What really stuck out to me was how R failed in a bunch of other subjects except math because he wasn’t interested in them.
I know society and norms expect students to learn all these other subjects.
But what if those just aren’t interesting to someone?
I wonder how many geniuses we skip on because doing the chores of homework and getting through boring classes is busywork and memorization for the sake of getting an A.
Meanwhile, hardly anyone actually remembers anything about those topics and even the best students mostly go on to achieve only above average things.
My class valedictorian went on to become a doctor and while that is certainly impressive to me, there are many doctors and he practices (like almost every other doctor) and isn’t pushing the boundaries of medical science. I feel terrible writing that because I’m certainly not as smart as him, but R is just so impressive and I’m glad he got his lucky break.
People like R would be lost in the sea of averages because their genius would be kept shut by norms.
Almost every extraordinary person I read about seems like they were 1 step away from being forgotten, and got some huge universal break that boosted them.
It's good that public school exposes children to many subjects - hopefully most of them. So that they can discover if they click with one of them. The real danger is that someone never gets exposed to a subject at all. College is the place to specialize in a subject.
Specialization does begin earlier than that. Most high schools in the US have advanced classes that students can opt in to, and there is the AP program.
Personally I think that we could do better by tailoring every student’s education to their abilities. Put in simplest possible terms, we could arrange classes by complexity rather than by year. Have one class for addition and subtraction, another for multiplication and division, then geometry, algebra, etc, etc. Then let students graduate from one to the next based on proven ability rather than by age. Do the same for language, history, etc. Let every student proceed through the courses at their own speed.
Exposure is good, but success in school requires you to be successful in these subjects as well. I have had similar thoughts recently as OP thinking about what I want for my young kids and what my experiences in school were. Being _really_ good in one thing should allow you to make up for being subpar in other areas, but it doesn't. You can only get an A (or A+) in math for example, even if your a genius. But maybe you should be able to get an A++++ that makes up for D's or F's in English for example and still get accepted into top universities. We need a system that accommodates spiky people better.
The admissions process to universities in the province of Ontario in Canada has a direct solution for this, which applies to well-known universities in the global technology industry, such as the University of Toronto and the University of Waterloo.
Most of these universities look at an applicant's grades for just six courses. After looking at the courses required for certain programs (such as calculus and physics for certain programs), the remainder of the six courses comprise the student's top grades for any courses at the Grade 12 (final year) level.
So, a high school student aiming for a top engineering or mathematics program will not be hamstrung by a poor grade in Grade 12 English, nor will a student aiming for a top international relations program be hamstrung by a poor grade in Calculus. At the same time, the student going into a STEM program will have an exposure to Shakespeare, which can provide inspiration and a rich set of works to explore later in life. The student going into international relations may later be inspired some years later to study mathematics for its beauty as a hobby, some years later.
I remember the feeling that I was wasting time with many of my courses in those years, despite having good teachers for many of them—I thought my time spent on mandatory humanities courses like music took time away from more practical subjects, and I wish I took a programming course (though I did love my English classes). Perhaps this remains true for many students, but I personally took an interest in music performance as a hobby years later in life, and the years-old lessons in music theory came back to me. My English classes also introduced me to literature, which has remained a very important part of my life that has guided me through highly consequential life decisions for the better. It is unlikely that I would have taken an interest in literary works without my exposure to English in school.
To add to this I feel the need to point out that the writing skill demonstrated by the average mid-length Hacker News comment is above the level you’d need to pass grade 12 English in Ontario. It’s an extremely low bar!
Of course, if English is not your first language then you’re not required to take this course. You have an alternate path which may be a lot more work for an English-language-learner but it doesn’t demand the critical reading and writing skills you would need for grade 12 English.
> Exposure is good, but success in school requires you to be successful in these subjects as well.
Being specific, it's not school, it's what school grants you i.e. a paying job. The higher paying, thusly more coveted jobs, generally filter against good grades which then the requirement pushes downwards into schools because, at scale, it's a decent system; leveraging the schools to help decide who is good.
> Being _really_ good in one thing should allow you to make up for being subpar in other areas, but it doesn't.
I counter with, if you are "_really_" good, it shows because you truly are a genius and you get fast tracked on that subject, but I think your "_really_" is actually just "_pretty_" and you're trying to include more than the 1 in 100 million.
To directly answer your point, for the "slightly smarter than everyone else" my middle school allowed kids to attend highschool in specific subjects and then highschool into the nearby community college and considered "harder/more prestigious" than the AP programs - admittedly only in math for this latter part. The school was in a more affluent neighborhood so I recognize the privilege.
> but I think your "_really_" is actually just "_pretty_" and you're trying to include more than the 1 in 100 million.
I don't quite understand your point. Pretty good still puts you far ahead of the average. I could easily handle second year college maths and computer science while in high school. And I couldn't hold a candle to Ramanujan.
I still needed to do well in my other courses in order to be able to get into my chosen college.
I think that's the point - "pretty good" isn't good enough for a top school to want to admit you. Second year college/CS is pretty good but I went to a great high school where there were 50+ kids at that level. That's not enough to stand out in a meaningful way.
Whereas if someone was Ramanujan-level, their raw talent would be so apparent they wouldn't have this issue and would clearly stand out.
But he ignored all subjects besides math and lost his scholarship within a year. He later enrolled in another university, this time in Madras (now Chennai), the provincial capital some 250 kilometers north. Again he flunked out.
> Second year college/CS is pretty good but I went to a great high school where there were 50+ kids at that level. That's not enough to stand out in a meaningful way.
It is not enough to stand out in the current system.
