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Genius Requires Just the Right Mix
An anonymous reader writes "LiveScience has an interesting piece taking a look at how genius is rarely developed in a vacuum. From the article: 'The reality is that behind many scientific geniuses, there is at least one other genius, and often a number of them.' It takes much more than a genius pal or predecessor, however, to do great science, according to Simmons. Scientific advances emerge from social, economic and political conditions."
What a foul little waste of blurb space that was.
Science doesn't have a monopoly on genius. There is plenty of genius elsewhere.
As for the conditions necessary for "genius" things to happen in science, that's called a "paradigm shift". Read Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolution".
All this article told me was someone was trying to cover some white space.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Human cognition has been described by some researchers as unique in that it is the result of many years of cumulated cultural evolution. We think in symbols that have developed over time. In that sense, all of us can be said to "stand on the shoulders of giants."
Certain environments (cultural, social, intellectual, environments) are ripe for a certain key innovation. It is up to individual researchers to make that development, but of course it wouldn't be possible without the work of others before them. This is even more evident when we look at scenarios in which several researchers develop the same innovation at almost precisely the same time.
Of course, drawing the conclusion that "geniuses are just like the rest of us" is totally of base. Some individuals are most assuredly better than others at innovating and developing our knowledge. In fact, I would submit that the majority of humans take the role of "imitator" not innovator. Innovators have to be rare, and imitators prevalent, in order for cumulative cultural evolution to work; lots of people need to preserve our knowledge -you can't have everyone thinking differently and innovating.
Further to this, I would like to add that the sort of genius that makes an "Einstein" is not necessarily just "being smart", whatever that means, but thinking differently than the rest of us -just being weird. A low amount of weird individuals in a social group will allow that group to explore new possibilities safely.
There's a very long string of famous mathematicians that associated with each other (not necessarily directly, but they are all connected on a relatively small graph), beginning with Leibniz and ending with Dirichlet. It includes Bernoulli, Euler, Lagrange, Fourier, and Poisson, as well as the aforementioned two.
So yes, I'd be inclined to agree.
From the article:
"The scientific genius who grew up in grinding poverty is an exceedingly rare bird," he said. "If it seems there was a great flowering of scientific genius out of Eastern Europe beginning in the late nineteenth century, it was due in large part to a developing middle class, a stable family life, and secular opportunities for both men and women."
So, less povery will produce more geniuses. I think that's a really good argument for creating a stronger social safety net.
I don't agree with the assertions of the author. I know it is in vogue to believe it's a special relationship between events, people, etc., that makes a genius, but I don't agree. You are or you aren't. Whether the genius' contributions are recognized, whether the genius finds an appropriate subject in which to expend his creative energy, these are the questions.
The article goes on to discuss how Einstein had all the benefits of other great physicists. But wait, he dropped out of high school, barely made it into college, and couldn't even find a job. He taught himself calculus, and developed special relativity on his own.
History is rife with examples of genius forgotten, and who knows how much is lost. The Fourier Transform was rejected by the Academy of Sciences of Paris, yet look at the applications today, from digital image processing, communications theory, and the profound impact it had on the revolutionary idea of function. Consider others, such as Fermat, a great mathematician, for whom math was only a hobby. This extends to other things like music. Bach, little known in his own time, and completely forgotten until he was discovered by Mendelssohn, is now considered by many to be the greatest composer of all time.
No, I think that people who like to say there is no Genius, only environment, are merely mediocre thinkers, socialists, and those who would rob the wonderful talent of the great contributers of our world. The goal? To diminish individual contribution and aggrandize socialism.
The real question we ought to be asking, is given there are as many people alive today as ever, why don't we have 10000 geniuses making enormous progress in the sciences, when largely we hear about questionable things like "cold fusion," and the like.
Ed Barbar, President and General Manager, Furnit USA
"Regardless, the intrigue of a conversation spreads on the merits of the conversation ... and not necessarily on the qualities of the people engaged in the conversation."
