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The Real-Life Doogie Howser
An anonymous reader writes "Sho Yano this week will become the youngest student to get an M.D. from University of Chicago. He was reading at age 2, writing by 3, and composing music by his 5th birthday. He graduated from Loyola University in three years — summa cum laude, no less. When he entered U. of C.'s prestigious Pritzker School of Medicine at 12, it was into one of the school's most rigorous programs, where students get both their doctorate and medical degrees. Intelligence is not Yano's only gift — though according to a test he took at age 4, his IQ is too high to accurately measure and is easily above genius level. He is an accomplished pianist who has performed at Ravinia, and he has a black belt in tae kwon do. Classmates and faculty described him as 'sweet' and 'humble,' a hardworking, Bach-adoring, Greek literature-quoting student. And in his own words, 'I may not be the most outgoing person, but I do like to be around people.'"
>Despite his gifts, success was not guaranteed. Several medical schools wanted no part of him because of maturity questions. Even at Pritzker, some faculty members worried they would be robbing him of a normal adolescence. On a college campus, he was a natural target for wisecracks. Some asked harsh questions about whether his mother was pushing him somewhere he didn't belong.
Now Imagine if he had mutant powers...
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
[citation needed]
Sounds like he's headed to spend the next five years as a pediatrician resident. What strikes me is this: After all the acceleration, does he end up simple having a professional career that's ten years longer than normal? Without some exceptional accomplishments along the way, it might not have been the best trade-off.
Yeah, most of the best parts of college are not the classroom stuff at all. I feel sorry for people who miss out on that, as the social stuff is the one part of college you can't come back to 20 years later or even a few years earlier.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
My father was someone like that, IQ literally off the charts, used by the University of Chicago to help calibrate IQ tests for people with IQ's over 200. Multiple degrees for the sake of multiple degrees, the whole nine yards. Did his buddy's doctorate thesis for his PhD in an unrelated field just to help him out, and his buddy is now a leading expert in his field. People's expectations were off the charts with how they how wanted to exploit him. His own expectations of himself and others became unfathomably high.
Had trouble his entire life connecting to normal people, even people of normal genius level intelligence had trouble relating with him. He thought so far ahead of everyone else that he even thought ahead of himself. When you spend so much time thinking past tomorrow you have trouble living for today. The result was this life was a mess and the practical details of his life were something that I often had to to take care of for him.
Being a genius is an accident of birth, being a genius compared to other geniuses is arguably more of a curse than a gift. In the end the longer he lived the more he learned to dumb himself down when around others. It was a social survival skill. I do not envy the person in this article.
IF only the school systems in america werent structured how they are I imagine that we could have many folks finishing schooling much earlier than 18 and college a few years later..
I know many students who were held back merely because they had to wait to go on to the next year.. at best put in an "advanced placement" course..
we could easily have students graduating highschool at 14 or 15 ...if not sooner.. with the 'smart' ones beating that.. all of the time.. but.... it just doesnt seem to happen
I do wish people would stop using that as some sort of gauge of intelligence - it has very little to do with intelligence, and just modernity.
Sure, but the only thing worse than an IQ test is every other form of intelligence measure. Claiming that the test has issues (it does) should not be used to divert attention from the fact that some people are very smart while others are mind-bogglingly stupid.
It's like saying that thermometers suck because they don't account for wind chill, humidex, UV exposure or different peoples' metabolism. You may be correct, but I'm still going to check the temperature before going outside.
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
Please excuse jgtg32a, he didn't get into MENSA, either.
:-)
I do wish people would stop using that as some sort of gauge of intelligence - it has very little to do with intelligence, and just modernity.
[citation needed]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iq#Criticism_and_views
Perhaps you just don't hear about their childhoods after they've found success, but I always hear stories about these geniuses graduated X years early, but rarely about their professional accomplishments.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
As such, the path he has chosen is good news for diseased children. However, humanity as a species isn't affected by those personnal tragedies he decided to focus on. On the other hand, there's a number of subjects in physics, genetics or even medecine that could have had a much wider impact.
Yes, I'm aware such a way of thinking classifies into the cold-hearted bastards category.
I hate having to RTFM just to find the one key point.
