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My experience was very similar to yours. I was definitely not prodigious. I was slightly gifted, for the most part, and exceptionally gifted in other non-notable ways.

I think one thing that hurt me, in particular, is that I repeatedly got told "you're really going to go places some day!". And, so I waited for things to happen.

It took me way too long to realize I had to make things happen.

If you're reading this and you're young and gifted, you need to make things happen. You'll have people help you along the way, but odds are, you will never be discovered and have riches lavished upon you.

> I'd note that there are many studies showing that the usual outcomes for gifted kids are not all that great.

No, there's not, and they do do great. And this goes back to Terman: there's a handful of highly selected examples (eg the Australian kids recruited from child psychologist referrals, the self-selected self-diagnosed Mensa adult survey), furious anecdotes, and then every systematic prospective sample like Terman or population registers or SMPY shows the opposite.

And while Tao is, of course, exceptional, the results for accelerated gifted kids are generally great. And Tao was part of SMPY (note the URL path, supporting documentation for https://gwern.net/smpy ) and helped demonstrate this in practice.

Nils M. Holm's essays about highly intelligent people and IQ are worth a read here -- "Where Do The Failed 0.1% Go?" [1] and others [2].

1: https://t3x.org/files/vidya_324-325_NH_reprint.pdf (on HN 2015, 170 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13145853)

2: https://t3x.org/#essays

These stories are quite common. It just goes to prove that the point of modern mass schooling is just to corral the kids in and provide daycare, not really an education.

I was in a similar situation as the parent post and skipped/was moved up by two years of high school.

I think it was very beneficial to have to work hard to catch up with more advanced classes. I feel flexibility around this is something parents and schools should take seriously.

(Tbf I was also super lucky to find a very accepting group of nerdy friends in the new year that would tolerate someone younger.)

I think a big one you didn’t touch on is being told you do well in school because you are smart, not because you put in the effort.

It’s a lie many start believing, that they don’t put in effort.

A trick I learned is to respond "Oh, ok", at a certain point.

Debating something is, as my grandmother said "the ultimate concession", you only ever really debate something if you feel that there is a chance you are wrong. If there is an impasse, and you are confident in your response, there is usually no reason to continue, especially when there's a teacher-student asymmetry, they take it personal, and you gain nothing but make an enemy out of your teacher and spend your "question" points.

There's only so many times you can interrupt a professor, and spending your question points on correcting them isn't very useful to a student. And that the student believe that on one ocassion they know more than the professor, does not mean that there is nothing to learn from the professor.

Both of these mistakes (overextending a challenge and conflating a specific dominance over a general dominance) I think often come together under a personality trait that is generally identified as "arrogance". I do think there's a middle ground between believing one is superior and dropping all contentions of giftedness, but it's a thin line, and I think it's especially notable when the difference in talents (between the student and teacher, or between the gifted child and the average) is very marginal anyway, if it's undisputable then most tensions dissipate with the clarity.

I finished my assignment in advanced 8th grade Math real quick, busted out MAD Magazine. Relatively quickly it was taken by Mr. P-------. Not missing a beat, aloud in class I said, "thanks a lot... asshole."

I got suspended for three days, and also the enmity of his best friend the advanced social studies teacher. Yet, somehow I didn't get kicked off the basketball team. And I actually got a girlfriend, who punched me at the wrestling match, then we kissed behind the school during the dance.

I learned a valuable lesson that day.

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.

In my house we discuss a macro feature of children as being "school-shaped". If Terence Tao wasn't school-shaped, would he have been as successful? The counter-point to that is to ponder how many children fail to achieve a similar level of success because they don't fit into the school system so are left by the wayside.

I wonder a bit about that. What activities or possibilities are you exposed at during that age.

I know many computer science colleagues who were not exposed to programming during that age and only later came to it.

I feel kind of lucky that somewhat randomly I stumbled into computer programming (because XtreeGold could show the content of files, and I was learning to understand BAT-files by looking into them) during that age, and that's what I do now.

There are probably a lot of things you were not exposed during that age, that could have been the perfect match.

There are also lots of kids who just play games, or video games, do sports, watch films or so during that age, without really being exposed to any "potential useful" activities. Some parents would maybe even say that this is how it should be.

