[squigs25]

Interesting read, but I have one major qualm about this.

There seems to be a confirmatory bias among the academic community that a measure of intellectual success can be found in the percentage of individuals who earn a PhD. Sure, it's true that you need to be reasonably smart to earn a PhD, but I think that someone can have a lot of intellectual success (potentially just as much or maybe more) if they don't earn a PhD.

I think you could even argue that, depending on the field of study, a PhD is the "easy" route for someone who is intellectually gifted - it's a simply a continuation of what you have been doing. I would be more impressed by the intellectual who not only realizes that they can conduct their own independent research, but also has the creativity to come up with a use case that can improve and contribute to the world (and presumably, make a living doing so).

My point here is that, given two gifted cohorts, one which has a 45% PhD graduation rate and one which has a 50% PhD graduation rate, I don't know that you can conclusively say that one is more gifted than the other without looking at other metrics associated with intellectual accomplishment.

[pas]

Knowing a few friends and other acquaintances with PhDs, all they have common is endurance and focus. They were not exceptionally creative, or apparently breathtakingly genius.

And I guess that's why Google et al. likes to hire PhDs. They can take all kinds of shit, and endure. Get to the bottom of those problems even in the face of internal politics/bureaucracy.

[pmoriarty]

"Godlike genius.. Godlike nothing! Sticking to it is the genius! I've failed my way to success."

  -- Thomas Edison

"Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lives solely in my tenacity."

  -- Louis Pasteur

"Men give me credit for genius; but all the genius I have lies in this: When I have a subject on hand I study it profoundly."

  -- Alexander Hamilton

[balabaster]

I can't believe that it's coincidence that every person I've ever come across that has been proclaimed a genius at whatever has had this very same sentiment to express.

There was a grain of talent and a moment of inspiration that led to a dogged pursuit of their interest.

People are quick to write it off as "oh, they had talent" or "oh they were a genius", but I'm reasonably confident given the number of amazing people I've met in this industry, everyone (well, everyone that's not an egotist) that's ever had this label attributed to them will attest: The talent comes from the countless hours of work, effort and frustration put into realizing that talent. It's only once we've overcome this effort and frustration and others think we make it look easy that they say "Oh, but you had talent"... sure, but I didn't have any to start with. Now after 10,000 hours of practice, of countless nights of going to bed frustrated that I couldn't understand something or make my fingers work right, of the number of times I played until my fingers and lips bled all in the pursuit of mastering whatever it is I'm trying to master. Only then does everyone see this talent. I don't see talent, all I see is the hard work to get where I am now and how far I still have left to go to consider myself part of the circle I still think are better or more accomplished than me. Any "talent" I may exhibit is the product of the pursuit of my interest.

My talent, my genius if you will is nothing more than this. I am not a genius. I am no more intelligent than has the capacity of any other that has the tenacity to stick with it through the basics and learn the fundamentals and go through the mental and physical pain that I have endured to get here.

[imgabe]

Nobody ever mentions the counterexample, assuming it exists - the person who spends thousands of hours practicing but never gets anywhere. How many Salieris are there for each Mozart?

There's definitely a need for hard work in order to have success, but perhaps there's something necessary that has to be present for the hard work to build upon. Maybe that something is "genius".

[michaelcampbell]

> How many Salieris are there for each Mozart?

And if Mozart hadn't been there, at that time; would we not be speaking of Salieri as the genius? Perhaps.

[mrcactu5]

What about Lady Gaga? (Stefani Germanotta)

Article says she was part of this study.

[ZenoArrow]

Hard work is overrated. What you really want is curiosity. You can refine something with hard work, but broadening your horizons comes from a desire to see what can be done. Basically, do you want to create a refined version of what's already been done, or do you want to explore what's possible. You can alternate between them to push in both directions, but the mindset is different.

[AStellersSeaCow]

>Hard work is overrated. What you really want is curiosity.

This is BS, and the kind of BS that results in lazy entitled adults expecting the world to be their oyster because they have kept their dreamer curiosity intact.

Out of the people I've know who are internationally-recognized academics and/or world-class engineers, many are both hard working and creative. Probably the majority of them, in fact. But many more are hard working and not especially creative: they doggedly pursue single lines of inquiry or development, and possibilities for truly new ideas or techniques - not just refinements - are exposed through the intellectual equivalent of brute force.

I don't know any internationally-recognized academics or world-class engineers who are creative but not hard working.

[hinkley]

I think it's two sides of a coin here. When someone asks me how I fixed some obscure bug or crazy performance issue, I will say something like 'I was the last one to give up on it'.

You could also say that many other people looked at the same thing and either didn't give a shit, or they weren't willing to continue suffering toward the payoff at some point.

