My D20 goes to a very diverse school with a very small population of geniuses, most of whom seem to concentrate on sciences. These are the kids who start taking APs freshman year. Each year, one or two is in the principal’s office and/or guidance office on the verge of a nervous breakdown because they can’t tolerate anything less than perfection. I would equate many of these kids to trained monkeys - they have been taught that if they do X, then they will receive the reward. However, I have also found that few of these kids really go on to make a difference. They have such a fear of failure that they are afraid to try. And, that is my answer to your question. Why would the lab want regular kids? Because regular kids have already failed and they know that the world is not going to end. They have a different confidence in themselves that eventually they will take their failures, learn from them, apply them, fail again and again, and eventually find what works. Never discount the power of perseverance. And, I would think this would be especially true in research which not only REQUIRES perseverance but also the confidence to be creative and break the rules to discover … whatever. Also, let’s be honest, those super genius kids can sometimes be annoying, bossy, pains in the you-know-what. Who wants to deal with that day in and day out?
Actually, they were highly self educated. That is a big difference from having no education at all.
I agree with ucbalumnus. Also, it is very dangerous to compare to extraordinary people like Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and The Woz… just because they did not need a degree doesn’t mean no one does.
It’s like saying “LeBron didn’t play college ball…” yeah, 'cuz he’s LeBron!
I agree. Getting a degree is not the issue. I don’t really know anything about the superstars mentioned above. I don’t know if they were profoundly gifted kids who simply didn’t need a college education because they so quickly outpaced it. If that is the case, they are actually counter examples. We are not talking about the profoundly gifted kid who divine the basics of calculus in 4th grade. We are talking about the hard working kid who is taking her classes in sequence and getting A’s through effort and perseverance.
@ucbalumnus – my rinky-dink software company gained some notoriety a few years back and at a local party a neighbor (an engineer from a top school) came up to DW and said, “how can he do that, he has no training” (meaning, I had no formal education in the scientific field). She told me about it afterwards. I said to her, “I have two eyeballs and can read”.
I think it’s important to note that the microcomputer and software fields are very different from scientific fields. Many of the examples in this thread are about people who made billions in microcomputer hardware/software without a formal education. What we’re doing is applying the hard-earned knowledge of the true experts. You don’t hear much about the guy who worked for years to shave a few picometers off the gate size in transistors – because he wasn’t celebrated in the media – yet it was no doubt a difficult task. The accumulation of similar effort from many people enabled the algorithms in Google, Facebook, etc. (e.g. Intel could make denser chips that were faster and cooler).
Final note. I have to laugh when I read stories about how the computers in the Space Shuttle and other spacecraft are “ancient”. Those computers and their software are in a completely different league! Lives and/or billions of $$$ of hardware are on the line. The engineers making them have to be extremely conservative and their products have to work the first time they’re used. Could Jobs, Wozniak, or Gates make that? I seriously doubt it. Amount of money != genius.