Slashdot Mirror
What Makes a Genius?
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Eric Barker writes at TheWeek that while high intelligence has its place, a large-scale study of more than three hundred creative high achievers including Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Beethoven, and Rembrandt has found that curiosity, passion, hard work, and persistence bordering on obsession are the hallmarks of genius. 'Successful creative people tend to have two things in abundance, curiosity and drive. They are absolutely fascinated by their subject, and while others may be more brilliant, their sheer desire for accomplishment is the decisive factor,' writes Tom Butler-Bowdon. It's not about formal education. 'The most eminent creators were those who had received a moderate amount of education, equal to about the middle of college. Less education than that — or more — corresponded to reduced eminence for creativity,' says Geoffrey Colvin. Those interested in the 10,000-hour theory of deliberate practice won't be surprised that the vast majority of them are workaholics. 'Sooner or later,' writes V. S. Pritchett, 'the great men turn out to be all alike. They never stop working. They never lose a minute. It is very depressing.' Howard Gardner, who studied geniuses like Picasso, Freud, and Stravinsky, found a similar pattern of analyzing, testing, and feedback used by all of them: 'Creative individuals spend a considerable amount of time reflecting on what they are trying to accomplish, whether or not they are achieving success (and, if not, what they might do differently).' Finally, genius means sacrifice. 'My study reveals that, in one way or another, each of the creators became embedded in some kind of a bargain, deal, or Faustian arrangement, executed as a means of ensuring the preservation of his or her unusual gifts. In general, the creators were so caught up in the pursuit of their work mission that they sacrificed all, especially the possibility of a rounded personal existence,' says Gardner."
Invariably, we also see throughout history that these laser focused artists and creators are preyed upon by the vultures. The swarming businessmen, promotors, managers, who give their charges "the best they can" (i.e. a fraction of their actual value) whilst proclaiming to the world that they themselves are the true producers and behind closed doors they opine how if only they could get that last fraction of a few pennies from "those leeches, those damned artists."
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
"The great men turn out to be all alike." Did you forget that not only men are reading your site? - A great woman
No, some people are just dumb.
Things are changing, but from a historical perspective, this cannot be ignored.
"The fact of the matter is that there have been no supremely great women artists, as far as we know, although there have been many interesting and very good ones who remain insufficiently investigated or appreciated; nor have there been any great Lithuanian jazz pianists, nor Eskimo tennis players, no matter how much we might wish there had been. That this should be the case is regrettable, but no amount of manipulating the historical or critical evidence will alter the situation; nor will accusations of male-chauvinist distortion of history. There are no women equivalents for Michelangelo or Rembrandt, Delacroix or Cezanne, Picasso or Matisse, or even, in very recent times, for de Kooning or Warhol, any more than there are black American equivalents for the same. "
From a brilliant essay on the matter:
http://www.miracosta.edu/home/gfloren/nochlin.htm
What drives the smart guys to keep focused and interested working for a long time on hard problems? After a hour of intensive STEM stuff I already feel quite exhausted and need a good break.
I can't help but wonder how many people with plenty of "curiosity, passion, hard work, and persistence bordering on obsession" we've never heard of. In other words, we don't actually know--and likely can't know--how likely people with these traits are to be remembered by the world as geniuses, and how many will be regarded by their families and friends as obsessive workaholics with lousy personal lives and utterly forgotten outside those circles.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I resent the comment above...
He's really talented, though. Hugh's summaries are never just a single link wrapped in a quick copy-paste summary, but a quite broad picture of a topic. On the other hand, I'm a curious why he puts so much effort to Slashdot submissions. Dice should be paying him already.
That must be Albert's younger brother who never bothered with physics. He just said, "Yes, that Einstein" in bars to get women. Who's the genius now, eh?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Whom is to determine the genius status of any particular individual. Genius is based on a system of values as perceived by ones peers. If i were to believe math or rocket science were an important trait, I would judge someone with impeccable skills in this area as genius. But someone that would value the arts or athletic skills at a greater lever may not see this person in the same light. Many times there has been someone given the genius label and I find it difficult to see the noted person in this classification because of my value system. so it goes that I cannot believe there is one common scale that genius can be measured.
