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The Link Between Genius and Insanity
An anonymous reader writes in a story about the link between certain mental illnesses and high intelligence. "Genius and insanity may actually go together, according to scientists who found that mental illnesses like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are often found in highly creative and intelligent people. The link is being investigated by a group of scientists who had all suffered some form of mental disorder. Bipolar sufferer Kay Redfield Jamison, a clinical psychologist and professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said that findings of some 20 or 30 scientific studies confirms the idea of the 'tortured genius' or 'mad scientist.'"
Emotionally unstable researchers find flattering results!
Crazy.
Maybe there is just a tippingpoint where the genius part of the brain has expanded that far that gets often out of bounds. Where the actual creativity is actually not a random set of neurons, but neurons primed for another task maintaining our common accepted singular personality.
Support Eachother, Copy Dutch Property!
"The link is being investigated by a group of scientists who had all suffered some form of mental disorder."
Shocking.
It's wyy most psychologists become psycholgists too. I have insecurity disorder. I try not to get angry when somebody calls me "stupid" and remind myself, "It doesn't matter what they think since I'm clearly not stupid." Still annoying though.
FREE magazine : http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/prior/
Sometimes it takes someone mentally unstable to accept or think about science that is unthinkable to a sane mind,
one of me believes in it, the other one thinks it is a myth.
I got to the chocolate box before you, that's why the hard ones have teeth marks.
If being a genius, or for the sake of argument, having a high IQ, is such big advantage, why haven't we evolved to have higher IQs? Or conversely, are their disadvantages to having a high IQ that prevented the average IQ from rising.
Of course, an IQ of 100 is defined as the average IQ, so maybe I should ask substitude "IQ corrected for inflation (or deflation)" rather than the standard meaning of IQ.
I hate to be bipolar. Its awesome!!
Linux games that try to make use of advanced features of OpenGL often suffer from driver bugs.
This is going to sound like the dumbest post (at least in this thread).
But I've taken a couple of "official" IQ-test. I've also been member of Mensa (Norway). They say my score is at least 170+, but you can't measure it any better with the tests they had.
I would say, maybe not insanity, but "not normal thinking" (how could it be normal?) and genius goes hand in hand. And yes, it's extremely easy to be considered bipolar, when you are almost always, with just a few exceptions, surrounded by idiots. You have to actively ignore most of what people do and say. Think about that! How lucky one would be, to work with people, interact with people more clever than your self. You could say, "Yes! That was a very clever idea!", even tho it is/was really amazingly obvious.
Many great minds are called "eccentric" but when we break down what that REALLY is, usually it is some kind of disorder, Howard hughes comes to mind, a very very smart man by any account, but he was batshit crazy when it came to some things, You could make the argument that steve jobs was slighty off balenced, and Many other great minds over the years have had some form of mental disorder, usually something autistic.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
From TA "Many prodigies like painter Van Gogh, author Jack Kerouac and mathematician John Nash had displayed self-destructive behaviors, and it is unclear as to why humans have evolved this trait. " Many people who *aren't* prodigies display self-destructive behaviors *all the time*.
Floating in the black seas of infinity without a paddle.
"He's not crazy, he's just....special."
Take that, fourth grade teacher!
the work ethic, the subversion of conventional wisdom and norms, and the increasingly esoteric and complex lexicon of the specialist being incompatible with social life, ultimately leading to isolation, stilted interaction, and resultant mental illness (some of it a matter of social construction, some of it legitimate disability).
At least, that's my experience—it's not that bright people are "inherently" socially awkward so much as that their practices, habits, and knowledge are incompatible with the lives, thoughts, and communicative practices of virtually everyone else, leaving them to be lonely, without much of a reliable support system, and feeling tremendously misunderstood, perhaps even hated, as well as having to deal with the knowledge (which can be quite persuasive) that everyone *else* thinks they're crazy, and the total lack of cooperation and support that can come with this.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
You mean, like a Savant? Thanks for the breakthrough there.
Next, you'll tell me that in a benign/benevolent environment, most of a person's behavior comes from their genetics- solving the obvious nature/nurture question that's about as obvious as the difference between day and night. One of many examples of nature vs nurture is the silver foxes. They bred the "passive pairs" and guess what? Now they have tame silver foxes.