Editors: Stop burying your leads!
Except for, you know, all the things the IQ predicts with strong correlation. You know, useful extrapolation, a fundamental tenant of science. Within that category of things, there's all sorts of things IQ is useful as a predictive gauge for:
*Productivity of new employees without previous experience in the field
*Income(up until about IQ 120, where huge diminishing returns take effect)
*Crime rates and recidivism rates
*Lifespan
*Chance of acquiring an advanced degree
*Political views
You know, other than all those major, life-impacting things, IQ doesn't predict anything.
I believe judging an individual on a single characteristic is both pointless and wrong. I just take issue with the meme that IQ is somehow irrelevant or useless as a means to understanding human intelligence. It reflects an ignorance of the observed reality we live in.
I don't know any genius level people, but I know 3 who were fast-tracked through high school and graduated very prestigious colleges at 17/18. They all went on to get PhDs, and they all failed out for the same reason: sometime during their PhD they wanted to try to re-live their youth as they should have, and began acting like teenagers again again. Drinking, partying, getting in trouble.... these guys were the smartest guys I knew, but each one, on their own, managed to derail their careers because they completely missed their youth.
Not saying this kid is in any danger of going down the same path... maybe his massive intellect will divert him from temptation. But every time I hear about someone graduating college exceedingly young, I always wonder when their fuse is going to run out.
I don't think there are stupid people. Just people who are smart in different ways, and I don't think I'm the only one.
Please spend an afternoon in a jury selection pool and then let us know if you'd like to change your hypothesis.
real geniuses produce breakthroughs in art, science and technology. paper geniuses collect academic credentials.
so far all this kid has proved is that he has the academic game figured out.
Yes, people are smart in different ways. Some people excel in multiple categories. Others barely budge the needle across the board. The latter are what we call 'stupid people'.
Have gnu, will travel.
I do wish people would stop using that as some sort of gauge of intelligence - it has very little to do with intelligence, and just modernity.
[citation needed]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iq#Criticism_and_views
Now that's just plain funny...
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
A TV show about a boy genius doctor from 1989-1993.
Now, please get off the damned lawn. ;-)
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I don't think there are stupid people. Just people who are smart in different ways,[...]
Someone clearly didn't work in tech support when he/she was younger.
Six months of that and it should be pretty clear to anyone with a couple of neurons still firing that yes, there are stupid people. In fact, stupid people are very likely to call tech support, not just because their internet connection is down but because the power is out, they don't like their neighbor or they just plain feel like yelling profanities at someone who works for a company they have no relationship to.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Okay, let's extend the analogy further.
So you've proven that a thermometer provides inadequate data to make the decision on how to plan one's dress for the day.
You've then implied that perhaps IQ tests as measuring tools are similarly faulty.
But surely your solution to this is not to abandon thermometers in favor of other measurements exclusively? Surely the correct thing to do is to use thermometers in concert with the other data they cannot provide. Much as is done in practice in meteorology today.
And if that *is* the correct approach, how does it discredit the use of IQ tests? Would they not continue to be appropriate for use (assuming the analogy is a valid one) in concert with other data that they cannot measure, just as thermometers are?
Does this not support Lev13than's ultimate point that the test may not provide all desirable useful data, but it none the less still provides useful data?
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
Davidson, who was on the same OB-GYN rotation, recalled the teenage Yano's reaction to witnessing his first birth. "He just looked at all of us and said, 'There's got to be a better way.'"
What is generally recognized though is that the accuracy of the test also diminishes at greater than 120. Richard Feynman had an IQ of 'only' 125.
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CGIQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FRichard_Feynman&ei=re7MT9foDIKE8ATci_2lDg&usg=AFQjCNFlZ7QHTlH2GfvFMOBQXefQcbolfQ
love is just extroverted narcissism
Yeah, most of the best parts of college are not the classroom stuff at all. I feel sorry for people who miss out on that, as the social stuff is the one part of college you can't come back to 20 years later or even a few years earlier.
That is so true -- and, in fact, I would say it applies much more to intellectual socialization than to things like frat parties and beer binges.