-- john
Video showing what this looks like when it happens.
I know you were going for something like record labels ripping off musicians, but I think the video of Obama saying "You didn't build that" hits the point better for everyone.
I have it on good authority that Kanye West is a genius.
Maybe you should read the essay.
"When Terman first used the IQ test to select a sample of child geniuses, he unknowingly excluded a special child whose IQ did not make the grade. Yet a few decades later that talent received the Nobel Prize in physics: William Shockley, the cocreator of the transistor. Ironically, not one of the more than 1,500 children who qualified according to his IQ criterion received so high an honor as adults." Simonton, Dean Keith (1999). Origins of genius: Darwinian perspectives on creativity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-512879-6. Lay summary (14 August 2010).
Exceptional output requires access to tools, training, and environment (food, health, relationships) that enable the person to devote (obssess?) over solving the problems or creating something. And, the person's exceptional output must be recognized as such. So being highly intelligent won't make it. It may even be a hindrance. For instance, it would be easy to imagine the first ever person to be able to repeatedly create fire would not score well on any measure of intelligence today, but to the tribe, that person may not only be considered a genius but a god.
They might get a better understanding of themselves instead of thinking they're total scum.
I have a lot of trouble pointing out that obsessiveness is often mistaken for addiction these days. I think it's due to an attempt to assign a medical condition to those being irresponsible with their families and thereby able to bring the law to bare.
Aside from the fact that one can't be addicted to an activity it also is disrespectful to those that do suffer under addiction and, of course, misleading to the rest of us.
Professor Hawking has better than a Nobel prize (given out all the time). He holds the Lucasian chair of mathematics, as Newton did. *That's* the real prize.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
Many people, including me, would argue that Carla Bley & Paul Haines' Escalator Over the Hill is a work of genius.
My definition of genius in a work is that it must contain aspects that can't be learned or explained. You're listening, watching, or reading along and thinking "yes, I understand how that follows now that it's been shown to me" -- this is merely brilliant levels of skill -- and then there comes a passage that sets you back thinking "woah, what just happened there?"
Claude Debussy's music is full of these moments, even when you understand its predecessors and influences like Chausson. Most of Hector Berlioz's compositions are tedious at best, but the 2/4 bars in his Roman Carnival Overture take a logical sequence of developing intensity beyond what can be sensibly explained by any textbook in a way that astonishes me every time I hear it.
Pablo Picasso is reported to have said "I never know when the spark of genius will strike me, but I make sure that I'm in front of an easel with a brush in my hand when it does."
All the practice in the world can't buy these kinds of moments, but it can give you the confidence to take them when they appear, and the skill to execute them with precision. You don't have to be a genius to produce genius works, but it helps.
Taxation without representation is tyranny! Statehood for DC, Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands & Pacific Territories!
Does any researcher really think their generalizations capture that which they cannot imagine?
If a dog researcher analyzed humans, he'd be like, "and we see the human goes over here and waves his hands and light suddenly appears in the night. That's all there is to it, I've watched him do it a hundred times."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
How is gennus formed?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
A maniacal cackle, an evil grin and an uncanny ability to great doomsday devices?
We'll make great pets
I always thought it was allegorical: never underestimate light infantry with a ranged attack capability.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
While intelligence is a vague term in itself there is something to be said for the written word, collaboration, education, proofs, and the extrapolated reasoning that comes from combining them all.
Wasn't it someone's theory (or experiments) that luck was the largest factor in a genius?
I remember Gladwell's book starts off with the Canadian hockey team and the birthday paradox. The birthdays of the players in the Canadian hockey team fall primarily on the beginning of the year, primarily the first few months of the year. There wasn't anyone born on the second half of the year.
The theory was that this is because of the age cutoff of Jan 1st. When they select the junior teams, the age cutoff is Jan 1st. So, someone born on January has almost a year head start over the person born on December. That little difference between individuals turns into who gets coaching or not, who gets selected for teams and ultimately who makes the national sides.