The parent was saying selecting the 50 kids who can handle it is a much better approach than just taking the highest overall grades.
The average A's across the board high school student can't handle second year college maths. Yet they will be placed ahead of the observably better at math kids.
Imagine if jobs worked like this - "Yes, we know you are a great developer but you don't really understand economics. Sorry".
Being well-rounded and having exposure to a bunch of topics is valuable to an extent. However, in my experience most of the people making a real difference in the workplace and academia are not particularly well rounded.
Thankfully in tech there are alternative pathways. However, for many professions there aren't and these high performers are simply excluded to societies detriment.
So in grade 5 you maths is A++++ (like college entry level), you're excused from English, Civics and what not, and when by the time of graduation you've fizzled out (which most prodigies do) you're just an unemployable nerd.
School education standards are the barest minimum and anyone of IQ > 85 can make them.
To quote an artist friend: exposure is good until you die from it.
Being forced to do subjects that you hate is not exposure, it is being forced to do things which you are completely unsuited for.
I would go so far as saying that being forced to take music until 7th grade put me off any musical pursuits for the next 20 years. The less said about the torture disguised as education that is PE the better.
College is not trade school. College exists not to generate people who are masters of Framework v3.0, but to generate people who can quickly learn to use whatever tool they're given and who can connect the dots to solve generic problems. Part of that is exposure to a broad range of ideas. Part of that is showing that you can learn about and deliver results on things you're not necessarily excited about.
This is true, but college general education requirements don't fulfill that role. They're classes of 250 people listening to a professor say "write this down because it'll be on the exam". Then the questions on the exam are what the professor said verbatim.
My university didn't allow any classes above the most introductory ones to be considered as fulfilling the general education requirement. I signed up for a history class that would involve doing research and having weekly discussions with a small group. I was stoked. Then the professor made a note that it didn't fulfill the general education requirements. I had to drop it and switch to a huge-ass mindless lecture of hundreds of people. I would've liked to still take the more in-depth history class even if it didn't fit the gen ed requirement, but so many of those BS classes are required that my schedule was completely packed all 4 years with zero leeway.
I don't think college teaches people how to learn, and if they do it's only by accident. There's a body of knowledge on how to teach and how to self educate and it takes a long time for systems to incorporate these knowledge.
I'm honestly no genius but I can relate to R in that one way.
As a child I used to get all As and even got into a Stanford pre-collegiate program as a kid where I learned C++ and geometry.
Unfortunately after a surgery in 9th grade that left me unable to attend school for 3-4 months and just terrible QOL for about a year my grades slipped (went from A+ studen to C grade student) and I basically became average. I lost all interest in most subjects at school due to depression and other things.
My goal as a child was to get a Stanford JD/MD MBA (lol I know..), and today I have only a bachelors from a low ranked state college in business.
I enjoyed programming so much as a kid that one summer, so later in life I ended up going back to it. Taught myself enough in a month to get on some projects as a swe. Later I got lucky working at a unicorn company that IPO'd.
Now I am trying to build my own company and see how far I can get as a solo founder. Sometimes I wonder how my life would have turned out if it wasn't for that injury, but oh well. Shit happens, right?
Jeez sorry for the sob story but it feels good to get it off.
> College is the place to specialize in a subject.
In Europe maybe, but in America a lot of students receive their general purpose liberal arts education in College, and will then specialize later with a post graduate degree.
"Exposure" would be spending much much less time on those subjects, especially the free home time. Then the number of subjects is practically infinite, so expecting "most" is just as unrealistic (and colleges also continue this "exposure")
Well, the eccentric geniuses have already left the system... Frankly, if you go through the last 30 years, how many such geniuses you can find in American universities? I only see a little bit higher than average, so it seems that the system has already eliminated the geniuses.
It's the crazy ones that push humanity forward. We lose far more than we can imagine by not enabling even just one of them. This is one of the most important problems for us to fix.
These people are still out there. When I was in high school we had the normal people, then people who took advanced placement stuff, then the "super nerds" who were at the top of all the advanced placement stuff with perfect grades, and then there was this one guy who was most of the way through all the advanced math classes at the nearby university. Same guy was in one of my English classes, and was failing. More or less he couldn't be bothered.
Sadly the later part of your comment may hold - I don't remember what ended up happening with him, whether he graduated high school or what. Hopefully at that level you just disappear into academia and not off the face of the earth in general.
If you are optimizing for finding geniuses like R, you may be right. Many probably fall through the cracks of the educational system. But I don't think this is what we are or should be optimizing for. The vast majority of people would end up unemployable if they weren't "forced" to study things they don't enjoy because some skills are just more employable than others. You're lucky if you enjoy engineering/science, but not so lucky if you only care about art literature.
The best way to learn is to play and come up with stuff yourself. But playing doesn't get you anywhere specific. People who play around a lot, clearly know much more and in depth than everyone else, but when you hand them a random checklist, chances are they won't know a few.
Standardized tests are screwing everything up. People who learn on their own might stumble upon the entire alphabet except for the letter "B," but standardized tests want only the first 5 letters. Hence the incredible efficiency of knowing the entire alphabet is thrown under the bus in favor of making sure none of the 5 are missing.
You can't teach someone to play, and there is no way to play systematically, at scale, and with guaranteed results. All the incredible people I know have some hole in "basic" knowledge, and if it is revealed nobody cares about them being miles ahead elsewhere. "Their basics seem lacking, in the name of stability and norm, throw them back to square one."
Following standards never produces something new, but the world is so afraid of failure and lack of definitions in "messing around" that they are willing to trade their souls for it.