The social aspect of college seems to have shifted over recent decades to encompass more and more non-academic things. (Many studies have shown that students 50 years ago spent a lot more time studying, etc.) But many of the most important aspects of my intellectual development happened in college due to conversations I could have with peers, whether it was stuff related directly to class or random philosophical debates with the guy next door at 3am.
I imagine that it would be a lot harder for a pre-teen or young adolescent in a college to build up the kind of relationships with significantly older students that could result in such intellectual socialization.
This is just a random theory, but I've wondered whether a lot of the awkwardness and "weirdness" we see in prodigies -- and their frequent inability to continue success at the same level as adults -- isn't just because of the lack of normal emotional social skills, but rather because they don't tend to work closely enough with peers at the appropriate level who are working through similar problems as they learn material (even if they are a decade older). Most very young prodigies tend to be taught by adults who often have things sort of "figured out" (or they think they do), but I feel like I learned the most from conversations with other peers in college who were actively trying to figure stuff on the same level... that exploration seems to be an essential skill in moving from the great "absorbing" and problem-solving skills most prodigies possess to the ability to do more creative and productive work as an adult.
Or, to put it another way: eventually, there are no more math books with "challenge problems" in the back, and you need to have some sort of intellectual skills to figure out what to do after that, unless your greatest goal in life is to join MENSA and do puzzles all day. Having productive intellectual socialization with peers in college and graduate school seems, to me, to be one way you learn how to think about the sorts of problems the rest of the world might actually be interested in, once there are no more introverted "academic" challenges to complete.
Unless you were making some kind of obscure pun, I believe the word you were looking for is 'correlation' not 'coordination'....
Yeah, correlation doesn't necessarily imply coordination. I thought everyone knew that.
If he's that bright, he'll be earning mad money before he's 25. If he's earning 100k+ by that age, he'll be driving a Porsche and banging chicks like a rock star.
Sorry, but that easily replaces a childhood with toys.
What's sad is that you identify this kid as sad because he was rushed to adulthood, when there are millions of kids also robbed of their childhood because of poverty, and a lack of opportunity to advance like this kid did, simply because they were born into some shithole.
And that shithole could even be in the USA -- many areas of this country are devastated by crime and poverty -- some kids don't even get to make it to his age, they are killed by stray gunfire, or in some even worse places (in the third world), sold off to slavers, or turned into child soldiers. Other kids here in the USA join gangs because there is no other choice.
If he makes good money while he's young enough to enjoy it, it will trump any and all childhood 'play'. Don't be sad for this kid, turn your empathy towards those that actually need it.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
"Maybe intelligence is too variable, complex and human to be measured in a single number?"
Anything can be measured in a single number, the question is 'how useful and predictive' is this number? With IQ, the empirical answer is "reasonably but not universally predictive".
There actually is a technical point behind IQ. If you measure performance across all sorts of cognitive (and sometimes other) aspects, appropriately normalize the subscores and then look at the principal component (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_component_analysis) across large samples of individuals you observe a phenomenon: a significant (though not total) fraction of the variance can be explained by the single, largest principal component called 'g' in psychometric literature. This phenomenon did not have to be true empirically, but it is, and the degree to which it is true is also quantifiable.
In a nutshell, people who perform high or low on some subsets are also substantially more likely to perform high or low on other cognitively-oriented subtasks.
So, yes, "intelligence" does mean something and is a fact of Nature. Note, that of course, the subjects typically tested on an 'IQ' test have now been post-hoc chosen to be those which have high g-loading, i.e. are substantially correlated within individuals.
If the typically tested tasks had also included, for instance *) ability to sing on tune *) ability to catch thrown balls while running, *) ability to distinguish odors *) ability to discern emotions in faces, etc, all of which clearly require brainpower, their "loading on the principal component of IQ" would be substantially weaker than the correlation between performance on predicting numerical sequences and analogies in natural language.
I don't think there are stupid people. Just people who are smart in different ways
Is there any particular evidence to support your belief, or do you just hold to it because it's a nice, politically correct thing to believe into that doesn't offend anyone?
I spoke to your cat, she deserved it, that dissertation on tongue bathing was genius.
You may know him as Barney Stinson, or possibly Neil Patrick Harris.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere