Late Bloomers: Why do we equate genius with precocity? (2008)

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/10/20/late-bloomers-2

by wslh • 12 years ago

156 67 12 years ago

newyorker.com

dominotw2• 12 years ago

older ppl can be genius too. Is that the tldr?

moultano• 12 years ago

If you find yourself wanting tldrs, maybe this isn't the site for you.

jessriedel• 12 years ago

That's completely mistaken. Everyone has finite time, and we need a way to find out what's worth reading. HackerNews and the Internet in general is filled with unnecessarily bloated articles.

Folks have been using tldr's in the academic sphere for centuries; they're called 'abstracts'.

possibilistic• 12 years ago

I have pretty extreme ADD, even on medication, and I could never hope to finish an article like this. I can never leisurely read; I have to skim. "tl;dr"s and commentary are what I thrive on, and ultimately how I derive a large percentage of my present context.

I'm not saying that I can't get deep into technical specs or literature, but when it comes to a form that is largely prose... forget about it. Breadth-first search takes over.

DennisP• 12 years ago

More that late bloomers are a different kind of genius, that takes time and experimentation to develop.

Mz2• 12 years ago

Excerpt:

Genius, in the popular conception, is inextricably tied up with precocity—doing something truly creative, we’re inclined to think, requires the freshness and exuberance and energy of youth.

It is also tied up with the idea that "geniuses" are fast. It was nice to see profiles of Maryam Mirzakhani indicate that she was a deep thinker, not a fast thinker. Maybe we can start changing some of these popular mis-conceptions.

wellpast2• 12 years ago

Einstein fit that bill, as well. Scientists that worked with him noted he was neither a fast thinker nor the best of mathematicians.

dominotw2• 12 years ago

Scientists that worked with him noted he was neither a fast thinker nor the best of mathematicians.

I thought this was mostly a myth. Do you have source for that?

judk• 12 years ago

Context, please. That means Einstein was a 99.99%ile fast thinker in a room of 99.999%ile fast thinkers.

cynicalkane• 12 years ago

This isn't really true; scientists also praised Einstein for his deep mathematical intuition. His work on Brownian motion and general relativity was new and difficult mathematics (GR still is). GR is also startling for the mind-bending fundamental intuitions behind it. He asked mathematicians for help hammering out details, but 1) everyone does this and 2) mathematical rigor and abstraction wasn't nearly as well-established back then as it is now, and was difficult to grasp for many physicists and even mathematicians. For example it was several years before Minkowski established the connection between special relativity and the "shape" of spacetime, giving rigor to Einstein's intuition--but doing so is nowdays an easy exercise in undergraduate mathematics.

ninguem2• 12 years ago

She chooses to think deeply and slowly about problems but I am sure she can think fast if she has to. You don't get gold medals at the IMO otherwise.

http://www.imo-official.org/participant_r.aspx?id=926

toehead2000• 12 years ago

Do you or anyone else have any further sources studying this split between "fast thinkers" and "deep thinkers"? I would be very interested in a way to find people who were "deep;" it seems like most of the technical interviewing techniques screen more for "fast" people.

mahyarm2• 12 years ago

I think a better distinction are qualities of intelligence. For example a meticulous person will do well in a hard pattern matching puzzle, but ask them to do symbol substitution and they will be relatively slow and get a low score.

tsunamifury• 12 years ago

An entire book was written about it recently called Thinking Fast, and Slow.

It is a detailed 900 page exploration if a lifetime of research from the famous behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman on the topic

ewindisch• 12 years ago

You might wish to look at fewer applicants sporting advanced degrees and specifically hire roles that deep thinkers would naturally gravitate toward, degree or not.

As elsewhere mentioned, our educational system often ties success to fast thinking. I've always known I am not a fast thinker and, in fact, had often been the slowest thinker in my classes. This made school difficult and I struggled accordingly. Ultimately, I offset this by studying harder than my peers. For me, it has never been about reading the material and repeating, for example, some mathematics system from memory, but in truly understanding that system.

I consider myself a deep thinker that can easily connect concepts, graph relationships, and see the big picture. This is why I prefer to work as an architect, on security projects, and inevitably play the right stocks on the market. I suppose, anecdotally, if I'm any model, that deep thinkers might be better suited to certain roles and might naturally gravitate toward them.

