How Geniuses Think

> Darwin was actually relatively unoriginal in his ideas about evolution, which was already commonplace in biological circles. He really just added a bit of sciency-but-not-quite-scientific rigor and coined the term "natural selection", then got famous for it.

That’s entirely unfair. Darwin spent his whole life furiously gathering evidence from everywhere he could and communicating with the rest of the biology community worldwide. If you read any of his books (the most fun, I think, is the Voyage of the Beagle) the constant probing and questioning shines through. The man made hypotheses about everything he saw and tested them where he could, or suggested possible tests even when they were beyond him. The character I see when I read Darwin is a passionately curious, perceptive, insightful, and careful man.

To call, for instance, The Origin of Species, one of the most remarkable presentations of evidence of the 19th century, “sciencey-but-not-scientific” is to project modern standards onto the past. There were certainly other people with similar ideas in the biology community (Wallace for one), but they weren’t anywhere close to mainstream. Darwin’s evidence in The Origin, however, was overwhelming. And It stands up remarkably well today; some parts could certainly use updates after 150 more years of inquiry by many more people with better tools, but it’s mostly very good.

Agree with this point. I'm 26, and I find that I am most inventive and creative when I'm doing something others would label as "child-like."

It's not bullshit, it's just that it isn't the only factor to keep in mind, and after a certain point, higher IQ doesn't seem to do much.

I have been working and thinking in many of these ways but as I am not prolific at creating revolutionary ideas I suspect that this mindset is not enough for genius to arise. The article also lacks consideration over the positional requirements for acclaim.

There is an extra strategy that is missing and I feel is of utmost importance. You must be in the habit of normalizing your knowledge. You need to generalise and compose ideas into principles. Without doing so, it is extremely difficult to quickly and correctly compose and verify new ideas, draw relationships between them, and visualize at the appropriate level of abstraction.

Does anybody else keep a text file of recurring patterns that occur in thought, biology, architecture and nature?

Thank you for pointing this out. I'm not sure why people just assume that what this author says is true. The author never shows that "geniuses" even think the way the author claims they do. Did Richard Feynman use this approach? Do a majority of people who have influenced their fields in large and meaningful ways also do this? Who knows, the author provides no evidence. I think a much better exposition on problem solving strategies is George Pólya's How to Solve It [0] and without the pseudoscientific analysis on genius.

The author states:

>Recognizing the common thinking strategies of creative geniuses and applying them will make you more creative in your work and personal life.

Again, there is no evidence that this is a common thinking strategy and there is no evidence that if you were to mimic it, you too would benefit from it.

I hope the author and people who too easily agree with the author are aware of confirmation bias [1].

[0] http://www.math.utah.edu/~pa/math/polya.html

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias