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I don't know how to do the math, but I'd expect SOME clustering just by chance. Anyone want to take a crack at calculating the odds for "eminence clustering" by chance alone?

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"even though I have never heard of her."

Given your age, you weren't reading Wired magazine in the 1990s, I presume.

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you're not taking all successful people at random, you're selecting for people who have successful families -- so you're probably selecting for people who don't just have high IQ, but for whom it's highly genetic/inheritable rather than random factors.

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Did they have significantly more children on average? It could be that professional/intellectual success used to correlate more directly to reproductive success, so that the first highly successful member of the clan would have a crap-ton of offspring. And then from there it's just a numbers game where you have more cognitive lottery tickets to choose from within the larger offspring pool.

(For the record I definitely don't think this is what happening and just thought it was a funny technically-possible explanation)

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You missed that the other daughter of Pierre and Marie Curie, Irene Joliot-Curie, also won the Nobel (with her husband, like Marie).

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The last point is the most powerful, combined with the privilege of other people taking your outsized ambitions more seriously given your pedigree. Simply having role models that you identify with has an ENORMOUS influence on achievement. It's played such a role in my own boring life that the statistical influence is surely gigantic.

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Any short list of the great families (or at least the great American families) should include the James's: Henry James is one of the perennial candidates for the greatest American novelist, and his brother William James is one of the perennial candidates for the greatest American philosopher. Their sister Alice James got a posthumous reputation as a diarist. (There were two other brothers who never became famous. Their father, Henry James Sr., had some reputation as a theologian, although not in the Henry (Jr)/William James league.

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Average IQ of Ivy League students being > 130, not controlled for major, is very surprising. I could see that for Harvard, but didn't expect it across the board

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Niels Bohr was also almost a professional level soccer player. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niels_Bohr

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Two brief things about Dysons - the vacuum cleaner guy in England is Not Related. And I don't know if Esther was ever the "most important woman" in computers but she was certainly very influential in the high-tech industry 20 or 30 years ago as a writer, speaker, analyst, etc.

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So, if IQ declines every generation, how do you get people with really, really high IQ? Is it a random mutation that jumps a child up a lot? Or was there a strain of people with ridiculously high IQ that has been slowly descending this whole time? Gladwell did a chapter of his book on a group of super high IQ people who nonetheless did not accomplish much, so possibly the astronomically high IQ strain is plausible because a lot of them don't rise above the herd?

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Another member of the Darwin family who achieved fame in a different area was the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, who was on a slightly different branch but was 4 generations down from both Erasmus Darwin and Josiah Wedgwood.

Watch out, too, for other cases where the surnames differ. I like to offer the story of Stanley Baldwin, Prime Minister and a leading figure in British politics in the 1920s and 30s. He had a particular ability to deliver powerful and effective speeches, which is perhaps partly explained by some of them having been written for him by his cousin, whose name was Rudyard Kipling.

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Sir Francis Galton, who you mentioned here, published the book Hereditary Genius (1869) where he notes that relatives of eminent men tended to be eminent. He suspected that there was a hereditary element to eminence like there is one to physical traits. Since relatives of eminence were often in different fields, he suspected that mental ability was a singular trait. In an attempt to exclude the possibility of class privilege, he compared the success of eminent men's children to those of boys adopted by popes. He concluded that the important factor was genes.

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Being able to see a regular person in your life, whose flaws you can see in real time, and whose work habits you can observe first hand, probably helps tremendously.

Though I know people who accomplish great things are, in many respects, regular people who still hate getting out of bed or cook shitty food or are petty and jealous of their friends or family or whatever, it is difficult to really imagine them as such. They always seem removed from regular life. But if you see from birth that they're just your father or your sister, and you knew them as people before you knew they were famous or even before they became famous, they might not seem so radically different from yourself. You wouldn't idolize them in the same way. And that might give you confidence to try.

And then, you know by growing up with them how hard they worked to accomplish the great things they did, and if you decide your goal is to be great like them, you know the sacrifice required. You'll go into it clear eyed. I must imagine having the correct expectations makes a huge difference in whether or not you'll succeed.

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0. Funny you didn't mention the Bachs or the Bernoullis.

1. Few of these families were amazingly rich, but they lived in a time when being comfortable, having access to higher education, etc., put you in the upper 5% (at least) - and, in all cases but the Tagores, we are talking about the upper 5% in one of the few countries that weren't poor.

2. Their upbringing varied, but unconscious or semi-conscious transmission of values and habitus may account for a fait bit more than being a Tiger parent or not. Of course that merges with the last point.

3. As other people have pointed out, you are cherry-picking examples! Return to the mean is the norm.

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Selection bias perhaps? There are many, many great accomplishments that have no family history or future of great accomplishments.

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I'd be very surprised if the correlation between math and musical ability isn't much higher than that. Rhythms and time signatures have an obvious connection to math. The same with chords and scales. And composing counterpoint or even a cantus firmus is almost algorithmic in nature.

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Other Dyson children are less famous, but no less accomplished. You have a veterinarian, a radiologist, a chaplain and I think a nurse?

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Did any of these families have adopted children who performed well above average? Obviously adopted children whose progenitors were also very accomplished wouldn't reveal anything about this "nature/nurture" question. Also, did any of these very accomplished individuals marry people who were simply attractive and personable rather then talented?

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You left out Josiah Wedgwood's greatest claim to immortality. "A prominent abolitionist fighting slavery, Wedgwood is remembered too for his Am I Not a Man And a Brother? anti-slavery medallion." wikipedia

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My favorite Tagore quote:

I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.

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“ I think most of these people are doing better than IQ 150. I don’t know if Charles Darwin can find someone exactly as intelligent as he is, but let’s say IQ 145. And let’s say that instead of having one kid, they have 10. Now the average kid is 129, but the smartest of ten is 147”

I don’t think the highest IQ of the parent’s IQ is the highest bound of the children’s IQ, though, even when above average, If that is what is being implied here.

Two parents with IQ of 120, could produce a 130,140, 150 just as they could produce a 110,100, or 90.

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How much of this is selection bias? I'm sure there are thousands of famous people who do not have famous family members. I'm not sure any meaningful conclusions can be drawn from picking out a few similar families and ignoring all the others.

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You didn't mention music, but families of musicians are common. There many many Bachs.

In today's paper there was an interview with Billy Joel (sorry can't link Gannet papers):

Q: I’ve been to a few of your shows when [your daughter] Della Rose has come out on stage. Do you think she has some musical genes, like Alexa Ray (Joel’s 35-year-old daughter with ex-wife Christie Brinkley)?

Joel: Yeah, I believe it must be inherited. Alexa has it; she’s a good pianist and songwriter. But Della, who is 6, learned on her own by going to the piano and playing “The Planets” by (composer) Gustav Holst. She plays the “Jupiter” theme, picks it out note by note. It was on this kids show, “Bluey,” and one of the kids was dreaming they were floating through space and they played “The Planets” (suite) and she went to the piano and picked it out, and I went, “Oh my God, another one.” Remy, the youngest, has already expressed an interest in learning to play at the piano, too. So, yeah, it’s going to be one of those families.

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A couple more families to ponder: The Wojcicki sisters, with Janet a professor at UCSF, Susan the CEO of YouTube, and Anne the founder of 23andme. Also the Emanuels, with Rahm former chief of staff to Obama, Ari the founder of the Endeavor talent agency (they own UFC now, among other things), and Ezekiel, an oncologist and academic.

I think there's mostly a high degree of selection bias here. You just don't hear about all the other families. The hero license concept also makes sense. Finally, I suppose there might be some tiger parent / family dinner table kind of effect, especially for siblings, but I bet it's relatively small. Shane Parrish did a podcast episode with the Wojcickis' mother that might be interesting.

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I think the Hero License may have a strong effect here: when I was picking a college to attend it never occurred to me to apply to Harvard, or Yale, or any prestigious college. Perhaps I wouldn't have been able to get in regardless (having never aimed for an Ivy, my extracurriculars were almost non-existent), but I didn't dismiss them because I thought I couldn't make it. I was one of the smartest kids at my high school, and I was a National Merit Scholar (the letter they sent me claimed I was in the 99th percentile of students my age nationwide, but beats me if that's accurate or impressive). I didn't even know that it was particularly hard to get into an Ivy because it wasn't anywhere on my radar in the first place. After I had already graduated and entered the job market I realized for the first time that for some people getting into an Ivy is a big deal, and that job prospect wise it really is a big deal (when I first learned that every Supreme Court justice attended Yale or Harvard I was genuinely surprised).

So, why wasn't it on my radar? I didn't have any familial role models who had gone to an Ivy. My mom went to a state university, my father went to a bible college. The most prestigious family member in my life was my grandfather who was an engineer for Boeing: he had attended the University of South Dakota, if I recall correctly (might have been University of Iowa). None of my family members have a doctorate of any kind. My mother was an elementary school teacher, Papa was the engineer, Grandma was a homemaker, my dad's dad was a failed entrepreneur/alchoholic and my other Grandma was an x-ray technician.

I've done some genealogical research recently, and I know all my ancestors out to the great-great-grandparent level. Picking at random, I'm descended from a mailman, an carpenter/machinist, a cannery worker, a sawmill worker, and a great many farmers. The further I dig back, the more farmers I find. Long story short, I don't see a single doctor or professor or scientist or philosopher anywhere. My people didn't aim that high, apparently.

I've never taken an IQ test, but based on SAT conversion I'm probably ~125+. And if I had decided to be a doctor nobody would have dissuaded me, but nobody was a role model for me in that respect either. People did encourage me to become an engineer like my grandpa, because they could see I was smart and good at math, but I wasn't interested (these days I often wish I had, financially). I wanted to be a college professor because I like reading books and teaching people, and I would have pursued that career if the market for it wasn't so terrible. Even then I wasn't planning on being a research type professor, I just wanted to teach college students.

I think close familial role models make a big deal in helping us define our options from a young age.

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On assortative mating, Gregory Clark would agree with you.

http://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/ClarkGlasgow2021.pdf

He shows levels of assortative mating that are /astonishingly/ strong.

Some quotes:

"Robinson et al. (2017) look at the phenotype and

genotype correlations for a variety of traits – height, BMI, blood pressure, years of education

- using data from the biobank. For most traits they find as expected that the genotype

correlation between the parties is less than the phenotype correlation. But there is one

notable exception. For years of education, the phenotype correlation across spouses is 0.41

(0.011 SE). However, the correlation across the same couples for the genetic predictor of

educational attainment is significantly higher at 0.654 (0.014 SE) (Robinson et al., 2017, 4).

Thus couples in marriage in recent years in England were sorting on the genotype as

opposed to the phenotype when it comes to educational status."

"The key point is that the correlation of grooms’ occupational status with their

own fathers’ is only modestly higher than the correlation of their status with the father of

their bride. By implication the groom and bride are matching very closely on some

underlying social status – and potentially on genetics that determine social outcomes."

"Table 9 shows the implied estimates of underlying marital assortment on social

abilities between bride and groom for each period. These estimates are very high, implying

a correlation of 0.8 or higher throughout the years 1837-1979 in the underlying social

abilities of bride and groom. There is some chance that the correlation declined in the last

40 years, but the small numbers of observations in this period make that conclusion

uncertain. The estimate of the underlying father-son and father-daughter correlations of

status are also very high being closer to 0.9. These estimates may be distorted by the fact

that the fathers and sons occupational status are measured at different points in the life

cycle (in a way that does not influence the estimate of m). But they are actually quite

consistent with the implication of the genetic model that 𝑏𝑏 = �

1+𝑚𝑚

2 �. If m = 0.8, then the

expected value of b is 0.9."

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Fascinating topic, although it strikes me that you went around the globe and back in time and only mentioned a handful of families. Of course there are more but without knowing how many it’s hard to think that a handful of families in all of human history can tell us much about anything.

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Regarding the hero license, I went to school with the child of a governor, and when the child followed the parent into government, someone mentioned nepotism, and I thought, that child probably learned more about that career through osmosis growing up than any entry level person knows if they don't also have a family member in that career. Obviously nepotism is a thing, but I don't think we can underestimate a lifetime of passive exposure to behavior and ideas.

