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The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
261–270 of 500 posts
Re: The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
#262I think this is correct. The bad news is we are creating systems which minimise the number of geniuses entering each field. In the past, science was an eccentric hobby, not particularly valued and certainly not a viable career option. Today it's all of these things - like becoming a doctor. Telling your mother you want to be a scientist is far better than saying you want to be a musician. A hundred years ago that wou…
> In the past, science was an eccentric hobby, not particularly valued and certainly not a viable career option. Today it's all of these things - like becoming a doctor.
Really! That's news to me. Are you aware of how much scientists are paid and their general career prospects?
Re: The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
#263its also look did this to another blog https://legitloaded.com/
Re: The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
#264Side note about Newton and occult. Newton was not just a physicist who dabbled with occult. He turned occult into physics. Before Newton scientists and natural philosophers like Descartes believed that movements were caused by physical contact. Newton started traditionally and proposed the existence of ether that transmits forces. When he became interested in alchemy, he replaced ether with occult forces that repel a…
Here's something I'd love for someone to explain about "magicians". I've read that Einstein was a great physicist for his work on relativity. I still don't know what he actually did.
Did he have some mountain of experimental data, to which he found a model which fit? Did he have sub-models which he unified, or simplified? What exactly were his inputs and outputs?
In school we're taught that the scientific method involves hypothesis, and experimentation, and confirmation or rejection, but in Einstein's case all I hear about are fully-formed theories -- and then confirmation by others, years after his death. Did he eliminate other possible theories through experimentation, or did he happen to get it right from the start? Was relativity the only possible solution, or was there also some luck involved?
Re: The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, Ronaldo is known for exceptional work ethic.
Most top athletes have excellent work ethic but they also have natural ability. No amount of work ethic can compensate for lack of natural ability. You absolutely need that to get to the top.
Depends on the sport. Football, basketball and fighting sports require natural ability. Soccer does not require nearly as much natural athleticism. So since there is less of a genetic filter, players must work that much harder.
Re: The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but work ethic and obsession are the absolute baseline you need.
I think even that point is debatable depending on how you define success. If the definition of success is wealth or notoriety, there are certainly people who achieve it without those traits.
The fact that people become successful and/or notorious due to luck does not invalidate the fact that work ethic and your efforts play the largest controllable role you have. To focus on pure chance outcomes is unproductive and nonsensical.
Re: The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
#267My take on genius is that it's akin to insanity, and for some of us, insanity doesn't seem to be so insane (which itself is an insane thing to say). Nikola Tesla ended his life alone, with a box of scrap parts as collateral for his rent ( https://www.history.com/news/9-things-you-may-not-know-about... ). Friedrich Nietzsche wrote "The Parable of the Madman" ( http://historyguide.org/europe/madman.html ), and apocryph…
Your comment makes sense if we replace “smart” with “crazy”. Note that most geniuses are not crazy and don’t act crazy. I doubt any parents pointed to young Einstein, Feynmann, or von Neumann and told their kids not to be like them.
Also, I don’t think there’s such thing as being too smart. Worrying about that is like worrying that you will have to pay lots of taxes if you get rich. A good problem to have.
Re: The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
#268I like the thesis, but peeling the onion back, there's an implicit assumption that one is always optimizing for world-changing impact. Looking back at Newton and sorting his work into useful/worthless buckets after a few hundred years tells us nothing about how he actually valued these pursuits, and what motivated him at the time. As silicon valley culture goes mainstream, salaries at big tech soar, and increasing nu…
I thought the point of the essay is that the obsessed will be obsessed, with possibly great results, regardless of whatever the lucrative career path of the moment is. It's not about anybody "optimizing" anything.
Re: The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
#269My take on genius is that it's akin to insanity, and for some of us, insanity doesn't seem to be so insane (which itself is an insane thing to say). Nikola Tesla ended his life alone, with a box of scrap parts as collateral for his rent ( https://www.history.com/news/9-things-you-may-not-know-about... ). Friedrich Nietzsche wrote "The Parable of the Madman" ( http://historyguide.org/europe/madman.html ), and apocryph…
> You can't relate to people. Nobody understands you. Your value structure is messed up. Parents point to you and tell their children to not be like you. Given that this is not an experience which is at all unique to intelligent people, why should the assumption be that, when this happens to someone intelligent, somehow it was caused by intelligence?
I once worked at a place where one interview question was, "Imagine you were digging a hole x by y by z and it look q minutes. How much dirt was in the hole at time r"?
I instantly answered, "There's no dirt in the hole, because a hole is defined by there not being any dirt".
They were like, "Wow, that was fast. Most people we interview take five to ten minutes to come to that conclusion".
Me: "I have a really bad feeling about this".
Unfortunately, I was right. I don't think the people there were bad people or dumb people (both are subjective value judgments, and that just seems passé now), but it was a really bad fit for me because I couldn't relate to anybody, even professionally. It sucks because if I was able to relate to more people at that time, I would have had more options I would have been happy with, and choice is wealth. Instead, I had to burn cycles outside of work on professional development in order to feel like I'm not trapped, which inevitably causes burnout. It's a horrible feeling. I wish I was more ignorant and felt less pain about these esoteric, really meaningless matters. But I can't. And I'm nowhere close to being a genius, so they have it worse than I do.
Re: The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
#270Side note about Newton and occult. Newton was not just a physicist who dabbled with occult. He turned occult into physics. Before Newton scientists and natural philosophers like Descartes believed that movements were caused by physical contact. Newton started traditionally and proposed the existence of ether that transmits forces. When he became interested in alchemy, he replaced ether with occult forces that repel a…
Here's something I'd love for someone to explain about "magicians". I've read that Einstein was a great physicist for his work on relativity. I still don't know what he actually did . Did he have some mountain of experimental data, to which he found a model which fit? Did he have sub-models which he unified, or simplified? What exactly were his inputs and outputs? In school we're taught that the scientific method inv…
Einstein's inputs were a bunch of scattered theories about electromagnetism and thermodynamics -- particularly, Maxwell's equations for the electromagnetic field, and the empirical description of the photoelectric effect, and Planck's description of blackbody radiation.
His outputs were deducing models that elegantly explained these phenomena: that a constant speed of light in all reference frames, as unintuitive as that is, would lead to the equations of relativity, and that energy being transmitted only in discrete quanta would lead to the photoelectric effect and blackbody radiation effects that were observed by others.
This was largely not a feat of producing theories on data. It was coming up with a simpler explanation for phenomena which had already been known, but for which existing explanations were far too complex.
The amazing part is that he did this four times in one year (1905): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annus_Mirabilis_papers