As a father of an 8 years old, this is very moving.
While Terence is -without a doubt- born with prodigious abilities, I think credit should also be given to his parents Billy and Grace who seem to have managed to simultaneously nurture these special abilities while still letting Terence have a happy (?) childhood. This is not easy to do.
SJC_Hacker 3 hours ago [-]
Can't find the reference but from an interview with his parents there apparently there wasn't much "nurturing" other than simply making available the necessary materials which he gobbled up. Its not like they put a made him practice for an hour a day.
A boy in my high school class made IMO and got a gold medal (and later on won the Putnam one year). They interviewed his parents and it was a similar story.
MrOrelliOReilly 3 hours ago [-]
I think you might be underrating the value of even that enabling work. Some parents would not have the financial resources to provide those learning materials. And some parents would take a normative stance on how an 8 year old ought to behave.
More importantly, it's not as though individuals like Clements or Erdos was corresponding with Terrence directly to arrange a meeting. His parents clearly played an important role in facilitating and allowing these encounters. That deserves a lot of credit!
fifilura 2 hours ago [-]
Sure. But what about the parents who struggle every day with normally gifted children? They deserve even more credit. This seems like an easy child :)
In my house we discuss a macro feature of children as being "school-shaped". If Terence Tao wasn't school-shaped, would he have been as successful? The counter-point to that is to ponder how many children fail to achieve a similar level of success because they don't fit into the school system so are left by the wayside.
chao- 5 hours ago [-]
This brings to mind the childhood of John Stuart Mill:
I guess it helps that he had Jeremy Bentham hanging around his house from an early age.
xamuel 2 hours ago [-]
J.S. Mill's autobiography is a fascinating read. He spends quite a lot of it discussing his early childhood, explaining that in his opinion he was not particularly special, rather, it was his father who pushed him to all those accomplishments. His father sheltered him from other kids so he was not aware that his accomplishments were unusual!
stevage 3 hours ago [-]
Learning three languages at an early age is completely unremarkable for millions of people around the world. It's just notable which ones his were.
lordnacho 2 hours ago [-]
It's notable if he learned Greek and Latin from books. Being classical languages, it sounds that way.
Most people who learn three languages as a kid are surrounded by other speakers, not books.
FL33TW00D 2 hours ago [-]
This was mostly down to enormous pressure from his father, causing him to have a breakdown in his early twenties.
Not to say the results weren't incredible, but certainly required sacrifice.
My daughter spoke four languages at age 3. Not because she is gifted, but because she grew up in an immigrant environment. One language with me, another with my partner who speaks a different mother tongue than I do, and the two local languages where we live.
And this is utterly unremarkable where I live.
When we visit my family (who are all monolingual), they think she is a prodigy.
She’s not. She’s just a normal kid.
exceptione 20 minutes ago [-]
Latin and Greek are classical, 'dead' languages.
defrost 8 minutes ago [-]
In the time of J.S.M. they were languages used by academics and upper classes regularly enough that in his circles he and many of his peers had early exposure.
Incredible. Knowing about Abelian groups, being able to graph y = x^3 — 2x^2 + x in one minute, and performing integration at age 7. Chomping up university-level math textbooks by 8. A classical math prodigy.
I definitely empathize with "his preference for using an analytic, highly logical problem-solving strategy" (I'm not a genius ofc). It's often more immediately clear for me than visual/spatial manipulation.
Liftyee 33 minutes ago [-]
Curious. I admire the analytic side since it's what I consider myself personally weak at. I have always preferred visual and spatial problems (then again, I spent a long time playing with Lego and making things).
I wonder how I ought to train up problem solving, given that I have an engineering degree to finish.
suprjami 4 hours ago [-]
At 8 years old I was able to expertly dismantle many radios.
Was still a few years away from reassembly.
nananana9 3 hours ago [-]
At 8 years I recycled filesystem directories. I didn't know you can create new folders, so when I needed one I grabbed a random one from C:\Windows, moved it to my desktop and deleted its contents.
jdthedisciple 3 hours ago [-]
Makes total sense, it used to be called "Recycle Bin" after all!
geoffbp 3 hours ago [-]
Worked ok til it was a system dir and the system wouldn’t boot anymore? :)
energy123 1 hours ago [-]
I deleted the files from there to free up disk space
markisus 5 hours ago [-]
This really reminded me of the first part Flowers for Algernon. The main character undergoes a treatment which improves is intelligence and the story is narrated via a series of diary entries which become successively more fluent and sophisticated.