Yes, some people are geniuses because they have drive and passion and are workaholics but not because they are born that way but because each little bit of effort they put in gets rewarded very heavily (and that situation comes by from luck).
Why do geniuses come in clusters? Why were there so many Greek geniuses? Why hasn't Greece produced another set of geniuses like them after that?
The other argument was that geniuses were able to feed off the society. If we as a society value something very highly, then we reward the person good in it with money and admiration. That again creates a lot of drive and passion for the work they do and they strive to obsessively improve on it.
It has been disproved that geniuses have high IQ. There are a lot of geniuses with normal IQ.
So, technically, anyone with at least normal IQ can be a genius. You have to be born in the right society and pursue something that the society deems very valuable. Then, you have to have luck that will get you funding, audience etc for you work that will fuel your passion and drive.
Really, wasn't this covered in school?
Man has always assumed that he is more intelligent than, for example, dolphins because he has achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins have ever done is muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins have always believed that they are far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.
-Douglas Adams (slightly paraphrased)
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
This sounds like a trait list for having Autism Spectrum Disorder. No seriously
You might want to change your statement to "no women equivalents to Michelangelo or Rembrandt, Delacroix or Cezanne, Picasso or Matisse..." have been recognized, due to the societal taboos of growing up in those times. They were there, but were sidelined or worse when their talents started showing. A sad statement on western civilization at the time, but others were/are no better.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
What makes a genius?
Output.
You can be the smartest person, ever. If you don't do anything with it you will never know genius. Genius is just a recognized smart person, that is a person recognized for being really smart.
The "Vultures" are no less greedy and manipulative than your description... probably more so. But I wonder if the most gifted artists, thinkers, scientist, mathematicians and so on, actually care. There are far easier ways to make money, If they are as focused and driven as described in the article then it seems likely they care more about attribution than monetary appropriation any more than is necessary to live and fund their work.
Conversely look at how pop artists and the RIAA bicker over adequately appropriating all of their disproportionate wealth...
I don't think this disinterest in money is necessarily limited to "Genius" ether though. I'd quite like to see a slashdot poll on this actually... what do you care about more, your work or your pay check?
So Freud is a genius? Maybe a Maddox-like one, a fraud. What's he doing near Einstein or Newton?
A person's genius is inversely proportional to the amount of time spent THINKING about attending and/or ACTUALLY attending business school, particularly Harvard, Penn, or Yale. Those business and econ motherfuckers have done more damage to mankind than the Bhopal incident write large all over the globe.
You call someone a genius after his/her great work is done, not before.
Some years back, one of the former department heads at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (whose reputation for innovation is nearly unmatched in history) wrote a book on this subject. I recently read it and enjoyed it greatly. It's called Breakthrough: stories and strategies of radical innovation. I highly recommend it.
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
Someone once asked Linus Pauling what his secret was to having good ideas. He answered that it was having lots of ideas and throwing away the bad ones.
Here's my personal list of genius traits:
Stand on the shoulders of giants as much as possible. No point rediscovering the wheel.
Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.
Learn as much as you can about as many different subjects as you can. You'll be stunned how often principles from one subject will apply in a completely unrelated subject.
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
I would also argue that people who are recognised early as "genius material" are more likely to piss away their potential because they have been told for so long how amazing they are. This sort of thing is very common in high schools and universities as well. I've seen plenty of people who performed very well early in their education, solely based on their natural ability, only to go on to massively underachieve in late high school or university because they grew up without really having a connection between academic praise and hard work. These are the sort of people who end up pissing away the rest of their lives unemployed or in average jobs browsing 4chan all day, despite being quite intelligent. Basically, I think the worst thing you can do to a kid with a naturally high IQ is to tell them that they are going to grow up to be a genius. All you will achieve is setting them up for a life of mediocrity on the back of laziness.
He's a racist troll. He needs help. You should have googled it for him.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
He holds the Lucasian chair of mathematics, as Newton did. *That's* the real prize.
Slight correction -- he held the Lucasian chair, but he retired in 2009. The current Lucasian professor at Cambridge is Michael Green.
