conuly | I was reading this article about very gifted children

It's an interesting enough article, but what I'm posting about is this line:

At the age of 12, Ophelia clocked 162 in Mensa’s IQ test. It is the highest possible score for someone under 18, and on a level with Stephen Hawking, the ground-breaking cosmologist who died last year.

It's a bit of a weird thing to say, when you think about it. Does anybody seriously imagine that people reading this article have never heard of Stephen Hawking and need to be told who he is?

Good form in writing in English, as my teachers drilled into my head as a child, means assuming your readers have lived their entire lives under a rock and, consequently, know nothing. The quoted text reminded me of this post by LanguageLog that reiterates that, using the example of an article from the WSJ which takes the time to patiently reminded its readers that McDonald's is a fast food company.

It's not strange until you really think about it, and then you can't stop seeing it.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

wpadmirer

Believe it or not, I've had to explain who Stephen Hawking was. (I had coffee and mince pie with him once at his home, back in the early 1990s. Pat and I have a friend who was a post-doc with Hawking at Cambridge, and they were very good friends.)

From:

steorra

Well, as someone who often doesn't know about famous people that "everyone knows about", I'm probably an example of why this is necessary.

I mean, yeah, I know who Stephen Hawking is. But lots of actors, musicians, bands, sports players, etc ... I would have no clue.

Edited Date: 2020-06-27 03:50 am (UTC)

From:

sixbeforelunch

Seconding this. I hear a lot about some dude named Ed Sheeran, but I have no idea who he is or why he's famous. (Obviously I could look it up if I cared enough, which I don't.)

From:

austin_dern

There's also the providing of context clues. Much of memory is about putting something in a logical place. If the reader thinks the group under discussion is ``people in this school district/city/part of the state'' they might assume Stephen Hawking to be someone else in the school or city or state, and need time to connect it to the famous one. The explanation guides the reader's memory.

From:

mtbc

I'm not one to judge, I find theoretical physics interesting and took some math and physics courses at Cambridge but, goodness, I think I even remember him appearing in everything from The Simpsons to ST:TNG. But, background may be everything: for instance, having grown up in Western Europe, it seemed weird to me for Americans to suffix "Paris" with ", France" and my first thought about wars in 1812 was Napoleon's advance on Moscow which turns out not to be what Americans typically think of.

So, given that historical-war example, perhaps it importantly helps with ambiguity: his name isn't the most unusual and it's quite plausible that the reader's first thought is of somebody half-known to them from some other sphere whose name is similar; ha, I bet some people think he's "Steven Hawkings". For example, just in terms of English physicists, British people will mention Brian Cox to me and expect me to not think of the actor from the city I work in who went on to play Hannibal Lecter, they're instead thinking of the guy who does particle physics and writes science books and suchlike and it doesn't occur to them that there's also the actor.

From:

oloriel

To start with, it's a convention from pre-Google days, back when people - if they came across a name or place or principle they happened not to know, or maybe confused with somethign else - had no way of finding out who or what the article was talking about except going to the library (wow, that's dedication!) or asking the next best person on the train/in the office/at the breakfast table. There are several problems with that:
a) If the name/place/principle isn't explained further, the reader will assume that it's common knowledge that they don't have, which will make them worry about looking stupid if they ask.
So they probably won't ask, unless it really bugs them, in which case
b) maybe they're lucky and the other person will know, but just as likely,
c) the other person may actually be just as clueless, in which case
d) they will either share an erroneous opinion,
e) bullshit so they in turn won't look stupid,
f) or admit their ignorance and they'll both have to go through the same exercise again.
And even in the days of Google, it's safer to assume that people are lazy and will not look up things unless they absolutely have to, so it's a lot better to provide them with additional info.

McDonald's might also refer to Old MacDonald (he who had a farm), or an actual individual of that name (for instance, singer Amy Macdonald). Even with the context of IQs already given, someone might still think of Steven Hawkin or Stephen Hawkins. Heck, it could be some other guy who took mensa's IQ test and happened to be named Stephen Hawking. Or maybe they've heard the name before but just can't place it right now. What did he do again? Oh I think he was an author? Yes, that sounds right. File under: literature! (Which isn't wholly wrong - he did write several books - but maybe that's not what the article is aming at, or maybe our brain is automatically thinking of fiction, which will lead it down a different path.)

