- Labeled as a “genius” from IQ testing at 6 years old
"I think genetics play a small role. I’m naturally smart and I have the ability to absorb information pretty quickly just by reading. But that only counts for a small part." - Andrew Hsu
I guess all the brainpower in the world can't magically cure arrogance or grant humility. I don't doubt that he'll be very successful in something, but he's so comically out of touch with the reality of public education that I doubt he'll ever have an impact there.
It is not easy to grow up being labeled as a genius. One day you realize that most of the people of your age are so far, far below your ability it's just sad. You try to help them, but everyone know it's not easy at all. All the work you've done to get to this level seems to be very natural for you after all these years, and you have no idea that most of the kids were not doing _anything_ in their childhoods. Then you got this feeling that all your "genius" skills came undeservedly and it's really depressing, because they constitute your person, and you really would like to believe that you got there by your own work, cause it does not feel fair otherwise.
To work out this cognitive dissonance, you start to look what you did differently than your peers and you notice that you were doing math (or cs, or electronics, or biology or whatever) as early as you remember, while your averagely performing mates from university only started doing something serious in university classes or maybe in high school. This feels like a pretty good explanation, especially when one takes into account a 10 000 hours rule, but being a rationalist (who you surely are), you cannot discard the impact of your genes, but as long as it is not measurable, you can believe it's small.
That's how you come to the state of mind when saying things similar to the quoted ones seems pretty natural and not at all out of touch with reality.
(I say this from my own experience, so it's easy for me to sympathize -- I'm not as brilliant as the guy from the article, but I'm getting two bachelors (math and cs) next year, by then being 20.)
As a genius, I can attest to the fact that this is spot-on. Every time I look around, I go "Man, those poor people. Don't they realize what they've missed? They could have been doing math!"
Ok, tongue out of cheek. In all seriousness, I've repeatedly felt that whatever (minor) financial success I've had is pretty undeserved. I have a fairly nice career as a graphics programmer, and I worked on an extremely popular online videogame. And why did I get that opportunity? Well, as far as I can tell, dumb luck. I happened to decide in ~5th grade that I wanted to learn programming. By 9th grade, I was sleeping through class every day, then going home and teaching myself game/graphics programming all afternoon and all night. For years.
I happened to find it interesting. And people happen to currently value my experience from it. But it feels less like I'm a genius and more like I just got lucky. But my friends and family all have the impression that I'm some kind of genius or something, and if I had an ego, I'd probably start thinking of myself as one. But I know I'm not. I'm just a hard worker who was interested in a field that turned out to be valuable.
I occasionally play a certain online game, and I've been friends with someone on there for a couple years now. He's about my age, still lives with his mom, and isn't really doing anything with his life. But I can tell you for a fact he's just as intelligent as me, and just as capable. I feel so bad knowing that the only thing he probably has to look forward to is a job in construction.
Conversely, it's hard not to be... condescending... of certain people I see every day. They believe their opinion is so perfectly accurate, and that they're so capable, when every objective measurement would show the opposite. And so you wind up getting into a strange state of mind, where you feel you're somehow "better" than them. I try to resist feeling that way.
Well said. Someone got some perspective into your head before it inflated out of control. Bravo to whoever did it (you or someone who taught you as a youngster).
Thanks. I have no idea. I've just always been modest / hated bragging. (In fact it feels silly to post this since it seems similar to "whoooo look at me I'm so modest!")
If you want to read what the childhood of a true genius is like, or just read a really great book, then check out Feynman's "Surely You're Joking". It helped me to realize how much of a monkey I am in comparison.
It didn't feel like I was talking to an alien who had no understanding of the problem with education today when I interviewed him. He started having attention problems in 4th grade (which is the age he's targeting), and all of the problems he described to me lined up with my own beliefs.
