Jul 31, How about these ones? Dec 30, I just started on Chinese books and I've been wracking my brain how to read more. Thanks again for this list. Feb 10, Jul 10, Hey guys, hey guys I know that many of these are web novels. Do you know of any sites where we can enjoy the translated ones?
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I only know of novelupdates Aug 21, Some of the books are not C-Novels like 50 shades haha.. Sep 16, Search for a book to add a reference. We take abuse seriously in our discussion boards. Only flag comments that clearly need our attention. We will not remove any content for bad language alone, or being critical of a particular book. My Books or a Search. How to Vote To vote on existing books from the list, beside each book there is a link vote for this book clicking it will add that book to your votes.
As a strong positive correlation exists between IQ and the median earned income, most people would gladly boost their IQ, improve creativity or accept being called a genius. Exceptions to this rule are few and most revolve around a claim that intelligence may be an obstacle on the way towards universal happiness. Here are a few exemplary arguments against human intelligence listed by the detractors of genius:. In this article, I will tacitly ignore the above claims and assume that you would gladly become more intelligent, creative or innovative.
I believe it can be shown that an increase in knowledge and creative power can statistically leads to more "goodness" see: I will tacitly assume throughout this text that achieving creative genius is a desirable goal. Many books on psychology put a substantial emphasis on the nature-vs-nurture debate. Psychologist ask which factors are decisive in developing human behavioral characteristics: As far as intelligence is concerned, both genetics and upbringing determine the final outcome.
Using reductio ad absurdum we quickly notice that we have not yet recorded a case of a success in science by an individual affected with Down syndrome , i. At the same time, we notice that individuals deprived of education and human contact may be deprived of the ability to read, speak or conduct abstract reasoning, i. The power of genetics on the functioning of the brain is illustrated by afflictions such as Down syndrome mental retardation , dyslexia reading problems , amusia problems with recognizing sounds and music , unipolar and bipolar disorders depression and manic-depressive disorder , and many more.
These factors on one hand illustrate that we may at birth be handicapped in the quest for genius. At the same time, behavioral therapies used in all listed cases, show the tremendous power of training in developing compensation for disability. If you look at the human brain from , years ago, you will not see much difference when compared with today's brains. Yet training and education, as well as the ability to communicate and work collectively, has lifted the human potential to unimaginable levels. See gray insets for more insights on the potential and limitations of the human brain.
Of the inborn disorders that affect intellectual capacity, Down syndrome is the most prevalent and best studied. Trisomy 21 is the existence of the third copy of the chromosome 21 in cells throughout the body of the affected person. Other Down syndrome disorders are based on the duplication of the same subset of genes e. Depending on the actual etiology, the mental retardation may range from mild to severe. Trisomy 21 results in over-expression of genes located on chromosome One of these is superoxide dismutase gene.
Some but not all studies have shown that the activity of the superoxide dismutase enzyme SOD is elevated in Down syndrome. SOD converts oxygen radicals to hydrogen peroxide and water. Oxygen radicals produced in cells can be damaging to cellular structures; hence the important role of SOD. However, the hypothesis says that once SOD activity increases disproportionately to enzymes responsible for removal of hydrogen peroxide e. Some scientists believe that the treatment of Down syndrome neurons with free-radical scavengers can substantially prevent neuronal degeneration.
Oxidative damage to neurons results in rapid brain aging similar to that of Alzheimer's disease. Another chromosome 21 gene that might predispose Down syndrome individuals to develop Alzheimer's pathology is the gene that encodes the precursor of the amyloid protein. Neurofibrillary tangles and amyloid plaques are commonly found in both Down syndrome and Alzheimer's individuals.
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Layer II of the entorhinal cortex and the subiculum, both critical for memory consolidation, are one of the first affected by the damage. A gradual decrease in the number of nerve cells throughout the cortex follows. A few years ago , the Johns Hopkins scientists created a genetically engineered mouse called Ts65Dn segmental trisomy 16 mouse as an excellent model for studying the Down syndrome. Ts65Dn mouse has genes on chromosomes 16 that are very similar to the human chromosome 21 genes. With this animal model, the exact causes of Down syndrome neurological symptoms will soon be elucidated for the amazing genetic science in action see: Cytogenetics Resources Ts65Dn including pictures of "Down syndrome mouse".
