When you want to do anything new, you have to go against the flow, and this is psychologically very hard.
When I decided to quit my job and create a company I went against everybody. My parents, my girlfriend, my friend, all them thought I was crazy quiting a good position for something so risky.
E.g My girlfriend told me that if I was doing my company the relationship was over, so I said to her, ok, go away. The next week she wanted to come back, but I preferred to risk this alone.
Of course, when whatever you did works, everybody believes you are a genius, and they always remind you how much they KNEW that. Success is contagious, and once the media says that, you are a genius for everyone.
People like Newton, who was a geek, had to suffer isolation all his life in order to do what he felt right.
Fortunately today there are two differences with Newton's time:
1-There is Internet. Whatever you do you are not alone. There is a 1 per cent or 1 per thousand people like you, and with Internet you can find them, meet them. In the past getting enough critic mass was only possible in cities, with millions of people.
2-We know a lot more about psychology, you have amazing educational materials to improve your live, be happy and not getting in holes like suicidal thoughts.
Your point about genius and success is well-taken, but the reality is even more complicated. There is a strong feedback loop between people believing you're a genius and success, not just one-way causation.
Convince a few influential people you're a genius and the odds of your success goes up. Then as you become more successful, the threshold for convincing people you are a genius goes down.
It can even happen posthumously: Herman Melville was a nobody loser when he died. A few decades later his work was "discovered" and he became a genius overnight.
Bootstrapping this process is an unsolved problem, although the kind of blatant self-marketing that characterizes Jobs or Edison certainly helps (although self-marketing still has to be backed with actual capabilities, as it was in those cases.)
Any advise for a person who had success, then had compound PTSD surface, get mingled with the concept of ego, leading to a negative sorts of ego death, and is still trying as hard as they can to become genius? I can't get the concept of being past my prime, out of my head, and I think that is precisely what is holding me back.
Start actively looking deeper into yourself to discover your fears. Your mind has built up a bunch of reasons why you can't do something, and you've become so accustomed to them that you don't even think to question their validity. At the core, it is your fears that hold you back, and those "reasons" exist only to mask that fear. You must dig deeper and expose the ugly fear underneath. Then you must face and walk into that fear, alone. You must discover that you are not a victim. A victim has no power over their circumstances. A victor controls their circumstances. This transition is VERY HARD to make, and it's not too uncommon to fail on your first few attempts. Good luck.
This resonates with me to an extent. I squandered some serious talent early on. I'll never know the answers to all those "what if's".
It's easy to be bitter or resentful of circumstances and opportunities -- I think of all the people entering the job market in the past 10-12 years. Get the wrong year in the wrong industry and you'll stagnate at just the wrong time.
For myself, I do not regret the past. I accept responsibility for not capitalizing on my talent, which is itself a talent. I am not bitter for not being luckier in opportunity as I have been luckier than so many. Today, I will sit down and accomplish what I can.
My company's CEO passed away last week. During her memorial I found out that she was 70 when she died, and had founded the company 25 years ago, when she was 45. Which I think shows that people's "prime" actually comes a lot later than they think.
The way I look at it is that if you start a business in your 20s, the odds are against you. You may be young and full of energy, but you don't know shit about the world yet and will make a ton of mistakes. If you do it in your 30s, the odds are neutral. You are more seasoned and possibly have some domain experience under your belt that you can leverage. If you do it in your 40s, the odds are in your favor. You probably have significant domain expertise as well as connections you have established earlier in your career that can help you. It's only in your 50s that you can justify feeling like you're past your prime. Then again, that hardly stops some people.
"Suffer" may be a bit overstated - if he was isolated, it was largely self-imposed; and if he was persecuted, it may have had more to do with his behavior than beliefs.[1] Best to think of Newton as the real-life "House" character: impossibly brilliant (did most of his heavy lifting on light, gravity, and calculus in one summer), but also incredibly abraisive.
This article gives the following quote some context:
"Mathematics requires a small dose, not of genius, but of an imaginative freedom which, in a larger dose, would be insanity. And if mathematicians tend to burn out early in their careers, it is probably because life has forced them to acquire too much common sense, thereby rendering them too sane to work. But by then they are sane enough to teach, so a use can still be found for them."
--Angus K. Rodgers
(The word genius seems to be rather ill-defined, as evidenced by Rodger's reluctance to use it in a context that seems identical to that of the article.)
