Meet the New Super People | Hacker News Reader

Meet the New Super People

nytimes.com

178 pointsdanso125 comments

Reminded me of http://theamericanscholar.org/the-disadvantages-of-an-elite-... - “So are you saying that we’re all just, like, really excellent sheep?”

Also, Marc Andreeson's take on a similar stereotype, The Organization Kid - http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/the-pmarca-guide-to-care...

In the younger generations it may seem there is nothing worse than entitlement, but after many years of observing, I think it is a worse affliction to be both super and an extreme conformist. I'm talking about the funneling of premium intellectual capital into existing institutions like investment, legal, management consulting, medicine, academia (in some cases) often through mechanisms like the Ivy's, but also through parental mechanisms (pressure, nepotism, etc) and various social institutions.

When ego-based considerations like reputation, status and compensation lure young minds, these minds have lost forever the ability to question everything - to abstract their understanding of the world beyond what social influences and short-term goals will allow. Stifling openness, creativity and non-conformity in formative years gives a person the ability to achieve a definition of success in our world. However, it closes the door to changing the world itself - and this is the real job of the super-capable.

Question everything. Take your own path. The world needs the super to constantly re-invent itself for the greater good, not for you to show the world that you are the best.

We've tried to domesticate genius, and lost it:

“It has been pointed out that we no longer have infant and child prodigies, or that at least they are now much rarer than before. … We sacrificed genius for our present interest in homogeneity. We began to dislike precocity in children and to dislike children themselves. Our insistence on uniformity began the modern oppression of children.” —Richard Farson, Birthrights

And it was done deliberately, systematically and with full (or nearly full) understanding of the consequences.

At least if you believe John Taylor Gatto. I would like to write him of as a loony, but having read his book (available for free http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm) that isn't as easy as I assumed it would be.

Thats not saying that he is right, only that he makes a damn good and interesting argument.

The free version of the book is the first edition. If you're going to take the time to read it, you might as well just buy the newest edition on Amazon, which has (from what I hear) eliminated a few mistakes.

Whatever the initial motivations, the system only persists due to the continued support of the masses, who genuinely (and misguidedly) believe it to be the best thing for children. It's a tragedy, not a conspiracy.

I feel like there's a common thread in many conversations I have these days, which can be described well by "We've tried to domesticate genius, and lost it." It's the parents that push their kids to be measurably good at all the things they've been told geniuses are good at. It's the students who go to university because that's how they're told they will get good jobs, and not due to a thirst for learning. It's the managers that try to create a workplace that has some superificial resemblance to another place that has turned out great work, and then expect that they've flipped on the genius switch.

We're so used to measuring and planning everything, that when we decide we want 'genius' all we think to do is measure what we can in other instances, and force that to happen. I suspect it's very hard for a lot of people to believe that (a) it takes all kinds of un-measured hard work, (b) there are so many more aspects than they can think of that go into creating genius, and (c) there's a measure of luck to it and they can't control everything.

Back to the topic of the article though, I see parents who believe there is a causal link from Good School --> 'Good Job', and see a link to Good School from all these things 'geniuses have been known to do.'

With everything you said -- isn't that the way you're supposed to do things? Seriously. You see what others do who are successful and you try to understand what it is and replicate it and improve on it.

It's not about domesticating genius, but its about understanding and application. And last time I checked the ONLY scientific method we have for understanding something is measurement.

Basically, applying the scientific method here would be a great idea, but keep in mind that correlation != causation. Just because many geniuses you've heard of could pick up a difficult instrument and learn it quickly, it does not follow that learning to play an instrument is a necessary step towards geniushood. The idea that I latched on to "We've tried to domesticate genius, and lost it" suggests that parents are shaping kids that exhibit secondary characteristics of genius, but we've failed to nurture the spark that pushes someone to do amazing things.

I offer the hypothesis that an important factor towards developing very high talent in a field is a love for it and an opportunity to explore within it, make mistakes, do "some costructive play." If this is true, it seems quite possible to me that training someone to exhibit all kinds of secondary signs of genius (that they may well enjoy, but not truly love) can take up time and energy that they might otherwise dedicate to developing their true genius.

Sometimes genius isn't where you expect it. What if the next Jim Hensons are currently practicing tuba between lacrosse games and advanced calculus courses, admonished whenever they "waste their time playing" and painting their WarHammer models?

I think you nailed it.

In a world in which so much routine work has been and continues to be automated, originality is becoming more and more essential for success. But originality can't be taught -- it has to be nurtured.

Yes, in order to do original work, you need mastery of a medium, whether that be lacrosse, tuba, or mathematics (to borrow your examples). But people think that the mastery is the whole point, when it's actually just the toolchest. Without originality to guide the use of those tools, you're just a mechanic -- and we don't need many mechanics anymore.

Originality really isn't the right word. I've been original my whole life -- almost everyone has by definition. I can do a lot of original dumb stuff. I think what you want is closer to ingenuity. And this is why mastery is important. And its also why mastery of certain things is important. I was one of the most original (and skilled) Gorf players of my day -- no one really cares. Had I been equally skilled at chess I probably could have gotten into Harvard on that alone. Both relatively equally non-transferrable skills.