It has been a well known fact for years that the line between being a Genius and a Psychopath or a total idiot is a very thin one. It is also a well known fact that most of the greatest geniuses and psychopathic mad-men have all been left handed as well. I am left handed with a borderline genius IQ. Don't piss me off, I could either bury you in tons of intellectual garbage you would never understand or just bury you in the back yard! ;-)
i prefer "mad tortured genius scientist"
Think of it like rope. The longer the length of rope you have, the more you can do with it, but it's also much easer for it to get tangled up in knots.
It's a lot more genius than you think.
my genius and insanity were endowed by lsd in my teenage years. well, i was reading and writing by age 3, but that proves nothing. i still think it was the lsd.
insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT
It was a good thing when I got excited and giddy about being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Everyone else was just jealous and too fucking stupid to understand me. Just like I always thought.
If genius came free, without HUGE DOWNSIDES then selection would ensure that we'd all be geniuses. Think about it for a second, virtually every renowned genius had huge emotional or operational baggage. Dyslexia, autism, bipolar, monopolar, synesthesia... the list of common problems suffered by the exceptionally intelligent is legion. It's guessed that significantly more than half of all the great works of art and science were accomplished by Bipolar people in their manic phase. Personally, I think the hardest part for someone of profound genius, is being torn between the clear vision of what it possible and the sad reality of what is allowed by people to persist. There are some interesting conversations about ways of coping with genius. The Greeks had a very healthy concept, externalizing genius, such that it was a resource to be tapped and that some were simply better at getting to it. That took the onus of brilliance off the person, freeing them up, to simply pursue whatever it was they were pursuing. Here's a great TED Talk about that.
All geniuses HAVE to have some mental instability, since stability is the enemy of creativity. If you're fully stable, you've no reason to invent for yourself new methods of working through a problem. If you're fully rational, a small discrepancy between theory and observation won't keep you awake at night until you damn well fix the theory. If you're fully functional, you're going to be too busy doing regular work and won't have time for creative thought.
Very, very few insane people are geniuses, although many will think of themselves as such.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Genius and insanity is just a Hollywood construct.
Not worth any studies. Nor is studying genius and anything else.
When Psychology stops getting their ideas from Hollywood, maybe we will take them seriously.
Mad scientist ponders mad scientists
artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.
Who didn't see that "Dr. Horrible" documentary? I should think this conclusion would be obvious after seeing that!
"The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success." from Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)
Yep,
When ordinary mortals were visiting Zombo.com, the mentally altered geniuses visited Obmoz.com.
http://zombo.com/
http://obmoz.com/
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
stupid govt wants justification to remain stupid....
This is roughly 2 years ago, and the study then concluded the same thing. Hey figure that back 100+ years ago, Oscar Levant wisecracked himself with the "There's a fine line between genius and insanity." Go back through classical literature on figures writing about others, and you see the same thing. Genius and Insanity are on the same coin, it's how far between the halves that makes your brain go round.
Om, nomnomnom...
comes to mind...
I forgot the name, but he claimed that highly-above intellectual capacities are usually the result of childhood-trauma. Maybe just bullshit, but strangely the "childhood" section of "great persons" in wikipedia usually are quite "interesting" with that perspective... but if you look for something, you will usually find something.
Everything changed when the fire nation attacked
Szasz what are you doing here on slashdot ;)
I saw a documentary not too long ago, about autism (and similar afflictions) and superior ability in some special field. One example was a patient suffering from dementia. His hobby was painting and his doctor noticed that his painting got better as his dementia increased. There were other examples but the theory, which some people were getting ready to test, was that a 'healthy' brain filters out a lot of sensory input. In the case of this patient suffering from dementia, some of that filtering failed and he was seeing the world 'bare' so to speak. The filtering has a survival value in that it keeps us from being overwhelmed. To have the brain processing power to handle a greater input we'd need bigger brains, consuming more resources; birth would be more difficult, etc.
