[SJC_Hacker]

Can't find the reference but from an interview with his parents there apparently there wasn't much "nurturing" other than simply making available the necessary materials which he gobbled up. Its not like they put a made him practice for an hour a day.

A boy in my high school class made IMO and got a gold medal (and later on won the Putnam one year). They interviewed his parents and it was a similar story.

[MrOrelliOReilly]

I think you might be underrating the value of even that enabling work. Some parents would not have the financial resources to provide those learning materials. And some parents would take a normative stance on how an 8 year old ought to behave.

More importantly, it's not as though individuals like Clements or Erdos was corresponding with Terrence directly to arrange a meeting. His parents clearly played an important role in facilitating and allowing these encounters. That deserves a lot of credit!

[koolba]

> I think you might be underrating the value of even that enabling work. Some parents would not have the financial resources to provide those learning materials. And some parents would take a normative stance on how an 8 year old ought to behave.

And most modern parents would swamp the child with a bunch of mind rotting auto playing TV and video games. There's an account of Terence's time at university where he nearly fails his oral qualifying exams as he spent most of his time playing Civ rather than studying anything. Imagine the travesty for the world if 5 year old Terence had been handed an Xbox.

[Aperocky]

He would just become a software engineer like the rest of us, and probably would have started google or netflix.

[swftarrow]

Possibly- but a prodigious intellect and capacity doesn't necessarily translate to "founder" type entrepreneurial talents.

[throwforfeds]

Yeah I agree, an 8 year old isn't setting up these meetings and correspondences.

I think beyond even having supportive parents, the most important part was that he had a parent that had a degree in the field that he happened to be a genius in. His mother knew exactly how to guide her child through the material, even if it just was to let him go off to a corner and read the books she guided him towards for 3-4 hours a day for fun. So many children have advanced proclivities for certain things and parents that just can't even see what it is their child is brilliant at.

Having someone that knows the path and can point it out to them is a beautiful thing to have as a child.

[markus_zhang]

I think gene and characteristics are more important than knowledge and degree. I happen to have two parents who are both in education, one teaches in university and one teaches in middle schools. Because of this I also know many friends whose parents are also teachers.

Without any statistical significance, but nonetheless the sample size is greater than 5. None of us consider their parents to be great, or even good teachers. All kids squandered sometime after they are free from the parents, usually in universities.

This experience impacts me so much, that I have a bias that teachers should not teach their own kids.

[throwforfeds]

A parent of mine was also a teacher, and other than grading their student's 9th grade math exams when I was in elementary school, I was on my own for most of my learning.

So I agree that yes, just having a parent who is a teacher doesn't necessarily get you much, outside of likely being in a home environment where school is deemed important (many don't have this unfortunately). But where things become slightly magical is when you have a genetically gifted child and a parent that both knows how to guide that genius and has the resources to do so.

[markus_zhang]

Yeah, and can be worse if they are arrogant and thinks they know everything about teaching. That’s why I said characteristics is important.

[fifilura]

Sure. But what about the parents who struggle every day with normally gifted children? They deserve even more credit. This seems like an easy child :)

[kakacik]

One needs to be a (long term present) parent to understand these subtleties.

You also hear just the success stories which are often extremely marginal, when such approach wouldn't fit development curve of some other potential genius we would not be hearing their less successful story, would we.

Not diminishing the overall message, in 80s even in western democracies deeper info was not so readily available so its not like his parents just threw him wifi-connected tablet with wikipedia opened and that was it.

But I think what should be celebrated more is some proper hard long term effort and not just usual approach with exceptional results.

[fifilura]

It is unclear to me what you are trying to say.

[kakacik]

Apologies I am not a native speaker so sometimes more complex thoughts take long sentences to explain.

We are discussing his parent's contribution to his growth. Some, like me, tend to agree they just gave him (good) tools and he found his interest and way through and beyond due to superior analytical skills and overall intelligence, not through some super duper tutoring by them.