LostMyLogin 4 hours ago [-]
We had to read it in middle school and man did it have me in tears at the end.
jorl17 5 hours ago [-]
Had me in tears by the end. One of my favorite books. So glad a friend recommended it to me.
svat 4 hours ago [-]
Don't miss the program he wrote after teaching himself BASIC from a book at age six (Fig 5 / book page 222 / PDF page 10):
> 320 print "(brmmmm-brmmmm-putt-putt-vraow-chatter-chatter bye mr. fibonacci!)"
dfex 4 minutes ago [-]
That program listing hit me right in the feels.
I remember when I was 6 or 7 teaching myself Applesoft BASIC and writing programs with funny (to me) little print statements all through them - when computing was just exploding with possibility.
I wouldn't have had a clue what a Fibonacci sequence was though ;)
nananana9 3 hours ago [-]
This does feel like something a super smart alien pretending to be an 8 year old would write.
whatshisface 39 minutes ago [-]
Sometimes I wonder if HNers have met more aliens than 8 year olds.
aurareturn 4 hours ago [-]
I know it must be obvious but this proves to me that biological intelligence hasn't nearly reached its peak. If we select for pure intelligence, biological brains can get much smarter. Imagine if we had 5 million geniuses as smart or smarter than Tao doing quantum physics. But life doesn't select for pure intelligence, it selects for survival.
In the Dune books, they banned computers so they bred super mentally capable humans.
baxtr 2 hours ago [-]
Interesting thought experiment.
The question is: what do we want to optimize for?
Minimize pain and suffering for humans? The spread of mankind throughout the universe?
I’m pretty sure your idea would help with the latter. Not so sure about the former tbh.
indy 2 hours ago [-]
Careful, we live in a society which has taken a side in the nature vs. nurture debate and if you're deemed to be on the wrong side of that then you'll be accused of being a nazi
jama211 4 hours 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 3 hours 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 2 hours ago [-]
I 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 2 hours ago [-]
As 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
jonahx 2 hours ago [-]
There 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?
ileonichwiesz 28 minutes 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.
plastic-enjoyer 2 hours ago [-]
Your post reads like someone is bitter because he is a midwit
aurareturn 3 hours 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, 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 2 hours ago [-]
I 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.
cm2012 1 hours ago [-]
There is a massive body of research showing this is not true
weatherlite 3 hours ago [-]
No .. 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
ileonichwiesz 21 minutes 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.
There’s plenty of mediocre musicians who became world-famous for their music, and plenty of great musicians who nobody’s heard about. Skill and success are pretty weakly correlated.
jama211 2 hours ago [-]
I actually think you could. If you’d done that, with enthusiasm* - and not just practiced but guided, trained practice, you 100% could.
testaccount28 2 hours ago [-]
whatever helps you sleep at night, brother.
qsera 3 hours ago [-]
I 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 2 hours ago [-]
Yes, the “with enthusiasm” bit is very important.
alisonkisk 2 hours ago [-]
There 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.
mmooss 2 hours ago [-]
Another 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 2 hours ago [-]
Very true! Lots of things had to go right for Terrance.
bendbro 3 hours ago [-]
I take it you've never met another human before
arjie 2 hours ago [-]
How interesting that it describes "meeting Terence's special needs". In isolation, that sentence today would mean the opposite of what that person intended it to mean. For a bit in my childhood "differently abled" was the one people went with, but it seems that "special needs" was contemporaneous and just seems to have won. Differently abled does seem awfully obviously euphemistic.
impossiblefork 3 hours ago [-]
I like that test where some of the questions are wrong and wonder whether we should have that kind of thing in maths textbooks.
I think people need to be trained to be more confident in what they know, and if we gave them that kind of thing we could maybe train them to become so.
andyferris 9 minutes ago [-]
Actually - do they do this in LLM benchmarks? As a measure of overconfidence/confabulation? Seems immediately applicable.
alisonkisk 2 hours ago [-]
I didn't see that in the document. What page is it on?