Finally, and now a bit off-topic: The fact that deep thinkers might be equated with "late-bloomers" might have to do less with "figuring out what they're good at", and more to do with a society and a system which is prejudiced against them. If deep-thinkers were better nurtured and led through the educational system, they may not spend their thirties, or even 40's, learning how and where to apply their talents.

redmaverick2• 12 years ago

"This is related to another comment about two types of genius. There are people who solve a problem the same way that you do, just much much faster. You can imagine doing the same work they had done, but rather than an hour or a day, you would have got to the same place after months of hard work and dead ends. These people are much like ourselves, only a lot quicker. Then there are the other people who show you a solution, and you have absolutely no idea how they even got started. Feynman fell into this latter group." [1]

"Upon starting high school, Feynman was quickly promoted into a higher math class and an unspecified school-administered IQ test estimated his IQ at 125—high, but "merely respectable" according to biographer James Gleick;"[2]

I think people with extremely high IQ tend to be "fast thinkers" and they seem to rely more on logical thinking while those who have sufficient IQ tend to be "deep thinkers" and rely more on intuition/epiphanies.[3]

John von Neumann would the "fast thinker" type of Genius.

[1] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?FeynmanAlgorithm

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman#CITEREFGleick1...

[3] “I never made one of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking” ― Albert Einstein

Mz2• 12 years ago

Well, my opinion is not entirely uninformed or off the cuff. I was briefly Director of Community Life for The TAG Project. I homeschooled my gifted-learning disabled sons. I attended a gifted conference and was a low-level presenter. I did plenty of reading on the subject for a time and participated in lots of discussions with other informed individuals in the gifted community, including some fairly important professionals in this niche field.

First of all, most IQ tests do not go above 140. So anything anywhere near 140 may only be telling you the person is at about the limits of what the test can measure. Even for those tests that do go above 140, it requires a qualified assessor to interpret it properly. The smartest kids often do not measure as being all that smart by standard measures. "Genius" is, basically by definition, someone who thinks differently from others. So measuring the kid who is radically different by standard measures has a track record of missing a lot.

In recent years, there is increasingly research into and available literature on the idea that gifted kids have different minds. They are not merely "more" of something, they are fundamentally different. The correlation of "speed = intelligence" is a rubric which assumes gifted kids are simply "more" of something. Yes, they do tend to be faster than average, even if they are slow compared to other gifted students, but it's really a lot more complicated than that and I think the emphasis on speed does a huge disservice to the gifted community.

The "fast = smart" paradigm is a really major metaphor for giftedness in the world. For example, Stephanie Tolan's essay "Is it a cheetah?" is very popular: http://www.stephanietolan.com/is_it_a_cheetah.htm I once wrote something of a polite rebuttal to that which used redwoods and gazelles as other metaphors. I am not terribly important in the world and it did not become popular (and is no longer online, unless it got captured on The Way Back Machine). I think the cheetah metaphor does a disservice to the gifted community in part because of the unstated assumption that smart people are all dangerous predators. Gazelles are just as fast and are not predators. Why not use that as a metaphor?

Anyway, I am quite busy today so I don't plan to argue this or dig up detailed supporting links. If you really want to look into it, HN's member who goes by the handle tokenadult is a good resource on the topics of intelligence and education. I believe his profile contains links to resources and his posting history, both comments and articles, is likely to be enlightening. (Though I have no idea if he would agree with any of my views above. He and I are not close. We haven't talked in quite a long time. But I have reason to believe he remains far more current on these subjects than I am.)

nilkn2• 12 years ago

Those profiles are probably just trying to make her seem more relatable.

Extremely fast thinking is the name of the game in the IMO and similar competitions. In fact, the emphasis is so much on speed that there are often doubts as to whether the medalists will also be good at research.

taurath• 12 years ago

There's probably more kinds of geniuses than those that do well in speed math competitions. At least, I hope for all of our sake.

imjk• 12 years ago

I read this years ago and thought he had a great premise for a book. I guess it kinda ties into Gladwell's Outliers and David and Goliath, but I still hope he writes more on this topic in the future.

simulate• 12 years ago

In another New Yorker piece, Steven Milhauser explores aged genius in his short story, "In the Reign of Harad IV"

Excert: he understood that he had travelled a long way from the early days, that he still had far to go, and that, from now on, his life would be difficult and without forgiveness.