Just happened across a blog post on this topic, more or less:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelellsberg/2011/07/22/life-...

Absolutely. But I also question the criteria of the hypercompetition, and the judges' valuation of the signals. Volunteer work in a Guatemalan day care center may indicate altruism and awareness, right up the moment when it becomes an aid, or a requirement, of Harvard admission. Likewise the school paper. Maybe the insistence on being "well-rounded" pushes kids outside a purely academic focus, and gets them exposed to things they might otherwise miss. But how much will a kid get from an experience without an interior interest? "Gotta go check the 'well-rounded' box."

Likewise I wonder about the curriculum they have to hit. If they are doing so much homework, why aren't they more numerate, why aren't they more familiar with the underpinnings of our literature and history? Why isn't Harvard conducting interviews in foreign languages?

We've made a grueling admissions process that measures compliance with a particular norm of social and political values, and tries to be "academically rigourous" without suggesting that particular topics are especially important or essential.

And why, exactly, is Harvard so much more important than Brown, and Brown than Wesleyan? The education available at these cannot be so different as the quality of the social network established. Now networks are extraordinarily important, but are the Harvard grads _learning_ that much more after college? or is the difference in their positioning for various status competitions?

It's hardly surprising that this process perpetuates the same status structure that determines its rewards and criteria. Those rewards and criteria are stated in vague but emphatic terms, which can only be judged subjectively. Is it any wonder that the process seems crazy? or that makes suspicious the very notion of "excellence" supposedly at its core?

But given there are a fixed number of slots at a place that a lot of people want to attend (which may not be the case forever, with online education) how else do you propose they judge the students?

The idea they have is that they don't just want the 4.0/1600 SAT students. They want students who have interests and passions outside of the class. The person who wins the Westinghouse competition, or the IMO gold medalist, or the 17 year old NY Times best seller, or the kid who toured with the Marsalis' on sax.

Sure all these things could be application padding w/o passion purely to get into Harvard, but how do you distinguish? How do you select for passion/competence, but not look at their actual accomplishments? What's a better way to do this?

You could ask them to code on the whiteboard. :-)

Not sure. For a start, I submit that the Ivy League inundation by 4.0 / 1600 students signals that high schools aren't grading hard enough. A more informative grade scale might clarify the competition. And I bet these 4.0s are hiding some academic posers, kids who maybe did a lot of work but are graded heavily on the fuss their parents would make over an A-.

If the schools are guessing less about which 4.0 signifies more ability, they'd have more time for serious attention to other parts of the portfolio.

My suggestion is using a modified version of sortition. Grade the students, then add some white noise to their final grading. You deliberately make the process less precise, hoping that this will discourage students from gaming the system too hard (which will more accurately get the intrinsically motivated ones in).

Even better, if you keep track of the random noise you added, you can do all sorts of interesting statistical experiments. Introduce a few kids who didn't get top scores into an MBA program, and see what factors later predict success.

There is an interesting trend at top schools where the marginal applicants from less prestigious prep-schools tend to do better. The better your parents help you game the system the lower your average intelligence after admission.

My younger sister went though this process recently. She was Valedictorian, had 5's on something like 12 AP tests, ran her own business, and had enough artistic talent that she was accepted into the top Graphics Art School in the country with an average admissions age of ~20. Now, she was considering a business degree and could have easily gotten a full ride at an Ivy, but the students where 'stressed and boring' so she gave up on that idea really quickly.

Which is an odd trap, where not only are poeple gaming the system to get in, you drive away the types of students you actually want because your student is so focused on checking things off a some list they never really learn to think for themselves.

PS: Continue down this path for long enough and we are going to end up with Japan's higher education system.

I've sometimes toyed with the idea of starting a university which gives no degree, in fact won't even confirm or deny a person's past attendance to any other institutions, in order to weed out those who are there for the degree.

How do I sign up?

This is one of the reasons I love programs like open courseware.

In the US we have community colleges, which offer a range of "adult ed" courses outside the degree program. Many universities also have Continuing/Night non-degree programs.

Yeah, unfortunately those institutions tend to be for people who want academic "appetizers", or a degree. They're not for serious intellectual pursuit.

There is something behind this that people from genetics and evolutionists don't talk about and even don't want you to know. The reason why there are so many men in our history who were prodigies is very simple, and not a result of female oppression. The genes of men are much more randomly activated/mutated/spread than those of women. Why? Because changing the genes of women could be dangerous to giving birth or raise children. As men can have much more children than women, let's call the reason "nature", nature decided that women have a dense distribution of qualities and men a very high variance. You can see this in the distribution of shoe sizes, the number of men with small feet is the same as those with big feet. And women all have the same, ask Al Bundy. Now if men have a much higher variance in their genes, chances are this affects their way to understand problems and therefor the huge mass of different approaches and a wider spectrum will produce solutions in a collective much faster than in the dense normal distribution of women. If we now keep on insisting that all humans are the same and no one is different and therefor better at understanding a specific problem, we might never solve a problem if it's not in the solution space of our normal distribution of the average human. (If you think I said women are less smarter than men you did not understand me. Women and men are equally smart with the same median, but there are more idiots and geniuses amongst men)

How do we even know that's true? First, I've never really believed in the idea of a child prodigy, (partially a consequence to my subscription to the "10,000 hour expert" rule) and second in a hypercompetitive world what once looked like a Touch from God now looks like every other kid in their class.