OJFord 51 minutes ago [-]
I think they mean at the bottom of p216 (pdf page 4), where he says he doesn't know, r+s=80 but there isn't enough information to solve for r and s.
impossiblefork 41 minutes ago [-]
There's two questions that are intended to be wrong (probably to test confidence). One with insufficient information and where the question itself implies falsehoods.
impossiblefork 43 minutes ago [-]
The questions are on page 215 (3/26) and Tao's answers are on the next page.
ChaitanyaSai 2 hours ago [-]
Fascinating read! And very interesting in the light of recent advances in AI to think about what makes this ability possible. How far can we go with increasing long-term memory and working memory? Does increasing comprehension follow with competence?
Long-term retention is is hard when encountering new symbols. He seemed quite comfortable at that age absorbing the new stuff and manipulating it. Where does that comfort come from? Is there a way to test that explicitly?
Finally, there is the ability to take the new and use it well. What about creating new shorthand? Being able to divine hidden patterns and articulate them?
Ramunujam seems to have had this.
elromulous 5 hours ago [-]
My brain initially parsed the title as an obituary title and I was really sad for a moment.
alkonaut 1 hours ago [-]
Proving, that the idea that "no matter how good you are at anything there's some 8 year old who is much better" held true even before social media had to tell it to my face every day.
TheChaplain 5 hours ago [-]
I am interested in his new book, "Six Math Essentials", but I doubt it will be on my very low level of math understanding..
small_model 41 minutes ago [-]
When will a SOTA model beat the best mathematician on earth? Similar to Chess and Go examples. It has to be getting close.
Wow, incredible read! Amazing what motivated peple (and children!) can achieve.
quietthrow 3 hours ago [-]
Genuine curiosity: if you are gifted with a certain “wiring” (genes, brain chemistry etc) why is that considered an accomplishment? Also - We, as a society, tend to celebrate people with “natural didn’t really need to work for” type gifts quite inconsistently - eg A supermodel who is gifted with the gift of looks, beauty etc is also in the same category of “natural” talent but sure doesn’t get the same celebration as a prodigy in maths or science. In both cases the people are fundamentally bestowed with abilities they didn’t really have to work extremely hard to acquire but are perhaps looked at differently. What’s kind of psychology is at play here? Would love to understand how we tend to interpret such things and then form beliefs.
I realize and acknowledge both sets had talents and the spent thier time doing something with it to produce something extraordinary but we seem to tend to overlook the massive head start they also had. Why so?
(Totally understandable if you feel like downvoting but I would ask you to articulate and share the cord it struck with you if you down vote)
krzat 6 minutes ago [-]
Do you celebrate people who persevere despite despite their hardships?
Ability to persevere is also wired in.
If you pull this thread to it's conclusion, then nothing is worth celebrating. Just law of physics doing their thing.
LudwigNagasena 3 hours ago [-]
Why for you is innate grit any more commendable than innate intelligence?
weatherlite 3 hours ago [-]
> Genuine curiosity: if you are gifted with a certain “wiring” (genes, brain chemistry etc) why is that considered an accomplishment?
It's complex; first of all society has an interest for exceptional people to be respected and well compensated; if there was absolutely no prestige or compensation in being a math genius it's quite possible Terrence Tao would have become a schoolteacher. So a well functioning capitalist society has both monetary and prestige tools to incentivize extreme accomplishment.
Second, I think it's human nature to like and want hierarchy. Admiring figures for their looks, charisma or intellectual accomplishments could very will be in our wiring - 20 thousand years ago we would admire the shaman, the great hunter or the storyteller.
But ultimately I totally agree with you - not only were these people born into the unique genetic and envrionmental circumstances that made the accomplishment possible , I also don't believe they had any say after being born in becoming what they had become; e.g I don't believe there's a "free will" and that Terrence Tao "chose" to become a math genius. He was born into that reality in a fluke.
rkomorn 3 hours ago [-]
There are people wired like Tao (or superstar athletes, supermodels, or other remarkable people) that don't achieve the same results.