Link: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/04/10/in-the-reign-of...

jgill2• 12 years ago

This is a really good link to share. Thanks, I also ordered Thinking, Fast and Slow the book because of this posting and the comments. This thread has been pretty interesting to me even from an "at speed of thought" perspective.

Certainly in lower levels of education, "fast" thinking against known problems and problemsets is the norm (at least in the United States). I worked with a few "fast" thinkers that fell into a strange, at the time to me, category of people that I could recognize as intelligent and could solve a certain class of issue or problem easily, but when it came to a more difficult problem space or perhaps one that requires delayed gratification (or no real external recognition/validation/praise) they would give up. The "deep" thinkers seemed to give equal or near equal weight to the validity of options in many cases. There's a time, place, and type of problem that can benefit from each mode of thinking.

sesqu• 12 years ago

Prior and subsequent to reading the book, I suggest you read some of the critique the book has recieved, as the topic is quite anecdotal.

jgill2• 12 years ago

Thanks, I'm going to read it with a skeptical but open mind.

davidw• 12 years ago

Offhand remark regarding the title: everyone can recognize the brilliance of a 5 year old doing calculus, because it's still sort of in the realm of something people may have encountered, and can compare to their own experience. Compare with someone who is, say, 30, and doing some topological quantum lattice tensor dilithium crystal quark extractor thing, it's just "blub" - it's so far beyond most of us we can't tell much more than that person is quite smart at something we know nothing about.

VLM3• 12 years ago

I would agree with and extend your remarks that it takes a certain level of competence in a field to correctly evaluate someone at a higher level in the field, and as the level of the evaluated person increases, the required level of the evaluator increases.

Someone with a BS in physics level of knowledge or maybe grad degree can possibly evaluate Feynman vs Einstein as per the debate in the comments today. However, I suspect most people can't do a useful evaluation of those two.

There are obvious HN on topic analogies with coding, system design, database design, network design.

anomie• 12 years ago

When I read the title I assumed it was an article about the unfairness of the education system, and the whole-life impact of an assessment carried out at an arbitrary point in your 18th year. Perhaps that's an even more pernicious example of the problem.

zb• 12 years ago

Edward Tufte does a pretty entertaining takedown of Galenson's work in his book Beautiful Evidence. The excerpt in question is online:

http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...

VLM3• 12 years ago

Its interesting to analogize thinking with athleticism.

There are some athletes who just outperform most people in all areas as a class.

There are athletes who are experts in certain fields and useless in others (don't enter a football defensive lineman in an ultra-marathon, etc)

Some athletes peak very young. Some train very slowly, some develop very fast. Some athletes start training late in life.

It is mystifying if you're trapped in the dead/dying idea of mind-body dualism, but if the mind and brain are just another pile of nutrient consuming protein just like muscle, it makes sense that the observations are similar.

I would imagine if it were easy to measure, we'd find similar performance trends WRT pancreas or kidney function.

Xcelerate3• 12 years ago

This may be a little off-topic, but as I was reading the article, I started wondering about something. The author uses examples of genius in art and literature, and noted how Cézanne's early works weren't "very good" and how his later one's were much better, whereas Picasso's early works were considered his best.

So I googled paintings of both artists, and I'm perplexed. I have absolutely no clue what is considered "great". Obviously this is because my work is in science and I know next to nothing about art, but I'm still kind of curious what makes a work great in art and literature.

For instance, there's thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of painters in the world right now. And if you select the top 100 and showed me their paintings, and then showed me a Picasso, I wouldn't be able to point out why Picasso's is "better".

Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" is also mentioned as one of the best poems of all time. I'll admit, it's very beautiful, but I just don't understand what makes it that much more amazing than a contemporary poet's work.

Imagine if you took the world's population and wiped everyone's memories of great artists, and then asked them to reevaluate which which works are the "greatest". Would we arrive at the same conclusions? Without the bias of knowing "this is a famous artist, therefore his work must be good", would the rankings of art remain the same?

