larger and easier to reason about.
graycat 4y ago
For education of present young people, the core need is to give them what will help them for the next 60 years. We can be fairly sure that one important theme for the next 60 years will be the economy. The economy has two important sides: The producers and the consumers. The producers need to generate products/services that please the consumers. So we see two goals for education: (1) Understand people, the consumers, how to please them. (2) Understand automation, for the lower costs of high quality production of products/services. So, net, understand people and automation.
steveBK123 4y ago
I think modern over-parenting by high income / HCOL area / high status couples takes sort of the worst of these approaches and produces a lot of precocious, stressed out, cardboard cutout, downwardly mobile youth. I suppose in olden days of yore, labor was cheaper so people could afford some of the 1-1 instruction/tutoring/etc from the article. Nowadays, the more common approach is to hustle/coach your kid so they get into highly selective K-12 programs, and/or pay up for the highly selective private school flavor. You then put your kids in the same dozen or so box-ticking exercise extracurriculars that all your social group are doing to their kids. Little league baseball? LOL, that's for the poors. My kid does fencing. Camp? Sorry that's below my kid, he/she does summers abroad at Oxford. Summer job when they turn 16? My kid doesn't need the minimum wage cash, anyway they are staying with our friends in DC to volunteer at HQ of an NGO this summer. By 17 you have a kid capable of scoring 1500+ on SATs, with a deep resume, and no ability to handle adversity. The real shock comes when they are up against 100,000 similarly coached kids. The kids end up only getting into colleges at best as selective as their parents, and quite often less so. Most of these kids are also so busy on their all-rounder resume building for 17 years, they have no career aspirations or idea what to do for a living..
- alexchantavy 4y ago
  I agree mostly with your post and wanted to ask about: > By 17 you have a kid capable of scoring 1500+ on SATs, with a deep resume, and no ability to handle adversity. How would the wealthy children in the olden days mentioned in this post be any different with handling adversity? How does one create an environment for their kids to learn independence, but also have academic rigor without being spoon fed and developing no deep curiosity/passion of their own?
  - steveBK123 4y ago
    I think the wealthy children in olden days probably had stricter teachers who gave them plenty of adversity in real-time. However there were also fewer wealthy producing fewer of these children so there was less competition for schools and jobs. You now have a sort of college prep industrial complex and mass affluent feeding into the same small number of prestigious school seats.. and thus more disappointment. I got into schools with scholarship money 25 years ago with 1300 SAT and no resume that kids with 1550 can’t even get into now. It’s quite an arms race.
stuckinhell 4y ago
So exceptional people had a lot of private tutors/training hired by their rich families ? That seems to be the critical takeaway for me.
aught 4y ago
Well thats a take…
g9yuayon 4y ago
> if you want to master something, you should study the highest achievements of your field > Thinking about this question, I wrote down a list of twenty names—von Neumann, Tolstoy, Curie, Pascal, etc So the author advocates that we learn from geniuses how to master something? I'm not sure if this premise is true to start with. Von Neumann could solve complex PDE systems in his mind in minutes if not seconds, can we no matter how hard we try? Poincare worked only four hours day, can we? Euler wrote faster than people could digest his writings, can we? Galois invented group theory when he was 19, yet how many people could really understand the simplest college-level abstract algebra after they graduate from a STEM field? Feynman (or Einstein?) self taught himself calculus by 12 or 14, yet how many students struggled with the concept of variables when they were at the same age no matter how hard they and their teachers tried? Those are extraordinary people with extraordinary capabilities. I'm not sure how much we can learn from them to master something. Rather, I would learn from ordinary people who struggle from time to time yet somehow manage to master something.
- eldritch_4ier 4y ago
  As someone who's followed pretty much this exact advice the article lays out since I was maybe 14 or so, I found it very useful in my life. I was interested in physics actually. So at 14 as a B student at a school district in the middle of nowhere, I went on to self-learn calculus up to what amounts to AP Calculus by 15, published a minor physics paper by 16 (when I started working in the particle physics lab at my state college), and graduated high school a year early at 17 and entered a top-tier public school. That was years ago, but I've done pretty well since, and I attribute a lot of it to constantly comparing myself to larger-than-life masters like these to be constantly paranoid about how I can move faster (this comes with a need to be self aware and to self-manage well, including giving yourself breaks and listening to your mental/physical health of course, you don't need to be a Terminator and I don't recommend it). The big value for me I'd say was a replacement for the lack of role models in my surroundings and getting a sense for what a really high bar looks like. At least for myself, striving to be a flawed human that has also mastered something is a bad target (but inevitably where every human ends up). If you actually want to land there, you have to aim even higher.

322 points by lxm 4y ago

Scubabear68 4y ago

I don’t think the models from those time periods work today.

swayvil 4y ago
Home schooling, hanging with brilliant people, free to pursue your own goals. That's the models, right?
- Scubabear68 4y ago
  Not what I meant. Back then you were either rich and had these golden opportunities, or you were like 99.999999% of humanity and had no chance at exceptionalism they would be noticed. With the Internet and modern connectedness, things are very different.
  - barry-cotter 4y ago
    > or you were like 99.999999% of humanity and had no chance at exceptionalism they would be noticed. I see where you’re coming from but those numbers are way off. Leonardo da Vinci and Rembrandt weren’t the children of peasants but neither were they nobles. They were relatively privileged but well over 1% of the population were as well off. Notary’s or miller’s son in a pre industrial society is bourgeois not one in less than a million.
- OJFord 4y ago
  I think GP means in a quasi-statistical/ML sense: if you build your model for an upbringing for success on data of yesteryear, it doesn't necessarily work (give good predictions for) today.
  - seymourhersh 4y ago
    Isn’t this a meaningless truism that can be applied to any model you haven’t proven works?

ip26 4y ago

I like the process. I do think it reaffirms well understood themes: 1) wealthy family 2) motivated and involved parents 3) very bright kids That said it’s interesting to see specifics.

paulpauper 4y ago
Yeah, that seems to be consistently the winning formula. It's obviously no assurance of creating a superstar, but it certainly boosts the odds, as low as they are.
- epicureanideal 4y ago
  Yeah, in all seriousness I probably could’ve been an exceptional person, but broken home and very low income childhood made a lot of things more challenging. Probably will end up in a pretty good situation in absolute terms but nowhere near what would’ve been possible.
  - klipt 4y ago
    Some families have bootstrapped their way out of poverty, but it usually takes multiple generations. Hence "families" rather than "individuals".
- Foobar8568 4y ago
  This is so true. Just being able to read your kids some stories before night time until they can read makes your kids in the top 10% of his peers, and the kids enjoy it. Shared privileged moment with their parents.

ckardat123 4y ago

This is an interesting article, but I think it's hard to form any conclusions about the correct way to parent children from this information due to the inherent selection bias. It may be true that a lot of exceptional people were taken seriously by their parents and given serious responsibilities, but I think that also may be due to the parents realizing that their children were exceptional. If you have a child who's closer to average intellect, you might not get the same outcome. It's also possible that these approaches just increase the variance of outcomes. So it might be that they generate exceptional people 1% of the time, but generate miserable people who accomplish nothing 99% of the time. I don't think that this is likely to be true to that magnitude, and I think a lot of the advice seems pretty good intuitively (I feel like being treated seriously by my parents when I was young was a big benefit), but am curious if there is any more data-driven approach to the question of how to best raise your kids.

paulpauper 4y ago
Think of how many kids were tutored by wealthy families over the past 500 years. How many achieved close to anything of noteworthiness like the examples in the article?
- Jill_the_Pill 4y ago
  How about the siblings of these people, with presumably the same upbringing?
- ip26 4y ago
  At the same time it’s still instructive to note, however, all the wealthy kids who were not tutored and who do not show up in the list.
mikeiz404 4y ago
This article [1], linked from original article, looks at the effects of direct instruction and mastery learning across various studies. I did not read it all but it concludes from randomized interventions that these approaches have a beneficial outcome on students when compared to alternatives (though not as high as two standard deviations as previously suggested). 1: https://nintil.com/bloom-sigma/ https://nintil.com/bloom-sigma/

paulpauper 4y ago

When it comes to formal instruction, an important element is tutoring. Some do all of their formal learning this way (such as John Stuart Mill), others have it as a complement to schooling (such as Albert Einstein, who had a number of math-focused tutors outside of school). Erik Hoel, who has written a series of great essays about why we stopped making Einsteins (here, here, and here), singled out “aristocratic tutoring” as the most important factor. (In this term, Erik includes not only tutoring, in its classical sense, but also more casual interactions between children and competent adults.) If I had to guess, the reason is much of the low hanging fruit has been picked. Progress is much more incremental and hard, building on a huge body of technical existing literature. Being the next Einstein means you have to learn everything Einstein knew, plus another 100 years on top of that. Tons of papers on arXiv to go through. Lots of dense math.

readthenotes1 4y ago
Did not Einstein win his Nobel prize for explaining Brownian motion in classical Newtonian physics? That is, did he not also have to master the existing material of the day using the woeful tools of the late 19th and earliest 20th century? He had neither the internet nor Anki cards to help him learn anything. I do not think the problem is one of low-hanging fruit
- deleted 4y ago
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- Kranar 4y ago
  Technically, Einstein won the Nobel prize for "his services to theoretical physics and especially the photoelectric effect", but in actuality he won it for his work on relativity. The reason the Nobel committee did not just give him the award for relativity was because until 1919, there was no way to experimentally verify relativity theory, and then in 1919 when it was experimentally verified, there was a significant increase in anti-semitism following the end of the first World War and a great deal of hesitation to award it to Einstein for what was considered an incredibly complex theory that few people could understand. Because of that, a compromise was reached, and Einstein would receive a deferred award for the photoelectric effect, which was much less contentious. But everyone understood that Einstein had won the award for his work on relativity.