Take any hacker here on HN, and ask how much they learned in CS class vs. how much they learned messing around with Perl on a weekend.
Standardized tests are tool for systems to be able to compare and work toward a uniformity of outcome. Expecting it to help anything beyond that is a foolish errand. Public schools need to educate million of people each years with differing deposition and life circumstances and do so with relative competency.
Excellence requires individual attention and cannot be so readily mass produced.
You're assuming it's luck. But maybe we're actually good at identifying boundary-pushing geniuses? There are huge, huge incentives for being good at that.
Education is optimized for average citizen who must work through boring tasks every day. I feel like geniuses probably more like survive in school rather than being supported.
I'm pretty sure I only have a successful career because I deeply enjoy programming and have a slightly neurotic obsession with code quality and ergonomics. I can't fathom giving enough of a shit about anything I don't enjoy for long enough to be successful otherwise.
> I wonder how many geniuses we skip on because doing the chores of homework and getting through boring classes is busywork and memorization for the sake of getting an A.
Zero? If you qualify as a prodigy, it is apparent from a young age. Maths prodigies are especially easy to distinguish. Given a little time, they will self-learn, grok and innovate on anything you throw at them and will likely attend higher education early unlike "the brilliant kid"s who will struggle with advanced concepts all their lives.
> But what if those just aren’t interesting to someone?
The school I went to grades 1--12
tried to be especially good
so taught Latin, French. Some of the girls were in ballet. MIT came
recruiting. The year before me two guys went to Princeton and ran against each other for President of the Freshman Class (whatever that meant!). In my class, one guy (did nearly as well on the SAT Math as I did!!!) went to MIT.
In one of the early grades, I got dumped on (adenoids, couldn't hear well until that got fixed). Apparently the teachers talked to each other and had me with a dunce cap until I proved otherwise. In 1st algebra, discovered math: I liked it, was good at it, was the best in the class, proved myself, got sent to a math tournament, couldn't get dumped on, etc. Continued that way: Was so good at math that I got an unspoken but powerful by in any subject, e.g., English literature, I didn't like.
Got sent to summer math/physics enrichment programs.
So, for that example, for
> But what if those just aren’t interesting to someone?
some schools will let a student who is good at some one subject get a by in other subjects.
Really, schools, K-Ph.D., have a tough time finding any students really good in even just one subject, are thrilled when they find one that is, and don't want to block him/her because
he viewed fictional literature as a not very credible presentation of common reality?
That by pattern continued: In grad school, they insisted that I take their computer science course. My background in computing was already nicely above that course, and I'd already taught a similar course at Georgetown. Soooo, mostly laughed at the course: E.g., they had a test question about Quicksort (very common topic then), and I answered with material they didn't know.
The best case of by: Took a reading course; decided to address a question in the pure math of optimization; two weeks later had a surprising theorem and from that an answer to the question. The work, clearly publishable, was instant news all over the department, some profs angry that I had done well, others pleased. Angry/pleased, the work got me a general purpose by, a gold crown, immunity from any criticism, and an easy path to the rest of the Ph.D.
I agree. That's also why I just don't believe at all when people say we have a shortage of talent (as in we need stuff like H1B) there is a ton of talent wasted. Everyone know that smart person who is working a menial job.
In the Ramanujan story, a true MVP is G.H. Hardy. He read letters from some random unknown guy (a savage "native" no less!) half the world away, and took them seriously. And then organized resources to have that guy travel to England. A true MVP. All the others Ramanujan wrote to ignored him (understandably so). Such a tragedy that he died so young.
The stories of mathematicians like Srinivasa Ramanujan, who claimed to have derived complex partitions and identities in dreams, have always captivated me. It's as if their minds were tapping into some hidden reservoir of knowledge. I'm curious what drives these intuitive leaps. Was Ramanujan's brain quietly processing patterns during sleep, leveraging its default mode network in ways we're still struggling to understand? Or was it something more fundamental – an emergent property of complex neural networks, perhaps, or even a glimpse into Jung's collective unconscious?
I'm curious to hear how others think about this phenomenon. Do recent advances in neuroscience, AI, or cognitive psychology offer any clues about how innovators like Ramanujan access these hidden sources of insight? Or are we still stuck in the realm of "genius is mysterious"?
Starting from the basics, Ramanujan was known to spend huge amounts of time in the library pouring over mathematical texts. He was also personally and spiritually obsessed with mathematics, thinking it was an expression of divinity. So its quite probable a significant chunk of his memories were already mathematical and random accesses to it were the same.
I am also intrigued by this question: What was different for guys like Ramanujan, and how were they able to tap in to this hidden reservoir of knowledge. And how can we replicate it
One guys able to tap into this knowledge in dreams is an indication that it is possible. Now, how do we make this the default for everyone is the question I wonder about
The way we found one variant of wheat in Mexico that was resistant to bacteria, and replicate that to the whole world -- can we do something like that for humans
( even I don't like the sound of it, but I hope you get the feeling )
As the article mentions ,we was familiar with the literature. He communicated with other mathematicians, read papers, and submitted in journals while in India. he was not some hermit in a cave or something. I think this claim that he just dreamed the results part of mythology that has been built around him. From what I read, he he did a lot of the grunt work deriving these formulas but only published the final results, so it only appears that he conjured them out of nothing. It's not like he could have sent Hardy a book-sized letter of all the steps to derive those results.
