科学与数学terrytao.wordpress.com编辑精选
做数学一定要是天才吗？
Does one have to be a genius to do maths?
2011 — 2015，它一次次回到首页
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陶哲轩（Terence Tao）在这篇职业建议文章中回应了一个经典焦虑：做数学是否必须天生是天才。他指出，数学界存在一种对“天才”的崇拜文化，容易打击年轻人的信心；即便承认个体在速度、经验、创造力上有差异，也不意味着只有“最好”的人才能做数学。他借用经济学中“绝对优势与比较优势”的区分，说明有趣的问题和工具组合远多于任何人能覆盖的范围，只要具备基本的教育、兴趣和才能，总能找到自己能做出扎实贡献的位置。
为什么经久不衰：来自当代最顶尖数学家之一的亲身回应，直面“天才崇拜”这一长期困扰数学学习者的心理障碍，且其论证可迁移到众多领域，因此反复被提起。
HN 评论精选
天才崇拜会毒害年轻人，作者以自身经历说明其危害。
这是一篇极好的博文，而且必须由陶哲轩这样成就的人来写。天才崇拜对年轻心灵极为有害，尤其在数学领域。我曾因家庭、老师和同辈的压力做过一些很蠢的事，不公平地拿历史上的巨匠来衡量自己在这个年纪该有什么成就。我拼命努力，却是在啃不可解的问题，而不是做哪怕早慧数学家也该做的合理研究。我的成绩下滑，是因为我以为自己能解决某个未解猜想，而不是像几乎所有成功的数学家那样一点点学工具。当你发现20岁生日已过、自己却不是伽罗瓦时，抑郁就会袭来。这话说出来很蠢，但人类心理本就充满为回避认知失调而生的荒唐行为。我们是有趣的肉机器。
jboggan查看英文原文
This is a fantastic blog post and it needed to come from someone as accomplished as Tao. The cult of genius can be very caustic to young minds, especially in mathematics. I used to do some rather stupid things out of a combined sense of pressure from family, teachers, and peers. I would compare myself unfairly to historical luminaries as a yardstick of what I should be accomplishing at what age. I worked incredibly hard, but on intractable problems and not on reasonable pieces of research for even a precocious mathematician. My grades suffered because I thought I was going to solve some open conjecture instead of learn the tools bit by bit like virtually every other successful mathematician had done before me. Depression can set in when you discover that your 20th birthday has passed and you are not Evariste Galois. I know it sounds stupid when it is phrased like that but human psychology is full of improbable behavior designed around avoiding cognitive dissonance. We're funny meatbots.
陶的建议可逐字迁移到创业等其他领域。
陶哲轩这篇博文里的每一条建议都逐字适用于许多其他领域——包括创业。以下是文中两段关键文字，只替换了几个词，把“数学家”换成“创业者”：即便你否认天才的说法，在任何一个时间点，总有一些创业者比别人更快、更有经验、知识更丰富、更高效、更谨慎或更有创造力。但这并不意味着只有“最好”的创业者才该创业；这是把绝对优势误当成比较优势的常见错误。有趣的商业机会和问题数量巨大，远非“最好”的创业者所能详尽覆盖；有时你拥有的工具或想法会找到其他优秀创业者忽略的东西，尤其考虑到哪怕最伟大的创业者在商业的某些方面仍有弱点。只要你有教育、兴趣和合理的才能，总会有某个市场机会让你做出扎实有用的贡献。它可能不是最光鲜的点子，但这往往是健康的；许多情况下，平淡的螺丝钉式点子实际上比花哨的点子更重要。而且，在涉足一个领域的光鲜部分之前，先在其非光鲜部分“磨牙”是必要的……
cs702查看英文原文
Every word of advice in this blog post by Terry Tao applies verbatim to many other fields -- including entrepreneurship. Here are two key paragraphs from his post, with just a few words searched & replaced so the text refers to "entrepreneurs" instead of "mathematicians:" Even if one dismisses the notion of genius, it is still the case that at any given point in time, some entrepreneurs are faster, more experienced, more knowledgeable, more efficient, more careful, or more creative than others. This does not imply, though, that only the “best” entrepreneurs should start companies; this is the common error of mistaking absolute advantage for comparative advantage. The number of interesting business opportunities and problems to work on is vast – far more than can be covered in detail just by the “best” entrepreneurs, and sometimes the set of tools or ideas that you have will find something that other good entrepreneurs have overlooked, especially given that even the greatest entrepreneurs still have weaknesses in some aspects of business. As long as you have education, interest, and a reasonable amount of talent, there will be some market opportunity where you can make a solid and useful contribution. It might not be the most glamorous idea, but actually this tends to be a healthy thing; in many cases the mundane nuts-and-bolts ideas turn out to actually be more important than fancy ones. Also, it is necessary to “cut one’s teeth” on the non-glamorous parts of a field before one really has any chance at all to tackle hard problems; take a look at the early efforts of any of today’s great entrepreneurs to see what I mean by this. In some cases, an abundance of raw talent may end up (somewhat perversely) to actually be harmful for one’s long-term professional development; if success comes too easily, for instance, one may not put as much energy into working hard, asking dumb questions, or increasing one’s range, and thus may eventually cause one’s skills to stagnate. Also, if one is accustomed to easy success, one may not develop the patience necessary to deal with truly difficult challenges. Talent is important, of course; but how one develops and nurtures it is even more so.
个人经历证明“不是天才也能做好需要数学的领域”。
大约一年半前我开始对机器学习和人工智能产生兴趣。我不觉得自己是什么天才（虽然还算聪明），而且我上学时数学很糟——糟到得出“我就是不擅长数学”的结论。经过大量阅读、试错和撞墙，我把自己带到了神经网络机器学习研究的前沿附近。这涉及相当多数学，一开始我很容易把它归结为“太难了”。但我很高兴坚持了下来，因为我正用它做一些相当不错的应用。我的意思是，如果你对某件事有兴趣、而它看起来需要天才才能做好，别让这一点阻止你，因为这多半不是真的。
dave_sullivan查看英文原文
I started taking an interest in machine learning and AI about a year and a half ago. I don't consider myself any kind of genius (although I'm reasonably intelligent), and I was terrible at math in school--to the point where I'd come to the conclusion that I simply "wasn't good at math". After a good deal of reading, trial and error, and banging my head against the wall, I've managed to get myself to pretty much the cutting edge of ML research as it applies to neural networks. There's quite a bit of math involved, and it would have been easy for me to write it off as "too hard" in the beginning. However, I'm glad I stuck with it because I'm actually using it for some pretty neat applications. My point being, if you have an interest in something that seems like you have to be a genius to be good at it, don't let that stop you because it probably isn't true.
对天赋与努力的观点可能因自身天赋水平而产生偏差。
一直让我困惑的是，一个人对“天赋 vs 努力”的看法是否与其天赋高低相关。你常听到非常有天赋的人说“真正重要的是努力”。与此同时，表现不佳者说“天赋决定一切”，可能被视为合理化（“我懒，所以怪没天赋，别怪不努力”）。我看不出研究这个有什么简单办法，但寻找这种相关性可能很有意思。
neworder查看英文原文
The thing that has always puzzled me is if one's opinion on "talent vs hard work" is actually correlated to one's amount of talent. You can often hear very gifted people say things like "it's hard work that actually matters". At the same time, underperformers' claims that it's the talent that does the thing maybe treated as rationalizations ("I'm lazy, so, yeah, let's blame that on lack of talent, not work"). I don't see any easy way of studying this, though looking for such correlations might prove interesting.
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