anigbrowl 4y ago

Thinking about this question, I wrote down a list of twenty names—von Neumann, Tolstoy, Curie, Pascal, etc—selected on the highly scientific criteria “a random Swedish person can recall their name and think, Sounds like a genius to me”. This is not even wrong, never mind less.

seymourhersh 4y ago
Which of the people listed do you think are poor choices for the purposes of the article?
314 4y ago
I tried this on a random Swedish person and she identified all of the names as people that sounded like a genius. Seems legit.

theGnuMe 4y ago

I taught myself linux at age 13 when it came out based on my experience with msdos. So dail-up modems and slackware. Now with the Internet things are amazing in terms of what you can learn if you are interested. I do think 1:1 tutoring is especially helpful but it doesn't help the socialization and group emotional regulation things that come up in school. Those are important skills as well.

anon291 4y ago
> I do think 1:1 tutoring is especially helpful but it doesn't help the socialization and group emotional regulation things that come up in school. Those are important skills as well. Unfortunately, children in school only learn how to emotionally regulate with children of the same age, which is why so many find 'adulting' hard.
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  > which is why so many find 'adulting' hard. Being an adult is hard. Its so much harder than being a student living with your parents. It does require a dedicated skillset that isn't taught to minors anymore, and it requires owning a lot more responsibility, all at once. When I was in school there was no HomeEc, no woodshop, no financial literacy, and the closest thing to health info I learned was that men are gross and need deodorant while women should stay a virgin. There is a real stress and challenge with maintaining a home, saving for retirement, etc as a young (and likely lower-income) person. And that's to say nothing about the growing income and affordability gap present across generations, making it harder for younger generations to achieve the life their parents had. A generation ago most women didn't work and everyone got married at a young age. Consequently, most adults lived in a shared household where one person spent their entire day cooking and cleaning and preparing the household.
sibeliuss 4y ago
> it doesn't help the socialization and group emotional regulation things that come up in school I think this is almost certainly a myth. There are a lot of ways that children can learn this.

rosebay 4y ago

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wanderingmind 4y ago

Ramanujan is an extreme outlier but an aspiration to lot of Indians. Growing up in the southern tip of India in British Raj to a poor family, he had to literally struggle through all his life, going hungry a lot. It was because he was only good at Math and nothing else, which was unacceptable to be employed by the British. "The Man who knew Infinity" by "Robert Kanigel" is a great book that captures the essence of his work and life beautifully.

barelyauser 4y ago
Ramanujan was an anomaly. What do we learn from someone like him? Can we reproduce it? Should we aspire to reproduce it? Or will it cause more harm than not?
- vlovich123 4y ago
  We should be crashing the conditions for as many anomalies as possible if we could. Talent like that is rare and moves humanity forward faster than the incrementalism we’re normally capable of
  - bryananderson 4y ago
    Trying to produce more Ramanujans by recreating the conditions of his childhood seems about as likely to work as trying to produce more cargo flights by waving landing signals around on a runway.
    - vlovich123 4y ago
      I didn’t at any point suggest we recreate the conditions of his childhood. All I said is we should create conditions that enables more of these anomalies to flourish in society. It feels like modern society is set up to stamp out such anomalies.
  - eastbound 4y ago
    Anomaly-based talent often implies that there persons sacrificed their lives, often their health, their family, to get an edge. A lot of high-achievers are suicidal, like Churchill, who only succeeded at plane dogfights because he’s the only outlier that didn’t die performing those crazy stunts. A lot of those who try and don’t succeed are very suicidal. I’m all for meritocracy, but we should strive so that most people can succeed in parallel to a good family life. So that the children are balanced and loved, and we have a second generation who’s even better.

bitwize 4y ago

So what made them brilliant was largely the usual suspects -- luck and privilege. Good to know.

paulpauper 4y ago
Maybe in those examples, but we're talking 20 people from 100 years ago. A lot has changed. Look at all the people earning good salaries at tech companies today. How many of them are from privileged backgrounds? Probably not that many. Looking at the bios of Forbes 400 CEOs or VCs or founders we see a similar pattern. Not so much being in the top 1% but more like the top 20%.
- ahoya 4y ago
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- vineyardmike 4y ago
  > Look at all the people earning good salaries at tech companies today. They're obviously in a great place in their life, but thats hardly "exceptionalism" like Van Neumann was. Tech exceptionals are a different and more selective cohort (you said CEOs). Take Steve Jobs - he wasn't wealthy, but he spent time alone as a child, and his earlier teachers gave him extra personal attention. His parents would share their interests with him (eg carpentry), and gave him freedom to learn from them and also learn from the neighbors (who were Silicon Valley engineers). He cold-called Hewlett (H of HP) who gave him a job at 13. He was starting businesses in high school for money. Steve was given a long leash to learn, ample minds and talent to observe, and was treated like a self-directed adult as a child.
aik 4y ago
So interesting how people can read the same thing and get completely different lessons out of it. I read it in a much less defeatist way: A big predictor of success for your kids is to deliberately surround yourself and family as much as possible with the best people you know according to the values and ethic you want to bestow upon your kids.
pico303 4y ago