Is that tenacity? Curiosity? Some of each?

[_0ffh]

While curiosity might be what causes you to work hard, it's still the work itself that produces the results. Although if you're lucky it might not feel very much like work! :)

[balabaster]

That something usually less genius and more a grain of inspiration followed by a love of the process, followed by a ton of hard work to get to a point that the instrument is an extension of the musician's soul.

I will concede that this may not always be the case. Of course, there are a thousand Salieris for every Mozart. But when you set out, you don't set out to become Salieri. When you play in an orchestra, you don't spend your life striving to play second fiddle and you certainly don't just get to sit down in the principal violin spot because you're a genius. You work for it, just like the guy who earned his right to be on that podium leading the orchestra.

For everything that's wrong with the movie Whiplash, there is a lot of nuance that it captures really well regarding the personalities in orchestras and what it really takes to get to the top of your game.

[Joof]

Not surprising. A lot of us probably qualify or come very close and the deciding factor is how much effort we expend to get there.

Meanwhile, I've got friends that live on welfare and legitimately couldn't understand neural networks (or even algebra) if they spent their whole lives dedicated to it. They are still excellent people, but perhaps mathematics isn't their best subject.

The guy I have in mind is an incredible impressionist and comedian, I wish he had more confidence in his talents.

[balabaster]

also, I've yet to see anyone spending thousands of hours on productive practice and not get anywhere. Conversely, you can spend thousands of hours practicing a shitty golf swing and you're not going to get anywhere but an over-practiced shitty golf swing. Without correction and enforcing good technique and good habits at every practice, you're not going to get anywhere fast if at all.

Music is a bit of a poor example for application to "genius" actually because just like a golf swing much of it is in the practice of your gross and fine motor skills and good technique, which as we all know, if you don't rigorously practice good habits, you may as well not bother practicing at all because you're actively going in the wrong direction.

[ThePawnBreak]

There is always a bell curve. It's more obvious in fields where people start practicing from a tender age, like chess or music, where you start learning when you're around 4. There are many who dedicate their lives to such pursuits, but very few become Kasparov or Mozart. The others still become extremely good, but not the best, and most are forgotten by history.

[balabaster]

But to be honest, you don't need to be Mozart to be considered a musical genius today... There are a dozen orchestral genii alive today that could easily outstrip the genius of Mozart when you compare the body of their orchestral work. Yet when these composers are dead and gone, 30, 40, 50 years from now, everyone will still be talking about Mozart, and todays better-than-Mozarts will be lost to the sands of time. It's quite sad how biased our filters are really.

[seizethecheese]

Perhaps true geniuses know the social value of humility.

[balabaster]

...or perhaps they're totally unaware of the existence of genius. Perhaps if they realized what they were attempting required genius they'd never have attempted it in the first place for fear that they didn't have the genius necessary to succeed.

[AStellersSeaCow]

Haha, no way. I've worked with or met a half dozen MacArthur fellows, and none of them were shy about bringing up that fact. You could argue that MacArthur selects for self-promoting geniuses, but such creatures clearly do exist.

[seizethecheese]

Exception that proves the rule.

How do you know if someone you met went to Harvard? They already told you.

[sovietmudkipz]

> True geniuses know the social value of humility.

Wouldn't you have to be a genius to be able to make such an evaluation?

[Retra]

That's not an evaluation, it's just a statement. Some genius could have just told them that.

[ARothfusz]

Genius does not emerge solely from tenacity. Genius comes from figuring out new things to try in pursuit of a goal over a long period of time.

If you tried something and failed, how many permutations could you go through before you ran out of ideas of what to try? Could you do it for _years_? Could you keep trying, learning from your mistakes for a lifetime, until you reached your goal? Maybe you're a genius then.

[balabaster]

Why not? Anyone could if the pursuit was worth it to them.

All it takes is being able to look at things and wonder "how could I apply this along with what I already know to achieve that goal?" Eventually you'll have some permutation of ideas that work. Even if you put it down and come back to it many years later. Maybe the goal isn't obvious until one day all the ideas come together to solve a problem that you need solved right now that yesterday you'd never even had cause to think about. That doesn't negate the work you did learning those things.

"Everyone is a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life thinking it's stupid." - Einstein

[AIMunchkin]

My favorite Edison quote:

"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work."

[KaneMorgan]

Saying I worked hard is a more comforting story than saying I was lucky. I think people are likely to put more value on hard work than its due.

[civilian]

I think that what successful people tell themselves is not that important of an issue. What's important is the narrative we give people who are not yet successful.