Invariably, we also see throughout history that these laser focused artists and creators are preyed upon by the vultures.
Geniuses, or the really talented and focused artists and creators do not care about the vultures. For the last few centuries vultures - aka 'agents' - were needed, without them it was difficult to propagate your work. At least in the field of arts (except for cinema) it has changed with internet. You do not need an 'agent' anymore to propagate your work. But the flip side - even in 2014, without an agent, your work may not achieve the acclaim it deserves.
But then Geniuses are not concerned with material rewards. I don't think a real genius cares too much about the square feet/number of bedrooms in their house, or the car they drive. As long as these basic necessities are taken care off, they will be happy in their environment. An 'agent' will increase your revenue, they won't better your output, and mostly they will be a distraction. As such a majority of 'agents' are glorified pimps.
A genius will never talk about their work, they will let their work talk.
Tat Tvam Asi
Hmm. Spend your life in an average job which allows you the time to waste at work on leisure activities like 4chan, or burn yourself out working for a money man in some sort of Faustian arrangement. Perhaps the failed prodigies ARE the real geniuses...
He holds the Lucasian chair of mathematics, as Newton did. *That's* the real prize.
Slight correction -- he held the Lucasian chair, but he retired in 2009. The current Lucasian professor at Cambridge is Michael Green.
Good! He wasn't using it anyway. Always insisting on using his own chair.
Pro & college football & basketball coaches definitely be the obsessive, but its definitely not the kind that fosters 'genius'.
They work, no joke, 80 hour weeks. (i know, i know, you work that much or w/e too but most professionals dont work more than 60 & to work more than that usually means you are being taken advantage of)
80 hour weeks. And not just the coaches...the whole staff. Sometimes down to the athletic trainers. It was an athletic trainer friend of mine from college who worked for a pro team in Indianapolis brieftly as a trainer.
He said it's **common** for the coaching/support staff to be insanely competitive & to attempt to 'signal value' by being seen at the facility physically virtually all hours. Even in the off season they are at the stadium every day, usually 60 hours a week total.
According to him it's an artificial kind of Darwinian way for these people to do office politics exaggerated b/c it is pro sports.
I know tech usually isnt this bad, but it shows something important about obsessive work.
Obsessive work with a functional goal may be a trait of genius, but Obsessive work doing abastract tasks to demonstrate commitment or some other non-funcitonal melodramatic trait is **pointless**
One thing I try to notice is how much drama a business I'm considering using as a vendor has to conjure up to get work done. If every task is a Shakespearean-in-magnitude epic then I stere clear.
Thank you Dave Raggett
whole point of my story was to point out how this is a trope but it's not true
this the support/coaching staff here not the actual athletes we're talking about...they watch more game footage than they need to just to look like they are working "as hard as possible" meaning, in practice, more than the other guy in a tight org. read old SI articles about what the schedule for someone in Coach K's staff is like. Have a look at what people say about working for Van Gundy in his tenure at the Rockets (I also had a friend who worked as a low-level staffer there but we didn't talk as much in depth...she said it was insanely competitive though...way beyond anything except something like the military b/c of the money these athletes/programs make)
look, your ideas of how sports work are a false narrative. yes of course it takes alot of work-hours to prepare an NFL game plan, but that's not my point...the whole point is that sometimes up to 50% of it is just, as Shakespear said,
"Sound and Fury signifying nothing"
the whole point is that spending 80 hours to do 40 hours of work is **the BAD type of obsessive** which b-ball & NFL coaches in the US recently are good examples of
Thank you Dave Raggett
A lot of what Pickens is saying here is about what makes people successful, regardless of whether they're smart or not. And the main thing that matters most, even more than talent, in making people successful is full singleminded commitment. As for talent, having 'enough' talent suffices. Obviously I know cases where full commitment is not going to be enough.
There are two divisions of "technique" when it comes to art. The first involves the physical manipulation of the medium, which has changed somewhat with the invention of new media, and some parts have become obsolete. The second involves understanding of perspective, anatomy, color, lines and shapes, various atmospheric effects, et cetera, and in many cases also how these rules may be broken to artistic effect, and these are timeless. Sure, anyone can paint without understanding, and anyone may criticize without comprehending, but you know how it is: everyone has an opinion and an asshole.
