To be included in Wikipedia, I suppose two things need to happen: (a) other people write about you in media, and (b) someone creates the article and adds the link. Plus some other rules, for example if the only thing that makes you notable is connection with some notable topic, you will probably be mentioned within the article about the topic, not in a separate article.
Looking at the "References" section, if I ignore his own blog, Instagram, etc., the most important seem these four links, two directly about him, two mentioning him:
Well, that is more than was even written in media about me, but yes, it seems at best borderline notable. He is also mentioned to have won a few competitions, I have no idea how exceptional that makes him within his community.
The Wikipedia article was written mostly by one person with only trivial modification afterwards. Here is the comparison between the first and the current versions:
My impression is that this is a borderline case, where I could imagine a Wikipedia admin debate go either way. (It is also possible that in case of an admin debate, more links would be found and added to the article.) The general mood on Wikipedia also changes between "let's document everything, online space is cheap" and "let's delete everything that wouldn't fit in a paper encyclopedia", so luck would probably play a great role.
I'd say that you regress toward your parents' genotypic mean and that this could be approximated using something like 80% * parental_mean + 20% * grandparental_mean.
Maybe England is so much more geographically concentrated that the brightest young people could court more readily? Maybe the intense centralization of high class male education at Eton and Harrow, Cambridge and Oxford played a role in who married who's sister?
My girlfriend has a measured IQ of 182. She is very smart but not as far as I can tell telepathic (I think some pretty weird stuff and she hasn't broken up with me).
I would be surprised if either of you was actually among the top 1000 humans in the world, just because it would be weird for me to have encountered two of them by semicoincidence (I KNOW THERE ARE SELECTION EFFECTS, but they're not THAT strong!). For one thing, I think testing as kids is infamous for giving some really high scores. For another, as a test result gets more and more implausible, you should believe more and more that there is some kind of flaw in the test. For a third, I think height isn't exactly a bell curve and has a long tail in terms of people with weird pituitary cancers and stuff, and I could see the tail of intelligence being equally long.
The trouble is that psychometric and educational metrics become less and less comprehensible/meaningful the further that you move from the mean. The difference between a 165 and 185 IQ is vastly less interpretable than the difference between a 90 and a 110 because we have so many more data points for the latter case than the former.
Are you open to being interviewed (non public by default unless you'd want to share)? I've interviewed a few SSC commenters in the past and it has always been interesting.
I don't know how to do the math, but I'd expect SOME clustering just by chance. Anyone want to take a crack at calculating the odds for "eminence clustering" by chance alone?
I feel like most of these families include one Grade A genius (e.g. Charles Darwin) combined with one or more Grade B lesser lights (Erasmus Darwin). No offence intended to old Erasmus, but he's not a household name.
Now, in 19th century Britain (which was admittedly one of history's greatest clustering of geniuses), there were probably one hundred household name type geniuses (not all of whom were Darwin level) combined with two thousand Erasmus Darwin type geniuses. There were thirty million people in Britain at the time. So if you take a random Grade A genius, consider their twenty closest relatives, you'd expect about a 1/750 chance of one of them being a Grade B genius, _if_ everything were totally randomly distributed. So, given what we know about genetics, wealth and education it doesn't seem especially surprising to find a few Darwin type families in the mix.
This is a terrible approximation in every way, like the fact that I've used 30 million as my denominator despite the fact that I should be looking over multiple generations.
Combine that with the fact that these families are generally at least somewhat privileged, so we're probably looking at maybe 1%-10% of the population who were sufficiently privileged to have any realistic chance of being Grade A or Grade B geniuses.
throw in that the UK has a long tradition of seeking out and harvesting unusually capable people from around the globe to come to Oxford, Cambridge etc.
Thanks for taking a crack at this! It was my first thought on reading the examples too and I'm glad someone tried to put numbers to it. Agree w/ Jon that in 19th century Britain the relevant talent pool is only a tiny fraction of the total population, clustered in established wealthy families.
I think your analysis may be mixing two definitions of "genius" -- i.e., the *potential* for great achievement and *actual* achievement.
For example, if Charles had had a heart attack and dropped dead before publishing his theory of natural selection would he drop from a Grade A genius to a zero? And if Erasmus had had the same data as Charles would he go from Grade B to Grade A? Either way, they are still the same people with the same traits and talents.
My guess would be that Charles Darwin's IQ was well south of 150. His was not a scintillating intellect. But he sunk his teeth into a great question and worked it out.
His younger cousin Francis Galton was a sportsman for years, but he was inspired by his cousin's success and thus took on many other unanswered questions, great and small. Galton's huge breakthrough in statistical mathematics finally came when he was in his mid-60s, which is ridiculously late for a mathematician, suggesting that it was less Galton's mental horsepower than his focus on overlooked topics that account for his achievements.
In general, both Darwin and Galton seem to have solved mysteries that the human race really should have solved earlier but never got around to for various reasons.
Darwin and Galton were a little bit like their contemporaries in the English-speaking countries who invented most of today's major spectator sports, in that the time was right.
One of the 19th Century sports inventors, James Naismith is individually famous. But it's worth noting that Naismith's friend William George Morgan then promptly invented volleyball as a less strenuous alternative to Naismith's new basketball, so it was less that Naismith was a unique creative genius and more that the time was right for new sports.
Most of the other major sports were invented out of ancient ballgames when railroads allowed teams to travel, which required nationally-agreed upon rules. But the railroads allowed players and coaches to get together after each seasons in conventions and hash out new rules.
The English-speaking countries had more railroads and perhaps cultural advantages so they worked out most of the sports first.
Disagree strenuously re. Darwin. IQ may not be the right construct to describe his genius, but he was brilliant in every scientific activity he turned his attention to. His greatest gifts were his humility, objectivity, and his unique ability, maybe unparalleled in history, to anticipate unforeseen consequences of his ideas, and find solutions to those next-generation problems, before anybody else could even conceive of the initial ideas.
Re. humility, this was a man who, while he was the talk of the entire world, spent the last years of his life studying earthworms, while being ridiculed for it by inferior scientists who would rather study "nobler" beasts. And this was in fact important work, though you rarely hear about it.
Re. objectivity, I can't recall a single instance where Darwin was wrong about something and didn't write explicitly that he might be wrong about it.
Re. foreseeing consequences, on issues like sexual selection, group selection, and the evolution of emotional expression, I think Darwin's first consideration of the topic, done before other people even understood evolution, got further on the problem than the rest of the research community combined would have in a century. Darwin has many paragraphs in his writings that are worth a Nobel prize by themselves.
"he was inspired by his cousin's success and thus took on many other unanswered questions"
Maybe that's half the answer to "genius lineages" -- intra-family rivalry. Galton probably thought: "I knew cousin Chucky when he used to eat paste in nursery school, if *he* can be a famous scientist, how hard could it be."
Another of Erasmus Darwin's grandsons was Francis Galton, whose lists of accomplishments was bizarrely broad -- e.g., he invented the weather map, the silent dog whistle, the correlation coefficient, the practical way for Scotland Yard to use fingerprints to solve crime, and twin study, and the nature-nurture distinction. Galton is kind of the Thomas Edison of the human sciences.
The Darwins also include a minor genius, Charles' favorite grandson Bernard Darwin, the most famous golf sportswriter ever.
In general, there seem to be more of these kind of intellectual lineages among the British than among the Americans.
One reason is that there weren't that many great intellectual theoreticians in America until maybe 100-120 years ago. The top rungs of theory were largely a European monopoly, with Americans focusing on more practical accomplishments.
Erasmus was famous enough to get a mention in Mary Shelly's Frankenstein. Obviously not a household name now but quite famous in his day and a bit after.
This is a good question. A bunch of research shows that truly random distributions seem “clumpy” to humans.
There are ~10 billion people alive. Of them, ~1 million have a Wikipedia page. Ergo 1/10K people is wiki-worthy.
Suppose that all people are divided into 1 billion true random “families” of ten people each. Then ~1 million such families have a wiki-worthy member; ~1 thousand have 2; and about one family would have 3.
The level of clustering described above seems to exceed the estimates here. However, if you fiddle with the variables a little (family size seems to be the easiest here, though you could also decide that the base rate was restricted to e.g. the wealthiest class of the richest country) you might get pretty close.
Poking into it a bit more, a few more factors occur:
1. The “Darwin-Wedgewood Family” is much more on the order of 100 people, maybe 1000. The wiki family tree has plenty of “six more children” boxes in early generations; presumably they’re associated with a huge but invisible further branching in the later generations.
2. Assortive mating may play more of a role in exaggerating these numbers than I realized. Suppose there are two clans with prominent forebears; then one marriage occurs between them. Then suddenly every prominent descendent can claim BOTH forebears as “distant uncles”. Since assortive mating happens after people (or their parents!) do impressive things, that might dramatically increase the apparent clustering.
I mean maybe a good thing to read on this is from one of the people mentioned in the essay; Galton "Hereditary Genius"? It was an attempt to literally list the levels of pre-eminence in England, and tease out the relationships therein. From memory, the clustering was definitely well above what you'd expect.
There is also probably a psychological bias toward "noticing" when successful people are related that may skew the perception about how much success runs in families. People love pointing out "did you know X is related to Y." And of course having the same last name also makes people notice and connect successful people.
For example -- Random fun fact: Singer Nora Jones is the daughter of Indian sitar legend Ravi Shankar.
As an American, my impression has long been that there were more British intellectual clans than American intellectual clans. If true, that might suggest that the preponderance of dynasties among highbrow Brits is not just due to clustering by chance, but some property of British society less often found in American society.
I don't think "chance alone" is the correct null model here. The null model should probably be a combination of "class privilege" and "these groups became prominent because they were really good at marketing and at supporting each other".
Ezra Pound, for instance, started preparing the ground for Joyce's /Ulysses/ before he'd even met Joyce. That is, he began getting his friends to infiltrate the literary magazines, helping to build a sympathetic publishing house, and so on, long before he chose /Ulysses/ to be the book for which he would call in all his debts. So when /Ulysses/ finally came out, it was printed by a publishing house that Pound had helped create, with money Pound had brought in; and about half of the reviews published (and all of the ones that said it was good) were by Pound and his friends.
He also has overlooked Gloria Vanderbilt (Anderson Cooper's mother), who partly did rich people things but was pretty impressive in her own right. (Unless she's the "art collector", which understates her life by quite a lot, if so.)
you're not taking all successful people at random, you're selecting for people who have successful families -- so you're probably selecting for people who don't just have high IQ, but for whom it's highly genetic/inheritable rather than random factors.
This is going to sound crazy but there were many eugenics research programs in the USA before that Nazis made it uncool. The crazy part is my grandma told me when I was too young to care much about it that our family was heavily studied because of the incredible number of high level types, senators , supreme court judges, business founders, C-suite attorneys etc... I didn't think much of it but after my grandmother died I found out she saved every official document from the day she turned 18 and she had much if the eugenics research program files pertaining to our family. This was happening at many universities and the study of these high performance familial clusters probably has lots of hushed hidden data to support it.
I would have to dig to find the documents at a place I don't currently live. I can tell you it was Baylor university in Texas where the eugenics research program was.1930s I believe but could have run into the 40s or later.
I think there's a line in a Doug Coupland novel that very intelligent people are either the only intelligent person in their family or the whole family's very intelligent. Not that this is in any sense evidence of anything.
The non-genetic components of IQ are, roughly, exposure to environmental insults (head trauma, infectious disease of the brain, nutritional deficiencies, etc.) and and developmental noise. Genetics give instructions on making a brain, but how that brain actually gets made has some intrinsic variability.
So:
1) Some families can have higher variance in exposure to environmental insults. This one is probably class/wealth-correlated. In one family, almost nobody gets whacked on the head or comes down with viral meningitis. In another, some of the kids do, so the kid that does might be dumb not because his genes are bad but because he was unlucky. So I'd expect, especially in the past, for richer families to show higher heritability than poorer families.
2) The genetics of what makes a particular person smart might be different in different families. If one family has a common variant that increases IQ 15 points (like that for torsion dystonia) and another just has generic "good smarts" genes, you'll expect more variance in the kids of the first family: some of them will have that large-effect gene and others won't. You could get a similar effect from epistatic interactions. The heritable component we care about is narrow-sense heritability, the additive effects of all the genes. If one family has significant non-additive effects, then those are much harder to pass down to kids. For a simple example: suppose variant X and variant Y both increase IQ by 2 points, but if you have both X+Y, you get not 4 points, but 10 points. Then a father with that pair is going to have a harder time passing down his smarts to his kids.
Related to this, one of the things about genetics is that individual genes don't 'dilute' away over generations. If there's a single (dominant) gene with a strong effect on something, a descendent will either get the 'good' allele, or not, a 1:1 ratio.
If it's two (unlinked) genes, there's a 25% chance that a child will receive both.
The GWAS studies that have been done to now seem to show something like >1000 genes which affect intelligence as measured, nearly all of which are obviously very small-effect. So thinking of it as continuous rather than discrete is perfectly accurate.
Your scenario would seem to be largely ruled out by the DeFries-Fulker extremes. As you say, if there were any genes floating around of very large effect, you would expect 'lumpiness', where one sibling gets it & is unexpectedly high, while the rest are closer to what one expects from their parents/siblings. But we don't seem to see that in any of the high-IQ samples. (Just in the low-IQ/retarded samples, where a disabled kid often has normal siblings/parents - where of course we know genes with very large negative effects do exist.)
Except this is a fairly common pattern, anecdotally, and also probably when you actually study the family trees (notwithstanding cases like the Curies where they didn't have very many kids)
Henri Poincare's sister married a dude who was trying his hardest to argue that science and religion do not contradict. The Bernoullis (surprised Scott didn't mention these guys!), Often considered to start with the guy who discovered Bernoulli numbers, were 2 of 4 kids (2 mathematicians, 1 painter, and 1 some dude - Wikipedia just said he married someone).
So lumpiness isn't uncommon at all - the Bernoullis exhibited basically a 1:1 split of geniuses and normal dudes.
Also, ask anyone with siblings and you'll find a common pattern of 1 smart talented kid, remaining average kids. E.g my mother's family:
1 APAC region General Manager of a Fortune 500
4 normie professions, not particularly distinctive
Did they have significantly more children on average? It could be that professional/intellectual success used to correlate more directly to reproductive success, so that the first highly successful member of the clan would have a crap-ton of offspring. And then from there it's just a numbers game where you have more cognitive lottery tickets to choose from within the larger offspring pool.
(For the record I definitely don't think this is what happening and just thought it was a funny technically-possible explanation)
"But also, all these people had massive broods, or litters, or however you want to describe it. Charles Darwin had ten children (insert “Darwinian imperative” joke here); Tagore family patriarch Debendranath Tagore had fourteen.
I said before that if an IQ 150 person marries an IQ 130 person, on average their kids will have IQ 124. But I think most of these people are doing better than IQ 150. I don’t know if Charles Darwin can find someone exactly as intelligent as he is, but let’s say IQ 145. And let’s say that instead of having one kid, they have 10. Now the average kid is 129, but the smartest of ten is 147 - ie you’ve only lost three IQ points per generation. And if you’re marrying other people from very smart families - not just other very smart people - then they might have already chopped off the non-genetic portion of their intelligence and won’t regress. This is starting to look more do-able."
> I said before that if an IQ 150 person marries an IQ 130 person, on average their kids will have IQ 124.
This makes two assumptions:
- The heritability of IQ is 0.6.
- The two parents are each drawn from a population whose mean IQ is 100.
There is no reason to believe that second assumption is true in the case of the families Scott is talking about here. If an (outstanding!) IQ 150 person from an elite family background of average IQ 120 marries an (unexceptional!) IQ 130 person from an elite family background of average IQ 130, on average their kids will have IQ 134.
(If the example didn't make it obvious, the secret to being a great family is to ensure that your children marry the children of other great families. This was noticed long, long ago.)
The last point is the most powerful, combined with the privilege of other people taking your outsized ambitions more seriously given your pedigree. Simply having role models that you identify with has an ENORMOUS influence on achievement. It's played such a role in my own boring life that the statistical influence is surely gigantic.
The biggest is in personal expectation-setting. Essentially everyone in my family has an advanced degree, so you take it for granted that that's what you'll do too, whereas if you're not immersed in that as a kind of baseline reality, it takes a major leap of ambition or imagination to do it. The Darwin example is not a coincidence, Darwin was explicitly and emphatically inspired by Erasmus's work to pursue natural philosophy, and certainly all his progeny would not have failed to be inspired by their illustrious ancestor.
My view is that there are so many confounders when it comes to heredity that unless there's a very specific problem like Huntington's disease comes screaming out of the data, it's probably a huge waste of time and energy to try and disentangle the spaghetti. And people who persist anyway, particularly with things like IQ...well, if I'm being perfectly honest, the whole enterprise smells funny to me.
Fully agreed, and one of my pet peeves as someone who actually had to study population genetics (although most of it is now lost to me).
The thing about heritability that nearly everyone who obsesses over IQ seems determined to underplay is that environmental things are often perfectly heritable. Which is why you more or less can't do heritability studies for breeding purposes without excluding the effect of environment in some way (and even there the dead cow issue comes up frequently). P=G+E+I and all that.
And all this is without even touching the issue that we're pretty terrible at knowing what intelligence even is in a mechanistic sense. Not just in the sense of Moravec's paradox (which implies that we should use ballerinas and professional athletes as the standard for intelligence in a universal sense), but in the sense of the neuron count vs structuralist arguments of how brains work.
So it's all more or less shooting in the dark, punctuated by loud proclamations from people who believe that a numerical score makes them ubermenschen or something.
The at time desperate effort to extract the perhaps two percent of intelligence attributable to genetics strikes me as inexplicable, given the fantastically mediocre insights it would give into the way the world works. I conjecture, perhaps unfairly, that there is more at stake here than simple dispassionate scientific curiosity, particularly as it seems to me that what most people are looking for is an excuse not to care about problems they might otherwise be expected to do something about.
I wonder. With all the name stuff one might think it´s male choice stuff, like smart hero males choose smart hero female spouses and beget smart hero kids. Somehow counterintuitive to me. I can't help thinking of Arnold Schwarzenegger and his contribution to Irish-american and hispanic-americas excellence. Maybe the thing about all the cousin-marrying is female choice. And "pater semper incertum est", pardon my French.
Do you reckon the expectation effect is more important than knowing a lot of people who can advise you on e.g. who to pick as a PhD supervisor? Things that would be unknown unknowns to someone who wasn't from that sort of background.
Agreed. I come from a relatively successful/academic family, and the biggest social contributions to my success have been:
1) That my parents were well-resourced enough and supportive enough so that myself and my siblings got to try out anything that we fancied in the full expectation that we could do it well if we tried (our family motto is that we can do anything); and
2) That my family's knowledge and connections opened doors in all sorts of unexpected places and provided advantages in all sorts of unexpected ways. At the place where I went to study a degree, my great-grandfather's photo was literally on the wall outside my future supervisor's office. People are vastly more supportive of someone that they have a connection to (however tenuous), and I've been privileged (in all senses of the word) to enjoy patient and kind tutoring by others that helped me grasp more closely to my full potential.
From my experience, then, there are some basic things you need to do well in life:
- Get good nutrition as a foetus, infant and child;
- Don't suffer trauma that damages your brain (birth asphyxia, head trauma, meningitis etc.);
- Have a supportive, stable, well-resourced family with good social connections;
- Be attractive (pretty children tend to get more attention then ugly ones); and
- Be at least moderately gifted in at least one domain (ie: be at least an average human being).
All of these things are highly heritable in the scientific sense of the word, but only the last two have any substantial genetic component (and that's complexed with environmental factors).
Yes, it's a strong argument for a society with strong social welfare and low inequality: that only that sort of levelled environment can allow the truly meritocratic to rise to the top.
The historical norm, on the other hand, has society run mainly by guys like Wilhelm II and Nicholas II (both part of another famous family with "notable" achievements).
Any short list of the great families (or at least the great American families) should include the James's: Henry James is one of the perennial candidates for the greatest American novelist, and his brother William James is one of the perennial candidates for the greatest American philosopher. Their sister Alice James got a posthumous reputation as a diarist. (There were two other brothers who never became famous. Their father, Henry James Sr., had some reputation as a theologian, although not in the Henry (Jr)/William James league.
Average IQ of Ivy League students being > 130, not controlled for major, is very surprising. I could see that for Harvard, but didn't expect it across the board
If I remember correctly, 130 is the average for *tenured physics professors* in the USA, that being the highest, with mathematicians slightly below them followed by philosophers in the mid 120s. If my numbers are even in the right ballpark it seems very unlikely to me that an average Ivy League student would have an IQ close to 130. I can try and rummage through my bookmarks to find the source if you want.
Well it's numerically dubious. The percentile for 130 is 97.7 and I seriously doubt that only 2.3% of the population can get into an Ivy League school as an undergraduate, if there were infinite seats but no change in admissions standards.
Based on some quick Googling, there are about 147,000 Ivy League students, and 19.6 million college students (2019, US). That would mean about 0.7% of US college students are in the Ivy Leagues. That would mean a little less than 1/3 of the 130+ IQs were actually in an Ivy League school.
Does that seem plausible to you? Ballpark that sounds fairly reasonable to me.
Not even remotely. The distribution of applicants is highly nonuniform. For example, a huge chunk of students merely go to the closest university into which they can get. In-state versus out-of-state makes a big $$$ difference. Many people choose based on family history, program availability and/or school focus, geographic location (hey if you go to Santa Cruz you can practically live on the beach). So an assumption that everybody applies to every school and the fraction that are admitted to the Ivies represents the fraction that *could* strikes me as completely implausible. That's why I didn't do that calculation :)
On the other hand, the average IQ of those 19.6 million college students is probably already above the average IQ of the whole population. So more than 2.3% of them would have an IQ over 130.
Fair enough. Keep in mind that if the *average* IQ in the Ivy Leagues is about 130, then there will be a fair number who are below 130 as well as above. That may help take some of the strain off of the 0.7%, though I agree that 1/3 or even 1/6 of the smartest kids going to a very limited number of schools may not be plausible.
If the average IQ of a college student is roughly 110-115, then the Ivy League schools are only a bit over 1 standard deviation above the average college. The 2.3% figure is for 2 standard deviations.
"Niels Bohr was indeed a keen football player and was the goalkeeper in the Danish team Akademisk Boldklub in the beginning of the 20th century," says Nicolaj Egerod. "But even though AB [as the club is commonly known] were, at the time, one of the best clubs in Denmark, he never made it to the national team. However, his brother Harald - a well-known scientist in his own right - who also played at AB, played for the Danish national team and was part of the team that won silver at the 1908 London Olympics."
Nils Refsdal suggests a possible reason why Niels never made it to the international stage: "According to AB, in a match against the German side Mittweida, one of the Germans launched a long shot and the physicist leaning against the post did not react, missing an easy save. After the game he admitted to his team-mates his thoughts had been on a mathematical problem that was of more interest to him than the game. He only played for the 1905 season."
remember also that the standard of "professional footballer" was much much lower 100 years ago, as with all professional sports. Consider the Tour De France; in its 10th year in 1913, it was still under rules that required competitors to not have "support teams" or "outside assistance"; this meant that when the fork of Eugene Christophe's bike broke, he had to carry his bike 10km to the local blacksmith and forge it back together himself, during the race. He was penalized 10 minutes, later reduced to 3, because the blacksmith's son pumped the bellows to the furnace for him.
No cyclist capable of completing a race in those conditions is likely to also be capable of the same kind of explosive and endurance power that modern professional cyclists produce. People just weren't as specialized 100 years ago, and that's true of professional athletes, academics, technicians, basically everyone in society.
oh, also, I say "professional" here to mean "serious"; Neils Bohr was almost certainly not a professional footballer, but an amateur, being the son of a professor and all.
Two brief things about Dysons - the vacuum cleaner guy in England is Not Related. And I don't know if Esther was ever the "most important woman" in computers but she was certainly very influential in the high-tech industry 20 or 30 years ago as a writer, speaker, analyst, etc.
So, if IQ declines every generation, how do you get people with really, really high IQ? Is it a random mutation that jumps a child up a lot? Or was there a strain of people with ridiculously high IQ that has been slowly descending this whole time? Gladwell did a chapter of his book on a group of super high IQ people who nonetheless did not accomplish much, so possibly the astronomically high IQ strain is plausible because a lot of them don't rise above the herd?
"So, if IQ declines every generation, how do you get people with really, really high IQ? Is it a random mutation that jumps a child up a lot?"
The *average* for parents tends towards the average for the group. So lots of 120 IQ parents would have kids with an average IQ less than 120. Lots of 90 IQ parents would have kids with an average IQ higher than 90.
But ... there is a lot of variation in those averages, so you'll still see 120 IQ parents having some kids with an IQ over 120.
Pretty much. IQ (as with many traits) regresses *towards* the mean. On average. You need to pay attention to the spread (standard deviation) as well as average, though. And sampling (the extremely low IQ folks may have fewer children; there are folks who are concerned that in many wealthy countries successful people seem to be having fewer kids on average than less successful people).
" Is this born out by studies of lower IQ families with consistently higher IQ children?"
I think that studies bear this out, but can't point you towards any as I believe this but haven't verified the claims myself (though I do understand the math ...)
Hmm. When you say "regresses" it makes it sound like it always degrades, but lower IQ families having on average higher IQ children sounds like "trends". Maybe I'm reading too much into the semantics of what you're saying. Regardless, thanks for helping me out!
The "regress" here is a math term that has no connotations of getting worse (think linear regression). The common use of the term "regress" does have that connotation. "Trends" is fine-ish, too.
The term "regression to the mean" is a standard term for a phenomenon that applies to a lot of other variables than family intelligence inheritance. See this video for an explanation:
This is the case with *everything* that has random components, not just IQ, and not just heredity. If you have an annual poetry contest in your middle school, and you take the students whose poem got a score of 95 one year, and look at their average score the next year, it will be substantially above the mean, but will likely be below 95.
Basically, the idea is that selecting "the people who got exactly 95", you'll get some number of individuals that are 80 level poets and had 15 points boost in their random effort this year, and individuals that are 90 level poets and had a 5 point boost in their random effort, and individuals that are 95 level poets and had no boost, and individuals that are 100 level poets and had a -5 point penalty in their random effort.
But if poetry skill and random effort are independent and normally distributed, then on any given contest, there are more people who are 80 level poets with a 15 point random boost than people who are 95 level poets with no random boost. On the next poetry contest, the random boost is re-rolled, while the poetry skill stays constant, and since most people who got a 95 were below 95 level themself, the average poem next time is closer to the mean.
You get the reverse at the low end - if you take the people who wrote the worst poems one year, then their average performance the next year probably won't be as bad (though it'll still be worse than average).
This isn't an IQ-specific thing; it's a property of random distributions in general. If a given data point for an observation (e.g. a family) is far from the mean, future data points for that observation are likely to be closer to the mean than that reference data point was.
'Regression to the mean' was one of the early arguments deployed against Darwinism as a theory of why species diverge. The response to that criticism was the introducing of the idea of 'selection pressure' a way to shift the mean.
No, the response was that genes are discrete units and cannot dilute indefinitely, and the seemingly continuous traits are defined by huge amount of smaller effect genes.
Strong selection *does* decrease population variability, though I doubt it's a huge effect in human populations. There's two effects: exhaustion of variance and selection disequilibrium. The first is easy to explain: if you select hard on something, alleles that affect that thing will get fixed, so they're no longer variable, and the population variability will drop a little bit as each variant fixes. The other is more complicated: selection on a trait induces small anti-correlations in all the variants that contribute to that trait. So someone with positive trait X is very slightly less likely to have a different positive trait Y than a random person. That decreases the population variance, but in an interesting way: it only happens during the selection. Once the selection stops, the variance relaxes back towards its natural level.
It doesn't decline every generation. It goes like this:
Suppose you pick out from the population a very smart couple. IQ is very heritable, but not perfectly. Say ~80% heritable or so. The remaining 20% mostly we don't know exactly, but let's call it "luck". When you pick out your very smart couple, in part you're selecting for people with good genetic IQ, and in part you're selecting for people that got lucky with non-genetic contributions to IQ. Their kids will get all that good genetic IQ, but they don't get the good luck: they get average luck, just like everybody else. So they will be smart, but not as smart, on average, as their parents.
So suppose you've done that with a bunch of couples and you have a bunch of first generation kids that are pretty smart, but not as smart as their parents. You pick two of them at random, and they have kids of their own. The second generation will be, on average, exactly as smart as their parents, though still less smart than their grand-parents. That's because they've got the same good genetics as their parents, and the same average luck as their parents. Note that if instead of picking randomly you picked particularly smart people from this second generation to have kids, you *would* have some regression here.
The regression only happens when you:
1) select for something (in this case, smart people)
Another member of the Darwin family who achieved fame in a different area was the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, who was on a slightly different branch but was 4 generations down from both Erasmus Darwin and Josiah Wedgwood.
Watch out, too, for other cases where the surnames differ. I like to offer the story of Stanley Baldwin, Prime Minister and a leading figure in British politics in the 1920s and 30s. He had a particular ability to deliver powerful and effective speeches, which is perhaps partly explained by some of them having been written for him by his cousin, whose name was Rudyard Kipling.
Being able to see a regular person in your life, whose flaws you can see in real time, and whose work habits you can observe first hand, probably helps tremendously.
Though I know people who accomplish great things are, in many respects, regular people who still hate getting out of bed or cook shitty food or are petty and jealous of their friends or family or whatever, it is difficult to really imagine them as such. They always seem removed from regular life. But if you see from birth that they're just your father or your sister, and you knew them as people before you knew they were famous or even before they became famous, they might not seem so radically different from yourself. You wouldn't idolize them in the same way. And that might give you confidence to try.
And then, you know by growing up with them how hard they worked to accomplish the great things they did, and if you decide your goal is to be great like them, you know the sacrifice required. You'll go into it clear eyed. I must imagine having the correct expectations makes a huge difference in whether or not you'll succeed.
0. Funny you didn't mention the Bachs or the Bernoullis.
1. Few of these families were amazingly rich, but they lived in a time when being comfortable, having access to higher education, etc., put you in the upper 5% (at least) - and, in all cases but the Tagores, we are talking about the upper 5% in one of the few countries that weren't poor.
2. Their upbringing varied, but unconscious or semi-conscious transmission of values and habitus may account for a fait bit more than being a Tiger parent or not. Of course that merges with the last point.
3. As other people have pointed out, you are cherry-picking examples! Return to the mean is the norm.
1. After another one or three hundred years, it would be nice to compare the number/kind of new great families to the great families discussed here. Thank you for bringing up the distinction between not amazingly rich and relatively upper class/comfortable. The class standings combined with far smaller population sizes and also families with greater numbers of children all lead me to believe there will be relatively fewer great families in the future than there have been in the past.
If only 1 / 1 million people has a Nobel Prize or "writing Brave New World" level achievement, there shouldn't even be enough cases like this to cherry-pick unless something is going on.
I’d guess that it’s a good deal more than 1/1 million.
If you look at the last two hundred years, there are about 15 billion people who have lived[0]. However, a quarter of those were women who grew up in situations that didn’t let them excel, about 7/8 were in poor countries or the Soviet Union, and 1/2 were too poor in wealthy countries (generously, everyone today in a developed country is wealthy enough while in the examples from the 1800s you had to be in the top 5% of wealth according to other comments). An eighth died before they were old enough to excel.
That brings the number down to about half a billion. There are 892 Nobel Laureates[1], probably a couple hundred authors on the level of Huxley (looking at famous book lists, I’m about as impressed by #200), a hundred artists, 44 US presidents, 43 UK prime ministers, and that’s not even accounting for all of the people like any of the Darwins, half of the Huxleys, most of the Tagores, any of the Dysons, the business tycoons, military leaders, governors of states, or the leadership of other countries. Once you factor all of those in, there are at least ten thousand people you could have listed. Adding in the Olympic athletes and sports stars brings you up into the hundreds of thousands range (10,305 people competed in Tokyo 2020 alone[2])!
That gets the statistic down to less than 1 in a hundred thousand people, or less than 1 in ten thousand including athletes, at which point cherry picking becomes much more plausible.
Maybe there’s still an effect, but it’s a much much weaker effect.
I don't agree with your definition of 'excel'. Women certainly excelled at all sorts of things, just different things to those that men could excel in.
I completely agree that women can and have excelled, both in the ways that men do and in other ways. There’s no barriers holding them back other than the ones placed there by society. However, those societal barriers meant that many women excelled in the past in ways that didn’t meet whatever definition Scott was using in this post. The only women from before the 1950s were Marie Curie, and Curie’s descendants, and after the 1950s it only added Esther Dyson and Joanna Newsom My statement was saying that out of the women who lived in the past two hundred years, half of them weren’t able to excel in ways that would make it to this post, but actually under Scott’s definition there were only 6 women compared to 37 men, so they were even more oppressed than I had originally calculated!
(There were also women who married men who were in the post, but I didn’t count those because Scott wasn’t including them in the first section of the post. Obviously many of those men couldn’t have done what they did without the support of those wives or mothers.)
The relevant definition of "excel" is "excel in a manner that will be highly legible across generations", and for a long time men did mostly monopolize the most common ways of doing that. And that is "most" and "mostly", rather than a 100% rule, but still. If Bob is the best scientist of the era and his wife Alice is the best ballroom dancer of her era, then both have excelled but probably only Bob gets a wikipedia page 200 years later. It may note that his wife was renowned for her dancing.
Why do you exclude the Soviet Union though? This might add a level of difficulty and/or random "sorry, your field is now bourgeois pseudoscience, bye" but there were still plenty of people with internationally recognized accomplishments, including Nobel laureates. Just the world chess champions is I think an achievement close to the level we're talking about.
I was excluding the Soviet Union because all of the people that were discussed in this post were from the US, Western Europe, or India. If Scott had mentioned people from the Soviet Union, I would’ve included them in this count.
I entirely agree that many people in the Soviet Union did excel, and a few of them were famous even in America (Yuri Gargarin could’ve made the post, or a Soviet premiere). Unfortunately the language and cultural barriers mean that Americans aren’t as aware of them, to the detriment of Americans.
I'm pretty sure people from India have lower chance to become Nobel laureates than Soviet citizens. I don't understand the cultural barriers argument, you did include Nobel laureates and there are 4 Soviet citizens (plus immigrant Ivan Bunin and Soviet-born Svetlana Alexievich) just in literature.
The cultural barriers argument is that Scott only listed people in the article who are either quite famous among Americans (Marie Curie, Charles Darwin), or their relatives, or the one example of an Indian family that Scott hadn’t heard of prior to writing the post and presumably included by intentionally searching for famous non-American/European families. Cultural barriers mean that people born in the USSR or in China (or even in relatively-Western Japan or South America) won’t be famous enough *among Americans* for Scott to decide to list them in this article.
I have no idea if Svetlana Alexievich has famous relatives, but they weren’t up for inclusion in this post by default.
I was overly zealous in including those people in the numerator but not the denominator, but I don’t think it significantly changes the results since Americans and Western Europeans are disproportionately selected as Nobel laureates and similar things because of American cultural domination.
"Nobel Prize" is a reasonably narrow and measurable category, but the categories included here include politics (without which the Poincare example doesn't seem remarkable), Olympic sports, writing (aside from Nobel laureates), business and some variation on "distinguished scientist/academic". I think when all these categories are allowed for, having 4-5 examples (I think Poincare, Newsom and Dyson are borderline) over about 150 years, while limited (at least for much of modern history) to relatively privileged families, 1/1 million doesn't sound right at all. And the family relations include grandparents, people who married in and cousins (distant and otherwise), each of which has some bearing on the suggested mechanisms.
I'd be very surprised if the correlation between math and musical ability isn't much higher than that. Rhythms and time signatures have an obvious connection to math. The same with chords and scales. And composing counterpoint or even a cantus firmus is almost algorithmic in nature.
Yes, there is a high correlation. I wonder if this might explain why there's more well-regarded electronic music than electronic art? Stockhausen pushed the boundaries of sound electronically around the same time Jackson Pollock was doing it on tried-and-true canvas. Modern film scores be much less interesting without technological assistance ranging from synthesizers to SMTPE. That last thought leads me to wonder if filmmakers are good at math too.
Did any of these families have adopted children who performed well above average? Obviously adopted children whose progenitors were also very accomplished wouldn't reveal anything about this "nature/nurture" question. Also, did any of these very accomplished individuals marry people who were simply attractive and personable rather then talented?
It's also not that they randomly became emperor. But maybe that's the key in general. If your father is literally Charles Darwin, how much more likley are people to take your wierd scientific theories seriously?
I think anvlex's point is that Augustus was a *good* emperor, not just an emperor... But then again Caligula and Nero were adopted too, so while an improvement over just leaving the throne to your biological kid it's still not a silver bullet
They're related enough that they'd have been part of the same family in this analysis even without the adoption, so IMO does not count in the context of nature vs nurture
You left out Josiah Wedgwood's greatest claim to immortality. "A prominent abolitionist fighting slavery, Wedgwood is remembered too for his Am I Not a Man And a Brother? anti-slavery medallion." wikipedia
Indeed and he gave one of the medallions to Benjamin Franklin who was an honorary member of the lunar society. JW was much more of a scientist than businessman. He invented the pyrometer (first thermometer to measure heat in kilns) and his experimental techniques had a profound influence on his grandson. Josiah II also convinced Robert Darwin (and funded) to let Charles go on the Beagle voyage
And Josiah pere was a pioneer in the movement. A passionate and interesting history of the early years of the abolitionist movement in Britain is "Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves" by Adam Hochschild
Now the irony. the FP began with the Huxley Family. Aldous' grandfather was Thomas, who was called Darwin's bulldog because of his advocacy for the theory of evolution.
Thomas's opponent in the early debates was an English Bishop, Samuel Wilberforce, who was William's son. Samuel was like his father a committed opponent of slavery. There abolitionists on both sides of the evolution debate.
Apparently it was misattributed to Tagore. Imran Khan (Pakistani PM) got into trouble claiming it to be Khalil Gibran's, media tried to "school" him that it was Tagore's, but apparently both were wrong, and it is adapted from the work of Ellen Sturgis Hooper.
Is there an original dated reference for that? I like the quote and would like to get it right. (Though I would have guessed that it was a Sufi saying in the absence of all other information).
“ I think most of these people are doing better than IQ 150. I don’t know if Charles Darwin can find someone exactly as intelligent as he is, but let’s say IQ 145. And let’s say that instead of having one kid, they have 10. Now the average kid is 129, but the smartest of ten is 147”
I don’t think the highest IQ of the parent’s IQ is the highest bound of the children’s IQ, though, even when above average, If that is what is being implied here.
Two parents with IQ of 120, could produce a 130,140, 150 just as they could produce a 110,100, or 90.
How much of this is selection bias? I'm sure there are thousands of famous people who do not have famous family members. I'm not sure any meaningful conclusions can be drawn from picking out a few similar families and ignoring all the others.
You didn't mention music, but families of musicians are common. There many many Bachs.
In today's paper there was an interview with Billy Joel (sorry can't link Gannet papers):
Q: I’ve been to a few of your shows when [your daughter] Della Rose has come out on stage. Do you think she has some musical genes, like Alexa Ray (Joel’s 35-year-old daughter with ex-wife Christie Brinkley)?
Joel: Yeah, I believe it must be inherited. Alexa has it; she’s a good pianist and songwriter. But Della, who is 6, learned on her own by going to the piano and playing “The Planets” by (composer) Gustav Holst. She plays the “Jupiter” theme, picks it out note by note. It was on this kids show, “Bluey,” and one of the kids was dreaming they were floating through space and they played “The Planets” (suite) and she went to the piano and picked it out, and I went, “Oh my God, another one.” Remy, the youngest, has already expressed an interest in learning to play at the piano, too. So, yeah, it’s going to be one of those families.
I think a lot of musical ability involves early training. Musician Rick Beato who has a you tube channel where he analyzes and discusses music sells an ear training program. Here is a video he did about nature and nurture in music training and ability:
A couple more families to ponder: The Wojcicki sisters, with Janet a professor at UCSF, Susan the CEO of YouTube, and Anne the founder of 23andme. Also the Emanuels, with Rahm former chief of staff to Obama, Ari the founder of the Endeavor talent agency (they own UFC now, among other things), and Ezekiel, an oncologist and academic.
I think there's mostly a high degree of selection bias here. You just don't hear about all the other families. The hero license concept also makes sense. Finally, I suppose there might be some tiger parent / family dinner table kind of effect, especially for siblings, but I bet it's relatively small. Shane Parrish did a podcast episode with the Wojcickis' mother that might be interesting.
I know one of them was married to one of the Google founders (who would later buy Youtube), and their relationship stemmed from the Google duo having Wojickis as landlords.
I have one adopted relative who followed a life-course very similar to what I've heard of the biological mother. But there are no siblings for comparison (which was part of the motivation for the adoption).
I think the Hero License may have a strong effect here: when I was picking a college to attend it never occurred to me to apply to Harvard, or Yale, or any prestigious college. Perhaps I wouldn't have been able to get in regardless (having never aimed for an Ivy, my extracurriculars were almost non-existent), but I didn't dismiss them because I thought I couldn't make it. I was one of the smartest kids at my high school, and I was a National Merit Scholar (the letter they sent me claimed I was in the 99th percentile of students my age nationwide, but beats me if that's accurate or impressive). I didn't even know that it was particularly hard to get into an Ivy because it wasn't anywhere on my radar in the first place. After I had already graduated and entered the job market I realized for the first time that for some people getting into an Ivy is a big deal, and that job prospect wise it really is a big deal (when I first learned that every Supreme Court justice attended Yale or Harvard I was genuinely surprised).
So, why wasn't it on my radar? I didn't have any familial role models who had gone to an Ivy. My mom went to a state university, my father went to a bible college. The most prestigious family member in my life was my grandfather who was an engineer for Boeing: he had attended the University of South Dakota, if I recall correctly (might have been University of Iowa). None of my family members have a doctorate of any kind. My mother was an elementary school teacher, Papa was the engineer, Grandma was a homemaker, my dad's dad was a failed entrepreneur/alchoholic and my other Grandma was an x-ray technician.
I've done some genealogical research recently, and I know all my ancestors out to the great-great-grandparent level. Picking at random, I'm descended from a mailman, an carpenter/machinist, a cannery worker, a sawmill worker, and a great many farmers. The further I dig back, the more farmers I find. Long story short, I don't see a single doctor or professor or scientist or philosopher anywhere. My people didn't aim that high, apparently.
I've never taken an IQ test, but based on SAT conversion I'm probably ~125+. And if I had decided to be a doctor nobody would have dissuaded me, but nobody was a role model for me in that respect either. People did encourage me to become an engineer like my grandpa, because they could see I was smart and good at math, but I wasn't interested (these days I often wish I had, financially). I wanted to be a college professor because I like reading books and teaching people, and I would have pursued that career if the market for it wasn't so terrible. Even then I wasn't planning on being a research type professor, I just wanted to teach college students.
I think close familial role models make a big deal in helping us define our options from a young age.
If you're white or asian, you probably couldn't have gotten into an Ivy on the things you've listed alone, but you almost certainly could have gotten into one of the top public schools or a prestigious liberal arts college.
It didn't even occur to me to try. I went to a private Christian college that wasn't too far from home. That seemed like the thing to do, probably because my parents met at a Christian college (my mother then went on to get her masters at a state university).
Strongly agree - it's only very recently in my life (I'm in my 30s) that the idea of trying to accomplish something beyond being moderately comfortable even occurred to me as a real possibility, and that's been as a result of a few lucky breaks with regards to career and mentorship, and just raw exposure to ambitious/successful people.
My family is peasants all the way back (my sister was the first person in my extended family to get a degree) and I grew up in a small town; the most aspirational option available growing up was doctor, which vaguely seemed like the thing the smart kids were doing a few years ahead of me.
One element which you highlight well here, and which I think is often misunderstood, isn't that I despaired of being able to attend [top educational institution] or [achieve career milestone] - these things literally just didn't occur to me as an option I could even try and fail at.
My experience is different but perhaps related in a way: growing up through high school, going to a top college like an Ivy *was* a big deal for me, my family, and others in my community. It was the norm for high achievers at my school to go to Ivy-league schools. However, I *didn't* know many people (including my parents) who went on to do academic research, and so I didn't realize until a year into graduate school that another Big Thing people aim for is doing research with a highly renowned professor. I just wanted to research something interesting and the prestige factor wasn't on my radar. I imagine that if I'd grown up with professors as parents, I would have seen working with a Nobel laureate as a much more real possibility and been more attuned to the opportunities that could open up.
Agreed - even just for small things. I thought office hours were for asking questions about the material (the textbooks and/or the internet were perfectly clear, so I didn't), and only realised towards the end that more switched-on students were using it to line up research opportunities, which an academic family would have obviously known (on the other hand, I'm personally thankful I didn't go into academia, so maybe it worked out...)
My impression is that famous high-achievers often have high-achieving collateral relatives. For instance, two of the most important American businessmen of the 1980s, Sam Walton (Walmart) and Michael Milken (junk bonds), were the sons of run-of-the-mill men but the nephews of tycoons. Walton's dad was a ne'er do well, but his uncle was a major regional player in retailing, so Walton's vast ambitions didn't come out of the blue. Milken's dad was merely an upper middle class accountant, but his uncle was a big shot.
Fascinating topic, although it strikes me that you went around the globe and back in time and only mentioned a handful of families. Of course there are more but without knowing how many it’s hard to think that a handful of families in all of human history can tell us much about anything.
With the large number of people on earth, random chance seems to indicate that some (especially large) families will have multiple exceptional people or at least people who excel in a notable way. Add in other advantages, like high intelligence and seed money from a rich patriarch, and it seems almost trivially true that some families will have multiple amazing people like the shared stories.
What would be interesting would be to determine if the rate of these families were higher than the chance of each individual among them randomly excelling.
After we consider genetics, plus nepotism, plus upbringing, plus the fact that the opportunity for high achievement in most of the past has been largely restricted to the rich/educated people in a few rich/educated countries, I actually come out of this surprised that there aren't more examples of super high achieving families.
You could just as easily write an article using the same families as an example of how structural advantage builds on itself. Or you could go to the other political pole and use the same approach (and mostly different families) to justify how aristocracies are both natural and morally correct.
It's fun and interesting, but doesn't say much beyond that there are a few prominent dynasties that spring up in academics, in the same way that there are always a few in politics.
Anecdote: SpaceX's CEO is Elon Musk, who came from a rich family with privilege, etc, etc.
But SpaceX's (former) CTO of propulsion, who deserves a lot of the credit for the actual technical innovation at SpaceX, was Tom Mueller, who grew up in Rural Idaho, and wanted to be a logger, just like his dad, as a kid. Eventually, he realized he had a talent for mechanics, and changed his goal to be... an airplane mechanic. He tells this story (https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/25/tom-mueller-spacex-cto-who-makes-elon-musks-rockets-fly.html):
> Then in my first year in high school, my math teacher asked if I was going to be an engineer. I said no. He was astounded. He asked, "Do you want to be the guy who fixes the plane or the guy who designs it?" If it hadn’t been for that math teacher, I probably would have been a mechanic or a logger
I think that story meshes well with the "Hero License" hypothesis.
Paul Graham has an interesting blog post (or tweet?) about how one of the highest impact things anyone can do is to encourage a promising young person to set his/her sights higher.
The last one seems right to me. I come from a "moderately great family" (one Nobel prize, one famous politician, one founder of well known movement, other minor notables), and I'm very aware of a social expectation in my family that normal goals like "having a good career" or "making a lot of money" aren't really acceptable. Success means doing something novel and important.
The flip-side of this is that it can be really emotionally hard when I feel I'm not on a potential path to greatness, and I think it's been hard on other family members who haven't met expectations.
I can also see the connection to sports. I got good enough at a sport that a coach wanted me to go for the olympics, but I did it by wrecking my body. I don't think I'm particularly physically gifted, but I was maybe more willing to tear myself apart in pursuit of something that looked like possible greatness.
I tend to think that certain people are more inclined to try hard on an IQ test, and these same people will likely try hard to do important seeming things like writing a great novel or solving deep problems in science. Sure, lots of people would never think of themselves as the sort of people who do Great Things. Perhaps even more people, when faced with the choice of living an unremarkable life, or one dedicated to a struggle towards achieving a Great Thing, would choose the former.
Some other potential factors, in no particular order:
1. A "cutting edge" effect. Remarkable work in any field is done at the cutting edge of that field. Exposure to the most recent discoveries is a crucial ingredient in any further success. This may even apply across widely separated disciplines—e.g., philosophy taking inspiration from new frames in science, etc. Cutting-edge work can take a while to percolate through society—decades, easily. But the children of cutting-edge researchers will have much more direct access. Curie's Cooperative was probably covering radiation long before even very good French schools were, giving its students a leg up. Even without such formal institutions, dinner table discussions could provide the same benefit.
2. A "credibility" effect. If someone comes up to you and says "I have a revolutionary new idea that will transform science" you may scoff. If they say ". . . and I'm Charles Darwin's kid," they get another chance. More positive external feedback loops could encourage breakthrough work in all sorts of ways.
3. Network effects. This is perhaps the most obvious one, falling under "privilege" above, but deserves to be called out separately. If my parents are famous composers and I'm an aspiring painter, well, there's probably a gallerist they can put me in touch with. Etc. etc. The more striking the achievement, the more cross-disciplinary the network.
Among great composers, which is a pretty objective list, a large fraction are the son of professional musicians (Mozart, Beethoven) and a large fraction are the sons of bourgeois parents who wanted them to study for the bar (Wagner, Stravinsky).
> And the second problem is: what gene do we think Niels and Harald Bohr shared that made one of them a physics Nobelist and the other an Olympic athlete?
Niels Bohr was a goalkeeper on the same top club team (AB) as his brother but left after a season:
"According to AB, in a match against the German side Mittweida, one of the Germans launched a long shot and the physicist leaning against the post did not react, missing an easy save. After the game he admitted to his team-mates his thoughts had been on a mathematical problem that was of more interest to him than the game. He only played for the 1905 season."
Surely he is the only Nobel winner to play for a top level soccer team, although the article notes that Camus played for the University of Algiers, but I'm not sure how top level that is or was in 1930.
>> Sometimes they become politicians, another job which benefits from lots of name recognition.
Warren Buffett ran the other way - his father was a Congressman, while one of his sons is apparently an award winning musician and composer. Buffett himself publicly subscribes to the Hero License theory - he has two sisters who he says are just as smart but were never encouraged the same way he was.