The thing is that our brains do something called "predicting" when we read. To speed up the process, our brain makes predictions about what is going to happen next, and sometimes we will jump right to the next section without bothering to make sure that the prediction was correct. (Same with listening. If you see a teacher in front of a class, and the teacher says "Good morning,...", then your brain will probably provide the rest from your own experience. Imagine that in your school days, your teachers pretty much always said something like "Good morning, everybody!". Now this teacher says "Good morning, boys and girls!" instead. Later, someone complains that this greeting unnecessarily perpetrates a gender binary and hierarchy. You will recall the situation in your mind, be convinced that you heard "Good morning, everybody!", wonder where the gender binary is in "everybody", and conclude that Social Justice Warriors (TM) are just crazy.)

Anyway -- depending on how experienced the reader is, they will catch their brain at predicting something wrongly and correct their assumption using the new information from the text. Or they won't. They'll feel that they've got the sentence or paragraph figured out, and move on. In which case they'll just add the information to whatever idea they have in their mind about Stephen Hawkins the Australian Champion Rower (whoever said you can't be brawny and brainy?). Or some random dude named Stephen Hawkings who doesn't actually seem to be relevant to this article but w/e, maybe he's Ophelia's stepdad or school principal or something! (On a side note, I first thought you were talking about some sort of modern Hamlet adaptation in which Ophelia's a child genius, apparently, because that's just the first thing my brain jumps to when it sees "Ophelia".)

Incidentally, this is why it's so hard to break convictions with facts. And also why it's so dangerous to write misleading headlines to "catch readers' attention". It catches their attention alright, but that doesn't mean they'll interpret the information in the article correctly!

Assume that the reader is stupid, lazy or both, and that you will have to take them by the hand to lead them safely through the article and get them to the conclusion that you actually want them to arrive at.

Edited Date: 2020-06-27 09:07 am (UTC)

From:

readerjane

Huh. The part that strikes me is, "highest possible score for someone under 18".

If someone can have an IQ of 200, why can't a 17-year old? Do the testers think their intelligence will somehow pop higher when they turn 18? Sure, it would be unusual, but isn't genius exceptional anyway? An IQ test isn't trying to measure wisdom and experience.

From:

batwrangler

Because the score is base on a formula that uses the age of the person being tested?

From:

batwrangler

Also, for historical context: It helps a piece not be dated and carries information for future readers, possibly many years from now.

From:

crystalpyramid

I wonder if part of it is that they wanted to mention that he died recently (which people might not know) and thought it would be weird not to say anything else.

Definitely an interesting article! It makes me wonder if the more inclusive gifted and talented programs that exist actually manage to serve these rarer children at all well.

The idea that the most brilliant people can really struggle definitely matches my experience. The most obscenely gifted of my college friends (who admittedly as the Swarthmore science fiction club were selected both for being academically strong and misfits) skipped grades and then lost years to unemployment, and i don't think they were as far off the charts as some of the kids described here.

From:

readerjane

Ah, this might be it. https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-highest-possible-IQ-score

It describes how, with the bell curve distribution of scores, any score around 195 is as rare as 1 in 8 billion, meaning one person in the world. Since the population of under-18s is smaller, there's less scope for the under-18 curve.

All of which, of course, says nothing about common sense. :-)

From:

highlyeccentric

I think it's perfectly plausible that people know who stephen hawking is as a concept but, if they saw his name without context, might be like... hawking... hawking... the angry athiest guy? (or the first famous stephen to come to mind, or... whatever)

From:

gatheringrivers

I suspect the target audience of the Economist are not really folks in STEM fields, but more people who are just mildly curious about the world.

From:

conuly

? Where does The Economist come in? This article isn't from them, and the other one mentioned is about McDonald's and was printed in the WSJ, and I think we can be reasonably certain that if virtually all 4 year olds worldwide recognize The Golden Arches = McDonald's then any reader of the WSJ also knows what McDonald's is.

From:

landofnowhere

1843 is the Economist's lifestyle magazine.

From:

landofnowhere

Maybe it's to help orient confused time-travelers? Of course it's likely they know who Stephen Hawking is...

From:

greghousesgf

I'm a giant Beatles fan so I read a lot of reviews for the movie Yesterday and every one I read made a big deal out of this Ed Sheeran guy being in the movie. I neither know nor care who he is.

From:

conuly

Rude, they didn't even go to his party.

From:

conuly

Ohhhhhhhh.

From:

landofnowhere

Yeah, if I were a time traveler I'd be super bummed to have ended up in 2020 instead of 2009!

From:

siderea

Because, IIRC my intelligence testing class correctly, IQ tests – like all psychological tests – are normed to populations, and the tests normed to minors only go up that high. That's all.