Brushfire 4y ago

We often worry about how to make our children exceptional, but I wonder of the people studied here, how many were genuinely happy? Shouldn’t we want our children to be happy more than we want them to be exceptional? The two aren’t mutually exclusive of course, but the pursuit of exceptionalism might lead to a less happy life, especially if that exceptionalism doesn’t materialize. I know far too many people pushed incredibly hard by their family/circumstances and burned out fast.

paulpauper 4y ago
These are mutually exclusive or positively correlated slightly, that is, successful people generally being happier. It's not like you have to choose between one or the other.
- kortilla 4y ago
  Successful and exceptional aren’t the same thing here.
seymourhersh 4y ago
The people described in the article don’t seem to have been “pushed incredibly hard” by their family or circumstances. For the most part it seems like the opposite - they were just given access to a lot of resources and expertise to help them in the directions they were already heading.
- NovaDudely 4y ago
  Bingo! The strive to achieve was an innate function. Having others realize the resources they needed allowed it to happen.
voisin 4y ago
We are concerned with exceptionalism as a society because we want to benefit from the exceptional person. We tell people it is better to be great than happy and assign all sorts of value judgments around that. We as a society have collectively forgotten how to be present, mindful, and enjoy this moment. To do so would be to miss achieving our absolute highest and best social purpose.

steele 4y ago

An exceptional author would have more interesting examples if they had access to an education system beyond the myopia of Eurocentrism.

yesenadam 4y ago
You have a chance on HN to educate us. Give us some of the examples you refer to. If you know better, please share that knowledge. Instead of a shallow dismissal that gives off nothing but negativity. But I see your HN comments are usually just lazy responses of 4 or 5 words, or less, that add nothing to the site.
- steele 4y ago
  Go to school to learn, or beg for labor elsewhere.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

hnthrowaway0315 4y ago

I'm thinking about childhood tutoring these days as my son has reached the age that doing activities with him altogether is not totally boring for me. However, I realized that I myself is not a good tutor. I don't retain a lot of academic knowledge even as a Master graduate some 10 years ago. Neither do I have a lot of time or energy to sacrifice plus I'm reluctant to sacrifice all of that to him -- which will make me quite unhappy as depression already hits due to chronic sleep deprivation. I'm not sure what's other people's plan, but I'm thinking about applying for the best local university to study Physics part-time in 5 years. I have always wanted to study General Relativity and this can kill the other bird of tutoring my son by just talking serious science and mathematics to him. I cam even invite say Doctorerate students to my home to freely discuss all kinds of topics so that my son can bath in that too. I wish I had the fuck you $$$ to immediately start executing my plan. I could do that part-time if I'm struggling with depression and fear of jobless in this economy. Anyway I wish you all good luck and your progeny having a bright future -- and more importantly have the freedom to pursuit his or her curiosoties instead of being a salary slave.

jhanschoo 4y ago

I like how this author's cursory research was so scientific that it fails to consider and control for all the other aristocratic children from those eras that his list is from who had tutors, connections, and apprenticeships and failed nevertheless to become "exceptional".

api 4y ago
Typical “rationalist” stuff: a supposedly smart person makes bald faced assertions backed by sophistry. Bonus points if it’s asserting something contrarian. But what do I know. I’m not officially high IQ enough to blindly assert that my personal biases are valid a priori because I’m smart.
- bryananderson 4y ago
  Double bonus points if the “contrarian” thing is the exact opposite of contrarian within the intended audience.
traject_ 4y ago
That could mean it is a necessary but not sufficient condition; I don't think your observation by itself invalidates anything the author said.
- curiousgal 4y ago
  I just typed the same comment before reading this. I totally agree!
barry-cotter 4y ago
The point, one presumes, is to make it as likely as possible that your child will become exceptional if they have the potential to do so. If these things are necessary but not sufficient doing them takes the odds from non-existent to small. More likely it takes them from extremely small to very small.
Atheros 4y ago
He didn't fail to consider that, he just didn't consider that, because he had no reason to consider that, just like he didn't consider the orbit of Pluto or the phases of the moon. If you think he should have considered and controlled for something, say why explicitly.

Imnimo 4y ago

Do the kids participating in, say, the math Olympiad not receive an amount of tutoring and exposure to satisfy these criteria?

impossiblefork 4y ago
I think it's too late and too little. There are some maths olympiad medalists who have become great mathematicians though, so it's probably good.

thepasswordis 4y ago

In summary: homeschool until 12, send them to Catholic school after that. Surround them with smart people, foster a culture of inquisitiveness, and encourage independence.