As a parent, I guess a good advice would be to try to expose your child to as much things as possible, without forcing it to do anything of course.

> when you were somewhere between nine and eleven years old.

As endearing as it sounds, that's pure selection bias on Walter's end rather than something even remotely common.

Clearly there are cases of this sort, like arts and other creative tangents, but on average it's a result of a discovery process much later in life.

I wonder if you could test this. Maybe someone has a longitudinal study where they check what people thought they liked to do as kids against what they do as adults.

This was mostly down to enormous pressure from his father, causing him to have a breakdown in his early twenties.

Not to say the results weren't incredible, but certainly required sacrifice.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10378/10378-h/10378-h.htm#li...

J.S. Mill's autobiography is a fascinating read. He spends quite a lot of it discussing his early childhood, explaining that in his opinion he was not particularly special, rather, it was his father who pushed him to all those accomplishments. His father sheltered him from other kids so he was not aware that his accomplishments were unusual!

I learned to read at age three or four, I think and I consumed every book I could find, including various math books, old chemistry books, etc. I didn't really understand anything there, but it was just fascinating to me to even touch that knowledge. So I'm a bit skeptic about these stories of children studying Plato.

Learning three languages at an early age is completely unremarkable for millions of people around the world. It's just notable which ones his were.

My daughter spoke four languages at age 3. Not because she is gifted, but because she grew up in an immigrant environment. One language with me, another with my partner who speaks a different mother tongue than I do, and the two local languages where we live.

And this is utterly unremarkable where I live.

When we visit my family (who are all monolingual), they think she is a prodigy.

She’s not. She’s just a normal kid.

His book 'On Liberty' is the subject of a recent In Our Time episode (BBC Radio Four series on the history of ideas) [https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002pqnc]. They discuss his childhood and his (apparently very warm) relationship with his father. (Sidenote: first proper In Our Time episode with the new host; he seems fine, but I miss Melvyn Bragg.)

Didnt he went through a major burnout and depression because of that? I remember reading something like that.

And imagine what he could have done if he had done something useful at such a young age!

Unusual to study Latin before Greek. It's usually the other way round.

Curious. I admire the analytic side since it's what I consider myself personally weak at. I have always preferred visual and spatial problems (then again, I spent a long time playing with Lego and making things).

I wonder how I ought to train up problem solving, given that I have an engineering degree to finish.

That program listing hit me right in the feels.

I remember when I was 6 or 7 teaching myself Applesoft BASIC and writing programs with funny (to me) little print statements all through them - when computing was just exploding with possibility.

I wouldn't have had a clue what a Fibonacci sequence was though ;)

This does feel like something a super smart alien pretending to be an 8 year old would write.

Found myself counting characters in case there was an easter egg in there. Spoiler: there isn't an easter egg in there.

Had me in tears by the end. One of my favorite books. So glad a friend recommended it to me.

We had to read it in middle school and man did it have me in tears at the end.

Good book, but the film is underwhelming. Saw it fairly recently for the first time.

Physics is not stuck because we don't have smart theoreticians who have good ideas: it is stuck because we don't have big enough particle accelerators and detectors to distinguish correct from incorrect theories.

Sure. But it doesn’t really seem clear to me that selecting for intelligence actually results in a better world. It’s a fallacy to think that intelligence = more rational or immune to human flaws, as a cursory glance at any “intelligent” social group should make obvious.

I think we’d be better off optimizing for conscientiousness or empathy, frankly. Even a world run by gardeners would probably be more beautiful and meaningful than one run by math geniuses.

Intelligent people tend to reproduce a lot less than other people. You wanna be average (or slightly above) for the best chance at successful procreation. And hyper-intelligent people are especially bad at procreation.

it's been a while, but I think mentats in Dune are trained not bred. Also, they use mind enhancing drugs (sapho juice IIRC). Which I guess makes a interesting point too, though different from yours :D

(I do agree biological intelligence is not close to its peak)

There is a slightly unexplored tangent in Brave New World about an experiment on Cyprus, where a society of humans bread to be intelligent descended in to civil war because nobody wanted to do menial work.

Interesting thought experiment.

The question is: what do we want to optimize for?

Minimize pain and suffering for humans? The spread of mankind throughout the universe?

