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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
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
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'm not claiming to be a genius, but one thing I noticed early on when deciding to take on STEM is that unlike art (which I had pursued previously), where an understanding of the history, techniques that were developed, and cultural perception of art were very helpful in developing a more acute understanding of the art in question, studying these things wasn't necessary, whereas in science and math the rigor is (usually) completely necessary.
When you talk to aspiring young scientists, generally you hear a fondness for lasers, space travel, disease research, etc, but almost none for finding the derivative of a function or the like. Because people see the space lasers as the carrot and the intense math as the stick, they tend to get pretty exhausted after a fair amount of work. But in my experience, developing an appreciation for the math itself led me to view science as more of an art form than merely labor. I suspect fostering a greater appreciation of math and logic in children, as well as diminishing the cultural perception of math as a difficult and troubling affair would lead to an easier time for students who can both accept and appreciate the level of math they commit to.
Marie Curie not a great? Two Nobel prizes in different fields - even Einstein cannot claim that. Only one other has achieved that (Linus Pauling).
Greed is the root of all evil.
"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.
There is no doubt that women have made many important contributions to science. One may argue this one or that is or isn't a genius, but there is little doubt that science would be poorer without their contribution.
Madame Wu and the backward universe
Marie Curie - Biographical
Ten Historic Female Scientists You Should Know
Pioneering Women in Computing Technology
The 50 Most Important Women in Science
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
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!"
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.
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.
OK, first of all, her work was not with x rays, it was with radioactive elements. Second the radiation wasn't leaked - they willingly and foolishly exposed themselves to it. She was a physicist and chemist - the biological science to understand the dangers had not yet been done. You have to remember her work was done more than a hundred years ago. Radiation was invisible to them and in their day equivalent to magic. The dangers of radiation were poorly understood even many decades after her death. To put her achievements into perspective, it would be like someone today providing a full verifiable explanation of dark matter and dark energy with working practical applications. She laid the foundations of some of the most terrifying (nuclear weapons) and most majestic (voyager spacecraft powered by nuclear energy) achievements man had accomplished in the 20th century.
She was well educated, even at an early age by her father. This is the critical difference between modern times and the renaissance. Then, women were rarely offered opportunity and education. Now it is available for anybody who wants to do the work. Its obvious that genius has little to do with gender.
I'm not suggesting that she was the greatest genius of all time, but to say that there are no great women is an insult to her legacy and half the human race.
Greed is the root of all evil.