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Anecdote: SpaceX's CEO is Elon Musk, who came from a rich family with privilege, etc, etc.

But SpaceX's (former) CTO of propulsion, who deserves a lot of the credit for the actual technical innovation at SpaceX, was Tom Mueller, who grew up in Rural Idaho, and wanted to be a logger, just like his dad, as a kid. Eventually, he realized he had a talent for mechanics, and changed his goal to be... an airplane mechanic. He tells this story (https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/25/tom-mueller-spacex-cto-who-makes-elon-musks-rockets-fly.html):

> Then in my first year in high school, my math teacher asked if I was going to be an engineer. I said no. He was astounded. He asked, "Do you want to be the guy who fixes the plane or the guy who designs it?" If it hadn’t been for that math teacher, I probably would have been a mechanic or a logger

I think that story meshes well with the "Hero License" hypothesis.

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The last one seems right to me. I come from a "moderately great family" (one Nobel prize, one famous politician, one founder of well known movement, other minor notables), and I'm very aware of a social expectation in my family that normal goals like "having a good career" or "making a lot of money" aren't really acceptable. Success means doing something novel and important.

The flip-side of this is that it can be really emotionally hard when I feel I'm not on a potential path to greatness, and I think it's been hard on other family members who haven't met expectations.

I can also see the connection to sports. I got good enough at a sport that a coach wanted me to go for the olympics, but I did it by wrecking my body. I don't think I'm particularly physically gifted, but I was maybe more willing to tear myself apart in pursuit of something that looked like possible greatness.

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I tend to think that certain people are more inclined to try hard on an IQ test, and these same people will likely try hard to do important seeming things like writing a great novel or solving deep problems in science. Sure, lots of people would never think of themselves as the sort of people who do Great Things. Perhaps even more people, when faced with the choice of living an unremarkable life, or one dedicated to a struggle towards achieving a Great Thing, would choose the former.

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Some other potential factors, in no particular order:

1. A "cutting edge" effect. Remarkable work in any field is done at the cutting edge of that field. Exposure to the most recent discoveries is a crucial ingredient in any further success. This may even apply across widely separated disciplines—e.g., philosophy taking inspiration from new frames in science, etc. Cutting-edge work can take a while to percolate through society—decades, easily. But the children of cutting-edge researchers will have much more direct access. Curie's Cooperative was probably covering radiation long before even very good French schools were, giving its students a leg up. Even without such formal institutions, dinner table discussions could provide the same benefit.

2. A "credibility" effect. If someone comes up to you and says "I have a revolutionary new idea that will transform science" you may scoff. If they say ". . . and I'm Charles Darwin's kid," they get another chance. More positive external feedback loops could encourage breakthrough work in all sorts of ways.

3. Network effects. This is perhaps the most obvious one, falling under "privilege" above, but deserves to be called out separately. If my parents are famous composers and I'm an aspiring painter, well, there's probably a gallerist they can put me in touch with. Etc. etc. The more striking the achievement, the more cross-disciplinary the network.

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It is also important to note that heritability is a population specific measurement. It is relevant at a time and place. This is sometimes used to attack the portability of the heritability estimates when it is not appropriate. However, if we are talking across centuries, then it is reasonable to critique any heritability estimate.

Some adoption studies show that children benefit from moving outside of the developing world and to the developed world in terms of IQ. And we see an increase in the average IQ score across time - the "Flynn Effect." Right now, estimates of heritability of cognitive ability as adults are sometimes pretty high - ~%80. In a world or time where malnourishment is common, we would expect lower estimates and the environment to play a more significant role.

Correct me if I'm wrong on this but: Keeping environment fixed, what mean will be regressed toward depends on the grandparents genotypic mean. A person from average grandparents will regress toward the average level but a person with 4 significantly above average grandparents will not regress toward the population mean.

It could be the case that geniuses are assortatively mating with geniuses and having genius offspring. This genius offspring is then seeking out geniuses to have genius offspring. These genius offspring don't become more normal, they continue to be geniuses with variation around a high mean. In addition to their high IQ genes, in a past era, achieving eminence probably protected against malnourishment and so the children of high IQ individuals were also likely far outside the norm environmentally as well.

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There is more genetic factors than just IQ. Things like conscientiousness, extroversion, capacity for effort, all have substantial genetic components.

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> And the second problem is: what gene do we think Niels and Harald Bohr shared that made one of them a physics Nobelist and the other an Olympic athlete?

Niels Bohr was a goalkeeper on the same top club team (AB) as his brother but left after a season:

"According to AB, in a match against the German side Mittweida, one of the Germans launched a long shot and the physicist leaning against the post did not react, missing an easy save. After the game he admitted to his team-mates his thoughts had been on a mathematical problem that was of more interest to him than the game. He only played for the 1905 season."

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2005/jul/27/theknowledge.panathinaikos

Surely he is the only Nobel winner to play for a top level soccer team, although the article notes that Camus played for the University of Algiers, but I'm not sure how top level that is or was in 1930.

>> Sometimes they become politicians, another job which benefits from lots of name recognition.

Warren Buffett ran the other way - his father was a Congressman, while one of his sons is apparently an award winning musician and composer. Buffett himself publicly subscribes to the Hero License theory - he has two sisters who he says are just as smart but were never encouraged the same way he was.

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Historical nitpick: Erasmus Darwin was not the founder of the Lunar Society, although he was a key member. The Lunar Society was very informal and didn't really have a single founder, but if I *had* to pick one, it would probably be William Small, or maybe Matthew Boulton. (I'm basing this claim on having read several books worth of the correspondence of Boulton and Watt, who were both Lunar Society members.)

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> But also, Margaret Darwin (Charles’ grandson) married John Maynard Keynes’ brother Geoffrey Keynes (himself no slacker; he pioneered blood transfusion in Britain).

Either this is a man named Margaret getting gay married (which would be pretty interesting) or this should be "Charles' granddaughter"

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Conflating "schooling" with "upbriging/values" is dangerous IMO. Lots more you can learn from your parents than what you can learn from school.

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"what gene do we think Niels and Harald Bohr shared that made one of them a physics Nobelist and the other an Olympic athlete? " Low genetic load. They both could have had a relatively small number of harmful mutations that decreased how well their bodies and brains performed.

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If Darwin was so smart what IQ do you assign to Alfred Russel Wallace?

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To the last question: I have written some fairly popular short stories, erased myself from the Internet, started again and become popular again so I know the popularity wasn’t purely chance. I’ve also wondered why I do it as I also genuinely don’t think of myself as a writer and find the whole thing somewhat embarrassing. I refuse to discuss it in my real life and change the subject as quickly as possible if it happens to come up. Even though I’ve had people cry when meeting me and met romantic partners based on this skill alone, I think of it more like having irritable bowel syndrome than a talent. It’s just medically something that I have to sometimes deal with that I’d rather not focus on in polite conversation. My father can barely read and my mother probably hasn’t read anything since high school. No one else in my direct sphere had any interest in it. My father did show an active dislike in it when I was young which as I’ve grown older I’ve started to wonder at that as my primary motivation. Any chance the hero license comes from the wanting to piss off your father license?

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"Have you, dear reader, ever tried writing poetry that will set the collective soul of your nation on fire?"

In Book 4 of his Odes, Horace wrote:

Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona

multi; sed omnes inlacrimabiles

urgentur ignotique longa

nocte, carent quia vate sacro.

meaning approximately:

Many strong men lived before Agamemnon;

But all are unwept and unknown,

Thrust into an endless night,

Lacking a sacred bard.

Byron quoted this at the beginning of his mock epic Don Juan, but reversed the meaning. Byron himself had the skills to be a sacred bard, and knew it - but where was his Agamemnon? Who could he write about that he wouldn't have some reservations over? Earlier in life, his writings made it clear that he wanted to write an epic sincerely...but between the tragedies in his life that weren't his fault and the ones which were entirely his fault, he'd lost his youthful optimism, and now was stuck with skills he could no longer use the way he'd originally intended. And moreover, he became convinced that *nobody* could write a sincere epic anybody, that these modern times (the early 1800s) were just too progressed for epics to work anymore, or for people to take them seriously. So instead, he took a classic villain, Don Juan, and made Juan into a satiric and misunderstood hero, so that he would have something and someone to sing about.

A century later, GK Chesterton wrote a completely sincere epic about a different man named Don Juan, in what might be a coincidence.

But a century after that, and Byron's original premonition has at last come true. I've tried it, and found that it is *shockingly* difficult to write sincere poetry in English. The mechanics are easy enough to learn - the Internet can provide examples of anything, you could see iambic monometer poems if you wanted - but poetry that is both modern and not comedic brings with it a level of cringe that is very difficult to overcome. The most popular form of poem (poem, not song, since music has split off from poetry like Spanish from Latin) in English is the limerick, and even poetic forms which weren't originally comedic have become so in the present day.

The haiku is a good example of this. An English haiku has one official rule and one unofficial convention. The official rule is that the syllables have to be 5-7-5. The unofficial convention is that it has to be either anticlimactic or crude (though not usually both). So a standard English haiku about Tagore's early life, from the Wikipedia excerpt you posted, might go something like this:

Never left his mansion,

And took long treks through hills - wait.

Contradiction here?

But a Japanese haiku has extra requirements on top of these: there must be a kiregi, meaning a "cutting word" that makes what came before a complete thought, and there must be a kigo (an image of nature), and this image of nature must reference the season. A poem about Tagore's early life with those extra requirements would look something like this:

My house, a thicket,

Stifling me and growing strong

From Indian summer.

And that just sounds weird, or at the very least pretentious, while the first one feels - if not good, at least normal, and not cringe.

Haikus aren't the only example; the only original sonnets I've seen online in the past five years are from Pop Sonnets, a website which for a while posted one pop song per week rewritten into perfect Shakespearean iambic pentameter, and the author, Erik Didriksen, mentioned specifically that his goal was to be funny, that "not all of them lend themselves to obvious comedy, but I think the ones that work the best are the ones that are obviously clashing in the modern lyrics and the anachronism of the Shakespearean sonnet". A good example is his adaptation of The Who's "Pinball Wizard" (and if you haven't heard that song, I recommend listening to it first, to get some idea of the background):

From London-town to Brighton's shores I've trekk'd

to test my dext'rous skills in each arcade,

and naught I've seen could make me e'er expect

to see the prowess Tommy hath display'd.

Like Grecian marbles, he unmoving stands

before the table, saying not a word,

for naught but intuition guides his hands:

he never hat the cab'net seen or heard.

No sight hath he, nor any means to hear -

how do his flipper fingers aim so true?

I'll crown this wizard king and disappear;

my name forgotten, I'll be known as "who?"

-To watch him play shall shurely thee enthrall,

for lo! The kid doth play a mean pinball!

This works fantastically for Erik's purpose, but it only works because of how funny it is to have somebody who sounds like Shakespeare talking about things like pinball cabinets. Let me try to do one, but without the humor of anachronism - I'll take the first verse and start of the chorus of Rachel Platen's "Fight Song", since the imagery there is reasonably timeless.

A modest ocean-going vessel toss'd

by mighty waves retaliates in kind.

A single phrase voiced to a heart of frost

may spark the love for which it was designed.

A cannonade I could myself begin,

and fuses light with but a twig aflame,

And all would hear the echoes of its din,

though naught but I would know from whence it came.

My inner thoughts, forever unexpress'd,

like batt'ring rams beseige my inner peace.

But mute no more, this night I shall not rest,

And all will hear me 'ere my song shall cease.

Though all around lack faith in me, I write.

These verses are the sword with which I fight.

It's cringe. It was cringe to write and it's cringe to read; I can't blame anyone who's ever deleted his old poetry on the grounds of not being able to bear it. Forget writing poetry that will set the collective soul of one's nation afire - writing poetry that even mentions setting things afire in a heartfelt way is really, really tough.

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I was interested in the idea of the Hero Licence, so I followed the link. And of course, it's a sixteen thousand word self-aggrandising dialogue between Eliezer Yudkowsky and Eliezer Yudkowsky about how smart and wonderful Eliezer Yudkowsky is.