LiamMcCalloway 4y ago

Looks like sampling on the dependent variable.

ilaksh 4y ago

The internet changes this in some ways. You don't need to literally be surrounded or in the same social circle to interface with gifted people now. Although the other aspects like being wealthy and having excellent role models and private tutors certainly still make a difference. Also home schooling means that people learn at individual rates rather than being held back by the class.

twayt 4y ago

One thing you realize after a certain age is that the notion of a person having any attribute X, whether X is a good thing (genius etc.) or bad thing, is almost completely a product of the environment / society and has little to do with the person themselves. People are just people, society puts these labels on people and that shapes people to express / develop certain attributes and hide others. The more interesting question is why certain attributes are highlighted over others. Think about that for a bit and the answers will probably surprise you. Some reasons are self-reinforcing / recursive but others are rooted in a functional reason or a flaw in thinking (also interesting to consider why some flaws are so common that they are grandfathered into the system). My thinking abruptly stops once I get to the physical survival layer and I don’t think we have sufficient language to reason beyond that.

paganel 4y ago

Parents obsessing over the intellectual fate of their children is just a middle-bourgeois endeavour, it reeks of desperation and of missed opportunities (for those adults themselves).

emodendroket 4y ago
Don't forget anxiety about their children not growing up to have the same class position.

emptybits 4y ago

Most parents won't drastically change the financial resources or personal time they commit to their kids' development. They probably can't. But this aspect seems immediately achievable and costs little: "It is just a way of viewing children: as capable of competence, as craving meaningful work, as worthy to be included in serious discussions. We can learn to view them like that, but it is a subtle and profound shift in perception, a shift away from the way we are taught to view children."

b800h 4y ago

This is an interesting article, and it's obviously inspirational, but I think to complete the job you'd have to reverse the process, and ask what the outcomes were like for ALL children raised with the techniques he's identified. For example, home tutoring might result in a greater number of exceptional people, but it might also lead to a higher incidence of those children going completely off the rails. Perhaps the question might be which child-raising techniques have the strongest benefit/risk ratio. That said, I bet most of the things in the list are largely upside.

steve1977 4y ago

It seems this article is biased towards examples of people considered “positively exceptional”. That could be a bit dangerous. It would be interesting to also look at biographies of “negatively exceptional” people (mass murders etc.) If those two groups have things in common in their biographies, some caution would probably be warranted.

guelo 4y ago
I'm pretty sure the purpose of the essay is to find child rearing ideas making the childhoods of negatively exceptional people irrelevant.
- fastball 4y ago
  I think you're missing the point GC was trying to make, which is that the kind of child-rearing patterns that make "positive" geniuses might also make negative ones. i.e. "all positive geniuses were given X, but not all people given X became positive geniuses (some became mass murderers).
  - steve1977 4y ago
    That was my point, thanks for putting it into words a bit better than I could.
- dijit 4y ago
  on the contrary, its possible there is a common factor for both which may become more obvious if plotted with the rest. it might also point out things that might corrupt an exceptional person to become net-negative to society.
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  One of the commonalities the essay highlighted was lots of alone time as a child: > A common theme in the biographies is that the area of study which would eventually give them fame came to them almost like a wild hallucination induced by overdosing on boredom. They would be overcome by an obsession arising from within I can easily imagine a child being left alone for long periods of time becoming disconnected from society, potentially to a destructive or anti-social point. Force-ably isolating your child for hours a day is probably not something that should be recommended lightly. Even mildly, its possible that your child will seemly be socially awkward or feel disconnected from their peers, which could affect them growing up more than any exceptionalism.

mcqueenjordan 4y ago

I really like a lot of the conclusions the article draws -- 1:1 tutoring, Taking Children Seriously, Access to an Exceptional Milieu, etc. However, I have always thought that the answer to the question "What happened to all the geniuses?" was somewhat obvious -- we ran out of an abundance of low hanging fruit to discover. The 'ease of discovery' for breakthroughs in science and math are on a some sort of a non-linear curve, and they aren't getting easier.

