ata comments on A Genius for Destruction - Less Wrong
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Those, in retrospect, were some of the biggest (intellectual) problems I had growing up. I received way too much praise for superficially but not technically impressive achievements, and for things things that were legitimately impressive for my age but which should have suggested that I could have been getting even better. (Not that I'm putting all the blame on the people who were praising me — I should have noticed myself that I could have been learning and improving faster — though since I'm a human with status motivations, I suspect that I mainly just didn't feel a strong drive to improve when the people around me already talked about me like I had magical superpowers, and I had no real intellectual role models to reach upward towards.) I wish I had read "Tsuyoku Naritai" when I was 7. (Well... actually I wish I had read a lot of things from LW and elsewhere as a child.) I often wonder how far my brain might have gotten by now if it had grown up under other circumstances.