I have cca such cousin. He was way ahead of his class (which was already math-focused class from secondary school), geniune interest in deeper math, physics and philosophy from early age. Even very good at software development in old Pascal or C. Nobody was tutoring him in any way, he just went to public library and borrowed what he liked.

The stuff thats not hard but still counts as discovery and learning must be self-motivating in way more average folks simply don't experience, not with same topics.

[markus_zhang]

His parents, as an old saying in my country, must have done a tremendous amount of good things in their previous life to be rewarded with an easy kid :P

[kccqzy]

That’s simply not quite true if you read the article. When Terence Tao got stuck on a continued fraction problem, his mother told him to use the quadratic.

In contrast when I was a kid and was thinking about optimizing my program to print all prime numbers, my mother, instead of telling me about the sieve of Eratosthenes, told me to do school-approved math instead.

Now shoutout to my actual math teacher, who, having been told that I got stuck on writing a program to solve simultaneous linear equations, told me about Gaussian elimination.

[hnfong]

Agreed. It's been decades, but personally being acquaintances with IMO and IOI gold medalists made me rethink a lot of things.

With our society being ostensibly meritocratic regarding intelligence, people generally don't like to listen to stories that suggest that nurture and hard work aren't as important as they presume.

[shermantanktop]

At the individual level of a newborn infant, all the genetic gifts collapse into a fixed quantity. Nurture and hard work (and self care and many other things) become 100% of the controllable factors.

Nurture and parental mental health are not controllable by the child, so those become fixed from their perspective as they grow to maturity. That still leaves a lot.

All the former G&T kids on here talking about whether they could have been this or that are likely discounting their own contributions that they made and make every day to their own trajectory.

No, you were never going to be Einstein, no matter what, but you can still be the best version of yourself- the kindest, the most capable, the happiest, the least resentful.

Maybe that’s happy talk? Certainly some people have been dealt a tough hand, and it’s an American naive attitude to think that can always be overcome. Sometimes it can’t.

[hirvi74]

> All the former G&T kids on here talking about whether they could have been this or that are likely discounting their own contributions that they made and make every day to their own trajectory.

I completely agree. I commonly see such sentiments online. People claim that if they were truly challenged more or had better resources, then they would truly become something noteworthy. However, I disagree with them after a certain point. If you need someone to coddle your abilities, then I would argue you aren't nearly as gifted nor talented as you may have been lead to believe. I am not claiming that only the truly talented will be able to white-knuckle their entire way through life on their own. Rather, I believe people contribute equally to their environment, which I believe is similar to what you were stating.

> you were never going to be Einstein, no matter what, but you can still be the best version of yourself- the kindest, the most capable, the happiest, the least resentful.

Tao himself would say that one does not have to be like him nor the best at anything to make a meaningful contribution towards something. I think the example he once used was a lot of the technology we currently have. Sure, perhaps some exceptional people designed it, but how many thousands upon thousand of people contributed to turning the design into an actual product?

> it’s an American naive attitude to think that can always be overcome. Sometimes it can’t.

While true, what kind of world do you want to live in? I rather go to the grave believing I had a chance versus knowing my destiny was essentially invariable. I believe that even ordinary people can be full of surprises given the right catalysts and circumstances. Maybe not Von Neumann level of surprises, but humans are pretty clever creatures.

[shermantanktop]

To your last point, I agree.

You don’t have to be a perpetual optimist to choose the best path available to you. But still, that best path is pretty rough going for many people all over the world.

[somenameforme]

It's still meritocratic even with dramatic genetic differences between individuals. A peer comment mentioned an anecdote of Terence nearly failing his orals because he ended spending all of his time playing Civ instead of studying anything.

It's basically the Gattaca story. Somebody can have the most brilliant mind in the world, but without actually applying it, they're not going to do great in life. If you give a person of average intellect Tao's life of dedication and work ethic, then he's going to end up a world class mathematician. He probably won't end up at the top of the top, as that's going to be reserved for those that hit the mega-lottery of genetics + dedication, but will also have no problem leaving his mark on this world and living a comfortable life.