thatoneguytoo 4y ago
IMO "abundance of low hanging fruit" is the main factor As Physics got more saturated, and matured, these geniuses somehow just stopped.
- substation13 4y ago
  Yep. And these historic geniuses were often Polymaths. Every field was smaller and an individual could realistically make several contributions.
  - thatoneguytoo 4y ago
    we see the same in tech too. many of the genius billionaires somehow just got started during the boom period.
    - danuker 4y ago
      The boom period may have more to do with macroeconomics affording hiring more people, than their ability to solve problems.
  - trudler 4y ago
    I don't get you guys... The geniuses can still make very valuable contributions to humanity. It's just that the general public will have a hard time understanding a new achievement. We already see this everywhere. "Higgs Teilchen" and so on. The media showed it, nobody cared and everyone was confused (found at the CERN in geneva). It only makes sense. We still make immense progress, but in very detaily branches often, that people just want to use but not having to know about, because of the sheer complexity. I wonder where the borders of humans will be. :) We might not be far from them anymore. Nowadays, to get into unknows territory, you need to do scientific research for decades often and an exceptional brain. Because you need to get the basics first, to which others created the paths. The next real innovation I see will be affordable space travelling and populating other planets. Other than that, some minor stuff will be implemented like nuclear fusion reactors and the like. The hardest thing will be to define "individuals" who contributed some of that stuff alone, as it used to be in the past (more or less).

jalapenos 4y ago

A wonderful article. Albeit one that makes me sad to think of what could have been. I hope everyone can think of how to raise their kids more like this.

quickthrower2 4y ago
Step 1 is being rich, by the sounds of it. > Michel Montaigne’s father employed only servants who were fluent in Latin, Is one example

ChemSpider 4y ago

This article is a good example of how NOT to do science and analysis. It is a completely arbitrary mix of what the authors thinks are exceptional people. To me it feels he wrote the conclusions first and then picked the people to support his theory.

HlessClaudesman 4y ago
Many posts raising objections to this obviously non-scientific article seem to be falling victim to motivated reasoning. Parents these days are stressed, two breadwinner families are the norm, adding child rearing to this is asking two people to do the work of three. Overworked parents would rather shoot the messenger proclaiming that they could / should have put more thought and energy into their kids' upbringing. It's an uncomfortable idea that the thing that has been sacrificed to maintain our two car lifestyle lies somewhere between our child's ears.
- kurthr 4y ago
  True and that's seen in many societies. It's a huge cause of the falling birth rate. Many parents simply don't have the resources to raise multiple children.
  - simonh 4y ago
    Are you seriously implying that the average family in the developed world nowadays is more impoverished than their grandparents? We have the resources, but we choose to devote them to other priorities. It's the two car lifestyle bit that's the issue. But frankly in past generations for the vast majority investment in the education and development of children was almost non-existent. treating children seriously and investing in their development was a luxury only a few could afford, and only a tiny few of them bothered to do so. Nowadays with universal public education the base level of education of most children is orders of magnitude better resourced, but of course still fairly generic. We just don't bother to add much on top of that, mostly.
    - 4y ago

the_omegist 4y ago

I've quickly read the blog post. Indeed, every comment here agrees on the recipe : wealthy family, private/personal tutoring and gifted children to begin with. But it seems, when asking if it can still be reproduced nowadays, no one here mentions the negative factors, the "inhibitors". I think social medias, tv (less nowadays), an education system less focused on core knowledge and more on "social" trivia, without mentioning a society that just is/seems giving less praise to smart people or intellectual achievements is not a soil from where geniuses can grow. People love to mention "low hanging fruits" but for music, philosophy or writing, there are no "low hanging fruits", yet I hope no one is gonna question the fact we don't see new Platos, Mozart or Hugos emerging...

raspberry1337 4y ago
I am Hugo and I just merged
eggsmediumrare 4y ago
Don't we? Or is our culture orders of magnitude bigger and thus the Platos and Mozarts and Hugos go less recognized due to competition from the Kants and Beethovens and Wolfes who are doing their thing at the same time? Did Plato have anything more profound to say than Daniel Kahneman or Sam Harris? Is Tosin Abasi less of a virtuoso than Mozart? How many brilliant writers toil away unrecognized because they can't break through Amazon's stranglehold on self-publishing?
- the_omegist 4y ago
  I believe the only advantage our societies have over the previous ones is better technology. I don't think we evolved (much) as a species since Plato's times. So to answer your question let me ask you one : do you think the names you quoted will still be remembered (and influential) in 100yrs? 1000yrs ? Sam Harris hype already faded after a couple of years and he said nothing special than Mark Twain didn't already say in "what is Man?". If by "culture" & "orders of magnitude bigger" you are referring to the amount of music,books, ... produced every year : I see it like noise or pollution, making it even more difficult to find potential gems. But I can agree genius didn't leave the world : it is just that the people who would have been found by institutions or who would have had more incentives to show their work are "out of phase" with modern society and "gone underground".

alex_duf 4y ago

Wouldn't looking only at successful people be running right into the survivor bias?

jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 4y ago

I feel like the conclusion I draw from this data is that smart people tend to have smart (and wealthy) parents

tjpnz 4y ago
Having wealthy parents buys a lot of private tutoring which pays huge dividends if you were born with decidedly average analytical ability.
- jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 4y ago
  Does it? I'd be interested in the data on private tutoring. Would be really interesting if tutoring could turn an average student into a great mind.

liammclennan 4y ago

I feel that the author has largely just identified the correlation between “exceptionalism” and wealth in the 18th and 19th centuries.

stuckinhell 4y ago
I agree with you here.

