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Comment by barelyauser | Hacker News Reader

Ramanujan was an anomaly. What do we learn from someone like him? Can we reproduce it? Should we aspire to reproduce it? Or will it cause more harm than not?

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I think we should learn not that it is something that we can reproduce at will, but it is something that naturally occurs and we should be aware of it.

Some people are born with an innate gift for math (or music, or whatever else). And the location and circumstances these people are born into are not correlated to anything. As far as we can tell, they are as likely to be born in a slum in India as they are in Cambridge (UK or Massachusetts, take your pick).

Therefore, we should strive to make opportunities available to everyone as much as possible so anyone, anywhere, born with such gifts can make the fullest use of them possible (should they choose to).

We should be crashing the conditions for as many anomalies as possible if we could. Talent like that is rare and moves humanity forward faster than the incrementalism we’re normally capable of

Trying to produce more Ramanujans by recreating the conditions of his childhood seems about as likely to work as trying to produce more cargo flights by waving landing signals around on a runway.

I didn’t at any point suggest we recreate the conditions of his childhood. All I said is we should create conditions that enables more of these anomalies to flourish in society. It feels like modern society is set up to stamp out such anomalies.

Anomaly-based talent often implies that there persons sacrificed their lives, often their health, their family, to get an edge. A lot of high-achievers are suicidal, like Churchill, who only succeeded at plane dogfights because he’s the only outlier that didn’t die performing those crazy stunts. A lot of those who try and don’t succeed are very suicidal.

I’m all for meritocracy, but we should strive so that most people can succeed in parallel to a good family life. So that the children are balanced and loved, and we have a second generation who’s even better.

Maybe, but even if an anomaly, they were quite lucky to be given certain opportunities. It's impossible to account for all the bright-but-impoverished kids who were not.

Not really anything, its just that talent can be come from anywhere and we need to be humble enough to accept and celebrate it.

It also points to the fact that the annals of history probably had any number of Einsteins who died anonymous after a lifetime of physical labor.

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