I didn't read the whole thing, but it got me thinking about the failure mode where you grant yourself _too much_ hero licence and never manage to back it up with achievements.

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As someone who does roughly the same job as my late father (without ever intending to end up in the same line of work) I tend to favor the theory that role modeling is a very strong factor in how kids tend to succeed in the same ways their parents succeeded. I stumbled into my father's former field with a lot of cultural and domain-relevant knowledge that has been of clear, obvious value in my career.

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As a father trying to figure out how to give his 1 1/2 year-old son all the best opportunities in life (and also a bit about how to engineer in him the aptitude to actually capitalize on those opportunities) I've thought about making a study of great families quite a bit. It's pretty appropriate that you would opt for a Bene Gesserit as your thumbnail for this post as I believe part of what makes for greatness in these conditions is also family culture. Not every offspring of your Messiah-breeding program will pan out, but if it's family policy to train them all to survive the Gom Jabbar test from birth, you're going to have some history-makers.

Great houses have mottos for a reason, they've institutionalized what it means to be a "Vanderbilt" or a "Darwin" or a "Tagore". This provides a set of guiding principles which, even if they aren't totally effective, at the very least generate a kind of placebo effect that having a normal last name coming from an unremarkable family does not. That whole thing about how "a man must live by a code" even though most boys today have no idea what should be in their code or how to go about seriously living by one? That problem doesn't exist if all your uncles and grandparents and great grandparents set being a doctor, or winning a Nobel Prize, or pushing the limits of human achievement as the ultimate value. To be born a Bush is to be handed an identity at birth along with a set of guidelines for how to live it. You won't necessarily become president, but you have a far better chance than somebody whose only access consists of David McCullough books and Ken Burns docs.

Like any organization, you'll have members who rebel against these principles, many of whom wash out and are forgotten (hence why great families also seem more likely to have burnouts and early tragic deaths). Maybe some of them do their best to create an approximation of average and get to enjoy a normal life. And then there will be those who actively embrace the culture, get that the times change and the destination is more important than following the family footsteps exactly, and succeed. Belief isn't everything, but if it's your self-belief reaffirmed by everyone in your family and social circles, it probably makes a much bigger difference than we think.

To put it another way, imagine if society's conclusion after Roger Bannister ran the 4-minute mile was that it's much easier to do the impossible if you're a Bannister, and the Bannister family all believed this. Within a few generations, we'd have more record-breaking Bannisters than 99% of other families.

Or an other, other way: not everyone attains enlightenment, but being born and raised in a Buddhist monastery probably helps :)

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Could test the hypothesis of environmental vs genetic for greatness by looking at adopted children of Nobel prize winners vs natural children. But we have already done that analysis for n=large regular folks and it seems achievement is mostly genetic and some X factor we don’t understand, but it’s definitely not parenting. Why would this be different for very eminent families?

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"The cognitive test has a mean of 5 and an SD of 3, so a cognitive score of 7 = IQ 115, and a score of 9 = IQ 130+."

Those calculations imply an SD of 2.

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Strange that you didn't include the Galton quote. After all, this blogpost is a kind of tribute to his book that did much the same thing you did. Here it is:

"In statesmanship, generalship, literature, science, poetry, art, just the same enormous differences are found between man and man; and numerous instances recorded in this book, will show in how small degree, eminence, either in these or any other class of intellectual powers, can be considered as due to purely special powers. They are rather to be considered in those instances as the result of concentrated efforts, made by men who are widely gifted. People lay too much stress on apparent specialities, thinking overrashly that, because a man is devoted to some particular pursuit, he could not possibly have succeeded in anything else. They might just as well say that, because a youth had fallen desperately in love with a brunette, he could not possibly have fallen in love with a blonde. He may or may not have more natural liking for the former type of beauty than the latter, but it is as probable as not that the affair was mainly or wholly due to a general amorousness of disposition. It is just the same with special pursuits. A gifted man is often capricious and fickle before he selects his occupation, but when it has been chosen, he devotes himself to it with a truly passionate ardour. After a man of genius has selected his hobby, and so adapted himself to it as to seem unfitted for any other occupation in life, and to be possessed of but one special aptitude, I often notice, with admiration, how well he bears himself when circumstances suddenly thrust him into a strange position."

Hereditary Genius by Francis Galton, 1969. https://galton.org/books/hereditary-genius/text/v5/galton-1869-hereditary-genius-v5.htm

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Bernoulii family! Just some of them (hacked from Wikipedia):

Jacob Bernoulli (1654–1705) mathematician after whom Bernoulli numbers are named

Johann Bernoulli (1667–1748), mathematician and early adopter of infinitesimal calculus

Nicolaus I Bernoulli (1687–1759) mathematician - curves, differential equations, probability

Daniel Bernoulli (1700–1782) "Bernoulli's principle:' originator of the concept of expected utility

Johann II Bernoulli (1710–1790) mathematician and physicist

Johann III Bernoulli (1744–1807) astronomer, geographer and mathematician

Jacob II Bernoulli (1759–1789) physicist and mathematician

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A little error in the statistics of the Swedish cognitive scores table. IQ is normally mean 100, SD 15. So if a test is mean 5, SD 3, then it requires a score of 8 to be equivalent to IQ 115 and 11 to be equivalent to IQ 130.

Not all IQ tests use SD 15, which is very irritating. Thus, someone’s IQ is only meaningful if they can tell you what test it was taken on and if that test is a properly validated test. Personally, I trust the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS-IV) as it’s got the most research behind it and is probably most widely used in the US and U.K. I’ve probably assessed about 50 people with it over the years. On an SD 15 scale, it really only makes sense up to IQ 145 because at that point you’re 3xSDs above the mean and ever increasing scores would be capturing a tinier and tinier fraction of the population. Consider that there’s only 2% of the population that are <70 IQ on this scale (typically learning disabled) and 2% that are >130 (98th percentile and upwards).

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I have a famous highly successful grandfather (similar in achievement to many of the examples in this post), and test high on IQ -- but have nowhere near the level of achievement that he did. I'm doing fine (top ~.1% income) but I'm not likely to have a Wikipedia page based on my personal achievements, as opposed to things related to the family.

There are 9 in my generation, and none of us has done something really extraordinary. I don't know the IQs of my cousins but they're a smart bunch, with lots of elite universities and graduate degrees.

So there's clearly another factor besides (a) fame and resources, and (b) IQ.

To me, it feels like something you might call "drive". For whatever reason (cultural?), my parents' generation chose not to push us extremely hard, and none of us had the level of drive/internal motivation that my grandfather did. I should in theory have gotten it from both sides, from my grandfather through my mother, and from my father who earned his own Wikipedia page while coming from a middle class background.

But in fact I merely have a successful tech career. Not extraordinary -- I see many around me who have done better at a younger age than I. In my case, I think the level of privilege and wealth we have was pretty demotivating. If I don't have to work to be comfortable, why should I? It took me a decade or so to come to an answer to that question (work is a lot more fulfilling than a life of leisure). A decade is a pretty big chunk of time to not make progress.

So maybe the answer to why some families are dynastic is in part extreme motivation. Motivation can be external (tiger mom or just generally very high expectations) or internal. Families that have the right genetics or culture can create levels of drive that, combined with the right abilities and access to resources, propel the family scions with potential to realize it.

I think most people don't realize their full potential. I certainly haven't. I think some thoughts around potential are required to have a full story about dynastic family achievement.

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I'm not sure what to take from this article other than "If you cherry pick from the whole population of smart or famous people especially Nobel prize winners, you can find a subset who are related."

The Nobel Prize Website https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/facts/nobel-prize-facts/ lists 609 Nobel Prizes, of which 30 (5%) went to related individuals.

With enough feats in various spheres across the entire world, it's not surprising that you could find a few families that consistently beat the odds

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All these factors are in play but the fact is that most Nobel prize winners don’t have Nobel prize winning children. Can you quantify just how much parentage improves their odds compared to the general population?

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Just thinking of Nobel prizes, there are two more relevant families to consider:

Jan Tinbergen won the first Nobel prize in Economics in 1969, and his brother Niko Tinbergen won the Nobel in medicine in 1973. (Both of them working on topics relevant to this blog, about individual and group behavior in economics and ecology.) Their brother Luuk Tinbergen committed suicide at a somewhat young age, but had two children that are both moderately prominent ecologists.

Another relevant family that doesn't have the heredity explanation - Gunnar Myrdal won the Economics Nobel in 1974 (partly for work that influenced the US Supreme Court in Brown v Board of Education), and his wife Alva Myrdal won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1982 (the only married couple to win separate Nobels). Their daughter, Sissela, is a moderately known philosopher, who married the President of Harvard, Derek Bok. Their daughter Hilary Bok is another philosopher, who also had a bit of fame with the political blog Obsidian Wings a decade or so ago.

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A Charles Darwin grandson you did not mention was Bernard Darwin, generally regarded as the best golf writer who ever lived, an excellent amateur golfer, and authority on Charles Dickens. Perhaps he represents a regression towards the mean, but still.

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Am I the only person triggered by the phrase "theory of evolution?" Darwin's theory was natural selection, which explained how and why evolution happened. Evolution isn't a theory, it's a fact. "The theory explaining evolution" would be correct, as would "theory of natural selection," but "theory of evolution" just grates.

Also, as a matter of social justice, if you can't become a dolphin, you still have the RIGHT to become a dolphin.

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I need to point out that my father quite literally worked in a bog and I held the record low score on a Golden Tee machine in my local bar in the late 1990s.

Yes, greatness is heritable.

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founding

Fascinating. I love the concept of a "hero license." That applied to Winston Churchill. But I wonder how often a hero license overcomes the downsides of being the child of a genius. I recently read "The Magician," Colm Toibin's wonderful novelistic biography of Thomas Mann. It was a a cautionary tale of life loved for his art at great sacrifice for family, among other things.

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"It seems weird to think of “genius” as a career you can aim for. But maybe if your dad is Charles Darwin, you don’t just go into science. You also start making lots of big theories, speculating about lots of stuff. The fact that something is an unsolved problem doesn’t scare you; trying to solve the biggest unsolved problems is just what normal people do. Maybe if your dad founded a religion, and everyone else you know is named Somethingdranath Tagore and has accomplished amazing things, you start trying to write poetry to set the collective soul of your nation on fire.

Have you, dear reader, ever tried writing poetry that will set the collective soul of your nation on fire? If no, why not? And does that fully explain why Rabindranath Tagore succeeded at this and you didn’t?"

For inscrutable personal reasons, I refer to this phenomenon (specifically the not seeing 'doing great things' or even 'doing greater things than your parents' as possible not for any intrinsic reason but just because you haven't thought of it, and being a normie instead when you don't have to be) and many like it as "the Cabal". I have little to none of it and it *psyches me out so perpetually* how other people do and so don't write nation-soul-fire poetry. I think this specific prong of Cabalism clusters a fair bit with the other prongs of epistemic learned helplessness (which you do need some minimum of to avoid getting paralyzed every time you discover a new idea, but I am not at all sold on the arguments for levels above it) and with a weak internal fantasy life. Accordingly, it's unsurprising to see very little of it in people who seek out new ideas (even if they're total crackpots) and people who develop and display complex internal fantasies (even if they're terrible writers).

I think this ties in with competitive pessimism, where people treat errors of overoptimism as worse than (and particularly deserving more mockery than) errors of overpessimism. The 'hero license' is removed from the range of possibilities even further by the fact that even if you consider it in the first place, you'll be socially shamed out of rising above your station or having Cringe Ideas. (This is not to overcorrect to the common and damnable overcorrection that all ideas tagged as Cringe are actually being overlooked by interminable normies -- sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.)

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I feel like teasing Scott for never having heard of Esther Dyson. I’m not sure whether her influence has declined since the nineties or if she has just succeeded in avoiding the spotlight more recently. I was never all that interested in the venture capital side of tech, but I knew who she wasback then. Maybe it was the gossip about Bill Gates angle that caught me, though if so, perhaps I am the one who should be embarrassed.