Another thing to consider with people who lack social skills, is that it could be the lack of social skills that leads them to focus on, say, science, as a compensation or a way to pass the time, rather, than their concentration on science leading to underdeveloped social skills. I'm not saying that's the way it is, just that when seeing a correlation, to be careful about which is the cart and which is the horse.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
This is what a tortured normal person looks like.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLTIK4soif8&feature=related
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Im not crazy! My mother had me tested.
AnimePapers.org: Anime Wallpapers Handled With Care
"I'll tell you what I'm gonna do." God said to me. "I'm gonna make you a really creative ahrtist. People from everywhere are gonna talk about you and what you've produced. But just to keep it interesting, every now and then, you're gonna want to kill yourself. Have a nice life."
Creativity is something that we dont value nearly as much as we should.
Maybe the difference between a Genius and an Insane person has more to do with how we see them than any real difference in them.
If someone tells you an idea that you havent heard of before its fair to consider them creative, but unless that creativness is within your area of rational then you will think them stupid. If its a creative idea that is in an area fam,iliar with you, and you havent thought of it before, you will have a much better opinion of them.
Personally, I blame the monothiests and the empiricists !
I thought I was a genius, turns out I was just crazy.
They come in the dark, only in the darkest.
Have gnu, will travel.
I dunno... Im pretty crazy and I'm not smart or creative at all. So statistically, 100% of the people i give a shart about are crazy dummies.
One thing about being an actual productive "Genius" vs. just having a genius level intelligence. In order to produce genius type results often requires a manic dedication to something that doesn't improve your life in a direct way. Basically you have to dedicate yourself to a subject in such a way that even if you do get monetary/social advantages from what you produce, you can't really take advantage of them. If you did, you wouldn't really have the time to make that next breakthrough.
Sometimes, by putting such people in the right type of social situation, so called “ivory tower”, they can have a slightly more balance social life. Basically lot's of the details of keeping things running in their life falls to others.
Time to work on advanced problems is so important in this kind of situation, you don't play games or watch tv, instead you are always brainstorming on new ideas. True breakthroughs are hard and time consuming, even for the genius that finally make them.
But I don't care. No one likes me anyway.
Leave me alone.
That idea may have come from variations of "ignorance is bliss". If you don't have a clue about the world around you, you have nothing to worry about. The better your perception or understanding of things, the more pitfalls or risks you can see.
There's gotta be a Windows user angle here someplace.
Have gnu, will travel.
Yes. No one ever distinguished themselves by being like everyone else.
Shooting for something above the norm is ... abnormal. An individual (or if lucky, perhaps a small peer group) challenges the greater conventional group, who, also by definition, has more clout, power, etc. Being different puts a lot of social pressure on a person. They might be exalted, or they might be stigmatized. Probably both. What kind of personality traits do people who are both praised and stigmatized develop? It's a difficult situation to deal with.
But don't confuse results with causes. People sometimes end up in the same place for different reasons. Some people are otherwise emotionally healthy, but confront social pressures inherent to being on the tail end of one bell curve or another; and that can lead to certain personality traits. Other people have those traits as a matter of course. And those two groups are often confused. Not everyone with the symptoms associated with aspergers are geniuses, but people who are geniuses sometimes have similar traits. What caused what? Hard to say unless you think know a lot more about the human mind than you actually do.
The obvious question is whether insane geniuses are insane because we* are geniuses (i.e. being more intelligent than everyone around us causes more distress than we can handle), or we we are geniuses because we are insane (i.e. our non-standard brains offer us insights that are opaque to those around us). Or is this an example of two independent phenomena with a common cause?
*Don't expect false modesty from an insane genius. :)
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
The partition that separates genius from madness is painted in shades of gray, and possessed of enormous mountains and valleys populated by winged marsupials who reproduce by completely consuming their mates in a process that is neither quick, nor painless.
... is measured only by success. --Bruce Feirstein
I am by no means special as there are likely hundreds of thousands like me. I started out young, labeled as "gifted", and put through special school programs. I have a very high IQ, and have the ability to create extremely intricate CAD-like images of any thing I can dream up, transpose and create into real working hardware. I learn new languages and programming languages with virtually no effort, and I am amazed at my own abilities sometimes. Other times ashamed. The price has been trips to the mental hospital with a severe bi-polar diagnoses and extreme depression, where I cannot even function as a normal human being some days. I love who I am and wouldn't want to be anyone else, but I understand that my brain is all on or all off, and that is the gift and the curse.