I also like the following quotation of N. Bohr, appearing in an Amazon book review[1] of Dr. Simonton's[2] "Creativity in Science: Chance, Logic, Genius, and Zeitgeist":
"We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough."
> The most important process underlying strokes of creative genius is the tendency to pay attention to things that normally should be ignored or filtered out.
I'd add that it's not only paying attention to these things, but questioning them.
Noticing something no one else does is useless unless it incites action. Deciding to act upon something can only happen if there's sufficient curiosity. Curiosity comes from questions. Why? What if? How might one...?
Questions are so fundamental to everything from creativity to innovation, management, sales, relationships...I just had my eyes opened by A More Beautiful Question by Warren Berger.
>I'd add that it's not only paying attention to these things, but questioning them.
Personally, I feel the rebellious aspects of intellectualism are far, far overplayed to the point of absurdity. It leads to buying into marginalized, if not discredited, ideas and not doing a proper investigation into mainstream knowledge. I mean, how many more reddit posts about the "evil" Federal Reserve or how terrible of a person Thomas Edison was do we need? Especially when these opinions are tied to politicized propaganda from the opposition and not remotely tied to a legitimate interest into monetary policy or late 19th century industry.
I don't think young geeky introverts need to be told to be more rebellious, if anything they should learn to conform more, learn better social skills, understand the power of teams and collaboration, etc. I really wish someone told me this when I was younger. These attitudes did me a big disservice in life and I imagine I would have been much more successful otherwise.
This. It took far too long for me to realize that noticing and questioning something that others have either not noticed or not questioned didn't make me any smarter or better than anyone else.
I think that a lot of younger, geeky types are always looking for or being told of reasons why they're better than their more socially-outgoing classmates. It's comforting to sit back and feel like you're winning because you see things that other people don't, but what really puts people ahead in the long run is being willing to confront the things which make them uncomfortable.
> I mean, how many more reddit posts about the "evil" Federal Reserve or how terrible of a person Thomas Edison was do we need?
Is that rebellion or groupthink? Either way, yes, most of it probably is useless.
But what about the rebelliousness that brought about the hyperlink, the mouse, and the iPhone? Surely those inventions were rooted in questions that sought rebellion against established ways of doing things?
There's a time to rebel and a time to conform. Rebellion without conformity leads to thinkers who have great ideas but no output. Conformity without rebellion leads to complacency and no progress.
>But what about the rebelliousness that brought about the hyperlink, the mouse, and the iPhone?
Are those really rebellions? TBL was a pretty milquetoast guy who built on top of a lot of things before him: TCP/IP, server OS, interconnected networks, and of course text-based predecessors to the web like Archie. He didn't wear all black and call everyone an idiot and magically produce something wonderful. He stood on the shoulders of giants and reached a little further.
It's groupthink, because if you ask why, then try to answer the question you'll soon come to understand that it is actually a really good institution for the economy, and not the opposite.
I was calling 'reddit posts about the "evil" Federal Reserve or how terrible of a person Thomas Edison' probably useless, not the entire other side of the argument.
The problem with your approach is that unless you invest a non-trivial amount of time and effort into something, you're just not qualified to question things on a level where you can do a wholesale dismissal. Unfortunately, many don't adhere to this. Thus the endless diatribes about the evils of vaccines and Thomas Edison.
Rebelliousness is typically a shortcut to thinking. Its not actual thinking. From my experience, most self-styled intellectual rebels are dilettantes who are socially rewarded for their loudmouth views. From a scholarly or historical perspective, they believe and preach garbage.
The successful types, even in fields we agree tend to be rebellious, are almost universally the more milquetoast and calm personalities able to work with others who took interesting but usually incremental turns. This is why we all know who, say, Lou Reed is and accept his contributions to rock, but may not feel the same about guys like G.G. Allin or Marilyn Manson.
> I mean, how many more reddit posts about the "evil" Federal Reserve or how terrible of a person Thomas Edison was do we need?
As many as it will take for mainstream thinking to be more aligned with reality.
You do understand that the Fed being necessary and Thomas Edison being a good guy is what is already taught in schools?
And you're saying people should investigate these mainstream ideas even more than what they're being taught in school?
In other words, it seems you're saying school is not educating people enough; and therefore students should keep focusing on the side the schools chose to take, but just study that side further; no need to consider the other side because... why?