Live and learn!

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I don't think there's much to be explained here but here's another interesting group:

Moses Mendelssohn was a philosopher called the "father of the Haskala" or Jewish enlightenment. I don't know how impressive he was as a philosopher, but he did beat out Kant for a big philosophy prize. Also, Kant was quoted as saying "Mendelssohn is an awesome-cool philosopher".

Moses' son Abraham doesn't seem to have done anything impressive except become very rich and host parties where all the cool people would hang out and Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn would play music.

Felix Mendelssohn was a legendary pianist and composer.

Fanny Mendelssohn was an extraordinary pianist and composer but also a woman: She was discouraged from devoting her energies to music and largely published under her brother's name.

Rebecka Mendelssohn may or may not have been a cool person, but she married Dirichlet, which is pretty cool. Dirichlet was very smart and very cool.

(There are other cool people like Paul and Kurt Hensel, Fanny's sons, but I don't know much about them. There's a Wikipedia page devoted to the family.)

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Charles Darwin was an elite, lazy malcontent who got stuck on a world-spanning ship tour because he was from a rich family who needed to give him something to do to keep him busy. He was notably not even brought along on the HMS Beagle in a scientific capacity — he was just there so that the ship's other elite passengers would have someone to talk to. He wrote some personal notes about wildlife during his trip, but failed to publish anything of note for decades afterwards and faded into obscurity.

Alfred Russel Wallace, a commoner, did actual thorough legwork to prove the theory of evolution through natural selection. Upon realizing that a commoner might get credit for this theory, Darwin's elite friends cajoled him into writing up something that they could present as a finding alongside Wallace's. The elites then trumped up Darwin's involvement in the discovery of natural selection.

In the end, the elites won. Darwin gets remembered as a visionary genius, and bloggers now misinterpret his achievement as a result of anything other than being born an elite in a society that existed to intentionally propagate the supposed superiority of the elites over the commoners.

I'd venture to guess that status, rather than IQ, is a much better explanation for the phenomenon that Scott has identified.

Source: spent time in the Galapagos talking to naturalists who have spent considerable time studying Darwin's life.

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This piece seems to confound "people who are famous" with "people who are highly skilled." Specifically, it doesn't allow that there might be highly skilled or respected families who were massively impactful but not all that well known. It ignores the idea that these families might be clustering because of a talent for self-promotion which can be sustained by average intelligence types.

Further, a famous family in the sciences not only has access to a great deal of institutional prestige, resources related to that profession, a cultivating home environment, etc but also a legacy which even mediocre people can maintain. There's plenty of people in those families who did okay but not great, enough they were well respected in their time but don't echo down in history. But they were still famous because fame is additive: if you have a famous father and brother then you're famous even if you're just an average person plus the advantages of a famous family.

Likewise, great families are not necessarily famous. Elite and media interest are what make fame. I'm sure there are many families who are elite in terms of their capabilities but work in something that isn't as fame selected. I can think of several impressive families that are like that.

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Maybe you have the same genetic talent for music as your brother, but your music education process went on the wrong path in some way? For example, since you were older maybe you were trying hard in a studying for a test sort of way, but your brother didn't know of that so he just plugged in his internal music sense and had fun.

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A few generations back, my family had 3 siblings that were a Nobel prize winner, a successful playwright, and another lesser-known published writer (but she was a woman in the 19th century, so also extraordinary for her time and place). I can agree with the "assortative mating" hypothesis -- the wives chosen in the subsequent century were women of science, or Fulbright scholars, that sort of thing.

So I think the intellectual capacity traveled down the line. However, the money did Not travel down, and honestly that level of accomplishment is nearly impossible without a certain level of extended material abundance. For most of human history, most geniuses have spent their genius just in trying not to starve to death, and maybe improve things a little bit for the next generation. So privilege is a huge part, I would say the larger part.

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The only two Indian physicists to win a Nobel Prize (CV Raman and Subrahmanian Chandrasekhar) came from the same family (Raman was Chandrasekhar's paternal uncle)

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>Who was also the niece of Matthew Arnold who wrote Dover Beach?

Don't forget that Matthew Arnold's father was Thomas Arnold, the headmaster who revolutionized education in England and was immortalized in Lytton Strachey's _Eminent Victorians_.

(Thomas Arnold's other two sons have wikipedia pages and seem to have important people, one a Beowulf scholar and the other "the first director of public instruction in the Punjab," but not up to the Matthew / Thomas levels of greatness.)

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I find it curious that you left out gumption, tenacity, drive, whatever you want to call it. I've known personally about a number of Nobel laureates, mostly in physics, and when you compare them to people who don't make it nearly as far *that* is what stands out above all. They're smart, sure, and some are smarter than others, but more than anything they're driven, tenacious, energetic. They never give up, they chip away and work at where they want to go far past the point where ordinary mortals turn around in defeat. "Can't get there from here. No Thoroughfare. Not the way it's done. This will never work." The people who reach the heights, at least in science, and I kind of suspect in many other fields, are the people who pay no attention to such signs.

And (1) I suspect this *is* the kind of thing that can be strongly influenced by family culture, and (2) if it's a major component of success it would explain a slower regression to the mean than pure stats would suggest. It also (3) helps explain why it seems more common that the offspring of really *creative* people in science, math, music composition end up making their mark in fields -- like politics, music performance, or sports -- where energy and discipline can compensate to some degree for less raw talent.

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Something important was missed here:

Children's IQ will indeed regress to the mean *on average*, but much more important: Since IQ is normally distributed, the probability of a genius child, while still low, is much higher (100x?) than in a random family. And of course, the probability of *multiple* sibling (or cousin) geniuses would be even higher (10,000x?).

Together with the selection bias this may explain everything.

IOW: While most genius parents produce OK children, almost all genius siblings are a result of genius parents.

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1. Could it be that some families have an ethos of hard work and competence no matter their field?

2. Does the example of the Polgar sisters help or hurt your argument?

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I am a long time subscriber to Eastern philosophies and their concomitant beliefs in reincarnation, which must be one of the uncoolest things to believe in this group, but it answers many of the conundrums discussed here. In these systems, souls naturally cluster together with like souls to work out their lives with those who have similar proclivities. Need an iron-clad example before you investigate an idea that seems so foreign to your belief system? As good a smoking gun as you can imagine is the case of James Leininger, investigated by the U of VA.

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We might want to think about low-hanging fruit here, and the idea that science is slowing down. I note that most of your examples are from the early 1900s or earlier. These people were living in an era during which there remained many fundamental ideas to be discovered, which were tractable for a hardworking individual. Perhaps, if you were reasonably smart, educated, and well-resourced, it was easier to come up with something groundbreaking that could make you into a household name. If it was also more common for parents to pass on their trade and privileges to their children; families were much larger; familial status was more legally codified; and nepotism/organization via family trust-bonds were more common; then you have a recipe for an era in which families were peppered with accomplishment, and especially related accomplishments.

I'd be really interested to see if we find a similar phenomena of talent-peppered families in a pre-registered set of figures.

Let's take the most recent 4 nobel prize winners in chemistry. Here's what I could find on Wikipedia and convenient Googling.

Benjamin List: "Born to a upper-middle-class family of scientists and artists in Frankfurt, List is a great-grandson of the cardiologist Franz Volhard and a 2nd great-grandson of the chemist Jacob Volhard. His aunt, the 1995 Nobel laureate in medicine Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, is the sister of his mother, architect Heidi List."

David MacMillan: He had a working class upbrining, and "he hailed his Scottish upbringing as a reason for his winning the Nobel."

Emmanuelle Charpentier: "As a young girl growing up in the environs of Paris, Emmanuelle Charpentier was encouraged by her father, a park manager, and her mother, working in psychiatry, to explore her own academic interests, which were many."

Jennifer Doudna: "Her father received his Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Michigan, and her mother, a stay-at-home parent, held a master's degree in education... Doudna's mother earned a second master's degree in Asian history from the university and taught history at a local community college. Growing up in Hilo, Hawaii, Doudna was fascinated by the environmental beauty of the island and its exotic flora and fauna. Nature built her sense of curiosity and her desire to understand the underlying biological mechanisms of life. This was coupled with the atmosphere of intellectual pursuit that her parents encouraged at home. Her father enjoyed reading about science and filled the home with many books on popular science."

Hard to see an obvious pattern here, but interesting that one of the four had a talent-riddled family. I picked the category of people to look up before reading anything about them.

My way of tying this together is that having a talent-riddled family is probably associated with achieving greatness, due to some combo of genes and environment; but that there are so many non-talent-riddled families that a large number of geniuses will be from regular backgrounds. I'd love to know what proportion of Nobel prizewinners are related to at least one other Nobel prizewinner.

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Also wroth nothing: one of Charles Darwin's great nephews was the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams!

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Gavin Newsom with Darwin, the Curies, et al.???????????

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I wouldn't dismiss the "privilege" explanation that quickly. When I look at some of your names -- e.g., Thomas Henry Huxley and George Darwin, as well as (mentioned by some of the commenters) most of the "later" Bernoullis -- I'm seeing some recognized achievement, but I'm wondering if we would know their first names if we didn't know their last. (Of course, less of a thing in the case of Huxley, who predated the more famous bearers of his name, but one could argue he was riding on Darwin's wave.)

Also, I'm not sure "success" is the first thing that comes to mind when you ask a European about Raymond Poincaré :)

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I think you discount some of the name recognition advantage. Being president of some prestigious society is much more like being a politician than it is like being an actual scientist. Winning a Nobel Prize requires having the Nobel committee take notice of your work.

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T.S. Monk is the son of Thelonious Monk, and a jazz drummer. I went to a concert of his, and in between songs he told anecdotes about his Dad. One was about growing up. Regular visitors to the Monk household were people like John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and other jazz deities. T.S. said he grew up believing (1) everyone played a musical instrument, just like everyone could read and write, and (2) the standards for performance were, well, Monk-Coltrane-Davis level. That’s just what people did. The fact he became a pro was just part of the family expectations.

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It might be worth looking at families where genius *doesn't* recur. Did they just not aim at assortative mating for whatever reason? Did they have a family culture of "no one can live up to famous person" rather than "it's normal to excel"? Something else?

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Interesting essay. Another such families is the Klemperer family (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klemperer), which features famous phyciststs, conductors, actors, economists, chemists, and much else.

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Got a distinct "Royal Tanenbaum" (too lazy to look up the correct spelling) crossed with "Umbrella Academy" vibe from some of these families.

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founding

A boring answer, but it may be part of the explanation: lots of these things were relatively easier back then (and relatively fewer people/families had basic opportunities that made such careers possible).

I think of this because physics and math show up on many of these lists of accolades, and for sure there was a lot of incredible work available to do back then that just isn't possible today. (I myself work in particle physics theory.) Even 100 years ago, a physicist could be both a theorist and an experimentalist, or both a physicist and a mathematician, or both a mathematician and a politician. Millikan had an idea that maybe electrons were real, built an experiment, tested it, and won the Nobel Prize a few years later [1]. That never, never, never happens today. I have a suspicion the case is similar in Biology (also shows up a lot in the list).

So yes, Poincaré and Bohr and the rest were super impressive. But there weren't very many physicists (relatively), and there was a lot more lower-hanging fruit than there is today.

I think athletics is also much more competitive today than it was back then. I have no real idea what to think about poetry and literature, but I'd bet there are many times more poets and writers than before, partly because the competition is more global now.

I guess from this I would predict that you'd see less clustering of genius/success today, but that's also a likely prediction of Scott's explanations: people have fewer kids today, they don't select as strongly in mating strategies, etc.

[1] https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1923/summary/

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I think a counter-argument to "genetics" is that there are also many examples of groups of unrelated friends of people who were not famous to begin with, of whom many became famous and are now regarded as geniuses: the Bloomsbury group, the Vienna Circle, the Inklings, the friends of Ezra Pound, the people who hung out with Lord Byron... there's more, but I haven't kept a list.

