This link.
People with exceptional talent need to be encouraged and nurtured. Collectively, they are needed, by the nation, as a resource toward future prosperity. The Vikings represent elite athletes, and are making themselves millionaires by their physical skills.
Great.
However jocks will not cure cancer, design better microcircuits, discover new genetics breakthroughs, explain the mechanics of bird or insect flight, discover and design the most efficient solar energy conversion materials, or advance math or linguistics as Knowlton reportedly intends.
Keeping a perspective on exceptional talent, in all directions, is something too frequently overlooked.
Clearly Knowlton shows potential now. The hope is he navigates through life happy and successful in his chosen life's work. It would be interesting to give the three candidates for governor an IQ test; with Pawlenty a question mark that way too. It would show whether Dayton or Horner would be the higher scorer.
Should test scores alone be trusted to measure a young person's potential?
Probably not. Potential is only that, and it is guesswork to define or recognize among exceptional individuals those who will end up in the narrow percentage that will do breakthrough work and those that will be skilled and competent, but for whom extraordinary accomplishment may be lacking. There is luck at play, defining the right hard questions, and not missing the key part or parts of reaching a successful answer.
Can we distinguish between a skilled musician, surgeon, or aircraft engineer and say one is more successful or "better" than the other if each ultimately earns peer group respect for exceptional ability and accomplishment? It is not as if each of us as ordinary people have a vote. Exceptional ability and accomplishment is not a democracy area. Writers such as Ayn Rand had a grasp of that notion, although her conclusions are but one person's viewpoint. And the story of the Harrison chronometer as a better answer - an engineering solution - then the favored elite approach of the time - forever honing better astronomical ways of knowing ship-at-sea longitude in the days before there was radio, GPS, and other things of our times. Making an exceptional mechanical watch in its day was key, and Harrison worked outside of an established intellectual elite of his times, with its biases, and perhaps Craig Ventner is today's example, where he had resources and will to attack genome research in different ways than most academic workers were moving. He did not supplant their effort, he supplemented it.
In 1965, nobody could have pointed to Kary Mullis, and said he'll be a bigger key part of unraveling the human genome than any of the others mentioned as playing a role in the process - including the equipment engineers, the Affymetrix chip people, and the statisticians who helped shape interpretation of "gene chip" data in productive ways with new analytical approaches grounded in their backgrounds in statistics as applied and advanced academically over the last century and earlier.
Solid state circuitry and laser technology, fiber optics, and GPS are common tools that did not exist when I was in high school. Where Knowlton may excel in the future, relative to new advances, is unknown. Yet his test achievement has been recognized as reportable news, and I expect he is smart enough to know it means something, but that his future is full of as much mystery and hope, as certainty that he will remain "well above average."
We can hope he has the luck and happiness all children, in an ideal world, should face during their adult lives. It does not always work that way. It is part of the human condition to await and see a future unfold. As Terry Hendriksen noted, we are not all flying around in personal levitation vehicles as the Popular Science and Popular Mechanics futuristic predictions of the 1950's to 1970's envisioned. Yet we understand more about disease and genetics and electronics and optics than those magazine writers envisioned. Most importantly, we are moving to keep the world fed and sheltered and healthy and to utilize renewable energy and minimize war as a tool of choice in international relations, all while the population crisis is not being faced rationally by world power elites including some with debatable worthwhile or counterproductive agendas. And we ultimately cannot avoid getting into value judgments, can we?
If Knowlton remains focused on math and linguistics, the hope would be he avoids being sucked into the NSA world of listening in on others' business - where those skills are concentrated - and achieves a more satisfying and worthwhile life's work.
Shakespeare lived long enough to create a body of unsurpassed work, Plato has survived the centuries, and Newton had to travel to rural English areas when the plague was spreading. Had either of the three fallen ill to childhood disease, our culture would be rooted much the same but with differences because such individual talents as theirs would have been absent.
At the turn of the nineteenth century there was a move to steel-hulled warships, rail was becoming a mature venture, electricity and internal combustion power were being developed, and such things had to be disruptive. It would be difficult to imagine a world as populous as now, relying on animal power and steam. We entered the present century with Internet, the bomb, and other disruptive advances established, and "nanotechnology" an almost new word but an already recognized field of study. We have ultrafast global financial trading as a mixed blessing. We have the likes of Helmsley of UnitedHealth holding out a disproportionate share of wealth, without any real meritocracy credentials. We have Tom Emmer. We have Pawlenty. We have top court of the nation saying legal fictional business beings, corporations, should hold personal powers as if equivalent to humans. In the past we had flat-earthers as a distant mirror to today's idiot bunch. So, how exactly should we define "rational society" in our times? Those using Twitter and Facebook? Or something more substantial than that, as a target for who we should aim to be?
In a local microcosm we have a November choice between Natalie Steffen and Matt Look, for a local government job and paycheck. What can a longer perspective on human culture and social limitations and capacities tell us about making such a choice, and how might we tie that democratic event to the very undemocratic notion of Knowlton's achievement proving all are not created equal, talentwise, which is something also apparent in the Favre uncertainty?