It also reminded me of paul graham's essay "after credentials" about cram schools in south korea. I remember watching a documentary about south korea where 3 year olds were literally cramming the times table.

This article is pretty interesting and well-written, but hypes up a major fallacy:

Just as the concentration of wealth at the very top reduces wealth at the bottom, the aggressive hoarding of intellectual capital in the most sought-after colleges and universities has curtailed our investment in less prestigious institutions.

This is just the the fallacy that the economy's wealth is a fixed pie; if I get a bigger slice, you must get a smaller one. But wealth and prosperity are not a limited resource. I think it's fitting that the author supports this fallacy with a quotation from the Bible.

By the way, I'm not just talking abstractly. The point made by the author is also just flat-out wrong. More and more people are going to college - now, you practically have to have a degree - because we've been spending tons of money on public higher education. Think of the California public schools; the North Carolina ones (we have 14 public universities!), etc.

1) No fallacy, if the the Pie gets bigger, but a small percentage of people get an increasingly larger percentage of that pie, inequality is increasing. 2) The author did state that more and more people are going to college. Thus if you have a fixed size of "Ivy League schools" a smaller percentage of the total will get into the top schools.

But the passage I'm citing isn't about inequality increasing, as you're discussing. It's about people at lower levels getting less, in an absolute sense. Which is a fallacy.

I'm not sure I see how this is a fallacy. Can you explain even anecdotally?

“Most economic fallacies derive from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.” -Milton Friedman

I just googled "Fixed pie fallacy" - I was assuming (probably wrongly) that most people were familiar with it. I'm not even certain Friedman was the first to identify it.

The first thing I come up with on Google is [1]. It's a decent overview.

[1] http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2006/12/fixed-pie-fallacy.html

Harvard is not fungible.

Right, but top-quality education is fungible.

Not everybody needs to go to an Ivy League, just like not everybody needs to own a 75-ft yacht.

I'm OK with that.

If the quality we're interested in is "being Harvard," then no, Harvard is not fungible. But if the quality is "providing a college education," the Harvard is extremely fungible in many cases.

People don't seek Harvard for the education only. They seek it or lots of things: access to wealth, access to knowledge and network, increased status, increased reputation.

Otherwise why would there be exceptional demand (and price) for harvard?

Sure, there's no disputing that the fixed pie fallacy exists, but you have not made a convincing argument that this situation is an instance of the fallacy.

1. You're attacking a straw man, which actually is a fallacy.

2. Even if the passage you cited were about "getting less in an absolute sense", there's still no fallacy. zafka already pointed this out in his #1 above. What's so hard to comprehend?

Please stop.

Inequality is only bad inasmuch as populists use it to rile people up. Let's say I have $100 and you have $50. Then someone gives me another $100 and gives you $5. Inequality has increased, but is the situation worse? Is anyone worse off?

If that happens to everyone in the marketplace, then inflation just occurred. The market had a total of $100 + $50 and now has a total of $150 + $105. The cash in the market increased by 58% so all the price of all goods will also increase by 58%.

This means that the money I have is now worth less than before, and I am now poorer than before.

Actually the hypothetical actors will have $200 and $55 respectively. To reinforce your point, if price of goods does go up 58%, the actor that started out with $50 will be 30% poorer in real terms (now having $55 and his $50 basket of goods now costing $79), whereas the actor that started out with $100 will be 26% richer (now having $200 and his $100 basket of goods now costing $158).

Okay, I oversimplified - but you are doing so as well. Societies as a whole can become wealthier over time. The difference between the 90th percentile and the 10th might be higher today than it was 200 years ago, but the 10th percentile today is also probably better off than the 90th 200 years ago in absolute terms.

Edit: s/dollars/utilons/g

Yes, it is true that we are all much better off than we were 200 years ago. This is due to both economic and technical progress. For instance, I can light and heat my house economically.

However, the 90th percentile might be even better off today if there was more equality - we could more efficiently share the fruits of our technical progress.

PG makes an effective argument that such equality would reduce the benefit and thus the motivation to innovate and create the present level of comfort / economic success : http://www.paulgraham.com/inequality.html

Overall, equality is a complex beast. I think that we need some level of inequality to ensure that there is sufficient motivation to succeed. We also need to do our best to help those who 'fall behind'

As far as I can tell from skimming it, pg is arguing against optimizing for economic equality in that article.

Certainly true given the analogy as stated, but if the overall quality/quantity of goods available has gone up by a factor of 3, then both are better off than before.

I think you're overstating the fallacy. Money begets money. Yes, those at the bottom can, say, open hot dog stands and generate wealth on the side, but their take will be far lower than the wealthy capitalist who launches, say, a prestigious restaurant.

The economy can be a non-zero-sum game and still have wealth accumulation at the top effectively reduce wealth accumulation at the bottom.

I agree with the first two paragraphs, but I don't think the third follows.