I don't understand your position. You have a bigger speech around these ideas, that you then used as an excuse to dismiss those two ideas out of hand, because you don't like them. But have you studied them further or have you just chosen to dismiss them because you interpret disagreement and debate as "rebellious aspects of intellectualism"?
It's not so much the question as the pattern (either noticing a new pattern, or the break of an existing pattern).
Everything operates in patterns, and some are more pleasing or more jarring than others. In either of these cases, it may spur you into investigating further, which may lead to an interesting discovery. Whether that discovery is useful or beautiful to other people or not is irrelevant.
How can you define action? Is it the summation, selection, and order of thoughts leading up the action, or is a web that connects possibly every observation and thought you've had?
Acting is easy, its simply answering the question, or at least attempting to. That is the part where you can't just ignore it and go on with your life.
this difficulty inhibiting thoughts that i know are irrelevant has long been an issue for me. i had to build a "memory palace" style visualizing technique for "disposing" of thoughts that i know aren't relevant, but can't help fixate on.
i imagine writing the thought down in vim, then moving the file to a USB stick, then taking the usb stick into a zip-lock bag, putting that into a specific pocket of my backpack, getting on my bike, and riding from my apartment down 101 to the NASA base at AMES, throwing the backpack into a red bin which is loaded into a rocket and shot into space.
the visualization is so detailed and specific that it takes all my attention to render that internal movie; after having expressed the thought syntactically (i actually imagine writing the thing down in vim and moving my fingers accordingly), it gets moved from "the thing actively afflicting my consciousness now" to "a thing i was thinking about". often after the rocket takes off, i can remember i was thinking something that bothered me, but i can't remember what it was. my mind will sometimes grab after it, trying to remember - and if it surfaces i get agitated again - but i can usually stay focused enough to distract myself by going for a walk or establishing a small, easily obtainable goal to fire up the ol' task positive network again.
It's not quite as detailed as yours, but I use a "trick" of the same kind to chase those obsessive thoughts.
I see myself on top of a miles high cliff, standing next to a safe. I somehow extirpate the thought by breathing it out into the vault, which I then lock and push off the cliff.
I then have to wait and when I "hear" a distant noise, I can't remember the thought, even though my mind perversely tries to remember.
Anyway, I'm glad to see I'm not the only one having to resort to such tactics...
I sometimes use imagery of a toilet flushing and the thought going down, several flushes if necessary (imaginary water is free!) Also, imagining white noise (visual and auditory) washing out the thought, increasing in power until it wipes away the thought like waves on a beach erasing patterns traced in the sand and then fading out, seems to work well. (I suspect using (imaginary) noise might have some actual biophysical basis for why it works, but that's just speculation.)
The author is talking about idea generation. As Edison wrote, "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration."
Here are a few ideas I don't have time to pursue.
1. Make extruder-type 3D printing work better by heating the material just laid down, just ahead of the weld point. Use hot air or a small, maybe 5W laser diode. Use 3 heat points 120 degrees apart so you can heat ahead of the direction of travel. Modulate the laser with pulse-width modulation, then read the temperature during the off period with two photodiodes with different IR filters. Go closed-loop on the temperature.
2. Initial application for automatic driving - airport auto rental. Book rental in advance. When customer's phone shows up at destination airport, dispatch car to terminal, timed to show up just after luggage pickup. Use phone to direct customer to car. On return, customer drops off car at terminal, and it head back to rental lot on its own. Self-driving is limited to low speed in known areas. Expand system by adding parking garages at likely car rental destinations, such as convention centers.
3. Conference room automation. Video projector should have camera, find screen, put up test pattern, focus, correct for parallax. Room lights should sense projector/external lighting situation. Microphone system should automatically track speaker from a distance (this exists, using a hemisphere with a large number of microphones and a lot of CPU power) without any effort by speaker. Video feed of talks and classroom should have people tracking and automatically generate a useful video feed. The whole thing should Just Work. Internet of Things crowd, get busy.
4. Integer overflow, both signed and unsigned, should trap in CPUs. If you want modular arithmetic modulo the word size, you should write "x+= (x % 65536)", and the compiler should understand that as an idiom, generating an cheap unchecked unsigned add.
5. Set import duties to recover about half the wage difference between the exporting and importing countries. This escapes the "race to the bottom" problem.