Historical nitpick: Erasmus Darwin was not the founder of the Lunar Society, although he was a key member. The Lunar Society was very informal and didn't really have a single founder, but if I *had* to pick one, it would probably be William Small, or maybe Matthew Boulton. (I'm basing this claim on having read several books worth of the correspondence of Boulton and Watt, who were both Lunar Society members.)
> But also, Margaret Darwin (Charles’ grandson) married John Maynard Keynes’ brother Geoffrey Keynes (himself no slacker; he pioneered blood transfusion in Britain).
Either this is a man named Margaret getting gay married (which would be pretty interesting) or this should be "Charles' granddaughter"
"what gene do we think Niels and Harald Bohr shared that made one of them a physics Nobelist and the other an Olympic athlete? " Low genetic load. They both could have had a relatively small number of harmful mutations that decreased how well their bodies and brains performed.
To the last question: I have written some fairly popular short stories, erased myself from the Internet, started again and become popular again so I know the popularity wasn’t purely chance. I’ve also wondered why I do it as I also genuinely don’t think of myself as a writer and find the whole thing somewhat embarrassing. I refuse to discuss it in my real life and change the subject as quickly as possible if it happens to come up. Even though I’ve had people cry when meeting me and met romantic partners based on this skill alone, I think of it more like having irritable bowel syndrome than a talent. It’s just medically something that I have to sometimes deal with that I’d rather not focus on in polite conversation. My father can barely read and my mother probably hasn’t read anything since high school. No one else in my direct sphere had any interest in it. My father did show an active dislike in it when I was young which as I’ve grown older I’ve started to wonder at that as my primary motivation. Any chance the hero license comes from the wanting to piss off your father license?
Why do you disassociate yourself from your writing so? Why not share it in real life, talk about it if the topic comes up, perhaps even pursue it professionally, insofar as short stories can earn any revenue?
"Have you, dear reader, ever tried writing poetry that will set the collective soul of your nation on fire?"
In Book 4 of his Odes, Horace wrote:
Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona
multi; sed omnes inlacrimabiles
urgentur ignotique longa
nocte, carent quia vate sacro.
meaning approximately:
Many strong men lived before Agamemnon;
But all are unwept and unknown,
Thrust into an endless night,
Lacking a sacred bard.
Byron quoted this at the beginning of his mock epic Don Juan, but reversed the meaning. Byron himself had the skills to be a sacred bard, and knew it - but where was his Agamemnon? Who could he write about that he wouldn't have some reservations over? Earlier in life, his writings made it clear that he wanted to write an epic sincerely...but between the tragedies in his life that weren't his fault and the ones which were entirely his fault, he'd lost his youthful optimism, and now was stuck with skills he could no longer use the way he'd originally intended. And moreover, he became convinced that *nobody* could write a sincere epic anybody, that these modern times (the early 1800s) were just too progressed for epics to work anymore, or for people to take them seriously. So instead, he took a classic villain, Don Juan, and made Juan into a satiric and misunderstood hero, so that he would have something and someone to sing about.
A century later, GK Chesterton wrote a completely sincere epic about a different man named Don Juan, in what might be a coincidence.
But a century after that, and Byron's original premonition has at last come true. I've tried it, and found that it is *shockingly* difficult to write sincere poetry in English. The mechanics are easy enough to learn - the Internet can provide examples of anything, you could see iambic monometer poems if you wanted - but poetry that is both modern and not comedic brings with it a level of cringe that is very difficult to overcome. The most popular form of poem (poem, not song, since music has split off from poetry like Spanish from Latin) in English is the limerick, and even poetic forms which weren't originally comedic have become so in the present day.
The haiku is a good example of this. An English haiku has one official rule and one unofficial convention. The official rule is that the syllables have to be 5-7-5. The unofficial convention is that it has to be either anticlimactic or crude (though not usually both). So a standard English haiku about Tagore's early life, from the Wikipedia excerpt you posted, might go something like this:
Never left his mansion,
And took long treks through hills - wait.
Contradiction here?
But a Japanese haiku has extra requirements on top of these: there must be a kiregi, meaning a "cutting word" that makes what came before a complete thought, and there must be a kigo (an image of nature), and this image of nature must reference the season. A poem about Tagore's early life with those extra requirements would look something like this:
My house, a thicket,
Stifling me and growing strong
From Indian summer.
And that just sounds weird, or at the very least pretentious, while the first one feels - if not good, at least normal, and not cringe.
Haikus aren't the only example; the only original sonnets I've seen online in the past five years are from Pop Sonnets, a website which for a while posted one pop song per week rewritten into perfect Shakespearean iambic pentameter, and the author, Erik Didriksen, mentioned specifically that his goal was to be funny, that "not all of them lend themselves to obvious comedy, but I think the ones that work the best are the ones that are obviously clashing in the modern lyrics and the anachronism of the Shakespearean sonnet". A good example is his adaptation of The Who's "Pinball Wizard" (and if you haven't heard that song, I recommend listening to it first, to get some idea of the background):
From London-town to Brighton's shores I've trekk'd
to test my dext'rous skills in each arcade,
and naught I've seen could make me e'er expect
to see the prowess Tommy hath display'd.
Like Grecian marbles, he unmoving stands
before the table, saying not a word,
for naught but intuition guides his hands:
he never hat the cab'net seen or heard.
No sight hath he, nor any means to hear -
how do his flipper fingers aim so true?
I'll crown this wizard king and disappear;
my name forgotten, I'll be known as "who?"
-To watch him play shall shurely thee enthrall,
for lo! The kid doth play a mean pinball!
This works fantastically for Erik's purpose, but it only works because of how funny it is to have somebody who sounds like Shakespeare talking about things like pinball cabinets. Let me try to do one, but without the humor of anachronism - I'll take the first verse and start of the chorus of Rachel Platen's "Fight Song", since the imagery there is reasonably timeless.
A modest ocean-going vessel toss'd
by mighty waves retaliates in kind.
A single phrase voiced to a heart of frost
may spark the love for which it was designed.
A cannonade I could myself begin,
and fuses light with but a twig aflame,
And all would hear the echoes of its din,
though naught but I would know from whence it came.
My inner thoughts, forever unexpress'd,
like batt'ring rams beseige my inner peace.
But mute no more, this night I shall not rest,
And all will hear me 'ere my song shall cease.
Though all around lack faith in me, I write.
These verses are the sword with which I fight.
It's cringe. It was cringe to write and it's cringe to read; I can't blame anyone who's ever deleted his old poetry on the grounds of not being able to bear it. Forget writing poetry that will set the collective soul of one's nation afire - writing poetry that even mentions setting things afire in a heartfelt way is really, really tough.
I think that "cringe" is the modern day's inheritance from the cynical and nihilistic pop culture of the 90's/00's. Nothing matters, everything is a joke, that sort of thing. To take something seriously, to love it honestly, to enjoy it unironically, is to go against the Zeitgeist. And I say, all power to the hero who can defeat the spirit of the age.
So for my part, when I feel "cringe" I rebuke it. It comes from a childish fear of being mocked. You can't write good poetry without honesty.
You're very kind - and your approach to the concept of cringe is fascinating. I do think we're better off now than we were in the 90s and 00s with respect to sincerity in art; there are plenty of other cultural issues, but the nihilism at least seems to have gone down a few notches since then.
Having thought about it a bit longer, I think that we have come to call the phenomena "cringe" is telling. On the surface it indicates something so embarrassing that it causes us to cringe in social pain at seeing it. But I think much more than that we cringe because we fear being struck: we are recoiling from the blow we believe is coming. If it is someone else's work that is "cringe" we cringe so that others will not mistake us as being associated with the work, and thus worthy of their blows. If it is our own work, we cringe in the hopes of mitigating the damage when the blow strikes. In any case, it is fear.
Take your Fight Song poem: wouldn't it be better to simply ask if it is bad or good, then whether it is cringe? I'm currently working on quasi-epic poem in iambic pentameter about the lifecycle of wasps: I'm sure a lot of people would consider it cringe. I'm more concerned about whether it's good, and if so how to do better in the future.
"I'm currently working on quasi-epic poem in iambic pentameter about the lifecycle of wasps: I'm sure a lot of people would consider it cringe. I'm more concerned about whether it's good, and if so how to do better in the future."
I can't speak for anybody else, but I'm intrigued by this premise for a poem; if this comment section is still open when you finish, do post it here.
Well after standing up for radical bravery in the arts I can hardly say no, can I?
Funnily enough as I look over what I have I keep thinking "This is so terrible. This is the worst." I'm cringing! But I meant what I said and I said what I meant, so if I do finish it I will post it here.
There's some very interesting societal analysis to be done here on "sincerity". There's this concept of the New Sincerity which I encountered in connection with My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic and the brony fandom: counterculturally appreciating a cheerful upbeat series whose primary target audience was little girls. Being a brony generally means abandoning any concept of "cringe" and just unironically enjoying things that are enjoyable.
The wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Sincerity describes a radio programme which "rejects irony, and particularly ironic appreciation of cultural products", which sounds like what you're describing.
I very much liked all this poetry, not cringe at all. I do find nearly all pop music "cringe", but have not heard Fight Song; perhaps if I had the association I would be less pleased with this version.
Also, the haiku didn't feel pretentious to me in the slightest. Rather, it felt simple and proper. Then again, my sister regularly insists that I am in fact quite pretentious.
I suppose my taste in poetry is somewhat unusual itself; my favorite poem is "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", by Eliot, yet I can stand no other of his serious works. Much of what I enjoy in poetry is clever use of words, to create pleasing sounds and rhythms, or to engage in wordplay.
Thank you again for the poetry, it was enjoyable to read!
But Byron also wanted to be his own Agamemnon by leading the military liberation of Greece from the Ottoman Empire. Paul Johnson's view (perhaps romantic) is that if Lord Byron hadn't died of fever at 36, he would have succeeded and been crowned first king of modern Greece.
Perhaps if he'd succeeded, he would finally have had a modern military hero to write about. But then, in order to succeed, the curse of everyone around him dying young would have had to not strike down his whole army.
An interesting hypothesis. I think you're on to something vis a vis the main cultural current, but while people aren't as open or loud in appreciating sincerity I think it is unironically appreciated by most people when they aren't playing a persona for the wider world - just because something is uncool does not mean it is unpopular
I was interested in the idea of the Hero Licence, so I followed the link. And of course, it's a sixteen thousand word self-aggrandising dialogue between Eliezer Yudkowsky and Eliezer Yudkowsky about how smart and wonderful Eliezer Yudkowsky is.
I didn't read the whole thing, but it got me thinking about the failure mode where you grant yourself _too much_ hero licence and never manage to back it up with achievements.
I'm sure I had read it before years ago, but I had a similar reaction and eventually just switched to doing a text search for "hero license" so as not to waste so much time.
I think the best mindset here is not believing that you will succeed, but that you might succeed. If you might achieve that implies you really have to try hard to make it happen. Related: Jeff Bezos told his investors that he had a 30% chance of success with Amazon.
As someone who does roughly the same job as my late father (without ever intending to end up in the same line of work) I tend to favor the theory that role modeling is a very strong factor in how kids tend to succeed in the same ways their parents succeeded. I stumbled into my father's former field with a lot of cultural and domain-relevant knowledge that has been of clear, obvious value in my career.
As a father trying to figure out how to give his 1 1/2 year-old son all the best opportunities in life (and also a bit about how to engineer in him the aptitude to actually capitalize on those opportunities) I've thought about making a study of great families quite a bit. It's pretty appropriate that you would opt for a Bene Gesserit as your thumbnail for this post as I believe part of what makes for greatness in these conditions is also family culture. Not every offspring of your Messiah-breeding program will pan out, but if it's family policy to train them all to survive the Gom Jabbar test from birth, you're going to have some history-makers.
Great houses have mottos for a reason, they've institutionalized what it means to be a "Vanderbilt" or a "Darwin" or a "Tagore". This provides a set of guiding principles which, even if they aren't totally effective, at the very least generate a kind of placebo effect that having a normal last name coming from an unremarkable family does not. That whole thing about how "a man must live by a code" even though most boys today have no idea what should be in their code or how to go about seriously living by one? That problem doesn't exist if all your uncles and grandparents and great grandparents set being a doctor, or winning a Nobel Prize, or pushing the limits of human achievement as the ultimate value. To be born a Bush is to be handed an identity at birth along with a set of guidelines for how to live it. You won't necessarily become president, but you have a far better chance than somebody whose only access consists of David McCullough books and Ken Burns docs.
Like any organization, you'll have members who rebel against these principles, many of whom wash out and are forgotten (hence why great families also seem more likely to have burnouts and early tragic deaths). Maybe some of them do their best to create an approximation of average and get to enjoy a normal life. And then there will be those who actively embrace the culture, get that the times change and the destination is more important than following the family footsteps exactly, and succeed. Belief isn't everything, but if it's your self-belief reaffirmed by everyone in your family and social circles, it probably makes a much bigger difference than we think.
To put it another way, imagine if society's conclusion after Roger Bannister ran the 4-minute mile was that it's much easier to do the impossible if you're a Bannister, and the Bannister family all believed this. Within a few generations, we'd have more record-breaking Bannisters than 99% of other families.
Or an other, other way: not everyone attains enlightenment, but being born and raised in a Buddhist monastery probably helps :)
Rather than any educational programs, perhaps your best goal for your son's future success is to engineer his potential friendship group, i.e. make sure the other boys with whom he naturally hangs out are reasonable and sensible people with strong life guidance behind them. My observation is that the largest risk factor for the lives of young men going astray are falling in with the wrong peer group at a vulnerable age. You go off into drugs, petty criminality, or just slackerhood at the wrong age and seems very difficult to recover in less than a decade or so, perhaps because of the changes made to the young plastic brain when it is setting up its adult furnishings, and some futures are pretty much closed off for good, given modern tendencies towards judgmentalism, particularly of the typical errors of the young male.
It's passe in this day and age to think that your social milieu is tremendously influential and can be so in a very positive way -- we all like to think, apparently, that we arrive at our adult values and habits through pure personal decision arrived at from only deep introspection, and our biggest problem is sustaining idiosyncrasies in the face of ignorant prejudice -- which is perhaps a harmless delusion in young adulthood (>25 for males), but arguably deeply destructive for younger boys, circa 10-15. I think these little guys really need sturdy social reinforcement and good peer (and slightly older) models to thrive.
So I think there's real value in some of those social institutions of yore like sports and service clubs, the Boy Scouts or equivalent, et cetera -- as well as churches, if your own philosophy runs that way -- and putting him in the right schools. It's difficult and ethically undesirable to try to control exactly who he chooses as friends, but at least you can try to ensure most of the choices on easy offer are other young people with sound moral compasses.
I think about one of my best friends from boyhood, who never made it to his 30s. After we parted ways to attend different high schools, he fell into drugs and criminality while those options just weren't readily available at mine. Parental guidance also plays a huge part no doubt but I always think about what might have happened had we stayed tight friends. Would I have done what he did? Would he have kept on a straighter, narrower path? We'll never know. He died some years after I'd moved away from our home town and I couldn't attend his funeral. Not sure what happened, only that it was tragic.
I believe what boys need more than anything in this era are endurance and strategy. Call it grit if you want, but most of us lack patience and foresight, having been conditioned to look for fast fixes and clear easy wins. Thus surrounding children with people who can show them how to make plans and stick to them is vital.
For that reason, I'm thinking of enrolling him in Jiu-Jitsu when he's old enough. The church is important too because even if the Christian God isn't real, the values and community imparted by his church definitely are.
Yup, fully agree with you there. It's a rough time to be a boy, and building gumption and grit is critical. You can't lecture someone into that, either, it only comes from trying, failing, getting up and trying again, winning. Oblig Youtube:
For example, Jeb's son George P. Bush isn't a God-given political talent, but, still, he managed to navigate the difficult Trump years without wrecking his prospects, which speaks well of his political skills. The chance he will be elected president in, say, 2036 or 2040 is very small but not zero.
Could test the hypothesis of environmental vs genetic for greatness by looking at adopted children of Nobel prize winners vs natural children. But we have already done that analysis for n=large regular folks and it seems achievement is mostly genetic and some X factor we don’t understand, but it’s definitely not parenting. Why would this be different for very eminent families?
You might think that "achievement" of the sort measured in large n studies of regular people is a different sort of thing than "achievement" of the sort being discussed here. (I don't mean to claim that it *is* qualitatively different, but I see the case one might try to make that it is.)
I've heard "genetics plus some X factor we don't understand but definitely not parenting" as the explanatory factors for IQ, but are you sure it holds for achievement?
So there are two elements to this, first is whether attainment has a genetic component in normal people not just great families, in the above post Scott does assume this for IQ but has recently provided data on a number of other factors https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/non-cognitive-skills-for-educational.
He provided data on how household income correlated with genetics. This is what I mean by attainment in “regular” folks.
On the second point of parenting not making a difference to children’s outcomes the original go to source is Judith Rich Harris, she wrote a bunch of books but the
“Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do” is probably a good one too start with. Steven Pinker also has written on this. Both of them rely on separated identical twin studies where twins were adopted into different families and outcomes are compared with natural children.
Strange that you didn't include the Galton quote. After all, this blogpost is a kind of tribute to his book that did much the same thing you did. Here it is:
"In statesmanship, generalship, literature, science, poetry, art, just the same enormous differences are found between man and man; and numerous instances recorded in this book, will show in how small degree, eminence, either in these or any other class of intellectual powers, can be considered as due to purely special powers. They are rather to be considered in those instances as the result of concentrated efforts, made by men who are widely gifted. People lay too much stress on apparent specialities, thinking overrashly that, because a man is devoted to some particular pursuit, he could not possibly have succeeded in anything else. They might just as well say that, because a youth had fallen desperately in love with a brunette, he could not possibly have fallen in love with a blonde. He may or may not have more natural liking for the former type of beauty than the latter, but it is as probable as not that the affair was mainly or wholly due to a general amorousness of disposition. It is just the same with special pursuits. A gifted man is often capricious and fickle before he selects his occupation, but when it has been chosen, he devotes himself to it with a truly passionate ardour. After a man of genius has selected his hobby, and so adapted himself to it as to seem unfitted for any other occupation in life, and to be possessed of but one special aptitude, I often notice, with admiration, how well he bears himself when circumstances suddenly thrust him into a strange position."
A little error in the statistics of the Swedish cognitive scores table. IQ is normally mean 100, SD 15. So if a test is mean 5, SD 3, then it requires a score of 8 to be equivalent to IQ 115 and 11 to be equivalent to IQ 130.
Not all IQ tests use SD 15, which is very irritating. Thus, someone’s IQ is only meaningful if they can tell you what test it was taken on and if that test is a properly validated test. Personally, I trust the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS-IV) as it’s got the most research behind it and is probably most widely used in the US and U.K. I’ve probably assessed about 50 people with it over the years. On an SD 15 scale, it really only makes sense up to IQ 145 because at that point you’re 3xSDs above the mean and ever increasing scores would be capturing a tinier and tinier fraction of the population. Consider that there’s only 2% of the population that are <70 IQ on this scale (typically learning disabled) and 2% that are >130 (98th percentile and upwards).
I have a famous highly successful grandfather (similar in achievement to many of the examples in this post), and test high on IQ -- but have nowhere near the level of achievement that he did. I'm doing fine (top ~.1% income) but I'm not likely to have a Wikipedia page based on my personal achievements, as opposed to things related to the family.
There are 9 in my generation, and none of us has done something really extraordinary. I don't know the IQs of my cousins but they're a smart bunch, with lots of elite universities and graduate degrees.
So there's clearly another factor besides (a) fame and resources, and (b) IQ.
To me, it feels like something you might call "drive". For whatever reason (cultural?), my parents' generation chose not to push us extremely hard, and none of us had the level of drive/internal motivation that my grandfather did. I should in theory have gotten it from both sides, from my grandfather through my mother, and from my father who earned his own Wikipedia page while coming from a middle class background.
But in fact I merely have a successful tech career. Not extraordinary -- I see many around me who have done better at a younger age than I. In my case, I think the level of privilege and wealth we have was pretty demotivating. If I don't have to work to be comfortable, why should I? It took me a decade or so to come to an answer to that question (work is a lot more fulfilling than a life of leisure). A decade is a pretty big chunk of time to not make progress.
So maybe the answer to why some families are dynastic is in part extreme motivation. Motivation can be external (tiger mom or just generally very high expectations) or internal. Families that have the right genetics or culture can create levels of drive that, combined with the right abilities and access to resources, propel the family scions with potential to realize it.
I think most people don't realize their full potential. I certainly haven't. I think some thoughts around potential are required to have a full story about dynastic family achievement.
I think another factor here is that opportunity for "greatness" is not evenly distributed.
If you were a genius born to an elite family in the Belgian congo circa 1880 or so, then your chances of becoming a nobel prize winner were more or less zero regardless of talent, drive, etc. The best you could hope for would be to be the most senior underling in the rubber plantation. A similarly-talented child from an elite Belgian family, however, was at a historical high point in terms of their likelihood to attain this form of greatness.
Fast-forward to today, and your elite family is now competing on a much more level playing field against up-and-coming families from across the developed and developing world. All of you may be just as smart and driven as your grandfather was - he just happened to be smart and driven in a space where there was relatively a lot more opportunity for whatever form of greatness you're referring to.
Your full potential is simply the fullest expression of your abilities and skills in the environment you find yourself in.
Mr. Orr's grandfather is, arguably, the key figure in the history of Silicon Valley. I got one of his grandfather's firm's calculators as a high school graduation present 45 years ago and it was the best present I ever received.
If Mr. Orr is in or near the top 0.1% by income -- that's millions of dollars a year - then he has plenty of drive - he's simply chosen to apply it to something other than the traits that get you a Wikipedia page. I'd also rather be rich than famous, although leaving an intellectual legacy is on my bucket list too.
IDK, .1% in one in a thousand. Elsewhere in the comments someone estimated that one in ten thousand people has a wikipedia page worldwide, and the rate is surely higher than that in the US.
So I think being profiled in Wikipedia is quite a bit more impressive. YMMV, of course.
I'm not sure what to take from this article other than "If you cherry pick from the whole population of smart or famous people especially Nobel prize winners, you can find a subset who are related."
As Daniel Seligman pointed out three decades ago, 5% of hard science Nobel Laureates going to children of the very small number of Nobel Laureates is hugely disproportional to random luck.
Why would it be random? The two cases that come immediately to mind are the Braggs and the Curies, and in both cases parent and child worked closely together.
All these factors are in play but the fact is that most Nobel prize winners don’t have Nobel prize winning children. Can you quantify just how much parentage improves their odds compared to the general population?
Just thinking of Nobel prizes, there are two more relevant families to consider:
Jan Tinbergen won the first Nobel prize in Economics in 1969, and his brother Niko Tinbergen won the Nobel in medicine in 1973. (Both of them working on topics relevant to this blog, about individual and group behavior in economics and ecology.) Their brother Luuk Tinbergen committed suicide at a somewhat young age, but had two children that are both moderately prominent ecologists.
Another relevant family that doesn't have the heredity explanation - Gunnar Myrdal won the Economics Nobel in 1974 (partly for work that influenced the US Supreme Court in Brown v Board of Education), and his wife Alva Myrdal won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1982 (the only married couple to win separate Nobels). Their daughter, Sissela, is a moderately known philosopher, who married the President of Harvard, Derek Bok. Their daughter Hilary Bok is another philosopher, who also had a bit of fame with the political blog Obsidian Wings a decade or so ago.
A Charles Darwin grandson you did not mention was Bernard Darwin, generally regarded as the best golf writer who ever lived, an excellent amateur golfer, and authority on Charles Dickens. Perhaps he represents a regression towards the mean, but still.
Right. As a prose stylist, Charles Darwin's grandson Bernard Darwin was close to P.G. Wodehouse in quality.
Interestingly, the anonymous author of the giant 1844 bestseller propounding evolutionary theory Vestiges of Natural Creation, Robert Chambers, was a fanatical golfer who'd written his evolutionary tract while living in St. Andrew's and playing the Old Course daily. A century later, the descendants of Darwin and Chambers collaborated on a history of golf that utilized the golf course at St. Andrew's as the exemplification of evolution in action.
Am I the only person triggered by the phrase "theory of evolution?" Darwin's theory was natural selection, which explained how and why evolution happened. Evolution isn't a theory, it's a fact. "The theory explaining evolution" would be correct, as would "theory of natural selection," but "theory of evolution" just grates.
Also, as a matter of social justice, if you can't become a dolphin, you still have the RIGHT to become a dolphin.
" "The theory explaining evolution" would be correct"
Well, yeah, and that's called "theory of evolution" in short. Gravity is an observed fact too (and for that matter natural selection) but we still speak of "theory of gravity".
I need to point out that my father quite literally worked in a bog and I held the record low score on a Golden Tee machine in my local bar in the late 1990s.
Fascinating. I love the concept of a "hero license." That applied to Winston Churchill. But I wonder how often a hero license overcomes the downsides of being the child of a genius. I recently read "The Magician," Colm Toibin's wonderful novelistic biography of Thomas Mann. It was a a cautionary tale of life loved for his art at great sacrifice for family, among other things.
'I had the feeling of being on a microscopic plate, with these six enormous eyepieces goggling down on me. I was my parent's precious child, and I was never left alone, because they lost the other nine through miscarriages- they had an Rh problem. I was a classic example of the 'Hartley Coleridge bind' which makes children of high achievers so lucrative to psychologists.' Alice Sheldon, aka as James Tiptree Junior, daughter of famous explorer and writer Herbert Bradley and Mary Bradley, author of thirty-five books. So yes, 'you are the lesser son of a great man' has form.
But in one of Freeman Dyson's books there's a passing career tip to the effect that when you are one of the first to explore a new scientific field, you should go ahead and write the first textbook- good career move, pays off later. Dyson grants license.
that quote really makes it sound like being the only survivor of 10 pregnancies is far more significant that the careers of the parents - it's easy to imagine a perfectly average middle class family becoming obsessive after that
"It seems weird to think of “genius” as a career you can aim for. But maybe if your dad is Charles Darwin, you don’t just go into science. You also start making lots of big theories, speculating about lots of stuff. The fact that something is an unsolved problem doesn’t scare you; trying to solve the biggest unsolved problems is just what normal people do. Maybe if your dad founded a religion, and everyone else you know is named Somethingdranath Tagore and has accomplished amazing things, you start trying to write poetry to set the collective soul of your nation on fire.
Have you, dear reader, ever tried writing poetry that will set the collective soul of your nation on fire? If no, why not? And does that fully explain why Rabindranath Tagore succeeded at this and you didn’t?"
For inscrutable personal reasons, I refer to this phenomenon (specifically the not seeing 'doing great things' or even 'doing greater things than your parents' as possible not for any intrinsic reason but just because you haven't thought of it, and being a normie instead when you don't have to be) and many like it as "the Cabal". I have little to none of it and it *psyches me out so perpetually* how other people do and so don't write nation-soul-fire poetry. I think this specific prong of Cabalism clusters a fair bit with the other prongs of epistemic learned helplessness (which you do need some minimum of to avoid getting paralyzed every time you discover a new idea, but I am not at all sold on the arguments for levels above it) and with a weak internal fantasy life. Accordingly, it's unsurprising to see very little of it in people who seek out new ideas (even if they're total crackpots) and people who develop and display complex internal fantasies (even if they're terrible writers).
I think this ties in with competitive pessimism, where people treat errors of overoptimism as worse than (and particularly deserving more mockery than) errors of overpessimism. The 'hero license' is removed from the range of possibilities even further by the fact that even if you consider it in the first place, you'll be socially shamed out of rising above your station or having Cringe Ideas. (This is not to overcorrect to the common and damnable overcorrection that all ideas tagged as Cringe are actually being overlooked by interminable normies -- sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.)
Well said. I think "learned helplessness" really does sum it up. In my case in came from chronic physical illness more than societal conditioning, in that the constraints on my goals are very physical and real, but looking back I can also see all the times I was held back by people not being willing to see someone else break moulds and achieve great things, and I wonder if had I been healthy, would that have enabled me to fight back or would it merely have made my relative mediocrity that much more of a waste of potential?
I feel like teasing Scott for never having heard of Esther Dyson. I’m not sure whether her influence has declined since the nineties or if she has just succeeded in avoiding the spotlight more recently. I was never all that interested in the venture capital side of tech, but I knew who she wasback then. Maybe it was the gossip about Bill Gates angle that caught me, though if so, perhaps I am the one who should be embarrassed.
I knew of Esther Dyson was back in the 90s, but always thought of her as a canonical example of someone with a famous last name who hob nobbed in the right circles, but had never actually accomplished anything. She may well be very smart and and awesome person, but all of her CV line items follow naturally from famous last name plus wealth.
Jaron Lanier says that someday he's going to write a history of Silicon Valley to point out the crucial role played by intuitive women hosting salons who facilitated history by introducing various male nerds to each other.
I don't know if he was thinking of Esther Dyson, but that's the name that sprang to my mind.
Does Esther Dyson have inherited wealth? Both of her parents are academics. I'm sure she was brought up comfortably, but I don't know how she got to be a private investor. Maybe she did accomplish something.
I don't think there's much to be explained here but here's another interesting group:
Moses Mendelssohn was a philosopher called the "father of the Haskala" or Jewish enlightenment. I don't know how impressive he was as a philosopher, but he did beat out Kant for a big philosophy prize. Also, Kant was quoted as saying "Mendelssohn is an awesome-cool philosopher".
Moses' son Abraham doesn't seem to have done anything impressive except become very rich and host parties where all the cool people would hang out and Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn would play music.
Felix Mendelssohn was a legendary pianist and composer.
Fanny Mendelssohn was an extraordinary pianist and composer but also a woman: She was discouraged from devoting her energies to music and largely published under her brother's name.
Rebecka Mendelssohn may or may not have been a cool person, but she married Dirichlet, which is pretty cool. Dirichlet was very smart and very cool.
(There are other cool people like Paul and Kurt Hensel, Fanny's sons, but I don't know much about them. There's a Wikipedia page devoted to the family.)
My guess is that most of the intellectual dynasties of the last 100 years have been Ashkenazi. For example, the brilliant sabermetrician behind the 2016 Chicago Cubs baseball world championship, Theo Epstein, is the grandson of one of the Epstein Identical Twins who wrote the final draft of "Casablanca."
According to their joint story, the movie was already being filmed, but they hadn't yet worked out the ending. The key line would be what Captain Renault says after Rich shoots Major Strasser. But they were stumped. Suddenly, while driving down Sunset Blvd. they both simultaneously looked at each other and said the best line in Hollywood history: "Round up the usual suspects."
I don't actually believe that. I suspect one of them said it and they later agreed that both would take credit for it. After all, the Epsteins were wonderful at making stuff up.
Charles Darwin was an elite, lazy malcontent who got stuck on a world-spanning ship tour because he was from a rich family who needed to give him something to do to keep him busy. He was notably not even brought along on the HMS Beagle in a scientific capacity — he was just there so that the ship's other elite passengers would have someone to talk to. He wrote some personal notes about wildlife during his trip, but failed to publish anything of note for decades afterwards and faded into obscurity.
Alfred Russel Wallace, a commoner, did actual thorough legwork to prove the theory of evolution through natural selection. Upon realizing that a commoner might get credit for this theory, Darwin's elite friends cajoled him into writing up something that they could present as a finding alongside Wallace's. The elites then trumped up Darwin's involvement in the discovery of natural selection.
In the end, the elites won. Darwin gets remembered as a visionary genius, and bloggers now misinterpret his achievement as a result of anything other than being born an elite in a society that existed to intentionally propagate the supposed superiority of the elites over the commoners.
I'd venture to guess that status, rather than IQ, is a much better explanation for the phenomenon that Scott has identified.
Source: spent time in the Galapagos talking to naturalists who have spent considerable time studying Darwin's life.
Interestingly enough, amongst biologists Darwin's career is seen as setting something of a precedent in terms of needing a different sort of approach to make useful insights.
It is (or perhaps was, until the rise of big sequencing and bioinformatics) a scientific field where a person's insights and output actually improve as they age instead of declining. This is speculated (usually by older professors) to be a product of the sheer volume of information and experience you need to take in to produce useful synthesis.
This is also interesting as a contrast with physicists, who are known to say that if you haven't produced good work before 35 then your chances of ever doing so are slim. They also have a habit of deciding to solve biology for the poor, idiot workers in the field: usually coming in with a splash before engaging in useless model construction and epicycle-building.
For myself, I'd both agree with you and argue that Darwin's greatest strength was a certain broad-mindedness, as well as the patience needed to thoroughly chew over a problem before making any grand conclusions. Here having a rich, supportive family was obviously a massive advantage here. He certainly wasn't a genius in the sort of "lightning-fast insights from first principles" kind of way that a lot of people understand the term.
I don't think this argument can at all survive an acquaintance with the Origin of Species, which contains a wealth of data from a huge range of sources, gathered over a lifetime. "Not publishing" doesn't equal "not doing anything". Also, Darwin was extraordinarily careful to acknowledge a very large number of predecessors, including Darwin, in the intro to OoS. Also, Darwin was a commoner just as Wallace was. Perhaps you mean he was richer than Wallace.
"Darwin was extraordinarily careful to acknowledge a very large number of predecessors, including Darwin"
I'm assuming you meant to write "including Wallace", but I'm now imagining a time-travel story about an elderly Darwin going back in time and explaining natural selection to his younger self.
Alfred Russel Wallace was a great guy. But his ambitions, having grown up in family of declining wealth, were less ambitious than those of Darwin, so he was happy to accede to Darwin getting primary credit. It's not unreasonable that Darwin, who had been gnawing away at the idea since the late 1830s while Wallace wrote his solution off to Darwin in 1858 as soon as he came up with it, should get credit for it.
But Wallace was a tremendous contributor to science.
Others have already mentioned that Darwin made every effort to credit Wallace in the foreword to Origin, but Wallace more-or-less destroyed his own career later in life by veering toward a stubborn interest in the paranormal. Darwin eventually secured him a small pension, if I remember right, so I think it's unfair to suggest that Darwin was stealing credit for anything.
I think in addition to what has already been said in reply to this, there is a case to be made that Darwin probably suffered from chronic anxiety, perfectionism and procrastination. After his return from the beagle his behavior bears all of the hallmarks of this: he tried to create "the ideal working conditions" and almost decided not to get married based on how it would affect his work (he was worried about the "terrible loss of time" and travel constraints it meant for his research) (https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/tags/about-darwin/family-life/darwin-marriage). He finally proposed to his cousin he knew since childhood to avoid any romantic complications and settled down in the countryside because:
"I have so much more pleasure in direct observation, that I could not go on as Lyell does, correcting & adding up new information to old train & I do not see what line can be followed by man tied down to London.—
In country, experiment & observations on lower animals,—more space—"
He suffered from a mysterious illness that was triggered by stressful situations and "became increasingly reclusive, actually fitting a mirror outside the house, so that he could withdraw when visitors were coming around the corner." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_of_Charles_Darwin#Psychic_causation)
He collected more and more data through experiments on earth worms etc. for 17 years without making significant process in writing "The Origin of Species", although he had communicated most of his theory already to the scientific community in letters and conversations. Finally, upon Wallace publishing his results, he wrote up the book in 13 months while constantly sick needing permanent encouragement from his friends.
I think it is unfair to characterize this 20-year struggle as the behavior of a "lazy malcontent". As others have pointed out, he was well aware of not only the scientific but also the immense social, political and religious implications of the theory of evolution. This was work that had the potential to render him personally a societal outcast and cause political, social and religious strive at an enormous scale (which, arguably, it did!). He knew that if he got something wrong or even only communicated his findings in the wrong way, the consequences might be dire.
So you try and go ahead writing that damn book!
He had every reason to be out-of-his-mind anxious about it and a lesser person might have given up. But he persevered and eventually got it done. He was not a lazy elite good-for-nothing but a man who devoted his life to science and sacrificed his happiness and health over it.
This piece seems to confound "people who are famous" with "people who are highly skilled." Specifically, it doesn't allow that there might be highly skilled or respected families who were massively impactful but not all that well known. It ignores the idea that these families might be clustering because of a talent for self-promotion which can be sustained by average intelligence types.
Further, a famous family in the sciences not only has access to a great deal of institutional prestige, resources related to that profession, a cultivating home environment, etc but also a legacy which even mediocre people can maintain. There's plenty of people in those families who did okay but not great, enough they were well respected in their time but don't echo down in history. But they were still famous because fame is additive: if you have a famous father and brother then you're famous even if you're just an average person plus the advantages of a famous family.
Likewise, great families are not necessarily famous. Elite and media interest are what make fame. I'm sure there are many families who are elite in terms of their capabilities but work in something that isn't as fame selected. I can think of several impressive families that are like that.
I think there's still a correlation, but you make a very sound point, of course. And there's tremendous variation even within an individual what lies within their ambit for accomplishment. For example, having read both Einstein and Feynman, I believe Feynman was the smarter. When you're reading along you just see him take these little leaps that are at first baffling, but resolve with patience and thought, and you realize he didn't need to do that -- he could just do casual leaps over serious thickets of puzzlement, just intuit the right answer like mortals can withotut effort realize chipmunks can't gnaw down a sequoia in an afternoon. With Einstein I don't feel that way. Everything is very solid, well thought out, clearly smart -- but you don't get the feeling he has to slow himself down to communicate with mortals.
And yet...arguably Einstein was far better recognized, at least in his time. And in no small part, I think, that's because Einstein was disciplined and focussed, while Feynman seemed to have spent about 2/3 of his time and energy trying to shag every cute girl he met. (In the #metoo era he would have spent his career as a bongo player or something, because the academy would never have countenanced him.)
I'm also frankly thinking of my family who are well known in a little world and have produced many, many noted {redacted}. But you've never heard of us.
If I wanted to be a {redacted} I'd probably be very successful because of what my extended family could've done. And I'm not all that good at {redacting}. I mean, I'm a LOT better than the average person. But by the standards of the great masters? I'm good. Competent. Not a talent for the ages or even particularly good for my generation of the family. But I have a fair number of relatives who are top level {redacted} and a lot of the ones who aren't do something else pretty notable. None of them are particularly famous though.
I don't talk to my family much but I expect, if being a {redacted} was as famous as being a great scientist or if my family self-promoted more, then I'd have a Wikipedia entry that was a few paragraphs mostly mentioning times when I interacted with my relatives. Instead none of us have Wikipedia entries but my name still runs in a small world.
An interesting reflection. I'm vaguely reminded of my personal hypothesis/grudge that the Internet is ruining imagination, because imaginative kids become little (microscopic!) fishes in a big (world-wide) pond far too quickly.
Like, you're a kid with an unusually good sense of observation and inquisitive imagination, and you get interested in how birds can fly or why there are rainbows. So you start looking for answers, and your parents shrug and say dunno, and your teachers in 5th grade give you an obvious load of shallow crap because *they* don't really know -- they're 5th grade teachers, not experts on aerodynamics or electromagnetism -- so you start looking in books, and when that proves insufficiently satisfying you start thinking about it on your own. Maybe you come up with some dumb crude ideas, but you're exercising the part of your brain that thinks rationally, and strengthening it. The books aren't fully satisfactory, those you find in the school library, but you learn stuff along the way willy nilly, and you start learning how to look for more sources, how to weigh them, how to squeeze all the juice out of them. "Let's see, here's a book on helicopters and it doesn't say how birds fly, but there's this business about an airfoil and Bernoulli's Principle and it gets you started thinking..."
I feel like some kind of self-apprenticeship like this is where you breed young people with good empirical and creative thinking skills, it's a sort of harsh training regime where they have to work out so much themselves -- but they get a lot stronger while they do that.
Contrast to 2021 kid. How do birds fly? I turn instantly to Google and shazam in 2 seconds I'm reading a Wikipedia article on that exact question, or watching a Youtube video by an expert ornithologist who flys small planes in his spare time. Curiosity, fully satisfied, in about 30 seconds flat. I go fire up Roblox and turn the work-think-hard part of my brain back off.
Or..even worse, I have already come up with some lame but original theory, and when I look up the expert opinion, I immediately *see* how lame my theory is, and I just think oh why did I bother even thinking I could noodle this out on my own, clearly I should just have looked it up -- and you lose the delicate bud of self-pride in being able to *reason stuff out* which, also, seems necessary to the future scientist.
I wonder if it works that way in the arts, too. You pick up the violin and start working at it, and maybe you're pretty good for a beginner, but with the Internet you're instantly exposed to the very best in the world, you can immediately see how pathetic you actually are. You never have the chance to be the big fish in the little pond -- the best violinist in 5th grade of Foo Elementary on Elm Street -- and so...do you get prematurely discouraged? Do only the people with sufficiently massive egos (or massive social/family support) retain the gumption to go on and on for the 10,000 hours or so it takes to find out if you're really world class, or just a boob? I wonder about this, too.
A superabundance of tasty food jades the palate, they say. I wonder if our modern superabundance of information dulls the brightening imagination of kids, too often douses the tiny spark of rebellious "I can think this out for myself!" spirit necessary for genuine innovation.
I'm guessing you're some type of teacher or professor.
>I feel like some kind of self-apprenticeship like this is where you breed young people with good empirical and creative thinking skills, it's a sort of harsh training regime where they have to work out so much themselves -- but they get a lot stronger while they do that.
This is a corporate educationalism meme, and it's not how people actually learn. You literally cannot fill in gaps with info you don't have. It doesn't work that way. I recommend starting with Ayer's Language Truth and Logic if you want to understand how knowledge works.
Am I right, are you repeating educationalist memes? Stop giving your students questions they don't have enough information to answer, Spinoza was a nutcase, you cannot deduce how birds fly from first principles, that stuff was carefully figured out with meticulous reference to loads of data, and your students are just googling the answers, not for lack of "imagination."
Well, sorry, but I think you're entirely wrong. The phenomena of pre-existing gaps priming learning (and the conceptually related "test effect") has been very well documented, experimentally, particularly by the Bjork lab at UCLA and the Karpicke lab at Purdue. I'm thoroughly convinced by their results, and they match my own classroom experience, both as an instructor and a student.
Can you link the studies? I'm convinced that it's an analytical truth that you can't deduce information you don't have from information you don't have, but I'll take a look. I suspect power might have distorted the truth market here. Happens a lot in climate, brain science, HBD, etc. Often bad studies are misinterpreted in the service of some political goal.
Feynman was much more well-rounded, which makes him easier to relate to and had a much more accessible stock of knowledge. He was a great teacher, something I have not heard about Einstein. But I have no idea who was "smarter." They both run circles around most of the very smart people I know and work with.
Maybe you have the same genetic talent for music as your brother, but your music education process went on the wrong path in some way? For example, since you were older maybe you were trying hard in a studying for a test sort of way, but your brother didn't know of that so he just plugged in his internal music sense and had fun.
A few generations back, my family had 3 siblings that were a Nobel prize winner, a successful playwright, and another lesser-known published writer (but she was a woman in the 19th century, so also extraordinary for her time and place). I can agree with the "assortative mating" hypothesis -- the wives chosen in the subsequent century were women of science, or Fulbright scholars, that sort of thing.
So I think the intellectual capacity traveled down the line. However, the money did Not travel down, and honestly that level of accomplishment is nearly impossible without a certain level of extended material abundance. For most of human history, most geniuses have spent their genius just in trying not to starve to death, and maybe improve things a little bit for the next generation. So privilege is a huge part, I would say the larger part.
I hope you don't mind, I found this comment the other day and shared a link to it on my newsletter. I was not expecting to find a descendant of the Echegarays reading SSC.
The only two Indian physicists to win a Nobel Prize (CV Raman and Subrahmanian Chandrasekhar) came from the same family (Raman was Chandrasekhar's paternal uncle)
>Who was also the niece of Matthew Arnold who wrote Dover Beach?
Don't forget that Matthew Arnold's father was Thomas Arnold, the headmaster who revolutionized education in England and was immortalized in Lytton Strachey's _Eminent Victorians_.
(Thomas Arnold's other two sons have wikipedia pages and seem to have important people, one a Beowulf scholar and the other "the first director of public instruction in the Punjab," but not up to the Matthew / Thomas levels of greatness.)
I believe Jared Diamond studied under (or at least knew) Nobel medicine laureate Andrew Huxley, the third most famous grandson of Thomas Huxley and descendant of Thomas Arnold.
Diamond's own father Louis Diamond invented a surgical technique that his NYT obituary said saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of babies (I repeat: "saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of babies:" that's a rather extraordinary contribution to human happiness.)
Jared very much wanted to follow his father, a great man, but he lacked the eye-hand coordination of his father and Dr. Huxley. In contrast, he was fluent in six languages, including Finnish and Japanese. So he wound up changing academic specialties three times in his career as a UCLA professor, but had a good career nonetheless.
I find it curious that you left out gumption, tenacity, drive, whatever you want to call it. I've known personally about a number of Nobel laureates, mostly in physics, and when you compare them to people who don't make it nearly as far *that* is what stands out above all. They're smart, sure, and some are smarter than others, but more than anything they're driven, tenacious, energetic. They never give up, they chip away and work at where they want to go far past the point where ordinary mortals turn around in defeat. "Can't get there from here. No Thoroughfare. Not the way it's done. This will never work." The people who reach the heights, at least in science, and I kind of suspect in many other fields, are the people who pay no attention to such signs.
And (1) I suspect this *is* the kind of thing that can be strongly influenced by family culture, and (2) if it's a major component of success it would explain a slower regression to the mean than pure stats would suggest. It also (3) helps explain why it seems more common that the offspring of really *creative* people in science, math, music composition end up making their mark in fields -- like politics, music performance, or sports -- where energy and discipline can compensate to some degree for less raw talent.
Yes, and this is a common blind spot of the rationalist and rationalist-adjacent community. I'd have hoped Scott wouldn't slip into it here, but that's OK - he's got us to remind him.
Particularly since it helps his thesis here. If (per Scott's handwavy but good enough for our purposes math) being the son of a Nobel Prize winner and a carefully selected spouse gives one an average IQ of 124, meh, that's pretty good but we don't expect anything noteworthy from them. But we don't expect slackers to win the Nobel Prize in the first place. If winning the prize requires equal parts genius and diligence, and the sort of people who win the prize value both traits in their spouses, then their kids will average 124 IQ *and* 95th-percentile diligence. That's going to synergistically combine to a significantly greater probability of accomplishing great things.
Throw in "hero license" and enhanced family and social support, and maybe we've got something here.
Well, gumption and tenacity are a kind of faith -- faith in yourself, faith in a positive outcome if you only work at it long enough, et cetera -- and we might say it is not rational to ignore the importance of faith :)
...I'm vaguely reminded of a quote attributed to Napoleon (if memory serves): "Reasonable men always assume other men are like them, in which point of view they are not reasonable." Or maybe that's de Maupassant? French, anyway, only a Frenchman would say something so simultaneously cynical and yet utopian.
That's an interesting idea for a dissertation: take all the Nobel laureates in the hard sciences and look at the Wikipedia pages for their descendants: did they distinguish themselves (among those who distinguished themselves) more for brilliance or for energy/discipline?
Children's IQ will indeed regress to the mean *on average*, but much more important: Since IQ is normally distributed, the probability of a genius child, while still low, is much higher (100x?) than in a random family. And of course, the probability of *multiple* sibling (or cousin) geniuses would be even higher (10,000x?).
Together with the selection bias this may explain everything.
IOW: While most genius parents produce OK children, almost all genius siblings are a result of genius parents.
I am a long time subscriber to Eastern philosophies and their concomitant beliefs in reincarnation, which must be one of the uncoolest things to believe in this group, but it answers many of the conundrums discussed here. In these systems, souls naturally cluster together with like souls to work out their lives with those who have similar proclivities. Need an iron-clad example before you investigate an idea that seems so foreign to your belief system? As good a smoking gun as you can imagine is the case of James Leininger, investigated by the U of VA.
We might want to think about low-hanging fruit here, and the idea that science is slowing down. I note that most of your examples are from the early 1900s or earlier. These people were living in an era during which there remained many fundamental ideas to be discovered, which were tractable for a hardworking individual. Perhaps, if you were reasonably smart, educated, and well-resourced, it was easier to come up with something groundbreaking that could make you into a household name. If it was also more common for parents to pass on their trade and privileges to their children; families were much larger; familial status was more legally codified; and nepotism/organization via family trust-bonds were more common; then you have a recipe for an era in which families were peppered with accomplishment, and especially related accomplishments.
I'd be really interested to see if we find a similar phenomena of talent-peppered families in a pre-registered set of figures.
Let's take the most recent 4 nobel prize winners in chemistry. Here's what I could find on Wikipedia and convenient Googling.
Benjamin List: "Born to a upper-middle-class family of scientists and artists in Frankfurt, List is a great-grandson of the cardiologist Franz Volhard and a 2nd great-grandson of the chemist Jacob Volhard. His aunt, the 1995 Nobel laureate in medicine Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, is the sister of his mother, architect Heidi List."
David MacMillan: He had a working class upbrining, and "he hailed his Scottish upbringing as a reason for his winning the Nobel."
Emmanuelle Charpentier: "As a young girl growing up in the environs of Paris, Emmanuelle Charpentier was encouraged by her father, a park manager, and her mother, working in psychiatry, to explore her own academic interests, which were many."
Jennifer Doudna: "Her father received his Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Michigan, and her mother, a stay-at-home parent, held a master's degree in education... Doudna's mother earned a second master's degree in Asian history from the university and taught history at a local community college. Growing up in Hilo, Hawaii, Doudna was fascinated by the environmental beauty of the island and its exotic flora and fauna. Nature built her sense of curiosity and her desire to understand the underlying biological mechanisms of life. This was coupled with the atmosphere of intellectual pursuit that her parents encouraged at home. Her father enjoyed reading about science and filled the home with many books on popular science."
Hard to see an obvious pattern here, but interesting that one of the four had a talent-riddled family. I picked the category of people to look up before reading anything about them.
My way of tying this together is that having a talent-riddled family is probably associated with achieving greatness, due to some combo of genes and environment; but that there are so many non-talent-riddled families that a large number of geniuses will be from regular backgrounds. I'd love to know what proportion of Nobel prizewinners are related to at least one other Nobel prizewinner.
Agreed on low-hanging fruit. It's part of the reason why most fields of technology (contra the singularitarians) have actually been slowing rather then accelerating. It turns out, for example, that it's relatively easy to jump from wooden biplane -> stressed skin, piston-driven monoplane -> jet airliner. Anything beyond that gets exponentially harder.
In terms of obvious patterns - this has already been brought up by others, but the most obvious pattern is that the future genius had a well-resourced family that could support them while they developed their interests and talents.
