<story><title>Childhoods of Exceptional People</title><url>https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CYN7swrefEss4e3Qe/childhoods-of-exceptional-people</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jhanschoo</author><text>I like how this author&amp;#x27;s cursory research was so scientific that it fails to consider and control for all the other aristocratic children from those eras that his list is from who had tutors, connections, and apprenticeships and failed nevertheless to become &amp;quot;exceptional&amp;quot;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jhanschoo</author><text>Add.: to substantiate, and argue against replies mentioning that this is a sufficient but not necessary condition, my impression is that that was the dominant form education took back then. Over half of Virginia Woolf, Lev Tolstoy, John von Neumann, Blaise Pascal, Alan Turing, Bertrand Russell, René Descartes, Mozart, and Bach were children before standardized testing (and schooling I think?) became widespread.&lt;p&gt;If the form of education we receive today was not widespread or present in their lives, and their dominant form of education did not have any statistically significant benefit in cultivating people to be exceptional, we would still see the same phenomenon that the post author has observed, that exceptional people mostly emerged from the dominant form of education system that they had.</text></comment>
<story><title>Childhoods of Exceptional People</title><url>https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CYN7swrefEss4e3Qe/childhoods-of-exceptional-people</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jhanschoo</author><text>I like how this author&amp;#x27;s cursory research was so scientific that it fails to consider and control for all the other aristocratic children from those eras that his list is from who had tutors, connections, and apprenticeships and failed nevertheless to become &amp;quot;exceptional&amp;quot;.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>traject_</author><text>That could mean it is a necessary but not sufficient condition; I don&amp;#x27;t think your observation by itself invalidates anything the author said.</text></comment>