The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius

Society deify successful people when in reality they are nothing more than serial lottery winners. For every "Ronaldo" there are a myriad of people trying to get there that will end their life as losers because they made an high-stakes bet and lost. The truth in unconfortable and nobody wants to listen about it.

"The man who said 'I'd rather be lucky than good' saw deeply into life. People are afraid to face how great a part of life is dependent on luck. It's scary to think so much is out of one's control. There are moments in a match when the ball hits the top of the net, and for a split second, it can either go forward or fall back. With a little luck, it goes forward, and you win. Or maybe it doesn't, and you lose" -Woody Allen, Match Point (2005)

I had one of those rare moments recently where I actually had an encounter with someone I considered to be an honest-to-God Genius. I won't go into the specifics. But it was at a public lecture. Elite research university. Auditorium packed with scientists of "Breakthrough" and "Nobel" calibre. And we were all "wow'ed"!

Afterwards I got to chat a bit with the relatively young researcher who gave the lecture. And I asked her point blank how she knew to follow path X when everyone else was following Y?

And she admitted it was sheer dumb luck! They had run out of the exotic material in the lab, and so she had to use its more common predecessor. Furthermore, all the elements had aligned to produce that infinitesimally improbable atomistic level perturbation at that very moment that led to her insights. Luck compounded upon luck.

And at that moment, it was much like PG described. Obsession, coupled with absolute conviction. She could not let go of The Idea. What's most interesting is that this finding occurred mid-200s. And it was only now a decade and a half later, that the world was beginning to realize its fruits ;)

>But you can never be sure. In fact, here's an interesting idea that's also rather alarming if it's true: it may be that to do great work, you also have to waste a lot of time.

>In many different areas, reward is proportionate to risk. If that rule holds here, then the way to find paths that lead to truly great work is to be willing to expend a lot of effort on things that turn out to be every bit as unpromising as they seem.

So true.

With highly capable instrumentation, each type of pursuit can often be seen as a potential lifetime effort so careful compromise needs to be made from the earliest time.

Musically, a singular focus on jazz, or classical, or pop music for instance can be the most legitimate path to top performance in a recognized idiom. Alternatively, other performers might spread themselves thinner between genres, sometimes only for practice or personal satisfaction by those whose professional performance is in a single genre itself.

And that's only recognized genres. What if the instrument itself still has more possibilities to offer?

A practioner (or hobbyist) could go off on a tanget, even a direction known from the outset not expected to be recognized, and whether it was a waste of time really depends.

It's possible that higher levels of performance can be achieved by greater development of instrument familiarity at the expense of focused musical practice that could have been accomplished in its place, and the outcome could be different than that which could be achieved otherwise.

Same goes for scientific instruments.

If you're going to break new ground, you're going to need to experiment.

And of course most experiments are going to fail, that's why they are called experiments.

To attempt completely avoiding having this type of failure waste any of your time whatsoever, you can simply try to never experiment, at least not in any way you are aware of.

But if you want to reach new milestones, you can't let that stop you, and since you are going to be going forward with many projects which will never be fruitful anyway, might as well include some with even less of an obvious chance.

You will best work harder and smarter than those focusing only on the recognized stuff, and can not become dependent on unbroken progress.

>If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it? >AEinstein

Science has a level of technical difficulty and detail to not be obsessed about something in order to discover anything. Try one of those extract DNA from a strawberry kit for example. Even in big data science you find people who know a lot of math or applied math that have the technical insights. A lot of science today also requires collaborative cross discipline work to make progress as well. I don’t think careerism is an issue. We should encourage wacky ideas though through competitive grants.

Neural networks are a good example of something that was once ignored as an academic curiosity at best.