Naturally, Ts65Dn research is also likely to highly benefit Alzheimer's research. Whatever the actual molecular reason, over-expression of chromosome 21 genes puts children with Down syndrome at immediate disadvantage as compared with normal kids. Their IQ rarely goes beyond The brain of children with Down syndrome is usually small and underweight. The cerebellum and brain stem are unusually small. So is the superior temporal gyrus. Their intellectual potential is further limited by a number of ailments such as recurring infections diseases, heart problems, poor eyesight, etc.
Genetics is a true roadblock here. People with Down syndrome have until now never become great scientists, novelists, politicians, etc. At the same time, medical treatment, conducive family environment, vocational training, etc. On one hand, Down syndrome shows that we cannot jump over genetic limitations; on the other, it shows that intense training can produce miracles whatever the starting point. In conclusion, the optimum path to excellence goes via the mental training independent of genetic limitations.
You will find many definitions of human intelligence of which three make the most of the daily use of the word:. In this article, I will focus on ways towards developing the intelligence in the sense of problem solving ability i. After all, the whole purpose of education is to improve our problem solving ability, i. What job to take? How to build a better mouse-trap? What should my position on abortion be? Which party should I vote for? High IQ is welcome but it makes up for only a fraction of intelligence Definition 1. As much as a fast processor stands only for a fraction for what we expect of a good computer.
Later in the article, I will argue in support for the scientifically obvious statement: However, this statement is surprisingly little understood in general population. It falls into the category of scientific facts that may find more skeptics than believers. Naturally, vox populi does not detract from the merits of evolution, genetic engineering, human cloning, Big Bang theory, sociocybernetics, neuropsychological interpretation of the thought and consciousness, etc.
However, to make the obvious more digestible, I will use the computer metaphor to illustrate the building blocks of intelligence and genius. The neural network of the brain can be seen as mental hardware. The inborn wiring and structure of the brain may roughly be compared to a ROM memory. If you stop eating for a day, program stored in your ROM will make you experience hunger. Things we learn in life can be considered software that is stored in your RAM. If you doubt a mental ROM exists try the following experiment: Now try to superimpose the face of a loved person by using the power of your imagination.
This is easy for most people. You can even imagine touching parts of the imaginary face. Yet the screen underneath does not seem ready to go away. The impulses from the retina hit the visual cortex, and you can do little about it.
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Knowledge is encoded in the modifiable strength of connections between neurons in a similar way as bits are stored by electrical charges in cells of RAM memory. Our software can roughly be compared to an expert system. An expert system is a software application that can be used in problem solving such as producing a medical diagnosis. An expert system is built of two components: They roughly correspond to data and software in a computer or to knowledge and reason in the human brain.
Expert systems are computer programs that take over the job of an expert in a highly specialized field such as medical diagnosis, production management, criminal profiling, etc.. An expert system is fed with data and it's job is to answer questions such as: Expert systems provide an excellent metaphor for studying human problem solving and provide clues for enhancing creativity. An expert system is usually built of a knowledge base collection of facts representing factual knowledge and an inference engine collection of rules representing inferential knowledge.
An expert system may store facts such as " E. It can also store updateable facts such as: The expert system can also store rules such as " If A is an antibiotic and B is a bacteria and patient is infected with B then suggest administration of A ". Some rules can be fuzzy, i. By analyzing the facts stored in the database and facts fed into the expert system, the expert system can use its inference rules to answer questions on the optimum antibiotic therapy. It can also generate the probability profile of the successful application of individual antibiotics.
Although the difference between static facts and if-then rules in an expert system is very clear-cut, there is no sharp fact-rule distinction in the human brain which uses neural representations for storing knowledge. However, the difference between facts and rules is very valuable in explaining the difference between smart and dumb learning. Expert systems are always based on storing large amounts of information. They are built by peeking at human experts in action and concluding about their reasoning. A knowledge engineer or an expert himself needs to formulate the rules that are used in arriving at a solution to a problem.
Consequently, there is a very direct parallel between an expert system and a human expert in action. Much of expert thinking is much simpler than what happens in a child's brain in the course of ordinary play! The reason for this is that we are inborn with powerful computing machinery for visual processing, for association, for analyzing motion, for spatial orientation, for phonological analysis, for language parsing, etc. A child recognizing a simple ba-ba language may be harder to imitate in a computer than an expert botanist recognizing one of a thousand species of plant.
