Comment by junto
20 hours ago
> I agree with the sentiment of this. I think our obsession with innate ~~mathematical~~ skill and genius is so detrimental to the growth mindset that you need to have in order to learn things.
I strongly believe that the average human being can be exceptional in any niche topic given enough time, dedication and focus.
The author of the book has picked out mathematics because that was what he was interested in. The reality is that this rule applies to everything.
The belief that some people have an innate skill that they are born with is deeply unhelpful. Whilst some people (mostly spectrum) do seem have an innate talent, I would argue that it is more an inbuilt ability to hyper focus on a topic, whether that topic be mathematics, Star Trek, dinosaurs or legacy console games from the 1980’s.
I think we do our children a disservice by convincing them that some of their peers are just “born with it”, because it discourages them from continuing to try.
What we should be teaching children is HOW to learn. At the moment it’s a by-product of learning about some topic. If we look at the old adage “feed a man a fish”, the same is true of learning.
“Teach someone mathematics and they will learn mathematics. Teach someone to learn and they will learn anything”.
Caveat here is that "talent" and "dedication" is linked to speed at least in the beginning. For instance, any student can learn calculus given enough time and advice even starting from scratch. However, the syllabus wants all this to happen in one semester.
This gives you vicious and virtuous cycles: Students' learning speed increases with time and past success. So "talented" students learn quickly and have extra time to further explore and improve, leading to further success. Students who struggle with the time constraint are forced to take shortcuts like memorizing "magic formulas" without having time to really understand. Trying to close that gap is very hard work.
Thank you for the insight that academic (in a very broad sense) bulk-fixed-time approach does in fact produce both of the cycles, and the gap indeed only widens with time (speaking from personal experience, especially from my life as an undergrad student).
Reminds me of my personal peeve that "studying" should not be "being taught", studying is pursuit of understanding, "being taught" is what happens in primary school (and I'm aware I'm simplifying here).
I would say that you could generalize this even further outside of education. A few early successes in life can greatly accelerate one's trajectory, while early failures could set one many years back. And this happens independently of whether those events are due to skill or luck.
Indeed, speed is often read as "smarts" whereas I would maintain it's much more often "preparation". We can't on one hand believe in the plasticity and retrainability of the mind, while simultaneously believing that speed is something only a few are born with. On the nature/nurture scale, I think it's 20/80 or so - but prodigies and geniuses have an interest that keeps them thinking and learning 10x or 100x more than other kids, and a little bump that lets them get started easier and therefore much earlier.
This sets them up for fantastic success very quickly. [1] shows a great example of this.
I'm fond of saying "You can do anything you want, but wanting is the hard part", because to truly be a grandmaster, genius-level mathematician, olympic athlete, etc, requires a dedication and amount of preparation that almost nobody can manage. Starting late, with emotional baggage, kids, and having to spend 5 years relearning how to learn? Forget it.
1. https://danielkarim.com/how-to-become-a-genius-the-polgar-ex...
Bobby Fisher won his first US Championships at 14 against people who had been playing chess longer than he had been alive. Suggesting they didn't want it more, or practice more than some kid is silly.
"We can't on one hand believe in the plasticity and retrainability of the mind, while simultaneously believing that speed is something only a few are born with."
Sure we can, the initial orientation of neurons differs between people, so some people need less "plasticity and retrainability" to be good at a task. Plasticity is physical characteristic like height and varies between people.
Initial speed usually isn't that important, but speed of learning is important and makes the difference between possible and impossible within a human lifetime.
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> I'm fond of saying "You can do anything you want, but wanting is the hard part", because to truly be a grandmaster, genius-level mathematician, olympic athlete, etc, requires a dedication and
I was having a problem agreeing with this subthread, and I have you to thank for putting it into words that I can finally formulate my disagreement against.
Have you never met one of those people for whom they did not need to "want"? They could literally phone it in and still do better than anyone else, no matter how dedicated they were. Even should practice/study be necessary for them, they benefited from it to some absurd proportion that I couldn't even guess to quantify. I've known more than one of these people.
I think most believe they don't exist for two reasons. The first is the ridiculous number of television shows and movies that depict motivation as being the key to success. We're just inundated with the (unsupported by evidence) that this is the means to extraordinary genius. Second, I would say that this is the most comforting theory. "Why yes, I could have been a gifted whatever or a talented something-or-other if I had put the time in, but I chose this other thing instead."