Ramanujan’s story is very interesting but I would love more Indian mathematicians and scientists to become household names. Mathematicians like Harish Chandra, C. R. Rao, Manjul Bhargava, Narendra Karmakar etc. Physicists like C. V. Raman, Satyendra Nath Bose, Meghnad Saha. Others like Har Gobind Khorana and Venkatraman Ramakrishnan too.
Fwiw Chandra, Rao, and Bose are instantly recognizable to me. I’m not a mathematician or physicist and don’t know the other folks. That said I am very aware that Indians have made significant contributions to math, physics and I imagine other disciplines.
You're right, some Indians don't have the recognition they deserve, but if it makes you feel better, few "western" mathematicians or scientists are household names either.
I used to think like you do. But the real place where we could make tons of progress is in relationships. Many stories of great thinkers involve one or a few crucial mentoring/pedagogical relationships. Without those, a person could forever find themselves trying to fit their square peg into the round hole of what "normal" society around them seems to expect. I can easily see how my life could have ended up like that.
As someone who benefited greatly from a few mentors in childhood and adolescence, my goal is to be able to give the same to at least a few other people in my lifetime.
> Straight edge (sometimes abbreviated as sXe or signified by XXX or simply X) is a subculture of hardcore punk whose adherents refrain from using alcohol, tobacco, and recreational drugs in reaction to the punk subculture's excesses. Some adherents refrain from engaging in promiscuous or casual sex, follow a vegetarian or vegan diet and do not consume caffeine or prescription drugs. The term "straight edge" was adopted from the 1981 song "Straight Edge" by the hardcore punk band Minor Threat.
I wonder what effects do you expect from that on a societal scale in the long term (at least 3,4 decades) ?
For instance we banned meth and other drugs that have tremendous productivity effects at the expense of the individual and how we had to deal with them, so it's not a rhetoric question.
Not quite, but if one does not have ADHD or something similar, things like adderall have a very different effect than they do to someone who has ADHD.
Your apparent disbelief in ADHD doesn’t make it imaginary, by the way. Consider yourself lucky that you do not have it; I am unemployable without medication.
People without ADHD take adderall &etc for focus/performance enhancing reasons. Some get it from a friend, some are incorrectly diagnosed. I don't know if you disagree that this is the case, but I don't think it implies anything about ADHD.
I'm aware we never "ban" any specific substance, as we say the dose makes the poison. And any substance that has any effect is also a potential cure for the disease that has the opposite effect.
I should have been clear I saw it in the "make people smart" light, as doping an already acceptable situation, instead of correcting something perceived as a pathology.
Meth was widely available over the counter at some point, and we made it legally disappear outside of strict medical settings.
Surely the most used because of its affordablity and easy access. Coffee, energy drinks, tea, caffiene pills, etc.
I wonder what academia would look like if adderall, vyvanse, modafinil were just as accessible, or even less controlled substances that are considered to enhance mental performance like L-tyrosine, alpha-GPC, Lion's Mane mushroom, Bacopa, or Ginko.
That was a fun read.
What really stuck out to me was how R failed in a bunch of other subjects except math because he wasn’t interested in them.
I know society and norms expect students to learn all these other subjects.
But what if those just aren’t interesting to someone?
I wonder how many geniuses we skip on because doing the chores of homework and getting through boring classes is busywork and memorization for the sake of getting an A.
Meanwhile, hardly anyone actually remembers anything about those topics and even the best students mostly go on to achieve only above average things.
My class valedictorian went on to become a doctor and while that is certainly impressive to me, there are many doctors and he practices (like almost every other doctor) and isn’t pushing the boundaries of medical science. I feel terrible writing that because I’m certainly not as smart as him, but R is just so impressive and I’m glad he got his lucky break.
People like R would be lost in the sea of averages because their genius would be kept shut by norms.
Almost every extraordinary person I read about seems like they were 1 step away from being forgotten, and got some huge universal break that boosted them.
IMO, you're thinking about this backwards.
It's good that public school exposes children to many subjects - hopefully most of them. So that they can discover if they click with one of them. The real danger is that someone never gets exposed to a subject at all. College is the place to specialize in a subject.
Specialization does begin earlier than that. Most high schools in the US have advanced classes that students can opt in to, and there is the AP program.
Personally I think that we could do better by tailoring every student’s education to their abilities. Put in simplest possible terms, we could arrange classes by complexity rather than by year. Have one class for addition and subtraction, another for multiplication and division, then geometry, algebra, etc, etc. Then let students graduate from one to the next based on proven ability rather than by age. Do the same for language, history, etc. Let every student proceed through the courses at their own speed.
One such school:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AME_School
The kids that went there … some succeeded, some really struggled to adjust to other schools and environments.
Exposure is good, but success in school requires you to be successful in these subjects as well. I have had similar thoughts recently as OP thinking about what I want for my young kids and what my experiences in school were. Being _really_ good in one thing should allow you to make up for being subpar in other areas, but it doesn't. You can only get an A (or A+) in math for example, even if your a genius. But maybe you should be able to get an A++++ that makes up for D's or F's in English for example and still get accepted into top universities. We need a system that accommodates spiky people better.
The admissions process to universities in the province of Ontario in Canada has a direct solution for this, which applies to well-known universities in the global technology industry, such as the University of Toronto and the University of Waterloo.
Most of these universities look at an applicant's grades for just six courses. After looking at the courses required for certain programs (such as calculus and physics for certain programs), the remainder of the six courses comprise the student's top grades for any courses at the Grade 12 (final year) level.
So, a high school student aiming for a top engineering or mathematics program will not be hamstrung by a poor grade in Grade 12 English, nor will a student aiming for a top international relations program be hamstrung by a poor grade in Calculus. At the same time, the student going into a STEM program will have an exposure to Shakespeare, which can provide inspiration and a rich set of works to explore later in life. The student going into international relations may later be inspired some years later to study mathematics for its beauty as a hobby, some years later.