I don't think all science is slowing down. Some is, some isn't. Physics has certainly slowed drastically since the 1960s, you might easily characterize it as stuck in molasses. But biology (almost entirely the molecular version) I think has accelerated. If your education stopped any earlier than 2000, you're seriously obsolete, which is I think the sign of a field of knowledge that is expanding rapidly. But this seems to be largely flying under the radar, and I'm not sure why. Perhaps because it's overshadowed by the behemoth of computing technology (which I actually think has past its peak and is in early decadence)? Chemistry, as befits its middle role, seems to be muddling along neither expanding as rapidly as biology nor as stuck as physics.
This is true, but also why I referred to "technology" rather than research, as technology is more applicable to our actual lives and societies. Well, that and the fact that advances in technology are easier to quantify and look better for making my point ;)
Anyway, here's something that I've thought about a lot: my great grandmother lived long enough to travel overland via ox-wagon, and fly via jet airliner before she died. She saw real, exponential growth in nearly every sphere of technology across her lifetime, with the corresponding invention of many completely new devices and forms of technology. In my lifetime, by contrast, I've seen no great new inventions and often precious little development in the technologies that are there. The car I had as a student was older than I was, but still perfectly viable. The thing that took it out of my life was lack of spares more than outright obsolescence.
Returning to research: as you rightly point out, we've seen rapid growth in one or two fields, steady growth in others and near-stagnation in most. The overall result, I think, is that the averaged growth curve over the last 200 years or so has been S-shaped rather than exponential. We're now past the period of explosive growth, and into the long tail of incremental development and improvement. This is not to say that this will always be the case - a revolution in physics could happen tomorrow that fundamentally changes technology. But, barring such an unexpected change, that's the path we seem to be on.
Hmm well yes I fully agree with you about technology, but I think there's a reasonable social explanation for that: the suppression of entrepreneurship. If you look at the rates of new small company formation in the US over the past 50 years, for example, they have fallen steeply. And this makes sense to me: we have made it much harder to succeed as a small entrepreneur, as a guy with a new idea. We impose very steep costs on business in the interests of all manner of social goals -- equity in employment, racial and sex quotas, regulation to achieve this or that social goal and/or ensure the re-election of this or that politician -- and while these are just part of the cost of doing business for a big firm that can employ a dozen lawyers and PR flacks full time, they are crippling for the two guys in a garage shop. Those fellows need to do everything *exactly* right, be very lucky, and probably have a big wad of cash on hand, to succeed. So fewer do, and fewer try.
This not to even mention the gigantic financial repression our monetary policy over the past 25 years has exerted. We have savagely cut down any form of "creative destruction," and while we're not yet at Japanese levels of sustaining a zombie economy, I can see it coming. So the little seedling struggling to get started, so to speak, has to do it in the shade of all these diseased half-dead giant trees around it, since we have suppressed the forest fires that would clear out the deadwood expeditiously and allow seedlings to grow more vigorously in the open sun.
In general, we have become socially *far* more conservative in our domestic economic policy, we are laser-focussed on making sure the "pie" is fairly divided, and everyone's slice does not vary too much year to year, and have given up any emphasis on the idea of growing the pie. "A rising tide floats all boats" is a slogan that ranks up there with #bluelivesmatter or "let's just stop asking about race entirely in college admissions" as the kind of thing that will get you ejected from polite society as a clueless if not malignant reactionary savage.
And it's all worked, in the sense of achieving its ends. People under the age of 30 have no real idea what a bad recession looks like, or a stiff bout of unemployment. There's no better time in American history to be poor or disadvantaged, since we will exert strenuous efforts to help you out. Our economic lives are more stable and if below the median more comfortable than ever before. No doubt all admirable achievements.
However, the cost has been a general suppression of innovation and growth. Economically, we celebrate 2% GDP growth as excellent progress, where it used to be considered enough to take down a sitting President. Technologically, we get variations on a relatively few themes -- I know! Let's build an app that automates random low-level human decision making process X! No one's ever thought of *this specific decision* before....! -- while we have a significant reduction in genuinely transformative innovation.
Fast-paced highly innovative societies are exciting, but fraught. You can get rich fast, and get dumped into grinding need just as fast. Things change more rapidly for the positive but also you get drastic negatives a lot more. It's rough-edged, you get bruised more often, even if you also have far better opportunities if you're not part of the pre-selected elite, you're just a schmo from nowhere with energy and an idea. We don't really want to be this way right now, but it's not outside of the realm of possibility that we will want to be sometime later. And in that case, I would expect technological growth to re-accelerate.
I wouldn't dismiss the "privilege" explanation that quickly. When I look at some of your names -- e.g., Thomas Henry Huxley and George Darwin, as well as (mentioned by some of the commenters) most of the "later" Bernoullis -- I'm seeing some recognized achievement, but I'm wondering if we would know their first names if we didn't know their last. (Of course, less of a thing in the case of Huxley, who predated the more famous bearers of his name, but one could argue he was riding on Darwin's wave.)
Also, I'm not sure "success" is the first thing that comes to mind when you ask a European about Raymond Poincaré :)
Right, I think if you restrict success markers to more objective criteria that have a stronger correlation to IQ then most of the examples are much better explained by privilege. The math and physics ones in my mind are more convincing since privilege only takes you so far. You actually need the chops to do math or physics which many people simply cannot do at a high level.
I think you discount some of the name recognition advantage. Being president of some prestigious society is much more like being a politician than it is like being an actual scientist. Winning a Nobel Prize requires having the Nobel committee take notice of your work.
T.S. Monk is the son of Thelonious Monk, and a jazz drummer. I went to a concert of his, and in between songs he told anecdotes about his Dad. One was about growing up. Regular visitors to the Monk household were people like John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and other jazz deities. T.S. said he grew up believing (1) everyone played a musical instrument, just like everyone could read and write, and (2) the standards for performance were, well, Monk-Coltrane-Davis level. That’s just what people did. The fact he became a pro was just part of the family expectations.
See also: Ravi and John Coltrane, Victor Wooten and his family, Michael Jackson and his family, Justin Lee-Shultz and his family https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SizoZwfKMZ4
Most of the greatest musicians had a parent who was at least really good, many of them had completely musical families. The advantage of learning music while you're young (like many, many things) is quite substantial. Really though when you look at the greatest musicians, they often have more hours of practice logged than anyone else, and getting a head start on those hours is pretty important in such a desirable field.
It might be worth looking at families where genius *doesn't* recur. Did they just not aim at assortative mating for whatever reason? Did they have a family culture of "no one can live up to famous person" rather than "it's normal to excel"? Something else?
Gregory Clark points to Daniel Defoe as somebody who emerged out of obscurity and whose descendants receded into obscurity. It would be interesting to have more such examples, but it's a lot of work to figure them out.
Interesting essay. Another such families is the Klemperer family (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klemperer), which features famous phyciststs, conductors, actors, economists, chemists, and much else.
A comment with less Gene Hackman - would something like the Mathematical Genealogy Project (MGP) be a way to try to isolate the non-genetic factors in this? If student Y is a PhD student of renowned brilliant mathematician X, what distribution does student X's greatness have? It would seem that the "Hero License" would be there, in terms of "If my advisor is a deity, there's a good chance I should be". Sadly, though mine was a deity, I've disgraced our (mathematical) family. A deep dive into the MGP might turn up interesting things there. Does the distribution of "greatness" there have a similar distribution to the actual genetic distribution of greatness?
A boring answer, but it may be part of the explanation: lots of these things were relatively easier back then (and relatively fewer people/families had basic opportunities that made such careers possible).
I think of this because physics and math show up on many of these lists of accolades, and for sure there was a lot of incredible work available to do back then that just isn't possible today. (I myself work in particle physics theory.) Even 100 years ago, a physicist could be both a theorist and an experimentalist, or both a physicist and a mathematician, or both a mathematician and a politician. Millikan had an idea that maybe electrons were real, built an experiment, tested it, and won the Nobel Prize a few years later [1]. That never, never, never happens today. I have a suspicion the case is similar in Biology (also shows up a lot in the list).
So yes, Poincaré and Bohr and the rest were super impressive. But there weren't very many physicists (relatively), and there was a lot more lower-hanging fruit than there is today.
I think athletics is also much more competitive today than it was back then. I have no real idea what to think about poetry and literature, but I'd bet there are many times more poets and writers than before, partly because the competition is more global now.
I guess from this I would predict that you'd see less clustering of genius/success today, but that's also a likely prediction of Scott's explanations: people have fewer kids today, they don't select as strongly in mating strategies, etc.
Well, because physics and math work has to be original, of course the work that was done 100 years ago isn't available to be done today. But, because work always builds on previous work, the work that is available to be done today wasn't possible 100 years ago either. So, how do you make a comparison?
We could try to compare by polymathy. But there weren't very many physicists who were also well-known as mathematicians, or vice versa (Poincaré was an exception) and there are still some today (Witten, Penrose, recently Hawking).
We could try to compare by the size of the ripple effect: everything in physics and chemistry now assumes that electrons are real, as Millikan's shining stars showed so brightly, and that Bohr's radical reimagining of what physics meant was more right than wrong; but how do we know the ripple effects that will come from Ashkin's optical tweezers, Thouless's topological order, the Higgs boson, or Parisi's breakthroughs in glasses? Not to mention the numerous achievements which, like relativity, were never rewarded with a Nobel Prize.
You say, "these things were relatively easier back then", but it depends on what you mean by "these things".
Einstein's or von Neumann's minds were surely greater than Ashkin's or Higgs's, but they still failed to discover the Higgs boson or invent optical tweezers, so I guess THOSE things had gotten easier by Higgs's time.
You could argue that LIGO's experimental confirmation of gravitational waves or the LHC's experimental confirmation of the Higgs boson were "harder" than Millikan's oil-drop experiment, and they certainly involved more people working on them and larger budgets; but having more people working on things like that, and larger budgets, means that we have a lot more evidence to use to find our way around in the universe, so we can formulate theories that are less stupid, and we can test them a lot sooner. Having more people to collaborate with accelerates your progress.
You could argue that the path from designing an experiment (Millikan didn't invent the idea of an electron, just the experiment) to carrying it out is longer nowadays, and certainly for Big Science projects like the LHC and LIGO that's true. But I think, for example, Queloz discovered exoplanets working with his advisor over a period of three or four years up to 01995, and Strickland invented chirped-pulse tabletop terawatt lasers over about four years, working with her advisor, up to 01985. I don't think it was at all unusual for a small team to develop crucial pieces of apparatus over five or ten years 100 years ago; consider the differential analyzer, X-ray diffraction, diffraction-grating ruling engines, the Weston cell, differential thermal analysis, etc.
I think the only way in which it's reasonable to claim that "these things were relatively easier back then" is if your measure of success is the zero-sum game of fame, in which case it's almost tautologically true: being the most famous person, or the most famous physicist, in a world of 8 billion people, is rarer than it was in a world of 2 billion people. It's not any harder to write great poetry or make fundamental discoveries about the workings of the universe; it's easier than ever. It's just harder to beat other people at it.
I'm a little skeptical of the general argument, although I get what you're saying, and I do not disagree at all that doing physics today is way harder than it was in 1935. But here's the thing: it's not much harder than it was doing it in 1870, when you had to be Gibbs or Maxwell to make any progress at all. My read on this is that there are breakthrough periods, where...something....changes, and a bunch of brand-new doors open, and there is a land-rush flood of new shiny things to pick up off the ground. You can be the first person to formulate a theory of the atom, wave mechanics, matrix mechanics, to invent spin after the Stern-Gerlach experiment, to write down a relativistic Hamiltonian for the electron, and so on. Afterward, it gets much harder indeed.
Until the next breakthrough, that is. Because I think we can trace the same explosion and then subsidence in earlier centuries. There's an explosion around the 1660s, which then tapers off, and then another in the early to mid 1800s, then another in the early 1900s. Which means, arguably we're just waiting for the next one, when once again it will be relatively easy to be great (or seen as great by later generations) in physics.
One wonders *why* this happens, of course, if it does, and one can make all kinds of arguments. Advances in instrumentation? That might account for the time of Galileo and Newton. Accumulated observation reaches some critical mass? Pure luck? Some social factor in which it becomes thinkable to question certain orthodoxies?
I take your point, though I guess I'm a more skeptical of the "great person" theory of scientific progress than you seem to be. Back then "you had to be Gibbs or Maxwell to make any progress at all," but if Maxwell hadn't been around to formulate the electromagnetic unification, then someone else would have. All the pieces were there. Today a bright graduate student would probably notice the symmetry of the equations as Maxwell did and have a good chance at figuring it out on their own (these are good graduate school homework problems). And the reward to Maxwell was Permanent Genius Status, whereas the reward to the student is an A on this week's assignment.
I don't want to undersell the impressive and important work of Maxwell or anyone else, but there just aren't any simple theoretical moves like this that haven't already been made by someone. Back then you could study physics for a few years and basically understand the cutting edge of the field, whereas today a graduate student studies for 5-7 years to begin to be moderately competent in one tiny sub-sub-subfield.
The same is true of experiment: aside from genuinely new technologies (which usually are imported from outside of academia), you can't just build a new experiment in your lab using odds and ends you picked up at a garage sale (so to speak). You need $1M, a team of postdocs and students, permission from your university, and 10 years of runtime, and for this you merely get to set a world-leading constraint on one of the thousands of theories you could have tried to test.
Science is hard today. Most of us are toiling in obscurity, which is fine, but it doesn't mean there aren't any Maxwell-level geniuses that are equally obscure because they were born 100 years later. (To be clear, I don't count myself as one of them. :) )
Well, I'm not going to say you're wrong, because I don't have any kind of serious confiddence in either point of view. Wouldn't bet a dollar either way. When I was towards the beginning of my career, I definitely thought more along your lines, that cometh the hour cometh the man. Later I was sort of persuaded the other way. You can toil and learn and learn and toil and make quite a lot of good, steady progress, and I've done some of that myself. But there just seems to come a time when mere mortals just get...stuck. Hard work just doesn't get you anywhere much any more, and you can kind of feel it. Like you're just adding terms to the Taylor series approximation and each term costs increasingly fantastically more and gets you meh results, and you can kind of sense that what you *need* is one of those strange minds that can just take a standing jump over the whole thing and sum the series, poof. Give you a whole new paradigm, a new and much simpler way of looking at things. At least, that's how it increasingly seemed to me. (And I would have loved to have *been* one of those minds, but I'm not. I will never have the kind of bolt of lightning insight of a Dirac or Newton, although I am perfectly competent in a workaday sense to nudge the border of what's known out in ways that are fairly forseeable will work.)
So now I tend to believe in a sort of intellectual pareto principle, that the really big advances come from a relatively few people who, for whatever weird combination of imagination, preparedness, and plain luck have these major insights -- and then the (relative) army of we second-rankers spend a century or so fleshing out the consequences and extending the model as much as we rationally can. Leading to the punctuated equilibrium model I feel like history shows us.
But as I said, I don't have full confidence in this model either. Maybe the truth is in between, some part gifted individuals, some part the mysterious swirlings of large social (and technological) currents.
With respect to the rest: I agree a graduate student *in 2021* can work out Maxwell's Equations on a problem set, but that's cheating! You already know they exist, you know the right direction to go, at least generally. It's way way harder to come up with in the first place. It's very similar to the fact that new PIs (or even graduate students) are shocked to find that working out brand new true things about Nature is about 10^9x harder than working out problems in a textbook. You think, geez I learned relativity in 6 weeks, why'd it take the scientific establishment a century or so? And the answer is: because there's just this enormous invisible structure around education, everything is targeted in the correct direction, so things lead logically from one to the other, and each new piece you learn fits into what you already know -- which means the "puzzle piece holes" in what you already know prefigure what you are going to learn -- a big honking hint. Unfortunately, there's no such guide in genuine new research. You often, even usually, don't know what the "holes" in present understanding look like, and you often suspect they're the wrong shape -- that people have been asking at least slightly wrong questions, and Step #1 in discovery is going to be learning to ask the right question.
So I think Maxwell's achievement in drawing these equations on an utterly blank slate has to rank far above the ability of the modern student (with the benefit of an entire pre-existing education priming him for this discovery) redoing it.
Yes, many experiments seen as necessary to advance fundamental physics are fabulously expensive. (Parenthetically, I'm reminded of the almost certainly apocraphyal story that in the depths of the Depression Lars Onsager proposed an experiment that required a cubic foot of gold, blissfuly unaware how preposterous this was.)
But I do think we need to ask: is this because there genuinely is no other way to get useful data? Or is it a lack of imagination, a problem that could be solved by someone who invents a new type of experiment? What if the only way Ole Romer and his colleagues could imagine measuring the speed of light was to build a rocke to travel to the Moon to put a mirror on it, so the time delay was sufficiently long to time with the timepieces of the day? They might have said, well, to get this piece of critical data we need umpty bazillion guilders. Are we in that situation, at all? I'm not saying we are -- to do that I would need to *have* the kind of imagination that *could* think up new and ridiculously cheap and fast ways to get the data, and I don't -- but the question isn't on its face ridiculous.
There are many possible contributing factors, and different factors in different fields.
One reason that a single person rarely accomplishes anything important anymore in science is the adoption of Karl Popper's structure for research papers. He insisted, because of his fondness for good-old rationalist metaphysics, that the essence of science is rational theory, not experimentation. He dwells on this with a fanatic obsessiveness in "The Myth of the Framework". It's the only subject I know on which Popper held an obviously stupid and ideological opinion: that scientific work never, ever, EVER begins with observation. Odd, since he understood (from comparing science with philosophy) the necessity of experiment.
Anyway, Popper proposed today's research article format, which begins with a statement of some theoretical problem, does a lit survey of the problem, states a hypothesis, posits an experiment to test a hypothesis, comes up with an experimental setup and methodology, runs the experiment, draws a conclusion, and lists new theoretical problems the results have suggested. This format begins and ends in theory, thus maintaining the supremacy of theory over experiment.
The trouble is that this isn't how science worked, back when it worked. One person would notice something funny--not necessarily a theoretical problem; often a pure disinterested observation of just the type Popper claims is impossible, such as when Robert Brown published a paper basically saying "Microscopic particles in my tea keep jostling around as if they were alive". Another person might propose a hypothesis, as when Einstein proposed that this Brownian motion resulted from the random movements of atoms. Then a third person might propose a test, and a fourth might conduct the proposed experiment and report the results. This entire process sometimes took a century or more.
You're not allowed to do that today. If you notice something funny, you can't just write a note to the Royal Society describing it. You've got to find a theorist to come up with a theory, and experimentalists to devise and carry out a test, and a statistician to evaluate the test; and you have to do the whole process before you can publish anything.
(To be fair, Popper wrote that scientists should be allowed to write things up however they liked, and he was just proposing one possible way. Unfortunately, most humans for some reason find it impossible to imagine that there could be two different right ways of doing anything. I blame Socrates for this.)
At most institutions and companies, you have to round all these people up before you make your observation! Then you all write up a proposal saying what you plan to discover and how you'll discover it, along with your bioethics review, environmental impact statement, and diversity plan, and submit it to a government agency's grant solicitation. Then you wait 4 months to hear back from them. Then, if you get an award, you wait another 3 months for the kickoff meeting, at which you discover the contracting officer who gave you the reward has been transferred, and you now work with a contracting officer who isn't interested in your project and wants you to do something else.
Yes, there are many times more poets and writers than before. In Shakespeare's day, there were less than 20 full-time writers of English-language literature. Today there are about a hundred thousand full-time writers, and IIRC a million part-timers working on their great American novels.
But also, I think the arts suffer from something that happens to fields when they grow too big: The overwhelming majority of people who lack the ability to reach the top of the field seizes control, and changes the rules of the game to make sure that success doesn't depend on ability. In art this was accomplished by ridiculing representation, so that one needn't learn to draw to become a great artist. In poetry, it was accomplished by elevating obscurity and ridiculing clarity. Literature was turned into a game of seeing how many of the necessary elements of literature you could eliminate from a "story" and still get it published.
Long before this, philosophy was turned into a similar game of seeing how stupid a thing you could get away with saying. This turned out to be quite stupid indeed, as the salons of France had already established by the time of Rousseau that the main criterion for a philosophical theory should be that it raises eyebrows at a cocktail party.
I wonder what field you work in (if you don't mind my asking)? I'm a theorist working in particle astrophysics, and our papers are not held to the standard you describe.
Many theory papers are pure theory; some have projections for future experiments that haven't been proposed yet; some have projections for current experiments that haven't tested the theory; and a rare few actually communicate with the experiment to make a new measurement or set a new limit. People totally do write a short paper pointing to "something funny" in the data without proposing a fleshed-out theory and a full-proof test to sort it out.
So maybe we're living in different worlds at the moment. Curious to hear more about yours!
In particle physics, I suggested in my OP that the kind of paper you're describing, with observation, theory, test, and confirmation all put together, is no longer even possible. It was possible for Millikan to dream up and test for electrons in his own lab; Higgs had to wait 50+ years for the greatest scientific machine ever constructed to test his theory. I'm arguing that the latter, not the former, is the norm in physics today (again, from the point of view of my own bubble world!).
My most-recent work was in bioinformatics. I just checked the guidelines of 3 of the top journals (IMHO), Bioinformatics, BMC Bioinformatics, and PLoS Computational Biology. The last 2 have authors' guidelines that specify the full Popperian structure for research articles. /Bioinformatics/ has a paper category called "Original Papers" which is surprisingly vague--it's just a few sentences long--but presumes you have biological data to test some hypothesis. All bioinformatics journals also allow review articles, and descriptions of new databases or software.
Bioinformatics might not be a fair comparison--it's easier to run an experiment (though not as easy as you might think! Getting multiple databases and pieces of software to compile and run together on the same OS, and exchange data, is a lot of work). More importantly, you haven't got a "thing to observe" as often as in physics or biology, because processing the data IS your method of observations. That is, I don't look at things under a general-purpose sensor like a microscope; I run a particular algorithm on data and analyze the output. Sometimes that output is surprising, but I find it in the middle of running an algorithm on sequence data, which I can cast as an experiment (even if it wasn't experimental originally).
I tried to think of an example where something was just obviously there in the genome sequence, and thought of micro-RNA. These are short non-coding RNAs which form hairpins that then regulate genes by binding to them, or upstream of them, in the manner of a transcription factor, but without producing a protein. They're abundant in eukaryotic genomes, and not that hard to find; you just look for inverted repeats much closer together than would occur by chance. This was a case where somebody could have written a piece of code in half an hour to find out how many of them there were in some genome, and report that there are just way too many of them to be random.
But nobody did that. I found the first paper to report them. It was in 1993, doi: 10.1016/0092-8674(93)90529-y (but see "A Short History of a Short RNA", Lee, Feinbaum, & Ambros 2004, instead, for a summary). They were searching for a regulatory protein, and did a full set of Popperian lab experiments and analysis which just happened to give them data conclusively showing that a gene sequence was having an effect without expressing a protein.
Did anybody notice all these (actually very important) "micro-RNAs" before then? Maybe. It wouldn't have been so easy in 1993, because we didn't have ANY sequenced genomes except for a virus or two (which almost certainly don't have miRNA; I haven't checked, but viruses shouldn't have the regulatory apparatus). Anyway, that was my one test case, and nobody wrote up the quick "I saw this weird thing" paper.
> because we didn't have ANY sequenced genomes except for a virus or two (which almost certainly don't have miRNA; I haven't checked, but viruses shouldn't have the regulatory apparatus).
(2011 and 2012 papers that both mention v-miRNA used for autoregulation and many other purposes. Autoregulation seems to be essential or near essential for hiding in the host for longer periods.)
They also use miRNA to f*ck directly with the host's gene expression, of course:
Here's one from 1986 about autoregulation in a particular virus. They didn't really know the mechanism back then but they ascribe at least some of it to a protein but they hedge by using language like "the data presented above demonstrate that at least one AAV gene product encoded in the p5 and p19 genes is required for optimal transcription of the AAV promoters."
Up until I read your comment maybe an hour ago, I had not even considered whether viruses generate any kind of miRNA or whether they have any kind of autoregulation of their genomic expression, so thank you!
I have no idea how I could have been so blind as to never consider those two things. All I can say in my defense is that I just never really thought all that much about gene regulation.
It's not the first time: I remember reading about miRNA in a newspaper back when they were new and cursing myself for never having considered that method of gene regulation. It's so obvious in hindsight.
Oh, they use the host's transcription system; so if the host also has an siRNA / miRNA mechanism, the virus can use it too! Duh. I wasn't thinking. Thanks!
You're 100% right about the cowardice in scientific publication, and even grant-writing. You just can't submit a paper that says "I saw X and I have no clue what it means," and it ranks right up there with "we tried X and failed, and we don't know why." The absence of this stuff is to me strong evidence that the mechanism of scientific publishing and grant-making is sick in a serious way. We have killed off empiricism! The very thing that made science work in the first place, and distinguished it from medieval scholasticm and the mutterings of alchemist that veered towards the utterly delusional. It's a disgrace.
It's an ironclad rule of scientific discovery that *most* of the ideas you have about How Things Work will be wrong, and that genuine discovery almost always happens by a process of elimination, by running down one blind alley after another and checking it off -- well *that* didn't work, damn it -- until you stumble into the right answer. The idea that it happens by some kind of fucking brilliant insight is exactly what medieval monks in their scriptoria circa 1450 thought. Why do an experiment, get all wet and break things, when *clearly* the royal road to The Truth is to sit in your cell and really *really* think about things, plumb your navel for the deep insight into the mind of God. It's mind-blowing that we're back here, after 500 years of miraculous success premised on the idea that it all -- as you say -- must begin with observation, because bare intuition, theory out of the vacuum, is almost worthless.
Generaly you only know what was low-hanging fruit in hindsight. That's why teaching is an art, not a science, and why people often have contempt for their teachers later. It's profoundly difficult to imagine what it's like not knowing what you do know, and therefore figuring out how to efficiently advance the knowledge of someone in that state. For the same reason, when it comes to original insight, it's very difficult to identify the weak spots in current understanding -- where unjustified assumptions have been made, where approximations are too approximate, where unexplored implications are important or not.
It's not clear what kind of intelligence is required to be able to do that, and how it is different from the intelligence required to exploit a weak spot once identified. You might call them the ability to ask the right questions, and the ability to find the right answers to a question. They're definitely not the same -- some people are good at the one, some the other -- and a society definitely needs both (and probably more of the 2nd on a quotidian basis). It's much, much harder to test and screen for the 1st, because by definition you can't do it by giving people complex but well-stated problems to solve, you're more or less trying to test their ability to think "out of the box" and it's difficult to tell the difference between creative and productive out of the box thinking and merely not having a good grasp on reality, having a tendency to sterile magical thinking.
I think a counter-argument to "genetics" is that there are also many examples of groups of unrelated friends of people who were not famous to begin with, of whom many became famous and are now regarded as geniuses: the Bloomsbury group, the Vienna Circle, the Inklings, the friends of Ezra Pound, the people who hung out with Lord Byron... there's more, but I haven't kept a list.
There are some lists as impressive as Scott's lists, of people who share a common background, but are not biologically related. For example, the Hungarian high school Fasori Gimnázium has the following list of students, all within ~20 years:
- John von Neumann, "generally regarded as the foremost mathematician of his time" (wikipedia)
- Edward Teller, "father of the hydrogen bomb"
- John Harsanyi, Nobel prize in economy
- Eugene Wigner, Nobel prize in physics
- Thomas Sebeok, one of the founder of biosemiotics research
- György Pásztor, ice hockey player, included in the Hall of Fame of the International Ice Hockey Foundation
Of course, a school might have a selection bias that a family doesn't. But it would be a heck of a selection bias to get von Neumann, Teller, and two other Nobel prize winners. If you want to argue that genetics plays an important role, you should take these non-biological examples as baseline and argue that the famous families exceed the baseline.
(More seriously, most of those people were Jewish, and all of them were Hungarian. So, measuring by IQ, genetics might plausibly account for around one standard deviation of theirs.)
Hm, perhaps. I am a bit sceptical. I have not heard that Hungarians are (or were) generally more intelligent than other people.
I did hear that Jews in the US have higher IQ than other people, a standard deviation or so. But I would guess that this is cultural rather than genetical. (Does the same also hold for Jews in other countries, or at other times? And are Jews particularly good at ice hockey? ;-) )
Also, this Gimnazium may be extreme, but there are other examples. You gave a few. I think generally influential people tend to be clustered for various reasons, and it's not just that they cluster *after* they became famous. In Britain, the childhood friends of Boris Johnson make a good chunk of British politics, and probably that's not because they profited from *each other*, but rather because they were in similar good starting situations to become politicians. Becoming a good (or even outstanding) scientist is much more a social thing than a question of intelligence, so the same reasoning applies.
I haven't heard that Hungarians are more intelligent either; but 2 random Hungarians are usually more closely-related than 2 random Europeans. If genetics are a factor, then they're a factor here. I wrote "1 standard deviation" because that size IQ difference has been measured between Ashkenazi Jews
& some other ethnic group, so it's at least plausible. (Also, we're not necessarily observing above-average IQ, or even "intelligence".)
Maybe all the dumber potential ancestors were snuffed by Khmelnytsky. Natural selection, baby. Perhaps Jews are smarter than average *because* of pogroms :(
Wikipedia lists the 4 most important members of the Bloomsbury Group as "Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster and Lytton Strachey." All were from upper middle class intellectual families, and Woolf's Stephens' clan was near-stratospheric.
The Dennings in the UK are a possible counterpoint to this - of the three brothers, one became Britain's most prominent judge, one was an admiral and one was a general. Their father was a draper, and they all attended the same state school. None of them had obviously notable kids though.
I've always wondered this about the lineage of Hiram Binghams.
Hiram Bingham the First was the leader of the first group of American Protestant missionaries to introduce Christianity to the Hawaiian islands. From the Wiki: "Bingham wrote extensively about the natives and was critical of their land-holding regime and of their "state of civilization". Bingham supported the introduction of market values along with Christianity. Those writings are now used by historians to illustrate the imperial values that were central to the attitudes of the United States towards Hawaii. Bingham was involved in the creation of the spelling system for writing the Hawaiian Language, and also translated some books of the Bible into Hawaiian."
Hiram Bingham II grew up in Honolulu but went to Yale, then came back to continue ministering to native Hawaiians. He explored and missionaried to lots of other Pacific Islanders too; among other things, Bingham II was the first to translate the Bible into Gilbertese, and wrote several hymn books, dictionaries and commentaries in the language of the Gilbert Islands.
Hiram Bingham III, the famous one, was "an American academic, explorer, and politician. He made public the existence of the Inca citadel of Machu Picchu in 1911 with the guidance of local indigenous farmers. Later, Bingham served as Governor of Connecticut for a single day, the shortest term in history, and then as a member of the United States Senate."
Hiram Bingham IV "was an American diplomat. He served as a Vice Consul in Marseilles, France, during World War II, and, along with Varian Fry, helped over 2,500 Jews to flee from France as Nazi forces advanced."
Genuinely never knew what to make of this dynasty, other than as a strange kaleidoscope of American imperial history.
Hiram Bingham I is the inspiration for the bad guy played by Max von Sydow in the the 1966 movie of James Michener's "Hawaii," which was the #1 movie at the box office that year.
"I’m still pretty weirded out by this; even granted that soccer talent and mathematical talent are correlated at above zero, it can’t be that high a correlation, can it?"
Several people have already mentioned the Bernoullis. Eight famous mathematicians in the 1700s is just outrageous. It does help if Euler is a family friend.
There were at least five Strausses who were famous composers from Vienna.
Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt were brothers who were both truly impressive polymaths, in almost non-overlapping areas. Alexander should be as famous as Darwin or Linnaeus in biology.
And then there's really weird families, like the Hintons. James was a surgeon and prominent advocate for polygamy. His son Charles was a mathematician who worked on intuitive understanding of higher dimensions. He coined the term "tesseract", he was a polygamist, his first wife was the daughter of Boole, and he invented the first automatic baseball pitching machine (using gunpowder). His son Sebastian invented the jungle gym. I don't know if this is a selection for excellence, but it's certainly a selection for something.
One of Charles' descendants is Geoffrey Hinton who won a Turing Award a couple of years ago. He is also a descendant of George Boole and George Everest (Surveyor General of India) after whom the mountain is named. He is not descended from the jungle gym guy. The jungle gym guy had two crazy Communist children who were big fans of Mao.
An interesting thing about British intellectual dynasties is that they tend tend to stay on the relative right or left. The Booles, for example, were leftists.
Makes me think of this website's occasional commenter, David Friedman (the economist), who sometimes talks about what it was like growing up as a son of the great economist, Milton Friedman. Reading what he has written about it, it just seems so natural (to me) that he would also grow up to do great work in that field. I assume his success in other fields is due to his natural genius, although perhaps it was because he learned to aim high (from his dad? or from his early successes?)
Also Scott, great great article, thank you for writing.
Lineage level gene complexes within our DNA guard their expressions through an incredibly complex array of strategies, against a sea of shorter-term genes and complexes trying to undermine their sovereignty and immense power/influence. Vestiges of this warfare escape their old-school-noble-family abstractions, into their own small peaks of equilibria whose lineage level protections optimized against exploitations, allows them to incubate otherwise-pathologies into genius.
Greatness here is defined as individual accomplishment, which is fascinating because it touches on the nature nurture problem. Greatness defined as wealth and influence is easier to explain.
Maybe as a segue to another post, I've always been fascinated with the mechanisms of dynastic wealth. In particular I've always been perplexed by the American custom of partible inheritance. For sure it makes for a more dynamic society when dynastic wealth keeps getting whittled down among more and more descendants. But if your goal is to build a dynasty - which is probably a goal of at least some rich people - it's a bad strategy.
I have heard that European dynasties behave differently. They are more likely to use a kind of "enlightened primogeniture" where one heir - not necessarily the eldest son - is chosen to be the custodian of the fortune and other heirs receive what amounts to a comfortable stipend.
Bit of a tangent, but as I said I find the behavior of American dynasties to be perplexing, explainable only as a social custom.
> But if your goal is to build a dynasty - which is probably a goal of at least some rich people - it's a bad strategy.
It seems like a bad strategy if you live three hundred years ago, your wealth is all in the form of one massive agricultural estate, and you don't expect much new wealth to be created over the next fifty years.
In the 21st century, though, where wealth is easily divided and readily created, I'd say that your chances of creating a dynasty are maximised by spreading your fortune out at each generation in the hopes of giving it to someone who will make the most of it rather than piss it away.
If Elon Musk died tomorrow and split his fortune among his seven children, then they'd each be in the top 40 richest people worldwide. I would expect that some of those children will take that wealth and use it to build something truly fabulous, while others will try and fail, and others will probably piss a lot of it away.
My impression is that building a dynasty takes building a family culture which may be luxurious, but which takes not being extravagant with the fortune.
Tonight I learned, while reading the relevant section of this post to my fiancée, that Rabindranath Tagore's living descendants will be attending our wedding in December. (My soon-to-be in-laws were educated in Shantiniketan.)
Brahmoism was the first modern sect of Hinduism. It was founded by Rama Mohammad Roy a wealthy Bengali Brahman and supporter of British rule. It is a weird mishmash of Advaita Vedanta, Protestant Christianity and enlightenment rationalism. It was mainly a phenomenon of the Bhadra Lok (“good people” the Bengali upper caste Hindu gentry) and while it may have had a few million adherents in its heyday (seems exaggerated IMO) I doubt if it has more than a few thousand now. Within a generation began schisming and Devendranath was a leader (not founder) of one of these offshoots which is confusingly called Brahmoism. The Tagores are also Bengali Brahmans. Only in the last generation did they begin marrying outside their caste. E.g. the famous Bollywood actress Sharmila Tagore who married a Muslim king and famous cricketer the Nawab of Pataudi. (Not exactly a peasant!)
Manne Siegbahn won the Nobel prize in physics. His son Kai Siegbahn won the Nobel prize in physics. His grandson Hans is merely a professor of physics.
I'm sure everyone has anecdotes about things like it.
I resolved a couple years ago to just assume I can do things, and it turns out you can do pretty much whatever, and picking up new skills to basic competency is easy as hell.
Nothing is actually that hard. You can probably code after a couple weeks of trying, just like it turns out I can rewire cars, weld, fix washing machines, do complicated plumbing, stain concrete, learn a foreign language, and just about anything else that doesn't need a four year degree (And if I had a year or two to spare, I'm pretty sure I could do those things as well)
I imagine the barrier to entry to being a normal genius (I'm excluding FREAKS like Newton and von Neuman and Einstein and such) is a kind of lunatic confidence you can do anything if you take a couple shots, and a really strong desire to do it.
The other interesting aspect of this is when average parents produce a genius. Isaac Newton's parents were farmers (like pretty much everyone else in 17th century England).
That farmers are always of average intelligence is a weird assumption to make. Maybe they just never got the chance to go to Cambridge, society being what it was in the day.
Or maybe they werent selective enough: As with the Repository's criteria to accept sperm donors, its criteria for women to receive sperm from the bank were not as high as initially reported. Rumors that women were required to be members of Mensa were false; in fact, women did not need to meet any particular intellectual requirement. Essentially, any woman who was married, in good health, and not homosexual was accepted; t
Does anyone else think that trying to create a 'great family' isn't a great idea?
I think it's a really common pattern to be smart at school and then go through a crisis when you realise that you are probably not going to be a world-changing genius. For some people that crisis is devastating and deprives them of being able to find meaning in their life. I, personally, know a few people that has happened to.
For anyone looking for parenting strategies here, this seems like a very risky one. A very small chance of great public benefit and mixed happiness for your children weighed against a pretty high chance of great unhappiness for your children.
Some people are harmed by high expectations they are unable to fulfill. Some people are harmed by lack of support in their environment. No idea which one is more frequent, empirically. Definitely both exist in sufficient numbers such that people have noticed.
I suppose that if your parents are successful at life, it is best for you to have the same IQ, or only slightly higher. Then you can copy their strategy, learn from them, learn from their mistakes, get their support, get their contacts, etc.
If your parents are super successful, but you are "merely" average or slightly above average, and there is no way you could ever achieve anything remotely comparable to their everyday work, not even with all their help... then I guess this can make you feel like a complete failure, even if compared with the rest of the population you are relatively successful.
On the other hand, if you talent exceeds your social environment so much than none of your friends or relatives can give you useful advice or effective help, that is also frustrating. "You are such a genius, you should use your brain to do something world-changing!" "What specifically?" "I have no idea; I am not the genius, you are! Like, make a new Facebook, or join this pyramid scheme, or start a company and get rich, something like that." Most of the advice is actively harmful. And the one that is not... well, if you follow it, you are going to compete against people who are just as smart as you, but they also have a lot of support which you don't have, so you will most likely lose. And then you live with the feeling of guilt that you got a precious gift that most people didn't get, and you squandered it.
I think there is a research made by Terman that suggests that high IQ kids born in educated families are mostly successful at life, but high IQ kids born in average families frequently follow the pattern: "child prodigy, burn out as adult, depression, maybe suicide". I suspect it is because they lack the supportive background, so any little mistake they make, it hits them hard (no one to warn them, no one to help them fix it).
It's a terrible idea. I know more than one very, very smart person who has strained his or her relationship with his children tremendously, as well as saddled the latter with serious psychological challenges, by pushing way too hard for them to be just as smart or just as successful in a particular area.
It's a terrible idea even if you're *not* a Nobel Prize winner or sing to sold-out audiences at the Met, if you're just a schmo. Your kids are not your God-damned craft project, some clay you get to fashion into an ideal memorial to your philosophy. They are human beings, with a right to their own life, and the working out of their own moira. In my opinion (and some observation of others), if you don't approach parenthood with a big slice of good humor, relaxed expectations, and humility -- if you think of yourself as a sculptor, instead of just a midwife and guide -- then you are asking for serious trouble sooner or later.
I mean, I'm not saying it's anything goes, or parents shouldn't firmly direct their children in ways that are vital -- how not to be an asshole, say, or how to protect yourself from assholes -- but it's really important for new parents to get out of their head the too-common delusion that they are going to be able to fashion this squally little bundle into any particular ideal. They're little people, as ornery and surprising and unprogrammable as any member of the species -- if you want to craft perfection pick up carpentry or painting as a hobby :)
I could see science fiction about one organization doing gradual multi-generation eugenics and family culture improvements vs. another that's looking for big relatively fast victory.
If you assume someone's IQ is: genetic IQ + randomness. The 150 IQ person and the 130 IQ person probably had really high 'randomness rolls', so their IQ might be something like this:
150 IQ = 130 genetic IQ + 20 random IQ
130 IQ = 110 genetic IQ + 20 random IQ
You'll probably get a much more average random IQ in their children, so their IQ might be:
124 IQ = 120 genetic IQ + 4 random IQ
Of course, the parents might not have a very high randomness component to their IQ, then you'd expect the children to be roughly the average of their two parents. But very high IQs like 130 and 150 are pretty rare so it seems unlikely that they can happen just due to genetics.
It's Bayesian math with a particular set of inputs, described by "mmmmmm" below. I don't agree with his or her inputs (I think s/he's way overestimated the randomness component), but the math is correct.
It feels like the privilege hypothesis is straw-manned/passed over way too easily here - there are a lot of ways having very successful/influential relations would plausibly increase your odds of being successful besides just wealth - obvious examples being you have easier access to important networks and better education.
More nebulously (but maybe importantly?) growing up around super high-flyers simply changes the set of possible futures you imagine for yourself: if you grow up in a very poor environment where high aspirations can simply be getting a comfortable middle-class job, you’re much less likely to ever consider becoming a composer - even if you have the potential for it (not to mention the fact that you’re less likely to discover this talent in the first place). I definitely notice this phenomenon in a watered-down way first hand going to an Ivy-league from a poor background.
Tying into this but on the wealth point: it’s true that you can’t “rich-kid” your way into being a great scientist as you might be able to in e.g show-biz, but growing up affluent means you have more opportunities to nurture and explore passions and talents - you get the best resources and the opportunity to do relevant extra-curriculars, and you have more of a safety net in early adulthood or try riskier stuff
The counter-argument is that there are a lot of people with good-to-excellent privilege who don't achieve anything notable. This isn't numbers, though.
Dunno about other fields, but in science my experience is that this argument only applies to the very poorest or those from the most dysfunctional backgrounds. I've known gobs of scientists, some successful, others less so, and in general wealthy or connected background turns out to be a slight negative -- young people from that background are more familiar with the world, and do have better connections, but they also tend to have less grit and drive, and believe in themselves less (and are more cynical about others), while people from a scruffier middle class background have more grit and drive, and believe in themselves more. In the end the drive matters at least as much as the raw talent, provided we are not talking about absolute Newton-level geniuses who make once-in-a-century breakthroughs.
I think a form of the privilege argument does apply at the very lowest socioeconomic levels, where young people are in single-parent households from a young age, where their young lives are disrupted by frequent moves and going to crappy schools, and especially when they have indifferent or cruel parents, or where they are exposed through their peer group to drugs and criminality in the vulnerable pre-teen years (especially among boys). None of these people ever seem to make it. But this is less because they lack privilege a small number of other people have, and more because they are suffering under handicaps most people don't have.
To give these people access to the opportunity their raw talent can use, you would need to ensure that they are live from a young age with parents who take their responsibilities seriously, who stay married (or at least together), who prioritize family stability and education for the children, and who consciously shield their pre-teens from evil social influence. They don't need to be native-born, or even native English speakers, they don't need to be rich or even middle class, and they don't need to have any familiarity with higher education or science, and they don't need connections -- I have seen people with all of these lacks succeed very well. But the steadying influence of sound involved two-parent parenting and a non-dysfunctional peer group are irreplaceable.
The concept of a hero license is interesting. One thing I've noticed in my family is that people's ambitions are all beaten down by life, but only in proportion to the strength of the original ambition, so there is a real advantage to being insanely ambitious. Mom wanted to be a doctor and wound up a nurse. Dad wanted to be an engineer, wasn't good enough at math, became an engineering technician, and then eventually left the field entirely. Brother followed similar path wrt chemistry. I wanted to be elected President of the United States as soon as I was legally eligible, and then found a dynasty. Not gonna happen, but I am by far the most successful person in my family. I know my mom's IQ and she is smarter than me. My brother is almost as smart as me; the difference is not enough to explain the difference in achievement. So it's not fundamentally a difference in talent. But it may be a difference in hero licensing.
In addition to random chance and selection bias, there is probably some halo effect as well,
Erasmus Darwin probably had similarly accomplished peers who are not as famous as him because they didn't have a super famous grandson. At some point the glow start to bounce off each other.
Erasmus Darwin's pals include James Watt and Joseph Priestly. They are still pretty famous despite the lack of epochal descendants. Another friend includes Samuel Galton who is remembered, if at all, for being Francis Galton's grandfather and Erasmus's brother-in-law.
> what gene do we think Niels and Harald Bohr shared that made one of them a physics Nobelist and the other an Olympic athlete?
Likely the same genes: Niels Bohr was *also* a great athlete, just not as good as Harald, and Harald was likely the best mathematician in Denmark. They were both very smart and very athletic such that it'd make sense that environmental and smaller genetic differences would cause the differentiation we saw between them.
> elite soccer players are smarter than you are - "and the sharpest of them score more often than their dimmer teammates"
This seems like a red flag. I can believe intelligence helps with soccer play, but I'd be pretty shocked if the elite levels hadn't already extracted all the signal available from intelligence. A parallel is in American football, arm length is really important to be a good lineman, but it doesn't correlate with success in the NFL because making the NFL with short arms mean you have compensating talent. Unless theres just a lack of people with soccer ability who are also intelligent (seems unlikely?), shouldn't we expect no correlation at the top level even if intelligence matters? Similar arguments are made for the GRE not correlating with grad school success.
Anecdotal example of intelligence helping with soccer: I've heard magnus Carlsen (best living chess player) is also a quite good soccer player.
As a meteorologist, I was a bit surprised to see Francis Galton credited as the inventor of modern meteorology, so I had to look him up to see what he did. Some stuff, but not nearly as foundational as, for example, Luke Howard (cloud classification), Robert FitzRoy (weather forecasting), Joseph Henry (weather observation and analysis), Vilhelm Bjerknes (meteorology as a branch of physics), and many others.
> just assume there are an approximately infinite number of Tagores, all of whom have names ending in -dranath
I strongly suspect that you've misidentified the word elements. Are they not Rab-indra-nath, Aban-indra-nath, Hem-indra-nath (with -indra- becoming -endra- for some reason), etc? This feels like cracking a joke about how Svandís Svavarsdóttir, Þorgerður Gunnarsdóttir, and Þórhildur Sunna Ævarsdóttir all have names ending in "-arsdóttir".
That genius runs in families suggests that it can be a good survival strategy to grant social power and authority on a hereditary basis. One can see how monarchies and aristocracies might have evolved in the ancient world on this basis alone, or even why Plato, for example, considered the philosopher king to be ideal of government.
It remains to also account for kakistocracy, or rule by the worst. Surely evil genius runs in families, too. An interesting question might be why (or whether) good genius predominates.
I think it's likely that growing up in an intimate environment with highly brilliant people is probably a unique kind of pedagogy which contributes at least SOME to inter-generational success.
Obviously it's hard to test for this (as is the case with a lot of nature vs. nurture things.) But seems prima facie really plausible to me.
I'm reminded of all the times that a controversial mid-century intellectual has been mentioned here and David Friedman talks about having met them when he was young.
Sorry if someone has beaten me to this objection, but I feel like this is just selection bias.
That is, each generation has thousands of “genius level” people, who accomplish noteworthy things. They likely have a high rate of intermarriage (see the sequence post on elites being way better than everyone else for why) and many will have children. Suppose that most regress to the mean at exactly the rate you expect, but four families, just by chance, regress more slowly than the others. Then these four families appear to be special, whereas really its just luck, and selection bias takes you the rest of the way towards solving the problem.
The proper prediction for me to pre-register would be to pick 1,000 of the top geniuses in the world today, do math to figure out how many of their children we would expect to succeed, taking into account predicted IQ regression, exposure to elite circles, etc. and wait a couple decades to see whether the prediction was right.
In societies where education was scarce and many people suffered decreased IQ from disease or malnutrition perhaps there would be more clustering than usual. Certainly there have been a fair number of people who were more likely to be excluded from the competition from the get-go due to social and environmental factors.
What I'd really be interested in is if the rate of this clustering *changes* with certain societal changes. Migration to the cities? How about availability of capital? I mean, in 1900 it was much harder to get startup capital if you didn't know someone wealthy. There were no venture capitalists. Though on the other side of things, less startup capital might have been required. You could start mixing herbs with opium and market the elixir from a soap box, whereas today marketing a new patent medicine would require that you be one of a handful of very large companies capable of passing regulatory muster.
Paul Graham had an article about how the number of people in the top 100 wealthiest in America were increasingly first generation wealthy. Not because there were fewer heirs, but because there were more self-made billionaires.
But I certainly agree that having a family that could place you on the first rung would be a big benefit if you wanted to start climbing.
"Have you, dear reader, ever tried writing poetry that will set the collective soul of your nation on fire? If no, why not?"
Because I absolutely do not want to set the collective soul of my nation on fire. I consider myself good at writing poetry and verse and I've had that echoed to some extent by those around me. But I'd rather write jokes and individual tributes. I would not *want* to found a religion, even if I had the capacity to do so. Why I'm not the next "Weird Al" is a more personal indictment, mostly due to my feeling that I don't have any musical ability or anyone who could help me make and popularize satirical videos.
I suggest reading up and researching a community called "South Indian Brahmins" in Tamilnadu, India. Typically classified as Iyers and Iyengars. They comprise less than 2MM population but have more Nobel prize winners per capita than Ashkenazi Jews. Also very talented as musicians, politicians, scientists, academics and even as sports persons (tennis, cricket etc). A lot of it comes down to childhood parental expectations, role models, community culture, etc.
So, I'm technically a Huxley-in-law (Julian Huxley was my wife's great-grandfather).
While her family are highly-intelligent people, certainly none are as well known as a few generations prior.
Genetics probably are a part of that. Julian's son married "beneath" himself by his family's standards (no criticism here, she was a wonderful lady with incredible business sense, but not a Nobel prize winning scientist).
Part of it is different set of priorities. Even discounting the genetics, if a scientist marries a merchant then the children are much more likely to choose some kind of business career than if both parents were STEM-focused. Your parents' peers are likely part of that too. The Huxley's weren't just impressive in their own fields but also friends with the movers-and-shakers of British culture of their generation. Different social circles offer different life-choices.
It's also hard to underestimate how much damage the first and second world wars did to historically influential families, and the Huxley's are no exception.
