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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."
Really brilliant people (not just scientifically, but in any discipline or industry) surround themselves with other brilliant people. They enjoy being challenged by peers. They are secure in their abilities and know that other brilliant people will not threaten their place but help to elevate it.
I am finding, early in my business career, that working with other talented people makes me work harder and aspire to greater things. The constant challenges put a perspective on the obstacles I used to face - ones I now overcome easily.
I'm beginning to believe that "genius" is just a frame of mind.
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
Browse /. at -1 and notice how stupidity doesn't develop in a vacuum either. Behind every "-1 Offtopic" comment, there are dozens of other equally irrelevant, nonsensical rants. One "Stephen King is Dead" post always leads to more, and penis bird lives on.
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.
According to that hypothesis, I'm wondering how many geniuses /. has produced, since everyone here considers himself/herself a genius? Most important of all, when am I going to become a genius too, since I've been surrounding myself with all these geniuses here for quite a while now?
/. genius makes you a genius. True. /. geniuses makes you a genius. True. /. geniuses makes you a genius. True. /. geniuses also makes you a genius.
/. geniuses does it take to prove this?
Can someone prove to me that this hypothesis is true:
1. Surround yourself with one
2. Surround yourself with two
3. Surround yourself with n
4. Hence, surround yourself with n + 1
The question is, how many
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.
Vizzini: I can't compete with you physically, and you're no match for my brains.
Westley: You're that smart?
Vizzini: Let me put it this way. Have you ever heard of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates?
Westley: Yes.
Vizzini: Morons.
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Well, if you perform an aggregate analysis of all the slashdot subscribers, I think you might find one or two savants.
:)
Certainly more than one idiot.
Myself included.
> So if it takes more than one genius to produce another genius, does that mean we could be looking at a genius shortage in the future?
It takes more than one stray cat to make a stray kitten, and yet we don't seem to have any shortage.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
No, I enjoy squashing them. As if a genius can have a "peer". True genius has no equal, and quite simply cannot have peers. In other words, true geniuses don't need to be around other people to convince themselves that they are "smart": they KNOW that they are smart.
Not sure what qualifies you as a genious. Anyways your approach of "squashing" will not get you far in the real world. Most geniouses will acknowlege they were not the first, nor the last. Perhaps you are familiar with the phrase "standing on the shoulders of giants"?
Not once the government-sponsored inbreeding program starts :) An idea that good couldn't possibly backfire!
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Not everybody who does well on an IQ test is a genius, but everybody who does not do well on an IQ test is not a genius.
...but is it art?
no correlation, hum? does that mean it has a p-value of +.05? does good grammar--"IQ and SAT has..." "correlate" with intelligence? is the data set parametric? what measurements are we using? note the repeated usage of "no correlation" without any data whatsoever. which school of thought? where is this school of thought that thinks IQ and SAT are the end all and be all of genius? where is this strawperson? yes, we might be moving beyond a single "q" factor for intelligence, but don't you think we should look at the evidence first, rather than asserting the recieved wisdom, which in this of all cases should be questioned?
The sociologist Howard Becker has written extensively, most clearly in his book "Art Worlds," that to understand creation the locus should be the entire world of the artist, not the artist. We're making a mistake if we try to understand Beethoven's 9th without reference to the culture of Vienna, the rising role of the publishing house, the people who let him live the unfettered (if tortured) life of a creative artist, all play a role alongside the musicians, the promoters, his students, and composers who preceeded him and worked alongside him. That Viennese world, with Beethoven in it, Becker would argue, is the actual producer of the work.
The same holds true for science and other creative endeavors. It's not an airtight thesis, by any means, but it is provocative and gets people thinking along different lines than the unitary individual acting alone as we are so prone to do in the West...
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
Genius is a BS concept. IQ is crap. Results are what count. Do you make things better or worse? Are you an asset or a liability? Only fools strut around hoping to have their genius recognized.
"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".
PHB: A good manager is someone who hires people who are smarter than he is.
Wally: So... your boss is dumber than you?
Alice: And you boss's boss is dumber yet?
Dilbert: According to your theory, our CEO is the dumbest person in the company.
Wally: Unless all of you are bad managers.
Asok: Truly we are doomed either way.
PHB: This concludes the motivational part of the meeting.
Wally: I'd give you a high five but I don't like to move.
One of biggest problems a "genius thinker" often faces is his own intelligence. He is on a much higher level and being surrounded by "normal people" often leaves him unchallenged, he doesn't have to work at anything, and then his discontent could squash the ideas right out of him. But as soon as you put him in a room with another on his level, he will quickly find himself challenged, and will respond with genius, as will his counterpart, leading to truly amazing things. As a general rule, I've found that people don't excel unless they have a reason to. 99% of the time, its competition
"genius is rarely developed in a vacuum"
Well, duh. Poor bugger'd be suffocated before he had time to say "Interesting colour my aaaaarghhhh"
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Hendrix came along at the right time in the curve (also, speaking as a long time professional guitar player, he had the ... uh ... genius to back it up (and really big hands)).
/.) but across musical history you see 'genius' arriving when the technology and or culture move (I'm resisting the phrase 'paradigm shift' for semantic reasons). The first ones to speak the knew language get to invent it, and the rest sit around analyzing Bach / Beethoven / Beatles / Bird et al.
The technology of the solid body electric guitar interfacing with the tube amplifier had reached a level where you (he) could lean on the vibrato arm and stay in tune (3rd Stone), the tubes were together enough to control feedback for long periods of time without the amplifier blowing out, PA systems had recently reached a point where you could play that loud and sing on top of the amps. Add to this a technological arms race going on with tape bandwidth and multitrack fueled by an enormous amount of money flowing into the music business. Read the studio logs, he gets his hands on the latest gear as it arrives. For the rest of the century devices are created that allow any kid in a garage to appx the amp sounds, tuners to take the first two years off of waiting to play out.
A better right place right time example from 60s pop music is Dylan (because he doesn't require the sheer mysterious hand-tone and control that Hendrix does). He arrives right as old school protest folk and Ginsberg are colliding, gets a head of steam and invents a language - having invented it his accent is usually more perfect than most. He's also granted unlimited carte blanc by the 'Zeigeist' to go where ever his beat poetry leads him, including rock and roll.
I can't speak for the science guys as I'm not qualified (though that statement doesn't make much sense on
Your statement about
> quiet, reserved, socially inept, introverts.
Is probably only partially true. Hendrix was definitely wierd by the standards of his time, but he wasn't socially inept.
> im fucking 16, and public school
Keep your head up. Highschool sucks. Learn shit. Join a band (or whatever you kids are calling it) and hit on chicks. It gets better at 18 (or so they say)
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
However, surrounding one's self with excellence at work is only part of the equation, surrounding one's self with a nurturing and supportive family environment (good nutrition and well-balanced life experiences) at an early age further assists your development. Then there are the other relevant social, cultural, and other environmental factors that would go along with this.
Like wild sex with a naked bitchin' ho.
Just for balance.
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.
Ramanujan is one of the biggest mathematical geniuses ever, and taught himself these things in a vacuum.
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...)
as in the ratio of LSD to amphetamines?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.