
Promethea Unbound - _dps
https://magazine.atavist.com/promethea-unbound-child-genius-montana
======
YeGoblynQueenne
>> To Jasmine, a little girl with olive skin and dark eyes prone to faraway
expressions, it felt like camping.

This is a weird thing that I've noticed before, with the way non-Greeks
perceive -or at least, describe- the skin colour of Greeks.

It's clear from her pictures that Jasmine's skin is not "olive", but rather
white. In some of her early pictures, she's pasty-white. The same goes for her
mother. Which makes absolute sense, given that their heritage is Greek and
Greeks don't have "olive" skin.

Anecdotally, it seems that many non-Greeks have a firmly lodged belief about
the "olive" colour of Greeks that persists even after they meet a real live
specimen. For example, an older Greek friend who did her PhD in Ann Arbour,
Michigan has told me how her American fellow students called her "our olive-
skinned friend". My friend is blond, with blue eyes and yoghurt-white skin
that is now mottled with a million freckles, from her exposure to the Greek
sun. It's hard to imagine "olive" skin getting freckled.

I've experienced myself this odd disconnect between my actual skin colour and
the skin colour people perceive me as having, when a Sri-Lankan friend
recommended to me her make-up colour, which was at least two tones darker than
my skin has ever been even in the height of summer. I mean, my friend is
chocolate-brown. Like my older Greek friend, I too am fair haired and light
skinned. I'd look ridiculous with brown makeup.

In fact, if you think about it, "olive" doesn't sound like any human skin
colour. Olives' colours range from brownish-green to black. Greeks can range
from fair to dark, but not black- and certainly not green. I think the strange
expression comes from Homer, who is known to have some pretty weird (by modern
standards) ideas about the colour of things. Famously, he described the sea as
"wine-like".

It's kind of funny to see how his strange description has persisted to this
day and how it seems to affect peoples' perception.

~~~
_dps
As a fellow Greek who has occasionally been called "olive skinned" myself, I
too find this pretty odd :)

------
dredmorbius
This story kept popping up among various feeds and streams, without much
context, before I looked at it. A _very_ engrossing long-form read, and a
well-written and researched story.

It's about genius, poverty, opportunity, lack, oppression, persistence, and a
bittersweet resolution, for now.

Read it. And add Mike Mariani to your "writers worth following" list. I have.

------
_dps
Taking the article's statistic of a genius of this level being roughly one in
a few million, and with the global birth rate somewhere around 100 million per
year, there are presumably something like 20-40 such people born per year --
or 200-400 in the age range of 10-20 where you could imagine them having a
reasonable chance of participating in higher education.

And yet one can only imagine how many of those never get the chance to fully
share their gifts (though I hope few of them suffer a fate similar to
Promethea's and her family). I'm struck by how little money it would have
taken to give this girl, and her mother, a chance to flourish.

~~~
gwern
One thing I would point out is that child prodigies typically regress to the
mean; if you took her, say, 5yo IQ scores, they generally correlate something
like r=.5 with final adult IQ scores, so if she was, say, 190 then (+6SD) you
would expect an adult score averaging more like 145 now. Very impressive but
not extraordinarily rare or historic. IQ scores don't really stabilize until
about middle school, and this is one reason why selecting for really smart
young kids doesn't work as well as if you wait until middle/high school to do
your screening. (I think part of it is that child prodigies are as much about
accelerated growth as about their final potential, and benefit from things
like getting adult-levels of working memory much earlier than their peers, but
I'm not really an expert on G&T stuff.)

Anyway, she may be one in a few million but only in the USA. Most of the world
has much lower average IQ scores (unsurprisingly, given economic, medical, and
educational conditions in poorer countries, which is most of the non-USA
countries), and one of the properties of the normal distribution is that a
shift in the mean reduces the extremes much more than you would expect, like
8x or more. So you may be overestimating the number of people globally by
quite a bit.

Promethea's case is strange and sad, but the journalist notes that some of her
excuses don't wash: lots of STEM grad students get stipends and financial
support, and she should be able to get way more than your average grad
student. Not to mention the many options she has for _much_ better paying jobs
than tutoring students - there's no way someone with her talent who was going
to get a CS degree can't get a decent programming job or find another way to
make money. I might be reading this into it, but I think she's just satisfied
with her life and doesn't want to leave her mom.

~~~
blunte
I suspect that her very unusual life (practically every aspect of her life has
been unusual), amplified by her unique and powerful mind, has created for her
a mental condition well beyond what any of us could even fathom.

Given that, I don't think it's fair to judge her inaction or reduce it to
merely "satisfied with her life and doesn't want to leave her mom". Her
reasoning could be much more complex.

Besides, she's still quite young. Even if she's just satisfied and not wanting
to be apart from her mother, is that so bad? I would argue that she's earned a
break.

