But the father's thesis was that hothousing produces geniuses on demand. Not that they're a precious find that needs to be directed to where they can be most use.
By using a subject that was well-known, widely available, cheap and popular, and very well-measured, he increased his chances of achieving his goal - convincing the world that his methods would get results out of bright kids so good that they would appear as geniuses to the world at large. He seems to have wildly succeeded, and the world just kinda shrugged.
I don't know if every child is a potential genius but I do know that not every child reaches their full potential. Its interesting that Polgar felt Chess was the ultimate expression of intelligence, why not mathematics? Or language?
As a parent when your children are young, I encourage you to encourage their curiosity in a healthy way, which leads to a life of wondering just why things are the way they are, and investing those questions in a productive way. Later in life its hard to rekindle the spark of curiosity, and early in life its easy to extinguish it.
> Later in life its hard to rekindle the spark of curiosity, and early in life its easy to extinguish it
Can this be backed up statistically ? Can a born genius have their spark extinguished by adverse circumstances or poor parenting ? I feel the exceptional ones march on their way to genius despite family support.
Seems a bit of a selection bias, in that no one who had their potential severely and permanently reduced from a young age is likely to be recognized as a genius. So you of course only end up recognizing "genius" in people who overcame whatever obstacles were presented them, or else had few to overcome in the first place.
The best example I can think of is Chris Langan[1], though we only know who he is because he maintained some form of recognizable intellect in spite of his upbringing. Had his beatings led to debilitating psychological problems, brain damage, homelessness, or other things of that nature, we wouldn't be recognizing him as someone held back by his early childhood. Which sort of shows the inherent selection bias.
It would be challenging to design such an experiment for obvious reasons. I've observed the cohort of children associated with my friends. Nearly all the kids started out quite curious, but by middle school there was definite segmentation, and by college it was very much a smaller subset who were still out there asking questions and following up on the answers.
I will also add that it is the curse of parenting that you cannot re-do the experiment. And so every choice you make, strict/lenient, forbid/allow, debate/fiat, talk/not-talk is full of questions about whether or not it would be better for your child if you acted in a different way. It is really stressful on the parents.
>Its interesting that Polgar felt Chess was the ultimate expression of intelligence, why not mathematics? Or language?
Says so in the article. Chess has a unified global ranking scheme so you can objectively measure your success in chess.
The real tragedy is that these children grew up under Communism; there's another, even better, unified objective global ranking scheme he could have used if he raised them in a free country.
Presumably money. There's a discussion on the correlation between wealth and intelligence at LW with lots of links. Summary, from a quick read: being smart contributes to being rich, but it isn't necessary or sufficient.
Likewise, in aggregate, being raised with a single-minded focus on chess is probably not necessary or sufficient for being successful on the scale of the article. Certainly most attempts to breed prodigies fail.
Using a financial metric as opposed to a chess metric is an internal/external validity tradeoff that would support the claim that the parenting techniques used are useful in real-world scenarios. I think this is better because as many others have pointed out, how good you are at chess is usually not a factor in how successful a life you lead, whereas in the West, your net worth is basically a direct measurement of success.
Yes, I agree, if you're optimizing for "success" you should optimize for "net worth", since for a lot of people those terms mean the same thing, no argument that this is the mainstream interpretation.
Personally I believe that as far as financial success is concerned, how well you handle transactions is just as important as net worth (so it's best to have a lot of money and handle it really well), but that's impossible to quantify of course.
Idealism is a different thing, and curiosity in service to changing the world is probably doomed. It took a while until I was comfortable that the world was going to be what the world was going to be, and that change was very much slower to happen than I could envision it happening.
For curiosity I read a lot to expose myself to new ideas, and follow up on things through journal articles, the occasional lab visit, and personal experimentation. It also helps to surround yourself with people who are curious, I identified that as one of the things that made college more "fun" than the office, everyone of my social group was excited to learn new things in college.
And a small note on "hectic". I find when I'm trying to do too many things at the same time my life is "hectic" because every activity is taking away from some other important activity and I don't feel good about the one thing I am getting done, I feel bad about the 9 things I am not making progress on. My wife helped me recognize this pattern in me and to combat it I put longer schedules on things to allow each week to have its "thematic" goal, and all progress against that goal is "good" and any non-progress against other goals is "expected" so not bad. I find I get the same amount of stuff done I just feel much better about the progress. And while I totally acknowledge it could be a "pop psych trick", it keeps my level of happiness up.
I think it was Steve Sailer that first said preferences are important. In climbing it's commonly thought most people could climb 5.12 with intense training. But not many actually do because few enjoy training that hard.
I saw this first hand, I was naturally a much better climber than my friend but I didn't enjoy training or climbing as much. After a couple years he's putting up first ascents.
In summary, a kid has IQ > 120 with hard working attitude(e.g. 10000 hour rule) that guarantees he/she will be a genius. The keyword seems like the 120 of IQ which is a minimum requirement.
What I see here is a choice to bring up a child in an environment of an elite pursuit, in this case grandmaster-level chess. If that brings them joy, fine. But it is not much different from children raised to perform at elite levels in sport, music, dance, etc. If they are happy that way, then good. But if they are not happy it is an avoidable misery.
If you have given your child the gift of a life of the mind, you really do not have to press them to be able to reach elite performance levels in the domains where, if you haven't sacrificed a normal-ish childhood, you have missed the boat.
If you avoid doing that, you give them the chance to excel in areas where one can have lifelong participation and growth.
If it were possible to create consistently world-class results in disparate fields by early specialisation and intensive training, could the world afford to ignore it? A decrease in total childhood happiness would be gladly accepted by every nation if more top performers in every field could be created.
Perhaps one instead could hothouse a child in the life of the mind and produce a world-class young generalist, with the capacity to become a world-class specialist in a pursuit that makes them happy. I'm sure that happens a lot on an individual level. And indeed that could describe the goals of public education systems. But that's not exactly encouraging.
We seem to have methods of intensive training that produce world-class prodigies in the arts and in competitive arenas - musical performers, athletes and chess. Academic hothousing seems a much more mixed bag.
That some people became grandmasters in as little as 3000 hours is enough to question the assertion that it's all about nurture.
There's a limit to perseverance. Some may be blessed with an extraordinary amount of it but most aren't. So you're much more likely to keep at it if you progress fast enough to achieve 1 % percentile performance in say 3000 hours instead of 10,000.
3000 hours is 5 hours a day of practice for 3.5 years. We all have observed how some just rocket ahead .
Surround them with intelligent people who like talking.
Take a visit to a children's area in a hospital if you want to meet some hyper intelligent children with less intelligent parents. They soak in an amazing vocabulary from being around doctors all day.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 64.8 ms ] threadDon't fret, my comment was not meant for you.
By using a subject that was well-known, widely available, cheap and popular, and very well-measured, he increased his chances of achieving his goal - convincing the world that his methods would get results out of bright kids so good that they would appear as geniuses to the world at large. He seems to have wildly succeeded, and the world just kinda shrugged.
As a parent when your children are young, I encourage you to encourage their curiosity in a healthy way, which leads to a life of wondering just why things are the way they are, and investing those questions in a productive way. Later in life its hard to rekindle the spark of curiosity, and early in life its easy to extinguish it.
Can this be backed up statistically ? Can a born genius have their spark extinguished by adverse circumstances or poor parenting ? I feel the exceptional ones march on their way to genius despite family support.
The best example I can think of is Chris Langan[1], though we only know who he is because he maintained some form of recognizable intellect in spite of his upbringing. Had his beatings led to debilitating psychological problems, brain damage, homelessness, or other things of that nature, we wouldn't be recognizing him as someone held back by his early childhood. Which sort of shows the inherent selection bias.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Langan
I will also add that it is the curse of parenting that you cannot re-do the experiment. And so every choice you make, strict/lenient, forbid/allow, debate/fiat, talk/not-talk is full of questions about whether or not it would be better for your child if you acted in a different way. It is really stressful on the parents.
Says so in the article. Chess has a unified global ranking scheme so you can objectively measure your success in chess.
The real tragedy is that these children grew up under Communism; there's another, even better, unified objective global ranking scheme he could have used if he raised them in a free country.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/jw5/how_much_wealth_is_produced_by_h...
Using a financial metric as opposed to a chess metric is an internal/external validity tradeoff that would support the claim that the parenting techniques used are useful in real-world scenarios. I think this is better because as many others have pointed out, how good you are at chess is usually not a factor in how successful a life you lead, whereas in the West, your net worth is basically a direct measurement of success.
Personally I believe that as far as financial success is concerned, how well you handle transactions is just as important as net worth (so it's best to have a lot of money and handle it really well), but that's impossible to quantify of course.
Too many of us have our idealism burnt out by dead end jobs and hectic lives.
For curiosity I read a lot to expose myself to new ideas, and follow up on things through journal articles, the occasional lab visit, and personal experimentation. It also helps to surround yourself with people who are curious, I identified that as one of the things that made college more "fun" than the office, everyone of my social group was excited to learn new things in college.
And a small note on "hectic". I find when I'm trying to do too many things at the same time my life is "hectic" because every activity is taking away from some other important activity and I don't feel good about the one thing I am getting done, I feel bad about the 9 things I am not making progress on. My wife helped me recognize this pattern in me and to combat it I put longer schedules on things to allow each week to have its "thematic" goal, and all progress against that goal is "good" and any non-progress against other goals is "expected" so not bad. I find I get the same amount of stuff done I just feel much better about the progress. And while I totally acknowledge it could be a "pop psych trick", it keeps my level of happiness up.
I saw this first hand, I was naturally a much better climber than my friend but I didn't enjoy training or climbing as much. After a couple years he's putting up first ascents.
To give a shout out he's http://vividrea1ity.blogspot.com/
If you have given your child the gift of a life of the mind, you really do not have to press them to be able to reach elite performance levels in the domains where, if you haven't sacrificed a normal-ish childhood, you have missed the boat.
If you avoid doing that, you give them the chance to excel in areas where one can have lifelong participation and growth.
Perhaps one instead could hothouse a child in the life of the mind and produce a world-class young generalist, with the capacity to become a world-class specialist in a pursuit that makes them happy. I'm sure that happens a lot on an individual level. And indeed that could describe the goals of public education systems. But that's not exactly encouraging.
We seem to have methods of intensive training that produce world-class prodigies in the arts and in competitive arenas - musical performers, athletes and chess. Academic hothousing seems a much more mixed bag.
I'm wondering what his take on this article his.
There's a limit to perseverance. Some may be blessed with an extraordinary amount of it but most aren't. So you're much more likely to keep at it if you progress fast enough to achieve 1 % percentile performance in say 3000 hours instead of 10,000.
3000 hours is 5 hours a day of practice for 3.5 years. We all have observed how some just rocket ahead .
Take a visit to a children's area in a hospital if you want to meet some hyper intelligent children with less intelligent parents. They soak in an amazing vocabulary from being around doctors all day.