I remember the feeling that I was wasting time with many of my courses in those years, despite having good teachers for many of them—I thought my time spent on mandatory humanities courses like music took time away from more practical subjects, and I wish I took a programming course (though I did love my English classes). Perhaps this remains true for many students, but I personally took an interest in music performance as a hobby years later in life, and the years-old lessons in music theory came back to me. My English classes also introduced me to literature, which has remained a very important part of my life that has guided me through highly consequential life decisions for the better. It is unlikely that I would have taken an interest in literary works without my exposure to English in school.
I like the first reply immediately try to scoff you :) Maybe oop is right, but the real problem is people always try to do this.
To add to this I feel the need to point out that the writing skill demonstrated by the average mid-length Hacker News comment is above the level you’d need to pass grade 12 English in Ontario. It’s an extremely low bar!
Of course, if English is not your first language then you’re not required to take this course. You have an alternate path which may be a lot more work for an English-language-learner but it doesn’t demand the critical reading and writing skills you would need for grade 12 English.
> Exposure is good, but success in school requires you to be successful in these subjects as well.
Being specific, it's not school, it's what school grants you i.e. a paying job. The higher paying, thusly more coveted jobs, generally filter against good grades which then the requirement pushes downwards into schools because, at scale, it's a decent system; leveraging the schools to help decide who is good.
> Being _really_ good in one thing should allow you to make up for being subpar in other areas, but it doesn't.
I counter with, if you are "_really_" good, it shows because you truly are a genius and you get fast tracked on that subject, but I think your "_really_" is actually just "_pretty_" and you're trying to include more than the 1 in 100 million.
To directly answer your point, for the "slightly smarter than everyone else" my middle school allowed kids to attend highschool in specific subjects and then highschool into the nearby community college and considered "harder/more prestigious" than the AP programs - admittedly only in math for this latter part. The school was in a more affluent neighborhood so I recognize the privilege.
> but I think your "_really_" is actually just "_pretty_" and you're trying to include more than the 1 in 100 million.
I don't quite understand your point. Pretty good still puts you far ahead of the average. I could easily handle second year college maths and computer science while in high school. And I couldn't hold a candle to Ramanujan.
I still needed to do well in my other courses in order to be able to get into my chosen college.
I think that's the point - "pretty good" isn't good enough for a top school to want to admit you. Second year college/CS is pretty good but I went to a great high school where there were 50+ kids at that level. That's not enough to stand out in a meaningful way.
Whereas if someone was Ramanujan-level, their raw talent would be so apparent they wouldn't have this issue and would clearly stand out.
Maybe, but TFA says at least in Ramanujan's case:
But he ignored all subjects besides math and lost his scholarship within a year. He later enrolled in another university, this time in Madras (now Chennai), the provincial capital some 250 kilometers north. Again he flunked out.
Maybe it would be different now?
> Second year college/CS is pretty good but I went to a great high school where there were 50+ kids at that level. That's not enough to stand out in a meaningful way.
It is not enough to stand out in the current system.
The parent was saying selecting the 50 kids who can handle it is a much better approach than just taking the highest overall grades.
The average A's across the board high school student can't handle second year college maths. Yet they will be placed ahead of the observably better at math kids.
Imagine if jobs worked like this - "Yes, we know you are a great developer but you don't really understand economics. Sorry".
Being well-rounded and having exposure to a bunch of topics is valuable to an extent. However, in my experience most of the people making a real difference in the workplace and academia are not particularly well rounded.
Thankfully in tech there are alternative pathways. However, for many professions there aren't and these high performers are simply excluded to societies detriment.
> Imagine if jobs worked like this - "Yes, we know you are a great developer but you don't really understand economics. Sorry".
This is exactly the route to exploitation by MBA managers.
Great developer, loyal, doesn't understand the need to change companies to get paid a competitive salary. Perfect hire.
The person who doesn't understand economics pays the price themselves.
> but success in school requires you to be successful in these subjects as well.
It requires a very small success on a very basic level. It is not good to be a super math genius and know nothing about geography and history.
So in grade 5 you maths is A++++ (like college entry level), you're excused from English, Civics and what not, and when by the time of graduation you've fizzled out (which most prodigies do) you're just an unemployable nerd.
School education standards are the barest minimum and anyone of IQ > 85 can make them.
To quote an artist friend: exposure is good until you die from it.
Being forced to do subjects that you hate is not exposure, it is being forced to do things which you are completely unsuited for.
I would go so far as saying that being forced to take music until 7th grade put me off any musical pursuits for the next 20 years. The less said about the torture disguised as education that is PE the better.
Most colleges now inundate students with painful core classes that go on into senior year. It's getting ridiculous.
Specific citation needed.
At Big US Engineering School, many people are done with their prerequisites in a year.
Unless you're talking about painful core classes like "compiler design" and "networking", which I would say is a different conversation.
It's probably because secondary school has become mostly worthless in the US, so college is taking its place.
College is not trade school. College exists not to generate people who are masters of Framework v3.0, but to generate people who can quickly learn to use whatever tool they're given and who can connect the dots to solve generic problems. Part of that is exposure to a broad range of ideas. Part of that is showing that you can learn about and deliver results on things you're not necessarily excited about.
This is true, but college general education requirements don't fulfill that role. They're classes of 250 people listening to a professor say "write this down because it'll be on the exam". Then the questions on the exam are what the professor said verbatim.