What's odd is the article puts the line at 18. It's 16. Wikipedia:

The WISC [Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children] is one test in a suite of Wechsler intelligence scales. Subjects 16 and over are tested with the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS), and children ages two years and six months to seven years and seven months are tested with the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence (WPPSI). There is some overlap between tests: children aged 6 years 0 months through 7 years 7 months can complete the WPPSI or the WISC; children aged 16 can complete the WISC-V or the WAIS-IV. Different floor effect and ceiling effect can be achieved using the different tests, allowing for a greater understanding of the child's abilities or deficits. This means that a 16-year-old adolescent who has an intellectual disability may be tested using the WISC-V so that the clinician may see the floor of their knowledge (the lowest level).

So you could use the adult scale on a minor, but the result wouldn't be consider valid because it's not normed to that population.

Edited Date: 2020-06-27 10:28 pm (UTC)

From:

peoriapeoriawhereart

The Richard Burton effect.

Also, very handy if someone given name very common surname not uncommon does something very interesting but niche. It's not improbable that someone also very niche overlaps enough name to confuse.

Currently there's someone that did not play the 5th Doctor but has quite a bit of the same name, within a qwerty typo anyway.

From:

mtbc

Ah, that's what it's called, thank you! Reminds me that I used to drink with (a) Paul Newman. (-:

From:

peoriapeoriawhereart

"Now I can only go later in time, not earlier, until I can find detailing services."

From:

siderea

Hmmmm. I have all sorts of reservations about that LanguageLog article. Starting with the fact I don't think those examples exemplify what they claim they do.

Your example, "Stephen Hawking, the ground-breaking cosmologist who died last year" really is an explanatory aside. Their examples come from headlines and journalism, in which repeating a word is a strong stylistic no-no. So news journalists don't refer to McDonald's as "fast food company" to explain what McD's is, but as a synonym for McD's so as not to have to repeat "McDonald's" nor use a pronoun. In fact, this practice works the opposite way. It's not telling you that McDonald's is a fast food company, they're relying on your knowing that it is a fast food company to be able to follow their construction. Same with the Wal-Mart example.

I am reeeeeeeeeally dubious about assigning reader/writer responsibility to whole languages, especially where it bleeds over into the issue of the use of ambiguity and implication and indirection. The big klaxon in my head labeled "CLASS" is going off. In English, we have many communities of English-usage practice – from regional communities to professional/occupational communities to artistic/professional communities (e.g. newspaper journalism vs magazine journalism vs blogging vs different traditions in fiction etc). And of course some of the biggest community of practice effects are organized around social class: as one ascends the academic system, dealing with ambiguity, implication, inference becomes more and more expected (and taught) of the student. In high school, while all students are taught to write in a writer-responsible style, one of the cleaving points of tracking is that the college-bound ("honors" etc) students' instruction is heavily skewed to analyzing more and more difficult to decode texts. In college, you're expected to be pretty adept at decoding texts that don't hold your hand. At the post graduate level: it's up to the reader to sink or swim.

In other words, the students sorted into the gentry-class get simultaneously taught both to write in writer-responsible way, but read in a reader-responsible way, and that is literally a class marker.

(Note! As an ex-English teacher and as a writer who thinks about this a lot, I am of the considered opinion that this works terribly, and we don't get a gentry class that is any good at reader-responsible reading (or writing). I think instruction in reader-responsible reading in the US is generally complete crap and most college-educated people are much worse readers than they think they are.)

AND! This also ties into my theory about What Science Fiction Really Is. I'd noted long ago that one of the unarticulated stylistic conventions around SF (and F) that is widely understood to be part of what constitutes quality is SF, is that it is more reader-responsible. It is considered a mark of excellence in SF that an author gets away with explaining nothing, while plunging the reader into a whole new world, but everything alien can be figured out by the reader from context. I have a theory that young readers who bounce off SFF do so precisely because of this convention, and decoding a text that way is ego-threatening to them (activates their intimidation, makes them feel dumb); and that successful YA SFF breaks with this convention more to give new-to-SFF readers training wheels, and this very thing is what causes SFF critics to look down their noses at YA SFF. Case in point: I was slightly scandalized by The Hunger Games's use of explicit exposition to explain to the reader what was happening, recognizing it as a violation of literary standards for SFF, and mused that might well be a critical ingredient in the recipe of its success.

Edited (tyop, html, another tyop, another HTML tag fix okay I'll go use my real keyboard now I'm so sorry for flooding your notifications) Date: 2020-06-27 11:01 pm (UTC)

From:

readerjane

Makes sense. Thanks.

From:

siderea

Okay, wait, I'm not done.