Even among the people who have similar "luck" in that respect, some still stand out. The people we think of as elite performers aren't just elite relative to the 99% of us. They're also elite within the top 1% that makes up their field: they're dominant even among the people who should be their peers.
weatherlite 3 hours ago [-]
There are very very few people wired like Tao; how many child prodigies like that are there ? He seems to be one in a million but its pretty much impossible to assess IQ at those levels.
Sure, it's not enough. YOu need the obsession for math, but lets not trivialize his intellectual ability - he's definitely not only top 1% that would just put him in the smartest 2-3 kids in his class. No, he was probably among the smartest 10-20 kids of his age group in the whole United States.
rkomorn 2 hours ago [-]
I was speaking generally, and wrote that people like him (not him specifically) are elite within the top 1%. So basically 1% of the 1%.
Not that I mean the percentages factually, more like an order of magnitude.
But my point is, in terms of "natural ability", I don't believe there is that much of a gap among top performers, but that things like work ethic and determination, and also some luck in environments, is what ends up setting them apart.
That's why I think they're worth praising: it's not just a spin of genetic roulette (unless one believes every single attribute about us is genetic, I guess).
weatherlite 1 hours ago [-]
> But my point is, in terms of "natural ability", I don't believe there is that much of a gap among top performers, but that things like work ethic and determination, and also some luck in environments, is what ends up setting them apart.
You could be right; I tend to disagree but its all speculation. My 2 cents is that the vast majority of researches/professors are motivated and driven people; you can't reach those levels if you don't know how to sit on your butt and concentrate. They all have good work ethic.
I tend to think what separates Tao from the rest of the smart researchers is not that he works 15 hours a day while the rest work only 9 but rather his very very rare genius. But yeah, speculation of talent vs work ethic.
jdthedisciple 3 hours ago [-]
> A supermodel who is gifted with the gift of looks, beauty etc is also in the same category of “natural” talent but sure doesn’t get the same celebration as a prodigy in maths or science
We living on the same planet?
Pretty sure the supermodel gets infinitely more attention and certainly makes orders of magnitudes more money than some math prodigy, at least on mine.
globular-toast 3 hours ago [-]
There is an inequality between the sexes here. A female model does indeed get more attention and money based purely on the genes they didn't have to work for. It's not the case for men, though. Men also have to actually deliver something, whether it's being a performer like an actor, singer, footballer etc, or winning the Field's medal which you don't just get for being quite good at maths when you're 8. Trying to think of men who are famous just for genetics is quite hard. I guess like Orlando Bloom or the members of K-pop bands and whatnot, but they still have to perform and can't just prance around in fancy clothes and call it a day. In the case of Tao, if he had just decided to do something else or not accomplished anything you'd never have heard of him. Men always have to work for it. Women often don't, and if they try it doesn't work. It's the source of a lot of disgruntlement between the sexes, but probably a "grass is always greener" thing.
rkomorn 3 hours ago [-]
> based purely on the genes they didn't have to work for
Modeling is notorious for its negative impact on models' health.
They absolutely work for it, and in one of the most toxic work environments.
jdthedisciple 2 hours ago [-]
All I can say is before you assess the inequality of outcomes across the sexes, perhaps consider the differences in their inherent qualities to begin with.
DeathArrow 3 hours ago [-]
The two types of talents can be judged by the impact they have. A scientific gifted individual can produce value while a good looking individual has mostly entertainment value.
That being said, supermodels are more famous, have a much larger following and earn much more money than math geniuses. That says we, humans, care more about entertainment than value.
squigz 3 hours ago [-]
I wonder how Tao - or a supermodel - might feel about the idea that they don't have to work for their "gifts"
defrost 3 hours ago [-]
Not a mystery, Tao has written about how, child prodigy aside, he has to work at math on a regular basis with grit and perseverance.
EugeneOZ 3 hours ago [-]
It depends on how much value their talents can bring to humankind, I guess.
Jun8 3 hours ago [-]
I read this earlier today and was thinking: how many such mathematically gifted individuals exist I. The world at one time? Assuming there are probably 20-30 Tao-caliber people in the US and an adversarial multiplier of 0.1 (only 1 in 10 such kids are nurtured), we reach 300 for this generation, about 1 in a million.