As Marvin Minsky put it: It can be harder to be a novice than to be an expert! A program written in by James Slagle could solve calculus problems that are normally given to college students. This program was able to score an A on an MIT exam. This program needed only about a hundred algebraic rules to solve all the required calculus problems! Calculus permeates engineering and forms part of the foundation of the industrial world. It is also a classroom nightmare to many students. Yet in essence it is very simple and compact.
Simplicity of calculus powerfully illustrates what our brains were not born to do. It also shows what new powers our brains can acquire with relatively little effort if the new knowledge is selected in the right way. Algebra can serve as a model of abstractness of rules. After all, it is based on symbols that can mean anything: As stated throughout this article, abstractness of rules stored in the human brain lays at the foundation of creative thinking.
What an expert needs to know can indeed be simple. However, it is often not simple to discover or explicitly formulate it in the first place. Many students may have problems with calculus because of the simple fact that some rules of calculus are highly heuristic and cannot be found in math books. Good or rather hard working students acquire those rules implicitly by solving a large number of calculus tasks. Poor students could easily catch up if their books or teachers explicitly formulated those hazy rules, e. Human experts seem more intuitive than computers.
But this only comes from the fact that they apply rules that they themselves have hard time formulating. There is no qualitative difference between human or computer expert in that respect. Intuition is not a magic power. Intuition is an inability to explicitly express knowledge that is already wired in the neural network of the brain.
As with the haziness of the rules, similar uncertainty may concern the actual application of inference rules: A creative individual will often not be able to clearly say how and why he or she arrived at the solution. When later writing a scientific paper on the solution to the problem, the creator will often need to look for a clear path towards the solution even though he has definitely arrived at the goal before.
Expert systems may use various strategies such as data-driven derivation called forward chaining going from the facts to a conclusion, e. As for the problem solving strategy, the human brain is even harder to simulate. Usually the search space for major problems is huge and no simple strategy can be used otherwise the problem would not be a problem in the first place. Then the lucky genius stroke, the brilliant association, insight, breakthrough, etc.
The "right time" here refers to the different states of the brain at different moments of time. The brain works associatively and two or more neuronal assemblies must be active at the same time for the association to be formed. Archimedes could have thought of volume when entering his bathtub before he yelled: Newton's brain must have been sensitized to gravity when he was struck by a falling fruit. James Watt must have had his engine-power neurons potentiated when looking at a rattling kettle. Millions of people see kettles daily but they rather do not think about a steam engine as a result.
The genius breakthrough comes from an association of ideas in the brain. In terms of an expert system, the right rule must be applied to the right set of facts. The best term to describe human problem solving is heuristic search. We apply available rules using the best-search rules which may be subject to another layer of meta-rules that are implicitly interwoven in the intricacies of the neural circuitry of the brain. In conclusion, knowledge is the key to problem solving. In particular, highly abstract inferential knowledge is central to a creative search for solutions.
The disassociation of the link between knowledge and genius can be harmful. The confusion usually comes from the fact that memorizing worthless data is not differentiated from memorizing useful rules. Many people mistakenly fail to recognize the associative power of human memory and conclude that relying on external sources of information may suffice in their particular field of activity. As a result, memorizing is perceived as a dumb act. Some articles at supermemo. The most important things we learn from expert systems is that extensive knowledge helps solve problems.
We also learn that the way we represent knowledge may determine the successful outcome of problem solving. For a quick course on basic concepts of Expert Systems and Artificial Intelligence see: Factual knowledge is made of facts. A fact may have a form of " Jimmy Carter was elected the US president in " or " Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in ".
Inference engine is based on inferential knowledge. Inferential knowledge is made of a set of rules. Unlike static facts, rules can be applied to facts to produce more facts, assertions, statements, theorems, formulas, etc. For example, a rule may say " Since the 22nd Amendment, a US president cannot serve for more than ten years" i. From a fact " Jimmy Carter was the president" and from a rule " President cannot serve for more than 10 years " we can derive new knowledge: Rules can then be used to derive new facts and new rules.
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In the course of problem solving, our brain will often develop new rules and store them in memory. These new rules will form a highly valuable component of your knowledge and will decide on your creative powers. Apart from declarative facts and rules which we can learn in a textbook, our nervous system also includes other forms of knowledge.