The link between them doesn't exist, as they are one in the same.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
At the risk of sounding like a pretentious prick, I had exceptional scores on tests, got invited to gifted and talented programs, and scored near-genius levels when I had a [real, not online] IQ test conducted as a child. Also I'M CRAZY AS SHIT. I take a mood stabilizer, an antidepressant, a benzodiazepine (3x day on the benzos, for serious) and Ritalin. Fortunately through the miracle of modern pharmaceuticals, I'm a somewhat healthy productive citizen, but it is hard. Even still my mind races with worst case scenarios, etc. and I always find new and and ever increasingly inventive ways to throw my brain into a frenzy over something completely stupid or erroneous; it's typically shit I can't control. Just saying is all... Forgive my self-absorption.
One thing I have noticed is that bipolar people who lack any employable skills/qualifications (eg my ex-wife of 20yrs) tend to be strongly attracted to the idea of being a counsellor and firmly believe they can 'fix' other people's mental problems, expecially when they are in the "up" phase. Since anyone can call themselves a counsellor without any formal training, that's what they do. Some may say that this is an undesirable situation but from my anecdotal observations I think keeping all the nutters busy talking to each other is ultimately a huge benifit to society
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Today it's quite normal that kids at junior school gets medical treatment for all kinds of disorders that practically didn't exist twenty years ago.
Too bad. because instead of treating people the way they are, sometimes geniuses, sometimes mad, we end up with a whole zombie generation.
One thing is for sure, the medical business makes a pile of money, while some unfortunate people end up on drugs for the rest of their lives.
This is the one time a Rick Astley video link wouldn't technically be a rickroll.
For every idiot savant you show me, I can show you 1,000 "geniuses" who in fact are just idiots. Of course they are kings in their subjective worlds. But saying that some highly intelligent people are not sane does not mean that all insane people are highly intelligent and creative.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Seriously, a lot of patients with mental problems are actually very very smart !!
They might be "mentally troubled", but, the manner of their thought process, - the way their brain managing information flow - if can be adapted and applied to research projects, could yield surprising results !!
The phrase "Think outside the box" is so common these days. For the mental patients, thinking "inside the box" turns out to be an almost impossible task
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
am I both crazy AND stupid. That seems like a raw deal to me.
Given the segment of the population that has bi-polar disorder; and a known correlation between the disorder and some of the greatest artists and geniuses - I find it highly interesting that we suppress these people with medication.
Is this ethical?
Even at 140, which is not that spectacular, you are already one in a thousand.
In a city of a million, that's only 1000 souls. And you probably won't get along with some of them.
How do you even find someone? Let alone form a peer group?
How socialized can a man be, when he lives alone on a planet of chimps?
Is 'insanity' a thinly veiled slur hurled at elite minds by a slow witted reporter from the bully pulpit?
What is normal behavior? What is insanity?
Is 'Normal Behavior' defined as what is accepted as normal by the majority in the 90 to 110 group?
What is insanity? Cutting your ear off?
Or merely being incomprehensible to the normals?
Is 'Smart People are Insane' a meme to make people feel better?
Is 'Smart People are Insane' part of what Ayn Rand talked about when she said "the PTB are out to say that thinking was 'hard, dangerous and pointless?'"
Don't go out there Billy! Thar be dragons!
Here's a Rifle and a credit score!
No need to think. We'll tell you what you need to know. We'll define you and your paradigm.
you cannot steal ideas
Try asking Xerox Palo Alto research center about "mouse", and "Steve Jobs"
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
"Often found" ... why, oh why, can't psychologists do statistical analysis? From TFA "They found that people who excelled when they were 16 years old were four times as likely to go on to develop bipolar disorder," Jamison said". That's something. And sample size was 700,000. Great. But that's just Sweden. And they're linking Genius-level to Bipolar disorder. What else did they look for ... examples: how many were vegetarians? Or had red hair? Or were named Lars? Or came from broken homes?
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
So, if I win the Nobel prize, I'll have to share it with my seventeen other personalities?