Maybe some would say we all need to believe this, that a society that doesn't believe in it is harsher or more unkind.
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I find it is good to go back to things you struggled with in the past and come at them with a new and broader understanding.
> The belief that some people have an innate skill that they are born with is deeply unhelpful.
In practice your views result in stinting access of non-existent (in your opinion) talented children to a faster education track. They don't exist therefore they don't need different treatment. Quite a hot theme in American education two (or so) years ago.
> I strongly believe that the average human being can be exceptional in any niche topic given enough time, dedication and focus.
I respectfully, but strongly, disagree. There's a reason most NBA players are over 2 meters tall, and one does not become taller with time, dedication nor focus.
It might be different for intellectual skills but I am not that sure.
Almost anyone can become decent at almost anything though. Which is good already!
> I respectfully, but strongly, disagree. There's a reason most NBA players are over 2 meters tall, and one does not become taller with time, dedication nor focus.
Being tall isn't a skill. I suspect you could be skillful enough at basketball to overcome the hight disadvantage. However, I think most people who might become that skillful see the high disadvantage (plus the general difficulty of becoming a pro basketball player) and take a different path through life. It's also possible that the amount of time that would be needed to grow your skill past the height disadvantage is too long, so it's not feasible to do it to gain a position in the NBA.
Intelligence is also not a skill, but the thing that makes you skillful in all cognitive tasks. Just like what height does to basketball players.
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Height is one physical attribute that helps, and professional players are mostly above average height for a reason. But also hand-eye coordination and fast-twitch muscles help even more. Many basketball players are very explosive athletes, because it's a sport with a relatively small play area and lots of quick movements are needed.
Track and swimming are where innate physical attributes have the most obvious benefits. Michael Phelphs had the perfect body for swimming. There is no amount of trainingg that 99.999% of the population could do to get close to what Usain Bolt ran. Most humans could not train to run under 4 minutes in a mile or under 2:30 in a marathon. They just don't have the right muscular and cardiovascular physiology.
Team sports are of course more complicated as other qualities come into play that aren't as directly physiological.
Most NBA players are under 2 meters tall. The average height is 1.99 meters.
https://www.lines.com/guides/average-height-nba-players/1519
Since we are being pedantic, your statement may be true but it is unsupported by the data you presented. To make it simple, let's talk about the imaginary basketball league with four players, of unit less heights of 4, 4, 4, and 1. The average height is 3.25, yet 3/4 the players are taller than average.
A paid promotion of International Median is not Average Association.
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Simpson's Paradox[0] is the reason people are so easily seduced by the tempting, but dead wrong, illusion that humans are in any sense equal in their innate capacity for anything.
Because it turns out that, in the NBA, height does not correspond with ability! This of course makes sense, because all the players are filtered by being NBA professional basketballers. A shorter player simply has more exceptional ability in another dimension, be that dodging reflex, ability to visualize and then hit a ball trajectory from the three point line, and so on. Conversely, a very tall player is inherently useful for blocking, and doesn't have to be as objectively good at basketball in order to be a valuable teammate.
Despite this lack of correlation, when you look at an NBA team you see a bunch of very tall fellows indeed. Simpson's Paradox.
We see the same thing in intellectual pursuits. "I'm not nearly as smart as the smartest programmer I know, but I get promoted at work so I must be doing something right. Therefore anyone could do this, they just have to work hard like I did". Nope. You've already been selected into "professional programmer", this logic doesn't work.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson's_paradox
So you're saying success at maths isn't an inbuilt ability. Instead, it depends on an (inbuilt) ability to hyper focus... Which you are just born with?
Not even that. It depends on the learned ability to stop pushing yourself when your focus is wavering. That's how you develop aversion towards the topic. Let your natural curiosity draw you to particular topics (that's why you might have a winding road through the subject).
parent comment was a bit tounge-in-cheek but I'll continue the sentiment: You're saying that the curiosity is "natural" hence one is either born with it or not. I think that there is no way around the fact that it will be hard and uncomfortable to mimic the progress of someone that has an innate inclination towards a subject (be it talent or focus or curiosity) artificially.
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I don’t know if I agree. Grad school was profoundly humbling to me because it really showed me that there are a LOT of people out there that are just much much better than me at math. There are different levels of innate talent.
>I strongly believe that the average human being can be exceptional in any niche topic given enough time, dedication and focus.
And this also gives the proponent (you in this case) an excuse to blame a person for not focusing hard enough or not being dedicated enough if they don't grasp the basics, let alone excel.