Half, so as not to have too much protectionism. Politically difficult, but the current ratio for the minimum wage in Shentzen to the US is 5.6. China is getting close to where this is feasible.
Re #5, there's a race to the bottom only in the short term. As you observed, income in China is rising dramatically and rapidly, even median incomes.
Free trade reduces wage differences. By stymying trade, you slow down the process. You sustain local wages at the expense of many more poor people elsewhere.
Policy attention is better spent addressing workforce mobility and skills gaps. If we could magically fix American policy, I'd raise the taxes and fund programs which address the aforementioned issues. Although an easy hack for improving mobility would be to 1) kill the home mortgage interest tax deduction and 2) government guaranteed mortgages. It's both a blessing and a curse that so many non-skilled, low-wage Americans can be homeowners in this country.
We'd need some kind of replacement model which promoted wide-scale access to capital, however. Homeownership is the only way most Americans can get access to cheap financing for small businesses, education, etc.
Your theory is that, let's say, John Carmack can't self-identify as a genius after all he has accomplished, and given how far out in front of most others he has always been on the technology curve?
Bill Gates possesses a genius level intelligence, has the accomplishments and mental demonstrations to back it up, and is apparently fully aware of it. What's the problem exactly?
Let's define genius:
"exceptional intellectual or creative power or other natural ability."
or
"a person who is exceptionally intelligent or creative, either generally or in some particular respect."
As though it should be difficult for a genius to recognize that their abilities far exceed those of other people.
I would argue that being oblivious to that level of blatant genius - having no idea you're so much better than most others - would be more of a negative mental trait vs being aware of it. You'd have to be incredibly ignorant, and almost entirely non-self-aware to miss such a thing across a lifetime.
If you can reasonably be defined as to be in possession of X trait, there is absolutely nothing wrong with recognizing that. It is not an ego problem to do so. If my brain is capable of great feats of mathematics, and I can tell that I'm drastically better at math than my peers, there is nothing irrationally egotistical about recognizing it. With there being a critical distinction between recognizing your capabilities, vs. obnoxiously promoting them to others.
If John Carmack or Bill Gates thought of themselves as geniuses, they wouldn't have accomplished a fraction of what they did. Nothing is more destructive to someone's intelligence or creativity than believing the hype that people put on you, and that goes 10x if that hype comes from yourself.
Put another way, I consider both of those guys geniuses, but if either of them made that claim about themselves, I would have to reconsider the position.
Put another another way, no good can possibly ever come from acknowledging your own genius, even if that was something a person was capable of perceiving about themselves, which I don't think it is.
I completely agree with most of your comment. I wonder, though, if some good could come from (erroneously) acknowledging one's own genius privately and temporarily. If that person were above a certain threshold, wouldn't the acknowledgement of one's own genius evoke the conflict that there must be much more left to learn that the person isn't yet aware of? It might just provide enough motivation to search for the reasons why it was so ignorant to have considered oneself a genius.
Very interesting! I find that what geniuses are secretly proud of is seldom what others perceive as their top achievements, so it would be hard to parallel the external "you are a genius" with the internal "I'm a genius".
Or maybe I'm just talking about highly intelligent people != genius.
Those two definitions are far too vague to use a term like 'blatant' to describe genius.
For example, I'm not sure what you're seeing in Bill Gates. I don't want to have a discussion about him, just offering an example of how nebulous any definition 'intellectual power', 'creative power', 'natural ability', 'general or particular intelligence' and 'general or particular creativity' is, and to second the opinion that definitions of genius are primarily social rather than operational or falsifiable.
edit: apologies for distributing your definitions but still using quote marks.
I guess it depends what the threshold for "genius" is. Obviously Carmack and Gates are very bright people who've accomplished a lot, but let's be honest, they're not exactly at the level of DaVinci or Einstein, or even Feynman.
And I do think it's ego problem if somebody goes around defining themselves as a genius. One of the things I'm always struck by is the fact that many of the smartest people I know are incredibly humble. They're smart enough to realize all the things they don't know.
Feynman was perversely proud of the fact that when tested (as a child?), he _didn't_ have a "genius" IQ. Wikipedia claims it was 125, but I thought I'd heard him claim it was 134, one point too low to qualify for Mensa. That's just my memory of a brief anecdote he told a group of undergrads over 30 years ago, so I likely have the details wrong.
