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Not sure it works like that, I think his biggest superpower was intrinsic motivation. Any child who read maths textbooks with enthusiasm for 3-4 hours a day for
by jama211 8mo ago
Not sure it works like that, I think his biggest superpower was intrinsic motivation. Any child who read maths textbooks with enthusiasm for 3-4 hours a day for years could in theory at least get close to doing what he did, but what kid had that level of motivation?
- jonahx 8mo ago> Any child who read maths textbooks with enthusiasm for 3-4 hours a day for years could in theory at least get close to doing what he did No, they couldn't. And neither could most adults, for that matter. Innate ability is real.
- jama211 8mo agoI simply disagree. Yes, they could. Same with adults. Basically no one does. Also I didn’t say innate ability doesn’t exist. But in my opinion is a small multiplier on top of effort. That’s why I said close to.
- petters 8mo agoAs a TA, I've seen adults try to pass initial college calculus many times (and failing - you were allowed to try several times) with enormous effort. It's not a small multiplier And this was still people selected from the small subset of the population choosing an engineering major. Human are much, much more different than you seem to think
- jama211 8mo agoGood for you. Those people likely didn’t have a true enthusiasm to learn the content, they just stressed and tried to cram themselves by. Kinda proves my point really.
- jonahx 8mo agoThere are many, many people (math majors, competitive programmers, chess players, etc) who devote incredible effort to becoming better, and simply cannot reach elite levels. And while in most cases elite players are also putting in a lot of effort, there are many cases where it is still relatively less than their peers who are trying harder but still lagging them. Would you ever be tempted to make such a claim (that everyone is close to the same in ability and effort is the main determiner of success) about athletes? It's so obviously untrue that it's laughable. Why would you think that mental ability is magically distributed evenly?
- plastic-enjoyer 8mo agoYour post reads like someone is bitter because he is a midwit
- ileonichwiesz 8mo ago> Would you ever be tempted to make such a claim (that everyone is close to the same in ability and effort is the main determiner of success) about athletes? Well yes, absolutely. People don’t do quadruple axels on the ice because they were somehow born with the ability, they can do it because they practice figure skating every day for years. Innate ability (or in this case, let’s be honest, mostly genetics determining body shape) certainly makes the difference between becoming an Olympic gold medalist and just being very good at the sport, but you need to get very far in the field before it truly holds you back. I don’t have a lot of experience with high-level professional sports, but I’m a classically trained violinist, and I’ve seen first-hand how a lot of the abilities that many people chalk up to “talent” (sense of rhythm, perfect pitch, composing music) are just skills that can be learned. Some students might need to practice more than others, sure, and some might reach a higher ceiling, but I firmly believe anyone can reach a high level with applied effort. “I don’t have the talent to paint so I won’t learn to do it” is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
- fuzzfactor 8mo agoThat's probably why some competitions are called Math Olympics. OTOH maybe there is no posibility whatsoever that genetics can determine mind shape no matter what.
- tovlier 8mo ago[dead]
- NitpickLawyer 8mo ago> No, they couldn't. Isn't that a bit too certain for something that's not settled at all? How else would you explain the Polgar sisters? I'm sure there are other examples, but this is the most famous one.
- jonahx 8mo agoFew claims in the social sciences are more fully settled. I don't think you could find a researcher in the world at a major university making that claim that randomly selected children could be reliably turned into world-class mathematicians with enough training. > How else would you explain the Polgar sisters? Genetics is the obvious explanation. The father was clearly very intelligent. Also to clarify: I agree that training and effort can have large effects, and that focusing on them is a good strategy. Over-believing in them is probably a good bias, even. But the idea that everyone is more or less the same except for effort is ridiculous.
- aurareturn 8mo agoAny child who read maths textbooks with enthusiasm for 3-4 hours a day for years could in theory at least get close to doing what he did, but what kid had that level of motivation? There is no way this is true. I've met and worked with enough people to know that not everyone has the same mental ability. There are some exceptionally sharp people and many dim witted ones too.
- jama211 8mo agoI don’t say everyone has the same mental ability. But I stand by my point. Those people you mentioned might be dimwitted in part _ because_ their lack of enthusiasm for learning is low, so they didn’t do it. I don’t care how smart you are, effort matters.
- drysine 8mo agoYeah, Fermi was such an unmotivated slacker. Relayed by Nick Metropolis: Fermi and von Neumann overlapped. They collaborated on problems of Taylor instabilities and they wrote a report. When Fermi went back to Chicago after that work he called in his very close collaborator, namely Herbert Anderson, a young Ph.D. student at Columbia, a collaboration that began from Fermi's very first days at Columbia and lasted up until the very last moment. Herb was an experimental physicist. (If you want to know about Fermi in great detail, you would do well to interview Herbert Anderson.) But, at any rate, when Fermi got back he called in Herb Anderson to his office and he said, "You know, Herb, how much faster I am in thinking than you are. That is how much faster von Neumann is compared to me." [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39965802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39965802
- bendbro 8mo agoI take it you've never met another human before
- fuzzfactor 8mo agoThis can descend from a hive-mind of not ever giving credit to anyone different than themselves.