[rowanG077]

I seriously doubt a person with average intellect can become a world class mathematician, let alone a decent one. Just on grid. I have seen people in college that were tremendously hard working fail math classes and just not understand it. At some point saying they should just try harder is cruel.

[somenameforme]

The logic in my claim is that the overwhelming majority of people will reach nowhere even remotely near to their genetic potential in literally anything. You can see this in any endeavor where performance can be objectively measured - chess is the obvious one. A 2000 rated player is not much more than a strong amateur, but that already leaves one in like the 90th+ percentile for a game that millions of people work and study at.

It's not like the other 90% of people lack the intelligence or whatever else to be much stronger than they are, but it requires extensive dedication, work, and suffering that many just uninterested in tolerating for the sake of improving at a single domain. I think your example largely proves the point. Anybody of average intelligence can obviously excel at undergraduate math if they're willing to dedicate themselves to it, but many people aren't. If somebody was failing at math it's probably because they were just treating it like you might e.g. literature, and trying to do cram sessions relatively shortly before each exam, whereas by the time somebody gets to stuff like diff eq math starts turning more into a puzzle game that requires developing things on a subconscious/intuitive level.

[rowanG077]

This was not undergraduate math in my case, but I still don't agree.

I don't think anyone of average intelligence can excel at undergraduate math. It of course depends on the degree and the school. Can anyone with average intelligence excel at an undergraduate math course in community college for their psychology degree? Probably yes. But an undergraduate math course at oxford as part of a maths degree? Not for sure not.

I think you are severely underestimating how much intelligence factors in how fast and even what at all you can learn. Take the opposite end of the spectrum. The US army rejects candidates with an IQ of ~85 or lower. Because they have found this group cannot contribute meaningfully. Let that sink in. Just a drop of 15 IQ points means the US army has decided you cannot be effectively taught anything to a minimum degree of competence. Now consider that the average IQ of a mathematician is 130 (https://realiqtest.webflow.io/posts/iq-by-occupation-a-compr...).

[somenameforme]

I'm speaking of math majors, or fields with a heavy math requirement, of course. Diff eq is not required anywhere, as far as I know at least, for non-technical majors. As for the army, I wouldn't just hand-wave away soldiering. You're talking about people being put in high pressure situations with ever-shifting dynamics, potentially against a human adversary, where lives are at stake. And they think everybody except the bottom ~32% of society is fit for this task.

I'd certainly expect an average person who dedicates his life to mathematics to end up with a higher than average IQ largely because while IQ is a useful measure, it's not an independent g factor. Studying mathematics is going to absolutely help train your brain in many areas that are also beneficial for performance in IQ exams. So for instance, some studies have shown that each additional year of education, relative to a fixed base, can causally contribute 1-5 additional IQ points. [1] So our person in question would almost certainly expect to see a significant and measurable IQ increase.

And FWIW I'm rather on the opposite extreme of those who argue for some sort of tabula rasa. I fully acknowledge dramatic innate differences between individuals, but I'm largely arguing that such differences only become major factors for people who approach their genetic potential in something, which most people will never get even remotely near, simply because the amount of dedication and sacrifice it takes is something that very few people are willing to accept.

[1] - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6088505

[tptacek]

The data on this site is extremely dubious.

[danielmarkbruce]

"Dedication and work ethic" is almost certainly nonsense here. Some people do the activity a lot without having any ethic or dedication - they like it.

[Viliam1234]

Yeah, it's easier to do the difficult and boring stuff when it's actually easy and interesting for you.

[danielmarkbruce]

Lots of examples in sports. Tiger Woods loved practicing. Most golfers (like me..) enjoy about 30 mins at the range... then it's torture.

[hnfong]

I don't know whether Terence Tao nearly failed because he spent all his time playing Civ.

But surely you're not going to mention this as potentially factual, and then praise his dedication and work ethic... right?

[somenameforme]

He stopped playing video games, presumably in part because of this event. [1] Many, if not most of us, would instead just let our professional life dip a bit and try to roll back the gaming a bit. Going completely cold turkey is a person with a special sort of dedication and ethic.

