Promethea Unbound | Hacker News Reader

Promethea Unbound

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>> 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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