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The Dennings in the UK are a possible counterpoint to this - of the three brothers, one became Britain's most prominent judge, one was an admiral and one was a general. Their father was a draper, and they all attended the same state school. None of them had obviously notable kids though.

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I've always wondered this about the lineage of Hiram Binghams.

Hiram Bingham the First was the leader of the first group of American Protestant missionaries to introduce Christianity to the Hawaiian islands. From the Wiki: "Bingham wrote extensively about the natives and was critical of their land-holding regime and of their "state of civilization". Bingham supported the introduction of market values along with Christianity. Those writings are now used by historians to illustrate the imperial values that were central to the attitudes of the United States towards Hawaii. Bingham was involved in the creation of the spelling system for writing the Hawaiian Language, and also translated some books of the Bible into Hawaiian."

Hiram Bingham II grew up in Honolulu but went to Yale, then came back to continue ministering to native Hawaiians. He explored and missionaried to lots of other Pacific Islanders too; among other things, Bingham II was the first to translate the Bible into Gilbertese, and wrote several hymn books, dictionaries and commentaries in the language of the Gilbert Islands.

Hiram Bingham III, the famous one, was "an American academic, explorer, and politician. He made public the existence of the Inca citadel of Machu Picchu in 1911 with the guidance of local indigenous farmers. Later, Bingham served as Governor of Connecticut for a single day, the shortest term in history, and then as a member of the United States Senate."

Hiram Bingham IV "was an American diplomat. He served as a Vice Consul in Marseilles, France, during World War II, and, along with Varian Fry, helped over 2,500 Jews to flee from France as Nazi forces advanced."

Genuinely never knew what to make of this dynasty, other than as a strange kaleidoscope of American imperial history.

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"I’m still pretty weirded out by this; even granted that soccer talent and mathematical talent are correlated at above zero, it can’t be that high a correlation, can it?"

Faster reaction time has a 0.2-0.5 correlation with IQ (http://www.ijmedrev.com/article_68880_bff0a3fc587803a00172cb2d2acb56d5.pdf) and it's a big advantage in sports (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-69975-z), so it's not surprising that there would be a correlation.

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Several people have already mentioned the Bernoullis. Eight famous mathematicians in the 1700s is just outrageous. It does help if Euler is a family friend.

There were at least five Strausses who were famous composers from Vienna.

Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt were brothers who were both truly impressive polymaths, in almost non-overlapping areas. Alexander should be as famous as Darwin or Linnaeus in biology.

And then there's really weird families, like the Hintons. James was a surgeon and prominent advocate for polygamy. His son Charles was a mathematician who worked on intuitive understanding of higher dimensions. He coined the term "tesseract", he was a polygamist, his first wife was the daughter of Boole, and he invented the first automatic baseball pitching machine (using gunpowder). His son Sebastian invented the jungle gym. I don't know if this is a selection for excellence, but it's certainly a selection for something.

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When I saw Newsom included in this list, I thought maybe I was the one taking the IQ test: “which one of the following is unlike all the others?” ☺️

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I searched Jeremy Siskind in youtube and there's mostly videos of him talking about piano and music theory each with a few hundred and sometimes a few thousand views. Which isn't that much. All the top hits seem to be teaching rather than original compositions or anything like that. He doesn't really seem that notable, especially not notable enough to have such a long wikipedia article. Is he actually famous or does he just have a fan/publicist that also happens to be a wikipedia editor?

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Makes me think of this website's occasional commenter, David Friedman (the economist), who sometimes talks about what it was like growing up as a son of the great economist, Milton Friedman. Reading what he has written about it, it just seems so natural (to me) that he would also grow up to do great work in that field. I assume his success in other fields is due to his natural genius, although perhaps it was because he learned to aim high (from his dad? or from his early successes?)

Also Scott, great great article, thank you for writing.

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Lineage level gene complexes within our DNA guard their expressions through an incredibly complex array of strategies, against a sea of shorter-term genes and complexes trying to undermine their sovereignty and immense power/influence. Vestiges of this warfare escape their old-school-noble-family abstractions, into their own small peaks of equilibria whose lineage level protections optimized against exploitations, allows them to incubate otherwise-pathologies into genius.

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Greatness here is defined as individual accomplishment, which is fascinating because it touches on the nature nurture problem. Greatness defined as wealth and influence is easier to explain.

Maybe as a segue to another post, I've always been fascinated with the mechanisms of dynastic wealth. In particular I've always been perplexed by the American custom of partible inheritance. For sure it makes for a more dynamic society when dynastic wealth keeps getting whittled down among more and more descendants. But if your goal is to build a dynasty - which is probably a goal of at least some rich people - it's a bad strategy.

I have heard that European dynasties behave differently. They are more likely to use a kind of "enlightened primogeniture" where one heir - not necessarily the eldest son - is chosen to be the custodian of the fortune and other heirs receive what amounts to a comfortable stipend.

Bit of a tangent, but as I said I find the behavior of American dynasties to be perplexing, explainable only as a social custom.

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Tonight I learned, while reading the relevant section of this post to my fiancée, that Rabindranath Tagore's living descendants will be attending our wedding in December. (My soon-to-be in-laws were educated in Shantiniketan.)

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Brahmoism was the first modern sect of Hinduism. It was founded by Rama Mohammad Roy a wealthy Bengali Brahman and supporter of British rule. It is a weird mishmash of Advaita Vedanta, Protestant Christianity and enlightenment rationalism. It was mainly a phenomenon of the Bhadra Lok (“good people” the Bengali upper caste Hindu gentry) and while it may have had a few million adherents in its heyday (seems exaggerated IMO) I doubt if it has more than a few thousand now. Within a generation began schisming and Devendranath was a leader (not founder) of one of these offshoots which is confusingly called Brahmoism. The Tagores are also Bengali Brahmans. Only in the last generation did they begin marrying outside their caste. E.g. the famous Bollywood actress Sharmila Tagore who married a Muslim king and famous cricketer the Nawab of Pataudi. (Not exactly a peasant!)

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I assume then that you are not related to Jeffrey Mark Siskind (computer engineering professor)?

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It's not just doctors, either.

Manne Siegbahn won the Nobel prize in physics. His son Kai Siegbahn won the Nobel prize in physics. His grandson Hans is merely a professor of physics.

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Hard agree on just going for it factor.

I'm sure everyone has anecdotes about things like it.

I resolved a couple years ago to just assume I can do things, and it turns out you can do pretty much whatever, and picking up new skills to basic competency is easy as hell.

Nothing is actually that hard. You can probably code after a couple weeks of trying, just like it turns out I can rewire cars, weld, fix washing machines, do complicated plumbing, stain concrete, learn a foreign language, and just about anything else that doesn't need a four year degree (And if I had a year or two to spare, I'm pretty sure I could do those things as well)

I imagine the barrier to entry to being a normal genius (I'm excluding FREAKS like Newton and von Neuman and Einstein and such) is a kind of lunatic confidence you can do anything if you take a couple shots, and a really strong desire to do it.

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The other interesting aspect of this is when average parents produce a genius. Isaac Newton's parents were farmers (like pretty much everyone else in 17th century England).

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If the genetic material were a driving factor, I'd suspect we'd have seen better results from efforts like this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repository_for_Germinal_Choice

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Does anyone else think that trying to create a 'great family' isn't a great idea?

I think it's a really common pattern to be smart at school and then go through a crisis when you realise that you are probably not going to be a world-changing genius. For some people that crisis is devastating and deprives them of being able to find meaning in their life. I, personally, know a few people that has happened to.

For anyone looking for parenting strategies here, this seems like a very risky one. A very small chance of great public benefit and mixed happiness for your children weighed against a pretty high chance of great unhappiness for your children.

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I don't understand the precise math. How does a 150 IQ person procreating with a 130 IQ person have a child with IQ 124 on average?

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It feels like the privilege hypothesis is straw-manned/passed over way too easily here - there are a lot of ways having very successful/influential relations would plausibly increase your odds of being successful besides just wealth - obvious examples being you have easier access to important networks and better education.

More nebulously (but maybe importantly?) growing up around super high-flyers simply changes the set of possible futures you imagine for yourself: if you grow up in a very poor environment where high aspirations can simply be getting a comfortable middle-class job, you’re much less likely to ever consider becoming a composer - even if you have the potential for it (not to mention the fact that you’re less likely to discover this talent in the first place). I definitely notice this phenomenon in a watered-down way first hand going to an Ivy-league from a poor background.

Tying into this but on the wealth point: it’s true that you can’t “rich-kid” your way into being a great scientist as you might be able to in e.g show-biz, but growing up affluent means you have more opportunities to nurture and explore passions and talents - you get the best resources and the opportunity to do relevant extra-curriculars, and you have more of a safety net in early adulthood or try riskier stuff

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The concept of a hero license is interesting. One thing I've noticed in my family is that people's ambitions are all beaten down by life, but only in proportion to the strength of the original ambition, so there is a real advantage to being insanely ambitious. Mom wanted to be a doctor and wound up a nurse. Dad wanted to be an engineer, wasn't good enough at math, became an engineering technician, and then eventually left the field entirely. Brother followed similar path wrt chemistry. I wanted to be elected President of the United States as soon as I was legally eligible, and then found a dynasty. Not gonna happen, but I am by far the most successful person in my family. I know my mom's IQ and she is smarter than me. My brother is almost as smart as me; the difference is not enough to explain the difference in achievement. So it's not fundamentally a difference in talent. But it may be a difference in hero licensing.

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In addition to random chance and selection bias, there is probably some halo effect as well,

Erasmus Darwin probably had similarly accomplished peers who are not as famous as him because they didn't have a super famous grandson. At some point the glow start to bounce off each other.

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> what gene do we think Niels and Harald Bohr shared that made one of them a physics Nobelist and the other an Olympic athlete?

Likely the same genes: Niels Bohr was *also* a great athlete, just not as good as Harald, and Harald was likely the best mathematician in Denmark. They were both very smart and very athletic such that it'd make sense that environmental and smaller genetic differences would cause the differentiation we saw between them.

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> elite soccer players are smarter than you are - "and the sharpest of them score more often than their dimmer teammates"

This seems like a red flag. I can believe intelligence helps with soccer play, but I'd be pretty shocked if the elite levels hadn't already extracted all the signal available from intelligence. A parallel is in American football, arm length is really important to be a good lineman, but it doesn't correlate with success in the NFL because making the NFL with short arms mean you have compensating talent. Unless theres just a lack of people with soccer ability who are also intelligent (seems unlikely?), shouldn't we expect no correlation at the top level even if intelligence matters? Similar arguments are made for the GRE not correlating with grad school success.

Anecdotal example of intelligence helping with soccer: I've heard magnus Carlsen (best living chess player) is also a quite good soccer player.

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As a meteorologist, I was a bit surprised to see Francis Galton credited as the inventor of modern meteorology, so I had to look him up to see what he did. Some stuff, but not nearly as foundational as, for example, Luke Howard (cloud classification), Robert FitzRoy (weather forecasting), Joseph Henry (weather observation and analysis), Vilhelm Bjerknes (meteorology as a branch of physics), and many others.

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> just assume there are an approximately infinite number of Tagores, all of whom have names ending in -dranath

I strongly suspect that you've misidentified the word elements. Are they not Rab-indra-nath, Aban-indra-nath, Hem-indra-nath (with -indra- becoming -endra- for some reason), etc? This feels like cracking a joke about how Svandís Svavarsdóttir, Þorgerður Gunnarsdóttir, and Þórhildur Sunna Ævarsdóttir all have names ending in "-arsdóttir".

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Just to add two data points: Both Alexander the Great and Hannibal had fathers who were military geniuses in their own right.

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That genius runs in families suggests that it can be a good survival strategy to grant social power and authority on a hereditary basis. One can see how monarchies and aristocracies might have evolved in the ancient world on this basis alone, or even why Plato, for example, considered the philosopher king to be ideal of government.

It remains to also account for kakistocracy, or rule by the worst. Surely evil genius runs in families, too. An interesting question might be why (or whether) good genius predominates.

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I think it's likely that growing up in an intimate environment with highly brilliant people is probably a unique kind of pedagogy which contributes at least SOME to inter-generational success.