If wealth were all relative, then people at the bottom could be "getting poorer compared to people at the top." But it's not the relative comparison that matters. The people at the top having more wealth does not cause the people at the bottom to have less wealth.

You're confusing two things. You are taking the fallacy, "the economy is zero sum" and attempting to lump, "wealth accumulation at the top reduces wealth accumulation at the bottom" in with it.

The former is demonstrably false. Simply open the aforementioned hot dog stand. The latter may or may not be false, depending on the circumstances.

A wealthy person opening a restaurant does not reduce wealth accumulation of a passerby. If, however, a wealthy person pays himself a fat bonus from his company, while cutting jobs in order to instill fear, increase production, and drive salaries down, has clearly increased his accumulation of wealth at the expense of those beneath him.

The point is, you can't take the statement, "economics is not a zero-sum game" and use it as a blanket counter argument to all statements about inequality of wealth accumulation.

Your post is a pretty thoughtful one, so thanks :-)

I don't think your analysis is right, though. Here's why.

You're equating

wealth accumulation at the top reduces wealth accumulation at the bottom

which is formulated as a principle (i.e., a "universal"), with

If, however, a wealthy person pays himself a fat bonus from his company, while cutting jobs in order to instill fear, increase production, and drive salaries down, has clearly increased his accumulation of wealth at the expense of those beneath him.,

which is just a particular instance.

Yes, of course you can imagine scenarios in which a particular wealthy person does something that causes a particular group of less-wealthy people to have less wealth at the time - like lowering their salaries.

In fact, I think that

wealth accumulation at the top reduces wealth accumulation at the bottom,

stated as a generalization, is the same as the statement "the economy is zero sum."

My take on it:

If both the rich individual and the poor individual are competing over the same scarce source material (eg Petrol, Rice, Real Estate) then the market will elevate the price of that material to the highest level that the rich will bear.

As the price of the scarce resource increases, the poor get driven from the market. If the rich were not so rich, the scarce resource wouldn't be priced so high.

This doesn't hold true for things which aren't really scarce, such as newspapers or software.

"If both the rich individual and the poor individual are competing over the same scarce source material (eg Petrol, Rice, Real Estate) then the market will elevate the price of that material to the highest level that the rich will bear."

This is actually not always the case. Food prices are a prime example. It turns out that the rich often pay less for food than the poor.

Take a look at some of the conclusions of this study:

"Do the Poor Pay More for Food? An Analysis of Grocery Store Availability and Food Price Disparities."

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Do+the+Poor+Pay+More+for+Food%...

  The researchers conclude that the poor do indeed pay more in the Twin
  Cities grocery market... In part, the poor pay more for grocery
  products because the stores that charge the lowest prices are not
  located in their neighborhoods.

The study has overviews of a lot of other research that supports these findings. For example,

  In 1991, for example, New York's Consumer Affairs Department compiled
  a report on grocery store price-fixing in several neighborhoods
  (Freedman 1991). The report showed the poor paid more for groceries in
  inner-city neighborhoods, yet they received poorer quality foods and
  services. The report consisted of price surveys in sixty stores and
  140 interviews in various New York neighborhoods.

Real estate, on the other hand seems like a classic example of a case where the concentration of wealth really can make poor people poorer, by crowding them out of more and more of the real estate market through gentrification.

Of course, this depends on there being an actual scarcity of land. In areas where new land can easily be developed, it's much less of an issue.

There might be plenty of land, but I think there will always be more desirable land. Either it is more central - better transport, trade, jobs. Or it is near a natural resource, for instance water - which provides fresh air, views, transport.

The poor benefit as much (or more) than the rich do by having access to this better land.

I think in an Open economy, it's almost impossible to generalize things. Your claim may be true in some situations, and wrong in others.

Wealth and political power are intimately related even within the best institutions, and that is a zero-sum game. If the distribution of wealth is heavily skewed towards the top it will wipe out the political power of the poor and solidify the social and economic hierarchies. It will subvert democracy. That sucks.

I propose a new term in economic discussion: The Fallacy of the Fallacy of the Fixed-Size Pie. ;)

Thank you so much for posting that. I stopped reading at that point and went to the comments specifically looking to see if that upset anyone else.

The size of the economic pie is not fixed. If a person works hard and builds a chair out of a lump of wood, the pie just grew. And if you build a factory that builds those chairs, and you get rich, the pie grew that much more. You stole nothing, and you created much. You could just sit on your butt and do nothing (or collect welfare?).

The fallacy that the rich steal every dollar from those below them is so often used to support socialist style wealth redistribution. It drives me batty.

If the ultimate goal of an institution is to maximize the alumni donation revenue, then attracting the top 5% of the type A's might be an effective strategy. But then again, the most successful might not be the type A's or even smart (see Terman's Kids)

If you do want to go to an Ivy League, consider the alternative strategy:

"How to game the U.S. Higher Ed system"

> In this article, I want to debunk a popular myth: the popular conception that very smart high school students should go to very good and very expensive colleges, and that these colleges will advance these peoples' careers more effectively than would other options. I propose another option: go to a cheap state school for a small amount of money, do very well, and pay full tuition at a fantastic graduate program. I believe that in most cases, these students would be better served by a bare-budget (but difficult) undergrad state-school education, and an expensive high-profile Master's degree.