He claimed that any genius could win a Nobel prize, but that he'd done really well to have won one as a non-genius!
I've never believed Feynman's self-reported IQ. Reading his breezy autobiographical books, he had a habit of somehow bragging by underplaying his abilities, making his accomplishments miraculous/lucky/etc. I suspect the IQ legend is just a part of that.
I've never seen a claim than an IQ as low as 120 would classify as "genius". Lowest I've seen is around 140.
In any case, while I'm not foolish enough to believe IQ isn't a useful measurement of intelligence, I certainly don't think any given number indicates "genius", which is something else again.
If it was truly 120, that would make over 10% of the population (based on a standard bell curve) geniuses. I've never seen it that low. 160 seems to be the current acceptable number, but of course there will always be a range.
This is also wildly dependent on the test in question and what 1SD is equal to. 3+ SD is generally accepted as "genius" and not all tests have the same SD.
Egoism is also a form of madness, is it not? Narcissism is actually well-known to be one of the more creative personality types, and there's research to back that up.
I had an IQ score higher than Marilyn vos Savant's once. I like to think I'm a more creative thinker than most, but I haven't exactly made any world-shaking discoveries ...
> Psychopathy, noun
> mental disorder especially when marked by egocentric and antisocial activity [1]
> Antisocial: adjective
> hostile or harmful to organized society; especially : being or marked
> by behavior deviating sharply from the social norm [2]
So if you're more intelligent (deviating sharply from the social norm) and you know you're intelligent (egocentric), you're kind of a psychopath, by definition of the word psychopath. What's the surprise there?
Not being accepted or understood by the society that you excel above would also be expected.
The M-W dictionary might not be the best source for that definition. The people best disposed to curate the meaning of that word, psychiatrists and psychologists, would characterize psychopaths as being bold, disinhibited, and utterly lacking in empathy or remorse.
In other words, they do what they want, when they want, and don't care about how it impacts anyone else, not during the act, and not after they finish. Correctly believing yourself to be smarter than most other folks is barely a nudge from the normal end of that spectrum.
But if I were to guess, r is probably very slightly positive when correlating genius with psychopathy, psychopathology, and several other "that guy's a little odd" disorders.
In case of psychopathy, or better anti-social personality traits in general, there is some research into this, and it indicates that "genius level" intelligence is a protective factor. So a person with amoral/anti-social traits and very high score on the G factor (I think) is able to compensate, high cognitive abilities can sort of inhibit amoral impulses through sheer brute force of intellect, sort of. This makes sense because anti-social/amoral behaviour is in the general case not very adaptive and beneficial (for each successful psycho, you have vastly more of them leading miserable lives). Also, the relationship is non-linear, it only works for very high levels of intelligence. I'd love to give you some reference, but unfortunately I don't have the literature at hand ATM.
They're being a bit trite in bandying the word "psychopathy" about. I think a better term would be eccentricity. Genius does tend to come with psychological quirks (usually the filtering of mundane things in a way others consider odd), but most of them are usually harmless.
I guess what I'm trying to point out is that psychopathy, genius, and eccentricity have the same semantic roots. They all indicate some offset from an average.
the article uses the word "psychopathology" which is notably different from psychopathy. the form of pscyhopathology referred to here is psychosis, not psychopathy or anti-social personality disorder.
The definition of psychopathology still indicates "disorder," though, which in the case of science in general indicates a departure from a generally observed and accepted order.
When I decided to quit my job and create a company I went against everybody. My parents, my girlfriend, my friend, all them thought I was crazy quiting a good position for something so risky.
E.g My girlfriend told me that if I was doing my company the relationship was over, so I said to her, ok, go away. The next week she wanted to come back, but I preferred to risk this alone.
Of course, when whatever you did works, everybody believes you are a genius, and they always remind you how much they KNEW that. Success is contagious, and once the media says that, you are a genius for everyone.
People like Newton, who was a geek, had to suffer isolation all his life in order to do what he felt right.
Fortunately today there are two differences with Newton's time:
1-There is Internet. Whatever you do you are not alone. There is a 1 per cent or 1 per thousand people like you, and with Internet you can find them, meet them. In the past getting enough critic mass was only possible in cities, with millions of people.
2-We know a lot more about psychology, you have amazing educational materials to improve your live, be happy and not getting in holes like suicidal thoughts.