Obviously it's hard to test for this (as is the case with a lot of nature vs. nurture things.) But seems prima facie really plausible to me.

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Sorry if someone has beaten me to this objection, but I feel like this is just selection bias.

That is, each generation has thousands of “genius level” people, who accomplish noteworthy things. They likely have a high rate of intermarriage (see the sequence post on elites being way better than everyone else for why) and many will have children. Suppose that most regress to the mean at exactly the rate you expect, but four families, just by chance, regress more slowly than the others. Then these four families appear to be special, whereas really its just luck, and selection bias takes you the rest of the way towards solving the problem.

The proper prediction for me to pre-register would be to pick 1,000 of the top geniuses in the world today, do math to figure out how many of their children we would expect to succeed, taking into account predicted IQ regression, exposure to elite circles, etc. and wait a couple decades to see whether the prediction was right.

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In societies where education was scarce and many people suffered decreased IQ from disease or malnutrition perhaps there would be more clustering than usual. Certainly there have been a fair number of people who were more likely to be excluded from the competition from the get-go due to social and environmental factors.

What I'd really be interested in is if the rate of this clustering *changes* with certain societal changes. Migration to the cities? How about availability of capital? I mean, in 1900 it was much harder to get startup capital if you didn't know someone wealthy. There were no venture capitalists. Though on the other side of things, less startup capital might have been required. You could start mixing herbs with opium and market the elixir from a soap box, whereas today marketing a new patent medicine would require that you be one of a handful of very large companies capable of passing regulatory muster.

Paul Graham had an article about how the number of people in the top 100 wealthiest in America were increasingly first generation wealthy. Not because there were fewer heirs, but because there were more self-made billionaires.

But I certainly agree that having a family that could place you on the first rung would be a big benefit if you wanted to start climbing.

"Have you, dear reader, ever tried writing poetry that will set the collective soul of your nation on fire? If no, why not?"

Because I absolutely do not want to set the collective soul of my nation on fire. I consider myself good at writing poetry and verse and I've had that echoed to some extent by those around me. But I'd rather write jokes and individual tributes. I would not *want* to found a religion, even if I had the capacity to do so. Why I'm not the next "Weird Al" is a more personal indictment, mostly due to my feeling that I don't have any musical ability or anyone who could help me make and popularize satirical videos.

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I suggest reading up and researching a community called "South Indian Brahmins" in Tamilnadu, India. Typically classified as Iyers and Iyengars. They comprise less than 2MM population but have more Nobel prize winners per capita than Ashkenazi Jews. Also very talented as musicians, politicians, scientists, academics and even as sports persons (tennis, cricket etc). A lot of it comes down to childhood parental expectations, role models, community culture, etc.

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Or, if the careers of our ancestors are so random and unconnected, we just might feel unburdened as a result, and be more "open" about doing stuff

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I enjoyed this article. Thank you.

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So, I'm technically a Huxley-in-law (Julian Huxley was my wife's great-grandfather).

While her family are highly-intelligent people, certainly none are as well known as a few generations prior.

Genetics probably are a part of that. Julian's son married "beneath" himself by his family's standards (no criticism here, she was a wonderful lady with incredible business sense, but not a Nobel prize winning scientist).

Part of it is different set of priorities. Even discounting the genetics, if a scientist marries a merchant then the children are much more likely to choose some kind of business career than if both parents were STEM-focused. Your parents' peers are likely part of that too. The Huxley's weren't just impressive in their own fields but also friends with the movers-and-shakers of British culture of their generation. Different social circles offer different life-choices.

It's also hard to underestimate how much damage the first and second world wars did to historically influential families, and the Huxley's are no exception.

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I suppose it would be easy enough, but probably too depressing, to consider the flipside: families with multiple instances of high school dropouts with low IQs, criminal convictions and violent early deaths. But I would expect the same combination of genetics, being raised badly by people who set bad examples, lack of opportunity or exposure to better options, and just random individual bad choices would likewise account for such things. The nature-nurture thing is kind of a feedback loop, I guess

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Both of my grandfathers' fathers were successful real estate developers. Then my maternal grandfather was a mathematician and computer science professor / bell labs researcher who was a frequent coauthor with Claude Shannon and invented finite state machines and fault-tolerant circuits. My maternal grandmother was a pastor's daughter who got a masters in math from Yale just to find a husband and became a housewife. My mother's elder sister was a childless programmer one block from ground zero in NYC (now retired and sponsoring several girls in third world countries). My mother majored in Economics, then dropped out of a computer science masters program to have me unexpectedly, and then got promoted into upper management at the defense mapping agency. My father majored in cartography and worked for the same agency for a while before he decided to start flipping houses, got divorced, and after a few years of probably toxic chemical exposures while renovating houses he went crazy and was permanently institutionalized for Schizophrenia when I was 8. My paternal grandfather was a flight mechanic on a B-52 in WWII and closet atheist who scored 99th percentile on the AFQT. After the war he worked for big corporations as a counselor to help fix/retain executives that had alcohol abuse problems (He kinda reminds me of Bob Ross). My father's only brother is a programmer and only sister is a convention manager at a 5-star hotel. My paternal grandmother was an accomplished musician. My brother won a prize for best PhD thesis in math, got married and had kids, and worked as a programmer. I dropped out of a computer science PhD program to go work for google, then a startup, then became a self-employed professional gambler / investor / bitcoin maximalist with a net worth in the top 1% for my age group despite being an extremely lazy videogame addict most of the time. My mother's first cousin is an ambassador, and her brother piloted air force one, and their mother is a great piano instructor. Many engineers and programmers are scattered throughout the family tree on both sides. When I was in public high school, I was #1 in my classes in AP Physics and Chemistry, but I didn't even consider going into those fields. I just went into computer science by default because of the family history.

Not everyone in the family is successful. My mother has an anomalously-blonde decade-younger unexpected-and-likely-illegitimate sister who posts annoying leftwing outrageporn on facebook and works retail for minimum wage after she got too old to be a park ranger and became very obese. She married a railroad foreman who domesticates hawks for fun and they had a strange son with severe ADHD who dropped out of community college after a few months, never held a job for more than 2 weeks, and still lives with his mother at age 25 playing videogames all day every day. They are nice people but not very bright. She always loses by a lot to my mother and her elder sister at board games.

BTW, if postnatal environmental effects were as important as genetic effects in explaining patterns of successful families, we should expect adoptive parent SES to strongly correlate with adoptive child SES in adulthood, but it doesn't. The correlation is almost zero. So the intergenerational correlation of SES for biological children is probably almost entirely caused by genes + prenatal environment.

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A good recent example is Larry Summers who is nephew to Kenneth Arrow and Paul Samuelson who both won Nobel Memorial prizes in Economics. Also Janet Yellen's husband just so happens to have one a Nobel Memorial prize in Economics as well.

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Some people say that regression to mean is due to luck evening out, but I think there's much more to it. If advantageous genotype is heterozygous in certain gene, then parents with best copies of gene would create child with same heterozygous gene with 1/2 chance.

After all, why plant breeding heavily uses f1 hybrids?

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To add to the hero-license thing, something that was going through my mind this entire article was familial expectation. Sure, it matters what you expect from yourself, but at least in India, it can matter even more what your family/environment expects from you. Most parents probably want their kids to be moderately successful, enough to have a happy life, but Nobel-prize winners expect their children to be the best in their field.

e.g. Rabindranath Tagore wrote some poems at the age of 8. Hey, I wrote some poems when i was a kid too. But Rabindranath was actively encouraged to write more, and to recite in front of a distinguished audience that all expected great things of him because he was a Tagore.

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This is an interesting theory, and hero-licensing seems to me as an extreme version of the 'success frame'* that is often used to describe 'tiger parenting' among Asian Americans (and other Western Countries).

Of course, if one believes that parenting is pointless, then this is probably covered by inheritance as much as the next person?

*https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12552-014-9112-7

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I think there is also an element that normalizes what it takes to be successful and gives kids of model to emulate.

One of my dear friend's mother is a world class opera singer, to the tunes of millions / year at the height of her career, and her children are both successful (though not as famous or storied) artists -- a writer and jazz muscian.

One of the things that always blows my mind about my friend's stories about her childhood was how she normalized habits that were completely foreign for me. It would be "okay" for her mother not to speak for a week leading up to a concert. Every single day, including holidays and birthdays, she had practice time that was sacrosanct. In the eyes of the kids, it was that her mother was making decisions and sacrifices about her talent and her career -- she normalized the sacrifices that it takes to be a world class opera singer -- and taught her kids to develop many of the same habits.

In my family, it was the total opposite. You would be ostracized and chastised for making those decisions and it was looked down on, in general.

In other words, families create micro-cultural norms... and highly successful families may imprint highly productive norms.

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Is this intentional that you only focus on intelligence (inherited or learned) as a Generic Talent measure? And not on any personality traits. Because, the word "willpower" may be banned from use in the rat community, but the reality is that some people are just better at trying really hard than others, call it "intrinsic motivation", "stubbornness" "hardworking-ness" or whatever, the thing measured by the marshmallow test. If it's genetic or learned from parents (probably both as all complex traits), it can better explain success in unrelated fields than IQ alone.

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Another example. Benedict Wells and Ferdinand von Schirach are some of the most famous authors in contemporary German literature and they happen to be cousins. Their grandfather was Baldur von Schirach who was indicted at Nuremberg and the von Schirach family contains other notable individuals. Wells changed his name to avoid (hide?) this association.

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Thanks for this, really interesting. I feel the "hero license" effect would be significant. Also, no proof here either, but not just genes travel down bloodlines, but ideas too. Especially for ideas to be deeply embedded into how someone thinks requires repeated exposure, e.g. from parent to child or from brother to sister, or, preacher to congregation. It's a generalization of the "hero license" effect.

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Julian Huxley also wrote the massive "The Science of Life" with H.G. Wells and Wells's son, G. P. Wells. Tomas Bohr's brother Vilhelm is a distinguished MD, PhD researcher on aging at the NIH.

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Bohr's sons and grandsons have described how every meal was an opportunity for Niels to ask them questions about science and give them mathematical puzzles to solve. That surely played a role.

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This also happens in leadership roles. For example, Charles II, King of Spain was both the son and the cousin of Mariana of Austria.

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I can't fully trust such a heavily anecdotal approach to understanding success, due to wiki-walk selection effects.

How much of Erasmus Darwin's notability comes from being Charles's grandfather? If he hadn't been, do you think you'd have heard of him? (I hadn't heard of most of the 3rd, 4th, etc. family members in these examples, and in some cases not even the 2nd.) How many other Englishmen of his generation made similar contributions? Very roughly speaking, if that number is larger than the square root of the entire talent pool (which in this era would have been exclusively upper-class males) then there's nothing to explain here-- the intuition is the same as for the birthday paradox.

Similarly, Nobel Prizes are pretty impressive (<10 per year) but the 3rd, 4th, etc examples in a lot of these families are just, like, 95th-percentile-successful academics or artists or businesspeople or whatever. Even in the 19th century there must have been hundreds of those born every year; today it's more like hundreds of thousands. Given the degrees of freedom in family ties (average person has >10 blood relatives, more in big families; we only have to find 2 or 3 notable ones) and kinds of notability, I'm inclined to chalk a lot of this anecdata up to coincidence. Though I don't doubt that the effects mentioned in Part V, at least, play a role as well.

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Well, I started looking for moonshots as soon as I graduated college. I spent 5 years researching and experimenting to find a huge unsolved problem I cared about, thought I could get traction on, and would enjoy tackling. When I found one I worked on it on and off for 20 years, only reaching gainful employment in the last 2.

So I’m definitely quite high on “obsessed with investing towards a shot at absurd success” scale. And I would directly trace it to having a famous family (though the experience was much more nuanced, and darker, than the Hero).

Maybe I would have met the right people and absorbed it over time. I think it matches my personality and values. But in most circumstances I’m sure ambition would have been much slower to develop, and much more reasonable, like “Start a unicorn company”.

So, one data point supporting Scott’s hypo about a family effect.