For our analysis we will mostly need to discern: Inborn knowledge can be compared to rules stored in our ROM. For example, when feeling a burning pain in fingers, retract the arm. Procedural knowledge is knowledge that is acquired by trial and error via punishment-reward stimuli.
For example, when we ride a bicycle, each time we lose balance, an information is sent to the motor system not to repeat the recent moves that should be considered an error. At the same time, the elation of smooth ride, reinforces the circuits responsible for sequential stimulation of muscles involved in cycling. Apart from inference engine, our brain is equipped with a sort of "interference engine". Our brain was programmed for survival. It is supposed to make you search for sources of water when you are thirsty or react with interest to an attractive representative of the opposite sex.
We are driven by instincts and emotions. Emotions helped humans survive thousands of years of evolution. However, emotions also interfere with the intellectual effort. Isaac Newton might be the brightest scientific mind of the 17th century, yet the last 25 years of his life were marred by a bitter battle with Leibnitz over their claim to having invented the calculus. Alan Turing, the father of the famous Turing Test, committed suicide by cyanide poisoning under the burden of intolerance brought forth by his homosexuality.
His mind might have been affected by a hormonal therapy that was supposed to "cure" him of homosexuality. Even the greatest mind may be incapacitated by a strong interference from hormones or lower-level brain circuits. Emotions can literally kill genius. Here is the summary of the computer metaphor of the human mind.
Terminology defined here will be used throughout the rest of this article:. Infrastructure - brain components: ROM - inborn knowledge e. All snakes are reptiles, formula for solving quadratic equations, etc. Genius is based on good hardware, excellent knowledge, strong motivation, and minimum negative interference.
What is special about a genius brain? Using the " simplified brain model " above, I will try to look for factors that determine a genius brain and how these factors could be influenced. A genius brain in action will tackle a problem, quickly find an appropriate set of rules, and derive a solution.
Actually, the speed of processing the rules is not as critical as the skill in choosing the appropriate rules at hand. For a genius breakthrough, the speed is usually quite unimportant. It took Darwin five years to collect data during his Beagle trip to come up with a vision of the evolutionary process. Yet it took him another 20 years collecting all necessary material, and opinions before mustering courage to publish On the origin of species.
The book has changed our view of the human species for ever. It is hard to pinpoint a single breakthrough or a stroke of genius. Darwin's reasoning wasn't blindingly fast neither. Yet Darwin's impact on the ways of the mankind was monumental. Humans do differ in their brain power. Some get a biological head start, others get handicapped from early childhood. In cannot be stressed enough though that the optimum path towards maximum achievement is always through training. The starting point is not relevant for choosing hard-work learning trajectory.
It is also important to know, that in majority of cases, mental limitations can be overcome.
Some major disabilities, such as Down syndrome or brain injury can pose a formidable challenge. However, practice shows that a huge proportion of the population see a problem where it does not exist. Many people write to me about their memory problems just to discover e. What usually prevents people from reaching intellectual heights is personality and the environment school, family, etc. Many do not live up to their potential simply because of insufficient motivation or belief in their own powers. Others fail due to parental inattention.
Those factors are statistically by far more important than inborn limitations.
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Scientists have studied Einstein's brain to look for the clues as to his genius. On cursory examination, they could hardly find any. Later it transpired that some areas of his brain were indeed better developed and nourished by a rich fabric of glial cells, i. Yet it is difficult to predicate as to whether all these differences were inborn or were rather a result of his training in abstract thinking. Anatomical studies show that various areas of the human brain may substantially differ in size between individuals.
Yet it is not easy to find correlations between these difference and mental powers. In people with a normal range of IQ, the volume of cerebral cortex may vary twice between one person and the next. So may the extent of differences in metabolic rates in the same organ.
Similar differences have been found between such critical brain structures as the hippocampus, entorhinal cortex, and the amygdala. Connections between the hemispheres can dramatically differ in volume e. The left inferior-parietal lobule located just above the level of the ears in the parietal cortex is larger in men, and was also found to be larger in Einstein's brain as well as in the brains of mathematicians and physicists.