But, to be any good as an artist, you must certainly have rigor and knowledge of history. It is not enough to simply expel your first imaginings onto paper or canvas. The proper course would be to take photographs, do a color study, a black-and-white shape study, and a dozen figure studies (from life, including making a maquette if necessary), before even touching the main work. A lifetime of photographic study, plein air painting, and a deep understanding of the Old Masters helps too. If you do all this, you may enjoy the commercial success of e.g. James Gurney. I wouldn't want to give odds on his being long remembered to history though, unfortunately. It is of course not necessary for the critic to be an artist, if you think only of a critic as someone who draws public perception towards or away from a work, but if your friend comes to you and says, "Be honest with me. What's wrong with this painting?" then you had better know the trade at least as well as he does.
On the mathematical side, as long as we teach mathematics as nothing more than mechanical calculation, I despair of the species. Rigor may be necessary to STEM, but we have truly wonderful machines for calculation these days. Perhaps programming will be the necessary method with which we abstract computation into the proper sphere of symbol manipulation.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Ah, thank you. It's shocking how unable to take the next logical step this argument is. Yes, there weren't famous women scientists during those times when women were allowed zero access to the realms of science, philosophy, or invention -- wonder why that might be??? Ugh.
It's not just your intuition, actually. There is a lot of research coming out that praising children for things beyond their control -- intelligence particularly -- will just make them feel helpless and afraid to disappoint, and will make them less likely to try new things and explore because of this paralyzing fear. (For the curious, the new research says, praise your children mostly for effort, and maybe also for particular accomplishments. Knowing you're effective even without natural advantages is a much, much more effective mindset than believing you're naturally good at everything -- because sooner or later, you'll find out that you aren't).
My generation is full of people who were praised for their innate intelligence -- something a child understands is beyond her control -- and subsequently developed the worldview that natural gifts are what matters, that failure is the worst thing, and that if you're not good at something naturally, you won't get good, so, no point trying (these aren't conscious beliefs; more like beliefs we find ourselves slipping into). Research shows that what children need is not high self-esteem, but "self efficacy", which is your faith in yourself to rescue situations, overcome even unexpected obstacles, and develop skill at things via practice and force of will. All telling a kid he's smart will do is make him very, very afraid of anything that might disprove his intelligence. And the fear that, if the intelligence was gone, he would be worth less as a person.
To develop this in others, praise them for their effort and the things they achieved (especially stuff that was harder for them, because the harder it was, the more they've accomplished, really). To develop it in yourself, try focusing on your efforts and strategies, and learn to identify in any situation what is under your control and how those things might be used to achieve your goals, even if it's going to be depressingly hard -- even if it's going to be EMBARRASSINGLY hard. We have to stop being ashamed of needing extra effort, or extra help, and start being proud that we MADE the extra effort, and that we FOUND the extra help. Those things are much, much more useful qualities than innate intelligence... which, by the way, INCREASES when you learn something that is difficult for you to grasp -- like literally, more nerve connections are forged so that later cell firing is infinitesimally faster, each time.
And this is the heart of the matter -- what the hell is intelligence? There are hundreds of qualities we associate with it, and one intelligent person may be completely unable to do something another intelligent person can. Maybe we need to face that fact that "intelligence", like "cancer", does not exist -- it's simply a shorthand for a variety of skills and talents, which for the most part we all have some of but none of us have all of. Stop thinking of the person who doesn't understand math but dances incredibly well as unintelligent. And stop thinking of unintelligent people as inferior. I bet you know some unintelligent people who are among the best people you know. I certainly do.
The assumption that genius requires "achievement" of some kind is smuggled in.
I think this posts misses one essential raw ingredient, not that the rest of it is wrong in any way. That is an astonishing memory for the content of the field, and in fact that is what stops most people, a poor focused memory.