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/1/24/11657/1141

This quote presumes you pay a lot of money to go to expensive colleges. Most friends I know who went to Harvard, Stanford, MIT paid close to nothing -- due to scholarships. Given that those who are likely to get into Harvard are also those most likely to win 3rd party full ride scholarships -- is this still good advice?

I think the advice of the article is targeted to high school students who aren't smart enough to get scholarships and are not necessarily guaranteed admission into a top Ivy. The type of students who are engaged in an AP arms race. The students who have parents who are living vicariously through their kids' academic performance, in pursuit of the ultimate bragging prize: an Ivy. The students who go to a very competitive high school an hours drive away in hopes that they can do well in this large pool of competitive hormones... only to be crushed by the true weed out courses, not science but humanities like AP History. Where high school graduation demands careful preparation of the pronouncement of the many Indian and Asian surnames. Where having a girlfriend is seen as having a direct negative correlation on the semester GPA. Where a bad test score can create family tensions that crack the San Andreas fault and leave all in the family, worst for fears.

All in the hopes of playing for a spot in a competitive admissions class with thousands of cookie cutter aspirants like themselves.

Your friends probably were not part of this group, and I wonder what they are doing now.

As an European, I find it cute how knowing "two or more" languages is sufficient for super status in North America.

edit: It's also pretty amusing to see how touchy North Americans can be about this even on HN.

It's a consequence of the social environment. In Europe, you are surrounded by different languages. In North America, you have English in the USA, English in Canada (with some French), and Spanish in Mexico.

You do have clusters of Spanish/Chinese/Japanese/Hindi/etc on the West Coast of the USA, but except for the large Hispanic populations, almost every one of them speaks English too.

In short, you can learn English and Spanish and be understood in 99.9999999% of North America. Learning any other language is largely a pursuit of fancy ("for fun" or for traveling abroad), unless you plan on moving out of the country.

Don't get me wrong, I know why it's happening. But it's still amusing.

> Learning any other language is largely a pursuit of fancy

What happens if you want to sell to, or buy from, some other country? Is business squeezed into the bit that isn't "largely a ..."?

I'm English. I speak no other languages, and it's something I'm a bit embarrassed by.

I'm not a businessman, but as I understand it English is pretty well established as the international language of business.

I'm not a businessman, but if I was trying to sell something I would want to reduce the work my customers have to do. I don't want to give them the choice of "The guy who doesn't speak $LANGUAGE" vs "Let's go with this guy who made an effort". (Let's not forget that customers are not always rational.)

There are about 500M people in north america, so 99.9999999% would be all but one half of one person.

I suspect the true number of people who speak at least english or spanish is closer to 99%.

I would suspect that the number of North Americans who speak a second language is comparable to the number of Europeans who speak non-European languages.

Nice point! I come from Europe and you are right from my experience.

That depends on the definition of "non-European" languages. More Europeans than North Americans speak Brazilian, Argentinian, Mexican, and DRCongolese.

Er........ You mean Portuguese, Spanish, Spanish, and French?

I believe the grandparent meant languages such as Japanese, Ethiopian, Thai, etc.

Yes. It doesn't make sense to dismiss Portuguese and Spanish as merely "European" languages for a German learner any more than it would to dismiss Spanish as a "U.S. Hispanic" language for an anglophone U.S. learner. The fact that they originated in Europe doesn't change the fact that they are also "non-European" languages.

The fact that they originated in Europe doesn't change the fact that they are also "non-European" languages.

Uh. Yes it does, and no they aren't.

Linguistically, they are indeed European languages. Culturally, if you tell people in Argentina, the U.S., Macau and Nigeria that they are European because of a language they can speak, the label will lose all meaning.

if you tell people in Argentina, the U.S., Macau and Nigeria that they are European

What? Nobody was saying anything of the sort.

Brazil has a large population of ethnic Japanese. A number of them are able to speak Japanese. That doesn't make Japanese a Brazilian language. Nor does it make those born and raised in Brazil Japanese, aside from discussions of ethnicity.

Okay, let's back up a bit. My point in stating that some European languages are also "non-European" was that learning them gives a larger, partially-non-European audience and thus more motivation (economic, cultural, what have you). Even to an European, there is a difference between learning a language spoken by 45 million people on their continent and a language spoken by 350 million people worldwide. By the simple proximity/diversity theory, a whole lot more Swedes would be learning Polish right now - this is not happening to say the least.

How about Finnish/Norwegian? If the proximity theory holds no water, then I would expect that even though every Norwegian is within something like 200 miles of Sweden, you'd see almost no Norwegians speaking Swedish.

I'm not sure if these are the best of examples. Norwegian and Swedish are by and large mutually intelligible, probably on a level comparable to Australian and U.S. English. Norwegians essentially are speaking Swedish, without trying.

Finland has had a large (currently ~5%) Swedish-speaking minority for a long time. While a large amount (~50%) of Finnish-mother-tongue Finns can speak Swedish, this is expected given the Swedish minority, the previously large and prestigious role of Swedish in Finland, the relative populations (~5M vs ~9M for Sweden), and the relative linguistic isolation of Finnish.

