Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion What is talent? Ultimate Philosophy thread?

Wow-- I'm really enjoying this, too.

Giftodd and JamieH both hit upon some of the same things I was thinking as I read your opening post, Val. I'll add that I had a bit of a chuckle at Giftodd's characterization of her childhood. Likewise, let me just say that.

I'll add to that that there may be "mitigating" factors which are not randomly occurring within the population as a whole, but have a positive correlation with cognitive ability.

Some of THOSE factors (which would seem to mostly dramatically limit achievement, at least achievement in terms that matter to the so-called outside world):

schizoaffective disorders-- these become a lot more common and also significantly more severe as one goes out to the tail of the cognitive bell curve.

Someone already mentioned OEs, which I think, when present in extreme forms, can be fairly debilitating in terms of allowing a person to live normally and interact with the world the way others do-- I also hypothesize that some of them may, in fact, lend vulnerability to the development of mental illness when they are severe enough.

Another thing that I see as missing (thus far, anyway) is the notion of focused PASSION for ONE thing in particular.

I mean, sure... there are the Tchaikovskys of the world, the Beethovens, the Mendeleevs, for that matter. But there are also the Borodins-- he's not as famous as any of the others... because of MULTIPOTENTIALITY and the ultimate inability/unwillingness to choose between two passions.

Some HG+ people seem to have more than two. In fact, in looking at my own family, I'd say that is probably more the rule than the exception.

I don't see multipotentiality as being a bad thing. Maybe it is just a THING. It's bad from the larger world's perspective, because it limits the advancement that could be achieved for humanity as a whole... but on the other hand, I think that it is probably a MUCH healthier way to be a PG person. A burning passion for a single thing all too often seems to lead to some of the darker side... the mental instability, workaholism, etc.

After all, look at what happened to Mendelssohn (Felix, I mean)... to Mozart (Wolfgang, I mean)... to Schubert.

None of them lived very long-- but all were incredibly prolific and blindingly brilliant. I'm not sure that the two things are unlrelated. It seems like a rather quaint notion, but I think that in Feliz Mendelssohn's case in particular, a very good argument can be made for him simply using himself as a non-renewable fuel source in his inbridled passion.


This particular Howler Monkey has a lifetime habit of wide-rangin dilettantism that keeps ME safe from such dangers, thankfully. LOL. Then again, I suppose that has probably kept me form winning a Nobel Prize or anything, too. On that note, however, several people have mentioned serendipity/luck as being a factor. I tend to think of that as a HUGE factor, one that is completely overlooked by the most successful among us. Human beings simply do not wish to believe in chance governing our lives. It's part of our psychology as human beings to construct reasons or causation-- even when it isn't factually based or even... uh.. "real." Particularly so when we are ascribing why something GREAT happened to ourselves, we don't want to imagine that it was luck-- but skill, somehow. Truth is that it is probably luck, at least in large part.


Rambling, I know...

I'm sure that someone else will probably have something far more erudite to add. But this was my one-penny thought off the cuff.

Fascinating topic.

The Federal government DOES send tens of billions of dollars to many local schools, especially in disadvantaged areas under Title I -- see http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/us/15education.html . Maybe the money for this academic year has already been disbursed. Much of the stimulus also went to public schools.

Oh-- ohh... one more!!

Consider for a moment just how many people in the world have all of their basic needs met and are therefore sort of receptive to 'taking it higher' as it were, into the realm of higher cognitive functions:

Maslow's Heirarchy of Needs


Even if we were to assume that some 30% of the world's population has those needs met, then that means that-- even in the absense of any other factors of mitigation-- we've gone from 6300 persons to 1890 who might have the "ability" to problem-solve at an Einsteinian level.

If we were to further assume (as is not unreasonable, I think) that a person has to actually encounter his or her passion at the right time to light that fire, and that if the right person, right time, and right presentation doesn't all take place, the opportunity for genesis is lost...


well, then I think that begins to explain why we have not seen a second Shakespeare or Einstein, and why we perhap won't for another 500-5,000 years.

I strongly suspect that the odds are greatly against the right set of circumstances coming together with the precisely right person. Part of that is the relative scarcity of prodigious talent, certainly, but part of it is also that most of the people with latent prodigious talent never have it 'triggered' by the right combination of things when they are uniquely receptive to them.

