Sunday, January 31, 2016

Sunday conversation: STS winner != Nobel Prize winner

From the New York Times and its book advertisements thinkpieces, a really dumb conclusion from Wharton professor Adam Evans:
THEY learn to read at age 2, play Bach at 4, breeze through calculus at 6, and speak foreign languages fluently by 8. Their classmates shudder with envy; their parents rejoice at winning the lottery. But to paraphrase T. S. Eliot, their careers tend to end not with a bang, but with a whimper. 
Consider the nation’s most prestigious award for scientifically gifted high school students, the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, called the Super Bowl of science by one American president. From its inception in 1942 until 1994, the search recognized more than 2000 precocious teenagers as finalists. But just 1 percent ended up making the National Academy of Sciences, and just eight have won Nobel Prizes. For every Lisa Randall who revolutionizes theoretical physics, there are many dozens who fall far short of their potential...
Wait a minute, is this guy actually arguing that all STS winners have the potential to be Nobel Prize winners? That is a wildly wrong statement; what if a STS winner chooses to be an undergraduate biology professor? No chance of a Nobel there - are they falling short of their potential? This is also evidence to me that Professor Evans has no idea about what it takes to win a Nobel Prize in the sciences.

Here's his concluding paragraphs:
Evidence shows that creative contributions depend on the breadth, not just depth, of our knowledge and experience. In fashion, the most original collections come from directors who spend the most time working abroad. In science, winning a Nobel Prize is less about being a single-minded genius and more about being interested in many things. Relative to typical scientists, Nobel Prize winners are 22 times more likely to perform as actors, dancers or magicians; 12 times more likely to write poetry, plays or novels; seven times more likely to dabble in arts and crafts; and twice as likely to play an instrument or compose music. 
No one is forcing these luminary scientists to get involved in artistic hobbies. It’s a reflection of their curiosity. And sometimes, that curiosity leads them to flashes of insight. “The theory of relativity occurred to me by intuition, and music is the driving force behind this intuition,” Albert Einstein reflected. His mother enrolled him in violin lessons starting at age 5, but he wasn’t intrigued. His love of music only blossomed as a teenager, after he stopped taking lessons and stumbled upon Mozart’s sonatas. “Love is a better teacher than a sense of duty,” he said. 
Hear that, Tiger Moms and Lombardi Dads? You can’t program a child to become creative. Try to engineer a certain kind of success, and the best you’ll get is an ambitious robot. If you want your children to bring original ideas into the world, you need to let them pursue their passions, not yours.
I'm sympathetic to the idea that art helps people become creative or think differently, but I think this is a lot of post hoc reasoning meant to sell the author's book. 

27 comments:

  1. Pffft... Only 8 have won Nobel Prizes? What a pathetic group of people.

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  2. I like the basic message to parents in the end, which is give your children some flexibility to be themselves and don't expect a certain outcome. I wish my parents had gotten this message.

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    1. I agree. I grew up in the free-range 70's and 80's and happened to go the the same high school as Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, although they were there much earlier. Steve Wozniak came back to give a speech to the students, and spent the whole time telling us about what F&^%ups he and Steve Jobs were and all the pranks they used to pull. I don't think the school administrators were particularly happy about the speech, but it was entertaining and made a big impression.

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    2. Huh. We may have been in the same school district. Expectations are high in that area, especially in the wealthier parts of town....

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    3. Small world, NMH! There are seemingly a large number of chemists from the district. I've met 4 or 5 just in my subfield.

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  3. The stats in your second quote are interesting. Further evidence that forcing [young] organic chemists (for example) to have no external interests is generally a bad thing.

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  4. Hah. CJ, I could tell you stories, but you would presumably have no interest.

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    1. Don't tease us, now, CG. Put up or shut up.

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    2. Nah. You know me. Too busy looking for work. Besides, if I start telling stories, then we both know what will happen. One day, as a last resort, I will write a book, which might bring in a little bit cash.

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    3. Let me guess, you lived in the shadow of your father, never quite meeting his lofty achievements, and never failing to feel like a huge disappointment.

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    4. Yep. I will freely admit that. He is/was National Geographic/routine PNAS material. But he made his mark back in the good old days.

      NMH, if you and all of the adjuncts who are reading this want to be teased, then I will draw your attention to the following article (if you don't already know it): http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/04/the-adjunct-professor-crisis/361336/ Two salient points therefrom

      (1) The adjunct movement and union mentioned therein, "New Faculty Majority". They are getting advice from the United Auto Workers on how to deal with the imbalance of power between administrators and adjuncts.They might provide adjuncts with some advice about how to deal with the treat of being fired.

      (2) A short quote from the article: "If administrators are faced with the possibility of lower rankings because of the proportion of adjuncts on their faculty, Feal believes they will change their hiring practices. “Accreditors could change this game overnight,”" In fact, as you will remember, that was why I suggested to the Unemployment Task Force that ACS accrediting be made contingent on a certain percentage of teaching hours be taught by full time faculty. That would really take the steam out of all those community colleges which need someone to teach General Chemistry, Organic Chemistry and lab sections. Also all of those little hunky-dory colleges (feel the Berm).