I wouldn't claim the proximity theory holds no water - it's just not the entire story.

Just try telling a Mexican they speak Mexican.

They know they speak español, not mexicano, they know it came from Spain, and even a Mexican will brand you as a fool if you try to tell them otherwise.

Classification of language has nothing to do with ethnicity, background, where you were born or where it is being spoken.

Exactly. And if you talk to an American, or an Australian, or a Nigerian, they'll tell you they speak English and know it came from England. But no one, even in Europe, is learning English just to speak to the English.

There are more than a couple of reasons while the comparison between Germans learning Spanish and Americans learning Spanish is a poor one. (Much less a comparison with Brazilian Portuguese)

1. The distance. Most of the US is actually quite far away from Mexico. As you get closer to the border (Texas, California, Arizona, New Mexico) the rate at which non-hispanics speak Spanish rises considerably.

2. The economic and social relations between the US and Mexico are nothing like those between Spain and Germany. If I'm German, I can learn Spanish, move there, find work (okay, the example works better the other way around), and live with a minimum of hassle. It's another stable, developed country.

In contrast, parts of Mexico are almost literally war-zones (Juárez et. al.), and gaining a work visa, finding employment, etc is quite difficult, and even then it will be a dramatically different standard of living.

you DO understand that learning a non-European language includes learning a new alphabet and signs? A European with germanic background who learned a romanic language definetely learned a very different language.

Learning a 2nd language as a monolingual adult (or teenager) isn't an easy thing. I can say this from personal experience. After thousands of hours, my language skills are still clearly non-native.

If you know a 2nd language because it's been in your environment since childhood, then it's not so "super".

"European"? Are you ashamed of your nationality?

I used "European" for the same reason I used "North American" - the phenomenons described largely transcend borders of any particular country in either region.

knowing "two or more" languages

I'm curious about your definition of 'knowing' in this instance. Fluent? Functional? Basic?

The NYT article used "fluency" - I'm fine with going with that.

Something like 50% of Europeans identify as speaking more than one language. Since 'speaking' is vague, and fluency is hard, I think attaining fluency in multiple languages counts as reasonably 'super' even in Europe.

Personally I'd restrict "super" status to a lot less than 20% or 30% of the population - certainly that's what the NYT article is doing. Fluency in two languages is pretty much a requirement for any but the most basic professional positions in much of Europe, and I wouldn't want to start calling every middle-level manager or accounts person "super."

Personally I'd restrict "super" status to a lot less than 20% or 30% of the population

Exactly. 50% of the population may identify as 'speaking' two or more languages, but I seriously doubt more than 20% of them are fluent in two or more languages. There is an enormous difference between functional and fluent.

Are we in violent agreement? If even 10% of European population are fluent in two languages, and we restrict "super" to something meaningfully specific, say top 2% of population, then fluency in two languages is not sufficient for super status in Europe.

I live in Switzerland, most people I know speak at minimum three languages fluently, and a huge proportion 4 or 5.

>As an European, I find it cute how knowing "two or more" languages is sufficient for super status in North America.

>edit: It's also pretty amusing to see how touchy North Americans can be about this even on HN.

That's because you're comparing two distinct things. There is no comparison between learning a language naturally or because it is spoken in your home environment and the brute force process of learning a language which you have no exposure to, and no real incentive (economic, social) to learn.

The way you phrased it appears to be disdainful, "oh how precious", which noting the faults of the comparison, makes you come off as somewhat rude to a North American reader.

More like cargo-cult super. Geniuses are often musical and multi-lingual so if junior can play sax and speak French...

Except that the components turn out, in most cases, to be cheap facades of the real thing and the spark of real genius is nowhere to be found.

Real genius is usually narrowly focused, but smart enough to pick up a reasonably good variety of other skills, like music and languages, on the side (see Richard Feynman for a good example). But you do not become a real expert without lots of dedicated practice, and if you are dividing your serious practice time between multiple subjects, you will never become really good at any one.

Richard Feynman's "Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman!" and "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" and Jagdish Mehra's biography of Feynman, The Beat of a Different Drum all show the combination of focus on physics and his ability to easily pick up the side interests, safecracking, drawing, drumming, Mayan arithmetic, that exemplifies real genius.

The competition for places in the upper tier of higher education is a lot tougher than it was in the 1960s and ’70s, when having good grades and SAT scores in the high 1200s was generally sufficient to get you into a respectable college.

Just a note about the SATs: The SATs used to be out of 1600 with Math/Verbal as a 800/800 split. Critical Reading wasn't added until 2005. There was also an adjustment in 1995 that boosted the mean score on the SAT about 100 points, effectively making tests taken before 1995 worth more than tests taken after.

Remember "antonyms"?

Critical Reading is just the new name for the Verbal section. Writing is the new section.

Sorry - typo. I can't seem to edit it, unfortunately.

Writing also doesn't factor into the main combined math / verbal score. It is considered separately and is on a completely different scale.