The average (the "norms") seem to make quick judgements and associations regarding the mentally ill, whether this means mild depression, or OCD, or full blown mania. First and formost, it is seen as insult. "Crazy" used to be cool... now its somehow on the same level as "homeless." Then it is somehow inexplicably associated with violence. Next, crime, then sexual devience, and finally, pedophelia. It matters not that evidence shows that, on one point listed, the violent are almost never mentally ill, and the mentally ill are almost never violent. About 1% of any population is inherently violent, and this is true among the mentally ill as well, 1%. Yet when an average person learns that another is mentally ill, they immediate begin to fear them and treat them with mistrust, only serving to exacerbate the condition of the individual suffering mental illness by ostracizing them.
People in general place far too much significance on what they believe is going on in another individual's mind, forgetting that there is no way to know, and also forgetting that mental illness is not crime nor indiciative of a criminal mind. The criminal, by the vast majority, are all sane. We, as a society, need to move back towards responsibility of action, not continue to gravitate towards the notion of thought-crimes. Judge a person by what they do, not by wild, unprovably notions of what or how they think.
The Admin and the Engineer
I wish I had mod points.
You'd be insane too if you were a genius that had to put up with the common man. Nothing in this world is more frustrating than people who insist on standing in your way because they think they know better, all the while lacking the mental capacity to understand why they need to sit down and shut up.
When I read journal articles by mathematicians that intersect engineering, say, numerical solution of differential equations in dynamical solutions, hoo boy are some of these people bad programmers. I mean, a journal article is really a form of source code that gets translated into an internal model by the scientific, engineering, or mathematical reader of the article. As I said, some programmers write concise yet lucid code, others just fill pages with every obscure language construct to do the same thing.
What the hell? Where'd Republicanism come into it?
He who develops the ability to go beyond thought will find genius.
A deeper statement may be that their is a thin line between enlightenment and insanity.
The enlightened and the insane have gone beyond thought and beyond personality.
The enlightened one maintains grounding and sees.
The insane one becomes ungrounded and panics.
Kay Redfield Jamison may be quite intelligent, considering she is a professor at Johns Hopkins, but it seems she merely continues to attempt to prove to herself that she is bipolar and that makes her special. The train that she rides does not do those afflicted by mental illness any good, nor does it help to expose the fact that mental illness can be extremely dangerous. For everyone one of these genius' she touts, because we all hear about them and their odd quirks, in her never-ending attempt to label herself as a genius, there most be tens of thousands of people suffering through various mental illnesses. Do not give her books to anyone suffering from mental illness, the odds that you have a mental illness strike you in the prime of your professional career as a psychologist at Johns Hopkins, with plenty of money and resources available to you, are not good.
This woman does nothing more than obscure mental illness in her crusade to feel special and label herself as a genius.
I don't suffer from my insanity.
I enjoy every minute of it.
You have a sick, twisted mind. Please subscribe me to your newsletter.
I'm bipolar and have an IQ of 145. This is the internet and I'm an AC so you'll just have to trust me.
This article resonated so strongly with me. My creativity has always been tied directly to my mania. Innovative problem solving, writing, music, artistic endeavors (for one unmedicated period of three years I became a traditional glassblower). It's not the mania itself, it's the period of transition from "baseline" to full-blown manic. As the brakes come off and my mind begins to work in a more random, expansive fashion I find new insights that don't really have a linear explanation. They just bubble up, seemingly from nowhere.
Of course, there's the rest of the time. The crushing, suicidal depression that follows the bouts of rabid, incoherent mania; the self harm and risky behavior; and the impossibility of maintaining a normal life and relationships. The 2% of my time that I was genuinely brilliant wasn't worth the rest of the symptoms.
I'm heavily medicated now, which has alleviated the extremes of my disorder. I must say that I miss my crazy. I can play the songs I wrote before, but when I pick up my guitar now nothing new ever comes out of it. I wrote whole stage plays in an evening, but haven't written a scene in a year. Whatever my "spark" was, it was the product of whatever malformation I'm now treating.
After suicide attempts and running down the street being chased by things that weren't there, I'm still not sure that I've made the right decision
I searched the page for the text "Stallman" and got a goose egg.
So much proof, so close to /home.