I have a friend who's smart, and is a really good listener. We have really good philosophical conversations, and he kicks my ass at board games. I've been wanting him to get into programming, because right now he's working as an assistant manager at a sandwich shop chain. He absolutely has the talent to understand programming, but he has never put an ounce of effort into it. He really likes the idea of making 50k/yr (which would essentially be a doubling of his salary) so he could be less depressed about finances.

I offer him help... I tell him how I self-trained into programming, without a C.S. degree. And he just has a total lack of effort, and I think that he just tells himself that he can't do it.

When we establish the narrative that the only barrier is hard work, then we ought to be able to motivate people because they'll recognize that most things are within their reach with enough determination.

[beachstartup]

i have friends like this.

trust me, you're not going to convince him.

he's probably going to just do nothing, for a long time, and tell you how lucky you are every time you visit.

[pmoriarty]

I have two counter-examples for you. I had two friends like this. I convinced them to learn programming while they were working menial jobs. Both of them did, and went on to have successful careers in the tech field.

I have a story of failure too. Two other frends expressed interest in learning to program, and I tried to teach them C while I was learning it myself. Big mistake. They quit after the first very intense and long lesson. I think I threw them in to the deep end of the pool, trying to teach them C as their first exposure to programming (when I myself didn't even know C and was learning along with them).

In the successful cases first mentioned above, both of my friends taught themselves languages they were interested in, at their own pace, and in their spare time (what little there was of it). They were also clearly very motivated, which my other two friends may not have been.

Moral of the story: I think it all depends on the student, the teacher, what they're trying to learn, how they're learning, how they're taught, and how motivated they are. You can't just generalize and say it'll work for everyone or not work for everyone.

The successes make me cautiously optimistic and I will personally try to help people again, if given the chance, despite there being no guarantee that it will work. In fact, I'd still try to help even every one of my previous attempts had failed.

[eutectic]

So we should be willing to lie if it makes a better story?

[chillwaves]

I'm not sure how you got that idea from the post you are responding to.

[replicatorblog]

"Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not: nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not: the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent."—Calvin Coolidge

[forgotmysn]

Sounds like an epic humblebrag by Hamilton. I don't think anyone, then or now, thinks he was a genius.

[omginternets]

I don't think he's using genius to mean "a genius". I think it's instead meant as a term for "a bright idea". i.e.: "to have genius" vs "to be a genius".

[pjmorris]

I am curious about how you come by your view. Have a look at this defense [0] of Hamilton on the $10. I can see from it how many could see him as a genius.

[0] http://www.financialsense.com/contributors/michael-pettis/pl...

[cfmcdonald]

He is saying he has been credited with genius, that is intellectual power or talent, not that he has been credited with being "a genius". The former is now an archaic way of using genius, the latter was pretty new in Hamilton's time.

[habitue]

Alexander Hamilton was definitely super smart. Read his biography, it's nuts how young he was while he was writing treatises that shaped world events

[karma_vaccum123]

Right...many people seem to confuse genius with being really smart.

[wrp]

I know a Chemistry professor whose favorite remark on this is, "A PhD is a badge of endurance, not intelligence."

[TheSpiceIsLife]

PhD stands for Piled Higher & Deeper. Is a path of learning more and more about less and less.

(of course that isn't necessarily true, but I find it amusing)

[Coincoin]

> Is a path of learning more and more about less and less

...until you know absolutely everything about absolutely nothing.

[euyyn]

Then you become Dirac's delta.

[Moshe_Silnorin]

>A PhD is a badge of endurance, not intelligence

It's very clearly both.

[gmarx]

What those who contradict you above fail to appreciate is just how little IQ difference makes someone seem "dumb". Most people with 140 IQs rarely spend any time having discussion of any depth with anyone who has an IQ below 120. They have not the slightest idea how dense someone with an IQ of 100 seems. When I was training as a physician I routinely needed to explain important things in depth to people with average and below average intelligence. It is shocking. Most of us live in a narrow world and make poor assumptions about life outside

[jack9]

It is not. The purpose of a PHD is to advance the sphere of human knowledge as it applies to a subset of existing data in a unique way. Getting the PHD by proving something empirically is the point of a PHD. This does not require a great deal of intelligence. Not enough to warrant more than a participation badge, anyway. e.g. Computer Science, where there's tons of data and few people have done the grunt work of organizing it for a statistician.

[B1FF_PSUVM]

Nah, I forgot which top flight physicist (Nobel, I think) wrote in a book that he had explained to his mother that there were indeed very dumb PhDs, thanks to mere "sitzfleisch".

Most anyone in the business knows cases.

[Panoramix]

Smarter than average, for sure. But people tend to over estimate the intelligence of the average PhD.