9991 4y ago

Such sloppy reasoning from a site that pretends to care so much about rationality. No attempt from the author to distinguish the effects of childhood from other things that might impact genius. Did he even consider alternative hypotheses for 5 minutes? Or how to distinguish effects from one another. Not even getting into that this is a study of a list of people the author has heard of.

nottorp 4y ago

Interesting but... Survivor bias? How many other children had similar childhoods and didn't grow up to be exceptional?

frodetb 4y ago
You are right to point that out, but I don't think the article is making a claim that its findings compose a recipe for exceptionalism. It actually seems very careful not to make any claims at all, except that it presents "a few of the patterns that have struck [the author] after having skimmed 42 biographies".
- nottorp 4y ago
  I do happen to agree with idle time, unrestricted access to information for self study and high level entourage. Not so sure about tutoring.

irthomasthomas 4y ago

Sorry, but as it is, this is useless. It falls into the same trap as all of those books on the habits of successful people. Unless you include a control group it doesn't tell you anything. You need to also study the childhoods of unexceptional people, in order that determine what is actually unique. Go out and take the biographies of a few hundred homeless people and compare.

BlandDuck 4y ago

I have two problems with this line of reasoning. Not just this article, but this line of reasoning in general. First, it postulates that "if you want to master something, you should study the highest achievements of your field". I don't think this is obvious at all. Exceptional achievement is often attained through a unique combination of individual traits and random luck, which it is not necessarily useful to study or trying to replicate. As an example, people who have attained extreme wealth have often done so by being very lucky at very concentrated financial bets, and this is definitely not an approach that it is advisable to mimic. In the same vein, the article talks about home schooling and exposing children to exceptional circumstances, which sounds like it may increase the volatility more than the mean. Second, it fails to run the reasoning through Bayes rule. The relevant question is not whether exceptional people have certain traits or experiences in common, per se. The more relevant question is whether these traits and experiences make you more or less likely to become exceptional than people who don't share those traits and experiences. For that, you also need a sense of the prevalence of these traits and experiences, and associated outcomes, in the broader population.

omgomgomgomg 4y ago

I am having this issue now, the kid is getting into phase where we need to make a decision about languages and schools etc. Currently, we are in Spain, the salaries we have are very good for here, but the economy is the worst in the EU by far, docs and lawyers earn barely more than 2300 Euro net after graduating, I really like Spain, but perhaps the kids chances for the future would be severly inhibited going to school here. We are solid upper middle class here. The other option would be Switzerland, but we would be lower middle class or worse there. Switzerland does have what I think is the best education system, with some caveats, its very competitive and if youre slow, youll be delegated into a low performer segment which will prevent you from attending faculty(you can qualify for this later). University cost is cheap, actually, even at the renomated ETH Zurich. The 3rd option would be Colombia, there we would be top tier class and the kid would have a privileged upbringing and education. The country is a bit dangerous and a private university costs more than the ETH. Jobs are scarce in Colombia, many people with masters and doctorates can be without a job for months or years and the pay is worse than Spain. Many dentists and such leave for Europe only to work in a fish fabric or some other no skill job. 4th option is UK, I only like London there, but it is definitelly too dear and we would get the worst bang for the buck, so to say. I consider the UK education as fantastic, if you make it to university. I have lived and worked in all the places and I wonder if 15 to 20 years from now most jobs will be remote, or at least accessible to most. Any feedback and input from you people would be greatly appreciated. I do not want to make the kid exceptional, unconditional love and best possible upbringing is my goal. Exceptional kids often come at a very heavy price.

elhudy 4y ago
The formal education system at the university level in any of those countries, to me, seems like the exact opposite type of education this article so highly touts. Not only that, but those universities are typically attended much later in life at a time when most children could have already experienced exceptional growth. I'm having a hard time seeing the parallel between your thought / decision-making process and the article.
- omgomgomgomg 4y ago

patwolf 4y ago

Scott Alexander has written several pieces mentioning Von Neumann. This is one of them: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-consid... From what I recall, there was a singular time and place from which many exceptional people were born. They were Jewish Hungarians, born prior to WW2. He was an exceptional person that happened to be born at the right time and place for it to be fully realized.

iambateman 4y ago

This article asks fascinating questions and then answers them in a bizarre way. For starters, the confounding variable among many of these folks is being rich. Simply being rich increases one’s odds of doing something remarkable because one need devote less time to the daily work of being human. But also, there is no explanatory power here. To say “Woolf grew up homeschooled and alone” does not explain why she was special and her sister was not. I too grew up homeschooled and was often alone and got to see many other children in the same situation. Many of them struggle in adulthood. Today, my capacity for aloneness is much higher than most, but I am probably not in danger of writing a classic novel. Again, interesting questions; dubious answers.