>The belief that some people have an innate skill that they are born with is deeply unhelpful. Whilst some people (mostly spectrum) do seem have an innate talent, I would argue that it is more an inbuilt ability to hyper focus on a topic, whether that topic be mathematics, Star Trek, dinosaurs or legacy console games from the 1980’s.
Nonsense!
The brain you are born with materially dictates the ceiling of your talent. A person with average ability can with dedication and focus over many years become reasonably good, but a genius can do the same in 1 year and at a young age.
We have an education system which gives an A Grade if you pass the course, but 1 person may put on 5 hours a week and the other works day and night.
What makes you think that "genius" is nature and not nurture? I'd love to see the evidence for this; i'm deeply skeptical.
Edit: I don't mean to argue that there aren't genetics involved in determining aptitude on certain tasks, of course, but the assumption that genius is born and never made feels like a very shallow understanding of the capacity of man.
> I'd love to see the evidence for this; i'm deeply skeptical.
Cool, come and have a coffee with me :) I have older and younger siblings and was the one randomly blessed.
Whereas most recognised talents are associated with hard work and so there is then this visible link, I am a good example as I did the bare minimum throughout education (and beyond...).
The way my brain processes and selectively discards/stores the information it receives is very different to majority of the population. I have no control over it.
I take zero credit for any of my achievments - I regularly meet intelligent people near to retirement who have been to a tier 1 university, may have PHDs, worked 60 hours a week since they were born, been on course and what not and cannot reach the levels I can.
My nurturing was no different to siblings/peers (and was terrible!)
Note: I have my weaknesses too, but as a whole, I am exceptional. Not through effort!! Completely random - neither of my parents are intelligent and nothing up the ancestary tree as far as I know.
The boostrap skill is the ability to obsess over something. To focus and self-reward on anything is a heaven sent. Good thing we do not medicate that if we are unable to get that energy on the road, that base skill.
I've had some success converting people by telling them others had convinced them they were stupid. They usually have one or two things they are actually good at, like a domain they flee to. I simply point out how everything else is exactly like [say] playing the guitar. Eventually you will be good enough to sing at the same time. Clearly you already are a genius. I cant even remember the most basic cords or lyrics because I've never bothered with it.
I met the guitar guy a few years later outside his house. He always had just one guitar but now owned something like 20, something like a hundred books about music. Quite the composer. It looked and sounded highly sophisticated. The dumb guy didn't exist anymore.
But also, some people are stupid, right?
Intellect is like a gas, it will expand to fill its container. The container, in humans, is epigenetic and social — genetics only determines how hot or cold your gas is, ie how fast and how fluidly it expands, but you’re taught your limits — it’s best to see stupid as not how limited you are relative to other but what limits you have now and may abandon in the future.
That said, some people received a smaller starting container, and might need some help cracking it. That’s the work of those who think they’ve found a bigger one.
The inborn part is how quickly you get results (good or bad). Stupidity is the results.
If we spent 50% of time thinking productively - inborn thinking speed would matter. But in my estimate even 5% is generous.
So it matters far more what kind of feedback you have to filter out the wrong results, and how much time you spend thinking - than how quickly you can do it.
Also practice helps with speed.
"What we should be teaching children is HOW to learn."
Absolutely correct. And that begins with getting their interest, thus their attention; and that's a whole subject in and of itself.
> The author of the book has picked out mathematics because that was what he was interested in. The reality is that this rule applies to everything.
My first thought when the article got to the dialog between logic and intuition bit was that the same is true for school level physics.
> Whilst some people (mostly spectrum) do seem have an innate talent
I think the only thing in autism that I'd call an innate talent is detail-oriented thinking by default. It'd be the same type of "innate talent" as, say, synesthesia, or schizophrenia: a side effect of experiencing the world differently.
> a side effect of experiencing the world differently
A side effect for which there is a substantial, lifelong, and most importantly wide cost, even if it occasionally confers usually small, usually fleeting, and most importantly narrow advantage.
At such cost with such narrow advantage, why has it persisted so pervasively? I would counter that the advantage is wider and the cost narrower than your current value system is allowing you to accept.
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Yes, there is a significant cost to being built differently regardless of perceived advantages (by one's self or others). For example, as an autistic, I have to cope with finding interaction with non-autistics quite difficult for me, even if detail-oriented thinking can make certain tasks seem easier to me.