My university didn't allow any classes above the most introductory ones to be considered as fulfilling the general education requirement. I signed up for a history class that would involve doing research and having weekly discussions with a small group. I was stoked. Then the professor made a note that it didn't fulfill the general education requirements. I had to drop it and switch to a huge-ass mindless lecture of hundreds of people. I would've liked to still take the more in-depth history class even if it didn't fit the gen ed requirement, but so many of those BS classes are required that my schedule was completely packed all 4 years with zero leeway.
I don't think college teaches people how to learn, and if they do it's only by accident. There's a body of knowledge on how to teach and how to self educate and it takes a long time for systems to incorporate these knowledge.
Isn't that what high school is for? What's the difference then?
Most of school is primarily baby sitting these days, if were being really real.
High school has been dumbed down and is mostly a waste of time.
> Part of that is showing that you can learn about and deliver results on things you're not necessarily excited about.
Why is that useful besides for the employer trying to impose Framework v3.0 onto their subjects?
To me at least, learning things one is not excited about is only useful to capitalist society that views human beings as replaceable resources.
I'm honestly no genius but I can relate to R in that one way.
As a child I used to get all As and even got into a Stanford pre-collegiate program as a kid where I learned C++ and geometry.
Unfortunately after a surgery in 9th grade that left me unable to attend school for 3-4 months and just terrible QOL for about a year my grades slipped (went from A+ studen to C grade student) and I basically became average. I lost all interest in most subjects at school due to depression and other things.
My goal as a child was to get a Stanford JD/MD MBA (lol I know..), and today I have only a bachelors from a low ranked state college in business.
I enjoyed programming so much as a kid that one summer, so later in life I ended up going back to it. Taught myself enough in a month to get on some projects as a swe. Later I got lucky working at a unicorn company that IPO'd.
Now I am trying to build my own company and see how far I can get as a solo founder. Sometimes I wonder how my life would have turned out if it wasn't for that injury, but oh well. Shit happens, right?
Jeez sorry for the sob story but it feels good to get it off.
> College is the place to specialize in a subject.
In Europe maybe, but in America a lot of students receive their general purpose liberal arts education in College, and will then specialize later with a post graduate degree.
I missed out on theater and improvisational comedy only because I pigeonholed myself as a computer nerd and engineering type and almost nothing else.
I found that I have a certain knack for it and really enjoyed performing.
"Exposure" would be spending much much less time on those subjects, especially the free home time. Then the number of subjects is practically infinite, so expecting "most" is just as unrealistic (and colleges also continue this "exposure")
It is good to expose them. But that doesn't mean the previous point is backwards.
But if their overall SAT scores aren't good enough to get into the elite colleges, won't we just be denying the eccentric geniuses?
Well, the eccentric geniuses have already left the system... Frankly, if you go through the last 30 years, how many such geniuses you can find in American universities? I only see a little bit higher than average, so it seems that the system has already eliminated the geniuses.
> I only see a little bit higher than average
Could you share your source for statistics on "eccentric geniuses"?
I like to look at the backgrounds of the people who win the Nobel prize. Everyone is interdisciplinary.
For college and life in general, I think main skill needed is emotional regulation. Everything else flows from that.
Agreed.
It's the crazy ones that push humanity forward. We lose far more than we can imagine by not enabling even just one of them. This is one of the most important problems for us to fix.
We shouldn't need crazy people to push the boundary. Rather, the crazier you are, the more likely you will flame out.
People who are "weird" and yet are entirely functional are the best of both world and a much rarer combination.
These people are still out there. When I was in high school we had the normal people, then people who took advanced placement stuff, then the "super nerds" who were at the top of all the advanced placement stuff with perfect grades, and then there was this one guy who was most of the way through all the advanced math classes at the nearby university. Same guy was in one of my English classes, and was failing. More or less he couldn't be bothered.
Sadly the later part of your comment may hold - I don't remember what ended up happening with him, whether he graduated high school or what. Hopefully at that level you just disappear into academia and not off the face of the earth in general.
If you are optimizing for finding geniuses like R, you may be right. Many probably fall through the cracks of the educational system. But I don't think this is what we are or should be optimizing for. The vast majority of people would end up unemployable if they weren't "forced" to study things they don't enjoy because some skills are just more employable than others. You're lucky if you enjoy engineering/science, but not so lucky if you only care about art literature.
The best way to learn is to play and come up with stuff yourself. But playing doesn't get you anywhere specific. People who play around a lot, clearly know much more and in depth than everyone else, but when you hand them a random checklist, chances are they won't know a few.
Standardized tests are screwing everything up. People who learn on their own might stumble upon the entire alphabet except for the letter "B," but standardized tests want only the first 5 letters. Hence the incredible efficiency of knowing the entire alphabet is thrown under the bus in favor of making sure none of the 5 are missing.
You can't teach someone to play, and there is no way to play systematically, at scale, and with guaranteed results. All the incredible people I know have some hole in "basic" knowledge, and if it is revealed nobody cares about them being miles ahead elsewhere. "Their basics seem lacking, in the name of stability and norm, throw them back to square one."
Following standards never produces something new, but the world is so afraid of failure and lack of definitions in "messing around" that they are willing to trade their souls for it.
Take any hacker here on HN, and ask how much they learned in CS class vs. how much they learned messing around with Perl on a weekend.
Standardized tests are tool for systems to be able to compare and work toward a uniformity of outcome. Expecting it to help anything beyond that is a foolish errand. Public schools need to educate million of people each years with differing deposition and life circumstances and do so with relative competency.