I know it reads as blatantly bragging, but from my interactions with Andrew (having met him at his office personally and then having done the interview over Skype), he didn't come across that way. It sounded to me like he had explained it many times before and was trying his best to succinctly give a straight answer. He seemed pretty normal by social standards, and I have some engineering friends who are sincere assholes with an ego much larger than Andrew's, if that's how you perceive him. I think most hackers and especially programmers have some amount of that cockiness though, that's not something we're all immune to. Even the CS professors admit that CS students walk around feeling more entitled than liberal arts students (and it's scribbled on the bathroom stalls: "Liberal arts degree dispenser below" right above the toilet paper roll in an engineering building on the campus I went to). Anyway, that wasn't the vibe I got from him, although I can see how you could read it that way.
It's an interesting point brought up: has he had enough painful experience with education to build a solution to it all? I don't know. I don't think it takes much to fix education; it's so broken that any young person today with an appreciation for gaming could probably figure out something better than what exists now. But I'm really interested in seeing what his team comes up with, and if someone wants to work on education, I'm more than supportive of those efforts because that whole process sucks right now.
"I don't think it takes much to fix education; it's so broken that any young person today with an appreciation for gaming could probably figure out something better than what exists now."
The world of gaming has put a lot of work into discovering how to motivate people to keep going, even if what they're doing isn't actually that fun. Think of grinding in an MMORPG, or whatever the hell people do on Farmville: it's not that fun, probably significantly less fun than playing Super Mario Brothers 3, and yet people spend hours and hours on it.
And yet teachers have trouble getting students to learn anything.
I think this is inaccurate both in its presumed comparison and in the premise which underlies it.
First, grinding (really farming, no one outside of Korea grinds anymore, which I'll get to) in an MMO or playing Farmville is pretty low intensity mentally, it does not require that much of your attention. Multi-tasking is easy, for example. I'm not so sure that you would be able to grind away at mentally taxing activities. It generates fatigue.
Second, though, is that video games have not figured out a way to effectively reward boring activities. Let's use MMORPGs. When I played Final Fantasy XI, grinding was so tedious I quit before level 20. EverQuest 2 was better, but not too much more. WoW was fairly easy. RIFT was a breeze. Each new release is easier than the last, indicating that grinding is something game developers have learned to avoid rather than create ways of rewarding it. As an empirical test, it seems like a resounding rejection of thesis.
I'm not sure gamification is going to get much done on the education front. I think this idea resounds with techies because they like video games, they often like to show their accomplishments and they like the ego-stroke the concept of displacing education with games brings.
Khan Academy has to some extent gamified educational exercises and [video] study. I have reservations about this sort of thing as it focuses on reward fulfilment rather than fostering a love of the topic by engaging the learner.
> I guess all the brainpower in the world can't magically cure arrogance or grant humility.
I didn't think he sounded arrogant at all actually. He stressed that he thinks genetics play a small role. He then explains much more thoroughly the systematic approach he used to maximize his studying proficiency. I, in fact, think he was quite humble about his merits.
But if that's not the case, I wouldn't blame him either. He's human after all. So he is conditioned by his environment as much as we are. If I would be labeled as genius at 6, have 3 B.S. degrees by the age of 16, and pretty much everyone agreed I was "special", I think it's pretty expectable that I might end up believing that.
If someone has a great interest in something, finds the work energizing, has a goal, is organized and people around him always set the bar a little bit higher and are there to help, I can see how that can bring you most of the way there to finishing high school by 12. I can become a genius violinist if I had an all consuming drive to become one. It's that bloody motivation issue.
He's trying to be self-deprecating there, and saying (I think incorrectly) that genetics plays only a small part. Genuinely curious, what do you think he should have said?
"I think genetics play a small role. I’m naturally smart and I have the ability to absorb information pretty quickly just by reading. But that only counts for a small part." - Andrew Hsu
I guess all the brainpower in the world can't magically cure arrogance or grant humility. I don't doubt that he'll be very successful in something, but he's so comically out of touch with the reality of public education that I doubt he'll ever have an impact there.