Twins reared apart do not exist

Summary

This story began two years ago, during the pre-launch of my book on the cognitive techniques of mathematicians. As authors do in those circumstances, I sent a handful of copies to selected high-profile people, in the hope that it would spark the public conversation.I had a fantastic success rate with mathematicians. I sent a copy to Pierre Deligne, who wrote back saying he loved the book, “especially the insistence that learning or doing math is about changing one’s brain.” I sent a copy to Terry Tao, who blurbed the book. It was harder to get my foot in Steve Strogatz’s door, as he initially declined to even receive the book. But I insisted and, after a few days, he sent back a warm thank you note. He then blurbed the book and posted a big shout-out on the launch day.Outside of academia, the pattern was quite different. Most people never responded. One exception was Paul Graham, who kindly replied to my two-liner cold email.I knew it was a long shot, but I couldn’t not try. First, because I admire him and enjoy his writing on software and startups—and even more so his writing on writing itself and its transformative powers, which is remarkably aligned with central ideas from my book (and this essay.) This made me feel a genuine intellectual kinship.Second, because I noticed that he was regularly posting on mathematics. It all clicked into place when I found out that his father was a mathematician—the alignment was no coincidence.This made me excited and confident that he would love the book. But, unfortunately, I never heard from him again.Let it be clear that I view this as completely normal. He is a busy person with a million competing interests and, no doubt, a massive reading backlog. Put simply, he owes me nothing.But this was still frustrating as I had a third, more important reason for sending him the book: I wanted to engage with his thinking on a topic where I fundamentally disagree with him—genetic determinism.Hereditarian statements are quite common in P...