[1] - https://archive.is/dIpCu

[lupire]

If it's so easy to be a world class mathematician, why can't most mathematicians do it?

[jodrellblank]

Which part of "lifetime of hard work and dedication" are you misreading as "so easy"?

[danielmarkbruce]

There is zero, absolutely zero chance of the 50th percentile IQ becoming a world class mathematician. People who say this have no idea exactly how smart these guys are.

[jodrellblank]

It seems like a bit of a pointless and unanswerable argument about semantics, the only bit is the irritating "ohh if it's SOOO EASY" about something that was definitely framed not to be easy.

If your cutoff of "world class mathematician" is a few hundred or thousand people, then no chance. If their cutoff is "earn a comfortable living" and the top 10% of the world is 800,000,000 people most of whom don't study mathematics, then can an average intellect with an obsession for math end up working a job a normal person might call 'mathematician' by working on AutoCAD or 3D rendering game engine or industrial statistics and process control or economics or vehicle aerodynamics and be in the top 10% of the world in mathematical ability? Possibly yes. And you can adjust the numbers and criterion to get a yes or no whichever way you like.

[hirvi74]

> absolutely zero chance of the 50th percentile IQ becoming a world class mathematician.

Good, we don't need billions of them anyway.

I wish modern society would quit focusing on individual intelligence over collective intelligence. We can take something like the microprocessor, for example. The smart group that designed the microprocessor was not the same group that designed the software nor the group the built the parts nor the group the assembled the device. However, every group is equally important.

[danielmarkbruce]

>> people generally don't like to listen to stories that suggest that nurture and hard work aren't as important as they presume

Having grown up in australia but living in the us, this attitude is very american. It's quite funny to see when you don't grow up thinking it. I married into a very athletic family and have a child who is a precocious athlete. Many parents ask us what training regime or practice sessions we do. The answer is nothing. People don't react well.

[hirvi74]

So, what do you tell children that do well/poorly?

[danielmarkbruce]

If you work at it you can get better. It's true in both cases. Getting better and getting as good as the very best are two very different things. One is about you. The other is mostly about others.

[zelphirkalt]

I don't think our society is even remotely meritocratic regarding intelligence. Maybe it is meritocratic regarding psychopathy.

We merely have a few pockets, where the very brightest are rewarded. However going from average intelligence up to those pockets, there is a ton of people, who are clearly more intelligent than most others. Much more intelligent than the typical lie-your-way-through-life people, who haven't shown any significant skill, yet are elected by the masses.

OK, this is making it political, but it's true in many countries, if not most. The truly very intelligent people rather focus on their area of expertise, where not many other humans are able to understand what they are doing or able to achieve a similar result. Similar thing happens in businesses. Talkers rise in the hierarchies, doers who don't self-promote massively remain low in the hierarchies, in most businesses. I don't see many scientists becoming millionaires for advancing humanity. We don't recognize great skills and smart people collectively in many cases. We chase silly trends and make-believe.

I could see "meritocratic regarding intelligence" somewhat in the way that smart kids don't have many problems at school usually, and then later at university, and then can maybe get a well paid job. But that's where the meritocratic system ends. In the job world it's mostly about other things. Like how well people fake being social with their higher-ups. Or how they have less worries about lying about their abilities. Or how they promote first and foremost themselves, rather than everyone, who significantly contributed to some achievement.

[zozbot234]

Hierarchies are promoted because they coordinate the work of large numbers of people and make them vastly more effective at scale. That's quite meritocratic.

[t-3]

Hierarchies are promoted because they concentrate wealth and power among a few people, who distribute it to a few people they more-or-less trust. It's just feudalism with less violent feuding.

[zozbot234]

That's a pointless observation though, the interesting point is that hierarchies manage to concentrate benefits because working as part of a functioning hierarchy makes even the individuals involved a lot more effective, to the point where they're better off even with much of the benefit flowing towards the top.

[t-3]

Do you have any evidence to back up that claim? I've never heard of any study that showed that cooperatives are less productive than hierarchies.

