[courtf]

It's also a lot easier to work hard when you are handed access to every academic resource on the planet before you hit puberty. His life story is the most blatant counterexample to this article imaginable. Sounds like a case of deep denial.

[ramraj07]

No ones saying anyone here has had the privilege of being born with a mind comparable to Terry’s, but a charitable (at the least) reading of his thoughts would be about working hard to better yourself, wherever you are today. If you’re just a programmer writing good code, you can work hard (not necessarily for your boss) to get better at it. Or not. Your choice. But given the day and age we live in you cannot keep insisting about the lack of opportunity if all you’re talking about is getting better yourself.

[courtf]

I don't really think you or Terry knows what hard work even looks like. We hold this conversation about personal advancement from positions of extreme privilege while billions live without running water. If you want to limit your view to only those of us with access to all the delights of modern society (and none of its externalities) I'm sure you can find plenty of evidence for the meritocracy.

You can personally thank my grandparents, all four laying dead in their graves before the age of 60, for your opportunity to "work hard" in America.

[tstrimple]

I've got a friend who is in industrial maintenance. I just can't understand how they put up with the working conditions. 12 hour shifts working around furnaces and covered in grease all day, forced overtime on a regular basis. This guy works harder than I ever have and makes a fraction of the income that I do. He has been injured multiple times at jobs. He's in his early 30's and has a more difficult time walking than many senior citizens due to a back injury. To your point he's still better off than many folks in similar situations in less developed nations. There's a lot of detail left out of the "work hard" narrative.

[wheelinsupial]

Maybe an article he wrote called A Close Call: How a Near Failure Propelled Me to Succeed [1] might be of interest to you.

"After many nerve-wracking minutes of closed-door de- liberation, the examiners did decide to (barely) pass me; however, my advisor gently explained his disappointment at my performance, and how I needed to do better in the future. I was still largely in a state of shock—this was the first time I had performed poorly on an exam that I was genuinely interested in performing well in."

"In retrospect, nearly failing the generals was probably the best thing that could have happened to me at the time."

[1] https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/202007/rnoti-p1007.pdf

[courtf]

Is this supposed to be a tale of overcoming adversity, almost failing some exam? The stakes are so low I can barely identify the conflict in the story. Actually failing something of actual importance and then overcoming the odds to succeed anyway would be a little less boring.

He sounds like he's lived his entire life in a university basement and mistook the petty challenges of academia for real life.

[wheelinsupial]

The original poster made a comment about grinding to get a math PhD. You said Terrence Tao is a blatant counter example to that. I posted (I'll concede that I probably didn't display great quotes from the article or provide enough context) an article about Terrence Tao almost failing his PhD generals exam, which I thought would lend some evidence to the idea of grinding for the PhD, which is the original point under discussion. Since he passed the generals and he didn't prepare very well for it, may be you're right and that is weak evidence. I think the article does provide some evidence that others who were studying for their PhD in math at Princeton while Terrence Tao was studying for his were not relying solely on intelligence alone. Perhaps I'm wrong on that point too.

However, I don't think you're trying to criticize the article as bad evidence in relation to achieving a math PhD. You're going on about academia having low stakes and academia not representing real life. If I'm mis-characterizing this, then I apologize. I do believe you're moving the goal posts in this discussion. The original article posted is about math graduate school. That's all. It's not about real life. The first two sentences in the article establish this point.

> Relying on intelligence alone to pull things off at the last minute may work for a while, but, generally speaking, at the graduate level or higher it doesn’t.

> One needs to do a serious amount of reading and writing, and not just thinking, in order to get anywhere serious in mathematics;