I suppose it would be easy enough, but probably too depressing, to consider the flipside: families with multiple instances of high school dropouts with low IQs, criminal convictions and violent early deaths. But I would expect the same combination of genetics, being raised badly by people who set bad examples, lack of opportunity or exposure to better options, and just random individual bad choices would likewise account for such things. The nature-nurture thing is kind of a feedback loop, I guess
Both of my grandfathers' fathers were successful real estate developers. Then my maternal grandfather was a mathematician and computer science professor / bell labs researcher who was a frequent coauthor with Claude Shannon and invented finite state machines and fault-tolerant circuits. My maternal grandmother was a pastor's daughter who got a masters in math from Yale just to find a husband and became a housewife. My mother's elder sister was a childless programmer one block from ground zero in NYC (now retired and sponsoring several girls in third world countries). My mother majored in Economics, then dropped out of a computer science masters program to have me unexpectedly, and then got promoted into upper management at the defense mapping agency. My father majored in cartography and worked for the same agency for a while before he decided to start flipping houses, got divorced, and after a few years of probably toxic chemical exposures while renovating houses he went crazy and was permanently institutionalized for Schizophrenia when I was 8. My paternal grandfather was a flight mechanic on a B-52 in WWII and closet atheist who scored 99th percentile on the AFQT. After the war he worked for big corporations as a counselor to help fix/retain executives that had alcohol abuse problems (He kinda reminds me of Bob Ross). My father's only brother is a programmer and only sister is a convention manager at a 5-star hotel. My paternal grandmother was an accomplished musician. My brother won a prize for best PhD thesis in math, got married and had kids, and worked as a programmer. I dropped out of a computer science PhD program to go work for google, then a startup, then became a self-employed professional gambler / investor / bitcoin maximalist with a net worth in the top 1% for my age group despite being an extremely lazy videogame addict most of the time. My mother's first cousin is an ambassador, and her brother piloted air force one, and their mother is a great piano instructor. Many engineers and programmers are scattered throughout the family tree on both sides. When I was in public high school, I was #1 in my classes in AP Physics and Chemistry, but I didn't even consider going into those fields. I just went into computer science by default because of the family history.
Not everyone in the family is successful. My mother has an anomalously-blonde decade-younger unexpected-and-likely-illegitimate sister who posts annoying leftwing outrageporn on facebook and works retail for minimum wage after she got too old to be a park ranger and became very obese. She married a railroad foreman who domesticates hawks for fun and they had a strange son with severe ADHD who dropped out of community college after a few months, never held a job for more than 2 weeks, and still lives with his mother at age 25 playing videogames all day every day. They are nice people but not very bright. She always loses by a lot to my mother and her elder sister at board games.
BTW, if postnatal environmental effects were as important as genetic effects in explaining patterns of successful families, we should expect adoptive parent SES to strongly correlate with adoptive child SES in adulthood, but it doesn't. The correlation is almost zero. So the intergenerational correlation of SES for biological children is probably almost entirely caused by genes + prenatal environment.
Prenatal environment is easy to improve with supplements of folate/iodine and education about the harms of alcohol and tobacco. Genes will soon be easy to improve with IVF embro selection. Changing the entire culture of the lower classes would be hard, so let's be glad if that's not what's holding them back from advancing to higher SES.
The mode is at 1 year old, but the median looks like 4 years. Very few are adopted before 1 year. So adoption studies alone probably can't rule out very-early-postnatal environment effects. I would modify my last paragraph with that caveat.
A good recent example is Larry Summers who is nephew to Kenneth Arrow and Paul Samuelson who both won Nobel Memorial prizes in Economics. Also Janet Yellen's husband just so happens to have one a Nobel Memorial prize in Economics as well.
Some people say that regression to mean is due to luck evening out, but I think there's much more to it. If advantageous genotype is heterozygous in certain gene, then parents with best copies of gene would create child with same heterozygous gene with 1/2 chance.
After all, why plant breeding heavily uses f1 hybrids?
To add to the hero-license thing, something that was going through my mind this entire article was familial expectation. Sure, it matters what you expect from yourself, but at least in India, it can matter even more what your family/environment expects from you. Most parents probably want their kids to be moderately successful, enough to have a happy life, but Nobel-prize winners expect their children to be the best in their field.
e.g. Rabindranath Tagore wrote some poems at the age of 8. Hey, I wrote some poems when i was a kid too. But Rabindranath was actively encouraged to write more, and to recite in front of a distinguished audience that all expected great things of him because he was a Tagore.
This is an interesting theory, and hero-licensing seems to me as an extreme version of the 'success frame'* that is often used to describe 'tiger parenting' among Asian Americans (and other Western Countries).
Of course, if one believes that parenting is pointless, then this is probably covered by inheritance as much as the next person?
I think there is also an element that normalizes what it takes to be successful and gives kids of model to emulate.
One of my dear friend's mother is a world class opera singer, to the tunes of millions / year at the height of her career, and her children are both successful (though not as famous or storied) artists -- a writer and jazz muscian.
One of the things that always blows my mind about my friend's stories about her childhood was how she normalized habits that were completely foreign for me. It would be "okay" for her mother not to speak for a week leading up to a concert. Every single day, including holidays and birthdays, she had practice time that was sacrosanct. In the eyes of the kids, it was that her mother was making decisions and sacrifices about her talent and her career -- she normalized the sacrifices that it takes to be a world class opera singer -- and taught her kids to develop many of the same habits.
In my family, it was the total opposite. You would be ostracized and chastised for making those decisions and it was looked down on, in general.
In other words, families create micro-cultural norms... and highly successful families may imprint highly productive norms.
Is this intentional that you only focus on intelligence (inherited or learned) as a Generic Talent measure? And not on any personality traits. Because, the word "willpower" may be banned from use in the rat community, but the reality is that some people are just better at trying really hard than others, call it "intrinsic motivation", "stubbornness" "hardworking-ness" or whatever, the thing measured by the marshmallow test. If it's genetic or learned from parents (probably both as all complex traits), it can better explain success in unrelated fields than IQ alone.
Trait conscientiousness is one of the few things that rivals IQ in sheer generality of its contribution to success. It's smaller than intelligence (intelligence's impact varies a lot, it plays a small role in some fields, a large in others, but contributes nearly always). Conscientiousness isn't so varied - its effect is generally small - but very, very widespread. Like other Big Five traits, it is also substantially heritable, though less strongly than intelligence.
Another example. Benedict Wells and Ferdinand von Schirach are some of the most famous authors in contemporary German literature and they happen to be cousins. Their grandfather was Baldur von Schirach who was indicted at Nuremberg and the von Schirach family contains other notable individuals. Wells changed his name to avoid (hide?) this association.
Thanks for this, really interesting. I feel the "hero license" effect would be significant. Also, no proof here either, but not just genes travel down bloodlines, but ideas too. Especially for ideas to be deeply embedded into how someone thinks requires repeated exposure, e.g. from parent to child or from brother to sister, or, preacher to congregation. It's a generalization of the "hero license" effect.
Julian Huxley also wrote the massive "The Science of Life" with H.G. Wells and Wells's son, G. P. Wells. Tomas Bohr's brother Vilhelm is a distinguished MD, PhD researcher on aging at the NIH.
Bohr's sons and grandsons have described how every meal was an opportunity for Niels to ask them questions about science and give them mathematical puzzles to solve. That surely played a role.
I can't fully trust such a heavily anecdotal approach to understanding success, due to wiki-walk selection effects.
How much of Erasmus Darwin's notability comes from being Charles's grandfather? If he hadn't been, do you think you'd have heard of him? (I hadn't heard of most of the 3rd, 4th, etc. family members in these examples, and in some cases not even the 2nd.) How many other Englishmen of his generation made similar contributions? Very roughly speaking, if that number is larger than the square root of the entire talent pool (which in this era would have been exclusively upper-class males) then there's nothing to explain here-- the intuition is the same as for the birthday paradox.
Similarly, Nobel Prizes are pretty impressive (<10 per year) but the 3rd, 4th, etc examples in a lot of these families are just, like, 95th-percentile-successful academics or artists or businesspeople or whatever. Even in the 19th century there must have been hundreds of those born every year; today it's more like hundreds of thousands. Given the degrees of freedom in family ties (average person has >10 blood relatives, more in big families; we only have to find 2 or 3 notable ones) and kinds of notability, I'm inclined to chalk a lot of this anecdata up to coincidence. Though I don't doubt that the effects mentioned in Part V, at least, play a role as well.
Well, I started looking for moonshots as soon as I graduated college. I spent 5 years researching and experimenting to find a huge unsolved problem I cared about, thought I could get traction on, and would enjoy tackling. When I found one I worked on it on and off for 20 years, only reaching gainful employment in the last 2.
So I’m definitely quite high on “obsessed with investing towards a shot at absurd success” scale. And I would directly trace it to having a famous family (though the experience was much more nuanced, and darker, than the Hero).
Maybe I would have met the right people and absorbed it over time. I think it matches my personality and values. But in most circumstances I’m sure ambition would have been much slower to develop, and much more reasonable, like “Start a unicorn company”.
So, one data point supporting Scott’s hypo about a family effect.
Terence Tao has two brothers. Nigel Tao is a senior engineer at Google. Trevor Tao is a musician and an international chess master. When Trevor Tao was two he was diagnosed with autism and mental retardation. All three of them competed in the international mathematical olympiads.
Yeah but compared to what Terence can do becoming a senior engineer at Google is like winning pin the tail on the donkey at a 5th grade birthday party.
I think one important thing that is missing from the discussion is confidence in your abilities, which is most likely affected by the people you interact with. In my own personal experience, confidence in my ability to solve a problem can have a very literal effect on the fluidity and clarity in how I think about it. Any sliver of doubt can interrupt this mental fluidity and make me start the sort of "motion" of thinking it through over again. This fluidity and confidence in your motion is much more easily demonstrated in sports ("just do it").
Your parents probably not only affect your big picture aspirations, but also this confidence on a more granular level, perhaps just from listening to how they think about problems.
A lot of comments along the lines of "I know why *I* was successful" here. This is unlikely to be true, people, sorry! You have no counterfactuals and an N of 1.
A relevant paper by Greg Clark: "For whom the Bell Curve tolls" is here: http://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/ClarkGlasgow2021.pdf. It argues using a big database of UK families that genetics fit the patterns in the data better than the environment. It also acknowledges that this argument requires a huge amount of assortative mating. Incidentally, he got cancelled from Glasgow University for this.
Also relevant, our working paper, not out yet but I'll give a flavour from the abstract:
"If social status and genetic variants are both assets in marriage markets, then the two will become associated in spouse pairs, and will be passed on to subsequent generations together. This process provides a new explanation for the surprising persistence of inequality across generations, and for observed genetic differences across the distribution of socio-economic status... environmental shocks to socio-economic status are reflected in the DNA of subsequent generations."
I could be grossly ignorant here because I am not a geneticist, but wouldn't Clark's Fisherian model be a good (at least, better) proxy measure also for environmental effects like nepotism based on parentage than the regression-to-mean "cultural model" presented in the paper? Or not only nepotism, but any cultural environmental stuff whose transmission from generation to next could be best described by additive mixture of behavior bits inherited from both parents.
Not saying what is the explanation (as I said, not exactly my field), but it seems strange to highlight Clark's paper because he doesn't analyze *any* actual genomics data, only family trees and inter-generational patterns of occupation. If one had, the researcher would still have to employ some nifty statistical tricks to infer anything about which genes are causative and which merely correlate with people's behavior.
I don't think he can distinguish between inherited culture and genetics - in particular, if you think of culture as additively inherited equally from parents, the two explanations are not distinguishable on purely behavioural data. He can only compare a "similar environment" explanation to genetics, where in particular he argues that siblings have a more similar environment than parent-child pairs. Imagine that parents provide an environment to (all) their children. But there's some noise in how they do that. (Plausible: childrearing practices are not perfectly predictable.) Then siblings get more similar environments than parent-child pairs.
I know a significant amount of early childhood development is based on mimicry, perhaps that instinct lasts longer than early childhood. Initially surnames often reflected trades and I assume that dynamic of "family businesses" arose naturally from the earliest human settlements. Proximity to critical thinking on a day to day basis likely increases the likelihood of proficiency at critical thinking.
Aside from all of that, it could be a significant amount of randomness. Even with very low probabilities of genius level ability and achievement, there is sure to be some clustering if we look at a long timescale.
Not all the non-genetic factors are going to be random. These kids aren't getting adopted out and assigned to random families.
People often learn a lot about parenting from their own parents. A family who's produced one genius may not be perfect but they're probably avoiding things that are likely to cripple their kids progression.
Privilege is definitely part of it, connections, knowledge, having a nobel-winning parent who's probably willing to dedicate time and resources to their children's curiosity.
And then throw in confidence and assumptions. I remember an old talk by an editor at the journal Nature talking about how one of the big filters was that they actually didn't get as many submissions as you might think, people self-select and send their papers to lower-tier journals.
So if both mom and dad are in the top tiers of their professions, if their parents friends are also in the top tiers of professions their their kids are going to see it as natural that they aim for similar levels. There are doors out there that are hanging open for anyone to use but which many people decide to not even trying to walk through.
"I said before that if an IQ 150 person marries an IQ 130 person, on average their kids will have IQ 124."
This isn't necessarily how regression toward the mean works. Because the "mean" one is regressing toward is not the mean of the general population -- it is the mean of your parents genotypes (not phenotypes). Your parents' phenotypes might be higher, lower or the same as their genotypes. The more you know about their other family members the more you can deduce their mean genotype.
For example, if the IQ 150 and IQ 130 parents came from families that averaged 150 and 130 IQ's, respectively, we would expect no decrees in the IQ of their offspring. In fact, if their respective families had average IQs of 160, their offspring would be expected to regress upward (!) toward that 160 average.
So the bottom line is that assortative mating/inbreeding for intelligence is probably more feasible over time than Scott imagines if people can just keep it up consistently. With selective breeding you can end up as a family of Border Collies living amongst a general population of Beagles.
Famous Adventurers, Scientists, Engineers... Rich people who take risks but always found ways to follow their own interests beside 16 hours 6 days per week in the factory (or 9 to 5 in these days) and get famous and wealthy by doing so.
Guess everything was already said - but not yet by everybody 😉
Not sure if this was mentioned - just my 2 cents:
- first thing would be to test the pure statistical significance of said example families as being absolutely improbabile. My expectation would be that with currently 8 billion people on earth and let's say 15 billion since 1700 (Darwin Family) chance seem pretty high that at least 10-50 families would do extremely well over let's say 3 generations. Could be that we are just standing in astonishment in front of some lottery winners and wondering 'what these guys did better then all the other players which didn't win the jackpot'. We all love stories of success and therefore easily fall victim to boasting about 'self made success' and don't emphasize the fact that most success is only a tiny fraction a result of an individual's personal actions and most a result of good genes at the right time in the right environment. Veritasium has made a extremely well video about 'The Success Paradox' https://youtu.be/3LopI4YeC4I
- Survivers bias: we just didn't think about the other 14.999999 billion people in 1.499999 Million families who did not that extremely well over the past 400 years.
- nurture or nature (genes or culture, inheritance or training) in some if not many families both genes and culture gets passed on to the next generation. Both favorable and unfavorable things. I guess for each 'positive' outlier family there exists at least one 'negative' outlier family in the world. Both hand their business over to the younger members sooner or later: Doctors, Attorneys, Competitive Sportsmen and Women, Engineers, Thieves, Bank robbers, Mafia clans and so forth. The knowledge of this is so old and basic that many of western people carry *family* (past) names, which were given their ancestors in European middle age and created by just adding the families male profession behind a person's first name: John Smith, Henry Butcher, Will Carpenter and so on. Businesses even in the new world country USA were often named 'X and Sind's etc.
this may be a bit too controversial, but there are ethno-national-religious groups who have a hugely disproportionate share of science and economics Nobel prizes, fields medals, and I believe chess world championships, just to name a few accomplishments one could claim are unambiguously impressive. The same questions apply, but I am not sure we have better answers
To add to the last point, I think its importance lies in more than just expectation setting or "hero license." If everyone in your family is a doctor, then not only is it easy for you to imagine yourself becoming a doctor at some point, but you can have a pretty good sense of all of the steps it would take for you to become one yourself. Most of my family has a PhD (my brother, my dad, my mom, my grandmother--now my wife too), mostly in philosophy. It was easy to imagine that I could get one too, and more than that at every stage of my life I knew exactly what steps I needed to take to achieve that goal, navigate the complex and arcane rules of academia, learn how to do PhD level work, etc.. Many of these I would have had to learn first-hand, but instead could just rely on others to help me with. Now, I think I can honestly say that I have not made use of connections (which I regret sometimes--they would have helped), but for many things it's as though I did not need to. It was enough that I knew exactly how, e.g., academic conferences worked that I could navigate them and their byzantine etiquettes fairly well to get a definite head start on my career.
If I had had a different family it's still possible that I would have encountered philosophy in college, fallen in love with it, and wanted to become a philosophy professor. And it's even possible that I would have done it. But without that inside knowledge of what steps to take to achieve that goal, I would have had a much harder chance not only of envisioning myself as achieving that goal, but even of envisioning myself going through the individual steps needed to make that a reality.
It certainly affects what sort of career you consider. I write poetry. I remember my sister pointing out, possibly when I was in college, that I wouldn't consider a life in Greenwich Village as a poet — it was obvious that I would go for an academic life of some sort.
On the other hand, the son of Ed Banfield, a prominent political scientist, did go to Greenwich Village (artist not poet) and is still a professional artist.
My impression is that there are more British intellectual dynasties than American ones.
For example, the actress Olivia Wilde has started writing screenplays, which is unusual for lovely actresses but not surprising in her case because she's actually a Cockburn (but she picked a stage name for obvious reasons), the heir to a long line of prominent left of center journalists going back to Lord Cockburn 200 years ago. Lord Cockburn is also the ancestor to a famous dynasty of right-of-center writers, the Waughs (e.g., Evelyn, who was the first cousin of Olivia's Communist grandfather Claude Cockburn).
I don't think there is quite the same density of family connections among intellectuals in US history, although I wouldn't know how to quantify that hunch.
In Michael Frayn's play "Copenhagen," there are three characters: Bohr, Heisenberg, and Mrs. Bohr, who is treated by two great physicists as a most estimable intellect.
Economic historian Gregory Clark has done a lot of research into unique surnames in Britain. For example, he compared two great names around c. 1700: Samuel Pepys, the famous diarist and naval administrator whose bureaucratic innovations helped institutionalized the Royal Navy as the world's foremost institution, vs. Daniel Defoe, the titanic author of the first bestselling novel in the English language, "Robinson Crusoe."
Pepys was the son of a tailor and Defoe (born "Foe") was the son of a butcher. But Pepys had numerous prominent relatives earlier in the 17th Century while Defoe's relations are obscure. Clark found that numerous Pepyses are found in the upper reaches of society in subsequent centuries, while later Defoes (or Foes) disappear back into obscurity.
This is all too common in academia. Off the top of my head :
Ed Witten's daughter Daniela is a prof @ UW
Greg Clarke, Hinton's family
Tauman-Kalai family
Valiants, Blums in theoretical CS
Laszlo Lovasz's son is on track to be a top mathematician...at the same group as Avi Wigderson's son
There are many other linkages. If you pick a random prof you have heard of a top uni, odds are good they are a professor's son and/or have unrelated achievements in their family, such as being a billionaire or being a CEO-tier exec. I remember randomly looking at someone's profile and going huh...Minsky ? But of course she's related to Marvin Minsky. There are no coincidences.
The reason is some mixture of genetics and upbringing, being an academic/researcher isn't for everybody. If it was purely genetics there would be ``crossover", people from elite profession A going to elite profession B fairly often.
This doesn't occur that much. Being a hedge fund manager's child tilts your odds at becoming a prof, but not as much as being a prof's son, despite the two professions both being selective. There is also a heavy unsavory aspect involved and nepotism does continue to occur in an untold manner of simply having a head start and using it well. Generally, genetics washes out head starts, but when you are in a hypercompetitive arena, these otherwise-useless things begin to matter.
I and my brother followed our Dad into IT, I wonder if there are studies on adopted vs genetic children in this? Of course we went into IT, it was 'what people do', I'd have no idea how to make a living as a plumber even if I could do the plumbing. I assume that these people all had contacts,such that upon showing promise they talked to dad's mate Jon about how to get elected rather than shrugging and saying 'not for me'
Both grew up in a small Norwegian homesteading community in Rural South Dakota, both had major academic achievements in their careers. Parents were just school teachers.
They also had another friend that was an accomplished physicist.
I'm genuinely surprised the topic of epigenetics wasn't breached here: "Epigenetics is the study of heritable changes in gene expression that occur without changes in DNA sequence (Wolffe and Guschin, 2000). Epigenetic mechanisms are flexible genomic parameters that can change genome function under exogenous influence, and also provide a mechanism that allows for the stable propagation of gene activity states from one generation of cells to the next." (https://www.nature.com/articles/hdy20102)
I am the farthest from an expert in this, but I'm extremely fascinated at the idea of how the environment can affect how genes are expressed. It would flow from this idea that the same core gene could be associated with music and mathematics, yet the environmental factors would dictate how that gene (or set of genes) expresses itself into one or the other. Further googling shows recent studies with some evidence that epigenetic mechanisms can affect IQ directly (https://www.europeanscientist.com/en/research/epigenetics-and-iq-a-new-study-uncovers-one-of-the-mechanisms-behind-environmentally-induced-effects-on-cognitive-performance/). There are many studies of in utero epigenetics influencing how genes are expressed, including environmental factors. The existence of this field fuels my epistemic humility in all things genetics, and I can't help but wonder if it's at play in any discussions of hereditary traits that seem to be transient. Of course, the engineer in me also wonders if/how we could improve health by better in utero programming.
It would be surprising if epigenetic mechanisms influenced intelligence per se. These mechanisms are *adaptive* and it's difficult to see why lowering intelligence would be adaptive under any circumstances. However, I can readily see epigenetic mechanisms affecting personality characteristics. For example, a child who suffered from poorer nutrition in utero might easily be born with a more anxious and conservative personality -- because being anxious and conservative is adaptive in an environment in which resources are unusually scarce. A child who experienced a plentiful or even superabundant nutritional regime in utero might be born with a bold and even reckless personality, because *those* personality traits are adaptive in a world of plentiful resources.
I agree with many of the points, especially the proposed model of how environment could shape personality traits. I think the idea of lowering intelligence never being adaptive shows a lack of creativity though. I’m not an expert in the mechanisms at work, so this could just be flaws in my own understanding, but if intelligence as always an optimal choice free of trade offs, you would think intelligence would skyrocket across all species.
Additionally, I don’t think this can be viewed as lowering intelligence as much as not choosing to optimize intelligence. One possible model for this is that adaptations are scarce (like creating a D&D character), and non-intelligence adaptations preclude also adapting for intelligence, where intelligence was adapted for in a parent. Now I doubt there’s really a pool of possible points for adaptations, but I wouldn’t be surprised if energy efficiency was at play. I would put a higher confidence in the model where expressing a set of genes for something more optimal for survival than intelligence precludes expressing genes for intelligence too.
Yes, that's a good point, there are always tradeoffs, and it is possible an epigenetic mechanism might boost X and as a side effect lower intelligence, and if X is more important to survival than intelligence, that's a win and will be selected for.
...of course, that argues one should be very careful about messing with this (cf. your comment about "in utero engineering"). It would well and truly suck if boosting the mechanism for optimizing IQ turned out to lead to overexpression of about 20 oncogenes...
Totally. The complexity of that system is absurdly high, and that's just for the stuff we know. Beyond deliberately trying to have traits expressed, there's also a thread calling for research into essentially a mechanical uterus, such that women wouldn't have to carry to term. It's not at all near-term, but even if you can successfully deliver nutrients, our ignorance of the epigenetic impact leads me to believe it's not something we could ethically pursue.
Agreed, although building an artificial uterus that would work for >20 weeks would be highly satisfying. The situation for 22-week preemies is heart-wrenching :(
I *have* written and translated poetry, but I'm more of a math/science geek and hardware/software amphibian.
Currently putting together an experiment to test electrostatic time dilation, which is a prediction of an obscure class of theories dating back to 1978 which I became the ~7th person to re-discover in 2009. (We're up to at least 9 now. I sometimes think that my biggest contribution to the field was just doing the literature search and finding everyone else. Most of them had no idea that anyone else had figured this out.) My wife (cognitive neuroscientist and ACX-follower) said I should apply for an ACX grant, but I don't need funds as much as I need a muon beam. The hardware is cheap, I can fund it from my Social Security. TRIUMF are being assholes, but PSI is letting me apply for beam time in 2022 (proposals due Jan 10th).
The saddest thing here is that you didn't know who Esther Dyson is. I've gotten to speak with her a few times, and she's one of the deepest thinkers I know.
Anyway, I think that you're underweighting the "enriched learning environment" part of the equation. A large family that throws salons has a huge advantage over a nuclear couple with few friends. "It takes a village ..." Schools are important, but can only do so much.
Probably. I don't actually want high intensity because I'm trying to measure one muon decay at a time. Somewhere in the 500-10000 muons per second range would be fine. I also want low energy (20-30 MeV) because I'm trying to stop them. But at this point, I've visited PSI and the proposal is about 2/3 written, so I probably don't want to change horses quite yet.
Actually, having looked at the ISIS web pages, the main problem is that ISIS has 7 muon beam experiment bays and all 7 are already occupied with long-term facilities (3 ISIS ones and 4 controlled by the Japanese RIKEN-RAL team). So they have no room to accommodate any new equipment for the foreseeable future.
It is simple. There are 5 colors. Red white green blue black. Humans, persons have at most 3. Two is for caricatures, 1 is for kids, 0 is for unborn babies. No man can achieve 4 or more on their own. for it is unnatural. 4 is the color of cities, clans, civilization. 5 appears to be the color of fucking magic. See this fella: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7msDInjK0wk Naya (the kid, white red green) is being styled on by a 5 color madman.
"Niels Bohr developed the modern understanding of the atom". Niels Bohr developed the common misunderstanding of Quantum Mechanics and managed to convince most physicists that his philosophy was science. E.g., see https://bohmian-mechanics.net/sokalhoax.html
"Take Niels Bohr. He’s a genius". I suppose it depends on how you define "genius".
Without the internet the only way for individual to pursue information was through family and peers. Family was giving access to peers and books respectfully. So coming from an affluent family was bare minimum to achievement beyond life of an individual. Someone whose family was not in 1% in terms of wealth through most of the history of civilization can't even comprehend doing something, which is not about their survival.
I don't think that's correct, although it's hard to be sure of the circumstances of people in the past. Isaac Newton doesn't seem to have been from that high in the income distribution. Ramanujan. Andrew Carnegie.
It was surely an advantage to be born rich, but past societies often had mechanisms, such as the church, by which a sufficiently bright poor kid could rise.
I don't think access to information depends primarily on the technical means. I doubt the Internet is fantastically more enabling than the public library or university, both of which have existed for twenty centuries. I suggest the key in almost all cases is having the security and leisure to be able to go rummaging around in what's known. 16th century German peasant kids didn't learn to read because there was no scriptorium nearby and no monks to teach them, but because they just didn't have time for that kind of impractical (at the time) pursuit. There were animals to be husbanded, crops to be raised, and winter coming.
That is still the case today. That I think was one of the reasons the OLPC initiative came to nothing and was inherently delusional: the reason kids from poor sub-Saharan African families don't surf the Web and learn about FFTs and Android programming on their own is not because they lack the devices but because they just don't have time for it, there's far too much going on in their lives of immediate practical necessity.
Of course, it is certainly the case that being in a wealthy (or at least non-impoverished) family is the single best way to gain time and leisure in one's youth to pursue education and information, and that is true today and was true yesterday. But it's not about technical means of access, it's about the person being at leisure for the pursuit.
I agree with most of this except I have spent the last ten years traveling and working in African countries, and the poor have more leisure time than the rich or middle class. When you have very few resources there isn't that much to do. "they don't have time for it," is not what is stopping poor African children from learning to code.
That is interesting, and since you have real data, I'm curious what, in your observation, *does* stop them from learning to code -- and for "learning to code" substitute something more appropriate to their situation, meaning something that leads to a more economically productive and better paying future.
Economic dead zones. You have to go to the capital city in order to have any hope of moving up economically. Your dead-end town didn't furnish you with a lot of skills, and in the city, you are competing with other people who are trying to get a leg up. Unemployment is very high among college graduates and your parents didn't have the audacity to think you were going to be smart enough to compete with intellectual types, so they just let you rummage around during your childhood instead of structuring educational activities for you. If you are smart and lucky and find a supportive environment maybe you get a job that allows you to take classes and become a nurse's aide. Of course, those hiring detest people from your region/tribe.
I think this lack of economic opportunities makes for poor incentives to invest in your own or your children's education. And only half the planet is regularly online, therefore many know only what they hear from others in their social group. I been accused many times of plotting to steal human organs. Ignorance and superstotion abounds.
I've been wondering about this, and whether it would be feasible to do some sort of broad-based math/science/coding talent scouting in impoverished areas to try to harness more of humanity's potential, in conjunction with trying to distribute cheap sturdy ebook readers loaded with textbooks... There are a lot of daunting challenges though to trying to leapfrog over the need for local economic development.
People are trying stuff like this. Rural schools, testing, handing out tablets to poor kids in India. We struggle to use education to bring kids out of poverty in the US. To do that in a foreign land is doubly hard.
> 16th century German peasant kids didn't learn to read because there was no scriptorium nearby and no monks to teach them, but because they just didn't have time for that kind of impractical (at the time) pursuit. There were animals to be husbanded, crops to be raised, and winter coming.
A lot of them certainly learned to read after the Reformation, actually. There were priests everywhere even if there were no monks, printed bibles and catechisms existed, and so did tablets for writing practice.
Are we talking a lot in absolute terms, like 10,000, or in relative terms, like 30%? A literacy rate among the peasant farmer class above 25% in the 16th century would be surprising to me, although that is of course no argument against the proposition's truth...
Relative terms. And 30% is likely far too low. Things really changed after the reformation (and counter reformation). Luckily, Europe has an alphabetic writing system instead of a syllabary or (gasp!) an ideographic one. That makes the learning task much easier/faster: just a few weeks/months to get the basics. It takes years of practice to get good at it, of course.
I know that Denmark had somewhat organized teaching around this time, paid for by the local parents. The teacher would travel around in the neighbourhood and be hosted by the locals in turn and the kids would receive lessons as long as he was in the neighbourhood. Can't imagine it was any different in the HRE.
The “permission to be great” thing is certainly a factor. There may be counterpart phenomenon: people who accomplish great things because they didn’t know they couldn’t. Would put Walt Disney, The Beatles, maybe Napoleon into this category.
And how many “privileged” families have how many other offspring who are ne’er-do-wells, who have developmental disabilities, become criminals, etc.? The unmentioned offspring are evidence that the “privilege” effect is not as great as the author suggests. I tend to think the parental examples of expenditure of time and effort are more likely and strongly correlated with and causing the success of children. Children tend to see (and adopt or reject, depending on the relationship with the parent) the values of things like readying, study, hard work, etc. based on the examples set in the home
Why in the name of whatever deity or collective good feelings (the Christian God for me) would you attempt to promote greatness in a single family lineage? Is this a callback to early twentieth century eugenics?
I don't want to promote a society full of supra-geniuses. I want to promote a society full of decent human beings that function in a mostly healthy and egalitarian manner. That might be because I work as a prison guard and don't have a graduate (or undergraduate) degree, which I suspect is the sort of prerequisite I would need to start ranking muh geniuses.
Additionally, I live in Texas. Matt McConaughey describes Texas as "The sort of place where no ones too good, and everyone's good enough." I completely subscribe to that philosophy. Ain't no solid gold statues of Prince Albert abouts, cause rigid classism is for brits- and so is eugenical promotions of supra-geniuses.
The last poetry written in America that set the soul of the nation on fire was from the pen of Ice Cube, and released on a CD, btw. All culture from America comes from the bottom, not the top. And that's the strength of street knowledge.
One thing worth noting about genetics is that *g* is associated with a lot of random things - like, for instance, physical attractiveness and height.
This makes genetic explanations much more likely. Imagine that *g* is influenced by something like, say, low mutational load (which it is). It's easy to imagine that basically every positive trait is probably influenced by this. So many "generically good genes" probably increase a lot of positive traits - height, physical attractiveness, *g*, physical fitness, etc. probably ALL are influenced by the same "general health" genes that make you more healthy and more physically fit, allowing your brain and body to develop better.
On top of that, *g* seems to positively influence just about everything, and most of the things you were focusing on were things that are probably *g*-loaded.
Just out of curiosity I tried looking into Srinivasa Ramanujan's family but couldn't find much from a casual internet search. I sure hope someone's keeping up with talent-scouting his extended family's descendants just in case...
The IQ thing is more complicated than you suggest. I am supposedly about the 6th great grandchild of Joseph Priestly, the man who discovered oxygen. I can't claim any great achievements of my own, but everyone is my family is very smart and successful, usually with IQ's in the 130-160 range.
But here's the interesting part. (1) That is everyone in all branches of the family, not just the part descended from Priestly. (2) My mother is an obsessive genealogist, so I have met all of these 3rd to 8th cousins, largely from England. Within that group, there is an unusual number of people who went to Oxbridge or the Ivies. My theory is assortative mating.
What's more, I have found strange cognitive similarities between myself and my distant cousins. For example, at the age of about 50, I met my 2nd cousin, once removed. He is English and our family had not seen anyone from that part of the family since about 1900. However, when he started to talk about Trump, I remember coming up with a reply to what he was saying in my head, an entire paragraph. My distant cousin then said that paragraph out loud to me, word for word. It was weird.
I can describe my personal relationship to your argument:
I decided at a young age that it was purposeless to pursue a standard career, solely for some promised 'happiness'. I don't feel an urge to reach for only *one* of my emotions; happiness just happens, and shouldn't be called to our side like a dog. I lack those reservations that protect people from attempting a likely failure - "If I fail, then I'll be sad, and I'll be broke, and the rest of my life will be that much harder." Yup. I step toward likely failure knowingly, because I am not wed to happiness. It's not on my score-card. It also means I'm boring. :)
I sense the fundamental distinction in *motive* held by the majority of those 'self-actualized' and 'genius' minds (compared to the boss-lovers who complained when their English teacher said "write an essay about a topic *of your choice*" - "No! You have to tell us what to write...") regardless of their lineage. The 'geniuses' strive without a longing for the comfort of stability; their risks only *sometimes* pay-off, which is still plenty to provide numerous 'miracle family' sets by sheer volume of accomplished individuals.
[Side-Note: Experimental Design of Gene-Hypothesis? If genes are a large portion of accomplishment, then the *incidence* of genius among any *one* child of a genius, for the set of all 'recognized geniuses', should be ~50%. Lots of data to collect, and clearly room to fudge the qualifications for who is on that list, yet it seems tractable. While a rate of 'half the time' does not imply genes, itself; however, if incidence is significantly lower, that would imply NOT genes; if incidence was higher than half that implies at least an INCLUSION of 'environmental and personal factors', like training, boredom, and grit.]
A willingness to take risks can captivate someone in many ways. And most of the people who pursue those risks fail. The successes are called 'genius' - even when others were distinct from that success only in that they were downtrodden and ignored. Either way, once happiness subsides in the face of valor, it becomes *heartbreaking* to EVER GIVE UP ON VALOR.
I suggest that the source of many accomplished minds is an ADDICTION to an incredibly RARE combination of neural states: the *chance* to INITIATE a WORLD-altering impact. A dent the tides of time can't comb smooth. Most people NEVER taste it; once you do, all else but the dearest love melts away.
Those 'geniuses' poured their whole lives into their work - Paul Erdos, who published 1,500 mathematical proofs, slept on a couch and never dated. He spent 20 hours a day working on mathematics, for his entire life. We can't expect someone to accomplish so much on any LESS time; and the only people who pursue their work so VIGOROUSLY are those lost in this addiction: "If I can do just *one* thing that LASTS..."
Late to the party... did anyone throw out Morphic Resonance as a sound (pun intended) basis for understanding the heredity of extraordinary talent? Happy to expound on this and the hypothesis of formative causation if anyone would like.
Tangentially Rupert Sheldrake, Jill Purce, and their sons Cosmo (an avant garde musician) and Merlin (a pioneering biologist) could one day qualify for such lists of influential super families, judging by the as-yet unrealized but re-evolutionary impact of much of Rupert's work, and the sparkling promise of Merlin's efforts in the realm of fungi and forest ecology.
I know I'm super later here, but I think there's another respect that privilege can make genius-level success more likely that wasn't considered at all. Children of great people are more likely to be given the opportunity to pursue greatness. Most people, when they graduate college, have to spend years finding their first jobs and establishing themselves in their careers so they can support themselves. They simply won't have the time or energy to spend studying and refining less immediately practical skills. Whereas highly privileged children of great people will be more likely to find encouragement and practical support in pursuing an academic (or political, or athletic) career.
I came across a Simon Baron-Cohen and I was like "surely he must be related to Sacha Baron-Cohen" and lo, wikipedia reports 5 named people with that surname who are all brothers/cousins. ...who are all significant enough to have a wikipedia page!
I did come to Slovakia (then Czechoslovakia) in 1991 to change the world - as a Free Marketeer. The Klaus coupon privatization had me stay a bit longer, and my lovely Slovak wife made me settle. She's a doctor. Our eldest child (of 4) is also a doctor.
(Bari Weiss reminded me of this fine post in her year-end list)
Within a single crop of siblings you have great actors Ralph and Joseph Fiennes, composer Magnus Fiennes, two film directors, an an adopted child who became an archaeologist.
Farther back in the family tree there are notable industrialists, explorers, politicians, and clerics.
I immediately thought of the Healy family (here's their Wikipedia page - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healy_family). I originally read about Michael, who was the first African American to captain a Federal ship, in a book about Alaskan history. Michael and his 10 (fits the pattern) siblings were born slaves, and many of them became accomplished in various fields (mostly religious leaders), leading the way for African American leadership in the 19th century.
Here's another one I feel like throwing into the comments here - Sir Timothy Gowers, a Fields Medalist. From Wikipedia: "Gowers's father was Patrick Gowers, a composer; his great-grandfather was Sir Ernest Gowers, a British civil servant who was best known for guides to English usage; and his great-great-grandfather was Sir William Gowers". His great-great-great-grandfather was a "ladies' bootmaker". Timothy Gower's great uncle was "a British colonial administrator who was Governor of Uganda from 1925 to 1932". His sister is a novelist.
Bedava Sohbet, arkadaşlarınızla sohbet etmenin en basit, en kolay ve en hızlı yoludur. Arkadaşlarınızla veya yeni insanlarla tanışmak için 1'e 1 veya daha fazla rakamlarla özel ve genel sohbet edebilir veya sohbet etmek için Ücretsiz Sohbet'i kullanabilirsiniz.
Bedava Chat siteleri ücretsiz, güvenli ve anonimdir. Takma adlar kullanabilir veya gerçek adınızla da sohbet sitesine bağlanabilirsiniz.
Günün veya gecenin herhangi bir saatinde çeşitli konularda çeşitli sohbet odalarına katılabilir genel veya tüm özel konular hakkında sohbet edebilir fikir alışverişi yapabilirsiniz.
Bedava Muhabbet sayesinde, başka bir kullanıcıyla özel görüşme yapmanız mümkündür. Ücretsiz Chat'te özel mesaj alışverişi yapabilir, aynı anda veya sırayla yazıp sohbet muhabbet edebilirsiniz.
"You only share 6.25% of your genes with your great-great-grandfather. ... Can 6.25% of the genome really do that much work?"
There may be a case to be made here about penetrance.
Of note, though; regression to the mean doesn't explain where high IQ comes from originally. Any thoughts? I have a suspicion that synaptic pruning may be involved: high-achievers in adulthood are often people who thought broadly during childhood and adolescence (discuss), and so retained more of their potential to connect disparate ideas: they used it and so didn't lose it.
Except that may be survivorship bias, and I'm currently far too sleep-deprived to unpick this right now.
Of course, not everyone with a high IQ and hero licence/childhood privilege/&c goes on to make a world-changing difference. Presumably there's another factor required for greatness, or something is mitigating the effects of the traits you've outlined. There's a quotation about talent hitting a target no one else can hit, while genius hits a target no one else can see. Hypothesis: if everything is a potential target to you, wouldn't that instil the worst case of choice-paralysis in a non-trivial percentage of a small group of people?
Hero License. I learned something. OK it is a variant of role model but also something more than that. This makes mores sense than anything else. BTW hero licensing is perhaps an actual case for things like affirmative action. Not for the purpose of the person getting in, but because the person getting in (initially through DEI, affirmative action or whatever) sets an example for later generations that people "like you" have license to be in "that kind" of job.
To be included in Wikipedia, I suppose two things need to happen: (a) other people write about you in media, and (b) someone creates the article and adds the link. Plus some other rules, for example if the only thing that makes you notable is connection with some notable topic, you will probably be mentioned within the article about the topic, not in a separate article.
Looking at the "References" section, if I ignore his own blog, Instagram, etc., the most important seem these four links, two directly about him, two mentioning him:
https://www.allaboutjazz.com/musicians/jeremy-siskind
https://jazzdagama.com/booksmiscellany/jeremy-siskind-piano-in-motion/3/
https://www.npr.org/sections/ablogsupreme/2011/04/19/135543416/a-jazz-piano-showdown-in-indianapolis-worth-100-000
https://www.postandcourier.com/spoleto/pianist-fred-hersch-on-the-honesty-jazz-demands/article_7f3f4cd2-578b-11e8-b08d-43d5ff9b609e.html
Well, that is more than was even written in media about me, but yes, it seems at best borderline notable. He is also mentioned to have won a few competitions, I have no idea how exceptional that makes him within his community.
The Wikipedia article was written mostly by one person with only trivial modification afterwards. Here is the comparison between the first and the current versions:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jeremy_Siskind&diff=1054407417&oldid=957144589
My impression is that this is a borderline case, where I could imagine a Wikipedia admin debate go either way. (It is also possible that in case of an admin debate, more links would be found and added to the article.) The general mood on Wikipedia also changes between "let's document everything, online space is cheap" and "let's delete everything that wouldn't fit in a paper encyclopedia", so luck would probably play a great role.
Out of curiosity, are any of your relatives also SEX models?
And among those who are, did any win a Nobel prize?
For SEX modelling?
IIRC, one of Aella's relatives is
Less of this please. If you have an objection, make an argument.
I'd say that you regress toward your parents' genotypic mean and that this could be approximated using something like 80% * parental_mean + 20% * grandparental_mean.
Or I guess you regress all the way to your parents' genotypic mean, which is toward your grandparents' phenotypic and genotypic mean.
My guess is that there was more assortative mating for IQ in Britain than in America.
I don't know.
Maybe England is so much more geographically concentrated that the brightest young people could court more readily? Maybe the intense centralization of high class male education at Eton and Harrow, Cambridge and Oxford played a role in who married who's sister?
But, I'm just speculating without much of a clue.
"My dad's not really that awesome, but he's still the governor, so why shouldn't I aspire to that level of achievement."
A real Charles Wallace ;)
But can you kythe is my main question? ;)
Neat! So you're a cross between Charles Wallace and one of the Second Foundationers? :)
My girlfriend has a measured IQ of 182. She is very smart but not as far as I can tell telepathic (I think some pretty weird stuff and she hasn't broken up with me).
I would be surprised if either of you was actually among the top 1000 humans in the world, just because it would be weird for me to have encountered two of them by semicoincidence (I KNOW THERE ARE SELECTION EFFECTS, but they're not THAT strong!). For one thing, I think testing as kids is infamous for giving some really high scores. For another, as a test result gets more and more implausible, you should believe more and more that there is some kind of flaw in the test. For a third, I think height isn't exactly a bell curve and has a long tail in terms of people with weird pituitary cancers and stuff, and I could see the tail of intelligence being equally long.
The trouble is that psychometric and educational metrics become less and less comprehensible/meaningful the further that you move from the mean. The difference between a 165 and 185 IQ is vastly less interpretable than the difference between a 90 and a 110 because we have so many more data points for the latter case than the former.
Thanks very much!
Making the case for the idea of a Hero's License.
The correlations between different cognitive skills get weaker at the tails, as well.
Are you open to being interviewed (non public by default unless you'd want to share)? I've interviewed a few SSC commenters in the past and it has always been interesting.
sure
I'm confused
lol I have no idea, but don't feel bad either way
I don't know how to do the math, but I'd expect SOME clustering just by chance. Anyone want to take a crack at calculating the odds for "eminence clustering" by chance alone?
I feel like most of these families include one Grade A genius (e.g. Charles Darwin) combined with one or more Grade B lesser lights (Erasmus Darwin). No offence intended to old Erasmus, but he's not a household name.
Now, in 19th century Britain (which was admittedly one of history's greatest clustering of geniuses), there were probably one hundred household name type geniuses (not all of whom were Darwin level) combined with two thousand Erasmus Darwin type geniuses. There were thirty million people in Britain at the time. So if you take a random Grade A genius, consider their twenty closest relatives, you'd expect about a 1/750 chance of one of them being a Grade B genius, _if_ everything were totally randomly distributed. So, given what we know about genetics, wealth and education it doesn't seem especially surprising to find a few Darwin type families in the mix.
This is a terrible approximation in every way, like the fact that I've used 30 million as my denominator despite the fact that I should be looking over multiple generations.
Combine that with the fact that these families are generally at least somewhat privileged, so we're probably looking at maybe 1%-10% of the population who were sufficiently privileged to have any realistic chance of being Grade A or Grade B geniuses.
throw in that the UK has a long tradition of seeking out and harvesting unusually capable people from around the globe to come to Oxford, Cambridge etc.
Thanks for taking a crack at this! It was my first thought on reading the examples too and I'm glad someone tried to put numbers to it. Agree w/ Jon that in 19th century Britain the relevant talent pool is only a tiny fraction of the total population, clustered in established wealthy families.
I think your analysis may be mixing two definitions of "genius" -- i.e., the *potential* for great achievement and *actual* achievement.
For example, if Charles had had a heart attack and dropped dead before publishing his theory of natural selection would he drop from a Grade A genius to a zero? And if Erasmus had had the same data as Charles would he go from Grade B to Grade A? Either way, they are still the same people with the same traits and talents.
My guess would be that Charles Darwin's IQ was well south of 150. His was not a scintillating intellect. But he sunk his teeth into a great question and worked it out.
His younger cousin Francis Galton was a sportsman for years, but he was inspired by his cousin's success and thus took on many other unanswered questions, great and small. Galton's huge breakthrough in statistical mathematics finally came when he was in his mid-60s, which is ridiculously late for a mathematician, suggesting that it was less Galton's mental horsepower than his focus on overlooked topics that account for his achievements.
In general, both Darwin and Galton seem to have solved mysteries that the human race really should have solved earlier but never got around to for various reasons.
Darwin and Galton were a little bit like their contemporaries in the English-speaking countries who invented most of today's major spectator sports, in that the time was right.
One of the 19th Century sports inventors, James Naismith is individually famous. But it's worth noting that Naismith's friend William George Morgan then promptly invented volleyball as a less strenuous alternative to Naismith's new basketball, so it was less that Naismith was a unique creative genius and more that the time was right for new sports.
Most of the other major sports were invented out of ancient ballgames when railroads allowed teams to travel, which required nationally-agreed upon rules. But the railroads allowed players and coaches to get together after each seasons in conventions and hash out new rules.
The English-speaking countries had more railroads and perhaps cultural advantages so they worked out most of the sports first.
Disagree strenuously re. Darwin. IQ may not be the right construct to describe his genius, but he was brilliant in every scientific activity he turned his attention to. His greatest gifts were his humility, objectivity, and his unique ability, maybe unparalleled in history, to anticipate unforeseen consequences of his ideas, and find solutions to those next-generation problems, before anybody else could even conceive of the initial ideas.
Re. humility, this was a man who, while he was the talk of the entire world, spent the last years of his life studying earthworms, while being ridiculed for it by inferior scientists who would rather study "nobler" beasts. And this was in fact important work, though you rarely hear about it.
Re. objectivity, I can't recall a single instance where Darwin was wrong about something and didn't write explicitly that he might be wrong about it.
Re. foreseeing consequences, on issues like sexual selection, group selection, and the evolution of emotional expression, I think Darwin's first consideration of the topic, done before other people even understood evolution, got further on the problem than the rest of the research community combined would have in a century. Darwin has many paragraphs in his writings that are worth a Nobel prize by themselves.
"he was inspired by his cousin's success and thus took on many other unanswered questions"
Maybe that's half the answer to "genius lineages" -- intra-family rivalry. Galton probably thought: "I knew cousin Chucky when he used to eat paste in nursery school, if *he* can be a famous scientist, how hard could it be."
Another of Erasmus Darwin's grandsons was Francis Galton, whose lists of accomplishments was bizarrely broad -- e.g., he invented the weather map, the silent dog whistle, the correlation coefficient, the practical way for Scotland Yard to use fingerprints to solve crime, and twin study, and the nature-nurture distinction. Galton is kind of the Thomas Edison of the human sciences.
The Darwins also include a minor genius, Charles' favorite grandson Bernard Darwin, the most famous golf sportswriter ever.
In general, there seem to be more of these kind of intellectual lineages among the British than among the Americans.
One reason is that there weren't that many great intellectual theoreticians in America until maybe 100-120 years ago. The top rungs of theory were largely a European monopoly, with Americans focusing on more practical accomplishments.
Don't forget the James Bros. (William and Henry, not Jesse and Frank)
Erasmus was famous enough to get a mention in Mary Shelly's Frankenstein. Obviously not a household name now but quite famous in his day and a bit after.
agree, this answer needs to be proven wrong as the first step otherwise it is all noise.
This is a good question. A bunch of research shows that truly random distributions seem “clumpy” to humans.
There are ~10 billion people alive. Of them, ~1 million have a Wikipedia page. Ergo 1/10K people is wiki-worthy.
Suppose that all people are divided into 1 billion true random “families” of ten people each. Then ~1 million such families have a wiki-worthy member; ~1 thousand have 2; and about one family would have 3.
The level of clustering described above seems to exceed the estimates here. However, if you fiddle with the variables a little (family size seems to be the easiest here, though you could also decide that the base rate was restricted to e.g. the wealthiest class of the richest country) you might get pretty close.
Poking into it a bit more, a few more factors occur:
1. The “Darwin-Wedgewood Family” is much more on the order of 100 people, maybe 1000. The wiki family tree has plenty of “six more children” boxes in early generations; presumably they’re associated with a huge but invisible further branching in the later generations.
