>Reemphasizing his theme, Gladwell continuously reminds the reader that genius is not the only or even the most important thing when determining a person's success. Using an anecdote to illustrate his claim, he discusses the story of Christopher Langan, a man who ended up owning a horse farm in rural Missouri despite having an IQ of 195 (Gladwell claims that Einstein's was 150).[2] Gladwell points out that Langan has not reached a high level of success because of the dysfunctional environment in which he grew up. With no one in Langan's life and nothing in his background to help him take advantage of his exceptional gifts, he had to find success by himself. "No one--not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses--ever makes it alone", writes Gladwell.[2]
>tfw owning your own horse farm is considered a failure
>tfw can't even achieve that because you have no one to help you
Well it's true. He could have done amazing things.
>>29611607
Intelligence is not inherently coupled with high ambitions. If a genius is happy to be a farmer, what's the problem?
>>29611097
it's not considered a failure in general. only a failure in relation to having the potential of an ubergenius.
>>29611097
You still need the natural ability. All Gladwell is saying is that you can't be amazing unless you have natural talent+good upbringing. A 4/10 dude with a great upbringing and support isn't going to be pulling in pussy left and right. A 7/10 with a good upbringing can. This goes for all other ventures in life.
>>29611670
All that matters for the ubergenius is what he wants. If he wants to own a a horse farm so be it. In fact the ubergenius who is happy and has a horse farm is more accomplished than the ubergenius who won a noble prize in physics but is miserable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QA0gjyXG5O0
Christopher Langan is a really weird and interesting person. He actually advocates eugenics.
>>29611804
No shit, all rich people do.
>>29611097
>Gladwell claims that Einstein's was 150
>chris langan isn't successful because he hasn't been widely published in scientific journals
160 is the accepted estimate for einstein and langan has stated that he dropped out of college because it was too easy and he thought his professors were idiots
>>29611804
>He actually advocates eugenics.
he wants to breed intelligence, nothing wrong with that
>>29611804
Oh god he's literally plebbit personified, all the edgy sophomoric sociopolitical theory bullshit that everyone grows out of.
>implying he lives on a farm due to lack of success
>>29611859
He's actually been low class most of his life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Langan#cite_note-20
Langan took a string of labor-intensive jobs for some time, and by his mid-40s had been a construction worker, cowboy, Forest Service Ranger, farmhand, and, for over twenty years, a bouncer on Long Island.
>>29611894
>taking a television interview seriously
how else do you think he's going to communicate his values to the masses? he can't elaborate or he'll be misunderstood, so he needs to water it down and speak in the most general terms. when you're extremely intelligent, dumbing yourself down is a calculated risk.
>>29611929
I don't think that "I fuck horses so I devised an autistic theory that we must breed people like horses and I'll be the one to decide on the criteria because I'm the smartest man in the universe" needs any further elaboration, every single alt right retard is obsessed with that.
You know (((who))) invented that btw, right?
>>29611971
jesus christ are you one of them feeler types or do you literally just think in memes
>>29611993
>feeler types
What, like the ones in Japanese subways?
>>29611971
Can someone tell me what (((this))) means? I keep seeing it.
>>29611971
>>29611894
I bet you are the type of person who thinks "fedora" is the end-all argument against atheism
>>29612023
It's the "coincidence detector" meme. Basically, a browser addon appeared that put brackets against all people confirmed as Jewish in articles and shit you read on the internet, the name being a reference to the "coincidence" that every time you see something that's ruinous to the western society, you scroll down and coincidentally the dude who wrote it is in brackets.
This got into the news as THE ANTISEMITIC BROWSER ADDON THAT LITERALLY CALLS FOR ANOTHER SHOAH and caused a huge media shitstorm.
So now brackets are just used to denote the nebulous concept of international jewry, the rockefellers, the lizard people, The Man, etc.
>>29612003
fuck you, i kek'd though
>>29612080
>against
*around, ESL goddamnit
>>29611097
> reading a book on "success"
>>29612080
Okay, thanks. This comment is 99,9998% original.
On Chris Langan--
He's a smart guy, sure. I have a hard time taking anyone seriously who puts a lot of stock in IQ tests. They're little more than a measure of pattern recognition, and indicate an abstraction of capacity for pattern recognition. They're not measures of smartness. Langan knows this and like another anon said in this thread he is watering down his train of thought to be easily communicable. And that's alright.
But there are reasons this dudes "model of the universe" has no scholastic traction. It's riddled with esoteric language and non-quantifiable bullshit. Whenever Langan comes up against something he can't work his way out of analytically, he resorts to rhetoric under the guise of cheap phenomenology. He's a smart guy, but he's also a pompous ass and there are reasons his theory isn't considered by anyone with actual clout. There's a reason he had to make his own "foundation for smart people" instead of sharing his ideas with the prolifics. I'm all for an avant garde reading of something or some set of things, but his work on a Theory of Everything is built on an esoteric foundation and leans on phenomenological crutches where his "math" can't hack it. It's very purely hobbyist pseudo science.
Look at this guy's list of credentials: no power reviewed scholarly publications, and dozens of day-time TV appearances. Is this really the guy who has the whole universe figured despite all the mean smallminds forcing their bureaucracy between him and his precious divine insights? Nah.
Also my IQ is 150 before anyone tries to meme me.
>>29612678
>no power reviewed scholarly publications
Wow. Didn't know your credibility depended on having those.
>>29611097
this can be viewed another way, it means you don't need any special talents to make it
don't hav anyone to help you? just brute force it, go around manipulating and bugging people, eventually some of them will give you pointers, then you can use sheer force of will to figure the rest out
>>29613036
Peer reviewed*
You don't understand the correlation? You don't understand the criticism of Langan's work?