I'm really, really bothered and kind of offended, as a writer, at this notion that one can assume the reader "knows nothing", and write to such a reader and that's what good writing is.

At the very least, I think it's uncontroversial to assert that all writing has a grade level. Certainly we have the idea that as we mature and progress through some sort of formal education our vocabularies expand; further that our repertoire of grammar also becomes more sophisticated. I would contend it is also a thing that what things we assume the reader knows about and don't need explained is something that varies with what we might term "grade level".

But not just grade level! Texts have intended audiences! If one is writing in the journal of the Association of Computing Machinery, you don't have to explain what "digital signal processor" or "refactoring" are. If one is shooting the breeze on r/wallstreetbets, nobody has to explain what a "stonk" is.

Even if we do entirely grant the premise that English is a writer-responsible language, the most writer-responsible English writing still picks a floor for the presumed audience's baseline knowledge and doesn't explain things below that.

And I am incensed here because, holy cats, do you have any idea how much blood, sweat, and tears I put into wrestling with this exact issue in all my writing? Baselining my audience is getting harder and harder. Like, this is mostly why I do polls when I do: "This thing? Do you all know this thing? Or do I need to explain to you this thing if I want to talk about this other related thing upon which understanding this first thing rests? How far back do I need to start this explanation? Can I trust you to google it? If you do google it, what will google tell you? If I start that far back, will this ever get done?"

ETA: No, still not done. And I am incensed because assuming a low level of reader knowledge doesn't make a work of writing good, that makes it more broadly accessible. And while that's one virtue, it's not the only virtue. It doesn't make a work of writing a bad work of writing if it has a baseline assumption of some specific technical background. That just means it's written for a specific audience. Its quality vis a vis its assumptions of reader knowledge should be scaled to its intended audience. We can say that a writer does a bad job at anticipating his readers' knowledge base and making themselves understood to their intended audience at any reader level or specialization.

And part of why I care passionately about this is that I'm all about cross-disciplinary communication. Cross-disciplinary communication runs hard into the problem of baselining audience knowledge. That's part of what makes it so interesting and so useful when it's successful.

Edited Date: 2020-06-27 11:36 pm (UTC)

From:

mount_oregano

When I was a newspaper editor, another editor explained it to me this way: "Babies are born every day." That is, there's always someone who through no fault of their own has never come across this thing before and has no idea of what you're talking about.

From:

nodrog

Question: Who was Richard Lawrence?

Question: Who was Giuseppe Zangara?

Question: Who was Arthur Bremer?

If you know the answers to any of these off the cuff, then you're right, it's unnecessary to explain yourself to a reader.

Update to add: This strongly relates to mount oregano's comment above.

Edited Date: 2020-06-28 03:55 am (UTC)

From:

swingandswirl

Not necessarily, to me? But then I've had to explain to people that, say, the reason we don't cover the Spanish colonisation of Asia in high school in India is we have 5000 years of history, including two other empires that actually did colonise us, to get through. What's obvious to person A may not be so to Person B, especially if they're not from the same demographic.

From:

conuly

Okay, to be fair, if you started off with "I had coffee with Stephen Hawking today..." I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that you meant the Stephen Hawking unless you sounded much more excited than this sounds.

From:

conuly

Yes, it's the massive overpresence in media that convinces me that almost anybody reading this article must at least know "Stephen Hawking = Very Smart Dude, a Modern Einstein".

From:

conuly

The idea that the most brilliant people can really struggle definitely matches my experience.

Don't forget, the same genes associated with high intelligence are also associated with ADHD, autism, and probably all those related learning disabilities. Not that anybody really wants to properly deal with people who have two things going on.

From:

conuly

Commenting to say I read all of it, twice, and am digesting but haven't been able to formulate a reply. I didn't want you to think I was ignoring you or choosing not to reply.

From:

wpadmirer

What was funny was I was answering the question, "Who's the most famous person you've ever met."

From:

conuly

Oh.

From:

crystalpyramid

Good point! I haven’t followed the developments in genetics closely but that definitely makes sense.

And yeah... although I wonder if there really exist people who don’t have more than one thing going on ever. I’ve taught so many brilliant but executively dysfunctional high schoolers. And I’m not convinced anyone’s actually totally normal.

I also know my husband’s cocktail of at least three things haveleft him very very wary of treatment.

From:

dhampyresa

Thank you for the links.

From:

silveradept

At which point xkcd #1053, aka "The Lucky 10,000" is the result when someone encounters a thing they haven't heard about before. For someone doing the writing, that's a lot of people who might be first learning about a thing through the work.