That means in a generation there are ~ 10k such people in the world. Think about connecting them or nurturing them with AI companions.
mmooss 2 hours ago [-]
How about nurturing them with human beings? We have no idea how nurturing children with a computer program would turn out but probably poorly.
The most important part of nurturing, as I understand it, is to be seen and loved by other humans, and to be made to feel safe and lovable.
arrowsmith 1 hours ago [-]
For a split second I read this headline as "Terence Tao dead at … years old" and was shocked
jibal 5 hours ago [-]
Humbling.
markus_zhang 5 hours ago [-]
Indeed. He definitely knows more Math than I do.
mmooss 2 hours ago [-]
I wonder if Terence agreed to have this published. This is an intimate look into the private life of an eight year old, written up as something like a lab report; it's not research on bacteria or monkeys or anonymous study subjects. It's possible that he did give permission, of course.
alisonkisk 2 hours ago [-]
He was 7 years old, so it was impossible for him to give consent for anything. His parents gave consent on his behalf.
mmooss 38 minutes ago [-]
I didn't realize this was published at the time. Still, I wonder what the current, adult Terence thinks. Whether or not legal recourse is available doesn't change Tao's feelings about it and isn't determinative regarding republishing it now is a good idea.
I guess that makes sense in the light of her previous post and work on making a new archiving solution for being able to host singlefile archives more efficiently.
Terence Chi-Shen Tao FAA FRS (born 17 July 1975) is an Australian and American mathematician. He is a Fields medalist and a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he holds the James and Carol Collins Chair in the College of Letters and Sciences. His research includes topics in harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, algebraic combinatorics, arithmetic combinatorics, geometric combinatorics, probability theory, compressed sensing, analytic number theory and the applications of artificial intelligence in mathematics.[4][5]
...
A child prodigy,[18] Terence Tao skipped five grades.[19][20] Tao exhibited extraordinary mathematical abilities from an early age, attending university-level mathematics courses at the age of 9. He is one of only three children in the history of the Johns Hopkins Study of Exceptional Talent program to have achieved a score of 700 or greater on the SAT math section while just eight years old; Tao scored a 760.[21] Julian Stanley, Director of the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth, stated that Tao had the greatest mathematical reasoning ability he had found in years of intensive searching.[7][22]
While Terence is -without a doubt- born with prodigious abilities, I think credit should also be given to his parents Billy and Grace who seem to have managed to simultaneously nurture these special abilities while still letting Terence have a happy (?) childhood. This is not easy to do.
A boy in my high school class made IMO and got a gold medal (and later on won the Putnam one year). They interviewed his parents and it was a similar story.
More importantly, it's not as though individuals like Clements or Erdos was corresponding with Terrence directly to arrange a meeting. His parents clearly played an important role in facilitating and allowing these encounters. That deserves a lot of credit!
Just the once, though, huh? [0]
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35015#35079
- Learned Greek starting age three.
- Was studying Plato at age six.
- Studied Latin starting at age eight.
And more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stuart_Mill#Biography
I guess it helps that he had Jeremy Bentham hanging around his house from an early age.
Most people who learn three languages as a kid are surrounded by other speakers, not books.
Not to say the results weren't incredible, but certainly required sacrifice.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10378/10378-h/10378-h.htm#li...
And this is utterly unremarkable where I live.
When we visit my family (who are all monolingual), they think she is a prodigy.
She’s not. She’s just a normal kid.
Hence that scene in Monty Python's Life of Brian.
Still fun today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mip30YF1iuo
I definitely empathize with "his preference for using an analytic, highly logical problem-solving strategy" (I'm not a genius ofc). It's often more immediately clear for me than visual/spatial manipulation.
I wonder how I ought to train up problem solving, given that I have an engineering degree to finish.
Was still a few years away from reassembly.
> 320 print "(brmmmm-brmmmm-putt-putt-vraow-chatter-chatter bye mr. fibonacci!)"
I remember when I was 6 or 7 teaching myself Applesoft BASIC and writing programs with funny (to me) little print statements all through them - when computing was just exploding with possibility.
I wouldn't have had a clue what a Fibonacci sequence was though ;)
In the Dune books, they banned computers so they bred super mentally capable humans.
The question is: what do we want to optimize for?
