Are geeks successful?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Days pass one after another, weekends stick together into a muddy mess, like proteins in the brain of an Alzheimer's patient, you shift papers at school, institute or office, cursing hated genetics: if only you could be born a child prodigy! Then the boss would have been kinder, and the girl would have been more compliant, and in general, the red carpet at the exit from the mother's womb did not bother anyone.

What do people really need to be successful in this life? A guide for children and parents from our humane editorial staff.

The Malaysian-born British name Sufi Yusof first hit the headlines back in 1997. To do this, the girl just had to go to Oxford and start studying mathematics at the women's college of Saint Hilda of the famous university. The reason for the interest of the newspapermen was the age of the girl: Sufi became a student at Oxford at the age of 13. Journalists who followed the fate of the little genius did not have to wait long for fresh news from the life of the Sufi. However, instead of the expected awards, discoveries and other academic fuss, something else happened: the girl first escaped from the university, having studied there for four years, and a few years later shocked the public by finding happiness in working as a prostitute. “I have no regrets about this,” the nugget girl categorically declared to all those who stuttered about the career and even more so the moral decline of the genius of mathematics. Having successfully worked for some time as a call girl, Sufiya changed her field of activity, becoming a social worker. She never used her outstanding brain for its intended purpose.

Another genius, who entered Oxford at the age of 11, Ruth Lawrence, who was also predicted the laurels of the great mathematician, now lives in Israel and is extremely skeptical of the increasing attempts by parents to raise unique children from their children. She herself insists that her offspring grow and develop "naturally." Andrew Hellburton, another child with outstanding math ability, graduated from high school at age 8. However, he went to university, like most of his peers, at the age of 23, after having worked at McDonald's.

The IQ of the eccentric prodigy William Sideis was estimated at between 250 and 300 points (the average human IQ is about 100 points) - this is the highest recorded IQ in history. At the age of 18 months, he was able to read The New York Times, at the age of 6, William became an atheist, and before his 8th birthday he wrote four books. However, Sidis was extremely socially passive. At a young age, he decided to give up sex and devote his life to intellectual development. His interests were manifested in rather exotic forms. He wrote a study on the alternative history of the United States and even developed his own quasi-liberal theory. Throughout his adult life, Sidis held the position of a simple accountant, wore traditional rural clothes and quit as soon as his genius was revealed, preferring to "keep his head down." Unsurprisingly, some critics use the biography of “the smartest man in history” as the most telling example of the risk that geeks run the risk of failing in adulthood.

The list goes on and on, right up to Teddy Kaczynski, who shone at a young age with mathematical and engineering talents and grew into one of the most famous terrorists of our time - the Unabomber.

Unfortunately, neither the IQ nor, more broadly, giftedness at a young age are the guarantors of a person's success and relevance in adult life

Indeed, it is strange to expect that the winner in the world competition for calculating square roots in the mind (there are some) will become a successful businessman or even an outstanding scientist as a result.

Professor Joan Freeman, a long-time observer of two hundred geeks, in her book Gifted Life: What Happens to Gifted Children When They Grow Up, provides evidence to support this opinion. According to the statistics she has collected, not every young talent, considered a “little Mozart” in childhood, will become such in adulthood. Of the 210 talented experimental subjects of Professor Freeman, only six, having become adults, developed their abilities into something worthy of attention, and the rest were remembered only as pink-cheeked toddlers, who at one time could remember more than 600 routes of London buses.

Recent observations of psychologists show that this trend is even more general and applies to almost everyone who was considered "mother's pride" in childhood. The problem is very well described by the prominent American expert on artificial intelligence and singer of rationality Eliezer Yudkowski, who wrote an excellent textbook on everyday logic in the form of fanfiction "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rational Thinking." “Harry knew he wasn't the only one. He met other geniuses at the mathematics Olympiads. And most often he lost miserably to his rivals, who probably spent whole days solving mathematical problems, never read science fiction and who would burn out from their science until puberty and achieve nothing in life, because they would use well-known approaches instead of learning to think creatively".