      There are some folks on these web sites who dispute the fact that I am a real person. Hopefully, they will finally get the idea (CJ, please don't erase this :-) )

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    5. ops, that's "threat", not "treat".

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  5. I would suspect that the overwhelming majority of those 2000 students were successful professionally unless some accident or disease prevented them from doing so.

    Most of my college friends are "top few percenters", and I can only think of maybe two or three people who are not successful professionals, depending on how you define it. Are they winning Nobels? No, but they are doctors, lawyers, scientists, professors, engineers, mid-level-and-rising corporate managers or bureaucrats, etc.

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    1. Yeah, I am flummoxed by the author's seeming expectation that they all coulda been Nobel Prize winners. Not all D1 quarterbacks play in the NFL, and not all great NFL quarterbacks make the HoF.

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    2. The author clearly is not familiar with the base rate fallacy.

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    3. Chad your suspicions appear correct as the article does state "many prodigies become experts in their fields and leaders in their organizations" hence does appear to me mistake about that single achievement metric for defining a expected proposed correlation (where CJs good point about the nonsense reasoning applies, I wonder can we reverse this to suggest there should be more actors, dancers and magicians required to work in labs (God help us all)?). Probably the program did ID students who had the potential for becoming strong scientist although circumstances in College are beyond took them down different roads (truly smart ones likely observed the tougher challenges in pursuing science as their professions verses seeking medical, legal or business careers)

      All that said I do think the article has certain nice points about nurturing creativity via Joy and Passion with resistance to potential harm from narrow or overdone training. I have observed most people have touches of creativity, albeit often applies in limited subjects, which education may impede rather than build on. A few rare individuals have greater inherent creativity in set areas or more diversely, that still can be stifled however will guidance and direction will come out.

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    4. Over that period, there are only 159 possible Chemistry winners; if you count Physics and Medicine, you could get at most 477 people who could win Nobel Prizes in related fields, or something less than a quarter. Even if that happened (somehow), would you then say that the other 3/4 of the finalists obviously didn't live up to their potential?

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  6. Yeah, I could have easily won a Nobel if my old man didn't hit me on the head when I did something wrong, or he came home back from work tired and I annoyed him. That's at least 20IQ points right there probably, especially if you get a headache after the hit (and I had headaches pretty often as a kid). Because of that, my broad interests didn't include acting or writing poems, but playing lots of grand strategy video games and some 1st person shooters. I blame the environment; now give me my consolation Nobel!

    Maybe all those STS Nobel losers had strict parents too. Or they never lucked out with a faculty position at a place where you can get an army of relatively competent workers to actually do all the reactions for you. Now you have to choose good projects, but if you didn't have an army of competent people to start with, you have no chance. You don't even have to be that ueber smart to take advantage of it in chemistry (don't know about physics though), and after a while your best ideas come from what the postdocs mentioned at group meeting during a research talk anyways.

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  7. Interesting "you're either a Nobel prize winner or a failure" criterion for success. I don't even want to know how shaky the statistics in the second paragraph are.

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  8. If they picked 2000 kids, and 8 of them won Nobel Prizes, I'd say they did a pretty good job. Considering the program went on until 1994, there may be some more winners in the decades to come.

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  9. And don't over supervise. If little Mick wants to write "I can't get no satisfaction", let him. Don't correct his grammar.

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  10. It would be interesting to see how many Nobel Prize winners in chemistry ever won first place (or any place) in a science fair. I would imagine it would be a mixed bag.
    I've been a science fair judge at a local science and technology high school. My impression is that the kids work very hard and are competitive with each other. Most of them do their projects at local universities and government labs - and it appeared to me that they basically parrot what they learn from those labs in their fair presentations. I didn't feel that any of these kids were geniuses, it is just that they work hard.
    Frankly, what I wanted to say to them all was "Put the books down. Enjoy your high school days. There will be plenty of opportunities in college to work hard. There will be plenty of opportunities to gobble up all this knowledge." But I didn't think this would go over so well.

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    1. I suspect a lot of good papers in scientific journals would get disqualified from a science fair for not having a clearly-stated hypothesis, i.e. following the "scientific method" as written in a grade-school textbook. Not knowing what will happen is a good reason to do an experiment!

      I volunteered to judge one of those things once. The kids who could get Mom or Dad to run some GC/MS's or whatever at Big Pharma Company generally steamrolled the ones who only had access to a kitchen, garage, etc.

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    2. I help judge part of a local science fair, and we generally try to take that out of account - partly seeing what they actually know about what they did (where thinking on your feet is helpful) and what kind of hypothesis they had (and how they would have come across it - how did you come up with your research?). It's imperfect, but we try.

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  11. No secondary education institution has ever produced more Nobel Laureates than the Bronx High School of Science. I am willing to bet that none of them won first place in the Westinghouse/Intel contest.

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  12. "I wonder can we reverse this to suggest there should be more actors, dancers and magicians required to work in labs "

    Actually, the internet poster which I prepared to run in parallel with the Unemployment Task Force discusses exactly this point. A (unstated) logical corollary of the policies proposed in the poster is that faculty should get back in the lab and do their own research. Because they already have jobs.

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