Publication doesn't decry credibility, of course, and i didn't say that nor did I mean to imply it. But Langan isn't being kept out of respectable circles of academics for any reason other than the fact that his work is flimsy as fuck, and its not hard to see that.
He is very intelligent. He is also a rhetorician. It's amusing that he doesn't see himself as one, though.
>>29613118
Also i should add, as his IQ demonstrates, dude is incredibly adept at pattern recognition. He equates the matter-information question to Cartesian mind-body duality in one paper (if I remember it right) and while its a compelling illustration, he never actually offers anything. He rarely is able to conclude anything. Langan can make fascinating comparisons all day but he is oddly hard on presenting quantifiable new materials, or reading information on such a way that it reveals anything that isn't esoteric.
>>29611607
Horse farmers make bank
How is living in a rural area owning a farm not success? That is my goal in life, to own a lot of land in a rural area and not have to put up with people in a big city. And besides, owning a lot of land and a farm is a great way to make money
>>29611097
Isn't it obvious though, that successful people, no matter their genetics or had work, also had opportunities and took them?
> Bill Gates in his youth had access to a computer at a time where 99% of people hadn't.
> Mandelbrot couldn't go to school but his grand-dad taught him high level maths which let him catch on and go to Uni.
This book is saying nothing new and is actually watering it down. I cringe everytime people talk about the "10 000 hours rule" like any skill is just about putting in the hours.
All studies actually point to the contrary: athletes and musicians study both harder/longer AND differently from amateurs.
>>29613390
It sounds like he's more of a philosopher than a scientist.
>>29615656
Anyone with a Steam account knows that hours alone aren't enough.
>>29612678
>I have a hard time taking anyone seriously who puts a lot of stock in IQ tests
>my IQ is 150
was this a clever joke?
>>29616090
>was this a clever joke?
low IQlets, when will they learn?
>>29613390
>the matter-information question
What's that? I can't find anything on it
>>29611804
This is puerile. Being smart doesn't make you wise it seems
>>29612061
Langan isn't even atheistic, moron
>>29616993
The gist is that someone posits matter isn't the basis of reality, information is. Someone else rebuts that this (informational reductionism) is just as problematic as other types of reductionism because information is meaningless without matter. Some third faggot might try to hold that meaning isnt a thing in this case, and then he would be told that meaning in this context is constituted by information having a measurable effect on physical reality.
A common example, and the one I think he cities in his paper is the case of proteins in DNA. Since the information embodied in a string of DNA or proteins cannot effect the material dynamic of reality without being "read" by a material transducer, the information encoded therein is meaningless in its own right.
Which is a bit stupid to my mind because the information constitutes a thing which can be read by a material transducer, rendering it a real object whether it's intelligible or not. The act of being read and translated into another form doesn't mean in any way that the thing being read wasn't already a thing to begin with.
In any case his """"paper"""" was published in like 200X, so none of it takes into account the existence of shit like the Higgo McBoson, which is some pretty hard evidence for the "realistic" influence of pure information in terms of it literally generating mass and matter.
>>29617157
Isn't energy the most fundamental form of anything though? I thought that's what QFT says.
I'm just a layman though, all of this is above me, but I still like to read about it.
>>29612678
Who cares what your IQ is? Having insight into the universe may be the province of those above a certain IQ threshold but what it really comes down to is maturity, grounding and good articulation. Its not a complex analytical process.
>>29617216
I think the most important thing to grasp here, with respect both to this topic and to Langan at large, is that its all in the realm of trying to contend with the border between abstraction and figure.
Information is an abstract concept, and the effects it has on things are physically measurable. Langan uses rhetoric to sail past this line, and seems to delight in splashing around.
To be frank with you I'm a layman myself and am not really sure how energy plugs in to the debate between information and not information. And my IQ is only genius level, I'm not as smart as le smart day-time talk show man
>>29617315
Well my understand of quantum field theory is that every particle has its own field. A particle itself is just a packet of energy in that field. So an electron actually isn't an election, it's an excitation in the electron field. Apparently that's why the LHC works. They collide protons together with such large amounts of energy that the energy from the collision 'spills over' (no idea how) into other fields, making different particles appear.
>>29617374
Right so this is why I'm interested in how Higgs plugs into his criticism of informational reductivism. Because, so far as I understand, the Higgs field is analogous to the DNA transducer which is effected by energy/information of certain types, and produced various particles of different types.
So matter isn't really a thing at that scale, it's all excitations of a pervasive field by abstract objects (?)
Also i like reading about this shit too. Quantum by Manjit Kumar was a great read. What have you been reading?
>>29617456
I've barely read anything whether energy, information or matter are the most fundamental. So I wouldn't have any idea.
I'm not really sure. I always thought particles were supposed to be little of energy in different fields, with all the different particles interacting to make matter.
I can't focus enough to read books. I like to watch lectures on youtube, read non-popsci articles online, and read discussions on places like Quora. If I could focus on reading books I'd read nonstop.
Whenever I try my mind starts to think about other things while I sit and read. So I'll read the book, but I won't take in the information being presented to me.
>>29617110
I never said he was. Assuming you are the person I was responding to, you think association with something undesirable discredits an argument.
>every single alt right retard is obsessed with that
>plebbit personified
>edgy, sophmoric
if you think any of these are good points, you are either retarded or a woman.
>wtf is this guy doin here
btw good book
>>29617574
Cool you would probably meet the diagnostic criteria for ADHD-i.
> inb4 meme condition
Anyway if you want to try being able to focus, this qualifies you for buying prescription speed.
> inb4 overpriced
Ok so buy some on a dark market if you want to try it. But research these things first and don't overdo it.
