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  • Hot Pepsi
    replied
    Originally posted by ursus arctos View Post
    I do think that particular dynamic tends to be limited to university towns and pockets of "high achievers" in "elite" communities (like all of the ones that I have lived in).

    In much of the rest of the country, the pressure can be in the opposite direction, especially when it comes to advanced degrees in the humanities or "pure research".

    As a society, we are genuinely terrible at this.
    Yeah. I think in Trumpland, smart people are expected to just go into “business,” without much understanding of what that entails or how higher education is supposed to contribute to that.

    But I have noticed that a lot of the CEOs I’ve talked to got to where they are simply by working their way up in sales, Michael Scott-style. In medtech, at least, they usually went to college, but it doesn’t really matter where. A lot of former athletes. They aren’t dumb, they were just more focused on sports and/or getting a well-paid job than struggling in school for a long time.

    Some medtech execs are engineers or doctors and some of them do have MBAs from Northwestern or whatever, but it seems like those types are more inclined to go into consulting, VC, PE, etc, than having to put up with the grind of actually running a company that makes something.


    What would our country be like if our “best and brightest” went into teaching, nursing, public administration, social work, or running small businesses that actually do something useful?
    Last edited by Hot Pepsi; 13-02-2024, 19:31.

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  • ChrisJ
    replied
    IQ scores are nonsense in any real context.

    I also have a silly high IQ score. It has been of no use whatsoever at any point in my life. I’m not good at languages. My memory is unreliable - either excellent or terrible. I can’t even do crosswords. In fact, since it got me into The Worst Grammar School In History, it could be said to have actually damaged my life.

    I regard it as a random genetic trait. I also have unusually long arms, which have proven rather more useful.

    Leave a comment:


  • ursus arctos
    replied
    I do think that particular dynamic tends to be limited to university towns and pockets of "high achievers" in "elite" communities (like all of the ones that I have lived in).

    In much of the rest of the country, the pressure can be in the opposite direction, especially when it comes to advanced degrees in the humanities or "pure research".

    As a society, we are genuinely terrible at this.

    Leave a comment:


  • Hot Pepsi
    replied
    Maybe this is just because I grew up in a university town, but one of the problems I see with heaping so much glory on high academic achievers is that we tend to funnel the cleverist kids into academic careers or, at least, careers that value degrees from major R1 research universities - law and medicine. Maybe it's ok to go into business as long as you get an MBA somewhere fancy and become a consultant or perhaps a hedge fund manager or venture capitalist.

    But either way, if you don't get an advanced degree, you've failed. At least, I got that idea in my head even though nobody ever explicitly told me that. Actually, in retrospect, some people were trying to tell me not to think that way, but they didn't say it out loud.

    Those are probably fine career options - OK, maybe not hedge fund manager - but they each have their own culture with their own systems of incentives and sanctions and that might not be the right fit for a lot of people, no matter how clever they are.*

    And they can be absolutely miserable.

    There's a huge pile of literature - or, at least, blog posts - about people dropping out of advanced degree programs or getting the degree but dropping out of the field. Especially with PhDs, these tend to be about how people overcame the pressures and shame heaped upon them to find their new life and self-confidence.

    It shouldn't have to be that way. The main problem isn't that those people failed, it's that our whole culture is an extremely efficient misery-creation machine.

    Soul Asylum earworm.


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  • Janik
    replied
    Originally posted by Hot Pepsi View Post
    Not surprisingly, I was *relatively* shit at math and absolutely shit at foreign language and just plain hated computer programming. I hate computers in general. Its like this. The fucking thing just tells you that you did it wrong, but won't tell you why, even though it probably could.
    It can't, unless someone has programmed it to tell you that. A computer has no intelligence of its own. It can't provide teaching or direction on it's programs unless someone has set the programs up to do that.

    Think of it as a system of cogs inside a box with a handle you turn at one end and a flag that goes up and down at the other. If you forget to put one of the cogs in the whole shebang doesn't work and the flag stays still. The only way you can know which cog you left on the bench is if you rig up some system where each individual cog also drives a working or not working flag. Then you can tell where the problem came from. That is the same as including in a program error commands for each line.

    Can these error commands be more descriptive of the type of error? Essentially no. When the computer prints something like "syntax error" on it's command line (old skool) or does a blue screen of death, or throws up a dialog box to say an entry is invalid, that isn't the computer's response to a user error. These are all the choices of the person who programmed how the computer should respond to incompatible inputs. That difference - it isn't the computer responding, its the program writer doing so - may seem like an esoteric and unnecessarily detailed point, but it's actually fundamental. There are times when the program developer can't be more specific about what was wrong because they can't predict all the ways people will try and interact with their program in ways they hadn't intended (the mismatches the programmer can predict can be set up to elicit more detailed feedback for the user about the difference between their and the programmers way of thinking).

    To an extent this is why people get excited about AI as that is a program that "learns". But, once again, its a program that the computer runs, not the computer itself. The computer remains just a mechanism for delivering programs.