Minimize pain and suffering for humans? The spread of mankind throughout the universe?
I’m pretty sure your idea would help with the latter. Not so sure about the former tbh.
No, they couldn't. And neither could most adults, for that matter.
Innate ability is real.
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.
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
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?
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.
As someone wrote here innate ability is a real thing
There’s plenty of mediocre musicians who became world-famous for their music, and plenty of great musicians who nobody’s heard about. Skill and success are pretty weakly correlated.
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.
I think people need to be trained to be more confident in what they know, and if we gave them that kind of thing we could maybe train them to become so.
Long-term retention is is hard when encountering new symbols. He seemed quite comfortable at that age absorbing the new stuff and manipulating it. Where does that comfort come from? Is there a way to test that explicitly? Finally, there is the ability to take the new and use it well. What about creating new shorthand? Being able to divine hidden patterns and articulate them?
Ramunujam seems to have had this.
I realize and acknowledge both sets had talents and the spent thier time doing something with it to produce something extraordinary but we seem to tend to overlook the massive head start they also had. Why so?
(Totally understandable if you feel like downvoting but I would ask you to articulate and share the cord it struck with you if you down vote)
Ability to persevere is also wired in.
If you pull this thread to it's conclusion, then nothing is worth celebrating. Just law of physics doing their thing.
It's complex; first of all society has an interest for exceptional people to be respected and well compensated; if there was absolutely no prestige or compensation in being a math genius it's quite possible Terrence Tao would have become a schoolteacher. So a well functioning capitalist society has both monetary and prestige tools to incentivize extreme accomplishment.
Second, I think it's human nature to like and want hierarchy. Admiring figures for their looks, charisma or intellectual accomplishments could very will be in our wiring - 20 thousand years ago we would admire the shaman, the great hunter or the storyteller.
But ultimately I totally agree with you - not only were these people born into the unique genetic and envrionmental circumstances that made the accomplishment possible , I also don't believe they had any say after being born in becoming what they had become; e.g I don't believe there's a "free will" and that Terrence Tao "chose" to become a math genius. He was born into that reality in a fluke.
Even among the people who have similar "luck" in that respect, some still stand out. The people we think of as elite performers aren't just elite relative to the 99% of us. They're also elite within the top 1% that makes up their field: they're dominant even among the people who should be their peers.
Not that I mean the percentages factually, more like an order of magnitude.
But my point is, in terms of "natural ability", I don't believe there is that much of a gap among top performers, but that things like work ethic and determination, and also some luck in environments, is what ends up setting them apart.
That's why I think they're worth praising: it's not just a spin of genetic roulette (unless one believes every single attribute about us is genetic, I guess).
You could be right; I tend to disagree but its all speculation. My 2 cents is that the vast majority of researches/professors are motivated and driven people; you can't reach those levels if you don't know how to sit on your butt and concentrate. They all have good work ethic. I tend to think what separates Tao from the rest of the smart researchers is not that he works 15 hours a day while the rest work only 9 but rather his very very rare genius. But yeah, speculation of talent vs work ethic.
We living on the same planet?
Pretty sure the supermodel gets infinitely more attention and certainly makes orders of magnitudes more money than some math prodigy, at least on mine.
Modeling is notorious for its negative impact on models' health.
They absolutely work for it, and in one of the most toxic work environments.
That being said, supermodels are more famous, have a much larger following and earn much more money than math geniuses. That says we, humans, care more about entertainment than value.
That means in a generation there are ~ 10k such people in the world. Think about connecting them or nurturing them with AI companions.
The most important part of nurturing, as I understand it, is to be seen and loved by other humans, and to be made to feel safe and lovable.
Thank you
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A child prodigy,[18] Terence Tao skipped five grades.[19][20] Tao exhibited extraordinary mathematical abilities from an early age, attending university-level mathematics courses at the age of 9. He is one of only three children in the history of the Johns Hopkins Study of Exceptional Talent program to have achieved a score of 700 or greater on the SAT math section while just eight years old; Tao scored a 760.[21] Julian Stanley, Director of the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth, stated that Tao had the greatest mathematical reasoning ability he had found in years of intensive searching.[7][22]
Saved you a click...
The HN mods apparently have a sign in the HN control room