There is actually a combined Math/Verbal/Writing score totaling a maximum of 2400. There is a separate score for the essay of the writing part, but it is factored into the final writing score out of 800.

Outliers… gonna outlie. Have you ever looked into the requirements for a Rhodes scholarship?

Also I think the article was a bit fawning.

How much of this is exaggeration? Of course there are outliers, but when thousands of people applying to top schools show such incredible backgrounds and achievements, I have to wonder about the accuracy of some of their claims.

The top schools are fooled from time to time, as evidenced by some high-profile cases at Harvard College in recent years. All of the following examples could be considered "super people" -- a published author, a valedictorian and essayist, a standout student with impeccable grades. Yet all three were exposed as plagiarists, and one of them pulled off a series of cons based on fabricated records and lies.

Blair Hornstine:

Following a widely-publicized report that Hornstine had plagiarized material in articles she wrote for her local paper, the Harvard admissions office has rescinded her offer to attend Harvard in the fall, according to a source involved with the decision.

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/7/11/harvard-takes-ba...

Adam Wheeler:

In Middlesex Superior Court, Wheeler conceded today that he dishonestly gained admission to Harvard by fabricating SAT scores, falsifying letters of recommendation, and forging high school and college transcripts. He also admitted to plagiarizing essays and a research proposal that earned him a Hoopes Prize, Sargent Prize, and Rockefeller research grant while he was a Harvard student. http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2010/12/16/harvard-wheeler...

Kaavya Viswanathan:

A recently-published novel by Harvard undergraduate Kaavya Viswanathan ’08, “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life,” contains several passages that are strikingly similar to two books by Megan F. McCafferty—the 2001 novel “Sloppy Firsts” and the 2003 novel “Second Helpings.” http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2006/4/23/students-novel-f...

Note that these are people who were caught. Surely there are others who weren't, either because no one bothered checking their claims or they were smart enough to keep a low profile once they were accepted.

Worse is the evolution of job requirements. I believe them to be the driving force behind this madness. No good can come of it, only lies and deceit. While I'm sure there are many true over-achievers at Harvard, I wonder how much of all this is polish rather than true greatness. Remember that Nietzsche's Uebermench has no scruples.

What's wrong with job requirements?

Also, often "requirements" aren't truly "required". They're just trying to give a sketch of the person they're looking for. So if an ad requires "7 years of Javascript experience" but you have less, you aren't necessarily excluded from applying, as long as you have a comparable level of expertise.

It's a problem when the ad requires three years of Javascript, two years of embedded C, two years of C++, two years of Python, two years of Ruby, and five years of HTML and CSS, and yet is only offering college-leaver pay.

I remember during the dot com implosion, for six months straight section 115 was entirely absent from the local classifieds. The numbers jumped from 110 (clerical) to 120 (accounting). As you might guess, 115 was the catch-all for anything computer related.

During the same time frame I saw a job post looking for all of the following: 8 years of unix systems administration experience, 5 years of MS Server, Exchange, 6 years of network administration, 5 years of perl, 6 of VB, bash scripting, and 8 years of experience as a DBA. The advertised wage for the titan that qualified for the position? $10.50 an hour.

Well, you aren't excluded from applying as far as the people actually hiring for the job are concerned.

But sometimes you've gotta be prepared to BS the HR creature in order to make it past them and actually talk to someone human - it's not too uncommon for these folks to view listed job requirements as a hard filter that all applicants need to pass in order to be considered, especially when dealing with bigger companies.

And the fact that perfectly qualified applicants are often forced to embellish experience to make it past these initial screens is a very bad thing, it means that a certain level of dishonesty is almost required as part of a standard job hunt (i.e. one that doesn't lean on connections or direct relationships with people at companies, which is always a better way to go). This is part of why it ends up being so hard to distinguish legit programmers from terrible ones by their CVs: the crappy ones know they have to make up a ton of crap to get any interviews at all, whereas the legit ones know that if they can just get through the door and interview they'll get an offer, so they don't bother embellishing, and all the CVs end up looking about the same.

This is a gross misreading of Nietzsche's conception of the ubermensch. The ubermensch is someone who doesn't _need_ scruples. He operates beyond conventional morality because the sharpness of his judgement and the greatness of his philosophical insights far exceeds the value of the slave morality embodied by everyday law, and morals.

But from the perspective of normal people, or "slaves" as Nietzsche would call us, he's just an overachieving asshole with no moral scruples.

Going to Harvard doesn't make you uber anyway, it just makes you "best slave". A real ubermensch would likely see that it's not in her interest to spend 100% of her time pleasing others.

>he's just an overachieving asshole with no moral scruples.

real unbermensch would have so little interests to and so little in common with the normal people what you'd be happy if s/he would spent a second of his time on the interacting with normal people (even being asshole toward them)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludens_%28Noon_Universe%29

The speciation inside the human species continues. We've had several successive species of humans so far and there is no reason for the process to stop. Human evolution has been speeding up, and i hope to see signs of new humans in my lifetime (statistically i have about 40 years left). Ivy Leaguers mating to Ivy Leaguers only is a one way to go, though i'd bet more on the changes coming from human-machine integration and biomedical advancements as brain related changes seems to be the primary driver of human evolution.