Excellence requires individual attention and cannot be so readily mass produced.
> and do so with relative competency
I dispute this on the grounds that students are going through American schools and many of them don't even know how to read.
You're assuming it's luck. But maybe we're actually good at identifying boundary-pushing geniuses? There are huge, huge incentives for being good at that.
Education is optimized for average citizen who must work through boring tasks every day. I feel like geniuses probably more like survive in school rather than being supported.
your thought reminded me of the radio program about Jean Shepherd getting his Class A radio license.
https://www.rfcafe.com/miscellany/factoids/Jean-Shepherd-Cla...
on youtube as well
I'm pretty sure I only have a successful career because I deeply enjoy programming and have a slightly neurotic obsession with code quality and ergonomics. I can't fathom giving enough of a shit about anything I don't enjoy for long enough to be successful otherwise.
Everyone here seems to have missed the significance of L.J. Rogers in this story.
> I wonder how many geniuses we skip on because doing the chores of homework and getting through boring classes is busywork and memorization for the sake of getting an A.
Zero? If you qualify as a prodigy, it is apparent from a young age. Maths prodigies are especially easy to distinguish. Given a little time, they will self-learn, grok and innovate on anything you throw at them and will likely attend higher education early unlike "the brilliant kid"s who will struggle with advanced concepts all their lives.
you can't serve two masters.
How would you characterize R's master and the "normie" master?
But if you notice the people who are in administrative positions are the people who are “well rounded” not those who are good at one thing.
Even within academic stem fields you have people who know how to promote and speak and they have the most influence.
I guess what I’m trying to say is the system is mostly selecting for what it wants.
> But what if those just aren’t interesting to someone?
The school I went to grades 1--12 tried to be especially good so taught Latin, French. Some of the girls were in ballet. MIT came recruiting. The year before me two guys went to Princeton and ran against each other for President of the Freshman Class (whatever that meant!). In my class, one guy (did nearly as well on the SAT Math as I did!!!) went to MIT.
In one of the early grades, I got dumped on (adenoids, couldn't hear well until that got fixed). Apparently the teachers talked to each other and had me with a dunce cap until I proved otherwise. In 1st algebra, discovered math: I liked it, was good at it, was the best in the class, proved myself, got sent to a math tournament, couldn't get dumped on, etc. Continued that way: Was so good at math that I got an unspoken but powerful by in any subject, e.g., English literature, I didn't like.
Got sent to summer math/physics enrichment programs.
So, for that example, for
> But what if those just aren’t interesting to someone?
some schools will let a student who is good at some one subject get a by in other subjects.
Really, schools, K-Ph.D., have a tough time finding any students really good in even just one subject, are thrilled when they find one that is, and don't want to block him/her because he viewed fictional literature as a not very credible presentation of common reality?
That by pattern continued: In grad school, they insisted that I take their computer science course. My background in computing was already nicely above that course, and I'd already taught a similar course at Georgetown. Soooo, mostly laughed at the course: E.g., they had a test question about Quicksort (very common topic then), and I answered with material they didn't know.
The best case of by: Took a reading course; decided to address a question in the pure math of optimization; two weeks later had a surprising theorem and from that an answer to the question. The work, clearly publishable, was instant news all over the department, some profs angry that I had done well, others pleased. Angry/pleased, the work got me a general purpose by, a gold crown, immunity from any criticism, and an easy path to the rest of the Ph.D.
I agree. That's also why I just don't believe at all when people say we have a shortage of talent (as in we need stuff like H1B) there is a ton of talent wasted. Everyone know that smart person who is working a menial job.
In the Ramanujan story, a true MVP is G.H. Hardy. He read letters from some random unknown guy (a savage "native" no less!) half the world away, and took them seriously. And then organized resources to have that guy travel to England. A true MVP. All the others Ramanujan wrote to ignored him (understandably so). Such a tragedy that he died so young.
If it had not been for Hardy, we would know a fraction of what R did.
The stories of mathematicians like Srinivasa Ramanujan, who claimed to have derived complex partitions and identities in dreams, have always captivated me. It's as if their minds were tapping into some hidden reservoir of knowledge. I'm curious what drives these intuitive leaps. Was Ramanujan's brain quietly processing patterns during sleep, leveraging its default mode network in ways we're still struggling to understand? Or was it something more fundamental – an emergent property of complex neural networks, perhaps, or even a glimpse into Jung's collective unconscious?
I'm curious to hear how others think about this phenomenon. Do recent advances in neuroscience, AI, or cognitive psychology offer any clues about how innovators like Ramanujan access these hidden sources of insight? Or are we still stuck in the realm of "genius is mysterious"?
Starting from the basics, Ramanujan was known to spend huge amounts of time in the library pouring over mathematical texts. He was also personally and spiritually obsessed with mathematics, thinking it was an expression of divinity. So its quite probable a significant chunk of his memories were already mathematical and random accesses to it were the same.
I am also intrigued by this question: What was different for guys like Ramanujan, and how were they able to tap in to this hidden reservoir of knowledge. And how can we replicate it
One guys able to tap into this knowledge in dreams is an indication that it is possible. Now, how do we make this the default for everyone is the question I wonder about
The way we found one variant of wheat in Mexico that was resistant to bacteria, and replicate that to the whole world -- can we do something like that for humans ( even I don't like the sound of it, but I hope you get the feeling )
As the article mentions ,we was familiar with the literature. He communicated with other mathematicians, read papers, and submitted in journals while in India. he was not some hermit in a cave or something. I think this claim that he just dreamed the results part of mythology that has been built around him. From what I read, he he did a lot of the grunt work deriving these formulas but only published the final results, so it only appears that he conjured them out of nothing. It's not like he could have sent Hardy a book-sized letter of all the steps to derive those results.