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  • ursus arctos
    replied
    It's just that she wants the "trophies" (i.e. A level grades) for it, which might not be the most attractive characteristic but seems pretty harmless to me and may be mother-driven from the feel of that article.
    This is exactly why I'm worried.

    No one is arguing that it is always problematic. It would be incredibly hypocritical for me to do so.

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  • Hot Pepsi
    replied
    Originally posted by Janik View Post
    One other area where kids will be at very different developmental speeds is foreign languages. But as someone was saying last night that kind of makes sense - all Maths really is is a different language used to explain ideas. A very symbolic formal language, true. But with arbitrary rules and patterns like natural languages. And other languages which bridge that apparent gap, such as computer programming languages, sign languages, and so on.

    See also:
    Computer programming
    Musical composition
    Not surprisingly, I was *relatively* shit at math and absolutely shit at foreign language and just plain hated computer programming. I hate computers in general. Its like this. The fucking thing just tells you that you did it wrong, but won't tell you why, even though it probably could.

    I never really tried musical composition. Music theory makes sense when somebody explains it to me, but it doesn't stick in my brain.

    Perhaps if I made a series of flashcards, I could memorize it. Same with chemistry and biology. I didn't learn that I needed the flashcard method until late in college. If I'd done that earlier, I'd have done a lot better and now my life would be so much better.

    Not really. It would probably be the same. Or worse, I'd have turned into an smug asshole.

    Leave a comment:


  • Evariste Euler Gauss
    replied
    Originally posted by ursus arctos View Post
    This is likely unfair, but the A Level story reminds me of those kids who apply to every Ivy plus Stanford, Cal, Chicago, etc even though they have absolutely zero interest in going to, say, Cornell.

    Or am I missing some purpose behind it?

    I am genuinely worried about where she will find herself in ten years.
    Well, first off, as Balders pointed out, she has not been taken out of her peer group at all - she's in exactly the school year that is normal for her age. She's just doing shed loads of extra A-levels as a kind of hobby. It really doesn't strike me as that different from people who just read very widely and accumulate vast general knowledge (often going into serious competitive quizzing, like one of our own OTF regulars has done). It's just that she wants the "trophies" (i.e. A level grades) for it, which might not be the most attractive characteristic but seems pretty harmless to me and may be mother-driven from the feel of that article.

    But on the more controversial question of precociously academically talented kids who do get accelerated to a an educational course level way ahead of their age group, sure it can have substantial down sides, but it's not always a bad thing.

    When I did my undergraduate level maths degree course in middle age around 10 years ago, I was amused that one of the post-grad students appointed to be my "supervisor" on one of my courses (meaning a teacher who would have fortnightly hour long sessions on a 1 to 2 basis, marking the students' written work and helping them understand the material covered in lectures) was an 18 year old, very close in age to my eldest daughter. He was already a post-grad at 18 because he had, as a prodigy, started university at 15. At 18, he was technically only a Masters course student but in practice he was so ahead of the field that the Faculty had given him a supervising gig normally given only to students working for their PhDs. I had feared that such an extreme prodigy, of such a young age, would be some freakish robotic type who would be unable to engage with me on a human level and understand the difficulities caused by my dull maths brain. But in fact he turned out to be a perfectly personable and socially fluent young man, and indeed a considerably better communicator and more perceptive teacher than many of the other supervisors I had. His name is Arran Fernandez by the way, and from a quick Google I see he is now an associate maths professor at the Eastern Mediterranean University, which I'd never heard of, but is located in Northern Cyprus. I'm very glad to see by the way that Northern Cyprus has an apparently thriving university despite the efforts of Greece to get other countries to marginalise and isolate the territory.
    Last edited by Evariste Euler Gauss; 13-02-2024, 17:57.

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  • Hot Pepsi
    replied
    Originally posted by ursus arctos View Post
    I think that's still generally true, though technology has largely eliminated the need for math prodigies to actually go to different schools in person.
    My friend's son still goes across town for math, but "across town" is not much of a burden here.

    Leave a comment:


  • Hot Pepsi
    replied
    Originally posted by Balderdasha View Post

    Yes, it's reminiscent of a lot of "child genius" stories. But she's not so young. She's still with her peer group and seems to like doing other stuff as well. It's not like being schooled only in maths and being sent off to Oxford with your parents in tow at 11.
    Yeah, but her extracurriculars are the classics for tightly wound overachieving kids - piano, chess and goddamned swimming. Hopefully, she'll get some chances to hang out with some dirtbags and lowlifes to see that there's more to life.

    I'm not sure how it is in the UK, but in the US, swimming and distance running are the sports for the academic tryhards. Lots of pain. Lots of getting up at the ass crack of dawn. Lots of travel. Swimming in particular offers lots of opportunities for parents to get involved. And, critically, these sports offer a very precise, objective measure of every individual performance - unlike in team sports where wins and losses are largely the result of team dynamics and luck.