[Nevermark]

The benefits of coordinated cooperation are called “civilization”.

While meritocracy in high dimensional humans is a muddy thing, as being capable, and being capable at what is actually needed often diverge.

But at the organization level, the benefits of strong coordination of the right things are clear. Virtually every business study, studies this. Virtually every political leadership study, studies this.

Cooperation has so many efficiency and effectiveness benefits. Institutionalizing the right kinds of cooperation, i.e. coordinating it, even more so.

This is the civilization superpower.

This is why billions of people can spend their days doing other things than food production, and can live in places with no food production in sight.

[hnfong]

I don't disagree. That's why I qualified my statement with "ostensibly".

But being really intelligent, at least for the top 1% or so, is often advantageous enough to offset any disadvantages from your class/cultural background etc.

I also wonder whether your "psychopathy" is just "ambition". After all, while intelligence alone doesn't guarantee anything, "intelligence + ambition" takes you quite far.

Personally, I can see how even an honest-to-god meritocratic society ends up with psychopaths at the top. For most people with normal-ish psychology, the risks and stress that comes with being on top of anything high stakes is just too much.

[boppo1]

Please elaborate

[fifilura]

We pressure our kids into grit, but genius comes from the inside.

Be grateful when it happens, but be happy if it does not.

[vlovich123]

Laszlo Polgar would disagree [1]. He contends that raising a genius is something you can actually target intentionally (whether or not you should). His proof being 3 daughters who became GMs and one that was a generational talent. As far as audibles go, that’s quite a flex. Yes, the daughters are not all equally talented and chess isn’t quite the same as math, but we’re talking about gradiation within an achievement only reached by much less than 1% of all active players. To me that’s genius level. Also, it’s not necessarily an accident that the youngest is the one to have attained the best result. Evidence is quite clear that older siblings can help their younger ones achieve more faster because the younger ones see it as a path to follow/if they can I can.

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/genius.pdf

[hnfong]

Even if you disregard the anecdote (n=1) thing, it's quite obvious that genius has a genetic component to it, and the father being a good chess player tilts the odds in his favor quite a bit.

Also, the idea that chess is a good proxy for genius is a bit out of date.

[somenameforme]

Laszlo was casual amateur at chess, and it's an n=3 sample at least. Though one sister 'only' made it to IM, but that was likely more due to social reasons. She decided to get married, have a family, etc rather than continue on with chess as actively as the other sisters.

[Viliam1234]

> Also, the idea that chess is a good proxy for genius is a bit out of date.

He wrote that the reason he chose chess was because it was objectively measurable. You play the game, you either win or you lose; there is no way to dispute the outcome.

Imagine that you have dozen children, each of them genius at something different, and that you are surrounded by people who want to prove you wrong. Whatever the artistic genius does, the people who hate you can simply say "yeah, he did something technically impressive, but it's lacking the... nebulous artistic qualities that only we can judge... therefore, not a true genius". Now the chess genius comes and wins every tournament against the adults, there is no way to argue that "yeah, he won all the chess tournaments, but... for some reason we still don't consider him to be a chess grandmaster".

[lupire]

That showed that you can be the best at something low value if you spend more than it's worth.

Most of the people so could be chess grandmasters are busy applying their brains to something else.

[kakacik]

That's just utilizing potential already present there and nurturing it far, the father was an established chess player and university professor and their mother is probably in similar range. Sure, it works, why would anybody argue against or find this shocking or relevatory?

Try the same with babies who are already visibly not the brightest (say in kindergarden group), their parents are also average or worse regarding intelligence. There is a ceiling, it may be high or not but its there. If you haven't experienced it in your life you are one of lucky few (and certainly didn't push yourself hard enough to sense it).

Same goes with memory - you can train it far, use various techniques. Then comes somebody natural (yet still far from what we would call genius) who didn't bother with any of that and immediately surpasses whatever was achieved. We are not created equal and all have hard boundaries, be it health, cognition, body regeneration and so on.