I know a little about musical memory and I am convinced that great composers of music must begin with very good memories, but that most musical people, even if they have good memories, must suppress the linkages between one passage and the next to process the mechanisms in the music to be able to compose new music. I am sure that someone like J.S. Bach must have had a flawless memory, probably recalling every musical work he ever heard, same with Mozart. Beethoven was deaf after about 1808, born 1770, died 1827, and so had to remember what he could no longer hear as he composed the masterworks of his Late period.
I have known a few very smart, possibly genius level people, whose hallmark, starting point, is a flawless memory for the subject. I think that math geniuses need a very good memory of relationships and the steps of proofs. Chess masters have to memorize 40+ moves into a line and all the variations. Writers probably remember conversations they had decades ago. etc. etc.
Ordinary people often project the mental acuity they have on the rest of the world, not being aware that there is wide variation in how people think, and what people remember, Geniuses probably do this as well, but as the article notes, as self-protection. Surely, they most be aware of how unique their mental abilities are.
"You are a product of your environment." --Clement Stone
Casteism
"Goliath beats David unless David is clever." You did research to see the Goliath always wins except when David is clever?
it always amazed me that anybody ever figured that a big guy with a sword could beat a little fast guy who had even moderate skill with a sling, on an open field.
i suppose they'd think it a miracle that a man with a gun could beat a bear in a fight.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
So, two TALENTLESS Jews, being hyped up by JEWS, no doubt, yet again. Picasso couldn't paint to save his life, and his works are monstrosities - a five year old can see that. Freud was a screwed up, neurotic failure, his own 'theories' couldn't even make HIM happy, what hope was there for his 'patients'?
how long have you felt this way about your mother?
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Humm... You know Picasso was not at all jew, do you?
And he also was already a master of the standard way by his early teens.
you are unfamiliar with the Protocols of the Elders of Antisemitism; chapter 17, on name.
1) Anybody with a German name is Jewish.
2) Anybody with an Eastern European name is Jewish.
3) Anybody with a Dutch name is Jewish.
4) Anybody with any unusual name is Jewish.
4) Anybody you don't like is Jewish, no matter what the name.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
james?? james??!!! you're back!!!!
You see, man made the car
To take us over the road
Man made the train
To carry the heavy load
Man made the electric light
To take us out of the dark
Man made the boat full of water
Like noah made the arc
This is a mans, mans, mans world
But it would be nothing, nothing
Without a woman or a girl
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
He divided all military personnel into four quadrants.
Slow-minded, lazy -- assigned as footsoldier
Slow-minded, energetic -- dismissed from corps
Quick-minded, energetic -- staff officer
Quick-minded, lazy -- commanding officer
What makes a genius?
Roller skates and Acme Corp on speed dial.
This is exactly the argument that the essay is making. Maybe you should read it.
This is exactly the argument that the essay is making. It was written by a well-known feminist philosopher. Maybe you should read it before claiming that it is incorrect.
That essay was written before Basquiat was popular. Maybe you should read it.
Then the essay fails in 100,000 words to say what I said in 40. Or, tl;dr. It failed to make the point in the first 4 paragraphs or the last 4, skimming the in between 50 or so just showed more driveling opining evident in the first couple of paragraphs. As a writer, the author failed. As an academic author, perhaps this relates to success, but only within the small secular group that would care to continually prattle around the topic about something that is already agreed to in 40 words.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
" a game-changing intellectual endeavour achieved by applying sustained effort to original insights afforded by superlative mastery of one or more subjects gained through outstanding intelligence and endless learning. "
The fact that you don't have the attention span to read an academic essay is not my, or the author's fault. It also doesn't give a gram of weight to your criticism.
Geeze, you sure got me.
The article agrees with me. The other commenters clearly do not.
You're incorrect. The fact that the author fails to write a coherent article is the reason I chose not to read the rest of the drivel (sorry, thoroughly analyzed and supported highly vaunted academic paper), much like I choose not to listen to Bill O'Reilly. Why waste my time? Now academic papers on cellular biology related to how we can repair genes in defective cells are interesting (to me), or perhaps stories on medical care from the 18th century, or Mark Twain's auto-biography or Albert Einstein's biography.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.