alt Hacker NewsGenuine curiosity: if you are gifted with a certain “wiring” (genes, brain chemistry etc) why is that considered an accomplishment? Also - We, as a society, tend to celebrate people with “natural didn’t really need to work for” type gifts quite inconsistently - eg 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. In both cases the people are fundamentally bestowed with abilities they didn’t really have to work extremely hard to acquire but are perhaps looked at differently. What’s kind of psychology is at play here? Would love to understand how we tend to interpret such things and then form beliefs.
I realize and acknowledge both sets had talents and the spent thier time doing something with it to produce something extraordinary but we seem to tend to overlook the massive head start they also had. Why so?
(Totally understandable if you feel like downvoting but I would ask you to articulate and share the cord it struck with you if you down vote)
Replies
Why for you is innate grit any more commendable than innate intelligence?
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I wonder how Tao - or a supermodel - might feel about the idea that they don't have to work for their "gifts"
It depends on how much value their talents can bring to humankind, I guess.
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.