Business Insider | For 99.9% of you, clicking on this link will be very depressing.
It's a NYT op-ed by professors David Z. Hambrick and Elizabeth J. Meinz which points out what what matters in life isn't effort or hard work: What matters in life is raw intelligence, and either you got it or you don't. Here's the nut of it:
Research has shown that intellectual ability matters for success in many fields — and not just up to a point.The authors go on to cite their own research conducted on pianists, which showed that when it comes to sight-reading ability, practice doesn't matter as much as "working memory" capacity does.
Exhibit A is a landmark study of intellectually precocious youths directed by the Vanderbilt University researchers David Lubinski and Camilla Benbow. They and their colleagues tracked the educational and occupational accomplishments of more than 2,000 people who as part of a youth talent search scored in the top 1 percent on the SAT by the age of 13. (Scores on the SAT correlate so highly with I.Q. that the psychologist Howard Gardner described it as a “thinly disguised” intelligence test.) The remarkable finding of their study is that, compared with the participants who were “only” in the 99.1 percentile for intellectual ability at age 12, those who were in the 99.9 percentile — the profoundly gifted — were between three and five times more likely to go on to earn a doctorate, secure a patent, publish an article in a scientific journal or publish a literary work. A high level of intellectual ability gives you an enormous real-world advantage.
What's interesting here is how un-popular this idea is. Malcolm Gladwell had a huge hit with his book on outliers, which basically argued that the real key to extreme success was just putting a bunch of hours into the work.
The kind of research also makes people uncomfortable, since it means that not everyone who wants to be great can be, and that there are probably some limits to how far we should go to cultivate talent, etc. Fist tap Big Don.
13 comments:
The most obvious candidate for memification in Outliers is a little gem Gladwell calls the 10,000-Hour Rule. Studies suggest that the key to success in any field has nothing to do with talent. It's simply practice, 10,000 hours of it — 20 hours a week for 10 years.
Outliers is a more personal book than its predecessors are. If you hold it up to the light, at the right angle, you can read it as a coded autobiography: a successful man trying to figure out his own context, how success happened to him and what it means. Gladwell is asking, as he puts it over lunch, "whether successful people deserve the praise we heap on them."
First understand your innate abilities, second find your niche, third practice, practice, practice. Individual IQ has been over rated, and if one is literate to life, one would know how many smart persons from H.S. landed up basic bums and bitter they did not excel. They even beat their wives. Ask the great Sonny Rollins who at 81 still practices. Any smart persons understand that a person with low IQ, can't excel in certain fields, but knows if they practice the basic skills of life, they succeed in life, and many times better than those who considered themselves g_d's gift.
I'm confused then Nana. Big Don sent this one to me as "The Bell Curve Confirmed" - as you well know, Big Don is truth/PRR. Accept no substitutes...,
I'll be damned, turns out really smart people are really smart.
What I've never understood is why people who are purported to be so smart have such fragile egos.
BB, it's because smart is still relatively common (there are 8 billion of us) and wise is rare. Even the dumb people who visit here are pretty smart.
...the
profoundly gifted — were between three and five times more
likely to go on to earn a doctorate, secure a patent, publish an article
in a scientific journal or publish a literary work. A high level of intellectual ability gives you an enormous real-world advantage.
WTF real world advantage is publishing a literary work or a doctorate? Those are markers of social status, they have jack shit to do with real-world advantage. Unless of course they mean "access to and inclusion in the 1% for cultural reasons wholly unrelated to results." It's all affect, no effect.
Does being anointed by the sovereign give one the ability to transmutate?
Happy Thanksgiving to all the teachers and students here at Sub-U!
and to you sir!!!
I just now returned from a tour of this truly unique facility http://www.bvcaps.org/ and cannot overstate the importance of social capital affording one privileged access and exposure to what's done, how it's done, and most important, who's doing it - to guide and shape the interests, enthusiasms, and capabilities of young minds.
I have now seen first hand the state of the art model under which hands-on guided highschool education will be delivered and in the light of that, everything else is reduced to conversation.
"Even the dumb people who visit here are pretty smart" LOL that has to be a given to read Doc's page. Have a good one Doc. Seen any good movies lately which will benefit smart folks. I have to rent Winter's Bone.
So, this BVCAPS thing is like a hi-tech work/study program? I'm all for that. In fact, when I went to visit my niece in KC, I was struck by the good vibes I was getting off the general environs - and it wasn't just the food. Seems like it is a younger population there. I'm obviously a huge fan of the STEM job sections. Anything and everything we can do to promote this area of human endeavor is all gravy. There may be something to the emphasis on talent (certainly worked for the Rooskie educational system - but to the detriment of the rest of the population), but seems to me getting everybody up to their optimal performance is a worthwhile goal period. Why, even a pennywise Republican should be able to see the logic in that.
Anyways, NYTOPEd or not, it ain't just E = talent + mentoring. It's E = talent times performance to the mentoring squared.
I would also mention that most of the jobs humans are offered don't really require much in the way of talent or smarts anyway.
And as to real-world advantages, I can show you plenty of mediocre (and less) talents who have done exceptionally well getting by on dumb luck - or criminal sociopathy.
11th and 12th graders attend for half a day and work with faculty taken straight from corporate partner job sites. there are professional threads in the areas of bioscience(gene/molecular/environmental/veterinary), electrical engineering, programming, robotics, aeronautical engineering, emergency and sports medicine, architecture/civil engineering, business, marketing, law, - pretty much the entire panoply of vocations for which there are corporate partners to provide faculty.
The faculty are essentially providing these highschool students with two years of professional OJT as if they were already college graduates in return for which they're getting boatloads of extremely low cost high-quality deliverable output with no limits/barriers/preconceptions - so you can imagine how creative and energetic such an enclave is.
This setup needs to be washed, rinsed, and repeated nationwide. Get all that certified deadwood talkinghead education degree having barriers to learning folk out.of.the.way and let professionals engage with the kids directly and start teaching them real stuff right out the box.
Hands-down the most impressive approach to education I have ever seen...,
We had that in the 1960's it was called the Co-op program. Those who were ahead and could work at businesses like IBM and Wall St.
No Nana, you didn't have anything even remotely like this in the 60's and to my knowledge, nothing remotely like this exists anywhere else at this time.
There are 5 teenagers pursuing patents out of this school and for non-trivial innovations - and - a number of LLC's and other startup entities being spawned on the back of teenager technical and creative work.
In a nutshell, the corporate partner/instructors have turned on-the-job training into fully accredited education (advanced professional studies) but the kids aren't being co-opted into the companies for which the instructors work, rather, the companies are in many instances obtaining the type of real-world project work from these kids that they've here-to-date gone offshore to obtain for a nominally lower cost in India and elsewhere.
Ok
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