[cubano]

Almost all of the education system is about signalling your abilty to be told what to do and doing it, and not hardly at all about actually learning things necessary for a successful and productive life.

[TheSpiceIsLife]

Although... Being able to do what your told is fairly necessary for a productive life.

Don't do drugs, brush your teeth, get a good education, exercise regularly, shower regularly, spend less than you make, eat healthy. Do as your told.

[tonyedgecombe]

Don't study CS, Law is where the money is, don't start a business, it will probably fail, don't date that girl, her parents are bumpkins. Do as your told.

[jimmaswell]

The vast majority of the time, you shouldn't start a tech startup.

[collyw]

I have been working at academic institutes the last few years, where maybe a third of the staff are PhD students. The ones that have gone on to more senior positions are like you describe, but I wouldn't say its the majority. A fair few of them decide to quit science after the PhD.

[irrational]

This reminds me of the old joke that PhD stands for "Pile it on Higher and Deeper".

[wrp]

It goes B.S. => More of Same => Piled Higher and Deeper.

[kohanz]

BS = Bulls---

MS = More s---

PhD = Piled higher and Deeper

[mordae]

I prefer this one: http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

OTOH, I bear neither.

[sharemywin]

My favorite was D stand for Diploma...

[clueless123]

When you think you know everything you get your BS

When you find out you know nothing, you get your Masters

When you realize no one else knows either you get your PHD

[vacri]

I'll support this with my experience. A PhD means you can do peer-reviewable original research. This means that you can't be too dumb, yes, but mostly that you have the elbow-grease to see it through. Maintaining motivation and stick-to-it-iveness are the most important qualities for doing a PhD.

Disclaimer: dropped out of a PhD program due to lack of interest and elbow-grease.

[rsp1984]

Really? As a PhD what you do is explore a -- best case: niche, usually: theoretical and worst case: completely made up -- problem thoroughly in absence of workplace realities like deadlines, office politics and backstabbery, and try to come up with a solution that's better in at least some sense than what's been written before, then write a big piece of documentation about it whose total number of individual readers in most cases won't reach double digits.

This does not prepare you well for most workplaces, except for maybe Google, who have enough resources to create an alternate reality for their engineers so they don't have to grow up.

[ci5er]

> in absence of workplace realities like deadlines, office politics and backstabbery

Really? I did not find that to be the case. I don't mind deadlines, but watching the day-to-day life of academics doing academia with their peers is what caused me to drop out of a PhD program and go finish my research project on my own. After seeing it in action, I wanted no part of being one of them for the rest of my career. I expect that I could have been at a rarely political university system, but after some medium-ish number of conferences (i.e. more than two dozen), I doubt that it was much worse than average. I found the whole thing quite "icky". In fact, I found it worse than any commercial environment I've been in (although I've been told I've been lucky in my experiences for failing to find it to such a degree in commercial environments).

[pbhjpbhj]

Not a Ph.D but reports from (UK) doctorate holders suggest there's sometimes a lot of backstabbery, often deadlines (funding), very often lab/department politics.

[jsprogrammer]

A PhD doesn't show that you get to the bottom of problems, but rather that you can influence, and be influenced by, group-think.

Edit:

Looks like it is still a while before my speech ban is up, so I'm pasting my response to kevingwang's response (below) here:

>To a particular degree, anyway. Convincing a University, or being published in peer-journal, for example.

>I think some are more or less ignored, though I guess I can't say that has no influence whatsoever and I'm also not sure that you can entirely avoid the influence of others.

[kevinwang]

So, the same as every other human being?

[jl6]

Well, don't they say that to do a PhD you have to be smart enough to be able to do one, but dumb enough to actually do one?

[hectormalot]

I agree, as a Chem Eng master (In the dutch system you do not leave university with a bachelor, it's interpreted as if you weren't good enough to get a master) I've noticed that most of the guys I considered to be the brightest left for corporate jobs, that Ph.D's were a mix of people with deep academic interest (and endurance), some very bright people, and some people that felt they weren't ready for the real world. I think it's too much of a short-cut to say PhD equals high intellectual success.

[princeb]

> some people that felt they weren't ready for the real world.

i know some of these people. i suspect a lot of phds are people like these. of those who stay through the entire 3-5 year program, yet some are happy to remain post docs for the rest of their lives. they seem to have no goal, no real curiosity, no desire to see what exists outside the academic life they've known since college... they are there simply because they were there.