Good post Val. But isn't the real definition of your thoughtfulness and creativity just "in the box" and "out of the box"?

No matter how high your IQ, it doesn't mean you can think out of the box. And that is what defined the great. Feyman put O-rings in a glass of ice water. How hard a concept was that?

Someone posted the article about that 12 year old that questioned the Big Bang theory and he had his reasons. Now he did have a phenomenal IQ but he was also taking himself out of the box to come up with why it didn't work. No amount of acceleration or challenge is going to make a kid an out of the box thinker. It has to do with life experience and perspective.

Ren

I think the explanation may be that there was more virgin territory in physics at the beginning of the 20th century than the 21st. Great achievement depends on working in a young field, not just talent and hard work.

Some of the smartest people in physics today are working in string theory -- and they may be squandering their careers. Has string theory made any testable predictions? Lee Smolin wrote a book "The Trouble with Physics" on this. Because physics is a relatively mature subject, I may advise my children to specialize in biology instead, where I think there is more to discover. Of course, they should LEARN a lot of physics, which is applicable to all other sciences and engineering.

Maybe, maybe not. As people become more talented, their ability to overcome adversity may also increase. I'm just thinking out loud here, but I doubt the equation is as simple as 30% of the world's population doesn't have its needs met. Highly talented people are more likely to find a way by virtue of having more talent. I don't know about survival instinct, of course, which is also important in this example.

But as an example, think about people like Andy Grove and Rep. Tom Lantos (California). Both were holocaust survivors (and Grove had to flee Hungary during the revolution in 1956). Both came to the US with basically pennies to their names, and both did spectacularly well.

Must read with my daughter...

Val

Val, you speculate that highly talented people are more likely to overcome adversity. But what kind of talent?

There are people who could build a house, or make a dress while what I make is makeshift. And also fear has a large part when you are in survival mode. You have to be willing to take risks.

There was another post about Myer Briggs. I remember taking this in first year in college but they also gave us a test about risk taking. Very few people will take risks, no matter how talented.

People don't like stepping out of the comfort zone for a variety of reasons. You generally keep your job by staying in the comfort zone. Questioning authority doesn't work well for many people. Hence why you have to become an entrepeneur.

Ren

I think the point about overcoming adversity is a good one. I found an interesting page citing to research recently for the proposition that a stimulating environment affects IQ, but that the effect can be lost over time if a person goes back to a normal environment, but that extreme achievers may tend to seek out or create their own stimulating environments. Will try to remember to hunt it up when I'm not posting from my phone.

You could add George Soros as another example of someone who fled the Holocaust and was very successful. Santos, Grove, and Soros are Jews, and European (Ashkenazi) Jews have average IQs of about 115. I think this is an important factor explaining the success of Jews in the U.S. and around the world. It is possible that Jews evolved high intelligence because of the adverse circumstances they faced over centuries. Here is an NYT article discussing such research:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/03/science/03gene.html
Researchers Say Intelligence and Diseases May Be Linked in Ashkenazic Genes
By NICHOLAS WADE
New York Times
June 3, 2005

A team of scientists at the University of Utah has proposed that the unusual pattern of genetic diseases seen among Jews of central or northern European origin, or Ashkenazim, is the result of natural selection for enhanced intellectual ability

The selective force was the restriction of Ashkenazim in medieval Europe to occupations that required more than usual mental agility, the researchers say in a paper that has been accepted by the Journal of Biosocial Science, published by Cambridge University Press in England.

The hypothesis advanced by the Utah researchers has drawn a mixed reaction among scientists, some of whom dismissed it as extremely implausible, while others said they had made an interesting case, although one liable to raise many hackles.

"It would be hard to overstate how politically incorrect this paper is," said Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard, noting that it argues for an inherited difference in intelligence between groups. Still, he said, "it's certainly a thorough and well-argued paper, not one that can easily be dismissed outright."

<rest of article at link>

I could believe that they developed some cultural aspects that help develop high ability; in my experience Jews are more likely than average to believe in the value of schooling and learning in general (sorry if that is offensive, but it's what I've seen here in the US). I don't think it's likely that less smart Jews were selected out of the breeding population in a way that led to a genetic predisposition to high intelligence. But of course that's a complete guess.