On the other hand, the two language area of the cortex: Broca and Wernicke areas are larger in women, which may explain why women might be superior in language processing and verbal tasks. Bigger men have bigger brains but are not smarter. A racially sensitive subject of lower SAT test scores among blacks and Hispanics in the US has been a matter of debate for a number of years. The differences could not be explained by the material status of families or the neighborhood factor.
Stanford psychology professor Claude Steele has conducted revealing experiments in which black students could do equally well on the test as long as they were not told they are being scored. Although we can point to differences based on sex or ethnicity, the ultimate difference in the creative potential is by far more dependent on the upbringing, education and student's personality. As explained in Genius in Chess , despite chess being a "male game", female chess player, Judit Polgar, developed skills that are superior to those of When we tried to see if student IQ makes it easier to do well in learning and in exams, we found that some personality factors matter more.
Most optimistically, SuperMemo and memory research show that our memory works in the same way at the very basic molecular and synaptic level. Our forgetting is described by the same forgetting curve whose steepness is mostly determined by knowledge representation. As the analysis of success stories with SuperMemo shows, main learning differences between individuals can be found in 1 personality perseverance, delayed gratification, optimism, etc.
A week-long course in mnemonic techniques immediately illustrates that knowledge representation skills can be learn very fast indeed. Those skills also develop in proportion to the amount of learning as demonstrated by differences between primary, secondary, undergraduate and graduate levels. All users of SuperMemo, unless primed beforehand, start with building clumsy collections of learning material that is quite difficult to retain in memory.
Within months, most users develop reasonable strategies on how knowledge should be represented to minimize the effort of learning see: To produce breakthrough ideas, most valuable rules are those that are highly abstract i. They should be applicable to a wide range of problems. This is why various branches of mathematics should be taught to students of all professions. Logic, probability calculus, or statistics are highly abstract and highly applicable. The same formula of logic may be the basis of dozens of other highly abstract rules.
Let alone the difference between deduction and induction which forms the basis of scientific investigation, as well as the basis of logical read "correct" thinking about such simple choices in life as selecting the appropriate brand of cereals for breakfast. If you learn the rule " Wheat contains kcal per grams" its is only applicable to wheat.
If you narrow the term wheat to a single concept i. However, the rule "Most cereals contain kcal per grams" is probabilistically applicable to both wheat and maize. The latter rule is more abstract and statistically more valuable in problem solving i.
The applicability of rules does not only depend on their express meaning. The actual representation of the rule in the human brain is paramount! The same rule in the mind of a genius can find a dozen more applications than can be borne out of an effort of a plain crammer.
The skill of learning the rules the right way is a critical component of genius. Genetic component may play a minor role here. Many individuals find it difficult to represent knowledge in their minds in a way that can lead to a genius breakthrough. Understanding the right forms of training for abstract representation of rules in the human mind may bring untold benefits to mankind in years to come. If we take this rule: If you type this rule to MS Word and save it in a doc file, the rule will be as useless as any rule crammed into your memory without understanding.
Yet the same rule encoded in a hardware monitor DLL can be a blessing to the security of data stored in your computer. The way we represent rules in our brain determines their applicability. For the same reason, I started this article with a computer metaphor. This way I tried to represent the foundation knowledge of this text in a form that is easily understood by everyone. The rules I am expressing can hopefully be easier to digest and store in your mind with a more tangible long-term benefit. With the appropriate representation, no scientific theory is complex.
All great theories were born in the human mind. However, they were able to arrange the pieces of the puzzle in their mind in such a way that they could easily see the light. There is nothing inherently complex in the theory of relativity, the theorem of incompleteness or the uncertainty principle. Some theories may be more voluminous than others. Some may be voluminous enough, in their digestible simple representation, to discourage many from digging in. No product of human thought is inherently complex or incomprehensible. The difference between easy subjects and difficult once can always be explained by the representation and volume.
Abstractness calls for particularly well-chosen representation. The fact that dinosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago may require no special approach. Abstract mathematics, on the other hand, may be introduced to a student in a number of ways that differ in their effectiveness by many orders of magnitude. There are many more students who fear algebra than those who tremble before a literature class. Symbols of algebra do not have specialized brain circuits to process and simplify them.
Student problems with algebra can usually be tracked down to insufficient training in math at primary and secondary levels. Consequently, a motivation factor builds up another inhibitory layer.