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Terence Tao has two brothers. Nigel Tao is a senior engineer at Google. Trevor Tao is a musician and an international chess master. When Trevor Tao was two he was diagnosed with autism and mental retardation. All three of them competed in the international mathematical olympiads.

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I think one important thing that is missing from the discussion is confidence in your abilities, which is most likely affected by the people you interact with. In my own personal experience, confidence in my ability to solve a problem can have a very literal effect on the fluidity and clarity in how I think about it. Any sliver of doubt can interrupt this mental fluidity and make me start the sort of "motion" of thinking it through over again. This fluidity and confidence in your motion is much more easily demonstrated in sports ("just do it").

Your parents probably not only affect your big picture aspirations, but also this confidence on a more granular level, perhaps just from listening to how they think about problems.

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A lot of comments along the lines of "I know why *I* was successful" here. This is unlikely to be true, people, sorry! You have no counterfactuals and an N of 1.

A relevant paper by Greg Clark: "For whom the Bell Curve tolls" is here: http://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/ClarkGlasgow2021.pdf. It argues using a big database of UK families that genetics fit the patterns in the data better than the environment. It also acknowledges that this argument requires a huge amount of assortative mating. Incidentally, he got cancelled from Glasgow University for this.

Also relevant, our working paper, not out yet but I'll give a flavour from the abstract:

"If social status and genetic variants are both assets in marriage markets, then the two will become associated in spouse pairs, and will be passed on to subsequent generations together. This process provides a new explanation for the surprising persistence of inequality across generations, and for observed genetic differences across the distribution of socio-economic status... environmental shocks to socio-economic status are reflected in the DNA of subsequent generations."

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I know a significant amount of early childhood development is based on mimicry, perhaps that instinct lasts longer than early childhood. Initially surnames often reflected trades and I assume that dynamic of "family businesses" arose naturally from the earliest human settlements. Proximity to critical thinking on a day to day basis likely increases the likelihood of proficiency at critical thinking.

Aside from all of that, it could be a significant amount of randomness. Even with very low probabilities of genius level ability and achievement, there is sure to be some clustering if we look at a long timescale.

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Re: Regression to the mean

Not all the non-genetic factors are going to be random. These kids aren't getting adopted out and assigned to random families.

People often learn a lot about parenting from their own parents. A family who's produced one genius may not be perfect but they're probably avoiding things that are likely to cripple their kids progression.

Privilege is definitely part of it, connections, knowledge, having a nobel-winning parent who's probably willing to dedicate time and resources to their children's curiosity.

And then throw in confidence and assumptions. I remember an old talk by an editor at the journal Nature talking about how one of the big filters was that they actually didn't get as many submissions as you might think, people self-select and send their papers to lower-tier journals.

So if both mom and dad are in the top tiers of their professions, if their parents friends are also in the top tiers of professions their their kids are going to see it as natural that they aim for similar levels. There are doors out there that are hanging open for anyone to use but which many people decide to not even trying to walk through.

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"I said before that if an IQ 150 person marries an IQ 130 person, on average their kids will have IQ 124."

This isn't necessarily how regression toward the mean works. Because the "mean" one is regressing toward is not the mean of the general population -- it is the mean of your parents genotypes (not phenotypes). Your parents' phenotypes might be higher, lower or the same as their genotypes. The more you know about their other family members the more you can deduce their mean genotype.

For example, if the IQ 150 and IQ 130 parents came from families that averaged 150 and 130 IQ's, respectively, we would expect no decrees in the IQ of their offspring. In fact, if their respective families had average IQs of 160, their offspring would be expected to regress upward (!) toward that 160 average.

So the bottom line is that assortative mating/inbreeding for intelligence is probably more feasible over time than Scott imagines if people can just keep it up consistently. With selective breeding you can end up as a family of Border Collies living amongst a general population of Beagles.

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Did somebody already mention Swiss family Piccard? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piccard_family

Famous Adventurers, Scientists, Engineers... Rich people who take risks but always found ways to follow their own interests beside 16 hours 6 days per week in the factory (or 9 to 5 in these days) and get famous and wealthy by doing so.

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Guess everything was already said - but not yet by everybody 😉

Not sure if this was mentioned - just my 2 cents:

- first thing would be to test the pure statistical significance of said example families as being absolutely improbabile. My expectation would be that with currently 8 billion people on earth and let's say 15 billion since 1700 (Darwin Family) chance seem pretty high that at least 10-50 families would do extremely well over let's say 3 generations. Could be that we are just standing in astonishment in front of some lottery winners and wondering 'what these guys did better then all the other players which didn't win the jackpot'. We all love stories of success and therefore easily fall victim to boasting about 'self made success' and don't emphasize the fact that most success is only a tiny fraction a result of an individual's personal actions and most a result of good genes at the right time in the right environment. Veritasium has made a extremely well video about 'The Success Paradox' https://youtu.be/3LopI4YeC4I

- Survivers bias: we just didn't think about the other 14.999999 billion people in 1.499999 Million families who did not that extremely well over the past 400 years.

- nurture or nature (genes or culture, inheritance or training) in some if not many families both genes and culture gets passed on to the next generation. Both favorable and unfavorable things. I guess for each 'positive' outlier family there exists at least one 'negative' outlier family in the world. Both hand their business over to the younger members sooner or later: Doctors, Attorneys, Competitive Sportsmen and Women, Engineers, Thieves, Bank robbers, Mafia clans and so forth. The knowledge of this is so old and basic that many of western people carry *family* (past) names, which were given their ancestors in European middle age and created by just adding the families male profession behind a person's first name: John Smith, Henry Butcher, Will Carpenter and so on. Businesses even in the new world country USA were often named 'X and Sind's etc.

-

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this may be a bit too controversial, but there are ethno-national-religious groups who have a hugely disproportionate share of science and economics Nobel prizes, fields medals, and I believe chess world championships, just to name a few accomplishments one could claim are unambiguously impressive. The same questions apply, but I am not sure we have better answers

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To add to the last point, I think its importance lies in more than just expectation setting or "hero license." If everyone in your family is a doctor, then not only is it easy for you to imagine yourself becoming a doctor at some point, but you can have a pretty good sense of all of the steps it would take for you to become one yourself. Most of my family has a PhD (my brother, my dad, my mom, my grandmother--now my wife too), mostly in philosophy. It was easy to imagine that I could get one too, and more than that at every stage of my life I knew exactly what steps I needed to take to achieve that goal, navigate the complex and arcane rules of academia, learn how to do PhD level work, etc.. Many of these I would have had to learn first-hand, but instead could just rely on others to help me with. Now, I think I can honestly say that I have not made use of connections (which I regret sometimes--they would have helped), but for many things it's as though I did not need to. It was enough that I knew exactly how, e.g., academic conferences worked that I could navigate them and their byzantine etiquettes fairly well to get a definite head start on my career.

If I had had a different family it's still possible that I would have encountered philosophy in college, fallen in love with it, and wanted to become a philosophy professor. And it's even possible that I would have done it. But without that inside knowledge of what steps to take to achieve that goal, I would have had a much harder chance not only of envisioning myself as achieving that goal, but even of envisioning myself going through the individual steps needed to make that a reality.

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My impression is that there are more British intellectual dynasties than American ones.

For example, the actress Olivia Wilde has started writing screenplays, which is unusual for lovely actresses but not surprising in her case because she's actually a Cockburn (but she picked a stage name for obvious reasons), the heir to a long line of prominent left of center journalists going back to Lord Cockburn 200 years ago. Lord Cockburn is also the ancestor to a famous dynasty of right-of-center writers, the Waughs (e.g., Evelyn, who was the first cousin of Olivia's Communist grandfather Claude Cockburn).

I don't think there is quite the same density of family connections among intellectuals in US history, although I wouldn't know how to quantify that hunch.

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In Michael Frayn's play "Copenhagen," there are three characters: Bohr, Heisenberg, and Mrs. Bohr, who is treated by two great physicists as a most estimable intellect.

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Economic historian Gregory Clark has done a lot of research into unique surnames in Britain. For example, he compared two great names around c. 1700: Samuel Pepys, the famous diarist and naval administrator whose bureaucratic innovations helped institutionalized the Royal Navy as the world's foremost institution, vs. Daniel Defoe, the titanic author of the first bestselling novel in the English language, "Robinson Crusoe."

Pepys was the son of a tailor and Defoe (born "Foe") was the son of a butcher. But Pepys had numerous prominent relatives earlier in the 17th Century while Defoe's relations are obscure. Clark found that numerous Pepyses are found in the upper reaches of society in subsequent centuries, while later Defoes (or Foes) disappear back into obscurity.

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This is all too common in academia. Off the top of my head :

Ed Witten's daughter Daniela is a prof @ UW

Greg Clarke, Hinton's family

Tauman-Kalai family

Valiants, Blums in theoretical CS

Laszlo Lovasz's son is on track to be a top mathematician...at the same group as Avi Wigderson's son

There are many other linkages. If you pick a random prof you have heard of a top uni, odds are good they are a professor's son and/or have unrelated achievements in their family, such as being a billionaire or being a CEO-tier exec. I remember randomly looking at someone's profile and going huh...Minsky ? But of course she's related to Marvin Minsky. There are no coincidences.

The reason is some mixture of genetics and upbringing, being an academic/researcher isn't for everybody. If it was purely genetics there would be ``crossover", people from elite profession A going to elite profession B fairly often.

This doesn't occur that much. Being a hedge fund manager's child tilts your odds at becoming a prof, but not as much as being a prof's son, despite the two professions both being selective. There is also a heavy unsavory aspect involved and nepotism does continue to occur in an untold manner of simply having a head start and using it well. Generally, genetics washes out head starts, but when you are in a hypercompetitive arena, these otherwise-useless things begin to matter.

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I and my brother followed our Dad into IT, I wonder if there are studies on adopted vs genetic children in this? Of course we went into IT, it was 'what people do', I'd have no idea how to make a living as a plumber even if I could do the plumbing. I assume that these people all had contacts,such that upon showing promise they talked to dad's mate Jon about how to get elected rather than shrugging and saying 'not for me'

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Kay Redfield Jamison has a good stab at some of these sort of family links in her book Touched by Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touched_with_Fire Worth it for the Spender poem she opens with alone - The Truly Great: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54715/the-truly-great

I think continually of those who were truly great.

Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history

Through corridors of light, where the hours are suns,

Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition

Was that their lips, still touched with fire,

Should tell of the Spirit, clothed from head to foot in song.

And who hoarded from the Spring branches

The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

What is precious, is never to forget

The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs

Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.

Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light

Nor its grave evening demand for love.

Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother

With noise and fog, the flowering of the spirit.

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields,

See how these names are fêted by the waving grass

And by the streamers of white cloud

And whispers of wind in the listening sky.

The names of those who in their lives fought for life,

Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre.

Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun

And left the vivid air signed with their honour.

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Here's another family that's super successful, but aren't mentioned that often.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_H._Lawrence

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Lawrence

Both grew up in a small Norwegian homesteading community in Rural South Dakota, both had major academic achievements in their careers. Parents were just school teachers.

They also had another friend that was an accomplished physicist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merle_Tuve

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I'm genuinely surprised the topic of epigenetics wasn't breached here: "Epigenetics is the study of heritable changes in gene expression that occur without changes in DNA sequence (Wolffe and Guschin, 2000). Epigenetic mechanisms are flexible genomic parameters that can change genome function under exogenous influence, and also provide a mechanism that allows for the stable propagation of gene activity states from one generation of cells to the next." (https://www.nature.com/articles/hdy20102)

I am the farthest from an expert in this, but I'm extremely fascinated at the idea of how the environment can affect how genes are expressed. It would flow from this idea that the same core gene could be associated with music and mathematics, yet the environmental factors would dictate how that gene (or set of genes) expresses itself into one or the other. Further googling shows recent studies with some evidence that epigenetic mechanisms can affect IQ directly (https://www.europeanscientist.com/en/research/epigenetics-and-iq-a-new-study-uncovers-one-of-the-mechanisms-behind-environmentally-induced-effects-on-cognitive-performance/). There are many studies of in utero epigenetics influencing how genes are expressed, including environmental factors. The existence of this field fuels my epistemic humility in all things genetics, and I can't help but wonder if it's at play in any discussions of hereditary traits that seem to be transient. Of course, the engineer in me also wonders if/how we could improve health by better in utero programming.