2. Assortive mating may play more of a role in exaggerating these numbers than I realized. Suppose there are two clans with prominent forebears; then one marriage occurs between them. Then suddenly every prominent descendent can claim BOTH forebears as “distant uncles”. Since assortive mating happens after people (or their parents!) do impressive things, that might dramatically increase the apparent clustering.
Agree - this is the default (less exciting) explanation.
Well, given enough attempts…
Roy Sullivan hit by lightning 7 times.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Sullivan
I thought, “Roy Sullivan made seven great discoveries? Never heard of him.”
Then I clicked on the link. You were not using metaphor at all.
In that case, there should be a lot more families with some geniuses, but not nearly as many. Are there?
I mean maybe a good thing to read on this is from one of the people mentioned in the essay; Galton "Hereditary Genius"? It was an attempt to literally list the levels of pre-eminence in England, and tease out the relationships therein. From memory, the clustering was definitely well above what you'd expect.
There is also probably a psychological bias toward "noticing" when successful people are related that may skew the perception about how much success runs in families. People love pointing out "did you know X is related to Y." And of course having the same last name also makes people notice and connect successful people.
For example -- Random fun fact: Singer Nora Jones is the daughter of Indian sitar legend Ravi Shankar.
As an American, my impression has long been that there were more British intellectual clans than American intellectual clans. If true, that might suggest that the preponderance of dynasties among highbrow Brits is not just due to clustering by chance, but some property of British society less often found in American society.
I don't think "chance alone" is the correct null model here. The null model should probably be a combination of "class privilege" and "these groups became prominent because they were really good at marketing and at supporting each other".
Ezra Pound, for instance, started preparing the ground for Joyce's /Ulysses/ before he'd even met Joyce. That is, he began getting his friends to infiltrate the literary magazines, helping to build a sympathetic publishing house, and so on, long before he chose /Ulysses/ to be the book for which he would call in all his debts. So when /Ulysses/ finally came out, it was printed by a publishing house that Pound had helped create, with money Pound had brought in; and about half of the reviews published (and all of the ones that said it was good) were by Pound and his friends.
"even though I have never heard of her."
Given your age, you weren't reading Wired magazine in the 1990s, I presume.
He also has overlooked Gloria Vanderbilt (Anderson Cooper's mother), who partly did rich people things but was pretty impressive in her own right. (Unless she's the "art collector", which understates her life by quite a lot, if so.)
Seems puzzling to include Gavin Newsom but omit or diminish Gloria Vanderbilt.
Right, Gloria Vanderbilt more or less developed designer jeans for women, which made my life better.
I was also surprised by that, but I'm an Old.
you're not taking all successful people at random, you're selecting for people who have successful families -- so you're probably selecting for people who don't just have high IQ, but for whom it's highly genetic/inheritable rather than random factors.
Good point, thanks.
This is going to sound crazy but there were many eugenics research programs in the USA before that Nazis made it uncool. The crazy part is my grandma told me when I was too young to care much about it that our family was heavily studied because of the incredible number of high level types, senators , supreme court judges, business founders, C-suite attorneys etc... I didn't think much of it but after my grandmother died I found out she saved every official document from the day she turned 18 and she had much if the eugenics research program files pertaining to our family. This was happening at many universities and the study of these high performance familial clusters probably has lots of hushed hidden data to support it.
That sounds fascinating! Are the documents publishable?
I would have to dig to find the documents at a place I don't currently live. I can tell you it was Baylor university in Texas where the eugenics research program was.1930s I believe but could have run into the 40s or later.
You mean, the heritability of IQ varies consistently within families?
the heritability of genetic IQ markets might not, but the heritability of an individual's IQ does because it depends on how much of it was genetic
I think there's a line in a Doug Coupland novel that very intelligent people are either the only intelligent person in their family or the whole family's very intelligent. Not that this is in any sense evidence of anything.
Exactly. Either it's raining. Or it's not...
Either the husband is the outstanding genius, or its the milkman.
Sure. There's a couple of potential differences.
The non-genetic components of IQ are, roughly, exposure to environmental insults (head trauma, infectious disease of the brain, nutritional deficiencies, etc.) and and developmental noise. Genetics give instructions on making a brain, but how that brain actually gets made has some intrinsic variability.
So:
1) Some families can have higher variance in exposure to environmental insults. This one is probably class/wealth-correlated. In one family, almost nobody gets whacked on the head or comes down with viral meningitis. In another, some of the kids do, so the kid that does might be dumb not because his genes are bad but because he was unlucky. So I'd expect, especially in the past, for richer families to show higher heritability than poorer families.
2) The genetics of what makes a particular person smart might be different in different families. If one family has a common variant that increases IQ 15 points (like that for torsion dystonia) and another just has generic "good smarts" genes, you'll expect more variance in the kids of the first family: some of them will have that large-effect gene and others won't. You could get a similar effect from epistatic interactions. The heritable component we care about is narrow-sense heritability, the additive effects of all the genes. If one family has significant non-additive effects, then those are much harder to pass down to kids. For a simple example: suppose variant X and variant Y both increase IQ by 2 points, but if you have both X+Y, you get not 4 points, but 10 points. Then a father with that pair is going to have a harder time passing down his smarts to his kids.
Related to this, one of the things about genetics is that individual genes don't 'dilute' away over generations. If there's a single (dominant) gene with a strong effect on something, a descendent will either get the 'good' allele, or not, a 1:1 ratio.
If it's two (unlinked) genes, there's a 25% chance that a child will receive both.
The GWAS studies that have been done to now seem to show something like >1000 genes which affect intelligence as measured, nearly all of which are obviously very small-effect. So thinking of it as continuous rather than discrete is perfectly accurate.
Sure. In the general case, many genes affect intelligence at some low level.
But we're not talking about the general case. We're talking about a very specific case where it seems to be highly heritable.
Your scenario would seem to be largely ruled out by the DeFries-Fulker extremes. As you say, if there were any genes floating around of very large effect, you would expect 'lumpiness', where one sibling gets it & is unexpectedly high, while the rest are closer to what one expects from their parents/siblings. But we don't seem to see that in any of the high-IQ samples. (Just in the low-IQ/retarded samples, where a disabled kid often has normal siblings/parents - where of course we know genes with very large negative effects do exist.)
Except this is a fairly common pattern, anecdotally, and also probably when you actually study the family trees (notwithstanding cases like the Curies where they didn't have very many kids)
Henri Poincare's sister married a dude who was trying his hardest to argue that science and religion do not contradict. The Bernoullis (surprised Scott didn't mention these guys!), Often considered to start with the guy who discovered Bernoulli numbers, were 2 of 4 kids (2 mathematicians, 1 painter, and 1 some dude - Wikipedia just said he married someone).
So lumpiness isn't uncommon at all - the Bernoullis exhibited basically a 1:1 split of geniuses and normal dudes.
Also, ask anyone with siblings and you'll find a common pattern of 1 smart talented kid, remaining average kids. E.g my mother's family:
1 APAC region General Manager of a Fortune 500
4 normie professions, not particularly distinctive
1 creative profession
1 business person
1 intellectually disabled
Additionally the Bernoullis (mathematicians branch) later married into the Curies (yes, those Curies)
Did they have significantly more children on average? It could be that professional/intellectual success used to correlate more directly to reproductive success, so that the first highly successful member of the clan would have a crap-ton of offspring. And then from there it's just a numbers game where you have more cognitive lottery tickets to choose from within the larger offspring pool.
(For the record I definitely don't think this is what happening and just thought it was a funny technically-possible explanation)
The Dysons had six children.
Scott said they did in the piece. Having ten children reduces the chances of regression to mean.
"But also, all these people had massive broods, or litters, or however you want to describe it. Charles Darwin had ten children (insert “Darwinian imperative” joke here); Tagore family patriarch Debendranath Tagore had fourteen.
I said before that if an IQ 150 person marries an IQ 130 person, on average their kids will have IQ 124. But I think most of these people are doing better than IQ 150. I don’t know if Charles Darwin can find someone exactly as intelligent as he is, but let’s say IQ 145. And let’s say that instead of having one kid, they have 10. Now the average kid is 129, but the smartest of ten is 147 - ie you’ve only lost three IQ points per generation. And if you’re marrying other people from very smart families - not just other very smart people - then they might have already chopped off the non-genetic portion of their intelligence and won’t regress. This is starting to look more do-able."
> I said before that if an IQ 150 person marries an IQ 130 person, on average their kids will have IQ 124.
This makes two assumptions:
- The heritability of IQ is 0.6.
- The two parents are each drawn from a population whose mean IQ is 100.
There is no reason to believe that second assumption is true in the case of the families Scott is talking about here. If an (outstanding!) IQ 150 person from an elite family background of average IQ 120 marries an (unexceptional!) IQ 130 person from an elite family background of average IQ 130, on average their kids will have IQ 134.
(If the example didn't make it obvious, the secret to being a great family is to ensure that your children marry the children of other great families. This was noticed long, long ago.)
Wouldn't this mean that the variations in IQ in the population get smaller and smaller as time passes? In one generation you had 150, on the next 147.
You missed that the other daughter of Pierre and Marie Curie, Irene Joliot-Curie, also won the Nobel (with her husband, like Marie).
And also died of radiation poisoning, if I remember correctly?
The last point is the most powerful, combined with the privilege of other people taking your outsized ambitions more seriously given your pedigree. Simply having role models that you identify with has an ENORMOUS influence on achievement. It's played such a role in my own boring life that the statistical influence is surely gigantic.
I'm interested in hearing more about how this affected your own life.
The biggest is in personal expectation-setting. Essentially everyone in my family has an advanced degree, so you take it for granted that that's what you'll do too, whereas if you're not immersed in that as a kind of baseline reality, it takes a major leap of ambition or imagination to do it. The Darwin example is not a coincidence, Darwin was explicitly and emphatically inspired by Erasmus's work to pursue natural philosophy, and certainly all his progeny would not have failed to be inspired by their illustrious ancestor.
But isn't the confound that a sense of personal potential and "hero license" could also be genetically heritable?
My view is that there are so many confounders when it comes to heredity that unless there's a very specific problem like Huntington's disease comes screaming out of the data, it's probably a huge waste of time and energy to try and disentangle the spaghetti. And people who persist anyway, particularly with things like IQ...well, if I'm being perfectly honest, the whole enterprise smells funny to me.
Fully agreed, and one of my pet peeves as someone who actually had to study population genetics (although most of it is now lost to me).
The thing about heritability that nearly everyone who obsesses over IQ seems determined to underplay is that environmental things are often perfectly heritable. Which is why you more or less can't do heritability studies for breeding purposes without excluding the effect of environment in some way (and even there the dead cow issue comes up frequently). P=G+E+I and all that.
And all this is without even touching the issue that we're pretty terrible at knowing what intelligence even is in a mechanistic sense. Not just in the sense of Moravec's paradox (which implies that we should use ballerinas and professional athletes as the standard for intelligence in a universal sense), but in the sense of the neuron count vs structuralist arguments of how brains work.
So it's all more or less shooting in the dark, punctuated by loud proclamations from people who believe that a numerical score makes them ubermenschen or something.
The at time desperate effort to extract the perhaps two percent of intelligence attributable to genetics strikes me as inexplicable, given the fantastically mediocre insights it would give into the way the world works. I conjecture, perhaps unfairly, that there is more at stake here than simple dispassionate scientific curiosity, particularly as it seems to me that what most people are looking for is an excuse not to care about problems they might otherwise be expected to do something about.
I wonder. With all the name stuff one might think it´s male choice stuff, like smart hero males choose smart hero female spouses and beget smart hero kids. Somehow counterintuitive to me. I can't help thinking of Arnold Schwarzenegger and his contribution to Irish-american and hispanic-americas excellence. Maybe the thing about all the cousin-marrying is female choice. And "pater semper incertum est", pardon my French.
"incertus" is the form you want there
Do you reckon the expectation effect is more important than knowing a lot of people who can advise you on e.g. who to pick as a PhD supervisor? Things that would be unknown unknowns to someone who wasn't from that sort of background.
Agreed. I come from a relatively successful/academic family, and the biggest social contributions to my success have been:
1) That my parents were well-resourced enough and supportive enough so that myself and my siblings got to try out anything that we fancied in the full expectation that we could do it well if we tried (our family motto is that we can do anything); and
2) That my family's knowledge and connections opened doors in all sorts of unexpected places and provided advantages in all sorts of unexpected ways. At the place where I went to study a degree, my great-grandfather's photo was literally on the wall outside my future supervisor's office. People are vastly more supportive of someone that they have a connection to (however tenuous), and I've been privileged (in all senses of the word) to enjoy patient and kind tutoring by others that helped me grasp more closely to my full potential.
From my experience, then, there are some basic things you need to do well in life:
- Get good nutrition as a foetus, infant and child;
- Don't suffer trauma that damages your brain (birth asphyxia, head trauma, meningitis etc.);
- Have a supportive, stable, well-resourced family with good social connections;
- Be attractive (pretty children tend to get more attention then ugly ones); and
- Be at least moderately gifted in at least one domain (ie: be at least an average human being).
All of these things are highly heritable in the scientific sense of the word, but only the last two have any substantial genetic component (and that's complexed with environmental factors).
I suppose if every family was equally supportive of all children then genetics would become an even greater factor in determining success.
Yes, it's a strong argument for a society with strong social welfare and low inequality: that only that sort of levelled environment can allow the truly meritocratic to rise to the top.
The historical norm, on the other hand, has society run mainly by guys like Wilhelm II and Nicholas II (both part of another famous family with "notable" achievements).
Any short list of the great families (or at least the great American families) should include the James's: Henry James is one of the perennial candidates for the greatest American novelist, and his brother William James is one of the perennial candidates for the greatest American philosopher. Their sister Alice James got a posthumous reputation as a diarist. (There were two other brothers who never became famous. Their father, Henry James Sr., had some reputation as a theologian, although not in the Henry (Jr)/William James league.
Yeah, I was just doing a text search of the essay to see if I had somehow missed them in my first reading.
Average IQ of Ivy League students being > 130, not controlled for major, is very surprising. I could see that for Harvard, but didn't expect it across the board
I could be wrong, I was averaging a lot of slightly different guesses.
If I remember correctly, 130 is the average for *tenured physics professors* in the USA, that being the highest, with mathematicians slightly below them followed by philosophers in the mid 120s. If my numbers are even in the right ballpark it seems very unlikely to me that an average Ivy League student would have an IQ close to 130. I can try and rummage through my bookmarks to find the source if you want.
Well it's numerically dubious. The percentile for 130 is 97.7 and I seriously doubt that only 2.3% of the population can get into an Ivy League school as an undergraduate, if there were infinite seats but no change in admissions standards.
Based on some quick Googling, there are about 147,000 Ivy League students, and 19.6 million college students (2019, US). That would mean about 0.7% of US college students are in the Ivy Leagues. That would mean a little less than 1/3 of the 130+ IQs were actually in an Ivy League school.
Does that seem plausible to you? Ballpark that sounds fairly reasonable to me.
Not even remotely. The distribution of applicants is highly nonuniform. For example, a huge chunk of students merely go to the closest university into which they can get. In-state versus out-of-state makes a big $$$ difference. Many people choose based on family history, program availability and/or school focus, geographic location (hey if you go to Santa Cruz you can practically live on the beach). So an assumption that everybody applies to every school and the fraction that are admitted to the Ivies represents the fraction that *could* strikes me as completely implausible. That's why I didn't do that calculation :)
Damn, I meant Santa Barbara. Although Santa Cruz is nice, too.
On the other hand, the average IQ of those 19.6 million college students is probably already above the average IQ of the whole population. So more than 2.3% of them would have an IQ over 130.
Fair enough. Keep in mind that if the *average* IQ in the Ivy Leagues is about 130, then there will be a fair number who are below 130 as well as above. That may help take some of the strain off of the 0.7%, though I agree that 1/3 or even 1/6 of the smartest kids going to a very limited number of schools may not be plausible.
If the average IQ of a college student is roughly 110-115, then the Ivy League schools are only a bit over 1 standard deviation above the average college. The 2.3% figure is for 2 standard deviations.
When I was a grad student at MIT, the stereotype of Harvard undergrads was that they were not at all selected for intelligence, to put it tactfully.
But of course. You were in MIT.
Niels Bohr was also almost a professional level soccer player. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niels_Bohr
"Niels Bohr was indeed a keen football player and was the goalkeeper in the Danish team Akademisk Boldklub in the beginning of the 20th century," says Nicolaj Egerod. "But even though AB [as the club is commonly known] were, at the time, one of the best clubs in Denmark, he never made it to the national team. However, his brother Harald - a well-known scientist in his own right - who also played at AB, played for the Danish national team and was part of the team that won silver at the 1908 London Olympics."
Nils Refsdal suggests a possible reason why Niels never made it to the international stage: "According to AB, in a match against the German side Mittweida, one of the Germans launched a long shot and the physicist leaning against the post did not react, missing an easy save. After the game he admitted to his team-mates his thoughts had been on a mathematical problem that was of more interest to him than the game. He only played for the 1905 season."
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2005/jul/27/theknowledge.panathinaikos
So beyond a certain level, football and mathematical achievement become anticorrelated?
remember also that the standard of "professional footballer" was much much lower 100 years ago, as with all professional sports. Consider the Tour De France; in its 10th year in 1913, it was still under rules that required competitors to not have "support teams" or "outside assistance"; this meant that when the fork of Eugene Christophe's bike broke, he had to carry his bike 10km to the local blacksmith and forge it back together himself, during the race. He was penalized 10 minutes, later reduced to 3, because the blacksmith's son pumped the bellows to the furnace for him.
No cyclist capable of completing a race in those conditions is likely to also be capable of the same kind of explosive and endurance power that modern professional cyclists produce. People just weren't as specialized 100 years ago, and that's true of professional athletes, academics, technicians, basically everyone in society.
oh, also, I say "professional" here to mean "serious"; Neils Bohr was almost certainly not a professional footballer, but an amateur, being the son of a professor and all.
Two brief things about Dysons - the vacuum cleaner guy in England is Not Related. And I don't know if Esther was ever the "most important woman" in computers but she was certainly very influential in the high-tech industry 20 or 30 years ago as a writer, speaker, analyst, etc.
Huh. TIL about the vacuum guy.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theonion.com/james-dyson-meets-in-secret-with-alien-ambassador-to-re-1819579291/amp
So, if IQ declines every generation, how do you get people with really, really high IQ? Is it a random mutation that jumps a child up a lot? Or was there a strain of people with ridiculously high IQ that has been slowly descending this whole time? Gladwell did a chapter of his book on a group of super high IQ people who nonetheless did not accomplish much, so possibly the astronomically high IQ strain is plausible because a lot of them don't rise above the herd?
"So, if IQ declines every generation, how do you get people with really, really high IQ? Is it a random mutation that jumps a child up a lot?"
The *average* for parents tends towards the average for the group. So lots of 120 IQ parents would have kids with an average IQ less than 120. Lots of 90 IQ parents would have kids with an average IQ higher than 90.
But ... there is a lot of variation in those averages, so you'll still see 120 IQ parents having some kids with an IQ over 120.
So IQ tends towards the middle? Is this born out by studies of lower IQ families with consistently higher IQ children?
"So IQ tends towards the middle?"
Pretty much. IQ (as with many traits) regresses *towards* the mean. On average. You need to pay attention to the spread (standard deviation) as well as average, though. And sampling (the extremely low IQ folks may have fewer children; there are folks who are concerned that in many wealthy countries successful people seem to be having fewer kids on average than less successful people).
" Is this born out by studies of lower IQ families with consistently higher IQ children?"
I think that studies bear this out, but can't point you towards any as I believe this but haven't verified the claims myself (though I do understand the math ...)
Hmm. When you say "regresses" it makes it sound like it always degrades, but lower IQ families having on average higher IQ children sounds like "trends". Maybe I'm reading too much into the semantics of what you're saying. Regardless, thanks for helping me out!
The "regress" here is a math term that has no connotations of getting worse (think linear regression). The common use of the term "regress" does have that connotation. "Trends" is fine-ish, too.
Got it, thanks! My English major brain tends to not think of the math terminology first. Probably should, in these discussions. :)
The term "regression to the mean" is a standard term for a phenomenon that applies to a lot of other variables than family intelligence inheritance. See this video for an explanation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tSqSMOyNFE
This is the case with *everything* that has random components, not just IQ, and not just heredity. If you have an annual poetry contest in your middle school, and you take the students whose poem got a score of 95 one year, and look at their average score the next year, it will be substantially above the mean, but will likely be below 95.
Basically, the idea is that selecting "the people who got exactly 95", you'll get some number of individuals that are 80 level poets and had 15 points boost in their random effort this year, and individuals that are 90 level poets and had a 5 point boost in their random effort, and individuals that are 95 level poets and had no boost, and individuals that are 100 level poets and had a -5 point penalty in their random effort.
But if poetry skill and random effort are independent and normally distributed, then on any given contest, there are more people who are 80 level poets with a 15 point random boost than people who are 95 level poets with no random boost. On the next poetry contest, the random boost is re-rolled, while the poetry skill stays constant, and since most people who got a 95 were below 95 level themself, the average poem next time is closer to the mean.
You get the reverse at the low end - if you take the people who wrote the worst poems one year, then their average performance the next year probably won't be as bad (though it'll still be worse than average).
This isn't an IQ-specific thing; it's a property of random distributions in general. If a given data point for an observation (e.g. a family) is far from the mean, future data points for that observation are likely to be closer to the mean than that reference data point was.
Regression to the mean does not imply lower variability over time!
Good to know! Learning quite a bit about IQ, at least second hand, here. :)
Regression to the mean is not "about IQ". It's about certain kinds of stochastic processes in general.
'Regression to the mean' was one of the early arguments deployed against Darwinism as a theory of why species diverge. The response to that criticism was the introducing of the idea of 'selection pressure' a way to shift the mean.
Likely you mean this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swamping_argument
No, the response was that genes are discrete units and cannot dilute indefinitely, and the seemingly continuous traits are defined by huge amount of smaller effect genes.
Strong selection *does* decrease population variability, though I doubt it's a huge effect in human populations. There's two effects: exhaustion of variance and selection disequilibrium. The first is easy to explain: if you select hard on something, alleles that affect that thing will get fixed, so they're no longer variable, and the population variability will drop a little bit as each variant fixes. The other is more complicated: selection on a trait induces small anti-correlations in all the variants that contribute to that trait. So someone with positive trait X is very slightly less likely to have a different positive trait Y than a random person. That decreases the population variance, but in an interesting way: it only happens during the selection. Once the selection stops, the variance relaxes back towards its natural level.
It doesn't decline every generation. It goes like this:
Suppose you pick out from the population a very smart couple. IQ is very heritable, but not perfectly. Say ~80% heritable or so. The remaining 20% mostly we don't know exactly, but let's call it "luck". When you pick out your very smart couple, in part you're selecting for people with good genetic IQ, and in part you're selecting for people that got lucky with non-genetic contributions to IQ. Their kids will get all that good genetic IQ, but they don't get the good luck: they get average luck, just like everybody else. So they will be smart, but not as smart, on average, as their parents.
So suppose you've done that with a bunch of couples and you have a bunch of first generation kids that are pretty smart, but not as smart as their parents. You pick two of them at random, and they have kids of their own. The second generation will be, on average, exactly as smart as their parents, though still less smart than their grand-parents. That's because they've got the same good genetics as their parents, and the same average luck as their parents. Note that if instead of picking randomly you picked particularly smart people from this second generation to have kids, you *would* have some regression here.
The regression only happens when you:
1) select for something (in this case, smart people)
2) that is partially but not completely heritable
Another member of the Darwin family who achieved fame in a different area was the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, who was on a slightly different branch but was 4 generations down from both Erasmus Darwin and Josiah Wedgwood.
Watch out, too, for other cases where the surnames differ. I like to offer the story of Stanley Baldwin, Prime Minister and a leading figure in British politics in the 1920s and 30s. He had a particular ability to deliver powerful and effective speeches, which is perhaps partly explained by some of them having been written for him by his cousin, whose name was Rudyard Kipling.
Being able to see a regular person in your life, whose flaws you can see in real time, and whose work habits you can observe first hand, probably helps tremendously.
Though I know people who accomplish great things are, in many respects, regular people who still hate getting out of bed or cook shitty food or are petty and jealous of their friends or family or whatever, it is difficult to really imagine them as such. They always seem removed from regular life. But if you see from birth that they're just your father or your sister, and you knew them as people before you knew they were famous or even before they became famous, they might not seem so radically different from yourself. You wouldn't idolize them in the same way. And that might give you confidence to try.
And then, you know by growing up with them how hard they worked to accomplish the great things they did, and if you decide your goal is to be great like them, you know the sacrifice required. You'll go into it clear eyed. I must imagine having the correct expectations makes a huge difference in whether or not you'll succeed.
0. Funny you didn't mention the Bachs or the Bernoullis.
1. Few of these families were amazingly rich, but they lived in a time when being comfortable, having access to higher education, etc., put you in the upper 5% (at least) - and, in all cases but the Tagores, we are talking about the upper 5% in one of the few countries that weren't poor.
2. Their upbringing varied, but unconscious or semi-conscious transmission of values and habitus may account for a fait bit more than being a Tiger parent or not. Of course that merges with the last point.
3. As other people have pointed out, you are cherry-picking examples! Return to the mean is the norm.
This Bach erasure shall not stand!
Also: John Baez (mathematical physicist), Albert Baez (physicist, co-inventor of X-ray microscope) and Joan Baez (folk musician).
Huh, didn't know John and Joan were related!
0. Yup!
1. After another one or three hundred years, it would be nice to compare the number/kind of new great families to the great families discussed here. Thank you for bringing up the distinction between not amazingly rich and relatively upper class/comfortable. The class standings combined with far smaller population sizes and also families with greater numbers of children all lead me to believe there will be relatively fewer great families in the future than there have been in the past.
Selection bias perhaps? There are many, many great accomplishments that have no family history or future of great accomplishments.
If only 1 / 1 million people has a Nobel Prize or "writing Brave New World" level achievement, there shouldn't even be enough cases like this to cherry-pick unless something is going on.
I’d guess that it’s a good deal more than 1/1 million.
If you look at the last two hundred years, there are about 15 billion people who have lived[0]. However, a quarter of those were women who grew up in situations that didn’t let them excel, about 7/8 were in poor countries or the Soviet Union, and 1/2 were too poor in wealthy countries (generously, everyone today in a developed country is wealthy enough while in the examples from the 1800s you had to be in the top 5% of wealth according to other comments). An eighth died before they were old enough to excel.
That brings the number down to about half a billion. There are 892 Nobel Laureates[1], probably a couple hundred authors on the level of Huxley (looking at famous book lists, I’m about as impressed by #200), a hundred artists, 44 US presidents, 43 UK prime ministers, and that’s not even accounting for all of the people like any of the Darwins, half of the Huxleys, most of the Tagores, any of the Dysons, the business tycoons, military leaders, governors of states, or the leadership of other countries. Once you factor all of those in, there are at least ten thousand people you could have listed. Adding in the Olympic athletes and sports stars brings you up into the hundreds of thousands range (10,305 people competed in Tokyo 2020 alone[2])!
That gets the statistic down to less than 1 in a hundred thousand people, or less than 1 in ten thousand including athletes, at which point cherry picking becomes much more plausible.
Maybe there’s still an effect, but it’s a much much weaker effect.
[0]: https://www.prb.org/articles/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-earth/
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates
[2]: https://www.insider.com/olympics-how-many-athletes-are-at-tokyo-2020-2021-7
I don't agree with your definition of 'excel'. Women certainly excelled at all sorts of things, just different things to those that men could excel in.
I completely agree that women can and have excelled, both in the ways that men do and in other ways. There’s no barriers holding them back other than the ones placed there by society. However, those societal barriers meant that many women excelled in the past in ways that didn’t meet whatever definition Scott was using in this post. The only women from before the 1950s were Marie Curie, and Curie’s descendants, and after the 1950s it only added Esther Dyson and Joanna Newsom My statement was saying that out of the women who lived in the past two hundred years, half of them weren’t able to excel in ways that would make it to this post, but actually under Scott’s definition there were only 6 women compared to 37 men, so they were even more oppressed than I had originally calculated!
(There were also women who married men who were in the post, but I didn’t count those because Scott wasn’t including them in the first section of the post. Obviously many of those men couldn’t have done what they did without the support of those wives or mothers.)
The relevant definition of "excel" is "excel in a manner that will be highly legible across generations", and for a long time men did mostly monopolize the most common ways of doing that. And that is "most" and "mostly", rather than a 100% rule, but still. If Bob is the best scientist of the era and his wife Alice is the best ballroom dancer of her era, then both have excelled but probably only Bob gets a wikipedia page 200 years later. It may note that his wife was renowned for her dancing.
Why do you exclude the Soviet Union though? This might add a level of difficulty and/or random "sorry, your field is now bourgeois pseudoscience, bye" but there were still plenty of people with internationally recognized accomplishments, including Nobel laureates. Just the world chess champions is I think an achievement close to the level we're talking about.
I was excluding the Soviet Union because all of the people that were discussed in this post were from the US, Western Europe, or India. If Scott had mentioned people from the Soviet Union, I would’ve included them in this count.
I entirely agree that many people in the Soviet Union did excel, and a few of them were famous even in America (Yuri Gargarin could’ve made the post, or a Soviet premiere). Unfortunately the language and cultural barriers mean that Americans aren’t as aware of them, to the detriment of Americans.
I'm pretty sure people from India have lower chance to become Nobel laureates than Soviet citizens. I don't understand the cultural barriers argument, you did include Nobel laureates and there are 4 Soviet citizens (plus immigrant Ivan Bunin and Soviet-born Svetlana Alexievich) just in literature.
The cultural barriers argument is that Scott only listed people in the article who are either quite famous among Americans (Marie Curie, Charles Darwin), or their relatives, or the one example of an Indian family that Scott hadn’t heard of prior to writing the post and presumably included by intentionally searching for famous non-American/European families. Cultural barriers mean that people born in the USSR or in China (or even in relatively-Western Japan or South America) won’t be famous enough *among Americans* for Scott to decide to list them in this article.
I have no idea if Svetlana Alexievich has famous relatives, but they weren’t up for inclusion in this post by default.
I was overly zealous in including those people in the numerator but not the denominator, but I don’t think it significantly changes the results since Americans and Western Europeans are disproportionately selected as Nobel laureates and similar things because of American cultural domination.
Is this true, though?
"Nobel Prize" is a reasonably narrow and measurable category, but the categories included here include politics (without which the Poincare example doesn't seem remarkable), Olympic sports, writing (aside from Nobel laureates), business and some variation on "distinguished scientist/academic". I think when all these categories are allowed for, having 4-5 examples (I think Poincare, Newsom and Dyson are borderline) over about 150 years, while limited (at least for much of modern history) to relatively privileged families, 1/1 million doesn't sound right at all. And the family relations include grandparents, people who married in and cousins (distant and otherwise), each of which has some bearing on the suggested mechanisms.
I'd be very surprised if the correlation between math and musical ability isn't much higher than that. Rhythms and time signatures have an obvious connection to math. The same with chords and scales. And composing counterpoint or even a cantus firmus is almost algorithmic in nature.
Yes, there is a high correlation. I wonder if this might explain why there's more well-regarded electronic music than electronic art? Stockhausen pushed the boundaries of sound electronically around the same time Jackson Pollock was doing it on tried-and-true canvas. Modern film scores be much less interesting without technological assistance ranging from synthesizers to SMTPE. That last thought leads me to wonder if filmmakers are good at math too.
Other Dyson children are less famous, but no less accomplished. You have a veterinarian, a radiologist, a chaplain and I think a nurse?
No offence to vets, radiologists, chaplains and nurses, but those _do_sound less accomplished.
You have no idea....
Did any of these families have adopted children who performed well above average? Obviously adopted children whose progenitors were also very accomplished wouldn't reveal anything about this "nature/nurture" question. Also, did any of these very accomplished individuals marry people who were simply attractive and personable rather then talented?
Would Julius Caesar and his great nephew/adopted son count?
Maybe, but it's only one example.
There are several more actually https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adoption_in_ancient_Rome#The_Adoptive_Emperors but it's not like they adopted random children
It's also not that they randomly became emperor. But maybe that's the key in general. If your father is literally Charles Darwin, how much more likley are people to take your wierd scientific theories seriously?
I think anvlex's point is that Augustus was a *good* emperor, not just an emperor... But then again Caligula and Nero were adopted too, so while an improvement over just leaving the throne to your biological kid it's still not a silver bullet
No, the adoptions were of grown men who were often nephews or cousins.
https://infogalactic.com/w/index.php?title=Nerva%E2%80%93Antonine_dynasty&oldid=1798379
As opposed to August, who was adopted when a newborn baby by a complete stranger? ;-)
If August is "one example" then the Antonines are examples too. If the Antonines don't count neither does August.
They're related enough that they'd have been part of the same family in this analysis even without the adoption, so IMO does not count in the context of nature vs nurture
You left out Josiah Wedgwood's greatest claim to immortality. "A prominent abolitionist fighting slavery, Wedgwood is remembered too for his Am I Not a Man And a Brother? anti-slavery medallion." wikipedia
Indeed and he gave one of the medallions to Benjamin Franklin who was an honorary member of the lunar society. JW was much more of a scientist than businessman. He invented the pyrometer (first thermometer to measure heat in kilns) and his experimental techniques had a profound influence on his grandson. Josiah II also convinced Robert Darwin (and funded) to let Charles go on the Beagle voyage
And Josiah pere was a pioneer in the movement. A passionate and interesting history of the early years of the abolitionist movement in Britain is "Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves" by Adam Hochschild
https://www.amazon.com/Bury-Chains-Prophets-Rebels-Empires-dp-0618619070/dp/0618619070/
Highly recomended.
Interesting side light on the movement. its leader in parliament was William Wilberforce. There is an excellent biopic "Amazing Grace"
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0454776/
Now the irony. the FP began with the Huxley Family. Aldous' grandfather was Thomas, who was called Darwin's bulldog because of his advocacy for the theory of evolution.
Thomas's opponent in the early debates was an English Bishop, Samuel Wilberforce, who was William's son. Samuel was like his father a committed opponent of slavery. There abolitionists on both sides of the evolution debate.
My favorite Tagore quote:
I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.
That's a fantastic quote. Thank you.
Apparently it was misattributed to Tagore. Imran Khan (Pakistani PM) got into trouble claiming it to be Khalil Gibran's, media tried to "school" him that it was Tagore's, but apparently both were wrong, and it is adapted from the work of Ellen Sturgis Hooper.
Is there an original dated reference for that? I like the quote and would like to get it right. (Though I would have guessed that it was a Sufi saying in the absence of all other information).
This is a reference for the original that was adapted https://archive.vcu.edu/english/engweb/transcendentalism/authors/hooperpoems.html
I slept, and dreamed that life was Beauty;
I woke, and found that life was Duty.
Was thy dream then a shadowy lie?
Toil on, sad heart, courageously,
And thou shalt find thy dream to be
A noonday light and truth to thee.
Thanks!
Amazing quote. Many thanks
This ideology is a bedrock of Indic thought. Further reflected beautifully in Einstein's conversation with Tagore:
https://mast.queensu.ca/~murty/einstein_tagore.pdf
“ I think most of these people are doing better than IQ 150. I don’t know if Charles Darwin can find someone exactly as intelligent as he is, but let’s say IQ 145. And let’s say that instead of having one kid, they have 10. Now the average kid is 129, but the smartest of ten is 147”
I don’t think the highest IQ of the parent’s IQ is the highest bound of the children’s IQ, though, even when above average, If that is what is being implied here.
Two parents with IQ of 120, could produce a 130,140, 150 just as they could produce a 110,100, or 90.
I think as you go further from the mean, the chance of your child doing better than you decreases, although never to zero.
How much of this is selection bias? I'm sure there are thousands of famous people who do not have famous family members. I'm not sure any meaningful conclusions can be drawn from picking out a few similar families and ignoring all the others.
You didn't mention music, but families of musicians are common. There many many Bachs.
In today's paper there was an interview with Billy Joel (sorry can't link Gannet papers):
Q: I’ve been to a few of your shows when [your daughter] Della Rose has come out on stage. Do you think she has some musical genes, like Alexa Ray (Joel’s 35-year-old daughter with ex-wife Christie Brinkley)?
Joel: Yeah, I believe it must be inherited. Alexa has it; she’s a good pianist and songwriter. But Della, who is 6, learned on her own by going to the piano and playing “The Planets” by (composer) Gustav Holst. She plays the “Jupiter” theme, picks it out note by note. It was on this kids show, “Bluey,” and one of the kids was dreaming they were floating through space and they played “The Planets” (suite) and she went to the piano and picked it out, and I went, “Oh my God, another one.” Remy, the youngest, has already expressed an interest in learning to play at the piano, too. So, yeah, it’s going to be one of those families.
I think a lot of musical ability involves early training. Musician Rick Beato who has a you tube channel where he analyzes and discusses music sells an ear training program. Here is a video he did about nature and nurture in music training and ability:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgFdics3uKo
A couple more families to ponder: The Wojcicki sisters, with Janet a professor at UCSF, Susan the CEO of YouTube, and Anne the founder of 23andme. Also the Emanuels, with Rahm former chief of staff to Obama, Ari the founder of the Endeavor talent agency (they own UFC now, among other things), and Ezekiel, an oncologist and academic.
I think there's mostly a high degree of selection bias here. You just don't hear about all the other families. The hero license concept also makes sense. Finally, I suppose there might be some tiger parent / family dinner table kind of effect, especially for siblings, but I bet it's relatively small. Shane Parrish did a podcast episode with the Wojcickis' mother that might be interesting.
I know one of them was married to one of the Google founders (who would later buy Youtube), and their relationship stemmed from the Google duo having Wojickis as landlords.
And the Emanuel’s adopted sister who fared far less well. She ended up much more like her birth parents than her adopted family.
I have one adopted relative who followed a life-course very similar to what I've heard of the biological mother. But there are no siblings for comparison (which was part of the motivation for the adoption).
I think the Hero License may have a strong effect here: when I was picking a college to attend it never occurred to me to apply to Harvard, or Yale, or any prestigious college. Perhaps I wouldn't have been able to get in regardless (having never aimed for an Ivy, my extracurriculars were almost non-existent), but I didn't dismiss them because I thought I couldn't make it. I was one of the smartest kids at my high school, and I was a National Merit Scholar (the letter they sent me claimed I was in the 99th percentile of students my age nationwide, but beats me if that's accurate or impressive). I didn't even know that it was particularly hard to get into an Ivy because it wasn't anywhere on my radar in the first place. After I had already graduated and entered the job market I realized for the first time that for some people getting into an Ivy is a big deal, and that job prospect wise it really is a big deal (when I first learned that every Supreme Court justice attended Yale or Harvard I was genuinely surprised).
So, why wasn't it on my radar? I didn't have any familial role models who had gone to an Ivy. My mom went to a state university, my father went to a bible college. The most prestigious family member in my life was my grandfather who was an engineer for Boeing: he had attended the University of South Dakota, if I recall correctly (might have been University of Iowa). None of my family members have a doctorate of any kind. My mother was an elementary school teacher, Papa was the engineer, Grandma was a homemaker, my dad's dad was a failed entrepreneur/alchoholic and my other Grandma was an x-ray technician.
I've done some genealogical research recently, and I know all my ancestors out to the great-great-grandparent level. Picking at random, I'm descended from a mailman, an carpenter/machinist, a cannery worker, a sawmill worker, and a great many farmers. The further I dig back, the more farmers I find. Long story short, I don't see a single doctor or professor or scientist or philosopher anywhere. My people didn't aim that high, apparently.
I've never taken an IQ test, but based on SAT conversion I'm probably ~125+. And if I had decided to be a doctor nobody would have dissuaded me, but nobody was a role model for me in that respect either. People did encourage me to become an engineer like my grandpa, because they could see I was smart and good at math, but I wasn't interested (these days I often wish I had, financially). I wanted to be a college professor because I like reading books and teaching people, and I would have pursued that career if the market for it wasn't so terrible. Even then I wasn't planning on being a research type professor, I just wanted to teach college students.
I think close familial role models make a big deal in helping us define our options from a young age.
If you're white or asian, you probably couldn't have gotten into an Ivy on the things you've listed alone, but you almost certainly could have gotten into one of the top public schools or a prestigious liberal arts college.
It didn't even occur to me to try. I went to a private Christian college that wasn't too far from home. That seemed like the thing to do, probably because my parents met at a Christian college (my mother then went on to get her masters at a state university).
Strongly agree - it's only very recently in my life (I'm in my 30s) that the idea of trying to accomplish something beyond being moderately comfortable even occurred to me as a real possibility, and that's been as a result of a few lucky breaks with regards to career and mentorship, and just raw exposure to ambitious/successful people.
My family is peasants all the way back (my sister was the first person in my extended family to get a degree) and I grew up in a small town; the most aspirational option available growing up was doctor, which vaguely seemed like the thing the smart kids were doing a few years ahead of me.
One element which you highlight well here, and which I think is often misunderstood, isn't that I despaired of being able to attend [top educational institution] or [achieve career milestone] - these things literally just didn't occur to me as an option I could even try and fail at.
My experience is different but perhaps related in a way: growing up through high school, going to a top college like an Ivy *was* a big deal for me, my family, and others in my community. It was the norm for high achievers at my school to go to Ivy-league schools. However, I *didn't* know many people (including my parents) who went on to do academic research, and so I didn't realize until a year into graduate school that another Big Thing people aim for is doing research with a highly renowned professor. I just wanted to research something interesting and the prestige factor wasn't on my radar. I imagine that if I'd grown up with professors as parents, I would have seen working with a Nobel laureate as a much more real possibility and been more attuned to the opportunities that could open up.
Agreed - even just for small things. I thought office hours were for asking questions about the material (the textbooks and/or the internet were perfectly clear, so I didn't), and only realised towards the end that more switched-on students were using it to line up research opportunities, which an academic family would have obviously known (on the other hand, I'm personally thankful I didn't go into academia, so maybe it worked out...)
Right, young people's ambitions are often scaled relative to their kin.
My impression is that famous high-achievers often have high-achieving collateral relatives. For instance, two of the most important American businessmen of the 1980s, Sam Walton (Walmart) and Michael Milken (junk bonds), were the sons of run-of-the-mill men but the nephews of tycoons. Walton's dad was a ne'er do well, but his uncle was a major regional player in retailing, so Walton's vast ambitions didn't come out of the blue. Milken's dad was merely an upper middle class accountant, but his uncle was a big shot.
On assortative mating, Gregory Clark would agree with you.
http://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/ClarkGlasgow2021.pdf
He shows levels of assortative mating that are /astonishingly/ strong.
Some quotes:
"Robinson et al. (2017) look at the phenotype and
genotype correlations for a variety of traits – height, BMI, blood pressure, years of education
- using data from the biobank. For most traits they find as expected that the genotype
correlation between the parties is less than the phenotype correlation. But there is one
notable exception. For years of education, the phenotype correlation across spouses is 0.41
(0.011 SE). However, the correlation across the same couples for the genetic predictor of
educational attainment is significantly higher at 0.654 (0.014 SE) (Robinson et al., 2017, 4).
Thus couples in marriage in recent years in England were sorting on the genotype as
opposed to the phenotype when it comes to educational status."
"The key point is that the correlation of grooms’ occupational status with their
own fathers’ is only modestly higher than the correlation of their status with the father of
their bride. By implication the groom and bride are matching very closely on some
underlying social status – and potentially on genetics that determine social outcomes."
"Table 9 shows the implied estimates of underlying marital assortment on social
abilities between bride and groom for each period. These estimates are very high, implying
a correlation of 0.8 or higher throughout the years 1837-1979 in the underlying social
abilities of bride and groom. There is some chance that the correlation declined in the last
40 years, but the small numbers of observations in this period make that conclusion
uncertain. The estimate of the underlying father-son and father-daughter correlations of
status are also very high being closer to 0.9. These estimates may be distorted by the fact
that the fathers and sons occupational status are measured at different points in the life
cycle (in a way that does not influence the estimate of m). But they are actually quite
consistent with the implication of the genetic model that 𝑏𝑏 = �
1+𝑚𝑚
2 �. If m = 0.8, then the
expected value of b is 0.9."
Fascinating topic, although it strikes me that you went around the globe and back in time and only mentioned a handful of families. Of course there are more but without knowing how many it’s hard to think that a handful of families in all of human history can tell us much about anything.
With the large number of people on earth, random chance seems to indicate that some (especially large) families will have multiple exceptional people or at least people who excel in a notable way. Add in other advantages, like high intelligence and seed money from a rich patriarch, and it seems almost trivially true that some families will have multiple amazing people like the shared stories.
What would be interesting would be to determine if the rate of these families were higher than the chance of each individual among them randomly excelling.
After we consider genetics, plus nepotism, plus upbringing, plus the fact that the opportunity for high achievement in most of the past has been largely restricted to the rich/educated people in a few rich/educated countries, I actually come out of this surprised that there aren't more examples of super high achieving families.
Oh, they're all over the place (disclaimer: I come from one). Most just don't provide easy metrics like "number of nobel prizes" to measure.
Yup.
You could just as easily write an article using the same families as an example of how structural advantage builds on itself. Or you could go to the other political pole and use the same approach (and mostly different families) to justify how aristocracies are both natural and morally correct.
It's fun and interesting, but doesn't say much beyond that there are a few prominent dynasties that spring up in academics, in the same way that there are always a few in politics.
Anecdote: SpaceX's CEO is Elon Musk, who came from a rich family with privilege, etc, etc.
But SpaceX's (former) CTO of propulsion, who deserves a lot of the credit for the actual technical innovation at SpaceX, was Tom Mueller, who grew up in Rural Idaho, and wanted to be a logger, just like his dad, as a kid. Eventually, he realized he had a talent for mechanics, and changed his goal to be... an airplane mechanic. He tells this story (https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/25/tom-mueller-spacex-cto-who-makes-elon-musks-rockets-fly.html):
> Then in my first year in high school, my math teacher asked if I was going to be an engineer. I said no. He was astounded. He asked, "Do you want to be the guy who fixes the plane or the guy who designs it?" If it hadn’t been for that math teacher, I probably would have been a mechanic or a logger
I think that story meshes well with the "Hero License" hypothesis.
My suspicion is that there is not that much evolutionary pressure on rural Idahoans.
Paul Graham has an interesting blog post (or tweet?) about how one of the highest impact things anyone can do is to encourage a promising young person to set his/her sights higher.
The last one seems right to me. I come from a "moderately great family" (one Nobel prize, one famous politician, one founder of well known movement, other minor notables), and I'm very aware of a social expectation in my family that normal goals like "having a good career" or "making a lot of money" aren't really acceptable. Success means doing something novel and important.
The flip-side of this is that it can be really emotionally hard when I feel I'm not on a potential path to greatness, and I think it's been hard on other family members who haven't met expectations.
I can also see the connection to sports. I got good enough at a sport that a coach wanted me to go for the olympics, but I did it by wrecking my body. I don't think I'm particularly physically gifted, but I was maybe more willing to tear myself apart in pursuit of something that looked like possible greatness.
I tend to think that certain people are more inclined to try hard on an IQ test, and these same people will likely try hard to do important seeming things like writing a great novel or solving deep problems in science. Sure, lots of people would never think of themselves as the sort of people who do Great Things. Perhaps even more people, when faced with the choice of living an unremarkable life, or one dedicated to a struggle towards achieving a Great Thing, would choose the former.
Some other potential factors, in no particular order:
1. A "cutting edge" effect. Remarkable work in any field is done at the cutting edge of that field. Exposure to the most recent discoveries is a crucial ingredient in any further success. This may even apply across widely separated disciplines—e.g., philosophy taking inspiration from new frames in science, etc. Cutting-edge work can take a while to percolate through society—decades, easily. But the children of cutting-edge researchers will have much more direct access. Curie's Cooperative was probably covering radiation long before even very good French schools were, giving its students a leg up. Even without such formal institutions, dinner table discussions could provide the same benefit.
2. A "credibility" effect. If someone comes up to you and says "I have a revolutionary new idea that will transform science" you may scoff. If they say ". . . and I'm Charles Darwin's kid," they get another chance. More positive external feedback loops could encourage breakthrough work in all sorts of ways.
3. Network effects. This is perhaps the most obvious one, falling under "privilege" above, but deserves to be called out separately. If my parents are famous composers and I'm an aspiring painter, well, there's probably a gallerist they can put me in touch with. Etc. etc. The more striking the achievement, the more cross-disciplinary the network.
Among great composers, which is a pretty objective list, a large fraction are the son of professional musicians (Mozart, Beethoven) and a large fraction are the sons of bourgeois parents who wanted them to study for the bar (Wagner, Stravinsky).
There is more genetic factors than just IQ. Things like conscientiousness, extroversion, capacity for effort, all have substantial genetic components.
> And the second problem is: what gene do we think Niels and Harald Bohr shared that made one of them a physics Nobelist and the other an Olympic athlete?
Niels Bohr was a goalkeeper on the same top club team (AB) as his brother but left after a season:
"According to AB, in a match against the German side Mittweida, one of the Germans launched a long shot and the physicist leaning against the post did not react, missing an easy save. After the game he admitted to his team-mates his thoughts had been on a mathematical problem that was of more interest to him than the game. He only played for the 1905 season."
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2005/jul/27/theknowledge.panathinaikos
Surely he is the only Nobel winner to play for a top level soccer team, although the article notes that Camus played for the University of Algiers, but I'm not sure how top level that is or was in 1930.
>> Sometimes they become politicians, another job which benefits from lots of name recognition.
Warren Buffett ran the other way - his father was a Congressman, while one of his sons is apparently an award winning musician and composer. Buffett himself publicly subscribes to the Hero License theory - he has two sisters who he says are just as smart but were never encouraged the same way he was.
Historical nitpick: Erasmus Darwin was not the founder of the Lunar Society, although he was a key member. The Lunar Society was very informal and didn't really have a single founder, but if I *had* to pick one, it would probably be William Small, or maybe Matthew Boulton. (I'm basing this claim on having read several books worth of the correspondence of Boulton and Watt, who were both Lunar Society members.)
> But also, Margaret Darwin (Charles’ grandson) married John Maynard Keynes’ brother Geoffrey Keynes (himself no slacker; he pioneered blood transfusion in Britain).