[hirvi74]

> the father was an established chess player

Where did you find this information? I haven't been able to find any source that states he was above an amateur level.

[vlovich123]

Data point: my comment prompted different reasons for why Polgar was successful: it’s genetic, he had time to spend with his kids, he was a professor, his kids all happened to be gifted, if you go to a kindergarten class you’ll already see kids that aren’t bright. Clearly more comfortable for explaining away because it forces us to look at why maybe we aren’t geniuses or our kids aren’t.

> Same goes with memory - you can train it far, use various techniques. Then comes somebody natural (yet still far from what we would call genius) who didn't bother with any of that and immediately surpasses whatever was achieved.

It’s always hard to compare how much effort and for how long they’ve been applying it between people. Someone starting earlier can make them seem like a genius. Someone who spent time developing their memory through various games may feel like they spent no time on it and “it’s natural” while someone else had to explicitly work at it instead because they never were encouraged to play memory strengthening games.

> We are not created equal and all have hard boundaries, be it health, cognition, body regeneration and so on.

Thats true, but the same was said of height but height only became 90% genetic once we fixed nutrition. I see no indication that our systems of parenting and child rearing are robust enough to make intelligence and academic outcomes purely genetic. It’s far too chaotic and you need to apply consistent effort daily almost from birth before the intentional learning stuff even happens. Making sure the mother is in good physical shape before birth, taking all the supplements before and after birth, limiting exposure to toxic stuff, making sure the baby is getting a good mix of engaged play, time to be chill, and exercise, making sure both parents are able to keep the child engaged and studying and understanding of expectations, adjusting the environment appropriately as they develop so they’re constantly challenged and enjoy and seek out challenges, that’s it’s emotionally and psychologically safe for the child, riding the balance of a little bit of frustration and recovering from that vs no frustration or frustration without a break, etc etc etc. a bunch of that happens before you start academic play to teach verbal and math skills and each of these is an add on (eg we know physical education is important for brain development).

Data point: I was at a prenatal class and after the nurse said marijuana isn’t good for the baby, one of the parents was asking “but like what’s the actual limit before it’s harmful”. So don’t be too sure that “surely kindergarten is early enough that kids are still on equal footing”. Another data point is I know a parent that has a 4 yold that doesn’t know how to read nor write because “he’s stubborn” nor is he going to preschool. Yet every parent that I know of that’s applied effort has their child typically by 2 or 3 and writing by 4/5 which is when basic math should already be going.

Nowhere did I state that there aren’t natural limits. But I also think academic achievement isn’t 90% genetic - there’s plenty of “naturally gifted” people who go on to not achieve anywhere as near as much as those who just work - perseverance trumps almost everything and environment trumps that because that’s how you learn perseverance.

The closest to the truth for Polgar is he had time to spend with his kids, but mainly because he prioritized doing so in a way to help them grow. Also, he did so with help from his wife. He wasn’t a chess prodigy. He chose chess because there was a clear demonstratable progression that a) could be used to demonstrate his theories b) his kids had immediate feedback on success c) could repeat the game endlessly to try out various tactics d) they studied chess as a family.

I agree, not every child can become a genius. Most of the reason for that today is less because of a learning disability or “physical limits” and more because of the environment the children are raised in (and the need to teach them perseverance and to keep trying regardless of how others are achieving).

[zozbot234]

Yes, but that kind of aristocratic tutoring is not scalable to the bulk of the population. You need the equivalent of deep PhD expertise in every subject to accomplish that, and even AIs are nowhere close to that level.

[ferguess_k]

I think they deliberately underplayed their role in this. Especially with Asian parents who think such nurturing is part of the "norm". I wouldn't be surprised that they spent TONs of time tutoring him when he was young -- and when he was more or less self-bootstrapped they don't need to spend too much time.

But I could be wrong. He is definitely a genius so maybe he did grasp the ideas rather early, like from 3 or 4.

[matsemann]

> and later on won the Putnam one year

Just the once, though, huh? [0]

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35015#35079

[jacquesm]

Hehe, that one will never die. It's the comment that more or less defines HN.