bedobi 4y ago

This is peak HN. Those of you who seriously contemplate subjecting your children to emulating what the article describes should be banned from having children, lol.

averagestudent3 4y ago

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29athrowaway 4y ago

Feynman grew up fixing old radios where electronic components were larger and easier to reason about.

graycat 4y ago

For education of present young people, the core need is to give them what will help them for the next 60 years. We can be fairly sure that one important theme for the next 60 years will be the economy. The economy has two important sides: The producers and the consumers. The producers need to generate products/services that please the consumers. So we see two goals for education: (1) Understand people, the consumers, how to please them. (2) Understand automation, for the lower costs of high quality production of products/services. So, net, understand people and automation.

steveBK123 4y ago

I think modern over-parenting by high income / HCOL area / high status couples takes sort of the worst of these approaches and produces a lot of precocious, stressed out, cardboard cutout, downwardly mobile youth. I suppose in olden days of yore, labor was cheaper so people could afford some of the 1-1 instruction/tutoring/etc from the article. Nowadays, the more common approach is to hustle/coach your kid so they get into highly selective K-12 programs, and/or pay up for the highly selective private school flavor. You then put your kids in the same dozen or so box-ticking exercise extracurriculars that all your social group are doing to their kids. Little league baseball? LOL, that's for the poors. My kid does fencing. Camp? Sorry that's below my kid, he/she does summers abroad at Oxford. Summer job when they turn 16? My kid doesn't need the minimum wage cash, anyway they are staying with our friends in DC to volunteer at HQ of an NGO this summer. By 17 you have a kid capable of scoring 1500+ on SATs, with a deep resume, and no ability to handle adversity. The real shock comes when they are up against 100,000 similarly coached kids. The kids end up only getting into colleges at best as selective as their parents, and quite often less so. Most of these kids are also so busy on their all-rounder resume building for 17 years, they have no career aspirations or idea what to do for a living..

alexchantavy 4y ago
I agree mostly with your post and wanted to ask about: > By 17 you have a kid capable of scoring 1500+ on SATs, with a deep resume, and no ability to handle adversity. How would the wealthy children in the olden days mentioned in this post be any different with handling adversity? How does one create an environment for their kids to learn independence, but also have academic rigor without being spoon fed and developing no deep curiosity/passion of their own?
- steveBK123 4y ago
  I think the wealthy children in olden days probably had stricter teachers who gave them plenty of adversity in real-time. However there were also fewer wealthy producing fewer of these children so there was less competition for schools and jobs. You now have a sort of college prep industrial complex and mass affluent feeding into the same small number of prestigious school seats.. and thus more disappointment. I got into schools with scholarship money 25 years ago with 1300 SAT and no resume that kids with 1550 can’t even get into now. It’s quite an arms race.

stuckinhell 4y ago

So exceptional people had a lot of private tutors/training hired by their rich families ? That seems to be the critical takeaway for me.

aught 4y ago

Well thats a take…

g9yuayon 4y ago

> if you want to master something, you should study the highest achievements of your field > Thinking about this question, I wrote down a list of twenty names—von Neumann, Tolstoy, Curie, Pascal, etc So the author advocates that we learn from geniuses how to master something? I'm not sure if this premise is true to start with. Von Neumann could solve complex PDE systems in his mind in minutes if not seconds, can we no matter how hard we try? Poincare worked only four hours day, can we? Euler wrote faster than people could digest his writings, can we? Galois invented group theory when he was 19, yet how many people could really understand the simplest college-level abstract algebra after they graduate from a STEM field? Feynman (or Einstein?) self taught himself calculus by 12 or 14, yet how many students struggled with the concept of variables when they were at the same age no matter how hard they and their teachers tried? Those are extraordinary people with extraordinary capabilities. I'm not sure how much we can learn from them to master something. Rather, I would learn from ordinary people who struggle from time to time yet somehow manage to master something.

eldritch_4ier 4y ago
As someone who's followed pretty much this exact advice the article lays out since I was maybe 14 or so, I found it very useful in my life. I was interested in physics actually. So at 14 as a B student at a school district in the middle of nowhere, I went on to self-learn calculus up to what amounts to AP Calculus by 15, published a minor physics paper by 16 (when I started working in the particle physics lab at my state college), and graduated high school a year early at 17 and entered a top-tier public school. That was years ago, but I've done pretty well since, and I attribute a lot of it to constantly comparing myself to larger-than-life masters like these to be constantly paranoid about how I can move faster (this comes with a need to be self aware and to self-manage well, including giving yourself breaks and listening to your mental/physical health of course, you don't need to be a Terminator and I don't recommend it). The big value for me I'd say was a replacement for the lack of role models in my surroundings and getting a sense for what a really high bar looks like. At least for myself, striving to be a flawed human that has also mastered something is a bad target (but inevitably where every human ends up). If you actually want to land there, you have to aim even higher.