Either this is a man named Margaret getting gay married (which would be pretty interesting) or this should be "Charles' granddaughter"
Conflating "schooling" with "upbriging/values" is dangerous IMO. Lots more you can learn from your parents than what you can learn from school.
"what gene do we think Niels and Harald Bohr shared that made one of them a physics Nobelist and the other an Olympic athlete? " Low genetic load. They both could have had a relatively small number of harmful mutations that decreased how well their bodies and brains performed.
If Darwin was so smart what IQ do you assign to Alfred Russel Wallace?
Alfred Russel Wallace was a great guy.
I don't think either compared to, say, Gauss in IQ. But the spirit of the age in Victorian England was conducive to intellectual innovation.
To the last question: I have written some fairly popular short stories, erased myself from the Internet, started again and become popular again so I know the popularity wasn’t purely chance. I’ve also wondered why I do it as I also genuinely don’t think of myself as a writer and find the whole thing somewhat embarrassing. I refuse to discuss it in my real life and change the subject as quickly as possible if it happens to come up. Even though I’ve had people cry when meeting me and met romantic partners based on this skill alone, I think of it more like having irritable bowel syndrome than a talent. It’s just medically something that I have to sometimes deal with that I’d rather not focus on in polite conversation. My father can barely read and my mother probably hasn’t read anything since high school. No one else in my direct sphere had any interest in it. My father did show an active dislike in it when I was young which as I’ve grown older I’ve started to wonder at that as my primary motivation. Any chance the hero license comes from the wanting to piss off your father license?
Why do you disassociate yourself from your writing so? Why not share it in real life, talk about it if the topic comes up, perhaps even pursue it professionally, insofar as short stories can earn any revenue?
"Have you, dear reader, ever tried writing poetry that will set the collective soul of your nation on fire?"
In Book 4 of his Odes, Horace wrote:
Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona
multi; sed omnes inlacrimabiles
urgentur ignotique longa
nocte, carent quia vate sacro.
meaning approximately:
Many strong men lived before Agamemnon;
But all are unwept and unknown,
Thrust into an endless night,
Lacking a sacred bard.
Byron quoted this at the beginning of his mock epic Don Juan, but reversed the meaning. Byron himself had the skills to be a sacred bard, and knew it - but where was his Agamemnon? Who could he write about that he wouldn't have some reservations over? Earlier in life, his writings made it clear that he wanted to write an epic sincerely...but between the tragedies in his life that weren't his fault and the ones which were entirely his fault, he'd lost his youthful optimism, and now was stuck with skills he could no longer use the way he'd originally intended. And moreover, he became convinced that *nobody* could write a sincere epic anybody, that these modern times (the early 1800s) were just too progressed for epics to work anymore, or for people to take them seriously. So instead, he took a classic villain, Don Juan, and made Juan into a satiric and misunderstood hero, so that he would have something and someone to sing about.
A century later, GK Chesterton wrote a completely sincere epic about a different man named Don Juan, in what might be a coincidence.
But a century after that, and Byron's original premonition has at last come true. I've tried it, and found that it is *shockingly* difficult to write sincere poetry in English. The mechanics are easy enough to learn - the Internet can provide examples of anything, you could see iambic monometer poems if you wanted - but poetry that is both modern and not comedic brings with it a level of cringe that is very difficult to overcome. The most popular form of poem (poem, not song, since music has split off from poetry like Spanish from Latin) in English is the limerick, and even poetic forms which weren't originally comedic have become so in the present day.
The haiku is a good example of this. An English haiku has one official rule and one unofficial convention. The official rule is that the syllables have to be 5-7-5. The unofficial convention is that it has to be either anticlimactic or crude (though not usually both). So a standard English haiku about Tagore's early life, from the Wikipedia excerpt you posted, might go something like this:
Never left his mansion,
And took long treks through hills - wait.
Contradiction here?
But a Japanese haiku has extra requirements on top of these: there must be a kiregi, meaning a "cutting word" that makes what came before a complete thought, and there must be a kigo (an image of nature), and this image of nature must reference the season. A poem about Tagore's early life with those extra requirements would look something like this:
My house, a thicket,
Stifling me and growing strong
From Indian summer.
And that just sounds weird, or at the very least pretentious, while the first one feels - if not good, at least normal, and not cringe.
Haikus aren't the only example; the only original sonnets I've seen online in the past five years are from Pop Sonnets, a website which for a while posted one pop song per week rewritten into perfect Shakespearean iambic pentameter, and the author, Erik Didriksen, mentioned specifically that his goal was to be funny, that "not all of them lend themselves to obvious comedy, but I think the ones that work the best are the ones that are obviously clashing in the modern lyrics and the anachronism of the Shakespearean sonnet". A good example is his adaptation of The Who's "Pinball Wizard" (and if you haven't heard that song, I recommend listening to it first, to get some idea of the background):
From London-town to Brighton's shores I've trekk'd
to test my dext'rous skills in each arcade,
and naught I've seen could make me e'er expect
to see the prowess Tommy hath display'd.
Like Grecian marbles, he unmoving stands
before the table, saying not a word,
for naught but intuition guides his hands:
he never hat the cab'net seen or heard.
No sight hath he, nor any means to hear -
how do his flipper fingers aim so true?
I'll crown this wizard king and disappear;
my name forgotten, I'll be known as "who?"
-To watch him play shall shurely thee enthrall,
for lo! The kid doth play a mean pinball!
This works fantastically for Erik's purpose, but it only works because of how funny it is to have somebody who sounds like Shakespeare talking about things like pinball cabinets. Let me try to do one, but without the humor of anachronism - I'll take the first verse and start of the chorus of Rachel Platen's "Fight Song", since the imagery there is reasonably timeless.
A modest ocean-going vessel toss'd
by mighty waves retaliates in kind.
A single phrase voiced to a heart of frost
may spark the love for which it was designed.
A cannonade I could myself begin,
and fuses light with but a twig aflame,
And all would hear the echoes of its din,
though naught but I would know from whence it came.
My inner thoughts, forever unexpress'd,
like batt'ring rams beseige my inner peace.
But mute no more, this night I shall not rest,
And all will hear me 'ere my song shall cease.
Though all around lack faith in me, I write.
These verses are the sword with which I fight.
It's cringe. It was cringe to write and it's cringe to read; I can't blame anyone who's ever deleted his old poetry on the grounds of not being able to bear it. Forget writing poetry that will set the collective soul of one's nation afire - writing poetry that even mentions setting things afire in a heartfelt way is really, really tough.
I apologize for the lack of formatting on this comment - I tried to get Substack to group stanzas together, but could not figure out how.
Well *I* liked it.
I think that "cringe" is the modern day's inheritance from the cynical and nihilistic pop culture of the 90's/00's. Nothing matters, everything is a joke, that sort of thing. To take something seriously, to love it honestly, to enjoy it unironically, is to go against the Zeitgeist. And I say, all power to the hero who can defeat the spirit of the age.
So for my part, when I feel "cringe" I rebuke it. It comes from a childish fear of being mocked. You can't write good poetry without honesty.
You're very kind - and your approach to the concept of cringe is fascinating. I do think we're better off now than we were in the 90s and 00s with respect to sincerity in art; there are plenty of other cultural issues, but the nihilism at least seems to have gone down a few notches since then.
Having thought about it a bit longer, I think that we have come to call the phenomena "cringe" is telling. On the surface it indicates something so embarrassing that it causes us to cringe in social pain at seeing it. But I think much more than that we cringe because we fear being struck: we are recoiling from the blow we believe is coming. If it is someone else's work that is "cringe" we cringe so that others will not mistake us as being associated with the work, and thus worthy of their blows. If it is our own work, we cringe in the hopes of mitigating the damage when the blow strikes. In any case, it is fear.
Take your Fight Song poem: wouldn't it be better to simply ask if it is bad or good, then whether it is cringe? I'm currently working on quasi-epic poem in iambic pentameter about the lifecycle of wasps: I'm sure a lot of people would consider it cringe. I'm more concerned about whether it's good, and if so how to do better in the future.
"I'm currently working on quasi-epic poem in iambic pentameter about the lifecycle of wasps: I'm sure a lot of people would consider it cringe. I'm more concerned about whether it's good, and if so how to do better in the future."
I can't speak for anybody else, but I'm intrigued by this premise for a poem; if this comment section is still open when you finish, do post it here.
Well after standing up for radical bravery in the arts I can hardly say no, can I?
Funnily enough as I look over what I have I keep thinking "This is so terrible. This is the worst." I'm cringing! But I meant what I said and I said what I meant, so if I do finish it I will post it here.
It's been almost a year, so I have to ask - how's the poem coming?
There's some very interesting societal analysis to be done here on "sincerity". There's this concept of the New Sincerity which I encountered in connection with My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic and the brony fandom: counterculturally appreciating a cheerful upbeat series whose primary target audience was little girls. Being a brony generally means abandoning any concept of "cringe" and just unironically enjoying things that are enjoyable.
The wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Sincerity describes a radio programme which "rejects irony, and particularly ironic appreciation of cultural products", which sounds like what you're describing.
I very much liked all this poetry, not cringe at all. I do find nearly all pop music "cringe", but have not heard Fight Song; perhaps if I had the association I would be less pleased with this version.
Also, the haiku didn't feel pretentious to me in the slightest. Rather, it felt simple and proper. Then again, my sister regularly insists that I am in fact quite pretentious.
I suppose my taste in poetry is somewhat unusual itself; my favorite poem is "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", by Eliot, yet I can stand no other of his serious works. Much of what I enjoy in poetry is clever use of words, to create pleasing sounds and rhythms, or to engage in wordplay.
Thank you again for the poetry, it was enjoyable to read!
After the post about architecture, we really need one about what's happened to English-language poetry.
Given's Scott skill at and knowledge of poetry, he is exactly the right man to write such a post.
But Byron also wanted to be his own Agamemnon by leading the military liberation of Greece from the Ottoman Empire. Paul Johnson's view (perhaps romantic) is that if Lord Byron hadn't died of fever at 36, he would have succeeded and been crowned first king of modern Greece.
Perhaps if he'd succeeded, he would finally have had a modern military hero to write about. But then, in order to succeed, the curse of everyone around him dying young would have had to not strike down his whole army.
An interesting hypothesis. I think you're on to something vis a vis the main cultural current, but while people aren't as open or loud in appreciating sincerity I think it is unironically appreciated by most people when they aren't playing a persona for the wider world - just because something is uncool does not mean it is unpopular
I was interested in the idea of the Hero Licence, so I followed the link. And of course, it's a sixteen thousand word self-aggrandising dialogue between Eliezer Yudkowsky and Eliezer Yudkowsky about how smart and wonderful Eliezer Yudkowsky is.
I didn't read the whole thing, but it got me thinking about the failure mode where you grant yourself _too much_ hero licence and never manage to back it up with achievements.
I'm sure I had read it before years ago, but I had a similar reaction and eventually just switched to doing a text search for "hero license" so as not to waste so much time.
I think the best mindset here is not believing that you will succeed, but that you might succeed. If you might achieve that implies you really have to try hard to make it happen. Related: Jeff Bezos told his investors that he had a 30% chance of success with Amazon.
As someone who does roughly the same job as my late father (without ever intending to end up in the same line of work) I tend to favor the theory that role modeling is a very strong factor in how kids tend to succeed in the same ways their parents succeeded. I stumbled into my father's former field with a lot of cultural and domain-relevant knowledge that has been of clear, obvious value in my career.
As a father trying to figure out how to give his 1 1/2 year-old son all the best opportunities in life (and also a bit about how to engineer in him the aptitude to actually capitalize on those opportunities) I've thought about making a study of great families quite a bit. It's pretty appropriate that you would opt for a Bene Gesserit as your thumbnail for this post as I believe part of what makes for greatness in these conditions is also family culture. Not every offspring of your Messiah-breeding program will pan out, but if it's family policy to train them all to survive the Gom Jabbar test from birth, you're going to have some history-makers.
Great houses have mottos for a reason, they've institutionalized what it means to be a "Vanderbilt" or a "Darwin" or a "Tagore". This provides a set of guiding principles which, even if they aren't totally effective, at the very least generate a kind of placebo effect that having a normal last name coming from an unremarkable family does not. That whole thing about how "a man must live by a code" even though most boys today have no idea what should be in their code or how to go about seriously living by one? That problem doesn't exist if all your uncles and grandparents and great grandparents set being a doctor, or winning a Nobel Prize, or pushing the limits of human achievement as the ultimate value. To be born a Bush is to be handed an identity at birth along with a set of guidelines for how to live it. You won't necessarily become president, but you have a far better chance than somebody whose only access consists of David McCullough books and Ken Burns docs.
Like any organization, you'll have members who rebel against these principles, many of whom wash out and are forgotten (hence why great families also seem more likely to have burnouts and early tragic deaths). Maybe some of them do their best to create an approximation of average and get to enjoy a normal life. And then there will be those who actively embrace the culture, get that the times change and the destination is more important than following the family footsteps exactly, and succeed. Belief isn't everything, but if it's your self-belief reaffirmed by everyone in your family and social circles, it probably makes a much bigger difference than we think.
To put it another way, imagine if society's conclusion after Roger Bannister ran the 4-minute mile was that it's much easier to do the impossible if you're a Bannister, and the Bannister family all believed this. Within a few generations, we'd have more record-breaking Bannisters than 99% of other families.
Or an other, other way: not everyone attains enlightenment, but being born and raised in a Buddhist monastery probably helps :)
Rather than any educational programs, perhaps your best goal for your son's future success is to engineer his potential friendship group, i.e. make sure the other boys with whom he naturally hangs out are reasonable and sensible people with strong life guidance behind them. My observation is that the largest risk factor for the lives of young men going astray are falling in with the wrong peer group at a vulnerable age. You go off into drugs, petty criminality, or just slackerhood at the wrong age and seems very difficult to recover in less than a decade or so, perhaps because of the changes made to the young plastic brain when it is setting up its adult furnishings, and some futures are pretty much closed off for good, given modern tendencies towards judgmentalism, particularly of the typical errors of the young male.
It's passe in this day and age to think that your social milieu is tremendously influential and can be so in a very positive way -- we all like to think, apparently, that we arrive at our adult values and habits through pure personal decision arrived at from only deep introspection, and our biggest problem is sustaining idiosyncrasies in the face of ignorant prejudice -- which is perhaps a harmless delusion in young adulthood (>25 for males), but arguably deeply destructive for younger boys, circa 10-15. I think these little guys really need sturdy social reinforcement and good peer (and slightly older) models to thrive.
So I think there's real value in some of those social institutions of yore like sports and service clubs, the Boy Scouts or equivalent, et cetera -- as well as churches, if your own philosophy runs that way -- and putting him in the right schools. It's difficult and ethically undesirable to try to control exactly who he chooses as friends, but at least you can try to ensure most of the choices on easy offer are other young people with sound moral compasses.
This is very good advice. Thank you.
I think about one of my best friends from boyhood, who never made it to his 30s. After we parted ways to attend different high schools, he fell into drugs and criminality while those options just weren't readily available at mine. Parental guidance also plays a huge part no doubt but I always think about what might have happened had we stayed tight friends. Would I have done what he did? Would he have kept on a straighter, narrower path? We'll never know. He died some years after I'd moved away from our home town and I couldn't attend his funeral. Not sure what happened, only that it was tragic.
I believe what boys need more than anything in this era are endurance and strategy. Call it grit if you want, but most of us lack patience and foresight, having been conditioned to look for fast fixes and clear easy wins. Thus surrounding children with people who can show them how to make plans and stick to them is vital.
For that reason, I'm thinking of enrolling him in Jiu-Jitsu when he's old enough. The church is important too because even if the Christian God isn't real, the values and community imparted by his church definitely are.
Yup, fully agree with you there. It's a rough time to be a boy, and building gumption and grit is critical. You can't lecture someone into that, either, it only comes from trying, failing, getting up and trying again, winning. Oblig Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4e5Xfmc8zQ
For example, Jeb's son George P. Bush isn't a God-given political talent, but, still, he managed to navigate the difficult Trump years without wrecking his prospects, which speaks well of his political skills. The chance he will be elected president in, say, 2036 or 2040 is very small but not zero.
Could test the hypothesis of environmental vs genetic for greatness by looking at adopted children of Nobel prize winners vs natural children. But we have already done that analysis for n=large regular folks and it seems achievement is mostly genetic and some X factor we don’t understand, but it’s definitely not parenting. Why would this be different for very eminent families?
You might think that "achievement" of the sort measured in large n studies of regular people is a different sort of thing than "achievement" of the sort being discussed here. (I don't mean to claim that it *is* qualitatively different, but I see the case one might try to make that it is.)
I've heard "genetics plus some X factor we don't understand but definitely not parenting" as the explanatory factors for IQ, but are you sure it holds for achievement?
> But we have already done that analysis for n=large regular folks
Can you link that?
So there are two elements to this, first is whether attainment has a genetic component in normal people not just great families, in the above post Scott does assume this for IQ but has recently provided data on a number of other factors https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/non-cognitive-skills-for-educational.
He provided data on how household income correlated with genetics. This is what I mean by attainment in “regular” folks.
On the second point of parenting not making a difference to children’s outcomes the original go to source is Judith Rich Harris, she wrote a bunch of books but the
“Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do” is probably a good one too start with. Steven Pinker also has written on this. Both of them rely on separated identical twin studies where twins were adopted into different families and outcomes are compared with natural children.
"The cognitive test has a mean of 5 and an SD of 3, so a cognitive score of 7 = IQ 115, and a score of 9 = IQ 130+."
Those calculations imply an SD of 2.
Strange that you didn't include the Galton quote. After all, this blogpost is a kind of tribute to his book that did much the same thing you did. Here it is:
"In statesmanship, generalship, literature, science, poetry, art, just the same enormous differences are found between man and man; and numerous instances recorded in this book, will show in how small degree, eminence, either in these or any other class of intellectual powers, can be considered as due to purely special powers. They are rather to be considered in those instances as the result of concentrated efforts, made by men who are widely gifted. People lay too much stress on apparent specialities, thinking overrashly that, because a man is devoted to some particular pursuit, he could not possibly have succeeded in anything else. They might just as well say that, because a youth had fallen desperately in love with a brunette, he could not possibly have fallen in love with a blonde. He may or may not have more natural liking for the former type of beauty than the latter, but it is as probable as not that the affair was mainly or wholly due to a general amorousness of disposition. It is just the same with special pursuits. A gifted man is often capricious and fickle before he selects his occupation, but when it has been chosen, he devotes himself to it with a truly passionate ardour. After a man of genius has selected his hobby, and so adapted himself to it as to seem unfitted for any other occupation in life, and to be possessed of but one special aptitude, I often notice, with admiration, how well he bears himself when circumstances suddenly thrust him into a strange position."
Hereditary Genius by Francis Galton, 1969. https://galton.org/books/hereditary-genius/text/v5/galton-1869-hereditary-genius-v5.htm
Bernoulii family! Just some of them (hacked from Wikipedia):
Jacob Bernoulli (1654–1705) mathematician after whom Bernoulli numbers are named
Johann Bernoulli (1667–1748), mathematician and early adopter of infinitesimal calculus
Nicolaus I Bernoulli (1687–1759) mathematician - curves, differential equations, probability
Daniel Bernoulli (1700–1782) "Bernoulli's principle:' originator of the concept of expected utility
Johann II Bernoulli (1710–1790) mathematician and physicist
Johann III Bernoulli (1744–1807) astronomer, geographer and mathematician
Jacob II Bernoulli (1759–1789) physicist and mathematician
I was shocked not to see the Bernoullis in this piece.
Or the Coleridges…
A little error in the statistics of the Swedish cognitive scores table. IQ is normally mean 100, SD 15. So if a test is mean 5, SD 3, then it requires a score of 8 to be equivalent to IQ 115 and 11 to be equivalent to IQ 130.
Not all IQ tests use SD 15, which is very irritating. Thus, someone’s IQ is only meaningful if they can tell you what test it was taken on and if that test is a properly validated test. Personally, I trust the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS-IV) as it’s got the most research behind it and is probably most widely used in the US and U.K. I’ve probably assessed about 50 people with it over the years. On an SD 15 scale, it really only makes sense up to IQ 145 because at that point you’re 3xSDs above the mean and ever increasing scores would be capturing a tinier and tinier fraction of the population. Consider that there’s only 2% of the population that are <70 IQ on this scale (typically learning disabled) and 2% that are >130 (98th percentile and upwards).
I have a famous highly successful grandfather (similar in achievement to many of the examples in this post), and test high on IQ -- but have nowhere near the level of achievement that he did. I'm doing fine (top ~.1% income) but I'm not likely to have a Wikipedia page based on my personal achievements, as opposed to things related to the family.
There are 9 in my generation, and none of us has done something really extraordinary. I don't know the IQs of my cousins but they're a smart bunch, with lots of elite universities and graduate degrees.
So there's clearly another factor besides (a) fame and resources, and (b) IQ.
To me, it feels like something you might call "drive". For whatever reason (cultural?), my parents' generation chose not to push us extremely hard, and none of us had the level of drive/internal motivation that my grandfather did. I should in theory have gotten it from both sides, from my grandfather through my mother, and from my father who earned his own Wikipedia page while coming from a middle class background.
But in fact I merely have a successful tech career. Not extraordinary -- I see many around me who have done better at a younger age than I. In my case, I think the level of privilege and wealth we have was pretty demotivating. If I don't have to work to be comfortable, why should I? It took me a decade or so to come to an answer to that question (work is a lot more fulfilling than a life of leisure). A decade is a pretty big chunk of time to not make progress.
So maybe the answer to why some families are dynastic is in part extreme motivation. Motivation can be external (tiger mom or just generally very high expectations) or internal. Families that have the right genetics or culture can create levels of drive that, combined with the right abilities and access to resources, propel the family scions with potential to realize it.
I think most people don't realize their full potential. I certainly haven't. I think some thoughts around potential are required to have a full story about dynastic family achievement.
I think another factor here is that opportunity for "greatness" is not evenly distributed.
If you were a genius born to an elite family in the Belgian congo circa 1880 or so, then your chances of becoming a nobel prize winner were more or less zero regardless of talent, drive, etc. The best you could hope for would be to be the most senior underling in the rubber plantation. A similarly-talented child from an elite Belgian family, however, was at a historical high point in terms of their likelihood to attain this form of greatness.
Fast-forward to today, and your elite family is now competing on a much more level playing field against up-and-coming families from across the developed and developing world. All of you may be just as smart and driven as your grandfather was - he just happened to be smart and driven in a space where there was relatively a lot more opportunity for whatever form of greatness you're referring to.
Your full potential is simply the fullest expression of your abilities and skills in the environment you find yourself in.
Thanks.
Mr. Orr's grandfather is, arguably, the key figure in the history of Silicon Valley. I got one of his grandfather's firm's calculators as a high school graduation present 45 years ago and it was the best present I ever received.
If Mr. Orr is in or near the top 0.1% by income -- that's millions of dollars a year - then he has plenty of drive - he's simply chosen to apply it to something other than the traits that get you a Wikipedia page. I'd also rather be rich than famous, although leaving an intellectual legacy is on my bucket list too.
IDK, .1% in one in a thousand. Elsewhere in the comments someone estimated that one in ten thousand people has a wikipedia page worldwide, and the rate is surely higher than that in the US.
So I think being profiled in Wikipedia is quite a bit more impressive. YMMV, of course.
I'm not sure what to take from this article other than "If you cherry pick from the whole population of smart or famous people especially Nobel prize winners, you can find a subset who are related."
The Nobel Prize Website https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/facts/nobel-prize-facts/ lists 609 Nobel Prizes, of which 30 (5%) went to related individuals.
With enough feats in various spheres across the entire world, it's not surprising that you could find a few families that consistently beat the odds
As Daniel Seligman pointed out three decades ago, 5% of hard science Nobel Laureates going to children of the very small number of Nobel Laureates is hugely disproportional to random luck.
Why would it be random? The two cases that come immediately to mind are the Braggs and the Curies, and in both cases parent and child worked closely together.
All these factors are in play but the fact is that most Nobel prize winners don’t have Nobel prize winning children. Can you quantify just how much parentage improves their odds compared to the general population?
A gigantic amount.
Just thinking of Nobel prizes, there are two more relevant families to consider:
Jan Tinbergen won the first Nobel prize in Economics in 1969, and his brother Niko Tinbergen won the Nobel in medicine in 1973. (Both of them working on topics relevant to this blog, about individual and group behavior in economics and ecology.) Their brother Luuk Tinbergen committed suicide at a somewhat young age, but had two children that are both moderately prominent ecologists.
Another relevant family that doesn't have the heredity explanation - Gunnar Myrdal won the Economics Nobel in 1974 (partly for work that influenced the US Supreme Court in Brown v Board of Education), and his wife Alva Myrdal won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1982 (the only married couple to win separate Nobels). Their daughter, Sissela, is a moderately known philosopher, who married the President of Harvard, Derek Bok. Their daughter Hilary Bok is another philosopher, who also had a bit of fame with the political blog Obsidian Wings a decade or so ago.
A Charles Darwin grandson you did not mention was Bernard Darwin, generally regarded as the best golf writer who ever lived, an excellent amateur golfer, and authority on Charles Dickens. Perhaps he represents a regression towards the mean, but still.
Right. As a prose stylist, Charles Darwin's grandson Bernard Darwin was close to P.G. Wodehouse in quality.
Interestingly, the anonymous author of the giant 1844 bestseller propounding evolutionary theory Vestiges of Natural Creation, Robert Chambers, was a fanatical golfer who'd written his evolutionary tract while living in St. Andrew's and playing the Old Course daily. A century later, the descendants of Darwin and Chambers collaborated on a history of golf that utilized the golf course at St. Andrew's as the exemplification of evolution in action.
Am I the only person triggered by the phrase "theory of evolution?" Darwin's theory was natural selection, which explained how and why evolution happened. Evolution isn't a theory, it's a fact. "The theory explaining evolution" would be correct, as would "theory of natural selection," but "theory of evolution" just grates.
Also, as a matter of social justice, if you can't become a dolphin, you still have the RIGHT to become a dolphin.
" "The theory explaining evolution" would be correct"
Well, yeah, and that's called "theory of evolution" in short. Gravity is an observed fact too (and for that matter natural selection) but we still speak of "theory of gravity".
I need to point out that my father quite literally worked in a bog and I held the record low score on a Golden Tee machine in my local bar in the late 1990s.
Yes, greatness is heritable.
Fascinating. I love the concept of a "hero license." That applied to Winston Churchill. But I wonder how often a hero license overcomes the downsides of being the child of a genius. I recently read "The Magician," Colm Toibin's wonderful novelistic biography of Thomas Mann. It was a a cautionary tale of life loved for his art at great sacrifice for family, among other things.
'I had the feeling of being on a microscopic plate, with these six enormous eyepieces goggling down on me. I was my parent's precious child, and I was never left alone, because they lost the other nine through miscarriages- they had an Rh problem. I was a classic example of the 'Hartley Coleridge bind' which makes children of high achievers so lucrative to psychologists.' Alice Sheldon, aka as James Tiptree Junior, daughter of famous explorer and writer Herbert Bradley and Mary Bradley, author of thirty-five books. So yes, 'you are the lesser son of a great man' has form.
But in one of Freeman Dyson's books there's a passing career tip to the effect that when you are one of the first to explore a new scientific field, you should go ahead and write the first textbook- good career move, pays off later. Dyson grants license.
that quote really makes it sound like being the only survivor of 10 pregnancies is far more significant that the careers of the parents - it's easy to imagine a perfectly average middle class family becoming obsessive after that
Could well be, James Tiptree was always chock-full of genteel nerves.
"It seems weird to think of “genius” as a career you can aim for. But maybe if your dad is Charles Darwin, you don’t just go into science. You also start making lots of big theories, speculating about lots of stuff. The fact that something is an unsolved problem doesn’t scare you; trying to solve the biggest unsolved problems is just what normal people do. Maybe if your dad founded a religion, and everyone else you know is named Somethingdranath Tagore and has accomplished amazing things, you start trying to write poetry to set the collective soul of your nation on fire.
Have you, dear reader, ever tried writing poetry that will set the collective soul of your nation on fire? If no, why not? And does that fully explain why Rabindranath Tagore succeeded at this and you didn’t?"
For inscrutable personal reasons, I refer to this phenomenon (specifically the not seeing 'doing great things' or even 'doing greater things than your parents' as possible not for any intrinsic reason but just because you haven't thought of it, and being a normie instead when you don't have to be) and many like it as "the Cabal". I have little to none of it and it *psyches me out so perpetually* how other people do and so don't write nation-soul-fire poetry. I think this specific prong of Cabalism clusters a fair bit with the other prongs of epistemic learned helplessness (which you do need some minimum of to avoid getting paralyzed every time you discover a new idea, but I am not at all sold on the arguments for levels above it) and with a weak internal fantasy life. Accordingly, it's unsurprising to see very little of it in people who seek out new ideas (even if they're total crackpots) and people who develop and display complex internal fantasies (even if they're terrible writers).
I think this ties in with competitive pessimism, where people treat errors of overoptimism as worse than (and particularly deserving more mockery than) errors of overpessimism. The 'hero license' is removed from the range of possibilities even further by the fact that even if you consider it in the first place, you'll be socially shamed out of rising above your station or having Cringe Ideas. (This is not to overcorrect to the common and damnable overcorrection that all ideas tagged as Cringe are actually being overlooked by interminable normies -- sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.)
Well said. I think "learned helplessness" really does sum it up. In my case in came from chronic physical illness more than societal conditioning, in that the constraints on my goals are very physical and real, but looking back I can also see all the times I was held back by people not being willing to see someone else break moulds and achieve great things, and I wonder if had I been healthy, would that have enabled me to fight back or would it merely have made my relative mediocrity that much more of a waste of potential?
I feel like teasing Scott for never having heard of Esther Dyson. I’m not sure whether her influence has declined since the nineties or if she has just succeeded in avoiding the spotlight more recently. I was never all that interested in the venture capital side of tech, but I knew who she wasback then. Maybe it was the gossip about Bill Gates angle that caught me, though if so, perhaps I am the one who should be embarrassed.
Live and learn!
I knew of Esther Dyson was back in the 90s, but always thought of her as a canonical example of someone with a famous last name who hob nobbed in the right circles, but had never actually accomplished anything. She may well be very smart and and awesome person, but all of her CV line items follow naturally from famous last name plus wealth.
Jaron Lanier says that someday he's going to write a history of Silicon Valley to point out the crucial role played by intuitive women hosting salons who facilitated history by introducing various male nerds to each other.
I don't know if he was thinking of Esther Dyson, but that's the name that sprang to my mind.
Does Esther Dyson have inherited wealth? Both of her parents are academics. I'm sure she was brought up comfortably, but I don't know how she got to be a private investor. Maybe she did accomplish something.
I don't think there's much to be explained here but here's another interesting group:
Moses Mendelssohn was a philosopher called the "father of the Haskala" or Jewish enlightenment. I don't know how impressive he was as a philosopher, but he did beat out Kant for a big philosophy prize. Also, Kant was quoted as saying "Mendelssohn is an awesome-cool philosopher".
Moses' son Abraham doesn't seem to have done anything impressive except become very rich and host parties where all the cool people would hang out and Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn would play music.
Felix Mendelssohn was a legendary pianist and composer.
Fanny Mendelssohn was an extraordinary pianist and composer but also a woman: She was discouraged from devoting her energies to music and largely published under her brother's name.
Rebecka Mendelssohn may or may not have been a cool person, but she married Dirichlet, which is pretty cool. Dirichlet was very smart and very cool.
(There are other cool people like Paul and Kurt Hensel, Fanny's sons, but I don't know much about them. There's a Wikipedia page devoted to the family.)
My guess is that most of the intellectual dynasties of the last 100 years have been Ashkenazi. For example, the brilliant sabermetrician behind the 2016 Chicago Cubs baseball world championship, Theo Epstein, is the grandson of one of the Epstein Identical Twins who wrote the final draft of "Casablanca."
According to their joint story, the movie was already being filmed, but they hadn't yet worked out the ending. The key line would be what Captain Renault says after Rich shoots Major Strasser. But they were stumped. Suddenly, while driving down Sunset Blvd. they both simultaneously looked at each other and said the best line in Hollywood history: "Round up the usual suspects."
I don't actually believe that. I suspect one of them said it and they later agreed that both would take credit for it. After all, the Epsteins were wonderful at making stuff up.
Charles Darwin was an elite, lazy malcontent who got stuck on a world-spanning ship tour because he was from a rich family who needed to give him something to do to keep him busy. He was notably not even brought along on the HMS Beagle in a scientific capacity — he was just there so that the ship's other elite passengers would have someone to talk to. He wrote some personal notes about wildlife during his trip, but failed to publish anything of note for decades afterwards and faded into obscurity.
Alfred Russel Wallace, a commoner, did actual thorough legwork to prove the theory of evolution through natural selection. Upon realizing that a commoner might get credit for this theory, Darwin's elite friends cajoled him into writing up something that they could present as a finding alongside Wallace's. The elites then trumped up Darwin's involvement in the discovery of natural selection.
In the end, the elites won. Darwin gets remembered as a visionary genius, and bloggers now misinterpret his achievement as a result of anything other than being born an elite in a society that existed to intentionally propagate the supposed superiority of the elites over the commoners.
I'd venture to guess that status, rather than IQ, is a much better explanation for the phenomenon that Scott has identified.
Source: spent time in the Galapagos talking to naturalists who have spent considerable time studying Darwin's life.
Do you have actual sources?
+1, never heard this story, seems contrived.
I know that Darwin was not the ship's naturalist but was brought aboard at the request of the captain. The rest seems contrived.
Interestingly enough, amongst biologists Darwin's career is seen as setting something of a precedent in terms of needing a different sort of approach to make useful insights.
It is (or perhaps was, until the rise of big sequencing and bioinformatics) a scientific field where a person's insights and output actually improve as they age instead of declining. This is speculated (usually by older professors) to be a product of the sheer volume of information and experience you need to take in to produce useful synthesis.
This is also interesting as a contrast with physicists, who are known to say that if you haven't produced good work before 35 then your chances of ever doing so are slim. They also have a habit of deciding to solve biology for the poor, idiot workers in the field: usually coming in with a splash before engaging in useless model construction and epicycle-building.
For myself, I'd both agree with you and argue that Darwin's greatest strength was a certain broad-mindedness, as well as the patience needed to thoroughly chew over a problem before making any grand conclusions. Here having a rich, supportive family was obviously a massive advantage here. He certainly wasn't a genius in the sort of "lightning-fast insights from first principles" kind of way that a lot of people understand the term.
Both Darwin and Galton, who had mutual sources of family wealth, were relatively late-in-life geniuses.
I don't think this argument can at all survive an acquaintance with the Origin of Species, which contains a wealth of data from a huge range of sources, gathered over a lifetime. "Not publishing" doesn't equal "not doing anything". Also, Darwin was extraordinarily careful to acknowledge a very large number of predecessors, including Darwin, in the intro to OoS. Also, Darwin was a commoner just as Wallace was. Perhaps you mean he was richer than Wallace.
"Darwin was extraordinarily careful to acknowledge a very large number of predecessors, including Darwin"
I'm assuming you meant to write "including Wallace", but I'm now imagining a time-travel story about an elderly Darwin going back in time and explaining natural selection to his younger self.
Alfred Russel Wallace was a great guy. But his ambitions, having grown up in family of declining wealth, were less ambitious than those of Darwin, so he was happy to accede to Darwin getting primary credit. It's not unreasonable that Darwin, who had been gnawing away at the idea since the late 1830s while Wallace wrote his solution off to Darwin in 1858 as soon as he came up with it, should get credit for it.
But Wallace was a tremendous contributor to science.
Others have already mentioned that Darwin made every effort to credit Wallace in the foreword to Origin, but Wallace more-or-less destroyed his own career later in life by veering toward a stubborn interest in the paranormal. Darwin eventually secured him a small pension, if I remember right, so I think it's unfair to suggest that Darwin was stealing credit for anything.
I think in addition to what has already been said in reply to this, there is a case to be made that Darwin probably suffered from chronic anxiety, perfectionism and procrastination. After his return from the beagle his behavior bears all of the hallmarks of this: he tried to create "the ideal working conditions" and almost decided not to get married based on how it would affect his work (he was worried about the "terrible loss of time" and travel constraints it meant for his research) (https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/tags/about-darwin/family-life/darwin-marriage). He finally proposed to his cousin he knew since childhood to avoid any romantic complications and settled down in the countryside because:
"I have so much more pleasure in direct observation, that I could not go on as Lyell does, correcting & adding up new information to old train & I do not see what line can be followed by man tied down to London.—
In country, experiment & observations on lower animals,—more space—"
He suffered from a mysterious illness that was triggered by stressful situations and "became increasingly reclusive, actually fitting a mirror outside the house, so that he could withdraw when visitors were coming around the corner." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_of_Charles_Darwin#Psychic_causation)
He collected more and more data through experiments on earth worms etc. for 17 years without making significant process in writing "The Origin of Species", although he had communicated most of his theory already to the scientific community in letters and conversations. Finally, upon Wallace publishing his results, he wrote up the book in 13 months while constantly sick needing permanent encouragement from his friends.
I think it is unfair to characterize this 20-year struggle as the behavior of a "lazy malcontent". As others have pointed out, he was well aware of not only the scientific but also the immense social, political and religious implications of the theory of evolution. This was work that had the potential to render him personally a societal outcast and cause political, social and religious strive at an enormous scale (which, arguably, it did!). He knew that if he got something wrong or even only communicated his findings in the wrong way, the consequences might be dire.
So you try and go ahead writing that damn book!
He had every reason to be out-of-his-mind anxious about it and a lesser person might have given up. But he persevered and eventually got it done. He was not a lazy elite good-for-nothing but a man who devoted his life to science and sacrificed his happiness and health over it.
This piece seems to confound "people who are famous" with "people who are highly skilled." Specifically, it doesn't allow that there might be highly skilled or respected families who were massively impactful but not all that well known. It ignores the idea that these families might be clustering because of a talent for self-promotion which can be sustained by average intelligence types.
Further, a famous family in the sciences not only has access to a great deal of institutional prestige, resources related to that profession, a cultivating home environment, etc but also a legacy which even mediocre people can maintain. There's plenty of people in those families who did okay but not great, enough they were well respected in their time but don't echo down in history. But they were still famous because fame is additive: if you have a famous father and brother then you're famous even if you're just an average person plus the advantages of a famous family.
Likewise, great families are not necessarily famous. Elite and media interest are what make fame. I'm sure there are many families who are elite in terms of their capabilities but work in something that isn't as fame selected. I can think of several impressive families that are like that.
I think there's still a correlation, but you make a very sound point, of course. And there's tremendous variation even within an individual what lies within their ambit for accomplishment. For example, having read both Einstein and Feynman, I believe Feynman was the smarter. When you're reading along you just see him take these little leaps that are at first baffling, but resolve with patience and thought, and you realize he didn't need to do that -- he could just do casual leaps over serious thickets of puzzlement, just intuit the right answer like mortals can withotut effort realize chipmunks can't gnaw down a sequoia in an afternoon. With Einstein I don't feel that way. Everything is very solid, well thought out, clearly smart -- but you don't get the feeling he has to slow himself down to communicate with mortals.
And yet...arguably Einstein was far better recognized, at least in his time. And in no small part, I think, that's because Einstein was disciplined and focussed, while Feynman seemed to have spent about 2/3 of his time and energy trying to shag every cute girl he met. (In the #metoo era he would have spent his career as a bongo player or something, because the academy would never have countenanced him.)
I'm also frankly thinking of my family who are well known in a little world and have produced many, many noted {redacted}. But you've never heard of us.
If I wanted to be a {redacted} I'd probably be very successful because of what my extended family could've done. And I'm not all that good at {redacting}. I mean, I'm a LOT better than the average person. But by the standards of the great masters? I'm good. Competent. Not a talent for the ages or even particularly good for my generation of the family. But I have a fair number of relatives who are top level {redacted} and a lot of the ones who aren't do something else pretty notable. None of them are particularly famous though.
I don't talk to my family much but I expect, if being a {redacted} was as famous as being a great scientist or if my family self-promoted more, then I'd have a Wikipedia entry that was a few paragraphs mostly mentioning times when I interacted with my relatives. Instead none of us have Wikipedia entries but my name still runs in a small world.
An interesting reflection. I'm vaguely reminded of my personal hypothesis/grudge that the Internet is ruining imagination, because imaginative kids become little (microscopic!) fishes in a big (world-wide) pond far too quickly.
Like, you're a kid with an unusually good sense of observation and inquisitive imagination, and you get interested in how birds can fly or why there are rainbows. So you start looking for answers, and your parents shrug and say dunno, and your teachers in 5th grade give you an obvious load of shallow crap because *they* don't really know -- they're 5th grade teachers, not experts on aerodynamics or electromagnetism -- so you start looking in books, and when that proves insufficiently satisfying you start thinking about it on your own. Maybe you come up with some dumb crude ideas, but you're exercising the part of your brain that thinks rationally, and strengthening it. The books aren't fully satisfactory, those you find in the school library, but you learn stuff along the way willy nilly, and you start learning how to look for more sources, how to weigh them, how to squeeze all the juice out of them. "Let's see, here's a book on helicopters and it doesn't say how birds fly, but there's this business about an airfoil and Bernoulli's Principle and it gets you started thinking..."
I feel like some kind of self-apprenticeship like this is where you breed young people with good empirical and creative thinking skills, it's a sort of harsh training regime where they have to work out so much themselves -- but they get a lot stronger while they do that.
Contrast to 2021 kid. How do birds fly? I turn instantly to Google and shazam in 2 seconds I'm reading a Wikipedia article on that exact question, or watching a Youtube video by an expert ornithologist who flys small planes in his spare time. Curiosity, fully satisfied, in about 30 seconds flat. I go fire up Roblox and turn the work-think-hard part of my brain back off.
Or..even worse, I have already come up with some lame but original theory, and when I look up the expert opinion, I immediately *see* how lame my theory is, and I just think oh why did I bother even thinking I could noodle this out on my own, clearly I should just have looked it up -- and you lose the delicate bud of self-pride in being able to *reason stuff out* which, also, seems necessary to the future scientist.
I wonder if it works that way in the arts, too. You pick up the violin and start working at it, and maybe you're pretty good for a beginner, but with the Internet you're instantly exposed to the very best in the world, you can immediately see how pathetic you actually are. You never have the chance to be the big fish in the little pond -- the best violinist in 5th grade of Foo Elementary on Elm Street -- and so...do you get prematurely discouraged? Do only the people with sufficiently massive egos (or massive social/family support) retain the gumption to go on and on for the 10,000 hours or so it takes to find out if you're really world class, or just a boob? I wonder about this, too.
A superabundance of tasty food jades the palate, they say. I wonder if our modern superabundance of information dulls the brightening imagination of kids, too often douses the tiny spark of rebellious "I can think this out for myself!" spirit necessary for genuine innovation.
I'm guessing you're some type of teacher or professor.
>I feel like some kind of self-apprenticeship like this is where you breed young people with good empirical and creative thinking skills, it's a sort of harsh training regime where they have to work out so much themselves -- but they get a lot stronger while they do that.
This is a corporate educationalism meme, and it's not how people actually learn. You literally cannot fill in gaps with info you don't have. It doesn't work that way. I recommend starting with Ayer's Language Truth and Logic if you want to understand how knowledge works.
Am I right, are you repeating educationalist memes? Stop giving your students questions they don't have enough information to answer, Spinoza was a nutcase, you cannot deduce how birds fly from first principles, that stuff was carefully figured out with meticulous reference to loads of data, and your students are just googling the answers, not for lack of "imagination."
See here as well : https://www.darkrationality.net/index.php?topic=13.0
Well, sorry, but I think you're entirely wrong. The phenomena of pre-existing gaps priming learning (and the conceptually related "test effect") has been very well documented, experimentally, particularly by the Bjork lab at UCLA and the Karpicke lab at Purdue. I'm thoroughly convinced by their results, and they match my own classroom experience, both as an instructor and a student.
Can you link the studies? I'm convinced that it's an analytical truth that you can't deduce information you don't have from information you don't have, but I'll take a look. I suspect power might have distorted the truth market here. Happens a lot in climate, brain science, HBD, etc. Often bad studies are misinterpreted in the service of some political goal.
Composer?
Feynman was much more well-rounded, which makes him easier to relate to and had a much more accessible stock of knowledge. He was a great teacher, something I have not heard about Einstein. But I have no idea who was "smarter." They both run circles around most of the very smart people I know and work with.
Agreed.
Maybe you have the same genetic talent for music as your brother, but your music education process went on the wrong path in some way? For example, since you were older maybe you were trying hard in a studying for a test sort of way, but your brother didn't know of that so he just plugged in his internal music sense and had fun.
A few generations back, my family had 3 siblings that were a Nobel prize winner, a successful playwright, and another lesser-known published writer (but she was a woman in the 19th century, so also extraordinary for her time and place). I can agree with the "assortative mating" hypothesis -- the wives chosen in the subsequent century were women of science, or Fulbright scholars, that sort of thing.
So I think the intellectual capacity traveled down the line. However, the money did Not travel down, and honestly that level of accomplishment is nearly impossible without a certain level of extended material abundance. For most of human history, most geniuses have spent their genius just in trying not to starve to death, and maybe improve things a little bit for the next generation. So privilege is a huge part, I would say the larger part.
I hope you don't mind, I found this comment the other day and shared a link to it on my newsletter. I was not expecting to find a descendant of the Echegarays reading SSC.
The only two Indian physicists to win a Nobel Prize (CV Raman and Subrahmanian Chandrasekhar) came from the same family (Raman was Chandrasekhar's paternal uncle)
>Who was also the niece of Matthew Arnold who wrote Dover Beach?
Don't forget that Matthew Arnold's father was Thomas Arnold, the headmaster who revolutionized education in England and was immortalized in Lytton Strachey's _Eminent Victorians_.
(Thomas Arnold's other two sons have wikipedia pages and seem to have important people, one a Beowulf scholar and the other "the first director of public instruction in the Punjab," but not up to the Matthew / Thomas levels of greatness.)
I believe Jared Diamond studied under (or at least knew) Nobel medicine laureate Andrew Huxley, the third most famous grandson of Thomas Huxley and descendant of Thomas Arnold.
Diamond's own father Louis Diamond invented a surgical technique that his NYT obituary said saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of babies (I repeat: "saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of babies:" that's a rather extraordinary contribution to human happiness.)
Jared very much wanted to follow his father, a great man, but he lacked the eye-hand coordination of his father and Dr. Huxley. In contrast, he was fluent in six languages, including Finnish and Japanese. So he wound up changing academic specialties three times in his career as a UCLA professor, but had a good career nonetheless.
I find it curious that you left out gumption, tenacity, drive, whatever you want to call it. I've known personally about a number of Nobel laureates, mostly in physics, and when you compare them to people who don't make it nearly as far *that* is what stands out above all. They're smart, sure, and some are smarter than others, but more than anything they're driven, tenacious, energetic. They never give up, they chip away and work at where they want to go far past the point where ordinary mortals turn around in defeat. "Can't get there from here. No Thoroughfare. Not the way it's done. This will never work." The people who reach the heights, at least in science, and I kind of suspect in many other fields, are the people who pay no attention to such signs.
And (1) I suspect this *is* the kind of thing that can be strongly influenced by family culture, and (2) if it's a major component of success it would explain a slower regression to the mean than pure stats would suggest. It also (3) helps explain why it seems more common that the offspring of really *creative* people in science, math, music composition end up making their mark in fields -- like politics, music performance, or sports -- where energy and discipline can compensate to some degree for less raw talent.
Yes, and this is a common blind spot of the rationalist and rationalist-adjacent community. I'd have hoped Scott wouldn't slip into it here, but that's OK - he's got us to remind him.
Particularly since it helps his thesis here. If (per Scott's handwavy but good enough for our purposes math) being the son of a Nobel Prize winner and a carefully selected spouse gives one an average IQ of 124, meh, that's pretty good but we don't expect anything noteworthy from them. But we don't expect slackers to win the Nobel Prize in the first place. If winning the prize requires equal parts genius and diligence, and the sort of people who win the prize value both traits in their spouses, then their kids will average 124 IQ *and* 95th-percentile diligence. That's going to synergistically combine to a significantly greater probability of accomplishing great things.
Throw in "hero license" and enhanced family and social support, and maybe we've got something here.
Well, gumption and tenacity are a kind of faith -- faith in yourself, faith in a positive outcome if you only work at it long enough, et cetera -- and we might say it is not rational to ignore the importance of faith :)
...I'm vaguely reminded of a quote attributed to Napoleon (if memory serves): "Reasonable men always assume other men are like them, in which point of view they are not reasonable." Or maybe that's de Maupassant? French, anyway, only a Frenchman would say something so simultaneously cynical and yet utopian.
"Reasonable men always assume other men are like them, in which point of view they are not reasonable."
That's great.
I totally don't believe that's from Napoleon but it should be.
That's an interesting idea for a dissertation: take all the Nobel laureates in the hard sciences and look at the Wikipedia pages for their descendants: did they distinguish themselves (among those who distinguished themselves) more for brilliance or for energy/discipline?
That seems like a doable study.
Something important was missed here:
Children's IQ will indeed regress to the mean *on average*, but much more important: Since IQ is normally distributed, the probability of a genius child, while still low, is much higher (100x?) than in a random family. And of course, the probability of *multiple* sibling (or cousin) geniuses would be even higher (10,000x?).
Together with the selection bias this may explain everything.
IOW: While most genius parents produce OK children, almost all genius siblings are a result of genius parents.
1. Could it be that some families have an ethos of hard work and competence no matter their field?
2. Does the example of the Polgar sisters help or hurt your argument?
I am a long time subscriber to Eastern philosophies and their concomitant beliefs in reincarnation, which must be one of the uncoolest things to believe in this group, but it answers many of the conundrums discussed here. In these systems, souls naturally cluster together with like souls to work out their lives with those who have similar proclivities. Need an iron-clad example before you investigate an idea that seems so foreign to your belief system? As good a smoking gun as you can imagine is the case of James Leininger, investigated by the U of VA.
We might want to think about low-hanging fruit here, and the idea that science is slowing down. I note that most of your examples are from the early 1900s or earlier. These people were living in an era during which there remained many fundamental ideas to be discovered, which were tractable for a hardworking individual. Perhaps, if you were reasonably smart, educated, and well-resourced, it was easier to come up with something groundbreaking that could make you into a household name. If it was also more common for parents to pass on their trade and privileges to their children; families were much larger; familial status was more legally codified; and nepotism/organization via family trust-bonds were more common; then you have a recipe for an era in which families were peppered with accomplishment, and especially related accomplishments.