- jama211 8mo agoWho is this aimed at?
- fuzzfactor 8mo agoNot you, because it looks like you're not one who thinks it's written in stone that genetics has no effect whatsoever. You cleared that up real well. But that's where that kind of thing comes from.
- jama211 8mo agoAh I see
- fuzzfactor 8mo agoAlso works for those who think genetics is all it takes. Or bendbro wherever he is at :)
- jama211 8mo agoDon’t be a dick
- weatherlite 8mo agoNo .. not really. Not even close. Just like even if I practiced music 8 hours a day I wouldn't be able to come up with the music Kurt Cobain has or Mozart. There are plenty of musicians who try really hard but lack the innate talent - at best they can learn to play other people's music but never can come up with good original music, at least not something other people want to hear. As someone wrote here innate ability is a real thing
- testaccount28 8mo ago[flagged]
- jama211 8mo agoI actually think you could. If you’d done that, with enthusiasm* - and not just practiced but guided, trained practice, you 100% could.
- ileonichwiesz 8mo agoI think you’re confusing mastery with marketability. “Other people want to hear it” is at best adjacent to someone’s skill at composing or playing music. There’s plenty of mediocre musicians who became world-famous, and plenty of great musicians who nobody’s heard about. Skill and success are pretty weakly correlated.
- weatherlite 8mo ago> I think you’re confusing mastery with marketability. “Other people want to hear it” is at best adjacent to someone’s skill at composing or playing music. This is a fun and complicated topic. Yes, sometimes things outside of the music influence our perceptions of the music. If the Red Hot Chili Peppers were a bunch of bald fat dudes maybe they would have had less fans; if Kurt Cobain hadn't killed himself he would still be a legend but perhaps in the calbire of Eddie Vedder and not what he became. But the following underlying principal I believe to be true : it's impossible to survive the test of time in music without producing "good" music. Example of music that survived the test of time : The Beatles, Queen, Pink Floyd and I'd argue Nirvana, Pearl Jam etc. How do I define "survive the test of time" is another discussion I'd rather not get into lol.
- qsera 8mo agoI think it has to be both. You need some ability to understand and thus find happiness in the thing that you are reading which leads to the motivation.
- jama211 8mo agoYes, the “with enthusiasm” bit is very important.
- fuzzfactor 8mo agoThat's why I loved comic books.
- mmooss 8mo agoAnother requirement is the emotional capacity at 8 years old to focus, feel confident, and feel safe. I think that is the main obstacle to most people doing highly effective work and putting in long hours. You hear some call people who don't 'work hard' lazy, but my impression is that it's emotional capacity, and a lot of that comes from family. I wonder if there is a correlation between prodigies and emotionally stable, healthy, present parents. It's hard to imagine children under a lot of stress - e.g., from abusive parents, highly unreliable parents (e.g., overwhelmed by addictions to drugs), emotionally unstable parents (e.g., narcissists), highly neglectful parents (e.g., who abandon their kids) ... - it's hard to imagine those kids doing what Tao did, regardless of their talent.
- jama211 8mo agoVery true! Lots of things had to go right for Terrance.
- confidantlake 8mo agoYes the correlation is there but it doesn't really matter. There are hundreds of millions of kids growing up with stable healthy parents and a handful of prodigies.
- mmooss 8mo agoThere are a only handful of prodigies regardless of what we're talking about, but I think that is a misguided way to look at the situation: If my GP comment is true to some significant degree, it matters for people who are prodigies. It matters for the world, which benefits from the prodigies. But I don't want to underemphasize the first or overemphasize the second. These are human beings, which is the overwhelming issue. They have the same needs and same importance as everyone else. That means we don't want to disregard their needs either because they are unusual and therefore more expensive to nurture, or because the world benefits from them and and doesn't care about their individual needs or thinks their needs can be sacrificed. And on a similar basis, it has strong implications for all the other kids in the world, who need stable, loving, nurturing family.
- alisonkisk 8mo agoThere are probably hundreds of people on this site who had the same enthusiasm for math and time dedication as Terence Tao, but lacked his extreme outlier fluid intelligence, processing speed, perfect memory, and even handwriting talent(!). Terence Tao mastered calculus at an age when most future-mathemician geniuses weren't yet strong readers of chapter books.
- jama211 8mo agoI mean I can make up any speculation too if you want. I seriously seriously doubt your claim. It’s extremely extremely rare to find “3-4 hours of maths textbook reading” levels of enthusiasm in 7 year olds. I don’t doubt he’s talented too. But, it’s a chicken and egg problem and I’m sick of people pretending it isn’t.
- cm2012 8mo agoThere is a massive body of research showing this is not true
- jama211 8mo agoThere’s a massive body of research showing this is true
- apt-apt-apt-apt 8mo agoThe important factors seem to be intrinsic motivation and other good mental faculties like great memory for concepts and formulas, understanding. It's hard to say whether the motivation came from the good skills (understanding, memory) e.g. "I'm good at this, I like it!", or that the good skills came from the motivation. I believe both are important though, and that they are intertwined.
- markus_zhang 8mo agoI actually agree with you on the first part, that is his super power is more on that persistence. But I’m not sure about the second part.