Eugenicists are out of date. The reason successful people have successful kids is due to enriched environments and increased opportunity.

The field of psychology can't even agree on a definition of intelligence anymore, and certainly IQ is not genetically determined. The environment is the biggest influence on IQ.

Harvard kids fucking Harvard kids doesn't create genetic supermen. It just creates an inbred aristocracy like has always been the case. Hemophilia is the true achievement of eugenics.

The wise know, and always have known, that it is education and drive that makes a person. Genes play little role in success.

Drive moreso than education. My Grandfather has a 5th grade education, worked the trades his entire life, repaired heavy equipment in his spare time, raised seven (7!!!) children and his net worth is somewhere in the millions. Drive.

He probably self-educated though. Which is really the only kind of education there is.

>Eugenicists are out of date.

just a statement of fashion.

>The field of psychology can't even agree on a definition of intelligence anymore, and certainly IQ is not genetically determined. The environment is the biggest influence on IQ.

The fallacy of nurture vs. nature as if one can be a substitute for another. Their respective roles are well known and each of them is a factor and not any of them is "the biggest influence" vs. the other. And about importance of the biological factors - i'd recommend reading on Einstein's brain, which was smaller, yet more densely packed and with higher ratio of energy supplying cells.

>Harvard kids fucking Harvard kids doesn't create genetic supermen. It just creates an inbred aristocracy like has always been the case. Hemophilia is the true achievement of eugenics.

Tell that to those several thousands who took over the world from other human species without much interbreeding with them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_African_origin_of_modern...

Why are you citing fiction in the support of your argument?

any argument about ubermensch is a fiction until we get to meet one. Without facts, a fiction/theory/speculation can be judged only on how logical it is and on the quality of underlying assumptions. The one i referred to does very well describing the alternative speciation scenario inside the human species when new species doesn't cause extinction of the old human species (the extinction has been a typical scenario so far)

Science-fiction is optimized for interesting story-telling, not for predicting the future.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/k9/the_logical_fallacy_of_generaliza...

only future will tell what was the most optimized way to predict it. You seem to dislike references to sci-fi in discussing the future, yet you link to the sci-fi yourself, and not just sci-fi, you link to the high brow discussion (i.e. specifically optimized for non-interesting story-telling) of how sci-fi may be predicting future incorrectly - without acknowledging that such a discussion in itself implies some modeling process of future (to compare other models against) and thus sci-fi in nature. At first i thought this link was some parody/joke :)

Nietzsche isn't calling you a slave. He's saying that your morality is a slave morality. Meaning your moral system was invented by people who were, in fact, at the time, slaves.

How anyone feels about that is up to them. He mostly just wanted to point it out.

Isn't this what they call Eugenics? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics

I know you have to give your kids the best that you can, but you also have to let them find their way. Education helps teach us about what other people have done (by it's very nature is is about the past) and maybe shows kids how to do it too, but it doesn't innovate, and some might argue at a certain level it could be a barrier to innovation.

It's the difference between a classically trained singer and James Brown. Would he be who he was if he was classically trained? When you hear a classical musician covering a rock song isn't there always something "just missing"?

I'm all for education don't get me wrong, but surely one of the best bits is allowing kids time to educate themselves? If you want your kids to be an innovator or someone who changed the world, then you have to teach them a bit about not following the rules, and self-determination.

I have no idea how I would have survived if I didn't have these skills.

Part of the high GPAs is grade inflation. Nobody wants to be the one who says "No." Illiterate students are passed on to universities and into the workplace, where reality suddenly intrudes.

I think I was in third grade when we were paired up with older kids, fifth or sixth grade, who were supposed to "help" us with our reading skills. It seemed like the guy I was paired with could barely read out loud. I remember wondering how he could possibly have made it that far. I've seen similar phenomena since. I've seen native English speakers around my age struggle with only moderately advanced vocabulary, including in college classes. It worries me a lot.

Just in case you wanted some anecdotal evidence to go with your claim.

I had a similar experience. But at college reading a play. Very depressing.

Nothing more depressing than an in-class reading of "Romeo and Juliet" during my freshman year of H.S. The obvious illiteracy of most of these students floored me; nearly everyone was sounding-out and guessing at any words over 2 syllables. "Apothecary"? Dream on. I think it took us something like a week to read through that play, which could be performed in an hour or two.

Outside of fiction, how many of them have even heard of an apothecary? How many of them would be tripped up if it had said something more familiar, like 'pharmacist', instead?

That's a sad story, indeed, as are the other ones on this thread.

My Dad was educated in a country school and the older kids were expected to help the younger ones learn. According to him it worked very well. But in your case it seems you were teaching the _older_ kids.

I guess the bad news is "We're fucked." OTOH the good news is that I'll likely have a job until I don't want one anymore!8-))

Anybody seen the film "Idiocracy"? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/

It's a matter of time. If we're all going to live 400 years or more, we could all be super persons. Nobody will rush to achieve multiple things in no time. One thing after another. Slowly and deep.

The people that read HN at least have the crucial ingredient: intellectual curiosity. Others, like me, lack the frenzy.

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