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The gratification from reading an excellent novel is instant. The benefits of math require good command of the raw basics, starting with the multiplication table and the sums. We have not been able to find many shortcuts from the basic level math towards solving differential equations. However, yet a few years ago, you could hear from many: That's not for me. I have never been good at technical subjects.
Today, the same people surf the net for hours. Seniors are flocking to the net in droves. We have succeeded in simplifying the way people see and use the computers. We have changed the way computing is represented in public mind. In acquiring knowledge, never say " this article or book is too hard for me ". When listing books he read in his youth, Charles Babbage, the inventor of the first mechanical computer, wrote " Amongst these were Humphry Ditton's 'Fluxions', of which I could make nothing". We know that Babbage was the last person you would suspect of having problems with mathematical texts.
If you see the text of which " you could make nothing ", go to the first sentence and analyze it. Most often than not, it is just the author who uses the language or structure that is either inappropriate or not matching your present knowledge in the field. If you encounter problems, and there is no explanation, no introduction, or if specialist terminology runs out of the field without a suitable glossary, you may safely excuse your comprehension problems.
Do not attempt to dig into advanced chemistry article without the basic chemistry background. Every fourth word may fall out of your vocabulary range. It may take months or years to build a necessary background! Least of all, blame your own perception. Just keep on working harder and one day you will see the light. If you find difficult material, do not waste time for depression or despair. Abstractness is inherently harder to digest than plain facts.
Methodically analyze the reasons for which you cannot comprehend given material. Either the material is badly presented or you need new knowledge that will resolve your problem. Be patient and remember: Everything is difficult before it becomes easy! High achievements in all fields require hours of training. This refers to music, chess , sciences, sports and what not. I wholeheartedly subscribe to the famous statement by Edison: Training can have a miraculous impact on the human brain. It does not matter much how well you were endowed by the genetics.
You got no better choice than to commit yourself to a lifelong course of learning. If you are in a minority that shows identifiable genetic limitations, you may need to hone your routine to your particular needs; however, if you have already arrived to this point in this article, health permitting, you are highly likely to be equipped with all the basic intellectual components for building genius. It is a pity that not all those genius chess brains had been sufficiently employed in the betterment of this planet. However, they all provide highly valuable material for studying the human brain power.
There are a couple of reasons for chess being so valuable to study. Chess rules are clear-cut. The competitive achievement is measurable. Individual games are available for study move-by-move on the Internet. Last but not least, chess is often associated with aura of genius, and world champions generate lots of excitement that results in numerous books and studies on scientific and popular-scientific platforms.
In those conditions, we can study factors that help some people reach processing power that is hard to match with the present computing technology.
Chess is a great metaphor for creativity. Chessboard positions roughly correspond to facts and applicable moves correspond to inferential rules see: The more abstract the rules, the more positions they can resolve. The more abstract the rules you acquire, the less sheer computation your brain needs to do in the game of chess. Consequently, the better your chess score. The move rules will often be based on pattern recognition rules who can filter complex position into simply identifiable patterns.
The better your arsenal of pattern recognition rules, the more applicable your move rules become. The rules are the key to chess genius. Although the formula does not represent exact science, it is a good illustration of the difference between the two concepts of intelligence and genius: Levitt's formula determines the approximate maximum chess score for a given IQ assuming years of extensive training. The purpose of IQ is to distil innate mental skills from expertise.
Although this is never entirely possible, people with little expertise in any selected field may still show high IQ which is indicative of high intellectual potential. In chess, adding new recognition and move rules to memory will plateau with time, and the quality of reshuffling them in conditions of maximum concentration will determine the champion.
However, there is no substitute for hard work on the way to success in chess. No amount of lateral thinking or transcendental mediation will help. The chess player's brain needs to be equipped with the arsenal of thousands position patterns. The chess scores reflect the true processing power of a players brain in the narrow specialty of chess. In real life, high IQ is welcome; however, what will determine a person's success in a given field is the actual ability to solve problems in that given field.
This ability is always related to knowledge, skills and expertise. One of the greatest geniuses of the past century, Herbert Simon Nobel prize in economics, has devoted his whole life to studying expertise and proposed another very rough formula: This number reflects the fact that we tend to measure human accomplishments relative to the accomplishments other individuals in the same class. A Yates revival is currently under way and some sort of commercial recognition appears imminent. His seven novels are being reissued. In , Yates was born into the heart of the American middle class in Yonkers, an unprepossessing town in New York State known, if at all, for its racetrack.
