[extropy-chat] it's all understandable, except

[Ben Goertzel]

On 11/5/06, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky <sentience at pobox.com> wrote:
> Lee Corbin wrote:
> >
> > You missed my point, which was my fault:  I should have stressed
> > this:  the very brightest  (the ones that I complain are too few) make
> > out well NO MATTER WHAT.  You can't wreck them.  It's just
> > sad when they can coast their last few years in the school system,
> > and the parents (of these very few) often won't stand for it.

Hmmm... I feel that, in this point of yours, "making out well" is
poorly-defined.

For instance, one of the brightest, most creative, most broadly
thoughtful math physics/students I knew in college, stopped studying
technical subjects after getting his BS in physics from Stanford, and
became a lawyer.  He just got frustrated with the need to work on
boring, conformist topics for N years in order to get tenure, before
you get to work on the stuff that really interests you.  He's a damn
good labor lawyer, working in DC, but had the university system been
of a different nature, I bet he would have been pushed in a different
direction, and study with his early interest in science, and IMO the
world would have benefited considerably. (And, yeah, of course I wish
he had chosen to fight against the stupider aspects of the academic
establishment, like myself and many others ... but not every very
bright person makes this choice...)

In another (very different) case I remember, there was a friend of a
friend of my mother's who was very gifted in mathematics, but from a
very poor neighborhood in Philadelphia.  He did well in high school
and got a scholarship to go to a university in Oklahoma; but he was
living off campus and his roommate committed suicide and he couldn't
cover the rent himself and wound up coming back home to Philly.  To
make the $$ to go back to school again he took up an occupation
suiting his math ability and the local neighborhood: "numbers
running", i.e. managing an illegal sports-betting operation....  This
wound up being so lucrative he never went back to school; he now has 9
kids and is making a really good living, far more $$ than most
professors ... so, yeah, he's using his brains to "make out OK" too...
;-)

Ben g





>
> I think the school system came within inches of wrecking me permanently,
> and if I'd actually been forced through high school, especially a
> non-Gunn-class high school, that might have been it.
>
> Selection bias, Lee.  You don't see the wrecked ones.  They don't look
> like the "very brightest" any more.
>
> --
> Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://singinst.org/
> Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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