I'd be really interested to see if we find a similar phenomena of talent-peppered families in a pre-registered set of figures.
Let's take the most recent 4 nobel prize winners in chemistry. Here's what I could find on Wikipedia and convenient Googling.
Benjamin List: "Born to a upper-middle-class family of scientists and artists in Frankfurt, List is a great-grandson of the cardiologist Franz Volhard and a 2nd great-grandson of the chemist Jacob Volhard. His aunt, the 1995 Nobel laureate in medicine Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, is the sister of his mother, architect Heidi List."
David MacMillan: He had a working class upbrining, and "he hailed his Scottish upbringing as a reason for his winning the Nobel."
Emmanuelle Charpentier: "As a young girl growing up in the environs of Paris, Emmanuelle Charpentier was encouraged by her father, a park manager, and her mother, working in psychiatry, to explore her own academic interests, which were many."
Jennifer Doudna: "Her father received his Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Michigan, and her mother, a stay-at-home parent, held a master's degree in education... Doudna's mother earned a second master's degree in Asian history from the university and taught history at a local community college. Growing up in Hilo, Hawaii, Doudna was fascinated by the environmental beauty of the island and its exotic flora and fauna. Nature built her sense of curiosity and her desire to understand the underlying biological mechanisms of life. This was coupled with the atmosphere of intellectual pursuit that her parents encouraged at home. Her father enjoyed reading about science and filled the home with many books on popular science."
Hard to see an obvious pattern here, but interesting that one of the four had a talent-riddled family. I picked the category of people to look up before reading anything about them.
My way of tying this together is that having a talent-riddled family is probably associated with achieving greatness, due to some combo of genes and environment; but that there are so many non-talent-riddled families that a large number of geniuses will be from regular backgrounds. I'd love to know what proportion of Nobel prizewinners are related to at least one other Nobel prizewinner.
Agreed on low-hanging fruit. It's part of the reason why most fields of technology (contra the singularitarians) have actually been slowing rather then accelerating. It turns out, for example, that it's relatively easy to jump from wooden biplane -> stressed skin, piston-driven monoplane -> jet airliner. Anything beyond that gets exponentially harder.
In terms of obvious patterns - this has already been brought up by others, but the most obvious pattern is that the future genius had a well-resourced family that could support them while they developed their interests and talents.
I don't think all science is slowing down. Some is, some isn't. Physics has certainly slowed drastically since the 1960s, you might easily characterize it as stuck in molasses. But biology (almost entirely the molecular version) I think has accelerated. If your education stopped any earlier than 2000, you're seriously obsolete, which is I think the sign of a field of knowledge that is expanding rapidly. But this seems to be largely flying under the radar, and I'm not sure why. Perhaps because it's overshadowed by the behemoth of computing technology (which I actually think has past its peak and is in early decadence)? Chemistry, as befits its middle role, seems to be muddling along neither expanding as rapidly as biology nor as stuck as physics.
This is true, but also why I referred to "technology" rather than research, as technology is more applicable to our actual lives and societies. Well, that and the fact that advances in technology are easier to quantify and look better for making my point ;)
Anyway, here's something that I've thought about a lot: my great grandmother lived long enough to travel overland via ox-wagon, and fly via jet airliner before she died. She saw real, exponential growth in nearly every sphere of technology across her lifetime, with the corresponding invention of many completely new devices and forms of technology. In my lifetime, by contrast, I've seen no great new inventions and often precious little development in the technologies that are there. The car I had as a student was older than I was, but still perfectly viable. The thing that took it out of my life was lack of spares more than outright obsolescence.
Returning to research: as you rightly point out, we've seen rapid growth in one or two fields, steady growth in others and near-stagnation in most. The overall result, I think, is that the averaged growth curve over the last 200 years or so has been S-shaped rather than exponential. We're now past the period of explosive growth, and into the long tail of incremental development and improvement. This is not to say that this will always be the case - a revolution in physics could happen tomorrow that fundamentally changes technology. But, barring such an unexpected change, that's the path we seem to be on.
Hmm well yes I fully agree with you about technology, but I think there's a reasonable social explanation for that: the suppression of entrepreneurship. If you look at the rates of new small company formation in the US over the past 50 years, for example, they have fallen steeply. And this makes sense to me: we have made it much harder to succeed as a small entrepreneur, as a guy with a new idea. We impose very steep costs on business in the interests of all manner of social goals -- equity in employment, racial and sex quotas, regulation to achieve this or that social goal and/or ensure the re-election of this or that politician -- and while these are just part of the cost of doing business for a big firm that can employ a dozen lawyers and PR flacks full time, they are crippling for the two guys in a garage shop. Those fellows need to do everything *exactly* right, be very lucky, and probably have a big wad of cash on hand, to succeed. So fewer do, and fewer try.
This not to even mention the gigantic financial repression our monetary policy over the past 25 years has exerted. We have savagely cut down any form of "creative destruction," and while we're not yet at Japanese levels of sustaining a zombie economy, I can see it coming. So the little seedling struggling to get started, so to speak, has to do it in the shade of all these diseased half-dead giant trees around it, since we have suppressed the forest fires that would clear out the deadwood expeditiously and allow seedlings to grow more vigorously in the open sun.
In general, we have become socially *far* more conservative in our domestic economic policy, we are laser-focussed on making sure the "pie" is fairly divided, and everyone's slice does not vary too much year to year, and have given up any emphasis on the idea of growing the pie. "A rising tide floats all boats" is a slogan that ranks up there with #bluelivesmatter or "let's just stop asking about race entirely in college admissions" as the kind of thing that will get you ejected from polite society as a clueless if not malignant reactionary savage.
And it's all worked, in the sense of achieving its ends. People under the age of 30 have no real idea what a bad recession looks like, or a stiff bout of unemployment. There's no better time in American history to be poor or disadvantaged, since we will exert strenuous efforts to help you out. Our economic lives are more stable and if below the median more comfortable than ever before. No doubt all admirable achievements.
However, the cost has been a general suppression of innovation and growth. Economically, we celebrate 2% GDP growth as excellent progress, where it used to be considered enough to take down a sitting President. Technologically, we get variations on a relatively few themes -- I know! Let's build an app that automates random low-level human decision making process X! No one's ever thought of *this specific decision* before....! -- while we have a significant reduction in genuinely transformative innovation.
Fast-paced highly innovative societies are exciting, but fraught. You can get rich fast, and get dumped into grinding need just as fast. Things change more rapidly for the positive but also you get drastic negatives a lot more. It's rough-edged, you get bruised more often, even if you also have far better opportunities if you're not part of the pre-selected elite, you're just a schmo from nowhere with energy and an idea. We don't really want to be this way right now, but it's not outside of the realm of possibility that we will want to be sometime later. And in that case, I would expect technological growth to re-accelerate.
The Doudna family might have been the smartest family in Hilo, which is like Bakersfield-in-Paradise.
Also wroth nothing: one of Charles Darwin's great nephews was the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams!
Gavin Newsom with Darwin, the Curies, et al.???????????
I wouldn't dismiss the "privilege" explanation that quickly. When I look at some of your names -- e.g., Thomas Henry Huxley and George Darwin, as well as (mentioned by some of the commenters) most of the "later" Bernoullis -- I'm seeing some recognized achievement, but I'm wondering if we would know their first names if we didn't know their last. (Of course, less of a thing in the case of Huxley, who predated the more famous bearers of his name, but one could argue he was riding on Darwin's wave.)
Also, I'm not sure "success" is the first thing that comes to mind when you ask a European about Raymond Poincaré :)
Right, I think if you restrict success markers to more objective criteria that have a stronger correlation to IQ then most of the examples are much better explained by privilege. The math and physics ones in my mind are more convincing since privilege only takes you so far. You actually need the chops to do math or physics which many people simply cannot do at a high level.
I would say it very much is privilege -- this is a blindspot for many people who are ignorant about how power works though. Good thread on this here: https://www.darkrationality.net/index.php?topic=4.0
I think you discount some of the name recognition advantage. Being president of some prestigious society is much more like being a politician than it is like being an actual scientist. Winning a Nobel Prize requires having the Nobel committee take notice of your work.
T.S. Monk is the son of Thelonious Monk, and a jazz drummer. I went to a concert of his, and in between songs he told anecdotes about his Dad. One was about growing up. Regular visitors to the Monk household were people like John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and other jazz deities. T.S. said he grew up believing (1) everyone played a musical instrument, just like everyone could read and write, and (2) the standards for performance were, well, Monk-Coltrane-Davis level. That’s just what people did. The fact he became a pro was just part of the family expectations.
See also: Ravi and John Coltrane, Victor Wooten and his family, Michael Jackson and his family, Justin Lee-Shultz and his family https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SizoZwfKMZ4
Most of the greatest musicians had a parent who was at least really good, many of them had completely musical families. The advantage of learning music while you're young (like many, many things) is quite substantial. Really though when you look at the greatest musicians, they often have more hours of practice logged than anyone else, and getting a head start on those hours is pretty important in such a desirable field.
It might be worth looking at families where genius *doesn't* recur. Did they just not aim at assortative mating for whatever reason? Did they have a family culture of "no one can live up to famous person" rather than "it's normal to excel"? Something else?
Gregory Clark points to Daniel Defoe as somebody who emerged out of obscurity and whose descendants receded into obscurity. It would be interesting to have more such examples, but it's a lot of work to figure them out.
Interesting essay. Another such families is the Klemperer family (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klemperer), which features famous phyciststs, conductors, actors, economists, chemists, and much else.
Colonel Klink on "Hogan's Heroes" was the son of a famous conductor and the cousin of a famous moral philosopher.
Got a distinct "Royal Tanenbaum" (too lazy to look up the correct spelling) crossed with "Umbrella Academy" vibe from some of these families.
A comment with less Gene Hackman - would something like the Mathematical Genealogy Project (MGP) be a way to try to isolate the non-genetic factors in this? If student Y is a PhD student of renowned brilliant mathematician X, what distribution does student X's greatness have? It would seem that the "Hero License" would be there, in terms of "If my advisor is a deity, there's a good chance I should be". Sadly, though mine was a deity, I've disgraced our (mathematical) family. A deep dive into the MGP might turn up interesting things there. Does the distribution of "greatness" there have a similar distribution to the actual genetic distribution of greatness?
A boring answer, but it may be part of the explanation: lots of these things were relatively easier back then (and relatively fewer people/families had basic opportunities that made such careers possible).
I think of this because physics and math show up on many of these lists of accolades, and for sure there was a lot of incredible work available to do back then that just isn't possible today. (I myself work in particle physics theory.) Even 100 years ago, a physicist could be both a theorist and an experimentalist, or both a physicist and a mathematician, or both a mathematician and a politician. Millikan had an idea that maybe electrons were real, built an experiment, tested it, and won the Nobel Prize a few years later [1]. That never, never, never happens today. I have a suspicion the case is similar in Biology (also shows up a lot in the list).
So yes, Poincaré and Bohr and the rest were super impressive. But there weren't very many physicists (relatively), and there was a lot more lower-hanging fruit than there is today.
I think athletics is also much more competitive today than it was back then. I have no real idea what to think about poetry and literature, but I'd bet there are many times more poets and writers than before, partly because the competition is more global now.
I guess from this I would predict that you'd see less clustering of genius/success today, but that's also a likely prediction of Scott's explanations: people have fewer kids today, they don't select as strongly in mating strategies, etc.
[1] https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1923/summary/
Well, because physics and math work has to be original, of course the work that was done 100 years ago isn't available to be done today. But, because work always builds on previous work, the work that is available to be done today wasn't possible 100 years ago either. So, how do you make a comparison?
We could try to compare by polymathy. But there weren't very many physicists who were also well-known as mathematicians, or vice versa (Poincaré was an exception) and there are still some today (Witten, Penrose, recently Hawking).
We could try to compare by the size of the ripple effect: everything in physics and chemistry now assumes that electrons are real, as Millikan's shining stars showed so brightly, and that Bohr's radical reimagining of what physics meant was more right than wrong; but how do we know the ripple effects that will come from Ashkin's optical tweezers, Thouless's topological order, the Higgs boson, or Parisi's breakthroughs in glasses? Not to mention the numerous achievements which, like relativity, were never rewarded with a Nobel Prize.
You say, "these things were relatively easier back then", but it depends on what you mean by "these things".
Einstein's or von Neumann's minds were surely greater than Ashkin's or Higgs's, but they still failed to discover the Higgs boson or invent optical tweezers, so I guess THOSE things had gotten easier by Higgs's time.
You could argue that LIGO's experimental confirmation of gravitational waves or the LHC's experimental confirmation of the Higgs boson were "harder" than Millikan's oil-drop experiment, and they certainly involved more people working on them and larger budgets; but having more people working on things like that, and larger budgets, means that we have a lot more evidence to use to find our way around in the universe, so we can formulate theories that are less stupid, and we can test them a lot sooner. Having more people to collaborate with accelerates your progress.
You could argue that the path from designing an experiment (Millikan didn't invent the idea of an electron, just the experiment) to carrying it out is longer nowadays, and certainly for Big Science projects like the LHC and LIGO that's true. But I think, for example, Queloz discovered exoplanets working with his advisor over a period of three or four years up to 01995, and Strickland invented chirped-pulse tabletop terawatt lasers over about four years, working with her advisor, up to 01985. I don't think it was at all unusual for a small team to develop crucial pieces of apparatus over five or ten years 100 years ago; consider the differential analyzer, X-ray diffraction, diffraction-grating ruling engines, the Weston cell, differential thermal analysis, etc.
I think the only way in which it's reasonable to claim that "these things were relatively easier back then" is if your measure of success is the zero-sum game of fame, in which case it's almost tautologically true: being the most famous person, or the most famous physicist, in a world of 8 billion people, is rarer than it was in a world of 2 billion people. It's not any harder to write great poetry or make fundamental discoveries about the workings of the universe; it's easier than ever. It's just harder to beat other people at it.
Good to see an actual physicist confirming this.
I'm a little skeptical of the general argument, although I get what you're saying, and I do not disagree at all that doing physics today is way harder than it was in 1935. But here's the thing: it's not much harder than it was doing it in 1870, when you had to be Gibbs or Maxwell to make any progress at all. My read on this is that there are breakthrough periods, where...something....changes, and a bunch of brand-new doors open, and there is a land-rush flood of new shiny things to pick up off the ground. You can be the first person to formulate a theory of the atom, wave mechanics, matrix mechanics, to invent spin after the Stern-Gerlach experiment, to write down a relativistic Hamiltonian for the electron, and so on. Afterward, it gets much harder indeed.
Until the next breakthrough, that is. Because I think we can trace the same explosion and then subsidence in earlier centuries. There's an explosion around the 1660s, which then tapers off, and then another in the early to mid 1800s, then another in the early 1900s. Which means, arguably we're just waiting for the next one, when once again it will be relatively easy to be great (or seen as great by later generations) in physics.
One wonders *why* this happens, of course, if it does, and one can make all kinds of arguments. Advances in instrumentation? That might account for the time of Galileo and Newton. Accumulated observation reaches some critical mass? Pure luck? Some social factor in which it becomes thinkable to question certain orthodoxies?
I take your point, though I guess I'm a more skeptical of the "great person" theory of scientific progress than you seem to be. Back then "you had to be Gibbs or Maxwell to make any progress at all," but if Maxwell hadn't been around to formulate the electromagnetic unification, then someone else would have. All the pieces were there. Today a bright graduate student would probably notice the symmetry of the equations as Maxwell did and have a good chance at figuring it out on their own (these are good graduate school homework problems). And the reward to Maxwell was Permanent Genius Status, whereas the reward to the student is an A on this week's assignment.
I don't want to undersell the impressive and important work of Maxwell or anyone else, but there just aren't any simple theoretical moves like this that haven't already been made by someone. Back then you could study physics for a few years and basically understand the cutting edge of the field, whereas today a graduate student studies for 5-7 years to begin to be moderately competent in one tiny sub-sub-subfield.
The same is true of experiment: aside from genuinely new technologies (which usually are imported from outside of academia), you can't just build a new experiment in your lab using odds and ends you picked up at a garage sale (so to speak). You need $1M, a team of postdocs and students, permission from your university, and 10 years of runtime, and for this you merely get to set a world-leading constraint on one of the thousands of theories you could have tried to test.
Science is hard today. Most of us are toiling in obscurity, which is fine, but it doesn't mean there aren't any Maxwell-level geniuses that are equally obscure because they were born 100 years later. (To be clear, I don't count myself as one of them. :) )
Well, I'm not going to say you're wrong, because I don't have any kind of serious confiddence in either point of view. Wouldn't bet a dollar either way. When I was towards the beginning of my career, I definitely thought more along your lines, that cometh the hour cometh the man. Later I was sort of persuaded the other way. You can toil and learn and learn and toil and make quite a lot of good, steady progress, and I've done some of that myself. But there just seems to come a time when mere mortals just get...stuck. Hard work just doesn't get you anywhere much any more, and you can kind of feel it. Like you're just adding terms to the Taylor series approximation and each term costs increasingly fantastically more and gets you meh results, and you can kind of sense that what you *need* is one of those strange minds that can just take a standing jump over the whole thing and sum the series, poof. Give you a whole new paradigm, a new and much simpler way of looking at things. At least, that's how it increasingly seemed to me. (And I would have loved to have *been* one of those minds, but I'm not. I will never have the kind of bolt of lightning insight of a Dirac or Newton, although I am perfectly competent in a workaday sense to nudge the border of what's known out in ways that are fairly forseeable will work.)
So now I tend to believe in a sort of intellectual pareto principle, that the really big advances come from a relatively few people who, for whatever weird combination of imagination, preparedness, and plain luck have these major insights -- and then the (relative) army of we second-rankers spend a century or so fleshing out the consequences and extending the model as much as we rationally can. Leading to the punctuated equilibrium model I feel like history shows us.
But as I said, I don't have full confidence in this model either. Maybe the truth is in between, some part gifted individuals, some part the mysterious swirlings of large social (and technological) currents.
With respect to the rest: I agree a graduate student *in 2021* can work out Maxwell's Equations on a problem set, but that's cheating! You already know they exist, you know the right direction to go, at least generally. It's way way harder to come up with in the first place. It's very similar to the fact that new PIs (or even graduate students) are shocked to find that working out brand new true things about Nature is about 10^9x harder than working out problems in a textbook. You think, geez I learned relativity in 6 weeks, why'd it take the scientific establishment a century or so? And the answer is: because there's just this enormous invisible structure around education, everything is targeted in the correct direction, so things lead logically from one to the other, and each new piece you learn fits into what you already know -- which means the "puzzle piece holes" in what you already know prefigure what you are going to learn -- a big honking hint. Unfortunately, there's no such guide in genuine new research. You often, even usually, don't know what the "holes" in present understanding look like, and you often suspect they're the wrong shape -- that people have been asking at least slightly wrong questions, and Step #1 in discovery is going to be learning to ask the right question.
So I think Maxwell's achievement in drawing these equations on an utterly blank slate has to rank far above the ability of the modern student (with the benefit of an entire pre-existing education priming him for this discovery) redoing it.
Yes, many experiments seen as necessary to advance fundamental physics are fabulously expensive. (Parenthetically, I'm reminded of the almost certainly apocraphyal story that in the depths of the Depression Lars Onsager proposed an experiment that required a cubic foot of gold, blissfuly unaware how preposterous this was.)
But I do think we need to ask: is this because there genuinely is no other way to get useful data? Or is it a lack of imagination, a problem that could be solved by someone who invents a new type of experiment? What if the only way Ole Romer and his colleagues could imagine measuring the speed of light was to build a rocke to travel to the Moon to put a mirror on it, so the time delay was sufficiently long to time with the timepieces of the day? They might have said, well, to get this piece of critical data we need umpty bazillion guilders. Are we in that situation, at all? I'm not saying we are -- to do that I would need to *have* the kind of imagination that *could* think up new and ridiculously cheap and fast ways to get the data, and I don't -- but the question isn't on its face ridiculous.
Thanks.
There are many possible contributing factors, and different factors in different fields.
One reason that a single person rarely accomplishes anything important anymore in science is the adoption of Karl Popper's structure for research papers. He insisted, because of his fondness for good-old rationalist metaphysics, that the essence of science is rational theory, not experimentation. He dwells on this with a fanatic obsessiveness in "The Myth of the Framework". It's the only subject I know on which Popper held an obviously stupid and ideological opinion: that scientific work never, ever, EVER begins with observation. Odd, since he understood (from comparing science with philosophy) the necessity of experiment.
Anyway, Popper proposed today's research article format, which begins with a statement of some theoretical problem, does a lit survey of the problem, states a hypothesis, posits an experiment to test a hypothesis, comes up with an experimental setup and methodology, runs the experiment, draws a conclusion, and lists new theoretical problems the results have suggested. This format begins and ends in theory, thus maintaining the supremacy of theory over experiment.
The trouble is that this isn't how science worked, back when it worked. One person would notice something funny--not necessarily a theoretical problem; often a pure disinterested observation of just the type Popper claims is impossible, such as when Robert Brown published a paper basically saying "Microscopic particles in my tea keep jostling around as if they were alive". Another person might propose a hypothesis, as when Einstein proposed that this Brownian motion resulted from the random movements of atoms. Then a third person might propose a test, and a fourth might conduct the proposed experiment and report the results. This entire process sometimes took a century or more.
You're not allowed to do that today. If you notice something funny, you can't just write a note to the Royal Society describing it. You've got to find a theorist to come up with a theory, and experimentalists to devise and carry out a test, and a statistician to evaluate the test; and you have to do the whole process before you can publish anything.
(To be fair, Popper wrote that scientists should be allowed to write things up however they liked, and he was just proposing one possible way. Unfortunately, most humans for some reason find it impossible to imagine that there could be two different right ways of doing anything. I blame Socrates for this.)
At most institutions and companies, you have to round all these people up before you make your observation! Then you all write up a proposal saying what you plan to discover and how you'll discover it, along with your bioethics review, environmental impact statement, and diversity plan, and submit it to a government agency's grant solicitation. Then you wait 4 months to hear back from them. Then, if you get an award, you wait another 3 months for the kickoff meeting, at which you discover the contracting officer who gave you the reward has been transferred, and you now work with a contracting officer who isn't interested in your project and wants you to do something else.
Yes, there are many times more poets and writers than before. In Shakespeare's day, there were less than 20 full-time writers of English-language literature. Today there are about a hundred thousand full-time writers, and IIRC a million part-timers working on their great American novels.
But also, I think the arts suffer from something that happens to fields when they grow too big: The overwhelming majority of people who lack the ability to reach the top of the field seizes control, and changes the rules of the game to make sure that success doesn't depend on ability. In art this was accomplished by ridiculing representation, so that one needn't learn to draw to become a great artist. In poetry, it was accomplished by elevating obscurity and ridiculing clarity. Literature was turned into a game of seeing how many of the necessary elements of literature you could eliminate from a "story" and still get it published.
Long before this, philosophy was turned into a similar game of seeing how stupid a thing you could get away with saying. This turned out to be quite stupid indeed, as the salons of France had already established by the time of Rousseau that the main criterion for a philosophical theory should be that it raises eyebrows at a cocktail party.
(I once had a research grant rejected because I "could not guarantee a successful positive outcome" of the experiment.)
I wonder what field you work in (if you don't mind my asking)? I'm a theorist working in particle astrophysics, and our papers are not held to the standard you describe.
Many theory papers are pure theory; some have projections for future experiments that haven't been proposed yet; some have projections for current experiments that haven't tested the theory; and a rare few actually communicate with the experiment to make a new measurement or set a new limit. People totally do write a short paper pointing to "something funny" in the data without proposing a fleshed-out theory and a full-proof test to sort it out.
So maybe we're living in different worlds at the moment. Curious to hear more about yours!
In particle physics, I suggested in my OP that the kind of paper you're describing, with observation, theory, test, and confirmation all put together, is no longer even possible. It was possible for Millikan to dream up and test for electrons in his own lab; Higgs had to wait 50+ years for the greatest scientific machine ever constructed to test his theory. I'm arguing that the latter, not the former, is the norm in physics today (again, from the point of view of my own bubble world!).
My most-recent work was in bioinformatics. I just checked the guidelines of 3 of the top journals (IMHO), Bioinformatics, BMC Bioinformatics, and PLoS Computational Biology. The last 2 have authors' guidelines that specify the full Popperian structure for research articles. /Bioinformatics/ has a paper category called "Original Papers" which is surprisingly vague--it's just a few sentences long--but presumes you have biological data to test some hypothesis. All bioinformatics journals also allow review articles, and descriptions of new databases or software.
Bioinformatics might not be a fair comparison--it's easier to run an experiment (though not as easy as you might think! Getting multiple databases and pieces of software to compile and run together on the same OS, and exchange data, is a lot of work). More importantly, you haven't got a "thing to observe" as often as in physics or biology, because processing the data IS your method of observations. That is, I don't look at things under a general-purpose sensor like a microscope; I run a particular algorithm on data and analyze the output. Sometimes that output is surprising, but I find it in the middle of running an algorithm on sequence data, which I can cast as an experiment (even if it wasn't experimental originally).
I tried to think of an example where something was just obviously there in the genome sequence, and thought of micro-RNA. These are short non-coding RNAs which form hairpins that then regulate genes by binding to them, or upstream of them, in the manner of a transcription factor, but without producing a protein. They're abundant in eukaryotic genomes, and not that hard to find; you just look for inverted repeats much closer together than would occur by chance. This was a case where somebody could have written a piece of code in half an hour to find out how many of them there were in some genome, and report that there are just way too many of them to be random.
But nobody did that. I found the first paper to report them. It was in 1993, doi: 10.1016/0092-8674(93)90529-y (but see "A Short History of a Short RNA", Lee, Feinbaum, & Ambros 2004, instead, for a summary). They were searching for a regulatory protein, and did a full set of Popperian lab experiments and analysis which just happened to give them data conclusively showing that a gene sequence was having an effect without expressing a protein.
Did anybody notice all these (actually very important) "micro-RNAs" before then? Maybe. It wouldn't have been so easy in 1993, because we didn't have ANY sequenced genomes except for a virus or two (which almost certainly don't have miRNA; I haven't checked, but viruses shouldn't have the regulatory apparatus). Anyway, that was my one test case, and nobody wrote up the quick "I saw this weird thing" paper.
> because we didn't have ANY sequenced genomes except for a virus or two (which almost certainly don't have miRNA; I haven't checked, but viruses shouldn't have the regulatory apparatus).
They should and they do!
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/82025201.pdf
https://www.qpcrupdate.info/kincaid-sullivan-viral-microrna-2012.pdf
(2011 and 2012 papers that both mention v-miRNA used for autoregulation and many other purposes. Autoregulation seems to be essential or near essential for hiding in the host for longer periods.)
They also use miRNA to f*ck directly with the host's gene expression, of course:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcimb.2019.00152/full
(from 2019)
Here's one from 1986 about autoregulation in a particular virus. They didn't really know the mechanism back then but they ascribe at least some of it to a protein but they hedge by using language like "the data presented above demonstrate that at least one AAV gene product encoded in the p5 and p19 genes is required for optimal transcription of the AAV promoters."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC253923/pdf/jvirol00104-0259.pdf
Up until I read your comment maybe an hour ago, I had not even considered whether viruses generate any kind of miRNA or whether they have any kind of autoregulation of their genomic expression, so thank you!
I have no idea how I could have been so blind as to never consider those two things. All I can say in my defense is that I just never really thought all that much about gene regulation.
It's not the first time: I remember reading about miRNA in a newspaper back when they were new and cursing myself for never having considered that method of gene regulation. It's so obvious in hindsight.
Oh, they use the host's transcription system; so if the host also has an siRNA / miRNA mechanism, the virus can use it too! Duh. I wasn't thinking. Thanks!
You're 100% right about the cowardice in scientific publication, and even grant-writing. You just can't submit a paper that says "I saw X and I have no clue what it means," and it ranks right up there with "we tried X and failed, and we don't know why." The absence of this stuff is to me strong evidence that the mechanism of scientific publishing and grant-making is sick in a serious way. We have killed off empiricism! The very thing that made science work in the first place, and distinguished it from medieval scholasticm and the mutterings of alchemist that veered towards the utterly delusional. It's a disgrace.
It's an ironclad rule of scientific discovery that *most* of the ideas you have about How Things Work will be wrong, and that genuine discovery almost always happens by a process of elimination, by running down one blind alley after another and checking it off -- well *that* didn't work, damn it -- until you stumble into the right answer. The idea that it happens by some kind of fucking brilliant insight is exactly what medieval monks in their scriptoria circa 1450 thought. Why do an experiment, get all wet and break things, when *clearly* the royal road to The Truth is to sit in your cell and really *really* think about things, plumb your navel for the deep insight into the mind of God. It's mind-blowing that we're back here, after 500 years of miraculous success premised on the idea that it all -- as you say -- must begin with observation, because bare intuition, theory out of the vacuum, is almost worthless.
This is a fantastic comment. You should bring it over to DSL, I think there'd be a lot to say about it.
https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php?board=1.0
"lots of these things were relatively easier back then"
But should those who figured out what the low hanging fruit were be given less or more credit?
For instance, I believe the accomplishments of Darwin and Galton should have been figured out generations before. But ... they weren't.
Generaly you only know what was low-hanging fruit in hindsight. That's why teaching is an art, not a science, and why people often have contempt for their teachers later. It's profoundly difficult to imagine what it's like not knowing what you do know, and therefore figuring out how to efficiently advance the knowledge of someone in that state. For the same reason, when it comes to original insight, it's very difficult to identify the weak spots in current understanding -- where unjustified assumptions have been made, where approximations are too approximate, where unexplored implications are important or not.
It's not clear what kind of intelligence is required to be able to do that, and how it is different from the intelligence required to exploit a weak spot once identified. You might call them the ability to ask the right questions, and the ability to find the right answers to a question. They're definitely not the same -- some people are good at the one, some the other -- and a society definitely needs both (and probably more of the 2nd on a quotidian basis). It's much, much harder to test and screen for the 1st, because by definition you can't do it by giving people complex but well-stated problems to solve, you're more or less trying to test their ability to think "out of the box" and it's difficult to tell the difference between creative and productive out of the box thinking and merely not having a good grasp on reality, having a tendency to sterile magical thinking.
I think a counter-argument to "genetics" is that there are also many examples of groups of unrelated friends of people who were not famous to begin with, of whom many became famous and are now regarded as geniuses: the Bloomsbury group, the Vienna Circle, the Inklings, the friends of Ezra Pound, the people who hung out with Lord Byron... there's more, but I haven't kept a list.
This.
There are some lists as impressive as Scott's lists, of people who share a common background, but are not biologically related. For example, the Hungarian high school Fasori Gimnázium has the following list of students, all within ~20 years:
- John von Neumann, "generally regarded as the foremost mathematician of his time" (wikipedia)
- Edward Teller, "father of the hydrogen bomb"
- John Harsanyi, Nobel prize in economy
- Eugene Wigner, Nobel prize in physics
- Thomas Sebeok, one of the founder of biosemiotics research
- György Pásztor, ice hockey player, included in the Hall of Fame of the International Ice Hockey Foundation
Of course, a school might have a selection bias that a family doesn't. But it would be a heck of a selection bias to get von Neumann, Teller, and two other Nobel prize winners. If you want to argue that genetics plays an important role, you should take these non-biological examples as baseline and argue that the famous families exceed the baseline.
That particular example has already been explained. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists)
(More seriously, most of those people were Jewish, and all of them were Hungarian. So, measuring by IQ, genetics might plausibly account for around one standard deviation of theirs.)
Hm, perhaps. I am a bit sceptical. I have not heard that Hungarians are (or were) generally more intelligent than other people.
I did hear that Jews in the US have higher IQ than other people, a standard deviation or so. But I would guess that this is cultural rather than genetical. (Does the same also hold for Jews in other countries, or at other times? And are Jews particularly good at ice hockey? ;-) )
Also, this Gimnazium may be extreme, but there are other examples. You gave a few. I think generally influential people tend to be clustered for various reasons, and it's not just that they cluster *after* they became famous. In Britain, the childhood friends of Boris Johnson make a good chunk of British politics, and probably that's not because they profited from *each other*, but rather because they were in similar good starting situations to become politicians. Becoming a good (or even outstanding) scientist is much more a social thing than a question of intelligence, so the same reasoning applies.
I haven't heard that Hungarians are more intelligent either; but 2 random Hungarians are usually more closely-related than 2 random Europeans. If genetics are a factor, then they're a factor here. I wrote "1 standard deviation" because that size IQ difference has been measured between Ashkenazi Jews
& some other ethnic group, so it's at least plausible. (Also, we're not necessarily observing above-average IQ, or even "intelligence".)
I dunno if they're more intelligent but in science and math Hungarians are unusually productive, or at least have been in the 20th century.
Budapest Jews have been famously smart. Whether they have been smarter than, say, Viennese or Prague Jews is an empirical question to be answered.
Maybe all the dumber potential ancestors were snuffed by Khmelnytsky. Natural selection, baby. Perhaps Jews are smarter than average *because* of pogroms :(
Scott wrote about them before here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/
Wikipedia lists the 4 most important members of the Bloomsbury Group as "Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster and Lytton Strachey." All were from upper middle class intellectual families, and Woolf's Stephens' clan was near-stratospheric.
The Dennings in the UK are a possible counterpoint to this - of the three brothers, one became Britain's most prominent judge, one was an admiral and one was a general. Their father was a draper, and they all attended the same state school. None of them had obviously notable kids though.
I've always wondered this about the lineage of Hiram Binghams.
Hiram Bingham the First was the leader of the first group of American Protestant missionaries to introduce Christianity to the Hawaiian islands. From the Wiki: "Bingham wrote extensively about the natives and was critical of their land-holding regime and of their "state of civilization". Bingham supported the introduction of market values along with Christianity. Those writings are now used by historians to illustrate the imperial values that were central to the attitudes of the United States towards Hawaii. Bingham was involved in the creation of the spelling system for writing the Hawaiian Language, and also translated some books of the Bible into Hawaiian."
Hiram Bingham II grew up in Honolulu but went to Yale, then came back to continue ministering to native Hawaiians. He explored and missionaried to lots of other Pacific Islanders too; among other things, Bingham II was the first to translate the Bible into Gilbertese, and wrote several hymn books, dictionaries and commentaries in the language of the Gilbert Islands.
Hiram Bingham III, the famous one, was "an American academic, explorer, and politician. He made public the existence of the Inca citadel of Machu Picchu in 1911 with the guidance of local indigenous farmers. Later, Bingham served as Governor of Connecticut for a single day, the shortest term in history, and then as a member of the United States Senate."
Hiram Bingham IV "was an American diplomat. He served as a Vice Consul in Marseilles, France, during World War II, and, along with Varian Fry, helped over 2,500 Jews to flee from France as Nazi forces advanced."
Genuinely never knew what to make of this dynasty, other than as a strange kaleidoscope of American imperial history.
Hiram Bingham I is the inspiration for the bad guy played by Max von Sydow in the the 1966 movie of James Michener's "Hawaii," which was the #1 movie at the box office that year.
"I’m still pretty weirded out by this; even granted that soccer talent and mathematical talent are correlated at above zero, it can’t be that high a correlation, can it?"
Faster reaction time has a 0.2-0.5 correlation with IQ (http://www.ijmedrev.com/article_68880_bff0a3fc587803a00172cb2d2acb56d5.pdf) and it's a big advantage in sports (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-69975-z), so it's not surprising that there would be a correlation.
Several people have already mentioned the Bernoullis. Eight famous mathematicians in the 1700s is just outrageous. It does help if Euler is a family friend.
There were at least five Strausses who were famous composers from Vienna.
Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt were brothers who were both truly impressive polymaths, in almost non-overlapping areas. Alexander should be as famous as Darwin or Linnaeus in biology.
And then there's really weird families, like the Hintons. James was a surgeon and prominent advocate for polygamy. His son Charles was a mathematician who worked on intuitive understanding of higher dimensions. He coined the term "tesseract", he was a polygamist, his first wife was the daughter of Boole, and he invented the first automatic baseball pitching machine (using gunpowder). His son Sebastian invented the jungle gym. I don't know if this is a selection for excellence, but it's certainly a selection for something.
George Boole's five daughters were either scientific glass ceiling breakers or famous leftists.
One of Charles' descendants is Geoffrey Hinton who won a Turing Award a couple of years ago. He is also a descendant of George Boole and George Everest (Surveyor General of India) after whom the mountain is named. He is not descended from the jungle gym guy. The jungle gym guy had two crazy Communist children who were big fans of Mao.
An interesting thing about British intellectual dynasties is that they tend tend to stay on the relative right or left. The Booles, for example, were leftists.
So do most families.
When I saw Newsom included in this list, I thought maybe I was the one taking the IQ test: “which one of the following is unlike all the others?” ☺️
Makes me think of this website's occasional commenter, David Friedman (the economist), who sometimes talks about what it was like growing up as a son of the great economist, Milton Friedman. Reading what he has written about it, it just seems so natural (to me) that he would also grow up to do great work in that field. I assume his success in other fields is due to his natural genius, although perhaps it was because he learned to aim high (from his dad? or from his early successes?)
Also Scott, great great article, thank you for writing.
David's son Patri is also a person of note, and has his own Wikipedia page. He's been active in seasteading and charter cities movements.
I'm David's son & I've commented elsewhere on the thread about my experience.
Thank you for sharing.
Lineage level gene complexes within our DNA guard their expressions through an incredibly complex array of strategies, against a sea of shorter-term genes and complexes trying to undermine their sovereignty and immense power/influence. Vestiges of this warfare escape their old-school-noble-family abstractions, into their own small peaks of equilibria whose lineage level protections optimized against exploitations, allows them to incubate otherwise-pathologies into genius.
Greatness here is defined as individual accomplishment, which is fascinating because it touches on the nature nurture problem. Greatness defined as wealth and influence is easier to explain.
Maybe as a segue to another post, I've always been fascinated with the mechanisms of dynastic wealth. In particular I've always been perplexed by the American custom of partible inheritance. For sure it makes for a more dynamic society when dynastic wealth keeps getting whittled down among more and more descendants. But if your goal is to build a dynasty - which is probably a goal of at least some rich people - it's a bad strategy.
I have heard that European dynasties behave differently. They are more likely to use a kind of "enlightened primogeniture" where one heir - not necessarily the eldest son - is chosen to be the custodian of the fortune and other heirs receive what amounts to a comfortable stipend.
Bit of a tangent, but as I said I find the behavior of American dynasties to be perplexing, explainable only as a social custom.
> But if your goal is to build a dynasty - which is probably a goal of at least some rich people - it's a bad strategy.
It seems like a bad strategy if you live three hundred years ago, your wealth is all in the form of one massive agricultural estate, and you don't expect much new wealth to be created over the next fifty years.
In the 21st century, though, where wealth is easily divided and readily created, I'd say that your chances of creating a dynasty are maximised by spreading your fortune out at each generation in the hopes of giving it to someone who will make the most of it rather than piss it away.
If Elon Musk died tomorrow and split his fortune among his seven children, then they'd each be in the top 40 richest people worldwide. I would expect that some of those children will take that wealth and use it to build something truly fabulous, while others will try and fail, and others will probably piss a lot of it away.
He only has six living children. His firstborn died after 10 weeks.
There's always the Ottoman method(s).
My impression is that building a dynasty takes building a family culture which may be luxurious, but which takes not being extravagant with the fortune.
Tonight I learned, while reading the relevant section of this post to my fiancée, that Rabindranath Tagore's living descendants will be attending our wedding in December. (My soon-to-be in-laws were educated in Shantiniketan.)
Brahmoism was the first modern sect of Hinduism. It was founded by Rama Mohammad Roy a wealthy Bengali Brahman and supporter of British rule. It is a weird mishmash of Advaita Vedanta, Protestant Christianity and enlightenment rationalism. It was mainly a phenomenon of the Bhadra Lok (“good people” the Bengali upper caste Hindu gentry) and while it may have had a few million adherents in its heyday (seems exaggerated IMO) I doubt if it has more than a few thousand now. Within a generation began schisming and Devendranath was a leader (not founder) of one of these offshoots which is confusingly called Brahmoism. The Tagores are also Bengali Brahmans. Only in the last generation did they begin marrying outside their caste. E.g. the famous Bollywood actress Sharmila Tagore who married a Muslim king and famous cricketer the Nawab of Pataudi. (Not exactly a peasant!)
Uh the first line should begin “The Brahmo Samaj was the first modern sect of Hinduism”
Aargh and I just noticed that Mohan got autocorrected to Mohammed. I do not come from a family skilled in the use of substack.
I assume then that you are not related to Jeffrey Mark Siskind (computer engineering professor)?
Not as far as I know.
It's not just doctors, either.
Manne Siegbahn won the Nobel prize in physics. His son Kai Siegbahn won the Nobel prize in physics. His grandson Hans is merely a professor of physics.
Hard agree on just going for it factor.
I'm sure everyone has anecdotes about things like it.
I resolved a couple years ago to just assume I can do things, and it turns out you can do pretty much whatever, and picking up new skills to basic competency is easy as hell.
Nothing is actually that hard. You can probably code after a couple weeks of trying, just like it turns out I can rewire cars, weld, fix washing machines, do complicated plumbing, stain concrete, learn a foreign language, and just about anything else that doesn't need a four year degree (And if I had a year or two to spare, I'm pretty sure I could do those things as well)
I imagine the barrier to entry to being a normal genius (I'm excluding FREAKS like Newton and von Neuman and Einstein and such) is a kind of lunatic confidence you can do anything if you take a couple shots, and a really strong desire to do it.
The other interesting aspect of this is when average parents produce a genius. Isaac Newton's parents were farmers (like pretty much everyone else in 17th century England).
That farmers are always of average intelligence is a weird assumption to make. Maybe they just never got the chance to go to Cambridge, society being what it was in the day.
I didn't mention their intelligence. By 'average' I mean of average accomplishment.
Owning a farm was not something average people did. Moreover, his parents were not average farmers.
If the genetic material were a driving factor, I'd suspect we'd have seen better results from efforts like this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repository_for_Germinal_Choice
Or maybe they werent selective enough: As with the Repository's criteria to accept sperm donors, its criteria for women to receive sperm from the bank were not as high as initially reported. Rumors that women were required to be members of Mensa were false; in fact, women did not need to meet any particular intellectual requirement. Essentially, any woman who was married, in good health, and not homosexual was accepted; t
David Plotz wrote a 2005 book about the "Nobel Prize Sperm Bank" than concluded the kids of it were, indeed, pretty smart.
Does anyone else think that trying to create a 'great family' isn't a great idea?
I think it's a really common pattern to be smart at school and then go through a crisis when you realise that you are probably not going to be a world-changing genius. For some people that crisis is devastating and deprives them of being able to find meaning in their life. I, personally, know a few people that has happened to.
For anyone looking for parenting strategies here, this seems like a very risky one. A very small chance of great public benefit and mixed happiness for your children weighed against a pretty high chance of great unhappiness for your children.
Also, from the post title I thought this was going to be 'secrets of happy families who all love each other'. A post I'd like to read Scott!
Some people are harmed by high expectations they are unable to fulfill. Some people are harmed by lack of support in their environment. No idea which one is more frequent, empirically. Definitely both exist in sufficient numbers such that people have noticed.
I suppose that if your parents are successful at life, it is best for you to have the same IQ, or only slightly higher. Then you can copy their strategy, learn from them, learn from their mistakes, get their support, get their contacts, etc.
If your parents are super successful, but you are "merely" average or slightly above average, and there is no way you could ever achieve anything remotely comparable to their everyday work, not even with all their help... then I guess this can make you feel like a complete failure, even if compared with the rest of the population you are relatively successful.
On the other hand, if you talent exceeds your social environment so much than none of your friends or relatives can give you useful advice or effective help, that is also frustrating. "You are such a genius, you should use your brain to do something world-changing!" "What specifically?" "I have no idea; I am not the genius, you are! Like, make a new Facebook, or join this pyramid scheme, or start a company and get rich, something like that." Most of the advice is actively harmful. And the one that is not... well, if you follow it, you are going to compete against people who are just as smart as you, but they also have a lot of support which you don't have, so you will most likely lose. And then you live with the feeling of guilt that you got a precious gift that most people didn't get, and you squandered it.
I think there is a research made by Terman that suggests that high IQ kids born in educated families are mostly successful at life, but high IQ kids born in average families frequently follow the pattern: "child prodigy, burn out as adult, depression, maybe suicide". I suspect it is because they lack the supportive background, so any little mistake they make, it hits them hard (no one to warn them, no one to help them fix it).
It's a terrible idea. I know more than one very, very smart person who has strained his or her relationship with his children tremendously, as well as saddled the latter with serious psychological challenges, by pushing way too hard for them to be just as smart or just as successful in a particular area.
It's a terrible idea even if you're *not* a Nobel Prize winner or sing to sold-out audiences at the Met, if you're just a schmo. Your kids are not your God-damned craft project, some clay you get to fashion into an ideal memorial to your philosophy. They are human beings, with a right to their own life, and the working out of their own moira. In my opinion (and some observation of others), if you don't approach parenthood with a big slice of good humor, relaxed expectations, and humility -- if you think of yourself as a sculptor, instead of just a midwife and guide -- then you are asking for serious trouble sooner or later.
I mean, I'm not saying it's anything goes, or parents shouldn't firmly direct their children in ways that are vital -- how not to be an asshole, say, or how to protect yourself from assholes -- but it's really important for new parents to get out of their head the too-common delusion that they are going to be able to fashion this squally little bundle into any particular ideal. They're little people, as ornery and surprising and unprogrammable as any member of the species -- if you want to craft perfection pick up carpentry or painting as a hobby :)
</rant>
I could see science fiction about one organization doing gradual multi-generation eugenics and family culture improvements vs. another that's looking for big relatively fast victory.
Robert Heinlein already wrote those books.
I don't understand the precise math. How does a 150 IQ person procreating with a 130 IQ person have a child with IQ 124 on average?
If you assume someone's IQ is: genetic IQ + randomness. The 150 IQ person and the 130 IQ person probably had really high 'randomness rolls', so their IQ might be something like this:
150 IQ = 130 genetic IQ + 20 random IQ
130 IQ = 110 genetic IQ + 20 random IQ
You'll probably get a much more average random IQ in their children, so their IQ might be:
124 IQ = 120 genetic IQ + 4 random IQ
Of course, the parents might not have a very high randomness component to their IQ, then you'd expect the children to be roughly the average of their two parents. But very high IQs like 130 and 150 are pretty rare so it seems unlikely that they can happen just due to genetics.
It's Bayesian math with a particular set of inputs, described by "mmmmmm" below. I don't agree with his or her inputs (I think s/he's way overestimated the randomness component), but the math is correct.
It feels like the privilege hypothesis is straw-manned/passed over way too easily here - there are a lot of ways having very successful/influential relations would plausibly increase your odds of being successful besides just wealth - obvious examples being you have easier access to important networks and better education.
More nebulously (but maybe importantly?) growing up around super high-flyers simply changes the set of possible futures you imagine for yourself: if you grow up in a very poor environment where high aspirations can simply be getting a comfortable middle-class job, you’re much less likely to ever consider becoming a composer - even if you have the potential for it (not to mention the fact that you’re less likely to discover this talent in the first place). I definitely notice this phenomenon in a watered-down way first hand going to an Ivy-league from a poor background.
Tying into this but on the wealth point: it’s true that you can’t “rich-kid” your way into being a great scientist as you might be able to in e.g show-biz, but growing up affluent means you have more opportunities to nurture and explore passions and talents - you get the best resources and the opportunity to do relevant extra-curriculars, and you have more of a safety net in early adulthood or try riskier stuff
The counter-argument is that there are a lot of people with good-to-excellent privilege who don't achieve anything notable. This isn't numbers, though.
Dunno about other fields, but in science my experience is that this argument only applies to the very poorest or those from the most dysfunctional backgrounds. I've known gobs of scientists, some successful, others less so, and in general wealthy or connected background turns out to be a slight negative -- young people from that background are more familiar with the world, and do have better connections, but they also tend to have less grit and drive, and believe in themselves less (and are more cynical about others), while people from a scruffier middle class background have more grit and drive, and believe in themselves more. In the end the drive matters at least as much as the raw talent, provided we are not talking about absolute Newton-level geniuses who make once-in-a-century breakthroughs.
I think a form of the privilege argument does apply at the very lowest socioeconomic levels, where young people are in single-parent households from a young age, where their young lives are disrupted by frequent moves and going to crappy schools, and especially when they have indifferent or cruel parents, or where they are exposed through their peer group to drugs and criminality in the vulnerable pre-teen years (especially among boys). None of these people ever seem to make it. But this is less because they lack privilege a small number of other people have, and more because they are suffering under handicaps most people don't have.
To give these people access to the opportunity their raw talent can use, you would need to ensure that they are live from a young age with parents who take their responsibilities seriously, who stay married (or at least together), who prioritize family stability and education for the children, and who consciously shield their pre-teens from evil social influence. They don't need to be native-born, or even native English speakers, they don't need to be rich or even middle class, and they don't need to have any familiarity with higher education or science, and they don't need connections -- I have seen people with all of these lacks succeed very well. But the steadying influence of sound involved two-parent parenting and a non-dysfunctional peer group are irreplaceable.
The concept of a hero license is interesting. One thing I've noticed in my family is that people's ambitions are all beaten down by life, but only in proportion to the strength of the original ambition, so there is a real advantage to being insanely ambitious. Mom wanted to be a doctor and wound up a nurse. Dad wanted to be an engineer, wasn't good enough at math, became an engineering technician, and then eventually left the field entirely. Brother followed similar path wrt chemistry. I wanted to be elected President of the United States as soon as I was legally eligible, and then found a dynasty. Not gonna happen, but I am by far the most successful person in my family. I know my mom's IQ and she is smarter than me. My brother is almost as smart as me; the difference is not enough to explain the difference in achievement. So it's not fundamentally a difference in talent. But it may be a difference in hero licensing.
In addition to random chance and selection bias, there is probably some halo effect as well,
Erasmus Darwin probably had similarly accomplished peers who are not as famous as him because they didn't have a super famous grandson. At some point the glow start to bounce off each other.
Erasmus Darwin's pals include James Watt and Joseph Priestly. They are still pretty famous despite the lack of epochal descendants. Another friend includes Samuel Galton who is remembered, if at all, for being Francis Galton's grandfather and Erasmus's brother-in-law.
> what gene do we think Niels and Harald Bohr shared that made one of them a physics Nobelist and the other an Olympic athlete?