Unlike my literature teachers in high school, I don't believe in "magical qualities", so there has to be some numeric metric one could use to separate the very best from the "just good". What is it? (Perhaps it's not an easily calculable number, but it still must exist; if it didn't, then the whole field of art and literature criticism would be nonsense.)

dboard• 12 years ago

Is there a numeric metric to separate the very best from the "just good" in any field?

Xcelerate3• 12 years ago

Yes. In athletics for instance it's very easy. Each sport has a built-in scoring system from the get-go. I would also say it's pretty easy to pick out the best scientists. Simply evaluate the improvement in predictive power that their contribution to the field elicits, and I think Einstein, Feynman, et al. would fall out pretty easily as the best.

vanderZwan• 12 years ago

The thing about a work of art being "good" is that it also largely depends on the surrounding art traditions of the time. Picasso's early works contributed most to new aesthetic thinking and the discussion of the nature of art, and within that context they are revolutionary and genius.

To give another example, in my opinion Duchamp's readymades were a genius piece of artistic trolling, great thought-provoking statements on aesthetics and the nature of art. Pretty much everyone who followed missed the point, as they did not add anything significant to the discussion - they just accepted the Fountain as art and proof that their readymades are therefore also valuable art.

Also, with many works of art you really need to see the real thing to even get the opportunity to "get" it. A real Mondrian is much better than you would expect based on pictures, because it's possible to empathise and "feel" how the artist made his brush strokes, the emotion behind it. That embodied experience of a work of art, which is essential to the readability of a painting, or any work of art, is often lost when translated to a digital JPG.

As for your last point, you fall for the mistake of believing that the external objective truth, which applies to the natural sciences, applies to art. Art is about (partially shared) subjective experiences, which can still be quantified to some degree if put in the proper context, but not in the same meaningful way we can calculate the value of Pi. For example, our eyes work mostly the same across our species, so before interpreting what we see the input should be largely similar, creating similarity in otherwise subjective experiences. But it's obvious that this similarity in perception is limited.

I suggest "Philosophy in the Flesh", by Lakoff and Johnson, if you want a nice empirically grounded discussion related to this - they apply empirical insights from the cognitive sciences to philosophy and in the process give you a good non-magical sense of how this subjective but shared experience works.

monocasa• 12 years ago

And as an engineer, this makes sense to me. True innovation in the field is respected just as much as if not more than implementation details.

VLM3• 12 years ago

There isn't one number.

Lets extend this to an easier subject we all have extensive experience with... evaluating the taste of the food we're eating.

If the food critic fad of the day prioritizes flavor balance, the "winner" will have an amazing balance of flavors but perhaps the texture will resemble dog food or clam chowder.

If the food critic fad of the day prioritizes texture, or heat, or visual appearance, or smell, or sweetness (well, food critics don't like corn syrup but walmart shoppers certainly do...).

Even worse, fads aren't binary either, its all a big ratio. That's at least partial explanation why some authors go in and out of favor in lit over centuries. Its actually a lot of work in lit to keep up with who is supposed to be cool and who is supposed to suck based on changing tastes.

Then dog pile a ton of groupthink on top with some politics and inevitable cultural issues (racism, nationalism, etc) and you can see how faddish some of this is.

On the other hand, if you have an agreed upon definition of impressionism, then you can evaluate who makes the best impressionist painter under that set of carefully defined rules. I think it would be hard to argue against Monet. Someone could claim Sisley but I think on long enough study that Monet beats Sisley overall. (edited to emphasize, beats Sisley at the defined rules... nothing wrong with liking a set of rules where Sisley beats Monet, just don't name that set of rules impressionistic painting)

Or, you can compare your Robert Frost to this dude named Robertson who wrote similar, yet somewhat inferior poems. I think it would be a lot of work or outright impossible to compare Frost to Kipling or to T S Elliot beyond sorta "and heres a different genre"

moron4hire• 12 years ago

Think of it like people who quote movie lines too much, like Arnold Schwarzenegger saying "Hasta la vista, baby" in Terminator 2. When the line first came out, it was interesting. The repetition kills it for a while. It can eventually make a comeback, a nostalgic throwback, less a reference to the movie itself and more a harkening to our shared experience of it.

And it could then eventually fade away completely, at which point a new movie (Terminator 4D!) could use it and kick off a whole knew wave, completely oblivious to the original, until a cultural anthropologist somewhere writes a paper somewhere that will get poorly summarized in the popular news.