I’m pretty sure your idea would help with the latter. Not so sure about the former tbh.

Strictly speaking, evolution selects for viable offspring, not simply surviving. But that’s a nitpick, quite beside your point.

> Imagine if we had 5 million geniuses as smart or smarter than Tao doing quantum physics.

This is a real possibility in our lifetimes due to AI.

Careful, we live in a society which has taken a side in the nature vs. nurture debate and if you're deemed to be on the wrong side of that then you'll be accused of being a nazi

Not sure it works like that, I think his biggest superpower was intrinsic motivation. Any child who read maths textbooks with enthusiasm for 3-4 hours a day for years could in theory at least get close to doing what he did, but what kid had that level of motivation?

At 8 years I recycled filesystem directories. I didn't know you can create new folders, so when I needed one I grabbed a random one from C:\Windows, moved it to my desktop and deleted its contents.

When I was a boy all we had were high-voltage vacuum tube electronics, it was fun.

I was doing that at three or four and was reminded of it constantly for the next ten years or more. (I actually raised the subject on my mother's death bed.)

Actually - do they do this in LLM benchmarks? As a measure of overconfidence/confabulation? Seems immediately applicable.

"incomplete information" is a standard concept in word problem curriculum. But usually it's explicitly an option in the test, as a fairness to the student.

Making mistakes in lecture is a standard technique used by good teachers, to promote active listening and critical thinking.

I didn't see that in the document. What page is it on?

This brings back great memories of a game I played as a kid called 24. Not so much modern, just cards with four numbers that you would add, subtract, multiply and divide to get the center number. Then you would slap the card and explain. It did something to my brain as even the thought of those cards makes me smile.

Hey thanks for this recommendation I'm going to check it out.

Have you tried Dragon Box? I've had my son doing that for awhile. Parent reporting is lacking.

Also briefly did Khan Academy Kids but he's so far ahead that seems pretty useless now.

The music in that game is sublime

In a school context, it is (or should be) just as important to consider each child’s need for being appropriately challenged as it is to consider their need for support.

I’ve settled on the idea that my job as parent is to introduce my kid to a bunch of different things, help them process that information, but ultimately the decision of where they choose to focus their energy is up to them. I’m proud of whatever they do, as long as they try their best.

Phew this resonated with me.

Before becoming a parent I'd always thought "when I have a kid I'll teach him such and such" but now turns out that my kid just wants to jump around and break things.

I don't know, let me know if you want to talk. Mine is little over 4yo.

> His primary school principal described him as ‘a happy little fellow who has a clear understanding of the fact that he is different’.

I believe it comes down to intrinsic interest, that he would not consider this something boring he needs to work through, but rather something fun and intriguing to spend his time on.

Disregarding the unusual age in this case, I believe that most people could be significantly better at mathematics than they are, if only they found it interesting enough.

As others said, Australia.

Like Terence I also had "out of band" classes and free time to read advance material in both primary and high school.

During that period Australia also had good federal and state programs for clustering advanced kids on yearly subsidised specialist camps - optional and free if parents couldn't afford to chip in.

I bumped into him at the same time Paul Erdős was doing the rounds and hanging out with anyone that might show promise.

Presumably Australia where he’s from, but also possible in the U.S.

Australia

He looks around his age to me, were you looking at old pics?

Asian.

> But I genuinely want to know a true account of what it took to get him there.

I guess it's being one of the biggest geniuses in the history. Why people find it so hard to accept that there can be HUGE differences in intellectual capabilities and that parenting does not account for even 1% of that? I can bet that if Tao's parents did same things they did for him to 1000 of random children, none would come even remotely close to Tao.

Roughly for the same reason that we put Olympians on a pedestal. Sure, there is a lot of grit involved. But it starts off with good genes and while you won't find anybody that didn't put in the work you also won't find people with bad genes because they will never make it to the entry point, and even if somehow magically they did they'd never stand a chance.

Case in point, that dance...

Society rewards 'good genes'. Which is interesting because it is effectively the club of good genes rewarding themselves by co-opting the ones without, either by amassing actual gold or by amassing gold medals. And we all let them because we recognize that they really do have good genes and they put in the hard work.