Likely the same genes: Niels Bohr was *also* a great athlete, just not as good as Harald, and Harald was likely the best mathematician in Denmark. They were both very smart and very athletic such that it'd make sense that environmental and smaller genetic differences would cause the differentiation we saw between them.
It's helpful in reading Michael Frayn's "Copenhagen" to understand that Niels Bohr was always understood to be the best all-around Dane.
> elite soccer players are smarter than you are - "and the sharpest of them score more often than their dimmer teammates"
This seems like a red flag. I can believe intelligence helps with soccer play, but I'd be pretty shocked if the elite levels hadn't already extracted all the signal available from intelligence. A parallel is in American football, arm length is really important to be a good lineman, but it doesn't correlate with success in the NFL because making the NFL with short arms mean you have compensating talent. Unless theres just a lack of people with soccer ability who are also intelligent (seems unlikely?), shouldn't we expect no correlation at the top level even if intelligence matters? Similar arguments are made for the GRE not correlating with grad school success.
Anecdotal example of intelligence helping with soccer: I've heard magnus Carlsen (best living chess player) is also a quite good soccer player.
Likewise, among NBA players, height doesn't correlate with success
That's a much cleaner example, thanks
Yes, they're all tall enough to play basketball at a professional level :-)
I hope my explanation is unnecessary but you never know.
As a meteorologist, I was a bit surprised to see Francis Galton credited as the inventor of modern meteorology, so I had to look him up to see what he did. Some stuff, but not nearly as foundational as, for example, Luke Howard (cloud classification), Robert FitzRoy (weather forecasting), Joseph Henry (weather observation and analysis), Vilhelm Bjerknes (meteorology as a branch of physics), and many others.
> just assume there are an approximately infinite number of Tagores, all of whom have names ending in -dranath
I strongly suspect that you've misidentified the word elements. Are they not Rab-indra-nath, Aban-indra-nath, Hem-indra-nath (with -indra- becoming -endra- for some reason), etc? This feels like cracking a joke about how Svandís Svavarsdóttir, Þorgerður Gunnarsdóttir, and Þórhildur Sunna Ævarsdóttir all have names ending in "-arsdóttir".
Just to add two data points: Both Alexander the Great and Hannibal had fathers who were military geniuses in their own right.
That genius runs in families suggests that it can be a good survival strategy to grant social power and authority on a hereditary basis. One can see how monarchies and aristocracies might have evolved in the ancient world on this basis alone, or even why Plato, for example, considered the philosopher king to be ideal of government.
It remains to also account for kakistocracy, or rule by the worst. Surely evil genius runs in families, too. An interesting question might be why (or whether) good genius predominates.
I think it's likely that growing up in an intimate environment with highly brilliant people is probably a unique kind of pedagogy which contributes at least SOME to inter-generational success.
Obviously it's hard to test for this (as is the case with a lot of nature vs. nurture things.) But seems prima facie really plausible to me.
I'm reminded of all the times that a controversial mid-century intellectual has been mentioned here and David Friedman talks about having met them when he was young.
Sorry if someone has beaten me to this objection, but I feel like this is just selection bias.
That is, each generation has thousands of “genius level” people, who accomplish noteworthy things. They likely have a high rate of intermarriage (see the sequence post on elites being way better than everyone else for why) and many will have children. Suppose that most regress to the mean at exactly the rate you expect, but four families, just by chance, regress more slowly than the others. Then these four families appear to be special, whereas really its just luck, and selection bias takes you the rest of the way towards solving the problem.
The proper prediction for me to pre-register would be to pick 1,000 of the top geniuses in the world today, do math to figure out how many of their children we would expect to succeed, taking into account predicted IQ regression, exposure to elite circles, etc. and wait a couple decades to see whether the prediction was right.
In societies where education was scarce and many people suffered decreased IQ from disease or malnutrition perhaps there would be more clustering than usual. Certainly there have been a fair number of people who were more likely to be excluded from the competition from the get-go due to social and environmental factors.
What I'd really be interested in is if the rate of this clustering *changes* with certain societal changes. Migration to the cities? How about availability of capital? I mean, in 1900 it was much harder to get startup capital if you didn't know someone wealthy. There were no venture capitalists. Though on the other side of things, less startup capital might have been required. You could start mixing herbs with opium and market the elixir from a soap box, whereas today marketing a new patent medicine would require that you be one of a handful of very large companies capable of passing regulatory muster.
Paul Graham had an article about how the number of people in the top 100 wealthiest in America were increasingly first generation wealthy. Not because there were fewer heirs, but because there were more self-made billionaires.
But I certainly agree that having a family that could place you on the first rung would be a big benefit if you wanted to start climbing.
"Have you, dear reader, ever tried writing poetry that will set the collective soul of your nation on fire? If no, why not?"
Because I absolutely do not want to set the collective soul of my nation on fire. I consider myself good at writing poetry and verse and I've had that echoed to some extent by those around me. But I'd rather write jokes and individual tributes. I would not *want* to found a religion, even if I had the capacity to do so. Why I'm not the next "Weird Al" is a more personal indictment, mostly due to my feeling that I don't have any musical ability or anyone who could help me make and popularize satirical videos.
I suggest reading up and researching a community called "South Indian Brahmins" in Tamilnadu, India. Typically classified as Iyers and Iyengars. They comprise less than 2MM population but have more Nobel prize winners per capita than Ashkenazi Jews. Also very talented as musicians, politicians, scientists, academics and even as sports persons (tennis, cricket etc). A lot of it comes down to childhood parental expectations, role models, community culture, etc.
Including the current Vice President of the United States.
Or, if the careers of our ancestors are so random and unconnected, we just might feel unburdened as a result, and be more "open" about doing stuff
I enjoyed this article. Thank you.
So, I'm technically a Huxley-in-law (Julian Huxley was my wife's great-grandfather).
While her family are highly-intelligent people, certainly none are as well known as a few generations prior.
Genetics probably are a part of that. Julian's son married "beneath" himself by his family's standards (no criticism here, she was a wonderful lady with incredible business sense, but not a Nobel prize winning scientist).
Part of it is different set of priorities. Even discounting the genetics, if a scientist marries a merchant then the children are much more likely to choose some kind of business career than if both parents were STEM-focused. Your parents' peers are likely part of that too. The Huxley's weren't just impressive in their own fields but also friends with the movers-and-shakers of British culture of their generation. Different social circles offer different life-choices.
It's also hard to underestimate how much damage the first and second world wars did to historically influential families, and the Huxley's are no exception.
A striking number of commenters on this posting are related to giant figures.
Yeah, it's almost like that's relevant to the topic of the article and that's why we mentioned it.
I suppose it would be easy enough, but probably too depressing, to consider the flipside: families with multiple instances of high school dropouts with low IQs, criminal convictions and violent early deaths. But I would expect the same combination of genetics, being raised badly by people who set bad examples, lack of opportunity or exposure to better options, and just random individual bad choices would likewise account for such things. The nature-nurture thing is kind of a feedback loop, I guess
Both of my grandfathers' fathers were successful real estate developers. Then my maternal grandfather was a mathematician and computer science professor / bell labs researcher who was a frequent coauthor with Claude Shannon and invented finite state machines and fault-tolerant circuits. My maternal grandmother was a pastor's daughter who got a masters in math from Yale just to find a husband and became a housewife. My mother's elder sister was a childless programmer one block from ground zero in NYC (now retired and sponsoring several girls in third world countries). My mother majored in Economics, then dropped out of a computer science masters program to have me unexpectedly, and then got promoted into upper management at the defense mapping agency. My father majored in cartography and worked for the same agency for a while before he decided to start flipping houses, got divorced, and after a few years of probably toxic chemical exposures while renovating houses he went crazy and was permanently institutionalized for Schizophrenia when I was 8. My paternal grandfather was a flight mechanic on a B-52 in WWII and closet atheist who scored 99th percentile on the AFQT. After the war he worked for big corporations as a counselor to help fix/retain executives that had alcohol abuse problems (He kinda reminds me of Bob Ross). My father's only brother is a programmer and only sister is a convention manager at a 5-star hotel. My paternal grandmother was an accomplished musician. My brother won a prize for best PhD thesis in math, got married and had kids, and worked as a programmer. I dropped out of a computer science PhD program to go work for google, then a startup, then became a self-employed professional gambler / investor / bitcoin maximalist with a net worth in the top 1% for my age group despite being an extremely lazy videogame addict most of the time. My mother's first cousin is an ambassador, and her brother piloted air force one, and their mother is a great piano instructor. Many engineers and programmers are scattered throughout the family tree on both sides. When I was in public high school, I was #1 in my classes in AP Physics and Chemistry, but I didn't even consider going into those fields. I just went into computer science by default because of the family history.
Not everyone in the family is successful. My mother has an anomalously-blonde decade-younger unexpected-and-likely-illegitimate sister who posts annoying leftwing outrageporn on facebook and works retail for minimum wage after she got too old to be a park ranger and became very obese. She married a railroad foreman who domesticates hawks for fun and they had a strange son with severe ADHD who dropped out of community college after a few months, never held a job for more than 2 weeks, and still lives with his mother at age 25 playing videogames all day every day. They are nice people but not very bright. She always loses by a lot to my mother and her elder sister at board games.
BTW, if postnatal environmental effects were as important as genetic effects in explaining patterns of successful families, we should expect adoptive parent SES to strongly correlate with adoptive child SES in adulthood, but it doesn't. The correlation is almost zero. So the intergenerational correlation of SES for biological children is probably almost entirely caused by genes + prenatal environment.
Prenatal environment is easy to improve with supplements of folate/iodine and education about the harms of alcohol and tobacco. Genes will soon be easy to improve with IVF embro selection. Changing the entire culture of the lower classes would be hard, so let's be glad if that's not what's holding them back from advancing to higher SES.
I just looked up the age distribution of adoptees: https://www.statista.com/statistics/633415/age-distribution-at-time-of-adoption-us/
The mode is at 1 year old, but the median looks like 4 years. Very few are adopted before 1 year. So adoption studies alone probably can't rule out very-early-postnatal environment effects. I would modify my last paragraph with that caveat.
A good recent example is Larry Summers who is nephew to Kenneth Arrow and Paul Samuelson who both won Nobel Memorial prizes in Economics. Also Janet Yellen's husband just so happens to have one a Nobel Memorial prize in Economics as well.
Some people say that regression to mean is due to luck evening out, but I think there's much more to it. If advantageous genotype is heterozygous in certain gene, then parents with best copies of gene would create child with same heterozygous gene with 1/2 chance.
After all, why plant breeding heavily uses f1 hybrids?
To add to the hero-license thing, something that was going through my mind this entire article was familial expectation. Sure, it matters what you expect from yourself, but at least in India, it can matter even more what your family/environment expects from you. Most parents probably want their kids to be moderately successful, enough to have a happy life, but Nobel-prize winners expect their children to be the best in their field.
e.g. Rabindranath Tagore wrote some poems at the age of 8. Hey, I wrote some poems when i was a kid too. But Rabindranath was actively encouraged to write more, and to recite in front of a distinguished audience that all expected great things of him because he was a Tagore.
This is an interesting theory, and hero-licensing seems to me as an extreme version of the 'success frame'* that is often used to describe 'tiger parenting' among Asian Americans (and other Western Countries).
Of course, if one believes that parenting is pointless, then this is probably covered by inheritance as much as the next person?
*https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12552-014-9112-7
I think there is also an element that normalizes what it takes to be successful and gives kids of model to emulate.
One of my dear friend's mother is a world class opera singer, to the tunes of millions / year at the height of her career, and her children are both successful (though not as famous or storied) artists -- a writer and jazz muscian.
One of the things that always blows my mind about my friend's stories about her childhood was how she normalized habits that were completely foreign for me. It would be "okay" for her mother not to speak for a week leading up to a concert. Every single day, including holidays and birthdays, she had practice time that was sacrosanct. In the eyes of the kids, it was that her mother was making decisions and sacrifices about her talent and her career -- she normalized the sacrifices that it takes to be a world class opera singer -- and taught her kids to develop many of the same habits.
In my family, it was the total opposite. You would be ostracized and chastised for making those decisions and it was looked down on, in general.
In other words, families create micro-cultural norms... and highly successful families may imprint highly productive norms.
They may and the do. 'The apple falls not far away from the tree's the say
Is this intentional that you only focus on intelligence (inherited or learned) as a Generic Talent measure? And not on any personality traits. Because, the word "willpower" may be banned from use in the rat community, but the reality is that some people are just better at trying really hard than others, call it "intrinsic motivation", "stubbornness" "hardworking-ness" or whatever, the thing measured by the marshmallow test. If it's genetic or learned from parents (probably both as all complex traits), it can better explain success in unrelated fields than IQ alone.
'Success is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent transpiration' they say...
Trait conscientiousness is one of the few things that rivals IQ in sheer generality of its contribution to success. It's smaller than intelligence (intelligence's impact varies a lot, it plays a small role in some fields, a large in others, but contributes nearly always). Conscientiousness isn't so varied - its effect is generally small - but very, very widespread. Like other Big Five traits, it is also substantially heritable, though less strongly than intelligence.
Another example. Benedict Wells and Ferdinand von Schirach are some of the most famous authors in contemporary German literature and they happen to be cousins. Their grandfather was Baldur von Schirach who was indicted at Nuremberg and the von Schirach family contains other notable individuals. Wells changed his name to avoid (hide?) this association.
Actually his IQ is known, I just remembered they measured it at Nuremberg. See https://twitter.com/adam_tooze/status/985869461189210112/photo/1, von Schirach's was 130.
Thanks for this, really interesting. I feel the "hero license" effect would be significant. Also, no proof here either, but not just genes travel down bloodlines, but ideas too. Especially for ideas to be deeply embedded into how someone thinks requires repeated exposure, e.g. from parent to child or from brother to sister, or, preacher to congregation. It's a generalization of the "hero license" effect.
Julian Huxley also wrote the massive "The Science of Life" with H.G. Wells and Wells's son, G. P. Wells. Tomas Bohr's brother Vilhelm is a distinguished MD, PhD researcher on aging at the NIH.
Bohr's sons and grandsons have described how every meal was an opportunity for Niels to ask them questions about science and give them mathematical puzzles to solve. That surely played a role.
I can't fully trust such a heavily anecdotal approach to understanding success, due to wiki-walk selection effects.
How much of Erasmus Darwin's notability comes from being Charles's grandfather? If he hadn't been, do you think you'd have heard of him? (I hadn't heard of most of the 3rd, 4th, etc. family members in these examples, and in some cases not even the 2nd.) How many other Englishmen of his generation made similar contributions? Very roughly speaking, if that number is larger than the square root of the entire talent pool (which in this era would have been exclusively upper-class males) then there's nothing to explain here-- the intuition is the same as for the birthday paradox.
Similarly, Nobel Prizes are pretty impressive (<10 per year) but the 3rd, 4th, etc examples in a lot of these families are just, like, 95th-percentile-successful academics or artists or businesspeople or whatever. Even in the 19th century there must have been hundreds of those born every year; today it's more like hundreds of thousands. Given the degrees of freedom in family ties (average person has >10 blood relatives, more in big families; we only have to find 2 or 3 notable ones) and kinds of notability, I'm inclined to chalk a lot of this anecdata up to coincidence. Though I don't doubt that the effects mentioned in Part V, at least, play a role as well.
Well, I started looking for moonshots as soon as I graduated college. I spent 5 years researching and experimenting to find a huge unsolved problem I cared about, thought I could get traction on, and would enjoy tackling. When I found one I worked on it on and off for 20 years, only reaching gainful employment in the last 2.
So I’m definitely quite high on “obsessed with investing towards a shot at absurd success” scale. And I would directly trace it to having a famous family (though the experience was much more nuanced, and darker, than the Hero).
Maybe I would have met the right people and absorbed it over time. I think it matches my personality and values. But in most circumstances I’m sure ambition would have been much slower to develop, and much more reasonable, like “Start a unicorn company”.
So, one data point supporting Scott’s hypo about a family effect.
Terence Tao has two brothers. Nigel Tao is a senior engineer at Google. Trevor Tao is a musician and an international chess master. When Trevor Tao was two he was diagnosed with autism and mental retardation. All three of them competed in the international mathematical olympiads.
Yeah but compared to what Terence can do becoming a senior engineer at Google is like winning pin the tail on the donkey at a 5th grade birthday party.
I think one important thing that is missing from the discussion is confidence in your abilities, which is most likely affected by the people you interact with. In my own personal experience, confidence in my ability to solve a problem can have a very literal effect on the fluidity and clarity in how I think about it. Any sliver of doubt can interrupt this mental fluidity and make me start the sort of "motion" of thinking it through over again. This fluidity and confidence in your motion is much more easily demonstrated in sports ("just do it").
Your parents probably not only affect your big picture aspirations, but also this confidence on a more granular level, perhaps just from listening to how they think about problems.
A lot of comments along the lines of "I know why *I* was successful" here. This is unlikely to be true, people, sorry! You have no counterfactuals and an N of 1.
A relevant paper by Greg Clark: "For whom the Bell Curve tolls" is here: http://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/ClarkGlasgow2021.pdf. It argues using a big database of UK families that genetics fit the patterns in the data better than the environment. It also acknowledges that this argument requires a huge amount of assortative mating. Incidentally, he got cancelled from Glasgow University for this.
Also relevant, our working paper, not out yet but I'll give a flavour from the abstract:
"If social status and genetic variants are both assets in marriage markets, then the two will become associated in spouse pairs, and will be passed on to subsequent generations together. This process provides a new explanation for the surprising persistence of inequality across generations, and for observed genetic differences across the distribution of socio-economic status... environmental shocks to socio-economic status are reflected in the DNA of subsequent generations."
I could be grossly ignorant here because I am not a geneticist, but wouldn't Clark's Fisherian model be a good (at least, better) proxy measure also for environmental effects like nepotism based on parentage than the regression-to-mean "cultural model" presented in the paper? Or not only nepotism, but any cultural environmental stuff whose transmission from generation to next could be best described by additive mixture of behavior bits inherited from both parents.
Not saying what is the explanation (as I said, not exactly my field), but it seems strange to highlight Clark's paper because he doesn't analyze *any* actual genomics data, only family trees and inter-generational patterns of occupation. If one had, the researcher would still have to employ some nifty statistical tricks to infer anything about which genes are causative and which merely correlate with people's behavior.
I don't think he can distinguish between inherited culture and genetics - in particular, if you think of culture as additively inherited equally from parents, the two explanations are not distinguishable on purely behavioural data. He can only compare a "similar environment" explanation to genetics, where in particular he argues that siblings have a more similar environment than parent-child pairs. Imagine that parents provide an environment to (all) their children. But there's some noise in how they do that. (Plausible: childrearing practices are not perfectly predictable.) Then siblings get more similar environments than parent-child pairs.
I know a significant amount of early childhood development is based on mimicry, perhaps that instinct lasts longer than early childhood. Initially surnames often reflected trades and I assume that dynamic of "family businesses" arose naturally from the earliest human settlements. Proximity to critical thinking on a day to day basis likely increases the likelihood of proficiency at critical thinking.
Aside from all of that, it could be a significant amount of randomness. Even with very low probabilities of genius level ability and achievement, there is sure to be some clustering if we look at a long timescale.
Re: Regression to the mean
Not all the non-genetic factors are going to be random. These kids aren't getting adopted out and assigned to random families.
People often learn a lot about parenting from their own parents. A family who's produced one genius may not be perfect but they're probably avoiding things that are likely to cripple their kids progression.
Privilege is definitely part of it, connections, knowledge, having a nobel-winning parent who's probably willing to dedicate time and resources to their children's curiosity.
And then throw in confidence and assumptions. I remember an old talk by an editor at the journal Nature talking about how one of the big filters was that they actually didn't get as many submissions as you might think, people self-select and send their papers to lower-tier journals.
So if both mom and dad are in the top tiers of their professions, if their parents friends are also in the top tiers of professions their their kids are going to see it as natural that they aim for similar levels. There are doors out there that are hanging open for anyone to use but which many people decide to not even trying to walk through.
"I said before that if an IQ 150 person marries an IQ 130 person, on average their kids will have IQ 124."
This isn't necessarily how regression toward the mean works. Because the "mean" one is regressing toward is not the mean of the general population -- it is the mean of your parents genotypes (not phenotypes). Your parents' phenotypes might be higher, lower or the same as their genotypes. The more you know about their other family members the more you can deduce their mean genotype.
For example, if the IQ 150 and IQ 130 parents came from families that averaged 150 and 130 IQ's, respectively, we would expect no decrees in the IQ of their offspring. In fact, if their respective families had average IQs of 160, their offspring would be expected to regress upward (!) toward that 160 average.
So the bottom line is that assortative mating/inbreeding for intelligence is probably more feasible over time than Scott imagines if people can just keep it up consistently. With selective breeding you can end up as a family of Border Collies living amongst a general population of Beagles.
Did somebody already mention Swiss family Piccard? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piccard_family
Famous Adventurers, Scientists, Engineers... Rich people who take risks but always found ways to follow their own interests beside 16 hours 6 days per week in the factory (or 9 to 5 in these days) and get famous and wealthy by doing so.
Guess everything was already said - but not yet by everybody 😉
Not sure if this was mentioned - just my 2 cents:
- first thing would be to test the pure statistical significance of said example families as being absolutely improbabile. My expectation would be that with currently 8 billion people on earth and let's say 15 billion since 1700 (Darwin Family) chance seem pretty high that at least 10-50 families would do extremely well over let's say 3 generations. Could be that we are just standing in astonishment in front of some lottery winners and wondering 'what these guys did better then all the other players which didn't win the jackpot'. We all love stories of success and therefore easily fall victim to boasting about 'self made success' and don't emphasize the fact that most success is only a tiny fraction a result of an individual's personal actions and most a result of good genes at the right time in the right environment. Veritasium has made a extremely well video about 'The Success Paradox' https://youtu.be/3LopI4YeC4I
- Survivers bias: we just didn't think about the other 14.999999 billion people in 1.499999 Million families who did not that extremely well over the past 400 years.
- nurture or nature (genes or culture, inheritance or training) in some if not many families both genes and culture gets passed on to the next generation. Both favorable and unfavorable things. I guess for each 'positive' outlier family there exists at least one 'negative' outlier family in the world. Both hand their business over to the younger members sooner or later: Doctors, Attorneys, Competitive Sportsmen and Women, Engineers, Thieves, Bank robbers, Mafia clans and so forth. The knowledge of this is so old and basic that many of western people carry *family* (past) names, which were given their ancestors in European middle age and created by just adding the families male profession behind a person's first name: John Smith, Henry Butcher, Will Carpenter and so on. Businesses even in the new world country USA were often named 'X and Sind's etc.
-
this may be a bit too controversial, but there are ethno-national-religious groups who have a hugely disproportionate share of science and economics Nobel prizes, fields medals, and I believe chess world championships, just to name a few accomplishments one could claim are unambiguously impressive. The same questions apply, but I am not sure we have better answers
To add to the last point, I think its importance lies in more than just expectation setting or "hero license." If everyone in your family is a doctor, then not only is it easy for you to imagine yourself becoming a doctor at some point, but you can have a pretty good sense of all of the steps it would take for you to become one yourself. Most of my family has a PhD (my brother, my dad, my mom, my grandmother--now my wife too), mostly in philosophy. It was easy to imagine that I could get one too, and more than that at every stage of my life I knew exactly what steps I needed to take to achieve that goal, navigate the complex and arcane rules of academia, learn how to do PhD level work, etc.. Many of these I would have had to learn first-hand, but instead could just rely on others to help me with. Now, I think I can honestly say that I have not made use of connections (which I regret sometimes--they would have helped), but for many things it's as though I did not need to. It was enough that I knew exactly how, e.g., academic conferences worked that I could navigate them and their byzantine etiquettes fairly well to get a definite head start on my career.
If I had had a different family it's still possible that I would have encountered philosophy in college, fallen in love with it, and wanted to become a philosophy professor. And it's even possible that I would have done it. But without that inside knowledge of what steps to take to achieve that goal, I would have had a much harder chance not only of envisioning myself as achieving that goal, but even of envisioning myself going through the individual steps needed to make that a reality.
It certainly affects what sort of career you consider. I write poetry. I remember my sister pointing out, possibly when I was in college, that I wouldn't consider a life in Greenwich Village as a poet — it was obvious that I would go for an academic life of some sort.
On the other hand, the son of Ed Banfield, a prominent political scientist, did go to Greenwich Village (artist not poet) and is still a professional artist.
My impression is that there are more British intellectual dynasties than American ones.
For example, the actress Olivia Wilde has started writing screenplays, which is unusual for lovely actresses but not surprising in her case because she's actually a Cockburn (but she picked a stage name for obvious reasons), the heir to a long line of prominent left of center journalists going back to Lord Cockburn 200 years ago. Lord Cockburn is also the ancestor to a famous dynasty of right-of-center writers, the Waughs (e.g., Evelyn, who was the first cousin of Olivia's Communist grandfather Claude Cockburn).
I don't think there is quite the same density of family connections among intellectuals in US history, although I wouldn't know how to quantify that hunch.
In Michael Frayn's play "Copenhagen," there are three characters: Bohr, Heisenberg, and Mrs. Bohr, who is treated by two great physicists as a most estimable intellect.
Economic historian Gregory Clark has done a lot of research into unique surnames in Britain. For example, he compared two great names around c. 1700: Samuel Pepys, the famous diarist and naval administrator whose bureaucratic innovations helped institutionalized the Royal Navy as the world's foremost institution, vs. Daniel Defoe, the titanic author of the first bestselling novel in the English language, "Robinson Crusoe."
Pepys was the son of a tailor and Defoe (born "Foe") was the son of a butcher. But Pepys had numerous prominent relatives earlier in the 17th Century while Defoe's relations are obscure. Clark found that numerous Pepyses are found in the upper reaches of society in subsequent centuries, while later Defoes (or Foes) disappear back into obscurity.
This is all too common in academia. Off the top of my head :
Ed Witten's daughter Daniela is a prof @ UW
Greg Clarke, Hinton's family
Tauman-Kalai family
Valiants, Blums in theoretical CS
Laszlo Lovasz's son is on track to be a top mathematician...at the same group as Avi Wigderson's son
There are many other linkages. If you pick a random prof you have heard of a top uni, odds are good they are a professor's son and/or have unrelated achievements in their family, such as being a billionaire or being a CEO-tier exec. I remember randomly looking at someone's profile and going huh...Minsky ? But of course she's related to Marvin Minsky. There are no coincidences.
The reason is some mixture of genetics and upbringing, being an academic/researcher isn't for everybody. If it was purely genetics there would be ``crossover", people from elite profession A going to elite profession B fairly often.
This doesn't occur that much. Being a hedge fund manager's child tilts your odds at becoming a prof, but not as much as being a prof's son, despite the two professions both being selective. There is also a heavy unsavory aspect involved and nepotism does continue to occur in an untold manner of simply having a head start and using it well. Generally, genetics washes out head starts, but when you are in a hypercompetitive arena, these otherwise-useless things begin to matter.
I and my brother followed our Dad into IT, I wonder if there are studies on adopted vs genetic children in this? Of course we went into IT, it was 'what people do', I'd have no idea how to make a living as a plumber even if I could do the plumbing. I assume that these people all had contacts,such that upon showing promise they talked to dad's mate Jon about how to get elected rather than shrugging and saying 'not for me'
Kay Redfield Jamison has a good stab at some of these sort of family links in her book Touched by Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touched_with_Fire Worth it for the Spender poem she opens with alone - The Truly Great: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54715/the-truly-great
I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history
Through corridors of light, where the hours are suns,
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the Spirit, clothed from head to foot in song.
And who hoarded from the Spring branches
The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.
What is precious, is never to forget
The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs
Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.
Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light
Nor its grave evening demand for love.
Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
With noise and fog, the flowering of the spirit.
Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields,
See how these names are fêted by the waving grass
And by the streamers of white cloud
And whispers of wind in the listening sky.
The names of those who in their lives fought for life,
Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre.
Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun
And left the vivid air signed with their honour.
Here's another family that's super successful, but aren't mentioned that often.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_H._Lawrence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Lawrence
Both grew up in a small Norwegian homesteading community in Rural South Dakota, both had major academic achievements in their careers. Parents were just school teachers.
They also had another friend that was an accomplished physicist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merle_Tuve
I'm genuinely surprised the topic of epigenetics wasn't breached here: "Epigenetics is the study of heritable changes in gene expression that occur without changes in DNA sequence (Wolffe and Guschin, 2000). Epigenetic mechanisms are flexible genomic parameters that can change genome function under exogenous influence, and also provide a mechanism that allows for the stable propagation of gene activity states from one generation of cells to the next." (https://www.nature.com/articles/hdy20102)
I am the farthest from an expert in this, but I'm extremely fascinated at the idea of how the environment can affect how genes are expressed. It would flow from this idea that the same core gene could be associated with music and mathematics, yet the environmental factors would dictate how that gene (or set of genes) expresses itself into one or the other. Further googling shows recent studies with some evidence that epigenetic mechanisms can affect IQ directly (https://www.europeanscientist.com/en/research/epigenetics-and-iq-a-new-study-uncovers-one-of-the-mechanisms-behind-environmentally-induced-effects-on-cognitive-performance/). There are many studies of in utero epigenetics influencing how genes are expressed, including environmental factors. The existence of this field fuels my epistemic humility in all things genetics, and I can't help but wonder if it's at play in any discussions of hereditary traits that seem to be transient. Of course, the engineer in me also wonders if/how we could improve health by better in utero programming.
It would be surprising if epigenetic mechanisms influenced intelligence per se. These mechanisms are *adaptive* and it's difficult to see why lowering intelligence would be adaptive under any circumstances. However, I can readily see epigenetic mechanisms affecting personality characteristics. For example, a child who suffered from poorer nutrition in utero might easily be born with a more anxious and conservative personality -- because being anxious and conservative is adaptive in an environment in which resources are unusually scarce. A child who experienced a plentiful or even superabundant nutritional regime in utero might be born with a bold and even reckless personality, because *those* personality traits are adaptive in a world of plentiful resources.
I agree with many of the points, especially the proposed model of how environment could shape personality traits. I think the idea of lowering intelligence never being adaptive shows a lack of creativity though. I’m not an expert in the mechanisms at work, so this could just be flaws in my own understanding, but if intelligence as always an optimal choice free of trade offs, you would think intelligence would skyrocket across all species.
Additionally, I don’t think this can be viewed as lowering intelligence as much as not choosing to optimize intelligence. One possible model for this is that adaptations are scarce (like creating a D&D character), and non-intelligence adaptations preclude also adapting for intelligence, where intelligence was adapted for in a parent. Now I doubt there’s really a pool of possible points for adaptations, but I wouldn’t be surprised if energy efficiency was at play. I would put a higher confidence in the model where expressing a set of genes for something more optimal for survival than intelligence precludes expressing genes for intelligence too.
Yes, that's a good point, there are always tradeoffs, and it is possible an epigenetic mechanism might boost X and as a side effect lower intelligence, and if X is more important to survival than intelligence, that's a win and will be selected for.
...of course, that argues one should be very careful about messing with this (cf. your comment about "in utero engineering"). It would well and truly suck if boosting the mechanism for optimizing IQ turned out to lead to overexpression of about 20 oncogenes...
Totally. The complexity of that system is absurdly high, and that's just for the stuff we know. Beyond deliberately trying to have traits expressed, there's also a thread calling for research into essentially a mechanical uterus, such that women wouldn't have to carry to term. It's not at all near-term, but even if you can successfully deliver nutrients, our ignorance of the epigenetic impact leads me to believe it's not something we could ethically pursue.
Agreed, although building an artificial uterus that would work for >20 weeks would be highly satisfying. The situation for 22-week preemies is heart-wrenching :(
Your conclusion is the same as mine. Believe in your own ability to DO, even if it feels a bit delusional at times. “‘Can do’ will do.”
I *have* written and translated poetry, but I'm more of a math/science geek and hardware/software amphibian.
Currently putting together an experiment to test electrostatic time dilation, which is a prediction of an obscure class of theories dating back to 1978 which I became the ~7th person to re-discover in 2009. (We're up to at least 9 now. I sometimes think that my biggest contribution to the field was just doing the literature search and finding everyone else. Most of them had no idea that anyone else had figured this out.) My wife (cognitive neuroscientist and ACX-follower) said I should apply for an ACX grant, but I don't need funds as much as I need a muon beam. The hardware is cheap, I can fund it from my Social Security. TRIUMF are being assholes, but PSI is letting me apply for beam time in 2022 (proposals due Jan 10th).
The saddest thing here is that you didn't know who Esther Dyson is. I've gotten to speak with her a few times, and she's one of the deepest thinkers I know.
Anyway, I think that you're underweighting the "enriched learning environment" part of the equation. A large family that throws salons has a huge advantage over a nuclear couple with few friends. "It takes a village ..." Schools are important, but can only do so much.
Poetry, travel, physics etc. on my blog here: https://howardlandman.wordpress.com/ The boundary between art and science is fuzzier than you might think; for example, my poem The Problem of Lesbian Sheep (https://wordpress.com/post/howardlandman.wordpress.com/1611) was cited in a technical paper about online dating algorithms (http://sigtbd.csail.mit.edu/pubs/veryconference-paper10.pdf).
Would the ISIS facility in Oxfordshire, UK be any use for your proposed muon experiment? Or is the total flux not enough?
Probably. I don't actually want high intensity because I'm trying to measure one muon decay at a time. Somewhere in the 500-10000 muons per second range would be fine. I also want low energy (20-30 MeV) because I'm trying to stop them. But at this point, I've visited PSI and the proposal is about 2/3 written, so I probably don't want to change horses quite yet.
Actually, having looked at the ISIS web pages, the main problem is that ISIS has 7 muon beam experiment bays and all 7 are already occupied with long-term facilities (3 ISIS ones and 4 controlled by the Japanese RIKEN-RAL team). So they have no room to accommodate any new equipment for the foreseeable future.
It is simple. There are 5 colors. Red white green blue black. Humans, persons have at most 3. Two is for caricatures, 1 is for kids, 0 is for unborn babies. No man can achieve 4 or more on their own. for it is unnatural. 4 is the color of cities, clans, civilization. 5 appears to be the color of fucking magic. See this fella: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7msDInjK0wk Naya (the kid, white red green) is being styled on by a 5 color madman.
... Crickets. Of course. Does anyone have a question, or would like to prove me wrong?
Absence of depression gene helps
"Niels Bohr developed the modern understanding of the atom". Niels Bohr developed the common misunderstanding of Quantum Mechanics and managed to convince most physicists that his philosophy was science. E.g., see https://bohmian-mechanics.net/sokalhoax.html
"Take Niels Bohr. He’s a genius". I suppose it depends on how you define "genius".
Without the internet the only way for individual to pursue information was through family and peers. Family was giving access to peers and books respectfully. So coming from an affluent family was bare minimum to achievement beyond life of an individual. Someone whose family was not in 1% in terms of wealth through most of the history of civilization can't even comprehend doing something, which is not about their survival.
I don't think that's correct, although it's hard to be sure of the circumstances of people in the past. Isaac Newton doesn't seem to have been from that high in the income distribution. Ramanujan. Andrew Carnegie.
It was surely an advantage to be born rich, but past societies often had mechanisms, such as the church, by which a sufficiently bright poor kid could rise.
I don't think access to information depends primarily on the technical means. I doubt the Internet is fantastically more enabling than the public library or university, both of which have existed for twenty centuries. I suggest the key in almost all cases is having the security and leisure to be able to go rummaging around in what's known. 16th century German peasant kids didn't learn to read because there was no scriptorium nearby and no monks to teach them, but because they just didn't have time for that kind of impractical (at the time) pursuit. There were animals to be husbanded, crops to be raised, and winter coming.
That is still the case today. That I think was one of the reasons the OLPC initiative came to nothing and was inherently delusional: the reason kids from poor sub-Saharan African families don't surf the Web and learn about FFTs and Android programming on their own is not because they lack the devices but because they just don't have time for it, there's far too much going on in their lives of immediate practical necessity.
Of course, it is certainly the case that being in a wealthy (or at least non-impoverished) family is the single best way to gain time and leisure in one's youth to pursue education and information, and that is true today and was true yesterday. But it's not about technical means of access, it's about the person being at leisure for the pursuit.
I agree with most of this except I have spent the last ten years traveling and working in African countries, and the poor have more leisure time than the rich or middle class. When you have very few resources there isn't that much to do. "they don't have time for it," is not what is stopping poor African children from learning to code.
That is interesting, and since you have real data, I'm curious what, in your observation, *does* stop them from learning to code -- and for "learning to code" substitute something more appropriate to their situation, meaning something that leads to a more economically productive and better paying future.
Economic dead zones. You have to go to the capital city in order to have any hope of moving up economically. Your dead-end town didn't furnish you with a lot of skills, and in the city, you are competing with other people who are trying to get a leg up. Unemployment is very high among college graduates and your parents didn't have the audacity to think you were going to be smart enough to compete with intellectual types, so they just let you rummage around during your childhood instead of structuring educational activities for you. If you are smart and lucky and find a supportive environment maybe you get a job that allows you to take classes and become a nurse's aide. Of course, those hiring detest people from your region/tribe.
I think this lack of economic opportunities makes for poor incentives to invest in your own or your children's education. And only half the planet is regularly online, therefore many know only what they hear from others in their social group. I been accused many times of plotting to steal human organs. Ignorance and superstotion abounds.
I've been wondering about this, and whether it would be feasible to do some sort of broad-based math/science/coding talent scouting in impoverished areas to try to harness more of humanity's potential, in conjunction with trying to distribute cheap sturdy ebook readers loaded with textbooks... There are a lot of daunting challenges though to trying to leapfrog over the need for local economic development.
People are trying stuff like this. Rural schools, testing, handing out tablets to poor kids in India. We struggle to use education to bring kids out of poverty in the US. To do that in a foreign land is doubly hard.
> 16th century German peasant kids didn't learn to read because there was no scriptorium nearby and no monks to teach them, but because they just didn't have time for that kind of impractical (at the time) pursuit. There were animals to be husbanded, crops to be raised, and winter coming.
A lot of them certainly learned to read after the Reformation, actually. There were priests everywhere even if there were no monks, printed bibles and catechisms existed, and so did tablets for writing practice.
Are we talking a lot in absolute terms, like 10,000, or in relative terms, like 30%? A literacy rate among the peasant farmer class above 25% in the 16th century would be surprising to me, although that is of course no argument against the proposition's truth...
Relative terms. And 30% is likely far too low. Things really changed after the reformation (and counter reformation). Luckily, Europe has an alphabetic writing system instead of a syllabary or (gasp!) an ideographic one. That makes the learning task much easier/faster: just a few weeks/months to get the basics. It takes years of practice to get good at it, of course.
I know that Denmark had somewhat organized teaching around this time, paid for by the local parents. The teacher would travel around in the neighbourhood and be hosted by the locals in turn and the kids would receive lessons as long as he was in the neighbourhood. Can't imagine it was any different in the HRE.
The “permission to be great” thing is certainly a factor. There may be counterpart phenomenon: people who accomplish great things because they didn’t know they couldn’t. Would put Walt Disney, The Beatles, maybe Napoleon into this category.
And how many “privileged” families have how many other offspring who are ne’er-do-wells, who have developmental disabilities, become criminals, etc.? The unmentioned offspring are evidence that the “privilege” effect is not as great as the author suggests. I tend to think the parental examples of expenditure of time and effort are more likely and strongly correlated with and causing the success of children. Children tend to see (and adopt or reject, depending on the relationship with the parent) the values of things like readying, study, hard work, etc. based on the examples set in the home
Bernoulli family was left out!
Why in the name of whatever deity or collective good feelings (the Christian God for me) would you attempt to promote greatness in a single family lineage? Is this a callback to early twentieth century eugenics?
I don't want to promote a society full of supra-geniuses. I want to promote a society full of decent human beings that function in a mostly healthy and egalitarian manner. That might be because I work as a prison guard and don't have a graduate (or undergraduate) degree, which I suspect is the sort of prerequisite I would need to start ranking muh geniuses.
Additionally, I live in Texas. Matt McConaughey describes Texas as "The sort of place where no ones too good, and everyone's good enough." I completely subscribe to that philosophy. Ain't no solid gold statues of Prince Albert abouts, cause rigid classism is for brits- and so is eugenical promotions of supra-geniuses.
The last poetry written in America that set the soul of the nation on fire was from the pen of Ice Cube, and released on a CD, btw. All culture from America comes from the bottom, not the top. And that's the strength of street knowledge.
There's the Bernoulli family too.
Powerful families could be added: the Clintons, the Bushes, the Roosevelts.
One thing worth noting about genetics is that *g* is associated with a lot of random things - like, for instance, physical attractiveness and height.
This makes genetic explanations much more likely. Imagine that *g* is influenced by something like, say, low mutational load (which it is). It's easy to imagine that basically every positive trait is probably influenced by this. So many "generically good genes" probably increase a lot of positive traits - height, physical attractiveness, *g*, physical fitness, etc. probably ALL are influenced by the same "general health" genes that make you more healthy and more physically fit, allowing your brain and body to develop better.
On top of that, *g* seems to positively influence just about everything, and most of the things you were focusing on were things that are probably *g*-loaded.
Bach family is one more example
Just out of curiosity I tried looking into Srinivasa Ramanujan's family but couldn't find much from a casual internet search. I sure hope someone's keeping up with talent-scouting his extended family's descendants just in case...
The IQ thing is more complicated than you suggest. I am supposedly about the 6th great grandchild of Joseph Priestly, the man who discovered oxygen. I can't claim any great achievements of my own, but everyone is my family is very smart and successful, usually with IQ's in the 130-160 range.
But here's the interesting part. (1) That is everyone in all branches of the family, not just the part descended from Priestly. (2) My mother is an obsessive genealogist, so I have met all of these 3rd to 8th cousins, largely from England. Within that group, there is an unusual number of people who went to Oxbridge or the Ivies. My theory is assortative mating.
What's more, I have found strange cognitive similarities between myself and my distant cousins. For example, at the age of about 50, I met my 2nd cousin, once removed. He is English and our family had not seen anyone from that part of the family since about 1900. However, when he started to talk about Trump, I remember coming up with a reply to what he was saying in my head, an entire paragraph. My distant cousin then said that paragraph out loud to me, word for word. It was weird.
I can describe my personal relationship to your argument:
I decided at a young age that it was purposeless to pursue a standard career, solely for some promised 'happiness'. I don't feel an urge to reach for only *one* of my emotions; happiness just happens, and shouldn't be called to our side like a dog. I lack those reservations that protect people from attempting a likely failure - "If I fail, then I'll be sad, and I'll be broke, and the rest of my life will be that much harder." Yup. I step toward likely failure knowingly, because I am not wed to happiness. It's not on my score-card. It also means I'm boring. :)
I sense the fundamental distinction in *motive* held by the majority of those 'self-actualized' and 'genius' minds (compared to the boss-lovers who complained when their English teacher said "write an essay about a topic *of your choice*" - "No! You have to tell us what to write...") regardless of their lineage. The 'geniuses' strive without a longing for the comfort of stability; their risks only *sometimes* pay-off, which is still plenty to provide numerous 'miracle family' sets by sheer volume of accomplished individuals.
[Side-Note: Experimental Design of Gene-Hypothesis? If genes are a large portion of accomplishment, then the *incidence* of genius among any *one* child of a genius, for the set of all 'recognized geniuses', should be ~50%. Lots of data to collect, and clearly room to fudge the qualifications for who is on that list, yet it seems tractable. While a rate of 'half the time' does not imply genes, itself; however, if incidence is significantly lower, that would imply NOT genes; if incidence was higher than half that implies at least an INCLUSION of 'environmental and personal factors', like training, boredom, and grit.]
A willingness to take risks can captivate someone in many ways. And most of the people who pursue those risks fail. The successes are called 'genius' - even when others were distinct from that success only in that they were downtrodden and ignored. Either way, once happiness subsides in the face of valor, it becomes *heartbreaking* to EVER GIVE UP ON VALOR.
I suggest that the source of many accomplished minds is an ADDICTION to an incredibly RARE combination of neural states: the *chance* to INITIATE a WORLD-altering impact. A dent the tides of time can't comb smooth. Most people NEVER taste it; once you do, all else but the dearest love melts away.
Those 'geniuses' poured their whole lives into their work - Paul Erdos, who published 1,500 mathematical proofs, slept on a couch and never dated. He spent 20 hours a day working on mathematics, for his entire life. We can't expect someone to accomplish so much on any LESS time; and the only people who pursue their work so VIGOROUSLY are those lost in this addiction: "If I can do just *one* thing that LASTS..."
Late to the party... did anyone throw out Morphic Resonance as a sound (pun intended) basis for understanding the heredity of extraordinary talent? Happy to expound on this and the hypothesis of formative causation if anyone would like.
Tangentially Rupert Sheldrake, Jill Purce, and their sons Cosmo (an avant garde musician) and Merlin (a pioneering biologist) could one day qualify for such lists of influential super families, judging by the as-yet unrealized but re-evolutionary impact of much of Rupert's work, and the sparkling promise of Merlin's efforts in the realm of fungi and forest ecology.
Alfred Nobel blew most of his up.
I know I'm super later here, but I think there's another respect that privilege can make genius-level success more likely that wasn't considered at all. Children of great people are more likely to be given the opportunity to pursue greatness. Most people, when they graduate college, have to spend years finding their first jobs and establishing themselves in their careers so they can support themselves. They simply won't have the time or energy to spend studying and refining less immediately practical skills. Whereas highly privileged children of great people will be more likely to find encouragement and practical support in pursuing an academic (or political, or athletic) career.
you reminded me to open my dusty old book of rabindranath tagore, works of translation.
some of his sayings -source, stray birds.
"The Great is a born child;When he dies he gives his great childhood to the world."
"That love could ever lose is a fact we cannot accept as truth."
"
Either you have work or you have not.
When you have to say, "Let us do something", then begins the mischief."
so perhaps, the original saying of Yoda in starwars also comes from Rabindranath?.
I came across a Simon Baron-Cohen and I was like "surely he must be related to Sacha Baron-Cohen" and lo, wikipedia reports 5 named people with that surname who are all brothers/cousins. ...who are all significant enough to have a wikipedia page!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baron-Cohen
But what of IQs that travel from one generation to the next in the other direction, up? Is this just the random flip of a genetic switch?
You should rearrange that to read: P(A|B)*P(B) = P(A n B) = P(B n A) = P(B|A)*P(A). You know, symmetry and all.
I did come to Slovakia (then Czechoslovakia) in 1991 to change the world - as a Free Marketeer. The Klaus coupon privatization had me stay a bit longer, and my lovely Slovak wife made me settle. She's a doctor. Our eldest child (of 4) is also a doctor.
(Bari Weiss reminded me of this fine post in her year-end list)
Another great family no one mentioned here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes_family
Within a single crop of siblings you have great actors Ralph and Joseph Fiennes, composer Magnus Fiennes, two film directors, an an adopted child who became an archaeologist.
Farther back in the family tree there are notable industrialists, explorers, politicians, and clerics.
I immediately thought of the Healy family (here's their Wikipedia page - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healy_family). I originally read about Michael, who was the first African American to captain a Federal ship, in a book about Alaskan history. Michael and his 10 (fits the pattern) siblings were born slaves, and many of them became accomplished in various fields (mostly religious leaders), leading the way for African American leadership in the 19th century.
Here's another one I feel like throwing into the comments here - Sir Timothy Gowers, a Fields Medalist. From Wikipedia: "Gowers's father was Patrick Gowers, a composer; his great-grandfather was Sir Ernest Gowers, a British civil servant who was best known for guides to English usage; and his great-great-grandfather was Sir William Gowers". His great-great-great-grandfather was a "ladies' bootmaker". Timothy Gower's great uncle was "a British colonial administrator who was Governor of Uganda from 1925 to 1932". His sister is a novelist.
Finds it way into a newspaper column after a suitable delay.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/why-success-in-life-is-the-art-of-the-possible-tj663nkjh
Bedava Sohbet, arkadaşlarınızla sohbet etmenin en basit, en kolay ve en hızlı yoludur. Arkadaşlarınızla veya yeni insanlarla tanışmak için 1'e 1 veya daha fazla rakamlarla özel ve genel sohbet edebilir veya sohbet etmek için Ücretsiz Sohbet'i kullanabilirsiniz.
Bedava Chat siteleri ücretsiz, güvenli ve anonimdir. Takma adlar kullanabilir veya gerçek adınızla da sohbet sitesine bağlanabilirsiniz.
Günün veya gecenin herhangi bir saatinde çeşitli konularda çeşitli sohbet odalarına katılabilir genel veya tüm özel konular hakkında sohbet edebilir fikir alışverişi yapabilirsiniz.
Bedava Muhabbet sayesinde, başka bir kullanıcıyla özel görüşme yapmanız mümkündür. Ücretsiz Chat'te özel mesaj alışverişi yapabilir, aynı anda veya sırayla yazıp sohbet muhabbet edebilirsiniz.
https://www.bedavasohbetodalari.site
I just stumbled across what I believe to be another great family - from Africa:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenyatta_family
Here because of the July '24 links post, item 12. I missed this when you published it (it was before I'd subscribed to ACX) but it chimed with this:
https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/childhoods
So: genetics.
"You only share 6.25% of your genes with your great-great-grandfather. ... Can 6.25% of the genome really do that much work?"
There may be a case to be made here about penetrance.
Of note, though; regression to the mean doesn't explain where high IQ comes from originally. Any thoughts? I have a suspicion that synaptic pruning may be involved: high-achievers in adulthood are often people who thought broadly during childhood and adolescence (discuss), and so retained more of their potential to connect disparate ideas: they used it and so didn't lose it.
Except that may be survivorship bias, and I'm currently far too sleep-deprived to unpick this right now.
Of course, not everyone with a high IQ and hero licence/childhood privilege/&c goes on to make a world-changing difference. Presumably there's another factor required for greatness, or something is mitigating the effects of the traits you've outlined. There's a quotation about talent hitting a target no one else can hit, while genius hits a target no one else can see. Hypothesis: if everything is a potential target to you, wouldn't that instil the worst case of choice-paralysis in a non-trivial percentage of a small group of people?
Hero License. I learned something. OK it is a variant of role model but also something more than that. This makes mores sense than anything else. BTW hero licensing is perhaps an actual case for things like affirmative action. Not for the purpose of the person getting in, but because the person getting in (initially through DEI, affirmative action or whatever) sets an example for later generations that people "like you" have license to be in "that kind" of job.