Darwin, Bach, and Professional Decline

What’s the difference between Bach and Darwin? Both were preternaturally gifted and widely known early in life. Both attained permanent fame posthumously. Where they differed was in their approach to the midlife fade. When Darwin fell behind as an innovator, he became despondent and depressed; his life ended in sad inactivity. When Bach fell behind, he reinvented himself as a master instructor. He died beloved, fulfilled, and—though less famous than he once had been—respected. The less...

 The Science of Wisdom

A bulk of research has already shown that this kind of third-person thinking can temporarily improve decision making. Now a preprint at PsyArxiv finds that it can also bring long-term benefits to thinking and emotional regulation. The researchers said this was ‘the first evidence that wisdom-related cognitive and affective processes can be trained in daily life, and of how to do so’. [...] Grossmann’s aim is to build a strong experimental footing for the study of wisdom, which had lon...

 Specific Family Characteristics and IQ

When we look at individual families, watch the ways in which they interact with their infants or young chil¬ dren, and then follow the children over time to see which ones later have high or low IQs, we can begin to get some sense of the kinds of specific family Ltei of this type has led me to the following list of five general characteristics of families whose children achieve higher IQ scores: They provide an interesting and complex physical environment for the child, in¬ eluding play m...

 The Authoritative Parenting Style

The most influential proposal about such styles has come from Diana Baumrind (1972), who has looked at combinations of four of the dimensions I've just described: (1) warmth or nurturance, (2) level of expectations, which she describes in terms of "maturity demands," (3) the clarity and consistency of rules, and (4) communication between parent and child. Baumrind saw three specific combinations of these characteristics: • The authoritarian parental style is high in control and maturity d...

 Reading Wars of the 1990s

WHOLE-language theory holds that learning to read and write English is analogous to learning to speak it -- a natural, unconscious process best fostered by unstructured immersion. In an atmosphere rich in simple printed texts and in reading aloud, small children make a wondrous associative leap from knowing the alphabet to being able to read whole words. Their minds receive print as if each word were a Chinese ideogram. If a word is unfamiliar it can be skipped, guessed at, or picked up from ...

 Consider the Longevity of the Knowledge You Consume

While most of us focus on consuming information that we won’t care about next month, let alone next year, Buffett focused on knowledge and companies that change very, very slowly or not at all. And because the information he was learning changed slowly he could compound his knowledge over time. And as Schroeder notes, Buffett has been in business for a long time, giving him incredible opportunities to create a cumulative base of knowledge. Expiring information is sexy but it’s not knowle...

 The Insecure Overachiever

Exacerbating this problem, elite professional organizations deliberately set out to identify and recruit “insecure overachievers” — some leading professional organizations explicitly use this terminology, though not in public. Insecure overachievers are exceptionally capable and fiercely ambitious, yet driven by a profound sense of their own inadequacy. This typically stems from childhood, and may result from various factors, such as experience of financial or physical deprivation, or a...

 Knowledge Work

The growing importance of knowledge as an economic resource reflects the fact that, as economies and production technologies develop, they become ever more complex and specialized, leading to increasing coordination costs. In the language of information economics, the organizational or informational task of coordinating the diverse steps in the productive chain grows, as the number of transactions within and among productive units increases (Joncher, 1983). Logically, the increasingly complex...

 New Kind of Memory for AI

AI researchers have typically tried to get around the issues posed by by Montezuma’s Revenge and Pitfall! by instructing reinforcement-learning algorithms to explore randomly at times, while adding rewards for exploration—what’s known as “intrinsic motivation.” But the Uber researchers believe this fails to capture an important aspect of human curiosity. “We hypothesize that a major weakness of current intrinsic motivation algorithms is detachment,” they write. “Wherein the a...

 Mental States in Gamer Mastery

Learning State While in the learning state of mind your objective should be to concentrate on learning and experimentation. You should play to win, and take matches seriously, but not be afraid to try different strategies for the purpose of learning. In this state you aim to maximize your learning, not your win-percentage. Feel free to think about your moves, what would have happened if you took another route, what you are going to try in the next matchup and so on. It is only beneficial to...