Interesting observations. That's one reason groups like Mensa exist and I assume that the average /.er has a higher IQ than average.
Maybe the question is whether you can control your brain (or not). You want it to think outside the box but can you stop it outside reality?
nosig today
Mental people cannot type, this is WRONG! Don't listen to their tricks, they often have an expanded ego and want to boss your work into oblivion. Just reach for the phone, keep smiling, :0)
The purpose of existence is to make money.
I am a genius, I am not stupid, It is just that the rest of the world is a bit slow.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out we're insane.
Even at 140, which is not that spectacular, you are already one in a thousand.
In a city of a million, that's only 1000 souls. And you probably won't get along with some of them.
I find it hilarious that "smart" people like to think they're unable to socialize with anyone of lower intelligence. The problem: Someone with "X" IQ doesn't think he/she can socialize with anyone with "X-1" or less IQ, so the "smart" person plugs the values into the normal distribution and figures that they can only socialize with (area under the curve from X to infinity). But what these "smart asses" fail to realize is that nobody with "X+1" IQ wants to socialize with them for the exact same reason.
In other words: If you subscribe to this form of exclusionary definition of "peer," then you have no peers.
IQ is just a number. Yours is higher than most. Congratulations. Now stop being so full of yourself, and maybe "normal" people will want to talk to you.
Just sayin'.
Doctor enters room...
Mr Einstein we were able to cure your mental illness; now you will be stupid like the rest of us.
For in much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.
Humility, it's a virtue.
...apparently one that has fallen out of fashion. Most functional adults interact with people who are less 'intelligent' than them- both in terms of having more knowledge and being more creative/insightful. That shouldn't be a barrier to empathy or communication. It is sheer arrogance when someone who is more knowledgeable or more capable at a particular task than someone else allows that to get in the way of caring about others and forming social relationships. I decided to comment on this story rather than moderate because so many of the commenters here seem to be wallowing in their own misery, lamenting about how smart they are and how lonely they are as a result.
.01% of whatever intelligence scale you choose to measure by have a different experience of things. Their skills may allow for a level of self sufficiency but "no man is an island" still applies, and if people isolate themselves from others then it is easy to fall into self-destructive patterns. With some mental disorders there is a very fine line between learned/self-induced behaviors and biological causes... I'm sure someone will throw up a snarky [citation needed] reply, but working to keep oneself involved with a community and investing the time and effort to develop genuine friendships can do a lot to ease the "burden" of intelligence.
Sure, those at the top
Much Madness is divinest Sense --
To a discerning Eye --
Much Sense -- the starkest Madness
Except the problem with Mensa is you end up having to hang out with a bunch of self absorbed pricks who spend their time masturbating about their 180 IQ's or whatever. According to an online test I took (the most "legit" looking one I could find), my IQ is around 130. I would much rather hang around captains of industry and dudes and ladies who are actually out in the world doing interesting things, than a bunch of jerk-offs in their ivory tower.
And with Slashdot half of them are geeks who have never lifted a weight in their lives, and have the fucked up perspective on life that can only come from being a beta male geek who never left the basement, who spend half the time arguing over the most inconsequential of trivialities, just to get the privilege of reading the few truly interesting and insightful posts. Worth it? IMO yes, but the original post still stands.
And nothing is more annoying than a person writing they're smarter than the entire world.
A more interesting topic of research is the link between mental illness and stupidity. How often are schizophrenics and bi-polar disorder sufferers utterly stupid?
Cars that drive 200 mph on a road not-so-designed for it often crash spectacularly.
I think my exact phrase was "With greater mental ability comes mental instability"
The funny part is many people scoffed the idea. My logic behind this was that the mind is like an engine. Kick it in to high gear it it will probably wear down quicker. Oh well, that's life. Not much arguing or claiming the point now the cat's out of the bag.
"The link is being investigated by a group of scientists who had all suffered some form of mental disorder" Yeah that isn't a confirmation bias or anything...