Ramanujan’s story is very interesting but I would love more Indian mathematicians and scientists to become household names. Mathematicians like Harish Chandra, C. R. Rao, Manjul Bhargava, Narendra Karmakar etc. Physicists like C. V. Raman, Satyendra Nath Bose, Meghnad Saha. Others like Har Gobind Khorana and Venkatraman Ramakrishnan too.
Fwiw Chandra, Rao, and Bose are instantly recognizable to me. I’m not a mathematician or physicist and don’t know the other folks. That said I am very aware that Indians have made significant contributions to math, physics and I imagine other disciplines.
You're right, some Indians don't have the recognition they deserve, but if it makes you feel better, few "western" mathematicians or scientists are household names either.
However, pretty much all of the ones who are household names, are western.
Well, at least to western people. Are Indians more familiar with Indian scientists?
Amoung the people who are interested in science? Yes. But to the general public? No.
I don't think a non STEM guy would know Ramanujan or C V Raman.
> Satyendra Nath Bose
I imagine most people won't recognise the name. But everyone's heard of a boson. So he's somewhat immortalised — more than most.
I've noticed India seems to be full of ring theorists/algebraic geometers. I wonder if that's actually true and, if so, why.
When I first encountered the Mahalanobis distance, I thought it sounded strangely Indian. Turned out it was!
Why aren't we working on drugs to make people smart?
I used to think like you do. But the real place where we could make tons of progress is in relationships. Many stories of great thinkers involve one or a few crucial mentoring/pedagogical relationships. Without those, a person could forever find themselves trying to fit their square peg into the round hole of what "normal" society around them seems to expect. I can easily see how my life could have ended up like that.
As someone who benefited greatly from a few mentors in childhood and adolescence, my goal is to be able to give the same to at least a few other people in my lifetime.
Lots of people are, they're called nootropics.
Whether they are successful and whether they are mostly a bunch of snake oil is another question...
I feel way more productive since going sxe.
I am naturally so tired around 9pm when I shut the lid of my laptop that I fall asleep within minutes of getting in bed.
On a side note.. Somehow my dreams have been insane and I’ve low key enjoyed the vivid worlds I find myself in over the past few months.
Wake up around 5 or 6, go for a stroll and then eat some breakfast.
Then I can work taking only breaks for lunch and dinner. Sometimes a 30 min nap in the afternoon in the park.
For those unfamiliar with the abbreviation sxe:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straight_edge
> Straight edge (sometimes abbreviated as sXe or signified by XXX or simply X) is a subculture of hardcore punk whose adherents refrain from using alcohol, tobacco, and recreational drugs in reaction to the punk subculture's excesses. Some adherents refrain from engaging in promiscuous or casual sex, follow a vegetarian or vegan diet and do not consume caffeine or prescription drugs. The term "straight edge" was adopted from the 1981 song "Straight Edge" by the hardcore punk band Minor Threat.
> sxe
Weird. First time I've ever seen that (abbreviation?) For straight-egde. Thought you were talking about some supplement at first.
One billionaire is using them to speedrun his mental illness.
'Source'.
I wonder what effects do you expect from that on a societal scale in the long term (at least 3,4 decades) ?
For instance we banned meth and other drugs that have tremendous productivity effects at the expense of the individual and how we had to deal with them, so it's not a rhetoric question.
We didn’t fully ban them. We just prescribe them to anyone a doctor decides has ADHD.
Not quite, but if one does not have ADHD or something similar, things like adderall have a very different effect than they do to someone who has ADHD.
Your apparent disbelief in ADHD doesn’t make it imaginary, by the way. Consider yourself lucky that you do not have it; I am unemployable without medication.
People without ADHD take adderall &etc for focus/performance enhancing reasons. Some get it from a friend, some are incorrectly diagnosed. I don't know if you disagree that this is the case, but I don't think it implies anything about ADHD.
You will be surprised to learn that methamphetamine is not banned and that it is currently prescribed for refractary ADHD under the name desoxyn!
I'm aware we never "ban" any specific substance, as we say the dose makes the poison. And any substance that has any effect is also a potential cure for the disease that has the opposite effect.
I should have been clear I saw it in the "make people smart" light, as doping an already acceptable situation, instead of correcting something perceived as a pathology.
Meth was widely available over the counter at some point, and we made it legally disappear outside of strict medical settings.
Anything in Schedule I is almost fully banned, though people will try hard enough to get around it that it doesn't matter.
IIRC nicotine is the most effective nootropic by far, the problem being that it's super addictive.
But none of them work as well as sleep and exercise.
And eating right! Gotta complete that trifecta, each one compliments the others.
Caffeine is the most used drug in academia.
no, you mean Ritalin. caffeine is a joke compared to actual stimulants.
Surely the most used because of its affordablity and easy access. Coffee, energy drinks, tea, caffiene pills, etc.
I wonder what academia would look like if adderall, vyvanse, modafinil were just as accessible, or even less controlled substances that are considered to enhance mental performance like L-tyrosine, alpha-GPC, Lion's Mane mushroom, Bacopa, or Ginko.
Alpha-GPC is just choline, so you can get it by eating eggs. Amino acids and mushrooms are also quite accessible.
Modafinil is straight up better than caffeine though, which is a crappy and addictive stimulant.
Caffeine also has a track record of several centuries.
We really, really know the long term effects.
We did and still are. You can only safely push hardware so much.