[usmeteora]

Well, in the study, they tracked students that went onto become CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, billionaires, Senators, none of which require a Graduate Degree. In fact, most CEOs are Phd dropouts and decided to leave the graduate education system, and some of them dropped out of their Bachelors program even, Mark from FB is in there as well as Lady GaGa. They both have a large influence on society but neither have graduate degrees. I don't see where in this study they were tracking people with Phds only. They tracked all the students who went through the program regardless of what they did.

I believe the only mode of failure they were questioning in the study was the program coordinators own inability or failure to accurately identify people who did end up making large contributions to society (such as Shockley, aka the transistor) who failed to pass their initial thresholds for what they deemed as gifted. Much of the study focuses on questioning the failure of the program to adequately identify and support gifted children, not whether gifted children themselves ended up being successful. I'm honestly surprised noone has brought this up yet and that your comment is so presumptuous.

[squigs25]

They tracked everyone, and measured success by the percentage that earned a PhD. So, while Mark and Lady GaGa were tracked, I don't think I saw any statistic that would have associated these two individuals with a positive outcome (except for the anecdotal line in the paper). I would argue that both Mark and Lady Gaga have probably had more influence than 99.9% of the tracked individuals in the study, and yet they are lowering the presented metric for success (percent that earned a PhD).

[jstelly]

> I think that someone can have a lot of intellectual success (potentially just as much or maybe more) if they don't earn a PhD.

I totally agree with this. Also as an anecdote, I really struggled with the decision to pursue a PhD. In the end I decided not to for various reasons. I was never interested in academia, just in certain technology careers that seemed to demand a PhD at the time I was finishing my BS (also I went to a fairly ordinary state school for my BS even though I was accepted to much more prestigious schools figuring I would attend one of those for a graduate degree and avoid some student load debt). Many years later, in hindsight, I am very happy with that decision. I never think about going back in time and making the decision the other way. If anything I expect I would have been less successful by any metric (intellectual or otherwise) had I done so.

[ArkyBeagle]

What's important is a familiarity and a comfort with rigor.

You don't have to be a genius to gain that. It might even be a liability - you don't have to follow the formula to get the right answer ( because you're impatient and want to go play outside ) ; you can just see the answer. This happened to me, and I spent a couple or four years as an undergrad undoing damage I'd done to myself that way.

I'd buy a lot more about what we think we know of human capability if there was even the most modest attempt to control for this factor.

I went to what used to be a "normal" school that had risen to university status. It still mainly taught teachers although I pursued a BSCS.

I asked the department chairman of the department why math was taught "from the wrong end of the telescope" and even he didn't really know why. I suppose the proofs course is no way to get buy in, but had I started with proofs rather than what they taught as algebra, I'd have had an easier time of it. I'd taken geometry but even algebra was still a morass, until I'd gotten a grounding in proofs.

[mrcactu5]

I am concerned about the metrics these guys are using to measure aptitude and their measures of success. Top 95% income bracket -- I mean that's nice.

Than again, I am not inside that 1 in 10000 range -- this study certainly does not apply to me. Or to the vast majority of people.

Opportunities for bright students in the United States are limited. Big news! We've always been anti-intellectual.

[0xdeadbeefbabe]

> other metrics associated with intellectual accomplishment.

Like say IQ. Feynman wouldn't have qualified for Mensa, and happily too[0]. Maybe that's a good metric. The metric is happy not to be in Mensa, but also has a PhD.

Edit: Feynman's IQ was 126 and Mensa wants 132, at least according to Ericsson and Pool in their book Peak.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEUcmKDaklY

[1812Overture]

If Feynman's IQ was only 126 then IQ is a totally meaningless metric of intelligence.

[Gargoyle]

I've always thought Feynman did poorly on some test in high school for whatever reason and then used that score for the rest of his life as a good story. Feynman was all about the good stories.

[sgt101]

Well, intelligence is a meaningless term as in "playing chess is intelligent" or sitting on a stool and answering questions about arithmetic is intelligent. Don't even get me started on creative or consciousness.

Oddly I feel that emotion is well defined as "behavioral modifications generated by reactions to circumstances", which is what John Maynard Smith told me it was.

He was an intelligent fella.

[paulpauper]

the problem may have been the low ceiling of the test. For certain tests, getting a single question wrong may drop the IQ from 140 (possible maximum) to 135. Verbal questions can also be a challenge if you don't know obscure vocabulary words.

[petters]

But also:

    Feynman received the highest score in the country by a large margin on the notoriously difficult Putnam mathematics competition exam, although he joined the MIT team on short notice and did not prepare for the test. 

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/finding-the-next-einste...

[paulpauper]

a STEM PHD is anything but 'easy' - it requires an original contribution of research, for one , and it must be defended and published

[mod]

Not sure if you read the sentence in context, but the OP said that it was the easier of the two choices he presented.