The problems arrive when the ones that are good at amassing actual gold and that are intelligent do not have a similar endowment in the ethics department. And weirdly enough we don't have a backstop for that unless they act in a limited number of ways that we consider 'criminal', usually reserved for the ones with 'bad genes'. So as long as they stay away from those we just look at the grit and the money and go 'that's ok then'.

And if you have amassed enough shiny rocks even those criminal laws seems to no longer matter and you can do whatever the hell you want and expect to get away with it.

Why for you is innate grit any more commendable than innate intelligence?

Do you celebrate people who persevere despite despite their hardships?

Ability to persevere is also wired in.

If you pull this thread to it's conclusion, then nothing is worth celebrating. Just law of physics doing their thing.

There are people wired like Tao (or superstar athletes, supermodels, or other remarkable people) that don't achieve the same results.

Even among the people who have similar "luck" in that respect, some still stand out. The people we think of as elite performers aren't just elite relative to the 99% of us. They're also elite within the top 1% that makes up their field: they're dominant even among the people who should be their peers.

> Genuine curiosity: if you are gifted with a certain “wiring” (genes, brain chemistry etc) why is that considered an accomplishment?

It's complex; first of all society has an interest for exceptional people to be respected and well compensated; if there was absolutely no prestige or compensation in being a math genius it's quite possible Terrence Tao would have become a schoolteacher. So a well functioning capitalist society has both monetary and prestige tools to incentivize extreme accomplishment.

Second, I think it's human nature to like and want hierarchy. Admiring figures for their looks, charisma or intellectual accomplishments could very will be in our wiring - 20 thousand years ago we would admire the shaman, the great hunter or the storyteller.

But ultimately I totally agree with you - not only were these people born into the unique genetic and envrionmental circumstances that made the accomplishment possible , I also don't believe they had any say after being born in becoming what they had become; e.g I don't believe there's a "free will" and that Terrence Tao "chose" to become a math genius. He was born into that reality in a fluke.

Real answer, none of us can do anything more than what you are given by your parents. You get the brain you get and that's it. You can either work hard and improve and become a genius or you become a drug addict and die in a gutter. Determinism and the laws of physics rules us all.

We might as well chose to praise those of us who were gifted with abilities that we aspire to.

> A supermodel who is gifted with the gift of looks, beauty etc is also in the same category of “natural” talent but sure doesn’t get the same celebration as a prodigy in maths or science

We living on the same planet?

Pretty sure the supermodel gets infinitely more attention and certainly makes orders of magnitudes more money than some math prodigy, at least on mine.

I wonder how Tao - or a supermodel - might feel about the idea that they don't have to work for their "gifts"

I like a massive head start.

There may not be many other things which can contribute the same advantage.

It depends on how much value their talents can bring to humankind, I guess.

The two types of talents can be judged by the impact they have. A scientific gifted individual can produce value while a good looking individual has mostly entertainment value.

That being said, supermodels are more famous, have a much larger following and earn much more money than math geniuses. That says we, humans, care more about entertainment than value.

> Think about connecting them or nurturing them with AI companions.

Yes, let's give them only the blandest, most boring interactions possible.

How about nurturing them with human beings? We have no idea how nurturing children with a computer program would turn out but probably poorly.

The most important part of nurturing, as I understand it, is to be seen and loved by other humans, and to be made to feel safe and lovable.

Indeed. He definitely knows more Math than I do.

He was 7 years old, so it was impossible for him to give consent for anything. His parents gave consent on his behalf.

Gwern hosts a lot of PDFs -- see https://gwern.net/archiving

See also: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Terence+Tao

The HN mods apparently have a sign in the HN control room

  It's been [ ] days since the last Terrence Tao submission

Honestly a quick google would tell you what you want to know. But something tells me you must consider yourself an other worldly genius if you consider any part of set theory as nonsense.

This is one of the most interesting questions to me about human brains, and as far as I know no significant progress has been made in answering it.

Some people appear to have a capacity for learning, retention and understanding that is well outside the normal range. People like Ramanujan or von Neumann, or Tao. They learn at a speed that far exceeds the speed of what we would consider gifted students, they reach a deep and intuitive understanding of the material, and go on to make many discoveries / inventions of which even one would be enough for an ordinary scientist to be considered successful.

It seems there is something very different about their minds, but just what is it that allows those minds to operate at such a level?