I'd have to disagree. Consider two geniuses, whose letters to each other as they reconciled are considered one of the greatest political correspondences of modern times: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Of course, they knew they were writing for posterity, but still... Do you think that their dialogue would have been even remotely interesting to their successors on the political stage in the US, or to historians, had not they been revered 'fathers' of the Constitution and of the US?
Or the famous letters between Newton and Leibnitz? Their personalities drove the interest in their letters as much as the items discussed did, particularly when those letters became less of theory and more of vitriol.
Personality drives the intrigue of conversation as much as content.
"What happens is that, on occasion, a compelling conversative takes place that really draws in the imagination of the academic crowd."
I agree there. But WHY are those conversations compelling? I believe it is because of the asking of, and attempts to answer, the questions that no one has thought to answer. And it's genius that is able to do so, and it does it best when geniuses can ask of eachother, and build of eachother's questions.
Scientific genius is not knowing the answers... scientific genius is asking the questions no one else has seriously asked.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
It's because America has top-notch gyms and training equipment, allowing more people with natural talent to be able to develop their talents to the extreme.
Cntrl-C, Cntrl-V this idea into an intellectual bucket, and you get the point of the article. Environment is critical to "geniusness".
An IQ of 140 is not 'genius' but, instead, it's 'gifted'. My IQ is about this, too, and what I've learned over the years is that I'm just smart enough to fool people into thinking I'm smart, when I'm really just 'average plus'. The downside is that everyone thought I was really smart growing up, and they managed to get me fooled, too, until I burned out.
I was always surrounded by people more successful than me, and it took a long time to sink in that I lacked every quality to achieve success, in spite of being 'gifted'. I'm not very social, for starters, and I also have trouble speaking clearly. Add several other things worthy of psychoanalysis (emotionally absent father, somewhat unstable mother, etc.), and I guess the "right mix" didn't materialize.
I'm much happier now that I've stopped trying to amount to a fantasy. My next job will be quite average, and combined with my wife's salary, our finances will be just fine. As far as I'm concerned, "genius" is just a fabrication of naive and optimistic teachers and parents.
IMHO, genius is very closly related to serendipity. Also, the ability to realize the discovery and act on it.
mentioned that focusing on the individual is a western thing. it is an intersting aside that in eastern cultures, a person accomplishes not solely for themselves, but often for the benefit of the scoial group (whatever that may be) this type of thinking is indoctrinated in several asian cultures (or any culture where the extended family is the basic social unit). Therefore, the individual who excels is acknowleged, but as a part of the larger unit that produced them.
This article demonstrates that the west (companies like Google leading the way) are only just catching on to the idea that breakthroughs are more complicated than an individual "A HA!" moment.
*prepares grammar shield of +5 flame protection*
There is no generally accepted definition of genius, and it certainly isn't a reflection of IQ alone, but rather of a creative capacity that is in some sense at the level of the best the human race has to offer. The odds of genius rise with IQ, and out around 160 (4 SD) in my experience it becomes common. But there are plenty of geniuses out there who score in the 130s and 140s. IQ isn't all that accurate or precise, particularly for high scores. It only measures a person's ability to solve contrived and artificial rather than natural and ill-defined problems, and it does not test the ability to delineate new problems or to frame old problems in a new way.
As far as fixing communications gear goes, yes, in my experience, the brighter the tech, the more problems he'll find. And the more problems he finds, and the more thouroughly he fixes them, the worse the quality ranking he'll get on "six sigma" bullshit metrics that big telcom companies use. IQ is better than that, but it still filters out most real intelligence in real complex and fluid situations with competing goals and measures of value.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
Clearly he's been taking his definition from Girl Genius
"Kneel you miserable minion!"
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
While the article may very well be true, I've heard another saying that strikes me as even more true, "There is a fine line bettwen a Genius and an Idiot." Many people we hold in high esteeme for their brillance were also a little eccentric, or down right crazy. Vincent Van Gogh, Bobby Fisher, Andy Warhol, hell Wikipedia has a whole list of them http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_widely _considered_eccentric.
In my personal experience, most of the smartest people I have meet have been a little bit, well crazy. Now figuring out what that tiny factor that truly does seperate the loonies, from the genius loonies, that is the hard part.