As the absent minded type of genius,
They were speaking generally, not making a claim about themselves.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
I call BS. You should be able to easily and productively talk to people with an IQ +/- 1SD of your own. At 140 that gives you a range of 125-155 with whom you should be able to hold a relatively interesting conversation, which comes out to about 5% of the general population. As long as you hang around the sorts of places where other smart people frequent, this will be much higher. College towns, business areas with largely college-educated workforce, etc. Hang out at the right pub and half the denizens there will have IQ's above 120. For that matter if you have an IQ of 140 and aren't working daily with lots of people with IQ's in the 120+ range then you need to find another place to work, or another line of work altogether.
I think you're looking for Mensa.
By the way, since you're on a 'planet full of chimps', can you tell me what you've created to help mankind? I mean, you did type this on a computer that those chimps have created, and over a network using protocols that some chimps created, and posted this onto a site apparently run by chimps for other chimps to read, right?
... and these Slashdot folks are just crazy about intelligence.
Not to derail your point, but a potentially interesting side note: it looks like Da Vinci may not have cut his OWN ear off. He may have gotten into an argument with a friend and had it lopped off with a sword. Take a look: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-news/5274073/Van-Goghs-ear-was-cut-off-by-friend-Gauguin-with-a-sword.html
Stop doing shit to piss off bipolar people. All of you drugged up zombies are fucking prick assholes to us. We're just so fed up by your stupidity that it doesn't take much to set us off.
And there's also a link between schizophrenia and bipolar disorder for people who are left handed.
So don't blame intelligence, blame being left handed.
Hello, Slashdot, I've posted for years. And being insane is more misery than you can know.
I clearly have to give credentials: Duke undergrad, evil Michigan MBA. And earning both of those degrees were hell. Not because of the work, but because I was hospitalized so many fucking times. I could - and can - do absolutely brilliant work, but having a clinically recognized illness screws things up.
In a very concrete sense, I don't perceive things as you do. I'm always lost in the details, lost in the shadows. Don't think I don't know that. I can't be in a normal classroom setting; I can't work in a normal job. I can't talk to you in a normal sense, you don't see what I see, and I can't see what you see.
I've been able to write very, very, serious papers with no problem, but I can't take a normal quiz. I don't know how to express this, but I actually know I'm insane. And before you scoff, suicide attempts should count. And to the posters above - I'm not doing anything for my pride, I'm not doing anything to make life easier on me. I've lost my family, I've lost my job, and I still dwell in the math of the economy. I can't escape, I cannot leave. But the math endures.
So before you become a righteous bastard, try to understand how much it hurts. I can't relate to you, except through writing on the Internet. I'm supposed to have an IQ over 160, but I cannot relate to anyone. You have no idea how that feels - the isolation, the isolation, the cold and constant fear. There's nothing I can do, as I an who I an. No sleep, no rest, no comfort. That's what insanity actually is. So you can make fun of me, but the pain is real.
/* Dang, I can't type that well. */
I was so depressed before I read this.
Coding (and sysadminning) and alcohol aren't mutually exclusive; the dose is the key here. When the technician is too afraid to make a bug, or to screw up, a small dose of alcohol can relax him enough to be willing to perform the task (it must be low enough to not significantly impair his job performance; slowly(!) drinking something tasty until one feels the courage for the task does the job well).
Agreed. I'm smarter than a lot of the people I hang with, but that doesn't mean we can't enjoy each other's company. I just have to bite my tongue when they say something dumb, and they keep quiet when I get boring and stuffy.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Just what the anti-science morons needed ... ammunition. I guess the up-side is that it's scientific research so they can't use it anyway. Decisions, decisions.
What smart people should realize is that a great deal of the reason they're "smart" is because they're lucky.
1) They were born with a good brain. (luck)
2) Their parents probably trained them well. (luck)
3) They had access to education. (luck, and possibly following from 1,2)
SOME of your "smarts" you won by your own efforts, via study and working hard. But lots of people work hard.
Find someone really intelligent? It's mostly luck that sets them apart.
Now, if someone is smart, wouldn't they realize this and realize how ridiculous it is to be arrogant about how smart they are?
"Uh, I won the lottery, so I'm better than you!"
It's amazing to me how few "smart" people realize this and act decently to those less fortunate. It goes back to your point, humility. One break of a blood vessel and you could be dumb as a rock.
--PM
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." --George Bernard Shaw
Casteism
Richard Feynman