The benefits of a creative, or heuristic, approach that does not use pre-existing rigorous problem-solving algorithms is familiar to Yudkowski. He himself did not officially receive any education, but at the same time achieved not only success in life, but also recognition in the academic environment. The prototype of heuristics is maieutics, or the method of philosophizing Socrates, the essence of which is not to assert the truth, but to help the interlocutor to discover it on his own. Socrates was convinced that leading questions can lead the respondent to formulate new knowledge. Such an approach is infinitely far from the mechanical memorization of existing truths and algorithms, which is required even from the most outstanding modern schoolchildren and students.

Modern education often offers knowledge that is either general or abstract. Students and schoolchildren are often able to solve complex typical tasks, performing many operations, however, when they have to perform an elementary, but non-standard task, they fall into a stupor

As an alternative, the famous physicist Enrico Fermi offered students his own tasks - the so-called Fermi problems, which allow them to develop the ability to apply their own knowledge in practice, as well as quickly find ways to solve any life problem. How many French teachers practice in Tomsk? The problem does not contain all the data for an exact answer, but a person is able to find an approximate value by assessing the population of the city, the number of children and students, the proportion of French learners, as well as the fullness of classes and the number of lessons taught. In real life, where information for decision-making is often limited or insufficient, Fermi's heuristic approach is much more valuable than the olympiadic ability to solve differential equations.

There is an opinion that the so-called formal knowledge or logical and spatial thinking, measured by standard IQ tests, is nothing more than just an indicator of the success of the well-known algorithms, a demonstration of the subject's ability to find a red circle in a sequence of yellow squares, which in itself, of course, valuable, however, it has a very indirect relationship to real life.

Research by the Carnegie Institute of Technology shows that 85% of your financial success depends on your "social engineering" skills, your ability to communicate, negotiate, and manage

Surprisingly, only 15% of scientists assign to the so-called general intelligence. By the way, the Nobel laureate, psychologist Daniel Kahneman found that people are more willing to do business with a person they just like, and they will trust him more, even if the object of affection offers a product or service of inferior quality at a higher price.

So instead of dwelling on your own intelligence and education, you should engage in the development of what is now called "emotional intelligence", "moral intelligence" and - in the English version - body intelligence, or the art of maintaining and developing your body … These characteristics of a person may seem difficult to measure or even far-fetched, but their influence can be much more significant than the classical IQ. The ability to control one's emotions, to adequately assess the emotions of others, the ability to forgive, be responsible, and demonstrate sympathy are really important for humans, who are evolutionarily existing as a social animal.

If keeping your body in order, in your opinion, is out of this list, just keep in mind that beautiful (read - healthy and outwardly harmonious) people are paid a higher salary, they are more willing to be hired and generally prefer to do business with them - this is statistics that do not care about the declared equality.

An equally important factor in achieving success is motivation, even if it sounds trite, like the thesis of Paulo Coelho. A series of studies by a team of psychologists led by Angela Duckworth from the University of Pennsylvania have shown that motivation has a very serious effect on even the results of one of the most popular and time-tested tests for measuring intelligence - the Wechsler scale. Children motivated by psychologists did better with it than those who passed the test under normal conditions. Another study by Pennsylvania psychologists involved observing children for 15 years, where highly motivated teens performed better even on issues such as employment or delinquency.

All of the above factors, in contrast to excessive childish giftedness, work in a more mature age, so do not give up when you find yourself in the boring 99% of ordinary people without any outstanding abilities.

After all, for every Mozart churning out symphonies at the age of five, there is Paul Cezanne, who wrote the best works in his seventh decade

Daniel Defoe, who became famous for "Robinson Crusoe" at the age of 58, or Alfred Hitchcock, who shot iconic films such as "Psycho", "Dizziness" and "Dial M for Murder," already at retirement age; and for every beardless student in Oxford, there is a mediocre Churchill in his studies. You don't need to have extraordinary talents to be successful in life. As 30th US President Calvin Coolidge said, “Nothing in this world can replace perseverance. Talent cannot: there is nothing more prevalent than talent that has not achieved anything. A genius cannot: an underappreciated genius is practically a household name. Education cannot: the world is full of educated renegades. Only persistence and perseverance are omnipotent. The slogan "Continue to persist" has solved, is solving and will continue to solve all the problems of the representatives of the human race."

Metropol 2015-02-09