"There is a school of thought that Sir Isaac said that not so much to be humble, but as a backhanded compliment towards Robert Hooke."
That may well be, but it seems that Newton was riffing on a metaphor that had already existed for centuries.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph-T/spo_sum_oly_me d_all_tim_percap
Olympic medals per capita, all time:
#1 Finland
#2 Sweden
#3 Hungary
#4 Denmark
#5 Norway
.
.
.
the US comes in at place 28 of 116. And as for gold medals, well, there are no total statistics on the site, but for Sydney, gold medals per capita put the US at place 31 of 48. And so on. It's pretty standard knowledge that the US does very badly in the Olympics for a country of that size. It only does well in the absolute number of medals because of its, well, absolute size, which gives it a massive pool of talented people and a lot will succeed regardless of how inferior their training/financial environment is to rich world standards.
(BTW, part of the reason why Finland is leading the all time per capita stats is that in the early 20th century Finns *were* often written off in Western Europe/America as racially inferior and there was a huge national push to succeed in sports to defeat that image...)
The dark ages are a prime example. Societies turned their backs on logic in favor of mysticism and people were afraid to pursue knowledge lest they be labeled as heretics. It took a lot of bravery in those times to stand up for any ideas that ran contrary to the religious beliefs of the day.
Not at all. It is actually the Christian faith that led to science.
A few excerpts from an interview with Rodney Stark:
WORLD: How is Christianity unique in emphasizing the idea of progress?
STARK: The other great faiths either taught that the world is locked in endless cycles or that it is inevitably declining from a previous Golden Age. Only Christians believed that God's gift of reason made progress inevitable--theological as well as technical progress. Thus, Augustine (ca. 354-430) flatly asserted that through the application of reason we will gain an increasingly more accurate understanding of God, remarking that although there were "certain matters pertaining to the doctrine of salvation that we cannot yet grasp . . . one day we shall be able to do so."
Nor was the Christian belief in progress limited to theology. Augustine went on at length about the "wonderful--one might say stupefying--advances human industry has made" and attributed all this to the "unspeakable boon" that God has conferred upon His creation, a "rational nature." These views were repeated again and again through the centuries. Especially typical were these words preached by Fra Giordano in Florence in 1306: "Not all the arts have been found; we shall never see an end to finding them."
WORLD: But a lot of us learned that Europe fell into the "Dark Ages." How did that historical understanding originate, and what's wrong with it?
STARK: The Dark Ages have finally been recognized as a hoax perpetrated by anti-religious and bitterly anti-Catholic, 18th-century intellectuals who were determined to assert their cultural superiority and who boosted their claim by denigrating the Christian past--as Gibbon put it in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, after Rome came the "triumph of barbarism and religion." In the past few years even encyclopedias and dictionaries have begun to acknowledge that it was all a lie, that the Dark Ages never were. This always should have been obvious since by the end of the so-called Dark Ages, European science and technology had far exceeded that of Rome and Greece, and all the rest of the world, for that matter.
WORLD: Could you be specific? What were some of the "Dark Ages" innovations that show the folly of considering Greek and Roman culture the apex of civilization until recent times?
STARK: How about the perfection and widespread use of waterwheels, windmills, and pumps, the invention of the compass, stirrups, the crossbow, canons, effective horse harnesses, eyeglasses, clocks, chimneys, violins, double-entry bookkeeping, and insurance? This list doesn't begin to do justice to this era that historians of science now refer to as an age of remarkable innovation and discovery.
I can empathise with you on this one. I went into my current role a super developer in what then looked like a professional atmosphere. I went from working in a world where people cared about what they did and work was an extension of the hobby, except you got paid. I now live in an environment where the priority of the day is socialising and quality code is engineered from a verbal spec, duplicating the behaviour of every other application on the system. I miss having peers to grow ideas with. Perhaps there are no geniuses. Only Gardeners. We nurture ideas, sometimes collectively. It's the evolution of these ideas which sometimes yields proud gardeners or geniuses. If there isn't enough nurturing, from one or more gardeners, the genius never appears. Or worse. The idea dwindles away and the gardener fails.