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Your conclusion is the same as mine. Believe in your own ability to DO, even if it feels a bit delusional at times. “‘Can do’ will do.”

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I *have* written and translated poetry, but I'm more of a math/science geek and hardware/software amphibian.

Currently putting together an experiment to test electrostatic time dilation, which is a prediction of an obscure class of theories dating back to 1978 which I became the ~7th person to re-discover in 2009. (We're up to at least 9 now. I sometimes think that my biggest contribution to the field was just doing the literature search and finding everyone else. Most of them had no idea that anyone else had figured this out.) My wife (cognitive neuroscientist and ACX-follower) said I should apply for an ACX grant, but I don't need funds as much as I need a muon beam. The hardware is cheap, I can fund it from my Social Security. TRIUMF are being assholes, but PSI is letting me apply for beam time in 2022 (proposals due Jan 10th).

The saddest thing here is that you didn't know who Esther Dyson is. I've gotten to speak with her a few times, and she's one of the deepest thinkers I know.

Anyway, I think that you're underweighting the "enriched learning environment" part of the equation. A large family that throws salons has a huge advantage over a nuclear couple with few friends. "It takes a village ..." Schools are important, but can only do so much.

Poetry, travel, physics etc. on my blog here: https://howardlandman.wordpress.com/ The boundary between art and science is fuzzier than you might think; for example, my poem The Problem of Lesbian Sheep (https://wordpress.com/post/howardlandman.wordpress.com/1611) was cited in a technical paper about online dating algorithms (http://sigtbd.csail.mit.edu/pubs/veryconference-paper10.pdf).

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It is simple. There are 5 colors. Red white green blue black. Humans, persons have at most 3. Two is for caricatures, 1 is for kids, 0 is for unborn babies. No man can achieve 4 or more on their own. for it is unnatural. 4 is the color of cities, clans, civilization. 5 appears to be the color of fucking magic. See this fella: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7msDInjK0wk Naya (the kid, white red green) is being styled on by a 5 color madman.

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Absence of depression gene helps

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"Niels Bohr developed the modern understanding of the atom". Niels Bohr developed the common misunderstanding of Quantum Mechanics and managed to convince most physicists that his philosophy was science. E.g., see https://bohmian-mechanics.net/sokalhoax.html

"Take Niels Bohr. He’s a genius". I suppose it depends on how you define "genius".

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Without the internet the only way for individual to pursue information was through family and peers. Family was giving access to peers and books respectfully. So coming from an affluent family was bare minimum to achievement beyond life of an individual. Someone whose family was not in 1% in terms of wealth through most of the history of civilization can't even comprehend doing something, which is not about their survival.

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The “permission to be great” thing is certainly a factor. There may be counterpart phenomenon: people who accomplish great things because they didn’t know they couldn’t. Would put Walt Disney, The Beatles, maybe Napoleon into this category.

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And how many “privileged” families have how many other offspring who are ne’er-do-wells, who have developmental disabilities, become criminals, etc.? The unmentioned offspring are evidence that the “privilege” effect is not as great as the author suggests. I tend to think the parental examples of expenditure of time and effort are more likely and strongly correlated with and causing the success of children. Children tend to see (and adopt or reject, depending on the relationship with the parent) the values of things like readying, study, hard work, etc. based on the examples set in the home

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Bernoulli family was left out!

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Why in the name of whatever deity or collective good feelings (the Christian God for me) would you attempt to promote greatness in a single family lineage? Is this a callback to early twentieth century eugenics?

I don't want to promote a society full of supra-geniuses. I want to promote a society full of decent human beings that function in a mostly healthy and egalitarian manner. That might be because I work as a prison guard and don't have a graduate (or undergraduate) degree, which I suspect is the sort of prerequisite I would need to start ranking muh geniuses.

Additionally, I live in Texas. Matt McConaughey describes Texas as "The sort of place where no ones too good, and everyone's good enough." I completely subscribe to that philosophy. Ain't no solid gold statues of Prince Albert abouts, cause rigid classism is for brits- and so is eugenical promotions of supra-geniuses.

The last poetry written in America that set the soul of the nation on fire was from the pen of Ice Cube, and released on a CD, btw. All culture from America comes from the bottom, not the top. And that's the strength of street knowledge.

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There's the Bernoulli family too.

Powerful families could be added: the Clintons, the Bushes, the Roosevelts.

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One thing worth noting about genetics is that *g* is associated with a lot of random things - like, for instance, physical attractiveness and height.

This makes genetic explanations much more likely. Imagine that *g* is influenced by something like, say, low mutational load (which it is). It's easy to imagine that basically every positive trait is probably influenced by this. So many "generically good genes" probably increase a lot of positive traits - height, physical attractiveness, *g*, physical fitness, etc. probably ALL are influenced by the same "general health" genes that make you more healthy and more physically fit, allowing your brain and body to develop better.

On top of that, *g* seems to positively influence just about everything, and most of the things you were focusing on were things that are probably *g*-loaded.

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Bach family is one more example

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Just out of curiosity I tried looking into Srinivasa Ramanujan's family but couldn't find much from a casual internet search. I sure hope someone's keeping up with talent-scouting his extended family's descendants just in case...

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The IQ thing is more complicated than you suggest. I am supposedly about the 6th great grandchild of Joseph Priestly, the man who discovered oxygen. I can't claim any great achievements of my own, but everyone is my family is very smart and successful, usually with IQ's in the 130-160 range.

But here's the interesting part. (1) That is everyone in all branches of the family, not just the part descended from Priestly. (2) My mother is an obsessive genealogist, so I have met all of these 3rd to 8th cousins, largely from England. Within that group, there is an unusual number of people who went to Oxbridge or the Ivies. My theory is assortative mating.

What's more, I have found strange cognitive similarities between myself and my distant cousins. For example, at the age of about 50, I met my 2nd cousin, once removed. He is English and our family had not seen anyone from that part of the family since about 1900. However, when he started to talk about Trump, I remember coming up with a reply to what he was saying in my head, an entire paragraph. My distant cousin then said that paragraph out loud to me, word for word. It was weird.

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I can describe my personal relationship to your argument:

I decided at a young age that it was purposeless to pursue a standard career, solely for some promised 'happiness'. I don't feel an urge to reach for only *one* of my emotions; happiness just happens, and shouldn't be called to our side like a dog. I lack those reservations that protect people from attempting a likely failure - "If I fail, then I'll be sad, and I'll be broke, and the rest of my life will be that much harder." Yup. I step toward likely failure knowingly, because I am not wed to happiness. It's not on my score-card. It also means I'm boring. :)

I sense the fundamental distinction in *motive* held by the majority of those 'self-actualized' and 'genius' minds (compared to the boss-lovers who complained when their English teacher said "write an essay about a topic *of your choice*" - "No! You have to tell us what to write...") regardless of their lineage. The 'geniuses' strive without a longing for the comfort of stability; their risks only *sometimes* pay-off, which is still plenty to provide numerous 'miracle family' sets by sheer volume of accomplished individuals.

[Side-Note: Experimental Design of Gene-Hypothesis? If genes are a large portion of accomplishment, then the *incidence* of genius among any *one* child of a genius, for the set of all 'recognized geniuses', should be ~50%. Lots of data to collect, and clearly room to fudge the qualifications for who is on that list, yet it seems tractable. While a rate of 'half the time' does not imply genes, itself; however, if incidence is significantly lower, that would imply NOT genes; if incidence was higher than half that implies at least an INCLUSION of 'environmental and personal factors', like training, boredom, and grit.]

A willingness to take risks can captivate someone in many ways. And most of the people who pursue those risks fail. The successes are called 'genius' - even when others were distinct from that success only in that they were downtrodden and ignored. Either way, once happiness subsides in the face of valor, it becomes *heartbreaking* to EVER GIVE UP ON VALOR.

I suggest that the source of many accomplished minds is an ADDICTION to an incredibly RARE combination of neural states: the *chance* to INITIATE a WORLD-altering impact. A dent the tides of time can't comb smooth. Most people NEVER taste it; once you do, all else but the dearest love melts away.

Those 'geniuses' poured their whole lives into their work - Paul Erdos, who published 1,500 mathematical proofs, slept on a couch and never dated. He spent 20 hours a day working on mathematics, for his entire life. We can't expect someone to accomplish so much on any LESS time; and the only people who pursue their work so VIGOROUSLY are those lost in this addiction: "If I can do just *one* thing that LASTS..."

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Late to the party... did anyone throw out Morphic Resonance as a sound (pun intended) basis for understanding the heredity of extraordinary talent? Happy to expound on this and the hypothesis of formative causation if anyone would like.

Tangentially Rupert Sheldrake, Jill Purce, and their sons Cosmo (an avant garde musician) and Merlin (a pioneering biologist) could one day qualify for such lists of influential super families, judging by the as-yet unrealized but re-evolutionary impact of much of Rupert's work, and the sparkling promise of Merlin's efforts in the realm of fungi and forest ecology.

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Alfred Nobel blew most of his up.

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I know I'm super later here, but I think there's another respect that privilege can make genius-level success more likely that wasn't considered at all. Children of great people are more likely to be given the opportunity to pursue greatness. Most people, when they graduate college, have to spend years finding their first jobs and establishing themselves in their careers so they can support themselves. They simply won't have the time or energy to spend studying and refining less immediately practical skills. Whereas highly privileged children of great people will be more likely to find encouragement and practical support in pursuing an academic (or political, or athletic) career.

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you reminded me to open my dusty old book of rabindranath tagore, works of translation.

some of his sayings -source, stray birds.

"The Great is a born child;When he dies he gives his great childhood to the world."

"That love could ever lose is a fact we cannot accept as truth."

"

Either you have work or you have not.

When you have to say, "Let us do something", then begins the mischief."

so perhaps, the original saying of Yoda in starwars also comes from Rabindranath?.

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I came across a Simon Baron-Cohen and I was like "surely he must be related to Sacha Baron-Cohen" and lo, wikipedia reports 5 named people with that surname who are all brothers/cousins. ...who are all significant enough to have a wikipedia page!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baron-Cohen

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But what of IQs that travel from one generation to the next in the other direction, up? Is this just the random flip of a genetic switch?

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You should rearrange that to read: P(A|B)*P(B) = P(A n B) = P(B n A) = P(B|A)*P(A). You know, symmetry and all.

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I did come to Slovakia (then Czechoslovakia) in 1991 to change the world - as a Free Marketeer. The Klaus coupon privatization had me stay a bit longer, and my lovely Slovak wife made me settle. She's a doctor. Our eldest child (of 4) is also a doctor.

(Bari Weiss reminded me of this fine post in her year-end list)

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Another great family no one mentioned here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes_family

Within a single crop of siblings you have great actors Ralph and Joseph Fiennes, composer Magnus Fiennes, two film directors, an an adopted child who became an archaeologist.

Farther back in the family tree there are notable industrialists, explorers, politicians, and clerics.

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I immediately thought of the Healy family (here's their Wikipedia page - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healy_family). I originally read about Michael, who was the first African American to captain a Federal ship, in a book about Alaskan history. Michael and his 10 (fits the pattern) siblings were born slaves, and many of them became accomplished in various fields (mostly religious leaders), leading the way for African American leadership in the 19th century.

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Here's another one I feel like throwing into the comments here - Sir Timothy Gowers, a Fields Medalist. From Wikipedia: "Gowers's father was Patrick Gowers, a composer; his great-grandfather was Sir Ernest Gowers, a British civil servant who was best known for guides to English usage; and his great-great-grandfather was Sir William Gowers". His great-great-great-grandfather was a "ladies' bootmaker". Timothy Gower's great uncle was "a British colonial administrator who was Governor of Uganda from 1925 to 1932". His sister is a novelist.

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I just stumbled across what I believe to be another great family - from Africa:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenyatta_family

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