There is nothing objectively, measurably different about when Arnold said it the first time, when your coworkers drove it into the ground around the water cooler, or in later uses. What differs entirely is the cultural context in which we experience it.

And when it comes to "Ahht"-art, it's never about the pretty picture. It's about what it communicates about culture.

murbard2• 12 years ago

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/arts/design/23pain.html?_r...

I think this story is evidence that there are some non arbitrary qualities to artwork that you (and I) are not perceiving.

It would never have occurred to me to pick up this painting in the trash, but the woman did... a woman who was "not a modern-art aficionado" but felt the painting "had a strange power".

snowwrestler3• 12 years ago

Art exists within contexts, and without understanding those contexts, you will have a hard time understanding why one piece of art is more respected/revered than another.

Here's an analogy: imagine you found an artist who had almost no background in science, and gave him a bunch of scientific papers to read. Would he be able to identify the significant or groundbreaking papers? By what criteria would he make his decisions?

JoeAltmaier2• 12 years ago

That's perhaps disingenuous. Artists are not known for their critical thinking skills. Scientists are defined by them.

dubcanada• 12 years ago

The problem with art/literature is it's all opinions. And some people feel that their opinion carries more weight due too reasons.

collyw• 12 years ago

whereas Picasso's early works were considered his best.

Having been to the Picasso museum here in Barcelona, it maybe because he could actually paint, as you can see in his earlier work, as opposed to his later stuff - which looks like it is done by a 5 year old.

I personally believe there is a lot of "celebrity culture" in art, even Banksy said something along those lines.

"The Art we look at is made by only a select few. A small group create, promote, purchase, exhibit and decide the success of Art. Only a few hundred people in the world have any real say. When you go to an Art gallery you are simply a tourist looking at the trophy cabinet of a few millionaires..."

freyr2• 12 years ago

So since you (an admitted neophyte who knows "next to nothing" about art) can't discern good art from great art, art criticism as a whole must be invalid? It might be, but that's surely not evidence of it. You tout your ignorance as if that somehow lends credence to your comment.

Sure, there's a high degree of subjectivity inherent to art. But we can look to the originality of a given work of art, and and cultural impact that it has had.

If you wiped everyone's memories of great inventions, scientific discoveries, etc., and then asked them to compare the Model T to a Ford Focus, they'd of course say the Focus is a much better automobile. And an understanding of the impact and importance of the Model T would be lost on them.

Xcelerate3• 12 years ago

So since you

I knew where this was headed as soon as I read the first three -- rather passive aggressive -- words of your reply. Yours seems to be the only comment among many implying I think "art criticism as a whole must be invalid". Curious that... I really despise people putting words in my mouth that were never there. You're looking for a fight that doesn't exist, so I flagged your post since it detracts from the discussion. Please abstain from these sorts of comments in the future.

wmil• 12 years ago

Picasso and Cézanne both got popular in the 190x's. As photography got better the art world stopped being impressed with accurate perspective.

Cézanne was famously bad at perspective, but kept painting anyways.

Essentially they were both doing interesting things with color and shape at the moment that became trendy.

aaron695• 12 years ago

I love the meta.

It's pretty obvious as time goes on, unfortunately it's not better. For some who didn't maximise their earlier it looks like they did, but no, they didn't get better.

But it's great art to think it does. So perhaps it's true after all. It's a nice artistic article.

otakucode• 12 years ago

I can think of 2 reasons very quickly - #1, the brain is far more capable and plastic and active in adolescence than it is in adulthood or later. #2, human beings have a finite lifespan. If you wish to get further than others, you have to surpass their development at all stages.

Until we can change biology, no one is going to have a brain that works better than an adolescent, that's just how we evolved.

squozzer• 12 years ago

To me, the question of precocity vs. late blooming can be summed up thusly:

1) The 70-year lifespan is a recent development. Producing great work in one's 20s and 30s was a necessity because one's 40s and 50s weren't guaranteed. Social inertia took over from there.

2) The young also have greater marketability (looks, energy) and can usually be controlled more easily. This makes them more attractive to backers. This matters a lot in many fields, but in the arts especially, where the artist receives as much attention as their art.

Late Bloomers: Why do we equate genius with precocity? (2008)

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