His father was an electric-light salesman with a fine tenor voice, and his mother an aspiring, unsuccessful sculptress. His parents separated when Yates was four. Always short of money, the family moved constantly in and around the West Village of Manhattan, with the odd, catastrophic foray upstate. Dookie forced her shy son to pose naked as a faun for a series of ghastly statutes, wore stained clothing and, when tipsy, would sit with her legs open so that her knickers could be seen.
Loyally, Yates insisted that she 'wasn't that bad', but one horrendous account of a drinking binge tells how she left 'a slick mouthful of puke' on the pillow adjoining her son's. Yates attended a 'progressive' but gruesomely competitive Wasp prep school in New England at which it was made clear to him that he was the poorest pupil and where he was mercilessly bullied. Yates survived, learning to write good prose while editing the school magazine. Still a teenager, Yates shipped out to become an infantryman in the Ardennes, ruining his lungs and losing his virginity in Paris. Lanky, dandyish, dressed in clothes he bought in England and wore long after they became unpardonably shabby, the young Yates never quite managed to believe in the future to which his precocious writing talent entitled him.
Unlike his contemporaries, he didn't go to college on the GI Bill. Instead, he drifted into the marginal bohemia of the West Village, doing menial journalistic work. Yates married twice, unhappily and unsuccessfully, fathered three daughters, Sharon, Monica and Gina, smoked and drank too much and in between bouts of bronchitis and tuberculosis began to experience the wild bipolar swings that wrecked his later years.
Yates's travails are comprehensively described in a brilliant biography, A Tragic Honesty , by Blake Bailey. Apart from the odd, unsuccessful, Fitzgeraldian moment in Hollywood, Yates survived by doing corporate PR, living off freelance work at the Remington Rand Corporation and writing copy about generations of spanking new computers. Constantly short of cash, he drifted into teaching creative writing, though it seems that he could never bring himself to believe that writing could be taught. Curmudgeonly and attentive, he wrung a sense of what writing should be from his yellowing paperbacks even as he trashed the writers of his own day while wheezing his lung-impaired way through cigarette after cigarette.
But it is clear that he always thought he was a failure - as a father, a husband and, most serious of all, as a writer. At least 10 breakdowns are exhaustively described in A Tragic Honesty and they become more horrifying, sometimes involving stripping off in the street of LA, and protracted enforced stays in such hellholes as New York's Bellevue Hospital. There are depressing accounts of filthy, dank West Village apartments in which he lived between marriages, jobs, girlfriends or wives. Bizarrely, Yates appears to have spent 11 years eating lunch and dinner in the same booth of the unprepossessing Crossroads Irish Pub in Boston.
When supplies of 'Mr Yates's horseradish' ran low, a waitress would be sent to a neighbouring supermarket. Somehow, Yates continued to fashion great sentences from these unpromising circumstances. Yates's daughter Monica went out briefly with Larry David. The scriptwriter incorporated Yates into a Seinfeld sketch in which a grumpy, down-at-heel author based on Yates torments Jerry and George.
The author refuses to let Seinfeld wear his suede jacket inside out as protection against a snowstorm, thus wrecking the jacket. Yates didn't find the show funny. In his last, illness-wracked years, Yates required a portable oxygen tank. He drove an old car around the university campus streets of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, puffing cigarettes and inhaling oxygen, to the horror of passengers.
By the time he died, in , his work was largely forgotten.
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Revolutionary Road kicks off when the curtain rises on a cringe-making amateur theatrical performance in the suburbs sometime in the late s. April Wheeler 'a tall, ash blonde with a patrician beauty that no amount of amateur lighting could disguise' plays the heroine, but it's clear that she cannot act. Husband Frank is succinctly described as 'an intense, nicotine-stained, Jean-Paul Sartre sort of man', edgy, harking back to his war experience, ill at ease with his 30th birthday. The two fight constantly. Frank is trapped writing copy for Knox Business machines, a company that sells an early computer this is the first novel in which computers figure as items of everyday life rather than sci-fi props.
He competes with fellow execs to see who can do the least work each day while downing the most martinis at lunch. Superficially, Frank and April would appear to illustrate long-forgotten sociological cliches of alienation set forth in such s works as William H Whyte's The Organization Man.