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  • ursus arctos
    replied
    I was actually going to mention that.

    Foreign language teaching in much of the US has always been terrible, and it just didn't exist in the primary schools that any of us attended. The same is true for musical composition. I'm literally too old for programming.

    Leave a comment:


  • Janik
    replied
    One other area where kids will be at very different developmental speeds is foreign languages. But as someone was saying last night that kind of makes sense - all Maths really is is a different language used to explain ideas. A very symbolic formal language, true. But with arbitrary rules and patterns like natural languages. And other languages which bridge that apparent gap, such as computer programming languages, sign languages, and so on.

    See also:
    Computer programming
    Musical composition

    Leave a comment:


  • ursus arctos
    replied
    I think that's still generally true, though technology has largely eliminated the need for math prodigies to actually go to different schools in person.

    Leave a comment:


  • Hot Pepsi
    replied
    Originally posted by Balderdasha View Post
    I used to do my maths lessons with the year 4s when I was in year 1, which was quite fun, but I wouldn't have wanted to be in that class full time.

    When I was in school, there were a pair of twins that had to be escorted from the elementary school to junior high just for math, and then later, from junior high to the high school - again, just for math. For everything else, they stayed with their regular class and that seemed to work out fine. They both ended up going to Harvard Law School.

    I have one genius friend who is just so good at remembering everything he reads, and can read so fast, that he was genuinely bored in AP history. He knew all of it already.

    But that's unusual.

    It always seems that math was the one subject where a few kids are so advanced that they have to go to a different class or school.​

    The other subjects - English, history, and even science, were better at accommodating a wider range of learning speeds in the same classroom.

    Or maybe that was just the fad in education when I was there and, in fact, that was holding some kids back and frustrating others.

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  • ursus arctos
    replied
    You literally couldn't pay me enough to join Mensa

    Leave a comment:


  • ursus arctos
    replied
    I'm particularly sensitive, because my professional lives have been full of very talented people who have assembled an armfull of brass rings by the their late 20s only to suddenly realise that they never wanted to get on the carrousel in the first place.

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  • San Bernardhinault
    replied
    As a general rule, I think you should not trust anyone who tells you their IQ* or that they're in Mensa. It generally means they'll be incredibly smug about how "intelligent" they are. And usually also means they don't have any actual conversational ability.

    * obviously, on this thread people are mentioning long-ago IQ tests that they're telling us are meaningless, which isn't the same thing

    Leave a comment:


  • Balderdasha
    replied
    Originally posted by ursus arctos View Post
    This is likely unfair, but the A Level story reminds me of those kids who apply to every Ivy plus Stanford, Cal, Chicago, etc even though they have absolutely zero interest in going to, say, Cornell.

    Or am I missing some purpose behind it?

    I am genuinely worried about where she will find herself in ten years.
    Yes, it's reminiscent of a lot of "child genius" stories. But she's not so young. She's still with her peer group and seems to like doing other stuff as well. It's not like being schooled only in maths and being sent off to Oxford with your parents in tow at 11.

    Leave a comment:


  • ursus arctos
    replied
    Some of my classmates would have been twice my age,

    Absolute nightmare, not to mention being expected to go to uni at 13.

    Leave a comment:


  • Balderdasha
    replied
    I used to do my maths lessons with the year 4s when I was in year 1, which was quite fun, but I wouldn't have wanted to be in that class full time.

    Leave a comment:


  • ursus arctos
    replied
    This is likely unfair, but the A Level story reminds me of those kids who apply to every Ivy plus Stanford, Cal, Chicago, etc even though they have absolutely zero interest in going to, say, Cornell.

    Or am I missing some purpose behind it?

    I am genuinely worried about where she will find herself in ten years.

    Leave a comment:


  • ursus arctos
    replied
    My cousin was a child psychologist, and administered some tests to me when I was about 4.

    She was very excited about the results, but I was rather less so, and told my mother that I didn't want to do anymore of this.

    So I didn't.

    And the results were very helpful when I wanted to get out of Kindergarten, though the school initially wanted to put me in fourth grade, which I just said no to as well.

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  • Nocturnal Submission
    replied
    Erm, it's "only" 28 A-levels, guys.

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  • Hot Pepsi
    replied
    Originally posted by Balderdasha View Post
    And yes, the concept of "resilience" really is a double-edged sword. It's great to teach kids to try again and how to keep going even if things get hard or how to pick yourself up if things go wrong. But it's not a substitute for resolving structural inequalities. In the same way that putting on morning mindfulness meetings is great but not a substitute for treating your staff well, having reasonable expectations of how much work they can do, and paying them fairly.
    Hundo-P, as the kids say.

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  • Balderdasha
    replied
    But yes, 38 A-levels is ridiculous. I doubt I'd even be able to name 38 A-level subjects. Surely by that point you're just doubling up on lots of stuff? There are probably a few A-levels I could get just because I'm good at cramming and doing exams but I'm not sure what the point would be.

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